Transcripts

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

Democracies don't break all of a sudden in a moment of crisis; they fail slowly over time, and only by knowing the warning signs and responding effectively to the threat before it's too late can the worst be averted. And the US is not alone in facing threats to democracy, so today we look both inwardly and outwardly at the practice of democracy.

Sources providing our Top Takes today include TLDR News Global, Tufts University, Vox, Velshi, Democracy Docket, The Marxist Project, the Democracy Paradox, Why is This Happening? with Chris Hayes, The Chauncey DeVega Show, and Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good. Then in the additional Deeper Dive half of the show, there'll be more on the dissection of democracy, international democracy, the cult of Trump, and democracy in action.

Why and Where is Democracy in Decline? - TLDR News Global - Air Date 2-21-24

JACK KELLY - HOST, TLDR NEWS GLOBAL: How [00:01:00] do you measure democracy? Well, as a concept it goes beyond just elections, and there are a range of possible indices we could use. For the purpose of this video though, we're going to use the EIU's index, which includes electoral processes and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. Globally though, all factors apart from political participation have declined since 2008, and declined further during the pandemic when civil liberties were curtailed.

So with that in mind, is democracy at risk? Unsurprisingly, wartorn countries and authoritarian regimes are at the bottom of the EIU's democracy list, and most of this regression occurred among the non-democracies, suggesting that the authoritarian regimes are becoming more entrenched and hybrid regimes are struggling to democratize. For instance, Taliban-run Afghanistan came last for a third [00:02:00] consecutive year. The biggest decliners though were Gabon and Niger, which both experienced coups in 2023. In fact, the average score for subSaharan Africa dropped to its lowest since the index began in 2006.

But region-wide data shows that every region in the world, apart from Western Europe, faced a democratic decline, with Latin America experiencing the greatest decline for the eighth consecutive year.

Moving away from the EIU data though for a moment, how have democratic elections fared in 2024 so far?

Now we made a video on a number of major elections, so if you want to check those out then you can, but so far a worrying number of elections have been interfered with or even suspended, and constitutional limits have been defied. So we're not even two months into the year and it's not looking great for democracy.

So, why could democracy be in decline? Well, [00:03:00] the integrity of democratic practices and institutions, summed up by the EIU's metrics, are, as we see it, threatened by the increase in three main factors: technology, lawfare, and apathy to authoritarianism.

So, our first reason is the uncurtailed growth of technology, which has enabled the spread of disinformation and media manipulation to influence elections at an unprecedented rate by both foreign actors and domestic groups. For instance, there's the fast growth of AI technology and deepfakes which have been used in attempts to interfere with elections. They're also getting increasingly hard to debunk, as media regulations and laws fail to keep up with technology's fast growth.

On top of this, AI can also enable online censorship. For example, according to Freedom House, in at least 21 countries there have been legal frameworks set up to require or encourage [00:04:00] online platforms to use machine learning to take down disfavored sociopolitical or religious speech.

Aside from AI, short form videos have distorted political campaigning around the world. The newly-elected Indonesian president, accused of human rights abuses during his time in the military under the dictatorship of his former father-in-law, rebranded himself during his campaign as a dancing cuddly grandpa in TikToks, some viewed over 20 million times. And then finally, group messaging platforms like WhatsApp have moved political discussions into opaque private messaging groups, where the degree of fast-spreading misinformation is difficult to ascertain.

In fact, Freedom House has published that at least 47 governments have deployed commentators to manipulate online discussions in their favor, double the number from a decade ago.

But it's not guaranteed that democratic institutions will always be outwitted by developing tech. [00:05:00] Taiwan, for example, was able to push back against disinformation campaigns from China in its January election, with information campaigns from fact-checking groups and the election commission.

But it's not even just technology. Our second reason behind the democratic decline is the use of lawfare, a very broad term which essentially means the use of law as a weapon when used illegally or fraudulently. And courts have been used to tilt the electoral playing fields by hobbling opposition candidates and parties.

Interestingly enough, the increased use of lawfare in the past years could paradoxically be seen as a sign of progress. In the past, authoritarians stuffed ballot boxes or fixed the counts. However, better monitoring of elections have made this harder to do, leaving lawfare as their favored method instead. In the past couple of months, in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Senegal, Venezuela and Russia, opposition leaders and parties have been disbarred by courts for [00:06:00] very dubious reasons.

But the third potential reason for this backsliding is that as the world is increasingly defined by great power competition, the various powers and axes are seeking to shore up their own positions. For the Western world, supposedly the defender and promoter of democracy, this can mean working to uphold democracy in certain countries. But in other cases, it means democracy is taking a back seat in favor of stability and security. The West, for example, has courted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, despite increasing violence used against minorities and democratic backsliding. Well, because, well, India is an important bulwark against China.

Meanwhile, European countries, seeking alternative supplies for fossil fuels since Russia invaded Ukraine, have turned to nondemocracies like Qatar and Azerbaijan. Similarly, seeking to address cross Mediterranean migration, the EU sought out a deal with [00:07:00] Tunisia's president, who has overseen the erosion of democratic progress since the country's 2011 revolution.

Ultimately then, this year could be critical for democracy, and so far, developments are concerning. But what about the 50-odd elections that are still to come? Some of these will be charades, such as in Belarus and Russia, but even those expected to be free and fair will face challenges from home and abroad.

Of course, the United States will be a key country to watch. Donald Trump's attempt to subvert the 2020 election, coupled with his multitude of legal difficulties, present a significant challenge to the country's institutions. and mean that this year's election has the potential of deeply destabilizing the country, with its ripples felt around the world.

But the next months aren't all doom and gloom. In the graph we mentioned at the start of this video, all democratic metrics have declined except political participation, which has massively increased since 2008. [00:08:00] So while democracy around the world might be on shaky ground and facing a difficult year, the silver lining is that even amidst this, it seems that more people across the world are determined and able to engage in political participation.

Is Democracy Under Threat? - Tufts University - Air Date 10-12-22

MOON DUCHIN: I do think that we're in for a period of challenges to democracy on several frontiers. We have challenges in the form of public trust. We have challenges in the form of courts that have shifted quite a bit. And we're in for a period where we get to see just how resilient our democracy is.

DANYA CUNNINGHAM: I'm concerned about a country that actually experienced a coup attempt. In so many ways, I think people feel that their government is not addressing the key crises that are impacting their lives. At a civic level, people don't trust each other. [00:09:00] There is a sense of the other as a threat.

BRIAN SCHAFFNER: Democracy is at risk right now, largely, I think, because we are so polarized as a country. I mean, not just polarized in a political way, but also polarized in a social way, so that essentially our political allegiances, whether we're Democrats or Republicans, overlap so much with who we are as people in terms of our identities now much more so than they did in the past. And so it just makes everything seem much more dire and important every time there's an election.

KEI KAWASHIMA-GINSBERG: It's become a spectator sports. You watch active people and politicians play together somewhere far away and it has nothing to do with us. And that's probably how we let us believe that democracy is secure. Democracy doesn't need or help. And it's eroding and it's really, really struggling.

PETER LEVINE: We have terrible voter turnout in the U. S. If you have low turnout, you get certain people voting. On one hand, you get people who are more advantaged, better educated, more privileged, but on the other hand, [00:10:00] you also get people who are much more partisan and often more radical, and you've left out a whole swath of people who are often closer to being in the middle. And so you get a distorted. Politics out of low turnout.

MOON DUCHIN: The kind of insistence of fraud where there's little evidence for fraud. I've been seeing, litigation pop up where people don't like the outcome of an election, so they allege that it had to have been rigged, and it's a pretty closed world view. If you didn't win, it was rigged. And we're seeing that not just from the top, but at a lot of different levels.

PETER LEVINE: In order to really like a democracy, you have to be willing to lose, because a democracy is a system of voting and majority wins. And I'm not sure that Americans have actually ever been that enthusiastic about the idea that they want a political system where they can lose. And when people realize, which they do periodically, that their fellow citizens don't agree with them, quite often they will actually prefer, and say that they would prefer, an authoritarian leader who they [00:11:00] regard us right over majority rule. And so I think that's part of the phenomenon that we see globally.

KEI KAWASHIMA-GINSBERG: When I think about eroding democracy, part of what we're not doing is really being committed to truthfulness of the information that we're getting and sharing. We're just so tired sometimes, and we're not really searching for the right information, and we're just letting it pass by.

BRIAN SCHAFFNER: Politicians sort of understand now that anger is a mobilizing emotion. So if you've ever been on an email list for a politician, you'll probably notice that the emails are centered not around " here are these policy things I want to do", but more around " here's something outrageous the other side has done and you should be angry about this". And if people are mostly getting involved in politics because they're angry, it's going to make it even harder for politicians to compromise. Because if you're essentially making people angry at the other side as a way of getting them motivated to vote, then how are you going to then, once you're in office, turn around and make deals with the other side to make good policy?

DANYA CUNNINGHAM: Democracy is a [00:12:00] frail and precious organism, and so it is a living thing that must constantly be tended to and cared for. It is precious because it is all we have to keep from descending into chaos and lawlessness. We have to be able to have agreement with each other that we will attend to building a peaceful and fair society. And that requires us to have a certain kind of empathy and regard for each other, and that takes work. We can come to understand each other and figure out together what we ought to do in order to preserve each other's well being. And so that is the work of democracy.

The decline of American democracy won't be televised - Vox - Air Date 6-22-17

CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: Trump's firing of former FBI director James Comey has gotten a lot of media attention, in [00:13:00] part because it's really easy to explain why it matters. If Trump fired Comey over the Russia investigation, that would be obstruction of justice, which is a crime. But a lot of what worries political scientists about Trump is tougher to explain in a sound bite like that. Because for the most part, it's stuff that's totally legal.

AZIZ HUQ: It turns out that government officials can exploit weaknesses in the law in ways that are destructive to the rule of law as a whole.

CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: This bearer of bad news is Aziz Huq. He's a law professor at the University of Chicago and he's written a lot about a concept called democratic backsliding. Backsliding is what happens when a democratically elected government starts attacking the institutions that make democracy work. And Huq argues that what makes backsliding so dangerous is that it's really hard to know when it starts.

AZIZ HUQ: In many other countries, the way that we see democratic backsliding happening is through a series of discrete legal changes, each of which is on their own, completely lawful.

CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: A great example of what backsliding [00:14:00] looks like is Venezuela's Former President Hugo Chavez. Chavez was elected as a democratic populace, but over time he changed.

CNN NEWS CLIP: And while remaining popular Chavez has been anything but democratic.

CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: He got frustrated with opposition from courts and the media, so he started doing things like firing judges, using anti defamation laws to silence journalists, and even describing unfriendly news organizations as, "enemies of the homeland." what's scary about Chavez's story is that he didn't need a military coup to screw up Venezuela's democracy.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The man who came to office by democracy is doing everything he can to snuff it out.

CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: He did it legally, by slowly turning his supporters and political allies against the country's democratic institutions.

AZIZ HUQ: Autocrats and other parts of the world have gone after those institutions very early on in the process of backsliding.

CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: And that's what worries political scientists about Trump. Trump shows a deep distrust of America's democratic institutions. He lashes out at judges, calls [00:15:00] journalists the enemy of the people, accuses watchdog agencies of conspiring against him. He questions the legitimacy of an election that he won. His White House stonewalls reporters to avoid answering questions. He is suspicious of the mechanisms that limit his authority.

DONALD TRUMP: This is an unprecedented judicial overreach.

CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: And he encourages his supporters to be too. That is a catastrophic thing to be happening in a democracy. It's how democratic backflighting starts. But the thing is, none of this is illegal. As long as Republicans in Congress go along with it, there's nothing to stop Trump from publicly criticizing basic democratic institutions.

AZIZ HUQ: Our constitution just doesn't do a very good job of protecting us against certain kinds of democratic failure. Whether we're in a moment of democratic backsliding really depends upon the character of our political leaders.

CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: Which brings us to back to Comey, and why it's so hard to talk about democratic backsliding without sounding paranoid. We live in a media environment that is [00:16:00] really bad at putting things in context. That is designed to bombard us with breaking news and discrete pieces of information. And that makes it hard to identify democratic backsliding when it starts. Because unless it clearly breaks the law, it's really tough to explain why any one Trump tweet or scandal poses a threat to democracy. So when Trump calls a federal judge a "so called" judge, it's just a one off comment.

CNN NEWS CLIP: Does anyone honestly believe President Trump is going to ignore this judge's order because he's a "so called" judge?

CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: When Trump calls the press the enemy of the American people, it's all talk.

CNN NEWS CLIP: He sounds like a broken record. It's just kind of like, what else you got Donald Trump?

AZIZ HUQ: I don't think that new media are well designed. to tell this kind of story, because those media are designed to convey information in very small chunks. The real story is not the discrete action at a particular moment in time, but some bigger picture.

CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: Democratic backsliding is one of those things that you can't really see from up close.

AZIZ HUQ: It is only when you look at changes in the aggregate that [00:17:00] one sees the effect upon democracy as a set of institutions and practices.

CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: That doesn't mean that Comey stuff isn't important. Obstruction of justice is obviously a big deal. But some of the biggest threats to democracy are way less dramatic, way more normal looking. And if you're waiting for the CNN chyron announcing that it's time to panic, you're gonna be waiting for a long time.

How Republicans are fueling Russia and China’s global effort to undermine democracy - Velshi - Air Date 5-11-24

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: In this remarkable article, you conclude that Russia and China are doing this, this influence peddling, with the goal of electing Donald Trump. Talk to me about why you think those countries stand to benefit from that.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So, first it's important to step back a little bit and understand what it is that they're doing. These are countries, and it's Russia, China, but also others, Venezuela, Iran, other autocracies, want to stay in power, and their most important opponents are people who use the language of human rights, of freedom, [00:18:00] of liberty, of democracy. They need to undermine those groups, they need to put them out of business, they need to convince their people that these ideas have no meaning and no purpose.

One of the inspiration for People who fight for democracy in countries like Russia and China has always been the United States. And of course, the United States doesn't always live up to that, those ideals itself, but it stood for those ideals in the world. And Donald Trump is a leader who does not stand for those ideas. In fact, he mocks them.

He himself is transactional. He has indicated he would do deals with whoever is most powerful and putting him in charge of the United States, especially after January 6th, which was also understood around the world as an assault on American democracy, an assault on our Capitol, would undermine the idea of democracy that so many people aspire to in so many different places. It's not that complicated a story, but it takes place on [00:19:00] a big scale, and I think it's important to understand the whole context.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: I want to get even farther into that context, because obviously we've discussed the fact that if Russia and Ukraine is not concluded by election and inauguration time, it probably won't be, that is an advantage to Vladimir Putin.

But more importantly, we have the most election a year in recent history. More people are going to the polls around the world, and many of those countries are countries in which voters are giving up some of their rights. India, it's happening right now. What's the larger goal? If this isn't just about Russia/Ukraine, if this isn't just about China and Taiwan or China and relationships, how does this work in terms of undermining the concepts of democracy in America? You just elect enough people to Congress who just don't believe democracy is that important a thing?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: It's even broader than that. It's convincing Americans that they shouldn't care about rights. It's convincing Americans that they shouldn't care about America's role in the world. Convincing Americans to withdraw from the world, not to stand for any kind of ideals as we have done for the last several [00:20:00] decades.

There's a larger game as well, which is the autocratic narrative. Which is now shared by so many countries and also by some Americans is pretty clear. It's that autocracy is secure and stable and safe. Democracy is divisive, degenerate, and declining. And those in the United States who also say these things and who argue these things are also arguing in essence for a change of our politics, for deeper change, they're hoping that if and when Donald Trump has a second term in office that he will continue undermining rights. That he'll, for example, replace our independent civil service with loyalists. That he will change the way the United States is run. It's a convenient narrative for them, and it's a convenient narrative for autocracies in other places.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: We have seen how this propaganda is causing havoc at the Capitol. You wrote that Republicans are both active participants and passive recipients of the propaganda. This reminds me of the conversations we used to have about disinformation and misinformation.

Some people put it out and [00:21:00] others willingly receive it and spread it. Talk to me about how the difference is there and what you do about it. Can you convince some of these Republicans in Congress? Be careful you're getting fed a lot of bad information here.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: The best spokesman for that are other Republicans, and we've seen them starting to speak out in the last few days.

One of the difficulties, though, now, and this is maybe another important point for people to understand, is that there are independent groups, there are researchers, there are academics, there are a lot of scholars and people who study this system and who seek to understand how it works. And one of the things that this Republican Congress has done over the last few months is tried to undermine them, create conspiracy theories around them.

Blacken their names, prevent them from having influence, convince social media companies not to pay any attention to them. There, there's a there's a project almost not only to put out authoritarian propaganda, but also to undermine the people who seek to expose it and explain it.

And so one of the first steps we need to take is to, [00:22:00] is for the government, the media, and everybody who understands what's at stake. To make sure we have those people's back, to put pressure on social media companies, to listen to them again to continue to take down foreign propaganda, which they had been doing in 2020 and to continue, and to continue to search out this problem to define it and to explain it.

How Republican Attorneys General are Undermining Voting Rights - Democracy Docket - Air Date 6-3-24

PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Twenty-three of the country's 27 Republican Attorneys Generals are currently in court arguing that only the Justice Department, not voters, can file lawsuits to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Mark, explain to us why this argument is so dangerous.

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: You know, Paige, we talk a lot about how the Voting Rights Act was gutted in Shelby County versus Holder. What Shelby County did was it took away one of the big tools of the Voting Rights Act. But other tools in the Voting Rights Act remained. And so that's why you continue to see the litigation that's going forward around redistricting in states like Alabama and [00:23:00] Louisiana and in Georgia, where groups and voters have brought cases saying that the maps that were passed in those states violate the rights of black voters to not having their votes diluted in the creation of unfair maps. In plain English, in Alabama and Louisiana, the Republican legislatures drew maps with one black opportunity district, and black voters were able to bring lawsuits to say, hey, that's not fair to our community. You have drawn maps that prevent us from exercising political power. And in both of those states, the federal courts have agreed and have said that there needed to be a second black opportunity district.

Well, how are Republicans trying to gut this part of the Voting Rights Act and some others by saying that private litigants can't even bring cases? They're saying that the only people who can enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and some other key provisions of federal law is the Department of Justice.

That's crazy. That has never been the [00:24:00] case. There has been the right of a private right of action, the ability of ordinary citizens who have been injured by these state laws, harmed by these illegal maps, to bring cases. And the overwhelming majority of Voting Rights Act cases that have been brought and have successfully vindicated the rights of minority voters to fair election laws, to fair maps, the overwhelming majority of those have been brought by private litigants, by organizations like the NAACP, by civil rights groups, by voting rights groups. It's what a lot of the work my law firm does is when we talk about representing black voters in cases and winning relief, we're talking about bringing private litigation.

Well, the Republican attorneys general are now latched onto a fringe argument where they want to gut the Voting Rights Act by basically taking away the ability of these private litigants to bring these cases.

PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Has this argument been successful anywhere in [00:25:00] court so far? And if so, what has been the impact?

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: So they've had success one place, okay? Only one place so far, in a case out of Arkansas that went up to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the court that covers the state of Arkansas as well as some other states. And that circuit has said that they agree with this fringe argument, that they agree that there is no pride of a right of action. But that's the only place they've had success so far.

Now they're pushing it elsewhere, but so far they have not had success. They've lost this argument in the Fifth Circuit, which is critical because it's a very conservative circuit, but it also is a circuit that covers Texas. It's a circuit that covers Louisiana. It's a circuit that has a lot of Voting Rights Act cases within it, but they're pressing this argument all over the country. They're pressing this argument, for example, in the 11th Circuit. Now, anyone who thinks Brad Rassenberger is a hero, you gotta read my article in Democracy Docket how he's just another Republican vote suppressor. He is [00:26:00] advocating this theory in a case out of Georgia to try to say that there is no private right of action.

PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: So if Republican officials are arguing that only the DOJ can file these lawsuits, has the Justice Department gotten involved? Have they said anything about these cases and these arguments?

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Yeah, look, DOJ knows that they need the help. This is not a negative on DOJ, right? DOJ is doing as much work as it can do across a range of issues, and it's got its hands full. But it simply can't cover the territory that private litigants can. So DOJ agrees that there should be a private right of action. Again, that's not because DOJ is not up to the job. But of course, what's interesting, Paige, is that the Republicans don't want private right of actions, but do you think they want to provide more funding to DOJ to bring more claims under the Voting Rights Act? No, of course they don't.

It's like they don't want there to be private funding of election offices, but you don't see the [00:27:00] Republicans trying to appropriate more money for our election officials to do their job. They want to starve democracy of money. They want to starve the Department of Justice of the resources to enforce the Voting Rights Act, and at the same time say that there's no private right of action so that private litigants can't bring these cases either.

Democracy vs. Autocracy: An Unproductive Dichotomy - The Marxist Project - Air Date 11-6-23

M. - HOST, THE MARXIST PROJECT: The dichotomy between democracy and autocracy, between democratic and authoritarian states, is an often used rhetorical instrument by the right, and even the left. It is employed to assess and justify geopolitical strategies, in painting democratic states as righteous, while labeling those operating outside the rule-based international order as authoritarian.

To be sure, there is an undeniable and material difference between autocracy and democracy. A society that condemns its women to servitude and degrades them to the status of commodity is surely less sustainable politically or defensible morally than its progressive counterparts. A country that is ruled by a dynasty rather than by an [00:28:00] elected body is almost always closed off to progress, social justice, and basic liberties.

But what exactly is a democracy? Is it simply the presence of free elections and multiple competing parties? Some authorities on the matter like to say that this is the recipe for democracy, but most of us would probably agree that it is insufficient. After all, parties can be captured by private interests, ballots can be manipulated, or the entire electoral system could be structurally designed to exclude actual popular input.

Another common approach is describing societies as having democratic values and norms, which are then ostensibly translated into formal political and judicial processes. This is certainly a better understanding, as it reflects ingrained attitudes and perspectives of an entire society, rather than vacuously describing the letter of the law.

However, we are ultimately displacing the central concern. If democracies are characterized by societies with [00:29:00] democratic values, then what exactly are democratic values? Much has been written about supposedly democratic countries and their shared values. In the field of political science, the so called democratic peace theory is one of a few consistent postulates that is treated virtually as a law.

The theory goes that democracies do not fight wars with each other because their governments are more accountable, the public is generally wary of conflict, and the societies share a common set of values. Democratic peace theory has found considerable statistical support through decades of study. Such observations about democracies extend into broader social discourse, where it is said that citizens of democratic nations abhor all forms of oppression and injustice. Conversely, the same people will often claim citizens living in autocratic societies have a predisposition to authoritarian methods. The Russians, for instance, are supposedly a people that prefer a ruler with an iron fist. One can imagine that such [00:30:00] characterizations quickly reduce themselves to banal colonialist dogma about the superiority of Western democracies, and the countries that strive to emulate them, over the regressive autocracies of the East.

Though it may be obvious to most of you watching this video, these sentiments are desperately under problematized in the Western mythos. How true is it that the American society has been fundamentally freedom loving and democratically inclined? Certainly, the U. S. has a rich history of popular movements for emancipation, enfranchisement, and liberation, but parallel to this history is one of slavery, genocide, segregation, white supremacy, and imperialism. To this day, the national psyche of the country elevates the ultra rich above the ordinary, and posits that those who have almost nothing deserve their lot in life. Is a society that necessitates unemployment for economic efficiency, and punishes the homeless for merely existing in public, truly freedom loving?[00:31:00]

While the majority of Americans struggle to make ends meet, socialized services and collective bargaining continue to be villainized by some of the loudest voices in the political arena. This is to say nothing about the January 6th coup attempt and the nearly half of the country that seems eager to embrace fascist slogans.

In her book, White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Eisenberg details how the founders of the United States were often staunchly opposed to any semblance of democratic governance. The early governors of the colonies styled a society so rigid in its class makeup that one might best describe it as a hierarchy of castes.

Puritan settlers punished individuals for wearing clothing above their station, and enforced rigid social roles at birth. The colonies regularly depended on slave and coerced labor, often legislating class boundaries in a way that made them insurmountable. John Locke envisioned a new nobility and serf class in the [00:32:00] colonies.

Thomas Jefferson promoted social engineering and eugenics. Benjamin Franklin sought to curb class division by way of endless territorial expansion. The most important figures of early American history had their differences, but they were all united under the common banner of contempt for the poor. None of the above demonstrates an unwavering commitment to democratic values.

To be clear, the point here is not to condemn the American people in a broad sense. Much of the progress that has been made took the sacrifice and tireless effort of activists, revolutionaries, organizers, and the public itself, which has tended to overwhelmingly support pro social policies. Rather, the idea is to challenge the notion that there is something special about the American, or even the Western, psyche.

The myth of the West's democratic roots is just that, a myth, that has been carefully repeated over the centuries. A society that offers the public practically no control over the workplace or the economy, and limited control [00:33:00] over the political structures, is not only far from being a democracy, but is quite far from being democratic.

By contrast, it is similarly misguided to describe a national mythos as ahistorically authoritarian. How can we describe the Russian people as fundamentally authoritarian when the October Revolution was one of the most explosive and transformative revolutions in human history? How can the Chinese people be predisposed to hierarchical politics if not even a lifetime ago they fought a cataclysmic civil war to destroy all vestiges of feudal oppression?

Such dramatic historical events beg the question: from where do the people draw a profound desire for emancipation if their national culture is undemocratic? There are a number of obvious responses to these thoughts. For one, there are no monolithic national cultures. There is no uniform affinity for freedom over order. These characterizations are sloppy historical work that omit important caveats and counterpoints. There [00:34:00] are democratic and authoritarian tendencies in all societies. Democracies can be unexpectedly authoritarian, and despotic regimes can contain within them surprising horizontalism.

Rather than ahistorical national cultures, there are evolving institutions and norms that are overdetermined by complex material processes. Only the ebb and flow of the constituent elements of these complex systems can explain how a democratic society could give birth to an authoritarian one, and vice versa.

The persistent characterization of a democratic and authoritarian camp serves ideological interests. Oftentimes, democracy is a thinly veiled substitute for Western liberal polity, complete with the racist colonial tropes about civilizational sophistication in the face of Eastern despotism. Insisting that the West is democratic also works as a legitimizing mantra. Democracies mean accountability and popular rule, implying [00:35:00] that the people have chosen the status quo. Conversely, any authoritarian regime cannot be popularly legitimate, by definition. This works as an added layer of political justification for the democratic bloc. Embargoes, interventions, and invasions are a lot more palatable if you can convince the public that the government in question has no popular support.

The result is a tale as old as time, or at least as old as imperialism. The civilized camp is morally superior and bears the burden of civilizing their non compliant counterparts. Of course, the banner of democracy is happily dropped if the autocrat in question happens to favor the interests of foreign capital. The U. S. had no problem supporting the Marcos regime in the Philippines, but could not abide by Assad in Syria. Pinochet was a fine ally, but Gaddafi had to be removed.

Ultimately, where it is used, this civilizational categorization becomes a favorite of policymakers, both for its value in justifying the domestic [00:36:00] circumstances and for its utility as a foreign policy instrument. We should not allow ourselves to be fooled by this primitive sleight of hand.

The sooner we can acknowledge that most of the supposed democracies in the world are barely democratic, the sooner we can work towards higher standards. Democracy should mean truly popular control over both politics and economics. It should require a deeply embedded commitment to public welfare and management of a collective future. Until we have done away with exploitation, discrimination, imperialism, and oppression of all forms, we should think twice about calling ourselves democratic.

When Democracy Breaks: Final Thoughts with Archon Fung, David Moss and Arne Westad Part 1 - Democracy Paradox - Air Date 6-4-24

JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: I’d like to ask each one of you if there was a case that really surprised you or caught you off guard in terms of how democracy broke? Because I’m sure that you guys were familiar with most of the cases. Some of them are very famous, like Germany. But was there one that really stood out to you that made you think [00:37:00] differently about democratic erosion and democratic breakdown?

ARCHON FUNG: The chapter that I found quite surprising was the chapter on Turkey. There you have the institutions of democracy defended by a secular elite in the military. The country is overwhelmingly Islamic, so you have this tension between what we think of as neutral, liberal, democratic institutions defended by a vanguard that ends up tipping because there’s a large majority able to be mobilized by a leader on popular, ethnonationalist, religious nationalist grounds. So, what does democracy mean in that context? Is it the vanguardist, liberal, secular elite that is championing the forms of liberal democracy that we’re accustomed to, or is it a less varnished, [00:38:00] more populist will of the people? We struggle with that tension throughout many chapters in the book.

DAVID MOSS: I thought also this idea that the rhetorical vilification of the political opposition, what an impact that had, and how consequential it was, up there with other types of democratic erosion. The ongoing demonization and vilification of opponents seemed to have had a really large impact. I was struck by what a large impact it made.

ARNE WESTAD: I think for me in many ways, Justin, the most surprising one was the one on Weimar Germany. Not because I don’t know the background for the collapse of Weimar Germany; most historians think they know something about that. But because of the way in which it was set up and structured. So, it’s Weitz who was the one who wrote that chapter and underlined the ongoing, almost continuous attacks at democratic institutions and maybe especially on the institutions that were set to handle the kind of [00:39:00] difficulties that most people in Weimar Germany knew that the new republic was going to face, and how over time, those attacks, both on the left and the right, ended up eroding most of the belief that had existed in the early years with regard to those institutions. It then took an acute crisis, the economic and financial crisis of the late 1920s, to overturn the whole system. But the preparation for all of that had happened beforehand through the attack on the institutions of the Republic.

JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: One of the things that I got out of the book was the way to think about democratic breakdown over the course of history, like the way that democracy is not something that is exclusively a phenomenon of the postwar era, but as something that has existed dating all the way back to ancient Greece, and some scholars have even made arguments that it existed in various forms even before that.

So your book really [00:40:00] brings in the ideas of thinking about democratic breakdown at different points in history. So, what I’d like to know from you is how has democratic breakdown really changed over time? Because I think of democracy as having changed a lot over time as well. Democracy in Athens is very different than democracy today. So, has democratic breakdown also changed over time?

ARNE WESTAD: Obviously, it has changed over time and each of these cases are individual cases in a way that is connected to the historical situation around the time in which you face a democratic breakdown. But I think our view is that you can still learn a lot from the discussion that contrasts the different kinds of cases, even though they are set at very different moments in time.

I do think there are some things that they have in common. The one that I mentioned earlier on about the attack on the institutions – if you don’t want to call it democracy, at least there’s some [00:41:00] institutions that preserve some degree of pluralism, both within society and within the state – that’s something that you see, albeit at different degrees and in different ways, in most of these cases.

Another aspect that struck me in all the cases, I don’t think every single one, was how rapid rises in social inequality contributed to some of the tensions that brought about the collapse of democracy. Not in a very simple way, not in a very straightforward way. Those who believe that there are necessarily distinct social causes in an immediate sense for all of these events are probably wrong. It helped to destroy the common approach to the value of these institutions and the value of participatory democracy itself. On that, I think, there is very little doubt.

A lot of people, a lot of different settings, were asking, what does this system actually do for me? What is the value for me, both in ethical, moral, political, but also in economic and financial [00:42:00] terms for me to come out and actually defend that system? If you are in a situation where you feel that your situation compared to others in social and economic terms is getting consistently worse, then your willingness to, not necessarily act against the system, but help protect the system, that willingness is much reduced.

JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: Do you think that there are more similarities in terms of democratic breakdown throughout history than there are differences? I mean, I know that each one of these cases is unique in its own right. But as we’re making comparisons between them, should we be more focused on how similar they are or how different each one of them are, particularly as democracy evolves over time?

DAVID MOSS: I think it’s hard to put a quantitative ranking on difference versus similarity, because they’re different places in different times, but also different countries. They’re really quite dramatically different in so many ways. And yet there are some commonalities. You asked [00:43:00] about change over time, maybe some of the most striking changes, I think, is just in the 21st century, which is we’ve seen a different kind of breakdown, what’s often called illiberal democracy. So more of a reliance on majoritarianism, but not the liberal protections of minority rights and the right to dissent. And so often in the past, there’s been a distinction between fast and slow breakdown. Fast like Weimar, Germany, so you see a rapid seizure of power and collapse of democracy. Whereas in Venezuela in the early 21st century, you see a slow breakdown. It’s hard to say what day, what month, even what year democracy broke down because there was a majority-picked president. But then the president chipped away at liberal protections, chipped away at minority rights, chipped away at the rights of the opposition, chipped away at all the constraints on presidential power, such that democracy as we know it disappears. What day and what year, what month it disappears is hard to say.

I think that a slower, more gradual [00:44:00] breakdown, the illiberal democracy, that’s characteristic of the 21st century so far, and quite a difference from the 20th century and before.

Protecting Voting Rights with Eric Holder - Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast - Air Date 2-20-24

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: This independence of the Justice Department is such an important point right now because it ends up being an enormously important constitutional protection. And as we conceive of what might be a second Trump term, possibly, where he has basically said, he’s going to use it to prosecute his enemies.

Now, Jeff Sessions, I think, was a terrible attorney general in most ways, but on this question of independence was decent. He was not completely a supplicant to Trump. He didn’t just do what was ordered. And he had some sense, I think, deep within his person and how he conducted himself, of this notion of independence. That it was important that he be independent. He appointed a special counsel. He did a bunch of other things. William Barr, much less so, right? William Barr much more of a sort of lackey.

The question becomes like, imagine a second term with a vacancy appointment, right? So, a temporary AG, not confirmed by Senate. And Donald Trump says, I want you to [00:45:00] open criminal investigations into Joe Biden and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Chuck Schumer and --

ERIC HOLDER: And Eric Holder.

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: And Eric Holder. So, what is protecting us from that eventuality, other than the norm-abiding of an attorney general who recognizes that’s totally unacceptable?

ERIC HOLDER: Well, you got at least one protection and that’s the career folks who work at the Justice Department. But I caution everybody: what Donald Trump says he is going to do, which not to politicize the Justice Department but to weaponize the Justice Department, is something that could come to pass. And he’s had a term to learn how to weaponize the Justice Department.

And so it won’t be just, who is the attorney general? It will also be, who is the deputy attorney general? Who is the head of the criminal division in the Justice Department? Who are the various U.S. attorneys who populate the U.S. attorney’s offices around the country? Who will these U.S. attorneys hire? Because you could have a whole bunch of career people say, you know, that’s crazy. We’re not going to do that kind of stuff. But [00:46:00] new employees hired by these new U.S. attorneys could in fact go to courts, impanel grand juries, and start up investigations of the very people who you just talked about.

Now you may ultimately get to a place where even though these are bogus investigations that they have done, that you can’t win in court, you will generate cases that undoubtedly will be reported on, that will have a negative impact on the reputations of the people who come under investigation and will have, I suspect, some kind of cowing impact on people who are the enemies or perceived to be enemies by the president in terms of the way in which they express that opposition.

You know, if you’re a congressman and you’re against what Trump’s going to try to do with NATO and you want to raise your hand and you know that if you do that, well, the Justice Department is going to just start picking through your life to see if there’s a way in which they can just gin up an investigation. Forget about a prosecution or a victory in a criminal case, just an investigation.

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: Yes.

ERIC HOLDER: And what’s the impact of that going to be on your reelection efforts [00:47:00] and just your reputation, you know, more generally? So, this is something I think we got to take, you know, be very, very mindful of, but it is really kind of the norm. It is the norms that have to hold and I think that he will just try to blow through.

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: Yeah, I mean at one level, right, there’s a constitutional protection for due process, which this kind of thing would be a violation of. And there’s the protections of a grand jury and, you know, for actual prosecution. But your point, which I think is the really scary one, right, is that you can make a lot of pain for a person through just investigation. And he seems very focused on that. I mean he basically is threatening to do it. Every time he says, look, if I don’t get immunity, then every ex-president will be subject to this. I read as him saying, we’re going to do this to Joe Biden, if I get into office. I mean I think it’s plain as day that’s the promise. But it’s more than just a criminal division. I mean one of the forgotten stories of the Trump administration --

ERIC HOLDER: Yes.

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: -- is that the Trump Department of Justice stepped in to block a merger that Time Warner wanted to do with AT&T, I believe. And they blocked it. It was sort of surprising because the sort of progressive anti-monopoly [00:48:00] folks wanted them to block it, and that was not the people running the Trump Justice Department. And later it was revealed, I don’t think it’s quite smoking gun, but I think we have sufficient evidence, that it was because he was mad at CNN, which is owned by Time Warner for their coverage and its First Amendment protected speech.

That’s really wildly dangerous stuff. And we’ve seen in places like Turkey and Hungary and other places, that is a very common means by which authoritarian sort of presidentialist dictatorships influence democratic landscapes. And I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are on that.

ERIC HOLDER: Yes, people, in a way that I just described, focus a great deal on what the authority of the Justice Department is when it comes to its criminal authorities. You know, the ability to investigate and to indict people, indict corporations, so that’s one thing. But the Justice Department is composed of a whole range of other divisions that can be used improperly to advance the agenda of a corrupt president or to go after, again, the perceived [00:49:00] enemies of a president.

There’s an antitrust division, there is a civil division, there’s an environmental, natural resources division. There are a whole range of divisions within the Justice Department, that if used inappropriately, can have an impact on almost every component of our lives, whether it’s in commerce, whether it has to do, as we talked about before, with the criminal law, when it comes to the media.

I mean there are a whole range of things. I mean if General Motors decides that it wants to, you know, continue making electric cars and emphasizing that, and this is something that, for whatever reason, Donald Trump thinks that he doesn’t want to have occur.

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: Yes, he said that.

ERIC HOLDER: Just go through the menu of, you know, what’s at the Justice Department, which division should we sic on --

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: Right.

ERIC HOLDER: -- General Motors to go after them and come up with a way in which we make that conversion to EVs difficult, if not impossible.

Rich Logis Escaped the Trump - MAGA Cult -- Heed His Warnings About Its Power and Extreme Danger to America - The Chauncey DeVega Show - Air Date 8-29-23

CHAUNCEY DEVEGA - HOST, THE CHAUNCEY DEVEGA SHOW: Did you ever think that you would see a political moment like this? Because I saw coming years ago—a black working class person, someone who's a [00:50:00] student of politics. These things are cyclical. We never purged white supremacy, which is America's native form, Jim and Jane Crow, fascism from this country.

But just thinking about what we were watching, growing up in the 80s. So, how do we go from Larry Bird in that moment to this? How do you make sense of it?

RICH LOGIS: I have to be entirely candid and transparent, Chauncey, with you. No, I didn't see this moment. One of the problems with being so anti two party system as I was, which led me to support Trump, is that it creates a lot of ignorance, and ignorance is very powerful.

Once one is in that traumatic world, and there's all the mythologies, and there's the hyper partisanship, I didn't have any interest in real history. I had an interest in "the Democrats are existential threat to America. Hillary Clinton was an existential threat. I believe that." When someone believes that—and there was no logical reason that I had to conclude that, Chauncey—which looking back on it, how did you come to that conclusion?

The answer is it wasn't really logical. It really was not. I'm not deflecting responsibility. I'm fully responsible for how I thought and how I voted. [00:51:00] But if one believes that Hillary Clinton was an existential threat, as I did, someone will support anyone or anything. So all of the factors that brought us here today, I have, in my life, proactively, and in a prorated, retrospective way, gone back and looked at what I consider to be more objective real history.

Looking at that real history, to your point on this, it begins to explain so well why this has happened. In the modern era, what I've come to realize, not that it started, but in the modern era, the election of President Obama accelerated a lot of the right wing traumatic mythologies. And then you had the Tea Party. And then you had Trump. And then you had COVID, and you had the 2020 election, you had the insurrection— and that's all in the span of 13 years?

I mean, that's a traumatic 13 years. We've not caught our breath from it, and we still haven't. And while I want to remain optimistic about the outcome that I think will happen next year democratically, I'm not naive about this fact. I know that the combination of the MAGA [00:52:00] voters, primary voters, combined with the fact that most Americans are apolitical—which apoliticism is a bubble unto itself—our politics are unpredictable. I know there is no guarantee here. So when we look at everything that's happened—and, to your credit, you saw it happening, and I suspect because you saw it happening at a time when maybe a lot of people weren't, you weren't really listened to.

So while I can't change the past, I am working really as feverishly as I can to make amends for the future. Because I consider what I did—my decisions—to have contributed to the problems. Yes, I'm one person. Yes, I'm one vote. But I don't look at it that way. I look at it, I need to take responsibility.

CHAUNCEY DEVEGA - HOST, THE CHAUNCEY DEVEGA SHOW: Now you said something very important there. You mentioned Fox News. I was talking to Tim Wise about this, and I've talked to other folks in this years long journey, this disaster. I've been asked to go on Fox News, all the big shows. So as a matter of principle, I will not go. Because Bernie is gone, and we saw what they did with that footage. Cornel West repeatedly goes on those shows, I don't know if he's doing it now. Point being, I can [00:53:00] understand the to-and-fro with some of this audience, but you're dealing with a fully propagandized public.

RICH LOGIS: It would be difficult for some of the Fox viewers to hear what I say and part of that reason it would be difficult for them to hear it is that part of leadership is telling people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

Now, I fully concur with this point about just how traumatized the Fox audience is.

If I were going to go on Fox, one of the points I would raise is to tell the audience that you've not heard from just a regular everyday person who was very deep in that rabbit hole. Why I left—I would get on a show, whomever the host is, and I would say, I want you to be honest with yourself and ask yourself some questions.

Number one, is it possible that some of my beliefs, my outcomes, my conclusions, my opinions, is it possible some of them are mistaken? Not saying they are, but is it possible that they're incomplete? That they are too black and white? That they lack [00:54:00] nuance? And the only reason, Chauncey, I'd go on, it's not to change a bunch of minds, but because I have a suspicion that those who'd be watching have never had anyone actually address them that way, which is firm, but I think fair and humanizing.

None of them, I believe, have been asked that question by someone and, not just that, being asked that question by a person like myself. I suspect that for some of them hearing that it would get them to pause just a little bit. Now maybe they pause for a moment and say "Well, yeah, that's a good point. Maybe. Ah! But you know what? The other side is just—they're an existential threat. So, yeah, I don't like this one side, but the other side is worse."

Chances are most would say that. But even if I got to one person, just one, I would consider it a resounding success. Because I know they will not have heard the way that I would frame it to them.

CHAUNCEY DEVEGA - HOST, THE CHAUNCEY DEVEGA SHOW: Help me! Help folks not of the MAGA world, not of—it is a cult, it meets the criteria of a cult.

How do you reason with those who are unreasonable? How do you talk to people, accepting your premise, who have been [00:55:00] fully propagandized, who are in a cult and want to be in it?

RICH LOGIS: To use some figurative language, although I suppose for some it might be literal, to the members of a cult, it's the outside world who are the crazies.

In the MAGA world, the trauma of that world is, you know, for as much as the Republican Party talks about identity politics. The community that MAGA provides, and it does provide a community, there is a kind of identity politics within that community, because there's a unity against common targeted enemy.

Democratic Party, Democrat, RINOs, the "Republicans In Name Only", the Romney type Republicans in the country—we used to look at those types of Republicans just as dangerous as a Democrat. That's how we used to look at them. When we were in that world—and I look back on it and I think about how much trauma I put myself under—for me to go to those right now, who have that cult mindset it's again back to the topic of affliction.

I mentioned earlier, bring [00:56:00] the news to the afflicted book of Isaiah. The book of Romans says, "Be patient in affliction," and that reconciliation to try to do that—it's going to require a lot of incremental work because unfortunately for some of those who are in the MAGA world, they are never going to leave it. I don't think as a country, and I'm concluding myself in this, I don't think we quite grasp the harm that has not only been caused, but we're going to see the residual effects of it for years to come.

And I just accept that. I'm not going to live in denial of it. But over the course of the next—we'll call it in the short term next year or two—there is going to have to be a moment where the MAGA voters are spoken to and addressed in such a way that they are not used to being spoken to. And that way of being spoken to is—again to not dehumanize them—but we have to somehow with whomever might be persuadable, we have to create doubt about their beliefs, about their support, [00:57:00] about their adherence to MAGA.

I don't think I've got the sole answer for it. I don't think there is a singular good answer to this. It's going to require some, in addition to the patience, it's going to require some collaborations with people we may not politically agree with and may not normally collaborate with. But if we feel like it's in the interest of the country and our democracy and our institutions, we're going to find a way to do it.

"The President of Forgetting" - Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - Air Date 3-13-24

SPENCER CRITCHLEY - HOST, DASTARDLY CLEVERNESS: Most of us in the U. S. have been spared the necessity of knowing history, and instead, we've been able to live as if the world was created at our birth. But people in Central and Eastern Europe have already been trammeled by the history that has just now caught up with us.

They've been trying to warn us about it for decades. Back in 1979, The Czech writer Milan Kundera warned what it's like to live under what he called "a president of forgetting." In his case, the Soviet controlled Gustav Huzak. [00:58:00] Huzak knew that in order for Czechs to believe in totalitarianism as their future, they had to forget their history.

This is from Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. If Franz Kafka is the prophet of a world without memory, Gustav Huzak is its builder. You begin to liquidate a people by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it. Give another culture to it.

Invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is, and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster. Our president of forgetting is every bit as hostile to history as Huzak was. He invents an alternative Great America—one that no one who believes in the founding vision of America can ever call great.

And in one [00:59:00] of history's notorious rhymes, our president of forgetting is also obedient to a Russian dictator. The distinction between them, without much of a difference, is that Huzak answered to a communist Russian dictator, while Donald Trump is ever so eager to please a fascist Russian dictator.

And yet Trump commands the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans, who are descended from a generation willing to die free, rather than live under fascism. The Polish writer Czesław Miłosz watched friends, highly educated, apparently free thinking friends, Embrace authoritarian rule, under both Nazi and communist occupation.

In The Captive Mind, Milosz describes how it happened, one convenient step after another. One compromise leads to a second, and a third, until at last, though everything one says may be perfectly logical, it no longer has [01:00:00] anything in common with the flesh and blood of living people. Because forgetting is easy, and remembering can be very hard, People will cooperate in their oppression, and even assist in the oppression of their neighbors.

Václav Havel watched it happen, as an author, poet, playwright, and resister, before he became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia. In his essay, The Power of the Powerless, he describes how a post totalitarian system succeeds by simply training people to accept pervasive dishonesty. How many of us do that every day?

Havel writes, "Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did. Or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life [01:01:00] with it, and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system."

To keep freedom alive, Havel tells us, we must continue to live truthfully. Even when that isn't allowed, we can find small parts of our lives where it's possible and try to make them bigger. We can and must remember what freedom is like and remind each other, day by day.

As Kundera wrote, also in the book of Laughter and Forgetting, the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivions.

Notes from the Editor on those who defend authoritarians against criticism during D-Day commemoration

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with TLDR News Global analyzing how democracies decline. Tufts University looked at the factors that put democracy under threat. Vox, back in 2017, that looked at how it was legal actions by Trump that were often the most concerning regarding democracy.

Ali Velshi on MSNBC, spoke with Anne Applebaum about [01:02:00] Russia and China's efforts to undermine democracy. Democracy Docket discussed the threat of racial gerrymandering. The Marxist Project laid out why the space between democracies and autocracies is often greater than we'd like to believe. Democracy Paradox looked through historical examples of failed democracies.

On Why is This Happening? Chris Hayes spoke with Eric Holder about Trump's plan to weaponize the justice department against his political enemies. Chauncey de Vega spoke with a former MAGA cultist who's now speaking out against the lies he once believed. And Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good described the importance of forgetting the past in order to enter a period of autocracy.

And those were just the top takes—there's a lot more in the deeper dive sections—but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all manner of important and interesting topics while trying to take a lighthearted angle at it at the same [01:03:00] time. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support. There's a link in the "show notes" through our Patreon page, if you prefer, or from right inside the Apple Podcast App. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

Now, before we continue on to the "deeper dives" half of the show—I know this is a heavy topic, existential questions about the future of democracy and all that.

So I thought I'd share one of the lighter takes on our current threat to democracy. The New York magazine Intelligencer had a short piece on conservatives' angry reaction to Biden's anti Nazi D-Day speech. Now first, it should be admitted that it's obviously true, that Biden was using the speech warning about the dangers of authoritarian tyranny, [01:04:00] as demonstrated in World War II as a modern warning against those same forces now ascendant in the GOP and elsewhere. However, he didn't actually mention anyone or any party by name. So it ended up being a nice sort of rhetorical trap wherein warning about tyranny and defending democracy. Has gotten the right to respond with anger to those ideas.

From the speech, "Now we have to ask ourselves, will we stand against tyranny against evil, against crushing brutality of the iron fist. Will we stand for freedom? Will we defend democracy?"

And then from the article writer, " What part of that do conservatives object to? Trump doesn't claim to be an isolationist, a lover of dictators or an opponent of democracy. They insist he doesn't want to break up NATO and only wants to toughen up the allies. His supporters only take attacks on these things as an attack on [01:05:00] Trump, because they understand he actually loves dictators believes in isolationism and hates democracy."

Pollock, one of the conservative commentators. Hilariously uses as evidence of Biden's scrupulous criticism, the following line: "The D-Day heroes fought to vanquish a hateful ideology in the thirties and forties. Does anyone doubt they wouldn't move heaven and earth to vanquish the hateful ideologies of today?"

And the article continues. Hearing the reference of 'hateful ideologies' Pollock's response is: "Hey, that's us!" Which is of course the classic rebuke, right? "Hey, I resemble that remark."

So. I said I was going for a slightly lighter angle, but it's also important to remind people of this, I'm about to say, you know, whenever possible. From a different New York magazine article, it says , "Trump is an admirer of Putin and reportedly of Hitler, even. Trump [01:06:00] truly supports neither Ukraine nor NATO. As I write this, it still seems insane, unimaginable that these are sentences about a once and possibly future American president, but they are real, if unfortunately, so familiar by now that Trump often benefits from our failure to be shocked all over again. Just two days before Putin's attack on his neighbor Trump called him a 'strategic genius' on the campaign trail. Trump frequently speaks about his great relationships with the world's current crop of autocrats and tyrants praising Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un for their strength while ranting about the weakness of the west. When Trump was president, he told his White House chief of staff, John Kelly—a decorated former Marine general —that he wanted America's officers to be more like Hitler's in their unquestioning loyalty to him. He routinely calls his enemies, 'vermin' and 'human scum,' echoing Hitler's language. And Kelly has said that Trump even told him [01:07:00] that Hitler did some good things."

Going on the article quotes from an unpublished resignation letter written by Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "It is my deeply held belief that you're ruining the international order and causing significant damage to our country overseas that was fought for so hard by the greatest generation that they instituted in 1945. It's now obvious to me that you don't understand that world order. You don't understand what the war was about. In fact, you subscribed to many of the principles that we fought against."

So when conservative pundits react in anger to Biden using the D-Day commemoration to criticize fascists and authoritarians from both the past and present, it seems to me that the only reasonable solution is for them to not nominate fascist authoritarians, to represent their party.

SECTION A: DISSECTION OF DEMOCRACY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with deeper dives on four [01:08:00] topics.

Next up Section A: "Dissection of Democracy," Section B: "International Democracy," Section C: "The Cult of Trump," and Section D: "Democracy in Action."

Freedom in the world is measurably declining… what can we do? - Disorder - Air Date 3-9-24

ALEXANDRA HALL HALL - HOST, DISORDER: This is the 18th consecutive year where freedom in the world has declined. So explain in a bit more detail what some of these trends are and then let's get to the whys and what's, what should we do about it.

MIKE ABRAMOWITZ: So The core trend is that global freedom declined for an 18th consecutive year, which really means that every year for the last 18 years, there have been more countries who have experienced declines in political rights and civil liberties.

And those that had improvements. Now, last year was kind of interesting because for the first time in 17 years at the time, there had been a narrowing of the gap. And so we had thought that maybe it might be a turning point, but that was not to be the case. This [01:09:00] year, we had 52 countries that declined and only 21 that improved.

That is really a pretty wide gap. And so it's really was a very bad year for democracy. I think we have to recognize that while. We're in this period of decline, we are still way ahead of where we were either at the end of World War II or even 1973, which was a trough for global democracy. And we've had, after 1973, the first 30 years of the report, a tremendous growth in democracy.

So now I think 88 countries are considered democracies compared to 44, 50 years ago. So ...

ALEXANDRA HALL HALL - HOST, DISORDER: 44, God, that's so few.

MIKE ABRAMOWITZ: Yeah. So even though there's been a. A recession, we're still ahead of where we were. And I think that is something that gives you hope, but you also don't want to take things for granted. I think there's a great line from Ronald Reagan, which I'm going to butcher, but he said often that [01:10:00] freedom had to be fought for every generation.

And it's only a generation from being extinguished. And I read, I think that you really feel that when you are in an organization like Freedom House. And while some people will say to you, well, things are not so bad. Well, yes, but if the current trends continue, they could get a lot worse. So we cannot take this for granted.

I think that the three trends that we highlighted in 2023, number one was there were widespread problems with elections, violence, manipulation. Then you had countries like Cambodia, Guatemala, Poland, Turkey, Zimbabwe, where incumbents tried to control the electoral competition, hinder their political opponents.

Or really prevent them even from taking power. That was something that happened in Guatemala. After Mr. Arevalo, who is the new president there, was fairly elected in an election there. And I think the other two would be armed conflict, often driven by authoritarian aggression, caused death and [01:11:00] destruction and imperiled freedom.

I still think that one of the major challenges to freedom is right there in Ukraine, where the invasion of Ukraine has helped degrade basic rights in both occupied Ukraine and the Ukraine that remains free. and also prompted more intense repression in Russia itself. And I think, you know, another area that we're concerned about is Myanmar, where civilians bore the brunt of a civil conflict that stemmed from the 2021 military coup.

I think the other trend that I think I would just highlight is the rejection of pluralism, which is, you know, we define as a peaceful coexistence of people with different political ideas. religions or ethnic identities. And that is something that is also, we're quite concerned about.

ALEXANDRA HALL HALL - HOST, DISORDER: So this is the year of elections.

There are elections taking place around the world, including in the US and the UK. I now have American citizenship, so I'm even more engaged in American political developments than I was [01:12:00] before. So which are the elections that we should be looking out for this year? And do you see this problem of.

Election rigging, or manipulation, or demonization of political opponents. Is that also happening here as well as in other countries?

MIKE ABRAMOWITZ: Couple points to make about elections. First of all, I think we should pause and reflect upon the fact that the most repressive authoritarian countries in the world, feel they have to have an election, right?

You think about countries like Iran and Russia, just to name two of them. There is nothing that is free and fair about elections in Iran or Russia. They are a joke, a sham, a farce, whatever you wanna call it. But Putin has to go through the exercise of having what he calls an an election because election has acquired a great power that people don't accept the kind of [01:13:00] legitimacy of a government unless it.

Except, you know, unless they have an election. And I think that's a good thing, and I think that's a hopeful sign in the long term for the power of democracy, because the fundamental democracy is about other things than just having an election, but having an election is absolutely critical to a successful democracy.

I think the second point that I would make is that there are just some global trends with elections that are concerning. I mean, just two or three just to point out. One would be the rise of social media and the changes in media have really made the ease of spreading disinformation and propaganda much easier.

And so, The presence of that in many different countries and then elections around the world is a challenge for elections and for the credibility of democracies. I think number two, you see incumbents really trying to tilt the playing field on [01:14:00] behalf of their candidacies to the extent of rewriting the Constitution as it happened in El Salvador so that, you know, Yeah, a clear rule against one term for each president.

And they basically rigged the election. So you Kelly could have another term. And I think that we've seen that around the world. And I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is that even when. Someone wins a free and fair election, entrenched powers go out of the way to try to prevent that person from taking power.

So I think there are a lot of very concerning trends about elections that we highlight in our report this year.

When Democracy Breaks: Final Thoughts with Archon Fung, David Moss and Arne Westad Part 2 - Democracy Paradox - Air Date 6-4-24

JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: The idea of democracy breaking still gives the indication that there’s a moment where democracy moves into something that is not democracy. What is the line that would represent the moment when you move from democratic breakdown? I mean, can we actually identify that moment? Does it matter to identify the exact precise [01:15:00] moment when a country moves from democracy to autocracy or at least not democracy?

ARCHON FUNG: Well, I think in the extreme cases, you can tell on either side pretty easily. Then your question is what’s the threshold? I guess many of my colleagues would have a minimal democracy definition where you absolutely know when there is no longer a contest between more than one party in a regular way. A lot of comparative political scientists would sign on to that definition still. I guess for me, it’s a fuzzier threshold in which contestation is just no longer viable within the institutions that exist and then you have to go extra-institutional. My colleague Erica Chenoweth, studies civil resistance. Once that’s the main path of contestation, it’s no longer democratic. So, for me, it has to do with the ability to contest. [01:16:00] Sometimes that’s in elections, but it’s also in many, many other spaces. When that’s just no longer viable. You’re probably not in a democracy anymore.

JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: That makes Turkey a really problematic case because this past year you had extremely competitive elections and you had municipal elections where the opposition was not just competitive but they actually won in a number of different municipalities. So, does that mean that we should still think of Turkey as being somewhat democratic or do we think of that as being a case of actual complete breakdown? Is it a country that is suffering extreme forms of democratic erosion or has it crossed that threshold where it’s no longer democratic anymore?

DAVID MOSS: I think that this idea that something being broken is binary isn’t actually quite right, not only with regard to democracy, but really almost anything else. If you think about whether your car is broken, if it doesn’t move at all and [01:17:00] doesn’t start at all, it’s broken. But what about if it only starts 1/10th of the time or what about if it moves, but it only goes about three miles an hour? Or what about if sometimes the brake works and sometimes the brakes don’t work? Different people are going to say that that car is broken depending on some configuration. But we might take a vote or something to decide whether it’s broken. Different people are going to think different things. Certainly, when it doesn’t work at all.

There are binary elements, but I think as with anything, there are elements that are not binary. We can look at a democracy and we can say not every feature is working. But a lot of features are working and broadly do we see a commitment to majoritarianism in decisions? Broadly, do we see protection of minority rights and the right to contest? If we say yes, we say it’s a working democracy. As those begin to break down, especially those protections on dissent, on opposition, on running a competitive election as a member of the opposition, [01:18:00] especially as those weaken different people at different times will say it’s broken and they may backtrack. They may say, wait, it seemed broken. Now it’s actually working a little better.

I don’t think it’s a complete binary, even with the word broken, which sometimes might feel like it’s binary. That’s one of the things that you’re pointing out and that we struggle with in the book. Different people are going to see it differently, but I would say we did all decide on these cases that, ultimately, even if we can’t name the exact moment in time, there was a breakdown. The car – in this case, the democracy, wasn’t working.

ARNE WESTAD: Specifically with regard to Turkey, I think it is difficult because no one would argue that there are no forms of competitive democracy in today’s Turkey. But at the same time, as David alluded to earlier on in this conversation, I think it’s pretty clear that for a very large number of Turkish people, they have lost faith in much of the promise that democracy seemed to hold out to them when it was restored from authoritarian rule in the late 20th century. So, there is a trajectory [01:19:00] here, but the key for us, at least the key for me, is this depends very much on who you ask. When you get a system in which almost everyone feels that the system somehow does not work for them, that’s one element of the system.

In Turkey, be it the Kemalist institutions that were put in place in the early 20th century or the way of rule that President Erdogan has developed that doesn’t work for them, it’s not part of their vision of what a democracy should be. Then you know that there is trouble. Then you know there are significant weaknesses in terms of the political system that would not be recognized by many people who live under it as being democratic. I think this is one of the most important issues for me in terms of thinking about what we can learn from these cases is that all of those approaches would be different. I mean, those are situational. Those are based on historical and cultural and political differences that come out in the case.

ARCHON FUNG: Justin, to the Turkey case and then associated cases that we don’t really write about like Hungary and [01:20:00] maybe even India and other places, this goes to maybe the changing form of autocracy rather than the changing form of democracy. John Keane points out in his book, The New Despotism, that the new despots, unlike the old ones, have to conduct these quasi-democratic rituals as part of their own legitimation. One of them is elections. Another is public polling. This makes them very nervous because they think that they’ll probably win and in Putin’s Russia, almost certainly he would win.

But there’s a little bit of insecurity there because sometimes they don’t go your way and they know this. So, it may be a permanent democratic opening in the way that the new despotisms work. It seems like there has to be that minimum doorway to some minimum contestability in which things could go bad for the despot in a way that wasn’t quite true in prior eras of autocracy.

JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: [01:21:00] The Athenian chapter is interesting because it emphasizes not just democratic erosion and democratic breakdown, but also democratic recovery. But if we look at all of the different historical cases, any of the cases that date back to the 70s or earlier, they all eventually became thriving democracies later on. It makes me wonder whether when you suffer democratic erosion, if there’s really a point where democratic breakdown becomes almost inevitable. That to create democratic recovery, it needs to recover almost out of a complete breakdown, almost tabula rasa, if you will.

That’s one of the thoughts in my mind that I’d like to pose to you guys is whether democratic erosion, once it hits a certain point, does it become almost like a whirlpool where it just sucks you in to eventual breakdown [01:22:00] or can you recover your democracy at any point of the backsliding episode? Is it possible to recover from severe democratic erosion right at the point of democratic breakdown?

DAVID MOSS: I think there’s no way really to know. Certainly, in this book, we only looked at cases where they ended in breakdown. We can’t say if a country might’ve had a large amount of erosion and then it recovered. We’re not looking at those examples and beyond that it’s hard to put a number on it. We haven’t yet figured out how to do it, but it’d be great. V-DEM is trying and they have their method and others are trying. It’s hard, especially historically to have a lot of confidence in a number. So, it’s a little bit hard to say this one has more erosion than the other in very fine-grained ways. I’m not sure if we know the answer to that. That said I know the US example a little better than some of the others.

If you look at the US there was always a great deal of what [01:23:00] I would call political hypochondria. People always thought the democracy was breaking. From 1800 forward, they thought the Republic was breaking and except for in the case of the Civil War, they were always wrong. If you think about the restrictions, for example, just to give one very notable example, on black voting rights in the post-bellum period up through the 1960s, this is a very significant degree of political erosion and the country takes an awful long time, but is able to begin to rectify that particularly with respect to voting. So, I think you can have significant degrees of erosion.

If you look back again in the antebellum period in the United States, one of the reasons for the push for public education was the belief that small-d democratic values were eroding and that public education was necessary to correct that. Now, there was also a lot of bigotry associated with public education and a Catholic-Protestant fight and lots of things going on. There was this sense that there was erosion and here’s an institution [01:24:00] that can help address it. I don’t know how you measure in the fine grained way you’re talking about and we don’t know if a country that’s had significant erosion can come back without the breakdown, but I would tend to think that the possibility may be there.

Three experts on why democracies are facing growing threats globally - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 12-10-21

NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: President Biden said there's a global competition between democracy and autocracy. Which side is winning in Latin America?

MIRIAM KOMBLITH: Unfortunately, I have to say that I think autocracy is winning.

Unfortunately, this is a region of the world that, until recently, praised itself of having all the countries in the democratic field, except for Cuba, and that has been a 60-year, long-lasting dictatorship. However, nowadays, we have — in addition to Cuba, we have Nicaragua and Venezuela, and we have a significant slipping into authoritarian trends both on the right and on the left.

And what's really worrisome is these authoritarian trends are being promoted from within, elected officials, [01:25:00] players, parties inside democratic systems that are pushing their own countries against the will of the people, in many cases, towards authoritarian regimes.

NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Helen Kezie-Nwoha, we have seen coups in Guinea, Mali, Chad, Sudan, the highest number of coups in afternoon in 40 years.

Each, of course, have their own local causes. But what's behind what Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently called an epidemic of coups?

HELEN KENZIE-NWOHA: The democratic process in Africa has been mired with a lot of corruption in electoral processes.

You will find politicians taking advantage of poverty, a large number of unemployed youths, buying votes during elections, making elections not credible. We have also seen increasingly marginalization of minority groups, ethnic groups.

We see also increasingly social and economic inequalities [01:26:00] that have also led to agitations by people calling for changes in government. Once people are calling for changes, the army takes over. And when they took over, they also used elections itself to manipulate themselves into power, making it even worse for people.

NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Heather Conley, how are leaders in Hungary and Poland especially challenging democracy, weaponizing cultural values, and how are other leaders in Europe, frankly, taking their example?

HEATHER CONLEY: Hungary, under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has really been a leader in establishing an illiberal handbook, so restricting constitutional capabilities for an opposition to be able to express themselves, reduce media freedoms, so any media voice has to be supportive of the government, is controlling the judicial branch, making sure that there can't be any meaningful investigation [01:27:00] into a government.

Mr. Orban's handbook has now been adopted in Poland, increasingly in Slovenia. In part, it's to ensure the current government can maintain its political power and its base, and making sure that the opposition cannot do that.

NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: So, let's talk a little bit in each region about how some local forces are fighting this.

Miriam Kornblith, let's start with you.

What do we see in terms of resistance in Latin America to these anti-democratic trends? How are people fighting back?

MIRIAM KOMBLITH: There is a lot of fighting back against the authoritarian trends.

Even in the case of Cuba, for the first time in 60 years, people took to the streets. There's a very vibrant civil society in Latin America that is fighting back. They are looking for transparency, anti-corruption. They're looking for rule of law, for independent judiciary, for independent legislative branches. There are lots of courageous, [01:28:00] innovative and very committed people fighting back.

NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Helen Kezie-Nwoha, you talked a lot about elections. Why is it important for the world to try and support African election infrastructure?

HELEN KENZIE-NWOHA: Civil society organizations and others bodies are working very hard to ensure that electoral processes are more transparent, despite the militarized nature of states within Africa.

Although there's been a lot of works in terms of sensitizing the citizens on the rule of law on elections, you find that the environment itself is not conducive for civil society.

NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Heather Conley, we have seen major protests across Poland. Can something like that make a difference?

HEATHER CONLEY: Absolutely.

So, you really are seeing a pretty significant social mobilization. But is it enough? You have governments that have all the tools. They control the media, they control the funding sources, and they [01:29:00] are able to use their majorities to pass through new laws.

But I think we're seeing some real improvements. So we see this as well in the European Union withholding pandemic relief funds from both Poland and Hungary because of the democratic backsliding, may, in fact, have the greatest leverage, in addition to strong U.S. engagement.

SECTION B: INTERNATIONAL DEMOCRACY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section B: "International Democracy."

“More Than a Symbolic Victory”: Mexican Women’s Movement Paved Way for Election of 1st Female President - Democracy Now! - Air Date 6-4-24

LAURA CARLSEN: After 200 years of democracy and 65 male presidents, the populace elected a woman for the first time, with an overwhelming majority. Now, this is more than a symbolic victory. What it means is that there’s an example for younger women that women can be leaders, that they can gain the support of the population, and they offer greater horizons for younger women as they begin to think about their own futures. It also means — and I’ve been talking to women from other countries, for example, in Chile, with [01:30:00] Michelle Bachelet as president, two terms, and also in Honduras, Xiomara Castro — that there’s a number of doors that open for women’s equality and policies that have to do with women’s equality. For one thing, there’s usually greater dialogue. There are more channels of dialogue. For another, there’s the support that women presidents can give each other, especially within this region, in terms of promoting gender equality policies across the region. This could be a path toward greater gender equality, and which is obviously very key to democracy within the region.

Now, in the clip that you played, Claudia Sheinbaum credited women before her with her victory. And it’s very important to recognize this. She owes a lot to women’s movements within Mexico. Women’s movements in Mexico began fighting decades ago for gender parity and equal representation [01:31:00] in political positions within the country. And it has not been an easy fight. We’re talking about a country with a traditionally macho culture which has now achieved a landmark in democracy that even the United States has not achieved. They began by requiring quotas in candidacies. They would get a legislation passed, and then the parties would find loopholes. They would have to close up the loopholes. They began to push for laws against political violence and gender-based violence that would disqualify or even threaten women for being women. And little by little, they made this progress, until, also with the support of Claudia Sheinbaum’s party and — the Morena, they achieved parity in the cabinet and within Congress at certain points in the recent history. So, all this was very important for her arriving.

Now, [01:32:00] the current government has not had a good relationship with women’s movements. Women’s movements have been dissatisfied particularly with the lack of progress on the key issue of gender violence. We saw massive demonstrations of over a million people throughout Mexico on March 8th, International Women’s Day, protesting against the lack of progress and what they see as relative indifference of the government toward women’s demands to reduce it and protect them. And, in fact, the president has been dismissive and at times even attributed their criticisms to a manipulation of the right wing.

There’s an expectation that the relationship will be different with Claudia Sheinbaum. The current government does have feminists who are involved in it. There’s an expectation that feminists will join this government, as well, and that there may be new policies to direct the issue [01:33:00] of violence, of gender-based violence. Femicide in Mexico is very high. It’s kind of hard to pin down the numbers, because it has a different legal definition in different entities. One of the things that she’s proposing is that there be a federal definition of “femicide” and that it be a crime that’s prioritized for prosecution, contributing with groups of lawyers for women who denounce crimes of gender-based violence. There’s a series of proposals, most of which are fairly similar to what’s been put — been in place before. So, women are looking to see a more aggressive policy. However, there is an expectation that there will be some changes here, and particularly in the tone.

Claudia Sheinbaum is a very different type of politician from Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He was obviously the wind in her political sails to be able to achieve a victory which is a 30-point margin. It’s greater [01:34:00] than even most of the polls assumed. She’s winning, by the latest figures, which is over 95% of the vote counted, by 59% to 28% to her closest rival, another woman candidate, which is interesting, from the right, Xóchitl Gálvez, as you mentioned. And so, his popularity, which has been consistently above 60% throughout his six-year period, significantly contributed to her win, as well as the popularity of his programs. These programs, which are called the Fourth Transformation, which means the fourth moment of significant change in the history of Mexico, from independence, the reform and the revolution, giving it this historic dimension, are really based on social programs where a majority of Mexican families are receiving benefits from the government. And that was reflected, as well, in the vote. So, she has promised [01:35:00] to continue with that.

And one of the big debates is: How much will she create her own mark on this presidency? Mexican presidents typically have a great deal of power, which means that former presidents typically fade into the background. But there is some question about how much she’ll be able to do that. She has, of course, insinuated that this kind of a question is sexist, which you could definitely see it that way, and has said that she has a commitment, because there’s a public mandate to continue with these policies, but that she will indeed be her own person.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Laura, I wanted to ask you, in terms of Sheinbaum’s policies toward the United States, and, of course, the very hot-button issue of immigration. We’re hearing that President Biden is about to issue an executive order that will effectively begin to close down the border for [01:36:00] migrants or people seeking asylum from through Mexico into the United States. Your sense of how Sheinbaum will be — attempt to deal with the Biden administration, or whichever administration takes office next January, in terms of immigration?

This is a critical issue. And so far what she’s repeated is the slogan “cooperation with respect.” The current government has walked a fine line in its relationship with both the presidency of Donald Trump and the presidency of Joe Biden, and particularly, of course, on the issue of immigration. Claudia Sheinbaum has not defined a very detailed plan for what Mexico will do with immigration. And so far what that policy has been is to toe the line of U.S. anti-immigrant policies that are focused on containing immigrant flows. There’s a lot of talk of going to the causes, creating jobs that would enable [01:37:00] people to remain in their home countries, particularly in Mexico and Central America. And what we haven’t seen, the investment that would correspond to really making that kind of a policy work. She has said that she will emphasize that. She has said that she will respect human rights. But we see a huge participation of the National Guard in immigration control, which has led to massive violations of immigrant rights here in Mexico. And she has certainly not said that that will stop.

LAURA CARLSEN: With the closure of the right to request asylum in the United States, Mexico has to receive these thousands of people. It is very likely that Claudia Sheinbaum will agree to receiving these people. Mexico has refused to be a third safe country, which is a formal agreement saying that everyone who wants to request asylum has to do it in the first safe country they pass through. But they have agreed to a number [01:38:00] of programs that require them to receive people who are technically waiting to go through a legal process in the United States. It will be a constant negotiation. It’s a very tricky negotiation. There’s always a sore point of national sovereignty involved, that Mexican governments, both López Obrador and now Claudia Sheinbaum, will defend. But they also know that they cannot anger the United States, at the risk of economic repercussions.

If it’s Donald Trump, that risk is even greater. And she will have the additional factor that he’s a misogynist. It will not be easy for a woman president to deal with Donald Trump. We’ve already seen his relationship with Angela Merkel, for example, in Germany. So, the challenges are great.

Indian Elections - Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - Air Date 6-6-24

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: If you're wondering how there's been both substantial growth and increasing poverty, that is because India's economic gains have been widely [01:39:00] unequal. By some estimates, just one million people now control around 80 percent of India's wealth.

And as they've gotten richer, much of the country has gotten poorer, even with all those bags of grain with his face on them. Under Modi, the country has fallen in the Global Hunger Index and now sits below North Korea and war torn Sudan. And you would think That all of this would be fertile ground for Modi's critics to exploit.

But, it's actually hard to do that in India. For one thing, it's difficult to confront him to his face, because he hasn't held a single press conference in India in the last ten years. And the interviews that he's granted have been the exact opposite of hard hitting. What criticism there is of Modi often gets suppressed in India, sometimes in a pretty heavy handed way.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Publications that have done stories critical of India's leadership, like the BBC, recently saw their offices raided on charges of tax evasion or money laundering. One of the country's most popular news channels that reported critically on the government, [01:40:00] NDTV, had its founders raided for bank fraud.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: It's true, not only were the founders of NDTV raided, but a few years later, a billionaire with close ties to Modi bought it, and its tone is now much friendlier to him.

Basically, if you criticize Modi, there's a pretty good chance that things are going to get very unpleasant for you. And given that we're here in America, I'm honestly not too worried about Moti's goons coming after me, but on the off chance that their reach does extend this far, you know what? Fucking try it!

You want to try and shut us down for being critical? I dare you! Do you have any idea who I am? I'm Bill fucking Ma, and my show has been on for, holy shit, over 20 years. And if you want to take us down, take your best shot. I, Bill Ma, would welcome it. It is no wonder. India is currently ranked 159th out of 180 countries for press freedom, that is 19 places lower than when Modi first came to power.

But it's not just national media, local outlets have been targeted too. This network in Kerala was suddenly taken off the [01:41:00] air by the government in 2020 for reasons explicitly linked to its content.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The shutdown was triggered by the channels reporting on anti Muslim riots in Delhi in February 2020.

According to the notice from the Information Ministry, MediaOne's coverage was biased and critical of the role of the Delhi police, and of a Hindu nationalist outfit, the RSS. The ban was soon reversed, the channel back on air. But the signal was clear, fall in line or else.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Yeah, that's not good. Because that crackdown creates a clear chilling effect, where media outlets may well be intimidated out of criticizing Modi.

And that could actually help explain why Hotstar, the platform that we were on in 2020, mysteriously chose to block our episode criticizing. And look, there are plenty of reasons to not watch this show. Depressing subject matter, too much profanity, and the very fact that the frantic pace of my talking voice causes dogs to, and this is a medical term, go nuts.

Also, the show seems biased, it's too long, I prefer Jimmy Fallon, Kimmel, Colbert, [01:42:00] Seth, or James Corden. Hi, Mum, by the way. Whatever your reason, at least it's your choice, not someone else's, to not watch. What I'm saying is, Meaningful criticism of Modi is scarce on TV in India. In fact, many veteran anchors who were critical of him have migrated to sites like YouTube instead.

But the government may soon be able to help heavily regulate digital media too. It's pushing a law which could mean that anyone making social commentary online would have to adhere to advertising and program codes prescribed by the government. Meanwhile, an amendment is working its way through the courts, which would establish a fact check unit, allowing the government to identify fake news about itself And order it to be taken down.

And I actually have a lead for that fact check unit. Check out the batshit claim that Modi stopped the war in Ukraine. Because there's a weird video going around that he should probably get taken down. And it's not just the press who found it hard to take on Modi. The same goes for his political opposition.

He's currently facing off against a coalition called the Indian National Developmental [01:43:00] Inclusive Alliance, or INDA. India, for short. A monumentally weak name for a coalition. The first I in India stands for Indian. It'd be like if the H in HBO stood for HBO. Which it obviously doesn't, it stands for Hank.

Hank's box office. The India Coalition. This election is led by the Congress Party, the face of which is Rahul Gandhi. And while his party never stood a realistic chance of challenging Modi, even so, its campaign has been significantly hampered by the fact that just weeks before this year's election began, tax agencies moved to freeze their bank accounts.

And on the same day that that was announced, the head of one of India's other opposition parties, And look, those could be just more lucky, complete coincidences for Modi. Except for the fact that over the years, multiple politicians who've opposed the BJP have found themselves facing charges of fraud or financial malfeasance.

Only for those charges to suddenly stall or be [01:44:00] dropped when they switch parties and join the BJP instead. There's even a term for this, the washing machine, where supposedly dirty politicians come out clean once they switch sides. And it is a completely open secret there.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: One opposition politician who joined the BJP in 2022 left the cat out of the bag when he said he sleeps easier now that he's a member of the ruling party.

I also had to switch to the BJP. Now I'm stress and tension free. All is good. No official inquiries, no investigation, and I can sleep peacefully. I'm tension free. Wow!

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: It is so universally understood. Everyone in that audience laughed, and laughed so hard, honestly. I'm a little bit jealous. It kind of makes me wonder if I should have spent our last show admitting to political corruption, instead of, what were we talking about?

What, corn? I did 25 minutes on fucking corn, and people watched it? What exactly is this show? [01:45:00] But in general, and to put it mildly, It seems good to be on Modi's good side, and very, very bad to be on his bad side. And that brings us back to his attacks on Muslims. As I mentioned earlier, he and his party are adherents to Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva.

It used to be a fringe ideology, but is now mainstream. And it's been said, nobody has done more to advance this cause than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And Muslims, as India's largest religious minority, have borne the brunt of this. Early this year, Modi famously opened an over 200 million dollar Hindu temple, showing up personally to help consecrate it.

Which might seem benign, until you learn that temple was built on the former site of this mosque, that was demolished by a Hindu mob in 1992, in an incident that set off riots, reportedly killing over 2, 000 people, most of them Muslim. So it's a site of tremendous pain. And the symbolism of opening a temple on that exact spot has been called the crowning achievement of a national movement aimed at establishing Hindu [01:46:00] supremacy in India.

But the damage here isn't just symbolic. In the climate that Modi stoked, Muslims have been lynched by Hindu mobs over allegations of eating beef or smuggling cows, an animal considered holy to Hindus. And then, there's been this.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Muslim owned buildings are literally being bulldozed in what the government calls a crackdown on illegal construction and accused criminals.

A brand of bulldozer justice all too common in India.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: That is awful and it's happening so much now that bulldozer justice has become a commonly used term. In fact, the bulldozer itself has become a Hindu nationalist symbol and it's been featured during election victories and in political rallies. This hardline BJP leader has even earned the nickname Bulldozer Baba.

And with anti Muslim hate speech and violence on the rise, it is no wonder many are feeling increasingly targeted and in incredibly grim ways.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Muslim shopkeeper Shamsher Ali feels like he's being pushed out. [01:47:00] Anything can happen at any point. That is the amount of hate now. Violence against Muslims is on the rise.

A Delhi police officer was caught on camera last month kicking a group of Muslim men, praying by the side of the road. The video went viral. The officer suspended. Another police officer arrested for killing three Muslims on a train, praising the prime minister while standing over their bodies.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Yeah, and it's worth remembering, that is not a bug of Modi's leadership, it is a feature.

So given all of this, what can we do? Well, for those of us who don't live in India, nothing really. Also, asking a British person, what should we do about India, is a little bit dangerous, as we tend to have quite a lot of ideas, none of which should be listened to. But as an international community, it seems past time to stop the uncritical, thawning praise of a man who is, to put it mildly, a deeply complicated figure.

So maybe we could at least stop comparing him to Bruce Springsteen. [01:48:00] And when you talk about what he's done for India, at least acknowledge that while, yes, he's responsible for giving bags of grain to people, he's also responsible for some getting sent bulldozers. And it should be possible to acknowledge the good things that Modi's managed to do for India, while acknowledging that many Indians live in active fear of what he seems more than happy to represent.

El Salvador’s "Cool Dictator" Bukele Begins Controversial 2nd Term with Backing from Biden & Trump - Democracy Now! - Air Date 6-4-24

AMY GOODMAN: President Bukele’s inauguration comes as his government continues to enforce a state of exception in El Salvador, a so-called war on gangs that’s led to the detention of nearly 80,000 people since 2022, many without charge or access to due process. Human rights groups have warned of gross violations and torturous conditions inside overcrowded Salvadoran prisons and estimate at least 240 people have died in police custody.

Despite growing concerns for Bukele’s authoritarianism, the Biden administration sent a high-level delegation, led by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, to the inauguration. Just three years ago, Biden officials had [01:49:00] refused to meet with Bukele in D.C. amidst concerns of his anti-democratic rule. Also in attendance at Saturday’s inauguration in San Salvador was Argentina’s right-wing President Javier Milei, Donald Trump Jr. and several Trump allies, including Florida Congressmember Matt Gaetz, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Protesters gathered outside the Salvadoran Embassy in Washington, D.C., to call out the Biden administration’s recognition of what they called an illegal and unconstitutional second term for Bukele.

CONSUELO GÓMEZ: [translated] We know that your government knows of the kidnapping and deaths of our children and families in Bukele’s jails. President Biden, it shames us that your government decided to participate in the inauguration of a new dictator in El Salvador.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to San Salvador, where we’re joined by Roman Gressier, a French American journalist, reporter with El Faro English, covering Central American politics. His latest piece for El Faro English is headlined “Biden [01:50:00] and Trump Camps Jockey for Favor in Bukele’s New El Salvador.” El Faro’s editorial board also recently published an op-ed titled “A Dictatorship Is Born.”

Explain the significance of this inauguration, the second term of Bukele, who describes himself as the “coolest dictator.”

ROMAN GRESSIER: As you noted in the introduction to this segment, this is essentially the evolution or the fulfillment of a process that’s been developing at least since 2021, when the Constitutional Chamber and the attorney general were removed in the first day of the last legislature, when Bukele’s party had achieved a supermajority in the elections. So, they removed the Constitutional Court, or Chamber, which then dramatically reversed course, just three, four months later — I believe in September of that year — ruling, despite six articles of the Constitution, that Bukele could seek reelection. So, that was [01:51:00] essentially the first stepping stone. And the following year, he declared that he would indeed run for reelection. And late last October, just minutes before the enrollment deadline as a candidate, he did indeed register as a candidate for reelection, without resistance from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal or other institutions. And on February 3rd, he was reelected with over 80% of the public’s support. And he was just sworn in on Saturday.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And, Roman, if you could explain to our viewers and listeners why Bukele has such deep support among so many Salvadorans?

ROMAN GRESSIER: Well, I think it has to do with a number of factors, first and foremost being the state of exception, which, while it has been very repressive, as you had also identified in the introduction, does hold the strongest support among the — [01:52:00] in the electorate and in polling. We saw throughout the election that the government, in fact, did not hold very much — did not do very much campaigning at all. The president did not do very much campaigning at all. It was more of a — and there weren’t future-looking proposals, such as, “We want to do this or that.” It was more a victory lap, stressing the reduction of gang presence, the dramatic reduction of gang presence in communities across the country. And there were even ads being run prior to the election suggesting that if the opposition, quote, “were to return to power,” then there would be a dramatic unleashing of gangs from the prisons, and this could only be avoided if the president’s majority in the Legislature were to continue.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And could you talk about the Bukele government’s crackdown on journalists and [01:53:00] human rights defenders? You yourself were among a group of journalists who were surveilled by the Bukele government with the Pegasus spyware.

ROMAN GRESSIER: That’s right. At the time, in late 2022, when we announced the Pegasus surveillance, extensive Pegasus surveillance, of El Faro, there were also multiple other newsrooms who were touched by that, as well as human rights organizations, columnists. It was very extensive. And I would suspect that if more people were to subject their phones to the same tests that we ran, we would have an even broader picture of what that surveillance truly looked like. But the digital surveillance certainly has been strong. The context of digital — of in-person and digital intimidation has also been very — has been ever present.

Just a few days before — two days before inauguration, if I’m not mistaken, the government announced arrests against nine [01:54:00] historic FMLN leaders, accusing them of plotting to plant bombs throughout the capital. And the audio that the police posted online didn’t speak of that in those terms. It spoke of a product that could not fail, etc. And one legal aid organization that knows the defendants asserted that they were speaking of firecrackers that are often used at protests.

So, the broader context or the undertones of inauguration have been very tense, hostile at times. And at inauguration itself, there were snipers on the rooftop, on rooftops close to the event, the military checking people who were coming in and out. So, the whole context definitely had militaristic undertones to it.

AMY GOODMAN: Roman, as we begin to wrap up, you’ve got Bukele detaining over 80,000 people since 2022, many without charge, in his so-called war on gangs. You have the Biden [01:55:00] administration, just three years ago, officials refusing to meet with President Bukele in D.C., given the human rights abuses or his tendency toward authoritarianism. Now you have a high-level delegation, led by Mayorkas, being present at the inauguration. And you have the right wing there. You have Florida Congressmember Matt Gaetz. You have Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host. And you have Donald Trump Jr., clearly representing Donald Trump. Why? What are their interests?

ROMAN GRESSIER: Yeah, it was interesting — it was interesting to see these what appeared to be parallel U.S. delegations at inauguration on Saturday. On one hand, you have the Biden administration, who, after the initial ruling by the Constitutional Court — actually, even before that, after the removal of the last Constitutional Court in May [01:56:00] 2021, they were extremely critical, as were most of the countries in the hemisphere, or many of the countries in the hemisphere. And that posture gradually changed. So, by the next year — actually, even adding one more step to the picture, when interim U.S. Ambassador Jean Manes left the country in around November 2021, the U.S., by that time, had compared Bukele’s ambition to seek reelection to Hugo Chávez. And she left the country saying that she didn’t — she believed she didn’t have a partner in the country at that time. So, the criticism was very broad. But by the following year, what Juan Gonzalez — the other Juan Gonzalez, the former national security adviser to President Biden, told El Faro English essentially said in a public forum the following year was that, you know, “There are different interpretations of the Constitution, and we’ll let the people decide.” [01:57:00] And at that point, things were more ambiguous. And by this year, the administration has settled into a posture of steering clear of the question of unconstitutional reelection and focusing on efforts to draw closer to the Bukele administration. I think part of that has to do with the fact that when the current U.S. ambassador faced his Senate hearing, Florida Senator Marco Rubio stressed that we don’t — and I believe this is a direct quote. He said, “We don’t have to applaud everything that they’re doing, but there is a national security interest that should also be balanced.” So, I believe that’s what is afoot on the side of the Biden administration.

And as for the Trump orbit, there has — Bukele was very close to the Trump administration and to U.S. Ambassador Ronald Johnson, who was there. There was an extensive cooperation on migration, efforts to stop migration to the U.S. at Mexico border. And in recent months, [01:58:00] you could say in the past year, as things have been particularly delicate with the Biden administration and there was a lot of uncertainty as to the tenor of the relationship, Bukele was very openly courting the U.S. far right. He was meeting with Tucker Carlson on his show, taking other steps. And it was very evident that there was a mutual affinity. And basically, the visit by Donald Trump Jr. confirmed. It was the most public sign of what had been understood for some time, which is that Bukele does, in fact, bet on and support the return candidacy of Donald Trump.

How to Dismantle a Democracy - Analysis - Air Date 2-19-24

DAVID RUNCIMAN: In the 1990s, there were these sort of fantastical visions of a democracy where you'd have nightly referendums where the people would choose on whatever the question was by clicking on their screens, whatever the technology was in the 1990s, policy choices for the government. So none of that has ever come to pass.

Instead, he says, technology is all [01:59:00] too often being used to damage democracy. If you think about the dawn of the digital technology age, the great hope was that this technology would provide the tools for citizens to expose their government. It was meant to be the great vehicle of democracy. democratic emancipation.

This is thought to be a democratic technology because it puts information in the hands of citizens. And I think what we have learned is that there is a massive power imbalance here. And actually the scope and the capacity to use and manipulate information lies with governments. They have far greater power to do this.

They have far greater appetite to do it. They have far greater capacity to do it.

MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: Amos Lipovich from Freedom House says the Turkish government is one of many, which is keen to check out what people have posted on platforms like X, often many years ago, to see if it offers potential to go after them.

AMY SLIPOWITZ: If you kind of get on the bad side of the Erdogan government, they'll just go back through your social media history, look [02:00:00] through your tweets, go back 10 years even, and find something that's not true.

that seems to be critical of the government and use that to investigate or prosecute them. So it also leaves this kind of digital trail that can threaten arrest at any moment.

MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: Turkish President Erdogan won't have to face the jeopardy of another presidential election now until 2028. But for the country normally referred to as the world's largest democracy, crunch time is fast approaching.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Modi is generating an immense amount of enthusiasm today, there's almost a frenzied atmosphere inside the rally.

MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: India is holding elections in two months time, with Narendra Modi seeking a third five year term in office. 900 million people are registered to vote. There are six recognized national parties, dozens of regional parties, and more than 2, 000 unrecognized ones.

Surely that shows a thriving democracy.

LARRY DIAMOND: The grip of the ruling party, [02:01:00] the BJP, just keeps tightening.

MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: Not according to Stanford University's Larry Diamond, who's concerned that, in fact, increasingly, it's just one party in serious contention. That's Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP.

LARRY DIAMOND: People are self censoring.

A lot of people won't, even in intellectual life, say certain things on social media in public for fear of being prosecuted. Businesses and independent media know that the taxman cometh with a political hatchet if they say too much that is critical of the government or the ruling party.

MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: Forget the Marines.

Sending in the tax authorities is a perfect way to intimidate your opponents. While most of us would agree companies and individuals who evade tax should be investigated, Larry Diamond says some suspect it has become a political tool in India to silence opposition.

LARRY DIAMOND: An independent research institute, not, you know, not one of the most oppositional ones [02:02:00] whose name probably I should leave out so that their plight isn't made even worse than it already has become, had to close down because they said modestly critical things and the tax man came.

That's the strategy now.

MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: The Indian Income Tax Department has raided an impressive number of organisations. The charities Oxfam and Amnesty International and several news websites which have been critical of its BJP party. The BBC has not been immune. In February last year, its Delhi offices were raided for three days over allegations of tax evasion.

Larry Diamond believes the Indian media has taken note.

LARRY DIAMOND: Many Indian newspapers now have become so quiet, so tame, even so servile. Their owners have huge business interests, and they don't want the tax man coming.

MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: The governing BJP party denies that journalists are being targeted, and believes [02:03:00] that much of what is happening is part of an orchestrated propaganda against the government.

But observers say India is using the courts to silence high profile opponents with the sorts of charges which would not have been brought before. For decades after independence, the Congress Party dominated Indian politics. But in March last year, one of its senior leaders, Rahul Gandhi, was sentenced to two years in prison for defamation after surname at an election rally.

He was also later disqualified as a lawmaker.

JENNIFER GANDHI: The prosecution of Rahul Gandhi, who is a prominent figure due to his family name and his position in the Congress party, but actually using the law to prosecute him in such a clearly manipulative way to prevent him from standing in the election is probably a pretty prominent low point.

MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: Jennifer Gandhi, no relation to Rahul, is professor of political science and [02:04:00] global affairs at Yale University. In August last year, India's Supreme Court suspended Rahul Gandhi's conviction. But Professor Gandhi says it's not just the final verdict that's important. It's the amount of time, money and energy political opponents have to expend in fighting their cases.

JENNIFER GANDHI: I mean, just think about the amount of energy and resources that those people who've been targeted by the government, how much they have to muster to defend themselves. It's a scary prospect, right? That you'd have to find counsel who's willing to represent you, who's not intimidated themselves by what the government could do to them.

MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: India's neighbours, Bangladesh and Pakistan, have a combined total population of around 400 million people and have both held elections this year. In January, Bangladesh Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, secured her fourth straight term in a controversial election. The [02:05:00] main opposition, Bangladesh Nationalist Party, boycotted the poll after mass arrests of its leaders and supporters.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Pakistan goes to the polls this week, but there are questions about how free or fair these elections will be. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan is disqualified from running An

MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: India's great rival and neighbour, Pakistan, has jailed former Prime Minister, a past captain of the Pakistani cricket team, Imran Khan and his wife, for seven years after voiding their marriage.

He was already in prison after having been found guilty on corruption charges. The week before the couple were convicted of profiting from state gifts, even the cricket bat, the symbol of Khan's PTI party, was banned from appearing on ballot papers for February's elections. That may seem like a small detail, but in a country where there are high rates of illiteracy, it's likely to confuse voters.

Anne Applebaum says smearing your opponent and trying to question their [02:06:00] integrity. It's part of the playbook.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: If you can undermine someone and destroy their credibility and harass them and ruin their lives, then you depress their followers and their admirers as well. It can include accusations of corruption.

It can include harassment, you know, tax inspections or forcing people to produce lots of documents about their financial status. You can just say you think they're good, you know, you think they're well meaning, you know, you think these are idealistic people. They're not, they're corrupt.

SECTION C: THE CULT OF TRUMP

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, Section C: "The Cult of Trump."

Jon Stewart Tackles The Trump Conviction Fallout & Puts The Media on Trial - The Daily Show - Air Date 6-3-24

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: For Democrats, of course, the challenge is how do we exploit the moment politically without giving the impression that this was the plan all along? Republicans needed to employ a slightly different strategy.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: This was a sham rigged political show trial from the very beginning.

This is the most outrageous travesty

I've ever seen. This was not law, this was not criminal justice, this was politics, this was a political smear job.

LAURA INGRAM: I [02:07:00] guess we all need, what, to shop at Banana Republic from now on? Because that's what it feels like, yeah, a Banana Republic.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: After this trial, we need to shop at Old Navy, because our country is a sinking ship.

It was a sham, a sham, this trial. A sham, I say. It was a sham. I'm shopping at Old Navy. The trial was a sham. Yes, we impaneled grand juries and submitted evidence and cross examined witnesses. But how is Donald Trump or his family not allowed on the jury? Outrageous! our justice system wasn't a sham, but certainly applying our justice system to Donald Trump was.

SENATOR TIM SCOTT: This is the weaponization of the justice system against their political opponent.

This is a justice system that haunts Republicans while protecting Democrats. [02:08:00]

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Oh my God! The justice system hunts Republicans while protecting Democrats. Someone should mention that to such unprotected Democrats as Senator Robert Menendez and Congressman Henry Cuellar, both facing corruption charges brought by our Department of Justice.

Not to mention, Hunter Biden was facing jury selection in a federal gun charges trial. F ing today! Through your sham upitization, the good hearted and good intentioned denizens of MAGA tania have finally been pushed too far.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Be ready, because on January 20 of next year, when he's former president, Joe Biden, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh said Trump should, quote, Make and publish a list of 10 high ranking Democrat criminals who he will have arrested when he takes office. These

MEGYN KELLY: Democrats will rue the day they decided to use lawfare to stop a presidential candidate.

It won't be Hunter Biden the next time. [02:09:00] It's going to be Joe Biden. It could potentially still be Barack Obama. It could still potentially be Hillary Clinton.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: It could be Barack Obama.

Perhaps it is time for those on the right to begin to examine what it might be like to investigate Hillary and William Clinton. Or perhaps to do it continuously and relentlessly for the last 30 years. But! To admit their own political gamesmanship, their own attempts at weaponizing justice, their own relentless pursuit of opponents, their own dehumanizing rhetoric towards the left, would be to allow a molecule of reality into the airtight distortion field that has been created to protect Magadonians from the harsh glare of the world.

It is a place where a moment such as this next one can pass without so much as a gasp of [02:10:00] what planet do you live on? For it is clearly not ours.

WILL CAIN: You famously said regarding Hillary Clinton, lock her up. You declined to do that as president.

DONALD TRUMP: I didn't say lock her up, but the people don't say lock her up, lock her up.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: What the f k? You never said lock her. I think I remember you saying it to her face at a debate.

HILARY CLINTON: It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

DONALD TRUMP: Because you'd be in jail.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: To be fair, I apologize. guys. You did not say the words, lock her up, you only used a phrase synonymous with locking her up. Lock her up! Lock her up! Again, apologies. You didn't say lock her up, you merely gave [02:11:00] the thumbs up to thousands of others chanting lock her up. But that doesn't mean he literally said lock her up, although to be fair, he literally said lock her up all the f

DONALD TRUMP: ing time.

So Crooked Hillary, Crooked Hillary, you should lock her up, I'll tell ya. For what she's done, they should lock her up. Lock her up is right. Lock up Hillary.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: three of them? And that, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you is why we need courts.

Whatever flaws the American justice system has, and they are legion, especially for non billionaire former presidents, [02:12:00] it does appear to be the last place in America where you can't just say whatever the f k you want regardless of reality. Trump knows this better than anyone.

DONALD TRUMP: Now I would have testified, I wanted to testify.

The theory is you never testify because as soon as you testify, anybody. If it were George Washington, don't testify, because he'll get you on something that you said slightly wrong, and then they sue you for perjury. You would have said something out of whack, like it was a beautiful sunny day and it was actually raining out.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Yes, our jails in America are filled with incompetent weathermen. I'm telling you, officer, I thought thundersnow! 20 percent is still a chance! Don't take me away! Don't take me away! This is why the law and order right hates court procedures when applied to them. Courts are the last remaining guardrail that has a [02:13:00] standard of evidentiary presentation.

It is the last place where you have to prove what you say and you see the difference in what they say out of court versus what they say in court. Here is Trump on the 2020 election, out of court.

DONALD TRUMP: This is a fraud on the American public. We know there was massive fraud. It was a rigged election, 100%.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Here are his lawyers in court.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: This is not a fraud case. We are not alleging fraud in this lawsuit. We're not alleging that anyone's stealing the election.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Here is Rudy Giuliani pleading before the Court of Seasonal Landscapers. What happened there? It's a mix up. He's pleading, but not in the actual court.

RUDY GUILIANI: It's a fraud. An absolute fraud.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: And what does Giuliani say about that in court?

RUDY GUILIANI: If we had alleged fraud, yes, but this is not a, [02:14:00] this is not a, a fraud case.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: It's not a fraud case in court where I would need evidence. It's only a fraud case out there amongst the sod and the mulch where I can say whatever I want. Fox News says that Dominion voting machines rigged the election for Biden out of court.

SIDNEY POWELL: They were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist. The whole situation was carefully calculated and created to steal the election from President Trump.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: But in court, Fox was forced to pay 787 million for false statements. The difference between in court and out of court is that in court, someone can say, prove it. [02:15:00] And the problem is that most of the time in this country, our political leaders are not in court. They are here on TV where the news media has decided that there's really no such thing as reality.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: We now live in two utterly different universes. These two Americas are living in two different realities. We're living in two different realities. Americans are living in two, for the most part, two very different realities right now.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: No, you're thinking of the multiverse. We are all living in one reality, and it can be the news media's job to litigate the parameters of said reality.

What the courts do really well is look backwards and reconstruct the realities of what happened. The news media could do the same, but what they do instead [02:16:00] is look forward and wildly speculate on the future.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: If Donald Trump is the nominee,

and if he is convicted of a crime, could you support him? If he's a convicted felon, if he is the Republican nominee, does that mean you're still going to vote for him?

could be convicted before November. Would you still support him then? Will you commit to certifying the 2024 election results, no matter who wins?

Let me look forward. Will you accept the election results of 2024, no matter what happens, Senator?

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: No matter what, Senator. Voting irregularities, ant overlords, voting machines that suddenly transform into fighting robots, voting booth powers activate, will you still certify?

Who f ing cares? No one knows what the future holds. Ask this person what it was about the 2020 election that they found objectionable, and then litigate the realities of their objections to the election to them, in front of them, so when they say to you, I never said locker up, you can say, [02:17:00] I object!

Jack Posobiec Welcomes END OF DEMOCRACY - Says They "Didn't Get All the Way There on Jan 6th!" - Dollemore Daily - Air Date 2-24-24

JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, DOLLEMORE DAILY: When Republicans tell you who they are, when they say who they are, and what they stand for, and what they believe Believe them, because they're not even hiding it anymore. It used to be like this, this cute little game they'd play. Oh no, voter ID is, that's not racist.

We just want to have voter security. Even though there have been Republicans on tape, long, time after time after time saying that they want voter ID in place because it diminishes minority vote. They've said it. They've admitted it. They tell on themselves. And we're in a place now where Donald Trump has given these people permission to be the worst versions of themselves.

To say the worst, most horrible things just right out in the open. And it doesn't really even get covered. Jack Posobiec is the guy who he either came up with or just was a guy who really ran with the conspiracy about the pizza gate. You know, the comet ping pong pizza here in [02:18:00] Washington, D. C. That they said there was a Uh, some kind of a child abuse ring in the basement, you know, the pizza place that doesn't have a basement that apparently was running something out of their non existent basement that, that initiated some psycho from North Carolina to drive to North, to, to, to Washington DC and discharge a firearm in an effort to stop what was taking place in this pizza place.

The thing that wasn't taking place in the basement that didn't exist. That's Jack Posobiec, him and Cernovich and Alex Jones. They're all of the same ilk. They're all cut from the same cloth. They are white supremacists. They are conspiracy theorists. They'll rabble rousers. They're real, real pieces of work.

And Jack Posobiec isn't just your random. Uh, fringy, cringy, conspiracy theorist. Now he holds weight within the Republican party. He's been given platforms. He's, he's, he sought after to speak. And this [02:19:00] was CPAC two days ago where Jack Posobiec sidled up next to Steve Bannon, says exactly what their intent is, what their mission is, what their end state seems to be, and that is to end democracy in America.

And he's not, he's not being cute. He's not being funny. He gets an amen brother from Steve Bannon. When they say what they want, believe them.

JACK POSOBIEC: All right. Welcome. Welcome. I just wanted to say welcome to the end of democracy. We're here to overthrow it completely. We didn't get all the way there on January 6th, but we will, we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with, with this right here.

We'll replace it with this right here. Amen. That's right. Because all glory, all glory is not to government, all glory to God.

JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, DOLLEMORE DAILY: Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to [02:20:00] overthrow it completely. We didn't get all the way there on January. but we will endeavor to get rid of it. So all of you conservative trolls out there who watch and comment, what do you say to this? The same group of people who, it wasn't an insurrection. It was a tourist event.

It was at the very worst, a trespassing event. It was a protest that got a little out of hand. It was a happy family reunion, says Michelle Bachman. All of these things have been said by, by Andrew Clyde, by Michelle Bachman, by Tucker Carlson, by Deon Clark. Even Jack Posobiec. So if you tried to end democracy on January 6th, that wasn't an insurrection, you're saying in one breath, it wasn't an attempt to overthrow the United States government by ending a or overturning a free and fair election.

You say that, but then also you [02:21:00] say, we're here to end democracy. We didn't quite get it done during our insurrection. Listen to what they say. These people treat it like it's a game. You see, clout is a currency in Republican circles. They don't care if the country is harmed as a direct result of it. They don't care if we all suffer, if some of us don't get a say in governance, in self governance.

You know, the system that was set up by our founders, that these people so go on about, that is all outlined here within the confines of this document, the Constitution of the United States. The document they claim to revere, that they wave around like a prop. They don't care. They don't want democratic rule.

You know, as much as it's not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic, which is a form of democracy. So much so they think it's a game that they literally constructed a game [02:22:00] out of the insurrection. Here is the J6 insurrection pinball machine that was at CPAC. They're calling it an insurrection. The January 6th insurrection.

The Peaceful Transfer of Power Is at Stake - Democracy Docket - Air Date 5-31-24

PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: You recently wrote an article describing the asymmetry of election denialism in the country. Explain to us what you mean by that.

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Yeah. So, you know, I was inspired to write this because I saw a poll out of Arizona that said that, um, half of Republicans in the state want Donald Trump to contest the outcome of the election if he loses. Before the election has taken place, before a single ballot has been cast, before there can be any claim of fraud or irregularity, they already want him to conduct the election, whereas when you look at the number on the Democratic side, it is like 10%.

Right? So there is an asymmetry in how election denialism has set up the two parties, where one party is like, We definitely want to contest the election no matter what. Where one candidate in the person of [02:23:00] Donald Trump is saying, Oh, I won Minnesota. And you're looking at it and you're like, Wait a second, what do you mean you won Minnesota?

Like you lost Minnesota by over 200, 000 votes. And his party believes him. And you have one candidate in the person of Donald Trump who at a rally in New Jersey says, I'm going to win New Jersey. He says, I'm going to win New York. And then you have another party who is like, well, we are committed in the Democratic party, who's committed to the peaceful transfer of power.

Who's like, we really want Joe Biden to win, but we also want to make sure they're free and fair elections. Who does not believe that Joe Biden won Alabama in 2020. Who does not believe, breaking news, that Joe Biden is going to win Mississippi. Or, uh, or Louisiana in 2024, and who is not lined up to say that if, if Donald Trump wins, you know, Arizona, no matter what, no matter what, Joe Biden needs to contest the outcome of the election.

So there is this grave asymmetry between the two parties. And what that is doing is [02:24:00] creating a real threat. To the peaceful transfer of power, because if you have a party that says, no matter what, we believe that, that there needs to be an election contest, no matter what, the election cannot be legitimate.

If, if Donald Trump doesn't win, then how can you have a peaceful transfer of power if that party loses? And so I'm very, very, very worried about this.

PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Republicans are quick to point out that some Democrats in 2016 called Donald Trump's election illegitimate.

So how is that any different from GOP election denialism?

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Yeah, it's, it's apples and oranges. I mean, let's just start with some basic facts. In 2000, uh, Al Gore lost by a few hundred votes after the Supreme Court halted a recount. Uh, he immediately conceded. In 2004, John Kerry lost by, uh, by a few thousand votes in a, in a single state of Ohio.

And the next morning he conceded, uh, in [02:25:00] 2008. In 2016, uh, Barack Obama won, and John McCain and Mitt Romney conceded in 2016, the election. You ask about Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump the night of the election to concede. The next morning she gave a speech conceding saying that Donald Trump needed our support 'cause he was going to be our president.

Okay. So this is mythology that, that, that somehow, uh, that, that there is a parallelism here. Now are there, were there questions raised by Secretary Clinton and others? Myself and others about the tactics? Donald Trump used to win the election? Absolutely. And by the way, in a courtroom in New York City, those, some of those, uh, some of those concerns have played out in a criminal trial.

And by the way, not the only criminal trial that, uh, Donald Trump's, uh, supporters have been involved in related to the 2016 election. So, sure, there are people who, who believe that Donald Trump won that election by doing some really terrible things, some really illegitimate things, [02:26:00] including perhaps falsifying records and paying off porn stars.

Uh, but that is not the same thing as saying that, that, that we are challenging that the vote totals were inaccurate, that, that, that, that somehow they were illegal ballots. That has never, that has not taken place on, uh, among Secretary Clinton or her supporters. And so this is a total, total. Uh, false, uh, false comparison.

PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Since 2020, we have seen contests against election challenges fail. We have seen indictments for people involved in efforts to overturn elections in Arizona, Georgia, Washington, DC. We've seen states change their laws around election certification, fake electors. Do you think any of the things that have happened since 2020 would discourage Republicans from trying, you know, to vote?

January 6, 2. 0.

MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: So look, again, this is part of what I write about, um, uh, in the democracy docket piece. I, I think that, [02:27:00] that unfortunately it's gotten worse, not gotten better, right? I mean, the fact is that election denialism is much, much more central to the identity of the Republican party and the Trump campaign in 2024 than it was in either 2016 or 2020.

I mean, in 2016, you know, you could point to a number of things that Donald Trump campaigned on. He campaigned on building a wall, which was ridiculous. Uh, he campaigned on a whole bunch of sort of ridiculous economic theories, trade policies, you know, in 2020, he, you know, he again, campaigned on a whole bunch of, of, of things that he had done while he was president, a lot of which were lies, but they related to when he was president. In 2024 the only thing he's campaigning on is election or not. I mean, if you think about it, you know, he waffles back and forth on a bunch of other issues. But the only thing he is consistent about is that, uh, he believes that the election was stolen in 2020 and will, and that, uh, that there will be massive fraud in 2024.

And [02:28:00] that Republicans need to be prepared, uh, for that. So election denialism is the central tenant of the Republican party and his campaign, and his claims about election denialism have become much more outrageous. I mean, we've gone from, you know, him lying about the results of 2020 in a handful of states, now he's lying about the results of 2020 in states like Minnesota, which he lost by seven percentage points.

So it's gotten much worse. It's also, by the way, Page, gotten much worse among the Republican party. There were people in the Republican party who were. Donald Trump in 2016. A lot of them, there were people pushing back against Donald Trump's election denialism in 2020, not enough Republicans, but there were some.

Look at the parade of Republican on a Sunday television. It's like literally a convention they hold every week for invertebrate, um, you know, invertebrate politicians, you know, in which they prostrate themselves on TV every week saying that they don't necessarily agree that The, uh, Joe Biden won in 2020, and predicting fraud in [02:29:00] 2024.

Uh, people like Tim Scott, who was supposed to be a moderate. People like Marco Rubio, who we are constantly told is one of the sensible Republicans in the middle of the Senate. These people are now far Full out election deniers. They are showing up at his criminal trials wearing matching suits and ties.

The Speaker of the House showed up wearing a matching suit and tie. I mean, there is nothing left to the Republican Party other than election denialism, which is why they kicked out Ronna McDaniel, replaced her with a more reliable and aggressive election denier, and why they now have Donald Trump's daughter in law running the RNC.

Former Republican strategist raises alarms about GOP in 'The Conspiracy to End America' - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 10-24-23

AMNA NAWAZ - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: In your book, you lay out five driving forces on the right that you say are working in concert basically to end our democracy. You list them as propagandists, the support of a major party, financers, legal theories to legitimize actions and shock troops.

But I want to begin with this idea of support of a major party, because you draw a pretty alarming comparison.

In the book, you write: "What happened within the Republican Party in 2016 [02:30:00] was a repeat of the rise of national socialism in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany."

You're arguing that the Republican establishment's acceptance of Mr. Trump echoed the German establishment's acceptance of Hitler. What are the parallels you're talking about here?

STUART STEVENS: Yes, it's interesting.

For a long time, there was sort of a trope that any time you compared anything to 1930s Germany or World War II, it reduced it to sort of absurdity. But I take a very different view, because I think the parallels are striking.

What happened in Germany was that the ruling class, mostly Prussian aristocrats, realized that they had lost touch with the working class, and they thought that they could control Hitler, that he would be someone who could connect them to the working class and take them into power.

And it's really exactly what happened with the Republican Party. Mitch McConnell said that he was confident that Trump would change, that they would change Trump, that they were the mainstream conservative and [02:31:00] Trump would adapt to that.

And it just proved to be incredibly naive, and it's still playing out. And every chance the party has to turn against Trump, they go in the other direction, and they embrace him more.

AMNA NAWAZ - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: There are some along the way who've rung the alarm, so to speak, like Mitt Romney, for example, whose campaign you ran in 2012.

STUART STEVENS: Yes.

AMNA NAWAZ - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: He criticized Donald Trump, but then he considered joining his Cabinet.

So, you can't really argue that some folks didn't see the danger. Is the story here that they just chose to ignore it?

STUART STEVENS: It's a fascinating question, because it is very difficult to find anyone in the Republican Party who will say in private that Donald Trump was a great leader, that Donald Trump is someone that they admire on any sort of personal level.

And yet they have basically turned over the party to him. And I think that what happened here was that Donald Trump, in some sort of animal instinct, realized that the Republican Party [02:32:00] ultimately did not believe in all the things that we had said that we believed.

What we said were values turned out to be marketing slogans, and that he realized that if he could give the party power, the party would go along with whatever he wanted. And that literally is what's happened now. And it's extraordinary.

I don't think we have seen anything like this in American history, just a complete collapse of a party. But it's the reality. It's the world that we live in, and it's not going to change. And there's a good chance he will be reelected president.

SECTION D: DEMOCRACY IN ACTION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And, finally, Section D: "Democracy in Action."

The Separation Of Church & State Is Eroding - Why, America? with Leeja Miller - Air Date 6-5-24

LEEJA MILLER - HOST, WHY, AMERICA?: If you ever find a Supreme Court decision these days to be incredibly fucked, I encourage you to seek out the dissenting opinions of the case. More often than not, Justice Sotomayor is the voice of reason, laying bare the absolute fuckery happening on the highest court of the land in every dissent that she writes.

It's both cathartic and disheartening. to read her dissents, and I do not envy her job right now. In case after case, this Supreme Court has made it [02:33:00] very clear that they do not care about facts, they do not care about precedent, and they don't even care about basic rules of standing. Nor do they care about trust in the institution as a whole, or even attempting to appear impartial.

They have an agenda, and they're sticking to it. 250 years of precedent be damned. And this turn towards irresponsible judicial activism is clearest when it comes to the withering away of the long established wall between church and state. Religion has a terrifying ability to justify just about anything.

Genocide against Native Americans? Manifest destiny, baby. Slavery? Practically a favor. How else would the inferior races have found God and salvation? Rampant inequality? Prosperity gospel. If you got it, you must deserve it. And look, I'm not out here to fight anyone about their personal religion, believe what you want.

My point is that religion is uniquely potent, and therefore, And the US already grants people, well, certain people anyway, a huge amount of freedom to practice their beliefs. Even to the point that their right to free expression bumps right up against other people's right to not be forced to practice a religion.

These are all the [02:34:00] states that allow religious or belief based exemptions for school immunization requirements. In every one of the colored states, Parents can say, no thank you, I would prefer not to vaccinate my child for measles or whooping cough or meningitis. And then their little crotch goblin just gets to skip off to public school without their shots, endangering everyone else.

Super religious families enjoy a lot of freedom when it comes to isolating and indoctrinating their own children. And on the third day, God created the Remington Bull Action Rifle. So that man could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals. Amen. And yet, conservative Christians have made it clear that that's not enough.

The free exercise clause has been weaponized by the Christian right to strengthen their calls of victimization, to claim persecution at the hands of Democrats, to say their way of life is under attack, when in reality they are simply living under a government that has full control. For decades, made it very clear that imposing your religion upon someone else is never a right you had to begin with.

Your rights cannot be under attack when they aren't your rights at all. They [02:35:00] forget that they live in a society with other people, and so their freedom to practice religion must be balanced against the rest of our freedom from having religion imposed upon us. But that is unacceptable, and so the religious right has set to work not only systematically changing the laws in their favor, but also vilifying the groups that require them to compromise by balancing their freedom to, and our freedom from, religion.

The gays and the trans kids require that the Christians allow them to exist, god forbid. The people who want to end their pregnancies require that the Christians allow them to exist. Notice that the trend is, freedom from beneficiaries are simply trying to exist, while freedom to beneficiaries are trying to exert control over others.

Basically, your freedom from having my religion imposed upon you is violating my freedom to practice my religion by imposing it upon you. Yes, Susan, that's how it works when you exist in a society of people who are different from you. Or I guess you could go the Nazi way and just try to exterminate the ones who are different from you Oh, you're already trying to do that?

Another way you can [02:36:00] tell that the encroachment of Christianity into the well established separation of church and state is getting worse, not better, is because the population is less religious than ever, but our elected officials remain about as religious as they have ever been. Nearly 30 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew between 2020 and 2023 said they consider themselves religiously unaffiliated.

Since 1980, the number of Americans who identify as Christians has dropped by more than 20 percentage points. From around 90 percent in 1980, on par with Congress that year, to 68 percent today. Yet 88 percent of the voting members of Congress today are Christians. That number has only dropped by 3 percent in the last 45 years.

Why? I couldn't find a single straightforward answer about the cause of this over representation phenomenon, but I have a theory. There are three major hurdles to running a successful campaign that I think being a church member would help a candidate overcome. One, networking. Churches have listservs.

Dwindling Lyft serves, but Lyft serves nonetheless. And being a member provides access to highly connected, very well funded communities who don't have [02:37:00] to pay those pesky taxes, and opportunities for reputation building. Like learning to golf or pretending to enjoy cigars, being a person of faith is a great way to rub elbows with powerful, wealthy, well connected people.

Number two, moral proxy. Humans love patterns, almost as much as we hate thinking. So when a religion offers a shortcut to understanding something as consequential as a political candidate's moral compass, you're darn tootin we're gonna take it. To many religious people, the idea that a person is capable of having a moral compass without being guided by a 2, 000 year old book is unthinkable.

Where do you learn how to be a good person without it being beaten into you through shame and cult like conformity to a belief system? Instead of politicians having to prove that they have a moral compass by walking the walk, they can just say, Look, I'm a Christian man. I go to church every Sunday. And we, somehow, despite years of proof to the contrary, believe that that automatically means that they are a good person led by a strong moral compass.

And number three, picky active voters. White evangelicals are more politically active than the average population. More evangelicals are registered to vote, and more of those registered actually [02:38:00] show up to cast a vote than the average eligible citizen. This means that even though white evangelicals represent a relatively small percentage of voters, their nearly unified bloc can have a major impact.

A 2021 Pew survey found that 85 percent of white evangelical voters identify with or lean toward the GOP. In the past three decades, the share of white evangelicals who associate with the GOP has risen by 20 percentage points, and the share identifying as or leaning Democratic has declined by 20 percentage points.

And who are these loyal Republicans eager to vote for? Another Pew survey found that among major religious groups, white evangelical Protestants were especially likely to find it important that political candidates share their religious views. Americans are less religious across the board regardless of age, but people over 65 are the most religious age group currently alive.

They also vote more consistently than other age groups, especially in local elections. A 2021 study found that the average age of white evangelical Protestants in America was 56, the highest age of any denomination. So, these folks are older, more organized, more politically active, [02:39:00] more Republican, and more invested in religious alignment with their elected officials.

When considered together, all these factors help explain the over representation of Christians in Congress. So, to answer the fervent questions in my comment section, I'm Yes, there is a separation of church and state. No, that doesn't mean that our elected officials have ever distanced themselves from their own religious identities, but yes, that means that we have decades of Supreme Court precedent establishing very clearly what the state can and cannot do in order to protect the general populace from having religion forced upon them, while balancing that same general populace's right to practice religion freely.

However, in recent years, Christian conservatives have done everything in their power to do away with the freedom from religion and focus solely on the victimhood of the righteous Christian crusader who has been forced to bend the knee to the heathenist ways of the godless woke left. And it's only getting worse.

So what do we do? Vote. Y'all, Project 2025 is no joke, and it will hit Trump's desk the day he enters office if he wins. We say Ronald Reagan ruined [02:40:00] everything, but that was 45 years ago, and there's nothing we can do to change the past, but we can at the very least vote now to try to avoid me having to make t shirts 40 years from now that say Trump ruined everything.

Though frankly, by then, if he wins, this place will likely be a burnt apocalyptic hellscape. Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are both in their 60s. Seventies ripe for just conveniently and casually retiring. Say next year, should Trump win the presidency virtually ensuring another full generation of a conservative court with little deference to precedent or respect for the institution they represent.

So for the love of God, vote. Stay vigilant, and prove that it's possible to be both moral and godless by supporting mutual aid and building community outside hierarchical church structures.

"Propaganda Machine": NY Congressmember Jamaal Bowman on AIPAC's $25 Million Campaign to Unseat Him - Democracy Now! - Air Date 6-6-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: The primary is coming up fast. I think June 15th begins early voting. Can you talk about, I mean, the kind of history that’s being made in this reelection bid for your seat?

REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN: Yes. It’s unprecedented. I believe AIPAC is spending more money [02:41:00] in this race than they have ever spent before. You know, they are bombarding my constituents with ads, ironically, that have nothing to do with Israel, even though they are a lobby group for Israel.

And so, it’s been overwhelming for the district. The district is actually pretty tired of it and frustrated by it and angered by it, because they know my record. They know what I’ve done the last three years, bringing in over a billion dollars to the district, reducing gun violence, investing in mental health and substance abuse, investing in affordable housing, etc. But they also know my work for 10-and-a-half years in this district as a middle school principal. So, for AIPAC to come in and try to hurt my reputation and manipulate people with disinformation and, in some cases, outright lies is pretty despicable.

And it is mainly because I called for a permanent ceasefire back in October, [02:42:00] and we have been consistent in calling what’s happening in Gaza right now an ongoing genocide. So, AIPAC cannot have that. They don’t want anyone to be critical of the state of Israel, even though an honest critique will lead to the ongoing safety and security of the people of Israel and, hopefully, get us a free Palestine, which is the objective, first and foremost.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: AIPAC super PAC United Democracy Project has already spent over $10 million on commercials alone to target you. This is one of the TV ads.

UNITED DEMOCRACY PROJECT AD: Jamaal Bowman has his own agenda and refuses to compromise, even with President Biden. Bowman voted against the president’s Infrastructure Act, against rebuilding roads and bridges in New York, against replacing lead pipes. And Jamaal Bowman voted against President Biden’s debt limit deal, putting Social Security and Medicare payments at risk, along with our entire economy. Jamaal Bowman has [02:43:00] his own agenda, and he’s hurting New York. UDP is responsible for the content of this ad.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Jamaal Bowman, if you can respond?

REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN: My agenda is the people’s agenda. My agenda is Medicare for All. My agenda is a Green New Deal. My agenda is assuring we put forward President Biden’s full agenda, which includes universal child care, universal pre-K, paid leave for the first time in U.S. history, historic investments in affordable housing. We have an affordable housing crisis right now, and President Biden, with Build Back Better, was trying to move forward on that issue. And we were working with him to move forward on affordable housing and all of Build Back Better, but it was stopped in the Senate by Senator Joe Manchin.

And my opponent, being a top recipient of AIPAC money and funded by racist MAGA Republican billionaires, [02:44:00] is already bought and paid for and in the pocket of AIPAC. And just like Joe Manchin, he is going to serve his donors, not the people.

And so, the people of our district have to ask themselves, “Do I want another Joe Manchin in Congress serving donors, or do I want to continue to support Congressman Bowman, who has dedicated his entire life?” I have dedicated my entire life to serving children, to serving families, to uplifting education — I come from the working class — because I know that the only way our democracy works for everyone is if we really support those who have been least, lost, left behind, historically marginalized, historically neglected and left vulnerable. That is unacceptable. That is what we have to change.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Interestingly, I’m looking at Haaretz. They say, “Bowman has charged both AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel with weaponizing antisemitism and primarily targeting Democratic candidates who are women and people [02:45:00] of color.” If you can talk about the major funders of AIPAC? I mean, this is historic, the amount of money they’re expected to spend in this election cycle, not only in your race, but around the country. It’s believed to be what? Over $100 million?

REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN: Yeah. Again, it blows you away, the sheer amount of money they’re looking to spend. And they have donors like Paul Singer and others like him who support Supreme Court justices who have supported the gutting of voting rights. Many of their donors support taking away a woman’s reproductive rights, taking away affirmative action. They support at least 109, I believe, election deniers, people who did not want to certify or members who did not want to certify the 2020 election results.

So, this is a right-wing organization. This is an extreme organization. This is a racist organization. [02:46:00] And they’re the ones trying to come in and buy this seat from a majority-minority community with their first Black representative finally speaking up for justice, equality and our collective humanity. It’s really, really gross, when you think about the spending.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: If you can talk about the Jewish groups that have rallied around you, Democratic Congressmember Bowman?

REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN: No, thank you for that, because just like the African American community, the Jewish community is not a monolith. So, we have tremendous support from organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace, Bend the Arc, Americans for Peace Now, IfNotNow, The Jewish Vote, the [c][4] arm of JFREJ, and many others.

And so, yes, there are Jewish constituents who want me to have a different approach to Israel in general, and specifically a different approach to what’s happening [02:47:00] in Gaza, but there are many Jewish organizations and many Jewish constituents who support the work I’m doing and understand very clearly that a pathway to peace forward has to include a free Palestine.

We can fight antisemitism and have a free Palestine at the same time. You can criticize Israel, you can criticize Zionism, and not be antisemitic. And it’s been very challenging having these conversations, because AIPAC and others, with their propaganda machine that’s been in place for many years, do not engage in these conversations. And the only way to create a better world and a better democracy and a better Israel and a free Palestine is through honest, open conversations that move us forward.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I’m looking at a piece in The Intercept that says, “As AIPAC has started to spend directly on elections, the group aligned itself with far-right Republicans. During the 2022 cycle, AIPAC endorsed more than 100 [02:48:00] Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.” If you can talk about the latest news about the congressional invite to Benjamin Netanyahu, who the International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan is now seeking indictments against for war crimes in Gaza, to address a joint session of Congress?

REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN: Yeah. I’m in complete disbelief. I’m horrified by that invitation. I can’t believe we are doing this. You know, when you think about and when I think about my Palestinian constituents, my Muslim constituents, my constituents who stand up for justice and humanity, who have been fighting to end this genocide in Gaza, what we see is the continued not just ignoring, but [02:49:00] dehumanization of Palestinian people. By inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress, we are stating to Palestinians that your lives do not matter. Your lives are less sacred, less precious and less valuable than other lives, particularly the lives of those Israeli lives. And it’s particularly disgusting because most of the people who have died in Gaza, been killed in Gaza, are women, children and babies. I can’t believe we’re inviting him here right now.

Election Deniers In Government Plot To Steal 2024 Election - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 6-5-24

THOM HARTMANN - THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: A Republican, uh, on the Fulton County Election Board, now this is down in, in Georgia, Fulton County of course is the Atlanta area, an area that, uh, well, Fannie Willis is the district attorney for example. Um, but this, this uh, white Republican lady, Julie Adams is her name, uh, she is one of five board members, uh, who certify [02:50:00] elections.

And she's also the, uh, uh, affiliate of the Tea Party Patriots, which has now become, uh, an election denying group. It was, you know, kicked off by the Koch brothers back in the day to, to fight against, uh, socialized medicine, uh, uh, aka Obamacare. Um, but now it's kind of gone its own way and turned into just another kind of right wing weird crank group.

Uh, she's also the regional coordinator for the southeastern states in the so called Election Integrity Network. Election integrity is a buzz phrase that Republicans use for preventing black people from voting, basically. And, uh, the EIN, Election Integrity Network, is a national group now that has recruited election deniers to try to fill spots in local election offices in communities where there are a lot of black voters, so that they can simply refuse to certify those elections so that those black votes don't get counted.

And, uh, she helped [02:51:00] start the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition after, uh, in 2022, attending the national, uh, EIN summit. And, uh, so, in May, uh, well, this is May, last week, or maybe two weeks ago, uh, Georgia had their primaries. And, uh, Fannie Willis, by the way, got re elected, as did the judge in that case, Scott McAfee.

Uh, Or at least won their primaries. I can't say they got re elected. Um, but they got re elected, you know, they won their primaries. But Julie Adams, this fifth member of the board that certifies the results, refused to certify the results. And, uh, she said that the reason why was because she wanted a bunch of additional information.

And the additional information that she was asking for would have basically just ground the entire system to a halt. Uh, she wanted to, you know, she wanted copies of all [02:52:00] the ballots, she wanted, uh, I mean, just insane stuff. It was just crazy. And, this is happening all over the country. That these election deniers from this, uh, we don't want no black people voting, uh, EIN group, have, uh, or are refusing to certify elections.

It's crazy. , and this is a, essentially in the primaries here, this is a dress rehearsal for this November. And you know, that's, that's how Trump tried to steal the election in 2020, was with the fake electors. Uh, you know, that the fake electors kind of blew up in his face. But if the real electors, or if the people who certify the election, that defines the real electors.

refused to certify the elections at the state level. See, they were trying to get at the federal level. You had 147 Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted [02:53:00] against certifying the election in 2020. Uh, that which is, you know, about, what, 60 or 70 short of what would have been necessary to shut down the election and throw it to the House of Representatives.

And, I guarantee you, they're gonna try to do that again this, this fall. If Trump loses. I, I, you know, hopefully, knock wood, you know, uh, please God, uh, when Trump loses. But, uh, in any case, this is, you know, part of their strategy. And, uh, one of Trump's, uh, former lawyers, Cleta Mitchell, uh, founded the Election Integrity Network.

Uh, we don't want no black people voting, uh, their in their unofficial motto. And she was on that phone call where Trump was, uh, telling Brad Rassenperger that if he didn't find 11, 000 plus votes, To put him over the top, that Rafson Perjure, the Secretary of State of Georgia, could be facing jail time.

Trump threatened him. And that, of course, is what Fonny Willis wants to charge him with. [02:54:00] And, um, and of course what the Republicans in Georgia are trying to prevent from happening. But, uh, the day after the primary, uh, Uh, uh, Adams had filed a lawsuit against the Fulton County Board, uh, to try to get all this information that she said she needed.

Um, you know, it's just, it's just gumming up the works. I mean, it's just, uh, very straightforward stuff. So keep an eye on this. This is, this is an early warning system. This is a sign, this is, like I said, this is a rehearsal. These people are practicing for what they're going to do this fall. In order to try to throw the election to the house.

Because in the House, you know, under the 12th amendment, if an election, if, if neither party, if neither Biden or Trump reach, assuming those are the candidates, if neither one of them reaches, uh, 270 votes, [02:55:00] then there is no Electoral College decision. It has to 50 percent plus one person. And if that does not happen, Then the fallback is that the House of Representatives selects the president.

And when they do that, each state has one vote, and that vote represents the will of the, of the majority of the people on that state's congressional delegation. So if you've got a congressional delegation that's got, you know, seven Republicans and two Democrats, like I believe North Carolina does, um, then, you know, they're gonna vote for Trump.

And, it turns out that there's 27 states that are majority Republican controlled, and, you know, only 23 that have, uh, either, uh, balanced, uh, representation or majority Democratic control. So, if a, if the election gets thrown to the House, Donald Trump will become President. And the Republicans know this. And, uh, that's what they're working toward, that's what [02:56:00] this is all about.

Margaret Huang : Fighting Hate and Protecting Democracy - Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People - Air Date 3-27-24

MARGARET HUANG: We have identified individual candidates running for a political office as extremist candidates. And that is something that the SPLC Action Fund does. That's our C4.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: So, there's a bad boys list and that comes out once a year or?

MARGARET HUANG: It's come out around election times every year. And we haven't been doing it that long. Our C4 has only been around for six years.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: Who's been on the list recent?

MARGARET HUANG: Some names you might recognize, but there are also some folks who are running for local or state office who might not be familiar. But you can find those on our website as well.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: Okay. But just throw a name out now though.

MARGARET HUANG: Sure. So Marjorie Taylor Greene's made it on the list. This is not a surprise.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: No.

MARGARET HUANG: Yeah. There are a few others. We actually just recently uncovered that Congresswoman Greene has a white nationalist working for her who has formal affiliations with extremist organizations. I think that he no longer now works [02:57:00] there.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: What's the trend line look, because it's hard to judge from reading media? It is worse?

MARGARET HUANG: It is worse in some ways. So, let me explain. There has always been hate and extremism in this country, since before it was founded. And the organization of that hate and extremism has never been as open, as coordinated, as well funded, and as tied to political leaders as it is now.

These groups have traditionally been more on the extremes. Now, of course, in the deep South during Jim Crow, there were political leaders, law enforcement leaders who were part of the KKK. So, that's familiar.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: Is it the George Wallace days?

MARGARET HUANG: But we haven't seen that since the end of Jim Crow. Right?

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: We're getting close.

MARGARET HUANG: And [02:58:00] what I'm trying to say is, it's a return. So it's not new, we've seen it before. But we are going back to a moment where it is inextricably tied to people in power and seeking to return to power in ways that we have not seen for decades.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: And do you this as a last gasp, desperate play for survival and the trend is not their friend? Or this is just how it's going to be forever?

MARGARET HUANG: It's not inevitable. No, it's not. The key here is that this is coming as part of a backlash. They're recognizing the changes that are happening in the country.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: Demographically.

MARGARET HUANG: Demographically, the values and morals of the younger generations who are growing up and coming into power, they're not aligned with this way of [02:59:00] thinking. And it is a bit of a last gasp, but only if we stay organized and aware and push back.

If we don't turn out in record numbers to reject this in 2024, we may lose the opportunity to have our democracy pushback. Because our opponents have been very clear that they're going to take away all of the powers of participatory democracy. This will become much more of an autocracy, of a fascist state. And that is when we are really in trouble, because we won't be able to organize at that stage.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: And it would be very difficult to dig yourself out of that hole?

MARGARET HUANG: Very difficult. Not impossible, but it will be much more difficult and likely much more violent.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: Even with people of color becoming the majority, it still will be hard?

MARGARET HUANG: Absolutely, because they're suppressing the vote now, Guy. If you look at the states where the Southern Poverty Law Center has offices, work, staff, [03:00:00] we are seeing hundreds of bills to suppress the vote in each of our states, every year. They're going after people of color, they're going after people with disabilities, they're going after women.

They're going after young people, they're going after senior folks. There's not a constituency that they haven't identified ways to suppress their vote. And the more that we let them do that, who will be voting in the end? That's when we lose our power.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: And call me naive or stupid, but how can you believe that is going to be a winning strategy in the long run?

MARGARET HUANG: For some of them, I don't think they care about the long run. If they did, we wouldn't be seeing the crisis and climate issues, right? They're really only thinking about themselves at this moment. Maybe their kids, probably not. So, I don't think these are people who care about the long term.

I think they're people who are in it for their own benefit [03:01:00] right now. I think for the rest of us who are worried about the future, who have to think about what happens next, it's a very different calculation.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: And how do you think they came to have this kind of mentality?

MARGARET HUANG: I think people like having power. I think once they've had it, they're unwilling to share or give it up.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: This is a depressing interview.

MARGARET HUANG: I don't mean it to be, because I'm not actually demoralized by this. If anything, I feel strongly motivated. And I'll tell you, we see stories all the time, even in the deep South where some of these challenges are the biggest, I think, there are communities that are organizing and fighting back. The organization that happened in Georgia over the last decade.

GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: The Stacey Abrams Movement?

MARGARET HUANG: Stacey Abrams Movement, and the movement of so many other strong Black women who led the organizing effort in [03:02:00] Georgia has transformed the way that people in that state feel about their relationship to government, and the accountability that they expect elected officials to have.

Is it sustainable? We've got to keep working on that. But they've shown us how to do it. And we are trying to replicate that incredible model across all of our states in the South to really build strong leadership, strong communities who understand what their priorities are and what they're going to stand for.

Credits

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

The additional sections of the show include clips from Disorder, Democracy Paradox, the PBS NewsHour, Democracy Now!, Last Week Tonight, [03:03:00] Analysis, The Daily Show, the Dollemore Daily, Democracy Docket, Why, America? with Leeja Miller, the Thom Hartmann Program, and Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People. Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Aaron Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our [03:04:00] 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 left podcast coming to twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.com.

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#1634 Abortion as the Tip of the Iceberg: the fight for privacy, bodily autonomy, and functional democracy are the path forward after the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade (Transcript)

Posted by · June 07, 2024 2:30 AM

Air Date 6/7/2024

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

Banning abortion is wildly unpopular and also one of the primary motivators for the group most strongly supporting the Republican party and Donald Trump: the Christian right, which has transformed both the party and politicians into extremists made in their own image, threatening the lives and health of millions and sacrificing democracy in the process.

Sources providing our Top Takes today include Lectures in History, The Weeds, Technically Optimistic, Consider This and CounterSpin. Then in the additional Deeper Dive half of the show, there'll be more on criminalizing abortion, abortion extremism in the Republican party, abortion in the legal system, and what there is to do now.

Abortion and Reproductive Rights - Lectures in History - Air Date 3-16-24

MARY ZIEGLER: So, I think now often when we think of reproductive rights and justice, we think of them in the context of criminalization and criminal laws, but that's a relatively recent phenomenon. So if you go back far enough, and [00:01:00] there's a dispute about this that was reflected in the Supreme Court's decision in 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. the majority led by Justice Samuel Alito. suggested that in the United States, to some degree or another, abortion had always been a crime at any point in pregnancy. he might have said, or might have believed, something similar about contraception. But the reality was that for much of United States history, Either passing or implementing criminal laws regarding reproduction would have been very difficult, in part because it was all but impossible to identify when someone was pregnant before quickening, or the point at which fetal movement could be detected. Distinguishing whether a drug was a contraceptive, an abortifacient, or a drug that simply helped people who were having irregular menstruation was all but impossible, and physicians relied on highly unusual and ineffective methods to test whether someone was pregnant or not. Touching someone's abdomen was considered off limits and inappropriate at a time when women and other people who could get pregnant were often hidden behind [00:02:00] screens during examinations.

So physicians, to tell if people were pregnant, would do things like examine their noses and mouths, which you might be surprised to learn did not result in reliable diagnoses of pregnancy.

So at this time, there was a sort of sense that there were female remedies that might influence pregnancy one way or another. And, for the most part, state laws didn't apply until quickening, the point at which abortion was most often criminalized. There were exceptions to this. There were laws, for example, poison laws that regulated drugs that could kill pregnant people early in pregnancy, particularly starting in the 1840s after a series of high profile deaths from poisonous concoctions used to end pregnancies.

There were some states that treated abortion as a misdemeanor early in pregnancy.

There was very little regulation of contraception at all until the late 19th century. And that was to change because of two independent social movements. The first was what we would view as an anti-abortion movement, though by no [00:03:00] means a fetal rights movement, that began in the mid-19th century and was led by physicians in the American Medical Association, including Horatio Storer, who's pictured here.

The American Medical Association was new at the time and medical education in general did not in any meaningful way resemble what we would see today. So there were no real licensure rules in a modern sense. Medical education was completely foreign and often not very credentialized at all. The difference between a so-called regular physician and a midwife or a homeopath selling medicines in the pages of the nation's newspapers was sometimes hard to distinguish. And the doctors in the American Medical Association were looking for a way to set themselves apart professionally.

They also were worried about what they saw as a grievously differential birth rate. What they would have viewed as white women, Anglo Saxon Protestant women, were having fewer children. And as the 19th century continued, this disparity would only grow, so much so that when it had [00:04:00] been normal in the United States for decades for the average family to have eight children, that number would decline to three by the end of the century. And disproportionately, Storer worried, that decline was coming in families he viewed as the best American families. At the same time that immigrant families, disproportionately Catholic, were having more children.

He argued, too, that life began not at quickening, but at conception, and that only physicians like him, physicians with the expertise to understand science, knew when life began, and that this was what distinguished them both morally and professionally from the midwives and others who'd disproportionately been serving pregnant people for the centuries before.

Storer lobbied for laws that would punish not only physicians for performing abortions, but patients for procuring them, to use his word. Abortion at this time was still synonymous with miscarriage. So the crime he proposed was the crime of procuring an abortion or miscarriage. A crime that he [00:05:00] proposed should be punished the most harshly when a patient was married, because a married person having an abortion was a married person rejecting their duties to their partner, or in this case, he would say their husband, as much as it was their duties to the nation.

Storer began promoting these laws in state legislatures in the 19th century, and gradually convinced legislatures in most states to introduce laws, although they rejected some of the harshest proposals that Storer introduced. It was relatively unusual for state laws to authorize felony punishments for abortion seekers. And virtually all, with the sole exception of New Hampshire, included exceptions for the life of the pregnant person, something that Storer also was not particularly concerned about in his proposal.

Storer wasn't alone in wanting to regulate reproduction in this era. This handsome gentleman, Anthony Comstock, was part of the picture too. Comstock's proposals were very different though. He was not concerned with what he saw as the taking of fetal life. He was concerned [00:06:00] instead with what he saw as obscenity. So, Comstock's business model first developed in New York in the late 1860s, came about because Comstock, by his own account, was a compulsive masturbator who worried that exposure to pornography was damaging the nation's fabric, for young men and women alike. He proposed a New York law that would define a much broader class of materials as obscene, everything from medical textbooks to art involving nudes, as well as abortion and contraception, which he defined as obscene, too.

Indeed, not just abortion and contraception, but any remedy for female troubles, as he would put it. Because there was, of course, no way at the time for anyone to discern consistently whether someone was pregnant, or whether a drug acted as a contraceptive, an abortifacient, a menagogue for regulating menstruation or as a placebo or a snake oil remedy.

Comstock's model that passed in New York in 1868 then quickly went national. With the advice of a Supreme Court Justice named William Strong, [00:07:00] Comstock went to Congress and convinced them to pass the Comstock Act, which made it a federal crime to mail any of the items listed in the Comstock Act, as well as receive them, subject to up to several years in prison and a hefty fine.

So Comstock's perspective was different. He wasn't invested in protection of fetal life. He was invested in stopping sex. He argued that the problem with abortion and contraception was that if people knew they were available, they would have what he called incentives to crime. Essentially, they would be able, as he put it, to conceal their sin because they would be able to have sex without consequences.

And so both of these models quickly spread. There are state Comstock laws. This was an era when, for the first time, state laws of many parts of the nation criminalized birth control, many of them on Comstock's model.

And significantly, there was always a close connection between reproductive rights and freedom of speech. Comstock's model criminalized not only the mailing of items used for things like contraception and abortion, but [00:08:00] also information about either one. So there was always a sense that telling people about how you could get these things or how you could do these things was as deeply problematic in his view as the doing of the things themselves.

Abortion and the erosion of privacy - The Weeds - Air Date 4-10-24

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: and since the Supreme Court made its decision in Dobbs, overturning Roe v. Wade and the right to an abortion, reproductive rights have been at the center of our national consciousness. Two of the latest headlines come out of Arizona and Florida.

NEWS CLIP: A historic ruling just handed down from the Arizona Supreme Court on abortion access in our state. The justices ruling...

Florida Supreme Court ruled the state's constitution does not protect abortion rights. The ruling allows a trigger law to go into effect in 30 days...

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: The Florida Supreme Court ruled that a six week ban gets the go ahead. Now, that's not really surprising news. Lots of states have rolled back abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe. But something in the Florida state constitution makes this decision particularly interesting.

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: [00:09:00] So, Florida has this provision in its constitution which says that every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from government intrusion into the person's private life.

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: Article 1, Section 23 of the Florida state constitution guarantees a right of privacy. And until the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion had long been considered a private issue.

Arizona has similar language in its constitution. It says, "No person shall be disturbed in his private affairs or his home invaded without authority of law." Despite this language, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that an 1864 law that makes abortion illegal, except in the case to save the life of the mother, can take effect. That news broke while we were finishing up this very episode.

Now, there are differences in the context for the language in these state constitutions. The language in the Arizona state constitution came [00:10:00] long before Roe, and Florida's was added post-Roe. While they're different, they have one thing in common: neither state's Supreme Court found it sufficient to protect the right to abortion. And all of this is evidence that Dobbs has shifted the very concept of privacy in the US. And that has us asking, do we still have a right to privacy?

That's the question I posed to my colleague Ian Millhiser. He's a senior correspondent here at Vox, where he covers the Supreme Court. He's been spending a lot of time thinking about this lately.

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: So let's talk about what the right to privacy is. This is something that developed really over the course of almost an entire century of various Supreme Court decisions. The idea behind a right to privacy is that there are certain parts of our lives that are private, that the government does not get to decide for us, that we, you know, decide for ourselves after talking to our own families, after praying to our own gods. And these are decisions like, [00:11:00] do I want to have a child? Who should I marry? Who are my sexual partners going to be? How am I going to raise my children? You know, all of these questions, the Supreme Court said over the course of many years, are just not decisions that the government gets to make for you. These are decisions you make for yourself.

One of the important components of the right to privacy is, am I going to have a child, when am I going to have a child? So wrapped up in that was the right to contraception and the right to an abortion. When the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, when it abolished the constitutional right to an abortion, it claimed that this was an abortion-only decision. You know, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion where he said, 'I'm not coming after any of the other privacy rights. I'm not coming after the right to marry. I'm not coming after the right to contraception'. And I guess the question is, how much can we trust these guys? And so the answer to your question of, do we still have a right to privacy, is we don't know. The [00:12:00] constitutional rights are only as good as the personnel that sit on the courts.

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: Yeah, I wonder, is the right to privacy, it seems like it's literally all about the sexy stuff. Like, it's either gender or sex or marriage. It seems like it concentrates on these specific parts of our lives.

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: A lot of it is sexy stuff. It's not all sexy stuff. But I think that, if there is a unifying theory, it does tend to be stuff about the family, even sexuality. I mean, the idea is that, you know, when you have a sex partner, they are auditioning to become a member...

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: [laughing]...to become a member of your family.

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: ...to become a member of your family, right! Exactly. And then when you have sex, there's the potential for creating children., So, you know, that is also tied up in the notion of the family. So, like, there is this idea that, you know, the way that the United States government is set up, you have the federal government and Congress is responsible for some things, you have state governments and they are responsible for other things, and I think the family was thought [00:13:00] of as another zone of autonomy, where there's some things that just don't belong to the government at all. They are family decisions. And, you know, how you raise your children, your sexuality, whether you use contraception, whether you're going to have a child at a particular moment, all of that got roped into this broader concept that we now call the right to privacy.

Digital surveillance and reproductive rights - Technically Optimistic - Air Date

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: I should say, I know Sue personally. I'm on the board of Planned Parenthood and we've spoken a lot about the state of things, and how urgent everything feels right now. But when I talked to her for the show, I pitched a conversation about technology's role in reproductive rights. And it's not that she wasn't interested in talking about technology, it's just that she's skeptical about putting too much faith into it. She's worked too hard, and she's seen too much.

SUE DUNLAP: I find myself being very regressive when it comes to [00:14:00] systems. We have to have redundancy, we have to have workarounds, we can't have a single point of failure. So when I was thinking about electronic health systems, I am loathe to live in a world today where there's an interdependence and a vulnerability. And when I think about data sharing, that's what I think of.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Can you give me a lived experience that you've been having of what women are actually going through right now?

SUE DUNLAP: Yeah, one story that for me, and there's so many stories that could break your heart. This one is a patient from Texas, chronic health condition, traveling here for an abortion, "here" being Los Angeles, so from Texas to Los Angeles, Texas to California, and we asked her for her most recent blood work. And what she shared was that the second she had even a [00:15:00] whisper, an inkling that she might be pregnant, she stopped going to any doctor whatsoever, even as she had this chronic health condition that needs to be regularly managed and monitored, because she doesn't want any record anywhere in any system in Texas that could suggest that she might be pregnant.

Now that would be true on paper. That's not specific to technology, as opposed to on paper, but when we think about what that means in the context of technology, it's horrifying to me. I just don't live in that world today, and nor do the people who I see traveling across state lines for what we know is very safe healthcare, but that is criminalized, marginalized, and increasingly creating victims.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: In the United States, even before Dobbs, people seeking abortions [00:16:00] faced unique challenges. Despite the right to an abortion being enshrined in the Constitution, some states still put plenty of obstacles in the way. And now, without Roe, there are some terrifying new obstacles.

SUE DUNLAP: One of the early data points in this post-Roe era tells us that one in three women who are pregnant or seeking abortion who find themselves in the criminal justice system by way of that pregnancy are essentially turned in by healthcare professionals or medical social workers. So, what I worry about when I try to balance what patients need in the moment and the potential for long term consequences and even criminalization is, there is no good answer, right?

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: When you criminalize abortion, you are criminalizing the people who seek abortions. It's a staggering coming together of healthcare and the criminal justice system. [00:17:00] Who is out there who could even be in a position to try and tackle this?

MELANIE FONTES RAINER: I'm Melanie Fontes Rainer. I am the director at the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Ah ha!

MELANIE FONTES RAINER: For anyone paying attention, I don't think anything that's happening right now is a surprise, right? I think a lot of this was highly predictable. And so I think in some ways we've been able to try to prepare as much as we can. But there's a deficit of information when it comes to, do people even know that we exist?

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: If you've never heard of the Office of Civil Rights that's inside the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, to be honest, I hadn't either.

MELANIE FONTES RAINER: Every single federal agency has a Office for Civil Rights. We are the second biggest one. Our office is unique to any other civil rights office because we don't just do civil rights, right? So, civil rights is a heavy mandate. It's a big lift, like non-discrimination in health programs and activities, making sure people are treated properly and getting their entitled benefits. Because we're [00:18:00] thinking about what does it mean to be discriminated against because you're pregnant, or what does it mean to now be targeted because of who you are and have your data targeted because of who you are and the kind of health care you're seeking and where you live? But we also do privacy under HIPAA. We are the only federal office that does both of those things.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It first passed in 1996, and it was a massive effort on the part of the federal government to do some rulemaking around personal health information, electronic medical records, in particular. You might know it from your own doctor's office. It's HIPAA that grants U. S. patients the right to view their own medical records.

MELANIE FONTES RAINER: So first, if you, Raffi, sought to get your own medical records from your provider, you have a right under HIPAA. It's called the HIPAA right of access provision. You could go in, and for a reasonable cost and a reasonable amount of time, your provider must give you your records. So, that's like a tenet of HIPAA.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: It's [00:19:00] also HIPAA that says health care providers have to alert the government if patient data is ever compromised.

MELANIE FONTES RAINER: A hospital system, a dentist, an insurance company, they're required to file a breach report and disclose that to the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services so that the public can know when these breaches happen. Those are the rules that protect your Protected Health Information from impermissible use and disclosure, meaning, did somebody have a permission to use and disclose this data in the first instance? Are they protecting it? Things like cybersecurity, we have a significant role in enforcement here, and whether or not there's been a breach.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Back when the law passed in 1996, Congress gave themselves three years to come up with a set of national security standards and safeguards for the use of electronic healthcare information, as well as a set of privacy standards for Protected Health Information.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Every American has a right to know that his or her medical records are protected at all times from falling into the wrong hands, and yet [00:20:00] more and more of our medical records are stored electronically.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: That was good. It would take pressure off the states and introduce a framework, not only for privacy, but for what to do when privacy was violated.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Today, with the click of a mouse, Protected Health Information can easily and now legally be passed around without patient's consent. I am determined to put an end to such violations of privacy.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: So, in 1999, President Clinton announced the first version of what would come to be known as the HIPAA Privacy Rule, although it wouldn't get finalized until 2002, and it wouldn't go into effect until 2003, and it would be significantly modified by the HITECH Act of 2009, as well as the HIPAA Omnibus Rule of 2013. I mean, okay, even by modern congressional standards, this is a really confusing patchwork of laws. But the HHS Office of Civil Rights has a specially designated role in the HIPAA [00:21:00] framework.

MELANIE FONTES RAINER: And so, we enforce and implement HIPAA. The HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification rules. The HIPAA Privacy rule gives permissions and those permissions means that covered entities, whether it's a health insurance company or a health provider or a pharmacy, they have discretion as to whether or not they believe that the permission is being met and whether or not they disclose the Protected Health Information.

Anti-abortion hardliners want restrictions to go farther. It could cost Republicans - Consider This - Air Date 5-23-24

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Abortion rights has been a motivating political issue for generations, and this year might be the most intense for those on both sides of the issue. NPR's Sarah McCammon reports on the anti-abortion rights activists who want to ramp up restrictions, criminalize patients who pursue abortions, and ban procedures like IVF.

SARAH MCCAMMON: For decades, protests outside clinics that offer abortions have been a pretty common scene in many communities around the country. Less common: protests at fertility [00:22:00] clinics that offer the procedure known as IVF.

NEWS CLIP OF PROTESTOR AT FERTILITY CLINIC: How many children are in the freezer here? How many?

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: That demonstration took place outside a fertility clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina last month. Dozens of protesters lined both sides of the street, as one of them preached and shouted Bible verses toward the closed front door.

NEWS CLIP OF PROTESTOR AT FERTILITY CLINIC: The fruit of the womb is the reward!

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: They were organized by a group of activists who described themselves as abortion abolitionists, who recently spent a long weekend in Charlotte meeting and strategizing. Matthew Wiersma, who's 32, is from Gainesville, Georgia.

MATTHEW WIERSMA: We want to ban IVF. We want to criminalize IVF.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Using the language of the anti-slavery movement, abortion abolitionists like Wiersma say they oppose all abortions, no exceptions. Many are also speaking out against IVF, at a time when most Republicans are stressing their support for the procedure. [00:23:00]

DONALD TRUMP: I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious, little, beautiful baby.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Speaking in February, former President Donald Trump noted that most Americans, including most who oppose abortion rights, support access to IVF. His comments came after Alabama's Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through the process should be legally considered children. Republicans there rushed to pass a law designed to protect providers from legal consequences.

T. RUSSELL HUNTER: Pro-lifers are scared to death of that, because IVF has not been thought about.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: T. Russell Hunter leads Abolitionists Rising, a group of activists that hosted last month's gathering in North Carolina. He accuses mainstream anti-abortion groups of being too willing to accept incremental restrictions and inconsistent in their message.

T. RUSSELL HUNTER: You can't say life begins at conception, okay, but we're going to allow abortion in the first five weeks, you know? Well, if life begins at conception [00:24:00] and you believe that human life must be protected, well, you're stuck, logically.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Hunter, who is based in Oklahoma, opposes IVF, which often produces extra embryos that are then frozen or destroyed, and he believes that embryos should have legal rights. Speaking to activists last month, Hunter said that means charging patients who seek abortions, and anyone who helps them, with murder.

T. RUSSELL HUNTER: So, we think and we know that the mother is the abortionist, or the father is the abortionist, whoever it is that's the abortionist needs to be punished, and we're not going to lie about it in order to be friends with the world, because that is precisely what the pro-life movement's done, and is doing.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: That's a departure from the long standing public position of most anti-abortion rights groups who've argued that women seek abortions under duress and that penalties for violating abortion laws should target providers, not patients themselves. Mary Ziegler is a law professor at the University of California, Davis.

MARY ZIEGLER: And [00:25:00] increasingly, on the pro-choice side, you have voices of people saying, either, you know, abortion is really important healthcare, and there's nothing wrong with it, women understand what it is, and choose it, or people in the abortion storytelling world saying, you know, I felt no regret about abortion, I felt relieved, I felt happy. You know, these statements that I think abolitionists also have really weaponized.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Christine Harhoff lives in Texas and has been involved in anti-abortion activism for well over a decade.

CHRISTINE HARHOFF: We're dealing with different types of women.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: She says she's met women who were reluctant to have abortions.

CHRISTINE HARHOFF: But so many other women who are loud and proud and, you know, like we had, what was it, a year ago, two years ago?, the mothers were taking the abortion pills on the steps of the Supreme Court on national TV. You know, they were not ashamed at all.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Harhoff says she's frustrated that even after the fall of Roe v. Wade, even in [00:26:00] Texas, where abortion is banned, women are still taking abortion pills. She's been talking with lawmakers in Texas and neighboring states like Louisiana and Oklahoma, trying to promote legislation that would treat abortion as identical to homicide.

CHRISTINE HARHOFF: And the penalty could be anything from nothing at all, if she was truly innocent, truly forced into that abortion, to a fine or community service, to yes, some jail time, and possibly even the death penalty if the court, the judge, the jury all deemed that to be an appropriate penalty for that particular situation.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Harhoff's position is by far the minority. Even among abortion rights opponents, like Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, a major anti-abortion group that opposes prosecuting patients.

KRISTAN HAWKINS: I don't think that, you know, that's our focus or has been or will be our focus.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Hawkins describes abortion abolitionists as social media trolls who do more harm than good and don't represent the [00:27:00] mainstream of her movement.

SARAH MCCAMMON: The pro-life movement opposes throwing mothers in jail who we believe are the second victims of abortion. Does that mean that every single mother doesn't know what's happening? No, that doesn't.. There are some mothers who, I agree, likely know that abortion kills a human child. But that's not the strategy that's going to end abortion in our country.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: On the subject of IVF, Hawkins' group and others have raised ethical concerns. She's described the fertility industry as underregulated. Rachel Bitecofer, a Democratic political strategist, says the line between the mainstream anti-abortion movement and the abolitionists is quite thin.

RACHEL BITECOFER: You know, if you radicalize people and tell them to gain power, and that's what Republicans did. They've been targeting those folks for 25, 30 years now with ever increasing hyperbolic rhetoric about abortion. So, if you accept that abortion is murder, then it [00:28:00] makes sense that you have pretty rigid requirements to stop it, you know, at all costs.

MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: So far, abortion abolitionists have been mostly unsuccessful in pushing through laws that define abortion as homicide. But they've made some strides in state legislatures, including a bill that made it to Louisiana's House floor in 2022. In an interview with Time Magazine published last month, former President Trump said he'd be open to letting women who have abortions be prosecuted. He said he'd leave that question up to the states.

Abortion and Reproductive Rights Part 2 - Lectures in History - Air Date 3-16-24

MARY ZIEGLER: So this was the beginning of what would become massive anti-abortion protests outside of clinics, which were not viewed the same light as hospitals.

It was in this era, too, that anti-abortion groups did not at all back away from the idea of fetal personhood. The overwhelming focus of the anti-abortion movement in the years after Roe was what they called the Human Life Amendment, a constitutional amendment that would change the meaning of the word "person" in the 14th Amendment to apply to a fertilized egg, or [00:29:00] any other, an embryo or fetus.

The Human Life Amendment was so important to the anti abortion movement that when members of Congress suggested it would be easier to get an amendment through that said states had the right to do whatever they wanted about abortion, anti-abortion activists overwhelmingly rejected the idea, saying it would essentially reaffirm Roe, which in their view stood not for the proposition that there was a right to abortion particularly, but that there was no right to life for a fetus. This struggle for the Human Life Amendment brought the anti-abortion movement into electoral politics, as the movement desperately strived to find allies in Congress and state legislatures who would support a Human Life Amendment. And it ultimately brought the anti-abortion movement into an alliance with the Republican Party, which in the era of Ronald Reagan came to embrace the movement and the Human Life Amendment as a potential path to power, a way to peel off conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestants who had voted Democratic often for reasons of economics, but who could be convinced [00:30:00] to change to the Republican Party as a result of the abortion issue.

It was in this era, too, that the anti-abortion movement stumbled upon a more consequential strategy, what we would think of as kind of incrementalism, or a death of a thousand cuts. And this began with the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment was the brainchild of Henry Hyde, a long-term legislator from Illinois who proposed that Medicaid patients should be unable to get reimbursed for most or all abortions.

And at the time, the Hyde Amendment, which is part of an appropriations bill, passed with the votes of both Democrats and Republicans, at a time when abortion rights was already becoming a Democratic cause. Why that was in part was because people in the Democratic Party believed the Supreme Court would take care of it and strike down the Hyde Amendment. And it was in part because there was already less emphasis put on access for low income people than would be or really ought to be the case.

The Hyde Amendment passed in 1976, and it had immediately significant impacts. A large percentage of people pursuing abortion in the 1970s in the [00:31:00] United States were Medicaid recipients, and by most estimates, upwards of 200 or 250,000 patients each year who otherwise would have had abortions, were prevented from doing so as a result of the Hyde Amendment.

The Hyde Amendment also ensured that people who were low income would have to rely on an intricate network of abortion funds and private charities for money to seek out abortion. And that in some ways is what became of the grassroots of the reproductive rights movement in the immediate aftermath of Roe: they all went in to service and access work. Which is part of what I think explains the lack of somewhat of the visible grassroots in the post-Roe era.

There was, of course, an early reproductive justice movement, too, that argued that what had become the so-called pro-choice movement, which sought to protect the right recognized in Roe, was not enough. And this movement, in part, took its inspiration from an epidemic of sterilization abuse. Women of color in this era and other people of color were being involuntarily sterilized, sometimes under existing eugenic sterilization laws, sometimes [00:32:00] under no legal authority at all. Physicians were notorious in cross parts of the South for offering what they called Mississippi appendectomies, in which patients who went in for childbirth or other services were involuntarily sterilized without their knowledge or consent, again, particularly in states like Mississippi.

The problem was particularly acute in Puerto Rico, where large percentages of women at some point in their reproductive lives were sterilized, often with questionable or no consent. And so activists, like Helen Rodriguez Trias, who's pictured here, argued that any movement for reproductive rights had to be not just a movement for freedom from the government, but a right, a movement that sought to protect people using the power of the government, right? A movement that would say the government should guarantee informed consent, the government should guarantee the means for people who want to have children to have them. And Rodriguez Trias and her colleagues founded organizations like the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse in 1974 and broader multi-issue groups like a group called CARASA or [00:33:00] R2N2, both of which were reproductive justice groups founded in the late 1970s.

But none of these groups succeeded in slowing down the attack on abortion rights and other forms of reproductive health care. Where that attack turned ironically involved two improbable things, Sandra Day O'Connor and Akron, Ohio, which don't usually go together. So Akron, Ohio was the site of an ordinance that had been marketed by the anti-abortion movement as a model for the rest of the country. And it's constitutionality ultimately came before the Supreme Court in 1980, after O'Connor had become Ronald Reagan's first Supreme Court nominee. The anti-abortion movement hated Sandra Day O'Connor. They thought she was a supporter of abortion rights and a feminist and generally just gross. And, she, to their surprise, dissented from an opinion by the court striking down this Akron ordinance, not only to say the ordinance was constitutional, but to say that Roe itself was fatally flawed. And that if Roe itself was fatally flawed, it was at least deserving of some [00:34:00] reconsideration.

So the anti-abortion movement, which had been utterly unable to get a constitutional amendment off the ground, needed a plan B. It was unable to get that constitutional amendment off the ground when Ronald Reagan was in power, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, and when it seemed as if Republicans had fared better than usual in state legislative elections. There was still no prospect of a personhood amendment, and no prospect even of agreement on a second best solution for the anti-abortion movement. So if there was going to be no personhood amendment, what could there be? Well, there could be control of the Supreme Court. And with control of the Supreme Court, there could be the upholding of more laws like the Hyde Amendment, which would mean less access to abortion, and a right to abortion that would mean very little or less and less in practice, a right that people would feel less compelled or energized to defend.

And with that, ultimately, too, in the long term, could be a Supreme Court that would recognize a fetus as a person, in a way that an American public that seemed to reject the principle never might.

And so with this, the anti-abortion [00:35:00] movement proceeded to focus on incrementalism, looking for laws that could be argued to be consistent with Roe and then defending them before the courts.

And the movement too began to look for arguments that would cement its relationship with an emerging conservative legal movement.

Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation, Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone - CounterSpin - Air Date 4-5-24

RACHEL K. JONES: So we know from decades of medical research that mifepristone is safe, effective, and widely accepted by both patients and providers. And Guttmacher's own research has established that the majority of abortions are done with medication abortions: 53 percent in 2020.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: So what would we expect, immediately and then maybe longer term, if this effort to make mifepristone unavailable, if that were to actually go through, what sort of impacts would you be expecting.?

RACHEL K. JONES: Okay, so there's actually a lot that we don't know about what's gonna happen or what would happen if the Supreme Court were to impose restrictions on mifepristone. But again, it's important to recognize that any restrictions that are put in place are not based on medical science. [00:36:00] We do know that it would have a devastating--any restrictions that were put in place would have a devastating impact on abortion access. Again, 53% of abortions are medication abortions.

Currently 55% of women in the US--only 55 percent of women in the US live in a county that has an abortion provider, and if mifepristone were taken away, that number would drop to 51%. But it would have a big impact. There are 10 states that would have a substantially larger notable impact. So about 40 percent of clinics in the US only offer medication abortion. And so again, there's 10 states where if this was taken, if these clinics were taken away, if these providers were taken away, that substantially large proportions of people would no longer have access to abortion. And some of these are states that are actually supportive of abortion rights. States like Colorado, Washington, New Mexico. And again, just one example, in Colorado, it's currently the case that 82 percent of women living in Colorado live in a county that [00:37:00] has an abortion provider. If mifepristone were no longer available, this number would drop to 56%.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: I think it's important the way that Guttmacher links health and rights, and the way that your work shows that access, sometimes media presented as though we're talking about the United States and rights to access to abortion in the United States, but it varies very much, as you're just indicating, by region, by state, and then also by socioeconomic status. So there are a number of things to consider here in terms of this potential impact. Yeah.

RACHEL K. JONES: Definitely. Again, we know from decades of Guttmacher research on people who have abortions, that it's people in disadvantaged populations, low income populations, people of color, who access abortion at higher rates than other groups. And so by default, any restriction on abortion, whether it's a complete ban, a gestational ban, a ban on [00:38:00] a certain type of method, on a medication abortion, it's going to disproportionately impact these groups that are already, again, at a disadvantage.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: Well, and I think particularly when we're talking about medication abortion, if you know, you know, if you never thought about it, then maybe you never thought about it, but there's a difference between having to go to a clinic where maybe you're going to go through a phalanx of red-faced people screaming at you and the ability to access that care in other ways. It's an important distinction. Yeah?

RACHEL K. JONES: Definitely. One of the benefits of medication abortion of mifepristone is that it can be offered via telemedicine. If there's a consultation, it can be done online or over the phone, and then the drugs can be mailed to somebody. There are online pharmacies that can provide medication abortion. This means that people, right, don't have to travel to a clinic, that they don't have to, in some cases, travel hundreds of miles to get to a clinic, that they don't have to worry about child care and [00:39:00] taking off time from work.

So, again, medication abortion has the ability to-- has for a number of people made abortion more accessible.

Abortion and the erosion of privacy Part 2 - The Weeds - Air Date 4-10-24

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: And I guess that goes back to RBG's argument about, like, No, this is about gender discrimination versus right to privacy.

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Exactly. And this is why, you know, again, if I were to do this from scratch, I think that Justice Ginsburg is correct, that the feminist right, you know, the right to be free from gender discrimination, that is a better source of rights, like the right to contraception and the right to abortion than this right to privacy, which, again, it's developed over 100 years, it's not like this came from nowhere. But that came from an iterative process of the court exercising its own authority, relying on very vague provisions of the Constitution.

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: And you wrote this piece about the right to privacy, and in it, you end it with these four different ways that this can play out. [00:40:00] It's almost like a choose your own adventure, except we don't actually get to choose. There are nine people in black robes that get to do it for us, but what are those scenarios, and how would we get there?

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: I mean, I will say we do get to choose. All of this is going to be decided, potentially, by the next election, and certainly by upcoming elections. So, one possibility is that Justice Thomas wins, and the right to privacy ceases to exist. You know, no more contraceptive right, no more right to marry the person you... you know, the government could potentially throw you in jail because they don't like who you're having sex with, in that world. And, that's not going to happen now. I mean, Kavanaugh said he's not going to vote for it. But if Donald Trump is elected and he puts more Clarence Thomas's on the Supreme Court, you know, we could very easily be in that world. I mean, this is going to be decided by this election.

There's two different versions of if Kavanaugh's view [00:41:00] prevails. So, like, if we keep the Supreme Court we have forever, and like, Brett Kavanaugh is the king of America, everything depends on what Brett Kavanaugh believes. We know that Brett Kavanaugh has said that he will not, with the exception of abortion, roll back existing rights that the court has already said is part of the right to privacy. So, he's not going to overrule Griswold. He's not going to overrule Lawrence. The court has not said that a right to gender affirming care is implicit in the right to privacy, and we just don't know where Brett Kavanaugh is going to fall on that. You know, given that he is a conservative Republican, I'm not optimistic that what he thinks is going to be good for trans rights, but, you know, I want to analyze him in a journalistically rigorous way. I have my suspicions about what he thinks about this issue, but we don't know yet.

And then the fourth possibility is, you know, I mentioned that there are Christian right groups that want to use the right to privacy to achieve their own [00:42:00] goals. So, you know, it is entirely possible that, if Trump wins, he could just appoint a bunch of hacks to the Supreme Court, and the right to privacy becomes a weapon that's used to, say, target trans inclusive bathroom policies.

I should mention there's a fifth possibility that I didn't discuss in my piece. The fifth possibility is that Biden wins. And if Biden wins, you know, he could potentially replace Thomas and Alito, and then we have Roe v. Wade back. Then we have the full bore right to privacy back in place.

So, you know, again, if I have one central message in this entire interview, it's that what the Constitution says does not matter. The right to privacy comes from the vaguest provisions of the Constitution. You know, if you look at what just happened in Florida, there's no doubt that Florida's privacy amendment, which is much more specific than what's in the U. S. Constitution, was enacted to codify Roe v. Wade. But there's a Republican court in Florida, and so that right doesn't exist anymore.

[00:43:00] All of this depends on judicial appointments. And at the federal level, judicial appointments are made by the president. So, you know, the future of the right to privacy is going to be decided, potentially forever, in the next election, and certainly in elections moving forward. You know, who picks the justices will decide whether this right remains robust and whether it remains a right that we recognize as the right to privacy that we have today, or whether it becomes a weapon that's used by the Christian right.

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: It's just all so vague and unpredictable, and I realize it would be very idealistic and, you know, probably more than a little bit naive to expect something like, Oh, let's get a constitutional amendment that says these things explicitly and codifies this right to privacy. And, you know, right now it is up to the interpretation of the Supreme Court. And clearly the makeup of that court changes over time. Like, you know, we have our eyes on 2024, but there will be a 2028 [00:44:00] and a so on and so forth until, you know, Lord knows what happens. But, what options do we have to make it a little more predictable? Like, can it be? Or is this sort of just the nature of the Constitution, the nature of the country? Like, there are just some things that will kind of always be up in the air, depending on who's in power.

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: I think one of the biggest lessons from the post-Trump Supreme Court, is that the Constitution means whatever five justices say it means. You know, we didn't lose Roe v. Wade because anything changed in the Constitution itself. The document we have now is virtually identical to the document we had when Roe was handed down. What changed was the membership of the Supreme Court. And that has two big implications. The first big implication is that politics still matters. If Joe Biden is elected in 2024, he can appoint different justices, and those different justices can give us back Roe v. Wade.

Even if he's not [00:45:00] elected, you know, one thing that we're seeing right now that's a little surprising is that the Republicans are sort of the dog that caught the car when it comes to abortion. In Alabama, the state supreme court tried to ban IVF, and approximately five minutes later the Republican state legislature passed a law overturning that because Republicans realized just how horribly unpopular it is. Donald Trump just put out a statement where he sort of hems and haws and says, I'm very proud that I appointed the justice who overruled Roe v. Wade, but also this is a state issue now I don't want Congress to do anything. And you know, he said that because he knows that the Republican party's position on abortion is unpopular and he's unlikely to get elected if he says what they have historically said about abortion.

Now that said, I think that we should be very cautious because, again, the Constitution says whatever five justices say it means. It doesn't [00:46:00] matter if Donald Trump is going to sign a law banning abortions. What matters is if he is going to appoint justices who will ban abortions.

So we are in this period where everything is in flux. The Republican Party is running scared. They don't want to do things in the honest way and pass a law banning abortion, but they might be able to be willing to do it in a more underhanded way, and appoint justices who will ban abortion that way.

Digital surveillance and reproductive rights Part 2 - Technically Optimistic - Air Date 5-15-24

AMY MERRILL: The mission of Plan C is to normalize the self directed method for safe, self-managed abortion. So, it started as an idea, a concept, a question: why don't we have access to abortion pills by mail in the U. S.? And it's evolved into a robust public health directory of information and creative campaigns where we suggest and introduce this information in ways that is understandable for people about ways that we can be reclaiming abortion and have agency over this reproductive health [00:47:00] need as the country spirals.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Plan C's central operation is to facilitate getting abortion pills to people who need them via the mail.

AMY MERRILL: Abortion pills are a reality in all states. That's kind of the core information that still so many people don't know. Even if you live in this state that has shut down abortion access and all these other ways, you still have options. Pills are not a panacea, I want to say, too. There's always going to be a need for in person care. We advocate for all options to be available. That's also not the reality that we are living in in the U. S. And so our focus really is on expanding the notion of abortion, introducing this method of abortion pills and self directed care.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Plan C is also committed to providing resources and support for people who get abortions. That includes legal and financial support. But also mental and emotional support as well.

AMY MERRILL: Part of our acknowledgment at Plan C is recognizing the transformative nature of this method of the pills and the [00:48:00] opportunity for demedicalization, the opportunity for ultimately the pills to go over the counter. And that recognition is grounded in a global context that all around the world, people in other countries are already doing this by the millions. It's very common, it's more accessible, and it's known to be a method that is safe and effective. The World Health Organization calls it an essential medicine. All of that is already true.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: As early as 2013, Amy began seeing abortion pills available through online medication vendors.

AMY MERRILL: We call them also websites that sell pills.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Many of them were operating overseas, unregulated, and pills would take weeks and weeks to arrive. So, from early on, Plan C's goal was to provide a safer, quicker alternative to the websites that sell pills. And then...

AMY MERRILL: I mean, the beginning of the pandemic was a wild time for everyone, but we were sitting there at our computers going, Oh my gosh, this is the moment. If there [00:49:00] was ever a moment to introduce a new idea, which is accessing pills by mail, accessing care virtually, it's now.

But then the commerce routes started to shut down. The flights were stopping, things weren't being imported, and that became a mini crisis that suddenly shipments weren't coming into the US. And so, simultaneously, the providers were looking more and more closely at these restrictions on mailing the pills, questioning, is this really the case? I mean, this is kind of crazy. Most of our other medications, the individual could go online to an online pharmacy and place their order and just do it. And this particular one has these antiquated requirements that it must be dispensed by a provider. You know, it's very patriarchal. It's very medically unnecessary. And these inquiries were moving forward. Providers were figuring out what they could do. And then the FDA rolled back the restrictions on medication abortion, on Mifepristone, [00:50:00] which are called the REMS.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: That stands for Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies, which are drug-specific guidelines put out by the Food and Drug Administration.

AMY MERRILL: So suddenly the REMS were lifted and these services popped up.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: So it's just interesting to note again, we're dealing with a convergence of two things here, which shape the future: the permissive environment around telemedicine, due to the pandemic, and the loss of privacy rights, due to Dobbs.

AMY MERRILL: With the overturning of Roe, we absolutely updated our information to reflect the changing status, to help people understand the implications of the case and how it impacted state by state access to abortion. We are also advocating for some digital privacy recommendations on our site, or rather, we're putting them right up top.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Plan C connects with online privacy organizations, like the Digital Defense Fund, in order to provide people with concrete advice [00:51:00] for safeguarding their personal data.

AMY MERRILL: So, we've spent many years gathering all of the best tips and best practices to present them to folks along the way. So using privacy-enabled browsing, you know, browsers are typically always tracking people these days. It's gathering this history of what someone has done, where they've gone. There's another recommendation to turn off location services on your phone. That's something that has come up in the abortion issue, of people having a record of their physical location. People are using encrypted text, so there's an app called Signal that folks are using for encrypted texting.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: And real quick, in case you missed it, I talked to Meredith Whitaker, Signal's president, in Episode 2.

AMY MERRILL: And oftentimes the providers are recommending that the patient download one of these encrypted services before going back and forth. So that's often baked into the telehealth intake process. There's also recommendations around email. There is a VPN, a virtual private [00:52:00] network, that will hide your device's IP address.

You know, it's not that, I don't want to create the impression that all of these services out there are being nefarious. I mean, there's a lot we could talk about, of course, with tech and how data is being collected and used. It's business, right? We think of this in terms of keeping a clean digital footprint. It's less about surveillance and more about someone who is coming after a person who had an abortion, who's trying to build a case and is trying to collect that digital footprint in order to make the case. So, you know, these are the steps that are recommended in order for that digital footprint to be clean and that person to maintain control over their experience.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: I agree with everything you said, but at the same time, it seems desperately unfair that we have to make the care seeker do all this work.

AMY MERRILL: Absolutely.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: And that responsibility doesn't fall somewhere else. Like, [00:53:00] these are complicated things.

AMY MERRILL: Yeah, um, that was a big concern that came up after Dobbs. Every individual's assessing their own risk. It is an information game. The challenge is to get all this information out there to raise their awareness to the fact that there's a flip side to all of these technologies that track data.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Yeah.

AMY MERRILL: I do appreciate the way that the veil is being lifted for us. I would say, like, I appreciate that actually, yeah, these conversations are happening more openly about what is actually happening with these technologies. How can we learn more about how they function so that we know what we're opting into. We have no idea what these apps are doing with our data, right? So, now I think we're in the process of swinging back to a place where we have an opportunity to be a little more conscientious about the way we're living our life with technology.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: It's better if we make explicit choices, not implicit choices. And I feel like with a lot of this tech, we've just implicitly chosen to use it and don't fully explore the trade offs that we're [00:54:00] making.

AMY MERRILL: I love, love that description. Yep. There's ways that companies can step up. That's actually critical, I think, from a human rights lens, that companies that deal in data start to really assess the severity of the situation and take steps to proactively land on the right side of history with this stuff, you know, to protect their users from being caught up in a completely unjust, unconstitutional risk of a legal case against them for seeking their health care.

Note from the Editor on the abuse produced by abortion restrictions

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with Lectures in History, discussing the history of abortion and contraception in the US. The Weeds, in multiple clips, looked at abortion and the constitutional right to privacy. Technically Optimistic examined how data is being weaponized against pregnant people. Consider This look at the real restriction extremists. Lectures in History described the push for fetal personhood. And CounterSpin watched the media watch the court on further abortion cases.

And those were just the top takes. There's a [00:55:00] lot more in the deeper dive section. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics often trying to make each other laugh in the process. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon ,pageor from right inside the Apple podcast app. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

Now, before we continue on to the deeper dives half the show, I just wanted to add in another element of restricting abortion access that is often overlooked, I think. And since a couple of articles have summed it up real nicely, I'm just going to go ahead and read a bit of each into the record here.

So, the first is from The Intercept. "Sterilization, murders, [00:56:00] suicide: bans haven't slowed abortions and they're costing lives". So, this article says, "For women in abusive relationships, to get pregnant is to risk your life. The narrative is well-documented. A violent, intimate partner sensing the impending loss of control over his wife's or girlfriend's body, and the arrival of a competitor for her time and attention, even if he wanted the baby at first, grows increasingly possessive, volatile and assaultive. His menacing behavior erodes not just her freedom but also her will to take care of herself. She grows depressed, skips prenatal clinic visits, eats poorly, and smokes drinks and uses drugs more, all to the detriment of her own and her fetus's health. Sometimes the partner's violence turns murderous. 'Women who are pregnant or recently gave birth are significantly more likely to be killed by an intimate partner [00:57:00] than women of the same age who are neither pregnant nor postpartum,' writes the authors of a new study from Tulane university. The harder it is to end a pregnancy the more danger women are in. Looking at the states with multiple abortion restrictions alongside their rates of intimate partner homicide committed against women and girls ages 10 to 44, the researchers found a 3.4% rise in the state homicide rate with each restriction enforced between 2014 and 2020. The authors acknowledge the limits of their methodology, but extrapolate that nearly a quarter of those murdered were associated with the statutes."

And then from the New Republic magazine article "Dobbs was a gift to domestic abusers", they bring in another element. And it says, "Abusive partners can also use state anti-abortion laws to intimidate and threaten partners who had an abortion. If/When/How operates it's [00:58:00] helpline for questions and support about abortion and the law through which it has observed the impact of antiabortion laws and legal cases. ' Before Dobbs people did contact the helpline because they feared an abusive partner could use their abortion or knowledge of a pregnancy against them', said Ling. But since, calls have increased, and with survivors " weighing the risks of their abusive relationship against their access to abortion." Along with the helpline getting more calls, Ling said, “we have seen the threats from abusers become more specific. Some have threatened to call the police on family members who help them access abortion. Other abusers have falsely claimed it is a crime to leave the state, or [that] their victim has to have their consent to get an abortion. And abusers are weaponizing the rising abortion stigma against their victims, suggesting that their decision to get an abortion will harm them in unrelated court proceedings". [00:59:00]

So, if you weren't angry enough already, thanks to those writers for highlighting yet another consequence of abortion restrictions. And just in case there's any question, or if you need to respond to any limp objection to this criticism based on the idea that you know, Oh, well, no one intends for abuse to increase, just know it doesn't matter. Those in the grassroots who support and those in politics who ultimately vote for extremist abortion restrictions, don't get any pass on the consequences of those laws, based on maybe some of those consequences being unintended. Which, by the way is a pretty questionable proposition in and of itself when dealing with mostly religious conservatives who tend to believe in strict father morality and the hierarchical ranking of men above women. But even for those who may be genuine and feeling bad about increased abuse and murder, due to their policies, that buys you no forgiveness until you work to undo the [01:00:00] damage. As for the rest of us, the more harm caused will just act as fuel for the campaign to take our policy back in the same direction.

SECTION A: CRIMINALIZING ABORTION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with deeper dives on four topics. Next up, criminalizing abortion. Followed by, abortion extremism in the Republican party, abortion in the legal system, and what is there to do now?

Abortion and the erosion of privacy Part 3 - The Weeds - Air Date 4-10-24

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: Yeah, I think this issue of privacy, you know, you name all these instances, like, you know, we have contraception, we have same sex marriage, we have same sex sex, sex outside of marriage, gender affirming care, all these different forms of healthcare, and I think this Issue of privacy is most well known in the Roe v.

Wade case, and when she was alive, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was very critical of the right to privacy being the reasoning behind the Roe decision. Can you talk about what her argument was?

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I mean, she was obviously a very significant judge, but probably [01:01:00] the most significant impact she had on the law was before she became a judge, you know, when she was still a lawyer, she was a very important feminist civil rights lawyer in the 1970s.

And there's a provision of the Constitution that says no one shall be denied the equal protection of the walls. That has traditionally been thought of as something that prevents race discrimination, and like, certainly the history of it, like, it's part of the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was essentially the treaty.

that between the North and the South that ended the Civil War. And I mean, that was a war about slavery. So it makes sense that we think of this as a race provision, but it's broadly worded. It says no one shall be denied the equal protection of the law. Not just, you know, black people won't be denied or, you know, people of a certain race won't be denied.

And so Justice Ginsburg's insight was this is something that should apply to types of discrimination that are similar in character to racism. Sexism is similar in [01:02:00] character to racism in that, you know, it is irrational. It judges people based on traits that don't have anything to do with their ability to contribute to society.

These are just arbitrary prejudice that we've held onto for a very long time. And the Constitution should always be also protect against that kind of thing. And she successfully convinced the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment should be read not just to protect against race discrimination, but also to protect against sex discrimination.

And she saw the contraceptive right and the abortion right as part of that broad project. You know, the idea was that a woman cannot thrive in society. They cannot, you know, achieve the same professional heights. They cannot compete in the workplace. If they are constantly under threat of being taken out of the workforce for nine months at a time or more because they are pregnant, that they need to be able to control that aspect of their life if they are going to have equality in society.

[01:03:00] And, you know, personally, I find that argument more persuasive than the right to privacy argument. I mean, I think. A contraceptive and abortive rights, they make more sense if you think of them as feminist rights. I think that that, you know, hews more closely to the text of the constitution. I also think it leads to a less freewheeling judicial power, where judges are just inventing rights on the fly.

But that's sort of the dog that did not bite. Bark in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence because the most important feminist legal decision was Craig v. Boren in the mid 1970s. It was two or three years after Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. So the Supreme Court had not yet embraced that language of equality that Justice Ginsburg advocated for when Roe v.

Wade was handed down. And so that whole line, the right to privacy jurisprudence, sort of developed independently of the feminist jurisprudence.

Abortion and Reproductive Rights Part 3 - Lectures in History - Air Date 3-16-24

Uh, eugenics, uh, as a [01:04:00] concept, was a term coined by Francis Galton, um, a cousin of Charles Darwin in the late 19th century. Uh, and the idea that Galton had was that if you could breed livestock to improve its genetic qualities, Why not breed, as Galton wrote, human beings to have better genetic qualities?

And exactly what eugenics would mean legally was complicated for some time. So some, uh, scholars and legal thinkers argued that there should be legal incentives for the quote unquote right sort of people to get married. Um, there were, for example, better baby contests, where the purported genetic quality of infants would be rewarded with cash prizes or apple pies.

And of course, there were much more interest in negative, what's called negative eugenics, right, using the law to prevent the quote unquote wrong people from having children. Initially, some of these laws focused on access to marriage, on the theory that if people We're for example, suffering from sexually transmitted infections, they shouldn't get married.

[01:05:00] But then, of course, reformers quickly realized that people could have children and have sex without getting married, and turned instead to compulsory sterilization laws, which are on the books, were on the books, in, uh, more than 30 states in the United States, including California, which was one of the nation's leaders in compulsory sterilization.

Uh, these laws applied to people we would now recognize as having, Mental illnesses or disabilities, but to a much larger class of persons as well. California, for example, often targeted persons who were viewed as sexually promiscuous on the theory that sexual promiscuity, particularly in women, was a sign of feeble mindedness or genetics.

Um, overwhelmingly, the people targeted by these laws were already in state institutions. Uh, they were overwhelmingly low income people. Initially, they were overwhelmingly white people, in part because of either de jure or de facto segregation, ensuring that people of color had no access to state institutions or services at all.

Um, this was to change after World War II, [01:06:00] when people of color, particularly black people, made up the overwhelming majority of sterilization victims as sterilization moved south. The eugenics movement changed the status quo when it came to abortion and contraception in a few ways. Obviously, in a sense, the eugenics movement was compatible with what had come before, because just as has been the case with Storer, Or Comstock.

The message of the eugenic movement had been that, of course it was the role of the state to control who reproduced and how. Um, albeit in a different way, the claim of authority from Eugen of eugenics was not moral as Comstock's was, or even Christian. It was, uh, it sounded in scientific expertise.

Eugenicists simply knew better than everyone else the argument went about who should reproduce. On the other hand, the idea of eugenicists was that more reproduction was not always an unmitigated good. And in fact, that certain circumstances, it may make sense for certain people not to have children at all, or not to have more children.

And that the cost of having children, not just to the individual, but to the [01:07:00] state, was something that the state could take an interest in. It was at this time that the first birth control movement organized and that movement had to varying degrees involvement in the eugenic movement itself. Um, so you see here pictured Margaret Sanger, who some of you, most of you know as the figure who coined the term birth control, the founder of Planned Parenthood, who began her career in the 19 teens connecting birth control to socialism and the rights of workers.

And transitioned in part to enli trying to enlist the support of eugenicists, who were at the time enjoyed popular backing across the ideological spectrum. Um, everyone from, uh, conservative Catholic activists to members of Congress viewed themselves as supporters of eugenicists. And Sanger, who was deeply pragmatic, believed that her cause, which she saw as an individual right to birth control, would be more popular, um, if it were embraced by eugenicists too.

Some of her colleagues, including Mary Ware Dennett, who's pictured to her left, rejected this [01:08:00] idea of courting eugenicists and instead framed birth control as an issue of democracy. Dennett argued that it was unreasonable to assume under the Comstock Act that Americans were incompetent to decide on birth control.

If the for themselves when to have children, much less when to consume information about birth control. And that it was inconsistent with the idea of democracy to patronize Americans in this way and to deny them this kind of information. The fight for birth control gained supporters outside of the white community, two prominent, uh Activists like W.

E. B. Du Bois and Mary Church Terrell, who's pictured here, endorsed the use of birth control in their communities, even as birth control, like many movements of the era, um, had ties to eugenics. The birth control movement, for the most part, didn't embrace the idea of a right to abortion at all, although precisely what it was embracing was complicated at a time when no one knew how drugs worked.

So common drugs that were marketed at the time [01:09:00] Like, uh, Miss Lydia Pinkham's remedy, for example, um, were sold as contraceptives and abortifacients and many viewed them as placebos that didn't work at all. So precisely what a right to birth control would entitle you to was ambiguous, even if no one was endorsing abortion on its face.

In fact, if anything, Sanger argued that abortions, which were dangerous at the time, one of the leading sources of maternal mortality and morbidity, would result in part because access to contraception was denied. There had also been an unspoken consensus about how criminal abortion laws would be implemented that had applied for this era.

Overwhelmingly, when an abortion was justified had been left to the discretion of physicians. who could invoke exceptions for the life of the patient. But the difference between life and health of the patient in the 19th and early 20th centuries was non existent at a time when maternal mortality and morbidity rates were high, even compared to the [01:10:00] shameful current standards for maternal mortality and morbidity that we still experience.

So the upshot tended to be that physicians were rarely prosecuted for abortion unless a patient actually died. Um, and then often were prosecuted using the dying declaration or dying words of the patient themselves. Um, competent practitioners, by contrast, were rarely prosecuted at all, and even those who did face prosecution often weren't facing long prison sentences and sometimes came back to practicing abortions after their prison time ended.

After the 1940s, this changed pretty dramatically for a few different reasons. Um, First, it was no longer easy to deny that abortions were occurring. In the 1930s, rates of contraceptive and abortion use increased exponentially during the Great Depression. Abortions were still unsafe, as was pregnancy, and entire hospital wards were dedicated to people suffering the complications of illegal abortions.

So the idea that abortion is just not something that happens here was no [01:11:00] longer possible. to maintain. Um, at the same time, prosecutors began to see abortion as more of a problem in the aftermath of World War II at a time when Americans were encouraged to have bigger families as part of the war effort and the rebuilding of the country after the war.

Um, being pro baby and having a big family was seen as a kind of antidote to communism at a time when the And the Soviet Union's embrace of smaller families and working women was seen as distinctly un American and un Christian. And conversely, abortion providers were seen as distinctly un American and un Christian as well.

Digital surveillance and reproductive rights Part 3 - Technically Optimistic - Air Date 5-15-24

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Take, for example, what happened in Nebraska

NEWS CLIP: in the summer of 2022. A teenager in Nebraska and her mother are facing multiple charges after Facebook's parent company, Meta, turned over their private messages.

Police say their messages prove the teen had an illegal abortion. Of course, [01:12:00]

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: tech companies have to comply with law enforcement when they really are in possession of data that's been subpoenaed. Privacy centered apps like Signal get around this problem by using end to end encryption. They simply don't have the unencrypted version of the messages sent on their platform.

But even Google, whose revenue is clearly tied to surveillance advertising, is making some adjustments. In December of 2023, they stopped storing location data on their servers, claiming in a blog post that your location history is now stored right on your phone. Now some privacy watchdog groups question whether or not Google has really fully implemented this switch.

But the point is that companies really could step up, as Amy is saying. Not only would this insulate our data from law enforcement, it would mean finally taking some responsibility off of individual careseekers. So tech companies can do better. But [01:13:00] so could Congress.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: Donald Trump campaigned on overturning Roe v.

Wade, and he successfully did it by appointing justices who in fact overturned Roe v. Wade. Now states can do whatever they want.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: This is Congressman Ted Lieu, the representative from California's 36th District.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: And then some of these states have very aggressive Republican attorney generals. who will prosecute people who seek reproductive health care, who get abortions, and we don't think folks should be tracked on whether they went to a reproductive health clinic or in some of these states who are looking at banning contraception or who want to ban abortion.

You know, in vitro fertilization, we don't think people should be trapped if they go to an IVF clinic or if they go to a place that sells contraceptives. And that is the gist of the legislation we're trying to get through. The

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: bill is called [01:14:00] the Reproductive Data Privacy and Protection Act, and it was introduced this past March by Representative Liu and four of his colleagues in the House.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: Law enforcement can make demands of private sector companies. in a way that they wouldn't be able to do if Congress passed a law saying you can't do that. So for example, even if the tech companies, let's say, did the right thing in my view and said, look, we're not going to give you the data on this user who visited an abortion clinic or reproductive health clinic and law enforcement gives them a subpoena, well, you know what?

The tech company has complied. This proposed

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: law would prohibit this. It would ban all sorts of communication about an individual's reproductive or sexual health, whether electronic or otherwise, from being used against that individual. These incidents that we've been talking about, when someone's Facebook messages or any kind of digital data is used to criminalize pregnant people?

This bill would just outlaw all of that.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: [01:15:00] BUTT. There's one problem. I frankly don't think it's going to happen in a Republican controlled Congress, but if the house flips next term, then I think this legislation could get passed. So,

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: beyond reminding everyone that election day is Tuesday, November 5th, what else can we do?

Elections won't change the makeup of the Supreme Court. And there's a scary possibility that the Dobbs decision was only the beginning.

NEWS CLIP: Today's arguments not only brought hundreds of protesters on both sides of the issue, it was also the first abortion related hearing before the Supreme Court since the conservative majority eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.

Nearly two years ago, CNN

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Paul Reed, this past March, the court heard a case that has major implications for the availability of mitrione, the medication that's used in nearly two thirds of all abortions in the us. A decision is expected in June.

MELANIE FONTES RAINER: [01:16:00] Absolutely, we're keeping a very close eye on that case.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Amy Merrill of Plan C again.

MELANIE FONTES RAINER: The case is not about making Mifepristone illegal or taking it off the shelves. It's rolling it back, again, to these early REMS, these restrictions, so that it would be prevented from being put in the mail by U. S. based providers. And I wish I had a crystal ball, but I don't. We'll have to, we'll have to wait and hear.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: This might be an impossible question to ask, but has technology been a net positive for reproductive health?

MELANIE FONTES RAINER: Oh, yeah. I, I would say absolutely. I am a big, Bit of a tech optimist, but I think, yes, technology is allowing people to access information from anywhere they are. Technology is the reason this whole system of pills by mail is proliferating in the U.

S. You know, it's that same system is making abortion pills available in all states for folks living in rural areas, for folks that don't have hundreds and hundreds of [01:17:00] dollars to drive or go to an in person clinic. And so, yes, I think that is all net positive. And I also believe that technology. is best thought of as a tool to get us where we want to go.

We judge it as good or bad, depending on whether it's serving our needs or whether we feel like it's controlling us or we're controlling it, you know, but it's a tool. It's our job to be stewards of it, to figure out what we want out of it, to regulate it when it's appropriate. It's looking ahead. You know, at Plan City, we talk all the time about our vision of the future.

I sometimes feel like progressive movements in the U. S. are often just fighting against something that is going wrong or in the way or whatnot, but we really want to be envisioning the future that we want to build. And that's why I believe that this is a really hopeful conversation that truly there's a beautiful vision here of liberation, of people being more in control.

People having more autonomy over their well being, their futures, their reproductive health and outcomes.

SECTION B: ABORTION EXTREMISM OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [01:18:00] You've reached section B: abortion extremism in the Republican party.

Texas Republicans Want To Execute Women Who Defy Them - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 5-30-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: equal protection is the phrase that the anti-abortion freaks use to describe a requirement that they want to have put into law that killing a, a fetus Or to quote the U. S. Supreme Court, an unborn child, um, is the exact same thing as killing an actual born child, or an adult, in other words, homicide. And down in Texas, the Texas Republican Party is putting together their platform this week, and one of the proposals, which looks like it's going to be built into their platform, is calling for, quote, equal protection.

Now, two other states have tried this before. South Carolina and Georgia have both tried doing the same thing. Uh, they didn't succeed in either case. Uh, these, these were actually legislative attempts in South Carolina and Georgia, and they, they tried to pass [01:19:00] laws saying that an abortion is homicide, essentially.

That, that equal protection is given to unborn children as it is to, uh, real children. Um, but this is You know, pretty straightforward. And they're right up front about it. I mean, one of the Republicans, this is Representative, State Representative, Stephanie Klick. Um, who is a Texas Republican, but she's not an anti-abortion absolutist.

Uh, attacked her primary opponent, David Lowe, who's also a Republican, who does want the Equal Protection Law to be applied to abortions. She said, quote, The legislation he prefers would give the death penalty to women who had an abortion. I don't support that. What I support is the Republican Party of Texas platform on abortion, which is the same laws that protect you and me, protect everyone else, to include pre born children.

I'm sorry, that's what he said in response. So she said, the [01:20:00] legislation he prefers would give the death penalty to women who had an abortion. I don't support that. And he says, yes, you're right. He said, what I support is the Republican Party of Texas platform on abortion, which is the same laws that protect you and me, and protect everybody else, to include pre born children.

In other words, if you get an abortion in Texas, you can get a lethal injection. You can get put to death by the state. And these are not fringe groups anymore. I mean, there was once a time when this was very much the fringe. But, no longer. I mean, since 2022, Republican lawmakers have introduced at least 26 bills calling for abortion to be considered homicide.

And women who get abortions to be subject to life imprisonment or the death penalty. Pretty much every anti-abortion leader, this is Jessica Valenti who's writing about this by the way over at her Substack [01:21:00] newsletter, Jessica. substack. com. Uh, she writes, pretty much every anti-abortion leader and organization in the country signed onto a letter last year calling for, quote, equal protection for children in the womb.

And you know, not only, by the way, this has larger implications. It's not just women who get abortions. If a woman in Texas, if this becomes law, and again, you know, this is, Texas is now the third state to suggest this should become law. Or where Republicans are suggesting this should become law. And more than 22 pieces of legislation have been introduced in various states to make this law.

None of them have succeeded so far. But if this becomes law, that fetuses have the same protection under the law as do children, actual children. And a pregnant woman is seen in a bar or restaurant having a sip of wine, [01:22:00] she could be arrested for child abuse. If she smokes a cigarette, she could be arrested for child abuse.

I mean, that's, that's where this is going. And to take it even weirder, you know, there have been several women who had, uh, the story, in fact, the stories that get a lot, you know, the most high profile stories about abortion in the media these days, are stories of women who have, Uh, such severely damaged, malformed, birth defected, uh, fetuses, that there's no way they can survive outside the womb, and yet, the Republicans want to force them to give birth, rather than have an abortion.

I mean, there's, there's, you know, we've all seen, in fact, we had one of those women on this program about a month ago, or maybe two or three months ago. Well, the Texas Republican Party. has two other pieces to their [01:23:00] platform that apply to abortion. One is that they want, uh, all children in the state to be forced to watch anti-abortion propaganda videos.

And the second is that they want the state to, quote, close discriminatory loopholes that fail to protect pre born children suspected of having a fetal anomaly, end quote. In other words, if a woman is carrying a fetus that is known to have, you know, profound birth defects that will cause it to die, they want to force her to give birth to that thing rather than have an abortion.

I, you know, I, I think just five years ago, before Trump was elected and started putting over 300 right wing judges on the courts. We would not have even imagined this was possible. This is how quickly things change. When [01:24:00] you put fascists in charge of a country. And people were amazed at how quickly Hitler changed Germany.

Or Mussolini changed Italy. How quickly Modi is changing India right now. Uh, you know, how quickly Xi changed China. We're seeing, now China didn't go from a democracy to something else, but, you know, things change, things can change really rapidly when you have really committed, uh, politicians. Meanwhile, Project 2025, now Project 2025 is, this is the plan for the next Republican president.

It might be Trump in 2025, it might be J. D. Vance in 2028, or Ron DeSantis, or whoever, you know, whoever runs for president in 2028 on the Republican side. But they want to eliminate requirements that health insurance provides for birth control, number one. Number two, they want to require insurers to cover, quote, fertility awareness based methods of family planning.

In other words, [01:25:00] the rhythm method. They want your insurance company to tell you, instead of giving you birth control pills, we'll give you a brochure explaining That there is this, you know, week long period during the, during the four weeks of your cycle when you're most likely to, uh, to become pregnant.

They also want, uh, another part of Project 2025 is calling for funding a federal study into the dangers of birth control pills. The senior researcher associate at the Heritage Foundation, who's in, leading this project around conception, Emma Waters, she said, quote, I've been very concerned with just the emphasis on expanding more and more contraception.

We want to make sure women are getting the thing that's best for them. And Trump recently said, yeah, I'm looking at banning contraception. Now, he walked that back the next day. It's possible he didn't know what the word contraception meant. But, you know, I'm [01:26:00] guessing he heard the word in a conversation.

The Trump administration also overhauled the Title 10 program, which provides birth control, STD screenings, and reproductive services to low income people. He basically ended all those services. Joe Biden reversed that. And Project 2025 calls for reversing Joe Biden's reversal. In other words, going back to where Poor people can't get birth control, can't get screened for sexually transmitted diseases, can't get any kind of free reproductive services.

Not the job of government to provide anything to poor people.

Why Trumps Abortion Video Needs Some Follow-Up Questions - Brian Lehrer A Daily Podcast - Air Date 4-9-24

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: If you took time from obsessing on the eclipse yesterday to take in any political news, you're You probably know that Donald Trump staked out a new, or is it new, position on abortion rights now that there is such a backlash, right, ever since he fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise to get Roe vs.

Wade overturned by appointing anti Roe justices to the Supreme Court. [01:27:00] He appointed three. They did what Trump promised, as you all know. And in elections and referenda ever since, voters, even in red states, have made it clear that, by and large, they want women to have the right to choose. So, a little Trump history here.

In 1999, when he was first being looked at as a potential presidential candidate, he said this on NBC's Meet the Press with host Tim Russert when asked if he supports even late term abortion rights.

DONALD TRUMP: I'm very pro choice. I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. I cringe when I listen to people debating the subject.

But you still, I just believe in choice.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Trump in 1999. But when he was running in 2016, he had the memorable exchange with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, which ended like this.

MUSIC: Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no, as a principle? The answer [01:28:00] is that there has to be some form of punishment. For the woman?

Yeah, there

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: has

MUSIC: to be

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: some

MUSIC: form.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So, in 99 he was pro choice, by 2016 he wanted women behind bars, yesterday he released a video on Truth Social which answered one question but begged several others.

DONALD TRUMP: My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, The states will determine by vote, or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land.

In this case, The law of the state. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that's what they will be. At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart, or in many cases, Your religion or your faith.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Very confusing clip, actually, and we'll discuss why, and talk broadly about [01:29:00] abortion continuing to develop as an issue in the presidential and congressional campaigns this year with Molly Ball, senior political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Hi Molly, welcome back to WNYC.

MOLLY BALL: Hi, thanks for having me.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So there are the things Trump said yesterday and the things he didn't say. We have more clips, but by way of background first, why did he say anything in a new video on the issue rather than just let his record of overturning Roe stand on its own?

MOLLY BALL: Well, that's a very good question. I think he seems to want to put this issue to rest.

But as you say, the statement that he did put out raised as many questions as it answered. So it certainly didn't do that. However, he has been under a lot of pressure to, uh, take a position on the many lingering questions that the overturning of Roe v. Wade, uh, created, uh, because that Supreme Court decision nearly two years ago now did send the decision making back to the states.

It raised a lot of [01:30:00] questions about how we move forward as a nation, whether there ought to be some kind of federal legislation creating a framework for when abortion is or is not allowed, uh, how states, uh, should administer this, uh, things like medication abortion, which is currently before the Supreme Court.

Uh, there's all sorts of policy areas that, uh, And that the Supreme Court decision actually opened up and that we have seen policymakers in various states and at the federal level be engaged with and so, uh, certainly activists on both sides of this issue do not see this as a closed issue and there's a lot for, for politicians to take a stand on.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: To take one of the things you just mentioned first, the Supreme Court case that they're currently deciding on whether to ban the abortion medication, the Priston. Has Trump taken a position on that? Do you know?

MOLLY BALL: He has not. I have not seen anywhere where he has even commented on that. And that's one of the many, uh, outstanding questions that, that he has [01:31:00] yet to answer.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: And on what he did say yesterday, he said, leave it to the states, but he did not say explicitly that he would oppose any kind of national restrictions if a Republican Congress were to send him some, though a lot of people are hearing it that way. Leave it to the states means no federal ban. Is it clear?

Uh, that he drew the line somewhere.

MOLLY BALL: Absolutely not. If anything, uh, it seems like a message that was almost designed to be unclear. He has said in the past many times that he believes there could be some kind of accommodation or compromise that pleases everyone. Uh, but I think we all know that this is an issue where you, where you can't please everyone because it is so divisive, so polarizing, and because people do feel so passionately, uh, on, on all sides of this issue.

Uh, but he, he seems to have wanted to take a position that would be perceived as moderate. He's said many times, uh, that he views As a political loser for the Republican party, and that's a statement that checks out. We have seen [01:32:00] public opinion really move toward, uh, the pro-abortion rights side of this issue.

In the years since Roe was overturned, we've seen it be a very galvanizing, mobilizing issue for voters, if not always for. Uh, the Democratic Party and its candidates. Uh, and so, you know, Trump doesn't want to lose the presidential election by taking a very hard core pro life stance, and he was criticized by many voices in the pro life movement for the stand that he did sort of take, because of that, and because, as you say, there are a lot of pro life people, anti-abortion rights activists who would like to see some kind of federal limitation, who would like to see a national framework passed by Congress that would say no abortions after a certain number of weeks.

We've seen that proposed, uh, in Congress, uh, and, in fact, get a lot of Republican sponsors in the, in the Senate, uh, right up to before Roe was overturned. [01:33:00] Uh, so, Trump, as you said, strongly implied that he would not support something like that, but he did not come out and say that he would veto such a bill if the Congress were able to pass it, and that's one of the many ambiguities that his statement left.

SECTION C: ABORTION IN THE LEGAL SYSTEM

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now section C: abortion in the legal system.

Abortion and Reproductive Rights Part 4 - Lectures in History - Air Date 3-16-24

We've seen two, count them two, U. S. Supreme Court cases on abortion in one term after Dobbs told us that the federal courts were out of this game, uh, one of which, um, involves the FDA's authority to approve Mifepristone, a drug used in more than half of U. S. abortions. The case also involves a claim that the FDA never had the authority to make abortion pills available via telehealth because Anthony Comstock's law was never repealed and is argued to make it a federal claim to mail abortion related items today.

There's another case involving the Federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. Which, uh, the Biden administration has argued requires access for abortion to patients in certain medical emergencies. [01:34:00] Uh, this claim this case also involves the claim by states like Texas and Idaho that federal law actually treats an unborn child as a patient, and that some states like California may be prohibited from providing access to emergency abortions because of the federal law, rather than required to do so.

And finally, of course, as we saw just in the past few weeks, there's the ongoing struggle for fetal personhood. Um, if you were wondering, like, what is the next Roe v. Wade for the anti abortion movement, it was and always has been fetal personhood, but now that Roe is out of the way, the campaign for fetal personhood has intensified considerably.

Um, it's reflected in state laws recognizing the personhood of fetuses for purposes like tax deductions. Um, and child support laws, and recently in a decision of the Alabama Supreme Court, um, holding that for the purposes of the state's wrongful death of a minor law, uh, a frozen embryo is a child or person, and that therefore, suits for the destruction of embryos can be brought.

Um, as wrongful death suits. Uh, these claims are all designed eventually [01:35:00] to return, ironically, not to Congress, not to state legislators, not to voters, but to the U. S. Supreme Court. Because we've seen, um, after Roe surmised, ironically, that when voters are faced with questions involving reproductive rights and justice, they tend overwhelmingly to support reproductive rights and justice.

And so instead, uh, groups that have long complained about the, So, anti democratic courts interjecting themselves into questions of reproduction are instead seeking out courts and arguing that as a matter of the Constitution's original public meaning, access to abortion, potentially access to IVF, potentially access to contraception, is itself unconstitutional.

So when people ask me sort of my favorite question is people usually not from the United States And I think a lot of people in the United States ask me, when is this going to be over? And the answer is probably never, right? Um, but I think one of the other things that's clear in the history of reproductive rights and justice is that it's always very much been a story about, uh, the health of democracy, right?

Who gets to vote, whether you get to vote at all, how money is influencing how you vote. [01:36:00] And so I think in terms of how this turns out, a good barometer will be how healthy is the democracy in the first place.

Abortion and the erosion of privacy Part 4 - The Weeds - Air Date 4-10-24

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: All right, so what is the first court case in which privacy is the central question?

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: There have been essentially three waves of Supreme Court decisions that we now think of as right to privacy decisions, although the earliest cases didn't use that term. So the earliest cases are two cases from the 1920s called Mayer v.

Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters. And these cases dealt with essentially the right to choose how to raise your children. Mayer was a case where Nebraska passed a law that forbade schoolteachers from teaching students in a language other than English. And there was a schoolteacher who was, who was, who charged with the crime because the teacher taught the German language.

And like that that was a crime in [01:37:00] Nebraska. If that case had come up today, it would have that would have probably been struck down on First Amendment grounds. I mean, obviously, free speech means you can teach someone to speak German. But, um, the court instead saw this as part of a right to choose the upbringing of your children.

And if you want your children to learn the German language, you Send them to school where they learn the German language. Pierce was a similar case. This was an Oregon law that, it targeted all private schools, but the real target was parochial schools. It was an attempt to ban Catholic parents from sending their kids to Catholic schools.

And the court struck that down. You know, if that case came up today, it would have been struck down under the free exercise clause of the Constitution, the provision saying that you have a right to exercise your religion. But the court in the 1920s saw this as a part of this right to raise your children.

And then that was the first wave of what we now think of as right to privacy decision.

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: And, and that's really interesting, especially in the context of now, when [01:38:00] you're thinking about the. current parental rights movement we're seeing in a lot of states?

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, no, I mean, the interesting thing about the early right to privacy cases being about the right to raise your children is you're seeing a divide within social conservatives and within the Christian right about what they think about the right to privacy.

Because in the second wave of right to privacy cases, these started to sweep in not just the right to, you know, choose how you raise your children, but the right to decide whether or not to have children at all. And so you're the second wave of decisions. That's Griswold, the 1965 decision involving contraception.

There were a few other contraception decisions that followed that. And then Roe v. Wade in 1973. These are right to choose whether or not to have children cases.

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: Yeah. Can you talk about Griswold v. Connecticut? You know, we've talked about it on the show before, but give us a refresher. Like what. What was that case and why is it important?

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Griswold is an odd decision. I think to understand Griswold, you have to [01:39:00] understand, like, what happened in, like, the 30 or 40 years prior to Griswold. The 1920s cases, Mayer and Brown, if they had been decided today, they would have been decided under the First Amendment. They would have been decided under an explicit, what's called an enumerated right that is, like, written into the Constitution.

Instead, the court invented this right that is Not mentioned in the Constitution, you know, the right to decide how to raise your children, and that's just how courts operated in the 1920s. You know, this was what was called the Lochner era. Lochner said that there was a so called right to contract, and what the right to contract was, was the right to enter into a labor contract where you're paid terrible wages and you We're ridiculously long hours.

You know, there's a right of employers to exploit their workers. That's not mentioned in the Constitution either

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: right to a job that sucks. Okay, right,

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: right to a job that sucks. That was essentially what what the right was that was that was created in Lochner. And [01:40:00] during the New Deal, this idea that court should be finding unenumerated rights was discredited.

And it was discredited, you know, because of Lochner, you know, because of these hot, very anti worker decisions that the court had handed down. And so Griswold is a weird decision because they want to recognize a right to contraception, but they want to make it look as little like Lochner as possible. So they have this sort of tenuous reasoning that like, well, the Constitution protects these other things that deal with privacy, you know, protects you against the police searching your home without a warrant.

And so the language that the court used was penumbras and emanations. Somewhere within the penumbras and emanations of these existing enumerated right to privacy is a broader right to contraception. There was a theory behind that. You know, the theory was that if [01:41:00] it's a crime to have contraceptions, if it's a crime to use birth control, if it's a crime to use a condom, then the police can search your bedroom or can search a married couple's bedroom for evidence of, like, illicit condom use.

For evidence of like, ooh, you've got an illicit diaphragm in there. We're gonna have to throw you in jail. Yeah,

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: I'm just like imagining a scenario where they're like, I need to check for an IUD, and I'm like, that sounds, that sounds terrible. No.

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, that was what the court wanted to prevent, was the idea was the sort of police investigation that would have to go on in order to determine that you were violating a contraception ban would be so offensive.

Think about modern forms of contraception and, like, the sort of search that the police would have to do in order to determine that you're using it. And so Griswold, you know, the insight was that there's something so offensive about the police being able to make this kind of [01:42:00] investigation that we're just going to take it off the table.

And that was how sexuality sort of got wrapped into this right to privacy.

Why Trumps Abortion Video Needs Some Follow-Up Questions Part 2 - Brian Lehrer A Daily Podcast - Air Date 4-9-24

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Let me also replay the clip of Trump from yesterday, and get your take on the confusing way this ends. If we are arguing about, or not arguing about, but if we're discussing whether Trump is trying to sow as much confusion as clarity, listen carefully as he says, up to the states, but then implies that it should actually be up to to each pregnant woman, if they want to hear it that way.

DONALD TRUMP: My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number [01:43:00] of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that's what they will be.

At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart or, in many cases, your religion or your faith.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So, did you hear that at the end, when he threw in, you must follow your heart or your religion or your faith? Uh, that makes it sound like he supports an individual's right to choose as opposed to a state legislature's right to choose for you, but I don't think that's his position.

MOLLY BALL: Interesting. I mean, I heard that more as, uh, a political statement saying you must follow your heart in terms of how you vote on this, but as we know, this is something that Trump does all the time. He, he speaks in these, these confusing and ambiguous ways or he just, you know, Blatout takes multiple positions on an issue, uh, and he counts on that to muddy the waters and to allow people to hear whatever they want to hear.

And so, uh, the hope [01:44:00] is that, you know, people sort of give him the benefit of the doubt and say, well, I think he's here and someone else can hear it completely differently. Uh, and then, you know, the, if they, for people who are looking to, to, to get to yes and voting to, for Donald Trump, it gives them sort of permission to hear whatever they want to in his various conflicting statements.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Yeah. We're going to talk about Florida now in this respect, Molly in brief, what just happened there?

MOLLY BALL: I was actually in the legislative chamber in Tallahassee when the legislature passed the current six week ban in Florida. What has just happened is that the Florida Supreme Court has allowed that six week ban to go forward.

Previously, the state had a 15 week limit that also had I believe yet to be implemented, uh, pending this, the, the Supreme Court's decision. So, on, starting on May 1st, there will be a ban on abortions after 6 weeks in Florida, which is before many women even know that they're pregnant, so many people [01:45:00] consider it.

Uh, effectively a complete abortion ban. Prior to this, Florida was the only southern state that hadn't restricted abortion and had become sort of an abortion haven for that reason. But on on the basis of polling, it is the most pro choice red state. Uh, at the same time, the Supreme Court issued another opinion allowing an abortion rights ballot initiative to go on the ballot.

This is a if 60 percent of voters support it, which is a quite high bar, would allow for a right to abortion up to fetal viability, which is the limit in Roe v. Wade, about 23, 24 weeks. So many, including the Biden campaign, are hoping that this will prove a powerful motivator getting people to go to the polls and vote for abortion rights, particularly, I think, for Democrats, the fact that there will be a six week ban in place for about six months before the election.

They're hoping we'll sort of [01:46:00] demonstrate to people what it's like to live under this sort of a regime, and then they will have an opportunity to change it.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: And I think Michael in Miami has something to say about this. Michael, you're on WNYC, hello from New York.

CALLER: Hey, Brian. Hey, Molly. Thank you so much for taking my call.

Brian, you've been my lifeline to New York, living in Florida for the last couple years.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Thank

CALLER: you. So, I appreciate it. We still live in Inwood, uh, not too far. Uh, I think this is the supercharge. I don't think people really understand how supercharging this is going to be for Florida. The Senate race is only three points.

The Biden Trump race is only seven, and we need 60 percent to get this passed. Thank you. I think it's going to be such a big influx of money and energy and power into this state that I think could, I don't know if it'll flip it all the way presidentially, but I could certainly flip it for the Senate and, and particularly the fact that this six week ban is going to infect in the next few days, [01:47:00] um, and, and I think people are going to realize how their rights are being taken away.

It's very direct. We've got this right being removed and then a ballot measure right in November. It's almost perfect. It's almost It's the best thing I think could have happened to Florida.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Michael, thank you very much for checking in. Call us again from down there. Molly, let me linger with you for a second on this 60 percent point.

You mentioned it. Michael mentioned it. Um, I didn't know about it. Am I hearing it right that it will take 60 percent of the vote in Florida to enshrine abortion rights?

MOLLY BALL: That's correct. So, this measure could get a majority of the vote and still would not pass. That is the threshold for ballot measures in Florida.

So, if you recall, in Ohio, for example, the last one of these ballot measures that passed, uh, the abortion rights side did win in Ohio, but it got 57 percent of the vote. Uh, so, [01:48:00] that's a very high bar to clear, and, uh, we will see if, uh, Uh, if Florida's able to, to, to clear it.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Um, it, it can work either way, right?

I guess the anti-abortion rights camp likes the fact that it's 60 percent because it takes that 60 40 majority, not 50 percent plus one. But maybe what Michael was hinting at there is that because the abortion rights proponents would need to get to 60%, it's even more of a turnout thing. Generator than it would be if it was 50 percent plus more than you think.

MOLLY BALL: It's possible I could also see an argument going the other direction that it's harder to motivate people when It's this hard to to pass something because they may not have a hope that they could actually get there We've seen this be, again, a very mobilizing issue in ballot initiatives, but not necessarily for candidates.

I covered the, the Florida gubernatorial election in 2022, when the [01:49:00] Democratic candidate, Charlie Crist, uh, was hammering this issue very hard, saying, you know, Ron DeSantis has already banned abortion after 15 weeks, and he's going to do further limits if you reelect him. DeSantis, of course, went on to win that election by nearly 20 points.

So, uh. Mm hmm. It's not necessarily clear that voters will take this and apply it to candidates, whether it's the Senate race, uh, between Rick Scott and his Democratic opponent, or the presidential race. Uh, but we, but what we have seen, uh, is that when abortion is on the ballot as an up or down issue, it does make a lot of people feel uncomfortable.

Go to the polls and those people tend to be Democrats and liberal leaning independents. So the hope is once you get those people out, you know, maybe they're not motivated to go vote for Joe Biden or vote against Rick Scott, but once you get those people to the polls, that's the way they're going to vote.

SECTION D: WHAT IS THERE TO DO?

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section D: what is there to do now?

Digital surveillance and reproductive rights Part 4 - Technically Optimistic - Air Date 5-15-24

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Through no fault of their own, Americans seeking reproductive [01:50:00] health care find themselves restricted, monitored, and under the threat of prosecution.

And because this seems so unfair, and so outside their control, It's strange that the best data privacy advice we have for them is just strong encouragement for people to take control of their data themselves. We seem to be passing the buck. We're not so much helping them as telling them to help themselves.

And as we talked about at the beginning of this episode, when we heard about Dr. Janet Vertazy's experiment to keep her pregnancy offline, opting out of mainstream internet services. can lead you to some strange places, and is itself sometimes seen as suspicious. But Director Fontes Rainer maintains that, when it comes to data privacy, you are your own best resource.

AMY MERRILL: The best advocate for my own privacy is going to be me, right? No one's going to care more about my privacy than me. Within the healthcare [01:51:00] space, we know that a lot of healthcare providers are using web tracking technologies to better understand their patient consumer populations. And in those web tracking technologies, we have some authority and we have reminded providers in particular that if you're going to use these types of technologies, take steps to be compliant with HIPAA, making sure first and foremost that you have a business associate agreement, which is basically an agreement between Google, Metapixel, these web tracking applications and the hospital, so that if there is a breach, if there is an impermissible use or disclosure of that data, it's protected.

Because if it's not, then those providers are just exposing individual protected health information, which is not compliant with HIPAA. I have limited jurisdiction, so to just like put a disclaimer, I have limited jurisdiction over that kind of data, right? So like I can't always do something.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Can I just try and make this more concrete for the people who might be listening, Director?

Are you effectively saying [01:52:00] don't use these apps? Is that basically the message I should take away?

AMY MERRILL: I'm saying you should not be storing protected health information on your phone. In a Google app, in any sort of, you know, there was a lot of attention on period trackers when DOBS first happened, right? And a lot of steps were taken to try to get those individual apps to change how they were tracking data.

But, you know, We know that there are gaps in the regulatory authority and enforcement.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Gaps? Big enough for apps, I guess.

NEWS CLIP: Fertility and period tracking apps have some of the most sensitive reproductive information.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: The new HIPAA reproductive privacy rule does a lot to protect people who receive out of state care.

That woman who traveled from Texas to California doesn't have to fear the results of a blood test might make it back to law enforcement in Texas. That's huge. But the data collected by birth control apps is still potentially dangerous.

NEWS CLIP: There is no difference in the data from your reproductive [01:53:00] choices than the pair of shoes you looked at online.

It's treated exactly the same in the law right now, and that's what the problem is.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: Leading up to DAWBS, we have been talking a lot at Planned Parenthood in and around making sure folks feel educated around what was changing within certain states. Kevin Williams

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: is the VP of Digital Products at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where he's worked for over a decade.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: Over one in three women, plus many more folks that identify as trans and non binary, are without access in their states. And so, obviously, that is Very, very important for us to get ahead of, and, you know, we've had to really be progressive and think how to take users through this very complex matrix now of what the laws are and where access is, and it's very confusing.

It's a very challenging process.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: [01:54:00] Kevin and his team have been doing digital outreach in the face of two overlapping challenges. The suddenly remote healthcare environment of the COVID pandemic and the confusing, restrictive landscape post dops. And as both of these events led more and more patients to seek healthcare information online, he knew that Planned Parenthood had to be exceedingly cautious in how it treated personal health data.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: So birth control and period tracking seemed like something for us to

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: explore. Planned Parenthood's own fertility and period tracking app is called SpotOn, and it's been around in some form since 2016. From

KEVIN WILLIAMS: the beginning, I'll just say, privacy and security has always been an area of focus for us. We believe that your personal health care data should never be used against you.

We don't sell data. It's very important for us, even at the ideation and design stage, to be [01:55:00] We don't collect information and sell it for advertising purposes. We don't collect the information, store it places. And I think that that is the common industry standard of collecting that information. And so what was interesting was when all of the noise In and around concerns around privacy came up.

There was a lot of focus on period trackers and folks were deleting their apps. And we had to spend a lot of time educating people around, um, understanding what we were doing was different than some other period trackers.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Planned Parenthood's app stores data locally on your phone rather than in the cloud.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: Planned Parenthood, we speak a lot about how important Privacy and security is to us. And so I think in a lot of ways, users and communities expect us to show up in this way. We've focused on thinking about accessibility, thinking about how we, uh, educate people to be empowered. I think [01:56:00] that privacy is a top priority for us and we stand by that.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Okay. So you've been talking about how some of the values of Planned Parenthood, like transparency and data privacy, like kind of make it into your work as a product designer. Which makes me want to ask you, like, how do you think about accountability here? Like, as a developer, but a developer in this, you know, particularly urgent space?

KEVIN WILLIAMS: It's a good question because we've been talking a lot in and around accountability as well. There's a real challenge on what accountability we have as an organization, providing care as a trusted brand there to support people, and then also holding big technology accountable as far as educating people on how to use these fancy devices that, you know, have the most sensitive information that they have available.

So when our team comes together thinking about what we should build and design, I mean, First and foremost, we [01:57:00] work very closely with our information securities team, our general counsel and legal advisors and folks are brought into that process right away in the beginning so that we are thinking bigger than just the moment.

We're trying to be more thoughtful about what the idea is going to look like in execution and iteration over time. You know, there's so much conversation around weaponizing of data these days, and there's a lack of trust. And so. Positioning ourself as a trusted resource is been really important to our social media and communications team, just because there's just a, you know, it's next level out there right now.

Yeah, it's a wild west. Yes, it is a wild west right now. Totally is. We've become so dependent on big technology. We really need to find a way to use this data for good. I think there's a lot of noise in and around the [01:58:00] exploitation of data, but there's some real societal shifts that that need to be observed.

And I think part of the challenge with that is what information is being collected, where it's being stored, who's monitoring it, how is it being exchanged in between and across organizations? And I just would really like to have more conversations about that.

NJ Rep. Mikkie Sherril On Abortion Nationwide, And Campus Protests In Her District - Brian Lehrer_ A Daily Podcast - Air Date 5-1-24

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Let's start with the judge shopping bill. Can you explain what that's about?

REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: Yes, so, you know, what we've seen in some of the anti-abortion tactics is judge shopping, meaning that there are certain divisions within our, uh, judicial system that have only one judge.

So for example, if you come, uh, if you bring a case to court in New Jersey, um, you don't know which judge you are going to get to hear your case. You could have a judge appointed by Biden or Obama. You could have a judge appointed by Trump or [01:59:00] Bush. You don't know. There are multiple judges that might be picked to hear your case by the assigning judge.

However, in some of these divisions, especially, you know, in some more remote areas, there is only one judge. So that you know, if you take your case to that court, you have One person that will hear it. And so that can, uh, ensure the outcome you want in certain cases. And certainly we saw that with the Mifa Prestone case.

So what my bill does is say you have to have more than one judge if you are going to bring a case that will impact the st the rights of people nationwide. So in that type of case with say, a nationwide ban on something or impacting a nationwide law. that you have to bring your case, uh, to a division or a department that has more than one judge.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Don't all sides in all cases judge shop if they can? And if so, how can a bill prevent it [02:00:00] in ways that would kind of advance what you're, uh, Erin Clayton, MAGA, QAnon,

REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: Deon Clark, Transcriptionist Quartet, enshittification, MAGA, QAnon, Deon and go to some of the most conservative judges in the nation to determine the outcome.

We want a more fair process. And certainly, they may draw a very conservative judge, but I think we want somebody to put forward a case where they are trying to make a very fair case and can't sort of game the system or determine the outcome based on where they bring that case.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So, The bill would explicitly do that, how, and do you think you have enough support in the Republican House of Representatives to get that bill to the President's desk?[02:01:00]

Work to the Senate.

REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: So the bill would specifically say that if you are trying to, um, bring a case that would impact people nationwide, you have to bring it into a district or division that has more than one judge, um, so that you can't sort of predetermine exactly the judge, uh, that is going to hear it.

Um, and, uh, you know, it's hard to say, we've had, uh, trouble in this Congress, I think, gaining enough support to get, um, Very non controversial things done. It's been very hard. So in this Congress, trying to find that group of support will be difficult, but I think we've seen movement in the Senate. Schumer introduced a similar bill, um, and I think that he's seen some bipartisan support there.

So hopefully we can build on that in the House, because really this is, this is something that, um, You know, when we're talking about rights, uh, that we want to protect in our [02:02:00] courts, um, you know, the very things that protect us against, um, some very conservative justices could protect people against some very liberal justices, so, or judges.

So I think this is an area where we could find, um, wide bipartisan support, and just trying to create a more fair justice system.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So the MIFA Pristone case was an inspiration for this bill. I see you're also concerned about another Supreme Court case on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.

What's that?

REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: So the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, um, called EMTALA often, Is a case heard, being heard before the court or just was heard before the court and we expect an upcoming decision, um, that is a case where Idaho had a trigger law, meaning that once Roe was overturned, that law would immediately go into effect, um, and it was one of the most draconian laws [02:03:00] regarding abortion care across the nation.

So, you could basically, um, You only get, as far as health care for women, abortion in the case of if you were seeing the death of a mother, um, so what EMTALA says in, and how that has been interpreted is to provide what, what is called stabilizing care, but what that really means is, look, if you are in a medical situation, if you are suffering, um, a medical problem with your pregnancy, abortion may be the way that.

The, um, the way that the medical center can treat you. And in cases such as placenta previa, um, hemorrhaging, other areas, it's really an important part of reproductive health care. We're seeing in too many cases that when doctors wait until the actual life of the mother is at stake, not just the health of the mother, they're making decisions that will put the mother at risk of [02:04:00] never being able to conceive again.

Transcriptionist Quartet, enshittification, MAGA, QAnon, Transcriptionist Quartet, enshittification, to conduct an abortion if it would save the reproductive organs of a mother and the answer was really very unclear because I think the answer is no under that law and so health care providers are not protected in that case and in Idaho you can be put in jail.

Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation, Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone Part 2 - CounterSpin - Air Date 4-5-24

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: Well, if you talk to staunch anti-abortion people, the conversation is, is very rarely about science or about medicine, you know? Um, but then some of them and their media, Folks will throw around terms that sort of suggest that they're being science y, you know, they'll talk about viability or heartbeat, or they'll say it's about [02:05:00] concern about the safety of drugs.

And I just wonder, as a scientist who actually is immersed in this stuff, what do you make of the reporting on the medical reality of abortion? And would more knowledge help inform the broader conversation or is it just two kind of different conversations? What do you think?

RACHEL K. JONES: Right, I definitely think it's two different conversations.

Like I said, we have decades of scientific medical research establishing that medication abortion is safe, effective, and widely accepted. People who don't support abortion choose to ignore the science and the safety and dig for their own factoids and, and supposed scientific facts to support their arguments.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: It's so strange how the media debate always seems to start again and again at point zero, you know, as though there were no facts in the matter or, or no experience. And as though women aren't And, uh, we're looking for [02:06:00] experts on their own experience, you know? Um, well, finally, we see things like the Women's Health Protection Act, you know, federalizing the right to abortion.

I know the law is not necessarily your purview, but, you know, In terms of responding to these court moves and these state level moves, do you think that federal action is the way to go?

RACHEL K. JONES: Certainly, that is one solution, right? The Women's Health Protection Act would enshrine the right to abortion federally.

But we also need, and especially in the current environment, I don't want to say Women's Health Protection Act is pie in the sky, but given everything that's going on right now, we also need federal and state policy makers to step up to restore, protect, and expand access to abortion. A lot of these restrictions are imposed.

I mean, quite frankly, you know, the right to abortion was removed because of Roe, and that allows states to impose pretty much any restriction that they want to. We're seeing from all [02:07:00] these, uh, different laws that are being implemented, and so it really is a lot of times at the state level, and certainly in the current environment, the state level is what we might need to focus

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: on.

And then anything you would like to see more of or less of from journalism in this regard? Thank you very much.

RACHEL K. JONES: You know, on medication abortion, it seems like the media is actually doing a decent job of covering the issue, of acknowledging, again, the decades of research showing that medication abortion is safe, effective, and commonly used.

I guess the only issue we might have is one that you see anytime that abortion is the subject of media stories, and that is a lot of times reporters think, well, if they have to Take a fair and balanced approach. That means that they have to talk to the people who oppose abortion. And again, when this is about science and facts and research, then you don't need to talk to people who don't believe in it, don't believe in sound science, or who are going to ignore the science.

Again, decades of, of solid [02:08:00] medical research.

Digital surveillance and reproductive rights Part 5 - Technically Optimistic - Air Date 5-15-24

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Even if you know about hipaa. You probably have at least a few misconceptions about it, according to director Fontes Rainer.

I think there's a lot of misinformation about HIPAA in the first instance, whether it's to doctors and hospitals or patients. And I have been told from people, right, you know, oh, well, HIPAA protects me for X, or HIPAA protects my data on my phone, or HIPAA protects me when I do X, or I'm going to get my records because of HIPAA.

And some of that is true and some of that isn't true. We all do everything on our phones now, and I think a lot of people have a very unrealistic expectation of privacy and expectation of protection when they think it's just, oh, it's my medical information, so it's protected, right?

Not right, unfortunately.

AMY MERRILL: There should be a business associate agreement in place so that data is protected, but oftentimes there isn't. So oftentimes you may be using some app on your phone that is not a HIPAA covered entity, it's not a business associate agreement, you're just using it, and so you are making yourself exposed.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: HIPAA makes many [02:09:00] concrete requirements about how healthcare providers have to treat medical records. The same is true of all sorts of private companies in the healthcare space. That's the function of these business associate agreements that the director just mentioned. But, HIPAA makes no provisions for technology companies.

AMY MERRILL: So one of the first things my office did last summer was we put out, literally, here's how to take this into your own hands even when HIPAA doesn't apply, right? Like basic things, right? Turning off, tracking things, tracking off geolocation, making sure you're not storing protected health information on your phone, on your tablet, on your devices in the first instance.

Don't store it into the Google Cloud. Don't store it into the Apple Cloud. Don't Because these things can be searchable, identifiable, and sometimes they're not protected.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: So this is the problem, and it's twofold. HIPAA goes so far, but falls short of protecting many sources of healthcare data for the 21st century American.

And in a landscape without the protections of Roe v. Wade, it also [02:10:00] became clear that HIPAA had huge gaps in it when it comes to reproductive healthcare. And when you take those two issues together, then you're at the intersection of data privacy and abortion rights.

SUE DUNLAP: I'm gonna turn again to a story here.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Again, here's Sue Dunlap of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles.

SUE DUNLAP: We recently had a patient here in Los Angeles who had started in Georgia, then went to South Carolina, got sent back to Georgia, then went. to Florida, then from Florida, flew to Los Angeles, all because there were various abortion limitations and bans.

The very first thing when one of our doctors came into my office to sort of explain what had happened, he said, she came with a stack of papers that made no sense. Would having had one seamless electronic health record have made her experience better? In a perfect world, [02:11:00] yes. Sure. But I can also tell you that what was contained in those papers was also informed by fears or fears.

around the limitations in each state. So what a doctor in California might expect versus what a doctor or a practitioner in a state where abortion is becoming criminalized might be able to offer are also very, very different. So, Again, I'm stuck in this in between where I can tell you what we aspire to and want isn't here today.

What should we do now? I think we have to live in both. I don't think it's a, this is the solution, health records. I think that's naive. Our patients live in a different world and that's exacerbated by dramatic differences across geography, which frankly are only going to become more intense. It just starts to create a dynamic that [02:12:00] is not going to work and isn't compatible with the beautiful vision of shared electronic health records, which is that.

Patients can travel, and they can get the best care possible. And so an electronic health record starts to become the path to transfer those disparities.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Sue reminds me that in real life, tech doesn't live in a vacuum. In a world where your own data can be weaponized against you like this, what might seem like a simple, obvious solution to a technologist, like electronic health records, becomes a huge social issue, an emblem of the loss of autonomy and surveillance.

And not just surveillance. For many Americans seeking reproductive care, simply visiting the doctor generates a dystopian digital scarlet letter. It could lead to your being fined or jailed, or to an awful self destructive cycle where in order to avoid getting arrested, you avoid seeing a doctor. Post [02:13:00] Dobbs America is a place where people have to choose.

Should I risk prosecution? Or should I risk getting sicker? And for pregnant people, the choice is even starker. States with restrictive abortion laws have made it so your data can very literally be the difference between life and death. That's post Dobbs America. But Melanie Fontes Rainer is trying to steer us out of this nightmare.

And she's trying to do that by fixing HIPAA.

AMY MERRILL: So, in this space that we live in now in post op, a lot of reproductive health care providers, reproductive health care clinics, OBGYN facilities, they are very aware of that. Trying to misuse data, trying to track women, going on fishing expeditions, none of this is new.

Those kinds of providers are very familiar with the landscape and they know the law. Oftentimes before you have surgery, what do they do? They give you a blood test [02:14:00] to make sure you're not pregnant. And now you have a medical record, whether or not it's related to your reproductive health care, that now affirmatively states whether or not you're pregnant, that someone wants to have, that someone could track you.

And so those are the instances I worry about because your medical record through your electronic health record can be everywhere, right? I've had people tell me, you know, uh, we had a patient, she went to California for an abortion. When she went back home, just stayed at. The provider said, I see you had an abortion in California, right, and now they may hand over those records.

And so, you know, that's why we have proposed a rule to actually take it a step further. We have a proposed rule that will actually prohibit those disclosures in the first instance.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: It's called the HIPAA Privacy Rule to Support Reproductive Healthcare Privacy. Yeah, that's right, privacy's in there twice.

And back when I spoke with Director Fontes Raynor, it was just a proposal. But on April 26th, it became official.

NEWS CLIP: Thank you for joining [02:15:00] us, uh, to discuss today's major announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: The new rule protects patients and providers. Because it basically says, if reproductive healthcare was given or received in a state where that care was legal,

AMY MERRILL: That information about that healthcare cannot be used or disclosed by that healthcare provider or health plan for an investigation to impose liability on the individual or the provider.

NEWS CLIP: There is one thing Dobbs did not take away, and that is the right of Americans to their privacy.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: That's HHS Secretary Javier Becerra. He's speaking at a press conference announcing the new rule, with Director Fontes Rayner at his side.

NEWS CLIP: We took action the moment the Dobbs decision became public. We're not stopping.

AMY MERRILL: The idea, right, that me as an individual, as a human being, that I can't travel somewhere to where the healthcare is lawful to receive lawful healthcare on my dime, [02:16:00] that that's not legal and that my state thinks they own me, that is bananas.

Credits

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

The additional section of the show included clips from Lectures in History, Technically Optimistic, The Weeds, The Thom Hartmann Program, The Brian Lehrer Show and CounterSpin. Further details are in the show notes.

Membership is how you get instant access to our impressively good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads, and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the 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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#1633 Fights for Fair Pay, Journalism vs Sensationalism, Billionaire Bailouts, and Addiction Capitalism: Sports are a Microcosm of the Ills of Society (Transcript)

Posted by · June 04, 2024 2:30 AM

Air Date 6/4/2024

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. Seemingly, the late Pope John Paul II said that, "Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important", referring to European football, of course. And arguably that could be extrapolated out to all of the other sports that people also invest much of their lives into following. But it's not just for the importance that people put on sports that it becomes a good topic for a political podcast; it's because the problems that arise within the systems of sports, are the same problems we all face everywhere, which makes them a good lens through which to understand the mechanisms of broader society: the fight for fair pay, both journalism and addictive games functioning under capitalism and unfair benefits for billionaires, all resonate far beyond the bounds of the

players, owners and fans of sparks clubs. Sources providing our top takes today, include the University of Iowa, the PBS [00:01:00] NewsHour, Brett Coleman, LeBatardShow, MSNBC Reports, Robert Reich, and The Current. Then, in the additional deeper dive half of the show, there'll be more on the new world of pay for play for college athletes, the folly of taxpayer funded stadiums, sports journalism and capitalism, and the impact of addictive sports gambling.

Pay for Play: Should College Athletes be Considered University Employees? Part 1 - University of Iowa - Air Date 3-28-24

DAN MATHESON: I want to set the stage for the tectonic shift that is facing college athletics right now. It didn't happen overnight, and the path that has led to this moment provides much needed context for a full discussion of the issues that we're going to have tonight.

I want to begin by going back to 1984. In that year, the NCAA lost the antitrust lawsuit known as the Board of Regents case. In that case, the Supreme Court found that the NCAA's restrictions on the number of football games that could be televised each week were illegal [00:02:00] restraints on trade and commerce under antitrust law.

But there was a silver lining for the NCAA in that defeat: the Supreme Court acknowledged in its decision that some restraints on trade and commerce are necessary for college football to exist and wrote, quote, "The NCAA seeks to market a particular brand of football, college football. The identification of this product with an academic tradition differentiates college football from, and makes it more popular than, professional sports to which it might otherwise be comparable, such as minor league baseball. In order to preserve the character and quality of the product, athletes must not be paid, must be required to attend class and the like." End quote.

"Athletes must not be paid." That dictum by the Supreme Court in 1984 became a foundation upon which the [00:03:00] NCAA based its legal strategy and its justification for amateurism for decades to come. But the protection the NCAA relied on from that Supreme Court decision would eventually come to an end, which I will talk about in a moment.

20 years after that Board of Regents decision, legal challenges to the NCAA's amateurs and rules began like a snowball at the top of a mountain that grew as it tumbled downhill, and today the NCAA is at the bottom of that mountain, looking up at an avalanche coming at it.

I want to briefly walk you through a few of those important legal challenges to amateurism that have taken place over the past 20 years and set up the issues that we're considering tonight.

First, in 2004, we have Jeremy Bloom. Jeremy Bloom was a unique [00:04:00] two-sport athlete who played college football [for] Colorado, but also was an Olympic-level skier, and he sued the NCAA because the NCAA denied his request to sign name, image, and likeness deals as a skier outside of his college sport. This was long before our current NIL environment that we've become so accustomed to. The NCAA won that lawsuit, and succeeded in holding off what was a very high-profile challenge to its authority. But in doing so, it sparked a national debate over the fairness of its amateurism rules.

Five years later, in 2009, the next legal challenge took Jeremy Bloom's fight one step further. That was a class action antitrust lawsuit known as the O'Bannon case. In that case, college athletes challenged the NCAA's amateurism rules that restricted them from profiting from [00:05:00] their name, image, and likeness in video games. This was the lawsuit that brought down the very popular EA college sports games that probably many of you students here played while you were younger. The O'Bannon case was an antitrust case, just like the Board of Regents case. So in deciding the O'Bannon case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was influenced by the Supreme Court's statement in the Board of Regents that athletes must not be paid. In the O'Bannon case, the court ruled that offering student athletes, quote, "Cash sums untethered to educational expenses is not minor. It is a quantum leap. At that point, the NCAA will have surrendered its amateurism principles entirely and transitioned from its particular brand of football to minor league status." End quote.

That decision by the Ninth Circuit to protect NCAA [00:06:00] amateurism rules against payments unrelated to educational expenses further emboldened the NCAA and further enraged a growing number of amateurism skeptics.

Right around the same time as the decision in the O'Bannon case, another case challenging amateurism rules was decided in a different legal venue by the National Labor Relations Board. In 2014, The Northwestern University football student athletes sought recognition as a labor union by the NLRB. In that case, an NLRB regional director found the football players to be employees of Northwestern. But on appeal, the full NLRB in Washington, DC chose not to exercise jurisdiction over the case, because doing so, it said, would create instability in labor relations in college football. [00:07:00] So the players couldn't form a union, but the NLRB clarified it was not deciding whether the regional director was right or wrong in finding them to be employees, which helped further stoke the flames of the debate.

So in about a 10 year period, starting in 2004, you had the Bloom case, The O'Bannon case and the Northwestern case. And while the O'Bannon and Northwestern cases were going on, another class action antitrust lawsuit known as the Alston case was filed against the NCAA and that one would end up going to the Supreme Court.

The Alston case went a step further than the O'Bannon case in that the plaintiffs challenged any NCAA restrictions on college athlete compensation, not just NIL restrictions in video games.

But by the time that case was litigated up to the Supreme Court, it was trimmed [00:08:00] back to a more limited focus on whether the NCAA was violating antitrust law by placing restrictions on educational benefits to student athletes. On that more limited question of educational benefits, the Supreme Court unanimously found the NCAA restrictions to be in violation of antitrust laws. And--this is significant--the Supreme Court rejected the NCAA's reliance on the Board of Regents decision and its "athletes must not be paid" comment as being some sort of safe harbor to protect the NCAA against amateurism challenges.

The Supreme Court noted in Alston how dramatically the economics of college football and college sports in general had changed in almost 40 years since the Board of Regents case, and emphasized that it would be unwise to rely on what was a stray comment [00:09:00] by the Supreme Court about student athlete compensation rules in Board of Regents, when those rules weren't even an issue in that case.

Taking things one step further in the Alston case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion that signaled to future plaintiffs that at least one member of the Supreme Court would entertain a more expansive takedown of the NCAA's amateurism rules. Justice Kavanaugh delivered a searing indictment of amateurism that concluded with the following passage. Quote: "Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not [00:10:00] above the law." End quote.

What the historic $2.8 billion settlement to pay NCAA players means for college sports - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 5-24-24

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: So I think it's safe to say the days of the amateur student athlete, college athlete, those days are over. Help us understand how significant this moment is.

PAT FORDE: Yes, this is the death of amateurism, which has basically been on the books forever in college athletics.

So it is a significant milestone. The castle walls of amateurism had been eroding for years, most specifically starting three years ago, when name, image, and likeness payments were first approved, but this is a major acceleration from that.

This provides, as you noted, back damages to four years' worth of college athletes who are no longer in their sports, and then also a framework to pay for a decade going forward. So this is a lot of money being transferred from the traditional coffers of the athletic administration, coaches, athletic directors, facility usage into — directly into the [00:11:00] hands of the players and it being done by the schools themselves.

That's the real change here.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: How soon could we see these payments start going out to student athletes?

PAT FORDE: I think it's going to be about 14 months from now, 15 months, setting into the 2025-'26 academic year. That's kind of what the target is right now.

There's still a million loose ends to this, so there's a lot of work to be done on the details, but that's the target date for when you will start seeing major sums of money going directly from institutions to the athletes.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Yes.

How are schools thinking about compensating athletes in those sports that generate a lot of revenue versus those that don't, so, say, the star football player, the star basketball player versus the star pole vaulter?

PAT FORDE: Well, how this actually is going to be divided up is going to be one of the great sources of curiosity and ultimately controversy, I would imagine.

As it stands now, it seems like the [00:12:00] preponderance of thought is to make this an institution-by-institution decision. This will not be like a nationally mandated pay scale. There will not probably be conferences dictating how much is going to go to which athletes or which sports. It'll be up to each school to decide whether they can afford a full $21, $22 million a year in revenue for the athletes or if they want to pay something less than that, and then that is divided up.

Obviously, the football players, the men's basketball player and probably increasingly women's basketball players will get the majority of this, but then, even within the team, what sort of parameters are put on in terms of performance or recruiting star power or experience as far as who gets what? That's all that's good going to be have to be sussed out at the institution level.

And it's going to be quite, I think, a process to get to those deliberations.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Yes.

To the point about women's sports, how does Title IX [00:13:00] factor into the financial calculus here?

PAT FORDE: Well, that's going to be another fascinating element of this, because, obviously, Title IX has really changed the game in terms of allowing females equal opportunity or near-equal opportunity to play their sports in college to the men.

But is equal opportunity the same as equal compensation? So far, in the NIL era, it hasn't been, that most NIL dollars have gone to men's football — or men's basketball and football players. So does this ruling have an effect on that and say, no women have to be compensated in a similar manner in terms of the actual outlay of money or just maybe the number of female athletes has to be somewhat commensurate or proportional to the men?

And then you decide what the money is. But that's going to be, I think a great major flash point of this, and I think we're going to be hearing a lot about that in the next year-plus.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Yes, and one flash point is, how do these colleges and universities go about paying these student athletes without really [00:14:00] classifying them as employees? How are they weighing that question?

PAT FORDE: That's an attempt to thread the needle here by the NCAA and by college athletics. Once again, they have been playing the thread needle game for time immemorial of these people probably are employees in a business setting, but they don't want to be classified as such and they don't want to have to face antitrust legislation along those grounds.

So what they are hoping is for the significant movement here to get the attention and the motivation of Congress to help come up with some antitrust exemption for college athletics to protect it from further lawsuits and to have a system where athletes are sharing in revenue, where they are being compensated, but they are not necessarily considered employees of the university.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Hmm.

And lastly, Pat, this doesn't replace the NIL, the name, image and likeness opportunities for those student athletes that are able to take advantage of them?

PAT FORDE: It doesn't. No, NIL [00:15:00] is still going to be an ongoing fact of life. It'll be fascinating to see how much money is still in an NIL sort of pool versus what's now going into a strict, straight university reimbursement pool and if donors are necessarily less inclined to give NIL money now through a collective or otherwise, because they're already seeing athletes getting paid by the school itself.

But NIL will still be part of the dynamic and there will be schools that want to spend more than the $21, $22 million cap. And so they will turn to boosters or collectives and say, hey, can you help us out with this star quarterback over here? We'd like to give him some more money.

So the NIL era is changing, but it's not going away.

Pay for Play: Should College Athletes be Considered University Employees? Part 2 - University of Iowa - Air Date 3-28-24

ALICIA JESSOP: If you follow my journey in sports, I've had the privilege of writing for some of the greatest publications in the world. And when I started in journalism, you can go back to the very end of ruling sports, I said, I believe that there [00:16:00] are good stories about sports in this world. I am tired of hearing the negative stories, particularly about the NCAA. I knew there were good stories out there and I set out to tell them.

But very quickly I realized that were there were some problems and I had a front row seat to Identifying them and addressing them. So now i'm going to go on script.

It's easy to paint the NCAA as the big bad wolf, and admittedly it's something that I have done. But doing so loses sight of how we got to where we are today.

Since the filing of O'Bannon, the focus on college sport has shifted from the field of play to the court of law. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on legal fees, only for massive blows to be dealt at every level of the American court system to the NCAA system of governance. In fact, in two legal challenges the association faces today, the House and Hubbard cases, it risks the possibility of having to pay damages greater than $5.1 billion. Repeated defeat calls [00:17:00] for a scapegoat, and in the world of college sports, the easy scapegoat to blame is the head governing body for college sport.

The story, though, of how we got where we are today, where examining whether college athletes are employees is something we're all spending our time doing, doesn't begin with O'Bannon, as we've examined here already. Nor does it start with NIL in 2021. I agree with Josh, and if I could redo this, I would go back to 1906.

I start 73 years ago, though, with the 1951 NCAA convention. And as I tell this story, I'm going to let you decide where blame lies. Is it with the head governing body? Is it with the universities? Is it with the media companies? Is it good old American greed? Or perhaps, can we stop laying blame and recognize that there is enough at the table for all to adequately be fed?

24 years before that fateful 1951 convention, a 21-year-old who lived the first 14 years of his life [00:18:00] without electricity unveiled an invention that would change the world. In a lab on San Francisco's Green Street, Philo T. Farnsworth wired to his fundraiser, quote, "The damn thing works," when after years of thinking, his contraption transmitted the first electronic television image.

It would be an understatement to say that television changed the American way of life. In 2023, 97 percent of the 125 million households in this nation owned a television. The average American spends three hours a day watching that device. Binge watching has become a common aspect of today's existence. But Farnsworth's invention hadn't proliferated American society in 1951. In fact, at that time, 96 percent of American households owned a radio, where only 12 percent owned a TV. As we are experiencing today with artificial intelligence, the potential reach and impact of new technology can spur fear in a populace awaiting its full rollout. [00:19:00] So it's not surprising that the three-person committee charged by the NCAA with figuring out what to do with what was called the, quote, "television problem," perceived that television posed the possibility of shaking up the status quo. If fans could watch games on TV, would they attend in person? If they didn't attend in person, what would happen to athletic department revenue? The committee determined, quote, "that the television problem is truly a national one and requires collective"--that's the key word there--"collective action by the colleges."

This is where the plot thickens. As the main character of our story, the NCAA's attempt to solve a " problem" ended in actually creating a bigger one, one that would embed the organization in decades worth of legal battles that it continues fighting today. To get the television problem under control, the association launched an association-wide TV plan that limited football teams exposure to two games per season. When one school, [00:20:00] Penn--and I'm not talking Penn State, I'm talking about the Ivy League school, which had televised all of its home games in the decade prior--pushed back, the association threatened to kick it out, and every team that had it scheduled for games that season canceled those games. So, needless to say, Penn acquiesced and hopped back on the system.

In 1981, modifications were instituted into the plan wherein the NCAA negotiated an overarching four year, nearly $132 million deal with ABC and CBS. Each of the networks would carry 14 games per season. However, while they could negotiate directly with the schools the right to carry their games, there were limitations around what games could be covered. Schools could only be shown no more than six times in a two-year window, four of which nationally. And they would be paid out of that $132 million pot with the NCAA specifying ideas, but not requirements, for how the money could be allocated. [00:21:00]

Since the turn of the 20th century--so this is the 1890s coming into the 1900s--marketplace competition has been a distinguishing aspect of the American economy. On July 2nd, 1890, Congress enacted the Sherman Antitrust Act. We are living today in a period of wide division in our American Congress, but this was a piece of federal legislation that everyone was on board with. One congressperson voted against it and it passed unanimously in the Senate. This law was enacted to combat the rise of trust that thwarted competition in this nation, like the Standard Oil Trust.

And so it was in the spirit of competition that in 1981, the NCAA's then-unchallenged television plan received its first real shake up. I don't consider Penn's attempt a real shake up because they backed down too quick. That summer, a group of schools organized as something called the College Football Association, hereafter the CFA, and they went [00:22:00] to ABC and CBS's competitor, NBC, and negotiated their own TV agreement. Pretty smart. Needless to say, the NCAA did not appreciate this because it would give these schools, quote, "an unfair competitive advantage to have more of their games broadcast on television and subsequently the ability to generate even greater revenues."

Unlike Penn though, two of the CFA schools, Oklahoma and Georgia, lawyered up. They sought a preliminary injunction preventing the association from disciplining them or interfering with their contract. Three years later, the case reached the United States Supreme Court. The seven to two decision by the court in Board of Regents versus NCAA deemed that the NCAA's television plan violated the Sherman Act, as it amounted to a restraint on trade and price fixing.

This decision singlehandedly reshaped the landscape of intercollegiate athletics forever. That's because it opened up the marketplace for college sports tv rights. And the market quickly [00:23:00] responded. Where once 82 schools fought for a piece of a $132 million dollar deal, now schools and conferences could individually land lucrative deals, expanding their exposure and coffers. Notre Dame was the first to the market. I always love asking people who say that they're Notre Dame fans if they went there. Nine times out of ten, they didn't go there. And when you unpack why they're a Notre Dame fan, it's because they grew up watching the games on NBC. They were first to market, striking a five-year, $30 million deal.

And then the Southeastern Conference was the next to follow with its first conference deal, inking a five-year, $100 million agreement with CBS that continued until last year.

Considering the athletic success of these programs across the last four decades, what opportunity was born from this initial financial advantage? Today, the valuation of the broadcast agreements for just the four biggest NCAA D One conferences, the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, and Southeastern conferences, along with the association's deals for men's [00:24:00] March Madness, the NCAA's other 40 championships, and then the separately-organized college football playoff, top $36.4 billion. So we're not talking about mid major conference TV deals. We're not talking about D2 or D3. $36.4 billion. That's a far cry from the $132 million allocated in 1981, which adjusted for inflation would be worth about $450 million today.

This influx of broadcast revenue into the college sport ecosystem has brought increased spending. In 2022, football bowls subdivision head football coaches saw a 15.3 percent rise in their average annual salaries. This is coming out of COVID. Ask the average American worker what raise they saw in 2022. USA Today data shows that public Power 5 conference schools will pay their head football coaches an average annual salary of [00:25:00] $6.2 million. These schools also pay their head men's basketball coaches average annual salaries of $3.35 million. In fiscal year 21 to 22, D1 FBS program spent $1.86 billion on college coaches' salaries, and another $2.04 billion on facilities and equipment. That same year, $1.19 billion was spent on athletic scholarships. I wish I had a whiteboard to write the number.

So we're spending more on coaches salaries and facilities than we're spending on the entirety of college athletes.

We are living in an age where there is infinite money to pay an in-demand coach and install lazy rivers and put-put courses in athletic facilities, but mention paying college athletes and suddenly the well dries up.

Sports Media has changed forever. - Brett Kollmann - Air Date 7-15-23

BRETT KOLLMANN - HOST, BRETT KOLLMANN: We are now firmly in an era where individual personal brands In sports media are king, and they [00:26:00] supersede pretty much everything else, including the corporate brands of the networks that employ those people. If you look at everything that's happened at ESPN over the last month or so, signing Pat McAfee to a mega deal, which he left an even bigger deal with FanDuel to take that deal with ESPN, and you overlay that with the unfortunate layoffs that happened at the same time, and it can feel weird, seeing the dichotomy of a whole bunch of talent get let go while at the same time they sign one talent for a lot of money. And I understand where those mixed feelings come from and why there's a lot of confusion about the state of sports media.

And as somebody who used to work in sports TV for a long time, I was in the trenches as a PA at NFL Network, cutting highlights, being in the control room for NFL Red Zone, doing graphics on Red Zone for years, working on virtually every single show that existed at that network at some point in time. And also at the same time doing local sports media at Time Warner Sportsnet, which was later [00:27:00] Spectrum Sportsnet, doing Lakers coverage, Dodgers coverage, Galaxy, Conca Cap, all that kind of stuff. Even going back to my time in high school, I started doing field cam work when I was 16. I started doing technical directing and directing when I was 17. So I spent a lot of my life in sports TV. And then I left all of that to YouTube for also almost a decade at this point. So I've been on both sides of the fence here. I have watched this transition happen, literally even to myself. So I feel like I'm in a unique position to comment on the state of sports media, and maybe give a little bit of context of what's actually happening at ESPN, or at least what I think is happening at ESPN.

First things first, I do want to express as much empathy as I possibly can for everybody that did, unfortunately, recently get let go at ESPN. It was --I think it was twenty total on-air talent got let go. A lot of them, yes, were in very expensive [00:28:00] contracts. They were making great money. And I don't think that matters. And my buddy, Brandon Perna, made a great point when he did his video about this topic that for a lot of the folks that were on-air talent at ESPN that were not former professional athletes themselves, being on air at ESPN is literally their dream job. That is the pinnacle of the profession. That is what you work for is to be an on air talent at ESPN. And they had that. And unfortunately they got let go. And so these are people that literally in many cases lost their dream job. And regardless of the dollar amount of their contract, I think that it just sucks, right? Nobody wants to go through that. And so I empathize with that because it's a very hard thing to have everything you wanted and then have it slip through your fingers. So I want to express empathy first and foremost for those people.

But I also want to explain the network perspective on why those layoffs were probably necessary from Disney's perspective. I do not believe that [00:29:00] Disney would have made those cuts unless they absolutely had to. Because typically, at least in this business, if a contract is not generating the revenue that they need in order to pay for that contract, they're just going to let it expire.

But these were outright layoffs. They were ending these contracts early. And I don't think they would have done that if Disney+ was not losing literally one and a half billion dollars a year. Disney+ has been a disaster for them financially for a lot of reasons, and there's a whole bunch of videos on YouTube that dive into why Disney+ has failed. But that has had an impact on the entire company as a whole.

And so in order to make ESPN profitable, there's really only two paths they can take. The first path is obviously, hiring talent that they think is going to bring in enough eyeballs to generate ad dollars so they can be profitable. And the second path is cutting expenses, which means cutting talent that they do not believe is bringing in enough [00:30:00] eyeballs to generate enough ad dollars to pay for those salaries.

And I do want to make a point here that these are two separate paths and two separate decisions. They're not necessarily linked together. There's not some salary cap that Disney has to adhere to where, oh, we have to cut all these contracts so that we can bring in Pat McAfee. It's really more like we're bringing in Pat McAfee because we need somebody that can generate eyeballs and get money injected into this company again, through advertising. And at the same time, unfortunately we need to get rid of contracts that we do not believe are bringing in revenue. Hence the layoffs.

All these people that got laid off, I don't think that they would have got laid off if Disney felt that they were a plus on the balance sheet, as callous as that sounds. They need to make money. They need to be profitable. Because Disney+ is just an anchor on the entire Disney business, globally. Disney+ is dragging everything down. So ESPN has to make money. [00:31:00] And I think that those are the two paths that they're taking simultaneously.

Now, for everyone else that is still at ESPN or FS1, or NBC, or print media, or any other outlet, anybody that's in sports media--and I know a lot of them are probably going to watch this because I know many of them all across these different outlets, so I'm sure a lot of them are going to see this video at some point--if you're watching this and you're in the industry, I want you to be aware of where sports media is right now from a consumer perspective.

Let's talk about what actually works in modern sports media and why a lot of legacy outlets are now having to play catch up with new media like YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and all the hundreds of creators. that are slowly but surely ripping eyeballs away from those networks.

With the rise of all these different social media platforms, sports fans now have more options than ever for where they consume their sports content. Yes, they [00:32:00] could turn on a debate show in the morning while they're getting ready for work, which let's be honest, that format now is basically just background noise while people make their coffee and toast a bagel. But if they don't like the debate format, they don't have to watch that anymore. They're not locked in to network television. They can get a million different things from a million different sources. If they still want live sports content in the morning, that's a little bit more lighthearted and not so combative, they could throw in Pat McAfee. If they want something that's edited or prerecorded that just lives on YouTube, they can watch Tom Grossi's 30 in 30 series every morning. They can throw on Brandon Perna. They can watch The Pivot. They can watch FlemLo. If they want fantasy content specifically, like on-demand fantasy content because they're getting ready for their drafts, they can watch the Underdog Fantasy Channel, they can watch BDGE. If they want Madden content to get ready for the Madden release coming up, they can watch Bengal.

There's so many options now. They don't have to watch First Take if they don't want to watch First Take. [00:33:00] This is not the 90s anymore. The audience is no longer captive. And I feel like it's taken a lot of legacy media outlets, in particular TV networks, it's taken them way too long to catch on to that fact.

For the first time ever, ESPN has to truly convince sports fans to watch their content over the hundreds of other content creators now that are making stuff for free. They never had to do that before, and they've had to change their entire content strategy as a result. And again, they're doing it a lot later than they should have. But I at least do want to give them credit for finally catching up.

And everything that they've done over the last three weeks, by the way, in my opinion, is part of that new content strategy. ESPN is now taking a step back and they're not focusing so much on having the network brand be at the forefront. And instead they're letting individual talent brands take the spotlight.

Dan Le Batard Tells Stephen A. Smith He Hates What He and Skip Bayless Did to Sports Media - LeBatardShow - Air Date 12-28-23

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: I hate what you two have done to sports [00:34:00] television.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: You could say that all you want to. I would say, who the hell are you to sit up there and say, me and him? What about you? What the hell were you, living under a rock, teaching at Miami U? You were part of it too? You ain't innocent?

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: I'm talking about all the imitators that you have birthed, all of the imitators that are all over the place thinking, without the journalism credentials, that the point of all this is to turn it into an argument on television.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Well, I would take umbrage at what you're saying in this regard, Dan. Those people who don't have a journalism background, who don't exercise journalistic ethics and beyond, how are we responsible for that, when our background is based on that?

Skip Bayless was a journalist for decades. I was a journalist for decades. We came, we come on television and [00:35:00] those ethics are applicable. The fact of the matter is, is that when I take a position, it's the same kind of position I would take right in the column. The difference is instead of writing 800 words and being limited to that space. I get to talk for a few minutes on each subject.

When was it, when did it happen that I ignored the fact that I was a journalist for the Winston Salem Journal, The Greensboro News and Record, The New York Daily News, and then The Philadelphia Inquirer, before I went to CNN/SI and then Fox Sports, and then ESPN? When was it, when did it occur in my career that I ignored the journalistic tenets that came with the job?

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Oh, it's not ignoring them, it's that they shrink in the face of the need for the argument as entertainment. It's that Kellerman offers too much nuance, so we have to make it, in the form of entertainment, we have to... it's not that it's ignored, it's that the journalism becomes less important. It's the argument, it's the sparks, it's the debate [00:36:00] that needs to be carried.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Yeah, but where you're missing the boat, and I'm actually surprised that you're missing it, Dan, is that it's not about us. It's about the money. The fact of the matter is, is that somewhere along the lines, social media came into play. And even with YouTube, you have the ability to monetize your product. People look at whatever it takes to monetize those products, you know, their product, and they prioritize that, and that dictates what they do. If you are on social media, and guess what? You don't have to go to college and you don't have to take 18 credit semester hours like I did each semester. And you don't have to get a bachelor's degree. And all you got to do is go on YouTube, talk smack, find a way to build subscribers and viewers per episode and monetize [00:37:00] your brand, and you get to bypass all of that stuff. And there's an industry that's been put in place that allows you to do that. And you've elected to do that just to get paid. How the hell is that Skip Bayless and Stephen A's fault? Or Dan Le Batard for that matter. Or anybody else. They created those platforms. It's allowed to be monetized. People see that that has the potential to pay you more than a $75,000-$90,000 salary working in newspapers. Everybody don't have space for you to do talk radio, or a television show. So you figured out a way to do this, rather than punch a clock, work a nine to five in corporate America, at whatever job you're doing. And that's basically been more beneficial monetarily to you. How is that Skip Bayless, Dan Le Batard, Stephen A, Wilbon, Kornheiser, or anybody else?

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Well, I don't think entirely, right?, that this category that [00:38:00] I'm talking about is something that I fit in just because you and I have had a long relationship. I don't think we've ever had an argument on or off the air. Like, the argument is not something that I pursue. I'm not saying it's not good for television. I'm not saying that. I just know that the show that you did with Skip Bayless was one kind of show. And then the one you did with Max was a different kind of show, at least in part. And you've said publicly that you didn't like how Max wasn't interested, as interested in the argument, in the sparks, as you were.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: What I'm saying to you is this: if people want to watch Dan Le Batard and they've come to know Dan Le Batard, they have an expectation of what they're getting when they click on the Dan Le Batard. And if you want to stay in business, you have to give the audience to some degree what they expect. Long before First Take was ever number one, [00:39:00] PTI was. PTI with Mike Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser had been number one for 20 years. First Take has been number one in the mornings for 11. Nine years before we ever came along, nine, 10 years before we ever came along, they were doing it.

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: So, I should blame them. I should blame.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: No, no. No, no. What I'm saying is no one said it about them. No one said it about Around the Horn, which was there years before we arrived. No one said it about Jim Rome or what he's doing, and you know how great Jim Rome has been. The list goes on and on. Mike and the Mad Dog.

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Oh, but...

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Mad Dog's screaming, Mad Dog been screaming since 1987.

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Oh, but you mutated it though. It's fair to say that you turned up the volume on all of it, that there are more flames around what you guys are doing.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: You're gonna sit up there with a straight face, Dan Le Batard and say, I turned up the volume on Mad Dog Russo.

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: No.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Are you, have you lost your mind

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: On the argument...

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Are you crazy?

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: On Wilbon and Kornheiser, you guys turned up the volume, uh, you guys...

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Okay. Okay. What [00:40:00] I'm saying is, is that I just named you a plethora of shows that existed before we ever came along. That's what I'm saying. We didn't create it. We saw what was there and we maximized it to the best of our ability. Just like you do. You'll go into what you don't like or whatever and I respect that. You know that. But what I'm trying to say is that you ain't no innocent birdie in all of this.

You've attacked many people over the years. Now, you might have had a platform where you're joined with dudes and y'all are not a debate show, so you're not debating somebody, but you've gotten into debates on your own show with people. You've gotten into arguments on your own show with people. I don't know if that former executive for the Florida Marlins will ever be in business again after the way you excoriated him because you were upset at the assets that he traded away.

You have been holding people accountable for decades. And because you don't have [00:41:00] somebody to volley back off, you know, volley off back and forth with, oh, you innocent? You're not. You're a part of it, too, and I'm saying it's not a bad thing. It's a great thing, because your intellect, your perspectives, and everything in between are very fresh, they're informed, they're not ignorant, they're not devoid of facts, the fact of the matter is, you bring a fresh perspective, and there's a lot of people out there that want to be Dan Le Batard.

So why are you tripping? You're right here with the rest of us!

Report Finds That Sports Owners Use Their Teams To Avoid Millions In Taxes- MSNBC Reports - Air Date 7-14-21

STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: We're learning more about the money behind the scenes, off the court, after a bombshell report from ProPublica detailed how mega rich sports team owners use their teams to avoid paying taxes.

Take Steve Ballmer, for example. He's the billionaire owner of the LA Clippers. According to this report, he only paid 12 percent in federal income tax in 2018. That is a lower rate than players like [00:42:00] LeBron James, who plays at the Staples Center, and more shockingly, a lower rate than the typical food worker at the Staples Center. But here's the real scandal. Don't be mad at Ballmer. Look to your lawmakers. All of this is totally legal.

Let's dig deeper and bring in one of the reporters who broke this story, ProPublica investigative reporter Robert Federucci. Robert, our tax code allows sports team owners to take deductions on team assets, like their cars, that depreciate in value. Uh, you don't get to deduct your car. Walk me through how this works.

ROBERT FATURECHI: Yeah. So, I mean, the original idea, right, is if you have a widget factory, you purchase a widget-making business, over time, the assets that make up that business—so, the widget conveyor belt, the widget maker—are going to break down and you're going to have to replace them. They lose their value. [00:43:00] So, for sports teams though, the assets are media deals and player contracts and franchise rights. These are assets that sort of automatically regenerate. And not only do they not lose value, they typically rise in value. But nonetheless, owners are able to write them off and they're able to write off almost the entire purchase price of the team.

STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: They rise in value a lot. So, how much money is the government losing by allowing these write offs to exist? Why on earth are they letting all this happen?

ROBERT FATURECHI: Sure. So, take Steve Ballmer, for example. We found that during a recent five year span, he reported $700 million in losses from the Clippers. What that means is that he was able to pay about $140 million less in taxes. That number is inevitably only going to grow and probably grow [00:44:00] dramatically. What this tax treatment does for owners, essentially, it allows them, if they're profitable, it allows them to tell the IRS they're actually losing money, and if they happen to actually be losing money, they can tell the IRS they're losing vastly more money, and that money, you know, those losses cancel out profits from other ventures, and they don't have to pay taxes on them.

STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: Okay, this is completely insane because we're sitting here looking at an infrastructure deal and how we're going to pay for it and talking about taxing rich Americans, families whose household makes 400 grand or more. Four hundred grand, these team owners blow their nose with 400 grand and they are not paying taxes. Legally. Are there any lawmakers pushing to close these loopholes? And if so, how do we do it?

ROBERT FATURECHI: Sure. So, I mean, one type of response we got from owners was, Look, if you take away this amortization benefit, the entire American [00:45:00] economy is going to break down. But in reality, not too long ago, sports teams were not able to take these kinds of write offs. The IRS would insist that the assets that they were writing off actually had, you know, real lifespans and were actually losing value. It wasn't until 2004 that Congress completely threw their hands up and allowed all types of assets to be written off in this way. So, you know, it didn't always work this way. And, you know, like you said, it's in the hands of Congress and the president to change it.

STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: Okay, you heard it here first. The entire American economy will not collapse if this is changed. People who defend this say that owners do have to repay the taxes,, if and when they sell the team, but that's like getting a massive interest free loan from the government. And this is how super rich people operate—I'm just going to borrow and borrow and borrow—when regular people out there would never be able to get a loan like that from the [00:46:00] government.

ROBERT FATURECHI: Sure. And not just that. I mean, a lot of owners will die while holding their team. And if that happens and you pass your stake onto an heir, the heir never has to repay those taxes that you save. That's just a loss for the American government.

The Sports Stadium Scam - Robert Reich - Air Date 2-10-23

Robert Reich: Billionaires have found one more way to funnel our tax dollars into their bank accounts, and if we don't play ball, they'll take our favorite teams away. Ever notice how there never seems to be enough money to build public infrastructure like mass transit lines and better schools? And yet, when a multi-billion dollar sports team demands a new stadium, our local governments are happy to oblige.

A good example of this billionaire boondoggle is the host of the 2023 Super Bowl State Farm Stadium. That's where the Arizona Cardinals have played since 2006. It was built after billionaire team owner Michael Bidwell and his family spent years hinting that they would [00:47:00] move the Cards out of Arizona if the team didn't get a new stadium. Their blitz eventually worked, with Arizona taxpayers and the city of Glendale paying over two thirds of the $455 million construction tab. State Farm Stadium is not unique. It's part of a well established playbook. Here's how stadiums stick the public with the bill.

Step number one— "Billionaire buys a sports team." Just about every NFL franchise owner has a net worth of over a billion dollars—except for the Green Bay Packers, who are publicly-owned by half a million "Cheeseheads." The same goes for many franchise owners in other sports. Their fortunes don't just help them buy teams, but also gives them clout, which they cash in when they want to get a great deal on new digs for their team.

Step number two— "Billionaire pressures local government." Since 1990, franchises in [00:48:00] major North American sports leagues have intercepted upwards of $30 billion worth of taxpayer funds from state and local governments to build stadiums. And the funding itself is just the beginning of these sweetheart deals.

Sports teams often get big property tax breaks and reimbursements on operating expenses, like utilities and security on game days. Most deals also let the owners keep the revenue from naming rights, luxury box seats, and concessions—like the Atlanta Braves' $150 hamburger! Even worse, these deals often put taxpayers on the hook for stadium maintenance and repairs.

We taxpayers are essentially paying for the homes of our favorite sports teams, but we don't really own those homes. We don't get to rent them out. And we still have to buy expensive tickets to visit them. Whenever these billionaire owners try to sell us on a shiny new stadium, they claim it will spur economic growth, from which [00:49:00] we all benefit, but numerous studies have shown that this is false.

As a University of Chicago economist aptly put it, if you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark. But what makes sports teams special is they're one of the few realms of collective identity we have left.

Billionaires prey on the love that millions of fans have for their favorite teams. This brings us to the final step in the playbook— "Threaten to move the team." Obscenely rich owners threaten to, or actually do, rip teams out of their communities if they don't get the subsidies they demand. Just look at the Seattle Supersonics.

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz owned the NBA franchise, but failed to secure public funding to build a new stadium. So the coffee magnate sold the team to another wealthy businessman who moved it to Oklahoma. Now [00:50:00] that'll leave a bitter taste in your mouth. The most egregious part of how the system currently works is that every dollar we spend building stadiums is a dollar we aren't using for mass transit, hospitals, housing, or schools.

We're underfunding public necessities in order to funnel money to billionaires for something they could feasibly afford. So instead of spending billions on extravagant stadiums, we should be investing taxpayer money in things that improve the lives of everyone. Not just the bottom lines of profitable sports teams and their owners.

Because when it comes to stadium deals, the only winners are billionaires.

The gambling problem in sports - The Current - Air Date 4-3-24

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: Walk us through the basics of this—who is Jontay Porter and what is he accused of?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: So Jontay Porter is one of the backup centers for the Toronto Raptors. He's on a G League contract, which is a two way deal where he plays sometimes for the Toronto Raptors, sometimes for their minor league team in Mississauga, [00:51:00] Ontario—the Raptors 905—and what he is accused of doing is purposely exiting games early to have an effect on proposition bets. And I'm going to define proposition bets for you, Matt. Yes, please. For your listeners, because it's important. It's important to this discussion. A proposition bet, commonly known as a "prop bet," is a kind of bet that isn't on the outcome—the result of the game.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: It's not about the win or the loss.

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: It's not about the win or the loss. It's about a player's performance. Famously during the Super Bowl, people will bet on what color Gatorade is going to be poured over the winning coach. That's a prop bet. It has no bearing on the outcome of the game in Jontay Porter's case they will have put together parlays for online book makers where it's how many points will he have in the game? How many rebounds, how many assists? Jontay Porter, in two games left early, meaning that anyone who bet the under [00:52:00] on him to get a certain number of points, a certain number of rebounds, a certain number of assists—if they picked the under, they won lots of money.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: I was reading about this, and they were saying that in some cases, some of these bets were five figures.

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Yes.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: They were placed on him. He left one of those games just four minutes in, saying that he had an eye injury that was re-aggravated or something like that, and there's a lot of money that's at stake here.

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Yes. And the money is an important thing. So if you place a bet online on a player prop bet, like the kind of bet we're discussing, most bookies only allow you to place a bet of a $1,000 to $2,000—it depends on the bookie. These are bets of $10,000, $20,000—which is why they got flagged as suspicious because it was so much and, with all due respect to Jontay Porter—

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: He's a fringe player.

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: He's a fringe player. And frankly, he was only getting the opportunity to play because starting Raptor Center, Jakob Poeltl is injured—he has a torn ligament in his [00:53:00] hand. So, Jontay Porter was getting more playing time that he wasn't able to take advantage of because he was leaving the games early.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: Who— I mean, I'd said that some of the suspicion here is that perhaps he was involved in this, aside from being on the court, that he may have had other involvement.

Who is being suspected of placing these bets?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: That's part that's not really disclosed yet. It's the MBA that's investigating this case and they haven't given a lot of information. When I reached out to them and other investigating bodies about this investigation—if it's even happening—the reply is, "We're looking into it."

They offered no other details, including who placed those bets. It's just that ESPN report that says several different parties were placing bets of $10-20,000 on Jontay Porter leaving games early.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: Is the suspicion that he could have placed bets on himself?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Allegedly, I mean it if he's not placing them himself Then the suspicion would be that he is working in party [00:54:00] with people who knew that he would leave the game early.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: And why would he do such a thing? Is this just about cash money? Like, do you make lot of money in these bets?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: In these situations that would be the case. Yeah

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: We heard his brother there. Have the Raptors said anything about this? Has Jontay Porter said anything about this?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Jontay Porter has not been made available and although, Raptors head coach Darko Rijakovic has made comments and, the team officially has no comment and, we asked players about it, they don't know anything.

Darko Rayakovic was asked specifically, "Did you think it was weird when Jontay pulled himself out of the game twice?" He said, well, of course I trust my players. Like, if my player tells me he's sick, I'm going to listen. Cause why wouldn't you, right?

And the other players on the team also said we don't know anything. This is upsetting, but we know, they all said, we know as much as you do. Like they learned as we did as news broke.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: We introduced this by saying that there were a couple of different things unfolding. [00:55:00] One is this issue of Jontay Porter and the NBA. The other one is the baseball superstar caught up in a different gambling scandal. Just briefly walk me through that. What do we know about what may have happened there?

RICHARD DEITSCH: Yeah, so there's some conflicting reporting when it comes to Shohei Ohtani—who, if you want to think about it in a modern context is your modern equivalent of Babe Ruth— and what Shohei Ohtani is saying is that his longtime interpreter, but "intrepreter" is really probably not even a fair description, it's his longtime very, very close compatriot and friend— had a gambling problem. And ultimately, because, allegedly, the friend had access to Shohei's funding, was able to pay off significant debts— close to five million dollars—using Shohei Ohtani's money to pay off these debts. Where it gets a little interesting and suspicious, if that's the right word, is that the story [00:56:00] had changed.

Initially, the story, which the interpreter told to ESPN in a 90 minute interview, was that Shohei Otani had paid off this problematic gamblers' debts because he cared about his friend and wanted to help him out. The framework of all this is that we're not necessarily dealing with bets that you make in legal gambling entities in the United States.

This was done through an illegal bookmaker. So Major League Baseball, just like the NBA, has said they're investigating this. Looks like the U. S. Attorneys are investigating the bookmaker in California, and we'll see what happens. The cynic would say that the investigation may be a little bit like Casablanca because I'm not sure how much baseball would like Shohei Ohtani to be under the microscope.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: People have been betting on sports since sports have been played, probably. [00:57:00] How different is this now? How big is the sports betting industry right now, Richard?

RICHARD DEITSCH: It's massive. People who live in Ontario obviously can get a little sense of it because it's very, very hard to watch any program on SportsNet or TSN, depending on the medium, without being inundated with gambling ads.

Just think of the population in the United States compared to Canada—it's 10x. So that's how much more you'd be inundated in the United States. I think, at this current juncture, there's 38 states where sports gambling is legal in the United States. There's still some big ones out there that are expected to become legal. So, you really can't, essentially—if you are a sports fan, I would say even a casual sports fan in the United States, you really cannot escape the sports gambling element. It's essentially everywhere. And I would also say, just to be fair, as people who work in the media, there's almost no sports entity that, that has some kind of [00:58:00] content or media play that doesn't have some kind of affiliation with a gambling network.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: John, you were nodding along as Richard was saying that. I mean, ESPN has a sports betting analysis segment, HockeyNet in Canada, other sports as well. How entwined now is this with pro sports?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: There's official sponsors who are bettors.

After the Jontay Porter news broke, we spoke to veteran forward Garrett Temple, who in addition to being one of the veterans in the Toronto Raptors locker room, he's also a vice president of the National Basketball Players Association—their union—and we asked him about it and he said, yeah, it's kind of awkward we're not allowed to bet on basketball. And that's the NBA rule. They can't bet on the NBA, or the WNBA, or the G League, or any associated basketball product. But we have official sponsors, like DraftKings and FanDuel. You see it in the arenas. The Toronto Blue Jays have it.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: These are these legalized entities here.

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Yeah, these are legalized entities in Ontario, and they are in business, literally "in business," with [00:59:00] Major League Sports.

Note from the Editor on the value of sports to building community

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with the University of Iowa in two parts, discussing the new pay-for-play rules. Same with the PBS NewsHour. Brett Kollmann looked at the changing landscape of sports journalism. LeBatardShow hosted a debate about the economic drive towards sensationalism. MSNBC Reports discussed sports owners using their team to avoid taxes. Robert Reich explained the scam of publicly-funded stadiums and The Current looked at the problems of sports gambling. And that's just the top takes; there's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section.

But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process. To support our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support--there's a link in the show notes; through our [01:00:00] Patreon page if you prefer; or from right inside the Apple Podcast app.

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

Now, before we continue onto the Deeper Dives after the show, I have just a few thoughts.

I occasionally find it sort of amusing to repeat the fact that I paid quite a lot of attention to sports up until 1997 or so. I was pretty deep into it, mostly watching baseball, football, and hockey. Then at the wise old age of 13 or so, I took stock of my sports-watching time commitments and realized I was basically wasting my finite time here on earth watching sports. So I stopped, cold turkey, and never went back.

And then it took another 25 years or so for me to soften my stance on the wastefulness and unimportance of watching professional sports.

Now I see it as a worthwhile lens through which to [01:01:00] observe society, even if I don't follow teams closely or watch the games myself. And I also have a better impression of those who watch sports, particularly as an excuse to come together, spend time with friends and family, share special moments, make memories, that kind of thing.

In fact, just today, I realized that when I was quite young, most of my sports watching would have been done with my older brother. But by the time I was 13, he'd moved out of the house. So when I decided that watching sports was a waste of time, what I really may have been feeling was that watching sports alone was a waste of time. And I pretty much still agree with that.

But in terms of using sports as a window into the nature of culture and society, sports documentaries are actually a great place to start. I've definitely watched more sports documentaries in the last two years than I've watched sports games in the past decade. And I found them very insightful often [01:02:00] or revelatory, depending on what you're trying to get out of it sometimes.

With all that said, it's still the fact that producer Deon here at the show is a sports fan, that I am reminded to take time now and again to focus on the intersection of sports and politics. It's Deon who reminds me that sports are important because they're a microcosm of the rest of society.

For instance, as maybe a parallel to the influence of money in politics and how that distorts what politicians do and what they vote for and what laws were able to pass, and how we get a distorted perception of ourselves as to what our country believes in. I think like, gun safety laws that we cannot get passed. And we think, well, I guess the country doesn't believe in it. But no, that's the influence of money.

So think of that compared to the sports system being overly consumed by capitalism and gambling. It will distort the game out of recognition. It will be hard to say whether [01:03:00] what we're looking at is a reflection of reality at all. Or if it ended up with a simulated version of sports to watch where the influence of the betting system throws everything off. And if that is the case, then what are we all even doing here, right? Deon made this point to me, to which I responded, speaking of the concern over reality just being a simulation, aren't we having that same problem with the entire universe as a whole? He said, Sports really is a microcosm. Sort of makes you think.

DEEPER DIVE A: PAY FOR PLAY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with deeper dives on four topics. Next up, "Pay for play." Deeper Dive Section B: "Stadiums, Our Great Folly" and—by the way—I know it's a deep cut, but one of the rarely used secondary definitions of the word "folly" is, "A costly ornamental building with no practical purpose built in a large garden or park," which doesn't exactly describe stadiums, but [01:04:00] comes a lot closer than it should.

So I just want to make sure that you enjoyed that double meaning wordplay along with me. Anyway, that's section B. Deeper Dive Section C: "Sports Journalism" and Section D: "Sports Gambling."

Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger: What NCAA Suit Settlement Means for Paying Players - The Rich Eisen Show - Air Date 5-23-24

KIRK MORRISON - HOST, THE RICH EISEN SHOW: These antitrust lawsuits that are being, that are going on right now, I'm seeing conferences or agreeing to the payout, but where's the money go? Is it going to the players or going back to the institutions? What, what does this pay out from these antitrust lawsuits that have been going on? I'm trying to keep up Ross and I'm like, how does it, what does this involve the players or no?

ROSS DELLENGER: Yeah, it definitely involves the players and it is complicated. You know, the, the settlement and it should be finalized by the end of the week, by, by Friday, uh, I will, I'll show you a portion of it should be finalized at least the NCAA in the power five conferences, which are the six defendants. in the case, they will have authorized the settlement by Friday.

It's got a long way before it's actually finalized. But the settlement right now, according to documents of [01:05:00] sources who are knowledgeable about it, will include kind of three parts. So The first part is the back damages to athletes owed NIL payments before NIL was implemented. There are four years before NIL, four years before athletes could earn compensation from their NIL.

Those athletes around 12, 15, 000 of them is the estimate will get, will be distributed, um, 2. 8 billion. That's the, that's the back damage and settlement to those athletes. So that's the first. Part of the settlement. The second part of the settlement is kind of the forward thinking part where, um, schools will be permitted, not required, but permitted to share revenue with athletes.

Um, we don't know exactly the specific amount, but it will probably be around 20 to 21, 22 million dollars. a year per school can can share with [01:06:00] athletes. It's kind of like there's a salary cap that will be put on that of around 2122 million. But that will fluctuate as the settlement, which is 10 years in length, goes on.

So that's the second part. And the third part, it's kind of a re Structured NCAA, um, where power conferences will have more control. Uh, we'll be able to create their own rules and probably enforce them. There'll be probably be a new enforcement arm. There'll be some changes to some other kind of granular things, scholarship limits, roster, things like that.

KIRK MORRISON - HOST, THE RICH EISEN SHOW: So we know that the money's going to be coming in Ross, is that what you're saying with all of these expansion of. Conferences. I saw that yesterday, though, that the college football playoff will now expand, um, its viewership opportunities, not just from ESPN, but now TNT will now hold, um, a first round matchup, I believe to first round matchups in the first couple of years, and then they'll have quarterfinals and we'll see where that [01:07:00] goes along.

But it just shows you now that college football has expanded viewership opportunities. That's more money. And now this money can now go into the pockets of the student athletes. But if I'm a volleyball player or water polo or soccer, am I entitled to what the football revenue brings in from these TV contracts?

Or is this going to be something that the NCAA is still trying to figure out how to disperse these collective television contracts coming into each university?

ROSS DELLENGER: That is, that is a key issue is how you distribute, you know, if you hit the cap, if a school hits the cap around 20, say this around number 20 million, because of the federal title nine law, which requires higher education in education institutions to share, to offer equal opportunity to men and women.

Do you have to split? down the middle. That 20 million is 10 million go to football and men's basketball, say, and then 10 million [01:08:00] go get spread out to women athletes. A lot of These women's sports, obviously, um, in the grand scheme of things, right? Um, call schools, millions of dollars. They, they lose, they lose money.

Most of this money, as you mentioned is coming from, is generated from TV contracts in ticket sales around, around football, uh, in, in a little bit of men's basketball. So how do you do that? Do you, do you follow. The title nine law, are you required to follow the title nine law and do you split the payments or is there a way around this where you can give more of the, the money to the players who sport generated, which would be football and men's basketball.

It is a key question in all of this. Uh, and so is these booster collectives. Do they continue outside of the university offering athletes money? And does that money Count toward the cap. I don't think it will. Um, so there's a way to potentially for schools to circumvent the cap by going outside with their [01:09:00] booster collective.

And there's a way toe potentially circumvent title nine by either by either not doing it or going outside as well. So a lot of questions still on the disbursement of the money to athletes.

“Amateurism Is Dead” - ESPN’s Jay Bilas on the Future of NCAA Sports - The Rich Eisen Show - Air Date 5-29-24

RICH EISEN - HOST, THE RICH EISEN SHOW: With the court cases and a settlement, it appears, between the NCAA and, um, I guess the Jeffrey Kessler led class, um, of players. I imagine, um, I might be botching it, but what is happening here and what's your prediction as to what happens next, if you don't mind?

JAY BILAS: Well, a lot's going to depend on what Judge Claudia Wilkin does, uh, the, the federal court judge out in California.

So she has to approve this settlement. The settlement's basically in two parts. One of them backward looking damages, uh, for the harm that was caused by players due to the antitrust violations of the NCAA. And that's in the neighborhood of 2. 8 billion payable over 10 years. The [01:10:00] other is revenue sharing.

That's the forward looking piece of this. And my understanding after reading what I've read is that players are going to be eligible to receive up to 22 percent of revenues going forward. That's a cap. And my question for the court when the settlement is presented is what other cap is there? Whom else is subject to a wage cap other than players?

Because coaches are gonna be able to be paid as much as a school wants to pay 'em. Uh, and I don't, I don't think players should be capped, absent some sort of collective bargaining agreement where the players agree to it. To me it's not enough. And what what's clear to me is the NCAA through this settlement is gonna try to take this to Congress and say, here's a framework that we've agreed to with, uh, with the, the plaintiff's lawyers and the plaintiffs in the class.

We want you to put this into law so that they can cap [01:11:00] all this at 22 percent and that and that doesn't even mean that they have to pay anything to players if they don't want to. I think the market will dictate they have to, but a 22 percent cap with the way revenues have exploded are continuing to go up in college sports to me doesn't sit well with me.

We'll see if it sits well with the, uh, with the players and what their objections. Uh, to this settlement and objections going forward. But one thing we know for sure, rich amateurism is dead. I think it was dead a long time ago, but they pulled the plug. Now they're going to be the players are going to be paid directly by their universities now, which was a long time coming.

And that hopefully will mean contracts for the players and they can put buyouts in them. So the schools feel like they have some more protections. But amateurism is now dead. It's, it's purely professional sports. And the only thing that differs from the NBA or the NFL is, uh, is they, the players have to be enrolled in school.

That's it.

Pay for Play: Should College Athletes be Considered University Employees? Part 3 - University of Iowa - Air Date 3-28-24

ALICIA JESSOP: I'm a big believer in the power of education. I'm a first generation college student. My father, who experienced [01:12:00] homelessness as a child, preached to me that education was my way out. I bought the sermon. I've been privileged with an incredible life and career thanks to my undergraduate and legal educations.

I also understand the value of a college scholarship. My father spent 40 years working on a factory line in the Coors Brewing Company. He and my mother provided me with a great life and home, but they didn't have the cash to finance my legal education. I was 38 years old when the 100, 000 I borrowed to pay for that education was finally paid off.

I say that to make apparent that I don't tread lightly when I say that most revenue producing college sport athletes are employees. Let me be clear. I do not believe that every college athlete is an employee. Rather, I believe that the two regional NLRB offices in the Northwestern and Dartmouth cases and the head NLRB in the Northwestern case got it right when they said that the right to control test is the correct test to apply to assess whether a college athlete is an [01:13:00] employee.

The right to control test looks at the level of control an employer exerts over how a worker does their job. By evaluating a set of factors, the greater the level of control exerted across those factors, the more likely it is that a worker is an employee who can access the benefits of the National Labor Relations Act.

I'm not gonna go through the factors, because that would be kind of boring. Not to say it's gonna be boring if someone else does it, but I'm going to give you some examples of control that I've seen in my experience as a journalist, as a lawyer, as a professor. Here's where I've seen control. It's not seeing the men's basketball players in my class at the university of Miami for close to a month during the school year, when they went on to win the NIT.

It's not because they were ditching those young men were always in class. They weren't in my class that month because the university kept them out on a business trip and kept them in New [01:14:00] York or the Northeast instead of bringing them home to go to school. It's a college football player falling asleep in the front row of my class because the television network scheduled a midweek game in a different state and he didn't get home until 4 a.

m. It's the quarterback in my class staying afterward to ask me if I know what the symptoms of a concussion are. When I tell him, no, I'm a lawyer, not a doctor, and ask why he's asking, he says, did you see what happened to me? No, I say, He says, my molar got knocked out in the game and coach told me to stop being a P word and go back and play.

Think about your molar getting knocked out. The amount of force that has to come across your head for a molar to fall out, and then not to be held out for one play seems a little problematic to me. It's the student I met who I mentioned earlier who had the reading skills of probably a 6th grader, but made it into two top 50 universities because he had NFL level talent.

I love it. [01:15:00] It's a student not being able to pick a science major because it conflicts with their practice schedule It's me spending my free time helping young men who played college sports around this nation find jobs after their playing career ends Because as one who competed at the university my missouri told me Nobody ever told him what he was capable of other than football.

And the football program demanded so much of their time that they didn't gain internship experience or meaningful networks during their college experience.

Coming back to where I started, I don't think the head governing body for college sports wanted to be where we are today. Where very valid arguments exist for the employee status of college athletes. Some may say that their television plan was an attempt to hold monopoly power, but I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I think they wanted to preserve the amateur nature of college sports and keep greed out of the game. But the Supreme Court's decision in 84 open Pandora's box and the reality of [01:16:00] college sports today is that is it is a 25 billion annual generating enterprise whose power and control is largely held by media companies and the conferences benefiting grandly from those media deals.

These media companies call all the shots. They schedule the games. They drive the bargaining power at the negotiation table to the point where West Coast schools leave historic conferences to join East Coast schools, increasing both the travel footprint and missed class time for their college athletes and the revenues that said schools generate.

D1 revenue producing college athletics is not an extracurricular. It is big business. We see this in that the expenditure for college coaches salaries and facilities often topples those of their professional counterparts. We know it's a big business because schools that say they don't have money to pay college athletes are spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists, hundreds of millions of dollars on legal fees [01:17:00] and possibly billions of dollars in legal damages to preserve the status quo.

As I mentioned at the outset, repeated, repeated defeat in the court of law calls for a scapegoat. Who got us to where we are today? I'll leave that for you to consider. But as sport tells us, repeated loss also calls for a new game plan. And if the NCAA wants to put an end to the litany of legal challenges it faces, it needs to turn course.

Turning course requires more than accepting that college athletes can benefit from the right of publicity that is afforded to every American. College athletes didn't gain some new right. Their right was finally restored to them through NIL. It requires coming into compliance with the law in full. And such necessitates understanding when and how the right of control test indicates that some Namely division one revenue producing sport college athletes are employees of their respective universities I know what some of you are thinking right now Here's some questions that [01:18:00] might be rolling through your head But where is the money going to come from to pay these athletes too?

Is this the end of women's and olympic sports? You What are the unintended consequences of this legal status? I've already talked a lot, so I'm not going to address those in full, but I'm happy to more. But I'll give you a few thoughts on each. I tell my students to question everything, so I hope that you'll do the same.

Don't buy that there is no money in the system. Likely this will require the reallocation of funds. Top college coaches will see pay reductions. Strength trainers will no longer earn $1 million per year. The stadium and facility spending boom will slow. Beyond that, a review of Power 5 Conference Schools 990 Forums, one of my current favorite activities, shows that there's cash in the coffers.

We were told that NIL would mean the death of women's and Olympic sports. That threat has not become reality. Instead, we are living in a time where thanks to an [01:19:00] incredible athlete from your own university, women's college basketball is seeing unprecedented success. We see from the viewership and ticket sales numbers for women's college basketball this season that opening up a market can produce greater demand for a product.

Olympic athletes now have longer windows also to financially benefit from their incredible gifts. What though of the unintended consequences? First we must recognize that the potential horror stories thrown around by those against recognizing the employee status of d1 Revenue producing sport college athletes are already true.

These things are already happening on college campuses People warn that if college athletes are recognized as employees, they would be quote fired for poor for poor poor performance Tell me what is different between that scenario and a coach, maybe one of the greatest coaches in college football history, routinely gray shirting college athletes to build winning teams.

[01:20:00] People today sport, people today say sport is the wild, wild West. My maternal grandfather was a cowboy and I'm not sure he would agree with that analogy, but the system is currently being shaken by the slow breakdown of the cartel with new additions like NIL and the transfer portal. The NCAA continues unsuccessfully and to the tune of millions of dollars in lobbying fees trying to persuade congress to grant it Antitrust immunity and deem college athletes to not be employees The likelihood of congress passing such bills is as good as caitlyn clark not being the number one overall wmba draft pick.

DEEPER DIVE B: STADIUMS, OUR GREAT FOLLY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering deeper dive section B: stadiums are great folly.

Why Are Taxpayers Paying For Stadiums? - Long Story Short - The Daily Show - Air Date 10-27-23

DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Right now, we're in a sports stadium building boom, and just about every one of them is funded by taxpayers. So how are billionaire team owners able to get these sweetheart deals? Easy. When asking for taxpayer subsidies, Teams come to a community like a dude asking for an open marriage. [01:21:00] Nah, girl, it's not just good for me, it's good for you, too!

Now, they say these stadiums will spread economic growth throughout the community.

These owners also claim these stadiums will increase property values. Which is one of the biggest lies in the world. What kind of psycho is like, Yeah, I want 50, 000 drunk idiots pissing on my stoop every night. No way, bro. If any drunk idiot's gonna piss on my stoop, it's gonna be me. Next, they promise to donate money to the community or build affordable housing.

And if none of that works, uh, they threaten to move the team. And it usually works, because even though using taxpayer money in stadiums is usually unpopular, losing a team could end a politician's career. Like, for example, if Mayor Eric Adams lost to the Knicks, he would be deported. All the way back to his real home in New Jersey.

But the truth is, a lot of the time, those owners are bluffing, and we know that because they admit it. [01:22:00]

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: David Samson, the former president of the Marlins, largely credited with being a Pulling off the worst stadium deal for Miami Dade taxpayers. It's actually a pretty easy playbook. I get a lot of credit for doing the Marlins Park deal, but it really wasn't very difficult because Miami did not want to lose its baseball team and all we had to say is that we're ready to leave Miami if we don't get a deal done.

Let me ask you, were the Marlins going to leave Miami, David? Truly. Absolutely not.

DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: See? These guys are full of shit. They were never going to leave Miami, because no one ever leaves Miami. Like, even people who are just visiting don't leave Miami. Now the cousin who went to a bachelor party six months ago, he's still in a club partying with BBLs. So, the teams get their free subsidies, and now that they have their brand new stadium that boosts their value.

But don't worry. Because in return, the city gets hundreds of millions of dollars worth of jack shit.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Economists who study stadium subsidies say little or none of the money makes it back to taxpayers. One [01:23:00] economist estimated that the contribution of a professional baseball team is similar to that of a mid sized department store.

As a University of Chicago economist aptly put it, if you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark.

DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Wait, that's an option? Yo, I wish they'd drop a giant bag of money in my neighborhood. Like, rest in peace to the person it lands on, but it'd be a payday for the rest of us. So the economic boost they promised doesn't pan out. And I know that personally, because I saw that in the Bronx. In exchange for that 20 acres of parkland, the Yankees promised to donate 40 million to affected areas.

But the media community has not seen a dime from the team. And more immediately, And more importantly, we haven't seen a World Series in like 20 years, though. Like, if you want to screw my community out of 40 million, fine. That's business. But me [01:24:00] not getting a ring, that's personal.

I mean, at the very least, these teams could toss out some more shirts during games. Like, how do you have 25, 000 fans in an arena and only toss out ten T shirts? And they're all size XL? Do mediums cost more? And also, could we please get a T shirt cannon that can hit the 300s? What the f? Up top in the row!

Up top! And the thing that really gets me heated These stadiums aren't even that old. Stadiums for the Braves and the Rangers last like 20 years before they built new ones. You can't be replacing a stadium that Leonardo DiCaprio would still hit.

I'm not gonna be in Titanic 2. Sorry. But you know what the worst part is? How much this sucks for the fans. Because suddenly the team they've been rooting for their whole lives starts extorting them for a fortune. And all they can do about it is to go to the stadium, And cuts out the owner, which is what they did in Oakland.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Check this out. [01:25:00] A's fans packing the Oakland Coliseum for the first time in what seems like forever to send a blunt message to the Athletics top brass. A season best crowd of nearly 28, 000 A's fans came out to the Coliseum for what was deemed a reverse boycott, which encouraged owner John Fisher to sell the team so it can remain in Oakland.

instead of moving to Las Vegas. Tonight, you should call us cheers. South Shore sucks! South Shore sucks! Fisher, get the hell out of here. 30, 000 people are going to show up tonight to show John Fisher that he sucks. That's how you do it. Listen, I'm an East Coast boy, but Oakland, paying

DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: 20 to cuss out a man you've never met is big New York energy. Respect.

Nick Wright won’t be a Chiefs fan if they move to Kansas - What's Wright? With Nick Wright - Air Date 3-31-22

NICK WRIGHT - HOST, WHAT'S WRIGHT: The public funding of stadiums is one of the [01:26:00] most It's something that I promise you, history will not look upon fondly when people are like, oh, what was one of the reasons American infrastructure and public schooling all seem to fail?

And they're going to be like, well, there's money issues, a lot of things. And then they're going to be like, oh, well, that's funny because all these municipalities sure seem to find a billion dollars when they needed it to build a stadium that's going to be used a dozen times a year. With that said. There are certain cities in America that I think you can justify the public kicking in some dollars to the team and Buffalo might be one of them.

So here's, here's my general point. Take your top 15 cities in the country. All of them should come together, have a meeting of the mayors or the governors of the states, however you need to do it, and make a pact and all a nice little collusion against the leads. Guys. [01:27:00] None of us are ever paying a dime.

You know why? Because pro sports leagues want to be in New York. They want to be in LA. They want to be in Dallas. They want to be in Houston. They want to be in Miami. They want to be in DC. They want to be in San Francisco. Their threats to leave are hollow threats. We never need to pay a dollar. If we're a major American city for a team, the leagues want to be here.

The owners have the money. Let them pay. Now, a city such as Buffalo, you can make the argument that the difference between Buffalo and Schenectady is one thing, that they have pro sports, they have the Sabres and the Bills. And that I, you know, I've said for a long time growing up from Kansas City, what's the difference between Kansas City and Des Moines?

Well, aside from the history of Kansas City and the amazing barbecue and the jazz, all that, the real contemporary difference was. Kansas City had the Chiefs and the Royals and Des Moines didn't. So I [01:28:00] do understand why a small city might feel incentivized to make sure their team doesn't move. So I get why the bills are doing it right.

The Buffalo's doing it. It's the state of New York that's doing it. And I know these two headlines aren't exactly, uh, aligned, but around the same time, I found out the state of New York's going to kick in about 800 million for the Bill's stadium. I read in the New York times. Our new governor say there's about an 850 million New York state public school shortfall.

You got to piss me off to be totally honest. But I, if you're Buffalo, if you're green Bay, if you're a small city that is kind of just happy to have a team, I get why you might want to make sure the team never leaves. But big cities should never pay a dollar to these leagues. They get tricked by them.

They're never leaving. Pro sports leagues are never leaving New York. Or LA or the cities I mentioned, they want to be there, so don't [01:29:00] get tricked into it. Speaking of the Chiefs, looks like we're gonna talk about them for a moment.

DAMONZA BYRD: Speaking of stadiums. Yeah. Is it possible that the chiefs end up leaving Arrowhead?

NICK WRIGHT - HOST, WHAT'S WRIGHT: Okay, so listen, Arrowhead Stadium is loud and it's a fine stadium. It's not state of the art, but it's fine. It also is in the, it's in the middle of nowhere. It is 30 minutes from downtown Kansas City. The closest restaurant to Arrowhead or Kaufman is a Taco Bell. The closest hotel is a Drury Inn. Arrowhead's not ideal. It's not an ideal location. The reason the idea of the chiefs leaving is touches a tendon for me is there was a rumor. They might cross state lines into Kansas. The Kansas city chiefs, Our Kansas city, Missouri's team. And there is a big difference between being from Missouri and being from Kansas.

The audience may not care. The Kansas city and we'll get it. If people, if you're from [01:30:00] out, you're like, oh, I'm from Kansas City, and they're like, oh, you're from Kansas? No . I'm from Missouri. And the idea of the chiefs crossing the state line will, I'm not saying I won't be a fan.

This is what I'm going to say. This is what I will say. If the chiefs move to Kansas, my fandom ends when Patrick Mulholland. That's it. I'm just telling you when Patrick Mulholland retires, I'm out. If they move to Kansas.

Former A's Bruce Maxwell calls out Oakland A's owner John Fisher for Vegas move - Edge of Sports - Air Date 5-3-24

DAVE ZIRIN - HOST, EDGE OF SPORTS: I want to talk to you about the Oakland A's, their move to Sacramento, and then their subsequent move that's coming up in 2028 to Las Vegas.

You're the person I wanted to ask this. What, what, what was your impression when you played for the A's of Oakland? as a baseball town.

BRUCE MAXWELL: It was incredible. The environment. I'm a very, I'm a big history buff when it comes to baseball. Um, my dad's favorite team was the Oakland A's and my dad's from Indiana.

Um, it's just with that team, [01:31:00] it's history. You know, it's, it's one of the oldest organizations in baseball. The players that have come through there, the winning the environment, what they've done for the city of Oakland itself. It's really given the community. a staple in a, in a, in a sports team. And that's something that you cannot allow to leave.

You cannot allow that to, to move to another area because now you're turning Oakland into almost like a wasteland when it comes to sports. I know they, they lost the warriors, the Raiders moved this and the other, but I feel like. The Oakland A's have been more of a pillar of the community than either one of those teams.

So it's upsetting and it's, it's honestly, it's bothersome to see that being allowed to happen. It's like taking the Cubs out of Chicago.

It's like taking the Dodgers out of LA. Um, it can't happen. It can't happen. [01:32:00] So it's devastating to, to see, uh, their moves and the fact that it's just allowing, they're allowing it to happen, uh, because of greed and because of, uh, the lack of.

Uh, the lack of stature when it comes to the city of Oakland.

DAVE ZIRIN - HOST, EDGE OF SPORTS: Yeah, what does this say about John Fisher, the owner of the team? He inherited all the money from Gap Clothing. That's where his 3. 3 billion come from. That's his net worth. What does it say about John Fisher that he's so willing to remove the team from Oakland when he clearly has the financial means to keep them there as long as he wants to?

BRUCE MAXWELL: It just says that he's selfish. And it's about as clear as I can be with that, um, it's the fact that the fans in the city of Oakland have seen him gouge our prospects and our players over the years. And then the Oakland A's fans have still been loyal and stayed loyal while watching their very players be all stars and important [01:33:00] players for their teams.

Um, the fact that he has the financial means to move the team, but not the financial means to upgrade the stadium, to upgrade the locker rooms, the field itself, to put more money into the contracts of players, to keep fans coming in wanting to support the Oakland A's. The fans took a stand and, and I would too, in that situation, especially again, for such an historical team, these people in Oakland, man, they grow up and teach their kids the love of the Oakland A's.

Even to this day, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a culture up there. It's not just another team. And I think with John Fisher, he doesn't care at the end of the day. He doesn't care about the workers who've been working there for 40 years. He doesn't care about the kids and the grandparents and the great grandparents that have been coming to Oakland A's games that have had season tickets for 40 [01:34:00] years.

He doesn't care about that. He wants new and shiny things, but he could easily have made those shiny things. In Oakland, he just didn't want to be there and for him to be able to move the team without a batter of an eye. It's disappointing and it's upsetting for the people of Oakland, but also for a lot of us that I can't speak for everybody else, but it saddens me.

I played seven years with those that organization. And the whole time it was history. You have Ricky Henderson, Dave Stewart, Vita blue, all these guys coming into spring training, working with these, working with the kids. So in phase, right? All of that is because of the Oakland ace. It's not because, Oh, they're just big leaguers.

No, they, they spend a good chunk of their careers playing for this team, winning for this team. And it's part of their lives. So to see it be uprooted to a very, a new place for whatever the reason may be. It's, it's, [01:35:00] it's bothering me.

DAVE ZIRIN - HOST, EDGE OF SPORTS: You know, I'm really glad you mentioned the stadium workers, because as awful as it is to move the team, there have been some articles about how generations of people have worked for that team and Fisher's disregard for them is just another mark against him to me as somebody who cares about the sport.

I mean, clearly he does not.

BRUCE MAXWELL: He doesn't. And I went back, um, this off season. Um, I was, I was coaching with kids, uh, with a couple of my former teammates in Palo Alto. And when we, when I got there, I went to an A's game within about a week to go see my coaches and things. Uh, cause I, when I was there, the coaches are the same minus Bob Melvin, but they're the same.

And, um, I walked up in the players area and same security guards. They gave me a big old hug. They were like, great to see you. It's been forever. Mind you, I haven't been in the big leagues since 2018 and God, I don't remember their names, but a hundred percent. [01:36:00] They remember me and the people that men, men, the parking lot, the people that, that check you before you go into the locker room, uh, the people on the field, the grounds crew, I spent most of my time talking to all those people because Those are the people that make the difference in our days every day.

And so for him to be able to uproot that team and put all of those people out of a job, just willingly, it's, it's upsetting. And it's cruel at the end of the day, it's cruel.

DEEPER DIVE C: SPORTS JOURNALISM

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached a deeper dive section C: sports journalism.

Pat McAfee Gets Torn Apart by Famed Sports Writer - TYT Sports - Air Date 10-26-23

PAT MACAFEE: Andrew Marshawn is a rat.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: There's no doubt Pat McAfee's tenure with ESPN has been entertaining, yet simultaneously troubling. Famous sports writer Greg Doyle has a bone to pick with the sleeveless ex punter because of instances such as this.

AARON RODGERS: I'm 48 hours in, and I consulted with a now good friend of mine, Joe Rogan.

I'm thankful for [01:37:00] people like Joe stepping up and using their voice. And this If, if, like we learned, if science is Dr. Fauci, you're damn right I'm defiant.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: And this.

AARON RODGERS: Mr. Pfizer said he didn't think he'd be in a vax war with me. Didn't a back floor? Me? This ain't a war homie. This is just conversation. But if you want to have some sort of, uh, dual debate, have me on the podcast, I'm gonna take my man RFK, junior.

Okay. . Okay. As an independent. Hell yeah. Right? And he can have, you know, Tony Fauci or some other crat and we can have a conversation about this.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Okay. And this. Where he ripped Travis Kelsey Doyle, a longtime media member, sees through it and is called out Rogers McAfee and ESPN in his column.

AARON RODGERS: You know, I think there's some sentiment that there's some sort of moral victory out there that we hung with the, you know, with the Champs and.

And that, uh, you know, our defense played well, and, and, you know, [01:38:00] uh, Pat didn't have a crazy game, and, uh, you know, Mr. Fizer, we kind of shut him down a little bit, he didn't have, you know, his, like, crazy impact game. Obviously, he had, you know, some yards and stuff, but I felt like, for the most part, you know, we played really tough on defense, especially the last three quarters.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Because he can't stand seeing this. Here's what he wrote. Every Tuesday, Rogers emerges from his rat hole and looks around smugly, enjoying the smell of his own breath, and says something really, really stupid about vaccines. And because we live in this cult of fame, liking and believing and even electing people only because they're rich or famous, people believe Rogers so he's out there, every Tuesday, saying something that makes us less safe.

It's because As Awful Announcing put it, Rogers went from the thinking man's quarterback to an anti vax buffoon allotted time on McAfee's show to ramble about life saving medications with zero pushback whatsoever even if the information he was offering was at best misguided and at worst harmful, penned Sean Keeley.

[01:39:00] Doyle has worked in the Indianapolis market for decades at this point. Even doing radio shows with a former Colts player named Sean Keeley. Pat McAfee. They have somewhat of a history, one can say. Which makes his article even more of a must read. He'd write McAfee is allowing and enabling Rogers to spew misinformation.

He'd bring up McAfee being found to pay the quarterback more than a million dollars to appear on his show, and third, according to Doyle, McAfee doesn't believe Rogers for a minute. Doyle, it becomes quite evident, lays the blame on at McAfee's feet for all of this. Rogers was a four time MVP with the Packers, but his anti vax gibberish makes him a harmful member of the human race.

McAfee lets it happen, Doyle wrote. Rogers has done McAfee's career a huge service by appearing on his show. Pat was going to take off regardless because he's that good, but Rogers appearance put booster fuel into [01:40:00] the rocket ship. And not just that. Not to be misremembered, this was first taken on by a long time NFL media member.

Pat McAfee is getting a massive pass for allowing Aaron Rodgers to spread disinformation and lies that could lead to people dying. He tweeted, McAfee would reply, You're not picking and choosing what to report from my show in an attempt to mislead people, are you? That'd be a style of misinformation, right?

You were probably saving the world at the time, but how come you didn't cover this with a video of Charles Barkley?

AARON RODGERS: I've been taking monoclonal antibodies. Ivermectin, zinc, vitamin C and D, HCQ. And I feel pretty incredible.

PAT MACAFEE: Okay. So you said a lot there.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Doyle then ends his piece with this. Unlike Rogers and people of his ilk, people who think they're the smartest guy in the room.

McAfee is the smartest guy in the room. He also was born with a second serving of empathy. He's a good man with a good heart. Pat McAfee. He understands [01:41:00] vaccines are the only reason the war is over. The only reason the good guys won the biggest and most important questions Doyle poses. In his piece are these.

Why is ESPN allowing this? And why is Pat McAfee a willing accomplice?

Are Athletes a Threat to Sports Journalism? - Karen Hunter Show - Air Date 5-28-24

RODERICK MORROW: Do you find any difference in this, uh, approach that the players have where they're like considering themselves the new media, uh, As compared to, you know, the classic traditional media. Um, are you finding that there's a, a, a real separation or difference between their approach and, and, and the approach that at the networks?

CHRIS BROUSSARD: Oh yeah. Like, like Rob Parker really gets upset about it. Now he has a, uh, journalism, uh, masters from Columbia. Um, he teaches sports writing at USC. So he's really into it and he gets upset because On their podcast, the athletes generally don't push back on one another. So if you're doing a podcast and one [01:42:00] player says, yeah, I think Paul George is better than LeBron.

Now, in a lot of cases, I'm just throwing that out, but in a lot of cases, it might be, Oh, wow. Okay, cool. Whereas the natural pushback is hold up. What are you talking about? You know? And so Rob is constantly complaining about, you don't get the full story. You don't get the pushback. From the athletes. But I say that's true, but what I do like is that you get to see the athletes in their own space and their natural, like as writers, what I was trying to do when I interviewed an athlete, I always was trying to get them to be comfortable.

And to not give cliche quotes and just, okay, I'm speaking to the media. Let me have my guard up. I wanted them to just be their normal selves and then convey that to the audience or the readers. And you get that in the podcast, like with Kevin Garnett's with Paul [01:43:00] Pierce or what, you know, they're just being their natural selves.

They cussing, they talking like they would in the locker room. They're not worried about, you know, coming off a certain way for the media, but that tells you that shows you what they're really like. So I think there's a real value in that. So I like what they're doing. It is a little different from what we do, but.

You know, there's space for all of us. Do you feel that

RODERICK MORROW: animosity too? Cause like, I feel like the new media thing is also a little bit of animosity towards the old media where it's like, y'all ain't doing it right. We're, we're going to show you how to do it. And I'm, and I'm not gonna lie. I miss a little bit of the conflict because I do like the pushback.

I do think the media has a job to fact check and, uh, and, and to be there in the space to say, Hey, that thing you just said, you need to explain that a little bit more out. So I kind of missed that a little bit.

CHRIS BROUSSARD: Well, no, that's why I said you could listen to both because they're not journalists. They're in the media space now, but they're not journalists.

They're not doing [01:44:00] investigative reporting. They're not probing. They're just talking, which is cool. There's a space for that, but you still have to go to the real journalist if you want to get some pushback and another side of the story. And something like that. But, um, the, the thing is to athletes, they don't like being criticized, which is normal.

I mean, wait, who likes being criticized? I'm told Rob will jump on. I'm like, don't nobody like being criticized, you know, they used to say. Y'all didn't play in the NBA, you don't know what you talking about, you know, and try to play the the player card on you. But if you notice, they don't like being, uh, criticized by Charles Barkley, right?

Phil O'Neill, Kendrick ver you. They just don't like criticism, period. It is not whether you played or not. And so that's where I think maybe the animosity can come from, but you know what's happening. They're criticizing. [01:45:00] Yes. They're criticizing other players too. Cause what we do, what I do on television and the radio and what they're doing on their podcast, it's like you in the barbershop.

Debating who's better between Michael and LeBron. We're just doing it on national television or radio. And so we have to answer for it. I might see LeBron at a game or see, you know, somebody, and you have to answer for it, whereas when you in the barber shop on your couch, you can spout all this stuff. And never see a player and not have to answer for it.

So.

RODERICK MORROW: I am, I am kind of looking forward to our first podcast fight, you know, like we're like Draymond green seas, Pat Bev. And like, we just, the gloves come off. Like, we think it's a basketball fight, but we find out, Oh no, it's cause of episode seven, you got to go back and

CHRIS BROUSSARD: listen. Well, that's, that does make it interesting for the guys that still play, that have to.

Podcasts and our [01:46:00] players, current players. Cause you really have to answer for the stuff you say.

Can You Afford to Watch the NFL This Year? - That's Good Sports - Air Date 5-17-24

BRANDON PERNA - HOST, THAT'S GOOD SPORTS: Welcome to That's Good Sports, I am Brandon Perna, and if you want, you can sign up for That's Good Sports Minus. What's That's Good Sports Minus? It's nothing. You sign up, you give me your money, and then you EAT IT! You shut up, and you give me your money for nothing! That's why it's called Minus! I hope you do have a war chest of extra Funds, if you wanna watch every NFL game this season.

Start cutting costs, okay, for unnecessary things in your life. Baby food, heart medicine, car insurance, to make room for your NFL viewing expenses. The NFL will now have games on YouTube TV. For the Sunday ticket, Amazon Prime, Peacock, ESPN and now two Christmas games on Netflix. I know a lot of people are complaining, but if you remember, What Jesus said, who's birthday is literally on Christmas, What a coincidence.

But he said, [01:47:00] With man, this is impossible, but with God, capitalism will save us all. That is how you get saved. By me, Jesus of Prophets. What, if Harrison Butker can use Jesus to push some weird bullshit narratives, So can I, so can I. That's America. How we will consume NFL and sports games in general is changing.

And the almighty dollar still rules this evolution of screens. Personally, I already have Netflix. I've been paying for that shit since it was DVDs. So I really don't care that games will air on that streaming service. I have all of the damn streaming services, plus cable. I hate that I have to pay for it all, but it's kind of my job, so I justify it.

That said, I want to break down what this means for us viewers, how much it's going to cost us, and if it's a good or bad thing for us in the long run. And the answer might surprise you. No, it won't.

Let's go back 11 years to the exact moment it all changed. [01:48:00] DirecTV was king with its exclusive rights for NFL Sunday Ticket. If you wanted access to watch every game of your favorite team out of market, DirecTV was the only way to do it. I know, I had it when I lived in Sin City, Los Angeles. Yes, technically it's the City of Angels, but after what I witnessed on Hollywood Boulevard, it will always be Sin City in my heart.

We watch NFL football on our phones now, right? And we don't even think about how that wasn't a possibility 12 years ago. DirecTV changed that with the Manning Bros.

AD: So now's your chance to have football on your phone and football in your pants.

BRANDON PERNA - HOST, THAT'S GOOD SPORTS: Now I did a video review of that commercial in the early days of this struggling YouTube channel Which predates the NFL YouTube channel, by the way, the NFL didn't create a channel until 2014 So you had to rely on idiots like me to get a chance to see highlights from your team's games. Now highlights are thrown in your face [01:49:00] Face, anytime you open up your phone, they're no longer a treasure worth hiding, but a readily available foundation of life that is simply consumed like breathing air.

Now, I say all that to emphasize that getting access to the NFL on your mobile device was a huge shift in the NFL's approach to making their product more available. Part of me believes that's what they are doing right now by making games available on services like Netflix. You can also argue that it makes its reach more limited because not everyone has Netflix.

If I were you, I'd blame Tom Brady who broke the Netflix football cherry via his roast. Would you like a massage? Which. He has said, as a parent, he now regrets doing because it greatly affected his children. As a fellow father, I agree. And if any of you are out there, and you're in a, a rare, and I mean rare, more rare than winning the lottery type situation where Netflix asks you if they can host a roast in [01:50:00] your honor, that as a parent, you should say no.

Do not, do not do a net, If you're a parent. Unless, of course, you are Harrison Butker, then definitely do it right now. I find it hilarious that one of the most prepared quarterbacks in NFL history didn't do his homework yet. On what a roast is. It's also wild to me that Tom made sure to protect Robert Craft from the massage jokes, but failed to see how his recent divorce and having a teammate that killed himself in prison, who was in prison for murder, might be, uh, the things that the comedians go hard on and ultimately offend and affect his family.

Anyway, why is this shift to streaming services happening? Duh, it's it's money right? It's money. Netflix is reportedly spending close to 150 million per game for the two christmas games and this is actually a three year deal with a couple more games coming in 2025 and 2026. Now last season an average of [01:51:00] 29. 2 million people watched the nfl games on tv. That's why Netflix is willing to pay. In addition to that, Netflix is hoping to see the big subscriber boost like Amazon saw two years ago when it took over Thursday Night Football. I forget the numbers, but they were insane. Johnny, throw them on the screen.

And also what Peacock saw when it had its exclusive playoff game this year. While we all might publicly complain about this on Twitter, it turns out that a bunch of people who signed up for Peacock, uh, just for that game, um, Didn't cancel. Peacock saw 2. 8 million people sign up and subscribe and 71 percent of those news subscribers kept paying for Peacock I don't know if those subscription numbers will translate to Netflix Or how many people stayed signed up after those seven weeks because I was too lazy to look it up.

Netflix has two regular season games that look nice on paper right now, but the must watch aspect of those Christmas games is far less compelling. Plus, I think [01:52:00] in general, Netflix has a much larger piece of the streaming service subscriptions already compared to Peacock, so I don't know if they get the big boost.

But that's what they're banking on. Now, a benefit that doesn't really get mentioned too often in all of this discussion is that Thursday Night Football on Amazon is actually a better viewing experience than it was when the NFL Network hosted all of those games. On Amazon, you have multiple broadcast options plus Prime Vision, and for hardcore fans like me, that shit's cool.

I'm not sure if a platform like Netflix can up the ante with the presentation for just two games a year, and for a company that has, uh, little to no revenue. Live production experience, the Brady Roast was good, went off without a hitch, but according to my wife Jess, their Love is Blind reunion live show was a disaster.

If they fuck up NFL games,

Netflix will look more like Quibi or PlayStation Vue after Chief Steelers and Ravens fans get done with them. They're just starting to enjoy some success again. For Netflix, it's willing [01:53:00] To drop a giant chunk of change on NFL games, because they're proven to work. For them, it's a lot less risky than spending that kind of money on a series that flops.

Tanks. Space forces, if you will. Like the NFL, Netflix was king of streaming for a very long time, but as that market became widely more competitive, they have to make some power moves. Netflix is betting on a massive influx of new subs, but for those two games. And while it's not a playoff game, Christmas is a smart play as that's when we're all in a pretty good mood and we don't have issues spending a little more money.

What's 20 bucks when I just dropped a thousand on my dumb kids who do not entertain me like football and only bring me the same misery my football equally provides? I will gladly give this for entertainment. Here's the loophole the NFL discovered, okay? They have more games than they know what to do with.

Thursday night football survived waves and waves of criticism about player safety [01:54:00] because a stand alone primetime game in the middle of the week blew up. does numbers. The NFL realized it can still satisfy all of its TV agreements because it has 14 to 16 games every single week. Plus, the game on Peacock still had fucking commercials even behind the paywall.

They can handpick one or two of their games on any week and then sell that to Netflix. And not disturb their billion dollar TV deals with Fox, NBC, CBS, and ESPN. I also think the COVID year, where they had to reschedule games, showed the league how much maneuverability they had to move games around, like chess pieces.

Which is why we have games on pretty much everything. Every day of the week at different points this year. Then you had Christmas fall on a Sunday in 2022 and a Monday in 2023 and boom, holy fuck, the NFL destroyed the holiday once formally monopolized by the NBA.

DEEPER DIVE D: SPORTS GAMBLING

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now deeper dive [01:55:00] section D: sports gambling.

Is the sports betting industry a huge mistake? - Good Work - Air Date 2-9-24

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: In 2013, the American Psychological Association officially classified gambling as an addiction. Meanwhile, since its 2018 legalization, sports betting has generated a gangbusters amount of economic activity in the US $220 billion. In just the first five years it was legal. There are now over 16 million average monthly users of the most popular sports betting apps.

And next year, online sports betting revenue is expected to approach 12 billion dollars. But to understand this growth trajectory, we gotta talk about something called Daily Fantasy Sports. Daily Fantasy is an online version of Fantasy Sports. And according to my wife, a terrible reason to have my phone out during our kid's baptism.

Fantasy is when you pick a bunch of real players, assemble a fake team out of them, and keep trying. But around 2010, a new turbocharged version of fantasy came onto the scene, where you could set new lineups as often as every day, play in apps on your phone, and crucially, put money down on the results.

KENNETH VOGEL: So you [01:56:00] had two competitors that really arose to the top of the market here, DraftKings and FanDuel.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Kenneth Vogel is a New York Times investigative reporter who was part of a team that wrote a series of major stories about the betting industry's rise in America.

KENNETH VOGEL: And they made a business out of fantasy sports and allowed players to win. Wager, not wager, but put money on the performance of their teams.

They would push back against the use of the term wager there.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Even though gambling on sports was still broadly illegal, Congress had previously determined that fantasy sports were actually a game of skill, not luck, meaning that putting money on the results wasn't gambling. Which reminds me, a lot of an argument my high school friend Chaz used to make about the pullout method.

The gray area in which these fantasy companies operated was pretty controversial. Even at the time. A lot of state attorney generals and even some sportsbook CEOs publicly said that they considered Daily Fantasy to be gambling. But the industry saw it differently.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: So you don't view what you do here at Daily Fantasy?

Uh, FanDuel is [01:57:00] gambling. No. That's a word that isn't used very much around here, I take it.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Still, FanDuel and DraftKings clearly understood that they were operating in murky waters, and made a huge lobbying push to defend themselves. And they were pretty successful. By 2017, 19 states had passed laws explicitly legalizing daily fantasy sports.

But this effort wasn't just about creating a legal framework for daily fantasy. The industry's big kahuna was still out there, swimming around in the deep waters. Just waiting to be caught. I'm talking about full on sports betting.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Breaking news to the Supreme Court this morning, striking down the federal ban on sports betting.

Now it leaves it up to the states.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: When that happened, the industry was ready to get lobbying, thanks to their powerful network of relationships in state capitals that they built during their daily fantasy push.

KENNETH VOGEL: There was a lot of like, whining and dining. That was, that was my colleague, Eric Lipton, and a photographer who went out to, um, This is a party that, uh, was sponsored by the industry or by lobbyists who were representing the industry.

The lawmakers [01:58:00] were smoking cigars and drinking expensive scotch that was provided by the lobbyists and sort of schmoozing with them as the debate was unfolding a few blocks away in the Capitol.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: The industry's main arguments for legal sports betting, both then and now, are to fight black market gambling.

JASON ROBINS: There's this big illegal market, and there's no consumer protections, no tax revenue being generated. Why don't we just bring that in house?

MATT KING: A lot of states are understanding that it's really just common sense legislation to allow mobile sports betting. Uh, it raises tax revenues and it puts an illegal market out of business.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: And look, I know it's easy to go around bashing these corporate CEOs. Especially when they got this mid as hell Zoom background. What, is this a map of the lands you plan to conquer? Why do you have a Bla black and white photo of the industrial revolution behind ya. Come on, Matt. It could be worse. You've got some work to do, buddy.

But my point, which I'm making very clearly and without getting sidetracked, my point is that the gambling black market is a problem, and regulating it would generate [01:59:00] tax revenue.

TIMOTHY FONG: One of our biggest concerns, we have so much of the unregulated sports betting market, right? So these are the websites, uh, that are based in who knows where.

They take all electronic betting. You know, financing, so they're, they're not subjected to the regulations of the state. But trying to shut them down is impossible because you don't even know where they exist.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Now, it's impossible to know the exact size of the black market at this time, but some estimates had Americans illegally betting as much as 150 billion per year.

But the industry's second point was that if states did vote to legalize, It would instantly create tax revenue.

KENNETH VOGEL: One of the things that the industry, sports betting industry had going for it, you know, after 2018 was, uh, you know, it's, um, sort of a perverse way to think about it, but it was the pandemic. I mean, the pandemic put a real dent in state budgets.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: So the black market, the promise of tax revenue, state budgets, absolutely decimated by the pandemic. It was the perfect storm for sports betting companies to capitalize on and capitalize. It was

OLIVER BARNES: [02:00:00] There's a huge investor appetite around it. The companies are turning over massive amounts of money.

Everyone's very excited.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Oliver Barnes is a reporter for the Financial Times who's been covering the gambling industry both in the U. S. and the U. K.

OLIVER BARNES: Lawmakers are also quite excited, right? Because you're sitting in a state that's yet to, um, legalize sports betting. You have a whole load of tax revenues you can just switch on there overnight.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: But in reality, many states who have voted to legalize have seen less tax revenue than expected.

KENNETH VOGEL: The industry, the sports betting companies and the gambling trade groups push for lower tax rates.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: While lobbying for legalization in states like Kansas, the industry argued that the best way for states to maximize their tax revenue would actually be to tax betting companies less because it would create an easier market for the companies to operate in.

Okay, whatever you say, Mr. Businessman. Alright.

But in 14 jurisdictions that legalized and followed the industry's tax advice, revenues in 2022 were nearly 150 million less than predicted. And in [02:01:00] addition to negotiating lower tax rates, the industry also convinced many states to classify huge chunks of their advertising spend as tax write offs.

KENNETH VOGEL: When we talk about deductions for advertising and marketing, what we're really talking about is the promotional bets.

And so, what that is, is you see an ad and it says, get your first 100 of like, free bets, or like, we'll match your first 100, or what have you, and this is like an incentive that the gambling companies are using to bring in new customers. And what they did was they convinced lawmakers in most states to allow them to deduct the cost of these promotional bets.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: In 2022 alone, the industry gave out almost 1 billion in these promo bets, costing states more than 120 million in potential taxes. States are losing money on promotional bets. I'm losing money on promotional bets. You and I aren't so different after all, Kansas. Maybe this could work out between us. And though tax revenue generated by the industry post legalization has been underwhelming, you might say the opposite [02:02:00] about its approach to marketing.

AD: Spreads to cover, overs to hit, and chances to live bet from the first sound to the final whistle. Download BetMGM. You know what to do.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: The industry spent about 300 million on TV ads in 2023, and an estimated 1. 8 billion in local markets. This marketing push even made it to college campuses. One deal between Michigan State and Caesars Sportsbook let Caesars Caesarize part of its campus. Another between Colorado Boulder and Pointsbet gave the school 30 every time one of their students signed up for the app and placed a bet.

Granted, there was a lot of backlash to these deals. The lead gambling industry trade group now prohibits marketing on college campuses. And since then, Michigan State, Colorado, and other schools have canceled their partnerships. But what's so bad about these ads anyway? Getting caesarized sounds fun!

RICHARD DAYNARD: It's a public health issue.

Is that this is an addictive product.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Oh, I get it. Too fun. Richard Daynard is the lawyer who designed the litigation strategy against the tobacco industry, resulting in Big Tobaccy [02:03:00] coughing up over 200 billion dollars and changing the way they market cigarettes. We lied and told him we were 60 Minutes and he agreed to tell us about his next target, the sports betting industry.

RICHARD DAYNARD: There's the denial of, you know, of dangers. Presenting this thing as simply a harmless way to have fun. March 10th of last year of 2023. That was the day that sports betting was unleashed in Massachusetts. It was just massive marketing. You know, there'd be trash containers. It'd be on the side of buses, uh, as well as on, uh, you know, television.

Just about anything you turned on would have an ad for, you know, one of the companies.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Unfortunately, it's been a while since I've turned anything on, professor. Daynard's Public Health Advocacy Institute recently backed a lawsuit in Massachusetts against DraftKings, and its focus is on one of those fun tax write off promotional ads.

According to the lawsuit, DraftKings knowingly and unfairly designed a 1, [02:04:00] 000 sign up bonus. The 1, 000 comes in the form of additional bets, which customers could only get if they first deposited 5, 000. Risk 25, 000 within 90 days, and bet on events with worse odds than 3 to 1, which doesn't sound like I'm gonna get 1, 000.

RICHARD DAYNARD: The idea is for you to continue to bet, which is the way you develop and heighten an addiction, which is you keep at it, you keep doing it. We hope to, you know, encourage that. You know, other litigation, this is hardly the only deceptive ad running in the United States.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: And there is some backlash building.

TIMOTHY FONG: We don't see cannabis ads on TV, do we? We don't see a lot of tobacco ads on TV anymore. And all that has an impact on what people think and feel about that product, right? When you look at the gambling ads right now, they're all 120 percent positive.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Regulators in Ohio. Doled out almost a million dollars in fines last year to betting companies for advertising that customers could make free bets.

Massachusetts and other states have moved to legally ban advertising on college campuses. And all the way up [02:05:00] there in Maine, lawmakers proposed banning cartoon characters, celebrities, athletes, and entertainers from being able to appear in ads. Which might sound extreme to us here in America, but is actually very simple.

Similar to the way that lots of other countries regulate gambling advertising.

OLIVER BARNES: In the UK there's like a whistle to whistle ban on football matches. You can't advertise like during a football match. In terms of like TV commercials. Because of the advertising environment where you're bombarded with ads, it's very difficult to kind of escape that habit of like recurrent gambling.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: The UK has also banned gambling logos on the front of Premier League jerseys and other regulators wanna move even further. In Australia, gambling ads are banned during games between 5:00 AM and eight. And Belgium and the Netherlands have fully banned gambling advertising on TV, radio, newspapers, and in public spaces.

And these regulations are all a reaction to the way that gambling has proliferated in these countries post legalization. The UK Gambling Commission earlier this year said that as many as 2. 5 percent of their adult population could be problem gambling. Meanwhile in Australia, citizens lose more [02:06:00] gambling per capita than in any other country.

And some worry that if this continues If the U. S. isn't careful, we might not learn from these more mature markets.

The NBA’s Sports Gambling Issue Is Worse Than You Think - Hoop Reports - Air Date 4-27-24

HOST, HOOP REPORTS: On December 19th, 2023, four games were scheduled, setting the stage for an unbelievable turn of events.

I'm not usually one to gamble, and I've never placed an online bet in my life, but let me tell you, this was one of the most incredible sports bets I've ever seen. It was a four leg parlay, meaning four specific outcomes had to align for the bettor to claim the prize money. Here were the conditions.

Brandon Ingram needed to score the first basket in the Grizzlies vs. Pelicans game, Zach Collins in the Spurs vs. Bucs game, Steph Curry in the Celtics vs. Warriors game, and finally Jeremy Grant in the Sun vs. Blazers game. Each of these events was necessary for the bet to succeed. The odds were staggeringly set at 4, 428 to 1.

Translating to a mere 0. 02 percent chance of success. Yet on this day, one daring individual defied these odds, turning a modest bet [02:07:00] of 2 and 50 cents into an astonishing 11, 000 after researching other astonishing online sports gambling wins. Including two unbelievable six leg parlays on three point shots that turn 25 into over 100, 000, I gained insights into the world of online betting, specifically about prop bets and parlay bets.

Now, some of you might already be familiar with these terms, but for those who don't engage in betting, like myself, this was quite enlightening. Essentially, a prop bet is a wager on a specific occurrence within a game, rather than on the game's final result. For instance, instead of betting on the Warriors to win, one might bet on Steph Curry to score 50 points, Draymond Green to get ejected, or Klay Thompson to miss all his three point attempts.

You get the idea. A parlay bet, however, involves combining several of these prop bets. Each event included in the parlay must occur for the bet to pay out. This is precisely what led to Jontay Porter getting caught. He placed a bet that was so [02:08:00] obvious it triggered an alert from gambling sites. Actually, he made two significant errors.

The first mistake involved the prop bet set for him on January 26th, which were five and a half points, four and a half rebounds, which were One and a half assists and 0. 53 pointers made. If you're wondering why these aren't whole numbers, like five points or four rebounds, it's to prevent something known as a push.

A push occurs when the final result of a bet matches the set number exactly, meaning the bet neither wins nor loses and all wagers are returned. Well, just 4 minutes into the game, Jontay had already racked up 3 rebounds and 1 assist. This meant there were just 2 more rebounds or 1 more assist that would cause anyone who bet on him, including himself, to lose the bet.

As a result, he abruptly left the game, citing a re aggravation of an eye injury.

On the following day, during their daily report, DraftKings announced that the under on porter had been the most profitable bet for props that night. Then [02:09:00] on March 20th, in a game against the Sacramento Kings, a similar incident occurred. His over under bets for the night were set at seven and a half points and five and a half rebounds.

And just about three minutes into the game, Porter exited citing an illness and did not return.

This meant anyone who had bet on his unders immediately won the prop bet. While initially Porter's season statistics might make you question the logic of placing those types of bets. The truth is, due to injuries to Scotty Barnes and Chris Boucher, Porter's playing time had surged to about 20 minutes per game.

So, in the 4 games preceding this, he averaged 7 points and roughly 5 rebounds. But, anyway Once again, DraftKings reported that this outcome was the top moneymaker for the night across all NBA bets. What made these cases even more suspicious was the fact that the average NBA player prop bet usually falls between 1, 000 and 2, 000, but the bets placed on Jontay Porter were significantly higher, ranging from 10, 000 to 20, 000.[02:10:00]

In fact, during the March 20th game, one bettor placed a staggering 80, 000 on a parlay bet. This bet was that if Porter scored 7 points or fewer and grabbed 5 rebounds or fewer, the bettor would win 1. 1 million.

However, the sports betting operators flagged this as suspicious and froze the wager. This action triggered the investigation which NBA Commissioner Adam Silver Issuing a permanent ban on Porter. What's somewhat ironic about this situation is that Adam silver himself played a significant role in bringing sports gambling into the mainstream in the United States.

Back in 2014, when he wrote a piece for the New York times advocating for the legalization of sports betting, using the phrase out of the underground and into the sunlight to express his stance. He also emphasized in his writing. Any new approach must ensure the integrity of the game. However, the inherent challenge lies in the fact that sports betting, and maintaining the integrity of the game, simply cannot coexist.[02:11:00]

Over time, human nature's insatiable greed for money will inevitably take a hold and begin to exert its influence over games. This has been evident in numerous scandals throughout sports history. The 1919 Black Sox scandal, where eight players were accused of throwing the World Series for money. The 1980s Boston College basketball point shaving scandal where players manipulated scores for betting gains.

The 2000 Spanish Paralympics basketball scandal involving athletes faking disabilities for medals and sponsorships. The 2000 Hansi Kronje cricket match fixing scandal where a captain accepted bribes to influence match outcomes. The 2007 Tim Donaghy NBA betting scandal where a referee rigged games he officiated.

The 2011 Turkish football match fixing scandal implicating over 30 games. These are just a few examples of the widespread betting scandals that have plagued professional sports globally. They span various sports and nations, but share a common motive, manipulating game outcomes for financial gain. Apart from the [02:12:00] Jontay Porter incident, the true extent of betting related issues in NBA games remains largely unknown until they surface publicly.

However, given the substantial financial stakes involved, there's a valid argument to suggest that such occurrences may be more widespread than commonly perceived, implicating both players and referees. In fact, some retired NBA players assert that there's actually a significant number of referees involved in gambling activities nowadays.

RASHAD MCCANTS: Do you think it's another ref that's in the NBA right now that's like him? A club of them. I think it's a club of them. We clearly see the discrepancies in certain games where the swing for Vegas hits the numbers, right? These are elements that bookies know about, gamblers know about. Hey man, this is a game we need Luka out.

He gets two technicals before halftime.

HOST, HOOP REPORTS: One counter argument to this notion is that the NBA players and referees already earn substantial salaries. So, why would they risk their careers for additional money? [02:13:00] However, as highlighted earlier, the potential financial gains from betting can far exceed their regular earnings.

For instance, the individual who placed the 80, 000 parlay bet on Jontay Porter stood to make over 1, 000, 000, more than double Porter's salary. However, in the case of Tim Donaghy, despite having a successful career with a comfortable salary of 300, 000 per year as an NBA referee, he still succumbed to the temptation of making extra money through illicit means.

These days, when you think about prop betting and parlay bets, you realize there's a ton of ways to cheat the system. Like even though I've never placed an online bet and likely won't just spending a few minutes brainstorming gave me some ideas on how referees can manipulate outcomes without getting caught.

For instance, imagine placing a parlay bet on a player getting exactly 5 fouls, but his team still winning by 10 points. As a referee, or a team of referees, orchestrating such an outcome might not be too difficult without anyone noticing, but the [02:14:00] potential payout could be huge. And that was a quick example I came up with in 5 minutes, without any professional refereeing or betting experience.

Just think about what experienced individuals could do in this scenario. That example should give you a quick glimpse into the extent of betting that occurs in sports. To be fair, the NBA claims to closely monitor all activities, and even has an internal team consisting of lawyers and full time data scientists dedicated to investigating any irregular bets or line movement.

However, the reality is that Pandora's box of sports gambling has already been opened, and the methods of gamblers will only become more sophisticated over time. Consider this, if the NBA couldn't effectively stop James Harden from exploiting the rules to draw fouls for a significant portion of the 2010s, how can they hope to regulate an industry where transactions amount to 50 to 80 billion dollars every year?

CREDITS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at [02:15:00] 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected].

The deep dive sections of the show included clips from The Rich Eisen Show, University of Iowa, The Daily Show, What's Wright? With Nick Wright, Edge of Sports, TYT Sports, the Karen Hunter Show, That's Good Sports, Good Work, and Hoop Reports. Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get [02:16:00] instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. 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.

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#1632 SiliCON Valley: The False Promises, Enshittification Economics, and Misguided Adventures of the Twits of Tech (Transcripts)

Posted by · May 29, 2024 2:30 AM

Air Date 5/28/2024