Transcripts

[00:00:00]

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

This is your one-stop reference guide to every issue that is being wrongly blamed on immigrants, as the Trump campaign rhetoric turns evermore fascist and xenophobic.

Sources providing our Top Takes in under 40 minutes today include:

Democracy Now!

Crazy Town

The Lever

Velshi and

The Zero Hour.

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there’ll be more in four sections:

SECTION A - MIS/DISINFORMATION

SECTION B - REALITY CHECK

SECTION C - OTHERING and

SECTION D - SOLUTIONS.

Deportation First Trump and Harris Compete for Latinx Votes While Pushing Anti-Immigrant Policies - Democracy Now! - Air Date 10-16-24

AMY GOODMAN: With just 19 days until the presidential election, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are ramping up efforts to appeal to a major voting bloc in battleground states: Latinx voters. Democratic [00:01:00] presidential nominee Kamala Harris appeared at a town hall with Latinx voters in Las Vegas, Nevada, hosted by Univision last week. She took a question from Yvette Castillo.

YVETTE CASTILLO: And I’m an American citizen, born to two Mexican parents. They were here before I was even born. They have worked their whole lives. But with the way immigration laws change over time, I was only able to help my dad get his legal status squared away, but not my mom’s. My mom passed away just six weeks ago.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Oh, I’m so sorry.

YVETTE CASTILLO: And she was never, ever able to get the type of care and service that she needed or deserved. Sorry.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Take your time. Take your time.

YVETTE CASTILLO: So, my question for you is: What are your plans, or do you have plans, to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole [00:02:00] lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: There are real people who are suffering because of an inability to put solutions in front of politics. I mean, an example of this on immigration policy is that as it relates to what we need to do to strengthen our border.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Republican candidate Donald Trump will take the stage with Latinx voters tonight in Miami at a town hall also hosted by Univision.

For more, we go to Austin, Texas. We’re joined by Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mijente, a national organizing hub for Latinx and Chicanx communities.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! We had you on at the Democratic convention in Chicago, Marisa. I wanted to get first your response to Kamala Harris. What she responded to this very emotional plea was the support of the Biden administration for the bill that [00:03:00] militarizes the border further. Your response to the Democratic and Republican approach to how to deal with the immigration crisis in this country?

MARISA FRANCO: Hey there. Thanks for having me.

That story is heartbreaking. And it’s a story that many, many people experience in this country. We are now close to 40 years since the last legalization in this country. Vice President Harris’s response is insufficient. The woman was not talking about the border. She was talking about the fact that her mother lived in this country, contributed to this country and was part of her community and was her mother, and could not get the care she needed and had no recourse. And all around, we’ve seen — and she mentioned she was able to adjust the status for her father but wasn’t able for her mom.

There has been, unfortunately, immigration reform in this country. It has been deportation first and building [00:04:00] a huge infrastructure to survey, to identify and detain folks. And that includes at the border. What we’re seeing at the border is horrible. The border bill was not going to be a solution, and it will not be a solution for Vice President Harris to mimic Donald Trump’s policies on immigration. In fact, she has to contrast.

I think Latinos, by and large, even when they say immigration or border security is an issue for them, it’s a much more nuanced view. I think people want a fair shake, and they’re seeing that — I think what’s happening is that folks are generally — this is not just an issue in the Latino community, but generally. Working-class people are — the math isn’t mathing. Whether it’s their wages, whether it’s their job conditions or the cost of living, you know, just trying to make it, people are barely keeping their heads above water.

And what Donald Trump has presented is “Who’s at fault?” And instead of it being the billionaire class, instead of it being corporations not paying their fair [00:05:00] share, he’s blaming the easiest people to blame, which has been done time immemorial in this country, which is blame immigrants, blame the other.

Kamala Harris is not contrasting that sufficiently enough. And she didn’t answer that woman’s question. And I think the question remains: What will happen to folks who have been living, working and part of our community in this country who have no real recourse to be able to adjust their status in this country?

JUAN GONZALEZ: And I wanted to ask you, Marisa: What’s your sense of the enthusiasm for voting? Clearly, in 2020, there was a huge surge of Latino voters in the last election. But there are key states. A lot of people focus on Arizona, but I also keep reminding people that there’s a million Latinos who live in the state of Pennsylvania, perhaps the biggest —

MARISA FRANCO: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: — battleground state. What is your sense of the enthusiasm among Latinx voters [00:06:00] in terms of this election?

MARISA FRANCO: I think Harris-Walz will win the majority of Latino voters in this election. That, to me, is very clear. At the same time, it’s never been Trump’s goal to win the majority of Latino voters. He just has to win enough of a sliver of it. And I do think there are real cracks.

And I don’t know that the right question is, like: Is Harris doing enough? Is the Harris campaign doing enough? I think that, in many ways, that campaign is behind the eight ball in terms of what the Democratic Party has done over the last many, many years in terms of their posture not just to Latinos, but to Black Americans, to working-class people broadly in this country.

I think the enthusiasm is — you know, I think there was a surge after Biden stepped out and she came in. And I think it’s leveled out. And I think it’s the economy that’s really, really hurting, and the fact that Biden is not popular and she’s not contrasting [00:07:00] herself enough. And so, in those states where it’s going to be very, very close, I am somewhat concerned that there’s not going to be enough of a margin, because I think that there’s — you know, I think a lot of people don’t know exactly what her plan is, or the plans that are being put out are not really capturing folks’ imagination or interest. So, I think it’s going to be very close, and I don’t know that there’s huge enthusiasm, I would say, in the community right now.

Escaping Otherism Why Dr. Seuss Could Never Find a Rhyme for Genocide - Crazy Town - Air Date 6-12-24

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: So it may be that we're talking about escaping othering, maybe it's recognizing it's not something we can completely escape from, but try to navigate and manage in some ways.

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Yeah.

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: But I do think we have to recognize and name and combat the truly dangerous and vile forms of othering that's happened.

And a lot of it does, you want to talk about the history, comes from the playbook of colonizers, right? We talked about this in our seasonal watershed moments. I think it was [00:08:00] episode 51, where we talked about the papal bulls and the doctrines of Christian discovery. In a sense, that was the papacy rubber stamping, authorizing the Spanish government, the Portuguese government and others to go out and conquer and divide up Muslim and pagan lands, to authorize slavery, authorize exploitation of the natural world. They codified that basically.

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Yes.

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: And led to a sort of a playbook of doing this around the world.

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Yeah, and I think that that ties into economics, of course, too. So in that season, related to these watershed moments, we talk about this as well about, and this was covered really well in the Seeing White podcast. There's a really interesting teachings of Suzanne Plissik of the Racial Equity Institute. And the story of what is defined as a different race or what is an inferior race versus superior race, it can't be separated from the story of labor, and rich [00:09:00] landowners in colonial America needed this reliable, consistent labor force. And they didn't want, they didn't want labor forces that were poor binding together. Bonding about their social status. And so they pitted white laborers against these racial African--

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: So indentured white slaves. Yes, chattel, those in slavery.

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: And so that prevented coming together because of class difference, of class solidarity, right? So this is how othered/othering can be used for empower dynamics to by the prop up the status quo and those in power

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Yeah, and this is where it gets so heavy -- it's just even hard to think about all the examples throughout history and into today of this sort of "divide and conquer" approach that colonizers have used. Maybe more recent example and horrendous is the genocide that happened in Rwanda about 30 years ago. The [00:10:00] numbers are staggering. As many as 800,000 people were slaughtered. And mostly one ethnic group, the Tutsis, were killed by another ethnic group, the Hutu. But the whole tension between them was initiated by the colonizing forces. The Belgians kind of gave the Tutsis these positions of power largely based on skin color.

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Yeah. And so starting in like the late 1930s, I think, or after World War I or something like that is when they set up that dynamic. And then it really culminated 60 years later in this genocide.

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: That to me is the -- we're going to talk about the consequences of othering, but that's getting at it. You start something moving at a point in history and it can end in utter tragedy and violence like that.

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: And we see, unfortunately we see that playbook still being adopted by those in power. And it can work across political structures, right? You see it in places in the world where you have authoritarian regimes [00:11:00] who find an other to pick on and to shine a light on as a scapegoat for the problems that the populace might feel because they don't have economic opportunity or civil rights of any kind. But you can also see it in democracies, where people rise to power because they played on the fears of, or tensions between different groups.

And unfortunately that playbook really works because of what we were talking about before, which is this maybe an innate tendency in us to other difference.

The Real Reason Trump Is Demonizing Immigrants - The Lever - Air Date 10-11-24

PAUL KAROLYI: Let's talk about what's happening in Aurora. How are they going to respond? Because Aurora has declared itself a, quote, "non sanctuary city." Like you said, they are run by a Republican, Mike Kaufman.

BREE: They also have this huge immigrant population already, and a lot of organizations are already mobilized to support folks in this situation. That's the interesting dichotomy.

PAUL KAROLYI: I agree. And then the other side, they don't spend public funds supporting [00:12:00] undocumented immigrants the way Denver does. These newcomers that we've supported so much in Denver. Do you all think that this wave of national scrutiny that Aurora is now like having this backlash of wait, maybe this isn't such a big problem? Do you think this is going to change anything in the local politics?

DAVID SIROTA: Boy, that's a really great question and it's really hard to predict. Look, Aurora went Republican before all this, I guess amid all of this happening.

And we are a state, we're going to talk about the history of our state. We are a state that has had that Tom Tancredo lineage of politics. A lot of people who are listening to this who may be younger don't remember that, but a real, anti-immigrant politics that was here in this state. So I think this is a volatile electoral issue.

But that said, it is a blue state. It is a Democratic state. And there is no evidence that this state's politics are going to overnight become MAGA politics. But it's also to say that [00:13:00] there are pockets of that. Even here on the front range.

PAUL KAROLYI: For the record, there have been some new polls out this week on the Trump-Harris race in Colorado, and Harris is up. No surprise. But Biden, that when he was the candidate, was only beating Trump by 2 percent in one poll back when it was getting really dicey for him. Harris is now up by 11 percent, according to this poll from Keating Research, which is a lot. But I was looking back at a precedent for this in our last gubernatorial election, Polis versus Ganahl. Polis beat Ganahl by 24 percentage points, which is double the margin that Harris is up on Trump. So I think there is something happening here.

BREE: I'm just always trying to relate this to the everyday experience of someone in Aurora. Is this really impacting their lives? Someone who is housed, who has lived there, they're, for 10 years or 20, is this really impacting them, or are they going to be motivated by fear?

DAVID SIROTA: I think those two things can overlap. I [00:14:00] do think that the perception of crime impacts your perception of how safe you feel. And so there's like kind of a psychological Vulcan mind trick going on here, where, for instance, this has happened across the country, where people's perception that violent crime is going, have a perception that violent crime is skyrocketing. Meanwhile, violent crime continues to go down, nationally and in cities across the country. But the perception can change the voting patterns, and can change how you feel in your neighborhood, right? And so what I worry about is, if the police are saying, listen, yes, we have normal problems with crime, like within the mean, like normal problems with crime, that sprinkling in, "oh, it's, a foreign terrorist organization, a foreign gang, a transnational scary gang," that it changes the politics of how people vote [00:15:00] based on perceptions that aren't necessarily real and also it can change the psychological character of a community. If more and more people walking around being afraid, right? And to be honest, that's how violent crime can go up. If everyone's walking around being afraid in a country that's got a lot of guns, that's one way that crime can go up.

BREE: Yeah, I just have thought about my own personal experience in my neighborhood and what changed when we saw the influx? I just saw more folks on the street, washing windows, asking for money, but that was literally the only difference. I didn't see a change in businesses that have been there. The housing prices didn't -- nothing changed to me. And my neighborhood conversations didn't really change.

And so that's why I wonder what it really means for Aurora residents.

DAVID SIROTA: I did hear Trump say something that was, he's always interspersed as, once in a while he'll say something vaguely interesting and almost [00:16:00] accidentally correct. And he did say, he was like, look, states and societies have been built up over decades and hundreds of years and, a whole new quick influx of people can change that. There is a truth to that. That a society, a quote unquote "culture" does build up over decades and really centuries, and that a whole new population can somewhat change that culture and that can be terrifying to people who were there.

Now, I'm not making a xenophobic argument, right? I'm not saying that I'm just saying like that fear of change is real.

BREE: And my neighborhood's also a great example of this. I live next door to the Polish club. There is nary a Polish person on my block other than my husband's last name. There's a Polish event there once a month. The rest of the time, it's mostly Spanish-speaking folks having quinceañeras, weddings, and birthday parties.

That change has happened over decades, right? And the neighborhood maybe was more predominantly Polish at some [00:17:00] point, but now it is more predominantly Spanish speaking. But this happens in neighborhoods in America everywhere. And look, New York City is a great example of that.

DAVID SIROTA: Yes--

BREE: To me, it's just part of the evolution of cities.

DAVID SIROTA: The fear of change, especially, if we're being honest among older people who are used to their communities. Not-- There was the old Wayne's World joke, right? We fear change, right? There's a baked in fear. And the question is, I go back to the maturity, are we a mature enough society to realize, okay, change can be scary, but we're being Vulcan mind-tricked into feeling it be a threat.

PAUL KAROLYI: To his benefit.

DAVID SIROTA: Exactly.

PAUL KAROLYI: To his benefit.

BREE: Oh, for sure.

PAUL KAROLYI: One more thing here, on the local impact, how it's actually affecting the people of Aurora. I wanted to share this cause I thought this was such an interesting Instagram post from Caroline Glover, the chef behind the wonderful restaurant Annette, which just by sheer [00:18:00] accident of the local economy ended up in this Stanley marketplace, which is just on the other side of the border in Aurora. And so therefore she didn't have a chance to win a Michelin star, which everyone says she probably would have in the last couple years that the Michelin guide has come here. But she put up this post and she said a lot about what's happening. But this one quote was just like, I have to share this. She wrote, "Our city leaders are doing too little to defend Aurora on the national stage and to call out these racist anti immigrant dog whistles for what they are. Some at the top in our city are even feeding the flames of falsehood and hate for political gain. This does nothing but harm our reputation and our economy. This city deserves better leadership. Let's be proud of where we live and work, and work to make it better."

BREE: Yeah.

PAUL KAROLYI: What did you all think of this from Caroline Glover?

DAVID SIROTA: I'm really glad somebody said that. I think it's pathetic for local politicians to try to use their own community as a way to platform themselves nationally.

BREE: They're throwing their own people under the bus.

DAVID SIROTA: I mean it's really gross, right? [00:19:00] Look, again, there are real problems in Aurora, like there are real problems in Denver. But the exploitation of your own constituency, your own city, to try to gain a national platform in conservative media, in any media.

BREE: And make your city look terrible. Why would you want to do that? That's the weird part to me.

DAVID SIROTA: It's just bad.

BREE: About Councilwoman Jurinsky's comments and consistent push of this rhetoric is, what are you doing? You're making people think the place that you're supposed to represent sucks.

PAUL KAROLYI: Yeah, whose fault is that, councilwoman?

BREE: And then we have a restaurateur coming out and saying it doesn't suck here. Why are you doing this to us?

DAVID SIROTA: Because here's the thing, If you're a restaurateur, I presume you want people to be, for instance, going out at night.

BREE: Absolutely.

DAVID SIROTA: You want people to be --

BREE: Feel safe.

DAVID SIROTA: Feel safe in your community. Right. So when your local politician is running out on Fox News and being like, Oh my God, this is not safe, that's bad for your business.

BREE: And it's bad for the economy of the city you're representing. So it is, [00:20:00] yeah, I liked her point. And I appreciated that. Because it takes a lot to stick your neck out a little bit as a business owner.

'Villains nor victims' Why immigration is good for our economy - Velshi - Air Date 6-2-24

VELSHI - HOST, MSNBC: "America must be kept American", said President Calvin Coolidge in 1923. As the Great Depression wore on and as xenophobia ran rampant, American leadership found a scapegoat in immigrants, blaming them for taking jobs, for not assimilating into American culture. Just before the bill was enacted, this op ed was published in the New York Times in April of 1924: "America of the melting pot comes to an end".

Then at the end of May, 1924, 100 years ago, President Coolidge signed the Johnson Reed Act, or the Immigration Act of 1924. The act banned all immigration from Asia and instituted very low quotas limiting the number of people allowed from each country, severely limiting all other immigrants except those from Western and Northern Europe.

The impact of that bill was swift and extreme. Almost immediately, the United [00:21:00] States saw a sharp decline in immigration, which lasted for the next 40 years. As author and Wharton professor Zeke Hernandez wrote in a recent op ed, "Communities that lost immigrants because of the 1920s quotas receive significantly less investment capital from the countries where those immigrants would have come from, and businesses in those places today invest less abroad as a result. That lack of investment equals fewer jobs".

The 1924 quotas, 100 years ago, led America to lose out on thousands of foreign scientists. As a result, native born scientists became 68 percent less likely to patent, and companies dependent on foreign talent suffered a multi decade decline in patenting. The architects of the 1920s immigration restrictions claimed to be protecting American workers, but it actually accomplished exactly the opposite. At the height of the Great Depression, politicians worried that American workers were being hurt by competition from Mexicans. [00:22:00] So, the government forcibly repatriated one third of all Mexicans living in the United States. That effort backfired, resulting in fewer and lower paying jobs for American workers.

One hundred years later, we find ourselves having a similar rhetorical and ideological debate about immigration. Trump and his allies are stoking anti-immigrant sentiment, using brutally dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, pushing the idea that immigration is the reason that the United States is a "nation in decline". As Hernandez points out, even many of the most progressive among us who have a positive view of immigration often have that positive view based on personal morals or an ethical obligation to help those in need and to accept the "poor, huddled masses".

But even that compassionate point of view gets it wrong. Supporting an increase in legal accessible immigration isn't the kind of thing to do for those who are fleeing turmoil in their birth country. Immigration actively improves [00:23:00] American society and there is now tons of data to back that up. Hernandez writes, "immigrants foster investment, create jobs, make us more innovative, fill our public coffers, reduce crime, and successfully integrate culturally".

Yes, people want to immigrate to our country because of the possibility of a better life, of economic prosperity, of social safety, of socio political stability. But we shouldn't just tolerate the idea of immigration as an act of humanistic altruism. We should embrace immigration as vital to our country's economic health, as integral to our position as a global leader in innovation, as necessary for us to continue on as a healthy and prosperous country.

Immigration and what we should do to change our current broken system is at the very front and center of the upcoming presidential election.

Escaping Otherism Why Dr. Seuss Could Never Find a Rhyme for Genocide Part 2 - Crazy Town - Air Date 6-12-24

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Okay, so let's talk about what the consequences are for this. Of course, there's health effects. We covered this in the episode on individualism. Being othered [00:24:00] leads to isolation and loneliness. It takes a toll on your mental and physical health. And remember we talked about, that being socially isolated is like taking up smoking or not exercising in terms of its health effects.

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Yeah, right. And of course, as we discussed in our episode on extremism, you see hate crimes, including violence against people based on their race or ethnicity or religion, gender, disabilities, sexual orientation. These rose nearly 12 percent between 2020 and 2021. Just that period of time in the U. S.

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Well, and of course, where this all really gets to is after you've othered people and dehumanized them, it's easy, you know, next step to start killing them. And we've had horrendous instances of genocide, in a lot of places in Myanmar, in Darfur region of Sudan, in Rwanda as we mentioned, Cambodia, and just naming a few. But this has been with us for a long time and [00:25:00] it's still with us

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: And I worry it is something we're going to have to increasingly face. We haven't talked a ton about this, but one of the drivers of othering, or a seeking of belonging to a group that might be a form of malignant belonging, is sense of scarcity, perceived scarcity, fear, and uncertainty.

And as we talk a lot about at Post Carbon Institute, if we're entering a period of what we've been calling the great unraveling of environmental systems like the climate system or social systems, that just heightens those tensions, that heightens that fear, heightens that uncertainty, heightens the at least perceived scarcity that people feel.

And so the risk of othering is even more real I think now and will be a more significant issue for us to contend [00:26:00] with looking forward. It really, if there's a thing that keeps me up at night it this is...you know.

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Right. Yeah, I mean we talk about coming together in times of crisis, but also we could fall apart in a time of crisis.

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Well, I think there's a dichotomy there. So it's like if you are a society and you face an acute crisis... yeah, it's like i'm gonna help my neighbor, whatever they look like, whoever they are. But if you are subject to chronic crises, I think that's more where you're going to share the great unraveling. It's like over and over and over again, you're hit with this. You probably lose that sense of cohesion pretty quick.

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: And you have people coming in to say, this is happening because of those people. So it's a combination of those, especially from people who want to maintain their power and the status quo for as long as possible, trying to deflect and say, we don't need to change the fundamental way that we operate as a society, because that's what's brought us here. It's like, no, [00:27:00] we can get back. We can make America great again, if we deal with those people.

Prof Richard Wolff A FUTURE WITHOUT FEAR OF IMMIGRANTS - The Zero Hour - Air Date 10-12-24

RICHARD WOLFF: First, and really important, I think that the Democrats are missing a fantastic opportunity to smash the Republicans on this issue. If I were advising Kamala Harris, I am not, but if I were, I would say go right after them. This is a mistake they have made. Clothe yourself in Judeo-Christian morality. Mary and Joseph were immigrants of a kind in that manger also, and we're kind of glad, at least those folks are, who are Christians, that they were able to survive and not be treated horribly at the border.[00:28:00]

The morality of it is obvious. I won't dwell on it. I want to dwell on why It is not only moral and ethical to welcome—welcome!—immigrants, but I want to go through the reasons why. Number one, the United States' population is becoming older, and its rate of birth is shrinking. We are not reproducing ourselves and that weakens our society and our economy and is very costly because the shrinking number of young people working has to support a growing number of old people in retirement who are not working.

This is not a sustainable arrangement unless you tax those at the lower end a lot more to fund the Social [00:29:00] Security that has to go to the increasing number of the old ones. Immigrants are overwhelmingly young, working age human beings, and what they mostly want, and we know that because of that's what they mostly do, is go to work when they arrive here. They want a job, they want a steady job, which means a steady contribution into the Social Security system of the United States. So they are not only not a burden, they are helping to address a very serious problem.

Number two, the United States, at least since the Monroe Doctrine of 1830, so we're talking now a two century history insistence that the United States is the dominant [00:30:00] power in the Western Hemisphere, that the others, mostly in those days the Europeans, are to keep out or to be secondary or need our permission or whatever. In other words, we're in charge, okay? I agree with that. We have been in charge. I would call it a kind of colonialism, but even if you didn't call it that, you know that major decisions about what has happened in Latin America over the last 200 years have been made by and with the heavy influence of the United States.

Therefore, major events like migration are partly the result of American policies across the board. Policies affecting trade, policies affecting politics, policies affecting the climate, all of which contribute to the very [00:31:00] conditions that drive people to leave their home, their religion, their community, their family, go to another country where they don't know any of those things, where they're taking enormous risks in order to create a livable life for their families. We ought to have some sense responsibility.

It's a little bit like the responsibility we do sometimes take that if we have mobilized a part of the population of a foreign country to assist the United States in administering that country or fighting a war in that country, we feel a responsibility when the war is lost. I'm thinking here, of course, of Vietnam and, to a lesser degree, of Afghanistan, to say we will create a place in the United States for those who have taken [00:32:00] risks to work with the U. S. in those countries to be able to come here. The same logic could and should apply in Latin America, which is where most of the influx of residents, immigrants have come from.

Third, the FBI data show immigrants have lower rates of crime than native Americans, and the reason for that is no mystery, and everyone should understand it. And it's simple. If you are a native person and you commit a crime, you are entitled to all the procedures of due process. If you are an immigrant and you commit a crime, you can be thrown out of the country, and you often are. Immigrants know that. No way are they going to go through what they went through to leave their country [00:33:00] with all that that means. Go to another one and then commit a petty crime that can not only deprive them of any chance of citizenship, but force them to leave and to go back to the very circumstances from which they fled.That's the reason they don't commit crimes. It's much too dangerous for them to do so. Okay?

I could go on. But I want to shift now beyond writing the list, which is a big list of why we should welcome immigrants, to asking a theoretical but yet also empirical question. Every wave of immigrants, and the United States is famous as being a country that has had one wave of immigrants after another throughout its history... well, let me change that: throughout its history, before [00:34:00] it ethnically cleansed the local people out of existence here. Those waves occasioned anxiety on the part of people who are already here, about their jobs, their housing, their communities, and so on. We know that story. And the way to handle that story, that a Democrat, especially one in the party of Franklin Roosevelt, ought to have thought through, is to say the following:

When the nation needs it, we have created full employment. We did it in 1941 when the nation went to war, okay? We are confronted with a twin crisis, a collapsing birth rate and an immigration wave. This is a good time to commit to [00:35:00] full employment, plus a housing construction program, and the two of them could be the same program. The unemployed could be put together to build the housing. The way the unemployed were put together to produce the Munitions that the other unemployed would use once they put their uniforms on. Okay, if we gave everybody a job who was here, we could then give a job to the immigrants without anyone here fearing loss of job or higher rents or any of the other bugaboos that are being suggested flow from immigration.

It would make the U. S. government a hero for all the people who need a secure job, who are native. It would make the friction between them and the immigrants disappear. It would [00:36:00] solve the entire problem and show up the Republicans and the right wingers for being the amoral, unethical departures from what could be a great American tradition of welcoming and integrating immigrants.

If Kamala Harris said it. My thinking is, it would be better for her, for her election prospects, a better response than going to the border and talking tough.

Notes from the Editor giving a quick list of immigration lies

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We’ve just heard clips starting with:

Democracy Now! looking critically at Harris’s answer on immigration at a recent town hall.

Crazy Town discussed how to escape the trap of othering.

The Lever looked at the accusation that crime is related to immigration in Colorado.

Velshi discussed the historical pattern of the impacts of immigration regulation.

Crazy Town discussed the impacts of othering.[00:37:00]

And The Zero Hour argued for how Democrats could turn immigration into a strength of theirs by flipping the script on Republicans.

And those were just the Top Takes. There’s lots more in the Deeper Dives sections. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members, who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process.

Members also get chapter markers in the show, but, depending on the app you use to listen, you may be able to use the time codes in the show notes to jump around the show similar to chapter markers, so check that out.

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 [00:38:00] continue on to the Deeper Dives half of the show, I just wanted to give credit to the article that inspired today’s episode.

The publication “Popular Information” a couple of weeks ago wrote the piece: "Every problem Trump wrongfully blames on undocumented immigrants." Obviously, we’re covering a lot of them today in the clips, but to just go down the list real quick:

The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for a "crime wave." Turns out there isn’t a crime wave.

The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for voter fraud. Turns out there is hardly any voter fraud.

The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for driving up housing costs. Turns out there are lots of reasons for high housing costs, but immigrants don’t contribute very much to the problem, considering that most who come here can’t afford to by houses. Many do, however, work in the house-building industry, so kicking them out of the country would slow the pace of new housing, [00:39:00] helping to keep prices high.

The Trump campaign claims undocumented immigrants will bankrupt Medicare and Social Security. Turns out they actually pay into the system just like everyone else and help increase funding of those programs - the opposite of threatening them.

The Trump campaign blamed undocumented immigrants for taking jobs from American citizens. This misunderstands the nature of where jobs come from. More people working and consuming within an economy, the more jobs need to exist to serve all those people. Mass deportation of migrants would kill jobs for those who remain because the economy would shrink.

Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for smuggling Fentanyl. Over 85% of fentanyl trafficking is done by US citizens. So, working to block migrants based on that premise would only make a tiny dent, and it's [00:40:00] attacking a demand problem from the supply side, which is always the wrong angle anyway.

The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for inflation. Again, understanding how an economy works is helpful here. Deporting migrants who currently work in the production of a wide variety of goods would constrain that production, raising prices. One primary example: food that comes from farms which employ migrant labor.

So, for that one listener of this show who’s been complaining about the price of eggs and is planning on voting for Trump so he can deport the immigrants, you probably need to think again.

SECTION A - MIS/DIS INFORMATION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, we’ll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics. Next up:

SECTION A - MIS/DISINFORMATION

Followed by SECTION B - REALITY CHECK

SECTION C - OTHERING

and SECTION D - SOLUTIONS

How is Trump winning the US immigration debate - Anywhere but Washington - Air Date 10-10-24

DONALD TRUMP: Millions and millions of people have come into our country and nobody has any idea where they're from.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: [00:41:00] Donald Trump has continued to push conspiratorial racist tropes.

DONALD TRUMP: They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: And even more extreme policies.

DONALD TRUMP: We're going to have the largest deportation effort in history.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: Meanwhile, the Democrats have responded by shifting further to the right.

KAMALA HARRIS: If someone does not make an asylum request at a legal point of entry, they will be barred from receiving asylum.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: We've come to southern Arizona, near the border with Mexico. to try and unpick facts for misinformation.

CITIZEN: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. We're

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: at a meeting of the Pima County Republican Party, which is a county that covers Tucson. This is a big car rally. A lot of people talking about the border.

CITIZEN: The border has got to get closed up. Those people that are breaking the laws of this [00:42:00] country, that came across here illegal, are going to be mass deported.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: Mass deportations? That's what Trump's calling for?

CITIZEN: Yes.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: That's millions of people. Well,

CITIZEN: the people that are here illegally. I don't have any problem with people coming here. My grandparents came here, but they did it the right way.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: But millions of people don't. I

CITIZEN: don't care.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: I think

CITIZEN: it has to happen, and I think citizens have to be behind it.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: How do you think it's possible to do that humanely?

CITIZEN: I don't know that, but I'm confident Trump can do it.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: You said you're a Mexican American. What do you think about Trump's border policy?

CITIZEN: I love it. I love it. I'm 100 percent for it.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: Do you know anybody that came across the border without applying for green card?

Oh,

CITIZEN: yes. Unfortunately, I have family members that did. Cousins, cousins, nephews, nieces.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: Because those people might be deported if Donald Trump wins.

CITIZEN: That's okay. That's okay.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: How long have they been here for

CITIZEN: Years, like 20, somewhere, 30 years.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: And so you think they, the members of your own family have been here for 30 years, should be deported?

CITIZEN: Uh, yeah. Yes. I mean, they can be deported, but they [00:43:00] can also apply to, to come back again to United States.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: How do you think they would feel about you saying

CITIZEN: that? It was lovely to meet you. so much.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: Lovely to meet you too. for

CITIZEN: what you're doing. Thank you. Okay.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: We've been making these films for a long time and I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that.

It shows to you how polarised this issue has become and how far fetched it is.

As the car rally lurched into action, we hitched a ride with party secretary Steve Selvey. There's a legal

REPUBLICAN CHAIR: process, obviously there's uh, we expect some of that. Um, we have democrats talk about, it's their goal to uh, to replace the right majority and then if you bring it up it's, they're upset with you for no decision.

And is

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: that a concern that you've got about the white majority of this country?

REPUBLICAN CHAIR: Not white, because they want to make it a racial issue. I'm concerned [00:44:00] that their, the plan is to bring in a bunch of new Democrat voters. We hear reports that there are terror cells setting up here. Um, that, uh, you know, when, when, you're not, you're not vetting people.

Where

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: are you seeing those reports? I'm sorry? Where are you seeing those reports? I definitely haven't seen them.

REPUBLICAN CHAIR: You haven't seen those? No, no, no. I'd have to find that for you, because I've seen it.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: The views here are mainstream in the Republican Party. And in a political climate that's become increasingly hostile, groups like Humane Borders have stepped in.

For years, they've placed water stations for migrants crossing the desert, even as far right militia and border authorities have tried to obstruct their work.

CITIZEN: Mayor has been alleged to have vandalized several water aid stations that were positioned in rural Pima County.

HELPER: We have to lock them now. Uh. Why is that to, uh, keep vigilantes from, uh, doing, doing nasty stuff to the water?[00:45:00]

It's probably down a quarter or so.

HELPER 2: Oh, this barrel is one of my patch jobs. It's been stabbed or shot quite a few times. You can see I've used, uh, the hot glue gun on it a few times.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: I mean, obviously there is a fentanyl crisis in this country at the moment. Some people would say that. Smuggling routes around here, you know, are contributing to that.

I just wonder whether you worry

HELPER: about that. The vast, vast majority of the fentanyl that comes in, comes in through ports of entry. It doesn't come across, you know, illegal crossings through the border. You know, it comes across Americans, you know, driving it across in their trucks, cars, whatever. So, uh, I don't think that what we do here contributes to the fentanyl problem.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: Just a few hundred yards away, Joel showed me where he recently found the body of a young Mexican woman. We've walked about 300 yards

and already doing 60 miles [00:46:00] feels unfathomable to me.

HELPER 2: She was like a 32 year old woman from some small village in Mexico, just came here for a better life. And the heck of it is, her life, wherever she was going, probably wouldn't be that fantastic, but it was better than where she was. I think that's what people tend to forget, is, well, not, not everybody's as fortunate as Americans are.

OLIVER LAUGHLAND: Someone's hot.

HELPER 2: Just a lightweight jacket. Does it matter if we're talking Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump, or Joe Biden. It's all the same. Death is the policy. Supposedly we'd land a free at the home of the brave, but we don't act like it.

FEMA is running low on disaster money, but not because funds went to housing undocumented migrants - Verify - Air Date 10-7-24

HOST, VERIFY: FEMA is asking Congress for more money to get through hurricane season, but some say the agency would have had plenty if it didn't spend so much helping undocumented migrants. Brandon Lewis from our Verify team went to the border to find out more. [00:47:00]

BRANDON LEWIS - REPORTER, VERIFY: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says the government's response to Hurricane Helene is stretching FEMA's budget and it doesn't have enough to make it through hurricane season.

Many people and politicians on social responded by claiming the real reason FEMA is running out of money is because it spent a billion dollars housing people who are entering the U. S. illegally. Multiple Verify viewers asked us if that's really the reason FEMA is running out of money. So, let's verify.

Our sources are Homeland Security, FEMA, the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office, and the White House. Homeland Security tells Verify the claims are completely false. Congress funds disaster relief and migrant assistance through two different programs under FEMA's control, and lawmakers have yet to Don't allow the agency to transfer money between them.

A Congressional Research Service report from January says during the last four fiscal years, Congress gave FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund 175 [00:48:00] billion. Separately, Congress allocated roughly a billion dollars for migrant assistance. The Shelter and Service Program helps distribute funds to help communities provide services to migrants, such as temporary shelter, food, and urgent medical care.

And FEMA says on its website that disaster relief money has not been diverted for other non disaster related efforts. So, No, FEMA is not running out of disaster relief funds because it spent the money to house people who enter the U. S. illegally. Any additional funding for the disaster relief program would require congressional approval.

SECTION B - REALITY CHECK

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Reality check.

Prof Richard Wolff A FUTURE WITHOUT FEAR OF IMMIGRANTS Part 2 - The Zero Hour - Air Date 10-12-24

RICHARD WOLFF: Look, I talk from time to time to people who work for example. with the United States Chamber of Commerce. They are not in favor of anti immigration. They know that their members need and want to hire immigrant workers, partly because they need the workers, period, and partly because [00:49:00] those workers are cheaper, and partly because those workers are are very fearful of losing a job because of the what that might mean given their immigrant status.

So they are docile, um, nasty employers take avail advantage of that, don't pay them. Because they know, particularly if they're undocumented, or even if they're documented, but their husband or their wife or their old sick aunt is living with them and she isn't, that they don't want any governmental official coming around, etc.,

etc., etc. But there's an economic calculus, very well known, uh, in, in the literature of The economics of migration that I want to mention now because it, it belongs in the conversation. It's, it's obvious, uh, but it has been jazzed up to be useful for professional economists. So [00:50:00] here's how it goes. If you want to have a worker in your society, if you need workers, Immigration is the most efficient way to do that.

Why? Because all of the sunk costs of a baby being raised for five years while it is completely dependent, then when another 10 or 15 years of not only being dependent, but in the sense of consuming goods and services to survive, but the costs of putting that person through a public education system, learning to speak the language, learning to do the arithmetic, learning to read, and so on.

By the time they're 17, 18, 19, and enter the labor force, you have spent a fortune on them. Now, if they're Native, now consider an immigrant. Even an immigrant who comes from a poor country, [00:51:00] those expenses have been carried by that poor country. If that poor country trained that young person until he or she or they were old enough to do the dangerous trek up through Mexico and, and come across the border into the United States as a 19 or 20 year old, which many of them are, you have an unbelievable subsidy.

That's what it's called in the literature. It's a subsidy that goes perversely from the poor country to the rich country. Because the poor country paid to raise the child up, but then all the productivity of the child is lost. is in the United States. The United States gets the fruit of their labor, but the United States didn't have to pay any of the costs of feeding and clothing and housing and educating and medically caring for them.

[00:52:00] And it's perverse because subsidies like that for development purposes are supposed to go from the rich country to the poor one, but the irony is it goes the other way. And migration makes that happen. And yet, in America, you never hear from any leadwell, I shouldn't go that farbut I have never heard from a leading Republican or Democrat.

an argument in favor of the enormous benefits coming to the United States when you have millions of working age people who thereby have loaded the cost of their education onto the poor country they've left. in order to bring their most productive years to the United States.

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: That reminds me of a, uh, a concept that had some currency in 2016 when I was working for Bernie Sanders and I, [00:53:00] I ran afoul of its adherence, even though I'm not necessarily opposed to it, uh, which is the concept of open borders.

Um, And here's a case where I think context is everything and the open borders adherence who are sort of a mixture of left and right, uh, of libertarian and some kind of left wing, uh, just so anybody can come in, right? Anyone, just no borders, no guards, no nothing. You want to come in, you come in. And, uh, as recline of the New York Times, uh, kind of sandbag Bernie on this one in an interview, uh, made it his leading question and pounded him.

Well, if you like immigration, you know, working people, why aren't you for this? Um, And I wrote a piece about it that basically, as I recall, just said, what I just said, context is everything, that if you'll have an open border policy with a 7. 25 [00:54:00] minimum wage, which is worth even less now than it was then, um, and, uh, and, uh, you know, no lack of, uh, employment guarantees, or absolute, complete lack of employment guarantees and so on, It would just, you know, screw the workers of the United States, you know, offer this flood of cheap labor.

And if people come in and don't obtain ID, they can be paid less than minimum wage and so on. You know, I saw a lot of practical problems with it. But again, coming back to the system we live under, but is there a system or a vision where something like Open borders could actually work, you think?

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I think it absolutely could, it's a question of the commitment you want to make.

If I'm right, and I believe I am, that the economic benefit [00:55:00] is greater to the country to which the migrant goes

than most people have understood, then it is in the interest of the United States to facilitate that. At this point, If you open the border, my guess is you'd have a pretty hefty movement into the United States. But as people who take it seriously, the open border argument, have shown, border movements go in multiple directions.

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: Right.

RICHARD WOLFF: Uh, when conditions change, uh, so does the, uh, immigration. Europe, which has open borders to an extent among the countries in the EU, etc., etc., gives us many examples of this, uh, of this sort of thing. The French story, which I know, [00:56:00] Um, is a variation on the American. The way the French work it, and I'm not advocating this, but the way the French work it is when the economy is booming and they're short of labor and wages are going up, they allow large numbers of North Africans and now also South Africans to come into the country.

And when the economy doesn't grow. They push them back out. And so what you have is actually a moving migration in one direction or the other. And even in the United States, we've had a significant amount of out migration of people from Central America going back to Central America and When they've lost their jobs, when jobs have become, uh, difficult to obtain in recessions, and so on.

The Real Reason Trump Is Demonizing Immigrants Part 2 - The Lever - Air Date 10-11-24

DONALD TRUMP: [00:57:00] You know, the governor is a Democrat and he's a radical left Democrat, and he's not too popular right now because they're going to take over a lot more than Aurora. They're going to go through Colorado, take over the whole damn state by the time they finished.

Unless I become president, they won't last long.

BREE: A radical democrat?

PAUL KAROLYI: He's talking about our governor, Jared Polis.

DAVID SIROTA: Okay, can we just, first of all, talk about one thing that, well, many things. There's a lot of misinformation about what's going on in Aurora, and I'm sure we'll discuss that in a second. But let's just talk the pure politics of this.

Aurora is a Republican run city.

BREE: Yeah.

DAVID SIROTA: They made a big deal over the Republicans taking it over. There are barely any Democrats left in that city government. So, just the MAGA movement ripping on Aurora It's wild. It's like Yo, it's your city. It's like

BREE: them ripping on Colorado Springs. Like, where do you think you are?

DAVID SIROTA: Like, the governor, like, [00:58:00] what is he, what about the city that this is allegedly, I'm gonna underscore allegedly, that this is all allegedly happening in? Like, they made a big deal of, like, MAGA taking it over. So

BREE: it's goldfish brain, though. They don't remember. I don't know.

DAVID SIROTA: To me, I don't even like a remember.

It's like what the government of Aurora literally is right now today.

PAUL KAROLYI: Yeah,

DAVID SIROTA: it's really weird. It is very

BREE: weird.

PAUL KAROLYI: Well, well, Kaufman is saying he would love for Trump to visit. He says he wants he now wants after weeks of he was so back and forth on this whole Venezuelan gang thing. He was like, it's a huge problem.

Then he was like, we made the arrests and he was like, it's overblown. And anyway, But he said he would love to see Trump visit because he wants the opportunity to set the record straight and show the candidate that quote, this is in the Colorado sun, we've dealt with the situation from a law enforcement perspective.

So he doesn't want to talk politics anymore. It sounds like

DAVID SIROTA: I mean, the thing is, is that my takeaway from all of this is, first and foremost, there is a serious housing [00:59:00] crisis. I mean, at the root of this is an out of state developer, excuse me, owner, property owner, uh, with properties in disrepair.

Properties in disrepair tend to create all sorts of problems, right?

BREE: Also, they're making money off of people living in squalor because these are the folks that will rent these places because they need housing so badly. It's the

PAUL KAROLYI: exact same situation with the Haitian immigrants in Ohio. I made this point on the show two weeks ago, but both of these political hysterical narratives the conservatives are rolling out, they're both boiled down to the housing crisis in this country.

DAVID SIROTA: Also, the police department. continues to say that while they can't say that there's not one single person affiliated with a gang somewhere in Aurora, the police department continue continues to consistently say, this is not a gang problem, not a Venezuelan gang problem. I don't think the police department [01:00:00] has any motive to lie about this.

That right? I mean, the police police departments can lie and do lie. But about that specific fact, is this or is this not a Venezuelan gang problem? What would the motive be for the police department to lie about that? If somebody has evidence that contradicts that, that would be great to see. But why? Why are we sort of brushing aside that the police continue to say that this is not fundamentally a Venezuelan gang problem?

BREE: I love this quote from, uh, Trump said in Aurora, Entire apartment complexes are being taken over by armed Venezuelan gangs with weapons the likes of which even the military doesn't see. Sir, have you seen the military?

PAUL KAROLYI: Is he for gun control? Yeah, this is like one of those things where, like, if you actually listen to what he says, it's like, What does he actually think about this stuff?

Like, what does he actually care about? These

BREE: are vicious, violent people. I mean, it's like, It's just racism. It's just old school racism. That's

DAVID SIROTA: all. That's all it is. Now, I will also say, look, I read a stat that it was [01:01:00] 40, 000 people in the sixth congressional district have moved in, in the last year, many of them immigrants.

And look. That's a huge influx of new people for a city, and it's going to sort of stress city services, it's going to stress the housing situation, I mean, that, how to deal with that, you can do what Trump is doing and just be just a straight up racist about it, or you can actually be. try to deal with the influx of people.

And I feel like what this all represents to me is an inability to have a mature conversation about, you know, population migration. It's just straight up lowest common denominator. Racism, uh, for electoral purposes, I don't think it'll work, but then again, like, I'm, I'm an eternal optimist, uh, and, you know, I mean, it's a pretty dark period of time right now, like I could [01:02:00] imagine it working, not for Colorado, not, not electorally in Colorado.

This is not an outcome. Yeah, we're like a stage for this, right? Like, uh, for the rest of the country.

The Truth About Immigrants and the Economy - Robert Reich - Air Date 7-2-24

ROBERT REICH - HOST, ROBERT REICH: Immigrants are good for the economy and our society. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. For centuries, immigration has been America's secret sauce for economic growth and prosperity. But for just as long, immigrants have been an easy scapegoat. One of the oldest, ugliest lies is to falsely smear immigrants as criminals.

We have a new category of crime. It's called migrant crime. It's just not true. Crime is way down in America. Anyone who says otherwise is fear mongering. And whatever crime there is, is not being driven by immigration. Immigrants, regardless of citizenship status, are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated for committing crimes than U.

S. born citizens. Maybe that's why border cities are among [01:03:00] America's safest. Immigration opponents also claim immigrants are a drag on the economy and a drain on government resources. They want the free stuff and they're coming here to get it and it's not right. Quite the opposite. The major reason immigrants are coming to America is to build a better life for themselves and their families, contributing to the American economy.

The long term economic benefits of immigration outweigh any short term costs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that adding more immigrants as workers and consumers, including undocumented immigrants, will grow America's economy by about 7 trillion. And those immigrants would increase tax revenue by about 1 trillion, shrinking the deficit and helping pay for programs we all benefit from.

Immigrants of all statuses pay more in taxes than they get in government [01:04:00] benefits. Research by the Libertarian Keto Institute found that first generation immigrants pay 1. 38 in taxes for every 1 they receive in benefits. This is especially true for undocumented immigrants, who pay billions in taxes each year, but are excluded from almost all federal benefits.

After all, you need documentation to receive federal benefits. And guess what undocumented immigrants don't have? And of course, one of the most common anti immigrant claims also isn't true. They're taking your jobs and they're creating lots of problems. They took our jobs! They took your jobs! No, immigrants are not taking away jobs that Americans want.

Undocumented immigrants in particular are doing some of the most dangerous, difficult, low paying, and essential jobs in the country. Despite what certain pundits [01:05:00] might tell you, immigration has not stopped the U. S. from enjoying record low unemployment. And as the baby boomer generation moves into retirement, young immigrants will help support Social Security by providing a thriving base of younger workers who are paying into the system.

The fact that so many immigrants want to come here gives America an advantage over other countries with aging populations, like Germany and Japan. What's more, immigrants are particularly ambitious and hardworking. They're 80 percent more likely to start a new business than U. S. born citizens. Immigrant founded businesses also impressively comprise 103 companies in last year's Fortune 500.

And immigrants continue to add immeasurably to the richness of American culture. We should be celebrating them, not denigrating them. We should be opening legal pathways to citizenship, not [01:06:00] closing them. It's time to speak the facts and the truth. We need your help. Immigrants to keep our economy and our country vibrant and growing.

They're not poisoning the blood of our nation. They're renewing and restoring it.

SECTION C - OTHERING

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Up next, Section C: Othering.

'Folks are scared' Springfield residents reeling from the fallout of Trump's immigration lies - Deadline - Air Date 9-19-24

DONALD TRUMP: I'm going to go there in the next two weeks. I'm going to Springfield and I'm going to Aurora.

You may never see me again, but that's okay. Gotta do what I gotta do. Whatever happened to Trump? Well, he never got out of Springfield.

NICOLLE WALLACE - HOST, DEADLINE: The mystery in that clip to me is why are they clapping, right? It's unclear what any of that was. Um, I think I know, but the ex president is. undoubtedly adding fuel to the fire for the people who live and work and have to try to survive and raise their families in [01:07:00] Springfield, Ohio, by talking about planning a visit that the Republican mayor warns would be a quote, extreme strain on the city resources.

Trump continues to ignore calls from local and state officials in his own party to stop fanning the flames of this baseless, debunked racist conspiracy theory about people who live there eating the family pets. To that point, his MAGA allies are now descending on Springfield, where, remember the sky, Vivek Ramaswamy is hosting what he calls an immigration town hall there later today.

The city itself is reeling from the recklessness of these lies. Our next guest reports that Clark County Democratic Party volunteers are now facing threats. From far right groups while canvassing for the election and in response to the bomb threats at the schools, the schools in Springfield are telling students to be careful of false information while state troopers sweep the school buildings twice a day.

Joining our conversation, NBC News Correspondent Shaq Brewster, [01:08:00] out in Springfield, Ohio, and Lifelong Ohian and Managing Editor of WYSO Southwest, Ohio's community owned radio station, Chris Walter is here with us. Alicia is still here as well. Um, Chris, tell me what it's like there.

CHRIS: Well, it's, um, It's been pretty hectic the last week.

Um, you know, this is a community that has faced a lot of challenges for years and years. And, you know, the Haitian Americans here have been a part of that community for, you know, the last five years. And, uh, you know, they've been creating businesses. They've been, uh, you know, working jobs. Uh, they've been going to school.

They've, you know, they've become a part of the community. And so, uh, really, right now, things are just tense. There's a sense of anxiety in the air. Um, there continue to be bomb threats every day. We're going on six or seven days in a row. Um, you know, like you said earlier, Governor DeWine and Mayor Rue [01:09:00] resources are stretched thin.

The Ohio State troopers have been called into the city to kind of help keep the school secure. But You know, when I was on Tuesday, when I was sitting in the parking lot of one of the schools, there were parents running into the schools to pick up their kids after they heard about a new rumor of a threat on Facebook.

So everyone's just really on edge. And yeah, there's there's just a lot of uncertainty about what's going to come next.

NICOLLE WALLACE - HOST, DEADLINE: Do people feel, um, do they understand why they're in the middle of the presidential race with 50 days to go? Do they understand that the lie that, that, that people like you, people have done the work to debunk the lie that nobody that follows the truth believes that anyone's Labrador retriever is at risk?

I mean, do they, do they, has it shattered their feeling that they're welcome in this country?

CHRIS: I think it depends on the person. I've been able to speak with a lot of Haitian American folks over the last week. But, you know, I've been reporting on this issue since 2020. [01:10:00] Um, it's not even an issue. I've just been reporting on the reality that, you know, Haitian Americans are moving to our area.

Um, and, you know, kind of what the, you know, they're dealing with and, you know, the both the challenges and the successes they've had. So there are some folks that have talked about moving back to florida. I think there's a real misconception that these people are illegal immigrants or illegal aliens.

They're not. The vast majority are transplants, people that lived in florida or long island and decide to move to Springfield Ohio because of a cheaper cost of living and an opportunity to start their own businesses here. So some folks are talking about moving back to places where there's a larger Haitian American community.

Um, but other folks are talking about, you know, sticking it out and being resilient and they, you know, that this too will pass because a lot of people have, they have started businesses, they've started families here. Um, so it's, you know, they're in, they don't want to leave, right? They care about this community, they care about Springfield.

NICOLLE WALLACE - HOST, DEADLINE: mean, what's amazing, Alicia, is that they, they're neither of those things, right? [01:11:00] They're, well, I mean, but that is what Donald Trump and J. D. Vance are calling them. And J. D. Vance knows better. He knows that whether you have They're

ALICIA - MSNBC: his constituents. They're his constituents. They know, he knows what temporary protective status is.

He understands. But I want to take us to a moment in the debate where Donald Trump Was at was talking about how he was spreading a lie that immigrants are coming and stealing jobs and says, you know You know who it's the worst for black Americans and Hispanic Americans He was trying to to drive a wedge Between those of us are who are here with paperwork and those of us who are not and I think part of what?

Springfield has illustrated so sadly is that once that lie is out there, it attaches to all of us, right? To be anti Haitian is to be anti black, to be anti Latinos at the border is to be anti Latinos at the interior of this country, which they're doubling down on by saying they want to deport 11 million people who are living on the interior of this country.

So if he's trying to call to you and [01:12:00] say, don't worry, you will be protected. You will be special. You will be different because you have paperwork. They are now saying. That is not true. Temporary protective status. J. D. Vance is still calling you an illegal alien. They see no distinction between people who are here without papers and people who are

NICOLLE WALLACE - HOST, DEADLINE: shack.

I want to play some of your great interviews since you've been on the ground there. Let me do that first.

CLIP: So it was a very terrifying feeling, but I was also enraged because I know that a lot of it is rooted in lies. Against the community that has shown me a lot of love. All this activity with the bombing threats and stuff, I mean, it's has a little bit of an impact on the kids.

They're kind of scared. What's going on right now is really chaotic and hectic. Everybody having a right to live in peace, and this is just disrupting our peace. And there's men. These people are nice people. They're [01:13:00] good people.

NICOLLE WALLACE - HOST, DEADLINE: Sheck Brewster, you're on the ground there, um, for us. Tell us what you're hearing.

SHAQ BREWSTER: Yeah, Nicole, I think one of those conversations that our team had with parents who were dropping their kids off to elementary school, one of the elementary schools that was evacuated last week because of that hoax threat. One of the parents said he didn't know how to explain a bomb threat to his six year old and he tried to sanitize it a little bit and tried to still explain.

And the six year old started crying to him wanting to go to school, but also just scared and fearful of going to school. And that's the word I continue to hear in the conversations I've been having with people. Folks are fearful. Folks are scared about the reality. Of course, it's the threats that we've been talking about, the bomb threats that we've targeted.

Elementary schools, high schools, campuses. Uh, yesterday it was a grocery store and a Walmart, but it's also the fear that something else could happen because you [01:14:00] continue to hear this rhetoric. You continue to hear these false, these debunked and nasty claims, uh, continue to be made. I spoke to the manager of a Creole restaurant in town, and he told me that people are still calling up, uh, his restaurant and saying, Hey, what's the cat special today?

Are you still serving that dog? Uh, That I'm hearing about just hateful calls that he's dealing with. And as he's dealing with that, he's also dealing with members of his community, other immigrants fearful of their reality, fearing that not only they can face a threat, uh, just existing in Springfield, but fearing if Donald Trump is elected And that temporary protected status, that is what is keeping them in a legal, uh, status here, a legal immigration status here in Ohio, if that is revoked.

What that means for them when they have purchased homes when they have started businesses. So there's a lot of fear that you're hearing on the ground and it's fear based on very different things, but all rooted. [01:15:00] It seems it seems from that lie.

‘Dangerous’ Trump's immigration 'fear-mongering' spreads lies to boost his campaign - The ReidOut - Air Date 9-28-24

Donald Trump has forced another issue into the center of the campaign with a lot of help from right wing media, including Fox. His running mates admitted lies, the internet and social media, and conspiracy theories cooked up by literal white supremacists. That issue, of course, is immigration. Donald Trump knows he can't win the election based on the crappy job he did as president, or his frankly crazy ideas for another administration, like spiking the cost of everything we buy through tariffs.

So instead he's going with fear of immigrants. Ironically, [01:16:00] immigration is how modern America was built, right? Both during and after slavery, someone had to replace all that free labor and immigrants fit the bill. Most of us here today, unless you are indigenous American, come from a family of immigrants.

And yet there's always been resistance by the old immigrants to the new people. There was the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s, the America First Nazi Curious Movement in the 1930s, and now we have Donald Trump, who has decided to make fear mongering about immigration the center of his entire campaign, with fascistic rhetoric like promising the largest mass deportation operation in history and promising it would be a bloody story, spreading racist lies about immigrants eating people's pets.

And even talking about giving immigrants serial numbers, Nazi style. At this point, his entire plan is trying to scare people into voting for him, despite two of his three wives being immigrants. And just to remind you, as we talk about this, [01:17:00] border crossings are actually down to the lowest levels in four years.

Violent crimes also weigh down across the country. And everything you hear on right wing media to suggest otherwise is a lie. There is no migrant crime wave. Immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than people born in the U. S. They also don't eat pets. But the facts don't matter to Trump. Instead, he just keeps ramping up the rhetoric more and more every day.

Here's what he said today at what was supposed to be a speech about the economy in Michigan.

DONALD TRUMP: These are killers. These are people at the highest level of killing. They'd cut your throat. And they won't even think about it the next morning. A lot of gang members, they take their gangs off the street, like in Caracas, Venezuela, the criminals have all been brought to the United States.

She let our American sons and daughters be raped and murdered at the hands of vicious monsters. She let American [01:18:00] communities be conquered. They're conquering your communities. We have to get them the hell out of our country. Cause they've ruined, I mean, they're ruining the fabric of our country.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Okay. And then on the other side of this adjudicated sexual assaulter slash rapist and 34 count felon on the other side of that ironic dude, you have vice president Kamala Harris, the daughter of two immigrants.

Right now, she's in the swing state of Arizona visiting the Southern border for the first time since she became the democratic nominee. Harris met with border patrol agents and will receive a briefing on efforts to curb the flow of fentanyl, you know, presidential stuff. Now compare that to Donald Trump's super awkward meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier today.

Later this hour, the VP will also speak on immigration, where she'll likely highlight her record prosecuting transnational gangs and drug traffickers as California Attorney General. She's also expected to go after Trump for killing the [01:19:00] bipartisan border deal earlier this year, just because he wanted to run on the issue.

But despite all of this Recent polling has shown a majority of voters say they trust Trump more when it comes to dealing with the border. A man who doesn't know the difference between political asylum and an insane asylum and whose plans to deport every immigrant or anyone who just looks like an immigrant would send our economy into a free fall because fear whether real or irrational can be an effective political tactic.

The question now for America is have we gotten to the point where we would destroy our own economy? And walk willingly into a Hitlerian dictatorship because of the fear Donald Trump and his MAGA cronies are perpetuating solely for their own political benefit. Joining me now is Olivia Troy, a member of Republicans for Harris, who previously served as the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor to former Vice President Mike Pence.

And Ray Suarez, host of the [01:20:00] podcast On Shifting Ground, an author of We Are Home, Becoming American in the 21st Century, and Oral History. An apt book, Ray Suarez. I am going to start with you because this is the irony of all of this. Is that this is a country that wouldn't exist in its present form without immigrants.

It certainly wouldn't without slavery, but set aside slavery. That's not immigration after that. When the slaves were free, they still needed workers. So they went all around the world and they attracted people here literally to work because workers are what built the economy and what built the country.

And yet each new group of immigrants says, Oh, we don't want those new people. Oh, gosh, we don't want them. You're even seeing that. Uh, Mr. Suarez among some Latinos who also want to shut the border and kick people out and even mass deport them. Why is that?

RAY: But you know, critically, Joy, part of this story is that the first century plus of immigration was almost solely from Europe.

And then As [01:21:00] America law, American law changed in the 20th century, people started to come here from more places in the world. So that created a bifurcated, stratified immigrant population in this country where most of the new people are non white, and most of the people with pictures of their grandparents and great grandparents, sepia toned photographs, lovingly kept on mantelpieces, those people are almost exclusively European.

And that sets up a difficult Social change for us now as the new folks, nine out of the 10 sending countries of people born in another place in the world are sending non white immigrants to the United States. That's a really important part of understanding the unease we're having about this right now.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Yeah, and I mean, Olivia, during the Trump administration, when you were working in the administration, I mean, Jeff Sessions, when he was Attorney General, he is an open supporter of the 1927, [01:22:00] I believe, Immigration Act, which essentially was, to Mr. Suarez's point, the goal of it was to shut down immigration from everywhere, but Europe was to say, we don't even want that.

Southern Europeans. They didn't even want Italians. They certainly didn't want Asians. They certainly didn't want Africans, North Africans, et cetera. The idea was to whiten immigration. And of course it was Reagan who did the opposite. 3 million people given open amnesty by Ronald Reagan. And those people were largely non white.

They were largely Mexican migrants. So, so how do you square a party where Ronald Reagan did amnesty or George Herbert Walker Bush was very open about saying, we welcome immigration. We want immigrants. And where George W. Bush said the same and even made positive noises about Muslim and Arab immigration to this.

OLIVIA TROY: Well, I think the fact of the matter is that that Republican party of the past is gone, Joy. I mean, that's the bottom line. Um, what it is today is a complete fear mongering, anti immigrant sentiment. And, you know, you mentioned Jeff [01:23:00] Sessions. I brought back a lot of memories of the immigration meetings I was in.

I, you know, Spent all four years of the Trump administration working the immigration portfolio when we could spend hours talking about the things that I witnessed and the things that were said. And it wasn't Jeff Sessions. I'll be very clear. I could just remember Stephen Miller was a big proponent of all these things.

And so when I hear actually Donald Trump speaking the way he is this week, the way he has in the past couple of weeks, he actually sounds like Stephen Miller did in actual immigrant immigration policy meetings at the very highest levels. I'm talking about cabinet meetings, Joy, where traditionally. You would not hear this type of language being spoken, but this is how he would speak.

He would talk in this manner and he would engage fear because that's the only thing he had. Right. And then he would push these extreme policies. And so I think in the contrast here, when we're looking at this and the Republican Party of today under Donald Trump, which breaks my heart, right, as a lifelong Republican and as a daughter of a Mexican immigrant who believed in the Republican Party of the past.

Watching what is happening here is so [01:24:00] just detrimental to who we are as a country. And it's also dangerous as we're seeing with all the threats that we're seeing throughout the country when they push these messages out.

SECTION D - SOLUTIONS

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

Prof Richard Wolff A FUTURE WITHOUT FEAR OF IMMIGRANTS Part 3 - The Zero Hour - Air Date 10-12-24

RICHARD WOLFF: I mean, I think it's a wonderful way to introduce socialism here in the United States. It's a wonderful idea. Look, it's about planning. It's about saying that our priority is to incorporate the benefits of a new technology, incorporate the benefits, if you like, of immigration, Without damaging people and and that requires planning you have to you have to plan you you can't say To the private sector you install AI when you want to and you fire X percent of your labor force And go about your business as if there's no agency, not [01:25:00] you, not the society, not the government, who takes charge.

We don't want you to fire those people. That destroys their morale. That puts, we know from, Every statistic there is that if you unemploy people, you increase their physical illness, their mental illness, their turn to drugs, their alcoholism, their, their wife abuse, their husband abuse, their child abuse. I mean, come on, the social ills that flow from unemployment are humongous and the costs of them equally so.

So it is irrational simply to incur them. And why? To secure private profit? That's not, that's not worth it. That's a bad bargain. Let's forego the private profit and make sure that we do the humane, cost minimizing thing, [01:26:00] which is to guarantee incomes and to guarantee the replacement of every worker who is found to be redundant.

Let us have a system in every workplace. If we need fewer positions, what is the system that allows those, for example, who are older to have a priority than those who are younger? Or those who have more dependents have a priority over those who have fewer? In other words, a whole system of planned adjustment.

Then we get the benefit of AI. without paying the absurd cost that is otherwise lurking. All of this anxiety about what AI is going to do has a premise that there is no program of planned job maintenance. If there were, we wouldn't be worried about it. It would be a non [01:27:00] issue. It's like saying in a community, we're worried that nobody has a public park.

No one can get out of the house. and have a picnic on the lawn. No one has a lawn. Okay, we're going to create Central Park, right in the middle of town. We knock down all the buildings, and we have grass and flowers and animals and ponds. Problem solved. Everybody can go to the picnic. This is not difficult, and if we had a voice that said it, whether it's on immigration or on AI, And I'm noticing the parallels as I talk.

I think these would be very popular positions politically for people to engage and think about. Even for one of the major parties if they lost just a bit of their mountain of timidity. [01:28:00]

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: And uh, I would summarize that all, Richard Wolff, with the phrase that popped into my head was a future without fear.

Which, which we can have, but we have to prepare for it in order to avoid that fear.

Escaping Otherism Why Dr. Seuss Could Never Find a Rhyme for Genocide Part 3 - Post Carbon Institute - Air Date 6-12-24

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Okay, let's talk about visions for for what doing the opposite might look like and

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: besides rooting for a sports team you mean Besides, okay,

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: and I think you talked about don't other another opposite is belonging, right? opposite of other Of othering.

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: I could, I could buy that.

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: So let's, let's just define belonging for a minute.

Belonging means having a meaningful voice and the opportunity to participate in the design of political, social, and cultural structures that shapes one's life. If you belong, then you have the right to both contribute and to make [01:29:00] demands upon the society and, and. political institutions. And so by this, we're talking about not just belonging to a small ingroup, but belonging to society, you know, more broadly, it's going outside of the completely homogeneous group,

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: right?

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: And the idea of belonging is radical, because it requires mutual power, right? It requires access for everyone opportunity for All the groups and the individuals within a shared container.

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Yeah. Like that, that's it, right? It requires those with power to give up and share some of that.

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Or just to say like, well, that's our goal.

Our, our goal, we have power, but our goal is to be sharing that power and to listen to others. And I think we have to be very careful then about who we elect and do they have those values or not? I would say, okay, the need to belong is of course, fundamental and universal to human survival and.

Flourishing. And so bonding is part of surviving and thriving as a human. And there's these consistent findings, right, of infants and children. You can have all the nutrients and physical care [01:30:00] set up, but if you don't have love and emotional bonds, you're stunted in brain development and IQ and impulse control and emotional empathy as well as your physical growth.

So it's absolutely critical that, that people feel that they belong to something.

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Okay, so if belonging is the opposite of othering and we're going to promote belonging, let's look at what are the elements, what, what, what makes it up and I read from the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley that there are four elements, okay?

So the, the first of these is that belonging requires inclusion. This is probably the most obvious, but something I want to point out is you can be included somewhere. But still feel like you, you don't belong. So including is sort of a necessary step, but it certainly isn't sufficient. Uh, you know, an example would be, uh, Jason, you belong to a male only tennis club, right?

Why

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: are you talking? I know it's not,

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: let's pretend it was the [01:31:00] 1930s and it was male only. Okay. And you started inviting women to participate. They can play

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: sports.

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Yes. Okay. Okay. Don't get into trouble. I'm pretending it's the 1930s. Okay. Sorry. I'm being ridiculous. But that's the thing. If women are treated as outsiders or tokenized or even you're expected to serve as kind of the representative of all women everywhere, then we're not really getting past other ring at that point.

But I

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: understand,

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: but it's the first step is mixed

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: doubles is a great game. It is. It's fine. Okay,

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: so belonging, you know, that's one element. Belonging also requires a sense of connection. And of course, that's subjective, but When an institution or an organization or a community engenders feelings of attachment and fondness, safety, warmth, that creates that sense of connection and belonging that's really critical for people.

JASON BRADFORD - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: And it also requires visibility or recognition and My wife tells me this all [01:32:00] the time, but the simple act of being seen, heard, and understood can be quite powerful for making people feel that their social group is respected and valued.

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: And I think it's a particularly true for groups that have been long marginalized.

Yeah. And there can be, you know, often situations for people where, because they've never really felt that they had a voice at the table, it's not just a matter of saying, Oh, now you have a voice. It's really trying to encourage that in, in creating a sense of trust. That, that gets back to that sense of connection because people need to feel like they can actually trust to be able to feel recognized.

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Okay, so we've got inclusion, we've got connection, we've got visibility or recognition, and then the fourth element, maybe stepping it up even farther. is agency. Belonging requires agency. And that means that people have a voice and a say, they have a meaningful degree of influence over how the group or the institution operates.

[01:33:00] And it doesn't mean that when People who are formerly marginalized come into the group that any demand or anything they ask is going to automatically be incorporated or change the group, but it does mean that it would be considered that you would have a legitimate listening, weighing, and then, you know, maybe you would have a compromise or an amendment to how the group operates, but that agency is key for belonging.

ASHER MILLER - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: So part of doing the opposite to othering or otherism is practicing anti othering. So we should talk a little bit about what that looks like. And I would say it begins with a commitment to not just tolerating or respecting differences, but to ensuring that all people are welcome and that they feel like they belong in society.

It's an active form. It's not a passive form of ensuring that

ROB DIETZ - CO-HOST, POST CARBON INSTITUTE: Yeah, I think all of the anti [01:34:00] othering that we can suggest is, you have to be active. And one of the ways you can be active is to challenge, and reject negative representations and stereotypes of other social groups. You know, you hear something, see something, then you kind of got to speak out. And on the flip side of that, be welcoming to outgroups.

Send them messages that they belong, that they're welcome in your community, in your society.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That’s going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today’s topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at: 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from:

Anywhere but Washington

Verify

The Zero Hour

The Lever

Robert Reich

The ReidOut

Deadline White House

and Crazy Town

Further details are in the show [01:35:00] 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 Podcasts 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 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 [01:36:00] bestoftheleft.com.

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#1663 Recovering from Disaster(ous) Policy Amid Disinformation: Hurricanes and Wild Fires at the forefront of our climate emergency (Transcript)

Posted by · October 15, 2024 5:30 AM

Air Date 10/15/2024

[00:00:00]

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

Just as COVID tended to expose the preexisting fractures and inequalities in our society causing undue harm, supercharged by disinformation, so do natural disasters. And the impact of disinformation and conspiracy has only grown in recent years.

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include:

Unf*cking The Republic

The BradCast

Democracy Now!

CounterSpin

Alex Wagner Tonight

All In w/ Chris Hayes

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there’ll be more in four sections:

SECTION A - NATURAL DISASTERS

SECTION B - INTERSECTIONAL ISSUES

SECTION C - POLITICS

SECTION D - TRUMP AND DISINFORMATION

Election Denials_ Asheville, Israel & Inequality. - Unf*cking The Republic - Air Date 10-25-24

MAX - HOST, UNFTR: A relative of mine who works in the renewable energy financing sector said something a couple of years ago that really stuck with me.

He [00:01:00] and his wife were thinking about having a child and evaluating the best places to start a family, while keeping their career prospects open. Now, as a New Yorker, I'm used to these conversations all along the age spectrum because of the insane cost of living here. And it seems like 9 out of 10 relocation conversations involve somewhere in the southeast of the United States. So-and-so moved to Florida. Our friends just bought a place in South Carolina, twice the size, half the price. There's a ton of New Yorkers in North Carolina. It just feels like home. Blah, blah, blah.

But my relative wasn't thinking that way. According to the models he and his team had built, a band of real estate from upstate New York, all the way through Quebec, will have more favorable climate conditions in the coming decades.

Investing down south was simply more of a risk for the large scale projects they work on, because, you know, climate change. North Carolina in particular has seen a huge influx of New Yorkers. In fact, New Yorkers make up the largest [00:02:00] percentage of transplants in the state, and one of the idyllic places we often hear about is beautiful Asheville, North Carolina.

SKIT: Asheville, it's a magical artsy southern futopia bubble. These blue mountains inspire you to try new things. Like doing mountain pose on top of a mountain, or blowing your own glass then drinking your craft beer out of it. There are sound baths, forest baths, and luxurious spa baths. And the food? Have you ever planned your day around a biscuit?

We can describe Asheville, but to really feel it, you kind of have to be here. Explore Asheville dot com.

CLIP: North Carolina is cleaning up from the worst flooding ever on record for the state. More than 100 people are dead from Helene, a number that's still expected to rise. Hundreds more are missing and roughly 2.1 million customers are without power across the region.

At least 57 of those who died are from Buncombe County, North Carolina. That's where Asheville is.

I haven't seen my kids. I'm tired. I'm [00:03:00] hungry. I still have no power. I have no gas to get to my kids. I don't know where to get gas. So there's that.

MAX - HOST, UNFTR: Asheville is one of the areas in the United States that has been billed as a so-called "climate haven" or, quote, "receiving zones of climate migration," as they call it.

Building on the success of this type of campaign and possibly even the models my relative and his team were building, cities such as Madison, Wisconsin; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Buffalo, New York; and Burlington, Vermont have latched onto this idea as a marketing tool.

But flash floods in Vermont have become more common in recent years due to warmer weather and more precipitation. Buffalo's infamous snowstorms are deadlier than ever. Wisconsin experiences an average of 23 tornadoes per year, and it's not even in quote unquote "tornado alley." And though Asheville is located inland, Hurricane Helene's intensity caused extensive damage, highlighting the [00:04:00] vulnerability of mountainous regions to hurricanes.

As the storm made its way across the southeast, heavy rainfall overwhelmed rivers and streams leading to severe flooding in Asheville and the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. The French Broad River, which runs through Asheville, swelled beyond its banks, inundating homes, businesses, and infrastructure. Many parts of the city were submerged, and residents faced displacement as floodwaters entered the neighborhoods.

Roads were washed out. and landslides became a dangerous reality due to the saturation of the soil in the region's steep terrain. The devastation was compounded by the isolation of some communities, as fallen trees and landslides blocked major roads, making rescue and relief efforts difficult. In rural areas surrounding Asheville, farmland and livestock were also heavily impacted, leading to, as of yet, unknown long term economic hardships.

This week in the vice presidential debate between J. D. Vance and [00:05:00] Tim Walz, The candidates were pressed on the issue of climate change against the backdrop of the devastation in North Carolina. Now, each man expressed sorrow at the tragic events before moving coolly into the same old talking points we've been hearing for years.

Vance said he didn't want to argue about, quote, "weird science." But said if one were to believe that carbon emissions are to blame for climate change, then the answer is to reshore manufacturing. And then stated that we're the, quote, "cleanest economy in the world." Walz made sure to hammer home the point that we're producing more oil and natural gas than ever before, and that the Biden/Harris administration created more manufacturing jobs.

After burnishing the country's resume on clean energy and oil and gas production, he concluded saying, we can do it all. But now we need to, quote, "start thinking about how do we mitigate these disasters?"

In The Future of Denial, author Tad DeLay writes, quote, "Perhaps our descendants look back on the lack of urgency [00:06:00] in the long 21st century as the great dithering," end quote.

It seems we've normalized the talk of climate change already to such a degree that growing our manufacturing base is seen as a logical answer to battling the effects of it. DeLay speaks to this level of normalization by recounting Kim Stanley Robinson's dystopian novel, New York 2140. Quote, "Set in its titular city and year, multi-meter sea level rise overcomes a seawall and permanently inundates Lower Manhattan. Instead of abandoning the city, people occupy buildings that occasionally collapse into eroded foundations. They travel by gondolas and skywalks, by boats instead of taxis. They trade financial instruments indexed to sea level rise and property values. All normalized. Robinson pitched the story as an absurd extension of capitalism beyond ecological limits, but it's not a prediction. Science fiction isn't about the future. It's the now, [00:07:00] turned up a notch."

Meteorologist Guy Walton on Hurricane Milton's threat to Florida - The Bradcast - Air Date 10-8-24

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: Over the past 15 years, he notes, North Carolina lawmakers have rejected limits on construction on steep slopes, which might have reduced the number of homes lost to landslides. They blocked a rule requiring homes to be elevated above the height of an expected flood.

They weakened protections for wetlands, which increasing the risk of dangerous storm runoff and slowed the adoption of updated building codes, making it harder for the state to qualify for federal climate resilience grants, the ones that Project 2025 wants to do away with entirely. Those decisions, notes the Times, reflect the influence of North Carolina's home building industry, which has consistently fought rules forcing its members to construct homes to higher, more expensive standards that, according to Kim Wooten, an engineer who serves on the [00:08:00] North Carolina Building Code Council, the group that sets home building requirements for the state.

Quote, The Home Builders Association has fought. Every bill that has come before the general assembly to try to improve life safety. She said many of whom are themselves, many of these lawmakers who are themselves home builders or have received campaign contributions from the industry They vote for bills that line their pockets and make their home building cheaper, she says.

In 2009 and 2010, lawmakers from the state's mountainous western region wanted statewide rules to restrict construction on slopes with a high or moderate risk of landslides. Their legislation failed in the face of pushback from the home building and real estate industries. Efforts to weaken building standards in North Carolina picked up [00:09:00] steam after Republicans won control of both houses of the state legislature back in 2010.

In 2011, lawmakers proposed a law that limited the ability of local officials to account for sea level rise in their planning. Again, so much for small local government. Let's tell them what they can and cannot do. At least if it helps our political cause. And then two years later, lawmakers overhauled the way North Carolina updates its building codes.

That change attracted far less attention than the sea level rule. which I think we might have covered on Green News Report at the time. Oh yes, we did. But this, in fact, this updating of the building codes would prove to be more consequential when it came to Helene. Every three years, the International Code Council, a non profit organization in D.

C., issues new model building [00:10:00] codes developed by engineers and architects and home builders and local officials. Most states adopt a version of those model codes. Which reflect the latest advances in safety and design. And again, they come out every three years, but in 2013, the North Carolina legislature now dominated by Republicans decided that the state would instead update their codes every six years.

Instead of every three. Sure, there may be helpful, new codes that help to keep our constituents safe, but let's ignore them for three years, shall we? The change proved very important because in 2015, the International Code Council added a requirement that new homes in flood zones be built at least one foot above the projected height of a major flood.

North Carolina did not adopt that version of the building code until [00:11:00] 2019. Since they were then only updating the codes every six years at that point and by the way, even then the state stripped out the new flood prevention standard that was in those new codes rather than make elevation mandatory in flood zones around North Carolina, the state decided that the requirement should only apply if local officials chose to adopt it, which is quite a racket because there were first they're preventing local officials from doing what they actually want.

And then they blocked the state from issuing mandatory codes, leaving certain things up to the states. A recipe, frankly, for nothing ever getting done, leaving homeowners in danger, raking in the dough. In the meantime, for the home builders that are giving money to the lawmakers, it's a pretty sweet deal.

That decision most likely left more homes exposed to flooding, according to experts cited in Flavel's reporting. The Republican legislature [00:12:00] took other steps as well that may have exacerbated flooding. For example, in 2014, lawmakers passed laws to weaken protection for wetlands and which can help reduce flood damage by absorbing excess rainfall.

Three years later, the legislature made it easier for developers to pave over green spaces, increasing the risk of flooding caused by heavy rains. Last year, efforts by Republican lawmakers to ease the states, to ease the state's building codes further. that erupted into confrontation with Governor Roy Cooper, who is a Democrat.

The legislature passed a law that essentially blocked the states, blocked the state from adopting new building codes until, wait for it, 2031. So they used to do it every three years. Then they moved it to every six years. Now they don't want to have new building codes again until 2031 [00:13:00] in North Carolina.

Cooper vetoed that bill saying it would wipe out, quote, wipe out years of work to make homes safer. But. Republicans, who have super majorities in the state legislature, they overrode Governor Cooper's veto. And how much will that cost homeowners today? After Helene? I don't know. Hope folks in North Carolina are asking.

The new law has made it harder for North Carolina to qualify for FEMA grants to fund climate resilient construction projects, which prioritize states with up to date building codes. The governor's office has estimated that North Carolina has lost some 70 million in grants because of the 2023 law. And then just this past summer, the Republican legislature in North Carolina again passed a series of reforms, [00:14:00] weakening the state's approach to building standards.

The law gave the legislature rather than the governor. the authority to appoint or approve members of the state's powerful building code council. It removed the requirement that the council include licensed architects. What are we going to do with architects on the council? And it included other changes like preventing the state from requiring that electric water heaters be located on campus.

Off the ground in order to protect from flooding. Governor Cooper again, vetoed that legislation and yes, you guessed it. Republicans again, use their super majority to override the governor. Now, why is this happening? Here's one reason. The Home Builders Association has contributed some 4. 3 million to North Carolina politicians over the past three decades, with Republicans receiving nearly twice as much as Democrats, according to data from [00:15:00] OpenSecrets, which tracks political spending.

And here's where it really, here's where it's really a racket. Really a racket for the home buyers in all of this. They save money when they're building houses and other buildings because of the, easing of the codes. And when they have to rebuild, they make a lot of money again because they failed to the thing, the houses they built failed to stand up to completely predictable disasters.

So guess who gets the contracts to rebuild? Quite a racket.

Six Factory Workers Feared Dead In Tenn. After Being Swept Away During Hurricane Helene - Democracy Now! - Air Date 10-3-24

NERMEEN SHAIKH - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: We look now at the impact of Hurricane Helene. Power outages and water shortages continue across six southeastern states. The death toll from the storm is nearing 200, with hundreds more still missing and presumed dead. This includes six plastic factory workers in Erwin, Tennessee, who were swept away as floodwaters [00:16:00] swelled around their workplace after their boss reportedly threatened to fire anyone who left during the storm. This is the family of an Impact Plastics worker named Lidia Verdugo.

FERNANDO RUIZ: [translated] She was still working when she called me, and she told me that it was really raining. And I told her to leave. But she told me they weren’t telling her anything.

COMMUNITY TRANSLATOR: If they would have told them to leave earlier, maybe we would be here — they would still be here today, and we wouldn’t be looking for them. But when they tried to leave, it was too late.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is investigating how some workers said Impact Plastics threatened to fire anyone who left ahead of the storm. This is Robert Jarvis, one of the survivors.

WCYB REPORTER: What would you say to the company?

ROBERT JARVIS: Why did you make us work that day? Why? We shouldn’t have worked. We shouldn’t have been there. None of us should have been there. And that’s what I should have said to them.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Impact Plastics said Monday in a statement it had monitored weather conditions [00:17:00] during the storm and that managers had dismissed workers, quote, “when water began to cover the parking lot and the adjacent service road, and the plant lost power,” unquote.

For more, we’re joined by Cesar Bautista, campaign director at the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, has been working in Erwin, Tennessee, to assist with relief efforts after Hurricane Helene.

Cesar, welcome to Democracy Now! We only have a few minutes. Can you explain what happened? This plastics factory is right next to a river. What were they told? Why were they so afraid they’d be fired if they didn’t come to work?

CESAR BAUTISTA SANCHEZ: Yes. Hi. Good morning. Thank you so much for having me on.

Yes. So, a lot of the family members, you know, expressed, just like on the clip that you showed, that they were told, like, not to leave yet, that they were still asking questions, like, you know, “Should we leave or not so far?” They kept going back and forth, I believe, with one of the secretaries at the office. But as [00:18:00] they were trying to get answers, they were noticing that the water was getting higher and higher, like in the parking lot area. And, you know, once, like, the factory did make the decision of telling people, “OK, you can go,” it was just too late. And the water had rised too high, to the point that they couldn’t move their cars anymore and try to get to safety.

NERMEEN SHAIKH - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And so, what are you calling for, Cesar? You’re obviously advocating on the rights of these workers. What are you calling for?

CESAR BAUTISTA SANCHEZ: Well, you know, in these moments right now, it’s very difficult, you know, and we are standing in solidarity with all the families that they lost a loved one. And like most importantly, what we’re calling is just to be sure that there’s equitable access to the recovery plan that the city and the state have initiated, so just making sure, you know, that there’s no language barriers, that everybody has the equal amount of access to any kind of resources that are being provided, just to be sure that the families have what they [00:19:00] need in order to rebuild their lives after this hurricane.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, talk about how typical this was. Now, again, to emphasize, Impact Plastics said, “At no time were employees told that they would be fired if they left the facility.” But if you can, overall, talk about the fear of migrant workers? And also, we’re talking about a vast area of six states right now. You work with the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. We don’t really know how many people have died, close to 200 at this point quantified, but hundreds more missing. And where are people going for refuge?

CESAR BAUTISTA SANCHEZ: You know, so, here in Erwin, Tennessee, a lot of people right now have been going to the county high school for any kind of refuge or resources that they’re looking for. That has been a great source also. The local [00:20:00] church, one of the local churches, St. Michael, has been just a great supporter for the community to gather, to mourn, to just really process everything that has been happening. And so, that has been, you know, where people have been going mainly just to try to find some comfort and support with the community. I would say, too, you know, that the community, overall, has shown a very great — they’ve come up as a unified forum, you know, just, like, to really support each other and just to keep each other together throughout this tough process right now.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And the understanding about climate change — for many immigrants, one of the reasons they came to this country, fleeing the devastation of climate change in their country, and then dealing with it today here. All the reports are saying the intensification, the rapidity with which this storm [00:21:00] intensified, due to climate change.

CESAR BAUTISTA SANCHEZ: Right. And so, you know, with climate change, as we see this — you know, this is starting to be more of a pattern now here in Tennessee. You know, we had the hurricane just a couple days ago. Last December, we had a tornado go through Nashville, Tennessee. And then, two years before that, there was another tornado. And so, we’ve noticed that this is starting to become a pattern.

And so, what really we’re urging, you know, our municipalities and, like, in the state, not just in Tennessee, but across the country, is that they have to have, like, you know, those evacuation plans for each city, but also now for each company that has, like, all these workers there, in order to be sure that people are safe,

Derek Seidman on Insurance and Climate, Insha Rahman on Immigration Conversation - CounterSpin - Air Date 10-4-24

JANINE JACKONS - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: In your super helpful piece for Truthout, you cite a Washington Post story from last September. Here's the headline and [00:22:00] subhead. Quote, "Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow. Some of the largest U. S. insurance companies say extreme weather has led them to end certain coverages, exclude natural disaster protections, and raise premiums," close quote.

I think that drops us right into the heart of the problem you outline in that piece. What's going on? And why do you call it the insurance industry's self-induced crisis?

DEREK SEIDMAN: Thank you. Well, certainly there is a growing crisis. The insurance industry is pulling back from certain markets and regions and states because the costs of insuring homes and other properties are becoming too expensive to remain profitable with the rise of extreme weather. And so we've seen a lot of coverage in the past [00:23:00] few months over this growing crisis in the insurance industry.

But one of the critical things that's left out of this is that the insurance industry itself is a main actor in driving the rise of extreme weather through its very close relationship to the fossil fuel industry. And in this narrative in the corporate media, the insurance industry on the one hand and extreme weather on the other hand are often treated like they're completely separate things, and they're just coming together, and this quote unquote "crisis" is being created. And it's a real problem that the connections aren't being made there.

So I guess a couple of things that should be said first, that the insurance industry is -- the fossil fuel industry and its operations could not exist without the insurance industry. We can look at that relationship in two ways.

So first, of course, is through insurance. The insurance giants -- AIG, Liberty Mutual and so on -- they collectively rake in billions [00:24:00] of dollars every year in insuring fossil fuel industry infrastructure, whether that's pipelines or offshore oil rigs or liquefied natural gas export terminals, this fossil fuel infrastructure and its continued expansion -- this simply could not exist without underwriting by the insurance industry. It would not get its permit approvals. It would just not be able to operate. It couldn't track investors and so on. So that's one way.

Another way is that -- and this is something a lot of people might not be aware of -- but the insurance industry is an enormous investor in the fossil fuel industry. Basically, one of the ways the insurance industry makes money is it takes the premiums and it pools a chunk and invests those. So it's a major investor. And the insurance industry across the board has tens of billions of dollars invested in the fossil fuel industry. And this is actually stuff that anybody can go and look up, because some of it's public. So for example, the insurance giant AIG, because it's a big investor, it has to [00:25:00] disclose its investments with the SEC. And earlier this year, AIG disclosed that, for example, it had $117 million dollars invested in ExxonMobil, $83M invested in Chevron, $46M in ConocoPhillips, and so on and so on.

So on one hand, you have this sort of hypocritical cycle where the insurance industry is saying to ordinary homeowners who are quite desperate, we need to jack up the price on your premiums, or we need to pull away altogether. We can't insure you anymore. While on the other hand, it's driving and enabling and profiting from the very operations, fossil fuel operations, that are causing the extreme weather in the first place, that the insurance industry has been using to justify pulling back from insuring just regular homeowners.

JANINE JACKONS - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: This is a structural problem, clearly, that you're pointing to, and you don't want to be too conspiratorial about it, but these folks do literally have dinner with one another. [00:26:00] These insurance executives and the fossil fuel companies.

And then I want to add, you complicate it even further by talking about knock-on effects that include making homes uninsurable. When that happens, well then that contributes to this thing where banks and hedge funds buy up homes. So it's part of an even bigger cycle that folks probably have heard about.

DEREK SEIDMAN: Yeah, absolutely. This whole scenario, it's horrible because it impacts homeowners and renters. If you talk to landlords, they say that the rising costs of insurance are their biggest expense and they are in part taking that out on tenants by raising rents, right?

But it also really threatens just global financial stability. With the rise of extreme weather and homes becoming more expensive to insure, or even uninsurable, home values can really collapse. And when they collapse, aside from the horrific human drama of all that, [00:27:00] and banks are reacquiring foreclosed homes that in turn are unsellable because of extreme weather and they can't be insured.

The big picture of all this is that it leads to banks acquiring a growing amount of risky properties, and it can create a lot of financial instability. And we saw what happened after 2008, as you mentioned, right? With private equity coming in and scooping up homes.

And so yeah, it creates a lot of systemic financial instability, opens the door for financial predators like private equity and hedge funds to come in.

JANINE JACKONS - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: And it seems to require an encompassing response, a response that acknowledges the various moving pieces of this. I wonder, finally, is there responsive law or policy, either on the table now or just maybe in our imagination, that would address these concerns?

DEREK SEIDMAN: There are organizers that are definitely starting to do something about it. And there are some members of Congress that are also starting to do something about it. For [00:28:00] this story, I interviewed some really fantastic groups. One of them is Ensure Our Future. And this is a broader campaign that is working with different groups around the country and really demanding that insurers stop insuring new fossil fuel build out, that they phase out their insurance coverage for existing fossil fuels, for all the reasons that we've been talking about today.

At the state level, there are groups that are doing really important and interesting things. So one of the groups that I interviewed was called Connecticut Citizen Action Group, and they've been working hard in coalition with other groups in Connecticut to introduce and pass a state bill that would create a climate fund to support residents that are impacted by extreme weather. Connecticut's seen its fair share of extreme weather. And this fund would be financed by taxing insurance policies in the state that are connected to fossil fuel projects, it's also a kind of disincentive to investing fossil fuels. In New York, there a coalition of groups and lawmakers just [00:29:00] introduced something called the Insure Our Communities bill. And this would ban insurers from underwriting new fossil fuel projects, and it would set up new protections for homeowners that are facing extreme weather disasters. I spoke to organizers in Freeport, Texas with a group called Better Brazoria. And these are people that are on the Gulf coast, really on the front lines. And Better Brazoria is just one of a number of frontline groups along the Gulf coast that are organizing around the insurance industry, and they're trying to meet with insurance giants and say to them, look, what you're doing is we're losing our homeowner insurance while you're insuring these risky LNG plants that are getting hit by hurricanes and fires are starting, and trying to make the case to them that this is just not even good business for them.

And then more recently, you've seen Bernie Sanders and others start to hold the insurance industry's feet to the fire a little more, opening up investigations into their connection to the fossil fuel industry, and how this is creating financial instability.

So I think this is becoming [00:30:00] more and more of an issue that people are seeing is a real problem for the financial system. It's something that we should absolutely think about when we think about the climate crisis and the sort of broader infrastructure that's enabling the fossil fuel industry to exist, and continue its polluting operations that are causing the climate crisis and extreme weather. So I think we're going to see only more of this going forward.

Trump's politicized lies about Helene recovery calls to mind his abysmal record handling disasters - Alex Wagner Tonight - Air Date 10-4-24

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Okay. In August of 2020, Donald Trump was campaigning for reelection amid a series of ongoing crises. We were in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. The summer saw a wave of protests and uprisings over the murder of George Floyd. And to top it all off, the state of California was experiencing its largest wildfire season in recorded history. And it was that last crisis that prompted Donald Trump to say this during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

DONALD TRUMP: And I see again, the forest fires are starting. They're starting again in California. I said, you [00:31:00] got to clean your floors. You got to clean your forests. They have many, many years of leaves and broken trees, and they're like, like so flammable. You touch them and it goes up. I've been telling them this now for three years, but they don't want to listen.

The environment, the environment. But they have massive fires again in California. Maybe we're just going to have to make them pay for it.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Maybe we're just going to have to make them pay for it. Trump bizarrely and falsely claimed that wildfires were somehow the result of California officials not cleaning the floors of the forest. And then threatened to make California pay for its own disaster relief. For the record, Trump's claim has been thoroughly debunked. The state of California owns only 3 percent of its forests. The rest are owned by private groups or the federal government. And federal agencies do take regular steps to mitigate the buildup of debris in the forest. I don't know if that includes cleaning the [00:32:00] floors, whatever that means.

But that reality didn't keep Trump from repeating this claim over and over again. The previous year, when California wildfires were also raging, Trump treated an angry screed at California Governor Gavin Newsom. This is what it said: "I told him from the first day we met that he must clean his forest floors. And then he comes to the federal government for financial help. No more."

The year before that, it was the same thing, almost like a California wildfire tradition. That year, Trump tweeted, "Billions of dollars are given each year with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments."

That was how Donald Trump acted when he was president, during moments of national disasters. He blamed the libs and threatened to withhold aid. He is still doing it. Just two weeks ago at a fundraiser in California, Trump threatened to withhold future fire aid [00:33:00] if Governor Gavin Newsom didn't agree to change the state's water usage rules.

DONALD TRUMP: And Gavin Newscomb [sic] is going to sign those papers. And if he doesn't sign those papers, we won't give him money to put out all his fires. And if we don't give him the money to put out his fires, he's got problems. He's a lousy governor.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: That threat is not just bluster. Trump has actually tried to do this before.

A bombshell new report today from E&E News reveals that in 2018, President Trump actually did try to withhold disaster aid from California, just because it was a blue state. To punish the Americans who didn't vote for Trump. Mark Harvey, a former senior disaster relief official in the Trump White House, told E&E News that he was only able to get Trump to approve disaster relief for California by pulling up voting results from conservative-leaning Orange County to show President Trump that his own supporters had been heavily affected by the [00:34:00] fires. Harvey told the outlet, "we went as far as looking up how many votes Trump got in those impacted areas to show him these are the people who voted for you."

And it wasn't just California. E&E News also found that as president, Donald Trump directed FEMA to cover 100 percent of the costs for disasters in conservative areas, like the Florida panhandle, while objecting to and slow walking aid for blue territories, like Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands after Hurricane Maria. Though Trump did manage to throw the people of Puerto Rico a few paper towels.

President Biden responded to this new reporting about Trump's nakedly political decisions on disaster aid, writing on X, "You can't only help those in need if they voted for you. It's the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it."

Right now, the Biden administration is in the middle of trying to deal with the latest natural disaster to hit this country. [00:35:00] The full extent of the damage from Hurricane Helene has yet to be realized. But right now, NBC News reports that over 220 people have died as a result of that storm, and hundreds of people are likely still missing.

More than a week after Hurricane Helene, nearly 700,000 people are still dealing with major power outages. Loss of connectivity has made it difficult, and in some cases nearly impossible to reach people. Residents are also dealing with the health risks posed by the lack of access to clean water and toxic contamination that has resulted from the storm.

FEMA has already processed 45 million dollars in direct assistance to the people affected by Hurricane Helene. But amid that ongoing relief effort, Trump has decided to use this disaster as fodder for his political campaign.

At a rally last night, Trump falsely claimed that hurricane victims are being denied relief money because the Biden administration [00:36:00] spent FEMA dollars on housing for migrants. Now, for the record, this is totally false. The White House has responded in a statement saying no disaster relief funding at all was used to support migrants, housing, and services. None. At. All. Trump may just be projecting here. The Washington Post reports that back in 2018, Trump himself diverted money from FEMA so that the Border Patrol could use it for migrant detention. Trump's claims about the Biden-Harris response to Hurricane Helene seem to follow the bizarre Trump rule that every accusation is a confession.

But that hasn't stopped the spread of misinformation among Trump supporters, especially online, where Trump has been aided by his pal Elon Musk in a quest to propagate lies. In addition to letting misinformation about the storm spread wildly on his platform, X, Elon Musk himself has been amplifying fake news.

[00:37:00] Things have gotten so out of hand here that FEMA has had to make its own landing page on the FEMA website dedicated to debunking these rumors about recovery efforts.

'Enraging' Republicans ‘suddenly’ see disinformation problem amid hurricane crisis - All In w/ Chris Hayes - Air Date 10-9-24

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: Far right kooks and conspiracy theories of all sorts have been part of our political landscape for a very long time now. But they're more powerful than they've ever been in my lifetime. They're on social media. They're on Fox. Some now hold elected office, even at the very top. Now, whether they do it out of cynicism or self delusion, or like they've just got brain worms, they're all happy to promote outrageous disinformation about the libs and the globalists and immigrants and lots of other people who can't defend themselves. But then, every once in a while, their ceaseless lies present a practical problem to the Republican political establishment they serve.

There's a moment that I think exemplified this back in November of 2020. After Joe Biden won, and Donald Trump started spinning lies about a rigged result, there was still, remember, [00:38:00] a pair of critical Senate runoff elections in Georgia which would determine party control of the Senate. And Ronna Romney McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman at the time, struggled to convince Georgia Republicans to vote because they falsely believed their votes wouldn't be counted.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Machines are switching the votes. And we go there in crazy numbers. And they should have won, but then there's still...

RONNA ROMNEY MCDANIEL: Yeah, we have to, we didn't see that in the audit. So, we've got to just... that evidence I haven't seen. So, we'll wait and see on that.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How are we gonna give money and work when it's already decided.

RONNA ROMNEY MCDANIEL: It's not decided. This is the key.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How do we know?

RONNA ROMNEY MCDANIEL: It's not decided. If you lose your faith and you don't vote and people walk away, that, that will decide it.

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: Oh really? Oh now, you don't like that disinformation, Ronna Romney McDaniel. Now you're standing up to tell them, no, no, no, it's not decided, it's not rigged. Now it's time to tell the truth that there will be bad consequences. [00:39:00] Republicans lost both those elections, by the way.

And so now here we are watching Hurricane Milton hitting Florida while still dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in the southeast. And I keep thinking of that Ronna Romney McDaniel clip because you've got government officials of both parties and apolitical civil servants struggling to combat the rampant misinformation that far right politicians, pundits, and influencers are spreading about the storms and disaster response.

From Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene posting repeatedly about "they can control the weather", to Elon Musk, the die hard Trump supporting owner of the website formerly known as Twitter, using his site and his personal account to spread lies that officials say are hampering recovery efforts. Listen to some of the lies that Congressman Chuck Edwards decided he needed to rebut. To be clear, he's a Republican whose district covers some of the parts of North Carolina that were worst hit by helines. He felt the need to tell his own constituents that no, Hurricane Helene was not geo [00:40:00] engineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock, adding, "nobody can control the weather".

He also stressed that FEMA has not diverted disaster response funding to the border or foreign aid. More on that particular lie in a moment. Also stating that no, FEMA is not going to run out of money and that FEMA cannot seize your property or land. That's a conservative Republican congressman trying to save his constituents from disinformation spreading primarily among Republicans and conservatives on social media.

He's not alone. When social accounts started spreading a false rumor that FEMA was hiring private security contractors in Florida to keep evacuees away from their homes, Well, it was debunked online by Christina Pushaw, a staffer for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, saying "Spreading LIES like this could have serious consequences. If people in an evacuation zone see this and decide NOT to evacuate, despite [00:41:00] warnings from state & local emergency management, they are unnecessarily putting their own lives (& lives of first responders) at grave risk".

If Pushaw's name sounds familiar, it's because she has spent much of her career spreading antisemitic, anti-gay, anti-media conspiracy theories and fake news. She helped popularize the term "groomers", a disgusting term, to condemn anyone critical of Florida's Don't Say Gay law. Now, imagine how bad the misinformation has to be for Christina Pushaw to say enough is enough, you're endangering people's lives. Same can be said for Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who just last week, as we quoted on the show, was telling his social media followers, "you can't trust the Biden White House and Bureau of Labor Statistics on jobs numbers. Another fake jobs report out from Biden Harris government today. All the fake numbers in the world aren't going to fool people". But this week, Rubio was on Twitter, telling his followers the path of Hurricane Milton mirrored what federal weather officials told him was a worst case scenario. You see, now he needs his constituents to [00:42:00] trust federal civil servants and follow their guidelines to survive the storm. Just days after he told them that the same federal civil servants lie. See the problem here, right? And of course, the ultimate example of this is the big lie circulating about FEMA.

DONALD TRUMP: Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars on housing for illegal migrants.

MATT GAETZ: Housing assistance under FEMA, almost any reasonable person would think, would be available for Americans who are displaced from their houses in a time of disaster, but that has been used on illegal immigrants.

JD VANCE: How can we afford to give billions of dollars to illegal immigrants in this country, but we've got to go back to the well to provide disaster relief for our own citizens? That's a disgrace.

STEVE SCALISE: Look, they can't even take care of people in North Carolina from a hurricane because they're too busy spending our taxpayer dollars taking care of illegal aliens.

SEAN HANNITY: This is the Biden Harris administration caught red handed [00:43:00] dedicating a massive amount of money that was supposed to be there for emergency relief for Americans in North Carolina, Georgia and elsewhere to dispense to illegal immigrants while hurricane ravaged victims all over the country are left out to dry.

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: To be clear, it's not like one of these things where it's a matter of interpretation or a kernel of truth. It's an absolute lie. Stone cold lie. Started by Donald Trump, then spread by his running mate. His supporters on Capitol Hill, all the lackeys you saw there, Steve Scalise, the number two man in Congress, his supporters on Fox. The lie says that FEMA lacks the resources for disaster victims because it spent the cash on undocumented migrants. It is a lie that, as you just heard, was debunked by a Republican congressman from the affected area.

So, here are the facts. FEMA has enough funding in the short term to address immediate needs for both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, and there is no funding connection between shelter for migrants and funding for [00:44:00] disaster relief. There is no intermingling of funds between these two programs. That's not me saying it. It's the Republicans in charge of the House Appropriations Committee. In a fact sheet they shared yesterday with Chad Pergam, the congressional reporter for Fox, because they felt the urgent need to push back on a lie that is being spread by Fox News and by Donald Trump. A lie started by their candidate for President, Donald Trump, and amplified, as you see, by his campaign surrogates, passed along on the social media site owned by the billionaire funding one of his super PACs.

Republicans who suddenly see a conflict between the welfare of their constituents and the toxic effect of their party's propaganda and also don't want to fly back to Washington for an emergency session to fund FEMA when FEMA has money. Now, struggling to explain to their audiences that, well, up is up and down is down and water is wet and 2 plus 2 equals 4. And you could laugh at it when their disinformation was mainly just costing them votes in winnable elections [00:45:00] like Georgia. But now it could cost lives in a massive, complex disaster recovery. It is enraging that it took a crisis of these proportions to convince politicians who politicized everything that some government functions need to be above politics.

Hurricane Milton Menaces Florida; Fact Report after Helene with NC blogger Tom Sullivan - The BradCast - Air Date 10-7-24

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: Now, to their credit, the North Carolina State Board of Elections, they were out very quickly after the storm announcing that they would be sending out mobile, so called Elections In A Box kits to affected areas to help register folks to vote and to process absentee ballots. Now the City of Asheville itself, as I said, is very Democratic leaning area, but the communities around it in, the mountains and so forth, I understand are very Republican leaning.

First, I know you were in touch today, I believe, with a local county elections chief out there in Asheville. What did you learn from him as far as how they can be preparing for an [00:46:00] election amid everything else that's going on, with an election just less than a month away now?

TOM SULLIVAN: Well, I mean, early voting starts next week. And we're having to scramble right now with the damage and the loss of power and water at a lot of the sites. They're having to scramble right now. They're not going to have a meeting until tomorrow to, well, basically we were going to have 14 early voting sites open for two and a half weeks. We will have fewer. How many fewer and what hours they will be run, that all has to be hashed out and on the fly.

But the Board of Elections just issued a press release this afternoon. And what they're having to do is all the planning for early voting and the voting operations have to be submitted to the state board and then approved. And once [00:47:00] that's approved, this pretty much locked in. Well, they're having to be more flexible for this. And so they're allowing for, I'm looking like 13 counties, they're going to be giving them a little more flexibility to change those plans on the fly to suit the fact that some of the sites we were planning on using may not be available. We have 80 precincts on election day. Some of those may have to be combined and all that's yet to be determined.

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: After speaking with the local county elections chief, Tom Sullivan, in Asheville today, do you have confidence that everyone in North Carolina, or at least everyone in Asheville, who wants to vote will be able to vote this year? Do you feel that they are nimble enough in the state, across the state, to accommodate this disaster that's gone on? And by the way, you guys just have put in a new photo ID restriction. A lot of folks, [00:48:00] I suspect, lost their photo ID in the storm, in the wind, in the rain. Do you have confidence that voters in North Carolina of any and all stripes will in fact, be able to cast their vote if they want to this year?

TOM SULLIVAN: Well, that's the plan. We've got one of the best boards in the state. We've got some of the best voter turnout in the state. Our problem is we're not as big as Raleigh or Meck or Charlotte. But, we do a really good operation here. And we don't expect any other kinds of shenanigans, if you want to read into that. But we will do the best we can. And we're really very effective at this. So I'm not too worried about that. But your comment about loss of I. D., that could pose a problem. And I haven't had a chance, this just came up, I haven't had a chance to read through what sort of flexibility the local boards will have [00:49:00] regarding handling that problem.

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: On that, I might be able to help you, Tom, because while you had no power, I was trying to keep my own eyes on this. And apparently, if you identify yourself, if you don't have an ID, if you lost your ID, but you come from one of the affected counties where there is a state of emergency, you will be allowed to sign an affidavit And I believe fill out a provisional ballot and then vote, and that should be counted. But of course, there's always concerns about provisional ballots. Those are easier to not count, easier to toss than, real ballots. So that's a concern. But as I understand it, that is currently the process for those counties that are currently, I guess, under a state of emergency, which is a bunch of counties in North Carolina.

In theory, folks should be able to vote if it's something they can even think about. [00:50:00] Karen in Oakland, calls in to ask, "Has Tom seen Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson anywhere, like tossing paper towels at storm victims?" Yes. is he out and about? People who don't know he's kind of the loony, to put it nicely, Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina who is running against the Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein for governor this year. Has Mark Robinson showed up in Asheville yet?

TOM SULLIVAN: I've seen a headline that he was out making some comments about the disaster, but I think it was something that popped up while I was completely cut off from comms, so I didn't get to see it. But I saw a photo and a headline, but I don't even know where he was when he made his comments.

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: It sounds like you are doing well. It sounds like the community there is pulling together, even if the rest of the world is [00:51:00] going batty around you, but do you have any sense—it may be too early, I realized, Tom—but do you have any sense of how all of this may affect the presidential race this year? Any overall understanding of that?

TOM SULLIVAN: I think Mecklenburg got added to one of the disaster counties. That's Charlotte. Their voter turnout has historically not been as good as it could be. And I believe that some of the out of state groups and some of the folks here are being encouraged to go help with their voter turnout. And if they could improve voter turnout in Charlotte, that could turn the election. Because...

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: In favor of the Democrats.

TOM SULLIVAN: In favor of the Democrats, a heavily Democratic county that doesn't turn out. A lot of people there are recent immigrants, [00:52:00] people who transition through Charlotte for jobs and then out again, it's not quite as cohesive a county as Wake County, where Raleigh is, which is a... government's the business. It's a company town. Their voter turnout is always terrific. Ours is always terrific. And that's been a weak spot and they've got a real good program. They've got a new chair there who's raising a ton of money and I think he's going to be getting a lot more help than they've used to, they're used to seeing. And, I've got my fingers crossed.

Note from the Editor on how to work with distrust in government

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We’ve just heard clips starting with:

Unf*cking The Republic looking at the hurricane impacts in Asheville

The BradCast discussed building codes and the impact of regulation

Democracy Now! highlighted the factory workers washed away by floodwaters

CounterSpin looked at the role of insurance companies and their relationship to fossil fuels

Alex Wagner Tonight reported on Trump’s politicizing of disaster recovery

All In w/ Chris Hayes explained the [00:53:00] impact of disinformation amid the election and natural disasters

And The BradCast discussed the impacts of the storm on the election in North Carolina

And those were just the top takes, there’s lots more in the deeper dives sections, but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all manor of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process.

Members also get chapter markers in the show but, depending on the app you use to listen, may be able to use the time codes in the show notes to jump around the show similar to chapter markers, so check that out.

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 [00:54:00] continue on to the deeper dives half of the show, I have just a quick thought on the decades-long effort to delegitimize the government and the effects its had.

I saw a reference to people commenting online about FEMA, calling them - effectively - a scam and refusing to donate to them. Wouldn’t donate to them. That’s not just a demonstration of how disinformation leads people to turn against those in government trying to help, it also demonstrates the sort of all pervasive idea that every group, every institution or program is doing their work while constantly asking for donations.

FEMA doesn’t ask for donations. Government doesn’t ask for donations. They’re funded, their people are paid salaries and now they’re here to help. That’s all.

Everyone knows that money can be misspent within a private or nonprofit organization, and there’s relatively little accountability. And so, if you’re [00:55:00] doing supposedly good works but you’re also soliciting donations at the same time there’s that question that arises about how well those donated funds are being used.

Are the executives getting paid way too much? What’s percentage of donations actually gets to those in need? These are the questions that always come up and haunt nonprofits while they’re fundraising.

That’s a complicated issue that I have lots of thoughts about - for another day - but what’s clarifying is the contrast with the relative simplicity of the government.

It’s funded through appropriations from congress, employees are paid based on a legally established tiered salary system - they don’t have to spend money on advertising asking for donations - in fact, they just have to advertise so that people know about the support the government is trying to provide.

But in our society that has spent so many decades demonizing government, people, exemplified by those anti-FEMA commenters refusing to donate to the cause, are [00:56:00] trapped in a worldview that sees all organizations related to the government as grifters when the reality is much more often the exact opposite.

Now, the one drawback to FEMA only dropping into a disaster area after the fact is that they don’t have the kind of local knowledge and connections that organizations on the ground might.

The Atlantic wrote a piece recently, “America Needs a Disaster Corps” and argues for a sort of hybrid model for the spending power of the government to be partnered with local organizations that, for the most part, already exist in communities across the country but don’t have the resources they need when disaster strikes.

Recognizing that disasters are only going to get more frequent and devastating, tapping into existing organizations and networks is probably the fastest way to ramp up preparedness while also reducing the effect of disinformation thanks to the nature of local organizations to have the credibility that many wouldn’t afford FEMA. [00:57:00]

We’re big fans of meeting people where they are. Usually that just means rhetorically, framing political arguments in ways that speak to peoples existing understanding of their needs - but it can also mean designing programs in a way that addresses the reality of a mistrust in government even if we know that mistrust is unfounded.

Maybe this hybrid Disaster Corps idea is just what the climate crisis is calling for.

SECTION A - NATURAL DISASTERS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, we’ll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics. Next up:

SECTION A - NATURAL DISASTERS

Followed by SECTION B - INTERSECTIONAL ISSUES

SECTION C - POLITICS

and SECTION D: TRUMP AND DISINFORMATION

Meteorologist Guy Walton on Hurricane Milton's threat to Florida Part 2 - The Bradcast - Air Date 10-8-24

DEZI DOYEN - CO-HOST, THE BRADCAST: Florida is bracing for another intense storm. The second major storm in just two weeks as we go to air Hurricane Milton in the Gulf of Mexico rapidly intensified into an extremely dangerous [00:58:00] category five storm fueled by the record hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Caused by man made global warming, which also rapidly intensified the deadly, wildly destructive Hurricane Helene just over a week ago. Milton will hit Florida's beleaguered west coast on Wednesday, likely in the Tampa Bay region, which hasn't seen a major storm since 1921 and is particularly vulnerable to storm surge.

Officials warn that debris still on the streets from Hurricane Helene Could become projectiles where Milton makes landfall, will make the difference between impacts that are extremely destructive versus catastrophic.

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: A huge difference.

DEZI DOYEN - CO-HOST, THE BRADCAST: Mandatory evacuations have been ordered, and Tampa Bay Mayor Jane Castor was blunt about holdouts on CNN.

CLIP: Helene was a wake up call. Uh, this is literally catastrophic and I can say without. any dramatization whatsoever. If you [00:59:00] choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you're going to die.

DEZI DOYEN - CO-HOST, THE BRADCAST: And yes, climate scientists see the fingerprint of climate change in both Milton and Helene record hot gulf of Mexico.

fueling each storm's size, intensity and rapid intensification. Rising sea levels have also increased the severity of storm surge and scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that climate change caused over 50 percent more rainfall during Hurricane Helene because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture.

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: The fact that the mayor is sort of downplaying Helene to, uh, note how bad Milton can be gives you a kind of an idea because Helene was terrible.

DEZI DOYEN - CO-HOST, THE BRADCAST: Yes, it was. The Biden Harris administration has already approved Florida's request for federal assistance for Milton and FEMA is already on the ground pre positioning resources.

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell says the agency is ready for Milton [01:00:00] amid its ongoing disaster assistance for victims of Helene. The death toll from Hurricane Helene is now more than 230 people across six states.

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: Yes, but is Donald Trump pre positioning his lies? about the next hurricane rolling into Florida.

DEZI DOYEN - CO-HOST, THE BRADCAST: Well, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump certainly has unleashed a relentless torrent of disinformation for his own political gain, which has been amplified by Fox News and social media

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: and is endangering people.

DEZI DOYEN - CO-HOST, THE BRADCAST: Yes, he's outright lying about the federal hurricane response to Haleen.

Republican senators and governors of those states have repeatedly debunked the right wing disinformation and demanded it stop. The editorial board of the Charlotte Observer published a scathing editorial saying, quote, shame on Donald Trump for Haleen tragedy with political lies. FEMA's Criswell was on ABC News warning that Trump's disinformation [01:01:00] campaign and lies are demoralizing first responders and harming the victims of Hurricane Helene.

CLIP: This dangerous, truly dangerous narrative is creating this A fear of trying to register for help. You know, people need resources and we need them to get into the system

DEZI DOYEN - CO-HOST, THE BRADCAST: long term. A new study released late last week suggests that hurricanes that strike the United States can result in thousands of additional deaths in future years.

The researchers publishing in the journal Nature analyzed 85 years of excess mortality data, finding as many as 11,000 additional deaths after. each storm and the death rates in affected states remain elevated for up to 15 years after a storm makes landfall. The researchers theorize it may be due to the health effects of stress, new pollutants and toxins released into the environment, loss of income, and lasting damage to homes, healthcare systems, [01:02:00] economies, and social networks.

They also found tax revenue declines after a storm, reducing healthcare and government services.

Complete Neglect Thousands Not Evacuated from Florida Jails & Prisons Ahead of Hurricane Milton - Democracy Now! - Air Date 10-10-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Jordan, explain what the situation has been now in Florida for prisoners.

JORDAN MARTINEZ: Yeah, the ongoing situation, Amy, in Florida has been one of almost complete neglect and fiction writing by the Florida Department of Corrections and various county sheriff’s offices, jails, etc., claiming that incarcerated people are in fact being evacuated. The Florida Department of Corrections claims 5,600, almost, incarcerated people were evacuated, but in the list of facilities that they released, the vast majority of those evacuated were from work camps, halfway houses, work release centers. And in many cases, they were evacuated to, quote-unquote, “hardened facilities” literally across the [01:03:00] street. For example, Lowell Work Camp, which is part of the Lowell Correctional Institution women’s prison, that organizers in Florida with Change Comes Now have been fighting around various conditions, Lowell Work Camp evacuated dozens of yards away to Lowell Correctional. And so, we’re seeing this fiction being raised by FDOC, as well as the county sheriffs.

We attempted to help force evacuations in multiple mandatory evacuation zones along the west coast, and we were able to achieve one evacuation of the Orient Road Jail in Hillsborough County. But Manatee County, Lee County, Pinellas County, as well as St. Johns County on the eastern coast, all left prisoners in mandatory evacuation zones in the jails.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Jordan, you mentioned Pinellas County. The sheriff [01:04:00] there stated that, quote, “It’s really not possible to evacuate the jail because of the number of inmates,” and he instead moved people to higher floors. Can you talk about that?

JORDAN MARTINEZ: I think this is, again, part of the fiction that the sheriffs and officials in Florida like to spin to project a sense of confidence in the face of conditions that are entirely unpredictable in hurricane situations. For the vast majority of hurricanes that we’ve organized around, the actually most dangerous portions of the hurricanes are not the immediate storm surges that might flood the first floor of a prison, jail or detention center. It’s actually the aftermath in the days and weeks following, in which water is cut off, access to food is cut off, power is cut off, medical supplies are cut off. And so, evacuating people to higher floors when the bottom floor is completely destroyed that [01:05:00] houses the majority of those facilities that keep the entire system running within the prison, that people need to survive, their basic living necessities, it can create conditions in which, as has been reported on Democracy Now! before, people are forced to drink water from the toilet because they have no other access. And we see this again and again and again in disaster situations.

And the fact that they are unable to evacuate people in mandatory evacuation zones, I think, goes to show the complete lack of prioritization of the lives of incarcerated people during hurricanes. And I think we can all agree, if we are prioritizing the safety of our communities, those communities must include the incarcerated people inside, that are themselves organizing on the inside to fight for better conditions and quite often being forced during hurricanes to prepare to protect their communities via forced slave labor with sandbags or in cleanup in the aftermath.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And, Jay, The [01:06:00] Intercept reports prisoners in North Carolina were left in their cells without running water or power for nearly a week, cut off from communication with the outside world and forced to keep their waste in plastic bags in their cells, from Helene. Your final comments on what needs to be done?

JORDAN MARTINEZ: Well, I think the final comments on what needs to done is there needs to be mandatory, in-place rules and regulations during evacuations when a certain category of hurricane is coming in, that require and force state and local county officials to have evacuation plans in preparation, in advance.

And lastly, I want to close with a quote from inside that we have with Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, who are the folks that reported those inside conditions. And we believe it’s very important that incarcerated people are allowed to speak for themselves in these conditions. So, this is coming out of the Florida Department of Corrections itself.

Jailhouse Lawyers Speak says, “We urge the public to [01:07:00] understand our plight as people in jails and prisons. We suffer during natural disasters in locked, dark cells, not knowing if we will survive or not. This is not just a logistical failure, it’s a profound moral failing. While entire towns are evacuated and communities band together to seek safety, we remain locked within these walls, treated as less than human. It is heartbreaking to think that while the world prepares for survival during a pending natural disaster such as Hurricane Milton, we are still treated as if we don’t matter, as if our lives can be tossed aside in the name of protocol. We must end this normalized routine. We beg the public to pay attention and have a heart of compassion.”

SECTION B - INTERSECTIONAL ISSUES

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Climate.

Corporate Greed Costs Lives During Catastrophic Flooding In Tennessee - The Majority Report - Air Date 10-1-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Death toll is already over 130. Anticipated to be more. and, you know, frankly, this is like the new normal is we have a once in 100 year storm once or twice a year. we are just simply not [01:08:00] set up for this. We are not set up for these type of changes. But here is a perfect example. I mean, how many times have we?

Heard a story like this. there were workers at a Tennessee based company called Impact Plastics. people died there because they were basically, with, Helene bearing down, a private enterprise is going to Air on the side that is going to make them the most money or, you know, not prevent them from making money.

This is the story of those buses in Katrina, the outsourcing and the outsourcing and the outsourcing, the subcontracting to private enterprise to be responsible for those buses at Katrina meant that when the guy was like, the guy with the final contract, if I send those buses and they don't need them.[01:09:00]

And I send them, two hours down the road and they're waiting out there. those buses are gone to the drivers are going to be costing me. I'm going to lose money on this private enterprises. Job number one is always make money, not protect your workers, not, create a situation for the community.

That's what it is. And, here is this, worker from Impact Plastics in Tennessee, interviewed by News WCYB.

IMPACT PLASTICS WORKER: Have you seen the statement the company sent out when you saw that? What's your first thought? It was anger hurt. It was life. It was just frustration. What really happened that day? We were we were all working and the power went out and I got a text right when the power went out from another employee saying that the parking lot was flooded.

And [01:10:00] I started walking. up towards the break room. That's where you walk out at the parking lot. And I seen the parking lot flooded and I was like, what do I do? And I told me to move my car. I said, move my car. So I moved my car to higher ground, which it was still on water. There wasn't no, no at all dry ground in the parking lot.

I got out. I said, can we leave? And the woman said, no, not until I speak with Jerry. About 10 minutes later, she came back and said, y'all can leave. It was too late. We have one way in one way out. And when they told us we could leave, the one way out was blocked off. So we were stuck in traffic on that road, waiting to see what we're going to do.

Cause everybody knew it was just one way. And then we turned around. We all felt like I turned around and some people going up this big old train road, old train road for a driver, getting up there barely and people were getting stuck trying to get up [01:11:00] there. So they see. down. So some of the other employees from another company sent us down.

They said they cut open the fence on 26. So we went down there and as we're trying to go down there, my car, I lost my car and I'm sort of floating down the river. Well, we didn't know what to do. We were in a panic mode. So the water was coming up and then we did what we had to survive. It was a guy in a four by four came, picked a bunch of us up and saved our lives.

Well, we'd have been dead too. What does that feel like now to be, you know, one of the, I guess, few that made it out? I don't know how many. It hurts. It hurts knowing that they didn't make it and I did. I don't know. I mean, it just doesn't seem fair to me that they didn't make it. What would you say to the company?

Why'd you make us work that day? Why? We shouldn't [01:12:00] have worked. We shouldn't have been there. None of us should have been there. And that's what I should have said to him. Why did you make us work when you knew, you said in your statement, you were monitoring it. Why did you make us stay and work? Um, is there anything else?

I mean, when they let us, when they told us we could leave, it was just too late. I mean, there was no way out. Some people made it out with four wheel drive, but if you didn't have four wheel drive, or if you were stuck in that line I was stuck in, it was too late. Because, I mean, like I said, my car got washed down the river.

All right, down the road. Um,

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: this is, like, reminiscent of COVID and Like I say, Katrina, the idea that these workers [01:13:00] feel so compelled and are so insecure in their status as working at this place that they can't even exercise that judgment of being able to say, like, I don't think I should go into work today.

Like that there is no margin for error for them. If they don't go into work and there's no 100 year catastrophic flood, they get fired. So if they're going to stay out from work, you better hope that's the situation that they're placed in.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, I'm not sure if they're a unionized workforce, but I would bet you Everything they're

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: not.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah,

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Tennessee

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I mean, I'm reminded of the Kentucky candle factory where eight workers died two years ago Because they weren't allowed to go home during a tornado and that same tornado also killed six amazon warehouse workers in illinois And then when you [01:14:00] mentioned covet i'm reminded of was it Dan Patrick, the Lieutenant Governor, who said that in Texas?

Where, essentially, he said that some people would have to basically be sacrificed for the economy to keep going. We said old

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: people would be sacrificed, but, then we proceeded to sacrifice both old people and, workers.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And, that's essentially how they view their work, their workers, at least in terms of how they treat them.

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: That's what the prevailing narrative is by all these, Restore the Republic grifters, like Bobby Kennedy, Russell Brand type of people. The problem with COVID was the shutdown and they didn't let businesses continue operating. Not that a bunch of people were maimed and killed by a virus.

Election Denials Asheville, Israel & Inequality. Part 2 - Unfcking The Republic - Air Date 10-25-24

MAX - HOST, UNFTR: Inequality

CLIP: the meantime, we turn to the economy tonight into this crippling strike. Tens of thousands of Union dockworkers up and down the East Coast and the Gulf, walking off the job, threatening the nation's supply chain, and of course then, the prices you could potentially pay.

MAX - HOST, UNFTR: The recent strike by dockworkers, represented by the International Longshoremen's [01:15:00] Association, is already significantly impacting ports along the East Coast and Gulf Coast.

This action, the first of its kind since 1977, is rooted in disagreements over wages and the automation of port operations, which the union argues could jeopardize jobs. The workers are demanding substantial pay increases to compensate for inflation and to oppose the growing trend of automation in port logistics.

All told, the strike currently affects 36 major ports, including key facilities in New York, New Jersey, and Florida. If the work stoppage extends beyond a few weeks, it could lead to shortages of certain goods, especially in industries like automotive and pharmaceuticals. But many companies preemptively stocked up on goods in anticipation of the strike, so the immediate consumer impacts could be limited.

As the world emerged from the pandemic, broken global supply chains had differing effects on the economy. On the one hand, it was a significant driver of inflation, though as we've demonstrated in prior episodes, multinational [01:16:00] corporations took great advantage of this phenomenon to raise prices beyond rational limits, using supply chain shocks as cover for corporate greed.

The result was a double shock to the consumer wallet. Another effect was the need to hire a great number of workers to meet pent up demand from the sudden halt to all economic activity. So taken together, in the United States at least, the economy has been incredibly difficult to read. Some areas of the economy look to be in the early stages of recovery, while others appear to be heading into a prolonged recession.

The Federal Reserve responded to inflationary pressures by increasing rates dramatically, thereby making all debt related activity extremely expensive and curbing investments. Revised employment data led the Federal Reserve to recently cut interest rates, saying that it achieved the soft landing it was looking for, and most of Wall Street and the mainstream media nodded its collective head in response to this and seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.

But all of this overlooks the [01:17:00] fact that the average American is still under an extreme amount of pressure right now. Accumulated household savings from government stimulus packages during the pandemic have all but been depleted. Consumer debt is at an all time high. There's a housing shortage and a homelessness crisis.

Republicans are blaming migrants for suppressing wages, taking jobs from American citizens, and taking all the available housing. Democrats are offering tax credits down the road to offer assistance for certain segments of the population, most of whom would be hard pressed to figure out how to apply for them.

Dock workers, like the rail workers and auto workers before them, understand the power of organizing and will either win certain key provisions or be obliterated by the Biden administration if this goes on long enough to hobble the economy. And of all the strike activity we've seen since the pandemic, this one has the potential to do immediate harm, so it's going to be interesting to see how the administration responds.

It's a [01:18:00] good reminder that the power is in the hands of the workers, but only to a limited extent. A hobbled economy could break the fragile electoral tie and produce Trump 2. 0, and there's no doubt that the organizers of the strike are keenly aware of this fact. It's solid brinkmanship that could pay dividends by inviting federal intervention on the side of workers to end this thing quickly in their favor.

Then again, the Biden administration isn't known for acting quickly, and has also come down on the wrong side of these disputes as in the case of the rail workers. The bigger reminder is that there is no plan for the American worker, not from the Democrats and certainly not from the Republicans. As they did with the Affordable Care Act, the Democrats crafted legislation and passed spending bills collaboratively and in favor of large corporations.

And it all passed because Republicans knew that as the minority, they could put up a stink for the sake of optics, but let it pass because Nothing materially changed on the ground for the American [01:19:00] worker. The calculus being that if they're successful in taking back the White House, they'll be the beneficiaries of corporate welfare programs that line the pockets of their donors.

So all they have to worry about is cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy, just like they always do.

So, what's the upshot? If you've been watching the debates or paying attention to the election messaging at all, and I know you have, unfuckers, Then you'll know that our leaders are having all the wrong conversations. Both sides are in denial about climate change, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the struggles of American workers.

There's plenty of lip service to go around, but no plan on any of these fronts that even has a remote chance of making things better. There's no such thing as a climate haven. There's no justification for funding the massacre of civilians in Gaza and now Beirut. And there's no justification [01:20:00] for promoting the inverted totalitarian state.

It's clear that the Republican Party is openly and transparently the enemy of the people. What's so utterly mystifying to me is why the Democratic Party is trying so hard to beat them at their own game. If we dodge a bullet in November and elect the Harris Waltz ticket, there will be no time to rest.

KC Tenants helps launch a national effort for tenant protections - Up To Date - Air Date 8-11-24

ZACH WILSON - HOST, UP TO DATE: So right out of the gate, in plain terms, explain the Tenant Union Federation and its mission to our listeners.

TARA RAGHUVEER: The Tenant Union Federation is a union of tenant unions, and we're banding together across state lines because we know our landlords are organized across state lines, and we've got a lot of work to do to figure out how The art and science of tenant organizing, you know, we've gotten a really strong start here in Kansas City and you spoke to some of the power that we've built and the wins that we've, uh, that we've been able to secure here, but the truth is where we've barely scratched the surface [01:21:00] on what tenant organizing could be and what it could look like.

We really see ourselves right now as in a similar, similar place to where the labor movement was at the beginning part of the last century before mass membership, before formal process. before organized money, um, and with a lot of urgent opportunity to go build a new kind of power in this country.

ZACH WILSON - HOST, UP TO DATE: Uh, tenants unions in Kentucky, Illinois, Connecticut and Montana are also a part of this federation.

How long has this been in the works and what initially inspired this as a collaboration?

TARA RAGHUVEER: In one way or another, this has been in the works for years. The unions that we're starting this federation with have been working together for several years, mostly on federal campaigns. We've been focused on getting the federal government to think about tenants, protect tenants, condition federal financing on a set of tenant protections.

We've been organizing a lot around the rent in the last several years with [01:22:00] that group of unions and several more. And We decided to take this next step because we saw a real limit on the power that we could organize if we didn't get serious about what defines a tenant union and started to apply some rigor to that organizing practice.

ZACH WILSON - HOST, UP TO DATE: So what went into determining who would be a part of the organization?

TARA RAGHUVEER: We spent a lot of time working with one another among that founding crew to try to understand what makes a tenant union, a tenant union. And it's interesting, even in your introduction of Casey Tenants, you describe us as an advocacy organization.

That's not how we understand ourselves. We understand ourselves to be a tenant union. And a union is actually something different than an advocacy organization. We think of ourselves as organizers, not activists. And to The sort of general listener, this might sound like parsing terms, right? Just a matter of semantics.

To us, the difference is actually really meaningful. Uh, the difference is about people [01:23:00] fighting for their own liberation. No one's speaking for the tenants. The tenants are speaking for themselves. In a tenant union, much like a labor union, uh, the tenants, like workers, organize their own power, bargain for their own protections, get their landlord to the negotiation table, uh, determine every strategic step, make decisions as a collective, and that's the type of thing that we're trying to figure out with this federation, how to do that better and more powerfully.

ZACH WILSON - HOST, UP TO DATE: And how is organizing at the national level different from organizing at the local level? Is it a much different operation when you're talking about something at that scale? Thank you. You're welcome.

TARA RAGHUVEER: In some ways it is. In other ways it isn't. Um, really what we're trying to do with this federation is strengthen each of our local efforts.

We have a lot to learn from some of the other unions at this founding table. I just spent a week with the tenants in Bozeman, Montana. And, you know, they're doing some things in Montana that we haven't tried to do here in Kansas City. So there's a lot to learn there. The local that is starting the federation, [01:24:00] um, from Connecticut is based out of SEIU 1199 Northeast, so they're based out of a labor union and they've experimented a lot more with structure based organizing in a labor organizing sense than we have.

So we have a lot to learn from each of these groups, um, and like I said, I think we're really just getting started.

ZACH WILSON - HOST, UP TO DATE: So you say you want to find like a standard approach to organizing across all the local unions. What do you exactly hope that approach looks like?

TARA RAGHUVEER: I hope it looks like something that can meaningfully contest with all that we are up against. And what I mean in saying that is 650, 000 people sleep outside in the richest country in the history of the world.

That to me, Is one piece of evidence about the failure of our current system. In addition to that, tens of millions of people pay over 50 percent of their income in rent. The rent is too damn high, and it has been for a long time. [01:25:00] The realities of the market that we exist in today, that is the product of a real estate industry that is more and more powerful.

They're, they're the most powerful today than they've ever been. One of the most potent and powerful forces, not only in the American economy, but the global economy. So we have to be serious about what we're up against. And We need to seriously contest as poor and working class tenants against those forces and to protect the people and most importantly to house the people.

ZACH WILSON - HOST, UP TO DATE: Uh, so you, you obviously want to get more people involved in moving forward beyond just the five unions that are involved so far. Uh, does this include starting new tenant unions in cities across the country or is it more about bringing more unions that already exist into the fold?

TARA RAGHUVEER: It'll probably look like a little bit of both, and it's not my decision to make.

I think one of the beautiful and interesting and challenging parts of an experiment like this is it's an experiment in real democracy. It's an experiment in [01:26:00] building real democratic process among people and institutions. So the Tenant Union Federation is founded by these five locals. Each of them has two representatives elected to a leadership team that will be making all kinds of decisions.

decisions about structure and strategy in answer to the questions like the ones that you're asking. So it'll be up to the leadership team to determine exactly what expansion looks like. We do plan to expand in 2025 and we're starting small on purpose, right? That wasn't, that wasn't an accident. We're starting small because we want to prioritize real methodological alignment.

over smoke and mirrors. We could have said we're starting with 50. We got all these numbers. It wouldn't have been a realistic picture of what this movement looks like right now.

ZACH WILSON - HOST, UP TO DATE: And what does that leadership team look like? How is that organized?

TARA RAGHUVEER: It's one organizer and one tenant leader per founding local.

So each union gets one vote. And again, that's an experiment in democratic process. We're kind of [01:27:00] making the road while we walk it. And that's a beautiful thing. And like I said, it's also a challenging thing. We've got a lot. of us.

ZACH WILSON - HOST, UP TO DATE: Uh, you've been behind a lot of change here in Kansas City with KC tenants and creating change federally, I expect is going to be harder.

Uh, how hopeful are you that you'll be able to accomplish the goals that you find out here today?

TARA RAGHUVEER: I'm very hopeful. I mean, I think the The joy of my life is being an organizer who gets to engage with people who are impacted by these issues every day. And those people are some of the most powerful, some of the sharpest, uh, some of the most disciplined people I've ever met in my life.

And all of that gives me hope, Zach. And I also think that The evidence is in what we've won, right? Like, I think that the hope comes from the fact that we've seen this type of change happen in Kansas City, poor and working class tenants have asserted their place here and they've started to [01:28:00] win. That's true across the country.

And even on a national stage in the last several years that These tenant unions have been working together. We've gotten the federal government focused on the rent. We're hearing presidential candidates talk about the rent for the first time in decades, maybe ever. Right. There's a new presidential ad out this week that has the rent in all caps.

People are starting to recognize this as what it is, which is what it is. One of the most significant economic issues of our time. So all of that gives me hope. We've already traveled a distance and now we need to move from message to material outcome. People's lives need to change for the better.

ZACH WILSON - HOST, UP TO DATE: And before we leave this conversation, I want to ask you to reflect on the work that you've done to get here so far and what else you hope to accomplish in 30 seconds.

What do you hope people take away from seeing the work you're leading?

TARA RAGHUVEER: The people have power. And more often than not, people just need an invitation to exercise that power. And that [01:29:00] invitation comes from vehicles like tenant unions.

SECTION C - POLITICS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Up next, Section C: Risk.

DeSantis Playing Politics With Hurricane Milton Relief - The Majority Report - Air Date 10-9-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: You know, there's so many issues involved with the, this hurricane that's barreling towards florida now. Still, my last, the last check, it's back up to a category four.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: It's been a category five. The hope is that it when it reaches landfall It's a category four by that point, but either way we're talking about one of the strongest storms to hit florida in my lifetime,

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: let's keep in mind times live coverage is saying as of now, it's a category four leading to its landfall

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: As of Monday, the anticipation was at this juncture, it would be closer to a category three, right?

And, it looked like it was losing steam. Then it sort of jumped back up. So we really don't know. we spoke about earlier, we played that, that clip of the mayor from Monday. We have no [01:30:00] response as a society in terms of providing evacuation notices. I mean, providing evacuation services, making it possible for people to evacuate, which, you know, in many ways, these storms are like COVID in that they expose and heighten failures that we have within our society that already exist.

Right, like the, What happens to your health care if you're not going into work? What happens to, you know, how do we do what happens with education when we have families who don't have the same technology, or money to spend on technology? In this instance, what happens to people who don't have the money to rent another apartment to own a car to drive out of town?

maybe they're disabled and don't have access to these things. I mean, these moments of crises [01:31:00] expose the weaknesses that we have that exist in society. Invariably, they're all around money because of the way that our society is structured. And we're going to have to address things for non crisis periods of time to make us more, durable and, strong enough to sustain through crises.

And, one of the problems that we also have at this point is as a society, a complete misunderstanding of like what happens in Congress, how things get funded, what services the federal government provides, et cetera, et cetera. Just contemplate this. Donald Trump wanted to get rid of the entire federal government's apparatus to track hurricanes.

He wanted to open the door for private corporations to do this work. Which means it's behind a paywall.

Just [01:32:00] contemplate that for a moment. And we know the Republicans, I mean, under him, he wanted to cut FEMA. The Republicans refused about another, 10 billion of a supplemental aid just a month ago to the FEMA budget. And then the super effed up notion about it is they will lie with essentially impunity.

Not saying they should be punished, but there's no accountability for it within their own sort of like ecospheres as to, I'm sure you've went over this the past couple of days, you know, payments to, people who suffered in Helene. there's no accountability in the sense that like, you know, Ron DeSantis outlawed the use of the words climate change in all of their sort of like, how do you address these things?

And so here is the, essentially Harris tried to, apparently [01:33:00] call DeSantis, in the run up to, Milton to offer support, find out what he needs, et cetera, et cetera. here she is basically retelling the story. President

KAMALA HARRIS: Sanchez, NBC is reporting Governor DeSantis is ignoring your calls on hurricanes, resources and health.

How does that hurt the situation here? You know, moment of crisis, if nothing else, should really be the moment that anyone calls himself a leader, you're gonna put politics aside people first. People are in desperate need of support right now and [01:34:00] I

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: if you recall, Chris Christie, the governor of the state I grew up in, Was photographed during Hurricane Sandy, basically putting his arm around President Obama, because Obama mobilized the federal government to help New Jersey in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

And that, I don't know, you can't, like, go back in time and say that's what killed his chances in terms of his 2016 presidential ambitions. But, at the very least, the base reacted to it in such an insane way. Like, how dare you touch Satan incarnate, Chris Christie. Or a black guy. Or, well. I mean, one and the same for the base, but like, before Trump came on the scene as the guy that was gonna talk tough and be the bully, I mean, that was Chris Christie's whole persona, an East Coast Republican that likes to talk a bunch of shit, He [01:35:00] cratered under that, and so DeSantis is trying to go the opposite way, and he's making a show of not taking Harris calls, but Harris is also making a show of the fact that he didn't take her calls, which she should, because they are playing politics, but this should be a moment where we're also talking about, like, Republicans are uninterested, for the most part, in building up systems that will mitigate the harms of this in the future.

Brian Kemp is Because if you do that Yeah.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: You're conceding that there's something going on now. Right. Which they also don't want to address.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Right, right. and, you know, it also gets in the way, I think, right now of her now two month long campaign for a moderate Republican voters. But, you know, that is the reality.

And Trump had been trying to do this and force Brian Kemp into lying to say that Biden, hadn't been answering calls from, or sorry, that, Biden hadn't called, or, so yes, that was true, answered calls from Brian Kemp, [01:36:00] Georgia's governor in, in. the response to Hurricane Helene. I don't know what the salience of this is anymore.

It's just like how can we get through to an electorate on the Republican side that thinks climate change is a hoax and like just seems to take the results of these extreme weather patterns at face value and then these Republican governors probably don't do anything for them.

DeSantis Playing Politics With Hurricane Milton Relief Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 10-9-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Let me just preface this by saying I am sympathetic to the plight of a Politician 30 days out less from an election, trying to get elected.

But, at one point

democratic politicians, and I don't anticipate that all will do this or that half, but some need to, not be afraid of politicizing these things. And I don't mean like [01:37:00] politics as a caddy sport. politics as is like selfish, but take this opportunity and I understand at this moment, it might be impossible to do.

And so, you know, don't misinterpret. Some people are going to be like, you know, a little bit oversensitive to this, but these are the opportunities to explain to people that there are certainly in this, I mean, even Bill Clinton was one of his best achievements was to basically rebuild FEMA. and George Bush came in and started to privatize all these services again.

When they talk about cutting FEMA. That's what they want to do. They want these to be private services.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And we saw how that worked

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: out with Katrina, by the way, exactly. And you want to take the opportunity. And it's it's it's not easy to express the people like this is what society is [01:38:00] about. Tampa cannot address this on

strength of having a country as large and as wealthy as ours is that we have the ability to respond to these crises. That don't hit everybody and part of it is you don't know if you're going to be one of those people.

Same concept behind single payer health insurance. Frankly, 80 percent of healthcare costs are borne by 20 percent of the people, but we don't know which 20 percent this is going to be. We don't know if it's today, it's Tampa getting hit by Milton or, you know, in a year, whether it's going to be.

I don't know, Craryville in upstate New York up in the mountains or something, or, Asheville, or, it's going to be, an extreme drought. We don't know where these crises are going to hit. And this is an opportunity for politicians to say, this is a fundamental difference between the policy orientation of these two [01:39:00] parties.

One understands that our strength as a country, our strength, as being this rich is that. We can help people when they are, in crisis one of the ways that we can help people when they're in crises is to mitigate these crises before they happen. That means build a public transportation system so that people can't evacuate.

That means mitigate, to the extent that we can now, the forces that are driving climate change. That means provide health care, provide resources, so that if somebody actually does have to, evacuate, and go rent a hotel at an exorbitant fee, 15 hours away, They're going to have at least some savings and some ability to do so because other aspects of their necessities in their lives have been decommodified.

I mean, this is a missed opportunity in that way. And I'll tell you something, you look at the polling on immigration right now. [01:40:00] And the turnaround of where the American public at is, is nuts.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: It's also a global phenomenon, I'll say, too. Like, this is a failure of, the left more broadly, I mean, liberal parties aren't really the left, but, in Europe, the right is just much more organized around this particular topic of nativism, and they've successfully incorporated Orban style politics about this with, into right wing parties throughout Europe and North America.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: But America has a unique relationship with immigrants relative to Europe, right? I mean, this country literally was built. Yes. There was no Americans 250 years ago. this country was uniquely built and the speed in which This turnabout happened far more rapid in this country than in a European country.

This has been a problem in Europe for, at least a decade. This is change of the past two or three years, and I would [01:41:00] contend it is a function of essentially Democrats leaving a vacuum, moving to the right on this as a way, instead of actually engaging in The rhetorical battle. They attempted to do what was the easy thing to do in this instance and attempt to placate this in a sway, these fears, instead of actually challenging the existence of these fears and in the short run, it may help you in the long run, you're never going to be as fashy on immigrants as the Republicans.

They're just going to move more to the right on this, where they're talking about, mass deportations. And you've left a vacuum here, that is going to end up both hurting you politically, but also in terms of like, well, economically, frankly. and I think that's [01:42:00] just a question of justice.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: It's a failure of liberalism to be able to combat fascism. I mean, this is something I think we've talked about many times. Like, the United States is unique in that it's a massive settler colonial society, different than Europe. I do think that some of those problems, remain the Democrats like they are.

This is what happens when they're basically doing campaigns and Harris's campaign. It's almost as if given that she took over the Biden campaign infrastructure. I'm not sure she had too much of a choice, and this is the path they've gone down, but it's just everything's from a focus testing perspective, run to the right on these issues, solidify your base to the right, and they haven't built up mechanisms to do.

The opposite, the party, while it's in a better position in terms of, like, delivering for people, the strategy's long term to beat back fascism is, not, they are very [01:43:00] poorly equipped. I worry about whatever this, like, they, they could win in the fall, but if they don't adjust their strategy for a post Trump world, we're in deep trouble.

SECTION D: TRUMP AND DISINFORMATION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally Section D: Trump and disinformation.

Hurricane Milton Menaces Florida; Fact Report after Helene with NC blogger Tom Sullivan Part 2 - The BradCast - Air Date 10-7-24

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: Meanwhile, as they prepare for another storm in Florida, officials in the Sunshine State and about five others are still responding to the catastrophic effects of the last one, of Helene.

Making matters worse is the fact that public officials are also being forced to contend now with widespread and persistent disinformation that is hampering relief efforts. And it is being spread by, yes, Donald Trump and Fox News and right wing Twitter, which is to say at this point, pretty much all of Twitter now known as X to some misinformation that suggests the FEMA is nowhere to be found and that the Biden Harris administration has pretty much left folks out there to die.

Particularly in Republican leaning areas, which is [01:44:00] out and out, false, and wildly dangerous. Roy Cooper, the governor in North Carolina, took to Twitter and called it a, quote, relentless vortex of disinformation dialed up by bad actors and platforms like X, or Twitter. A North Carolina Republican state official had to take to social media and plead for an end to right wing conspiracy theories about Helene disaster recovery.

Brian Beutler, in his off message newsletter today, described MAGA's Hurricane Helene lies as, quote, a trial run. for the election. Apparently it all got so bad so quickly that FEMA had to put up a rumors page on its website just to debunk the nonsense and the lies coming from right wingers via social media.

These rumors are still circulating and are still dangerous for those struggling to rebound from Hurricane Helene. But as we [01:45:00] pride ourselves here in a public service, as a public service journalism, I was hoping to share at least some of these, uh, today from FEMA, from their rumors web page that they had to post in order to respond to all of this stuff and nonsense kicked off by Donald Trump and Rick Scott and all the rest.

But now, with Milton headed to shore, I think it's even more important that folks here understand what is actually going on so they can help shut down the lies and the dangerous nonsense that many on the right, who I think have been hoping for their own, for years, for their own Hurricane Katrina, but with a Democrat in the White House so they could blame the Democrat, well, they may not have Katrina, or they may soon, but either way, they're trying to blame the White House.

Even if there is nothing to blame them for. So, uh, just a couple of these, uh, [01:46:00] for example, um, the, uh, this, uh, Donald Trump has been claiming that, uh, FEMA disaster, uh, money was diverted to support international efforts or border related issues. The fact is, according to FEMA, that this is false. No money is being deferred, diverted from disaster response needs.

FEMA's disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund. It's a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other non disaster related needs. efforts. There's also been a claim that Oh, 750 is the is what the Biden Harris administration is giving to survivors to support their recovery and that they will give no more.

Well, FEMA says this too is false. This 750 is a type of assistance that you may be approved for soon after you [01:47:00] apply. It's called serious needs assistance, and you get it almost immediately. It's an upfront flexible payment to help cover essential food, essential items like food, water, baby formula, breastfeeding supplies, medication, and other emergency supplies.

There are other. Forms of assistance that you may also qualify for, qualify to receive, and serious needs assistance is just an initial payment that you may receive while FEMA assesses your eligibility for additional funds. As your application continues to be reviewed, you may still receive additional forms of assistance for other needs, such as support for temporary housing, Personal property and home repair costs.

And yet we've seen folks out on, out on the Twitters. Over the past week, saying, yeah, the Biden Harris administration, all they're doing is giving 750 to survivors.

DEZI DOYEN - CO-HOST, THE BRADCAST: Which is interesting, because remember, during the Trump administration, it was also 750 for that [01:48:00] first day, and he never said a word about that.

Because

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: that's how the fund works. Exactly.

DEZI DOYEN - CO-HOST, THE BRADCAST: And Republicans have also stopped, periodically, any attempt to increase that emergency assistance fund that you can get from that 750 or something. That would be more helpful.

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: This one is a particularly dangerous one that FEMA had to rebut. FEMA is in the process of confiscating Helene's survivor property, according to this rumor.

If I apply for disaster assistance and my land is deemed unlivable, my property will be seized. That is false, and it is really dangerous. Because it could lead to harm against FEMA workers who show up at people's homes trying to help them. But if they believe that FEMA might be there to confiscate their property I don't even want to think what happens.

That is another false rumor. I will link to their, uh, to the FEMA rumors page. The idea that we even have to have one.[01:49:00]

Welcome to 2024.

How Will Project 2025 Turn Hurricanes Into Even Deadlier Threats - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 9-30-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Good news, I suppose, was that the hurricane missed us. You know, it, it, it went, uh, it, originally there was some concern that it might be heading toward New Orleans. Um, the bad news is that this hurricane, this is going to be the new normal. I mean, this thing went from not even being a hurricane to being a Cat 4 hurricane when it hit, hit land, made landfall.

In just, what, two days, as I recall? I mean, you know, very, very quickly. And why? Because the Gulf of Mexico is much warmer than it has ever been in the history of humanity. Or at least in the history, in recorded human history. And now at least 115 people are dead across six states. Officials fear the death toll can rise.

Uh, there's many more people missing. Hundreds of roads remain closed, especially in the Carolinas. Carolinas got hit really, really hard. Everybody was worried about the wind, right? Oh, is it still a Category [01:50:00] 4 or 3 or 2 or 1, you know, when it hits? But, you know, what people were not counting for or expecting, and what the media, frankly, is not talking about, is that because our atmosphere is warmer, it's one and a half degrees warmer than it was just 30 years ago, um, or certainly at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, um, Because of that, it holds more moisture.

Warm air holds more moisture than cold air does. It's, you know, it's, it's why in the winter, you know, the humidity collapses. You know, it's because cold air can't hold moisture. And once it gets below freezing, it pretty much really has a hard time holding moisture. And, uh, but the warmer it gets, the more moisture it can hold.

So there was just a mind boggling amount of water That this storm had picked up out of the Atlantic and then dumped on the Carolinas and and every place in between I mean Georgia's in big trouble You know Yeah, it's just just right up the coast So there's [01:51:00] a meat and and by the way, there's an it's a they're describing it as a medium chance that a new storm Will develop in the Western Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico later this week and You know, it's too early to know what's going to happen with that.

Uh, President Biden says he's going to visit some of the affected communities as soon as they're kind of back on their feet. He doesn't want his visit to slow down or impede any rescue operations, which is just, you know, reasonable. Um, but, uh, he's, he's sending, you know, all kinds of socialist aid to these, uh, red states.

Uh, you know, I, it's now, now you've got, uh, Brian Kemp going, uh, please, uh, President Biden, send us some of that socialism. Meanwhile, of course, Project 2025 wants to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You know, the people who predict these storms and tell us what to look out for.

And they want to cut back FEMA, uh, radically. So, you know, all in the service of lowering taxes on billionaires. [01:52:00] It's crazy. Asheville, North Carolina, has been particularly hard hit. Uh, we had some friends who moved from Los Angeles to Asheville some years ago. You know, looking for a little more affordable place to live and, you know, a nice quality of life.

And Asheville certainly has that. And they just loved it. They moved back to L. A. last year, you know, so Uh, you know, they're, they're okay, but, wow, I mean, the floodwaters, uh, just, just wiped out this town. I mean, it didn't wipe out the town, but it has isolated the town. There's no cell service. Uh, I'm, I'm guessing they're, some of this is coming back today, but, uh, damaged roads, lack of power, lack of cell service, um, this is across Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, and in North Carolina alone, more than 400 roads, uh, remained closed over the weekend.

Some gas, most of your gas stations were closed. They didn't have electricity to pump gas. The few that were open had lines that were wrapped around the block. [01:53:00] Um, again, Asheville home to 94, 000 people, about 700, 000 people across North Carolina without power right now.

Rep. Frost Trump & GOP hurricane relief lies can ‘cost lives’ - MSNBC - Air Date 10-9-24\

REP. FROST: Well, thank you so much for having me on, Lawrence, and I'm here in Orlando. We're a few hours away from getting the really serious part of the storm. We've had rain and wind gusts up to 60 miles per hour so far.

Being on that plane a few days ago was terrible. Uh, very enlightening and educational experience and a very intense experience. You know, my entire life growing up in the state of florida. I've gotten used to hurricanes. I've gotten used to waking up, looking at the news, seeing the prediction of where to go, seeing all these models, but not fully understanding where this information comes from.

Even though we have great technology now, there are still data points that have to be collected within the hurricane. And for people who don't know, Noah, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, um, has an amazing heroic team that they call the Hurricane Hunters. And these folks are pilots, technicians, [01:54:00] engineers, scientists and meteorologists.

And they fly into these storms, uh, flights going anywhere between eight and 12 hours, and they drop beacons within the storm, drop different things within it to collect data about the pressure, um, the how the size of the waves and a bunch of different things. They send this data to the National Hurricane Center, and that is how we get all the information that we get about these storms.

So this data can be used. Literally saves lives. And I have to mention that there are people in Congress who have voted against funds for this important administration. And not just that, but Project 2025 wants to get rid of NOAA. And so it would literally cause us to not be able to save more lives. And so Either way, it was incredibly intense experience.

There were times where we free fell thousands of feet because of the way that they fly the plane within the hurricane. But it was an honor to be there. I learned so much about how important the work Noah does is and how important the hurricane hunters are.

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL - HOST, MSNBC: I just want to go back over that point [01:55:00] about Project 2025 wanting to abolish NOAA, along with abolish the Department of Education.

Abolish is a word that appears frequently in that document, but they want to abolish the scientific collection of data by the federal government that has been able to warn people in Florida, how to save their lives and how much time they have to save their lives. They just want to just eliminate that information system.

REP. FROST: Yes. And this whole thing of project 2025 and wanting to get rid of NOAA while at the same time wanting to get rid of the mention of climate change and the climate crisis as well shows that not only do the That not only do they want to deny the issue, but they want to deny us the means and solutions to deal with the issue.

And we see this happen all the time. You know, I'm on the House Oversight Committee. I have my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who constantly want to badger and talk [01:56:00] about. Um, a lot of our, uh, uh, agencies and departments, they're not doing their job. They're horrible. They're bureaucrats. This and that.

And then at the same time, vote against budget increases to ensuring these agencies have the resources that they need. It's complete hypocrisy. And it's what's going on here in Florida and the thing about it. is this data saves lives. There are people who have already died because of this hurricane today, and we're gonna have more discussions over the coming days and weeks about how these two hurricanes that seemingly came out of nowhere are here because of the climate crisis and because it's here.

But, you know, I'll tell you, Lawrence, when I was driving back from that hurricane hunters mission, I was on I four leaving kind of the Tampa area coming back to Orlando, and I broke down being in the car because I'm in the Stop and go traffic. I'm looking to my left and right and all you see is all these cars full of families, seniors, people, and you look at their face, they've packed up their entire livelihood.

and they are scared. And this is becoming more and more of a [01:57:00] normal occurrence for Floridians. And so when we talk about the impacts of climate change, of course, it's human lives. That's a death toll. But it's also people being displaced and people having to leave their homes time and time again. It's really sad.

We've been focusing on making sure people are prepared here in Central Florida. We were at the emergency operations centers earlier today. I met with lunch workers who serve lunch to kids at school who are staying overnight in shelters to feed the people in the shelters three meals a day while we get through this storm.

So if I know one thing is for sure, it's that here in Central Florida and across the state, we're going to help each other get through this. Um, we're going to clean up and then we're going to continue to have these conversations on how we need to make sure. We prevent these kind of events happening again.

I mean, we're having too many once in a hundred year storms over just the last five years.

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL - HOST, MSNBC: In all of your conversations with the people living in the path of this hurricane, have you found people who believe Republican Marjorie Taylor [01:58:00] Greene's statement that, I guess, President Biden controls the weather?

REP. FROST: haven't just yet. But what I have had is I've had people come up to me and ask questions about some of the misinformation they've seen out there. We saw, uh, former President Donald Trump talking about the 750 number without talking about the fact that there are different buckets that people can apply to to get direct assistance from FEMA.

One of the buckets is an immediate cash send out to help people with things they might have lost where they need food. Baby formula, stuff like that with 750 can go a long way with that. There's another bucket of funds where people can help get money to help recover their home. So there's a lot of misinformation out there.

And the problem here and president Biden brought this up is that when that misinformation goes into the public and people believe it, it means they don't believe or have any kind of faith in their government. And when they don't have faith in FEMA, it means they won't come to these organizations to get the help they need.

Which [01:59:00] means that there are people out there who will need help, who won't seek help because they've been lied to. And so what everyone should know is President Biden and Vice President Harris signed and authorized a pre landfall emergency declaration for FEMA for this hurricane hitting now. FEMA and the federal government has resources up and down the state, working closely with the state and municipal governments.

And we are working together to handle this thing. And the last thing we need are politicians trying to make political points and score political points out of this horrible tragedy. Right now, it doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican. We have to come together to save lives and keep people safe, especially people in our most vulnerable communities.

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL - HOST, MSNBC: Unfortunately, a lot of the victims in the path of this hurricane right now cannot hear you say that. They don't have access to television right now for obvious reasons. Uh, they might, uh, their phone batteries might be dying and they might not be able to have internet access over the course of this. And so [02:00:00] in situations like this, word of mouth actually becomes more important than it normally is, and Donald Trump has been poisoning and Marjorie Taylor Greene have been poisoning the word of mouth or trying to anyway, how much is that getting in the way of helping people?

REP. FROST: It gets in the way. It really does get in the way because what it does is it erodes faith. When, when I come to a mic and I say something, when our county mayor comes to a mic and says something, when someone from FEMA comes to a mic and says something, we need folks who are watching. And who get this information to help us disseminate it so our neighbors understand something we always say here in Florida.

It's like communities. We have to take care of each other. Neighbors have to take care of neighbors. I'm I'm here in my parents house right now. Um, you know, getting through the storm with them. It's going to hit here in Orlando in just a couple hours. We haven't gotten the worst of it yet. Um, but when I got here to the house, you know, my dad was out talking with neighbors talking to each other.

Mhm. taking care of each other. And the [02:01:00] problem is when people start believing this, this and misinformation, they could be spreading lies. And again, if those lies get spread, people might not reach out to get the help that they need and the help that they deserve. And so again, it is dangerous. It can cost us human lives when politicians, especially people with large platforms, spread mis and disinformation.

Just to try to get ahead, just to try to get political points. It's a damn shame and it's going to cost lives. And so we need people to focus on the truth. We cannot play politics with these hurricanes or these storms. We need to focus on saving people, helping people and making sure we get on the other end of this.

Trump's politicized lies about Helene recovery calls to mind his abysmal record handling disasters Part 2 - Alex Wagner Tonight - Air Date 10-4-24

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: George, just first, because you're a sort of student of Trump's strange psyche, what does the, the clearly confessional nature of these accusations tell you about, I don't know, where his head is at right now?

GUEST 1: Well, I mean, you're absolutely right. It's a form of projection.

He attributes to others motives that he himself has. But it's more [02:02:00] than that. I mean, the words that came to mind when I read about this controversy today is the Große Lüge. That's German. I don't speak German, so forgive my pronunciation, but Große Lüge is Big lie. It means big lie. It was a phrase coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf in 1925 for the, for a propaganda technique by which you tell as big a lie as possible so that people will believe bigger lie.

They will believe bigger lies more than they will be believe smaller lies because they simply believe, think that it's impossible for anybody to have the temerity to tell such an amazing, an amazingly large lie. But Donald Trump. Does that as a matter of course, he's a pathological liar and a sociopath.

This is par for the course for Donald Trump, just as his lies about the, about the supposedly stolen election in 2020 where gross and Luger, and this is what he does. And it's why he is a cancer on American public life that must be removed once and for all.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: I will say, [02:03:00] Michelle, you know, it's, um, I won't speak German on this broadcast.

I'll save our audience from that. Uh, but, but the, the lies. In particular, and of late, are really focused on people of color and specifically migrants. And the toxicity has possibly, if it was even possible, have increased in their sort of poison grade since the Springfield debacle. The lies that Haitian immigrants there were eating pets.

This is what happened tonight at a Trump rally. And this is evidence, Michelle, of how, how successful Trump has been in, in poisoning his audience. Let's take a listen.

CLIP: This week, this week, we have learned that not only did 13, 000, 13, 000 murders illegally cross our border, but FEMA is out of money because they have been providing 9, 000 to every illegal.

Enough. Enough is enough. We must [02:04:00] put Americans first. How soon will you start deporting the murderers?

DONALD TRUMP: So, let, let me just tell you that you're right about that, it's, uh, 13, 099 to be exact, and murderers, many of these people murdered more than one person, some, one, did seven. These are not people we want in our country.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: The crime, the crime statistics are a whole nother kettle of fish. Some of that happened under the Trump administration. Those numbers have not been verified by NBC news as far as I know, but to get to the point of the, this woman in the audience believes that FEMA gave 9, 000. And I

GUEST 2: think this vicious sort of demonization is the precondition for Trump's mass deportation plan.

When J. D. Vance was asked what mass deportation looked like at the debate, he didn't want to give a straight answer, because nobody wants to [02:05:00] talk about what it would mean to have a network of detention camps. dotted throughout this country, what it means to have the national guard going into neighborhoods and rounding people up.

And if you want to get even part of the American people to consent to that, you re and, and I mean, this actually does deserve probably some sort of German analogy, but you actually do need to convince people that they are not human beings. Yes. Like you and I.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: I just want to add on the JD Vance answer. He was asked explicitly, how are you going to deport 20 maybe what he termed 25 million people over here without their papers, Michelle.

And he outlined how one, 1 million of them would, would leave because the wages wouldn't be what they wanted them to be. And the rest, I guess in the parlance of Mitt Romney would self deport. There was no explanation of how that would all work. Um, um, Um, you know, George, for your former party of Republicans, the, the, the, even I think attempted the truth [02:06:00] has become kind of a fool's errand today, as in like October 4th, the year 2024 Marjorie Taylor green, who is now weirdly because the party is so extreme because becomes seen as.

Maybe one of the more rational actors in the Republican conference in the house tweeted, sorry, yesterday, October 3rd, yes, they can control the weather. It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done. This is a member of Congress. It's part of the inner Trump sanctum. The truth does not matter, George.

GUEST 1: No. The truth doesn't matter. In fact, they compete with each other to tell the biggest lies. They are all into the Grosse Luge. And the phrase that you're looking for, that Michelle was talking about, there is a German phrase. Unter Mensch. It's, he, they, they are, they are. Persuading the American public that people who come from other countries are under, are beneath them, um, beneath man, beneath human.

And that, this is the kind of, of, of poison that the [02:07:00] Republican party is spreading now. It is really inhumane. Really sick and and it's it's difficult to chase it all down because they tell so many lies. So many big lies so quickly. I mean, I looked at today. I walked in a CVS this morning and I saw a big headline in the New York Post about this lie.

Perpetuating this lie that the government had blown all its money on, on migrants instead of, instead of the hurricane. And you know, it, it just, it's, it's chasing down all this, these lies is hard and difficult work and it makes, it gets in the way of people actually getting help.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: I will say, Michelle, you know, I think it's laudable that FEMA has created its landing page to debunk these rumors.

But you put that effort up against Tucker Carlson out there about Elon Musk, about any number of right wing actors propagating these lies, the, you know, the, the unbridled enthusiasm for disinformation that is the internet. Um, and I, I wonder [02:08:00] if you have a thought about how, for example, Kamala Harris should be handling this.

You know, she came out with the statement, Biden came out with the statement, you know, what is the correct pushback? On a, on a topic in particular where Republicans have mud on their hands at best, they've consistently refused to fund FEMA. It is funded through these stopgap funding measures in Congress.

The irony here is so thick, you couldn't even slice it.

GUEST 2: I mean, look, she has to go out and be on the ground to just talk about what the government is doing and calling out Donald Trump's lies over and over again. But. I don't think that that's an antidote. And this is what people were worried about when Elon Musk bought Twitter.

You know, a lot of times you can ignore the fact that Elon Musk has spent this enormous fortune to buy himself, um, a microphone for his own boundless narcissism. But when you have a natural disaster, that is a situation in which you need reliable information. And what they're doing is [02:09:00] something vicious and cruel.

To the people in those regions who need to know who they can trust. I mean, they're telling you some of some of the lies that are out there. Or that FEMA is going to confiscate your supplies, you know, that FEMA can't be trusted. And so what does that do to somebody who needs to go to FEMA for help?

They're instilling fear and paranoia in people who are already deeply, deeply traumatized. And this is only going to get worse because if you have a party That denies climate change, that calls it a hoax, as Donald Trump says. And there's going to be more and more climate related disasters. They can only explain that with recourse to, um, ever escalating conspiracy theories.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Yeah. That's such a good point, right? They don't want to do anything about climate change. Red states tend to be on the forefront of climate change. They don't want to fund FEMA, which is the last, you know, saving grace for people in harm's way. And then they're going to lie about migrants [02:10:00] who, um, help propel the American economy in a fundamental way.

Hurricane Milton Menaces Florida; Fact Report after Helene with NC blogger Tom Sullivan Part 3 - The BradCast - Air Date 10-7-24

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: Now this woman on TikTok, Who explains that she is from Western North Carolina, perhaps the hardest hit region from Hurricane Helene and, and, and she is a paramedic. She says, uh, in a video posted, I believe on Sunday night, that she is enraged from what she is now seeing online now that her power is back.

And she's a, you know, able to see how the world has been talking about what is going on in Helene and particularly in Western North Carolina. This, uh, you know, it was quite a surprise to her apparently since the power has been restored enough to see the way that these false rumors have been spreading on social media over the past week.

I want to play you some of what she said.

CLIP: I just got access, um, back at my house to the world around me yesterday. And I've never made a post before, but I am [02:11:00] enraged at the number of people spreading lies about the community that I live in and I call home. Um, what I will say, the National Guard. is here.

They have been here since Wednesday, two days before the storm hit. They activated the Wednesday. FEMA is here. They're set up. Their home base is mission hospital in Nashville, North Carolina on Biltmore Avenue. They have been here. They are here. I think there's some confusion about what FEMA's job is.

FEMA is not boots on the ground. FEMA is not going into your house and searching for people. FEMA's job with the government, I'm angry, is to make sure that funds are distributed. are allotted the way they're supposed to be. FEMA comes in and they assess what the need is and then they appropriate those funds to the places that the need is.

Um, FEMA is not denying, um, donations [02:12:00] technically because FEMA doesn't take donations. FEMA doesn't take donations. They don't take money. They don't take goods. That's not their job. That's not what they do. So all these people coming on here saying that FEMA stopped me and said I couldn't. Like, take my truckload of donations.

First of all, we don't want people just coming in here. There's nowhere for you to go, okay? There is nowhere for you to go. Thousands of people lost homes. Um, those people are staying in all of our hotels. Those hotels are full. We, we have 35 active right now. Sorry, shelters for people. Most of those are at capacity.

Um, as they reach capacity, we build more shelters. Not build, but you know what I mean, make space for more people. Um, we're not building buildings. I don't want anyone to take me out of context. But we create more shelters. The Army Corps of Engineers is here. The Marines are here. Um, I didn't even know that was a thing that they did.

But they're here, um, [02:13:00] interestingly enough. Um, there are people here from all over the country. There are people here from Canada. So anyone who comes on this app and tells you that we are just not receiving help, we are. Do we need more help? Yes, we do. We need help in the form of awareness. We need help in the form of monetary donations.

Um, Needs change. Initially, what we needed was gas. What we needed was

hygiene products. Um, those things are going to change over time. My biggest concern is people are going to forget about this in two weeks, and we're not going to continue to have the support that we have. And what we have is great. Like, I am grateful for the support we have. But anyone coming on the staff and telling you that we are bulldozing bodies and the government is coming in and usurping our property, that is not happening.

It's not happening. I'm here. Those are the mountains. I'm North Carolina. I'm North [02:14:00] Carolina native. I'm a paramedic. I am Telling you right now Please do not listen to the propaganda and the people who are using the death of our neighbors our friends and our family to tell you that this is some sort of political scheme.

The government did not cause this hurricane. That's not a thing. Um, Just stop. We're hurting. I mean, literally, as I'm talking right now, there's an osprey flying. I don't know if you can hear it. The one landed right there about an hour ago and dropped supplies. The government is here. And I think it's ironic that the same people who are fighting for less government and fighting to cut all of these programs are the ones who are criticizing the government and saying they're not here.

Because they are here. can be here. Um, so if yo with your [02:15:00] running water, water and your warm, comf sofa, just like shut up, to say, you don't know wh through. You don't know w We are people. We are people who have lost loved ones. We are people who are suffering and yeah, stop it. I'm so sick and tired of it.

Stop it.

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: That's a paramedic in Western North Carolina, enraged about the lies being told by yes, by folks on the right. about what is going on out there in the wake of Hurricane Helene, where they're still struggling. Even as another monster storm, Milton, is now headed toward the west coast of Florida.

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 [02:16:00] else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at: 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from:

Up To Date

Democracy Now!

The Majority Report

Unf*cking The Republic

The BradCast

The Thom Hartmann Program

MSNBC

and Alex Wagner Tonight.

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 Podcasts app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good, and [02:17:00] 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.

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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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#1662 Renewing the Nuclear Age: Weapons, Energy, Climate Mitigation, and Risk (Transcript)

Posted by · October 11, 2024 5:30 AM

Air Date 10/11/2024

[00:00:00]

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast. Humans' insatiable need for increasing amounts of energy and our tendency to want to at least have the option to wipe entire populations off the map has led to a renewed age of risks related to nuclear power, nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and nuclear fallout. Sources providing our top takes in about 45 minutes today includes Vox, CNBC, Our Changing Climate, One Thing from CNN, Democracy Now!, and This Is Not a Drill. Then, in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in three sections: Section A: Energy; Section B: Climate; and Section C: Risk.

Can clean energy handle the AI boom? - Vox - Air Date 10-1-24

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: Data centers are massive, often windowless warehouses [00:01:00] that house thousands of servers that run virtually non stop. Some of the bigger data centers are as big as four football fields and use as much electricity at any given time as 80,000 households. There are more than 8,000 data centers around the world, and the U. S. has more than any other country. In 2022, data centers, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrencies made up about 2 percent of total global electricity demand.

But by 2026, that number is expected to double, which is like adding the amount of electricity used by the entire country of Sweden.

That big jump from 2022 to 2026 is thanks to rising cloud storage and cryptocurrency electricity demands. But it's also because of the AI boom. We know AI requires a ton of computational power, but it turns out that the amount of electricity it uses is a really difficult question to answer. AI is a huge umbrella term that includes everything from basic statistical models that detect [00:02:00] patterns in data, to generative AI that creates text and images and videos.

That's the most computationally intensive kind. The thing is, The handful of private tech companies that dominate the AI field don't really disclose how much of their energy use is dedicated to AI specifically. If you look at Google's latest environmental report, it clearly states they absolutely don't want to make a distinction between regular workloads and AI specific workloads.

And these companies AI models are mostly closed source, meaning no one knows exactly how they are built. This has left some researchers to try to piece it together on their own. Researchers looked at an open source large language model called Bloom that has roughly the same amount of parameters as GPT 3, and found that training something like GPT 3 required almost 1, 300 megawatt hours of electricity, about as much power as consumed by 130 homes in the U. S. for one year. Today, large language models like GPT 4 have hundreds of [00:03:00] billions of parameters, if not a trillion. And researchers say that the computational power required to train these models is expected to double every nine months. So far, it has mostly been large language models driving the AI energy boom.

ALEX DE VRIES: Of course, that could change going forward. Now we see AI on the rise for image generation and also specifically video generation. So far we talked about training a large language model. Researchers also looked at energy use from people actually using it. It's been estimated by myself and others that a single ChatGPT interaction would take three watt hours, which is comparable to running a low lumen LED bulb for one hour.

So on itself, it doesn't sound like a whole lot, but of course, hey, it's the volume that matters. This is 10 times more than a standard Google search. And of course, if you're talking about millions or billions of interactions, the numbers start to stack up quickly.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: Alex took another research approach by looking at [00:04:00] the hardware used for AI training and use.

Over 95 percent of the AI industry uses servers made by the company NVIDIA. They could sell 1.5 million of their servers by 2027. He multiplied that by the information NVIDIA publicizes about each of their servers' energy demands. He found that data centers devoted to AI alone could consume around 100 terawatt hours of electricity per year, or about the same as his home country of the Netherlands.

There's a big part of Cathy's question I haven't gotten to yet. Can renewable energy meet the surging demand from the world's data centers?

The good news is that using green energy is the stated goal of a lot of these companies. Both Google and Microsoft have made pledges to be net zero by 2030. But there are signs that AI is disrupting those plans. That's because solar and wind energy can't produce electricity all of the time. And these data centers need to be running all of the time.

ALEX DE VRIES: In most cases, they will just have a [00:05:00] backup connection to the power grid, which will have fossil fuels on it.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: It's not just that. Data centers are being built at a rate that renewable energy infrastructure can't keep up with. It can take a year to build a data center, but many more years to get a solar or wind farm on an electrical grid.

Google's 2024 sustainability report showed that the company's emissions rose by 48% from 2019 to 2023, in large part due to its data center energy consumption, suggesting that integrating AI into their products could make reducing their emissions challenging.

There's already evidence in the US that coal plants that were meant to close are staying open because of data centers' electricity demands, and that state utilities are building new natural gas plants for the same reason. But even if these tech companies can look good on their sustainability reports and get to net zero, there's still a problem.

ALEX DE VRIES: The thing is that our renewable energy supply globally is limited. So if we are attributing an increasing part of that to the data center [00:06:00] industry, the consequences that there's less renewables available for everything else, that probably will mean that on the whole, we will end up using more fossil fuels anyway.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: With all this context, the answer to Kathy's question is that for right now, we aren't prepared for renewable energy to meet the increasing demand of the world's data centers.

So, what do we do about this? As users, it would be extremely difficult to opt out of backing up our data on the cloud, or even refrain from using AI.

KATHY: I think AI is embedded in so many things that I'm not sure I will have the option to say I'm not using it, you know, I'm out.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: Researchers like Alex say the best place to start is to force more transparency from these tech companies.

ALEX DE VRIES: In the EU, the AI Act doesn't really force tech companies to disclose anything with regard to the environment. And that's the EU, not even talking about the US yet, which is lagging behind a bit on this matter. [00:07:00]

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: Some environmental organizations and local communities are calling for moratoriums on data centers. And some researchers have proposed the idea of an energy efficiency rating so companies and consumers can choose data centers that are the most sustainable.

We could also hope that the servers and data centers will keep getting more energy efficient. But more than anything, this issue emphasizes how desperately we need to be scaling up renewable energy, and fast. Not only to meet the ever increasing data center demands, but so there's plenty of renewable energy to go around.

Why Nuclear Energy Is On The Verge Of A Renaissance - CNBC - Air Date 6-7-22

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: In the wake of the war in Ukraine, the United States is urging domestic producers to step up.

JESS GEHIN: A light water reactor works primarily by using fission reactions to produce heat. Nuclear fission occurs when a heavy atom like a uranium atom is bombarded with neutrons or interacts with neutrons. These particles interact with the nucleus of a uranium atom [00:08:00] and makes it unstable. It splits apart. When it splits apart, it produces large quantities of energy. That energy release heats up in the coolant, which in light water reactors is water. That heated water then produces steam. The steam turns a turbine, which turns a generator, which produces electricity.

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Worldwide, there are about 440 operational nuclear reactors that are responsible for supplying around 10 percent of the world's electricity. The United States, once a leader in building out nuclear power plants, has today fallen behind countries like Russia and China.

CAT CLIFFORD: There were several accidents which really affected the public perception of nuclear power. The Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the Chernobyl accident in 1986, and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. There hasn't been much construction of nuclear power recently because of the change in perception after these accidents. And also, in the 90s, the deregulation of the [00:09:00] energy markets in the United States left nuclear power competing with all other kinds of energy on an open market. And in those markets, natural gas is cheaper.

KEN LOUNGO: The sheer volume of money which is required to build large reactors in the United States today, and the amount of time that it takes, is a significant disincentive. Any utility company is going to say, You know what?, it's a lot easier for me to build a gas plant. It's cheaper and people don't care as much.

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Aside from challenges around public perception, costs, and construction time, another often cited criticism is the fact that nuclear power plants produce radioactive nuclear waste. Allison McFarland specializes in nuclear energy and nuclear waste disposal and served as chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission for two and a half years.

ALLISON MACFARLANE: Once the spent fuel comes out of a reactor, it's very hot, both radioactively and thermally. That material needs to be placed in a pool where there's active [00:10:00] cooling, water's actively circulated, and that keeps that material cool while some of the initial radioisotopes decay away, and then it does get cool enough after about five years that you can remove it from the pool and put it in dry storage, which are basically these concrete and steel casks that sit on a concrete pad and passively cool the material. But yes, that's a safe practice and it's a standard practice all around the world to do that.

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: In the US, nuclear waste is stored at the nuclear reactor facilities because there's no national waste repository. Plans to establish such a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have been thwarted by local and federal politics. There are some countries like France that also reprocess spent nuclear fuel.

JESS GEHIN: It is possible to take used fuel and process it, recover the useful materials, the remaining enriched uranium, the other fissile materials such as some of the plutonium, and that could be used as fuel in future reactors.

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: But that, too, is not a perfect solution

ALLISON MACFARLANE: That costs a [00:11:00] lot of money. We won't do that in the US because uranium is plentiful and cheap.

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Another common argument against nuclear power is that we already have other renewables to help us decarbonize.

CAT CLIFFORD: Nuclear is a baseload power source. That means it runs all the time. For renewables to be used all the time, you need to have a huge build out of battery technology. Right now, that doesn't exist.

KEN LOUNGO: Nuclear power in the United States has changed its future and its prospects have changed quite substantially over the last two to three years. There were a number of plants that were in line to be shut down and some were shut down, but a number of states and now the Biden administration has made a determination that you need those plants and there's zero carbon electricity output in order to meet the climate objectives of the country and also at the state level.

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: The war in Ukraine has disrupted energy markets in Europe and [00:12:00] reignited conversations around the need for countries to be energy independent.

KEN LOUNGO: In the wake of Fukushima, the German government made a determination to shut down all of their nuclear energy and make themselves even more dependent on Russian natural gas.

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Back in the US, one of the plants scheduled to be decommissioned is Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo, California. The state's last remaining nuclear power plant has a long history of anti nuclear protests. Lately, there's been heated debate on whether to extend the plant's lifespan beyond its planned 2025 retirement. The reasons why nuclear power plants are shut down are often complicated and typically come down to political and economic factors.

KEN LOUNGO: The two drivers for nuclear are price and politics.

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: But one Diablo Canyon employee says that the clean energy produced by the plant is still needed.

HEATHER HOFF: Part of the reason that the closure of Diablo Canyon was announced so early in 2016, with a nine year lead time, was so that we could prepare and [00:13:00] get more clean energy online so that when we shut Diablo Canyon, we could replace it with clean energy. And we just haven't made much progress.

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Heather Hoff has worked at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant for over 18 years. In 2016, she co-founded Mothers for Nuclear, an activist group that supports the protection of existing nuclear power plants as well as the construction of new ones. Still, Hoff says she understands the reluctance to embrace nuclear power, and it's something that she herself struggled with when she started working at Diablo Canyon.

HEATHER HOFF: My family was pretty nervous about me working there, and I was a little nervous as well. I heard a lot of stories of scary things and just didn't really know how I felt about nuclear. I spent the first probably six years of my career there asking tons and tons of questions and eventually changed my mind about nuclear and realized that it was an really good alignment with my environmental and humanitarian values.

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Californians seem to be changing their views too. A [00:14:00] recent poll found that 44 percent of voters are in support of building new nuclear plants compared to 37 percent who oppose such a measure. But that's not to say Hoff never questioned her newfound respect for nuclear power. In March, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Japan, triggering a tsunami. Suddenly, the world had a nuclear disaster on its hands.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Brian, for the first time, Japan declared an atomic emergency at two nuclear power plants, and Japanese officials say they have lost control of two reactors.

KEN LOUNGO: For any existing reactor, what you need is to be able to continue to pump the coolant around the fuel so that it doesn't get too hot and then melt down. And what happens is in Fukushima, the electricity went out, and then in every reactor, there's backup. generation, which is mostly diesel fuel, but the diesel generators in Fukushima were on the ground and were swamped by the tsunami, and [00:15:00] so they weren't able to keep the coolant pumping, and so the fuel melted down. It's sitting at the bottom of the reactor, and then the explosions that you saw was the buildup of hydrogen inside of the reactor containment that then blew.

HEATHER HOFF: I was actually in the control room at Diablo Canyon during the few days when the Fukushima events were unfolding, and it was super scary. And, it's like my worst nightmare as an operator to be there and think about these other operators just across the ocean from us. And they don't know what's going on with their plant. They have no power. They don't know if people are hurt. Some of what I was hearing on TV and the media was pretty scary. But then, like, when we actually learned what was going on, it wasn't as bad as I thought. No one was actually hurt by events that happened at the plant. And that was really surprising to me. So, it kind of went from, like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to quit, to, like, Oh, now I feel even more strongly that [00:16:00] nuclear is the right thing to do.

MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Although there have been no direct deaths attributed to the Fukushima disaster itself, over 160,000 people were evacuated from their homes as a result of the tsunami and nuclear incident. About 41,000 have not yet been able to return home. Some experts predict that it will take another 30 years to clean up the Fukushima plant. But there is some good news. A 2021 report concluded that the doses of radiation that Fukushima residents were exposed to are such that future radiation associated health effects are unlikely to be discernible.

Is Nuclear Energy the solution? - Our Changing Climate - Air Date 5-10-19

OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: Many proponents of nuclear point to the lack of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants as a major reason to increase nuclear energy production. While this is true for the actual nuclear fission process that creates energy, the processes surrounding nuclear, like uranium mining and refining, demand emissions. A life cycle assessment of various fuels conducted [00:17:00] by the IPCC reveals that the average greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear power production is relatively the same as its renewable counterparts.

But when compared to natural gas and coal, nuclear emissions are drastically lower. So as an alternative to gas and coal, nuclear power is certainly less emissions heavy and could be a viable low carbon energy option. But, waste also comes hand in hand with emissions. This is a big sticking point for the anti nuclear movement, and rightfully so.

No one has really implemented a viable long term solution for nuclear waste storage. There are currently three main options right now: on site storage, long term deep storage, or reprocessing fuel for use in other nuclear energy plants.

Reprocessing spent fuel sounds like a perfect solution. But it's really not. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, one consequence of [00:18:00] reprocessing spent fuel could be the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The byproduct of the recycling process is more plutonium, which can easily be used to build weapons. In addition, only a little bit of the reprocessed waste can be used again, and you're still left with a host of other radioactive materials.

And on top of all that, recycling this waste has a substantial cost tied to it. So ultimately, the only answer right now to our current nuclear waste is long term storage. Unfortunately, the only country that is currently setting up a facility is Finland. The rest just stockpile their waste on site, with no options or outlooks for long term storage.

The other two main elements that really hold back nuclear are cost and safety. Combined, the drawbacks of these make nuclear an infeasible solution to a swift decarbonization of our global electrical grid.

ARJENDU PATANAYAK: The problem with nuclear energy is [00:19:00] that, technologically speaking, it is mature, etc., but it's incredibly expensive and very slow to build.

OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: That's Arjendu Patanayak, a professor in the Carleton College physics department who teaches a class on sustainable energy policy. And this cost is in the range of an average of 9 billion per plant in the US, with the possibility of a plant taking up to...

ARJENDU PATANAYAK: They'll take 30 billion in 30 years, which. Is an unusual number to hear for a single plant.

OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: With that kind of price tag, nuclear energy production becomes almost twice that of other fuels, all while needing someone with deep pockets to finance the whole operation. Once a nuclear power plant is built, the energy may seem low cost. in part due to a small amount of physical fuel needed to be shipped to the plant.

But the actual construction and decommission costs of these plants are huge financial burdens, especially when you consider that they often run over budget and way past schedule. At this point you may be thinking, but what about a [00:20:00] country like France? Doesn't it support 75 percent of its energy consumption with nuclear power? And hasn't it done so for many years? Unfortunately, France is an outlier, not the norm. Partly, this is due to France's strong nuclear initiatives and top down political approach.

ARJENDU PATANAYAK: France is a top-down kind of governmental system. And so the bureaucrats basically call their friends in the technological world and say, what should we do? And they said nuclear and so, okay, let's keep going

OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: In the US and other countries lacking clear plans for nuclear power however, the opportunity to use nuclear as a transition fuel to solar and wind has passed.

ARJENDU PATANAYAK: It would take so much momentum that doesn't seem to exist for nuclear energy to have real legs.

OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: Indeed, if we are trying to rapidly decarbonize an energy grid like the US's within the next 10 to 30 years, nuclear power just isn't the answer in terms of cost and time. Part of the prohibitively slow and expensive nature of [00:21:00] nuclear comes from safety concerns, which when you look at death tolls seem to be more of a product of public perception than an actual occurrence.

ARJENDU PATANAYAK: Nuclear power per capita is actually the least harmful.

OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: According to a tally accumulated by Forbes, deaths caused by nuclear are much less when compared to coal. natural gas, or even wind and solar. But this low death rate could be due in part to the heavy safety regulations put on nuclear power plants already.

Ultimately, nuclear power is a contentious source of energy. As a result of both the public imagination and the complexity of its system, nuclear requires a large chunk of initial capital and time to become a feasible source of quote unquote clean fuel, a fact which Professor Patanaik agrees with.

ARJENDU PATANAYAK: I personally don't see nuclear roaring back.

OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: A transition away from fossil fuels will definitely involve current nuclear power plants, but [00:22:00] renewables like solar and wind have nowhere near reached their potential, especially once we've sorted out battery storage. Not only are renewables cheap compared to nuclear, they can be produced quickly and spread widely across the globe in a decentralized fashion.

While nuclear does have the benefit of a massive power output, it is a slow and cumbersome beast. If we are to swiftly and effectively transition away from a fossil fuel-reliant grid, we have to explore other energy options.

Three Mile Island Is Reopening. Some Climate Scientists are Thrilled. - CNN One Thing - Air Date 9-25-24

ELLA NILSEN: Nuclear power was starting to fade from our collective consciousness, I feel like after various plant meltdowns.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: This is the first time an incident or accident like this has happened in Pennsylvania, which has five nuclear reactor units involving three power companies, which, of course, includes Three Mile Island.

ELLA NILSEN: In the US, the most recent meltdown was a long time ago. It was the 1979 [00:23:00] Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Within days, schools reopened and families came home. On Three Mile Island, workers eventually found out half the reactor core had melted. It took years to clean it up. And it will be years more, if ever, before nuclear power's reputation fully recovers from what happened at Three Mile Island.

ELLA NILSEN: Three Mile Island closed in 2019, and it's among a pretty large number of aging nuclear plants that shut down. But just last week we learned that Three Mile Island is actually going to reopen in the next few years, and will be selling its power to Microsoft to help power AI and data centers.

The project still has regulatory hurdles to clear, and it's going to be an unprecedented thing in the US, but it's a snapshot about how a lot of players, tech companies especially, are embracing it as a way to generate lots of power with no climate pollution.

DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Well, so, [00:24:00] before we go any further, Ella, I need you to explain this to me and it's like as simple as you possibly can. How does nuclear energy work?

ELLA NILSEN: So, I feel like we think of nuclear energy as really complex, but it's actually pretty simple. Nuclear energy works by splitting atoms to create heat, which then is basically used to generate electricity by steam turbines. That's essentially what it is.

DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: And, of course, the upside here is that there are no greenhouse gases emitted, right?

ELLA NILSEN: Correct. Nuclear does not emit any CO2 or methane, the kinds of greenhouse gases that are dramatically warming the planet. It does, however, create nuclear waste, which is something that the US still needs to figure out how it's going to deal with.

DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Wait, yeah, so tell me about that. Are you saying that there's still a bunch of nuclear waste just sitting around at Three Mile Island and other [00:25:00] sites around the US?

ELLA NILSEN: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. That is currently how we deal with nuclear waste. It is just sitting at about 75 sites all over the US and these sites are power plants that have either shut down or are still going.

I will say, I feel like the general American population thinks of nuclear waste as green goo in barrels, kind of Homer Simpson-esque. However, the way that it is currently stored around the country, nuclear waste is essentially metal rods that, have radiation in them, and they are essentially put into these huge concrete casks that stop the radiation from getting out into the air and the environment. And so these things are being stored safely and can be transported safely. But it still, I would say, looms very large in the American imagination as something that is bad and dangerous.

DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Right. I mean, [00:26:00] we saw in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island incident, there was a lot of concern from the community that even though the government was telling them, Yes, this is all safe, there's no actual problems to your health, I think there are still people to this day who feel like there's been adverse effects.

ELLA NILSEN: Yeah. And there are lots of different places all over the country. Nevada was supposed to be the host site of Yucca Mountain, which was supposed to be the deep geologic formation that was going to store all of America's nuclear waste.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Energy department officials hope 70,000 tons of the most lethal atomic leftovers can be safely stored deep within the mountain for 10,000 years. Putting that in perspective, 10,000 years ago, man was just learning to use stone tools.

ELLA NILSEN: That has never actually been done because public opposition was so fierce to it that it stopped the projects in its tracks.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: But the powers in the capital, Carson City, have been fighting back in court to block Washington at [00:27:00] every turn, calling the Yucca Mountain site perilous, refusing to issue environmental permits. Seems like the government just slapped it up here and said this is where it's gonna go.

ELLA NILSEN: There are a lot of different communities around the country that are still really fearful about nuclear waste and what a nuclear meltdown might mean for our community.

DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: So, with all that said then, why is nuclear being talked about more as a possible solution to the climate crisis?

ELLA NILSEN: Nuclear is a really good way to generate the electricity that we are going to need, not just for AI and data centers, although that's certainly a big piece of it, but in order to really decarbonize the US. We are going to be driving electric cars. There's a big push for people to electrify our homes. Like, we're going to need a lot of electricity and clean electricity in order to really bring US emissions down. Currently, the US gets about 20 [00:28:00] percent of its power from nuclear. And nuclear has some major pros. It can stay on at all times. It's really reliable. It's easily dispatchable. But there's a push for more nuclear and different kinds of nuclear.

BILL GATES: Yeah, we've been willing to go back to the basics and do what people have always said should be done, which is to cool the plant with metal instead of water.

ELLA NILSEN: Bill Gates, I don't know if you've heard of...

DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Heard of him, yes.

ELLA NILSEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, heard of Bill Gates. He's investing, in this big project in next generation small modular nuclear reactors in Wyoming.

BILL GATES: And that means that this problem of high pressure and extra heat when you shut down is completely solved. And so the complexity—that's meant that nuclear has gotten more complex and more expensive as it's gone from first to third generation—we changed that utterly.

ELLA NILSEN: It won't be operational until at least 2030, but it's a really interesting look at the future. And the [00:29:00] US is racing currently to make fuel for this next generation of nuclear reactors, in part by melting down old nuclear warheads from our stockpile.

DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: It's like weapons into energy.

ELLA NILSEN: Yes, literally old weapons into the energy of the future. The problem is in the US we and other countries have been reliant for decades on Russia for our enriched uranium. That's ending soon because Congress recently passed a ban on importing Russian uranium into the US but we need to now enrich it at other facilities, really start this supply chain from scratch.

Then—we've just been talking about nuclear fission, which is just the standard nuclear energy that has been powering reactors for years—there's also nuclear fusion, which is this holy grail energy of the future, which could really give us a limitless [00:30:00] supply of energy. There are fears that China could be eclipsing the US in nuclear fusion development, and that'll be a hugely important technology to be the first country to get right.

The private sector won't be enough to back the kind of widespread investment that's needed on nuclear, so people are looking to the government to really get this going.

DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Well, that's kind of what I wanted to ask. Do we know, in terms of the government, what a future President Kamala Harris or President Donald Trump feel about expanding nuclear energy in the ways that you're talking about?

ELLA NILSEN: Yeah, so Democrats and Republicans are both pretty into nuclear energy. It's like one of the sort of rare bipartisan, clean energy forms in the US...

DONALD TRUMP: but on the other hand, their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that.

ELLA NILSEN: Trump isn't as opposed to nuclear as he is to other forms of energy. Like wind, he bashes a lot.

DONALD TRUMP: Starting on day one we will end Kamala's war [00:31:00] on American energy and we will drill, baby, drill. We're gonna drill, baby, drill. That's gonna break down...

ELLA NILSEN: You know, he doesn't really love solar, but the important 'but' here is that Trump wants to slash government funding in general and gut a lot of what was in the Inflation Reduction Act, which could be a big problem for nuclear.

KAMALA HARRIS: ...the young people of America care deeply about this issue, and I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels, we have...

ELLA NILSEN: The bottom line is the US needs a president and an administration to keep federal investment at current levels, at least, or even invest more when it comes to nuclear energy.

DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Is that just because it's so darn expensive?

ELLA NILSEN: It's really expensive, but also with things like fusion, I mean, these are technologies that are still pretty nascent, and they just need a lot more development [00:32:00] and a lot more work to get right and get to a commercial level.

Warnings of Nuclear Catastrophe as Power Plants in Russia and Ukraine at Risk Amid Escalating War - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-29-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: This extreme situation at the Kursk nuclear plant, the head of the IAEA has said that it is an old plant that doesn’t have much of the safety mechanisms. Can you explain what’s happening there? That’s in Russia. It’s been invaded by Ukraine in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And also, what’s happening with Zaporizhzhia, which is in Ukraine, but it’s occupied by Russia right now, and it’s the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, Vladimir?

VLADIMIR SLIVYAK: So, the situation on the Kursk nuclear plant is getting worse and worse by, basically, every day. There is fighting between Russia and the Ukrainian army — well, it was officially said it was in the [00:33:00] few kilometers from a nuclear power plant. And today, Russian army already said that Ukrainians been trying to get into the city that is next to a nuclear power plant, where the workers from the plant are leaving.

And it’s true that it’s very old reactors. It’s very similar to the one that exploded back in 1986 in Chernobyl, causing the largest nuclear accident in humankind history. And right now situation, well, you can call it worst of the worst, for the reason that those are very old reactors. It’s not protected, but can’t contain them. And, well, for example, Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, it’s more protected. I mean the reactors itself. In Kursk, reactors are not protected, and basically any big rocket, missile or the bomb dropped on the reactor itself [00:34:00] may lead to a very big nuclear accident. I wouldn’t say it’s going to be second Chernobyl, but it could be very, very big, with a radioactive release approaching a few countries that are close to Russia.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Matt, if you can talk more about what has taken place, this huge change in the last weeks, with Ukraine invading Russia, not clear how Putin will respond, and how he’s responded so far, and Zelensky saying at this point he’s not interested in any discussion of a ceasefire or any kind of peace deal?

MATT DUSS: Right. Well, I think what we’ve seen over the past months, before this incursion, was Ukraine being a bit more aggressive in the way it was striking sites inside Russia, specifically sites that were used to launch rocket and drone attacks inside Ukraine. They were restrained from doing that for a long [00:35:00] time by their U.S. and European partners out of escalation concerns — once again, I think reasonable escalation concerns, given the nuclear aspect here. But I think they showed that those escalation concerns may have been slightly overblown, given Russia’s relatively muted response to those attacks. And once again, I think we should note that attacking sites being used to launch missiles, rockets and drones into Ukraine is a pretty legitimate tactic.

But what we’ve seen just over the past week is, you know, actual U.S. — excuse me, Ukrainian military forces invading into Russia, the first time, I believe, since World War II that Russia’s territory has been invaded by a foreign army. And I think part of the approach here is, again, to kind of turn the tables and show that Russia is not immune to these incursions. It’s certainly a propaganda loss for President Vladimir Putin, though it’s hard to say what Russians are actually [00:36:00] seeing, given the almost complete control that the Russian government has over what Russians are allowed to see in their media. But I do think just taking the initiative, as we saw about a year and a half ago in the first counteroffensive, I think that’s one benefit of this, is for just Ukraine to show that it is not simply on its back foot and defending, it is now taking the initiative and taking the fight into Russia.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Vladimir, if you could speak about the Rosatom State Corporation, which is the Russian state corporation focused on nuclear energy, and its role in the occupation of Zaporizhzhia, Russia having replaced France now as the world’s leading player in international nuclear power plant production?

VLADIMIR SLIVYAK: Well, first of all, it’s not just a nuclear corporation. It’s a military organization. In fact, it’s part of the Russian government. And it’s in charge of a nuclear weapon and civil — so-called civil nuclear power in [00:37:00] Russia.

But it’s also being used by Vladimir Putin as an instrument of geopolitical fight around the world. Like, Russia is going around to different developing countries, proposing them to build new nuclear power plants of Russian design, even giving them loans because most of the developing countries cannot pay such big sums of money, because, well, like, one Russian nuclear power plant with, let’s say, two reactors in it would cost over 10 billion of American dollars, and not many developing countries can afford it. So, Russians would just loan this money to other countries. And in exchange, they get, well, basically, economic control and some sort of political control over those countries, because once you sign up with Russian Rosatom to build reactor in your country, you get into dependence. It’s dependence on [00:38:00] Russian engineers, Russian technology, supplying of Russian fuel — nuclear fuel, I mean. And also, when the nuclear plant will go offline because it’s old, you will be dependent on the decommissioning technology, which is also coming from Russia. And we’re talking about roughly 100 years or even 120 years, you know. So, new nuclear power extension that Rosatom is doing around the world are under order of Vladimir Putin, its extension because Vladimir Putin wants more control over developing world. He wants to use developing world in his, well, opposition to the West, I would say.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And we also have to say that the Kursk nuclear power plant is similar to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which melted down in 1986.

Are we facing a new nuclear arms race? - This Is Not A Drill with Gavin Esler - Air Date 9-17-24

ANKIT PANDA: During the Cold War, nuclear [00:39:00] weapons were threats to other nuclear weapons, right? The United States and the Soviet Union by the 60s and into the 70s and 80s had adopted practices in nuclear targeting that privileged destroying the other side's nuclear forces. So, that was designed to limit damage. This was the jargon in nuclear strategy calls this counterforce. One of the examples in which technologies have changed today is that we actually live in an era where non nuclear weapons can pose threats to nuclear weapons as well. So you have, for instance, in the East Asian context and in the European context, for that matter, a whole bunch of American allies building conventional weapons capabilities that could be used to destroy nuclear capable launchers in North Korea, in China, in Russia, command and control facilities, leadership facilities. The precision revolution has now been playing out for a few decades, but the implications for nuclear stability, I think, are often overlooked.

But that's just one example. We're also in this era of [00:40:00] disinformation, the proliferation of artificial intelligence capabilities, non-kinetic means of interfering with the adversaries' computer systems, so cyber attacks, all of this can, I think, cut against nuclear operations in ways that could have significant escalatory effects.

But you also have old technologies that have gotten better, missile defense capabilities, I think, are the classic example there. Missile defense was once seen as highly destabilizing in the context of the Cold War. But as I think we now see with Ukraine, some of the cases where missile defenses have been used successfully by the Israelis, tactical missile defense is starting to take on significant salience for many countries, which also has implications for how strategic missile defense, for instance, for the US homeland is going to, I think, factor into debates here in the United States. So just a little taste of some of the technological change that bears on nuclear escalation.

GAVIN ESLER - HOST, THIS IS NOT A DRILL: Could I pursue a little bit of the politics now with Jake Sullivan, President Biden's National Security Affairs Advisor. He said, "the United [00:41:00] States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them".

So, nuclear deterrence has never really demanded nuclear superiority. I get that point. But what is he on about there? Is he suggesting that they have enough conventional weapons which are possibly able to deter because they could also attack nuclear facilities in countries that seem to be proposing a threat?

I'm not quite clear what that's about, that statement.

ANKIT PANDA: Yeah. So, Sullivan made those remarks last year. And since then, there've actually been other speeches by senior members of the Biden administration, not quite as senior as Jake Sullivan, indicating that actually the U S might need to prepare for a future where we do need additional nuclear weapons.

But you referenced this idea of nuclear superiority. It's one of the open debates in our field. I personally would agree with you that nuclear superiority does not deter, but the question of how difficult nuclear deterrence is, is really one of the fundamental dividing questions in the field of nuclear strategy.

You can go all the [00:42:00] way back to debates in the 1960s between figures like Thomas Schelling on the one hand and Albert Wohlstetter on the other that very nicely state the two sides of this debate. I would argue that Wohlstetter—who famously described the balance of terror that underpins nuclear deterrence as being delicate—really, in many ways, carried the US establishment, I think in the United States. If you talk to members of the military involved in nuclear operations and targeting, they would evince a belief that numbers do matter. The precise contours of force structure matter.

What Sullivan says, though, is really important, right? He is pointing out that the US is now facing an unprecedented problem. This problem is now known as the two-peer problem. For decades, the United States has only had to contend with one adversarial nuclear arsenal that is in the vicinity of being quantitatively in the realm of what the United States feels. And that's of course, the Soviet Union and later Russia's arsenal.

But now China is building up. And so the unprecedented [00:43:00] problem is that by the mid 2030s, the United States will have significantly more nuclear warheads pointed its way than it will be able to field in return unless a change is made today.

Now, for deterrence, the only thing that needs to obtain is that the adversary understands that pursuing a course of action that is inimical to US interests will not yield him or her advantage, or it may be unlikely to succeed. But you have two approaches basically to deterrence, you can threaten punishment or you can communicate that you have the capabilities to deny benefit. Neither of those necessarily depends on precisely ensuring that numbers match what an adversary can bring to bear.

But, going back again to counterforce, which has been this really, really strong undercurrent in US nuclear strategy since the 1960s. If the goal is to have the ability to hold at risk adversary nuclear capabilities. So, let's just use some numbers here. China's [00:44:00] building about 1500 (is what the Pentagon says) by 2035. Let's say they put that on their 300 plus nuclear silos, submarines, ground launch missiles for theater purposes. The US would need to add warheads to have the ability to hold all of those capabilities at risk in addition to simultaneously holding everything at risk that we hold today at risk in Russia, and that, of course, demands a buildup.

Now, the question for anybody concerned about an arms race is why would Russia and China tolerate that? Why would they tolerate an American nuclear force that is cumulatively as large as their combined nuclear forces? The answer is they probably wouldn't. And the other question that I think we need to ask ourselves is, in the field of nuclear strategy, we think about worst case scenarios.

During the Cold War, the worst case scenario really was a Soviet first strike against the United States. Today, it is not uncommon in Washington in certain circles to hear genuine concern about Russia and China collusively contemplating a first strike against the United States. Now, for anybody that watches the Russia-China relationship, sure, they're [00:45:00] partners. They work closely together. Xi and Putin have a lot of shared grievances. Are they ever going to collusively carry out a first strike on the United States? Probably not. But if you're a military planner in Omaha, Nebraska, at US Strategic Command, you cannot rule that scenario out, right? You mentioned this idea of thinking about the unthinkable and these are the kinds of scenarios now that American planners have to take into account seriously.

GAVIN ESLER - HOST, THIS IS NOT A DRILL: I do get that, but I expect also listeners of a certain age will remember MAD—mutually assured destruction—and will say, This is mad, I mean, both in the common sense and also in the sense of looking at those initials and what they mean. In other words, we don't really need to spend a lot of time thinking much more on this, even because Russia and China have got grievances with each other that perhaps receive less treatment in the media than they should.

ANKIT PANDA: Yeah. There's other wrinkles to this, too, for the United States, right?

So we in the United [00:46:00] States extend our nuclear deterrent to 34 other countries: the members of NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. And each of those capitals has a stake in the decisions the United States will make about the future of its nuclear forces. And of course, no two allies are alike. You'll get very different answers in Berlin, in Warsaw, in London, in Paris, in Seoul, in Tokyo, in Canberra, about what the United States ought to do about this. But in the coming years, as these debates are hashed out in Washington, American allies will have a stake in the outcomes here. And of course this is a conversation we're also having against the backdrop of a presidential election where you have two candidates with very, very different ideas about the obligations the United States has to its allies around the world. So that, too, I think, factors into a lot of what we're talking about.

Note from the Editor about the nature of humans and energy use

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with Vox explaining the energy uses of the AI boom. CNBC looked at the renewed interest in nuclear energy. Our Changing Climate highlighted the disconnect in [00:47:00] timeframes between the climate and nuclear energy. One Thing discussed the evolving design strategies for nuclear plants. Democracy Now! highlighted the extreme danger when war and nuclear power mix. And This is Not a Drill look at the nature of nuclear deterrence.

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, 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 the you'll receive sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, there's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the apple podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but anyone, depending on the app you use, may be able to use the time codes in our show notes to jump around similar to chapter markers, so check [00:48:00] that out. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

Now, before we continue onto the deeper dives half the show, I have a few thoughts on the nature of energy usage that I think anyone wanting to address climate change needs to come to terms with. The crux of it is something called Jevons paradox, and the basic idea is that as a commodity becomes more efficient and therefore cheaper, demand for that commodity goes up. It happened with coal production, that's what the guy Jevons was originally talking about, but it was that same idea that also describes why adding an extra lane to alleviate traffic congestion just ends up inviting more traffic. The extra lane makes driving more efficient, therefore more people do it up to the point when it becomes too congested again.

Starting around the turn of this century, [00:49:00] there was a lot of talk about switching to more energy efficient light bulbs. Like compact fluorescents and LEDs, which are 90% more efficient than the old style. Doing this in the home. Definitely reduces energy consumption, but with the availability of such cheap and efficient lights, it also opened the door to a lot more use cases for lights that we just wouldn't have considered before. One article points to the Las Vegas sphere and it's 1.2 million LEDs as an example. So globally, even though lighting efficiency has gone way up, we collectively use about the same amount of energy on lighting now, as we did about 15 years ago.

For another example, many years ago, we all started learning about the energy usage required to run the internet in general, as well as specific use cases like spam. We don't think generally of sending an email as an energy intensive thing, but once you add them all up, they actually do take their [00:50:00] toll. Now in more recent years, crypto and crypto mining came on the scene with its absurd energy usage, all for the purely philosophical supposition that it's the mining of crypto that gives it its value, which I think is a pretty perverse idea of value. Now even more recently, AI has come along with their chat bot queries that require something like 50 times more energy as a regular Google search.

And the problem with our relationship with energy is that as people who live in societies with 24 hour electricity, barring acute emergencies, we think of it as basically limitless. And when something is seemingly limitless, we feel no compunction about using more of it. We may individually want to use less of it for the sake of climate change or a company may strive for efficiency for the cost benefits or the social credit they'll get, but collectively, if there's a halfway decent reason [00:51:00] to use more energy, like building a light up sphere in the desert, making fake money, that's just real enough to sell to other people, or making the faustian bargain inherent in new technology that may deliver us from our woes or destroy us entirely, we are going to use that energy in those cases.

There's been a concern for a long time. Now that focusing on efficiency may actually backfire, and targeting renewables to be able to replace carbon emitting sources of energy has always been guaranteed to be too little too late if we don't also consider the inevitable growth in our consumption. I fear that the alternate option to this Jevons paradox we keep falling into is a world in which we are actually bumping into our power limits, experiencing rolling blackouts and brownouts as our demand exceeds our supply.

Now in theory. [00:52:00] That's one way to fight climate change—don't focus on efficiency so much, just put a hard cap on usage—but it's the sort of thing that would backfire into fascism immediately. Blackouts due to a lack of power is one thing, imposed blackouts, or even the threat of blackouts due to a government policy to artificially limit energy usage when we could theoretically generate more, that'll get people angry.

So where does that leave us? Ultimately, we are probably in another progress trap. Using more and more energy as a society has always been beneficial to humans, right up until it becomes catastrophically unhelpful. Just like Jevons paradox, progress traps have happened again and again, and climate change is the biggest one of all time. So when it comes to an all-of-the-above energy strategy, I'm in favor of that concept consisting of [00:53:00] philosophical and sociological strategies to keep energy usage as low as possible, like building walkable communities so that the easy thing to do is also the cleanest and most efficient. But also recognize that humans are going to keep demanding more and more energy, and when they demand it, what we have to offer had to better be as clean as we can get it.

Solar and wind or good starts, we should keep going on that path. Geothermal may be on the brink of a revolution as incorporating fracking technology of all things can make geothermal feasible in many more places than ever before, and it is incredibly efficient once it's set up. Thinking farther out, space-based solar power and the theoretical Dyson Sphere may even be in our future. But in the meantime, I do find it difficult to imagine a world in which nuclear doesn't need to be part of the mix. That's where I sit right now. [00:54:00]

I guess what I'm saying is that if we continue to follow our nature, then we can either pave the way for a fascist backlash against environmentalism, or we can be destined to become the aliens from independence day, roaming from planet to planet to scavenge for resources. If we want to find another path, I really think it's up to the philosophers rather than the engineers to steer us in a new direction.

SECTION A - ENERGY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics. Next up, Section A: Energy. Followed by Section B: Climate and Section C: Risk.

The Renaissance of Nuclear Power Part 2 - The Energy Gang - Air Date 1-27-23

MELISSA LOTT: One of the things I would really love to dive into before we run out of time are the concerns that people have about nuclear power. And it goes back to something I said earlier, actually, about the future not looking like the past nuclear power. And I'm not going to recap the great safety records or any of that stuff. I'm just saying when people look at the future of nuclear, often I run into these conversations where they think it's a replication of the past. And with these new technologies, how do they or do they address some of the [00:55:00] biggest concerns that people do have around what having nuclear power means? So if we could touch on that, I think it's an important part of this conversation.

KATIE HUFF: I would love to come back to a comment that Carl made about his dad being anti institutional rather than anti nuclear. And I think this comes and points directly at a concern about nuclear that is rooted in distrust of large institutions, particularly large, you know, utilities or large companies that make big engineering projects, or the Department of Energy itself.

Trust is absolutely critical in our ability to build this out. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission provides trust. Their incredibly high standards worldwide provides trust internationally. But we also have to make good on our promises. And in the Department of Energy, for example, spent nuclear fuel is one of those promises. We are legally required to begin taking spent fuel from the sites where it currently sits and waits for a final destination. And [00:56:00] during the time in my office, we've been able to restart a process for consent based siting of an interim storage facility that would reduce the number of those interim storage facilities across the country.

There's many of them at the sites where that fuel is generated, and we like there to be a single consolidated one or maybe a couple. We need to find a site that recognizes and centers the energy justice inherent in that. So I would touch on the trust that we need to meet for nuclear spent fuel management in the United States. And that's on me. And we're taking it very seriously in my office. And I hope we're starting to rebuild some of that trust. But I would say it is infiltrated throughout. Many questions people have about nuclear reactors, even just the cost overruns, are a matter of trust. Do you trust a company to meet the cost and schedules that they've promised the public utility commissions, for example? It's about trust.

MELISSA LOTT: Yeah, I'm actually having a flashback really quick on just that comment. And I remember it was, I believe, Steph Spears who said this at the Aspen Ideas [00:57:00] festival last summer that was talking about. She said that, I'm going to paraphrase, you can find the direct quote online at the video of the event. But it was that these things move at the speed of trust.

Like that's the core of this so I just, I'm hearing it in what you say, Katie, and actually something you said earlier, Carl, about regulation. And just to give a little more background, Ed, I didn't say this earlier, but I grew up in a Navy family. Admiral Rickover is like childhood stories to me. And the nuclear navy, I mean, I grew up on that stuff, but I thought of nuclear as being this thing in a submarine, you know, and then I became a power plant, you know, more aware person around power plants later. But I just think that phrase I keep coming back to, and it's not just with nuclear, but I think it certainly applies here. But Carl, I'm sure you want to jump in on this topic too.

CARL PEREZ: I think trust is super important, but also the messengers. And what you're seeing much more of is these public advocacy groups that are grassroots movement. None of them are paid for by the utilities or anything. These are just concerned citizens. I mean, I see it here in New York. Thanks to nuclear New York, NySErda finally decided to include [00:58:00] advanced nuclear. Right. So what's also interesting is I think we spent a lot of time as an industry and myself admittedly trying to say, well, what you think of the passive nuclear is not actually what you think it is. And I think we should try to, and obviously opinion, but stop trying to focus on saying, let's agree on the past and let's agree on the future.

Let's agree on what we want nuclear to look like together.

That was really the focus of what we tried to do when I as an undergrad at 21 years old, tell myself, hey, let me start a nuclear energy company. What emboldens me in that moment is when I start learning about a scientist like doctor Alvin Weinberg, who was at the head of Oak Ridge and was one of the first environmentalists talking about carbon in the air and how problematic it is before so many other people were discussing it and him saying, we should better utilize our resources. And so he was one of the co inventors of the light water reactor and the Moen saw reactor. So obviously where I had my passion for the Moen saw reactor. But when you start looking at the technology and you start looking at the people beyond just Alvin Weinberg, Eugene Wigner and so many other engineers years, when you [00:59:00] add that personality and that humanity to it, you realize, okay, these are people who really wanted to do the right thing and were willing to take the risk because at the time, those rates and working in those labs was not the same thing as working in the labs today. And they were willing to take those life risks to make sure that we have a good future.

ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Yeah, no, that is a great point. I always think about one of the best lines on this I've ever heard was from the chief executive of electricity de France, who was talking about France's nuclear program. And he said, all countries have different endowments of natural resources. Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil, Scotland has a lot of wind. California has a lot of sun. In France, we have a public that's happy with the idea of nuclear power. That's our natural resource, and that's what we have to build on. Which was very funny and said it at a conference. Got a big laugh in the room. There is something to it. But also, as you've been saying, it's not a fixed endowment. People can change their minds, people can be persuaded. I think the polls always are highly unclear on [01:00:00] nuclear power, and it depends a lot how you ask the question and so on. But it does seem to be the case that there has been a shift in general, in public opinion in the United States and some other countries to being more pro nuclear over the past decade or so. Certainly there was a huge setback after.

CARL PEREZ: Fukushima just for the messengers. France. What they also did, which really changed the opinion in the recent two, three years, is they're injecting €1 billion into their nuclear industry for innovation. And more than half of that is destined to create a private sector, because they see that in the United States, there's a private sector and that we're all competing on price. And so utilities are looking at different costs, they're doing due diligence, and that's really what's helping the innovation move forward, because we're all pushing each other to progress. And I think France, because of its very nationalized nuclear industry, coming back to anti institutionalism, that was the reigning factor. In fact, three years ago, when they did a poll on nuclear, 60% of french people thought that nuclear energy generated carbon emissions.

ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: That's amazing. [01:01:00] One thing I worry about particular moment is, of course, the situation at Zaporozhazia in Ukraine. When you've been talking about, as you say, Poland, Ukraine, other countries in central and eastern Europe being very interested in new nuclear development because of the energy security benefits that they see. The situation in Zaporozhugier is really quite alarming. It seems to me. If you look at the recent statements from the International Atomic Energy Agency, they've been saying it's very important that the site be kept secure to avoid what could be a very serious problem. There and issues both with getting power supplies on the site, maintain cooling systems and so on, and potentially with damage. There's been missiles and shelling kind of around the plant quite a lot. There's been some quite intense fighting in that region over the past couple of weeks. Katie, maybe get specifically your thoughts on this and how the administration is thinking about this. Is this something which is a particular concern? How [01:02:00] worrying do you think that situation in Zaporozhyzia is right now?

KATIE HUFF: Yeah, it's an unacceptable situation. No country should turn a nuclear power plant into an active war zone. Combat operations in the vicinity of any nuclear plant are dangerous. They're irresponsible, they're unnecessary. Nuclear reactors are incredibly safe, but, you know, are not designed to withstand targeted military assault. And, you know, the heightened risks of a nuclear incident at Zap are the result of, of Russia's unprovoked invasion. And, you know, they've controlled a dangerous military presence at that site and they've been unwilling to turn control back to Ukraine for safe and secure operations. They've damaged power lines in the vicinity, which increased the likelihood of a loss of offside power event, which we have seen many times over the course of this invasion. And that kind of loss of offside power event, if extended, can increase the likelihood of the reactor failing to cool itself and therefore causing a meltdown, which is then a problematic situation for the reactor. Now, we haven't seen that [01:03:00] transpire because of the heroic efforts of folks repairing those transmission lines. But what it really draws out is a couple of things. One, it's just not acceptable. But two, when we look at a future of nuclear power in Ukraine, as you noted earlier, there's interest from Ukraine in building more nuclear. And the designs that they would likely select are going to leverage some of the passive safety features that would allow longer periods of walk away safety in the event of a loss of off site power event.

So, for example, the Westinghouse SCP 1000 has 72 hours after the beginning of such an event where you don't have to do anything. There's no human intervention required at all. And even after that 72 hours period, the human intervention is extremely minimal. And so you really are in this place where we've learned over many decades what to do to design reactors that are robust even to that totally unacceptable situation.

The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste - Huge If True - Air Date 5-10-23

CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: This is Argonne National Laboratory. We're gonna get to go see the research that they're doing. And they have been doing research on nuclear power since, like, before I was born. Hold on. Do you recognize that name?

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: [01:04:00] Argonne National Laboratory. Yeah,

CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: this was the same national lab that developed that incredible old nuclear waste recycling reactor.

But I didn't know that yet. So we go on this incredible tour. It's awesome. I'm learning a ton. I'm thinking, oh my god, I'm gonna be so overprepared to talk to Johnny about nuclear power. And on this tour with me are these two people from Oklo, which is a company that's working on new kinds of nuclear reactors.

And at the end of the tour, I'm sitting with them under this beautiful, Big tree and one of them says something that just short circuits my brain.

SPEAKER 1: So we're actually working with Argonne closely on how to recycle existing nuclear waste in the us. There is enough use fuel to power the country for the next 150 years.

Wait, I'm sorry. What? There is enough use fuel in the country in the US alone. to generate power for the country for the next 150 years.

CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: There's enough used fuel, meaning nuclear waste, in the U. S. to power the country for 150 years. Like, you can see me not believing her. I think it's some fake math. Like, [01:05:00] maybe technically there's enough energy there, but like, we could never really use it.

We don't know how to do that. Or it's like when they say, you know, geothermal, you can power the earth for like, Thousands of years if we could get all of the energy out of the earth. It's like yeah We can't we don't know how to do that. Do we know how

SPEAKER 1: to yeah, we just don't have the facility Commercial facility to do so but the technology is there

CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: experts differ on the exact number of years here But they agree that the nuclear waste we have now It could be used as a large energy source, based on technology that we've already built.

But it gets even better. If you reuse that nuclear waste, especially if you reuse it more than once, you can dramatically cut down on the amount of time that the waste after all of that's done is radioactive for. So the amount of time that we have to store our nuclear waste. The problems are cost and global politics, not fundamental technology.

Here we go. By the time I got to DC to talk to Johnny about this, I was Obsessed. Hello!

JOHNNY HARRIS: How's it going? Good morning! Welcome to our studio.

CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: We have all of this nuclear [01:06:00] waste, right? And it is scary. But imagine that there was a way that you could actually not just store it, but actually use it.

JOHNNY HARRIS: So you can use nuclear waste as fuel for more energy.

You can recycle

CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: nuclear waste. You can

JOHNNY HARRIS: recycle nuclear waste. Yes.

CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: And I dug all the way into this in a video that I'm now going to promise is going to be on my channel by the time we air this one. This is that video. To understand what's going on here, you have to understand that nuclear waste isn't what you've been told.

Basically all of the electricity that you use, except solar, comes from spinning a turbine. It's magic. Most of the time inside a power plant what you're really doing is you're heating up a liquid into steam and using that to spin the turbine. The most common way to do that is still burning stuff near it.

That's fossil fuels. But you could also use liquid that the earth already heated up for you. That's geothermal. Or You can split atoms apart inside special rocks and make them really hot. That's nuclear. And the special hot rocks are uranium. Uranium. Uranium 235. Uranium. Uranium fever. But only a [01:07:00] really small part of natural uranium, less than 1%.

is a kind of breakable uranium that can sustain a nuclear reaction. This is uranium 235. The number refers to the number of neutrons in the atom. So typically, uranium goes through a process called enrichment, which is making more of the uranium 235 out of the less useful uranium 238. By the time that's all done, your fuel looks like this.

If you take your finger up to your first joint, that's about the size of a uranium fuel pellet. Those pellets then go into these long metal rods that I got to see while I was at Argon. And then comes the nuclear reaction. So you fire a bunch of free atoms at your uranium 235, which cracks it into smaller, very unstable atoms, and throws off a couple other neutrons in the process, which zoom off and hit more uranium nearby, and then more, and more, a chain reaction of splitting atoms.

And each time they get split, a little mass turns into energy, which makes the rods really hot, which heats the water, which spins the turbine, which generates electricity. Ta da! But eventually, after four to six years, you've broken enough of [01:08:00] that special uranium that the reaction stops working efficiently.

And that spent fuel is now considered high level nuclear waste. At this point, that waste is a mix of 238 and a little bit of leftover 235 and a bunch of very unstable atoms that give off ionizing radiation. That ionizing radiation, in large doses, is the bad stuff. It's the scary, invisible killer that affects our tissues and our DNA in often deadly ways.

And the thing is, this nuclear waste stays radioactive for an insanely long time. We're talking hundreds of thousands of years sometimes. Which is To put it mildly, a problem. We've got to find better and safer ways to store nuclear waste. Waste that can remain radioactive for centuries, that remains a big problem.

Right now, most nuclear waste in the United States is stored in dry casks that look like this, to protect people from the radioactive material inside. Those dry casks are meant to last decades, but not hundreds of thousands of years, which is what we're talking about here. So we've been having this ongoing fight for decades.

decades about what to do with nuclear [01:09:00] waste. There are options for long term storage, and some countries are already doing that. Johnny and I got into the details in his video. But right now, in the U. S. and in lots of other countries, there are a lot of dry casks full of nuclear waste just sitting there at nuclear power plants.

So, to summarize, we take uranium out of the ground, we use it once, and then we store it basically forever. This is the once through fuel cycle that the U. S. has today. Now listen to the analogy that they used in the 1960s to describe how This fuel cycle would be. Would you say that using the 235 and not the rest is sort of like using the cream and throwing away the milk?

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Exactly. The key is to figure out how to filter out the stuff that's still useful from the real waste that's not. Turns out, Argonne is one of the few places that is still testing nuclear waste recycling in the U. S. And I got to go see it. I'm just gonna go right on up, and they're gonna tell me to stop filming right now.

CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: It was a whole thing. I had to send them my passport to prove that I was a U. S. citizen before they'd let me on the tour, and I wasn't allowed to film inside. [01:10:00] In order to go into this place that I can't show you, I have to wear these cool safety glasses. How do I look? Amazing. Let's do it. Luckily, Argon itself has actually published footage from the lab that I toured, so here's what they're doing inside that large protective box.

First, they cut up the nuclear waste into little pieces. Then they dissolve those pieces into a vat of molten salts. When they run electricity through that vat, it separates the uranium and other useful materials from the rest of the junk, and pushes it across the vat, where it creates deposits of the useful stuff on the other side.

Then they make new fuel rods out of those deposits and stick them back in a reactor. And it's not just possible to do that once, you can do it multiple times, not just making electricity, but also reducing how long that waste is radioactive for, because you're using up the materials that last the longest.

From hundreds of thousands of years, down sometimes to hundreds of years, which is a much easier time frame to store something. If you can pull this off, you can have a nuclear fuel cycle that looks like this. You mine the uranium, you use it in a reactor, filter out the useful stuff, then you use it [01:11:00] again, and maybe again, and again.

And when you can't anymore, then you put it in much shorter term storage that's much more manageable. This is called a closed fuel cycle, and there are lots of variations, but it's not hypothetical. Some countries, like Japan for example, are already doing this. And they say they do it because it reduces their dependence on imported fuel, it conserves uranium, and it reduces the radioactivity of their nuclear waste.

Which makes sense! So, what happened in the United States? Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced new policies meant to stop the growing risk of nuclear war. And that meant stopping all nuclear recycling. Why? Well, you remember the materials that we separated out during the recycling process.

One of those materials was plutonium, which is a highly radioactive element that was seen as the highest concern for nuclear proliferation. So President Jimmy Carter stopped all nuclear recycling, saying, quote, A viable and economic nuclear power program can be sustained without such reprocessing and recycling.

The U. S. moved away from the kinds of reactors that could [01:12:00] handle nuclear waste, called fast reactors, and toward the kinds of reactors that exist today, called light water reactors. But while the U. S. stopped nuclear recycling, other countries didn't. The ban on nuclear recycling stopped being seen as helpful to slow the threat of nuclear proliferation.

So, President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981. But by then, companies had invested in the kinds of reactors that couldn't recycle, the kind that we have now. Today, the main claim is that nuclear fuel recycling is too high cost. It's just not economical. And that's true, compared to using new uranium, which has been cheap and plentiful.

What incentive did anyone have to recycle their fuel? But those incentives The combination of wondering whether global conflict will cut off fuel supply and the recognition that we need more clean energy in as many ways as possible, as fast as possible has started to wake people up to a technology and a dream that we left behind.

We are not far off from it. We're not talking about a technology that we're dreaming of, that we hope can work. We're talking about a technology that has already been [01:13:00] demonstrated before and proven. We just need to commercialize it. There is a lot to figure out and a long way to go, but if we can recycle nuclear waste, I think it says something profound about what we as humans are capable of.

Splitting atoms, sure, but I mean something much more simple. Changing our minds and overcoming our fears to use our resources and our technology and our ingenuity to make other people's lives a little bit better tomorrow than they are today.

The Renaissance of Nuclear Power Part 1 - The Energy Gang - Air Date 1-27-23

ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Do you think we are seeing a global nuclear renaissance, if you like?

KATIE HUFF: Yeah, absolutely. You know, that word has a specific sort of connotation for folks my particular age. You know, we got into the nuclear energy world in the first renaissance that never really panned out. But I absolutely think there's a resurgence. You've noted all of the ways that I would say are really critical. The increased attention on the quantifiable impacts of various energy technologies, on our fight against the climate crisis, and on our other things that are valued by people and communities. [01:14:00] I think those quantifiable impacts are being better understood by the public now than they once were.

It's a very quantitatively sophisticated public out there on the Internet now, and people want to see the statistics, they want to see the receipts. And nuclear energy looks really great. When you think about the things you mentioned, like reliability, energy density, energy security, land use, materials use, lifetime emissions, and even cost, because of their incredibly long lifetimes and stable high capacity factor power production, nuclear reactors really stack up nicely against other energy sources. And because we care about clean energy now more as a society, as a critical sort of existential threat, we worry about emissions.

Nuclear energy has an incredible role to play, and I think people are recognizing that in a more mature and sophisticated way.

ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Cole, what do you think?

CARL PEREZ: Just adding onto that the advent of Internet and social media and just much more transparency and [01:15:00] information and facts has been super helpful in creating new public advocates. You have never seen as many reactor types and companies in development ever. So you definitely see that there's a renaissance, but as the renaissance in the 14 hundreds, 15 hundreds, there's also an association, enlightenment, right. And people are truly understanding what are the risks beyond simply the environment, but also energy security and what that means for geopolitical tensions. And there's a clear understanding that if we really want to ease geopolitical strife globally, solving energy dependence, or at least security for nations out there, is crucial for that first step. And the second thing I'll just add is we now know way more than we knew before, right. We've had accidents. After Fukushima, there were about $47 billion spent globally in enhancements of nuclear installations to make sure that they abide by these new regulations. So we're also learning, and that's why I think that today we're in a prime position to really capitalize on nuclear technology that was first conceived in the fifties and sixties.

ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Melissa, what do you think?

MELISSA LOTT: So I think it's [01:16:00] interesting thinking about the fifties and sixties and the conversations that I'm in around nuclear power, which I agree, I'm seeing a huge uptick in the interests and questions around it. And. Okay, I want to understand more. How could this work when it comes to this whole question of how we get our power systems to net zero? And actually that might be the clarifying question in my part of this field. We're not talking about a 50% reduction or an 80% reduction anymore. It's net zero. And when you want to do that, and you want to do that quickly in your power sector, because that's the backbone and the leading piece of the drive to net zero, you have to start thinking about firm power, and you've got to think about how that complements energy storage and complements variable renewables. And you don't have a ton of options. Nuclear is one of them. So I see a change in the conversation as a result of that. One of the questions and why. I'm Carl, I love that fifties and sixties popped into my brain when you were saying it is. I often get asked, okay, so we're going to do what we did already again, that's what we're talking about, right? I like this conversation about how the future of nuclear. Yeah, some of it looks like the past. We're talking about vision, you know, we're talking about processes that we have used in the [01:17:00] past, but actually the technology that have been developed in the decades since then. I mean, the future of nuclear doesn't look exactly like the past.

There's actually some key differences in how we'll build things out in the future. And the second piece that I'll say, ed, that I see a lot in the work that I do is how different the conversation is actually in some parts of the US versus the international conversation. And Katie, I'm thinking about the US Poland announcement.

KATIE HUFF: Yeah, absolutely.

CARL PEREZ: And I don't know if you want to talk about that one at all, but that's a big one that signals, hey, you know, okay, maybe not every community is saying, yeah, nuclear power plant, that's something we can have, but a lot of places are seriously considering it and considering different sized reactors, different proportions of their overall energy mix and electricity mix. And I think it's important we differentiate there. It's maybe your community or my community, it's not on the table for a number of reasons, but in a lot of places it is a big part of the conversation. Poland's just one example.

KATIE HUFF: It's existential for places in central and eastern Europe right now where energy in particular, natural gas have clearly been weaponized. And countries as a [01:18:00] matter of national security, national existence, sovereignty in general, are looking towards energy sources that are going to be both clean and secure. Energy sources that don't require refueling every day. Nuclear reactors require refueling once every 18 months, every two years. If we're looking at a gigawatt scale plan. It also can supply an incredibly large fraction of a grid, the scale of Poland or other eastern and central european nations.

ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Sorry, I missed this announcement about the US Poland agreement. What's happened?

KATIE HUFF: Yeah, so there's been an announcement that Westinghouse will be building three, possibly more AP 1000 reactors in Poland. These will be the first reactors that Poland has built commercially and they're ready to go with a large set of three full gigawatts, possibly to expand to six.

CARL PEREZ: I was actually going to continue on that point because there's also an interesting announcement which was Ukraine's Ernago Atom saying that they also want to add two reactors. So we're just mentioning Japoricia, but Ukraine has just announced that they want to buy two AP [01:19:00] 1000s. So it's really interesting to see that even the nations that are, again, Ukraine had Chernobyl, they're one of the largest consumers of nuclear energy in Europe and they're planning on having even more. I think these signals go in the right direction.

ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Yeah, agreed. No, that is really fascinating. I just wanted to jump back to something you said, though, Katy, about those words, nuclear renaissance, which have that somewhat unfortunate connotation. And it feels like probably in the late two thousands, we were talking a lot about that around 2010. The phrase nuclear renaissance got banded around for rather similar reasons to the reasons we're talking about nuclear power today. This appeal of reliable, consistent 24/70 carbon power seemed very significant then. And then the Fukushima accident happened in 2011, and that completely knocked that whole thing off course. And you had a lot of pullback from nuclear power, a lot of delays, nuclear plants being shut down, projects being cancelled, and so on. Do you think we've learned lessons from [01:20:00] that? Is there a danger that this is going to be sort of yet another false dawn for the nuclear business?

KATIE HUFF: Yeah, you know, possibly my favorite author, Sir Terry Pratchett, once wrote that coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. And we may be sort of back in this place where there's an incredible amount of optimism about nuclear. There's a recognition that we need more of it, and there's a lot of interest from vendor companies, but we have learned a lot about deploying and meeting those needs. I think the United States will be turning on two big gigawatt scale units in Georgia, the Vogel units, that are the sort of small realization of that renaissance is a very small fraction of what was expected. But we've learned so much in building those plants, learned about making sure that the design is fully complete before starting work, making sure that you have enough craftspeople in your region, you know, skilled trade workers and craftspeople, union workers, to do the work of electricians and boilermakers and welders and everything that's required. Construction union laboratory to [01:21:00] actually build a plant. Taking a design to an on the grid power plant is an incredible endeavor that we haven't done at scale since the sort of decades between the seventies and nineties. And implementing that has taught a lot of lessons that I think we will take forward as we sort of venture out this same path again. I don't think we'll hit the same roadblocks around implementation, meeting deadlines, and hitting projects on cost and on timeline.

Nuclear waste is reusable. Why aren’t we doing it? - DW Planet A - Air Date 8-2-24

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: To understand why most other countries consider them waste, we need to take a quick look into how nuclear reactors work. Basically, nuclear power is created by splitting atoms, also called fission. One specific type of uranium loves splitting up. When a neutron hits it, it breaks apart and releases more neutrons.

These neutrons then hit other uranium atoms, which also split, causing a chain reaction. When the atoms split inside the reactor core, they create heat. That heat then boils water, [01:22:00] which produces steam, which then drives a turbine. This splitting creates byproducts called fission products. After about three to five years, they build up so much that they absorb neutrons, weakening and slowing down the chain reaction.

And that's when the fuel rod is declared spent. The problem is that according to pure physics, it's very hard to get more electricity out of this type of nuclear fuel safely. There are a handful of other types of reactors where more of the energy can be used continually, but those are mostly experimental, very expensive and complicated to build and maintain.

The majority of nuclear waste around the world is sitting around unused. So what's left is mostly uranium that doesn't like to split up that much, fission products and plutonium. This plutonium is one of the big reasons why there aren't that many countries doing this. But we'll come back to that later.

So that's when [01:23:00] the fuel lands here. The next step is disassembly and separation.

SYLVAIN RENOUF: Behind this door, we have the chemical process. Everything is inside nuclear cells. Without windows, we only use sensors, but we also can send robots or drones inside to make measurements, to check that the equipment is OK. The chemical process consists in separating, uh, uranium, plutonium, and fission products.

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: First, you separate the metal cladding from the fuel pellets. Then you put them into nitric acid to dissolve them. After that, you put the solution together with a solvent that extracts the uranium and plutonium, leaving the fission products behind. Then a chemical is added that changes the state of the plutonium, letting it separate from the uranium.

The fission products, which make up about 4 percent of the waste, are not recyclable. We'll get back to these later. This uranium can be used in regular [01:24:00] nuclear power plants instead of mined uranium. But this process also produces purified plutonium. And that's where it gets interesting. One gram of plutonium represents the energy equivalent of one metric ton of oil.

And this is the not so peaceful part of nuclear technology. And the first reason why recycling isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Because that plutonium is also what makes nuclear bombs so destructive. Nuclear weapons are usually produced with dedicated military technology. But you can also use recycled plutonium from civilian reactors, like India in the 1970s.

ALLISON MACFARLANE: They extracted plutonium from a can do reactor, Canadian designed reactor, using U. S. supplied nuclear fuel.

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: This is Alison McFarlane. She used to work for the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

ALLISON MACFARLANE: And this really terrified the U. S. government. And so that's when the U. [01:25:00] S. indefinitely deferred reprocessing.

They wanted to set an example for the rest of the world, because they now saw that reprocessing was a crime. a grave threat in terms of nuclear weapons proliferation.

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: So what does Orano do with the plutonium today?

SYLVAIN RENOUF: It's a product that we have to take care of it because it can be dangerous, of course, but we have many, many protections for that.

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: Orano ships the purified plutonium all the way across the country in secret, using specific trucks and escorted by the French army. There, the company mixes it with uranium to make something called MOX fuel. This fuel can then be used in regular nuclear reactors. This whole process means that the operators can use up to 30 percent less fresh uranium.

SYLVAIN RENOUF: In the end, the energy is so important that in France, 10 percent of the electricity is generated thanks to the MOX fuel.

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: But there is still one pesky little thing left even after recycling all of this. The fission [01:26:00] product, which brings us to the fourth and final step of the recycling process, vitrification.

That's when the fission products are trapped in glass. And they are stored where we're headed now. It's

massive.

You can just walk right on top of them.

SYLVAIN RENOUF: Exactly. So down just below my feet, uh, the floor is two meters thick. Below my feet, I have a pit with nine canisters on top of the others. So when I stand like this, I got 18 canisters. That's the space you need for one nuclear power plant operating during one year.

I got five rows by 20. That's one year of waste for France.

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: If you did not recycle, how much more room would you need? [01:27:00]

SYLVAIN RENOUF: Five times more than this.

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: So the vitrified waste needs less space. The whole trapping in glass thing also makes it safer.

SYLVAIN RENOUF: But it's the same if you don't recycle. The lifetime is the same.

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: The canisters are stored here year after year, for now, until France completes its final storage site, which is supposed to start construction in the coming years. So, sounds neat, yes. But the biggest hurdle here, as is often the case, is cost. The 24, 000 rooms, the security needed, the transportation casks, bespoke technology.

All of this costs a lot of money. Just buying mined uranium, using it once and throwing it away is cheaper. The price of uranium is rising, but it's still quite abundant.

ALLISON MACFARLANE: There's plenty of uranium. There's just, there's just no need to spend the money to recycle. And it's not [01:28:00] really, it's more difficult than it sounds.

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: The way I explained Orano's recycling process was extremely simplified. This is what it would look like if I'd shown you the entire video. And not many countries know how to do this at scale. Russia is the second biggest recycler, reprocessing about a tenth of what France does. India also reprocesses its own waste and is planning on expanding its capacities.

China has one demonstration plant and is currently building more. The UK used to recycle, but gave up a couple of years ago, also because it was too expensive. Japan has been building a reprocessing plant for over 30 years, with massive delays and cost increases. But out of 32 countries that use nuclear power, that's it.

SYLVAIN RENOUF: France made the choice to recycle a long time ago, more than 60 years ago now. But for France, it's a very strategic way to keep sovereignty, because we have, um, a strong [01:29:00] parts of our electricity which is produced with nuclear electricity. So it's logical to have our own plants.

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: This is also why the entire recycling operation is state owned.

So is the operator of all the nuclear power plants in the country. France just locked in that strategy through 2040. But right now, they're recycling much more than they can reuse. Most of the recycled uranium is sitting around in another location and could be used if uranium becomes more expensive.

Plus, recycling does reduce the amount of extremely radioactive waste, but it also creates another problem.

ALLISON MACFARLANE: Those chemicals and all the other equipment and other materials that you use generate a lot of waste. It's not, you can't just go in and pull out, you know, with tweezers. And the once

KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: recycled MOX fuel isn't currently recycled again, so it also becomes waste after another couple of years.

SECTION B - CLIMATE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Climate.

The big environmental costs of rising demand for big data to power the internet - PBS NewsHour 6-22-24

ALI ROGIN: Tell us a little [01:30:00] bit more about what a data center is. And why do we need so many of them?

SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: Whenever we use the internet, upload photos to the cloud, send emails, watch a video, all of that data and digital information needs a home and it lives in these huge facilities called data centers, which hold tens of thousands of servers each and they process all that digital information for us. Something like 70 percent of the world's digital information is processed by a cluster of data centers in Virginia alone. And there are over 5,000 facilities in the US.

ALI ROGIN: What are the environmental impacts of having some of these data centers in your backyard?

SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: So to process all that information, they need two things. The first is electricity, of course, to physically crunch and process all that gigabyte going on. The other is water, which are used in cooling systems to protect these servers from physically overheating. And researchers think they're in the top 10 water consuming industries in the U.S. they use 2 percent of the electricity in the U.S., which is a lot.

And a source told me that data center campuses can use the resources equivalent to a small city and as AI booms they'll use even more. The average AI [01:31:00] application uses six times the amount of electricity so they run a lot hotter and that is scales exponentially they just need more water to cool down.

ALI ROGIN: And how do these data centers in the United States and around the world affect global efforts to decarbonize?

SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: It's tricky, because right now we are building out green energy solutions at a great scale, it's happening really fast, but it might not be happening fast enough. Currently, a lot of the grid is still running on fossil fuels, and even plans in Virginia to shut down, you know, coal firing plants may not go through, because these data centers need so much energy that grid operators need to fire those coal plants backup or just keep them running in order to meet all that demand.

So in one of the talking points of these data center reform coalition's I've spoken to is that that's a step backwards from clean energy goals, and kind of almost a betrayal of some of the promises certain states have made to, you know, get off of carbon.

ALI ROGIN: And many of these data centers are located in densely populated residential areas. What's it like to live near one?[01:32:00]

SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: Yeah, you know, they're being built near schools and neighborhoods protected nature parks in Virginia, in particular. And one big impact is that they're really loud, they hum and they bring all this noise pollution to the area.

All that concrete also means a huge increase in stormwater runoff, because that rain can no longer soak into the ground at all has to go somewhere. And so the amount of electricity also could be more than the grid may be able to handle. So when there's an outage, there's kind of a question of who gets the power of residents or data centers.

ALI ROGIN: We're talking to you now via Skype, we're using a lot of data to do it. As we increasingly rely on this type of cloud computing, to do so many things we use apps we use, we do virtual meetings, that kind of thing. Is there any way that these data centers can continue to expand, continue to grow and support all this usage, but do so in a more environmentally friendly way?

SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: You know, it is possible to build cooling systems that use less water, but we don't really see those built out at scale yet. And you could power them with green [01:33:00] energy. But again, right now we have a grid that's kind of stuck on fossil fuels, and we're slowly making the transition to green energy, but maybe not fast enough to meet all this demand.

First, before we can really know what we need to do next, we just need more transparency from the industry, which scientists and activists both told me is pretty secretive. Google is saying it's a leader in sustainable data centers. And they only began releasing their water usage data a couple of years ago, after a lawsuit.

ALI ROGIN: And to that transparency point, I want to play for you a soundbite from an environmental activist in Northern Virginia, as we've said, where so many of these data centers are located.

JULIA BOLTHOUSE: One of the big things that concerns me is that some of these data center companies are claiming to be holding federal or Department of Defense servers, and therefore their critical infrastructure and cannot be allowed to go down. And so there's this this question of who gets the water in a trout situation? And are they going to leverage that kind of argument of national security [01:34:00] to potentially say they get the water first?

ALI ROGIN: Are there any safeguards that exist to make sure that these companies are being honest about the types of companies that they're supporting with their servers and what the effect on the environment is?

SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: We're kind of trusting companies to be transparent and do the right thing. There are a lot of companies like to tout sustainability goals. But truthfully, we're trying to get lost there in Virginia right now, a couple of bills were introduced in Virginia and in other states, but they're not getting a lot of traction until we have that research we need.

And so right now, Virginia is conducting a data center impact study. And the results of that will come out later this year, hopefully. I mean, we're just seeing a lot of action. In Virginia in particular, the Piedmont Environmental Council is a group that has this coalition called the Data Center Reform Coalition. And they just started this year really digging in organizing their community together with hundreds of individuals and nonprofits on board.

And they're working directly with lawmakers too to see what they can do, and how they [01:35:00] can, you know, keep this industry a little bit more accountable. They also are taking action through the Freedom of Information Act requests, to see what other kinds of information they can learn about these data centers even before the transparency is coming from the companies themselves.

The Three Mile Island Melt Up - Decouple - Air Date 9-20-24

DR. CHRIS KEEFER: In short, 20 year power purchase agreement with Microsoft, which we'll see three mile Island, uh, unit one, not, uh, not the melted unit two.

Restarted just five years after it was shut down for economic reasons. Mark, what's going on? Break this down for us.

MARK NELSON: First of all, I don't differentiate between unit one and unit two. It's all three mile Island coming back. I think that, uh, people use the meltdowns in the past to smear all of nuclear. So I just say three mile Island is coming back.

Chernobyl operated for 14 more years. Probably no hope for hope for Fukushima Daiichi, but yeah, Three Mile Island rides again. So Three Mile Island has already had a 40 unit one has already had a 40 year life. It's [01:36:00] been shut down since 2019 for two big reasons. Fracking boom made an enormous amount of cheap gas, including under Pennsylvania itself.

So there's gas coming out of the ground in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Meaning if you set up a new, uh, competing natural gas plant, you could drive down the local cost for of electricity wholesale prices enough. To kill off the local nuclear plant. So that was the idea. Economists said we'd have these markets to destroy long lived cheap assets, because that will somehow be better for consumers.

They're, they have PhDs, so they're very smart, Chris. Um, anyway, so we lost 2000, in 2019, we lost Three Mile Island Unit One. Why that reactor? Because as opposed to most other nuclear plants in the area, it was only a single unit plant. The other one melted down in 1979. So we had a one unit plant. Whose costs were higher than the two unit plants of the area and were higher than the almost dirt free, nearly free natural gas going [01:37:00] into natural gas plants nearby and the natural gas plants can turn off when there's a low prices, but nuclear plants do best when they're base load and run for the whole system all the time because they have fixed costs.

So in 2019, the nuclear plant was about to go offline and they said to the state, we need subsidies are going to lose us. And the state said, not our problem. And then they said to the tech companies, you need to buy our power or you're going to lose this power. And you're not going to have it in the future.

And the tech company says, Oh no, we're already 100 percent renewables. Powered. Now it was a lie. Like they knew they were lying. They knew it was false. They knew they were not getting 100 percent renewables. They knew they were running off of fossil fuels, but legally they were able to claim and their lawyers said it was okay to claim that they're on 100 percent renewables.

They did that by building wind and solar in a different state. Crediting themselves with that generation than building their data centers by the coal, gas, nuclear and hydro plants. Great system, until you run out of other people's baseload power, the [01:38:00] certificates of which you're not buying. This is what happened.

The big tech companies, over the last 24 months, suddenly realized they needed to 10 X the size of their biggest data centers to effectively compete for the cheapest compute, the cheapest operation of the most number of processors. So suddenly they need a gigawatt or more at a time. Of power to build the largest and therefore the cheapest per unit of computation data centers.

But they've absorbed almost all the excess available in the market and they can't just snap their fingers and bring through existing transmission lines, another gigawatt of power. And they certainly can't gather up from renewables here, renewables there, and flow it all to a single point in. In space, like a single data center and know for a fact, they're going to be able to deliver all that power at a price anywhere close to what the power purchase agreements were for the wind and solar that's getting built.

So if [01:39:00] we see as with levelized cost of electricity or power purchase agreements that are for wind and solar. where they can put their stuff on the grid. 30 a megawatt hour, 40 a megawatt hour. That means nothing to the data centers that need physical power delivery at a specific location. And if they say to the wind and solar, hey, we'll pay, we'll pay 100.

Isn't that better than your 30 and 40? And then the data that the renewables would say, so yes, but you're gonna have to have somebody else get it to you and you're gonna have somebody else like have to actually supply the The power because we're just the certificate saying you're totally good man. So there's the background with my anger.

You can hear my anger here because we lost nuclear plants because of this, this awful system. In the case of three mile island, clearly constellation was hedging a little and they took a sort of german pace of years long, slow disassembly. If that now they shut off that plant when they did need to. Some [01:40:00] life extension upgrades and some work they couldn't justify spending what at the time would have been a couple hundred million on that work.

And at the moment, what we're hearing now is that it's about 1. 6 billion dollars of spending needed at that nuclear plant. To upgrade it for long life. Now, whether that's like to build the data centers, build the hookups or to operate, or there may be a bunch of goodies thrown in there, but constellation needed to be sure it could make 1.

6 billion and the cost of the power and a healthy profit, I think they've probably been quite certain for some time they could get it. The question was how much could they get and how much certainty now I would imagine that Microsoft said. To anybody in the country that makes power, we'll take 20 gigawatts yesterday.

If you've got it clean, hopefully, but whatever, we're not picky. That's what all the big, the big tech companies are saying at the moment, in the case of three mile Island, they would have needed that as soon as possible. And I would imagine that there was [01:41:00] a. Very nice premium that was likely paid to get that restart date as soon as possible and to lock in as much of the power as possible.

Now, this is not true behind the meter. This isn't behind the meter. They're going to put this power on the grid. So it's not clear how much of this power is going to a co located data center versus just being sold into the grid and allowing Microsoft to say they have. Additionality. What is additionality?

It means you're adding low carbon generation. So there's only a few nuclear plants in the country where you can get this additionality by either, you know, turning the back on or in, I guess, in aggregate, you can have a few nuclear plants worth of up rates if people really push that. So here in Three Mile Island, there's almost none of these left.

Plants to turn back on. We've got what Dwayne Arnold in Iowa and, uh, Palisades in Michigan, but that power has been spoken for probably at lower than the prices that the tech companies would now, uh, purchase it. So Three Mile Island seems to be getting a deal that may be [01:42:00] the largest electricity deal in us history, or at least one of the largest, certainly from a single power plant, what we're hearing is it's above a hundred dollars a megawatt hour, which means on an annual basis, almost 800 million of revenue, not of profit.

You know, they've got to pay for the fuel and the staffing and the, and safety and stuff like that at the three mile Island, they've got to pay for the upgrades too. But they're going to make a few hundred million dollars of profit for years, as far as I can tell, if deal terms hold, and they're going to make it over 20 years.

Here's the key points. For your listeners, Chris, these are scales of revenue equivalent to the task of financing and building new gigawatt scale nuclear plants in America. Starting today, if we can deliver reliably, that's that's the thing. It doesn't even. Not even delivering it cheap, Chris. It's knowing that in six years or seven years, you can be giving Microsoft power at a given location and, [01:43:00] and at a, at a, at a price that they're willing to pay. Three mile Island is such a high price in part because it can be available in by 2028 and there's almost nothing left. That's additionality. Now, are these companies going to wait for additionality? Oh, hell no. They are going to buy up entire nuclear plants.

And the cities that are currently using that power are going to suddenly learn the downsides of the electricity markets if they didn't know them before. Which is, Even though a nuclear plant can keep running for 20, 30, 40 years after it's paid off its construction costs. And even though those, those operation costs for the nuclear plants, maybe 20, 25 a megawatt hour, if there's a shortage, you can sell that power for a hundred, 120, even the plants that were built out of rate payers pockets.

Back in the seventies.

Nuclear Power and the Climate Emergency - Against the Grain - Air Date 7-1-24

SASHA LILLEY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: We're told that while nuclear power may have its downsides, we need to turn to it to avert a larger catastrophe from the combustion of fossil fuels, since nuclear power would [01:44:00] allow us to produce energy without greenhouse gases. Why don't you find that argument convincing?

M.V. RAMANA: That argument is a good one and, um, under other circumstances, one would go with that argument because precisely the reason you mentioned, which is that the climate is in a real crisis situation today and it's getting worse.

But, Nuclear energy, we've had experience with this for about 70 years now. And one thing we can conclude about it is that nuclear reactors are very expensive and they take a long time to build. And this means that using nuclear energy to solve the climate crisis will be an expensive way to deal with it and will take a long time to even affect any kind of reductions in emissions.

And so the problem With that is there are other [01:45:00] alternatives. If nuclear were the only way to replace fossil fuels, then perhaps we could consider that. But, uh, because there are other alternatives, which are far cheaper and far quicker to build, I'm talking in particular about solar energy and wind energy, which have grown tremendously in the last couple of decades.

Um, trying to invest in nuclear energy represents a diversion from investing in more effective, uh, and currently deployable climate solutions. One should also think about this question politically, not just in terms of technology and, you know, does this emit, uh, greenhouse gases or not. One has to try to also think about this in terms of who's pushing it, who's going to benefit from it, what else are they interested in.

And I don't think nuclear, those people who are promoting nuclear energy are really very keen on, uh, solving the climate crisis as soon as possible, [01:46:00] especially in the way that we think it should be done, which is to have significant social and political change, uh, system change, not climate change, as the slogan in many, uh, rallies go.

SASHA LILLEY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: Well, we'll return to this whole push now for nuclear power as a purportedly cleaner alternative to the climate crisis. But I wanted to ask you if you could just give us a sense of the trajectory of electrical generation from nuclear power. Why has it fallen globally? In the last several decades,

M.V. RAMANA: the fleet of reactors around the around 400 nuclear reactors operating around the world, and this fleet has been built up since the 1950s.

Uh, initially it was a slow growth, and then there was a steep increase in the 1970s and 80s. Most of the reactors that were built, um, came up in the 1970s in the United States, and then in the 1980s, [01:47:00] uh, in Western Europe and Canada and elsewhere. Uh, And the maximum number of reactors that were ever constructed were in 1984 and 1985, roughly a little over 30 reactors every year.

And since then, there was a sharp fall, and one might note that 1986 was the year that the Chernobyl reactor exploded, uh, and caused a huge amount of radioactive contamination in Belarus and, uh, Ukraine and other parts. Uh, that did affect, uh, how, uh, Many countries thought about nuclear energy, but since then, uh, since the mid 1980s, the number of reactors that have been shut down each year, um, has, uh, compensated for or been, uh, roughly comparable to the number of reactors that have been connected to the grid each of those years, so the result of that has been that the number of reactors And the total generation capacity for nuclear energy around the world has been more or less constant, uh, [01:48:00] for since the 1990s.

But at the same time, uh, it's not as though energy demands have not been growing. And, uh. Various other kinds of, uh, electrical generation systems have been, uh, constructed around the world. And the result of it is what you mentioned, the share of nuclear energy. Uh, in the globe's, uh, electricity generation has been declining consistently since the mid 1990s.

In 1996, it was around 17.5%, and that has declined to around little over 9% in the last, uh, few years. Uh, and, uh, that's the trajectory that we've been seeing entirely contrary to what you would want, uh, if nuclear energy were to be a solution to climate change. What you would be expecting is that the share of nuclear energy should be increasing and the share of fossil fuels should be declining.

But, in fact, that's not been happening. The, uh, in contrast, uh, renewables, [01:49:00] uh, modern renewables, which is mostly solar and wind, have been increasing consistently since the mid 1990s and exceeds about 14 percent as of 2022. So considerably more than nuclear energy.

SASHA LILLEY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: You know, you mentioned the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown.

What is it about nuclear plants that make them prone to accidents, even including the recent generation of nuclear plants, which claim to be safer?

M.V. RAMANA: So nuclear power, um, is, uh, Ultimately, a very complicated way to boil water. That's what it is, um, because you're producing steam, which is going to drive a turbine, and the process that is used to produce the heat that's, uh, producing the steam in turn, uh, is, uh, nuclear fission, um, nuclear fission by its very nature is hazardous because when, uh, a uranium or a plutonium nucleus, [01:50:00] uh, fissions and breaks up into two or more lighter substances.

Many of the substances that are produced, so called fission products, are highly radioactive. And in a nuclear reactor, we have to try to design it in such a way that none of these hazardous fission products or many other radioactive materials that are produced inside the reactor when the neutrons that are produced in the fission are absorbed by various other materials that are part of the reactor.

All of those radioactive materials have to be kept within the nuclear reactor and not allowed to enter the environment. And this requires a lot of safety mechanisms, extremely robust construction and so on. Um, that, uh, But, but the very fact that you have to have all of these complicated, uh, systems together means that we are dealing with a very complex technology with [01:51:00] multiple parts, which, uh, also interact with each other.

Uh, in the 1980s, uh, the sociologist, uh, Charles Sparrow, uh, examined what happened at the Three Mile Island accident. Uh, in, uh, Pennsylvania in 1979. And he realized that, uh, nuclear power, nuclear reactors, like some other hazardous technologies, which also he examined, have two fundamental characteristics.

One of it was what I talked about, the, uh, interactive complexity, the fact that you have a complex technology with multiple moving parts, which can interact with each other. And the. Implication of that particular feature of the technology is that it's very hard to foresee what all can happen, what possible end states a nuclear reactor might end up in, simply because the number of ways in which a system can evolve is extremely [01:52:00] complicated.

The second feature that, uh, Pero noticed was that they have something called tight coupling, that the events in a nuclear reactor happen very quickly and one can very easily affect, uh, another. Uh, an example I often give is imagine that you are taking, uh, some kind of an intercontinental flight. Uh, let's say you're flying from Washington, D.

C. to Colombo in Sri Lanka, uh, odds are that you would have to change, uh, flight somewhere, maybe in Frankfurt in Germany. If the time between, uh, your, your first flight landing and the second flight taking off is a very short period, let's say just half an hour, then any small error that might happen, let's say you forget to lace your shoes.

Or you forget to zip up your bag as you're leaving the first flight and all the contents fall down. You stop to tie your lace or pack your bag again. That slight delay can mean that you might miss the second flight. [01:53:00] Whereas if the flights were like six hours apart, then these kind of small errors may not cause a major impact.

The system is more forgiving of small errors. Nuclear reactors are like the tightly coupled, uh, flight system, that even small errors cannot be tolerated very easily. The only way to deal with that tight coupling is to add multiple systems, uh, to try and compensate for these errors. Uh, but that would both increase the cost of your reactor and also add to the complexity.

And adding safety systems because of the complexity does not always mean that you're going to end up with a safer system because sometimes a fault in the safety system can ultimately result in an accident. We have examples of all of these from the history of nuclear reactor operation. The bottom line from all of this is that it's very hard to, it's almost impossible to design a nuclear reactor that can, you know, under no circumstance release, [01:54:00] uh, radioactive.

There will always be some scenario where these reactors can have a catastrophic accident that results in radioactive contamination, uh, being spread out. And this is true for all kinds of reactor designs, whether they are the traditional light water reactors or fast neutron, uh, sodium cool reactors, the kind that, uh, Bill Gates has been promoting in Wyoming, uh, or Uh, so called molten salt reactors.

All of these reactors have, uh, different kinds of accident, uh, scenarios. Uh, so you cannot really rule out, uh, any of this. And you have to take into account the possibility of an accident whenever you're planning for nuclear power.

SECTION C - RISK

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section C: Risk.

Why does America need new nuclear weapons? Part 1 - On Point - Air Date 5-25-24

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: You've written quite extensively on the overall plans and expansions of America's nuclear arsenal. I'd like first to learn more from you about Sentinel. These are missiles that haven't yet fully been constructed, because obviously there's an issue about the [01:55:00] delivery of the program.

But what is the Sentinel missile? How would it ostensibly work? It is a land based, long range nuclear armed missile.

STEPHEN YOUNG: Each missile would carry one to two or three warheads potentially, and each warhead would likely be about 20 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Japanese war.

So these are massively powerful weapons that have about a 30-minute flight time from the U.S. to almost anywhere in the world. We've had these systems like this for decades, but in reality, we don't need them at all. We actually have no need for land-based missiles. We can be perfectly safe without them.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Okay. So when we say that there are orders many times the strength of, or the devastation power of the bombs that landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you're talking about then therefore bombs that could kill millions and millions of people, should they be used.

STEPHEN YOUNG: [01:56:00] That's correct. Absolutely.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Okay. Now, their land base, which is the key thing here. You've also written about other weapons systems, for example and, there's a lot of, we're talking about the Defense Department, so there's a lot of acronyms and numbers here, help me keep them straight. Is this, is Sentinel the same thing or something different as the proposed gravity bomb that has been discussed before.

STEPHEN YOUNG: So the U.S. maintains what's called a triad of nuclear systems, the land-based weapons are one leg of that triad. Another leg is the air based weapons delivered by jet fighters and bombers. That's what uses gravity bombs. And the third leg are missiles launched from submarines at sea.

The third leg of the triad. So we have navy, ICBMs, bombers, and nuclear armed submarines, are the three legs of the nuclear triad. I would argue we could get rid of one, if not two of those legs of the triad [01:57:00] and still have a very strong deterrent to keep us safe.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Okay, so the gravity bomb then is the one that's also, it's flown in by a bomber.

And there's one at least that you've written about called the B61-12, which as you report, would cost more than its weight in gold. Is it in production though?

STEPHEN YOUNG: It is. It's taken a very long time and cost far more than initially estimated. But yes, it's in production now. And they will complete production in the next two to three years, probably. And it will be deployed in the United States and also about a hundred U.S. weapons are actually deployed in Europe, and four or five European countries maintain U.S. nuclear weapons. And should a war happen, those weapons would be handed over to those countries for nuclear war fighting.

It's a scary thought.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: So that's gravity bombs. And then Sentinel falls under the land-based missiles that you talked about a bit [01:58:00] earlier.

STEPHEN YOUNG: Yes.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Are there other land based missiles that are in development, or new types of warheads? We only have the one land based missile currently deployed, the Minuteman III, and the one to replace that is the Sentinel.

Minuteman III, as we mentioned in the previous discussion, was deployed first in the '70s. It's been updated and upgraded many times since then, so it's not still a 70-year-old missile but it definitely needs to be refurbished again, or simply retired. I would argue we should retire it.

But yes the Sentinel Missile is the only missile we will have, if it is indeed built, despite the cost increases it's going through. And then again, the third leg is the nuclear armed submarines. ... 20 or so nuclear armed missiles that have mini warheads on those.

Okay. And so are there new sea based or submarine based ballistic missiles in development? Because I think you've written about a new warhead. Is that different [01:59:00] than the quote, low yield warhead that the Trump administration deployed?

STEPHEN YOUNG: So the submarines can carry, each submarine has currently 20 missiles on it, and they can carry multiple warheads, and some of those warheads, most of those warheads are very high yield weapons.

Again, ones that are 20 to 30 times the size of the bomb dropped in Hiroshima. But under the Trump administration, the U.S. has had to deploy a few weapons that are lower yield, only a third of the size of the bomb dropped in Hiroshima. But still, if you drop it in a big city, that would kill tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people in minutes.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Okay.

STEPHEN YOUNG: Still, massive destruction.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: But Stephen, I just want to be sure that I hear you clearly. So the low yield ones are a third of the size of Hiroshima, which is still very devastating. And then you say the other regular yield submarine based [02:00:00] nuclear weapons, I want to be sure I'm not mishearing you, were 20 to 30 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima?

STEPHEN YOUNG: That's correct. And in total, if you add up all the explosive yield of all the bombs on U.S. submarines, one submarine has seven times the destructive power of all the bombs used in World War II. And we have 12 of those submarines. So one submarine, again, has seven times destructive power of all the bombs used in World War II.

And we have 12 of those.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: All the bombs, including conventional artillery and yes, fire bombs, et cetera. Not just nuclear bombs.

STEPHEN YOUNG: Yeah, that's correct.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: All the bombs of all types, including nuclear bombs in World War II.

STEPHEN YOUNG: It's just incalculable the level of obstruction we have at our fingertips.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: And yet, this is an effort to modernize and even expand [02:01:00] America's nuclear might, is an effort that has been consistent over several administrations, both Republican and Democratic. We'll talk in a little bit more detail about what happened under Obama, what happened under Trump and what may be going on under Biden.

But what's your conclusion from that, that there's a consistency from the White House and also the Pentagon, in the belief that this massive modernization and expansion of America's nuclear power is essential for U.S. security?

Yes. And there is a bipartisan consensus at one level that the U.S. needs to maintain a nuclear deterrent. If you actually have a vote in the U.S. Congress, most Democrats actually would support getting rid of the Sentinel Missile Program, but not enough of them. So if the President called for cancelling the Sentinel Missile, he probably would lose a vote in Congress [02:02:00] because enough Democrats agree with Republicans that they think this is a valuable contribution.

STEPHEN YOUNG: But the reality is the military simulations they play out are just so terrifying, that people worry, oh, we have to be just sure that we're going to be safe by having more of this destructive capability. But the reality is we have still far more than we need. And I think the argument to me is pretty clear that the risk is simply not worth it.

We don't need this massive nuclear arsenal. We don't need redundancy upon redundancy. We don't need to have every target covered multiple times with multiple yield warheads that are massively destructive. It's simply overkill, again and again.

Nuclear power in an unstable world - Front Burner - Air Date 7-10-23

TAMARA KHANDAKER: I was wondering if you could take us back to 2011, the tsunami that happened in Japan, which was triggered by an earthquake. What happened at the Fukushima power plant?

JIM SMITH: When the earthquake happened, the nuclear site at Fukushima, the reactors shut down automatically. [02:03:00] But 40 minutes later, that giant tsunami arrived and that overwhelmed the sea defences at Fukushima and flooded the reactor buildings. And that caused the diesel generators to be flooded and stopped working and it shut down the cooling system. So basically, the reactors no longer had cooling, they'd shut down, but they were still very hot and they overheated. And that led to a meltdown and release of radioactivity. And so the really dramatic thing that we saw at fukushima was three of the reactor buildings exploding from an explosion of hydrogen gas.

[news clip]

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: It’s becoming difficult for crews to try to prevent a meltdown at the site. Since the weekend, there have been explosions in reactors one, two and three, and temperatures are also rising at two other reactors nearby.

JIM SMITH: And so the meltdown and the explosion released radioactivity into the [02:04:00] atmosphere, which then deposited on the land and the sea, as well as direct discharges of radioactivity into the pacific Ocean.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: So this water that Japan wants to get rid of now, where is that coming from?

JIM SMITH: So initially, water was radioactive water from the plants that were trying to cool the reactors. And so water was going into the ocean, but the Japanese started pumping that out and storing it. And this is still going on because the reactors still need water for the cooling operations. And there is also radioactive water in the water around the plant, underneath the plant. And so that has to be pumped out. So since about 2012, the Japanese have been collecting that water and storing it in over a thousand giant tanks. So they've now got about 1.3 million cubic metres of radioactive, not, I wouldn't say, not highly radioactive, but significantly [02:05:00] radioactive water stored in tanks.

[news clip]

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Treated radioactive water at the plant is stored in about a thousand tanks that are nearing their 1.37 million ton capacity. It must be removed to prevent accidental leaks and to make room for the plant's decommissioning.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: You said that it's not that radioactive and the Japanese government says that it’s been treated and its plan to dump it into the ocean through this tube is safe. Last week, the u.N. watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Association signed off on this plan.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The plan as it has been proposed and devised is in conformity with the agreed international standards and its application. If the government decides to proceed with it, would have negligible impact on the environment.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: So what is it about the water that [02:06:00] people are worried about?

JIM SMITH: So the water has been treated. So there's a wide range of radioactive elements, things like if we cast our minds back to the Fukushima accident, people were worried about radioactive cesium. And that's been the main contamination of both the marine and terrestrial environment around Fukushima. That's been removed, except for the radionuclide in their water treatment processing system. What's left is a thing called tritium water. So tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen. So instead of H2O, it's what we call HTO. Instead of two hydrogens and an oxygen, it's got hydrogen and oxygen and a tritium, the radioactive form of hydrogen. So chemically, it behaves in an identical manner to ordinary water. And at that sort of scale, it makes it pretty much impossible to separate it from the, you know, 1.3 million [02:07:00] cubic metres of ordinary water.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: I see. And so these concerns about the tritium, I just want to dive into this a little bit. What kind of danger does tritium pose to humans and marine life?

JIM SMITH: So at high levels, the tritium can pose a danger both to human and marine life by damaging DNA essentially. So DNA damage is going on all the time in our bodies not only from radiation, but from other things, from all sorts of chemical reactions that are going on in our cells. But the cell can usually repair it, but there's occasional moments where the cell can't repair it and that can lead to cancer. So those are the sort of concerns, but we're not talking about those sort of levels of tritium.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Right. The Japanese government says the final level of tritium that would be deposited into the water is [02:08:00] safer than the level required by regulators for nuclear waste discharge or by the WHO. So can you just sort of put the numbers when it comes to the level of tritium into context for us?

JIM SMITH: So the Japanese plan is that after this dilution 100 times, the sum of all the other radionuclides in that release will be less than 1% of the Japanese guideline limit for discharge. Yeah, the tritium will be about 40 times lower than the Japanese guideline level, and that makes a value. We measure radioactivity in Becquerels, and the tritium will be about 1500 becquerels per litre in the discharge water. Now, to put that in context, the World Health Organization guideline limit for tritium in drinking water is 10,000 becquerels per litre, so seven times higher. So in theory, from [02:09:00] the radioactivity perspective, you could drink the water that's going to be released to the pacific.

[music]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: So there seems to be agreement among a lot of scientists that this plan is safe, but I feel like it's worth noting that there isn't total consensus on this plan in the scientific community. Even inside the IAEA, there are also some who say there needs to be more studies on how this would impact the ocean bed and marine wildlife, and that Japan and TEPCO have cut corners, that this has all been a bit hasty. And what do you think of that?

JIM SMITH: I think that's totally inaccurate. It's not that this is unprecedented. We know that this has been going on for decades. And I just think that there's no scientific basis for claims that this is a big risk or that it hasn't been considered properly. I [02:10:00] think it has. We know from previous experience what tritium does in the environment. The proviso is that the Japanese do what they say they're going to do, which is really important. But if they do what they say they're going to do, then I don't see any grounds for considering this a significant risk.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: But there has also been some opposition to this plan from the Japanese public. So surveys show that people are pretty evenly divided and 45% of respondents support the plan. 40% of people are against it. But fishing communities in Fukushima have been especially hard to convince. And on Friday, a petition with 33,000 signatures was delivered by fishing cooperatives, expressing their opposition to the plan. If the majority of scientists say the water is safe, why are fishers so opposed to this?

JIM SMITH: I mean, they have a very good reason to be opposed to this because they know what perception of damage it will do to [02:11:00] their products. And we know that food is a very sensitive issue for people. And any kind of… even the perception of risk is certainly going to damage their ability to sell their catches on the market. And we know that Rice from the Fukushima prefecture after the accident, even though it had been tested and it was radioactively below the safe limits, it achieved prices less than other rice from other parts of Japan. And the fishermen know very well that this is going to damage their industry, and I have a lot of sympathy with that.

Why does America need new nuclear weapons? Part 2 - On Point - Air Date 5-25-24

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: There's a massive program to rebuild every piece of the U.S. nuclear arsenal at a cost likely to top two trillion dollars over the next three decades. Through this modernization program, the military industrial complex is building new submarines, new land based missiles, new stealthy bombers, new stealthy fighter craft, and new stealthy air launched cruise missiles, plus a suite of all new nuclear warheads and bombs [02:12:00] for the delivery vehicles to carry.

It is an enormous, yet largely unnecessary, excuse me, undertaking, end quote. What is your response to that?

MADELYN CREEDON: This whole debate and discussion really is about the fundamental security of the United States. And I think the fundamental security of the United States, the backbone of deterrence of the United States, is really based on our nuclear weapons.

And as big as these numbers are from a cost perspective, they really do have to be put in perspective. The nuclear budget of the U.S. is about 7% of the overall defense budget. And the triad, as you have been discussing, so the three legs of our nuclear deterrence, the land, the sea and the air legs are all in modernization and they've been in modernization since about 2010.

And it's a more or less for like [02:13:00] replacement of the bombers and the ICBMs and the submarines, but it is an absolutely essential part of our deterrence, as well as the deterrence of our allies.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: So the point I think that Stephen was making is that if, specifically let's talk about sea launched missiles, if we have such a mighty arsenal on at least 12 nuclear, 12 submarines that are patrolling the world's oceans right now, why would we need those land-based ones that would be launched from here in the United States?

First, we also have to look at the strategy and we also have to look at what our adversaries are doing. And in this case, what I mean by adversaries, are really China and Russia, but each of the three legs of the U.S. triad provide a different purpose. And you look at China, they're also developing a full nuclear triad, and Russia has also had a full nuclear triad for many years, [02:14:00] like the U.S.

But each one of these provides a very different response. So our sea-based leg is really for a second strike. It's survivable, and by the way, all 12 of the submarines are not at sea at any one given time, obviously they have to come back, they have to change crews, they go through refurbishment.

So it's important to keep in mind that we want these different capabilities, both in the air, the sea and land.

Okay. But this, I really appreciate your insight here because Ms. Creedon, I have to say I'm struggling to understand, and from a layperson's perspective, what would the different scenarios be that would lead to the preference of using land-based ICBMs, for example, than a sea launched nuclear capability that would ostensibly be [02:15:00] closer to whatever targets were selected by the Commander in Chief and the Pentagon?

MADELYN CREEDON: The idea here is that a president has multiple options to respond to whatever the situation presents. Obviously, no one wants any sort of a large scale nuclear war. So one of the things that the recent strategic posture commission concluded is that it's important for our national strategic posture to also focus on our conventional capabilities, so that we never get into a situation where we actually have to use the nuclear weapons, but they are all there.

As our backbone of deterrence, and there are different scenarios that each of these would be used, but the most likely in a conflict, in a regional military conflict, is probably first used by either someone else, Russia or China, or what we refer to as the [02:16:00] theater nuclear weapons. Not the strategic nuclear weapons, the strategic nuclear weapons are fundamentally there to deter an all-out nuclear war, which we don't want.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Okay, this is a really good point. So Stephen, let me go back to you, because as you well know, both of you will know that we came closer, everyone experienced a greater fear of potential nuclear war in the past couple of years than we have in some time, specifically because of Russia.

There was legitimate talk about would Vladimir Putin use nuclear weapons in his war against Ukraine? If that were to happen, how would the United States or the rest of the world respond? People were very appropriately anxious about this. So does that not give creed, give heft to what Madelyn Creedon here is saying in that we actually are closer to a [02:17:00] potential nuclear war than we've ever been before?

And so therefore now is not the time, in fact, to let the United States arsenal languish?

STEPHEN YOUNG: A great question, Meghna. Thanks for asking it. Yes, nuclear war is a terrifying thought, and she's correct. The most likely scenario is that probably Russia might use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. If it starts to lose that war, it could use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine to try and say, stop, I want to win this war so badly, I'm willing to start nuclear war.

And that is a terrifying scenario. The reality is though, if they do that, we would not need to respond with nuclear weapons at all. We have vast conventional capabilities, and Russia could be decimated with those capabilities. And that's far preferable to us launching a nuclear strike in response, because that leads to their retaliation and a nuclear escalation that would never be stopped, and we'd all be dead.

The reality is that if Russia did go nuclear, we would absolutely not want to respond with nuclear weapons. We would want to respond conventionally, and to [02:18:00] avoid further escalation, if at all possible. We can't control that. But if we do respond with nuclear weapons, we can guarantee escalation will happen and we'll all be dead.

The world after nuclear war - The Gray Area with Sean Illing - Air Date 6-17-24

ANNIE JACOBSEN: Imagine every single engineered structure. I'm talking buildings, bridges, changing physical shape and collapsing. We haven't even spoken of what happens with that thermonuclear flash that sets everything on fire. It melts lead steel. I mean, titanium.

You're talking about streets nine miles out, transforming into molten asphalt lava. People kind of getting sucked into this. The details are so horrific. And I also think it's important to keep in mind, these are not details from Annie Jacobson's imagination. These are sourced from Defense Department documents because the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department have been keeping track of what nuclear bombs do [02:19:00] to people and to the environment.

Things ever since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of 1945.

SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: You can't find a vision of hell and any religious text that can even approach the horror of this scenario, in my opinion.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: You know, it's interesting that you say that because the religious tax and I often look at the paintings that portray hell and their narrative and their evocative.

They're not specific and scientific. And when you read in the book, things like at precisely what distance pine needles will, you know, ignite from line of sight, nuclear flash, and you realize that that is something that has been measured by the defense department. Because when we were setting off these thermonuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands.

We were measuring [02:20:00] all of this in terms of distance, in terms of atmosphere, we were sending animals up in planes, we were tying animals to ships. This is like horrific details, a lot of which I left out so that readers didn't get essentially beyond grossed out. I worked to include enough detail that The readers could have their own imaginations and their own narrative thoughts about this kind of horror, or as you say, hell, you know, working in tandem with some of these scientific facts.

SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: In service of more detail in that giant mushroom cloud.

That's the image everyone has of a atomic bomb. If I understand the physics of this at all, and I don't, but if I understand what people who do. Understand it told you [02:21:00] everything around that blast gets sucked up into this giant mushroom cloud. So in the case of an actual bomb in a populated area, what gets sucked up into that cloud are thousands of people.

And I guess all the rest of the non human population. Debris in the area, which would be basically everything.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: It's not thousands of people. It's hundreds of thousands of people. It's upwards of a million people. If you're talking about a one megaton thermonuclear bomb, and when you can, you know, try and wrap your head around that.

I think that it takes your heart and soul to an entirely different area of being, perhaps that you've never even been. This was certainly my experience reporting this book when, when Ted Postal, the MIT professor emeritus was describing to me how humans turn into [02:22:00] combusting carbon and then they become sucked up in that cloud.

And this is a man who's Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC.

SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I want to talk about a nuclear winter for a minute, or what you call day zero in the book. What does that look like? How cold would it be? How dark?

ANNIE JACOBSEN: One of the big premises of the book was to take readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter.

And the nuclear launch up to Day Zero, as you say, takes place over this horrifying 72 minute period. And, you know, that is enough to shock anyone that, as STRATCOM Commander General Keillor said to me in an interview, when we were talking about a nuclear war,[02:23:00]

And so, nuclear winter begins. In essence, after the bombs stop falling, stop exploding, there is a process of mega fires. So, the area around every nuclear detonation is going to ultimately result in what is known now as a mega fire. You're talking about a hundred. 200, 300 square miles of fire per bomb where everything in that area is burning until it doesn't exist anymore.

This is because, of course, there are no first responders anymore. There are no fire trucks. There's no way to put anything out. And so, with all of these explosions, soot gets lofted into the air. Troposphere. 330 billion pounds of soot would be lofted [02:24:00] into the air, and that is enough soot to block out 70 percent of the sun.

What happens when that much sun gets blocked out is a dramatic temperature plunge. It's up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Certainly in the mid latitudes, the areas, for example, from Iowa to Ukraine, that whole band of the mid latitudes, the bodies of water in those areas become frozen over in sheets of ice.

With that temperature drop, you have the death of agriculture. And that is why nuclear winter, after nuclear war, will result in what is now estimated to be 5 billion.

SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: And that model you just mentioned, if I remember, also estimated that in places like Iowa and Ukraine, temperatures basically wouldn't go above freezing for something like [02:25:00] six years, at least.

ANNIE JACOBSEN: That's right. And I mean, you know, sometimes the, the details become so overwhelming, they're almost hard to keep track of and other details you simply can never forget. At least that's the case with me as a reporter. And when I was reading Carl Sagan's, he was one of the original five authors of the nuclear winter theory.

And Carl Sagan wrote about how after these uh, uh, uh, bodies of water that get frozen over for, as you say, seven years after the thawing out of that, the dead people who had been frozen in the nuclear winter, then you have to start considering the pathogens and the plague. And so just when you thought you couldn't imagine more horror, now you have to learn about the details of nuclear winter.

And I think the best quote for all of [02:26:00] Was spoken by Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier during the Kennedy administration. And the two of them talked a lot about nuclear war with deep horror. And it was Khrushchev who said after a nuclear war, the survivors would envy the dead.

SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Yeah, that sounds about right.

Credits

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

The additional sections of the show included clips from the energy gang.

Huge. If true. DW planet a, the PBS news hour decouple against the grain. On point front burner and the gray area, 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 [02:27:00] bonus episodes.

Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet. Can 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 [email protected] slash support through our Patrion page or from right inside the apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny 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 will find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our discord community, where you can also continue the discussion.

So coming to you from far outside, the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the best of left podcast coming to twice weekly. Thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestofTheLeft.com.

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#1661 Immigration is Actively Good for the Country Unless You're Racist (Transcript)

Posted by · October 10, 2024 3:50 AM

Air Date 10/8/2024

[00:00:00]

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

Immigration dominates our politics in the worst way because one side benefits from lying about it, and the other can't get their messaging together to create an effective rebuttal. Opposing immigration and stoking blatantly racist arguments doesn't just make the right bad or unsavory, it also makes them wrong on literally all of the facts.

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include

The Thom Hartmann Program,

Democracy Now!,

Deep State Radio,

The ReidOut,

and the LeBetard Podcast.

Then, in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there’ll be more in three sections

SECTION A - DISINFORMATION

SECTION B - WHITE SUPREMACY

SECTION C - LATINO ANTI-IMMIGRATION VIEWS

Trump & Vance are Reviving Dangerous Racist Myths To Win 2024 Election - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 9-16-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: [00:01:00] Using hate explicitly as a political weapon. And this is what Trump and Vance are up

DONALD TRUMP: to:

In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: They're reviving these dangerous, racist myths. and these are not even new.

In the 1890s, in the United States, East Coast German and Dutch immigrants were slandered with claims that they were making sausages from local pets. The assertion was even made into a well known folk song. And Chinese immigrants suffered the same sort of defamation, again, starting in the mid 19th century.

Right through last year, last year in Ohio there was, or in California, excuse me, there was a Thai restaurant that was forced to shut down. because local white racists were claiming that they were serving dogs and [00:02:00] cats, and it just, it blew up their business.

So now it's Donald Trump and J. D. Vance's turn telling these vicious, racist lies. in this case, that legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who are there legally, these are not illegal immigrants, contrary to what Donald Trump and J. D. Vance are saying, are eating the pets of local white people, which is also a lie.

And most recently, Don Jr. even repeated his father's frequent claim that black people have lower IQs than white Americans. He said, quote, "You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average IQ, if you import the third world into your country, you're going to become the third world." Yeah, right, Don Jr.

But nonetheless, this rhetoric of Vance and Trump about black Haitian immigrants, legal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who were there in response to the town actually saying, please come, we need workers. [00:03:00] The response to this has been threats of violence. They had to shut down the schools a couple days in a row. They had to shut down city buildings. They're literally getting bomb threats from these, sick, pathetic Trump supporters who think that this is the way that you do politics, is you threaten violence.

This is what, this is how fascists think. Let's just be candid about this.

And yesterday Trump was asked about this and he repeatedly refused to condemn the bomb threats. And this is a guy who is literally embracing stochastic terrorism, which is what bomb threats are, just random lone wolf terrorism.

And then he published, he posted a thing saying "I hate Taylor Swift." This is just hate, hate, hate, hate. This is all these guys have. And as long as they keep making these outrageous claims and the, what it does, and this, by the [00:04:00] way, this is an intentional strategy.

Several of the, of the, Vance Trump campaign people have just come right out and said it. This is a strategy. This is what, J. D. Vance said it on one of the Sunday shows, this Sunday. I think it was on CNN. He said that we have to create these stories in order to get the media to focus on immigration.

And the reason why is there's only really one subject where the Trump Vance campaign is beating the Harris Walz campaign, and that is immigration.

And so if Trump and Vance can continue to tell outrageous lies about black immigrants, it keeps immigration at the top of the news cycle. Which, in the opinion of Trump and Vance, is to their advantage, because then the corporate media are not discussing how Joe Biden put this country back together after Donald Trump threw us into [00:05:00] the worst depression since the Great Depression.

The media are not talking about the, how we're taking, really, some pretty dramatic steps to mitigate climate change. They're not talking about the factories that are coming back to the United States as a result of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, just utterly, openly rejecting Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama's neoliberal policies, and just saying, no, we're gonna go back, we're gonna go back to FDR and John Maynard Keynes's just, real economics. We're gonna go back to that. Nobody's talking about that because they're all talking about, oh my god, these poor refugees, these poor immigrants, or these bad immigrants.

It's really time for the Republican Party, what's left of it, to [00:06:00] do some serious soul searching. But I, tragically what I'm seeing is that's not happening. Instead, what you're seeing is elected Republicans and Republican spokespeople, people who are the voices of Republicans on TV and radio just out there saying, Oh, no, we're just, it's fine with us. it's there is a problem down there. I'm hearing from my constituents.

As Madeline Albright, a former secretary of state, wrote, who fled Germany in the thirties, in her book, Fascism, A Warning decades ago, "George Orwell suggested that the best one word description of a fascist was bully." And that's what's going on. Hate has always been a tool of fascists and dictators. Because it's powerful enough to cause people to behave in ways they would normally consider offensive or even bizarre, that they normally wouldn't do it. And now we're seeing, as Vance has confessed. [00:07:00] that he is telling lies, that he's making up stories, that all the guardrails, all the limits, even common decency are gone from the Trump Vance campaign.

This is a guy who's married to the brown skinned daughter of Indian immigrants, J. D. Vance. And yet he's willing to trash people based on their skin color and do it intentionally just to gain political power. That is as sick and twisted and craven as it gets.

So this is not a problem that Democrats alone can fix. Having an overwhelming victory this fall would be a, take us a big step forward. But, I warned you about this a couple of weeks ago, the billionaire money is starting to drop. We're seeing it here in the Portland market, in the local race for Congress. Janelle Bynum, is a great member of Congress is being just viciously attacked. [00:08:00] She's actually a great member of the Georgia House of Representatives, or Senate, I'm not sure which. And she's running for Congress and we've got this Republican in the seat right now.

And just vicious ads calling her a liar and, darkening her face, the whole thing, right? It's all, it's coming from a super PAC, one of these billionaire funded super PACs. So here we are. The billionaire's money is starting to hit. And, the races are going to, they're going to tighten up.

Early voting starts this Friday in some states. So here we are.

As German conservatives learned in the late 1930s, if they don't act now, it may soon be too late.

Fascism Expert Jason Stanley on Project 2025, Great Replacement Theory, Attacks on Immigrants & Gaza - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-15-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: We're in an election year. And we were at the Republican National Convention covering it, among those who [00:09:00] spoke was Tucker Carlson.

Media Matters has accused Tucker Carlson of being responsible for, quote, single handedly introducing the White supremacist Great Replacement conspiracy theory into mainstream American politics. This is a clip of Tucker Carlson when he was still hosting a nightly show on Fox News.

TUCKER CARLSON: So into that you throw millions of brand new people who have no connection to America whatsoever.

People who broke our laws to get here, who don't speak our language, who have no idea what the U. S. Constitution says and don't care. And what do you have when you put all of that together? You have a recipe for social collapse.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So you also have written a piece in Slate, Donald Trump is openly running a Great Replacement Theory campaign.

Talk about what Carlson said, what Trump repeatedly is saying, and why you think this is so dangerous.

JASON STANLEY: I was recently talking to [00:10:00] some of my relatives who are Orthodox Jewish who are parroting this line about how our family came in legally. However, many, many thousands of Jewish refugees, from Germany weren't able to come in illegally, come in legally.

They would have had to come in illegally. Many of them were turned away. Their ships were turned away and they died in concentration camps. My fellow Jewish Americans are saying, when they're saying, we should only accept people who come in legally, is they are supporting the mass murder of Jews who were turned away from America's shores.

And that is something that I will never do. I will never turn away the victims of genocide. So this great replacement theory is the core of the message of MAGA Republicanism in this election and previously. it links to the education. framework, because in education, what you do is you eliminate the history [00:11:00] of non-White Christian cis-men.

And you instead elevate the stories of great White Christian men who are supposedly what the people who make our country great. And that way you can represent non-White immigration as an existential threat to the nation. And what we know from history is that Great Replacement Theory motivates mass violence.

It motivates mass violence on the state level and the individual level. We have many, many mass shootings since Anders Breivik, in 2011, justified on the basis of Great Replacement Theory about immigrants ruining the greatness and innocence of the nation. And it justified, of course, mass violence as we're seeing in India when they represent Muslims as sort of foreign invaders, and there's regular [00:12:00] lynchings.

And it, of course, was the core of Nazi ideology when Hitler had this crazed conspiracy theory that Jews lost World War I to, betrayed Germany in World War I in order to bring in Black Senegalese soldiers into the Rhineland to mate, have children, rape and seduce German women to undermine the White race.

So that's what we're seeing. We know from history and the present what it justifies.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And what's so interesting is that, look, when you had the White supremacists marching in the University of Virginia, they were marching chanting, "Jews will not replace us".

JASON STANLEY: Yeah. So, I always ask my students a quiz when I'm teaching this material.

Are they saying Jews will numerically replace Christian Americans? No, they're saying Jews are behind the engineering of this replacement. What we're now [00:13:00] seeing is we're seeing the Republicans say, Democrats are behind this great replacement, and that is actually aiming political violence, not just against immigrants, but at their political opponents.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Let's go back to Donald Trump and his debate with Kamala Harris, hosted by ABC News.

DONALD TRUMP: Because they're destroying the fabric of our country by what they've done. There's never been anything done like this at all. They've destroyed the fabric of our country.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: They've destroyed the fabric of our country. And of course, this is the same debate where he said that Haitians are eating your pets.

JASON STANLEY: Yeah. So, when you have accurate history, if you knew, for example, that Haiti had the only successful slave revolution in human history, then you might be able to see what the demonization of Haitian immigrants is doing.

The demonization of Haitian immigrants has multiple aspects. It's racist, of course. It's saying [00:14:00] that exactly like Hitler did with the Senegalese soldiers, it's saying that Black immigrants are going to undermine the character—so hint-hint, what is the character of the nation?—and it's singling out Haitians as particularly dangerous. And that's a shout out to history, as it were, since Haitians have been being punished by the world for their revolution for hundreds of years.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I wanted to go to Project 2025 and how that fits into erasing history, how fascists rewrite the past to control the future. President Trump has had to distance himself from this, even though something like well over a hundred of his allies and aides were involved with writing Project 2025.

It was done under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation. The head of it has just written a book. It has a forward by J. D. [00:15:00] Vance, and it's been postponed for publication until after the election. But talk about the significance of it.

JASON STANLEY: The significance of Project 2025, is that it calls for what in the Nazi parlance is called Gleichschaltung, the systematic replacement of civil servants by loyalists, by party loyalists, and the systematic replacement of teachers in schools and universities, and in general institutions throughout society by party loyalists.

In the case of education, it's completely implausible that Trump is ideologically distant from the goals of Project 2025. Trump has repeatedly said he's going to target critical race theory, which, let's face it, is simply Black History. He said he's going to replace education with patriotic education, namely patriarchy, representing the United States as an exceptional grand nation whose [00:16:00] exceptionality is due to its White, Christian, heterosexual men who've defined the nation. In Project 2025, the civil rights agenda is to base civil rights enforcement on a proper understanding of the laws and eliminating critical race theory and gender ideology.

In other words, civil rights law in schools is entirely there to make sure that there's no racism against non dominant groups, against Black Americans. Civil rights law is there to make sure that LGBT children or the children in LGBT families are not discriminated against. In other words, this is a mandate to eliminate civil rights enforcement.

Project 2025, in a bizarre kind of quasi fascist way targets funding [00:17:00] for disabled students. Of course, fascism involves privileging non-disabled people, privileging producers to the nation. And that, I find, a bizarre kind of resonance of fascist ideology to slash funding for disabled students.

The Daily Blast Trumps Angry, Unhinged New Rant About Fox News Offers Hidden Warning Part 1 - Deep State Radio - Air Date 9-30-24

GREG SARGENT, HOST, THE DAILY BLAST: At a rally in Wisconsin over the weekend, Donald Trump really cranked up the rage and hate speech about immigrants in a major way. He seethed at Kamala Harris over a speech she gave laying out her own vision of immigration.

But something else Trump said at the rally deserves special attention. He directly attacked Fox News for the mere act of carrying Harris's speech on the network. He said they shouldn't be allowed to do that.

This, when taken along with other things Trump has been saying lately, should be seen as a warning of sorts -- a preview [00:18:00] about what might happen to dissent if Trump wins a second term. And today we're discussing all this with Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte, who is very good at interpreting the dangerous subtexts of Trump's most unhinged public utterances.

Good to have you on, Amanda.

AMANDA MARCOTTE: Thanks for having me.

GREG SARGENT, HOST, THE DAILY BLAST: So at his rally in western Wisconsin, Trump said that migrants will walk into your kitchen and cut your throat. He called Kamala Harris "mentally impaired." He said migrants will transform every American town into a third world hellhole. I think this is a way of getting the MAGA masses excited about the bloody mass deportations and detention camps to come if he's elected.

You wrote recently in your newsletter that Trump's language is getting more violent to create permission to persecute enemies within. Is this more of the same?

AMANDA MARCOTTE: Yeah, it's getting to the point of fantasy land, right? And I think we saw that going on with the cat and dog eating [00:19:00] accusations. It's convincing people to live in a mental space that's outside of their normal reality. And I think you see in history that this has been very effective at getting people to think about committing violence and doing acts of violence that are outside of what they would normally be willing to put up with. And it's gonna cause hate crimes, there's no doubt about it. But it's also about accepting any kind of violence that's coming. It's putting people in the space of the unimaginable and keeping them there.

DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DSR: Right. It's telling people I think in a sense that look, you can just invent a whole alternate world where all this is okay, meaning the violence toward migrants.

AMANDA MARCOTTE: Yeah, it's very much reminiscent, and I'm not the first person to say this, of the satanic panic in the 80s where [00:20:00] the level of accusations against daycare workers and other people that, heavy metal musicians and stuff, just got completely out of control, that they were engaging in human sacrifice, that they somehow had murdered thousands and hidden it and things like that.

And a lot of that was about justifying the religious right's grab for power, their crackdown on music, their censorship, other things that I think previous to that would have been not allowed in American society, but they work themselves into a frenzy of moral justification by imagining enemies that were so bad, so evil that everything was justified in stopping them.

DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DSR: You just gave me a flashback to Stranger Things, which is also set in the 80s, where, there's this witch hunt for this one guy who's called a freak because he wears a denim jacket that has a heavy metal logo on the back. [00:21:00]

I want to play a specific quote from Trump at the rally. He talked about the speech that Harris gave Friday night, laying out her plans for stricter border security and comprehensive immigration reform. Then he said this.

DONALD TRUMP: And then I have to sit there and listen to her bullshit last night?

And who puts it on Fox News? And they shouldn't be allowed to put it on. It's all lies. It's all lies. Everything she said is a lie.

DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DSR: Amanda, this is really unhinged. Trump just said Fox News shouldn't be allowed to air the opposition's criticism of him. You have to take that along with his recent threat to prosecute Google if elected, for no reason other than it carried stories that criticize him. Amanda, does this also fit into your frame in that it creates a [00:22:00] permission structure for persecution of the media for criticizing him later?

AMANDA MARCOTTE: Oh, absolutely. I think that Trump has long held the opinion that one of the most important benefits of power is silencing people who criticize you. And he's getting louder and louder about it and more and more obnoxious about the double standard that he holds, which is if you say things I like, then that's free speech. And if you think, say things I don't like, then that's should be criminal. And trying to hold him to any kind of legal or morally consistent standard is ridiculous because his only standard is, if I like it, it's good and legal; if I don't like it, it should be criminal.

The scary thing here is that sort of narcissism is spreading out across the supporters. Elon Musk is a good example. He's somebody who calls himself a free speech warrior because he lets Nazis run rampant on Twitter. [00:23:00] And he published the quote unquote Twitter files, which were all these interior communications at Twitter under the guise of free speech. But then what happened was a journalist got his hands on a dossier that the Trump campaign had made up about J. D. Vance that was supposed to be private, published it, put it on Twitter, and Elon Musk censored that. The only consistent standard here is if it's for Trump, he's for it, and if it's against Trump, he will censor it. And, he doesn't even try to be consistent anymore.

DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DSR: I want to pick up on that because I think it's crucial for people to understand that the explicit declaration of a double standard is the thing here. That is the thing that Trump is promising. He's saying we no longer have to be consistent. Everything should be rigged in our favor. Elections that we lose are illegitimate. Elections that we win are legitimate. [00:24:00] The media is being fair when it criticizes our opponents. The media is being unfair when it criticizes us. He is essentially selling a kind of liberation from consistency and neutrality to his supporters, I think.

AMANDA MARCOTTE: Yeah, it's very explicitly this end of liberal democratic ideals, and replacing them with fairly classic fascist ideals, blood and soil notions. J. D. Vance's speech at the RNC was very clear on this, that what makes you an American is that you're born here and your ethnicity and your history here, and he played a little around the edges to imply that there was some for racial diversity in there, but we all heard what he was saying, which is Americans are an ethnic group. And that ethnic group is obviously a white one and a conservative one and a Christian one and all these other things. And [00:25:00] once you've redefined Americanness in those lines, you can redefine the law and who is in and who is out.

And the consistency here is not we have free speech for all citizens, it's that -- or all people actually -- it's that the in group are real Americans and they have all the rights and privileges, and the out group are not real Americans and they deserve nothing.

Did Donald TRUMP Make Germany RACIST Again - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 9-27-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: This isn't just about necessarily race.

you look at the, the, history of Northern Ireland versus Ireland, and you can see it, it can be about a religion too. Or about national origin. the orangeman, the, the, people of i, of, Northern Ireland. You've got, basically this battle between, the indigenous loyalist Catholic or the indigenous Catholics and those who are the loyalists who are still, descendant of British overlords [00:26:00] and still loyal to Great Britain, and they're willing to kill each other o over it.

this tribalism is like deeply baked into us. And, all that, I lay out all that premise by way of saying that whenever any other country points to the United States and says, Oh, we have a race problem because of you, or because of America, I think we need to view it skeptically.

This is a, on the one hand, a human nature problem, and on the other hand, an all of society problem. But, Now the, minister Angela or Angela, I'm not sure how it's pronounced. I'm guessing Angela actually in England. Angela Eagle is the British minister in charge of irregular migration. It would be like, what you would call illegal immigration here in the United States.

she said that, [00:27:00] Donald Trump has helped create quote, vitriol against migrants through social media and that is what is cranking up. The, anti immigrant hate and race and just naked racism that the UK has been experiencing in large quantities recently. The overt, her phrase, overt racism that has spilled out onto British streets.

she said that, this is a quote from The Guardian. She said, unnamed right wing Tories, that's the conservatives in the UK, had used language that had given a yellow flashing light to racists. using a toxic discourse as they fought off the challenge from the Reform Party. In other words, the Brit, the British conservatives are using racism the same way that American conservatives and Republicans have been using racism since Nixon's Southern strategy.

Dixon, Nixon did it with the Southern strategy, talking about his all white, silent majority. [00:28:00] And then you had Reagan, of course, using it explicitly. the very first speech Reagan gave after he was nominated at the Republican convention, he went down to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to this little town, to the Neshoba County Fair, to give a speech to an all white audience, about states rights, which, what they were referring to in 1980 when they said states rights was the right to, prevent black children from going to schools with white children, specifically.

And, he, chose a location that was just a couple miles down the road from where, miss years, Schwimmer, Cheney, and Goodman were murdered. The three civil rights workers who were murdered, that they made the movie Mississippi Burning out of, Reagan and his campaign chose that site for the first speech of his election.

And then, he, went around giving speeches in which he would talk about. Doesn't it upset you when that young buck standing in front of you [00:29:00] in the grocery store is using his food stamps to buy steak and champagne when you're barely scraping by? And we all know what he meant. his welfare queen in New York City that literally did not exist, the New York Times spent years looking for her, she doesn't exist, a black lady driving a Cadillac.

Reagan was like all in on the stereotypes. And then of course you had George W. Bush. He wasn't so much going after black people. He was a little more tolerant there, but, Katie bar the door, when it comes to Muslims, he, gave some good lip service to, we need, but look at what he did in Gitmo.

look at what he did in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then, Trump comes along and starts picking on, Mexicans. And, oh my God, these Hispanic people, they're murderous and they're rapists. And. And whatnot. So we have this long history, or at least the Republican Party has this long history in the United States, a [00:30:00] 60 year history of using racism, not just race, but racism, hatred of race, hatred of a specific race as a political weapon.

this is now starting to happen in the United Kingdom. And, I get it that Donald Trump has given license to a lot of this stuff. I think Trump's presidency. And Trump's rhetoric has helped the AFD party, the Alternative for Deutschland, the, the new neo Nazi party in, the UK, excuse me, in Germany.

I, think he has helped, Giorgia Moroni, the, neo fascist leader of Italy and her party, the fascist, I, forget the name of the party, but it's basically the reinvention of Mussolini's party, toned down slightly. you've got a, an openly white supremacist party in Sweden that, that is doing very well right now.

you've got a huge openly white supremacist party in Austria that is doing very [00:31:00] well. this is happening all over Europe. And I do believe, I I think that she's right. this, member of parliament who's saying that, Trump is the, is causing an awful lot of this.

I, think there's some truth to that. But I also think that Putin just, was brilliant when he just bombed the crap out of Syria in order to, when Assad was being challenged during the Arab spring back in 2011, 2012 and the years immediately after that, when Assad was being challenged.

Putin wanted to protect his deep water ports, off Damascus. it was basically his African base. And so he had to keep, Bashir in power in Syria. And so he bombed Aleppo back to the Stone Age and bombed a third of Damascus into rubble. And what did that do? It produced, six million Syrian refugees.[00:32:00]

And where did they go? They went to Europe. They fled north, along with the Libyan refugees following our murder of Gaddafi. And, and, refugees from other countries in the region as the Arab Spring was really cranking up. And so all of these people flooding into Europe, then that was used by Viktor Orban for his political purposes.

He, his, slogans when he was running were build a wall and make Hungary great again. And he did build a wall along Hungary's border. And he has been keeping Syrians out of Hungary. and other countries are looking at the crisis associated with this. You can absorb, people who are different than you culturally, racially, whatever it may be, over time without a problem, but it has to be relatively gradual.

So I think, part of it is just, [00:33:00] the, radical demographic shift or sudden shock rather. that was inflicted on Europe by Putin's attacking Syria back, a decade ago. And, and, to this day, you've got refugees now being coming by boat into the UK and they're struggling with what to do about it.

So that's part of it. Another part of it is that there is now a worldwide refugee crisis. this is what's happening in our southern border. You got parts of Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador. that have been taken over by gangs in large part because the Reagan administration destabilized all four of those democracies.

You've got, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. It's one other country down there. Anyway, and, you've, you, you've, and this is the result of climate change. And now we're seeing people literally on the move all over the world. Because climate change is [00:34:00] rendering their environments inhospitable. there's a much larger issue here, and I have no glib or easy answers for it.

But to reduce it down to, it's all Donald Trump's fault, which I'm happy to say, but it's not true. he's just riding the wave. But the point, I think the big point that I want to make here, is that it's going to get worse.

The Daily Blast Trumps Angry, Unhinged New Rant About Fox News Offers Hidden Warning - Deep State Radio - Air Date 9-30-24

GREG SARGENT, HOST, THE DAILY BLAST: Right. It's a little hard to say exactly what MAGA rally attendees believe. I think certainly some of them are there for the authoritarian display, whether all of them are, I don't know. I will tell you there was some really interesting polling from the Public Religion Research Institute that found that something like 70, high 60s, low 70s percent of people who view Trump [00:35:00] positively agree with the statements that migrants are poisoning the blood of America, as Trump has put it, and agree that immigrants are invading our country, in a way that sort of eradicates our culture.

And by the way, Trump started using that word "culture" at this rally as well.

So what do you think of that? That's really a euphemism, isn't it? Culture? In other words, it's a euphemism when Trump says, they're a threat to culture.

AMANDA MARCOTTE: Yeah. Western civilization, Western culture. These have been euphemisms that have been used by the quote unquote, alt-right. I just consider them fascists for years now. And it is basically creating an in group, out group, denying that -- denying a lot of things that are just objectively true. One of which is that immigrant communities do assimilate into American culture. And they change it. And [00:36:00] that what we consider American culture is the result of waves and waves of immigration changing our culture.

But it's very easy I think for a lot of people to tell themselves a story that the way things were when they were a kid is the way things have always been and should always be. When I was at the RNC, my videographer and I went around asking people when they thought America was great again. And what we found was really fascinating was no matter how old they were or young, they would say that America's greatness peaked when they were like around 15 years old.

Like it was fascinating. If they were a boomer, it was like in the early sixties. If they were my age, it was in the nineties. And, it just tells you that it's this delusion that you, it's a very narcissistic delusion, not -- the culture that you came of age in is the real American culture, and [00:37:00] he really is -- Trump is an addled-brained old man, but he still has an ability to plug into that. And what's really scary is he came of age obviously in the fifties. So that's the great America he wants.

GREG SARGENT, HOST, THE DAILY BLAST: I think that's absolutely clear. I want to bring up the effect Trump's threats have, particularly the threats and attacks on the media, in terms of CBS's announcement that they won't be fact checking the vice presidential debate. The Associated Press explicitly wrote that the network, quote, "wants to take a step back from the heat generated by calling attention to candidates falsehoods." I mean, that formulation drove me nuts because what the AP won't say directly is that CBS is afraid of the fallout of fact checking Trump and Vance in particular. They're not afraid of the fallout of fact checking both candidates, both sides, because Democrats and the Harris campaign simply don't [00:38:00] attack the media and threaten it for telling the truth, whereas Trump and MAGA do.

AMANDA MARCOTTE: It's so frustrating, because it should be part of -- journalists often pride themselves on being able to take criticism, being able to take heat, but apparently it only is something to be proud of if you're getting it from the left and you withstand it. Like folding to the right is ridiculous.

What's doubly frustrating about this to me is there's many other reasons that you could say that might have to be the way things are. Vance is a better liar in many ways than Donald Trump. So fact checking him could be a much more difficult proposition during a debate. I think he's going to say untrue things, but he's going to say them in this way that creates plausible deniability, very legalistic. And I could see the, don't even bother, it's just going to turn into a nightmare.

The other thing is Vance is aching to be attacked [00:39:00] by a reporter so he can whine and flip out and say this is what the media always does, blah, blah, blah. He wants to make the debate against the moderator so he doesn't have to debate Walz. I think these are all good reasons to be cautious about fact checking him in real time.

But it's very frustrating that the actual reason is that they don't want people to yell at them on Twitter.

GREG SARGENT, HOST, THE DAILY BLAST: It's worse than that, right? It's, they don't want a president Trump to threaten to take away their license, and make it so that they are not allowed to say these things.

AMANDA MARCOTTE: And that's so dumb too, because there's nothing that they can do that's going to make him not go after them if he thinks he has the power to do, because the entire point of this is squelching anything that he considers opposition and that's any factual reporting. So either they give up entirely on doing journalism or they're going to be feeling the heat if [00:40:00] Trump is president again.

GREG SARGENT, HOST, THE DAILY BLAST: Let's talk a little bit about sanewashing, which is how the media soft pedals Trump's dangerous authoritarian threats. As press critic Mark Jacob pointed out, one news outlet, I think Bloomberg, had a tweet saying Trump sharpened his criticism of Harris during this rally. This is how Bloomberg describes Trump's wildly unhinged claims about migrants slitting people's throats and turning every American town into third world hell holes and describing Harris as mentally impaired. Where does this leave us? I think, we actually made some progress by pushing the New York Times To actually render the reality of Trump's quotes and public utterances and to stop sane washing them, as the saying goes.

But then there's just this constant backsliding that happens. A quick blow up happens over one particularly absurd act of sane washing. Media figures seem [00:41:00] to recalibrate a bit. They do a few pieces that do show the reality of Trump's profound mental unfitness for the presidency. But then we backslide. What do we do about that?

AMANDA MARCOTTE: I guess we have to keep the heat up because that's inexcusable. And it's inexcusable insofar just from a writing perspective, I think there's a tendency to want to make sense out of what you've seen, but you can do that very easily without misleading people. You can say, Trump told a bunch of lies, falsely accusing migrants of being murderers. And he then told some more lies, falsely accusing Kamala Harris of being mentally impaired. Simple. Easy. And you don't have to get into what I would write as an opinion writer, which is Trump is clearly engaging and just off the charts psychological projection, everything, every finger he [00:42:00] points out needs to be pointed at himself. Like the only person in this equation, that's like unleashing, that has unleashed violence against the United States, is Donald Trump. The only person who's clearly feeling a way about his own mental impairment is Donald Trump. Like they don't have to do that. That's engaging in analysis and opinion about him. They could just say he lied. End of story.

Trump's rhetoric on immigrants gets even darker - The ReidOut - Air Date 9-27-24

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: And the reality is Ray, that, there was an attempt by Republicans. So this is, a lot of this is an internal Republican struggle because Democrats have always been for immigration reform and have always been like, we're ready whenever you are.

We'll pass it. We will easily pass it. Republicans got together and negotiated a very, very conservative border patrol bill, a bill that would have largely closed the border. It was going to pass. Let me let you listen to what Republicans say happened to that bill.

LINDSEY GRAHAM: So, [00:43:00] everybody who comes on this floor and says our border's broken, we should do something about it you're absolutely right and unfortunately, we didn't get there. President Trump opposed a Senate bill.

POLITICIANS: And then, our nominee for president didn't seem to want us to do anything at all? After

President Trump said don't fix anything during the presidential election, it's the single biggest issue during the election, don't resolve this, we'll resolve it next year, quite a few of my colleagues backed up, looked for a reason to be able to shoot against it, and then walked away.

The fact that he would communicate Republican senators and Congress people that he doesn't want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is is really appalling.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: And so if people are so exercised on the Republican side it's really Republicans who are mostly exercised about this, Ray, then why aren't they blaming Donald Trump for not having a border bill?

RAY SUAREZ: Well, they are implicitly [00:44:00] blaming him. You just heard after all the leader of Republicans in the Senate acknowledge the former president's opposition to the bill.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: But I mean voters, I'm so sorry, I mean voters.

RAY SUAREZ: Even Senator Lankford from Oklahoma, one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate was pretty mild in his assessment. He admitted that was what was happened. Donald Trump threw a monkey wrench in the gears and that's just what happened. And life was supposed to move on. It's really something.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Yeah. And, Olivia, it's hard, I think for people who probably watch this show and watch MSNBC to understand why voters look at Donald Trump and they look at the failures and they also look at the successes. Let me show you. Illegal border crossings fell in July. They're at the lowest level. They are in four years. That's just a fact. And so the reality that people are seeing on Fox, this idea that immigrants are running through the country, murdering people, it's just not true. Let me play one more thing that we also see happening. This is the [00:45:00] idea that immigration is somehow tied to people's lives, even if they're not in a border place. The great Alex Wagner, she, she talked to union members in Michigan. Let me let you listen to what some of them said. This is cut three from my director.

POLITICAN: There are thousands and thousands of illegal immigrants coming across the border every day. And the vice president has done minimal work to fix that based on what I've seen. So I'd like that to change.

REPORTER: Do you feel like Donald Trump's going to be better on that issue?

POLITICAN: Based on what we've seen on his first four years, I do believe that he will be better on that. Yeah.

REPORTER: Do you, are you leaning towards Trump right now?

POLITICAN: Yes, ma'am.

REPORTER: Is there anything that vice president Harris could do at this point to change your mind?

POLITICAN: Not particularly, no, unless she changes her stance completely on fixing the border. That's, no.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Olivia, based on what we've seen in his first four years, I do believe he'll be better on that based on what the only things that we saw in terms of immigration as you talked about with Stephen Miller, we're taking babies out of the hands of their [00:46:00] moms at the border and separating them and sending them off in two different directions and losing track of them.

You saw a lot of cruelty. You saw a lot of talk about S whole countries. He didn't build a wall. And border crossings are lower now than they were then. What are people seeing? What reality are they living in?

OLIVIA TROY: Well, therein lies the problem, Joy. I think it's just because the fear mongering and all of these narratives, they work when the right wing media machine is coming together and pushing that.

And that's all they're seeing. And so this is a product of disinformation that they're continuing to push, devoid of policy or facts, right? Because when Donald Trump gets up there and gets these speeches, they're He, all he does is spread this divisive, hateful rhetoric on immigrants, but he's not actually telling you what he's going to do to solve the border crisis, right?

He's not talking about international asylum cooperation agreements. He's not talking about actual foreign policy that could decrease migration. He's not talking about like, Oh, perhaps funding law [00:47:00] enforcement on the border, which is what Kamala Harris is doing. She's actually saying, I will support that bipartisan bill.

I will fund border security. I will support CBP at the border. This is what I want to do. I'm going to slow fentanyl. She's actually talking concrete policies. But the problem is that I think that it's easier to sell a narrative on a very complicated issue like immigration. By stowing fear and instilling that in communities and getting people to be divided.

And so I think that's what you're seeing there is just that what he says is resonating in communities. Now, the problem with that is that what is Donald Trump's immigration proposal actually look like in the future? It's going to look like encampments. What is it going to look like when they're like putting people in encampments on the borders or in these cities where they're shipping them around?

What's it going to look like? When they're targeting just anyone who looks potentially like a minority in general and taking these kids out of schools and corralling them. And what is it going to look like when they're going after legal residents, right? Because denaturalization was [00:48:00] actually discussed in the Trump administration where they don't actually differentiate between a legal resident alien and someone who is here illegally.

Sometimes those were actual policy discussions that were had. And so I think, to me, to someone who actually believes in legal immigration wants to fix the immigration system, this is all just like bluster. And it's sad to see that Americans don't understand it.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Well, I'll tell you what it would look like.

It would look like concentration camps. In Germany in the 1930s, because that's what you call it when you put somebody in a camp with means to separate them from society. It's called a concentration camp.

Paola Ramos Explains the Rise of the Latino Far Right and Growing Anti-Immigrant Sentiments - LeBatardShow - Air Date 9-26-24

DAN LEBETARD - HOST, LEBETARD PODCAST: Talk to me about the Proud Boys existing in Miami. And I want to read a passage from your book to the people after you explained to me what Enrique was doing as the head of the Proud Boys and how proud he must have been when Donald Trump is saying out loud in a way that is unfathomable [00:49:00] to me, telling the Proud Boys to stand down and stand by.

PAOLA RAMOS: Absolutely. So, I met Enrique Dario. And so I meet him at a time when he starts to feel himself and feel his power, but he wasn't there just yet. So my first impression of Enrique Dario, who, by the way, grew up just a couple of minutes from where I did, my first impression was that this is a guy that is deeply insecure, who can hide who he is behind his sort of like macho, tough appeal.

He does it really well. And, but he's someone that even according to him, he never really knew where he fit in Miami. No, in his own words, he was always like too black to be considered a Republican. He felt like he was too independent and too radical to be considered a Democrat. He always said this thing that like no one would ever knock on his door to ask for his vote.

So even among the sort of Miami Dade Cuban community, which is typically an exile community that looks more like me, light skinned, privileged Latinos. As a Black Latino, he never really fit [00:50:00] into that. And then come the Proud Boys. and the Proud Boys offer someone like Enrique Tarrio, not just this sudden sense of belonging, but power.

And then you see the way that Enrique and I saw it like happening in real time, how he suddenly evolves from being this like ordinary, guano guy in Miami to then suddenly becoming this guy that is being praised by Donald Trump, praised by Roger Stone, and he takes that power and runs with it.

The funny thing though, the sad thing is that come November, 2020, after Enrique Darrio tries absolutely everything to ensure that Donald Trump wins and he doesn't win. What's fascinating is the way that the Proud Boys, you have this guy called Kyle Chapman, that they instantly try and distance themselves from Enrique Tarrio and from his blackness and his brownness.

One of the things that Kyle Chapman says when Enrique is no longer powerful, he says, you know what, the Proud Boys are actually, have always been a group that's based on the white race. And he says, and the white race alone and any other [00:51:00] race has no place in this group. And so that sort of shows you how 10, that sort of idea of why power is.

DAN LEBETARD - HOST, LEBETARD PODCAST: One of the things that my mother has said since I was a child as they came from communism, is if you want to find out about a person's character, give them power. And the reason she used to say it is because when communism came to Cuba. The neighbors who were given the government power to watch the other neighbors all of a sudden became powerful in the ways that you're describing in this book and then abused the power of taking some of their identity that was given to them by the government.

So let me read this from your interview with Enrique Taddeo. You say, why define women as housewives? You asked him at one point, why not use another word? And this is something Latin men do all the time. Quote, because it's like the end goal for us. We're big on family. He said, family is a number one priority for us.

He followed up. You need to step up as a man and make sure that you provide for everyone in that household. As a man, that is your job. And then you write, I [00:52:00] always got the sense that independent, strong, and outspoken women frightened and intimidated Enrique. I imagine that's why he reserved a special kind of vitriol for them.

He would frequently disrupt women's March events with his megaphone. He'd make appearances wearing his signature. Costume, essentially a full body outfit that resembled a phallus. He would constantly provoke women, including with the use of transphobic slurs. He called Michelle Obama a tranny and refused to apologize despite the uproar that followed.

What's happening there? It's just bravado that's wrapped around as armor the insecurity.

PAOLA RAMOS: That's part of it. But imagine down what it was for me. No, I'm, a lesbian. I'm a queer woman. I'm a Latina. I, try and understand the privilege that comes with, these platforms that I have now. So I understand the power that I have and I always felt a sense of discomfort that Enrique was feeling among people like me and people like me are everywhere, no?

We're just people that like understand that we too can change the dynamic in this country. There was always something that sort of made him uncomfortable, [00:53:00] but Enrique, alludes to what I try and find in this book, and it's the same conversation that I had with other sort of Latinos in Miami actually that also participated in the January 6th insurrection and that is these men that were driven by the anti immigrant sentiment that we just talked about, a, by the sort of, fixation with going back to a time when these sort of gender norms, no, and these sort of more patriarchal norms were, there, and they're fixated by that idea.

And then what you just mentioned is when I asked them, what, what, was at the heart of what drove you to storm the Capitol that day? One of the main answers was, the United States is being taken over by communism. And if someone like Joe Biden won, then that means that this country would turn into communism.

And that sort of paranoia, which obviously comes from a real political trauma that a lot of Latinos hold, that just shows you the way that it's been just so injected with mis and disinformation. That can truly, drive someone to do something [00:54:00] as violent as storming the Capitol, no?

Note from the Editor about what Democrats need to do on immigration messaging

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We’ve just heard clips starting with

Thom Hartmann laying out some of the historical precedent for racist anti-immigrant propaganda.

Democracy Now! spoke with fascism expert Jason Stanley about far-right rhetoric.

Deep State Radio discussed Trump’s authoritarian, anti-speech response to the existence of opposition to him.

Thom Hartmann looked at how blatant anti-immigrant racism has been spreading around the world.

Deep State Radio discussed more of the fallout from threats against the media.

The ReidOut reflected on the impact of Trump’s rhetoric.

And The LeBetard Podcast discussed the race essentialism and white supremacy at the heart of the MAGA movement and Proud Boys.

And those were just the Top Takes. There’s lots more in the Deeper Dives sections. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all manner of [00:55:00] important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process.

To support all our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new, members-only podcast feed that you’ll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support [there’s a link in the show notes], through our Patreon page if you prefer, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but I’ll note that anyone, depending on the app you use to listen, may be able to use the time codes in the show notes to jump around the show similar to chapter markers, so check that out.

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 just want to highlight one important point from a couple of different angles: The Democrats are terrible at messaging on immigration, and they have all the reasons in the world to start changing that discussion. [00:56:00]

The first point is that it’s simply never a good idea to let your opponents set the terms of the debate. Democrats' relative silence on immigration - even when they have policies and ideas - leaves a gap that the right can fill however they like. Unsurprisingly, they fill it with anything they think will scare people into voting for them - and their rhetoric has only been getting more extreme with time.

The second point is that there actually is a positive story to tell about immigrants, and it’s a dereliction of duty to not being telling that story. A failure to highlight the benefits of immigration puts immigrants themselves at greater risk of demonization, while also hurting the Democrats politically, so it’s a real hitting-themselves-in-the-face kind of a mistake to not take the issue head on.

The New Republic, in their article, “The Democrats’ Shameful, Foolish Surrender on Immigration” put it this way: Democrats should “point to how immigrants helped economically revitalize a [00:57:00] depressed Springfield, Ohio, and cities across the United States, instead of just ridiculing the pet-eating lie. Don’t let the right ever get away with talking about birthrates without hounding them over how this squares with the prospect of new arrivals. Force right-wing figures to explain how, exactly, the United States would have become a global economic and cultural locus without massive immigration, or how all this contemporary business about revitalizing domestic high-tech manufacturing or keeping domestic food production running could be accomplished without it. Ask voters: Do you like the prospect of Social Security and Medicare remaining solvent? Great! Immigration is the straightest path there.

“Just say it: Immigration is good. We should consider ourselves lucky to have had so much, and we should strive to have more. This psychopathic and—you can say it—white supremacist fixation on punishment and [00:58:00] control of migration is not just a moral stain but a disastrous economic policy. If carried out to its full effect, it would represent one of the greatest acts of national self-immolation in our history.”

In a different article, this one from The Nation, “Kamala Harris Needs to Meet the Moment and Reframe Our Poisonous Immigration Debate”, they lay out the historical precedent for the kind of shake up on messaging the Democrats need right now:

“Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette, a presidential contender, mounted a 1924 campaign that decried the race hatred of the 1920s, and welcomed the support of the Blacks, Jews and Catholics who were targeted by the Klan. Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a future presidential contender, delivered her 'Declaration of Conscience' and challenged the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Just two years before he was elected president, [00:59:00] Ronald Reagan, then the country’s most prominent conservative, became the most high-profile foe of a 1978 California initiative that proposed to fire openly gay and lesbian teachers, warning in widely circulated public statements that the measure threatened to infringe ‘on basic rights of privacy and perhaps even constitutional rights.’"

The article continues, “None of those moves were made casually, or easily. In each circumstance, supposed 'leaders' in the two major parties had looked the other way. Political counselors and strategists urged candidates to keep silent in order to preserve their electoral viability. Sometimes there were penalties for doing the right thing. But, more often than not, these acts of courage came to be seen as both morally sound and politically smart.”

SECTION A - DISINFORMATION#

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, we’ll continue to dive deeper on 3 topics. Next [01:00:00] up:

SECTION A - DISINFORMATION

Followed by SECTION B - WHITE SUPREMACY

and SECTION C - LATINO ANTI-IMMIGRATION VIEWS

Matt Walsh PAINFULLY Unprepared For Ryan Grim’s Haiti Facts - The Majority Report - Air Date 9-20-24

RYAN GRIM: We're a much bigger country. We don't want a marine invasion and occupation of, The United States that constantly decapitates governments and, and takes, takes the money out of the country.

And it saddles us with, like, debt from a revolution. Right. Although I don't, I don't, we wouldn't want to be like a, basically a colony that the entire West spends 200 years punishing after the Haitian revolution.

MATT WALSH: I, I get that, but I, but I understand that, but also at a certain point. We wouldn't want that, no, yes.

We wouldn't want that, but I would also say that, that, uh, That's not entirely why Haiti's in the position that it's in, I mean, at a certain point. As a country, you have to stand on your own two feet and take care of yourself. And,

RYAN GRIM: uh What point is that? They [01:01:00] elect Aristide and we overthrow Aristide. Then they elect Jovenel Moise.

Jovenel Moise has assassinated a bunch of Pause it, sorry. I

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: hate to Grim's doing such a good job here, but I just want to re insert what I just said about the, we don't have to go back far. We can go back to the Obama administration, Matt Wallace, what do you think about that administration?

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Even Emily, uh, points it out as a conservative.

Yeah,

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: the Clintons! The Clinton Foundation, even, yeah, putting the, uh, Haynes Levi Strauss minimum wage for textile production aside, you still have the, uh, botched response by the Clinton Foundation after the hurricane, or the, uh, hurricane or earthquake in 2010. Like, which was a notoriously, uh, failed too.

Um, which who played a lot in 2016, well, I mean, not as much as we wanted it to, but which I was paying attention to.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, right. Um, and, and also like, you know, Matt Walsh's doesn't even know what he's talking about there. He's completely on the back foot, but, uh, when, when he refers to the Haitian revolution, that's a part of it too.

There it's the racism that conservative, that conservatives reflexively have towards, uh, Towards Haitian people is just [01:02:00] that, but for conservatives that actually know the history, and Matt Walsh clearly isn't one of them, a lot of their resentment towards Haiti is what, what Ryan describes, is the fact that, uh, Haiti successfully had a slave revolt.

Uh, and Haiti has been paying for that with reverse reparations, uh, for centuries, uh, reverse reparations because of the loss of capital from the slave owners in France. That's part of why Haiti is in the situation and that they're, that it is in, in terms of political and economic turmoil and the privatization, disaster capitalists that have come in, aided by, uh, NGOs like the, you know, the Clinton Foundation and other organizations.

And so that's what Ryan is alluding to, but, but, but, but he, Matt Walsh isn't even like a well researched racist here.

RYAN GRIM: He's out of his depth.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah,

RYAN GRIM: what point is that that let's say that they Elect they elect Aristide and we overthrow Aristide then they elect Jovenel Moise Jovenel Moise is assassinated a bunch of bunch of people with [01:03:00] American connections and then we install in 2021 like the United States installed The prime minister that we just ousted.

Like, so we can say, okay, yeah, you got to get over the, you know, 200 years ago, but like we're still doing it,

MATT WALSH: right? Yeah. I mean, and I'm not in favor of, um, I'm very non interventionist in my policy. So I'm not in favor of most of the things that we're doing.

RYAN GRIM: We just made the new government in Haiti in a hotel room in Jamaica.

And then we insisted that whatever government we made in Jamaica had to allow Kenyan police. Kenyan troops to come in under the flag of the UN in order to go to war with, uh, the gangs.

MATT WALSH: Yeah. I mean, I'm not, look, I'm not interested in, if it were up to me, I'm not interested in doing anything in Haiti. Like, let Haiti be Haiti and take care of them.

That's sort of my, my whole point here. Oh! Uh, let them take care of themselves and their own problems. I'm also not saying, That there's like never a scenario where we let someone from Haiti into the country. Uh, but, and [01:04:00] it doesn't have to just be about Haiti, but when you're throwing open the gates and just inviting anyone, uh, in particular, you know, the third world.

I guess your

RYAN GRIM: assumption there was that it is Haitian people that are creating the conditions on Haiti and that if the Haitian people come to Springfield they will recreate the conditions in Haiti in Springfield. Whereas what I'm saying is that it's actually. The U. S. that is, largely.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Oh wow. Check out Dropsite, check out Ryan's work everywhere, but yeah.

I mean, the United States violently occupied, uh, Haiti, uh I'm

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: so against intervention, I don't even really know about it. Right. I'm against learning about it, being aware of it, as the context that sets, uh, the conversations I'm having.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Into the 20th century, the United States was occupying Haiti. Go on, Brandon, sorry.

BRANDON SUTTON: I'm so I'm so against intervention. I'm not going to intervene in my own stupidity. I'm so against intervention. You guys are taking a neutral position.

MATT BINDER: The, the, the main part of [01:05:00] intervention that he seems to be against though, is the small part where America takes responsibility for the innocent people who are caught up in this and we bring them here so they can live a ostensibly a better life than under the conditions that we put the country of Haiti in.

BRANDON SUTTON: I'm actually surprised he didn't have a better answer to that because this is not the first time Republicans or far right commentators have been confronted by like, Hey, you know, a lot of the countries that you're saying people are coming from, it's because America's like conducting a drug war there or because we did a coup or because we're like exploiting them in all of their natural resources.

They use this against, just to

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: buttress your point quickly, uh, Brandon, they use this against, uh, Biden because of, uh, the Afghan parolee problem, right? Or the Afghan parolee initiative, right?

BRANDON SUTTON: Yeah, I mean, usually the response is just like, who cares who, you know, you're saying that like they're weak, they're weak country, you know, blah, blah, blah.

So it's just weird that he didn't even go that far. He just seemed almost shocked by the fact that this is happening. It's very like shows his ignorance.

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I think that ignorance is exactly right. I [01:06:00] think they legit think when people say, well, look, this is what America did, uh, 20 years ago. Five years ago, fifty years ago.

I think they literally think that is like some kind of fallacy.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: No, I think it's whining.

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: To historicize. Yeah, it's like this is some sort of woke, uh, hand waving when it's actually just, no, Historically situating the problem that we're trying to fucking address. But

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: the, but the entire, all of conservatism is based on no understanding of history.

I mean, like, I guess this is kind of a, a, a point that we've made many times. It's nothing new, but Once, if you learn history, it's quite clear when patterns emerge. It's myth versus history. Right. It demystifies things like, you know, American exceptionalism, or what capitalism really means in the context of the global south, or

Walz Decries Demonizing Immigrants After Trump & Vance Spread Lies About Haitians in Springfield, OH - Democracy Now! - Air Date 10-2-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: On Tuesday night, Governor Walz criticized Trump and Vance’s comments while answering a question from debate moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Governor, [01:07:00] what about our CBS News polling, which does show that a majority of Americans, more than 50%, support mass deportations?

GOV. TIM WALZ: Look, we fix this issue with a bill that is necessary. But the issue on this is, this is what happens when you don’t want to solve it. You demonize it. And we saw this, and Senator Vance — and it surprises me on this — talking about and saying, “I will create stories to bring attention to this.” That vilified a large number of people who were here legally in the community of Springfield. The Republican governor said, “It’s not true. Don’t do it.” There’s consequences for this. There’s consequences.

We could come together. Senator Lankford did it. We could come together and solve this, if we didn’t let Donald Trump continue to make it an issue. And the consequences in Springfield were the governor had to send state law enforcement to escort kindergarteners to school. I believe Senator Vance wants to solve this. But by standing with Donald Trump and not working together to find a solution, it becomes a talking point. [01:08:00] And when it becomes a talking point like this, we dehumanize and villainize other human beings.

SEN. JD VANCE: Now, Governor Walz brought up the community of Springfield, and he’s very worried about the things that I’ve said in Springfield. Look, in Springfield, Ohio, and in communities all across this country, you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed. You’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed. You have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes. The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border. It is a disgrace, Tim. And I actually think — I agree with you. I think you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think that Kamala Harris does.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Very interestingly, further on in this debate, JD Vance complained about the fact-checking. Margaret Brennan of CBS said, “Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, [01:09:00] Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status,” she said. Vance spoke up to complain about the fact-check. He said, “Margaret, the rules were that you were not going to fact-check. And since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on,” he protested.

Well, we’re joined right now by Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, which recently used an Ohio state law to bring criminal charges against Trump and Vance over their false claims.

Guerline, welcome back to Democracy Now! As they were making these claims, we interviewed you when you came to New York. Now you’re in Washington, D.C. You’ve met with many public officials. Can you respond to what they said, and particularly this criminal complaint you’ve brought against Trump and Vance in Ohio for endangering the Haitian community?

GUERLINE JOZEF: Thank you so much, [01:10:00] Amy.

And the reality is they continue to spread those lies, even after we have brought criminal charges against them. They must be held accountable. What they are doing, as we have seen over the past few weeks, is creating chaos, creating division and really making an environment of fear, not only in Springfield, Ohio, in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, in Long Island, New York, in places in California. We cannot allow this to continue, Amy. We have lives at risk. Real people’s lives are at risk. And the Haitian community in Springfield and around the country along with our allies and the people of America are standing up to say, “Enough is enough.”

So, these criminal charges that we have brought against Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance is we need to hold them accountable, make sure that they understand that they are not above the law, and what they are [01:11:00] doing is unacceptable as people who are seeking to be really leading this country forward. This cannot be the case.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And can you also talk about what’s happened, as early as a week ago, or less than a week ago, the continued deportations of Haitians back into Haiti, where now, according to the World Food Programme, something like one in two people, half the population, is suffering severe hunger, not to mention violence?

GUERLINE JOZEF: Thank you, Amy. And I want to make it clear that the Haitian Bridge Alliance is a nonpartisan organization. We have lawsuits filed against President Biden for what happened in Del Rio. And we continue to push back against deportation that President Biden and his administration continues today to Haiti, as you just mentioned, as we see that we continue to deal with [01:12:00] extreme political turmoil in Haiti and the famine that is happening right now. And President Biden and his administration continues to deport Haitians, immigrants, to Haiti right now. So, we are calling on President Biden and his administration to stop the deportation, while we are also calling on Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump to be held accountable for the criminal acts that they continue to terrorize a community and the entire country, for that matter of fact.

SECTION B - WHITE SUPREMACY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering SECTION B - WHITE SUPREMACY

Fascism Expert Jason Stanley on Project 2025, Great Replacement Theory, Attacks on Immigrants & Gaza Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-15-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And also you have Trump saying these are too far left people who tried to assassinate him. When I think in both cases, I mean, uh, the mental health, uh, Problems of both men, you know, are, uh, have yet to be fully laid out, but, [01:13:00] uh, they were originally Trump supporters.

And this last one, Ralph, um, voted for President Trump.

JASON STANLEY: Right. Misrepresentations of reality, as we know, are no barrier to, uh, the campaign that the Republicans are, are waging. Uh, now J. D. Vance, I think he should be thought of. Uh, as one of the emerging intellectuals of this authoritarian movement. Uh, initially people said, how could it be fascism when you don't have intellectuals?

Uh, the fascist intellectuals. I think that's what we're starting to see. J. D. Vance, uh, is a Yale man. When I came to Yale soon after he, he left. Uh, everyone spoke glowingly about him. Uh, he is someone that Yale loves. Uh, like Ron DeSantis, like Tom Cotton at Harvard, the, these, these leaders of this movement, uh, come from the very elite institutions that they are supposedly decrying.

Both Vance and his spouse are [01:14:00] Yale graduates. Now, Vance is entirely inconsistent. Hillbilly Elegy is a book about how Poor whites reject meritocracy and the promise of America to wallow in self pity and resentment. And now, uh, Vance is running a campaign about, uh, self pity and resentment, saying to the dominant group, you're being replaced by immigrants, your misery is not your fault, it's the fault of the very institutions that created you.

trained me to become the vice presidential candidate of the United States and connected me to billionaires like Peter Thiel, who are supporting me, who are my mentors. Uh, so J. D. Vance comes from the billionaire world of private equity and hedge funds. So He is being supported by billionaires who are exploiting, who want him to exploit resentment, uh, to elect, uh, uh, an administration [01:15:00] that's going to cut their taxes and eliminate regulation against them.

So, uh, J. D. Vance, I think his internal ideology is, uh, a far right, uh, anti woman ideology that is based around great replacement and natalism, the idea that women should be having large families to replace the true Americans, the real Americans.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And then going after, of course, uh, the childless so called cat ladies.

JASON STANLEY: Absolutely. Because in this ideology, in this kind of, uh, far right fascist ideology that draws in both social conservatives, uh, anti democratic social conservatives, uh, as, uh, the ideal, as well as sort of macho men who, who think men should be men, the sort of musk, uh, who also, uh, has a lot, you know, goes in for, we have to replace our populations.

There's a simple solution to, uh, dealing with declining birth rates in the United States, and it's on the southern border. It's immigration. If that's really what you care about, [01:16:00] is declining U. S. populations, then you're going to open the floodgates to, to immigration. Really J. D. Vance is asking for there to be more immigrants, but because what is meant Uh, non black immigrants, specifically.

Uh, because what is meant are, uh, Christian immigrants. Uh, are, are, uh, well, because, sorry, what is meant are black immigrants and non Christian immigrants as a threat to the nation. Uh, J. D. Vance is, uh, is calling for rigid gender roles, denouncing women who don't have children. And that's the ideology here.

That's the ideology that sweeps in, uh, that sweeps in social conservatives. Uh, they see, uh, women's rights being then diminished along the lines that democracy allows. It's an anti freedom agenda. Women's rights are central to the democratic value of freedom. And attacking women's rights, Is the most central way attacking the freedoms of 50 percent of the population [01:17:00] is the most central way to attack freedom.

Erasing History Yale Prof. Jason Stanley on Why Fascists Attack Education & Critical Inquiry - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-17-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Election Day is now seven weeks away. On Monday, Republican vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance lashed out at Democrats, saying liberal rhetoric is to blame for Sunday's apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida.

Vance made no mention that the man arrested was actually a former Trump supporter. Brandt spoke on Monday at a Faith and Freedom Coalition event in Atlanta.

RON DESANTIS: You know the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that we, no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months.

I'd say that's pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And a Trump ally, Elon Musk, posted a message on social media [01:18:00] platform, his social media platform X, that read, and no one's even trying to assassinate Biden Kamala, along with a thinking face emoji.

Musk deleted the message after widespread criticism. Criticism is now being investigated by the Secret Service. J. D. Vance's remarks for Democrats to tone down their rhetoric came just days after Donald Trump repeatedly used inflammatory language to attack Vice President Kamala Harris during last week's ABC News presidential debate.

DONALD TRUMP: She's destroying this country, and if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success, we'll end up being Venezuela on steroids, because they're destroying the fabric of our country by what they've done. There's never been anything done like this at all. They've destroyed the fabric of our country.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: We're joined right now by Jason Stanley, author and professor of philosophy at Yale University, his new book titled [01:19:00] Erasing History. How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Professor Stanley is the son of Holocaust survivors. This is your second book on fascism. Why are you writing it now?

And the significance of its publication as this election, to say the least, heats up in its last weeks?

JASON STANLEY: Well, I faced a puzzle when writing this book. Why authoritarians always target schools and universities? Uh, so we see that, uh, all over the world. We see that with Victor Orban, who provides a kind of template for U.

S. authoritarianism. He attacked Central European University for gender ideology and leftism and being pro immigration. And so we know about the courts. Uh, the authoritarians targeting the courts, but why do authoritarians always target voting? Uh, that's, that's clear. And schools and universities. [01:20:00] So, uh, so when last year when the anti genocide, anti war protests on campus were happening, I thought about, you know, The international context.

I thought about what happened in India in 2019 when they passed the, uh, the Citizenship Amendment Act, which made Muslims into second class citizens. And there were nonviolent protests on campus denounced as anti Indian. So I Uh, so and violent militarized responses. So this, this tactic of tarring school teachers, tarring university professors as Marxists and communists and ruining the country and replacing this kind of education, uh, replacing black history, replacing LGBTQ perspectives by a kind of grandiosity of white Christian nationalism as we're seeing right now.

Uh, this seemed to me a democratic emergency. Okay.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: This is Republican vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance speaking in [01:21:00] 2021 at the National Conservatism Conference. At the time, he was a candidate for the U. S. Senate in Ohio.

RON DESANTIS: I think in this movement of national conservatism, what we need more than inspiration is we need wisdom.

And there was a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40, 50 years ago. He said, and I quote, the professors. You are the enemy.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, that was J. D. Vance, the professors are the enemy. I also want to quote, um, First Things Magazine, a right wing magazine. It says, University should be places of sober analysis, but at Yale, philosophy professor Jason Stanley and history professor Timothy Snyder published books of political propaganda that described Trump as the second coming of Adolf Hitler.

TV newscasters in tone rants rather than report on [01:22:00] events. And of course, J. D. Vance, your fellow Yale, um, uh,

JASON STANLEY: So, uh, so that's a strangeness about this moment that all these people, the leaders of the movement to attack universities and schools are all Ivy League grads. Ron DeSantis is a Yale and Harvard grad.

Ted Cruz is a Princeton and Harvard grad. Uh, uh, J. D. Vance is a Yale law school. Grad Tom Cotton is Harvard, Harvard, at least Stephanie is Harvard. So what's going on? That's a mystery. These guys are sending their kids to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. They're not sending their kids to Hillsdale College. It's Hillsdale College for the rest of us and Harvard, Yale and Princeton for their kids.

So they're attacking the institutions, the universities. Because the universities provide critical inquiry into the kind of myths that's required for the, for these kinds of politics. Uh, this kind of politics, uh, elevates the dominant group, in the case of the United States, [01:23:00] white Christian men. Uh, it diminishes, uh, women, the agency of women by, it represents history as the exploits, uh, in the United States of white Christian men.

Like in India, uh, history is represented as the exploits of Hindus. In Israel, it's represented as the exploits of Jewish nationalists. Who founded the state. Uh, this kind of erasure of history, uh, justifies it doesn't just justify wars and genocide. If you look at, uh, at Russia, a case I look at, uh, extensively in the book as well as Israel, uh, in Russia, the erasure of Ukraine as an independent place, the complete erasure of Ukrainian history justifies Vladimir Putin's, uh, war on Ukraine because it says it is sort of a fake identity, a fake.

Country. Uh, it represents all Russian incursions as justified by supporting independence movements. Israel has erased the existence of the Palestinian people. It has erased the history, [01:24:00] uh, making the desert. Jews made the desert bloom, uh, this kind of thing represent a racist Palestinians from the narrative of the country and of, of the area.

And, and paves the way for genocide. Uh, this kind of erasing history paves the way for ethnic, racial, and religious nationalism, which is the core of the message we're hearing from MAGA Republicans today. Uh, when you represent, when you erase black history, when you erase LGBTQ perspectives, when you erase social history of social movements.

Then you represent history as just the exploits of great white men. You erase social movements, you make citizens feel like they have no agency, and so it's an anti democratic education. And then you justify Great Replacement Theory, which is their core message, that the greatness of America comes from the exploits of great white men, and so we need to protect that identity.

Kamala Harris blasts Donald Trump for playing political games with border policy - Alex Wagner Tonight - Air Date 9-27-24

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: [01:25:00] Elon Musk is hiring all across the country. There are job openings in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.

A few other places too, but mainly those swing states. Because the job is to canvas door to door for Donald Trump. Let me clarify. Technically it isn't Elon Musk himself who is hiring here. It's the super PAC Mr. Musk created and the one he funds and it's called the America PAC. And technically, this PAC is not canvassing for Donald Trump, they're just canvassing door to door to convince people to vote for Donald Trump on their own accord.

If those sound like meaningless technicalities, that is because they are. When you remove the layers of legal and optical separation that a super PAC magically provides, the reality here is that Elon Musk, through his super PAC, is spending [01:26:00] millions of dollars to do the Trump campaign's door knocking.

And while the Trump campaign and the RNC both claim that they are still doing some of that work themselves, we have seen numerous reports of Republicans at the state level saying there are not many signs of a Trump ground game that they can see. That is, no signs other than the door knockers hired by Elon Musk's super PAC, which is frankly surreal.

Get out, the vote efforts have traditionally been the bread and butter of political campaigns. They're basically half the reason you need a campaign staff to begin with. Outsourcing that work, having the richest man in the world and his super PAC do that work for you and pick up the tab, well, that is an unprecedented contribution to a political campaign.

And it may not even be the biggest contribution Elon Musk is making to Donald Trump right now. Today, the New York Times published an analysis of five days of [01:27:00] Elon Musk's posts on his website X. In those five days, Musk posted 171 times, and almost a third of those posts Were false, misleading, or missing vital context.

For instance, the Times found that on one of the five days, a rumor circulated online claiming that a bomb had been found near a Trump rally in New York. That rumor was quickly debunked. But Elon Musk pushed that rumor anyway, sharing it with his nearly 200 million followers. Now, the thing about all of these falsehoods that Elon Musk was pushing, the secret sauce that makes what he is doing here so nefarious, is that the falsehoods he is spreading are not just factually incorrect, they are also nakedly political.

He published misleading posts claiming that Democrats are making memes illegal, that Democrats are trying to open the border to gain votes from illegal [01:28:00] immigrants. In one post, Musk falsely implied that the Springfield, Ohio city manager had received reports of Haitian immigrants eating pets, when in reality, the city manager had said there were no credible reports.

Musk is using one of the biggest bully pulpits in the world, one that he just bought for himself as the world's richest man, to push misinformation unchecked. And that misinformation just so happens to bolster the completely twisted worldview of Donald Trump, whose politics do not seem based in reality.

Now, you could ask, what is the difference between what Elon Musk is doing here and the spin on Fox News or Newsmax or OANN or any of the other conservative information silos? And the answer is not much. But that's the problem. More and more of our country's information ecosystem has been transformed into a machine that takes what Donald Trump says [01:29:00] and pushes it out as the truth.

And that means that Donald Trump can get away with blatant lies.

DONALD TRUMP: Make up some lies, like she said about the border bill that Trump stopped. Let me tell you, number one, I didn't stop it.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: That was Donald Trump today in Michigan, telling a rally that he did not stop the bipartisan immigration bill that was drafted earlier this year.

Now that may sound like a small detail, but because polls show immigration is a top issue for voters this year, and because Trump is trying to pin the current status of our country's immigration system on Vice President Harris, Whether or not Trump killed something that would have addressed immigration in a big way is a key detail here.

And the truth is, he did. He did kill it. But don't just take my word for it.

LINDSEY GRAHAM: Everybody who comes on this floor and says our border's broken, we should do something about it, you're absolutely [01:30:00] right. Um, and, Unfortunately, we didn't get there. President Trump opposed a Senate bill. We couldn't find a better way

REPORTER: forward.

President Trump said don't fix anything during the presidential election. It's a single biggest issue during the election. Don't resolve this.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Just a couple of months ago, Republican senators were loud and proud about the fact that it was Donald Trump who killed that bipartisan immigration bill. And you know who else is loud and proud about it?

Donald Trump.

DONALD TRUMP: There is zero chance I will support this horrible open borders betrayal of America. It's not going to happen. I noticed that, and I'll fight it all the way. I noticed a lot of the senators, a lot of the senators are trying to say respectfully they're blaming it on me. I said, that's okay.

Please blame it on me. Please.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Blame it on me, please. But of course, now that that particular detail is complicating Trump's [01:31:00] presidential campaign, he is rewriting history in front of our eyes. And to a huge swath of the country, he will probably get away with it. Meanwhile, back on Earth One, in reality, today, Vice President Harris made a trip to Douglas, Arizona, to the U.

S. Mexico border. Where she did her best to tell the truth about Donald Trump.

KAMALA HARRIS: It was the strongest border security bill we have seen in decades. It was endorsed by the Border Patrol Union. And it should be in effect today, producing results in real time right now for our country.

But Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said, stop the bill. Because you see, he prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.[01:32:00]

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Which version of this story will more of the American public believe? Harris version or Trump's?

Erasing History Yale Prof. Jason Stanley on Why Fascists Attack Education & Critical Inquiry Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-17-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Jason Stanley, you write in your book, Erasing History, um, The most visible current manifestation of the black American tradition of reclaiming history is Nicole Hannah Jones 1619 Project. She's, of course, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The New York Times Magazine, creator of the landmark 1619 Project, which reframes U.

S. history by marking the year 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as the country's foundational date. This is then President. Donald Trump denouncing the project at a White House conference on American history in September 2020.

DONALD TRUMP: Critical race [01:33:00] theory, the 1619 project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that if not removed will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.

We'll destroy our country.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Professor Stanley, your response?

JASON STANLEY: This is an erasure of black history. This is an erasure of black perspectives. What we need to, to, to improve our democracy is we need knowledge of who has been denied equality and why. We need to know, democracy is a system all play a role in the formation of the policies that govern us, the laws that govern us without black perspectives, without the black perspective on history.

We don't know. We don't understand their voices. We can't. We can't. With the grounds for eliminating and responding to [01:34:00] stereotypes and prejudice have been robbed from us. Without critical race theory, the study of structures that maintain racial hierarchy, the study of say, uh, mortgage redlining. Uh, you won't, uh, children won't understand why there are poor black neighborhoods and wealthy white neighborhoods in their cities protected by military police.

Black children will be led to believe the stereotypes about themselves and, ironically, uh, feel shame about their own identity. These divisive concept laws that are being passed. All over the country that invite students at public universities and students at public schools to report on their own teachers and professors.

These are purportedly justified as students, uh, we shouldn't have teaching that makes students feel shame about their race. Well, when you don't allow teachers Professors and teachers to teach black history, you're making black students feel ashamed about their race. When you don't allow [01:35:00] LGBT perspectives, when you declare them as obscene and pornographic, you do you rep, or you make LGBT families feel ashamed about their identity.

People say, okay, it's not really banning because you can look at, uh, at the web, but what's taught in schools, the perspectives that are taught in schools affect us through our whole lives. They represent an authority, a state authority, and we're being told by MAGA Republicans that that perspective is the perspective of Christian, white, and black.

SECTION C - LATINO ANTI-IMMIGRATION VIEWS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: and finally, SECTION C - LATINO ANTI-IMMIGRATION VIEWS

Kamala Harris blasts Donald Trump for playing political games with border policy Part 2 - Alex Wagner Tonight - Air Date 9-27-24

KAMALA HARRIS: In the four years that Donald Trump was president, he did nothing. For to fix our broken immigration system. He did not solve the shortage of immigration judges. He did not solve the shortage of border agents. And what did he do instead? Well, let's talk about [01:36:00] that. He separated families. He ripped toddlers out of their mother's arms.

Put children in cages and tried to end protections for dreamers. He made the challenges at the border worse.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Vice President Kamala Harris was in Douglas, Arizona this evening, marking her first visit to the U. S. Mexico border since she became the Democratic presidential nominee. Arizona, where 33 percent of the population is Latino, is the only battleground state facing daily migrant crossings.

Since President Biden's executive order in June restricting asylum at the border, those numbers have seen a sharp decline. In July and August, the Border Patrol's Tucson sector saw less than 12, 000 encounters per month, which is down from 80, 000 encounters in December of last year. But recent polling shows that former President Donald Trump still holds an edge on immigration in Arizona, which is a key issue among his supporters.

It is also a [01:37:00] top issue among Latino voters overall, who rank it among the most important concerns this election cycle. But when it comes to who they will vote for at the ballot box, registered Latino voters still favor Harris over Trump 57 to 39 percent. Joining me now is Paola Ramos, MSNBC contributor and the author of defectors, the rise of Latino far right and what it means for America, which is available now, wherever books are sold.

First of all, congratulations on putting this out like literally at exactly the right time. No, you're super genius is what you are. And it's deeply reported. Super relevant and essential read for right now. Um, I, I thought about it actually while I was watching Harris at the border. And then first of all, I just wonder what you thought of her remarks were, it was a combination of, you know, here's, here's some sort of detailed policy, how am I going to get tough?

Um. But with a reiteration that we have to have a humane policy, right?

PAOLA RAMOS: I'll give you two answers. No, the one is the surface answer, which is I thought it was effective. I thought it was balanced. She [01:38:00] did something that's very hard, which is a combination of toughness and softness. And the reason why I say it's the surface answer is because we're not the average listeners.

Yeah. The average listeners are the folks that you were interviewing in Michigan. No. And I say this because. The first question in an American voter's mind right now, when you're thinking about immigration in an electorate that has fundamentally shifted to the right on this issue that is fundamentally threatened by this idea of a border crisis, when you think about immigration, there's one question that comes to mind, and that is who is tougher at the border.

That's it. Who's tougher? And so I think within that context, Within a context that is so politicized and so toxic, that is the only thing that Donald Trump has in this moment, the only thing. And so the idea that you can out Trump Trump at the border, you know, because he's infused so much fear mongering and disinformation, it is so hard.

So, yes, I understand what the Vice President was doing to crystallize this image of someone that's tough. of someone that can take on the cartels, of someone that will pass the [01:39:00] border bill. But then I think about the potential backlash of that image, and I'm thinking about some Latino voters that were so instrumental in 2020, precisely because of the way that Biden could humanize immigrants.

And maybe they're thinking like, why don't you lead with that message? Why don't you flip the script?

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Can we talk a little bit, because I think most people don't understand how far the right, some in the Latino community have gone on the issue of immigration. And you, you know, this. You know what's happening here better than almost anybody else.

Can you talk about how these Latino voters are thinking about immigration and why they lust for the tough hand on, on the border wall?

PAOLA RAMOS: So the first time, Clare, because people come at me, Kamala will, will win the Latino vote. Right? And that's clear in the overall numbers. And that's clear. Okay. Um, but then, okay.

So even think about this idea, send them back. Now, there is a group, a small but growing group of Latinos that when you say send them back. They do not see themselves reflected in that them, no, they see themselves reflected as the other. And then you make sense of, of the [01:40:00] numbers that you're seeing out there right now.

The Latino electorate is so different from our parents generation, no? And it is an electorate where third generation Latinos are the fastest growing segment. It is an electorate that is overwhelmingly young. The majority are U. S. born under the age of 50. And most people speak in English. And so Trumpism, is sort of betting on this idea that you can invoke a certain type of racial and ethnic grievance.

No, they're betting on this idea that within that segment of Latinos, within that picture, Um, they have become so Americanized, you know, and so assimilated that they too can sort of buy into the nativism and the anti immigrant rhetoric, and even perhaps with more force. Why? Because there is a fear among some Latinas that we will always be otherized, you know, and we will always be these perpetual foreigners.

And when you put all of that together, infused with that fear mongering, you know, it's

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Trumpism is powerful. It's an intoxicant for that group of people. I mean, and I think you make a really important point, which is that she will overwhelmingly win the Latino vote. But within that vote, there is a [01:41:00] growing subsection that's really critical and explains a lot of Trump's growth among Hispanic Americans.

Same, you know, the, that phenomenon exists in, in other racial subgroups as well. I just, I guess I wonder, When you talk about authoritarianism that exists in some Latin American countries and the authoritarianism that Donald Trump presents in terms of his vision for the country, does that also have to do with the sort of interest in the right wing politics over immigration?

PAOLA RAMOS: It's so complicated because I think, so Democrats typically are betting on this idea that if you cast Donald Trump as a strong man, you know, because of so many Latinos really complicated history with authoritarianism, that that in and of itself will sort of drive some to towards Democrats. But here's the thing.

Yes, it works, but Latinos have a very complicated relationship with strongman rule. In fact, this idea is pretty present, you know, that at times, because history has repeated itself in Latin America, that at times when democracy feels messy, um, the appeal of strongman is perhaps required, no? And [01:42:00] let's also remember that the United States government sort of conditioned that.

among the Latin American population, right? In the 20th century during the Cold War, um, in the name of sort of ridding the West of communism, the United States government supported strongman rule and military juntas in places like Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua. And so considering the fact that so many migrants and asylum seekers come to this country with those political traumas, again, when you're facing something that because mis and disinformation tells you that things are feeling weird, Trumpism, again, has an appeal.

Paola Ramos Explains the Rise of the Latino Far Right and Growing Anti-Immigrant Sentiments Part 2 - LeBatardShow - Air Date 9-26-24

DAN LEBETARD - HOST, LEBETARD PODCAST: Do you have a plausible make sense explanation for how Hispanics can be against immigration?

PAOLA RAMOS: Um, the, the only explanation I have is that anti immigrant sentiment and xenophobia, no one's immune to that. No, just because [01:43:00] we're sort of descendants of immigrants and just because we're Latinos, that in no way makes us sort of immune to, uh, to also having, like, carrying these anti immigrant sentiments.

No, the sort of fear and the, what we're hearing from someone like Donald Trump, that every single day tries to create this idea that we're invaded, no, that immigrants are bad people, that immigrants are out there eating pets and dogs, like, what? I understand why people would be scared if that's what you hear every single day.

And so I think our job is to sort of ground people in the facts, you know, get people to understand that even statistically, like, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U. S. born natives. And so I understand where their fear comes, particularly when you have a Republican candidate that uses that megaphone Every single day.

And why is he doing that, Dan? Well, that's exactly how he won the 2016 election. No, he made build the wall, um, his central message, and that's how he won. In 2020, he toned it down, and now here we are in 2024, where he's trying to make that the centerpiece of his [01:44:00] campaign because he knows that it works.

DAN LEBETARD - HOST, LEBETARD PODCAST: What was your initial reaction, immediate visceral reaction, to the news that Donald Trump was talking about putting serial numbers on immigrants in something that felt a bit holocaust y?

PAOLA RAMOS: It was, I mean, it was that. It's even surreal that we're, like, it is surreal that we're in 2024 and we're literally talking about this.

No, and what's even more surreal is the idea that over 50 percent of Americans could actually fathom, I'm not even talking about being a Republican or a Democrat, But that over 50 percent of Americans could even fathom bringing this country back to those dark days now. And so I think part of the problem is, and when we're talking about these things and serial numbers and mass deportations and like immigrants in this way, like it's just become this talking point and we hear it on TV, but people have to be grounded in what this means.

Now, what would it mean to deport over 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country? In Donald Trump's own words, like, it can turn bloody. And more than anything, Dan, and I think this is important, [01:45:00] we're at a point where even Donald Trump doesn't really know where, where he's drawing the line, right?

It used to be that he was just targeting undocumented immigrants, and now what we heard after his comments about Haitian migrants, it's like, Haitian immigrants are legal immigrants right now. They are protected under temporary protected status. And so where is he drawing the line? If you're a legal immigrant, would you also be deported?

If you are the sort of U. S. born child of immigrant parents, are you also going to be deported? So I think that's, that's sort of the scary part of all of this.

Trump's rhetoric on immigrants gets even darker Part 2 - The ReidOut - Air Date 9-27-24

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: And we begin tonight with just 39 days to go until election day with early and absentee voting already underway in some states. And while Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are barnstorming the country talking about what they call an opportunity economy and making things more affordable for Americans, including housing food and starting a business, Donald Trump has forced another issue into the center of the campaign with a lot of help from right wing media, including Fox, [01:46:00] his running mates admitted lies, the internet and social media and conspiracy theories cooked up by literal white supremacists.

That issue of course is immigration. Donald Trump knows he can't win the election based on the crappy job he did as president or his frankly crazy ideas for another administration like spiking the cost of everything we buy through tariffs. So instead he's going with fear of immigrants. Ironically, immigration is how modern America was built, right?

Both during and after slavery, someone had to replace all that free labor and immigrants fit the bill. Most of us here today, unless you are indigenous American, come from a family of immigrants. And yet there's always been resistance by the old immigrants. To the new people, there was the no nothing party of the 1850s, the America first Nazi curious movement in the 1930s.

And now we have Donald Trump who has decided to make fear mongering about immigration, the center of his entire campaign. With [01:47:00] fascistic rhetoric, like promising the largest mass deportation operation in history and promising it would be a bloody story, spreading racist lies about immigrants eating people's pets, and even talking about giving immigrants serial numbers, Nazi style.

At this point, his entire plan is trying to scare people into voting for him, despite two of his three wives being immigrants. And just to remind you, as we talk about this. Border crossings are actually down to the lowest levels in four years. Violent crimes also way down across the country and everything you hear on right wing media to suggest otherwise is a lie.

There is no migrant crime wave. Immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than people born in the US. They also don't eat pets, but the facts don't matter to Trump. Instead, he just keeps ramping up the rhetoric more and more every day. Here's what he said today at what was supposed to be a speech about the economy in Michigan.[01:48:00]

DONALD TRUMP: These are killers. These are people at the highest level of killing that cut your throat and they won't even think about it. The next morning, a lot of gang members, they take their gangs off the street. Like in Caracas, Venezuela, the criminals have all been brought to the United States. She let our American sons and daughters be raped and murdered at the hands of vicious monsters.

She let American communities be conquered. They're conquering your communities. We have to get them the hell out of our country because they've ruined, I mean, they're ruining the fabric. Okay.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: And then on the other side of this adjudicated sexual assaulter slash rapist and 34 count felon on the other side of that ironic dude, you have vice president Kamala Harris, the daughter of two immigrants.

Right now she's in the swing state of Arizona, visiting the Southern border for the first time since she became the democratic nominee. Harris met with border patrol [01:49:00] agents and will receive a briefing on efforts to To curb the flow of fentanyl, you know, presidential stuff. Now compare that to Donald Trump's super awkward meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier today.

Later this hour, the VP will also speak on immigration, where she'll likely highlight her record prosecuting transnational gangs and drug traffickers as California Attorney General. She's also expected to go after Trump for killing the bipartisan border deal earlier this year, just because he wanted to run on the issue.

But despite all of this, recent polling has shown a majority of voters say they trust Trump more when it comes to dealing with the border. A man who doesn't know the difference between political asylum and an insane asylum, and whose plan to deport every immigrant, or anyone who just looks like an immigrant, would send our economy into a free fall, because fear, whether real or irrational, can be an effective political tactic.

The question now for America is, have we gotten to the point [01:50:00] where we would destroy economy? And walk willingly into a Hitlerian dictatorship because of the fear Donald Trump and his MAGA cronies are perpetuating solely for their own political benefit. Joining me now is Olivia Troy, a member of Republicans for Harris, who previously served as the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor to former Vice President Mike Pence.

And Ray Suarez, host of the podcast On Shifting Ground, an author of We Are Home, Becoming American in the 21st century, an oral history, an apt book, uh, Ray Suarez. I, I am going to start with you because this is the irony of all of this is that this is a country that wouldn't exist in its present form without immigrants.

It certainly wouldn't without slavery, but set aside slavery. That's not immigration. After that, when the slaves were free. They still needed workers. So they went all around the world and they attracted people here literally to work because workers are what built the economy and what built the country.

And [01:51:00] yet each new group of immigrants says, Oh, we don't want those new people. Oh gosh, we don't want them. You're even seeing that, uh, Mr. Suarez among some Latinos who also want to shut the border and kick people out and even mass deport them. Why is that?

RAY SUAREZ: But you know, critically, Joy, part of this story is that the first century plus of immigration was almost solely from Europe.

And then as America law, American law changed in the 20th century, people started to come here from more places in the world. So that created A bifurcated, stratified immigrant population in this country, where most of the new people are non white, and most of the people with pictures of their grandparents and great grandparents, sepia toned photographs, lovingly kept on mantelpieces, those people are almost exclusively European.

And that sets up a difficult social change for us [01:52:00] now as the new folks, nine out of the 10 sending countries of people born in another place in the world are sending non white immigrants to the United States. That's a really important part of understanding the unease we're having about this right now.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Yeah. And I mean, Olivia, during the Trump administration, when you were working in the administration, I mean, Jeff Sessions, when he was attorney general, he is an open supporter of the 1927, I believe immigration act, which essentially was to Mr. Suarez's point, the goal of it was to shut down immigration from everywhere.

But Europe was to say, we don't even want, Southern Europeans. They didn't even want Italians. They certainly didn't want Asians. They certainly didn't want Africans, North Africans, et cetera. The idea was to whiten immigration. And of course it was Reagan who did the opposite. Three million people given open amnesty by Ronald Reagan.

And those people were largely non white. They were largely Mexican migrants. So, so how do you square a party where Ronald Reagan did amnesty or George Herbert [01:53:00] Walker Bush was very open about saying, we welcome immigration. We want immigrants. And where George W. Bush said the same and even made positive noises about Muslim and Arab immigration to this.

OLIVIA TROY: Well, I think the fact of the matter is that that's. Republican party of the past is gone, Joy. I mean, that's the bottom line. Um, what it is today is a complete fear mongering, anti immigrant sentiment. And, you know, you mentioned Jeff Sessions. I've brought back a lot of memories of the immigration meetings I was in.

I spent all four years of the Trump administration working the immigration portfolio when we could spend hours talking about the things that I witnessed and the things that were said. And it wasn't Jeff Sessions. I'll be very clear. I could just remember Stephen Miller. Was a big proponent of all these things.

And so when I hear actually Donald Trump speaking the way he is this week, the way he has in the past couple of weeks, he actually sounds like Stephen Miller did in actual immigrant immigration policy meetings at the very highest levels. I'm talking about cabinet meetings, Joy. Where traditionally [01:54:00] you would not hear this type of language being spoken, but this is how he would speak.

He would talk in this manner and he would engage fear because that's the only thing he had. Right. And then he would push these extreme policies. And so I think in the contrast here, when we're looking at this and the Republican party of today under Donald Trump, which breaks my heart. Right. As a lifelong Republican and as a daughter of a Mexican immigrant who believed in the Republican Party in the past, watching what is happening here is so just detrimental to who we are as a country.

And it's also dangerous as we're seeing with all the threats that we're seeing throughout the country when they push these messages out.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That’s going to be it for today.

As always, Keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today’s topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at: 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from

The Majority Report

Democracy Now!,

Alex Wagner Tonight,

The [01:55:00] LeBetard Podcast,

and The ReidOut

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, 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 Podcasts app.

You’ll find that link in the show notes along with a link to join our Discord community where you can also continue the discussion.

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of [01:56:00] 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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#1660 Criminalizing Pregnancy: The high cost in health, freedom, and even lives of the campaign to keep people pregnant (Transcript)

Posted by · October 04, 2024 5:30 AM

Air Date 10/4/2024

[00:00:00]

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

When women's value is seen only in relation to their ability to bear and raise children, you get policies that strip them of the right to choose whether or not that's something they actually want for themselves. And the lived consequences are devastating.

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include The ReidOut, NowThis Impact, Danielle Moodie, Democracy Now!, Brittany Page, and The Defenders. Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in five sections: Section A. The casualties; Section B. Religion; Section C. The punishment is the point; Section D. Black women; and Section E. The pushback.

‘Authoritarian’: Vance’s weird war on women echoes history's biggest facists - The ReidOut - Air Date 8-15-24

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: You may not be familiar with the term [00:01:00] called "coverture," but stick with me for a moment because I'm going to explain. Coverture was the law of the land in Europe and in America for the first three and a half centuries, from colonization through the creation of the United States. And it's the reason women in the 1800s and before -- and we're talking white women here, not enslaved black women -- had essentially no rights over their money, land, or even their own bodies. Under coverture, married women were considered the property of their husbands, which meant they could not seek gainful employment or manage their assets independently.

It wasn't until the women's rights movement in the mid 1800s that women began to gain financial and legal control over their lives. Specifically, the passage of the Married Women's Property Act in Mississippi in 1839 triggered a wave of similar legislation across the country that allowed women to regain ownership of their property. And that [00:02:00] was all before women gained the right to vote, which didn't happen until 1920 and still didn't include all women.

And even after that, there were still things women couldn't do without a husband or father's permission, including buying stocks and opening a bank account. Women didn't gain those rights until 1974 when President Gerald Ford signed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act into law. And that was nine years after the Supreme Court gave women the right to use contraception, and one year after the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade gave women the right to an abortion. A right the current Supreme Court majority rescinded in 2022.

And apparently it's not just Sam Alito and his five Leonard Leo friends who disagree that women achieving full citizenship was a good thing.

Enter J. D. Vance, who has said so many disparaging things about women, specifically childless women. It is hard to put them all in one montage. But here's our good old college [00:03:00] try.

JD VANCE: We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.

Just to be a little stark about this, I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country.

AOC has said basically, if you look at her public remarks on this, that it's immoral to have children because of climate change concerns, right? This is -- let's just be direct -- a sociopathic attitude towards families.

If you bought into an idea that it's liberating to leave an 8-week-old baby to go work 90 hours a week at Goldman Sachs, you've been had.

When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don't have kids.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: I mean, did anybody in the Trump campaign even vet this guy? And by the way, none of this is super old. That was [00:04:00] Vance. I mean, this was Vance as we played for you last night on this show just four years ago on a right wing podcast denigrating, in one go, menopausal women, grandmothers, and Indian women like his own mother-in-law.

JD VANCE: They spoil him. There's sort of all the classic stuff that grandparents do to grandchildren. But it makes him a much better human being to have exposure to his grandparents. And the evidence on this, by the way, is super clear. That's the whole purpose of the post monopausal female in theory.

When your child was born, did your in-laws, and particularly your mother-in-law, show up in some huge way?

She lived with us for a year. Right. So, you know, I didn't know the answer to that. That's this weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: And just last night, when asked by a friendly host on Fox about what he would say to suburban women who are worried about abortion rights, this was Vance's response.

JD VANCE: [00:05:00] Well, first of all, I don't buy that, Laura. I think most suburban women care about the normal things that most Americans care about.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: J. D. Vance has a long obsession with childlessness, with there being a problem that enough women in America are not bearing children. Talk about this obsession and how you fit that in the construct of his wider belief.

RUTH BEN GHIAT: He is like a one-man compendium of misogynist ideas and, although it's unfortunate he's in the position of vice presidential candidate, it's useful for us to track this, because he expresses these attitudes which are really at the roots of authoritarianism's war on women.

I'm often asked, when do the kind of charismatic demagogues and authoritarians appeal? And it's often when women have made great strides in society. And my book shows case studies from after World War I, when there was tons of gender emancipation, Spain, 1930s, before the coup of [00:06:00] Franco, women had won all these economic independence for the first time and so on and so on. And it creates this kind of backlash.

And so you get this focus, obsession with women whose value has to be in their ability to bear children, to be mothers. And so there's a whole century of this. And Vance is an example of this, but it goes all over the global right today.

In Italy with Giorgio Meloni. She says, Oh, I'm breaking the glass ceiling. But she also says that my value is as a mother. So the childlessness obsession has demographic implications, has racial implications because it's usually tied to wanting more white Christian babies, and it's this massive fear and dread of female autonomy, female independence in all ways.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Yeah, to go to the piece about it being international, in Hungary, Victor Orban encourages mothers in Hungary to have [00:07:00] four or more babies. We will note that Mussolini argued that the Italian people have a duty to produce as many children as possible. He introduced a number of measures to encourage reproduction. Loans often offered to marry couples. The part of the loan canceled with each new child. Any married man that had more than six children was made exempt from taxation. His regime outlawed abortion, restricted women's access to birth control. You've got Republicans, conservatives in red states who are getting rid of no fault divorce, or at least trying to get rid of it.

And then they're tying it to this other piece, which I think people don't often connect: immigration. Here is JD Vance talking about abortion and tying it to cheap labor and immigration

JD VANCE: When the big corporations come against you for passing abortion restrictions, when corporations are so desperate for cheap labor that they don't want people to parent children, she's right to say that abortion restrictions are bad for business. We should be for abortion restrictions, even [00:08:00] if they are bad for business.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: And the idea being that if they can do mass deportation, they must tie it to forcing American women to bear more children so that they can be the labor. I think people don't often tie all that together, but they certainly seem to.

RUTH BEN GHIAT: Yeah, and it's really good we're talking about this, because mass deportation on a truly old dictator scale. They're talking about 15 million people being deported, is part of Project 2025, and it's part of what Trump said in his interview with Time magazine, that they would deport 15 to 20 million people who would be undocumented immigrants, people of color, and that creates a need for more babies of the right race and the right religion.

So these things are always tied in history.

Where Did MAGA's 'Post-Birth' Abortion Claim Come From? - NowThis Impact - Air Date 9-12-24

CHELSEA FRISBIE - HOST, NOWTHIS IMPACT: At the debate, Donald Trump kept insisting that babies are getting aborted after they're born, saying:

DONALD TRUMP : Just look at the [00:09:00] governor, former governor of Virginia, the governor of Virginia said, we put the baby aside and then we determine what we want to do with the baby.

CHELSEA FRISBIE - HOST, NOWTHIS IMPACT: So what Trump is referring to is a clip from former Democratic governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, who in 2019 was on a radio show talking about newborns who were born with a birth defect so severe that they would not survive outside of the womb for long.

He was saying that in that specific case, the priority would be the comfort of that newborn and the will of the parents. He was talking about a newborn baby that a mother wanted, carried for nine months, had hopes and dreams and outfits for. He was talking about what happens when that baby doesn't make it more than a few hours after being born.

He was saying the woman who carried that baby inside of her Yeah, her comfort, her will, her opinion is valued, heard, and prioritized. But of course, that was all taken out of context. So no, Democrats don't want to kill your baby once they're outside of the womb. They want that baby to be [00:10:00] pain free. And they want to do everything they can to empower parents as they witness a child that was supposed to outlive them pass away in their arms.

And it speaks volumes of MAGA Republicans that they can't wrap their goddamn heads around the fact that for some people, the heartbreak that comes from making these decisions are private and the government shouldn't have a say.

Woman Shares 'Trauma' of Abortion Bans During Senate Hearing - NowThis Impact - Air Date 9-24-24

KAITLYN JOSHUA: My name is Kaitlyn Joshua, and I'm from Louisiana. I'm here to talk about my own experience under extreme abortion bans in my home state soon after the Supreme Court eliminated the federal right to abortion care more than two years ago, and the problem these laws caused me and continue to cause other pregnant Louisianians and their families.

You see, I was turned away without care twice from two different emergency rooms in Louisiana while experiencing a painful and potentially dangerous miscarriage. This was two summers ago. My husband Landon and I were already parents to a curious and happy four year old daughter when we found out [00:11:00] I was pregnant again.

We were thrilled. At least to us, this was the perfect time to add a second baby. But this time, Louisiana's new abortion ban affected my pregnancy from the very start. When I called to schedule my first prenatal appointment, I was told I would have to wait until I was 12 weeks pregnant, a month longer than my first pregnancy.

I was asked, or I asked, excuse me, if this was because of the Louisiana abortion ban and the young lady was very candid. She said yes. Because of the abortion ban, prenatal appointments were purposely scheduled weeks later than normal, delayed further into pregnancy when miscarriages are less common, so avoid potential legal and criminal liability for medical providers.

Practically overnight, these laws were already compromising health care for all pregnant patients.

Aside from experiencing some mild cramping and spotting, my second pregnancy was going along okay until around 11 weeks, just one week shy of that first prenatal appointment. I started bleeding while also experiencing pain worse than childbirth. My husband was at work at the time, so I drove myself to the emergency room. [00:12:00] There, the medical team evaluated me and told me that my fetus had completely stopped growing. I realized I was having a miscarriage, but because of the state's abortion ban, the healthcare team wouldn't even say the word. They sent me home telling me that they would pray for me.

The next day, the bleeding and pain got worse. I did not want to go back to the same hospital that I had been turned away the day before. So I met my mom and husband at a different hospital. I was losing so much blood at this time, even the security guard knew to put me in a wheelchair. The standard treatment for a miscarriage, what I was experiencing, is exactly the same treatment as abortion care: to empty the uterus by prescribing pills or a procedure called a DNC. It is an abortion, yet in the second hospital, the staff told me we're not doing that right now and told me to go home and wait.

Ultimately, it took me weeks for me to pass my pregnancy at home, on my own, without medical care, and I was absolutely terrified.

This experience has made me see and realize how black women like me die needlessly in and around childbirth.

Since telling my story, I've received hundreds of letters [00:13:00] from women across Louisiana who have had similar experiences. And we know routine and potentially life-saving medical care is being in denied states across the country.

And I've met so many other women who are also suffering because of abortion bans like others in Louisiana. 22 states have banned all or most abortions, and several states have criminal penalties for healthcare providers. As a result, doctors and other healthcare providers are afraid to treat patients who are miscarrying. And that's why women like me are being denied the dignity of basic, essential, time sensitive health care that saves our lives: abortion care.

Capable and caring physicians simply cannot practice medicine based on their training and expertise and of course the Hippocratic Oath. We're simply asking for, yet still being denied, the most basic level of maternal health care.

Sharing my story is not fun, nor is it easy. I don't like being away from home. I have two children now and part of me would like to forget the weeks of trauma I endured. But I know that I have to speak out. I owe it to those women who wrote to me, who have [00:14:00] met in person, for women who look like me and who women or for women who don't.

This is certainly an attack and an affront to our most basic fundamental rights: life, liberty, health, happiness, self determination.

This is government and political interference in private healthcare decisions. How is that okay in a freedom loving country in 2024?

Donald wants to CONTROL WOMEN not PROTECT them. The truth behind his FALSE PROMISE. - Danielle Moodie - Air Date 9-25-24

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, DANIELLE MOODIE: If White women didn't go along with and parent in a way that would have White men think that everyone is just there to cater to their needs, to their tantrums. Then maybe they would turn out as better fucking men and I mean that real talk because the fact of the matter is that when you look at the Brett Kavanaugh's, the Donald Trump's, the Justice Roberts, the list of horrible CEOs, the [00:15:00] string of me too's and all of these things, it is White men, White, heterosexual, Christian, pseudo-Christian men that have caused so much goddamn damage, not just in this country, but around the world.

And you would think then, that much in the same way that Black women have been pathologized, with regard to Black men and high incarceration rates and all of these things that we would have a serious conversation about White women parenting White boys that turn into incel misogynistic men like Donald Trump and JD Vance.

But we don't because when it comes to White women and White men, they get to be [00:16:00] individuals. We don't think about them as a collective and that if we were to actually unpack the internalized Right misogyny that White women carry if we were to unpack right the racism that has been innate and figure out what is at the root of the root of the thing and talk about accountability and responsibility, then maybe we would get somewhere and we wouldn't see numbers folks.

Like this one. Take a look. Yes, that's CNN's recent poll that has White women polling 50 percent for Donald Trump and 47 percent for Vice President Harris. So, the woman in the lobby, the White woman in the lobby, is not alone in her thinking. Because 50 percent of White [00:17:00] women think the same way. And if you recall, 2016 and 2020 had their numbers grow.

Which is why you had Shannon Watts, following the lead of Jotaka Eadie and Win With Black Women, put together her call, the second call that we, the third call that we saw after Black men, White women answer the call because there is a set of White women that are recognizing their role and responsibility to bring their community along to the side of democracy and educate these women into understanding that your whiteness and proximity to maleness is not going to save you in Trump's America.

So Donald [00:18:00] Trump, as he's starting to see his numbers with other demographic women, Black women, Latina women. Asian women, Indigenous women, traditionally, these women are like, Yeah, no, I'm good. I'm good with your misogyny and I'm good with your racism. So listen to what Donald Trump just said recently at a rally in Pennsylvania. Take a listen.

DONALD TRUMP : You know why they like, they like to have strong borders. They like to have safety, nothing personal. I think they like me, but I make this statement. I love you too. I love you too, because I am your protector. I want to be your protectors president.

I have to be your protector. I hope you don't make too much of it. I hope the fake news as ago, he wants to be their protector. Well, I am as president, I have to be your protector. I will make you [00:19:00] safe at the border. On the sidewalks of your now violent cities, in the suburbs where you are under migrant criminal siege, and with our military protecting you from foreign enemies, of which we have many today because of the incompetent leadership that we have, you will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared.

You will no longer be in danger. You're not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected and I will be your protector.

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, DANIELLE MOODIE: "I will be your protector" coming from a man who is an adjudicated rapist and owes E. Jean Carroll, the woman whom he raped 80 million or something to that [00:20:00] effect.

Because like he said on the Access Hollywood tapes, "when they're a star, they just let you do it. You can grab a woman by the pussy". So when I hear this man say, I will be your protector. I am your protector. What I hear is a toxic, violent abuser and what was so disgusting, folks, were the rounds of applause and cat calls from women in the audience.

So we wonder, where do the men like JD Vance and Donald Trump come from? They come from White women who have told them, you can do whatever it is that you want. Because the world is yours and we are here to do nothing [00:21:00] other than be ornaments in your life and serve you. That's why JD Vance continues to go on his misogynistic sprees where he talks about, Oh, how feminism and independence and working got women out of their traditional roles.

Where Donald Trump is saying, you don't need to worry your pretty little head about abortion. I took care of that. All you need to worry about is tending to my needs. They want to take away not only bodily autonomy, but any choice that you have whatsoever. And the target, dear friends, truly is White women because it goes hand in hand with their ability to create more White men to avoid what they have been referring to as [00:22:00] the Great Replacement Theory.

So if you get rid of abortion like they've done and you force women into becoming mothers and then they have to drop out of the workforce. Their plans are in motion and folks, we don't have to wait for the election to see Project 2025 and their plan for women operationalized because it's already here. There are women dying in Georgia. There are women bleeding out in parking lots in Texas, Alabama. These red states are blood red because the lives of women, the deaths of women are on their hands. And Donald Trump's response is "I will be your protector. Don't worry your pretty little head about it".

Georgia's Deadly Abortion Ban: The Tragic Deaths of Two Black Women, Candi Miller & Amber Thurman - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-18-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: [00:23:00] On Tuesday, Republican senators once again blocked legislation to protect access to IVF, in vitro fertilization, and require health insurers to cover the fertility treatment, after Democrats forced a vote.

Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris slammed Donald Trump, her Republican rival, for his role in abolishing national abortion rights after he appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who issued the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. In an interview yesterday with the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia, Vice President Harris cited the case, reported by ProPublica, of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old Black woman in Georgia who died from a fatal infection after doctors refused to treat a rare complication from a medication abortion.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I don’t know if anyone here has heard most recently the stories out of Georgia, [00:24:00] tragic story, about a young woman who died because, it appears, the people who should have given her healthcare were afraid they’d be criminalized, after the Dobbs decision came down, laws that make no exception even for rape or incest, which means that you’re telling a survivor of a crime of a violation to their body that they have no right to make a decision about what happens to their body next, which is immoral, an approach that doesn’t take into account that — most people, I think, agree you don’t have to abandon your faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do with her body.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Georgia’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee found Amber Thurman’s death was preventable and largely due to delays in care. This comes as Project 2025 staffer, former Trump White House personnel chief John McEntee [00:25:00] doubted the danger of abortion bans in a TikTok post last Thursday.

JOHN McENTEE: Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned? Don’t hold your breath.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: McEntee was widely ridiculed as women posted responses about their experiences being denied care.

Well, today, ProPublica published a new report on a second woman in Georgia who died from medical abortion complications. Candi Miller’s family said she didn’t visit a doctor, quote, “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions,” unquote. Overall, deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Monica Simpson is with us. She’s executive director of SisterSong, the national women of color reproductive justice collective based in Georgia. And Ziva Branstetter is also joining us, from Walnut Creek, California, senior editor [00:26:00] at ProPublica, who helped edit two new reports by Kavitha Surana.

We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! I want to begin with Ziva. Actually, Vice President Harris cited your investigation in her answers to questions from the National Association of Black Journalists yesterday. Can you lay out the stories of [Amber] Thurman and also today you’ve just broke a new story on a second death?

ZIVA BRANSTETTER: Correct. Well, thank you, first of all, Democracy Now!, for having me on to talk about reporting by ProPublica and reporter Kavitha Surana. We have reported two stories. Both deaths of these women occurred in the months following the overturn of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court. Both were in Georgia. Both were African American women.

The first case, Amber Thurman, 28-year-old single mother with a 3-year-old son, she died after doctors did not provide care over about a [00:27:00] 20-hour period in the emergency room. She had taken abortion medication to end her pregnancy, and fetal tissue remained, which is a rare — a very rare complication of taking abortion medication, very simply solved with a procedure called a D&C, that doctors did not provide over 20 hours in the emergency room. That procedure, in almost all cases in Georgia now and in other abortion ban states, is a felony. Doctors could face criminal prosecution for performing it. We don’t know what was going through their minds, but they did not operate over 20 hours. And she died in August of 2022.

The story that we just published today on ProPublica’s website is about Candi Miller, a 41-year-old woman, also from Georgia, a mother of three, who also self-managed her abortion at home, which is becoming far more regular under abortion bans. She took abortion medication. Again, rare complication. [00:28:00] Instead of going to the hospital, she was afraid to seek care, and did not and died at home with a mixture of drugs that her family believes was trying to manage the pain. And she died, as well, in November of 2022. That death has been ruled by the state preventable and, not only that, directly related to the state’s abortion ban, which is the first time we’ve seen this reported.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And explain the abortion ban in Georgia.

ZIVA BRANSTETTER: Correct. It’s a six-week ban. You know, we classify that almost the same as a complete ban, because many people can become pregnant and don’t know at that point that they are even pregnant. And experts say a six-week ban is tantamount to a complete ban. And there are no health exceptions in Georgia’s ban. Well, Candi Miller had lupus. She had hypertension. She had diabetes. She’s 41 years old. She already has three children. She found herself pregnant. Doctors had told her, [00:29:00] “You can’t. Your body cannot survive another pregnancy. It will kill you.” So, she had, literally, no good options under Georgia’s abortion ban.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Now, can you talk about how rare medication abortion complications are, Ziva?

ZIVA BRANSTETTER: About 6 million people, since the FDA approved abortion medication, have used it, and there have been 31 deaths of any kind, only 11 of those from sepsis. It is 0.0005% of cases that are fatal, which is a lower complication rate than penicillin and Viagra. And so, it’s extremely safe. All medications have risk. There is a simple solution to a complication with abortion medication, and that is a D&C. And abortion ban states, for the vast majority of cases, criminalize that procedure.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I want to turn to Monica Simpson. You’re [00:30:00] executive director of the Georgia organization SisterSong. Can you talk about the levels of Black maternal mortality in Georgia?

MONICA SIMPSON: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me this morning.

We are devastated to hear this news and to see that Black women are still not being treated in the ways that they need to by our healthcare system in Georgia. What is real in the state of Georgia is that we are in a maternal healthcare crisis in our state. We are a state that has yet to expand Medicaid, which means that thousands upon thousands of people are already falling under the radar and not getting access to the care that they need. And on top of that, we are dealing with the fact that we are in this country seeing Black women die at a rate three to four times higher than white women in childbirth, right?

So, we look at that, and coupled with the fact that Georgia has a desert of OB-GYN availability in our state. There are over half of our states that do not — excuse me, half of our counties that do not have access to [00:31:00] an OB-GYN, so people are having to travel miles upon miles just to get care. So, when you bring all of that together in this context of a state that is also dealing with a six-week abortion ban — SisterSong is the lead plaintiff in that case against our state; we have been fighting that for many years now, trying to get this ban removed — we are seeing a really dire picture for Black women and for people in general in the state of Georgia.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: In this case that ProPublica talked about today, the story of Candi Miller, Monica, Candi Miller’s health was so fragile — I’m reading the first sentences. “Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her.” So she was already at high risk. Her previous pregnancy was high-risk. But she was terrified to go to the doctor. Talk about that, what this means. And the number of women who may be [00:32:00] suffering or have died that we don’t know, it’s because of their fear of going to the doctor, that they would be criminalized.

MONICA SIMPSON: Absolutely. We hear this story far too often, that we know too many Black women, in particular — right? — are saying that they do not feel safe when they go to their doctor. They don’t feel as if they’re listened to. They don’t feel as if they’re trusted. We have seen this show up in the lives of people who are celebrities, like Serena Williams, right? So, if we have people who have the amount of privilege and resources that a Serena Williams has and they are still not listened to and trusted by healthcare providers, imagine what that looks like on the ground for everyday people who are trying to get access to care. In our membership, we get these stories all the time, that we don’t feel like we’re trusted, we don’t feel like we’re going to get access to the information that we want. And so it silences people. And we know that that silence then drives people inward, and it does not allow them to be able to move towards the solutions that they need for [00:33:00] themselves and their families.

So, this is a really sad day in the state of Georgia. Our elected officials need to be on top of this more than ever. And we have to take this very seriously, because we knew and we have been saying, since the Dobbs decision and even before then, that when you remove access, restrict access, ban access to lifesaving care, healthcare that people need, then those who have historically been pushed to the margins will be the ones most affected. And we are seeing that in the state of Georgia, where these Black women have lost their lives to a preventable — preventable — issue that could have been taken care of in real time.

Texas Republicans ARE KILLING WOMEN!!! - Brittany Page - Air Date 9-26-24

BRITTANY PAGE - HOST, BRITTANY PAGE: Last week I covered the first confirmed preventable death from abortion bans in Georgia, with reporting from ProPublica. Shortly after I posted that video, ProPublica announced a second preventable, confirmed preventable death in Georgia, this time involving a woman [00:34:00] named Candy Miller. And in the video, I said this was just the beginning because Georgia's Maternal Mortality Review Committee is two years behind. They are reviewing deaths from fall 2022.

I said we would get more deaths from abortion bans, but I also said Georgia is just one state. And now we're starting to see the impact of abortion bans from other states, this time in Texas. In an analysis shared exclusively with NBC News, the Gender Equity and Policy Institute used publicly available data from the CDC and found, quote, from 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11 percent nationwide during the same period.

"There's only one explanation for this staggering difference in maternal mortality", said Nancy L. Cohen, president of GEPI. "All research points to Texas's abortion ban as the primary driver of this [00:35:00] alarming increase. Texas, I fear, is a harbinger of what's to come in other states", she said.

Now, anyone who has been paying attention could have predicted this. Experts have warned politicians repeatedly that abortion bans kill women. And yet, we're still existing in a world where Republicans continue to push lies about abortion, and try to hide their true goals of banning abortion entirely.

Which, as we're seeing now, causes more death for mothers. In Texas, we've read the stories about OBGYNs fleeing the state, increasingly fearful of what will happen to them under draconian laws that put lives at risk. Leaving behind, in some cases, maternal health care deserts. But Texas restricted abortion before the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June 2022.

So we have an even more unique glimpse into the damage caused by abortion bans in Texas. Reading again from NBC News, "The Texas [00:36:00] legislature banned abortion care as early as five weeks into pregnancy in September 2021. Nearly one year before the U. S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the case that protected a federal right to abortion in June 2022.

The passage of Texas Senate Bill 8 gave GEPI researchers the opportunity to take an early look at how near total bans on abortion, including cases in which the mother's life was in danger, affected the health and safety of pregnant women. The SB8 effect, Cohen's team found, was swift and stark. Within a year, maternal mortality rose in all racial groups studied.

Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant during childbirth or soon after increased from 14. 5 maternal deaths per 100, 000 live births in 2019 to 18. 9 in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled from 20 per 100, 000 to [00:37:00] 39. 1. And black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while pregnant during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.

6 to 43. 6 per 100, 000 live births. And so what is the result of this? Well, obviously, inaction on the part of Republicans. Well, inaction and doubling down on restrictions on abortion from Republicans. But also, what is the result of this, meaning what is the impact of this on women? I'm sure you can guess that it's fear.

And this quote really stood out to me. "Fear is something I'd never seen in practice prior to Senate Bill 8", said Dr. Leah Tatum, an OB GYN in private practice in Austin, Texas. Tatum, who was not involved with the GEPI study, said the request for sterilization procedures among her patients doubled after the state's abortion ban.

That is, women prefer to lose their ability to ever have [00:38:00] children over the chance that they might become pregnant following SB8. So for the pro family, pro life party, we have Republicans doubling down on policies that are not just increasing the maternal mortality rate, not just killing women. Who are often already mothers, but also forcing women to choose sterilization over the possibility of death due to pregnancy or due to the inability of having access to life saving medical care in the form of abortion.

of an abortion, if needed. We need to keep this issue front and center, because these stories are the kind of thing that can move the needle. And it's unfortunate when people can't find their empathy before their tragedy. We would hope that people don't need to experience something firsthand before understanding an issue fully and investing themselves in activism.

But that's often the way that it works, and we're [00:39:00] slowly starting to see that happen as more people suffer the negative consequences of these dangerous policies. So keep talking about it, keep sharing it.

Everyone Loves Someone Who's Had an Abortion - The Defenders - Air Date 12-30-23

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Obviously the majority of Americans who support abortion rights, but many people are locked into an old way of seeing things. And I’m hearing you say that we there is new, there is a fresh way to look at it, there is new thinking there is new, relevant information that everybody deserves to have, and an arms you.

JESSICA VALENTI: It does, so many people even though we are the majority still have that mindset of this is a controversial issue that we are split on. But when you actually look at the polls, that’s just not borne out, like we are seeing that people really understand this issue in a much more nuanced and complicated way than they did even five years ago, young people especially. [00:40:00] And I think we just need to give them credit for that and start talking about this in the way we want the policy to look like and in the way that we want our future with pregnancy and abortion to look like and stop holding on to those old ways of thinking and having this conversation.

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: And the old language, the old verbiage of like safe, legal rare, which we’ll.

JESSICA VALENTI: No, like overlooks all over it like it’s, it is. It is so stigmatizing honestly, I’ve struggled with that in my own life like for when I used to talk about having an abortion. At first I only talked about the abortion I had after my daughter was born, and I had a really terrible pregnancy and almost died and being pregnant again, could kill me and so it was not really a choice. I was like, well, you know, I don’t want to leave my daughter mother listened so I had an abortion. It was very easy for me to talk about that abortion, and less easy for me to talk about the abortion I had, you know, four years [00:41:00] before or before I met my husband before I had my daughter because that was like not as okay, right? And I’m someone who does this for a living and I internalize that stigma. There’s just so much of that we need to like really move past it.

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I could not agree more that stigma can impact any of us, even those who write about this topic for a living like Jessica. So how do we move past it? Part of it is doing the work arming the choir with the information that they need to break it down. Like Jessica’s incredible newsletter, Abortion Every Day, which we will of course link in the show notes for you. But another part of it is in the stories we tell each other. This is something I got to chat about with Renee Bracey Sherman of We Testify.

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: What feels important is educating the mass on why people have abortions. And we can do that through our [00:42:00] stories, and dispelling the myths that exist about abortion that we’ve all believed.

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: We testify supports abortion storytellers, especially for marginalized backgrounds. Renee was motivated to do this work because of her own experience sharing her abortion story. We dug into her personal story and why she works to train storytellers in our interview. So okay, so can you tell us why? Why did you decide to start this organization? What was the genesis of that?

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: I did not see people who looked like me sharing their abortion stories. It was about a little over a decade ago, when I first started sharing my abortion story and it was so isolating, not seeing people of color and their stories be out there especially with who was like interviewed in the news or when abortion was the topic. [00:43:00] And when I had my abortion at 19, I thought I was like the only person of color to have an abortion ever. It was like me and like rumor Lil Kim. That was it right? And I knew that my cousins and aunts, White women in my family, had had abortions, but it had not been talked about with Black folks in my family. And so I really felt like what do we need to do to create a space and to create a world in which people of color who have abortions feel like they are able to step in and feel supported to share they’re stories. And it was it again, I would be on panels and people of color would come up to me and say I had an abortion too. I had an abortion too. And that was really, really wonderful but it was like, okay, but why am I still like the only on this panel?

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Right? It’s just me and Lil [00:44:00] Kim out here and we could use some company.

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: Yeah, and I later learned Vanessa Williams. There’s just so few of us. And so I, I don’t think that you can ask someone to do something that you’re not willing to do yourself. And it’s not right to ask people to do things without giving them the proper training and support. And when I first started sharing my abortion story, the harassment was so bad, especially so racist. And I definitely heard from a lot of White leaders at the time, well, that’s just part of it. That’s just it is what it is. And there wasn’t this desire to fix it. And so when I thought about how do we actually protect abortion, storytellers, they are the people that were say we’re supporting, they are at the core of this work. But they’re not centered. They’re not invited to be part of our movement. They’re not the leaders of our movement. They’re not the spokespeople of our movement. How do we support them and [00:45:00] so then I did an a survey 10, it’ll be 10 years ago next year, where I interviewed abortion storytellers and asked them what it was that they needed. And they said that they needed harassment support, they needed compensation for their time and their energy. They needed someone to be there with them. And so then I started creating a curriculum for that which later, then became we testify as an organization. And what I have sought to do is just to make sure that all abortion stories are heard, that the stories are as diverse as the people who have them, and that it’s within proportion of who has abortions on why the majority of people who have abortions are people of color, their parents, their spiritual, they experienced financial, logistical and legal barriers to their abortions. But what ends up happening is that White women’s stories get elevated, especially if there’s tears [00:46:00] involved. And Black folks, Black and Brown folks, just their stories get deprioritize. So the majority of abortion stories that you hear should be from people of color. But we’re not there yet. We’re getting there, right now. All right, yeah.

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I guess let’s can I, we talk about the approach? Because you’re using storytelling as a way to build leadership within the movement? I guess why is that more effective or more important than just trying to run out and change the minds of people who disagree with us. Do you know what I mean?

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: Well, couple things. I think there’s a misunderstanding of the people who agree with us and people who don’t. The majority of the country agrees with us. I believe in reminding them as we say that we testify, everyone loves someone who’s had an abortion, that the things that you think about abortion, even if you’re supportive of it, you might think of some things that are stigmatizing like, oh, well, it’s [00:47:00] dangerous. And so for me, what feels important is dispelling the myths, the pro choice myths that we write, which Paul protrace politicians spread constantly.

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Yeah, I was just gonna say that, like generationally, too. There’s like a whole cohort, like a large cohort of people who support abortion, but it’s, you know, there’s some conditional support, you know, people who are like, I’m fine with abortion, but I don’t want people to use it as birth control it things like that.

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: That is the stigma right there. And at the end of the day, they’re uncomfortable with abortion, and you need to get deeper into figuring out why you’re uncomfortable with abortion, not shaming people who have abortions along the way.

Notes from the Editor about further demands for reproductive justice

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with The ReidOut, discussing the worldview of people like JD Vance. NowThis Impact explained the truth behind the lie of post-birth [00:48:00] abortion. Also from NowThis Impact, there was featured testimony given by a woman to describe her experience with pregnancy in Louisiana. Danielle Moodie discussed the role of patriarchy on how men are raised to see women as subservient. Democracy Now!, looked at the preventable deaths of two women in Georgia who couldn't access the reproductive care they needed. Brittany Page looked at the rising rate of maternity mortality in Texas and the promise of the trend spreading. And The Defenders stressed the importance of de-stigmatizing abortion. And those were just the Top Takes.

There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives section, but first a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics. To support 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 [00:49:00] our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but I'll note that anyone, depending on the app you use to listen, may be able to use the time codes we provide in the show notes to jump around the show, similar to how chapter markers work. Now, 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 have a couple of articles I wanted to highlight with some counter narratives, but they're counter from even further left. The first was published in Jacobin though I've seen similar sentiments expressed in multiple outlets. It's titled "We Need Better Than a Return to the Roe Status Quo". And basically, the initial stance of the Democratic Party after the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade was to call for a reinstatement of [00:50:00] the previous status quo through legislation, going around the Supreme court. Reproductive justice advocates, I think, rightly recognize that this is actually a once in a generation opportunity to demand, not a return to the old, entirely insufficient status quo, but a real fundamental shift in reproductive and family policy under a reproductive justice framework. Which, by the way, is also in line with what the majority of people in the country actually support. So, from the article, "It's not only reproductive health care that's necessary for communities to thrive, but also Medicare for All, universal childcare, more funding for public education, paid family leave, and a higher minimum wage, all demands of the reproductive justice movement". And they go on to put a finer point on the problem itself: "A right without access is meaningless, and access [00:51:00] was frequently blocked by pre-Dobbs restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortion, state restrictions on health insurance coverage of abortion, and state regulations on abortion clinics, that have led to many clinic closures. Roe did not ensure that everyone was able to make unencumbered decisions about their bodies and lives and was decided on flimsy legal arguments about the constitutional right to privacy that did not sufficiently advance or protect women's rights to autonomy and self-determination".

And there is certainly hope that the shift in this stance is already underway. They point out that, in a 2023 interview on Face the Nation, Kamala Harris said, "We're not trying to do something new. We need to put into law the protections of Roe vs. Wade, and that is about going back to where we were before the Dobbs decision". However, "In Harris's August 6th rally in [00:52:00] Pennsylvania, her language evolved from the 'Restore Roe' call that Biden popularized. Under her presidency. She said, 'We will restore reproductive freedom'".

And finally the article highlights further ideas to promote "expanded access to care by funding clinics and direct service providers for ending the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, especially for pregnant people of color, and for the repeal of the Comstock Act, a 19th century anti-obscenity law that could function as a nationwide abortion ban".

All good ideas.

Now, next up, this article published in The Nation is highlighting a split between large reproductive rights groups and those local groups providing services in their local communities. The headline is "National Abortion Rights Groups Have the Wrong Priorities For Our Movement". And it starts out pointing out that this piece was written and signed by a [00:53:00] collective of abortion fund representatives. So, it was written by several people and then it was signed onto by many, many groups and it says. "As representatives of local abortion funds across the country, we of course support any political efforts to expand abortion access in the future. But we also want to pose this question to the elite sectors of our movement: where is your strategy to increase abortion care right now when it has never been needed more?". And highlighting their meager resources and the ever-increasing need for their services, the local groups points to "Some national funds with resources that our organizations could only dream of are making it harder, not easier, to get abortion care. In June, for instance, the National Abortion Federation announced that it would be cutting back on the amount it gives people who qualify for its financial assistance program. Where the NAF previously paid for 50% of the cost of care, it will now pay for [00:54:00] just 30%. These groups blamed their decision on budget constraints. But their resources dwarf anything local funds can provide. For instance, planned parenthood received $275 million in 2022 from just one donor. Every budget is a reflection of priorities".

Now, the argument that these big groups are making for the decisions with their budgetary priorities, right?, is that they're keeping an eye on the political landscape and efforts to establish new lasting policy that will benefit all going forward. And it's not a ridiculous case to make. But it's important to not lose sight of the immediate emergency of need for care right now. And the 34 signatories to this article theorize that the lack of funding may be at least partly due to differing official stances between [00:55:00] the organizations. "Local funds have been put in a position to disproportionally hold the weight of abortion access while being abandoned based on their more radical and staunch values than their national counterparts. Local abortion funds are the experts in this political moment and deserve respect and investment". And then finally they say, "In order to more directly support abortion seekers now donate directly to your local abortion funds to ensure that your donation gets to abortion seekers and realizes abortion access right now". And they link to an Act Blue donation page to support abortion access right now. I will link to that along with these two articles in the show notes.

SECTION A: THE CASUALTIES

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to a dive deeper on five topics. Next up, Section A: The casualties. Followed by Section B: Religion. Section C: The punishment is the point, Section D: [00:56:00] Black women. And Section E: The pushback.

Trump-Vance Ticket and the He-Man Woman Haters - Hysteria - Air Date 9-19-24

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: We've got Some interesting news in Nebraska. The Supreme Court ruled last week that opposing constitutional amendments can appear on state ballots in November. So currently, Nebraska law prohibits abortion after 12 weeks, with exceptions for medical emergencies, sexual assault and incest. Now, let me just say 90 percent of abortions take place at 12 weeks or earlier because the first trimester sucks.

Most of the time, you know you're pregnant. There are circumstances where you might not know you're pregnant or you're disenfranchised and you can't. You can't access the care that you need, but 90 percent of abortions take place before that 12 week mark. The ones that are delayed until after that often take place because of something catastrophic, heartbreaking, awful, terrible.

Like, you get your NIPT results back around 12 weeks, and that can tell you if your child has like a, um, a genetic defect that's incompatible with life. It doesn't test [00:57:00] for all of them, but it catches some of the big ones, and sometimes you're not gonna know until you're 12, 13 weeks along. You know? Anyway, that's neither here nor there.

One amendment known as Protect Women and Children would codify that law, like keep it on the books, and another amendment called Protect the Right to Abortion would effectively reverse it. So only a handful of states have protections for the right to abortion in their state constitutions, and Nebraska is a deeply red state.

Alyssa, do you think, That the Protect the Right to Abortion Amendment has a chance at passing. Or is that wishful thinking?

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: I'm concerned about the name of the second amendment. Like, it's very confusing. Protect Women and Children. If you're a low From what? Right, if you're a low information voter, and you're going into the Like, like, if you're just looking at the name of it, you're like, I guess, yeah, of course I want to protect women and children.

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: Not if you're a gay man woman hater.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: You might actually be like, you know what, I'm motivated by my hatred for women and children. So fuck them. Fuck them kids. Listen, I think that Republicans continue to underestimate, [00:58:00] look, Kansas, Ohio, overwhelmingly people have voted to protect a woman's right to abortion.

So I don't know, fingers crossed. I feel less, a little less hopeful about this because of the dueling amendments and because I do think that they were wrong to have let. The second amendment protect women and children be named protect women and children. I actually do think it's confusing. It is

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: confusing and it's inaccurate because, uh, pregnancy is more dangerous than being an on duty police officer.

If it were a job, it would be one of the top five most dangerous jobs in the U. S. Yeah. You're right. More likely to die when you're pregnant or in the first year after giving birth than you are if you are literally a non duty cop. Uh, so, yeah. Um, Nebraska's one of ten states where constitutional amendments that would protect or expand abortion rights are set to appear on ballots in November.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: Mm hmm.

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: What do you think these amendments mean for the future of abortion in a post Roe country?

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: Look, what we've seen is that when there are amendments, [00:59:00] Thus far, they are passing overwhelmingly. I think maybe at some point, I mean, look, and the thing that's like really fucking creepy about Republicans is that their constituents are telling them what they think, not, I'm not talking about the core base of their party, I mean, the constituents that they represent in their state are telling them abortion, reproductive freedom.

Should exist. Um, women should have access to it and then it passes and then what do they do like in Ohio? Secretary of State's like mmm. We actually think that some of the some of the sentences in here are like not constitutional So we're gonna go line by line and try to strike them all it's bullshit, but I do think at some point Ignoring the will of your constituents will have consequences, you know, like too many local leaders are running on a national platform, um, that I think at some point is going to truly, uh, bite them in the ass,

But, Erin, this isn't the only issue. We have our eyes on down the ballot in Nebraska. Democrats are also hoping to flip the congressional seat in Nebraska's second [01:00:00] district. Incumbent Don Bacon The Republican and Tony Vargas, the Democrat, are in a tight race and we know we can flip the seat. Ooh, it would save America.

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: Dot com slash vote 2024.

I think it's slash 2024 or slash vote either way either one. You're gonna get what you need All right another couple things, you know, this is another situation where uh conservative legislators Put all the ingredients to make a cake in a bowl stirred the cake stirred the ingredients around Put it in a cake pan, put it in the oven that was preheated to 350 degrees after about 30 minutes, took it out, and act shocked that it became a cake.

Uh, back in May, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a bill into law making abortion pills, Mifepristone and Mizoprostol, controlled substances. The law will go into effect on October 1st. And this is what I mean about people getting their science tests handed back to them face down. Mm hmm. Because both of these drugs Are important drugs in the treatment of things [01:01:00] besides post miscarriage care and abortion care like even if you want to be like, fuck them women, abortions, you know, we don't even take care of miscarriages like Both of those drugs have other uses.

Both of those drugs.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: And can I give you, I have a lot of thoughts on this. One, for the misoprostol, which I know doctors use especially if a woman is hemorrhaging, right? And so now it's a controlled substance akin to Valium or Xanax. If a woman is bleeding out, normally misoprostol would be in the crash cart.

Now it is in a locked room, potentially very far away. Do you know that doctors in Louisiana right now are doing time trials to see how far and how long it will take them to write the prescription, run to where it's kept, and get back to the rooms where they would be using it? That's fucking deranged, number one.

Number two, even though they're classifying it as Xanax and Valium, here's something. [01:02:00] Erin, I take Xanax. I don't take it every day. I take it when I need it. My doctor says, Alyssa, here's X number of pills. I pick up my prescription. I don't have to have a nervous breakdown, wait for it to get really bad, and then call my doctor and try to get a pill and run to CVS and get it before I'm a messy puddle on the bathroom of my floor.

So it doesn't even work like the controlled substances they're talking about.

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: Mhm. No, and like, you know, when's the last time you crushed up a mythoprostone and snorted a couple lines of it? Like, me and my girls in the bathroom, we're having abort summer. We're going into the bathroom, we're doing key bumps of misoprostol.

It's like, no, it's not, it doesn't get you high. Nobody's breaking into, like, houses to, to, nobody's breaking into pharmacies to raid them as a pro, postal supply. Yet. So now they should. Exactly. Um, but it also may, means that in order to access the drugs, you need to have a prescription from a medical professional based in Louisiana, which [01:03:00] totally bans abortion.

So, like, If you're trying to do the pills by mail thing, like, that's another added layer of risk, and it's really, really stupid. It is a huge waste of time and a huge waste of money, and people are going to die. People in Georgia have died because of the abortion ban ProPublica uncovered just this week.

It's, it's just, it's disgusting. Um, Ron DeSantis still being, uh, trying his hardest to be somehow less appealing than J. D. Vance is having his goons go around knocking on doors trying to verify that real people signed a petition that meant to get an abortion amendment on the ballot this November. What is Ron DeSantis long game here?

Does he really want to like, edge out J. D. Vance as America's biggest fucking prick?

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: Erin, that's a sad thing. I think he's spiraling, and this is part of a midlife crisis, because he knows that he lost his one chance. He's nothing but to sanctimonious now to Republicans, and God knows Democrats [01:04:00] don't want him.

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: Mm hmm. Yeah, you can't click those high heels together and bring back the political career that you thought you had. Nope! But some good news. Some men in red states have come out loud in support of abortion rights, which would give us some hope in places like Florida and Louisiana.

I gotta admit that it is a little frustrating for me to read Story after story that's like, man, I was really against abortion. And then my wife needed one or she would die. And then I was like, wait a minute. Are other women also people? And then I realized that abortion wasn't a frivolous procedure for loose women.

Uh, it's just, okay. Like glad to have you welcome in, but like, I'm giving you like a little bit of side eye cause it shouldn't take somebody in your immediate family suffering a medical emergency for you to see other people as human...

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: because fundamentally it means you lacked empathy.

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: But I'm glad. Welcome to team. We're here. We're not judging. Um, you know, show me when you get your one year [01:05:00] chip and I will, I will gladly applaud you. And I really appreciate them being outspoken. You know, it's, it's never too late to do the right thing. Yeah, it's sometimes it's almost too late. It's before election day.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: So we're like, okay,

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: that's true. That's true. Okay, so good job. Tepidly, red state men, don't take your foot off the gas because we are going to be watching.

Exactly how Trump could ban abortion - Vox - Air Date 9-9-24

MARY ZEIGLER: Banned states want the possibility of prosecuting people, abortion providers, abortion funds, organizations that help abortion seekers.

ADAM FREELANDER - HOST, VOX: A Trump administration could help states get that information, either by lifting the protections that keep doctors from sharing it, or by using the Center for Disease Control to create detailed records on every pregnancy in the country.

All these plans are written down in a document called Mandate for Leadership. You probably know it. As Project 2025, [01:06:00] a plan written by conservative analysts and former Trump administration officials for what they would do in a new Trump administration. The document includes the word abortion just about 200 times, and we've only touched on a few of its plans to limit abortion access, but It actually contains one anti abortion measure that dwarfs all the others.

If the other plans in Project 2025 are more piecemeal, just kind of chipping away at abortion access, this one would come the closest to an actual national abortion ban. And it uses a powerful tool to make that happen. Something that has just been kind of hiding in the law of the United States. for a hundred and fifty years.

No obscene publication or any article or thing intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion shall be carried in the mail. This is the Comstock Act of 1873. It banned the mailing of three things. Obscene publications, [01:07:00] pornography, and then anything intended for either The Prevention of Conception, or Abortion.

In the 150 years after this law was passed, it was weakened by various court cases and used less and less, and Congress eventually repealed part of it entirely. But the overturning of Roe v. Wade brought this part back, and how or whether to enforce it is now up to the U. S. Department of Justice, overseen by the President.

In December 2022, the Biden administration said that the revived Comstock Act does not prohibit the mailing or receipt by mail of Mifepristo. In other words, mailing abortion pills is illegal. Still okay. But a Trump administration would probably feel differently. Not long after that, a group of Republican members of Congress wrote to the Biden administration urging them to enforce the Comstock Act and stop the reckless distribution of abortion drugs by mail.

One of those members of Congress was Senator J. D. Vance, [01:08:00] who is now running to be Trump's vice president. It's pretty straightforward to see how the revived Comstock Act could be interpreted to prohibit the mailing of abortion pills from providers. But if that's the case, there's no reason it wouldn't also prohibit the shipping of abortion pills from manufacturers.

To providers, and for that matter,

CARRIE N. BAKER: about two thirds of abortion are done with pills now, but about a third are done with instruments and mailing. Those instruments could be a violation of Comstock Law if the Trump administration interprets Comstock as prohibiting the mailing of anything. They could accomplish an abortion.

And that would shut down abortion nationwide, in all states, because every doctor orders things from out of state.

ADAM FREELANDER - HOST, VOX: An administration enforcing the Comstock Act would probably target the two major manufacturers of mifepristone first. And just going after a few doctors would probably be enough to create a chilling effect on all doctors providing abortions everywhere.[01:09:00]

In August, Trump finally addressed this, kind of.

MARY ZEIGLER: It's kind of been Trump's game plan from the beginning to be confusing about what exactly he means on abortion. Would you enforce the Comstock Act, which could prohibit the distribution of medication abortion by male?

DONALD TRUMP : First he said no. No, uh, and then we will be discussing specifics of it, but generally speaking, no.

And that

MARY ZEIGLER: was reported as no, but I don't know what generally no means or we'll discuss the specifics. Does that mean you're going to prosecute some people, but not other people? Like does it mean you're going to prosecute people sometimes and not, like, He hasn't been as clear, I think, as is sometimes reported.

CARRIE N. BAKER: Look at what he's done rather than what he says he will do. Look at who his supporters are. He says what he says to get elected to office, and then he does what he does.

ADAM FREELANDER - HOST, VOX: We don't know what will happen with the Comstock Act. If Democrats win control of the government, They could repeal it.

This is the 2024 Republican Party platform. It barely [01:10:00] mentions abortion. What it does say is more interesting. It says, we stand for families and life, and that the 14th amendment guarantees no person can be denied life or liberty. What It doesn't sound too out there, but that is actually coded language.

Anytime you see these phrases together, 14th Amendment and the repeated use of the word life, they are talking about an idea called fetal personhood. Fetal personhood gives fetuses, embryos, fertilized eggs, full constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment with the assumption that those rights would override the rights of pregnant people.

MARY ZEIGLER: The anti abortion movement has, um thought of fetal personhood as the kind of endgame since the 1960s. To the extent that Comstock approximates a national ban, fetal personhood is pretty much a ban full stop. You can't legally justify abortion if the law says that embryos are people. Nineteen of the states actually already have some form of personhood law on the books.

ADAM FREELANDER - HOST, VOX: But [01:11:00] on the national level, this is almost certainly not something Congress will be able to pass. And it's not something the president can do either. It will have to be done through the courts. This is where the anti abortion movement ultimately wants to go. This is sort of the next Roe v. Wade. In 2019, an anti abortion group filed a lawsuit in the state of Rhode Island, asking the state's court to block Rhode Island's abortion rights law on the basis that Human life commences at the instant of conception, and that said human life is a person.

In other words, fetal personhood. They lost. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, they appealed that case to the U. S. Supreme Court, again on the basis of fetal personhood. The Supreme Court declined to hear their case. But the Supreme Court can change, and the groundwork has already been laid for that. Over the course of Trump's first [01:12:00] administration, he installed right wing judges throughout the federal court system, which is where future Supreme Court justices will probably come from.

And in just four years, Trump was able to replace one third of an already conservative Supreme Court. Another Trump term could do the same.

South Carolina Woman Charged with MURDER Following Life-Threatening Miscarriage - The Humanist Report - Air Date 9-28-24

MIKE FIGUEREDO - HOST, THE HUMANIST REPORT: This is genuinely Orwellian and reading the details sent chills down my spine.

Mari Marsh had just finished her junior year at South Carolina State University in May of 2023 when she received a text message from a law enforcement officer. Sorry, it has taken this long for paperwork to come back, the officer wrote. But I finally had the final report and wanted to see if you and your boyfriend could meet me Wednesday afternoon for a follow up.

Marsha understood that the report was related to a pregnancy loss she'd experienced that March. Okay, having to talk to a police officer due to a miscarriage you had already. [01:13:00] Deeply, deeply draconian situation we're dealing with here, but it's so much worse. During her second trimester, Marsh said she unexpectedly gave birth in the middle of the night while on a toilet in her off campus apartment.

She remembered screaming and panicking and said the bathroom was covered in blood. I couldn't breathe, said Marsh, now 23. The next day when Marsh woke up in the hospital, she said, a law enforcement officer asked her questions. Then a few weeks later, she said she received a call saying she could collect her daughter's ashes.

So, just to kind of slow down a little bit, so we can try to process the insanity here. She has a medical emergency, bleeds in the bathroom, panics, probably thinking, you know, she's gonna die. Uh, and the next day in the hospital, she's visited by a fucking police officer. Why? Because she had a miscarriage.

There are no words for this. [01:14:00] Uh, at that point, she said she didn't know she was being criminally investigated. Uh, yet three months after her loss, Marsh was charged with murder homicide by child abuse, law enforcement record show. She had a miscarriage, ended up in the hospital because of it through no fault of her own.

And she was charged with murder. How fucking insane is that? She spent 22 days at the Orangeburg Calhoun Regional Detention Center. She went to jail for having a miscarriage! What the fuck? Where she was initially held without bond, facing 20 years to life in prison. Folks, this is why the issue of abortion is so salient to women.

Men don't have to deal with this shit. I never have to worry about this. This is genuinely astonishing to hear. Like, this is the type of shit [01:15:00] that we hear about from authoritarian regimes, right? But it's happening in the United States. She went to jail for having a fucking miscarriage. This is August, 13 months after she was released from jail to house arrest with an ankle monitor.

Again, all for a fucking miscarriage. Marsh was cleared by a grand jury. Her case will not proceed to trial. And again, we're talking about a 23 year old. This is a very young woman. She's 23. And she had to deal with this through no fault of her fucking own. When Marsh took an at home pregnancy test in November 2022, the positive result scared her.

I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to let my parents down. She said, I was in a state of shock. She didn't seek prenatal care, she said, because she kept having her period. She thought the pregnancy test might have been wrong. An incident report filed by the Orangeburg County Sheriff's Office on the day she lost the pregnancy stated that in January of 2023, Marsh made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Columbia to take the Plan C pill, which would possibly cause an abortion to occur.

The report doesn't specify whether [01:16:00] she took or even obtained the drug. During an interview at her parents house, Marsh denied going to Planned Parenthood or taking medicine to induce abortion. It shouldn't even fucking matter. Why does this matter at all? It's insane to me that she went to jail for all of this.

I've never been in trouble. I've never been pulled over. I've never been arrested, Marsh said. Uh, I never even gotten written up at school. She played clarinet as section leader in the marching band and once performed at Carnegie Hall. In college, she was majoring in biology and planned to become a doctor.

South Carolina State Representative Seth Rose, a Democrat in Columbia and one of Marsh's attorneys, called it a really tragic case. It's our position that she lost the child through natural causes, he said. No, no, no, but, uh, Apparently, there was an incident report filed because she went to Planned Parenthood and was considering getting an abortion.

So when she ends up having a miscarriage naturally after not getting an abortion, uh, then she's a criminal all of a sudden. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, we gotta back up and just [01:17:00] go, go through how crazy this is. An incident report for going to Planned Parenthood. 2024 America, folks. 2024 America. So on February 28th of 2023, Marsh said she experienced abdominal pain and that was way worse than regular menstrual cramps.

She went to the emergency room investigation record show, but left after several hours without being treated. Back at home, she said the pain grew worse. She returned to the hospital, this time by ambulance. Hospital staffers crowded around her, she said, and none of them explained what was happening to her.

Bright lights shone in her face. I was scared, she said. According to the Sheriff's Department report, hospital staffers told Marsh that she was pregnant and that a fetal heartbeat could be detected. Freaked out and confused, she chose to leave the hospital a second time, she said, and her pain had subsided.

In the middle of the night, she said, the pain started again. She woke up, she recalled, feeling an intense urge to use the bathroom. And when I did, the child came, she said. I screamed because I was scared. Because I didn't [01:18:00] know what was going on. Her boyfriend at the time called 911. The emergency dispatcher kept telling me to take the baby out of the toilet, she recalled.

I couldn't because I couldn't even keep myself together. First medical responders detected signs of life and tried to perform life saving measures as they headed to Regional Medical Center in Orangeburg. The incident report said, but at the hospital, Marsh learned that her infant girl had not survived.

I kept asking, asking to see the baby. She said they wouldn't let me. So, It seems like she wanted to have the baby, and even if she was considering getting an abortion, that is fine, it's her body. Um, but she wanted the baby, and she still, even wanting to see the baby, she went to jail for a fucking miscarriage.

I can't get over this. I mean, it's really not that surprising, um, given this is kind of what we expected to happen if Roe v. Wade was overturned. But, this young woman, Was traumatized again, unnecessarily. So [01:19:00] the following day, a sheriff's deputy told Marsh in our hospital room that the incident was under investigation, but said that Marsh was currently not in any trouble.

According to the report, Marsh responded that she did not feel as though she did anything wrong. Yeah, because she didn't. And I'm sorry, like, I have to go back to this. You're a police officer like this is what you want to focus on. Like, look, I don't like Police officers. Uh, that's a different story for a different day, right?

I don't think you can reform this system. But like, I would imagine that there's at least some naive belief in anyone who becomes a cop that they're doing this to stop the bad guys, right? Do you really feel like you're accomplishing much by going to the hospital and visiting this woman who just had a miscarriage?

Because she's a little bit sus. Do you really feel like you're accomplishing a lot by doing that? Like, what the fuck is happening? More than 10 weeks later, nothing about the text messages she received from an officer in mid May implied that the follow up meeting about the final report was urgent. Oh, it doesn't have to be Wednesday.

It can be next week or another week. The officer wrote in [01:20:00] an exchange that Marsh shared with KFF Health News. I just have to meet with y'all in person before I can close the case. I'm so sorry. No problem. Understand. Marsh wrote back. So she's like going out of her way to be so cooperative when she has every right to.

To be like, fuck you. I'm not cooperating with you. It's none of your business. I had a miscarriage. Leave me alone. Why are you nagging me? Take him and talk to you. Fuck off. Like she is well within her right to say that, but she's not. She's a sweet person. And she's like, no, I understand. I'll cooperate when she doesn't have to, or she shouldn't have to, I should say.

She didn't tell her parents or consider hiring a lawyer. I didn't think I needed one, she said. Marsh arranged to meet the officer on June 2nd of 2023. During that meeting, she was arrested. Her boyfriend was not charged. How reasonable of them.

How Texas' Abortion Ban Increased Infant Deaths - Mama Doctor Jones - Air Date 9-8-23

DANIELLE JONES - HOST, DOCTOR MAMA JONES: What did abortion in Texas look like before SBA?

Well, to be honest, it [01:21:00] wasn't entirely easy to access at all before that. There were huge barriers. Most hospitals in Texas won't let the OB GYNs working there provide abortions even if they want to. Most pharmacies don't dispense because of the regulations and because of just statewide trends towards being opposed.

It's incredibly difficult. For example, I have trained and worked up until I moved here my entire life in Texas and I've never worked at a facility where I was allowed to do abortions or like elective abortions or to give people medication for it. It just was not something I could do in Texas for a whole lot of reasons that I've talked about in a whole lot of other videos.

I don't know how much that this actually changed access. Except that it made people scared. It changed like the face of abortion access in Texas. Does that make sense? Because it doesn't do anything, SBA doesn't do anything to make it technically more difficult. It just made people scared to access it and to provide it.

I [01:22:00] don't think most people Physicians who were already providing abortions in Texas would have stopped providing them based on this SB 8 bill. It just kind of gave people a lot of hesitancy in accessing that kind of care. All right, so they found that spike. It's interesting, they say here, earlier research has found that the number of Texas residents who travel out of state for an abortion spiked after SB 8 took effect.

And, uh, It says that may not be an option for as many people under DAWBS. As many neighboring states, more than a dozen states nationwide, have also enacted abortion bans. Other factors may affect birth trends too, so this is what I was getting at that we don't know for sure that we can see a change in this related to that ruling specifically.

Okay, so, um, At least we can see this public health journal, review it and see if they address the overall birth rate. So researchers expect that the number of abortion procedures to drop and live births to increase when abortion [01:23:00] restrictions go into effect, but don't know what the extent of that will be.

Okay, so it's, it's compared to what they would have expected it to be based on birth trends. around the country. So they have controlled for the expected birth rate. So it's not just comparing it to like last year or anything like that. It's comparing it to expected birth rates based on other places. So that makes sense.

And it's 3 percent higher than what they would have expected. All right. So that's kind of where we're starting with this. So we know that after the 2021 abortion ban. went into place, we saw an increase in the birth rate. Nearly two years after Texas's six week abortion ban, more infants are dying. Texas abortion restrictions, some of the strictest in the country, may be fueling a sudden spike in infant mortality as women are forced to carry non viable pregnancies to term.

And not just non viable pregnancies, right? Any pregnancies that previously would not have been terminated. happening. So some 2, 200 infants died in Texas in 2022, an [01:24:00] increase of 227 deaths or 11. 5 percent over the previous year. According to preliminary infant mortality data from the Texas Department of State and Health Services, CNN obtained through a public records request, infant deaths caused by severe genetic and birth defects rose 22 percent.

So we are noticing a trend here, right? Severe Genetic and birth defects rose by 22 percent. Essentially what they were saying, the number of pregnancies people are forced to carry to term, which then puts them and their health at risk, and also puts their family in a position of not having an option for what to do in a situation where they are put between a rock and a hard place, essentially.

You have to remember most of these people are pregnant with pregnancies they want to have, and then they find out a devastating problem, and they. are not allowed to make a choice, right? So, I kind of liken this to life support options for people. If you are pregnant with a fetus that has a lethal anomaly, and you don't want to continue that [01:25:00] pregnancy, I don't think anybody should be forced to terminate a pregnancy for any reason, obviously.

But, uh, But you also should not force somebody to continue a pregnancy, particularly in a situation where you know that the health outcome is going to be dire. Why? Well, for a whole lot of reasons, not the least of which being, in that interim period from, I don't know, 18 ish weeks when you find out that this could be going on, up until the point that you end up delivering, your health is at risk, right?

So pregnancy is not a health neutral state. Being pregnant puts you at an increased risk of pretty much everything bad that can happen to you in life, and you are naturally at an increased risk. So why it doesn't make any sense to force people to have that. And then in addition to that, while some people would like to have time with a baby if it's born or let things happen naturally on their own.

Some people would really like to, [01:26:00] in what they see, in my experience taking care of these patients, is that some patients fall into that group of like, I just want to stay pregnant as long as possible, have as much time with this baby that is my baby as long as I can. Or in the event that it's born alive, I just want to be able to have that time with it.

And that's perfectly reasonable. I don't know what I would do in that situation. And I think anybody who says that they do know what they would do in that situation, if they have not been through that situation, is lying to themselves and everybody else if they say they know what they would do. Because I've seen this happen hundreds of times, and I can tell you for sure, I don't know what I would do.

That being said, there are some people who fall into another group, which is, I would like to Make what I see as the most humane decision to end this pregnancy so that maybe they think that the fetus is suffering or that when the baby is born, it will suffer and they don't want that to happen. So this is a very personal thing, right?

I think that's really important when we're discussing this is not to lose sight of [01:27:00] the fact that some people on Twitter in particular have looked at this and said, oh, 2200 infants have died. Well, that's, you know, X number less than how many abortions there would have been. And what we're not going to do is compare taking a pill to induce a miscarriage to Somebody having a two month old or a two hour old or a three month old die.

Because those are not the same thing. And we're not going to pretend they are. If somebody wants to pretend that's the same thing, they are just lying because you know And I know that that's not the same thing. That is not to diminish the absolute horrible heartbreak that it can be for people who have lost pregnancies even really early.

That can also be a tragedy. It's not competition of tragicness, but we cannot, Sit here and say that, you know, there's 2000 Texas families [01:28:00] in this short time frame who have lost newborns or babies that were a few months old and say that that's worth it. That is not necessarily something that I will get on board with.

That is a wild thing to even imply. In addition to that, people were asking, well, you know, why would it be associated with higher neonatal and infant mortality to ban abortion. So let's talk a little bit about that. There's a few reasons for this, and it's multifactorial. One is that a lot of times people who have terminations are doing so because they're not in a health situation where they can take care of, grow, birth, and safely care for after birth.

a newborn. Anyone who is at a higher risk of having pregnancy complications, which is a large number of people who choose to have an abortion, they are also at [01:29:00] an increased risk of pregnancy complications, which increase risk of infant mortality. So a higher risk pregnancy, which is Not everybody who has an abortion would fall into a high risk pregnancy group, but a good number of them will.

So you've increased the number of people who have higher risk pregnancies, which increases the risk of having complications related to the pregnancy, specifically things like preterm birth, premature rupture of membranes, abruptions, small for gestational age babies, which increases the risk of things like cerebral palsy, and also, all of those things increase the risk of neonatal and infant mortality.

So yes, banning abortion does increase infant and neonatal mortality rates. We know this. We know this from the plethora of research that we have on this topic, but we also can understand it from a basic level of thinking through what happens when more people are pregnant. And another thing that came up on Twitter was, okay, well, there's more babies being born, so obviously [01:30:00] there's going to be more infant deaths.

And that is true. But the rate is what we're talking about. So if you have one in one hundred, that's one percent. If you have ten and a thousand, that's still one percent. The rate should not change just because the absolute number goes up. And what we're seeing is a trend towards that happening in Texas.

We don't have enough data, I don't think, to know that for sure because I think I'm not positive on this. Again, I would have to look at the data specifically, but I would imagine that we are in too short of a time frame at this point to say if that is an actual change or if it's just related to something else.

But we know this from other data. We know this from logical thinking. We know this from other data on the topic. Banning abortion will increase maternal and infant mortality. What is happening? already starting to happen. It was predictable that this is what would happen, and I think we need to be aware that that's what's happening, because you cannot in one breath [01:31:00] say, I am pro life, and in a second breath ignore the fact that we have thousands of families now grieving their infants dying.

Okay? We cannot ignore that, and we cannot ignore what will likely be an increase in maternal mortality as well.

SECTION B: RELIGION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Religion.

LIVE FROM NETROOTS NATION 2024 #3: Yes, Pro-Faith and Pro-Abortion IS A THING! With Ashley Wilson & Rev. Terry Williams - Feminist Buzzkills - Air Date 9-20-24

REV TERRY WILLIAMS: I just want to lift up the joy and the wonder that we have in partnering with local clinics and with organizations such as your own, that we get people who send folk to us not because they are primarily having a moral decision making quandary around abortion, but because they're struggling with the stigma and the violence that has been forced on them by religious systems that don't represent the majority but do represent in many systems and many situations, the power [01:32:00] structures. And they get this messaging, this consistent onslaught of very loud messaging, and the silent majority is not heard in their life. So they come to us and they say, I'm struggling with the stigma, not with the decision, but with the stigma and the violence of this society. And for us, like you said, to be able to just hold space with people and say, you know what? You're not alone. Not only are you not alone, you're in the majority, and you are beloved. And you know your body and what your body needs and what your life looks like. When you think about a flourishing future, you are the expert on your own future and the expert on your own body.

KRISTIN HADY - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILS: So good.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: And I just want to say, too, as somebody who is brought up Catholic, sometimes when we look at who's outside of those clinics and we look at those men that we just showed you, right? Those violent men. while they are holy garbage, sometimes you can say, oh, yes, I [01:33:00] know that. And sometimes for a young person of faith who is coming to have an abortion, maybe alone, maybe Catholic, those guys are predictably awful. And sometimes the more damaging stigmatizing person can be that quiet person with a rosary who, as the person walks into their procedure, says, if you go in there, you will not have salvation. And those, sometimes I think that we look at the loud ones as the most aggressive, when really it's sometimes the people who pretend to be peaceful who can really take that and make that experience be really scary.

ASHLEY WILSON: It's spiritual violence is what we call it at Catholics for choice. You know, I, everyone, I used to love Pope Francis, and now I have a complicated opinion. He has said that if you have an abortion, you have hired a hitman. And, like, that is bananas [01:34:00] to me. Right. And, like, shows how truly out of touch, you know? Never forget, in the Catholic Church, the people who are writing our policies are ostensibly celibate, ostensibly straight men who have no inroads into the lives of women. They don't have children. They're just so far removed. And they're also obsessed with sex. And it just creates this, like, dark black hole, like, this black hole of spiritual violence and shame that just ripples out everywhere. Even though in the United States, one in four abortion patients in this country identifies as Catholic.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: I also want to say that being the coolest pope is sort of like being the smartest person at Fox News. It's like. It's kind of like. Not that. It's like, okay, fine. Like, you know, like, what are the pickings here? The history's not that great.

REV TERRY WILLIAMS: As an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and part [01:35:00] of the german protestant tradition, I've had a very clear opinion about the pope for about 400 years.

KRISTIN HADY - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILS: you're like, I was ahead of the game. I'm glad everybody's catching up.

REV TERRY WILLIAMS: But I think to Lizz's point, we have for so long in religious circles, we've given people a pass on the worst possible behavior of, like, oh, they're not totally trash today. Guess what? There are people who aren't just minimally, not totally trash. There are people with really great theology and who support abortion access, people who have stood up for decades across many different denominations, across many different systems of faith within the catholic hierarchy, to say no, actually, consciousness is important, and your ability to control your body is a really big fucking deal, to paraphrase.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: So I want to jump on that exactly, because I think it's important to talk about the history of abortion and [01:36:00] religion, how it wound up in the hands or rephrase clutches of these extremists and their narrative around. So let's just talk about the history of abortion.

ASHLEY WILSON: Well, I will say, you know, at Catholics or choice, we talk about the very rich tradition of choice that our religion has. You know, Mary famously was visited by the angel Gabriel and had a choice or not to bear the son of God. And she said, yes. And if Mary had a choice, you should too.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: Oh, wow. That's going over well with those Catholics at the Vatican Church.

KRISTIN HADY - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILS: Merch alert.

REV TERRY WILLIAMS: Mary had a baby by choice.

ASHLEY WILSON: Yeah. And the reality is the catholic hierarchy's obsession with abortion is much more recent. The formal catholic church didn't have a position totally banning abortion until 1917\. It was only a little bit before that, that one of the pope piuses, I think, 9th, [01:37:00] firststarted talking about abortion.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: Can we call him pp nine?

ASHLEY WILSON: Yeah. For real. So all of this is much more modern, really. We're thinking we're looking at the last hundred years, and when you look at the universe that is the United States today, and you look at people like Leonard Leo who have constructed this Supreme Court, people forget Paul Weyrich, who's one of the co founders of the Heritage foundation. He's Catholic. You know, Leonard Leo, who is the architect of the Supreme Court, he's Catholic.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: Six justices.

ASHLEY WILSON: Every member of the Supreme Court who overturned Roe versus Wade, Catholic. Paul Ryan, Catholic. John Boehner, Catholic. Like all of these members of Congress and our government at all levels have literally, intentionally been put there by religious overreach and the catholic bishops to advance this very anti [01:38:00] LGBTQ, anti woman, anti abortion agenda. And it is like the signs of the Catholic Church becoming this political body that has been devastating. And then we're at progressive conferences like this, and the word religion is never talked about. And I'm always like, but Heritage foundation is the one behind project 2025\. Let's look at those roots. The roots are all catholic.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: Totally. And also, just to point out that once you realize that the priest can't get married, thing changed in the 7th century because the church was like, these bitches are dying and giving their property to their families. We want their property. So we're gonna change up that rule. And so when you see the patriarchal spiral of how do we keep control? Eventually you're gonna get to the narrative of let's control the reproduction of people so that this patriarchal [01:39:00] system can work for us.

ASHLEY WILSON: Yeah.

REV TERRY WILLIAMS: The roman empire did not fall. It became a church. Right? I mean, literally, like, this idea of constantly utilizing those systems to reinforce the power and the ability to hold onto resources that has become institutionalized religion, whether it's protestant or catholic, particularly in this country, for decades. I love the phrase that you used, Ashley, that the roots are Catholic. The roots might be catholic, but the fruits are protestant.

Project 2025: The Plan To DESTROY Women’s Rights - Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast - Air Date 7-22-24

MOLLY JONG-FAST - HOST, FAST POLITICS: I'm hoping you could talk us through where we are in America right now with abortion.

That sets the stage for all of this.

MARY ZEIGLER: Yeah, I mean, where we are right now is, is it kind of a mess, right? I mean, there are two pending U. S. Supreme Court cases that we're likely to hear about any time between this week and the end of the month. There are any number of [01:40:00] divergent state laws. States are introducing new bans, even as they already have existing bans.

We're starting to see more interest in conservative states in limiting travel for abortion. We're seeing conservative efforts to introduce a kind of backdoor federal ban on abortion through the Comstock Act that they're hoping a potential Trump administration would enforce. And we're also seeing, I think, leakage or slippage between the concepts of contraception and birth control that could have a lot of consequences.

So, I mean, big picture, you know, the U. S. Supreme Court, when it overturned Roe v. Wade, was essentially saying, well, sure, you know, everybody's going to lose this fundamental right, and that's kind of too bad, but on the bright side, the abortion conflict will simmer down, because the real problem was Roe v.

Wade. So, once we, the Supreme Court, like, exit stage left, everyone is just going to get along better, and this conflict is not really going to exist anymore. And, you know, it turns out that that's not the case. Not true, right? Um, and it turns out that not only that, but the U. S. Supreme Court has more abortion cases than ever before, not fewer.

So the kind of general [01:41:00] picture is sort of is chaos, but also I think it's not necessarily that we've hit rock bottom either. I mean, I think that it, you know, since we're talking about 2025, things could get a lot more draconian at the federal level still.

MOLLY JONG-FAST - HOST, FAST POLITICS: Part of the plan here is this embryonic personhood.

So I'm hoping that you could talk a little bit about how heritage. Um, and the question is, how did the, the movement get involved in that? And what that means in this post Roe America?

MARY ZEIGLER: Yeah. One of the things that most people don't understand is that the embryonic personhood was sort of the reason the anti abortion movement came into being, right.

The anti abortion movement existed before Roe v Wade. Like it started, the modern anti abortion movement started in the 1960s as soon as states tried to reform their criminal abortion laws. and the argument that the movement made Was essentially, well, you can't, you know, have reformed abortion laws because it violates the constitutional rights of fetuses and embryos.

And that [01:42:00] argument never went away. If people want to kind of, you know, check me on this, look at the Republican Party platform, starting in the 1980s, it always called for a fetal personhood amendment. It was just that the anti abortion movement thought it was politically impossible for a long time to get such an amendment or to get a court to say that fetuses or embryos had constitutional rights.

And now for obvious reasons that isn't true anymore, right? I mean, it seems that some conservative judges are, are quite open to this idea. And so that's always been kind of the end game for the anti abortion movement. And since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, you know, the overturned window has shifted and we've seen more and more conservative groups saying, yeah, you know, we're, we're here for fetal personhood.

Like that's the, the idea. Um, they have referred to the, uh, um, Coalition of anti abortion groups refers to this as the movement's new North Star. Um, and they have quoted, for example, Abraham Lincoln saying, you know, you can't have a nation that's half slave and half free, by which they mean you can't have a nation where abortion is [01:43:00] legal in some places and illegal in others.

There needs to be a sort of one size solution imposed on everyone from the top down. I

MOLLY JONG-FAST - HOST, FAST POLITICS: mean, they went from states rights to we have to ban this, making us think that this was never, ever. Ever about states rights.

MARY ZEIGLER: No, yeah. It totally wasn't. I mean, the anti apportionment movement is not the pro democracy or pro states rights movement.

I mean, the idea that anybody like believed that that was the point is sort of beggar's belief a little bit.

MOLLY JONG-FAST - HOST, FAST POLITICS: Right. No, I agree. So Heritage has sort of mapped out a kind of roadmap for this post Roe America and includes this embryonic personhood. and in this embryonic personhood is regulating. IVF. Now, if you look at the, the heritage documents, there's no even pretend there's just like, why don't we regulate IVF?

Why, you know, let's not regulate Exxon because oil companies are fine. Let's [01:44:00] not regulate cigarettes. Let's not regulate, but we have to regulate IVF. Can you sort of make this make sense?

MARY ZEIGLER: Well, still, if you, if you buy the argument, so, I mean, there are two, there are two things going on here, right? One is that if you buy the argument that fetuses and embryos are persons, then IVF might be weird to you, right?

Because you'll see anti abortion people saying, Well, we can't put children in freezers, and we can't donate children for research, and we can't destroy children. So once you kind of go down that road, that's part of what's going on. I think the other thing that's going on in the background is that often beliefs about personhood travel alongside beliefs about gender, sex, sort of the idea that there are God given gender roles, that those are necessary to human flourishing.

And I think there's always been a subset of people within the anti abortion movement who are disturbed by IVF because they see it as sort of antithetical to the idea that children are only born when straight married people have sex [01:45:00] or that it's sort of is used in ways that subvert their, their beliefs vis a vis gender and sex, right?

You have lots of queer families that use IVF, you have single parents, single women who use IVF. So, uh, I think it's both about personhood, but also about this kind of constellation of beliefs that often travel alongside personhood.

MOLLY JONG-FAST - HOST, FAST POLITICS: From there, there's this, like, need to regulate birth control, and that's sort of another branch of this fetal personhood.

So, these are wildly unpopular things. It's not like abortion where you poll it and you get 60, 65 percent say there shouldn't be, you know, there should be choice. It's like 80%. You don't 90%. Nobody wants to take away birth control. Nobody wants to take away IVF, but the part of this is birth control. So can you talk us through?

And it's not just the morning after pill, which might. In this idea sort of makes sense [01:46:00] because I mean, again, it doesn't. But the idea is that maybe, you know, whereas the birth control just totally doesn't make sense at all. I mean, by this sort of fake logic. So talk us through that for a minute.

MARY ZEIGLER: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that there there again, two things going on.

So the first thing some people may remember back to the fight about the Obamacare contraceptive mandate. So there were lots of conservatives at the time. Lobby. It turns, right, Hobby Lobby, that it turns out that most of the things we all thought were contraceptives are actually abortifacients, right, so not just emergency contraceptives but IUDs and the birth control pill.

And ever since Hobby Lobby, really powerful anti abortion groups like Students for Life on which Leonard Leo sat on the board of directors, you know, they've said, you know, contraception is a con, right, this is the sort of marketing, right, that these things, we're being told these things are contraceptives, but they're not, and this has been a major, um, social media campaign.

So, part of the, the Push back against contraception is a definitional thing, like another interesting feature is that, um, since dogs, [01:47:00] several states have, um, reformed their definitions of abortion to remove language that excludes contraceptives, right? So, um, that's created some kind of gray area. Uh, they haven't, you know, said that contraceptives are a worse patients either.

They're just leaving that to the imagination. The other thing I think that's happening is that, again, many conservatives have been uncomfortable with contraception going back some time to viewing, you know, separating sex and reproduction as immoral or as encouraging promiscuity or as unnatural or as contrary to their religious teachings.

So we're starting to to see some conservatives mount efforts to criticize contraception, not as abortion, but just to say, contraception is bad as contraception. The most obvious at the moment focus unsurprisingly on on minors, right? So saying minors shouldn't be able to access contraception and if their parents don't want them to.

We've started to see some arguments that kind of parallel ones we saw about abortion where you're hearing them say, well, contraceptives are [01:48:00] dangerous and they increase the risk of depression and cancer. Kind of the same thing we saw with abortion. And we're seeing, I think one of the interesting things too is, you know, a lot of kind of.

Behind the scenes efforts to defeat right to contraceptive bills, even when conservatives are not always putting out front why they oppose contraception, they don't want right to contraception bills either.

Weekly Roundup: Trump Makes Republicans Pro-Choice - And His Christian Base Revolts - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 8-30-24

DANILE MILLER - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: I want to remind people, because I've had people who reach out, who, who again are like, why, why is IVF like, like, why are the, the, the anti abortion people so opposed to IVF? And again, we've talked about this, but just to throw it out, You have fertilized eggs that are destroyed in the process of IVF, and if you believe, if one believes that a fertilized egg is a full human person with human rights and all of that, that's the issue.

Um, this is like, again, one of these like, kind of unforced errors that Trump keeps doing. Um, It's also sort of [01:49:00] humorous, like, so I, I can imagine, I can imagine, you know, they're sitting around strategizing and they know that banning IVF is colossally, colossally unpopular. We've, we've heard Vance trying to walk back on this, Trump has been trying to do this and so forth.

And I can hear the analysts now, because they know, they know that they're pissing off all the, the, the anti abortion people, like, we need to frame this as not being pro choice, but as being pro family. People need to be able to have families, families are important, it's pro family, and Trump, the other thing about this is, not only does he come out in favor of IVF, And like a mandate for it and whatever, but he, he, the way he talked about it was sort of comical.

So here's what he said, because we want more babies to put it very nicely. And for this same reason, we will also allow new parents to deduct major newborn expenses, uh, from their taxes so that parents can have, uh, that beautiful baby will be able. So we're pro family. It's like, it's like, he's like, let me get all the buzzwords [01:50:00] in babies and families, and we're pro family.

And it's just, on one hand, the transparency of it. We need to sound pro family, so let's throw this out there, and we need to try to appeal to other people. I, I, I don't, I'm, I'm with the right wingers who say I don't see the, the strong benefit of this for Trump. You're right, I, I'm with you, I don't think that this moves the needle much for Trump with most populations, cause he's, he lies all the time, everybody knows he lies all the time.

He clearly, the way he articulates these things makes explicit that it's a political calculation. Yes, politicians are politicians. They're always making political calculations, but like on abortion, Trump has said, we need to not talk about abortion so much because like, it's not a good policy win for us.

Like he says the quiet parts out loud, but this, if this catches fire the way that it appears that it might, and it kind of has, and if it keeps going, I think this only hurts him with some of his own people. He had a major [01:51:00] abortion rights group this week before the IVF comment, who said we're not obligated to vote for Donald Trump.

I mean, it was kind of a warning shot to his campaign. And I think we also see, and we can get into the Florida stuff a bit more in a minute, I could see him tomorrow turning around and having to try to walk this back and creating the policy salad that he does. Where, no, no, no, it's states rights, I always said it was states rights, I'm the one that took away Roe v.

Wade, and you're like, cool, so like, how, like, how, how do you square this circle, Donald Trump, in saying we're pro family, isn't gonna be enough, it isn't gonna do it, so, it's, yeah, it's a, if I thought Trump was more of a calculating person, like, like, more sort of logical and strategic in his thinking, instead of just sort of instinctive and reactionary, I would be like, what in the world is he doing?

Um, I think this comes out to me as like a really bad mashup of political strategists trying to get him to do things mixed together with Trump [01:52:00] mixed together with, I think desperation. Um, so yeah, you're, well, I think, I think he knows,

BRADLEY ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: I think he knows that an abortion ban, whether a full abortion ban or a six week abortion ban is wildly unpopular.

I think he knows that. I think he, so is he calculating? I don't think that's the right word. What I think he's doing is saying, if I come out and say that. I'm it's wildly unpopular what he's not calculating and this is the part I want to dig into and I think is the part That on this show we can really speak to is this has been one of the the excuses to vote for trump Well, yeah, he's not he's not a great christian.

Yes, uh porn stars. Yes adultery, yes, uh You know eugene carroll. Yes all that stuff grab them by the dad But abortion but abortion

DANILE MILLER - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: but abortion. Okay,

BRADLEY ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: so here's what peter You Peter Wiener says at the at the Atlantic, how could an evangelical who claims to be passionately pro-life vote for a presidential candidate who now promises that his administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights, [01:53:00] especially when that person has cheated on his wives and anonymous taxes, paid hush money to porn stars and been found liable of sexual assault.

So, dent, let's just, let's just kind of cut to the chase. Does this make a difference? Does it make a difference? I mean, you know, a lot of, a lot of folks are waiting for Al Mohler in about a week to come up with a tweet thread that says, well, we're disappointed in President, former President Trump, but when it comes to the two choices, he's still better than Kamala Harris.

That's gonna happen. And I don't know if that'll be Al Mohler specifically, but it might be Marjorie Taylor Greene. It might be Ralph Reed. It might be any number of like evangelical Christian nationalists, luminaries who are all, all completely against reproductive rights. They, they will rationalize their way into a vote for Trump.

The, the thing that I, I think is important is 2016 and 2020, he gets 80 percent or more of the white evangelical vote. He cannot afford to let that slip [01:54:00] to like 75. He cannot afford to let some of those people just not vote. Because if they write in, if they write in somebody, if they write in a candidate, if they write in Ron DeSantis, if they stay home, they're Whatever that white evangelical base shrinks every year because there's less and less white evangelicals every year.

The Trump campaigns basically approached 2024. Like we've got them in the bag. They didn't pick a Mike Pence evangelical. They picked JD Vance. Right. And who is a reactionary Catholic, but nonetheless is not that like tried and true evangelical Reaganite kind of legacy pick. In addition, they are really looking at Latino and black voters as the kind of new Christian, uh, population and constituency that they would like to win this time.

All in my opinion, assuming that they will get 82, [01:55:00] percent of the evangelical and other white Christian nationalists sort of base, whether that's Pentecostals, whether that's Catholics, This might be one of those moments where, like, 2024, we see the election results, and it's like, he got 77, he got 76, but that, Dan, that could be Pennsylvania, that could be Wisconsin, that could be Georgia, because if enough of those hard line, anti abortion people are willing to not be Al Mohler or someone else, and just say, we're not voting for him now, he's in trouble, and it may be, like, three percentage points in, in one category of religious voter in the country, But it may be enough.

That's my, that's my take. And that's my, that's how I'm looking at this whole issue as we go forward. Final thoughts, and we'll go to Arlington.

DANILE MILLER - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Yeah, just a couple thoughts about that. Um, is number one, I, I, I think that that all makes sense. And I think we're not talking about, I think this is important, we're not talking about people who are going to go to Harris, but you're talking about the same kind of enthusiasm gap that can [01:56:00] start to open up that was plaguing Democrats forever.

And if there's an enthusiasm gap for Trump with religious voters, that's a huge problem. I'm also thinking about, you know, there was an article, maybe it was Politico, I don't remember where I read it, but, you know, they were at a Trump rally in Michigan, and they're interviewing rally goers there, and the people, the, the, you know, who absolutely do not believe that Donald Trump is behind in the polls, this one dude's predicting he's gonna win by, you know, an 80 percent to 20 percent margin, and this is all fake, and like, whatever.

Remember in 2016? When Hillary Clinton lost, in part because a lot of people who would have voted for Clinton weren't super excited about her, but thought she was going to win the election, so they didn't vote. If you get a tiny sliver of people that do that for Trump, they think he's got it overall, yeah, they would like him better than Harris, but you know, they're upset about what he's now saying about abortion, and they stay home, I, I, I think it's, I think it's a possibility.

The last point I want to do, I just want to talk about in Florida real quick, and the, you know, what happens here. [01:57:00] You get Trump who one minute, you know, he's asked about DeSantis and as you say this, this thing and he says that, you know, six weeks is too short and they asked him, Oh, you'll vote in favor of the amendment then that would, you know, override this.

Um, he says, I'm going to be voting that we need more than six weeks. And so people that the headline was Donald Trump opposes this and his pro life. And then immediately his campaign turns around and says he hasn't said how he'll vote. He just said he believes six weeks is too short. That is not going to be what those religious voters want to hear.

They want to hear him say, we are going to eradicate abortion. Now, when he says I'll veto a federal ban, if they still believe that there's a wink wink with that, I'm saying this, I have to say this to get elected. We all know I need to say this to get elected, but you put it on my desk and once I'm in office, I'll do whatever the hell I want.

If they still believe that, okay, maybe they go. But if he keeps doing this, I think that sows that doubt and there's the chance of losing that.

SECTION C: THE PUNISHMENT IS THE POINT

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [01:58:00] You've reached Section C: The punishment is the point.

Blue State Barriers and the Messy Map of Abortion Access - Reveal - Air Date 3-8-24

AL LETSON: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas have all banned abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. wade in 2022.

Georgia and South Carolina only allow abortions up to six weeks, before most women know they’re pregnant. Up until recently, Florida was a stronghold of abortion access in the South.

Over the last seven years, more than 30,000 abortions were performed on patients from out of state. But in 2022, a Republican super majority passed a law banning abortions after 15 weeks.

And then last year they passed a six-week ban. And Sadie says, if the Florida Supreme Court upholds this ban, women’s health across the South will [01:59:00] be at risk.

SADI SUMMERLIN: It is scary to be somebody capable of becoming pregnant right now. It is terrifying. And when I say-

AL LETSON: Sadi’s standing with about five other activists, she’s holding a bullhorn and a sign that says “Pro-women. Pro-choice.”

SADI SUMMERLIN: We need Florida. We need Florida.

SPEAKER 17: If Florida falls, where would people go?

SADI SUMMERLIN: Florida falls, Virginia, basically, they’re going to have to go up to Virginia.

AL LETSON: Virginia. It’s the one state in the South where abortion is still legal. Up to 26 weeks. Over the last six months, Laura’s been talking to one Florida abortion provider who’s been preparing for this very moment. Laura takes it from here.

LAURA MOREL: It’s July 2023, two months before the hearing at Florida Supreme Court, and Kelly Flynn is preparing for abortion access to keep shrinking across the South.

KELLY FLYNN: All right, [02:00:00] you got the measuring tape?

LAURA MOREL: She’s standing in a medical plaza in Danville, Virginia checking out an office. She put an offer on site unseen and she’s trying to be inconspicuous.

KELLY FLYNN: Yeah, so I’m been trying to be really discreet about this because I don’t want to get any backlash before we open.

LAURA MOREL: Kelly walks across the parking lot with a purple notepad and a Diet Coke. This is her latest venture, her next abortion clinic, and she’s got to do it quietly, because she’s worried about protests and pushback.

KELLY FLYNN: But yeah, we’ll take a walk around and see.

LAURA MOREL: This used to be an OBGYN’s office, but it’s been empty for a while and it looks pretty rough. Kelly’s walking around the rooms, making notes, measuring door frames.

KELLY FLYNN: Oh whoa, this room, it’s orange. And brown. Or something.

LAURA MOREL: [02:01:00] It’s truly an awful color like pumpkin pie filling, but years expired.

Kelly knows she’s got a lot of work ahead of her. There’s water damage. A bunch of the cabinet doors are broken and there’s a room with stacks of documents from 2001. She keeps clicking her pen. It’s this giveaway that she’s anxious.

KELLY FLYNN: I’m really excited, nervous and scared at the same time, because I never know how unpredictable these laws are going to be, but it looks like Virginia is pretty safe right now.

LAURA MOREL: In Virginia. Democrats have been protective of abortion rights. They’re in control of the state legislature, and won’t face reelection in the Senate until 2027.

KELLY FLYNN: So my contractor is going to be here in just a little bit to go ahead and start the remodeling process. We plan to close on this building pretty quickly, as our patients in North Carolina [02:02:00] need somewhere to go.

LAURA MOREL: She owns three clinics in North Carolina and one in Florida. And ever since Roe fell, Kelly’s been shifting and pivoting like a point guard scanning the court for the next open play.

So, when Florida passed a 15-week ban, Kelly sent her patients to North Carolina where abortion was still legal up to 20 weeks. But then last year, North Carolina passed a 12-week ban, so Kelly sent her patients back to Florida, but now that Florida is facing a possible six-week ban, her new plan is that women can come here to this clinic in Danville, Virginia.

KELLY FLYNN: I have big visions for this place. It’s going to look really pretty when we’re done, and the goal is to be open, ideally… I mean in a perfect world, I’d like end of August, but I’m thinking mid-September.

LAURA MOREL: Kelly’s on a mission to make sure people can access abortion and it’s something she can relate to. She had two abortions during [02:03:00] college and the second time she ended up comforting another patient because Kelly knew what to expect. She held the patient’s hand while they ate crackers in the recovery room, the clinic staff noticed and offered her a job. That was her path to becoming a provider.

I’ve known Kelly since 2021, when I interviewed her for a story about harassment and violence targeting abortion clinics. After that story aired, Kelly and I kept in touch mostly over the phone. I wanted to understand what the fall of Roe would mean for providers.

And Kelly agreed to let me follow her.

KELLY FLYNN: Just text me if you need anything. And I’m sorry about the delay in the schedule.

LAURA MOREL: Oh, it’s fine. No worries. We’ll touch base next week.

One I learned about Kelly early on is that she’s really careful.

KELLY FLYNN: Because I’ve got my little boy. I never know how crazy somebody can get, and how obsessive they become. So I mean, I take it very personally, and I’m careful in terms of [02:04:00] who I choose to bring into my circle.

LAURA MOREL: And this venture into Danville. Only a very select group of people know about it. Kelly’s worried about attracting backlash before she’s even had a chance to open, and there’s good reason to be so cautious.

After Tennessee banned abortion, a clinic in Bristol crossed state lines to open in Virginia, and almost immediately, it faced legal challenges and protests.

VICTORIA COBB: Virginians, no matter where they stand on the value of human life, don’t want abortion to be part of the tourism offerings.

LAURA MOREL: This is Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation of Virginia, an anti-abortion group based in Richmond. Victoria doesn’t live in Bristol, but her group has organized residents there and in other cities along Virginia’s border to advocate for laws that would stop abortion providers from coming to the state.

VICTORIA COBB: People don’t want to see a commercial that says, “Come to Virginia, visit historic Williamsburg and get your abortion while you’re [02:05:00] here.”

That’s not any community’s desire. And so that’s what these communities are trying to do, is wall off being exploited by the abortion industry.

LAURA MOREL: What is abortion tourism? How would you define that?

VICTORIA COBB: I would say it is marketing our location, our commonwealth as a place to pursue your abortion.

LAURA MOREL: Victoria’s organization had a strategy for Bristol. They drafted a zoning ordinance that would ban future abortion clinics from operating within city limits.

VICTORIA COBB: Yeah, I mean it’s essentially in the same way that an ordinance would prevent a strip club from setting up next to a church or a school, for example.

LAURA MOREL: Bristol’s ordinance hasn’t gone into effect yet. It still has to be approved by other city officials.

It is a particularly hard time to open an abortion clinic in the US. There’s a complicated [02:06:00] web of local ordinances and state laws to maneuver around. And with so many states enacting all-out bans, more than 60 clinics have closed or stopped offering abortion care across the country.

But that also means they’re clearing out offices, getting rid of equipment.

KELLY FLYNN: I’ve got equipment in my garage that I bought from another office earlier this year, like exam tables and chairs.

LAURA MOREL: It’s all now heading to Virginia.

Honestly, it’s like the floor is lava. You know that game where you jump from couch to chair across your living room? Each state that passes a ban is one less safe place for abortion providers like Kelly to stand.

I don’t know. I am assuming that’s got to be a very surprising shift for you in the last few months, just realizing that, “Well, if I want to keep doing this, then I’m going to have to go to another state.”

KELLY FLYNN: Right. I feel like I’m too young to retire [02:07:00] and too stubborn to quit, and this is my life’s work. I am still in a little bit of disbelief that we are going backwards.

A Right-Wing Conspiracy Overturned Roe, Then Came Back for More. - Grave Injustice - Air Date 3-9-24

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Small details are important to Bex. She notices things. And the details are what made her first abortion, I don’t want to speak for her and call it traumatic, but it was pretty clearly an overwhelming experience.

BEX: So like immediately it just kind of feels a little, it felt a little intense for me. I don’t know about like feeling unsafe, but I was just like, whoa, this was unexpected.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: For context, she had her first abortion in 2017 in Texas, where she’s from. It was a surgical procedure. It wasn’t an easy process. For starters, Bex was broke.

Also, the clinic was an hour and a half drive from her house, and she had to go twice, first for an ultrasound, and then for the procedure itself. But it was the little things that made the [02:08:00] procedure so ghoulish.

BEX: I walked in the building, there’s like, you know, metal detectors, and you have to take everything out of your pockets, and they like, check your IDs.

It’s like, not, also not like a normal routine thing for healthcare, um, to be like, Someone with a gun is like asking for your ID when you walk through the door.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Then there was the sterile, uninviting medicalness of the whole place.

BEX: I grew up, um, homeschooled, so I didn’t go to school, which also meant we didn’t really have to go to the doctor.

So I think that I still have like really, um, extreme feelings of discomfort in a lot of medical settings. They weren’t like a routine thing for me growing up. So whenever I went, it was like something really bad happened or I just feel really uncomfortable. I would say in like most medical settings.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: She had to listen to the fetal circulatory system and they also made her look at the ultrasound display.

BEX: Because of [02:09:00] regulations, you had to have an ultrasound, you had to listen to the like heartbeat. cardiac activity. They actually made me look at the screen. And then two days later I came back. And that was after waiting three weeks from the time I called asking for an appointment. You know, so there was a lot of travel involved, which just kind of like added

to the

stress level, like logistics.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Bex’s next abortion last year was a lot better. She caught the pregnancy early. She was more informed and medication abortions were more accessible. She literally took a day off, took her pills, and that was that.

BEX: It felt simple. It felt straightforward. Very uneventful. Like, in a way, it was like, very nice that it was private and at home.

It was very important to me to be able to do it myself and to not have to go into, like, a medical facility.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Whether to take an abortion medication, Mifeprestone, off the market in all 50 states will be the Supreme Court’s first abortion decision since it overturned Roe [02:10:00] v. Wade in the summer of 2022. That case, of course, was Dobbs v.

Jackson Women’s Health Organization, or just Dobbs for short. I’ll try not to swamp you with case names and legalese, but the upshot is that with Dobbs, the Supreme Court decided that abortion access isn’t a right. It was a moment many red states had been waiting for. Several had trigger bans. That is, anti abortion legislation set to spring into effect the moment the Supreme Court overturned Roe.

Since the ruling, 21 states have restricted abortion beyond what the Roe vs. Wade standard would have allowed. 14 have banned it outright. What has this meant for women in America? To find out, I spoke with an abortion provider.

LAUREN JACOBSON: My name is Lauren Jacobson. I’m a women’s health nurse practitioner, and I work as an abortion provider for Aid Access.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Aid Access mails pills for medication abortion to women throughout the U. S., and since Dobbs, demand has skyrocketed.

LAUREN JACOBSON: Right [02:11:00] now, 50 percent of all of our pills are going into Texas. So, just for context, um, Yeah, and I’m sending 30 to 50 packages a day total, and there’s about 10 of us now, so if you do the math there, it’s a lot.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Lauren says her clients in states like Texas are nervous, not just because they now need to outsource their abortion in distant states, but also because they just don’t know what’s going to happen next.

LAUREN JACOBSON: There’s a lot of fear. Because some people don’t know what can happen to them. You know, we see people who are four weeks pregnant.

We see people who are 12 weeks, five days. You see this whole spectrum. So some people, I think, are more, and this is anecdotal, are more aware of You know their bodies and if they’re pregnant and they’re testing quicker and then they’re just like got to get the pills as soon as possible because I’m in a restricted state, but then there’s also people who of course know what’s going on and they’re afraid and so they wait longer.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Last year that [02:12:00] aforementioned Texas judge.

ruled to strike down FDA approval for Mifepristone, which is one of two pills used in the most reliable medication abortion method. The plaintiffs in that case were a group of anti abortion doctors who call themselves the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. They claim that Mifepristone was rammed through the FDA approval process back in 2000 and was never proven to be safe.

That claim is, of course, bullshit. Mifepristone is safe. A paper in the Stanford Law Review pointed out that after 20 years on the market, Mifepristone is, quote, one of the most studied drugs available, end quote, and is safer than penicillin and Viagra, and 14 times safer than childbirth.

LAUREN JACOBSON: It’s just crazy to me that a pill that was FDA approved, like, what, 23 years ago, is suddenly just, people are deciding, Oh no, we’re gonna say it’s no longer, uh, safe.

Based on absolutely no evidence. I mean, it’s incredibly safe comparatively to like, as you know, Tylenol, Viagra, [02:13:00] the potential risks or complications are less with Mifepristone.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Renee Bracey Sherman agrees. She’s the founder of We Testify, an abortion advocacy group. She also co hosts the podcast, The A Files, A Secret History of Abortion.

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: It’s like settled science. We, this pill has been around globally since 1988. It’s been in the United States since 2000. It’s widely available. Mifepristone is one of the safest medications that we have, right? But that is being put into question on purpose by people who want to sow this distrust and, and miscommunication and confusion.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Who exactly are these people sowing miscommunication and confusion? In this case, they have a name, Alliance Defending Freedom.

ADF PROMO TAPE: Wherever human freedom is under attack. We stand ready to defend it, both at home and around the world, in courtrooms, legislatures, [02:14:00] and the public square. You’ll find us on the front lines.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Architect the Dobbs case and overturn Roe v. Wade. They’re also bent on overturning same sex marriage and restricting trans rights. The Southern Poverty Law Center is called ADF, an anti LGBTQ hate group. They have strong ties to Washington, including to Amy Coney Barrett. who spoke at ADF backed events before she became a justice on the U. S. Supreme Court.

PAUL WEYRICH: Louisville wedding photographer has won her federal lawsuit.

ADF PROMO TAPE: We must protect Title IX and women’s sports for the next generation. One powerful Christian legal organization has been planning a strategy to overturn Roe v. Wade. Their plan worked. ADF is one team, a part of a broader alliance.

We are Christ centered. We are committed to victory.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: ADF helped launch the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine in 2022 [02:15:00] in Amarillo, Texas. Why Amarillo? Because that was the home of this one Trump appointed judge named Matthew Kaczmarek in the District Court of Northern Texas. Matthew Kaczmarek backed Trump’s harsh immigration policies, shot down the Biden administration’s protection for LGBTQ plus workers, and has been an outspoken anti abortionist before he took the bench.

If anyone was going to ignore the science and ban the abortion pill, it was going to be this guy.

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: So they’re judge shopping. Like, that’s what that is. There’s not a question about the science here. There’s not a question about, you know, what the American public wants. There’s not a question about, ah, do four out of five doctors believe this?

We don’t know. There’s no question there. What they’re doing is judge shopping for any sort of decision that they want.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: The lower federal courts have spent the last year bickering over Matthew Kasner’s ruling. Another U. S. district judge in Washington state ordered the FDA to leave Mifepristone on the [02:16:00] market.

For Later, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which includes Texas, ruled that while Mifepristone could stay on the market, it reinstated old regulations that required women to obtain a prescription and pick up the pills in person. So no more getting pills by mail from providers like Lauren Jacobson.

Finally, in December, the U. S. Supreme Court agreed to make a final call. They might side against both Kasemiric and the Fifth Circuit and leave Mifepristone as it was. They might uphold the old regulations and make the pill harder to get. Or they might just ban it for everyone, in every state. Even if the worst happens, there is still another abortion pill on the market.

It’s called misoprostol, which was technically approved as a medicine for stomach ulcers, not an abortifacient, making it much harder for the likes of ADF and Casimiric to target. It’s still effective when used on its own, but less so. Right now, the far right agenda isn’t about huge victories. The game plan isn’t to wipe out abortion access in one fell swoop.

[02:17:00] It’s about the little things, making it that much harder for people to obtain medical abortions, sowing that much confusion and misinformation about their options, setting a precedent for revoking FDA approval so that maybe, next time, they can go after a stomach ulcer medication, or surgical abortions, or even contraception.

Abortion bans reduce women to breeding stocks– and that’s exactly the point - Velshi - Air Date 9-15-24

JOHN McENTEE: Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned? Don't hold your breath.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Don't hold your breath. That condescending smirk belongs to John McEntee, who is a former Trump White House official and now a staffer for Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for a second Trump term.

Thousands of women responded to his callous post, sharing stories of being denied abortion care during a health emergency. Among them was Carmen Brewster. [02:18:00]

CARMEN BREWSTER: Present. I'm right here. I had a 19 day miscarriage in Idaho because of the abortion regulations. I was turned away, not from one ER, but two ERs, technically three, because I walked into one and they said they wouldn't help me and I had to walk out.

I blacked out in my hallway due to blood loss. I developed a heart condition called AFib. It, it means my heart doesn't work right anymore, and it f s up. So if I get too excited, too hot, too much in pain, uh, too traumatized, if somebody yells at me too much, my heart f s. And so I have to regulate for my heart to keep active, otherwise I could have a heart attack and die.

I have to deal with these side effects for the rest of my life because of abortion laws. But yeah, women are bleeding out in parking lots. I actually have a pinned video of me saying. They're gonna just let me f ing bleed out here, [02:19:00] if you want to refer to that. But I'm present! Hi! But yeah, we exist.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Some Republicans want you to think of abortion as, uh, sort of an isolated elective procedure with no medical basis that's disconnected from women's overall reproductive health.

But since the Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion, stories like Carmen's underscore the reality that abortion care is a critical component of maternal health. Many women who have been denied care because of draconian abortion bans were carrying wanted pregnancies, but each faced health complications that required abortions to save their lives.

Their stories illustrate a very stark, uh, in very stark terms, how the politicization of this aspect of women's health has life or death consequences for any woman who can be pregnant. Everything that could go wrong as a result of Dobbs has, including the case of Caitlin Cash, a Texas woman whose routine postpartum care was delayed for the removal of remaining placental tissue after giving birth to a healthy baby [02:20:00] girl.

That procedure, known as a D& C, is also used in abortion care, which may be why medical staff at the hospital where Caitlin was staying failed to perform it. Texas's near total abortion ban criminalizes medical professionals who carry out abortion procedures. Even when DNCs are used for other medical purposes, doctors are simply too afraid to be able to do their jobs.

When Caitlin didn't receive the care she needed, her condition deteriorated and she lost consciousness. What began as a normal delivery ended up with her in the ICU and she was later told she was lucky to have not lost her uterus. This is what it means to be a pregnant woman in post Roe America. The U.

S. already has the highest rate of maternal death among high income countries, according to the Commonwealth Fund. Abortion bans have only made that worse. A KFF study found that 68 percent of OBGYNs believe the Dobbs ruling has worsened their ability to manage pregnancy [02:21:00] related emergencies, and 64 percent say pregnancy related mortality has increased.

For At best, the anti abortion activists pushing these abortion bans assume that nothing can go wrong during a pregnancy, but you have to be pretty stupid to think that's true. There is, however, a darker truth lurking behind these efforts. To remain indifferent to the countless women who are harmed by these abortion bans is to see them as nothing more than collateral damage in a broader crusade to impose forced births.

Let's be clear. This isn't actually about saving unborn babies. It never has been.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Should the woman be punished for having an abortion? Uh, look, uh, This is not something you can dodge. If you say abortion is a crime or abortion is murder, you have to deal with it under the law. Should abortion be punished?

Well, people in certain parts of the Republican Party and conservative Republicans would say yes, they should be punished. How about you? Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no, as a principle? The [02:22:00] answer is that abortion There has to be some form of punishment. For the woman? Yeah.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: The answer is there has to be some sort of punishment for the woman.

By treating abortion as a crime, as something isolated from general maternal health care, Christian fundamentalist extremists frame women's bodily autonomy as something to be policed and controlled by the state. Now, imagine if men's healthcare were treated the same way. Imagine a world in which a man is denied basic care for a prostate condition because a law overrides his urologist's professional judgment.

Imagine men being forced to bleed out in parking lots because lawmakers felt entitled to interfere with their doctor's decisions. It's almost inconceivable because it sounds so absurd, yet this is the reality for women in America today. Men don't live in a world where their reproductive organs are treated as state property.

I have greater rights over my body today than the segment producer who wrote this script. Than my senior producer. Than [02:23:00] her boss, my executive producer. Than her boss and her boss. I have greater bodily autonomy than the majority of my staff. All the women in my family and in fact all the women in America watching me right now.

And that's not right. That's not equality, that's not liberty, and that's not democracy. No one living in a democracy should have to endure such intrusion into the most personal and intimate aspects of our lives. This is the very definition of a human rights violation, made possible only in a world that reduces women to mere instruments of reproduction.

Abortion care is health care, and the GOP's campaign to convince you otherwise poses a deadly threat to American women.

SECTION D: BLACK WOMEN

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Up next Section D: Black women

Maternal Mortality Crisis: Why Black Women in the U.S. Are Dying During Childbirth w/ Dr. Joia Perry - Marc Lamont Hill - Air Date 7-31-24

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: What, what was the main factor for black women receiving birth support? Uh, these drastically negative outcomes. It's like, if there's nothing [02:24:00] biological about us as black people that makes us more likely to die giving birth, why are we dying more giving

DR. JOIA PERRY: birth?

Well, it's racism. We know that despite income or education, even a black woman who has a college degree, it's five times more likely to die within a year of childbirth than a white woman who has no high school education. So if you think about that, even when we're normal weight, we are more likely to die than a white woman who's obese.

Even when we live in a fancy neighborhood, we move into gated communities. I love my other doctor friends who love staying. I went to my Fancy HPC or my IV. And now I live in this gated community. Guess what's this? You're still more likely to die than a white woman who doesn't even have a high school diploma.

So despite our income, despite our education, we cannot buy or educate our way out of dying from the impact of racism.

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: Connect the dots for me though, because people are going to be watching this and they're going to say, well, how does racism make you die? Well, I don't see it.

DR. JOIA PERRY: True. Well, I mean, your first comments were really important.

You talked about the blood pressure cuffs. That would be, I liked your, that statement. That was very important. So who are you going to take the time to put the right cuff on? [02:25:00] Who do you care about enough to stop and say, Hey, your arm is not the regular size. You have a smaller arm or bigger arm. We know right now that one of the leading reasons that people die from in childbirth is a heart attack.

Or Kira Johnson, Charles Johnson's wife, who died, um, who is Judge Hatchett's daughter in law. So think about all the layers of privilege that this woman had. She was a healthy, FAMU grad, loved by her husband, brought there for a repeat C section. And she was allowed to bleed to death for hours. And what the nurse said to his wife, to Charles was, Your wife's just not a priority right now.

So even as he tried to advocate for his wife as a Black man, With a suit on, at a fancy hospital, guess what? The more he escalated, the more they downgraded and didn't listen to him. So, that's how you get those outcomes.

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: Wow. You know, the idea that we don't listen to black women's pain. We don't trust their expression of pain levels.

Uh, we're sort of dismissive of them in general. It's something that we experienced throughout life, not just in the hospital, [02:26:00] all parts of life. But it seems like it's playing out so much in U. S. Hospitals. But the report also mentioned that black women in Latin America and the Caribbean face racism in health care as well.

So, uh, You know, why the U. S. Why do we focus on the U. S. So much?

DR. JOIA PERRY: Well, I mean, the truth is, I live here. I'm from here. I'm from New Orleans. And so as a black woman who's an OBGYN who's had three different complicated births myself. Um, like most black women, you start an organization to fix your own problem first, right?

So I had a son who was born premature and I started him back to say now what is wrong with me? I know that there is no biological basis of race. Me having more melanin does not make my kidneys act differently. Doesn't make my lungs act differently. All those were racist tropes. We were taught, I was taught in medical school at Louisiana State University, a publicly funded university, playing state dollars in a state that has a lot of black folks in it, that there were three biological races.

Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid. That was taught in a lecture in class in the 1990s. What year was that?

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: Oh my god, that's [02:27:00] like, that's like early 20th century race science. We still doing We're still doing that eugenic

DR. JOIA PERRY: science in medical schools. Yes. And then, so even when we get rid of it finally across the United States, guess where we export it?

The Caribbean and Central and Latin America. Guess where they get their textbooks from? Our old textbooks. So guess what they're learning? Eugenics, race based science. So yes, it's also we don't listen to black women and we don't listen to black men. I just don't want to over to discount that black men are showing up for their wives, for their partners.

Just like Charles Johnson did. And even, you know, if you escalate, if you buck, guess what happens, a nurse is going to buck back, and nothing happens, and then you can end up, the police get called on you so many times, people getting kicked out of hospitals. Oh, I've seen it. Because they're part of security.

I have seen it. So this is, this is a real thing. Racism kills us for real. Like, it's not just police brutality. I love to talk to, um, Kimberley Crenshaw about how, like, yes, we talk about what happens in the streets, but the hospitals are also a war zone for us being able to survive and live.

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: Absolutely. You know, I, I [02:28:00] was, uh, my, my, my one year old was born.

Uh,

DR. JOIA PERRY: We

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: were born, you know, we were in the hospital, we were in the NICU for months. Um, and you know, we had the ability to advocate for ourselves in certain kinds of ways. And, and we were sort of legible to them as people who deserved certain kinds of treatment, uh, sometimes. But as, but when you sit there for months, you watch different people come in and And I watched how nurses treated different people and how they disregarded people's concerns and people's pain.

And I heard people talk about how they, when they decided to drug test certain people during delivery and not others. And when they, they sort of weaponized all aspects of the system against black women and particularly poor and working class black women. That's a key thing. But you said something else that I thought was important, which was that you can't behave your way out of it and you can't, you know, Achieve your way out of it.

And we've seen that with celebrities like Beyonces, uh, Serena Williams. They talk about the experiences they've had giving birth, and if they ain't listening to Beyonce, people pay 300 to sit behind a wall, to listen to Beyonce at the [02:29:00] concert, but they're not listening to her in the hospital. What, what hope do we have?

DR. JOIA PERRY: I mean, I'm thinking about Serena being pregnant right now, right? So I'm thinking about her. She's married to a very kind of appearing white man who's a, who's a billionaire, and yet she almost died. So here she is. if you hear her story, wh is that she said to them She walked to the nurse's listen, I think I might b just give me some heparin blood clot?

And they were feel faint because you ju is a world class athlete If you don't listen to Serena Williams, so they made her go lay back down, they didn't listen to her for hours. Serena would be dead if she didn't act as what they like to call her as a diva. If she didn't keep saying, you know, for real, I need a CAT scan and I need, they first did an ultrasound, they did all these other things to stall.

These are things that could have killed her. So then if you are Serena, where do you go now for help here? Where do you and your billionaire husband go that you're going to be seen and be valued? So what we say, I'm not all doom and gloom. [02:30:00] You really have to find someone who you trust. If you don't trust them, leave, just like you would do with anything else.

You don't have to stay with the provider you don't trust. If you don't trust the healthcare facility, go somewhere else. And while you're there, you're constantly negotiating all those things. I might vote my father's a doctor, my mom's a pharmacist. I still have to go in hospitals with them, with their elder care, I'm sorry, and do the same kinds of things to make sure that they, our elder black folks can still get medical

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: treatment.

DR. JOIA PERRY: You ain't

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: never lied, I asked. I had similar experiences. It's just crazy that in this country, it's not surprising, but it's just still crazy that in this country we still have to wrestle with this stuff as black folk, no matter how hard we work, no matter what we do. Everybody deserves quality health care.

Everybody deserves quality treatment. You shouldn't need a degree or a big bank account to get treated well.

Treating abortion bans ‘as if they aren’t violence’ turns Black women into ‘collateral’ - Velshi - Air Date 9-22-24

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: You and I have not had a chance to see each other in person for some time, but as soon as Roe fell, you were my first stop. I went to Alabama. We talked about some of the things that women were going to face and you pointed out that women across [02:31:00] Alabama and across the Southeast were going to face these problems, but black women were going to face them.

yet more harshly. Tell me about how these restrictions have exacerbated exacerbated the challenges that black women in the south were already facing.

JENICE FOUNTAIN: First of all, I really want to thank you for your coverage of this. Um, and I have to apologize. I'm still very emotional about all this happening. But when I joined you in Tuscaloosa, I remember saying that black women would die right from this abortion ban.

It was a death threat. And so many people told us. And I was told me that that was hyperbolic, that I was exaggerating. And now here we are with Amber Thurman and Candy Miller being casualties of this country's attack on reproductive health care. And they're not just inconvenienced. They're dead, right?

They're not coming back. There's not going to be a policy change that means that they get to take care of their children. They're gone.[02:32:00]

And we, we named this, right? We said this would happen. And so it's just infuriating for people to, um, still have these conversations about abortion bans as if they aren't violence, as if they aren't killing people. And Black women shouldn't be the collateral for people's political campaigns. Um, and fighting this has been such an uphill battle because there's that, we have to be civically engaged, right?

But we have to organize now. Like, not all of us are going to make it to see those policy wins. So what is it like to care for people now, in this moment, where we're having to watch Black women die and be collateral for political agendas?

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Yeah, you did name it. You, you were very, very clear about how this is going to unfold.

Michelle, um, let's talk about why it's especially dangerous for women of color to have abortion access isolated and removed from the umbrella of, of health, reproductive health, and maternal health, all of which [02:33:00] suffer in this country in a way that they do not in most, most developed countries.

MICHELLE GOODWIN: Such a long legacy of the targeting of black women and utilizing their bodies in the most horrific ways.

We know this. It's written in stone in terms of the history of our country, a disregard for the lives, the well being, the health, the safety of black women from time of slavery through Jim Crow. We see it now there is a book called unequal treatment. The Institute of medicine published this over 20 years ago.

And they chronicled virtually every area of health care, and it turned out in every area of health care in the United States, black people had it worse. And the only area where black people got more service than white people did was with amputation. Black people were two to six times more likely to have their limbs amputated.

The only area. And when we think about matters of reproductive health and safety, my goodness, what black women have been targeted with. In the 1960s, when black women demanded inclusion and [02:34:00] welfare programs and Medicare, Medicaid, that's when we get the Mississippi appendectomy, the coercive sterilization of black women because they wanted equality.

Fannie Lou Hamer told us about that the Supreme Court itself has acknowledged that an abortion is far safer than carrying a pregnancy to turn. You know, just a few years ago, in the Supreme Court case, Whole Woman's Healthy Hellerstedt, Justice Breyer, in writing that opinion, said that you're 14 times more likely to die carrying a pregnancy to term in the United States than having an abortion.

Abortions are incredibly safe. And when you look at the risks that are involved, if these were men, the government would say, Save your lives. Do that, which is 14 times more likely to save your life, and we will fund it. We will underwrite it rather than the risk of you dying. But when it comes to women, there is that disregard, and then it becomes even heavier, like concrete tied around the ankles for women of color and especially black women in [02:35:00] communities where there's just been historic mistreatment in the medical community.

I mean, if we're honest about it, Ali, then we know that there are black people in the 19 forties, fifties and sixties that were dying on the steps of hospitals that refused to admit them. Segregation within hospitals. And there's still suspicion about black folks. And let me just add one thing that I think will bring it home for your listeners and viewers.

At the University of Virginia, they did a study within the last decade of medical students. And residents to see whether or not they had these same beliefs that people had 50 years ago, and it turned out they did, you know, that they believe that black people had thicker skin density, that they don't feel pain that they have a different kind of blood that their blood coagulates differently.

So, Ali, that's where we are.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Uh, these, these myths persist and you make an interesting point, Michelle, that when it suited people, black women are being sterilized. Uh, when it suits people's political agenda, uh, then to, uh, Janice [02:36:00] for black people to have an abortion is black genocide. And in fact, this black genocide thing is having a bit of a revival.

I'm hoping your answer is no, but do you hear people using this argument?

JENICE FOUNTAIN: Oh, absolutely. I will live with transport folks to the Atlanta abortion clinic. That's all you heard in the background was, well, I guess black lives don't matter. Well, y'all are killing all the black people. It's not us. So, absolutely.

There's definitely a resurgence of that. What's difficult is that there are conversations that have to be had around how we offer abortion and how we talk about reproductive autonomy. Absolutely. But that's not it, right? That's not that conversation has been weaponized in an intentional way against us and not as a part of bodily autonomy at all.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: One of the things you pointed out to me, Janice, when we were in Tuscaloosa, Is it for a lot of one of the inherent structural pieces of racism that is only multiplied by this is the lesser access, the lower [02:37:00] access to health care or health insurance that black women in places like Alabama have. So they're starting from a net negative place in the first place.

And then if they require added protections or added reproductive health services, they're not available to them anyway, but they weren't getting them in the first place.

JENICE FOUNTAIN: Oh, absolutely. I think one of the things that people don't talk about enough in terms of access or in terms of what abortion bans mean for black women is that we're largely relying on state clinics, state, you know, like state medical care, which is obviously incredibly biased.

It's not like, we're talking to primary care physicians that trust what we're communicating to them is that we're having to take whatever we can. And that's a risk. And a lot of people don't know where they can go to actually have. conversations with their providers that actually care about their well being.

Not everyone knows that Dr Yoshiko Robinson has a birthing center and that she's pro abortion right where they can have a candidate conversation about their choices [02:38:00] or Heather's games. And a lot of people are just scared. So it's either that they don't seek that medical care at all, but they don't know how to have the conversations with someone that is biased in that way.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Michelle, what's your sense of this, this black genocide conversation and its historical context.

MICHELLE GOODWIN: Well, you know, it's it's the big lie that's been portrayed by the Supreme Court. And this is where we should be very, very cynical and skeptical about the court itself. Because genocide, as Justice Thomas should know, who's been a perpetrator of this mythology, 1927, the Buck v Bell decision is where the United States Supreme Court.

Permits eugenics policies to go in place. And we know explicitly it's not a case about black women. We know it's not a case about black women and abortion. It is a case where Justice Oliver Wendell Hobbs says Carrie Buck is a poor white girl and the reality. And it's a 2020 project 2025 reality. And people should know this in the United States at the turn of the century.

There was a real question about what to do with poor white [02:39:00] people. And we are a country that in 1927, our Supreme Court said it was okay to coercively and forcibly sterilize poor white people, just as Holmes said, better than to let them starve for their imbecility. Society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind manifestly unfit.

It was considered white people. The state of Virginia was rounding up poor white people, little girls, 10, 11, 12 years old. and sterilizing them. The idea was America had no room, no space for poor white people. And Justice Holmes said three generations of imbeciles are enough. And the subject of that litigation was a poor white girl who had been raped at 16 and had a baby out of wedlock.

So this mythology is a made up thing. And what makes it so horrific is that this is a Supreme Court case. Our Supreme Court justices should know the law and should know this case and its origin. And so there has been a way again of utilizing black people, black women in this [02:40:00] space of mythology, stereotype and stigma.

SECTION E: THE PUSHBACK

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section E: The pushback.

Why Ron DeSantis Hates Direct Democracy - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Air Date 9-14-24

DALIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: Explain the mechanics of how direct democracy works. In over half of all of the states, the people can place measures on their ballots. They can pass statutes, constitutional amendments. They can do it through the popular vote. And yes, the process varies. And yes, the number of signatures vary. And yes, the percentage of the populace that vote, yes can vary. But can you just explain to us what this logic of sort of ballot initiatives, constitutional amendments is and why only half the states do this kind of direct democracy?

JESSICA VALENTI: It has only been literally in the last two years that I have learned anything about ballot measures, and now this is all I think about.

As you said, it’s half the states in the country have the ability to bring citizen led initiatives [02:41:00] where, depending on the state, you need to get a certain amount of signatures from a certain amount of counties to get something directly on the ballot, whether it’s abortion rights, marijuana, what have you, and then in half the states, it’s only legislators who can get something on the ballot.

And what’s been really sort of fascinating to me, especially over the last year, because these abortion rights ballot measures are getting so much attention and people are so excited about the ability to perhaps be able to restore abortion rights, that in the states where there aren’t citizen led initiatives, voters are asking why this link between democracy and abortion rights has just never been clearer.

Voters are p***** off when they don’t have the ability to weigh in directly on abortion. I’ve read piece after piece from columnists who are talking about readers writing in, asking them, why don’t we have this [02:42:00] ability? Why aren’t we doing this? I think it was in Mississippi where they had to put the question of why there wasn’t the ability to vote directly on abortion rights.

They had to ask it at the gubernatorial debate because it became such a big deal for voters wanting to know why they couldn’t do this, watching states like Ohio restore abortion rights, getting really excited about that possibility, and then figuring out that actually they don’t have the same right to direct democracy that other people do.

And as you said, this is what makes Trump’s will of the people. I gave it back to the people. Such utter nonsense. Because that’s not true for everyone and as we’ve seen in the states that do have the ability to vote directly on abortion rights, Republicans, anti abortion activists, legislators are doing everything that they can to make sure that that just doesn’t happen. They are working overtime to keep voters as far away from this issue as possible because they know that when voters have a direct on abortion, abortion wins.

DALIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: So, Lauren, one of the [02:43:00] reasons I really wanted to talk to you in as part of this conversation is that the week kind of opened this week with the Tampa Bay Times revealing that Florida’s State Department is like scrutinizing amendment four signatures for vote fraud and that the secretary of state, Brad McVeigh, is contacting supervisors to collect signatures for review.

And I think what is so crazy about this is how quickly we kinda of vaulted from, you know, we want to make sure people have the right information, quote unquote, to oh no, we’re knocking signatures off the freaking ballot.

So I would love for you to just tell us how we got here in Florida because this is actually quite a shocking intervention and it’s much more dramatic than, you know, the earlier iterations of the shenanigans, which are like, futzing with the language.

LAUREN BRENZEL: First and foremost, I want to say about this moment. There wasn’t a time where the Florida [02:44:00] coalition didn’t think that this was coming. We saw in 2022 the arrest of numerous individuals who had felony convictions for registering to vote, despite the fact that it was put to Florida voters that they wanted to give those folks the right to vote back. And then most of those cases were dismissed afterwards.

We have seen people bust out of state because of their immigration status. This is like the playbook of Florida right now. It’s what our government does.

There are few people who are deeply in charge who weaponize state systems against people. We’ve had democratically elected officials removed from office for saying that they were going to protect abortion patients and abortion providers.

We have right now at my alma mater, books being put into a dumpster from our gender and diversity center. Like, this is the model and the playbook. And I think something that’s really disheartening on our end is this coalition has worked incredibly hard to make this process as non [02:45:00] political as possible. We have really relied on the voters of Florida, the coalition of organizations, on patient stories, on activists, in order to qualify this for the ballot. And that’s been in removing conversations about any political party. But it’s also just been in how we structured this.

We are not coordinated with the Florida Democratic Party. We are not speaking out against republican actors because we know we have a 60% threshold. And we are aware that that means that people need to think of this issue as a health care issue, not a partisan issue. And so to have a year and a half of work to really intentionally center, be entirely disrupted and have this turn into a fight about DeSantis like this needs to last beyond any administration in the state of Florida.

We’re talking about our constitution. So seeing narrative shift so quickly into what has Ron done? And take away all of the focus and the emphasis that we’ve been very intentional about is also the playbook. Like, [02:46:00] part of this is to stoke fear. I have, like, 70 year old white women right now telling me that they’re afraid to go vote this November, and it’s like hitting them that they think that the election police are gonna come after them to ask them about whether they sign the abortion petition and what their vote is.

And like, that is part of the mind game as well. It’s just so the idea that we’re not credible actors, it’s to one disrupt. Also, the petition collector vendor that they’re going after is like the only progressive vendor in the state of Florida. So none of the corporate initiatives have been investigated. It is solely the one who, like, works for progressive initiatives. It’s the same vendor who successfully qualified medical marijuana, the dollar 15 minimum wage redistricting initiative, and citizens rights restoration. So that’s incredibly telling of. And then it’s a distraction and it’s a misinformation campaign. It’s a disinformation campaign to cause fear and to weaponize all systems so that we’re having to fight on the legal front, we’re having to fight on the comms front, we’re having to [02:47:00] fight on the reputational front. And it is the playbook of authoritarianism. And people let it happen for abortion in very specific ways because we know that there are actors who are so radicalized on this issue that they believe that abortion advocates are actual murderers. So they’re willing to put aside any belief they have in democracy or democratic processes because they are such radicalized actors on this subject. And once you learn how far you can radicalize people, you can figure out how to do that for any issue.

What’s At Stake in Arizona - The Defenders - Air Date 9-12-24

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: This past spring, there was a lot of whiplash for Arizonans. Within just one month. Right when things were starting to feel really hopeful, Arizona came close to losing almost all access to abortion.

First, in early April, the coalition behind the ballot initiative [02:48:00] announced it had collected more than half a million signatures.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Arizona for abortion access need about 300, 000 signatures to put their question on the ballot. But today, this group said they have more than 500, 000 signatures on their petition, and they still have more than three months left until the deadline.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Things were looking up. And then, just a week later, the Arizona Supreme Court revived the 1864 near total ban on abortion. You know, the one we talked about earlier, that Athena had been trying to repeal for years as a legislator.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Arizona's highest court today backing a law that bans nearly all abortions, and carries up to five years in prison for doctors who perform one.

Immediately, there was confusion. The legal ramifications of all of this, a lot of questions there, the political consequences of all of this, a lot of questions there, a lot is up in the air right now.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: And in an election year, the court ruling set off a political storm. With even anti [02:49:00] abortion state legislators calling for the ban's repeal, but it still took a few attempts before the Arizona legislature narrowly voted to repeal it a few weeks later.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The repeal passes by a 16 to 14 vote here in the state senate with Republicans helping out Democrats to cross the finish line. They've gotten to that 16, the magic number of 16 to repeal the 1864. Abortion ban. The eyes of the nation are on the statehouse in Phoenix today.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I imagine, uh, that that month was quite something for you.

So I would love for you to just tell me, you know, what were you thinking? How were you doing? I,

ATHENA SALMON: I, I was among the people that just was not anticipating that the court was going to resurrect. a total ban on abortion from 160 years ago. It was a shock after the news came out. I didn't really take a second to actually feel it.

Yeah. I was just like, nope, not going to feel that. We're just going to go straight to the legislature and do the work to repeal this. And we are going to push [02:50:00] so hard and hold their feet to the fire. Um, and so we knew we were starting with 29 votes and 14 votes and we just had to find two more in the house and then in the Senate.

And it was interesting because The pressure in the moment and having the entire country watching what would happen next in Arizona, I think really laid the groundwork to finally get this law off the books. Um, and thank goodness, thank goodness we have a governor that is unapologetically supportive of Reproductive freedom and an attorney general, Attorney General Mays, who has just done a phenomenal job to make sure that this law doesn't take effect.

And so it's fundamental that we not only lock this right into the Constitution to prevent further interference by the state legislature, but we also have to flip the legislature to a reproductive [02:51:00] freedom majority to then defend that right. instead of passing laws that are intended to go to the courts that are not reflective of the American people that are also stacked with extremists and try to erode the rights that we just secured.

So I think it all goes hand in hand and it all connects to one another.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I, I'm, I'm curious. Can you tell me what it was like to be with Governor Katie Hobbs when she signed the repeal? What was going through your head at that time?

ATHENA SALMON: I was standing there, um, behind the governor with allied organizations and with the legislators and you know, I was just like beaming.

I kind of felt like a mom in that moment. I was like, we did it. Like, I was just like getting teary eyed. I was like, Oh my gosh, like, look where, look how far we come. There's never been an Arizona that has not had the 1864 ban. 1864 was the first year that a legislature convened. [02:52:00] So I really just like soaked in the historical nature of that moment and these women that led the way.

And then a reporter from CBS News like being the most emotional person out there. She was like, Athena, can we get your remarks? And then I just started bawling. I was like, what? I'm sorry. I did not come prepared to speak today. I um,

I can't. Stop thinking about my daughters and how they will have a future. And as we continue to go into the future and protect and enshrine the constitutional right to abortion and reproductive freedom, that future generations will not have to live under the, the restrictions and the interference that we've had to experience.

So. It's just been an incredible moment, and I'm going to turn it back over to folks.[02:53:00]

It was just very nice to be recognized in that moment. I wasn't expecting it. Hence, you know, the bawling. Hence the tears.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Yeah. Well, it also makes me think that it's a moment where you let yourself feel like all that hard work that you had done to carry that bill for so long, finally, in one moment, came to fruition, right?

ATHENA SALMON: It came to fruition, and I really let my guard down.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: With the 1864 abortion ban finally repealed, Athena could shift her efforts to door knocking for the abortion ballot measure. Let's move out again and look at the ballot initiative. So your organization, Reproductive Freedom for All, that's part of a larger coalition to pass the Arizona Abortion Access Act.

So walk us through what the ballot initiative proposes and what it will do if it passes.

ATHENA SALMON: makes abortion a fundamental right in the constitution. It guarantees the right to abortion up to fetal [02:54:00] viability. And then after that, those decisions can occur with the consultation of your healthcare provider and the really good news.

And we see this at the doors where, you know, we're knocking on doors. We're talking to voters across political affiliations is nine out of 10 Arizonans support the legal right to abortion. It's actually higher than the national average nationally. It's eight out of ten Americans. So I think that the people are with us.

I think that's part of the reason why you saw one out of five Arizona voters signed the petition to refer this to the ballot so that they would have an opportunity to secure and lock this right in the Constitution.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I know that July 3rd was the deadline, right, to turn in the signatures for the ballot initiative.

Um, How many signatures can you tell me did it end up getting and what did it feel like to have those submitted and in? I mean, it's like, okay, dust off your hands. That's done.

ATHENA SALMON: Yeah. We turned in over [02:55:00] 823, 000 signatures. It was a historic number of signatures.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The most signatures ever submitted by a citizens initiative.

Yeah. To put that into context. That means one out of every five Arizona voters. Signed this petition.

ATHENA SALMON: It really is incredible the grassroots effort that went behind mobilizing for the Arizona for Abortion Access Act. So it felt really good. It felt like we made history. And it's also a relief because I just with any Citizen initiative effort, like the signature phase is just so grueling and and towards the end, he said it's July 3rd.

I mean, to put it into context for your listeners, like it's like 115, 117 degrees that time of year. And we were collecting signatures all the way up until the [02:56:00] very, very end.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I'm curious what you're hearing from organizers who are door knocking and phone banking and are there any stories that stick with you?

Um, Um, and empower you in this fight.

ATHENA SALMON: Um, there are so many stories that empower me. I love door knocking, you know, I'm out there door knocking organizers out there door knocking and we've received feedback where people were very closed minded and very black and white about what access to abortion care was about.

And then once conversations happened about like, Oh, this also includes like miscarriage management and helping people navigate. through unviable pregnancies. And like, this is health care. We talk about how it's health care. People walk away from those conversations being like, Oh, I didn't realize that that was also included in a part of abortion rights.

Yeah, I support that. I do support that. Right. And so like, there's really meaningful, important conversations that have been [02:57:00] happening on the ground that I challenge people to think. Overwhelmingly, people are supportive of the issue. So, always door knocking and talking to voters. It always gives me a lot of hope because when you actually talk to people, people are aligned with our values and people are with us on this issue.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Here's Arizona State Organizer with Reproductive Freedom for All, Jamila Rahim, who sent us this voice memo about door knocking.

JAMILA RAHIM: We faced all kinds of voters at the doors from enthusiastic reproductive freedom voters Two voters who literally wins at the mention of the word abortion. There is one thing that remained constant, however, and it was that the American people seem tired and exhausted too, of the political vitriol, the extremist political agendas put forth before them and in general political fatigue, but right now in Arizona, there is another shift in energy starting to [02:58:00] take place.

People don't just seem tired. They seem angry. Whether it was a young woman in the professional space or an elder woman who does not want to relive the past, or even a father who simply cares for his daughter's future, I had conversations on the front porch of countless neighbors recounting over and over at how angry they had become that something like this could even happen in our state.

That an 1864 abortion ban could even be thought of, let alone materialize. That they would have to vote again for the autonomy of their own bodies.

Reversing Florida’s 6-week Abortion Ban - The Defenders - Air Date 9-19-24

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: What I want to know right now is for you, let's see, heading into the election. What is your day to day look like? What does every day look like for you?

LAUREN JACOBSON: Everyone on this campaign is. Waking up every morning and going to bed every night, trying to do everything we can ahead of November. We have a really [02:59:00] phenomenal team of organizers who have already started their door knocking process.

They've already started phone banking. When we did phase one of this campaign, we set up hubs all across the state. We had over 50 hubs in the state of Florida where people could come get petitions so that they could gather signatures in their community and then drop them off to be submitted to us. And we're trying to rebuild that model right now for this canvassing phase.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I want to circle back for a moment and just get specifically to speaking to, uh, not the opposition, but the people that you have to convince, right? How do you go about that? What's the thought process in speaking to conservative and independent voters on this issue?

LAUREN JACOBSON: It's another area where I feel stories are so incredibly instrumental to the work that we're doing.

And I also think that it's uplifting how ridiculous it is to trust a politician with your health care over a doctor. That's something that is resonant with [03:00:00] a wide variety of Floridians because they don't want politicians making medical decisions for them. They don't want politicians in their doctor's office with them.

So for swing voters, it's incredibly important for us that we talk about the realities of what it means to allow politicians to control your health care, and it's important that we share the stories of aboriginal Floridians who have experienced the harms of these abortion bans.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: What are the stories that you've heard that have stayed with you, that come to your mind quickly when you're thinking about?

Talking to not only Republican and independent voters, but just, I don't know, that you just can't let go of.

LAUREN JACOBSON: I got a chance about a year ago now to meet, um, a man named Derek Cook and Derek's wife, Anya, was pregnant and she was, um, He was hemorrhaging and lost half of the blood in her body before she was offered a medically necessary abortion.

And she had come in for care two days before that happened. [03:01:00] And I was on a call with him and he talked about the loss of his child and the devastation and the trauma that that caused him. And then he talked about that moment calling him into action. And he's been volunteering with an organization called Men for Choice consistently over the past.

And Over a year since his family experienced this, I come back to it regularly. If I'm feeling tired or sad or unmotivated, and it's like, who am I to not show up every day in the same way that he shows up? And who am I not to advocate for others in the same way that he is advocating for his wife? And so that is a moment that I constantly come back to, seeing somebody translate.

A devastating [03:02:00] trauma into a desire to change his state for the better is one of the most impactful things that I've seen on this campaign.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I love that. That's really beautiful. Who am I? Right? I mean, when you first started telling that story, I was thinking, Oh, I want to hear a story about a person. A person who's pregnant, but I like this idea of someone intimately adjacent being so invested.

So therefore, why can't you? Yeah. Yeah.

LAUREN JACOBSON: Not everybody in the state of Florida should have to experience trauma at the level that the Cook family did, but everybody in this state better care about them. and what they experienced because we have a response. We are the only ones who are going to protect us from what's going on here.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: And you said that story is one that you reflect on when you, you know, feeling sad or unmotivated. So when somebody literally knocks on my door or the phone rings, [03:03:00] what am I going to hear? How do I? Get to hear that story

LAUREN JACOBSON: right now in the organizing realm, we're honestly doing just a ton of public education about what the laws are here in Florida.

People know that they don't like extreme abortion bans, but they don't know that we have one in effect. Very oftentimes people don't find out about the ban until they're trying to actively seek care. It's incredibly common story that we're hearing right now. So we are trying to let everybody know that there is it.

It's almost all care banned in the state of Florida already, but there's also the other subsect of people that they don't need to be convinced on this issue, but they do need to be convinced that they should go to the polls and vote this November. And so that is a ton of the work that our organizers are doing at this stage in the game is not trying to persuade people to vote yes on this, but trying to persuade people to get up to the polls and vote in November on this issue.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Okay, so let's talk about an [03:04:00] ideal world in which this initiative passes.

LAUREN JACOBSON: What happens? We have a fabulous network of abortion funds in the state of Florida, and I can't wait for them to go back to getting to do community activism instead of having to focus on getting folks out of the state. I would love for us to figure out more local solutions to making sure people have access to care and working on, you know, mutual aid within communities.

So I have to shout out, um, the phenomenal worship funds across the state of Florida who will be helping to lead that work. Um, and then we have to start building towards a long term vision of what change is possible in the future. I have not gotten that far yet. Um, I am, I am a singular thinker right now.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Yeah. I mean, and having been in this work for so long, Lauren, do you think Floridians have it in them to pass this initiative?

LAUREN JACOBSON: I do. I think that they know what's at stake. I think we are resourced and if we do our job correctly over the next four months that we will win because I don't think Floridians are stupid.

I think they [03:05:00] are empathetic and I think they,

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: What can they do? What can Floridians do from now until November?

LAUREN JACOBSON: Everybody should go to our website, Floridiansprotectingfreedom. com, and you can learn all about the stories of Floridians and how they've been impacted by these abortion bans. You can sign up for events in your community or online, and you should talk to everybody you know about what's going on in the state of Florida right now with regards to a lack of access to abortion and that there is a solution this November, and it's to vote yes on 4 and end Florida's abortion ban.

Want to Fight for Reproductive Health? Fight for Medicaid, Too. - rePROs Fight Back - Air Date 6-25-24

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Medicaid has existed for almost 60 years. It is the largest public health insurance program for low-income people in the United States. And the way that it works is as a federal state partnership. So, the federal program [03:06:00] provides some amount of money for the states per service, and then the state gives at least half or even less than half of the amount for every service that is covered by Medicaid.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: That's so great. I think people, there's a lot of confusion around that. Like, you have Medicaid and Medicare and, like, how are they different? And like I think people don't not necessarily know how they're different or, like, get confused, like, with the Affordable Care Act and stuff. And I think there are so many different things that sound similar but are different that it's worth kind of digging into that a bit.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Yeah, it is so much. So, Medicare is a purely federal-run program. Medicaid is a state federal partnership and that means that it's really complicated because if you know Medicaid in one state, you just know Medicaid in that one state. It's very different across the board. Here in California, the Medicaid program is very different from New Mexico, even from New York, from Texas, from Mississippi—it's just really all over the [03:07:00] place. And that's what makes sometimes Medicare great, but sometimes Medicaid really confusing and bureaucratic.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: Yeah, I'm so glad we were able to kind of clarify that a little bit 'cause it really, it does vary so much state by state. One of the things we do is a 50-state report card that looks at sexual reproductive health and rights at the state level. And one of those things we look at is like Medicaid and like if this, if states have expanded their program, like, they were able to under the Affordable Care Act and like even there you just see such huge variety of, like, what states are doing and how many people are being left behind.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Yeah, I'm really glad that you raised that because historically before the Affordable Care Act, it was not enough to just be low-income or poor. You either had to be pregnant or you had to be a minor or you have to have a disability, or you have to be old. And thanks to the Affordable Care Act, we created Medicaid expansion, [03:08:00] which allows someone who is not pregnant or who doesn't have a child or doesn't have a disability to be able to qualify to the Medicaid program. Now when the Affordable Care Act was passed, it was supposed to extend this great new category for all states, and of course, you know, which states sued the federal government and said, no, we don't want healthcare for low-income individuals, so therefore they made it optional. And at the beginning there were about more than half of states who opted to expand Medicaid. And little by little other states have realized that actually it's really good because one of the things that the Affordable Care Act said is actually the state is only gonna be able to cover10% and the federal government picks up 90% of that healthcare service. So, now I'm pleased to say that only nine states have not expanded Medicaid [03:09:00] and there's definitely conversations in the works in some of the states where Medicaid has not expanded.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: That's so amazing.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: One important thing...it is so wonderful. One of the things that I wanna highlight is that one out of five Americans are in the Medicaid program. I used to be in the Medicaid program. We believe at the National Health Law program that Medicaid saves lives. There are 77 million people who are on Medicaid and without Medicaid, people wouldn't frankly be able to live or to operate as human beings. So, it is absolutely critical to make sure that it's working and I'm happy to talk to you more about some of the complications which we know exist.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: So yeah, how does this relate to sexual and reproductive health?

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Yeah, so Medicaid is actually a critical payer of sexual and reproductive healthcare services for the most part, and I'll talk about the [03:10:00] Hyde Amendment in a little bit, but in regards, for instance, to family planning, Medicaid is the largest public payer of family planning covering 75% of all public expenditures on family planning. Medicaid is the largest single payer of pregnancy services covering almost half of US births, and that includes prenatal, labor, delivery, postpartum. Medicaid also covers outpatient prescription drugs and sterilization and breast cancer services, and some gender-affirming care and mental health and all of the things that relate to sexual and reproductive health. But the one thing that we know Medicaid does not cover is abortion. Shortly after Roe v. Wade was held by the US Supreme Court, so many of your listeners I'm sure know, a congressman by the name of Henry Hyde wanted to get rid of [03:11:00] abortion access. And essentially, he knew that the first thing to do was to get rid of Medicaid coverage of abortion services. I'll paraphrase here, he said something like, I would for sure like to get rid of all abortions, but I know that the one way in which we can do that significantly is by running a Medicaid bill. So, since 1977, what we call the Hyde amendment bans Medicaid coverage of abortions with very limited, just with very few exceptions—rape, incest, and life endangerment. And as a result, a lot of people, I would say the majority or at least half of abortion patients, don't have their abortions covered because there is this prohibition. Now there are 17 states that use their own funds to cover abortions for their Medicaid beneficiaries. So [03:12:00] not all is lost, however, this is absolutely huge.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: Yeah. So, as a DC resident, like, definitely expressed my frustration as DC has tried so many times to expand coverage for Medicaid and abortion and Congress keeps blocking it. So, very frustrating.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Yeah, it's absolutely awful. And it's not only frustrating, but it really has endangered people. Since the Hyde amendment was passed, only months later, a Latina woman by the name of Rosie Jimenez lost her life because she couldn't, she was a Medicaid recipient, she wanted to get an abortion. She was a single mother, she was a part-time worker. She was a student, and unfortunately, she had to get an unsafe abortion that ended her life. So, it is no exaggeration to say that the Hyde Amendment is more than [03:13:00] frustrating.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: Yeah.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: It's cruel. It is a danger to people's lives, and it has been for many years.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: Yeah, it just makes me think of like all of the people who could be able to access care, who are being blocked from it, who are having to go to abortion funds, which I mean thankfully are there, but like abortion funds shouldn't have to cover them because they should have coverage and then abortion funds would be able to fund other people who were needing access. Like, it's just like trying to fill in these stop gaps to ensure that people can get the basic healthcare they need.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Absolutely. Thank goodness for abortion funds. They do really the work that's really needed, but they shouldn't have to be. You're absolutely right. I mean, just do the math. If half of US births are covered by Medicaid, then if the Hyde amendment didn't exist, it would cover at the very least half of US abortions and, and the other side knows that really [03:14:00] well. So yeah, it's just really unfortunate, especially I think it's cruel to someone who's poor, someone who has children. I mean, you should get an abortion regardless of the circumstances, but it's particularly dangerous to prohibit the coverage of a healthcare service that used to be covered just like anything else once Roe v. Wade was held. And yeah, just to have this barrier is just really awful and it's just really cruel. And this has been happening for almost, I don't know, 50 years and the situation was even bad before the Dobbs decision. So yeah, there was definitely a lot of work to do there. I think given that so many of your listeners like myself, our advocates, as we're thinking about how to rebuild from having you know, the no more of the constitutional right to have abortion services, [03:15:00] that as we think about our long-term plan, we have to have coverage in the equation. We have to think about those who are at the margins and that includes low-income people in the Medicaid population.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Hysteria, Vox, The Humanist Report, Mama Doctor Jones, Feminist Buzzkills, Fast Politics, Straight White American Jesus, Reveal, Grave Injustice, Velshi, Marc Lamont Hill, Amicus, The Defenders, and rePROs Fight Back. Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for [03:16:00] 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 all those who support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny 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.

So, coming to from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from [03:17:00] BestOfTheLeft.com.

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#1659 Conflagration Through Escalation: Israel expands the war to Lebanon to defend their ongoing genocide in Gaza (Transcript)

Posted by · October 01, 2024 10:52 AM

Air Date 10/1/2024

[00:00:00]

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. There is still no end in sight to Israel's real war on its neighbors and the US continues its toothless efforts to deescalate, while maintaining seemingly unconditional support in spite of standing laws that should prevent our sale of weapons to any country committing war crimes, which Israel certainly is. Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes The Muckrake Political Podcast, Democracy Now!, The Real News Network, and The Book Cafe Podcast.

Then, in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in four sections:

Section A: State terrorism;

Section B: Global complicity;

Section C: Protests and indoctrination; and

Section D: Resistance.

Israel Terrorizes Hezbollah With Exploding Pagers - The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 9-20-24

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: [00:01:00] People, we have a whole lot to talk about today, but we have to start with a really really bizarre story that I think has huge implications. Over the past few days Israel has carried out—I don't even know what else to call it—a strange, innovative, tragic attack in Lebanon against Hezbollah, blowing up pagers and walkie talkies.

So far, it looks like the death toll has climbed up over 30 and we're talking about over 2000 people being injured by this. The details are starting to come out a little bit here and there, how this might've happened, what exactly took place. Israel has officially called this "a new era of war". And also it seems that they're now turning their eye towards Lebanon in their operations as peace remains unfortunately and tragically far off or nonexistent.

Nick, I have a lot of thoughts about this. I've been [00:02:00] walking around thinking about it for a few days now. What were your initial reactions when you heard about this?

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: I mean, it sounds like a Mission Impossible thing where somehow a number is dialed... and at some point, I thought, like, they could have put explosives in there and then the next page is when it blows up, but it's supposedly, no, it was coordinated to only a specific number received, so they all go off at the same time. And I suppose the real question now is, why now? That was really what's on my mind most, is why are they widening what's going on in Israel to another front basically. And so, you know, we have to now decipher or maybe we get more information eventually about the timing. Was it simply a use it or lose it situation, where somebody was about to tell them what was happening and they were going to find out and obviously Israel wanted to continue this mission for whatever reason, and then, you know, pull the trigger on this thing?

So, that is what I find most interesting, exactly what's going on and [00:03:00] why they have to do it now in the midst of a war they're in with Gaza, on the other front.

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Well, it appears—and there have been leaks that have been coming out and of course, the Biden administration has handled a lot of this by leaking to the press its frustrations, what it's trying to do, what it can achieve—it does appear as if Israel felt like this plot wasn't going to come to fruition or it would be discovered and they needed to do it.

On one hand, I think it is evident of a new type of attack that I want to talk about in just a moment because I'm truly horrified by this and its implications and larger thoughts that we need to have. But I think logistically, you know, Israel has been given the most state of the art weaponry and innovations that you could imagine. The United States has kept them afloat and awash with weapons. Meanwhile, America just continually is just, like, I don't even know what to do here. And now we're hearing leaks that they're [00:04:00] trying to keep them from, you know, putting troops on the ground in order to follow this thing out.

But I think the other thing with this—and, Nick, we're talking about over 2000 people being injured, children being killed, innocent bystanders being injured and killed—like, this is again, I think, another moment where Israel has all this innovation, it has all this support, it has all these abilities, and it's just haphazard, right? It really doesn't matter. Like, we can hear about "terrorists". That is a very, very handy rhetorical designation. Like, if you got killed by this thing or you got wounded by this thing, then that means you're a terrorist.

But I think it is the, the sloppiness and the brutality that the Netanyahu regime represents. I think it shows that they have no interest in peace whatsoever. I think it's only going to continue and any idea that this is going to be taken care of in November, much less just in a timely manner, I think we can wave [00:05:00] goodbye to that and just, uh, you know, settle up to the reality that Netanyahu absolutely depends on this thing growing and continuing. And that's where we are.

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Oh, I agree wholeheartedly as far as the resolution of conflicts going on there. None of this is going to get settled by probably the middle of next year, the way this is going. And there are plenty of reports that Netanyahu continues to torpedo any kind of ceasefire in Gaza. And so, if that's the case and they're trying to just continue keeping chaos going so he can stay in power, this is how you would do it.

But, Hezbollah is going to respond and Israel is going to respond. So, you kind of have to wonder. 'Cause again, there were two choices. It's not a use it or lose it situation. You could have decided, You know what?, we're not going to send out that code anyway, even if they do find out. In fact, they could have made it into some sort of a diplomatic thing where they said, Okay, you found that we didn't do it. We showed restraint. [00:06:00] Something! You know? They could have tried to make a positive out of that.

But, here we are now where... yeah, they're going to mount some sort of attack. It's going to widen the war. And then when mistakes are made, which are inevitable in a war situation...

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Already happening. Yes.

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Yeah. It widens, it gets worse and worse. And so, it's still unfathomable that this guy can still be in power. 'Cause you have to imagine that Netanyahu had final say on whether they detonated these things. And I don't believe that they had done this like a year ago. This is not a thing where, I mean, I don't know. To me, it seems like it would have been more recent when they would have gotten...

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: It appears that this was put into motion a few months ago.

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Right. So, it's like in the middle of what they're doing already, with the whole thing going on in Gaza, they're actively planning this stuff, too. It just, it doesn't make a lot of sense if any kind of resolution is the goal here.

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Oh, it's not. And I think one of the things that we have to do is we have to change the way that we view Netanyahu. And I've been thinking about him a [00:07:00] lot through the lens of someone like a Kim Jong Un, like a dictator who only relies on fear and paranoia. Right? Like, the only reason that North Korea is able to operate the way it is, is because it has the "threat" of the West. Right? 'There are spies everywhere, they're going to attack you, they will annihilate you', and that is the entire basis of power, which is the entire basis of Netanyahu's power.

What concerns me, Nick, I've been thinking a lot about the horror—I mean, this is state terrorism. Let's make this clear. That's what this is. Like, literally, this was done not just to kill and assassinate members of Hezbollah, but the way that it was done was intended to sow fear. We're hearing reports now out of Lebanon, people are turning off the refrigerators, they're turning off their baby monitors, they're turning off every appliance that they own for fear that somewhere or another there's a bomb that is hidden in this that could kill them or their family. That is a lot different [00:08:00] from state power in the past, such as drone attacks and drone strikes.

I was thinking a lot about Barack Obama and the regime of drone strikes. Like, you would be going to a wedding and if there was a suspect there, a drone strike could wipe out your entire extended family. But that actually, Nick, that involved intelligence. At least there was somebody in a room looking at a report that said these people will be here. That's not what this is. It's literally a device that they're not tracking. They don't know who has it. They don't know what the vicinity is. We've now seen like footage of people being in like marketplaces and places, and it just goes off and it can kill anybody.

On top of that, this is also a weaponization of the global industrial chain. Like, the reason this happened is because Israel made a deal. These pagers, I don't know about the walkie talkies, but the pagers came out of a company in Taiwan called Gold Apollo. Israel went over [00:09:00] there, worked with Taiwan and talked them into putting weapons grade explosives in their products. How are we supposed to feel about this?

Knowing that the global supply chain can be taken over by states. and have weapons put in them. And by the way, it's not like this happened and no one's ever going to do it again. This, you know, it's like you develop a weapon, somebody's going to develop their own version of it, and somebody's going to use it. And now, like, to look at that entire sort of new sort of frontier for a person who worries about state power, particularly with growing authoritarianism, it has me really, really concerned.

Hell Is Breaking Loose in Lebanon Israel Rejects Ceasefire Proposal as U.N. Chief Calls for Peace Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-26-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: We go now to Beirut, where we’re joined by Lara Bitar, editor-in-chief of The Public Source, a Beirut-based independent media organization.

Lara, if you can talk about what’s happening on the ground in [00:10:00] Beirut? And here we are in New York right next to the United Nations. You have this international call for a ceasefire, but apparently the Netanyahu government of Israel is saying no, the Israeli general in charge of the IDF forces rallying troops, saying he’s preparing them for a ground invasion of Lebanon.

LARA BITAR: Good morning.

Here in Beirut, nobody really has any hope in these processes in the United Nations, in the words of the Biden administration or in the words also of the Netanyahu government.

I wanted to share with you some things that were relayed to me by one of our journalists who is now working in the south. He is going around to different schools that are hosting people who have been [00:11:00] displaced from their homes but remain in southern Lebanon. So, first, he relayed to me that people are very, very tired. They’re unable to sleep for longer than a few minutes at a time because of the relentless bombardment by Israel. And he said that the shelters are full with elderly people, who have lived through so many massacres and witnessed so much horror inflicted by the Israeli settler colony. And he shared the story of one woman in particular. He said that she was in her eighties. She was wearing her house key as a pendant. And she told him that this is nothing in comparison to what they have lived through over the past few decades. And she mentioned the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut, the first Qana massacre in 1996, the second Qana massacre in 2006, and so on and so forth.

And the one [00:12:00] thing that I want to relay here is that for a lot of these people who have been displaced from their homes, whose homes have been destroyed, their attachment to their land only grows stronger. And this is a prevailing sentiment among those who have been displaced. And this is not uncommon for Lebanon.

So, if you will just allow me 30 seconds or so, I would like to read a brief passage that I came across yesterday, written by Mahdi Amel, who was a Marxist intellectual. And he wrote this a few months after the 1982 invasion of Beirut. And he writes, “They said that the war in Lebanon would be swift and that in a few days those who have not knelt and who understand only the language of force would kneel. They declared that there would be no salaam, but shalom, and that Israel is the Rome of our modern times. To the kings [00:13:00] of Israel, to the scum of our nation and our foul Arab regimes, to the petty fascists and to their imperialist masters, we say: It pleases us to spit in your faces. We will fight you even with our nails. Our fists are the compass of history. And the bullet of our freedom will pierce your hearts. To them, we say, brick by brick, we build a world on your graves. You are the dustbin of history, and Beirut is the city of the free. We have vowed that we will resist you.”

And this is not to say that everyone in Lebanon shares this sentiment, and definitely not the over 200,000, up to half a million people who have been displaced from their homes over the past few weeks, because there is a lot of suffering. There is a lot of hardship right now. People are struggling to find housing, shelter, food, diapers, milk. [00:14:00] Hospitals are at capacity. People are really exhausted and suffering across the board. But for the most part, this pain can be pinpointed — the source of this pain can be pinpointed to the presence of the Israeli settler state in our region that continues to wreak havoc in Palestine, in Lebanon and across most of the world.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Lara Bitar, you talked about this quotation that you read from 1982, when Israel invaded in 1982, and you’ve said that you don’t have much faith in a ceasefire. So, if you could provide some context to a possible imminent invasion, Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Talk about what happened in not just 1982, but also in 1978 and 2006.

LARA BITAR: [00:15:00] I think we have to take very, very seriously every genocidal intent that is now being uttered by different government and military officials in Israel. Lebanon has a long history of invasions and occupation and terror by the Israeli state. And we can go even further back, to ’47, ’48. Lebanon [sic] seized over a dozen Lebanese towns and villages in ’78. There was also an invasion in ’82. The ’82 invasion lasted until the liberation in May 2000. There was also an attempted ground operation in 2006. And in terms of the 2006 attempted ground invasion into Lebanon, [00:16:00] soldiers who returned home recounted how traumatizing it was for them, how they felt that they were fighting with ghosts. They could not see the fighters on the other side.

So, I think it’s important to note that coming into Lebanon is deeply traumatizing and frightening experience for the Israeli soldiers, who are accustomed to throwing bombs from the safety of the airspace. But on-the-ground battle, on-the-ground confrontation with real fighters who are fighting for their land, for their country, for their people, they don’t stand much of a chance.

And to the point of pushing for a ceasefire or for a truce or for the Biden administration having any kind of redline, we saw exactly what happened in Gaza over the past 11 months. The Biden [00:17:00] administration was repeatedly saying that Rafah was a redline, that a ground invasion into Gaza was a redline. But the Israeli state, there were absolutely no repercussions, no ramifications for any of the actions that the Israeli state was doing. And this is what compelled it to continue to escalate, to continue to escalate its massacres, its terror of the Palestinian people in Gaza, who to this day continue to endure daily massacres that are not being reported on as much as they were at the beginning of the war.

U.S. Gov't Agencies Found Israel Was Blocking Gaza Aid. Blinken Ignored Them to Keep Weapons Flowing - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-26-24

NERMEEN SHAIKH: ProPublica has revealed USAID and the State Department’s Refugees Bureau both concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza, but U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top Biden officials rejected the findings of the agencies even though they’re considered the two foremost U.S. authorities on [00:18:00] humanitarian assistance. Blinken’s decision allowed the U.S. to keep sending arms to Israel. Under U.S. law, the government is required to cut off weapons shipments to countries preventing the delivery of U.S.-backed aid. Days after receiving the reports, Blinken told Congress, quote, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

On Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, called for Blinken’s resignation, accusing him of lying to Congress. [Blinken] was asked about the ProPublica report Wednesday on CBS. This was his response.

SOS ANTONY BLINKEN: So, this is actually pretty, pretty typical. We had a report to put out on the humanitarian situation in Gaza and what Israel was doing to try to make sure that people got the assistance they needed. And I had different assessments from different parts of the State Department, from other agencies that were involved, like [00:19:00] USAID. My job is to sort through them, which I did, draw some conclusions from that. And we put our report, and we found that Israel needed to do a better job on the humanitarian assistance. We’ve seen improvements since then. It’s still not sufficient.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Of course, that was U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

We’re joined now by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Brett Murphy, a reporter at ProPublica, where his new piece is headlined “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.”

Can you respond to Blinken’s response to your report, Brett?

BRETT MURPHY: Yeah. So, he said, basically, it was his decision to make. He was getting a lot of information, and he ultimately decided that it was not the assessment of the State Department that the Israelis were deliberately blocking aid.

What he didn’t mention and what’s really important to note here is that the two agencies that had told him that they were in fact deliberately blocking aid, one being USAID, are the [00:20:00] foremost experts in this, as you said. They are the ones responsible for delivering humanitarian assistance into Gaza, into war zones all over the world. In addition to that, his own refugees bureau had made a similar conclusion called that a law called the Foreign Assistance Act should have been triggered because the Israelis were restricting aid.

The other assessments he was receiving were nowhere near as detailed as what he received from USAID. They sent a 17-page memo with detailed evidence describing exactly what they knew to be the truth on the ground, and he ultimately rejected those findings in what he told Congress.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if you could elaborate, Brett, also on what U.S. obligations are under the Foreign Assistance Act?

BRETT MURPHY: Sure, yeah. So, it’s this law that has not been used very much systematically, but it basically says a foreign partner or ally that is receiving military assistance from the U.S. [00:21:00] cannot at the same time be blocking U.S.-backed humanitarian assistance into a war zone. If it is the conclusion of the U.S. government that that is happening, the U.S. government is then required to cut off the military assistance. That’s what the law says.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Is there any other context in which this has occurred, that the U.S. has denied that a country is preventing U.S. aid from getting in in a conflict zone?

BRETT MURPHY: The last time it came up was in Turkey and Armenia. That was kind of the original context of the law itself. But, like I was saying, we have never truly been applying this in a systematic way. So, this has really been an obscure provision in the Foreign Assistance Act, but this year lawmakers, activist groups have been calling for the Biden administration to be using this exact provision.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: We interviewed two people: Stacy Gilbert, the former senior adviser in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration — she resigned over this after 20 years in service — and Alex [00:22:00] Smith, a former contractor for USAID, who was forced to resign over the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza. Talk about the significance of what they did, and Antony Blinken understanding full well what they understood and why they left.

BRETT MURPHY: Stacy Gilbert worked on the report that Secretary Blinken ultimately delivered to Congress. She was working on the drafts of that report. She was in the refugees bureau. She had a very clear understanding of what was going on. And what she ultimately said, when she resigned, when she saw the final version of what he had told Congress, she said, “We know this not to be true. We, the experts inside of the government, know that the truth on the ground is that the Israelis have been blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza.” This is what she said, and this is what she resigned over. And she said in her resignation letter that this report, what he told Congress, “is going to haunt us.”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And can you explain: How detailed was [00:23:00] that USAID memo that Blinken saw?

BRETT MURPHY: It was extremely detailed. It’s 17 pages of evidence that they were bringing to bear. The example that stuck out to me the most was on food, food shipments that were being held up just 30 miles outside of Gaza. There was enough flour, USAID said, to feed 1.5 million Palestinians for at least five months. But at the time — this was in the February to March timeframe — Israelis were not allowing flour into Gaza, because they said it was going to the U.N.’s branch there that had been accused of having ties to Hamas, so they were not allowing the flour in.

And this is what — this is the kind of thing that was really bothering USAID and frustrating their efforts. They couldn’t get food in. They couldn’t get medicine in, other supplies. A lot of their trucks, from, like, the Red Crescent, other humanitarian groups, were being turned around because of items in there the Israelis were not allowing in. Aid workers had been killed. [00:24:00] Their convoys had been targeted. These were all the types of examples that USAID was telling Secretary Blinken.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And basically, there’s no recourse now, right, because it’s done? Or is there anything that the U.S., the Biden administration could now do differently?

BRETT MURPHY: Yeah, the law is not — it was not just a one-time shot. And this is what the U.S. government said, too, in response. They said, “We’re currently — we’re always assessing the situation.” They said that they believed that the situation was improving since after they applied leverage with this. The folks I talked to, both inside the government and in the humanitarian world, said that’s not true at all. The situation is as bad as it’s ever been, including since the Rafah incursion. But this law does not only have — you know, whenever Blinken addresses Congress to it; it can be applied at any point.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: That they could cut off, that the U.S. government could cut off aid to — military arms to Israel.

BRETT MURPHY: Absolutely. If it assesses that the Israelis are deliberately blocking [00:25:00] humanitarian assistance at any point, they can apply this law. That’s right.

'Whitewashing genocide' How Democrats & the media kept Gaza out of the DNC - The Real News Network - Air Date 8-31-24

MAX ALVAREZ - EDITOR, TRN: Well, speaking about shifting rhetoric, I want to just quickly follow up. I got some thoughts on what you guys just said, but I wanted to follow up really quickly on the role that the media was playing in laundering this rhetorical change that we saw manifest on the DNC main stage, where some of the loudest applauses I heard throughout the week came when people like Bernie Sanders mentioned the word "ceasefire," and suddenly the stadium's clapping. And I know you guys were losing your collective minds. I saw Adam losing it on Twitter in real time, as mainstream and corporate media journalists were doing the work of laundering this rhetorical shift. Could you just say a little bit about that, about the role that certain actors and institutions in the media are playing to make that rhetorical shift where Kamala Harris [00:26:00] is calling or mentioning a ceasefire, but it's now meaning something different, and the media is there to massage that difference out of perception.

ADAM JOHNSON: Yeah, this is the most literal minded -- this is trained clapping seals. I don't if you've been to the Shedd Aquarium, but they have a seal that does the clapping This is lower than that, I mean this is when Harris, again, she's very clear she's not going to engage in arms embargo, not going to use real leverage, and I understand why this is confusing to passive media consumers who can't really keep up. I get it.

But those in the know, those who track these things, know better. And they know that what Harris talks about the word "ceasefire", she means exactly what Biden means, which is appeal to these nebulous talks that are like the peace process. They're designed to provide cover for Israel. They're not in good faith.

Israel is very clear, to their credit, to Netanyahu's credit. Every single day he's asked he goes down and says, "We do not support a lasting ceasefire. We are not going to end this war until we defeat Hamas." Quote, unquote, "Total victory." He's very clear about that.

But that goes through the liberal media laundry machine and comes out as Israel supports a ceasefire. Hamas is the one holding it back. But [00:27:00] Israel is very clear. They support a temporary pause for the purposes of hostage exchanges.

So when Harris talks about how we need a ceasefire, that's what she's talking about, a genocide cigarette break. And she's been very clear about this. Biden's been very clear about this.

On his May 31st speech, which is one of the most cynical things I've ever seen, Biden used the term in their twice, three times. And then in follow up questions, their dead-eyed zombie press -- Matt Miller, these guys, John Kirby -- they say, well, wait a second, do you support a lasting ceasefire that keeps Hamas in power? Because that's implied in the idea of ending the war, because obviously, insurgent militias, maybe in some normative sense you may not like them, but typically, you don't just defeat them by magic, right? And they're not even remotely close to defeating Hamas to the extent they could, it would basically be tantamount to genocide, which is why they're carrying out the plan they're carrying out. And they say, Oh, no, no, we're not going to support an end of the war until Hamas is defeated.

Well, okay, so what's the mechanism here? So clearly it's bullshit. Again, when people said ceasefire, they were referencing things like 2009, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, when a ceasefire meant Israel ends its current military campaign. It doesn't mean [00:28:00] kumbaya, doesn't mean we solve the problem, but it means we stop killing dozens of people and scores of children per week. That's what it meant. Everybody knew it.

But then they switched the definition to this ambiguous open ended peace talks. So when Bernie Sanders calls for a ceasefire and he gets all these write ups, it's like, well, he's just appealing to the same bogus ceasefire talks, unless he's explicit, when the demand shifted months ago from this vague sort of normative appeal of a ceasefire -- which again could mean anything from two days to two years to two decades, right? -- to an arms embargo. Because everybody knows that's the only mechanism with which Israel will agree to anything. And we know that because that's what they keep telling us.

And so, when the trained seals at the Shedd Aquarium started going, ah, ah, ah, ah, when she said the word ceasefire, I was like, oh, here we go. And then people started doing all the bullshit, all the kind of progressive and foreign policy adjacent sheepdogging. They started doing all this kind of tea leaf reading like, oh, oh, her empathy speak was slightly better. And she said this words. And then you look it up and it's actually the exact language Biden used four months ago.

And by the way, the exact language the Trump [00:29:00] administration had been using: Palestine needs dignity and freedom and these meaningless buzzwords.

This doesn't mean anything. People don't need better tone. They don't need better nonprofit speak. They need her to change her policy and to support an arms embargo. And it's a very clear ask. It's an ask with a material consequence. It's actually an ask that'll make A-PAC have a five-alarm meltdown.

And that's how this bullshit rhetoric doesn't matter. 'Cause they're not saying anything. They don't care. And in fact, they praised her speech, which reinforced every basic premise of this genocide. Israel has a right to defend. It's always this sort of liberal code for "we're going to keep sending arms and let them do as they wish in Gaza."

And so, I know that was immensely frustrating because they're just rebranding the same policies with a different face. It's just the same thing Biden did. And then whenever she's asked to clarify, she's very clear that she has the exact same position as Biden. I'm not sure how much clearer she can make it because she keeps saying it.

Palestine In Israeli School Books w Author Nurit Peled-Elhanan - Book Cafe Podcast - Air Date 2-22-24

NURIT PELED-ELHANAN: Well, this idea was even before the Holocaust with the beginning of Zionism. The idea of Zionism at the [00:30:00] beginning was to create what they called a Jew with muscles. Because the diaspora Jew -- Jews who lived everywhere -- was considered, in anti Semitic discourse but also in Zionist discourse, as a weak, spiritual, effeminated man. They never talk about women. Women are just there to produce more men, you know?

And, the idea was to create a new Jew that would be the opposite of this Jew.

So when they came to Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, and even the end of the 19th century, they wanted to indigenize themselves. They wanted to look like Arabs. To be suntanned, muscly, to master Arab horses, to know how to use guns, and to work the [00:31:00] land, to be farmers. Because Jews in Eastern Europe were not allowed to have land. So they were all merchants and bankers and whatever.

That's why, whenever you go to Poland, they sell you these little puppets of a man who holds a coin in one hand and the Torah scroll in another. And when you ask the lady who is sitting there in the street, what is this puppet? She said this is a Jew. I don't think she knows what a Jew is, but this is the image. And that's because they could not work the land and so on and so forth.

So the idea was to heal the illnesses of diaspora by becoming farmers and warriors. So this was the counter to the diaspora Jew.

What happened was, as you know, they became too muscly and much less spiritual. And they lost it. They lost [00:32:00] this Jewish quality of being spiritual. And they became thugs, as you know today.

But it was even before the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, David Ben Gurion, who was the first prime minister later, said you can call me anti-Semitic, but I'm ashamed of the Jews in Europe because they don't fight back. And I grew up to despise these people who didn't fight back. They told us they went like sheep to the slaughter.

Later on, so we were educated about Holocaust heroism whenever there was some uprising, which was nothing but a choice to die with a gun in your hand, because they could never win. This was commemorated in the culture of Israel in school books, everywhere. Even today you can find statues of these people who don't resemble the people at all, because they were small and weak and pale, but the statues are like Michelangelo's [00:33:00] David.

And Ben Gurion set the tone to despise them, to really despise them. And then when the survivor came, he despised them even more because he said, how come you could survive? There's something tricky in here. Okay?

So the attitude towards the victims and the survivors were of complete contempt.

Now, later on, they decided that there's something wrong with that. And the school books started to say that even living day-to-day life in the conditions of Nazi Germany was heroic. So today we celebrate, celebrate. Every year we commemorate Holocaust and Heroism Day.

But still the idea that you have to be heroic when you are being exterminated. Okay. And the way these people are represented in school books to this [00:34:00] day is very demeaning. We know nothing about them. We know only that they were annihilated, exterminated, but we know nothing about their life before. 2,000 years of life, of rich life, of contributive life, of industrious life. We don't know nothing about it. Just as we don't know anything about Palestine in all those 2,000 years. Nothing.

I studied especially the photographs. Because the school books present what a Holocaust historian by the name of Hannah Blanca said, what they teach the children is the pornography of evil. They show you naked bodies on a cart. They show you naked bodies of tortured children. They show horrendous, gruesome, terrible photographs. And also they tell every single detail of German sadism. So you [00:35:00] don't really learn about the history. You learn to fear. You are being traumatized. The children are being traumatized. Because it's enough to see one photograph in your life of Jewish victims or victims of Nazis, whether they're Jewish or not. To change your life.

Susan Sontang, the famous photographer, she wrote this very famous book looking at the pain of others. And she tells there that when she was 12, she walked on the beach and she saw someone selling old photographs. And there she found a photograph of these emaciated bodies on a cart from Bergen Belsen. And she said, my life has changed that very moment. I can speak of before and after.

So can you imagine what happened to Israeli children when they're exposed to these photographs from the age of three, [00:36:00] every single year, every single year.

Now what it creates is heterophobia. They are afraid of anybody. Anybody. Now at the age of 16, 17, they go to the death camps, wrapped in Israeli flags, accompanied by armed Israeli soldiers, and they come back nationalist and imbued with the urge to revenge. But their revenge is not towards the German or their collaborators. No, their revenge is directed towards the potential exterminators, who are the Palestinians and the Arabs in general.

Okay. So it's a very sophisticated education that really educates the children to take revenge at the wrong people.

Now there is an organization in Israel called Breaking the Silence, in [00:37:00] which soldiers confess about the terrible things they did during their army service, until something changed in them. And all of them say, I was educated to believe that whatever I do to Palestinians will save us from another Holocaust. And it wasn't until I found myself aiming my rifle at a little girl that I realized that I was the evil one here. Okay.

So it's so deep and thorough and abusive, I would say, really. Abusive, because as this professor Yablonka says, you only teach the children to be victims. And since they are victims, they must be super powerful and must mistrust everybody, especially the neighbors.

How U.S. College Administrators Are Dreaming Up Ways to Squash Gaza Protests - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-5-24

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring into this conversation another professor, Natasha Lennard, columnist at The Intercept, associate director of the Creative Publishing and Critical [00:38:00] Journalism Program at The New School, not far from Columbia University. Her most recent piece, “College Administrators Spent Summer Break Dreaming Up Ways to Squash Gaza Protests.” Can you put Professor Thrasher and Professor Franke’s experience in a broader context of the universities from here in New York, NYU, to other universities around the country?

NATASHA LENNARD: Absolutely. And thank you. It’s lovely to be back. And I firstly want to say thank you to Professor Franke and Professor Thrasher for being among the professors who refuse to be silenced in this moment of what is widely being called a “new McCarthyism.” And I think that’s an accurate description.

Their cases are not unusual, and it is indeed sad, and it is indeed disappointing, indeed no less than ghoulish. We are having, both de facto and through policy, [00:39:00] both in terms of new regulations and student conduct guides coming through for this semester, as well as punitive actions against students and professors, a real reification of the claim that Israel critical speech and pro-Palestinian speech should count under violations of Title VI nondiscrimination law and regulations and policy in universities. What that does is align university policy with the right-wing agenda of Congress and right-wing lawmakers who follow in the footsteps of a right-wing Israeli-U.S. consensus.

And I think if a university is not a place where that can be critically challenged, especially at a time of genocide, when there are no universities left standing in Gaza — which we cannot forget — and the [00:40:00] concerns of our academy is the speech of professors speaking out for academic freedom and speaking out for the liberation of an occupied people, we’re in very dark times indeed.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Natasha Lennard, you write in your piece in The Intercept that, quote, “Tucked into a document purportedly offering clarification on school policy, the NYU” — New York University — “guidelines introduce an unprecedented expansion of protected classes to include 'Zionists' and ’Zionism’”?

NATASHA LENNARD: Yes, this is a very exemplary, in the worst of ways, document that was just released by the administration at NYU. It is a new updated guide of student conduct about nondiscrimination and harassment. It goes further than any document I have seen in asserting that Zionism, [00:41:00] when used critically, should or at least readily can be understood as — and I quote the document — a “code word.” It doesn’t say that occasionally by antisemites that Zionism is used as a code word. It takes that as a given.

So, that is — to clarify, that is a student conduct guide, very poorly written, very open to misuse, that is asserting that the political ideology founded in the 19th century of the ethnostate of Israel being a Zionist project, that that should be considered part of the protected class of Jewish identity, religion and ethnic and shared ancestry. That is what we’re seeing in attempts of statehouses nationwide to attach Zionism, the [00:42:00] political ideology, to the protected class of Jewish identity. It’s extremely dangerous. It performs de facto apologia for Israel. And to have that put into writing by a university so clearly is just open for further abuses and an escalation of the sort of repression we’ve already seen.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Franke?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, I teach a class on citizenship and nationality in Israel and Palestine. And we begin with a critical look at the concept of Zionism. Of course, it was advanced as a place, as an idea, about the safety of the Jewish people being located in Mandate Palestine, but there were plenty of Jewish people at the time who said, “This is actually a horrible idea from the perspective of the safety of Jewish people, because what it says is the Jews all belong in Israel and nowhere else, not in Europe, not in the United States, nowhere else. And so this will lead to more violence, more expulsions, more [00:43:00] antisemitic pogroms, if we lean in too much to the idea that Jews belong primarily and especially in Israel.” And those were critiques coming from Jews, again, themselves.

So, if we are not allowed to talk about that anymore in universities, what we’ve done is surrendered the very idea of the university itself. And that is so much what troubled us about Minouche Shafik, our president — former president of Columbia’s testimony in Congress, and some of those other presidents who came, who were called before Congress, is they not only did not put up a robust defense of the idea of a university where we teach students how to be critical thinkers in such a critical time, but they actually joined in to the criticism of the university. My president did not stand up for any one of us, nor did Professor Thrasher’s at Northwestern.

And this is part of what concerns me, is that our [00:44:00] universities are places now where we could not have a protest and say things that are now being said in Tel Aviv by Israelis. The protests that are happening there this week, if they took place on Columbia’s campus, our students would be expelled or charged with very serious disciplinary violations. This is where we’ve come. It’s impossible to talk about the kinds of things that, Amy, in your setup, of the just horrible things that are happening right this week in Jenin, in Gaza — we can’t talk about that at Columbia. That’s part of what concerns me is, is that we don’t know our history, and these new policies are keeping us from learning it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Natasha Lennard, we just have about 30 seconds, but you’ve noted that universities are not only facing attacks from Congress, they’re also being subjected to lawsuits all around the country. Could you talk about that briefly?

NATASHA LENNARD: Yes, we’ve seen a series of litigation, including at NYU, [00:45:00] Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, brought by often unnamed students and faculty, often very frivolous suits that universities are forced to answer to nonetheless, and then, through settlements and often nonpublic agreements, are then forced to change policy, often leading to the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

Arrest Netanyahu: NYC activists call for mass march during Netanyahu's UN address - The Real News Network - Air Date 9-25-24

JU-HYUN PARK - ENGAGEMENT EDITOR, TRN: Some people may be wondering by this point, if the things we do from within the U. S. are truly having an impact, what's it going to take for the movement in solidarity with Palestine to achieve its political objectives?

LAYAN FULEIHAN: Thanks for that. I mean, I think the number one thing that we need to be doing as organizers, as the movement, the people that make up the movement for Palestine in the United States, is to continue growing the movement. And that means a lot of different things.

One, it means showing people the fact that [00:46:00] growing the movement and the movement itself is actually important. It can feel strange because people came out on the streets almost now a year ago saying, 'no genocide on Palestine, we want to end the genocide on Palestine', and spoke directly to the United States government, of which we are constituents, to say please stop everything that you are doing to make possible this genocide.

As the months went on many people grew conscious of the fact that the United States is actually the perpetrator of genocide. The way the relationship between Israel and the United States is shaped and it's formed means that Israel cannot do any of the things that it is doing without the support, whether it is public open support or not, of the United States.

And we saw multiple moments in which the U. S. 's role was actually exposed in more direct ways. Whether it was actual U. S. military personnel on the ground in [00:47:00] Gaza, helping the Israeli occupation forces carry out massacres, or whether it was U. S. intelligence agencies providing more information for the Israeli occupation than the Israeli intelligence services themselves.

So the question of complicity has moved to, now to be transformed into a greater understanding that it's not about complicity at this point. The United States is responsible for the genocide. That said, it isn't the movement in the United States that is fighting on the front lines in Gaza. It is the Palestinian resistance, the Palestinian people, who are the ones fighting directly against the military machine of imperialism.

And we've seen that the United States is completely unwilling to listen to the demands of its own constituents, of its own population and to shape its foreign policy along the lines of the demands of its population. And so what we've watched over the past year is that the battle [00:48:00] has been played out and has prolonged, primarily because the Palestinian people have not yet been defeated.

There have been huge massacres. The pain of the losses and ththemmensity of the losses is impossible to describe at all in words. And the everyday torture that the Palestinian people are going through in Gaza is just impossible for anyone to really understand. What we're witnessing is so inhumane and so brutal that it is just beyond human comprehension.

That said, the Palestinian liberation struggle has not been defeated. And we can see the results of that. I think what you mentioned about Lebanon is extremely important. And I want to say a few words on this because what we've now seen is that Netanyahu and his administration, frustrated by the fact that they can't win in Gaza, have now moved to open a new front of the war. They've been [00:49:00] threatening this for the past year, but with the massacres that they committed and the terrorist attack that they committed yesterday and their declarations of war with that act and with their actions today, as well, claiming that they're going to triple their bombardments of Lebanon every day, that now Lebanon is the focus of the war. They've added a new objective to the war, which is returning the Israelis back to the north, which they had been evacuated from to avoid casualties from the conflict across the border. So, we've seen now that Netanyahu has no qualms about expanding the war of extermination to Lebanon because he's unable to reach a conclusion that works for him in Gaza.

Now, I'm giving all of this context because It's important for us to understand the shape of the genocide and the war of extermination that the United States is carrying out alongside its Israeli partner. And we have [00:50:00] to understand also that our role is extremely important. The United States cannot publicly say right now that they're willing to go ahead and open another front of the war of extermination with Lebanon.

If you listen to what the White House is saying, They are saying diplomacy, de-escalation, et cetera. They've been saying now for months, and they've been trying to trick the population into thinking that they are engineering a ceasefire, when in fact, we know that they are providing cover for Netanyahu to create obstacles to the negotiation process.

But again, we're not believing the words of the White House, but this is a sign that the public opinion is acting as some form of restraint, that the White House is anxious to fully associate itself with its own actions in the region right now. And we need to keep building that restraint, keep building that pressure. And most importantly, the most important thing that we can do is through the movement change public consciousness [00:51:00] in the United States. Public opinion is one thing. Public opinion right now is not on the side of the White House and on Israel. The majority of people in the United States would like to see an end to this chapter, this terrible chapter of human history.

Consciousness is another thing, and consciousness is that realization of the fact that it's the U. S. system itself, the U. S. capitalist and imperialist system itself, that has created the conditions for this genocide to occur. And it is only by changing that system that we are going to be able to end, not just this chapter of the genocide, but the entire occupation of Palestine and all other U. S. imperialist wars across the world.

One. And two, that we're going to be able to have a system in which the demands of the population itself has an impact on the decisions that the government makes in regards to both foreign and domestic policy.

So I kind of was a bit long winded there, but I [00:52:00] think it's a complex issue, and one of the main roles that we have in the movement here is to bring this kind of analysis and this kind of understanding to people who have been in the streets now for almost a year, who have changed their entire way of living. I mean, many people used to do things on the weekends, like other things, like go see people and have brunch. I don't know what people did. Now, you go to protests. You go to meetings. You go to actions. You go to teach-ins. A large section of the population, their whole daily life has been transformed. They have changed their routines. They have reorganized themselves, to become not only people who participate in the movement, but who organize it. And it's important that all of us actually develop the skills and the capacity to understand the shape of this genocidal war as it continues. Because the number one thing we need to do is not let down of the movement. We need to keep it [00:53:00] growing. If war breaks out in Lebanon, direct war, a larger scale war with Lebanon, if it breaks out in the region, if it breaks out in other places, this new shift in consciousness that we've created, we need to build off of it. We don't want to have to rebuild it again.

So, we are really committed to continuing to mobilize, continuing to organize, and to not allow the White House and the propaganda arm, the mainstream media, to distract people from our task.

Note from the Editor on the ease of misunderstanding when discussing Israel

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The Muckrake Political Podcast describing Israel's state-sponsored terrorism in Lebanon. Democracy Now! discussed the history and present conflict escalating between Israel and Lebanon. The Real News looked at the language of ceasefire. The Book Cafe Podcast looked at the development of the Israeli self-image after the Holocaust. Democracy Now! looked at the impact of universities expanding the concept of protected class to [00:54:00] include Zionism. And The Real News looked at the role of the US complicit in the escalating conflict.

And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section.

But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics. This coming week, we will be continuing the discussion on Israel and anti-Semitism. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support -- there's a link in the show notes; through our Patreon page; or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but I'll note that anyone, depending on the app you use to listen, may be able to use the time codes in the show notes to jump around the show similar to how chapter markers work.

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 [00:55:00] hearing more information.

Now, before we continue on to the Deeper Dives half the show, as I said, we're going to be having a much bigger discussion about the role of antisemitism, both real and imagined in the debate over the escalating crisis in the middle east, on the bonus show for members. But I just wanted to share this one passage that I found in an article prepping for that larger discussion. And I'm sharing it because I find it hopeful and instructive.

And this is the author of the book, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, which comes at the whole issue from the left, arguing that the left needs a better structural understanding of antisemitism in order to be better equipped to fight it. And in this article. That author said, "At one of our book events, someone said, 'I'm offended by all the talk about anti-Zionism. I'm a Zionist. And for me, Zionism means full equality between Jews and Palestinians in the [00:56:00] Holy Land.' I responded, 'Well, okay. For me, anti-Zionism means the same thing. So maybe let's stop arguing about the word Zionism altogether.'" And then he continues: "We certainly don't want to give anyone a pass for supporting Israel's genocide. At the same time, being more attentive to the nuance is important for winning over more American Jews, for whom the definition of Zionism might not really mean support for an ethno state. It might be more of an identity, meaning more or less 'Jewish pride.'" End quote.

And for more, the article is "A Leftist Analysis of Antisemitism" and that's from Jacobin magazine.

And I just wanted to share that above all other potential quotes I could have pulled or points I could have made, because I think it exemplifies how language can get in the way of the real discussion we're trying to have, particularly on a topic that is so fraught with opportunity for miscommunication, confusion, distraction, [00:57:00] obfuscation, and yes, accusations of antisemitism that are sometimes, but definitely not always, well founded.

Here's just one example that always comes up during discussions of antisemitism: "from the river to the sea," often with the addendum, "Palestine will be free." It's perfectly understandable that many hear this as an anti-Jewish, anti-Israel code phrase. I'm not going to debate here whether or not it should be heard that way, now or in the past or ever. My point is that it is heard that way. And therefore becomes a flashpoint in accusations about antisemitism. However, it's also incredibly understandable that many particularly young people who are only awakening to this issue in the past year or so wouldn't understand the backstory and context of that phrase, and therefore take it at face value, hear it as a perfectly innocuous [00:58:00] call for peace and freedom, and then repeated themselves with that exact intention.

So knee jerk labeling of the use of that phrase as antisemetic makes nothing but perfect sense for some, while being completely nonsensical for others. And how does that help sort out people's true feelings on the war or the dynamic between Israel and its neighbors? Obviously it doesn't. But continuing that debate rather than getting to the underside of what people truly mean only works to the advantage of those who want to maintain the status quo of Jewish supremacy and apartheid in Israel.

So for those of us who oppose that unjust status quo, just like the discussion at the book signing where the author and the audience member turned out to mean the exact same thing while using diametrically opposed language, we all need more understanding of what people actually [00:59:00] believe what they mean with their words, and, most importantly, for what we can control ourselves -- how our own words may be interpreted by others.

When there's so much opportunity for miscommunication, not being mindful of language can blind us to actual fundamental agreement that we have with others, and undercuts opportunities for gaining would-be allies, all of which weakens our ability to oppose the ongoing injustice.

So language is important. Be careful how you use it.

In the meantime, I might suggest going with something like "from the river to the sea/coexist peacefully."

Just a thought.

SECTION A: STATE TERRORISM

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics. Next up, Section A: State terrorism. Section B: Global complicity. Section C: Protests and indoctrination. And Section D: Resistance.

Hell Is Breaking Loose in Lebanon Israel Rejects Ceasefire Proposal as U.N. Chief Calls for Peace - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-26-24

NERMEEN SHAIKH: [01:00:00] Lara Bitar, so, if you could tell us a little bit more about how you think Hezbollah might respond to a possible invasion? And also explain Resolution — U.N. Resolution 1701, because the U.N. secretary-general, speaking Wednesday, he warned that Lebanon is at the brink, calling for an urgent ceasefire, but he also called for the implementation of U.N. Resolutions 1559 and 1701.

LARA BITAR: I can’t really predict how Hezbollah will respond, but what we know is that, so far, Hezbollah has continuously tried to deescalate. Hezbollah is not targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure. They have consistently aimed their weapons at military [01:01:00] infrastructure and sites and soldiers, even after the pager attack, the walkie-talkie attack, repeated campaigns on Dahieh. Just a few minutes ago, before I joined you, Dahieh was yet again bombarded by the Israelis. I think this is the eighth attack on the Lebanese capital. Despite all of this escalation from the Israeli side, Hezbollah remains restraint, continues to try to deescalate. And the only ask here, which is not a really unreasonable ask, is for Israel to immediately end its war on the Palestinian people of Gaza after 11 months.

As far as U.N. resolutions, for the most part, they’re not legally binding. For the most part, they’re not respected. The 1701 Resolution, that was adopted after the 2006 war, [01:02:00] is habitually, if not daily, violated by the Israelis in a variety of different ways. That’s why the majority of the Lebanese population is not holding its breath waiting for a U.N. resolution or for the Security Council or even for the international community. I think not just the people in Lebanon, but people around the world have completely lost faith in the so-called international order, the rule of law.

So, right now we can only expect things to get significantly worse. So long as the international community does not take any action to halt the insanity and the barbarism of the Israeli state, so long as the Western world continues to supply the Israelis with weapons, with support, with diplomatic [01:03:00] cover, we have very little chance of seeing an end to this campaign anytime soon.

But on the other hand, what people can do, people anywhere can boycott Israel, can put pressure on their institutions, on their universities, on the corporations in which they work, and to divest from Israel. The only chance that we have is for the world and for comrades around the world to put this kind of pressure on their governments and on their institutions to isolate Israel, because Israel will only stop this campaign and this war around the region if it becomes too costly for it. And right now it’s not paying any kind of price for its actions.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: As we wrap up, Lara Bitar, there is a protest that is approaching the United Nations now, especially people protesting what’s happening in Gaza. You have Netanyahu, the Israeli [01:04:00] prime minister, who delayed his trip by a day. He was supposed to address the U.N. General Assembly today; he’s going to do it tomorrow. What do you expect him to say? And in the U.S. media, on television, they’re saying that Blinken has been desperately, you know, rallying countries on the sidelines to get this 21-day ceasefire that the U.S., France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are now calling for. But you have The Guardian reporting that, in fact, an effort by France and Britain to secure a joint statement by the U.N. Security Council calling for a ceasefire has stalled in the face of U.S. objections. Your final thoughts, Lara?

LARA BITAR: At the risk of repeating myself, I don’t see —or, we, for the most part, don’t really believe anything that’s coming [01:05:00] out of the Biden administration, neither its White House spokespeople or Blinken and others who are representing the U.S. And again, we have seen these maneuvers and this manipulation of public opinion, manipulation of the press for 11 months. They are not serious about a ceasefire, neither in Gaza nor in Lebanon, regardless of what they’re saying, regardless of what narrative they’re trying to sell us. We’re simply not buying it.

Jon Stewart on Israel's Widening War & Biden Admin's Stalled Ceasefire Attempts - The Daily Show

JON STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: the Americans have been working tirelessly On a ceasefire in Gaza, But this new conflagration points to another outcome the United States has been very much trying to avoid.

ANTHONY BLINKEN: From day one, since October 7th, it's been one of our primary objectives to prevent, Prevent the conflict from escalating, from spreading in other places.

Prevent an escalation or widening or deepening of this conflict.

WH SPOKESPERSON: We have been laser focused on trying to prevent that wider war since October [01:06:00] 7th.

PRES. JOE BIDEN: I don't think we need a wider war in the Middle East, that's not what I'm looking for. Why would you be looking for

JON STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: that? You know what I'd love? A wider war in the Middle East!

Well, uh, now that a wider war has broken out in the Middle East This is President Biden yesterday talking about what we're going to do about it. a wider war from breaking out. How f ing wide does this war have to be before we call it a wider? Without Turkey, it's still technically in the margins.

Look! As far as I'm concerned, it's not a wide war until it includes Mongolian archers. Cut.

What are we doing? And by the way, if this isn't the wider war, then what is this?

BIDEN ADMIN SPOKESPERSON: It continues to be a very dangerous [01:07:00] situation, a very difficult situation, a very difficult, volatile situation, um, and, and the, the situation could, um, could escalate at any moment. Tch. F

JON STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: it. Oh, I'm sorry, okay, so it's not a war, it's a volatile situation ship.

Uh, uh, Friends with Bamafits, if you will. But what, what if,

what if you really want to experience the full cognitive dissonance and language calisthenics that have to be deployed to describe the Middle East over the last, I don't know, 000 years? How we're describing what's I give you the golden Sound bite brought down from Sinai to explain how f ing convoluted this has

CNN GUEST: to be.

What the [01:08:00] Israeli government is saying, and the Biden administration is in many ways subscribed to this idea, is de escalation through escalation.

JON STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Or as that is sometimes called, War! That is World War II! Look at the subhead! here's the worst part. Now, the country that's providing all the bombs to the Middle East, or I guess now we have to call the bombs escalators, seems to have no idea when these bombs are going to be used.

PENTAGON SPOKESPERSON: We were not notified by the Israelis about their, um, strike or the intended target of their strike.

ANTHONY BLINKEN: First, uh, this is something we were not aware of or involved in. The United States, uh, did not know about, uh, nor was it involved in, uh, these, uh, [01:09:00] incidents.

JON STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Oh, you're not telling me anything, huh? Have you checked your pager?

I mean, my God, there have to be other ways of achieving de escalation without all this Respectful exchange of missiles. Historically, that part is generally followed by years of sorrow and bloodshed. And we know there have been opportunities for de escalation, but Netanyahu did not seem particularly interested in it.

Oh my God. I've criticized Netanyahu.

PRES. JOE BIDEN: What have I done? Go, go ahead. The people who are criticizing the Prime Minister, it is shameful, it is pathetic.

FOX NEWS GUEST 2: We should be standing shoulder to shoulder with our strongest ally in the Middle East instead of launching this criticism. They criticize them for going too far, constantly, and that gives Hamas comfort.

I'm

JON STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: [01:10:00] sorry? Criticism of the war is shameful and it gives comfort to Hamas. You know who might be surprised to hear that? The Israelis, who are unbelievably critical of the war and Netanyahu.

PRES. JOE BIDEN: The Prime Minister did not look the public in the eye and tell the truth. That he won't bring the hostages alive. It's a

ISRAELI: total failure. The Israeli government. No strategy. No vision. He

PRES. JOE BIDEN: is trying to do everything to prevent a deal. He don't have any intent to end this war.

Netanyahu is lying as he breathes.

JON STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: What anti Semites the former prime minister of Israel and defense minister are. But still, people are going to see this segment and go, all right, maybe Israel isn't perfect, but criticizing them feeds the fire. Don't you worry about anti semitism? And to that I say no. I believe anti [01:11:00] semitism will be fine.

laughter I gotta say applause not for nothing applause but from what I've experienced It's very resilient. And it's not really tied to any event, or war, or activity, or reality. For God's sakes, Kanye thought we ruined his Adidas deal. We just need orthotics, that's all.

Anti Semitism will survive this war like it survived all wars, going back to the brave Hebrews at Masada.

Do you see, Rabbi? I was paying attention and he wasn't. But you know what? You know what? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the blame the Jews from the Black Death, the Spanish Inquisition, to [01:12:00] the space lasers will all go away if Israel does right. And peace will reign. And people will no longer baselessly and conveniently blame the Jews when things don't work out exactly the way they want them to.

DONALD TRUMP: This is the most important election in the history of the United States. I'm not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I'm at 40%.

JON STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: SON OF...

“Lebanese Civilians Are Paying the Price”: Israeli Strikes Kill Nearly 600, Displace Tens of Thousands - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-25-24

AYA MAJZOUB: I mean, the onslaught that started Monday was really unprecedented. We saw tens and tens and tens of thousands of families hastily pack up their bags, leave their homes, without any idea where they’re going to next. All across Beirut now, you see cars that are parked with displaced families that have nowhere to go. The [01:13:00] strikes have been expanding. There’s a lot of misinformation around. People are paranoid about another pager or walkie-talkie attack. I mean, the situation is really devastating.

And, Amy, you know, I really want to put the death count into perspective here. In a single day, on Monday, more than 500 people were killed, and that is a really astounding number. It is one of the highest daily death tolls in recent global wars. It is higher than most daily death tolls in Gaza in the past year. You know, in Gaza, despite the horrific Israeli onslaught, it took 18 days for the death count to reach 500. This happened in Lebanon in about 24 hours. In 2006, the 33-day war that took place between Hezbollah and Israel resulted in 1,100 deaths over 33 days. We’ve already achieved half of that in just 24 [01:14:00] hours. So the numbers are really unprecedented.

And you see a major panic across the entire country. People don’t know where is safe anymore. The Israelis have expanded the areas that they’re targeting. They’re not limited to some areas in south Lebanon along the border and in the Beqaa. They’ve really expanded inwards into coastal cities, into mountains in the north. It really feels like nowhere is safe, and people are very much at a loss for what to do and where to go.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Aya, what about these phone calls and text messages and also reports of dropping of leaflets on the population by the Israelis? How are people reacting to that? And what indication do they have of even where to go?

AYA MAJZOUB: So, on Monday, the information minister said that around 80,000 people [01:15:00] received calls to evacuate. And we tried to look into some of those calls, and there didn’t seem to be any pattern for who was receiving these calls. Some people in Beirut received them. Some people in the south received them, in the Beqaa. It was really all across the country. So it seemed like a tactic that was more intended to cause fear rather than an actual evacuation.

Some residents in south Lebanon did get more specific evacuation orders. But again, under international law, for evacuation orders to mean anything, they have to be effective, meaning that people must have the time to leave, and they must have the means to do so. What we saw on Monday was anything but. I mean, the instructions that people got were stay away from Hezbollah targets. Nobody knows — a civilian doesn’t know where a Hezbollah target is. So people just fled with the clothes off their back. It took 14, 15 hours for some families [01:16:00] to make it from south Lebanon to Beirut. And we were receiving reports that there were some strikes on, you know, near where civilians were gathered to evacuate, in traffic jams. We’re still looking into those. But if that holds up, then that is also a serious violation.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And I wanted to ask you — that Amnesty is calling for an international investigation into the deadly attacks using these exploding portable devices. Could you talk about what you’re calling for and why? And why isn’t this patently labeled as a terrorist attack?

AYA MAJZOUB: So, under international humanitarian law and human rights law, we don’t use the term “terrorist attacks.” For us, attacks are either lawful or unlawful. Our qualification of the pager attacks is if, as [01:17:00] is being reported and as U.S. officials and Lebanese officials have said, Israel was behind the attacks, then international humanitarian law applies, because these attacks were part of an armed conflict. Under international humanitarian law, it is prohibited to use weapons indiscriminately, which we found that the pager attacks were. The people who detonated the pagers did not know who was given the pagers or the walkie-talkies, and they did not know who would be around the individuals carrying those pagers and walkie-talkies. Therefore, the attack was indiscriminate and, therefore, unlawful under international humanitarian law and should be investigated as a war crime.

The reason that Amnesty has called for an international investigation on this particular attack is because of the risks of this kind of warfare. It transforms everyday objects, like pagers and walkie-talkies, into essentially booby traps. And there is an [01:18:00] explicit prohibition under international humanitarian law on the use of such booby traps. But we felt that such an attack, although it didn’t cause nearly the same number of casualties as Monday’s onslaught, did instill some fear and panic into the Lebanese society and is a really dangerous method of warfare to be using. It was unprecedented. And the involvement goes far beyond just, you know, the Israeli military. There are allegations around various shell companies. So we’re trying to look into all of the multifaceted aspects of this attack, but we do feel that an international investigation in this case is warranted.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I want to ask you, Aya Majzoub, if you consider this a war on Hezbollah or Israel’s war on Lebanon.

AYA MAJZOUB: I mean, in terms of the [01:19:00] impact on civilians, it is undeniable that Lebanese civilians are paying the price. You know, a lot of the media coverage of Monday’s attacks was Israel strikes Hezbollah targets. However, you know, we’ve looked at entire neighborhoods that have been flattened, residential towers that have been brought down, people’s livelihoods, their shops, their homes, their cars, all in ruins. You mentioned the deaths of the two UNHCR staff members. The health minister also mentioned the deaths of four medics and paramedics. Ambulances are being hit, medical centers. And the wave of displacement from south Lebanon, the Beqaa and other areas is now, I think, almost 500,000 people have had to leave their homes. Not all 500,000 people are Hezbollah. So, the impact on Lebanese civilians has really been catastrophic.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And the response of the United States? President Biden [01:20:00] just gave his last speech at the United Nations as U.S. president. He — let’s see — the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has characterized this as almost a full-fledged war. President Biden said, “Too many on each side of the Israeli-Lebanon border remain displaced. Full-scale war is not in anyone’s interest.” Even though a “situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is not [sic] possible.” He said “is still possible,” he said. Aya Majzoub, at the same time, the U.S. continuing to provide billions of dollars to the U.S. military — to the Israeli military.

AYA MAJZOUB: Yeah. I mean, there’s an obvious hypocrisy there. We consistently, since October 7, have been calling for the suspension of weapons sales and shipments to Israel. We’ve continued to call [01:21:00] for respect of IHL. We have, in at least one instance, documented a possible war crime that Israel committed in Lebanon using U.S. weapons. So, if the U.S. really was serious about a deescalation in the region, then they should start by stopping arms and weapons shipments to Israel and by also supporting judicial criminal proceedings, including at the ICC.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Aya.

Israel Terrorizes Hezbollah With Exploding Pagers Part 2 - The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 9-20-24

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Well, and by the way, the idea of state control versus small d democratic populist movements against it, Nick, think about the implications here.

And one of the, one of the worst things America has done in the 21st century, and we have done plenty, was the war on terror. And the designation of the idea of a terrorist being anybody that we decide is a terrorist, which Israel has now learned from, um, That idea that state power needs to defend itself against the people, [01:22:00] like, I'm, I'm sorry, but like, if you look around the surveillance that we've been under during the 21st century is overwhelming.

We now know that all of these companies have worked with the government in order to provide constant surveillance. On top of that, like now the idea that any product or anything, cars, phones, laptops, you name it. And by the way, like in a, it almost, It's almost quaint. It almost feels like the old plots to kill Fidel Castro, right?

With like an exploding cigar. Like that idea that a state can then weaponize, uh, the, the articles and artifacts of consumerism to basically carry out targeted assassinations. And by the way, I just want to remind you and everybody listening, cause I almost forgot about this. Remember how the Supreme Court said that a president can do anything under their official power, including possibly killing political opponents?

Like this type of stuff starts to grow and grow. And a large part of the problem, it's not individual based like Netanyahu didn't come up with this, right? [01:23:00] Like he, he wasn't sitting around and he came up with this. It's expressions of power by the state as things become more and more destabilized. Like there is a creep.

That happens here, whether it's Israel, the United States, Great Britain, you, you name it, whatever it is, that creep mixed with the willingness to use state power to kill randomly and indiscriminately, like I've been seeing people like laugh about this online. I don't find this funny. This isn't about supporting Hezbollah.

This is about needing to always be curious and to always have a critique of state power, because unchecked state power only will grow and grow and grow and take advantage of whatever is given to it.

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Absolutely. I mean, listen, Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. Sure. Generally people who are affiliated with it are people who are terrorists.

Uh, but you know, people are getting named. They're losing eyes. They're losing limbs. Uh, they're, you know, they're, they're dying. Um, and then, yeah, again, the residual or the, um, you know, people who nearby or getting [01:24:00] injured again, those are the, that's where it becomes terrorism on Israel's part. Did, by the way, did you mention maybe a couple of times, a couple of pods before about how wifi routers can actually see people?

Did you ever see that report? No, I didn't, but I'm not surprised. There was a, there's a report about that where somehow they could take data that they're receiving and it can actually map like movement in rooms so they can almost have like that matrixy, matrixy looking thing. Um, and now see where you are and where you're moving.

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: No. And we, we've even heard, you know, that like things like Roombas do that. And what we've basically done is we've come to accept all of this. I'll, I'll never forget back in the early 20th century when the Patriot Act was happening, whenever the whole PRISM program was coming out, people would tell me like, Hey, we don't need to worry about this.

Like, you know, just sort of relax about it. That's not how this stuff works. It grows and grows and grows. And if you really want to know how any of this works, look at China, which isn't just an authoritarian state. It's a model for how Western societies are starting to [01:25:00] change themselves. And like, Eventually, over time, this sort of access that we give, uh, corporations, which for the record, just to go ahead and connect the dots, Nick, am I wrong or do all these corporations work hand in hand with authoritarian regimes when it serves their bottom line?

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Yeah. I mean, they want to make money. So they want to make

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: money and they want to, you know, have their contracts going back and forth. They want access to, you know, giant markets like China and India. Like there is a relationship that starts to take place and anything that happens overseas, particularly an American knew about this, we've now heard that they gave America a heads up that they were going to carry out this attack.

They didn't give them all the specifics. If you believe that. All the stuff that happens to people across the ocean and other countries, it's always going to boomerang back. That is just how this stuff works. And this thing, I'm sickened by it, Nick. I really, truly am. And like, the first thing I had was surprise and shock by it.[01:26:00]

But the more time that has passed since these attacks took place, the more that I am absolutely concerned and sick.

SECTION B: GLOBAL COMPLICITY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Global complicity..

U.N. Experts Accuse Israel of Starvation Campaign in Gaza & Demand End to Western Complicity - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-17-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Top experts at the United Nations have strongly condemned Western countries for supporting Israel's devastating war on Gaza. Speakers at a U. N. press conference Monday included Pedro Arroyo Agudo, the U. N. special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation.

MICHAEL FAKHRI: The lack of clean water has led to 1.

7 million cases of infection diseases, mainly diarrhea, dysentery and hepatitis A, particularly affecting children, as well as cases of polio, smallpox, and other infectious diseases that can trigger massive [01:27:00] and deadly epidemics. All these, coupled with the lack of medical care, result in deaths, especially of babies and children, making water scarcity and contamination a silent bomb, which has far less visibility than those that destroy buildings, uh.

But Uh, no less lethal bomb.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: This comes as the U. N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhry, has accused Israel in a new report of carrying out a starvation campaign in Gaza. Francesca Albanese, the U. N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, wrote to the U. N. In response to the report, quote, The way Israel is destroying Palestinian food sovereignty will be studied not only as a shocking example of genocidal conduct, but also as a textbook case of sadistic disrespect for human life and dignity, unquote.

U. N. Special Rapporteur Francesca [01:28:00] Albanese is joining us now from Tunisia, and Michael Fakhry is joining us from Brasilia. in Brazil. We thank you both for being with us. Michael Fakhry, let's begin with you. You have just released this report. Can you explain what you found?

MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yes, Amy. What we're witnessing in Gaza is the starvation of 2.

3 million Palestinians. We've never seen a civilian population made to go hungry so quickly and so completely. So in this report, I answer the question, How was this possible? How was Israel able to starve so many Palestinians so quickly and so completely? And the story starts of course, with the political economy of Gaza.

This story starts to, in some ways. In 1991, Israel started restricting the, the flow of goods into Gaza. Starting in 1991. By 2000, it imposes a full blockade. So what we saw from 2000 to 2002 is the rate of malnutrition [01:29:00] amongst children in Gaza double. In 2005, what Israel did is it changed the nature of its occupation.

It pulled its military out of Gaza and surrounded Gaza in a siege. So since 2000 until now, Israel has created a wall, in effect, a wall around Gaza, limiting the flow of goods. And what they did is they counted calories. They made sure that people in Gaza were just hungry enough to be weak, but not so hungry to raise an alarm.

So right before October 7th of last year, 50 percent of Palestinians in Gaza were food insecure, and 80 percent depended on humanitarian aid. So when this war started, Israel announced its starvation campaign on October 9th, and that's in effect what they did. And they've been pushing people from the north into the south.

While at the same time continuing to bomb civilian structures and target schools, hospitals and homes.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Can you [01:30:00] explain, this is the first report that includes graphic reporting, Michael Fakhry.

MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yes, the situation is so horrific in Gaza right now that I felt that words weren't enough to explain what's going on, but words weren't enough also to imagine a better future for Palestinians, but for people all over the world.

This report focuses on the Palestinian people's food sovereignty, but it looks at how starvation is being used as an increasing rate by forces all over the world. So I was lucky to work with Ammar Jure, an artist from Lebanon. And what we presented are illustrations and graphic reports highlighting the struggle of fishers, highlighting what food sovereignty means for the Palestinian people, but for everyone.

And highlighting what it means to maintain and fight for your dignity despite the the genocidal violence that the Palestinians are experiencing.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: [01:31:00] Michael Fery, who did you talk to for this report?

MICHAEL FAKHRI: For this report, I've consulted, uh, starvation and right to food experts from all over the world. I received, uh, direct testimony from people in Gaza.

I, uh, spoke to, uh, UN, um, workers, uh, both within Palestinian territories and around the world. I spoke to diplomats from countries from all over the world. Um, And I did my own research, and I drew from statistics from the U. N., and this was standard, standard methodology for any U. N. human rights report.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has suggested starving the entire Gaza Strip To death could be justified.

He told a conference last month, quote, nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned. SMOs also [01:32:00] repeated the Israeli government's goal of removing the threat of Palestinian statehood. You have that. And then you also have, um, what, uh, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, um, that accusations of Israel limiting humanitarian aid were outrageously false.

He said a deliberate starvation policy, you can say anything, it doesn't make it true. Your response, UN rapporteur Michael Fakhry.

MICHAEL FAKHRI: There is never an exception to starving civilians. There's never a justification for starving any civilian, whether it's one person or 2. 3 million. And this is in the context of genocide.

And there is no exception to genocide. Israeli officials since October 9th until today have explicitly announced their intent to starve civilians. And they've executed their plan and we've seen the effects of their plan. We also have received [01:33:00] reports regularly and consistently, um, from UN sources that humanitarian aid is either blocked or restricted.

And then even when it goes through these humanitarian convoys that are coordinating with Israeli forces are targeted by Israeli forces. And then even when these humanitarian aid, uh, convoys reach civilians, civilians have been repeatedly targeted, shot and killed you. While trying to get aid, but the issue is not just aid and the denial of goods.

The issue is Israel has been weakening and destroying the food system in Gaza in this war and previously they're just over 75 percent of the agricultural system has been destroyed. Uh, fishers have been targeted, uh, orchards have been uprooted, shepherds have been targeted and shot at. So what Israel is trying to do is making sure they're trying to make sure that the Palestinian people can't feed themselves.

This starvation campaign is part of displacing Palestinians from their land. And it's part of a [01:34:00] plan to annex not just Gaza, but the West Bank as well. This is the last two years have been, we've seen record violence against Palestinians, especially Palestinian farmers. Uh, this is, again, targeting all Palestinians and all of their territories.

So it's not just about Gaza. It's Israel has, over the decades, attacked and destroyed the Palestinian food system as a way to create the conditions of starvation and, in this case now, to the degree of genocidal violence.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Michael Fakhry, according to your report, 34 Palestinians, the majority of them children, are known to have starved to death since October 7th?

MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yes, and this is this is what indicates to us that it's a full blown famine across all of Gaza. So you can imagine a situation when a community is struggling. The first thing they always do is they feed their children. This is true throughout history. And so when a parent is watching their child, Waste away before their very [01:35:00] eyes and is unable to do anything and that child dies when the first child dies in a community.

That indicates to us that that whole society is being attacked. And when the first Palestinian child died, that confirmed that the situation in Gaza is a situation of famine.

'Whitewashing genocide' How Democrats & the media kept Gaza out of the DNC Part 2 - The Real News Network - Air Date 8-31-24

ADAM JOHNSON: And to be clear, those, those protesters who I think are, are, uh, terribly courageous.

I mean, again, these are people who were there for hours. They have nothing to gain. There's no career gain. They're not getting paid to do it. Although of course Fox news would say they are, who are literally just trying to get people to pay attention. And, and I worked on a piece for the nation about the, what I'm calling or what I call the compartmentalization, which is to say, There's been an, there's an elaborate regime of excuse making and burden shifting that liberal media has propped up to make it so people can go celebrate at the DNC, including some of our, you know, frankly, union brothers and sisters who are there celebrating again, I, there's, this is already [01:36:00] complex.

We can get into that while while the administration, the current administration, and it's, it's Current replacement running on the Democratic ticket, the Vice President, Vice President Harris have have committed to doubling down, tripling down on the policy of supporting genocide. Again, this is not and I think some people have a hard time drawing this connective tissue because ostensibly, right?

They sort of use the magical C word. They say they support a ceasefire and that they correctly guess that would be sufficient. And they were right because what they did is they simply redefined the term ceasefire. Something I've been writing about since March. Mhm. The second they began doing it, because for the first five months of this, of this so called conflict, the, the State Department issued a memo banning people from using the word ceasefire in related terms.

And then on the eve of the Michigan primary, when the uncommitted movement was increasingly embarrassing the administration, who at that point, of course, was running for re election, they decided to co opt the term ceasefire and just make the temporary pause hostage exchanges, which they used to call temporary pause, and rebranded that ceasefire, which is why activists And in concert with that switch from the White House's part, started [01:37:00] talking about an arms embargo and conditioning aid to Israel as being the ask, because that was the implicit ask of a ceasefire demand.

But because the White House and liberal media and more generally started to play stupid, they had to explicitly state what the demand was, which is using the leverage of conditioning aid or arms embargo to compel Israel to agree to a lasting ceasefire, which, you know, is Again, finally, you know, the New York Times today said on the daily podcast, Patrick Kingsley, their Jerusalem correspondent said, uh, literally is Netanyahu opposes a lasting ceasefire.

So now finally, I guess people are, are acknowledging that reality, that when he, when they talk about ceasefire, when liberal Zionist organizations talk about ceasefire, when the white house talks about ceasefire. Yeah. They're talking about a temporary pause for a few weeks while they exchange hostages, get the only, you know, get leverage from, from Hamas or whatever militants have hostages and then continue doing, uh, the, the sort of genocide, which they've been carrying out.

I think pretty much consensus among, among genocide scholars who are not, you know, in denial. I know that's a bit of a tautology, but that it is a genocide as every, you know, they, Gaza is not livable. They are [01:38:00] pushing people to a very small, Airport, you know, airport size, a piece of land, and they are continuing to punish them with engaging collective punishment and displacement and unleashing diseases, especially polio, which is now taken off and that this is this is not going to stop unless the U.

S. conditions arms to Israel. Everybody knows it. Again, to their credit, although they did not withhold their endorsement on this condition, seven unions representing six million workers, including UAW, SEIU, demanded that Biden engage in a full arms embargo of Israel until it ends its genocide, which is now the sort of baseline ask, I think, of, you know, humanitarian organizations.

Again, this was always the implied mechanism of the ceasefire, but now you got to say it literally. And so when they did the switcheroo from Biden to Harris in a matter of 48 hours, Because the issue of Gaza was not allowed to be litigated in a primary, because there really wasn't one, there was an attempt to try to push Harris, again, to the extent that's even possible, uh, the uncommitted, which, of course, began under [01:39:00] Biden during his primary and continued until, up until the DNC and continues to this day, um, saying, we're going to withhold our support until you agree to an arms embargo on Israel, which sounds scary to some people, some lay people who say, arms embargo on Israel, but what about blah, blah, blah, but really what it is, another way to phrase it is conditioning aid until Israel, uh, Is in line with international U.

S. law, which, by the way, the U. S. is supposed to be doing anyway. Otherwise, I'm not sure what the point of having these laws are. And, you know, many experts, many normie experts just today, just security had an article showing how again, this is kind of a very normie publication showing how Israel's in gross violation, both in Gaza and the West Bank of international law and the Leahy law compels the White House.

And ought to compel a future harris white house to comport to that law as israel commits gross human rights violations The state department's own internal memo a few months ago Said, uh, they committed human rights violations, but they're taking the necessary steps to prevent in the future Which everyone knows was a total whitewash job And so what the protesters are demanding the baseline ask obviously protesters outside the perimeter, you know Their asks [01:40:00] are more ambitious right in apartheid and occupation liberate palestine all that But the baseline ask that every organization agrees on Liberal progressive left, far left, Palestinian, uh, even frankly, some non Zionist, you know, Jewish groups and anti Zionist Jewish groups, uh, over 30, I think at this point, uh, hundreds of Nobel laureates.

They say we have to end selling arms to Israel to compel them to stop this madness. So it's a very basic ask. I think it's incredibly reasonable ask. It's a ask that the Biden White House and a future Harris administration can do unilaterally. They don't need Congress. There isn't some parliamentarian who they can appeal to to sort of block their way.

And it's something Harris could have agreed to that she decided not to. And so that's the connective tissue that, again, through the ceasefire co option PR effort and all these kind of other faux humanitarian efforts, the humanitarian peer, um, all these other public relations campaigns they've undertaken, the White House, that they've confused liberals and so they kind of put Gaza out of their mind.

And so when they, when they're going into, when you're actually physically going into the DNC, as you [01:41:00] know, You're bombarded by by protesters calling out the names of the people that their candidate has agreed to continue, frankly, supporting and killing killing because she is now through her foreign aid advisor or foreign policy advisor.

Phil Gordon has reaffirmed their support, unequivocal support for continued arms sales to Israel. So she's not budging. And so she's just assuming she can kind of do brat memes and vibe her way beyond the criticism from Gaza protesters, which theoretically ought to be picking up this week with with school being back in session.

SARAH LAZAR: If I could just jump in for 1 second to talk about the demand of protesters. So the Coalition of March on the DNC is composed of more than 250 organizations. It's a lot from across the country and a lot of Palestinian organizations are numbered among them. For example, US PCN, the US Palestinian Community Network.

And so U-S-P-C-N [01:42:00] actually moved to join the coalition before October 7th, 'cause their position was. What Israel is doing to Palestinians, the injustice, the apartheid, the colonial settler context predates October 7th, and so they had reason to protest before that, but then given what Israel has done over the past 10 months, 40, 000 Palestinians killed, this is likely a dramatic underestimate, you know, one Lancet study estimated that 186, 000 people have been killed.

This is likely a dramatic underestimate, you know, one Lancet study estimated that 186, 000 people have been killed. When you consider both direct and indirect death, you know, we're seeing the most efficient killing campaign in the 21st century if you're speaking just in terms of daily death tolls. So given that emergency, the coalition march on the DNC decided to center Palestine and Gaza in the multiple marches that they held that had thousands of people in the streets.

The two demands that they put out were very simple. One was end [01:43:00] the genocide, and two was end all USAID to Israel. The end, the demand to end all USAID is a little different from some of the demands that we've been seeing, focusing on arms specifically. The seven major unions representing nearly half of all unionized workers in the U.

S. That Adam mentioned, their demand was specifically around an arms embargo pursuant to a permanent ceasefire. And then the uncommitted delegates, there were 29 who went to the DNC. They were also demanding an arms embargo. That was their demand that they had painted on their banners. And that they had put out in terms of their messaging around not another bomb.

We all know that they ended up putting out more moderate demands, so they did their sit in because they were denied a Palestinian American speaker on stage. Any of them would have told you that was absolute bottom of the barrel, lowest possible bar demand, and they did go in there calling for an [01:44:00] arms embargo.

And so even though the these demands have some variation and difference. The, what unites them is the focus on ending material support, which is a recognition that it's not enough to shift rhetoric. You have to change material reality.

U.N. Experts Accuse Israel of Starvation Campaign in Gaza & Demand End to Western Complicity Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-17-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Now you are expecting to give, present this report, um, to the UN General assembly, uh, in October. What are you expecting? How will this be presented

MICHAEL FAKHRI: right now?

Uh, all of us, all the U. N. Human rights experts. And I think the whole world is watching closely the current draft resolution that's before the General Assembly. That is, uh, in the draft. They're calling for sanctions against Israel. Since the first weeks of this war, we as human independent human rights experts have been calling [01:45:00] for a cease fire.

An immediate ceasefire and sanctions against Israel. And we'll see how this resolution goes through. By the time I get to New York on October 18th, if there are no sanctions, I will repeat that call for sanctions against Israel. And what I will, I will tell the general assembly, what is at stake? What is at stake is the global order itself.

How the world responds to Gaza and to the Palestinian struggle for liberation will determine the structure and the fate of the U. N. and the global order. Because what's at stake is, of course, the Palestinian people's right to self determination, their right to return to their territory in Palestine, and American global power.

And the, the, and Europe is facing an existential crisis. This is its, what's at stake. This is why millions of people are marching in the streets. in solidarity with the Palestinians. If the world does not respond to Palestine today, just like the world is not responding to the starvation in Sudan, [01:46:00] we're going to see more and more starvation campaigns around the world into the future.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: We want to bring in Francesca Albanese into this conversation, U. N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. You're in La Marza, Tunisia, where you participated fromin that news conference yesterday in Geneva. Um, uh, you, uh, talked about the significance of this report. Can you respond?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yes, I was really, um, impressed by the report that my colleague Michael Park reproduced, because not only it analyzed what he just said, I cannot really add to the brilliant presentation he gave, but he put things in context, which is something that tends to be missed when discussing, uh, the situation of Palestinians under Israeli's military rule.

People tend to, um, Align themselves or [01:47:00] accept critically the narrative of the two parties in conflict without capturing the troubling asymmetry that exists, um, between the Palestinians, the occupied people, and Israel, the protracted occupier, which is colonizing by force. The little erritory that.

bringing the attention back to the root causes and the fact that these didn't start on October 7th, didn't start even with the blockade that has been declared on Gaza 17 years ago. This is a long term plan that Israel has somewhat devised. to achieve its final goal, which is getting as much control as possible over maximum land with minimum Palestinian people.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Naezy, you've said the attack [01:48:00] that Israel has unleashed is not just against Palestinians in Gaza, it's against Palestinians as a whole. Explain.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Absolutely. Um, Amy, since the beginning of the assault against Gaza on the beginning of October, following of course the attack unleashed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, we have recorded an escalation of violence against the Palestinians in Gaza.

The rest of the occupied territory, both is Jerusalem and the West Bank. Over 11 months, 670 Palestinians have been killed. Carfew incursions and raids have escalated at unprecedented rates, particularly against the north and Gaza that over the past Tweaks as experienced least less lethal, but similar, um, attacks [01:49:00] on civilian infrastructure, roads, water reservoir, electricity, um, uh, electricity sources and homes that are unjustifiable.

And, uh, The other thing is the detention, arbitrary detention, detention without any legal justification of Palestinians, both from the West, the Gaza Strip, but all the more the West Bank and East Jerusalem have skyrocketed. And all Palestinians, no matter their place of residence, have been exposed to humiliation and sadism.

That's what we're And what B'Tselem has qualified as a network of torture across Israeli detention center, how can we explain that? This is why I say when international community has failed to prevent genocide in Gaza, we have to be very careful because I do see patterns of violence clearly expanding to the West Bank and East Jerusalem.[01:50:00]

And ultimately, the goal is the same. expel the Palestinians or simply displace the Palestinians from the little that remain of their land. And this is not something that I'm inferring from the evidence. This is something that is accompanied by endless statements of Israeli political leaders and actions of Both army and settlers, illegal settlers, that have been armed by Israeli ministers.

So this is a state, there is a state endeavor sustaining this wild attack against the Palestinian people as such.

Ilhan Omar On The Shallow Divide Between Dems And GOP Over Israel’s Gaza Genocide - The Majority Report - Air Date 9-16-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: We just heard from the Israeli military that they killed three hostages that were found dead, I guess a couple of months ago. They killed them early on in their, um, a bombing campaign. It is, it's almost feels like shock that Israel was [01:51:00] going to admit this, but there definitely seems to be more pressure on them.

There's also been reports out now how, when there was an outcry about, uh, the, um, hunger situation in Gaza, Israel let in a trickle of food and is now sort of like tightening up again on it. Um, we also have a story of the first, uh, UN worker, uh, in, at least in the past year, who was, uh, killed by a sniper in the West Bank.

This after, um, an American citizen also killed by an Israeli sniper, uh, which. Joe Biden claimed was like an accidental shot that ricocheted, I guess, off the ground up into her head. Sounds like something Trump would say. And, uh, with a lot of evidence that, um, That, in fact, was not the case, that it wasn't a bullet that bounced on the ground.

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: evidence that it was the case. [01:52:00]

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: No evidence.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And the Biden administration has been kind of propping up Yoav Galant as somebody who's more reasonable within Likud, the defense minister who they can reportedly work with in this administration. News broke this morning that Netanyahu is apparently planning to fire Yoav Galant from his post.

Uh, that's maybe, it hasn't happened yet. But it's this, as we've been saying, the reality of Netanyahu and the far right of the Israeli government being together on this has not changed since October 7th. It's been that reality for that this entire period solidified. Yeah.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Here is Ilhan Omar on, uh, with the CNN's Kaitlyn Collins and, um, commends, uh, Harris on a rhetoric, but says.

We got to do more.

CNN REPORTER: Well, I'm glad you brought that up because there's really important constituencies in places like your home state and michigan and others. There wasn't a lot of time spent on on the Israel Hamas war that [01:53:00] is that is underway last night between the two candidates. But when they did talk about it, despite trump saying that Israel would cease to exist if Harris was elected, they largely agree on the policy of that supporting Israel and backing it on a ceasefire hostage deal.

She said that she would work around the clock. But she didn't offer any specifics on what that would look like. Was that enough of a plan in your view?

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Yeah, I mean, I think there is a, um, I believe there is a great appreciation, um, in, in the empathy and compassion that she offers. Uh, but I do believe that voters both in, in my district, um, and in, in Minnesota and across the country that care Um, want to actually see either an implementation of a ceasefire, um, or an actual, uh, concrete answer, um, to how we get a ceasefire and why we have not been able, um, to utilize, [01:54:00] uh, the leverage that we have in order for that ceasefire to be implemented.

CNN REPORTER: And of course, I assume by that in part you mean sending arms and weapons to Israel, which Something, you know, we can

REP. ILHAN OMAR: hear intangible actions that could be taken, right? We are supplying the weapons that are causing the catastrophe. Uh, and so, you know, to, to say you're working around the clock and, and not, you know, take any actionable steps that the, the voters, um, and, and the American people can see, um, makes that rhetoric really hard to, to swallow.

And is that,

CNN REPORTER: I want to hear this follow up, you know, that was her rhetoric last night. And so when you hear about the implementation of a ceasefire deal, we hear off all the time from the administration. Take it or leave it is on the table. Take it or leave it is on the table. I talked to the Israeli ambassador to the UN last week.

He said the idea of a ceasefire being close is is just not realistic at this moment.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: And I think, and I think that is where, um, it does feel disingenuous, [01:55:00] right? Because we hear Our Secretary of State, Blinken, um, who has now traveled to Israel, I believe 11 times, um, you know, who makes these statements, um, as he's departing, uh, the country from Egypt and says We are.

You know, very close and deal has been reached. Um, BB Netanyahu is there and then we see the humiliation that follows as BB takes the stage right after he departs and says there is no such thing. Uh, and I think For a country that is not only considered as a leader, uh, in, in the world, but a country that is directly in, in support, in, in supplying these, these weapons, um, to, to Israel to, uh, you know, not, not do that after the first time that they backtracked on, on what they promised us, not do that on the second time, not do that on the third time.

Um, now, you know, 11 months in, [01:56:00] uh, I, I think it is starting to, to sound like this is not a, a, a serious thing, um, that, uh, our secretary is, is working on.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah. Congressman Ilhan Omar. Understated, uh, but, uh, accurate.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Carrot and stick, right? So she's opening with the empathy thing to appeal to Harris and her supporters, I guess, but then giving her a path forward because Ro Khanna now has come out on cable news and said that she should talk about enforcing the law.

Elizabeth Warren has done the same, and Ilhan Omar as well, still being like, I'm a team player, but this is what you can do. Um, I was just like appreciative of that because, can we pull up this tweet? This was from over the weekend. This is why she needs to now begin to, like, the Biden, Biden officials are complaining to ABC that she didn't defend him more in the debate.

Selena Wang of, uh, of ABC reports some White House officials are, uh, also disappointed that Harris did not stand up for [01:57:00] Biden during the debate. A former Biden White House official tells me many feel Harris missed opportunities to acknowledge that Biden deserves thanks for his service, according to the source.

So the point is that They're already, she, she, she tried to distance herself from Biden in the debate by not really mentioning him. She at one point said, I'm not Joe Biden, I'm Kamala Harris. She didn't go out of her way to full throatedly defend Biden in any way because he's an extremely unpopular president right now.

So, a way that she can distance herself from him is also on this matter. On this matter, and there are a lot of lawmakers trying to give her the, the path forward to do so. But if the Biden administration and his, like, lame duck lackeys are going to whine and complain in the press that she's not being more forceful in her defense of him, First of all, then why not go all the way, all, uh, full bore on this and actually do something that is both right, good policy, and in her interest to distance herself from him in some meaningful way?

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Because, uh, for all the talk [01:58:00] of all these Reagan staffers, uh, supporting Kamala Harris, there's no votes there. There's not, that's not going to turn people out. We know undecided voters turn out because they're activated by the partisan leading they already have, not because they're right in the middle and are waiting to see who's the most center of all the candidates.

So they're just, this, this like sort of conservative look at what they're doing is, I think, because they think they can walk to a victory, and they don't need to break that glass and actually change the policy, because they'd rather win with these freaks than with people who, uh, expect to win. People to stop a genocide.

SECTION C: PROTESTS AND INDOCTRINATION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section C: Protests and indoctrination.

Whose Speech, Whose Campus - What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law - Air Date 9-10-24

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Well, until 2004, it wasn't really obvious that the kind of problem you see with the student protests of this past year have anything to do with Title VI. But in 2004, the Office of Civil Rights under the Bush [01:59:00] administration issued a new interpretation of Title VI.

And under the new interpretation, Title VI's protections also apply to students who are discriminated against based on what the office calls shared ancestry. And that includes being part of a group that is identified for its racial, and religious characteristics. The 2004 interpretation specified that title six could now apply to students who are Muslim, Sikh, or Jewish and say, well, hey, I'm being discriminated against at my school.

And so specifically for Jewish students, this means that the office of civil rights now considers Judaism like a race or a nationality, not just a religion. And it's that 2004 interpretation. which is applying Title VI's protections to students of religious faiths who are targeted for what the Civil Rights Office calls perceived shared ancestry.

That new [02:00:00] interpretation has been adopted by every presidential administration since, including the Biden administration.

ROMAN MARS - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: So how does this expanded interpretation of Title VI, to include shared ancestry and Jewish students, how does this affect the protest?

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Well, because of the enforcement powers possessed by the Office of Civil Rights.

So Congress has given the Office of Civil Rights broad powers to investigate complaints of potential Title VI violations. If there's a violation of Title VI, the office is supposed to first find some cooperative resolution with the school that's being investigated. So that might mean persuading a college to change its policies or how it treats students or maybe doing something different or to stop doing something it had been doing before.

And of course, we're talking about federal funds. And as a very last resort, the department of education could seek to cut off federal funding for the college or university. And that could mean the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. And practically that's [02:01:00] probably unlikely, but the threat of it does give a college the incentive to change its behavior.

If it's been found in violation of title six and since October 7th. The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has opened dozens of investigations into claims of anti Semitism at colleges and K through 12 schools under this relatively recent interpretation.

ROMAN MARS - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: So how does the language of the protesters.

you know, when they're sort of taken in and perceived by Jewish students, how does that violate title six?

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: That is a much, much more difficult question. So a title six violation can happen with a school, either one, when the school treats a student differently because of their race, color, or national origin, or two, because the school creates what courts have called a hostile environment.

So a hostile environment means that the school might know that a student is being treated differently because of their race. Mm

MUSIC: hmm. But

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: the school does nothing [02:02:00] about it. And so it's that kind of indifference that can violate federal law. And the Office of Civil Rights has recently released some examples of how this might work.

So imagine a college student whose dorm room is defaced with swastikas or white supremacist slogans about Jewish people. Or a Muslim student who is targeted for wearing a hijab. And if the school is told about this and does nothing, The office of civil rights has said that can be the basis of a hostile environment investigation for a violation of title six, based on this idea of shared ancestry.

MUSIC: Yeah.

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: So if any pro Palestinian protester acts in ways that are similar, that would be a potential violation of federal law for the schools. But it's not so easy, right? Because what about some other statements? What if a campus protester puts up a sign that says, Israel is a racist state that must be dismantled?

Or if a professor says that we must oppose Israel at all costs? Are those [02:03:00] statements violations of federal anti discrimination law? Because if you're a Jewish student hearing these words, and you consider Israel as part of what it means to be Jewish, then it could feel threatening. And if you're asked to disavow Israel just to cross campus and get to your classes, it can feel like maybe you have to deny your own identity just to be a student on campus.

But even if these kinds of statements might violate Title VI, Aren't these also the kinds of statements that are protected by the First Amendment? So thus far, there haven't been any major court decisions that answer these questions. But there may be soon, because ever since October 7th, a number of lawsuits have been filed that ask this very question, whether highly critical statements against Israel can violate Title VI.

Because Title VI has been interpreted not just to give powers to the Office of Civil Rights, but it allows private individuals to bring lawsuits too. [02:04:00] So for example, there is now a lawsuit by a group of Jewish students who have sued the University of California, Berkeley Law School.

ROMAN MARS - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: What's the story with that lawsuit?

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Well, some student groups at the law school had established a policy. They said, look, we're not going to invite any speakers who hold views in support of Zionism. So the UC Berkeley lawsuit argues that this student policy violates title six. Because it's anti Semitic and the law school tolerates it. It allows the student groups to do this.

Now the law school, on the other hand, has argued that, well, we can't punish student groups for their policy because that would violate their own first amendment rights. And in June of this year, a group of Jewish students at UCLA filed a federal lawsuit over pro Palestinian protests held at UCLA's campus in April.

ROMAN MARS - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: So what happened there?

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Well, there, the protesters established an encampment on part of the campus called Royce Quad. And according to the [02:05:00] lawsuit, protesters established checkpoints at the campus and required people who wanted to cross the quad to go to class or go to the library, they had to denounce the state of Israel.

MUSIC: Uh huh.

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: And the plaintiffs here, these Jewish students, argued, well, they had a religious obligation to support Israel. And the fact that the university did nothing to stop these checkpoints violated their rights. And on August 13th, a federal district court judge granted the plaintiff's request for a preliminary injunction or to order the university to stop doing what they were doing.

And the judge ordered UCLA to ensure equal access to Jewish students when they wanted to be on campus and go to class. Now, this lawsuit claimed that UCLA violated the students First Amendment rights, including their free exercise of religion rights, as well as their rights under Title VI. On the preliminary injunction motion, the judge found that the students were likely to win on their First Amendment free exercise of religion claim, so he didn't resolve the Title VI claim.

And on August [02:06:00] 23rd, UCLA decided not to appeal the judge's decision. So that was a victory, uh, for the students at UCLA who had argued that they'd basically been denied their ability to freely access libraries and classes on campus.

ROMAN MARS - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Because they had to go through these checkpoints.

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: That's right. At the very least, this means that other lawsuits are also going to be coming to test out whether these kinds of actions that we're seeing and have seen violated federal anti discrimination law.

Whose Speech, Whose Campus Part 2 - What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law - Air Date 9-10-24

ROMAN MARS - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: So describe institutional neutrality.

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Well, after October 7th, many colleges and universities offered official statements of support for 7th attack. And many colleges offered official statements in support of Ukraine over the Russian invasion. Many colleges also condemned the attack on the Capitol in 2021. And many of them also made official statements regarding George Floyd's death when he was killed by a police [02:07:00] officer in 2020.

But it's been the October 7th statements that have put universities maybe in the most uncomfortable position because They received a response from students and some faculty that were not in support of the statements that they'd made. They wanted them to reverse those statements. And so after the campus process of last spring, where you had hundreds of arrests of students and some faculty, several colleges, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Texas have said that they will adopt what they call institutional neutrality.

And you asked about it. It really means that yeah. The university is officially saying we will stay out of political and social issues. And it's a policy position most commonly associated with the university of Chicago, because it comes from a document called the Calvin report from 1967. The university of Chicago had studied this through a committee saying, what should we do in the wake of these violent protests of the sixties?

And Chicago ever since has said, we stay out of these things. We [02:08:00] don't say one way or the other, uh, in terms of our political support.

ROMAN MARS - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: So if henceforth all these institutions were, you know, neutral, how would this affect the protest going forward?

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Well, it does affect it because of what the students protesting for Palestine have been asking for.

First of all, they've been asking for campuses to condemn Israel. So if a college is institutionally neutral, they'll say, we're not going to say one way or the other. They've also been asking campuses to divest their financial holdings from companies that have anything to do with Israel. And that too can be related to institutional neutrality.

So if a college says from now on, we are institutionally neutral, then they could respond to these demands by saying, look, politics do not dictate our financial decisions. We're not going to change based on what students are asking for. I

ROMAN MARS - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: mean, through all of this, how did the University of Chicago fare?

Like, if they adhered to the Calvin Report since, you know, the late 1960s, were protests [02:09:00] substantially different there?

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Well, they didn't reach any level of violence. They certainly restricted, uh, the way in which students could protest. And I think more than that, you know, for a long time now, the University of Chicago has, uh, promoted a certain culture that you can have respectful protest.

You're allowed to protest in these places and in these ways, but that's it. If you go beyond that, we're going to crack down on you. And I think other colleges have promoted freer interpretations of how and whether and when to protest. And some of that of course has backfired because it's led to calling the police in and sometimes, um, some violence and a lot of tension on campus.

So what you see with these student protests of 2024 is colleges having to take a new look at what free speech really does mean in practice for them and how much they're willing to tolerate.

MUSIC: Yeah. Yeah.

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: And, and keep in mind that some of the faculty themselves were part of another generation of protests.

So [02:10:00] there's some irony here too.

ROMAN MARS - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it just goes back to this whole idea of, like, when there's conflicting ideology, free speech is extremely complicated. So is neutrality. I mean, like, neutrality, the idea of neutrality, you know, could mean, oh yeah, I'm not on anyone's side. And then another interpretation of neutrality is the Swiss, like, laundering Nazi gold.

You know what I mean? Like, it's just like, both of those things are. Kind of their own mess.

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Yeah. And of course, neutrality is a statement, right? Yeah, exactly. So if you look at the, if you look at the University of Chicago statement, um, for January 6th. It only says we understand there was a terrible incident and we have counselors and people to help for students who are upset.

That's very, very neutral to say that there's been a thing that happened. Whereas other campuses were much more willing to say, we condemn this attack on democracy. Now it all works when most of the campus is behind that [02:11:00] statement. It doesn't work when there's incredible division.

ROMAN MARS - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Right, right. Right. And so is there any sense of how this will play out?

I mean, is it just like a matter of there really being no solution if the temperature is hot enough, you know what I'm saying is the only solution just like. Things not being quite so volatile.

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Well, I mean, I, I think it's, uh, early yet in the school year to see whether these protests will be of the same size and intensity as last spring.

I do think there will be continuing conflicts in the courts now that there have been investigations and there have been some successes in the courts, um, on the part of, um, Uh, Jewish students who say, look, this is a title six violation. And I think it will be really interesting to see how courts grapple with, is this a protected speech issue or is this a federal anti discrimination issue?

Because there does have to be some kind of decision and it's not obvious, um, which way [02:12:00] to go for some of the most difficult questions.

ROMAN MARS - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: Yeah. It doesn't seem obvious to me at all. It seems completely case by case with every utterance, like every message. It seems completely different.

PROF ELIZABETH JOH - CO-HOST, WHAT ROMAN MARS CAN LEARN: That's right. And I think the problem then, of course, as someone pointed out, is that if you have the potential for the Office of Civil Rights to investigate you as a college and you just don't want to get involved in too many lawsuits, then you pull back and you actually curb student speech.

You say, you know, you can't say stuff like this because we don't want to get sued in court.

SECTION D: RESISTANCE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally Section D: Resistance.

Anti-Zionism Sweeping Across Jewish Communities - The Majority Report - Air Date 9-12-24

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: And I think it came from, you know, a real sense of like, These really harmful ideas can get bonded with our identity such that we think that that's who we are. And so, you know, that's part of why we talk about racism, and we talk about white supremacy, particularly that there's this idea of supremacy that got bonded [02:13:00] in with what it meant to be a white person when the whole world.

idea of whiteness was being formed. It was being woven in, right? That supremacy is a part of it. And so now when people are like, Oh, I'm an anti racist, like I'm a white person, but I'm actively working against that, that connection that happened. I think the same thing happened for Jewish people with Zionism.

There's been Judaism forever. There's been Jewish people since the beginning, and they've been practicing in so many different ways. It's so many communal ways, so many beautiful ways. Um, I have a lot of incredible Jewish friends in my life who have gifted me the practice of ritual with them, of Shabbat with them.

Um, I've gotten to go through some of these things. I'm like, Oh, what it means to be Jewish is actually to be loving, to be caring, to be looking out for your neighbors, to be thinking about repair from harm. Zionism comes in and is like, this is about taking land and claiming something and trying to create an ethno state.

That, that. That's a totally different project from what Judaism has [02:14:00] been about for its entire existence, but it comes in at this interesting moment where there's a ton of trauma and you can take advantage of that and you can fuse these things together. So I wanted to talk about that because I learned that from anti Zionist Jewish people.

That they were like the way that I began to understand that Zionism wasn't a fundamental aspect of being Jewish. It was actually a really harmful thing that was happening. And it was. We were raised to think it was a beautiful vision and that it was our destiny, but actually it's, it's causing so much harm.

It's causing, um, so much dissonance in our community. And, and now we see this genocide playing out where I think if any other country was doing what Israel is doing right now, we would be very clear headed. And it's even interesting, you know, to watch the debate and to be like, Oh, look at this, the differences in the stance on Ukraine and the stance on Palestine, where the power dynamics are so similar, and we're showing up in one situation for the person who's being attacked, and in one situation for the person [02:15:00] who is doing the attacking.

And, yes, there, There's so much, I mean, we can unpack and unpack and unthread and unthread, but for me as a black person who has really lived in this country and watched and become in deep community with white people, undoing racism, it felt so important to me to see that there was an option like this for Jewish people that was like, oh, we can undo this work as well.

And in this moment. I think one of the most beautiful things I've seen, um, amidst all the horror is how many Jewish people are like, oh, I can let go of Zionism and I can heal. I can recover my soul and I can recover community. And in, in doing that, that's the way that we will actually stop this problem, not just in this moment, but in an ongoing way.

Because I think that's also the piece is now people are not just saying we want to cease fire. It's like we want an arms embargo and we want to stop this occupation. We want to end this. And I will also say this. I live on land that was stolen. I live in the United States. And so it's very [02:16:00] personal for me.

I'm like, I didn't get, I wasn't there at the moment in history when I could have intervened on this happening and could have changed the story of this happening. But I'm here now and my country is supporting the same thing happening somewhere else. And I can intervene. I can play a role in that. So it felt really important for me to include that.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, um, and I think the optimism about that moment, that, that display of solidarity for a free Palestine in this current moment is, I think, you know, part of the vision that you're, you're hoping for, which is a glimmer of hope in, in this and, um, can you expand a little more on the notions of power and whiteness and how, um, the, the, you, you including that section, you know, it's also, you know, An acknowledgment that whiteness and, and, and power through whiteness is, is done through imperialism, too, um, and that Zionism has folded into that, obviously, but that that history is so present, [02:17:00] I think, in white supremacy all around us.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: Yeah, I think that's important. I mean, I want to acknowledge, you know, and I was, as I was writing it, I was like, I understand that Jewish people are multiracial people, um, and then I also understand and what I see, the visual of what's happening between Israel and Palestine is very much um, That Israel has, in part of its development, really drawn in white Jewishness and really created a space of whiteness for Jewish people.

And if you study American history, you see how whiteness developed and how it has claimed one people at a time, right? It's like, okay, we're starting off with these British people, these French people. Okay. Now, all right. Italians, okay. Irish people, like y'all can be down. Now Jewish people come in in a different way where they're like, we were oppressed by white people.

We were oppressed by people who wanted to be Aryan. So the journey from going from that to being in a space where you're like mostly in the U. S. when we were moving through the world, we're identified as white people. We're seen as white people and it gives us a different kind of [02:18:00] access and a different kind of power than brown people have.

And when I speak with anti Zionist Jewish people, they're like, I can see that. I can understand that. I can acknowledge that. And then I can take responsibility for it. I think that's part of what we're seeing play out internationally now is that we're looking at the Middle East and we're partnering with people who have the whitest looking leadership, people who would come to this country and be acknowledged as white people.

We're being like, that's where we're going to pour our energy and attention. That's who we're going to call our ally. That's who we're going to call our friend, the people who will serve Western interest in this part of the world. It's deep and. The other piece of this I think that we have to bring in is we're in a, you know, it was 9 11 yesterday.

It was like we're in this, we're in a long arc in the U. S. with our Islamophobia, with our anti Arab sentiment, with our racism against people from that part of the world. So these things are all tied in, right? And one of the things I keep trying to do is like pull them apart [02:19:00] just enough so we can look at them clearly and be like, oh, we were told to see these people.

As untrustworthy as terrorist as violent. We were told that as a black person. I'm like, I've been on the other end of that same kind of storytelling where all of my people are something and all of us deserve some kind of, um, punishment and all of the white people are innocent and all of them are victims and all of them deserve protection.

And once you start to see it, you can't unsee it. Right? This book, the ideas. It's exactly the same tropes. Yeah, and it's sexual violence, but it's also like the story only gets told one way, right? I mean, I think it was so interesting in the debate when Kamala was like, well, look at where all this started, October 7th.

And I was like, oh, that's such, um, that's, that's a very Western way to tell that story, right? To say, oh, you know, You know, and again, because it's the same thing that happened with 9 11, where it's like, oh, this just happened to us out of the blue, out of nowhere. We have no idea why it happened. Instead of saying, what are the conditions that are being [02:20:00] created around the world that would make people want to do this, right?

Can we get curious about it? And without having to justify it, right? I think that there's a disparate distinction that's important. That's being able to say, I'm not in charge of whatever strategies people are using for their resistance, but can I understand why people might engage in resistance or why people might engage in pushing back against empire or why people might engage in pushing back against those who are oppressing them?

And one of the things I think we are privileged in is that we get to sit in a place where I'm like, well, I'm not. Under bombs and constant attack and being enclosed in a small space. I have room to have a ton of nuance about everything that's happening. When I have been in situations of deep oppression, I, that nuance fell away.

All I was concerned with was how do I get this person to stop hurting me? And. whatever story I need to change to get them to stop hurting me, I'm going to try to do that. I think we're in that situation right now where there's a ton of people who are like, how do I get this person [02:21:00] to stop hurting me?

And to be a U. S. citizen is to recognize like, we are the funder of most of the harm that's happening in the world. We are thinking it through. We are collaborating with those who are causing harm and we need to take responsibility for that. If we hope to continue to exist.

Palestine In Israeli School Books w Author Nurit Peled-Elhanan Part 2 - Book Cafe Podcast - Air Date 2-22-24

NURIT PELED-ELHANAN: So I'm an Israeli Jewish woman. Well, I didn't choose to be Jewish. You know, this is forced upon you. There is something like Jewish blood, which is really a very racist way of looking at people. If your mother is Jewish, then your blood is Jewish, then you are Jewish, but it's not a matter of choice.

And in Israel, they divide the population between Jews and non Jews. The non Jews are nothing but non Jews. Nobody tells you what they are, only what [02:22:00] they aren't. And these are, of course, the Palestinian Arab citizens. They are defined as non Jewish population or non Jewish sector, and that's it. Okay, I grew up here in a very patriotic, chauvinistic, racist society.

Uh, we didn't have television. We didn't have any way to know what's going on in the world. And, uh, but then I went, uh, abroad to study and I started looking at things differently and I learned a lot of things that I didn't know about, uh, Israel. And that changed me a little bit, you know, Little by little.

My family was mostly socialist. My father was in the army. He retired as a general, but he was very critical of the army and of the politics of Israel, of course. [02:23:00] After he retired, he devoted himself to, um, to the study of Arabic and especially Palestinian literature. And he was a professor of Palestinian literature in University of Tel Aviv.

I am a researcher of, um, the educational discourse of Israel. So I started by studying the development of literacy at school, uh, writing and reading and speaking at school. This is my PhD. And then I studied the classroom discourse and dialogue in the classroom. Class, and I came upon racist discourse in class, especially towards Ethiopian children.

So I did some study about that. And then I wanted to study the teaching of scientific discourse. Because there are a lot of [02:24:00] literature that says that the fact that so many children decide that science is not for them is not because of science, but because of the language of science. And I started studying that, but when I I read the school books.

I realized there's something much more urgent to look at, which is racism in Israeli school books. Uh, so my first book is about the representation, misrepresentation of Palestinians in Palestine in Israeli school book. And my second book just came out is about other minorities, Jewish minorities that are marginalized and discriminated.

And also, of course, in the textbooks, who are the Arab Jews, Jews who came from Arab countries and the Ethiopian Jews who were brought in the 90s. Um, and of course, Holocaust education, Holocaust education is, is the key [02:25:00] factor to understand a lot of things about Israeli education and Israeli behavior also.

It is the main factor of Israeli identity, both personal and national. More than Zionism, more than Judaism, more than anything, it's a holocaust. Israel is presented to the children as an alternative to holocaust. And the potential exterminators today are Ever since, you know, we befriended Germany at 53, 1953, the Arabs received the role of potential exterminators.

So all the feelings and actions of revenge go to them. The idea is that since we are the eternal victims, we have to be very strong and domineering in the area in order to prevent another holocaust. And that's the main, uh, the [02:26:00] main foundation of, uh, the Holocaust.

Anti-Zionism Sweeping Across Jewish Communities Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 9-12-24

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: But, um, personally, you had your section on your conversation with your sisters was something that I really loved. Like I have a sister and I really resonated with how you talked about how you guys would argue and, uh, lacking, uh, Uh, models of conflict resolution when growing up, uh, like my parents are lawyers, so, uh, we were taught to argue a lot, uh, that's why I'm in this job, maybe a little bit, um, but not the conflict resolution part, and we've gotten better, but like some of your suggestions about these kind of inter familiar, familial Dynamics are really key here too because we always get I am from viewers about my my brothers in the QAnon rabbit hole My dad is a trump supporting The whatever and how do I approach them about this?

I think this the the the conversation that you transcribe between you [02:27:00] and your sisters is About repair in those relationships if you could talk a bit about that. Yeah

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: Yeah, well, you know, I I do appreciate it's all connected to me, right that i'm like You Even when I look at Israel Palestine, I'm like, y'all are all brothers and sisters.

We're all brothers and sisters. Like, in all these places where conflict is happening, we're actually all family. We're all related. We're all coming from the same root systems. All of us are, but none of us learn conflict resolution. Almost none of us learn it at a young age. And that plays out. at the small scale, at the, you know, local scale, at the federal scale, and at the international scale.

Like, I think it's the same thing happening in, at every level. So for me, I'm like, okay, let's bring it back down to the most accessible place for many of us, which is every year I'm going to see my family, at least once. How do I shape those conversations? And this idea of repair, of being proactive about it, is, you know, Recognizing most of the time that the conflicts that are happening, it's, it looks like it's about something that's [02:28:00] happening between us, but so often it's actually about stuff that's happening within our own lives and things that are not being seen, right?

Those, that cousin who's like slipping off into a cult, something was not being seen usually in that person. There was a way that that person was not being heard. They were moving into a crisis of isolation. of individualism, of not feeling honored, of not feeling smart enough, not being recognized in dating or whatever it is.

Something's happening where that person's being lost in the social, um, fabric. They're slipping through. And as siblings, as loved ones, as family, we're in a unique position to be like, Hey, I see you. I see that something's going on. Can we talk about it? Can you tell me what's happening? When we started doing these check ins, like we have political differences.

They're not that, that kind of, um, you know, it's not like that kind of golf, right? Yeah. It's not like a huge chasm. I'm like, Hey girl, you know, but, but we were coming together and being like, [02:29:00] we're exploding over how the dishwasher got loaded or something. And then having to, Cry it all out and be like, well, what was really happening is I'm super stressed at my job or My money's not right or I just went through a breakup or something's happening with my health or I'm in a grieving process And I need you to know that so that you can be tender with me That's the thing that almost everyone wants is someone People to look at them be like I can be tender with you.

I can still see the child in you I can see the person that I love in you and I can give you room for your humanity and your contradictions And your need for repair, whatever that might be, um, I can learn to give you a good apology. And then I can learn, you know, the good, the best apology is the one where it includes how you're not going to do something again and you don't do it.

So it's like really learning to make those adaptations as well. Um, I think that if more people are able to practice this at the intimate level, and I also want to say, like, if your family doesn't feel like a safe space to practice this [02:30:00] chosen family or other, your friendship circles. There's tons of places where you can actually practice this.

The idea is to just be very intentional. Like, we're going to be together. How are we? Let's start off with, how are we actually coming into this? And then let's be.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Democracy Now!, The Daily Show, The Muckrake Political Podcast, The Real News Network, The Majority Report, What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law, and The Book Cafe Podcast. 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, [02:31:00] 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 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 twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from BestOfTheLeft.com

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#1658 Pileup on the Information Superhighway: Information Dispensation in the Age of Deep Doubt (Transcript)

Posted by · September 27, 2024 7:35 AM

Air Date 9/27/2024

[00:00:00]

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

Let's just say that it's not a coincidence that right wing authoritarians are on the rise at the same time as people around the world are having a harder time than ever figuring out what's true. That said, society is beginning to fight back.

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 45 minutes today includes The New Abnormal, The Commonwealth Club World Affairs, Wisecrack, Zoe B., Tech Tank and On The Media. Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in three sections: Section A. Social misinformation; Section B. Live by the algorithm; and Section C. Solutions.

Trump: Project 2025 Will Lay ‘Groundwork’ for Second Term - The New Abnormal - Air Date 9-22-24

JASON PARGIN: I'm someone who is terminally online. I have been since I [00:01:00] first got an AOL connection in 1996, I think, and have had many experiences of refreshing a feed, not of journalists, but of people who are rapidly trying to gather information ahead of the journalists, because the journalists are waiting to actually get sources and confirm things.

So I just did this yesterday, after there was another assassination attempt on the president, like I was refreshing Twitter and watching the bad information flow in and watching good information get discarded. It's something I've been doing now for more than half my life. So ultimately it becomes a story about that, about the movement of information through this bizarre system we've built.

ANDY LEVY - HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Yeah. And look, there's a lot of stuff in the book is about the internet and about social media. One of the characters in the book, a former FBI agent named Joan Key, says that, or is thinking in the book that a TikTok is possibly the most addictive piece of software ever created.

You, in real [00:02:00] life, are someone who uses that platform a lot, and really well, I should add. Do you share Joan Key's belief in this case?

JASON PARGIN: In a book like this, I tried to include characters that represent every view, and I never wanted to seem like one person is voicing, like they're there to yell at the reader about "You need to get off your phone," because I am a creature of this ecosystem.

I would not have a writing career if the internet had not come along. My first novel was originally posted as a blog. It was one of the first big books that, back in the era when letting bloggers publish books was seen as weird. So I cannot lecture anyone else about being glued to a screen.

But there is no question: the algorithms are not built for truth. They are not built to make you smarter. They are built to keep you doing one thing and one thing only, which is glued to a screen. So, automatically from the jump, no matter who is running it, no matter how honest the company is or how much you like them, [00:03:00] their incentive Is not in your benefit. Their incentive is to keep you glued to a screen where, in a perfect world, if there was a news story and you wanted to find out what had happened and then you find out what happened and so you can say, okay, now my curiosity has been satisfied. I have learned what has happened. I'm going to turn it off and go outside and play with my children in the sun. The algorithms fail if you ever turn it off. So it's more like a casino thing. Obviously the casino's job is not to help you win money. The casino's job is to get you to stay there, glued to a stool, pulling the lever on the slot machine.

So the thing we are using to get us information -- and with TikTok, Gen Z uses TikTok as their Google.

ANDY LEVY - HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Right.

JASON PARGIN: When they want to find out something, they search on TikTok. This is a habit. TikTok is not built for that. TikTok is built to hypnotize you. And I have more than half a million followers on there. I've been on there for two years now and have [00:04:00] grown a huge following. And I tell myself that I'm trying to be one of the good ones, like I'm trying to spread things that are actually true or things that are interesting and not trying to play up on people's fears or anything like that.

But if you try to do what you feel like is good, honest content, you will find yourself swimming against a current. And it's not that TikTok is specifically more evil than any other company. I don't trust Mark Zuckerberg more than I trust the owners of TikTok. They all have an incentive that runs counter to my interests.

ANDY LEVY - HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Except for Elon Musk, who is the world's greatest altruist, I think

JASON PARGIN: [Laughs} He just wants us to be better. That's all, his only motivation.

ANDY LEVY - HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Yeah. So in the book, Abbott, who is the Lyft driver and Ether, the woman who hires him to drive her in the black box, they head out across the country. And because they don't have any cell phones or computers or anything, they're blissfully unaware that they've become the subject of a ton of online scrutiny. Talk about the role of Reddit, both [00:05:00] in the book and in real life. You describe it as where the internet's unfathomable gush of data was gathered, sorted, and shaped into a satisfying narrative.

JASON PARGIN: That's -- it's so interesting to me because I've been around long enough to see the internet evolve from a series of chat rooms to a series of message boards to a series of blogs, and then finally around 2009, 2010, you start to see the social media era. And then when smartphones came along and started to become pervasive around 2012, everything totally changed, like everything had to be geared totally around something that could be easily browsed on a tiny screen.

My whole deal is that I have watched the nature of the flow of information change with each of those. For example, where there used to be a whole galaxy of message boards of niche interests, now it's pretty much just Reddit. The internet has one big message board and it's all divided up by the Subreddits. It's like if you're a fan of, I don't know, [00:06:00] the Philadelphia Eagles, once upon a time, there'd be a bunch of niche fan websites and message boards where you could talk to other fans. Well, now by far the biggest gathering of Eagles fans is going to be the Eagle Subreddit.

ANDY LEVY - HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Right.

JASON PARGIN: So he has basically a kind of monopoly on that kind of discussion, which is permanently recorded, long form discussion where it's all threaded out and people can reply to each other. But because that now dominates, then Reddit Culture, which is a very distinct type of culture where it's heavily male, it's heavily libertarian, it's heavily atheist, that kind of acts as an umbrella over everything in a way that I don't think anybody fully appreciates, especially if they were born after the internet was pervasive. Because the one advantage I feel like I have is that I was in my twenties before the first time I logged on, because I'm extremely old. I don't think -- it's hard to understand how platforms shape [00:07:00] information and shape misinformation until you've seen the difference between how people used to talk to each other versus how they talk to each other now. And with Reddit, which plays a role in the story, this is where people like Reddit wants you to do this. They want you to follow a live thread on any kind of a breaking story.

And so, for example. Infamously during the Boston Marathon bombings, Reddit sloots all got together and immediately found the guy who did it, who it turned out not only didn't do it, but he wasn't even alive at the time.

ANDY LEVY - HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Right.

JASON PARGIN: And that's the kind of thing where the rush to be first, where we're not going to wait for a journalist to tell us what happened; we are going to ourselves dig through social media. We're going to put clues together. We're going to take this still photo from a security camera and decide, Hey, I've decided I know exactly who this guy is.

The way like voting on comments works, the way certain things rise to the top, the way it governs what becomes visible and what doesn't, [00:08:00] that all winds up pulling the strings on the discussion in a way that is not necessarily visible to you, if this is the only way you've ever known it.

NBC's Jacob Ward: How Technology Shapes Our Thinking and Decisions Part 1 - Commonwealth Club World Affairs (CCWA) - Air Date 1-31-22

JACOB WARD: So around January 6th, for instance, I spent that day monitoring all of the online streaming folks, typically on YouTube, who were streaming from the Capitol. And they're pulling in the live feeds on people's phones, which of course have gotten so many of those people arrested. And at the top of the YouTube screen, if you have a certain number of subscribers, you're allowed to institute what's called a super chat, which allows you to charge money for pinning somebody's comment to the top of the window for a few minutes, and you can set whatever price you want. YouTube of course takes a percentage of that and it's 20 bucks, 50 bucks, whatever, a hundred bucks. And I'm just watching [00:09:00] people bing, bing, bing, they're making a few thousand bucks a minute.

Now...

DJ PATIL - HOST, COMMONWEALTH CLUB: Is that a few thousand bucks a minute live streaming over at the seat of democracy!

JACOB WARD: An insurrection at the Capitol. You cannot make it up. Exactly. You would not believe it if you saw it. So it is, yeah, it's idiocracy, but not funny, right?

And so that profit incentive is a huge driver of this. When I I was covering a lot of the Stop the Steel protest rallies at NBC, I would go see these people there who are streaming live. And it's so interesting because they look to a space alien, they might look like their job is the same as mine. They've got lights, their hair's done, they're doing their makeup, right? And then they go live. But these people are leading the chant. And, when you look at their Instagram feed, or you look at their super chat on YouTube, you can see they're making money in that moment. Now I am also being paid to cover this, but I don't get paid more per comment. You know what I'm saying?

DJ PATIL - HOST, COMMONWEALTH CLUB: You have an industry behind you ideally called [00:10:00] journalistic ethics.

JACOB WARD: Yeah, that's right. And I get fired if I make it up. If I lie, I get fired. So there's some gargoyles around it.

But anyway, lfor me, earning the grift was really powerful. And then there's a very brilliant woman named Nandi Jamini who runs something called Check My Ads. And, she was the co-founder of Sleeping Giants, you're probably familiar with. And she has been doing all of this research about the ways in which online advertising funds all of these very scary publishers of all kinds of scary stuff. And, she turned me on to the research that really set her on her path, which showed that there are all kinds of blacklist services that will spike certain published articles against -- basically make it such that advertisers who don't want to be publishing or advertising next to sensitive topics, won't be published next to certain news articles. And she discovered that in fact, with the research actually discovered, that it is people covering [00:11:00] really important stuff that are being blacklisted off of these lists, such that some Pulitzer Prize-winning brilliant people at the New York Times, for instance, no online advertising was appearing next to their work. So it's actually costing the New York Times money to run that kind of really important journalism.

So for me, when I think about misinformation again, I'm thinking, Okay, there is a system here, both of pattern, dumb pattern recognition that nobody is equipped to question, and incentive structures that is fueling this stuff.

I also blame, as much as the next person, our tendency to just try and be tribal and crass and get attention. The attention economy is a really important part of this, all that stuff. But there's some specific machinery in there that I think we should be starting to think about how we're going to take a hammer to it.

DJ PATIL - HOST, COMMONWEALTH CLUB: One of the ones I will highlight because this is how much I enjoyed the book here is, and I think it's in chapter two, you talk [00:12:00] about this experiment of what happened when kids are just basically told they're on the green team versus the orange team and what affiliation does as a powerful psychological motivator, and it gets me to one of these big questions that's in here is -- and the way I almost want to describe it is once you -- could you talk about this is addiction of people have too much time on their hands. because technology is freeing them up. They can take drugs, get into the stupor and detached from the world. Same thing happens with gambling. You see a version of that. You see a version of this with people who don't have. alternatives to spend their time on work or other things, getting into these forums where they get radicalized, not just here in the United States, we see it around the world. And it's almost this version of, we're using technology to free ourselves up from time, but then, when time comes together, your free time plus despair, the note I wrote is "free [00:13:00] time plus despair equals opportunity to take advantage of people, and technology accelerates it."

I'd love for your reaction to that.

JACOB WARD: Yeah. I'm very interested about what you say. I'm not sure that I blame free time as much as I blame despair in the equation that you have there. And I also think that social isolation is a huge part of that as well.

So one of the common threads there in the book, there's a 14-year-old kid who lost his mom, and was deeply isolated in Florida, who wound up going down this rabbit hole, of quote unquote, "race realism," and all of this stuff, and wound up adhering to all kinds of white supremacist ideology.

And he turned out to be Muslim. That's right. He was a, his parents were Bosnian Muslims who escaped genocide. And he nonetheless wound up down this rabbit hole and became somebody who believes in white supremacy. That kid couldn't have been sadder or lonelier than he was. He was deeply looking for connection and was not able to find it.

Another [00:14:00] character who fell prey to online casino simulators, also, a deeply lonely and sad person. And here's the thing, what I'm starting to understand is that there are marketing mechanisms out there that find people who exhibit those conditions. I don't know about you, but a lot of my pandemic -- as soon as I turned in the book, I went hard at TikTok for a while and would doom scroll my way through hours of it, until -- and here's what happens when you get to a certain point in TikTok -- until a video comes up that says you've been scrolling really fast; you should slow down. There's a little warning that says you've been going too fast, slow down. And then eventually it'll say, you've been looking at videos for quite a while. You want to take a break?

Meanwhile, every ad I get is for ADHD medication. And I'm sure anyone out there listening to this who's been on TikTok recently has gotten these ads as well. Huge amounts of ADHD medication.

Now, maybe everybody's getting that. Maybe that's just a blanket kind of advertising campaign. I don't think so. [00:15:00] I think that inside that company, there is a pattern recognition system that says this guy is exhibiting the classic signs of X, Y, and Z; serve him an ADHD ad. It is not just the affinities that we have and the hobbies we exhibit and what we post about. It is the way we behave that is showing our inner state. And I think that we are being analyzed in that way. That is the loop. That's what's starting to grab us. And as they get better at noticing that I'm ADHD, I'm not actually a diagnosed ADHD, people. And there's a whole problem with advertising ADHD to people who have not been clinically diagnosed.

But putting all that aside, the qualities they have spotted in me, and are feeding me information as a result, basically the way TikTok is for me, it's like doing drugs. I do it for a couple of months, and then I have to erase it off my phone, because I cannot control myself with that app.

And so, yeah, there's an inner state being analyzed here, that I think is a huge part of this. And, maybe it is extra time on our hands, but I don't know about you, like half [00:16:00] of Americans can't put together an extra $400 in an emergency right now.

I don't think time is our problem.

Streaming is Changing Politics...Is That A Good Thing? - Wisecrack - Air Date 9-20-24

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: It's clear that authenticity is critical to the success of political streaming, but of course, it's not just about being cool and relatable, because some of these guys aren't cool or relatable. They're kind of weird and unrelatable.

It's that the very structure of the medium creates moments of truthfulness in both the streamer and their audience that are almost impossible to achieve in other forms of digital media.

Now we can better understand this via the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson and his concept of pure duration.

Now, for Bergson, duration is a way of thinking about time or a type of time which operates in distinction from clock time. It's not mathematical or mechanical. Like I have a little watch right now, and the second thing it's going 50, 51, 52, 53, right? [00:17:00] Sequential, linear, mathematical, things of that nature.

But duration is more to do with our experience of time. Imagine what it feels like to wait for 45 minutes in the waiting room of your dentist. Feels like an eternity. Now imagine what it feels like to spend 45 minutes catching up with your best friend that you haven't seen in a while. Probably flies by before you know it, they're on their way, and you wish that you could hang out for longer. Same amount of, linear time, but we experience it way differently.

And we see this at play in the unique temporal experience of watching a live stream. Now, unlike watching a cable news show, which is broken up into distinct segments and commercial breaks equaling precisely one hour, streams can often go on for hours without any segment breaks or time constraints.

To be clear, some streamers do have sponsors -- take a little break to talk about that -- but it's not quite the same as cutting away to, I don't know, some commercial about mesothelioma.

AD CLIP: How will this affect my loved ones?

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: But all of this creates a sense of flow that [00:18:00] affects both the streamer and the audience. And in doing so it can collapse the way that we think about and experience time.

Now think about it this way: okay, you're pretty unlikely to get home from work and just say, now I'm going to sit in front of a screen for five hours, watching a guy talk about politics, play some games, hey, maybe do some research. Instead, you probably just tune into your favorite streamer, and before you know it, you're caught up in the discussion, you're jumping in the chat, you're participating in an active way, and, then five hours have passed, and holy crap, you have to be up for work soon.

Now, for Bergson, this disillusion of clock time creates the space for "pure duration," where we're purely in the moment, fully experiencing our own internal lives.

Now, Bergson unfortunately died way before you could watch Hbomberguy stream Donkey Kong 64 for 57 hours straight, but, he may be considerate in terms of music.

CLIP: Chunky Kong is my favorite.

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: Now, music does follow a specific temporal structure, right? It [00:19:00] conforms to a certain clock time. Maybe a song is in 4/4 at 110 beats per minute. But when you're caught up in a song that you love, your experience is one of pure duration. You're not thinking about measures and time signatures. You're just fully in it. This is why Deadheads can vibe out to a song for 45 minutes and then want more as soon as it ends. Cause when that music never stops, you feel free from everything else.

This feeling of temporal freedom is the exception to the rule of our normal lives. Which, let's be honest, are mostly governed by clock time, and more specifically, work time or work clock time.

Now, as Bergson writes, "We spend the majority of our lives outside ourselves, hardly perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost." He goes on to write that "we live for the external world rather than for ourselves. We speak rather than we think. We are acted rather than act ourselves." This means that our identities and our internal states of consciousness are shaped by rigid clock time. It's maybe I'm this [00:20:00] person when I'm at home; when I'm this person when I'm at work.

But considered from a perspective of duration, I'm all of these things at once. And my identity and consciousness are constantly unfolding.

And streamers are able to tap into this, creating an experience of duration in which different elements of their consciousness or perspective emerge over time. Think about the stream marathons of someone like Ludwig, where dramatic variations in his behavior can create a palpable sense of authenticity.

Sometimes even a streamer's mistakes or lapses in judgment or random asides make them feel most real to us.

CLIP: Hawk Tua on that phobia.

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: Take this time that Assam Piker, seemingly forgetting that he was streaming, got a little bit distracted.

But the sort of realness that emerges via duration doesn't just lead to personal details or accidental bro behavior. It also creates a particular experience for us, the audience, one in which I am actively listening and engaging and experiencing myself thinking in real time.

When this is happening, it can [00:21:00] feel like my identity is unfolding in dialogue with both the streamer I'm watching and the community that I'm engaging with. This can all create the conditions for the political streamer to truly guide the audience when dealing with tricky or contentious issues and policies. And when they do this, they might help the audience see past rhetorical traps and empty platitudes, ideally creating the feeling that you're learning alongside your favorite streamer.

And the authenticity of the medium, mixed with the freedom of duration, can then lower our guards. And that makes us maybe more likely to reconsider our opinions, or remain open to ideas we don't immediately agree with.

That might sound like I'm being too gracious, but I've seen this a little bit on our tiny little YouTube streams where people in the chat kind of open their minds, debate with each other, change their minds on stuff. It's a very beautiful thing to see. Other times they just say This channel fell off. Why is he here?

Now, we can see some of this in Piker's analysis of a debate between Ben Shapiro and Malcolm Nance, in which, the audience gets all the [00:22:00] benefits of having a political commentator who can translate, add context, and fact check in real time. This enhances the audience's understanding and equips them to critically engage for themselves.

And it's not just the political streamers are able to offer us more honest and authentic analysis than traditional news media. They also have a pretty dialectical relationship with their audiences, participating in an open back and forth that can shift the conversation or lead to digressions and insights that a streamer maybe wouldn't arrive at on their own.

The duration of these streams and the communities they engender really do open up new types of interaction between host and audience. One where, unlike most experiences of our media consumption, you feel like being in the audience actually matters. We see this in an instance like Piker responding to his audience when they had concerns about the rise of anti woke rhetoric.

The unique temporal nature of political streaming might then be one of the reasons that it creates such impassioned communities, which is all well and good. But if you're like me, you [00:23:00] might still be a little skeptical of the actual political efficacy of any of this. Because sure, political streamers draw audiences as large as traditional news outlets, but are they as politically influential? Now, this question feels especially relevant when we know that networks like Fox News and CNN or podcasts like Pod Save America have exhibited the power to influence voters.

Here's the thing that makes streaming so interesting on a theoretical level, that the temporality that comes through an experience of duration might actually be the problem. By keeping folks locked into a consumptive trance, it's arguably doing the opposite of facilitating offline political activism.

Which raises the question, are we too busy watching political streams to actually participate in politics?

YouTube and the Death of Media Literacy - Zoe Bee - Air Date 9-2-24

ZOE BEE - HOST, ZOE BEE: For a lot of people with poor media literacy, numbers are a really easy metric for understanding media. Why would you worry about actually analyzing a film to understand its strengths [00:24:00] and weaknesses when you could just look at its Rotten Tomatoes score instead?

And on the industry side, making art objective and quantifiable makes it easier to figure out the most efficient method of dispensing that art, as we've seen with the rise of binge watching thanks to streaming services. And we're not just seeing this with movies, either. There's been a recent rise in book summary apps, and I find that absolutely fascinating.

Now, obviously, things like CliffsNotes have been around forever, but now we have ShortForm, Blinkist, and Magibook, which aren't helpful guides to books. They're literally just summaries of books. And something that all of these services emphasize is how easy they're making things. They take confusing ideas and explain them in plain and simple ways. Never get confused by a complicated book again. I don't know if you've seen these ads for Magibook, but they are wild. There's a couple of videos that I've seen from folks breaking down [00:25:00] exactly what they do and how terrible it is, so I won't get too much into it here, but suffice it to say, Making something simpler doesn't necessarily make it better.

But if you see books not as art that's made with intention, but instead as a quantifiable and infinitely reducible data point, of which you need to sell as many units as possible, then of course it makes sense to reduce it down until it's as easy as possible to consume. But this focus on ease of use is also a big factor in another media literacy issue: the spread of misinformation online.

Part of this is because, as Mike Caulfield puts it, the primary use of misinformation is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In other words, it's confirmation bias.

Social [00:26:00] media actually thrives on confirmation bias. Because while changing your beliefs is hard, maintaining them, having them catered to, being told what you want to hear, is easy. And like I've said over and over again, brains like easy. So, social media companies aren't incentivized to combat these algorithms, and instead just focus on giving users what they want.

And that's to say nothing of how much YouTube and Facebook actually directly profit off of grifters. But just because these systems aren't incentivized to change, doesn't mean that we're stuck like this. Now, unfortunately, a lot of solutions for these big picture problems are unsatisfying. Like I mentioned earlier, most articles and organizations focus on education as a panacea to media literacy issues, and I think that's just a lazy answer.

One of the books I read for this video is a non-fiction graphic novel, A Firehose of Falsehood: the Story of Disinformation. And I think that it can be a [00:27:00] really valuable resource, like it has some really interesting stuff on the history of propaganda, but this whole book talks about the firehose, the big institutional forces that overload us with information.

And its solution to that issue? Wear a raincoat. So, first of all, that metaphor really falls apart, because the danger of a fire hose isn't the water. It's the pressure. Sure, wearing a raincoat will probably keep your clothes from getting wet, but it's still gonna hurt. And second of all, like I said earlier, I'm skeptical of any solution that comes down to just teach more media literacy in school.

When you have such powerful forces bombarding you with information and misinformation and disinformation, it doesn't really seem fair to put the responsibility entirely on the individual. Rather than trying to protect yourself from [00:28:00] the firehose, doesn't it make more sense to just turn the hose off?

Now, to be fair to this book, the authors do offer other suggestions for how to protect societies from the proverbial firehose of falsehood. They bring up regulations on businesses, especially social media, as well as safeguarding free press and repairing the public sphere. And these are solutions that have been echoed by other media literacy scholars like Dana Boyd and her article, "Did Media Literacy Backfire?"

Now, I don't love every single thing she says in this article, but there are some gems that I think are really helpful for understanding the scope of our society-wide media literacy struggle. She argues that media literacy programs and solutions that focus on expert fact checking and labeling are likely to fail. Not because they are bad ideas, but because they fail to take into consideration the cultural context of information consumption that we've created over the last 30 years. Addressing so called fake news [00:29:00] is going to require a lot more than labeling. It's going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information.

In other words, we've built this huge, tangled, attention economy web and there's so much baggage associated with it, like all the algorithm stuff I brought up at the beginning of this section, that surface level issues like labeling misinformation aren't ever going to be enough. What we need to do is untangle the web.

The question of how we untangle the web is complicated. Some people, like Ben and Elliot, argue that we need big picture, radical, societal change.

ELLIOT: For one to just start radically changing systems of education, systems of media, just sort of radically undermine capital. You know, the more that you undermine capital and put power into the hands [00:30:00] of workers and in the hands of non-proletarian, working class people, in the hands of people who are underprivileged, in the hands of people who are disabled—the more that you do that, the less you'll feel there's a problem with media literacy.

ZOE BEE - HOST, ZOE BEE: But until the revolution happens, Dana Boyd suggests in her article that we instead get creative and build the social infrastructure necessary for people to meaningfully and substantively engage across existing structural lines.

This won't be easy or quick, but if we want to address issues like propaganda, hate speech, fake news, and biased content, we need to focus on the underlying issues at play. No simple band aid will work. Part of the problem with this, though, is that there's been an erosion of trust in a lot of the institutions that make up this social infrastructure.

For instance, people are becoming more skeptical of higher education, but especially of the humanities. [00:31:00] And the humanities are the home of media literacy studies.

BEN: Actual humanities education of, like, thinking and reading and writing is on the decline on the average in our society because we don't, like, assign a value to it, really.

LILY ALEXANDRE: I would situate this in the context of a growing resentment for, like, humanities and liberal arts in general. You know, I get the feeling that people don't understand, or can't quantify the benefit that those disciplines give. And, like, universities all over the world are slashing humanities funding to make room for more, like, STEM funding.

ZOE BEE - HOST, ZOE BEE: I'm not saying that these solutions are doomed to fail. I actually have a lot of hope for these kinds of things. I'm fatally optimistic about this kind of stuff. But, like Boyd said, this won't be easy or quick.

A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation - TechTank - Air Date 9-3-24

NICOL TURNER LEE - HOST, TECHTANK: We used to have decades where we were attacking disinformation based on these [00:32:00] falsehoods that, you know, essentially persuaded the collective conscience. It sounds to what Daryl's talking about in the area of climate and what we previously talked about in elections, they're also becoming like these advertising commercials. Is that right, Elaine? For people like to pick up on in the book?

ELAINE KAMARCK: Well, you know, the advertising example is an interesting one because we are fairly sophisticated consumers these days of advertising, and we are not sophisticated consumers of stuff that looks like news. And so one of the ways disinformation spreads is people make up fake newspapers.

You know, they'll just make up the name of the, you know, the "Santa Fe Evening Sun", right? And it turns out that newspaper doesn't exist, but they'll send along an article from a newspaper that doesn't exist, and people will say, Oh, that's from a newspaper, and they assume [00:33:00] that this news, this fake newspaper has all the fact checking and editorial oversight that a normal newspaper has, and it doesn't.

So, that's where we're really getting confused out there, and where the citizen is getting confused. And one of the things we urge the citizen to do is, look, if this doesn't make sense to you, it probably is something you should look into, okay? Don't take this stuff at face value and don't pass it on to your 400 friends until you think it's really true. And that sort of thing is, I think, a public service that we're trying to do in this book.

NICOL TURNER LEE - HOST, TECHTANK: Yeah, that's the part that I really found to be interesting, right? Because across those verticals that I mentioned that you discussed, you're essentially trying to embolden citizens back to action, back to agency over these issues.

You know, one other area I do want to dive into before we pass on what those tools [00:34:00] are for citizens, you've got a fantastic chapter on disinformation and race relations, which I found to be interesting because I think we still have, you know, a lot of memories of the 2016 election and the use of foreign operatives to sort of play off of our history and use that to the advantage of spreading more disinformation and essentially disenfranchising voters.

Why was it important, Darrell, to put that in this book? Right? Because I think, in and of itself, it's one of those areas where people will probably say, yes, there's disinformation, but this is a long history of a whole lot of other stuff. I just, I found it fascinating the way you talked about it in the book.

DARRELL WEST: I mean, disinformation is at the heart of race relations and, in fact, racism itself. Historically, there's the myth of African American inferiority. There were prominent Harvard professors who spread this and disseminated that viewpoint. In more recent times, we see [00:35:00] a overlap between race and crime and the idea that blacks commit more crimes than whites and then therefore that became a vehicle to toughen the sentencing patterns and we ended up in a situation where, you know, it seems like three quarters of the people in prison now are racial minorities. So, there is a long history of disinformation that links up with racism. So, we just wanted to point that out.

We also have seen foreign governments and foreign agents play on the racial divisions in America. Like, whenever anything happens, basically these other countries see it as an opportunity to further divide Americans from one another. And so they will spread false rumors. You know, we just saw this in England, where there was violence that was committed and people blamed it on immigrants. And then there was a wave of anti-immigrant violence that took place. So, even in the contemporary period we're seeing a close tie [00:36:00] between disinformation, race relations, and ethnic conflict.

ELAINE KAMARCK: And one of the things that social science has shown for many years now is that communities that have a high number of immigrants in them actually have less crime, not more crime, than the general public.

And of course there's a reason for that if you think about it. Common sense. And we, by the way, keep coming back to common sense in this book. If you're an illegal immigrant in the United States, you are going to pay every parking ticket. You are going to be careful to walk in the darn crosswalk. I mean, you are not going to run the risk of putting yourself in the midst of the legal system, which could end up having you deported. So, ironically, the very fact of being an undocumented person in the United States makes you less likely, not more likely, to commit a crime. And [00:37:00] yet, given the information out there and the disinformation out there, you would think that immigrants here are coming here to rape and murder.

NICOL TURNER LEE - HOST, TECHTANK: That brings me to a question, too. I mean, we just came off the heels of the Democratic National Convention, where I think there was this play on maybe unraveling some of the disinformation that is out here on some of those issues as well, Elaine and Darrell. My question for the two of you is, as we're thinking about your book, and particularly this time, are we going to catch this disinformation trend in time or, Elaine, is it going to be in the next three to four weeks that it's going to ramp up? I mean, I think we're seeing those tropes play out in such significant ways that your book is so timely on this, right? So I'm just curious, coming off of the heels of this, is this something that, you know, citizens have to be aware of?

ELAINE KAMARCK: Boy, I think it is. And the question really goes to campaigns. You know, there's a lot of discussion in your world and [00:38:00] Darrell's world about the sort of legal aspects to fighting disinformation. But the fact of the matter is, in a fast moving environment, the law is just too slow. Okay? In a fast moving environment, the responsibility for fighting disinformation rests with the opposite campaign. And campaigns are going to have to spend a great deal of resources on literally just the constant monitoring of the internet, of the huge, huge internet, and the constant real time fight against disinformation. Because waiting for it to be proven, and waiting for somebody to have a subpoena brought to them, et cetera, you know, that does not work in elections. And so I think the campaigns are going to be spending a lot of time and a lot of money doing it. And we've gone so far as to propose that, in fact, under the federal election law, there'd be an exemption for monitoring disinformation in terms of [00:39:00] spending, just as there's an exemption for accountant and lawyer fees.

DARRELL WEST: I agree with that. I think the problem in an election campaign is this stuff just happens so fast. It gets seen by millions of people sometimes in a matter of hours. And so it's hard for other candidates to respond. It's hard for the media to respond. And then there's the risk that people are going to end up making up their minds based on false narratives. And I think this is particularly worrisome with the undecided vote. Like, 95 percent of Americans have made up their mind in this presidential election. They are not likely to be persuaded by disinformation, but there's a question about that last 5 percent: On what basis are they going to make up their minds? And I think that's the part that I worry about in the coming months.

Enshittification Part 3: Saving The Internet - On the Media - Air Date 5-19-23

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, I've got some good news for you, Brooke, which is that podcasting has thus far been very enshitification-resistant.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [00:40:00] Really?

CORY DOCTOROW: Yes, it's pretty cool. Podcasting is built on RSS.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I know that. It stands for Really Simple Syndication that lets pretty much anyone upload content to the internet that can be downloaded by anyone else. The creators of RSS were very aware of how platforms could lock in users and build their tech to combat that. In turn, podcasts are extremely hard to centralize.

CORY DOCTOROW: Which isn't to say that people aren't trying.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Like Apple?

CORY DOCTOROW: Oh, my goodness. Do they ever? YouTube. Spotify gave Joe Rogan $100 million to lock his podcast inside their app. The thing about that is that once you control the app that the podcast is in, you can do all kinds of things to the user like you can spy on them. You can stop them from skipping ads.

The BBC for a couple of decades has been caught in this existential fight over whether it's going to remain publicly funded through the license fee or whether it's going to have to become privatized. It does have this private arm that Americans are very familiar [00:41:00] with BBC Worldwide and BBC America, which basically figure out how to extract cash from Americans to help subsidize the business of providing education, information, and entertainment to the British public.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The BBC created a podcast app called BBC Sounds?

CORY DOCTOROW: That's right. One of my favorite BBC shows of all time is The News Quiz.

GAME SHOW HOST: Welcome to The News Quiz. It's been a week in which the culture secretary suggested that BBC needs to look at new sources of funding, so all of this week's panelists will be for sale on eBay after the show.

[laughter]

CORY DOCTOROW: You can listen to it as a podcast on a four-week delay. [chuckles] You can hear comedians making jokes about the news of the week a month ago or you can get it on BBC Sounds. From what I'm told by my contacts at the B, people aren't rushing to listen to BBC Sounds. Instead, they're going, "There is so much podcast material available, more than I could ever listen to. I'll just [00:42:00] find something else," and that's what happened with Spotify too.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Spotify paid big bucks like hundreds of millions of dollars to buy out production houses and big creators like Alex Cooper and Joe Rogan in an attempt to build digital walls around their conquest's popular shows just to see their hard-won audiences say, "Hmm, I'll pass."

CORY DOCTOROW: Now, Spotify is making all those pronouncements, "We are going to, on a select basis, move some podcasts outside for this reason and that." Basically, what's happening is they're just trying to save face as they gradually just put all the podcasts back where they belong on the internet instead of inside their walled garden.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Maybe it's because of the abundance of content or because, like the news business, people are used to getting it for free. Podcasting seems resistant even though no medium is safe from what Doctorow is describing. Enshitification sits at the intersection of some of our country's most powerful players, entrenched capitalist values, [00:43:00] and the consumer's true wants and needs. How do you see our future?

CORY DOCTOROW: I have hope, which is much better than optimism. Hope is the belief that if we materially alter our circumstance even in some small way that we might ascend to a new vantage point from which we can see some new course of action that was not visible to us before we took that last step. I'm a novelist and an activist and I can tell the difference between plotting a novel and running an activist campaign. In a novel, there's a very neat path from A to Z. In the real world, it's messy.

In the real world, you can have this rule of thumb that says, "Wherever you find yourself, see if you can make things better, and then see if, from there, we can stage another climb up the slope towards the world that we want." I got a lot of hope pinned on the Digital Markets Act. I got a lot of hope pinned on Lina Khan and [00:44:00] the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust actions, the Department of Justice antitrust actions, the Digital Markets Act in the European Union, the Chinese Cyberspace Act, the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK stopping Microsoft from doing its rotten acquisition of Activision. I got a lot of hope for people who are fed up to the back teeth with people like Elon Musk and all these other self-described geniuses and telling them all to just go to hell. I got a lot of hope.

Note from the Editor on bad media diets and brain worms

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The New Abnormal explaining the change algorithmic casinos have brought to the internet. Commonwealth Club World Affairs spoke with NBC reporter Jacob Ward about the differences between fact-based journalism and the wild west of live streamers. Wisecrack dove deeper into the effect of live streamers on politics. Zoe Bee expounded on media literacy. TechTank discussed the impacts of [00:45:00] disinformation that society is not trained to handle. And On The Media explored enshittification and how podcasts have avoided the worst of it. And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section.

But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here at discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often making each other laugh in the process. To support our work and have all of those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.Com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but I'll note that anyone, depending on the app you use to listen, may be able to use the time codes in the show notes to jump around the show, similar to chapter markers. So check that out. 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 [00:46:00] funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

And one more quick note, we are in search of a new volunteer transcriptionist. If you would like to join the team and help put our transcripts together, please send an email to [email protected]. Thanks.

Now, before we continue on to the Deeper Dives half, I have a few random thoughts, slightly more random than usual.

The first is to give credit to a sit-com from about eight years ago. Because I just saw it and they just made a clever joke about giving kids phones and the problem with the internet. It's the show You're the Worst. And there's boy in it, maybe about 13 or so. And in one episode, he needs to be found by an adult. He sort of out in the world. And so an adult finds him and asks, "Hey kid, don't you have a phone?" And the kid says, "Nah. My parents are afraid I'll become a YouTube celebrity if I had a phone." Which I find pretty great on multiple levels. There's the classic subverting the expectation of what the parents would be [00:47:00] concerned about, classic joke form, but then there's the underlying reality that being a YouTube celebrity is actually awful, and parents should be concerned about that. So, congrats on that joke from 2016 I just heard.

My second thought is something that I came up with during a recent bonus show, but I need to share it here so it gets wider traction. I think I have an important contribution to the future of internet literacy. I was describing my theory about how modern internet and phones are a disruptive technology to society, similar to how cars were a hundred years ago. People used to be able to simply walk in the road whenever they wanted, without fear of death, just like we used to be able to go on the internet without fear of an algorithm feeding us conspiracy theories. Right?

Well, when cars came along and started killing people on a regular basis, there [00:48:00] were a few ways that we tried to change culture and laws to protect people from being run over. And at the time -- I am personally familiar with this -- "Jay" was an insult term, meaning basically a sort of dumb bumpkin kind of person. So "jaywalking" wasn't just a misdemeanor; it was actually an insult. So it was a way of using shame to help push people to make better decisions for their own benefit.

So I thought we could do the same for modern internet and all of the ways it's trying to feed us disinformation. People need to be pushed to be more discerning in what they believe about what they see online.

So I figured that JFK Jr is a good modern example, having recently admitted to getting sucked in by online misinformation and not being able to recognize AI images and the like on a regular basis -- that he could be a good point of reference. So when someone believes something [00:49:00] false that they saw online, you should ask them, "When do you get your brain worm? You believe stuff you saw online without checking the source? I didn't know you also had a brain worm." And by insulting people, we can steer them to make better decisions. That's my idea.

And the last thing I have to add is the phrase, "deep doubt." I came across this while prepping for this episode in an article. And I think it describes well the informational predicament we find ourselves in. I'll link to the article from Wired, "Welcome to the era of deep doubt." It goes into more detail and the history on the subject.

But to cut to the Suggestions portion and then to add my own bit to it: Getting trustworthy information basically it comes down to this: number one, try to seek out reliable sources. It's sort of obvious, but you got to remind people, right?

But, number two is also really important, because no single source is [00:50:00] right all the time. So after trying to find reliable sources, number two, seek out multiple sources. Only by hearing from multiple perspectives can we ever really hope to get a well-rounded, contextualized perspective on anything.

And then number three, this is my own addition: It is well overdue time to Make RSS Great Again. If you're not familiar with RSS, don't worry. It stands for Really Simple Syndication. And you are actually using it right now, in all likelihood. So it's not scary. Podcasts run on RSS. Blogs, which have fallen a bit out of fashion recently, also run on RSS. And you can get just about any source of media through an RSS reader instead of an algorithmic feed. Instead of saying, I like this, I want to be shown more of it in my [00:51:00] feed, you can just subscribe to a source in an RSS reader. And then get every article, every video, every piece of information that source sends out, and you know exactly what you're getting. No guessing, no casino involved.

Personally, I subscribe to dozens of sources that I consider to be reputable, and they span the spectrum from perspective and temperament. And, even some that get more radical opinions or more conservative opinions, just to round out my perspective. I read each source, understanding their context. And by reading multiple sources, talking about the same issue from different perspectives, I get a greater context, and a more three-dimensional view.

Now look, don't get me wrong. My style isn't what I recommend for everyone. It's my job to read this much, and it's not healthy. So don't take it as a suggestion. But the basic idea of curating your [00:52:00] own set of trusted sources, making sure to throw in some more light and funny stuff for entertainment, is easily superior to the algorithmic alternative.

And look, it's not that I don't see the appeal of the algorithms. They're a slot machine, after all. For you, feeds are made to be fun, so fun that they're addictive. But to me, they're like going to a restaurant that serves really good food, but 10% of the time you order, your food will be just a little poisoned. We're not talking about a lethal dose, but you're going to get ill clearing your system, one way or the other. And maybe it's only one out of a hundred, maybe even it's only one out of a thousand times. But one of those meals you get from this great restaurant with all the fun stuff, it's going to give you a brain worm. And you're going to be in for a world of hurt. So, that's the risk you're taking. To me, no thanks. Not worth it.

SECTION A: SOCIAL MISINFORMATION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper in our quest for truth [00:53:00] in three topics. Next up, Section A: Social misinformation. Followed by Section B: Live by the algorithm, and Section C: Solutions.

Charges against Telegram CEO sparks debate over balance of free speech and responsibility - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 8-29-24

STEPHANIE SY: French authorities have charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with several offenses related to his messaging app. The charges include complicity in the distribution of child abuse images, drug trafficking and failure to comply with law enforcement requests.

Durov, who operates Telegram from Dubai, was apprehended over the weekend and was ordered to pay five million euros for bail. The arrest of the Russian-born tech billionaire has sparked a free speech rallying cry in some circles and has raised questions about how other social media executives may be held accountable for their platforms.

Joining me to discuss the implications of this arrest is Pranshu Verma, technology reporter for The Washington Post.

Pranshu, thank you so much [00:54:00] for joining the "News Hour."

Before we get into the ramifications of this arrest, tell us why Telegram is in law enforcement's bullseye and what brought about this unprecedented arrest of the company's founder?

PRANSHU VERMA: So Telegram is a wildly popular messaging app, mostly in places like Russia, the Middle East, and South Asia.

About 950 million people use it. And it's a way to send private chats or public broadcasting messages to large — hundreds of thousands of people. And it's also a way to send individual kind of encrypted chats as well. So it melds two types of messaging into one app.

And now this kind of app is pretty good in some ways, for example, if you're a dissident and you want to organize a protest against an authoritarian government. But it's also become an app where some of the worst activity online kind of has become a haven for it, such as the sharing of child sexual abuse imagery.[00:55:00]

And so that's kind of what's made Telegram into the bullseyes of the French authorities now, is that they are basically saying that the owner of Telegram, Pavel Durov, is complicit in making Telegram spread child sex abuse imagery, kind of spread organized crime, and also not complying with law enforcement when law enforcement wants user data about criminal activity.

And so, as you saw this weekend, this all culminated into a head when Pavel Durov landed in France outside of a Paris airport and was arrested and has now been issued charges around these types of activities.

But the other platforms, as you know, including platforms like Facebook and Instagram, have also been accused of having nefarious activities, including sexual abuse imagery of children, extremism, scammers.

How is this different? How does Durov differ from his peers when it comes to that? Do the other platforms, for example, cooperate much more with governments and law enforcement?[00:56:00]

There's no doubt that platforms like Meta and Twitter do host similar types of content.

But what Telegram is very specifically known for, it actually boasts about is its reluctance and often complete noncompliance with law enforcement in sharing user data. So even if a law enforcement official comes to Telegram, it is their policy as they boast about even on their own site to not share zero bytes of data with government to date.

And that's what makes it really different from all the other tech companies is that kind of strong noncompliance.

STEPHANIE SY: Elon Musk and other tech giants have posted their support of Mr. Pavel on X. Musk did. And a lot of people are asking what his arrest means for the heads of other similar platforms.

Should folks like Mark Zuckerberg, for example, be concerned about facing similar accusations? And could you see him being arrested if he travels to Europe? [00:57:00] And do you see these charges being levied against a tech executive in the United States?

PRANSHU VERMA: Yes, this is the big question here. It's opened up a can of worms.

Are the people who own the tech companies liable for the content that is on their platforms? Now, in the United States, there's a rule in law that shields companies from being held liable for the content that they have put on their sites.

But in Europe, there is a little bit more of a strength around holding tech companies accountable. And you have seen now, in this case, kind of the most muscular act to date of a government official — of a government holding a private official of a company to account. And it is unlikely that we would see it in the United States where somebody like a Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk is detained for what is on Facebook or on Twitter.

But now the question becomes, what happens if that activity happens in Europe or elsewhere, and will governments kind of respond in kind? And we don't know the answer yet.

Beyond the Grifterverse - Pillar of Garbage - Air Date 9-13-24

PILLAR OF GARBAGE - HOST, PILLAR OF GARBAGE: [00:58:00] Let's start by taking a look at the DOJ indictment. The document opens with some relevant context, which is probably worth including here. I quote, After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, RT was sanctioned, dropped by distributors and ultimately forced to cease formal operations in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union.

In response, RT created, in the words of its editor in chief, an entire empire of covert projects, designed to shape public opinion in Western audiences. As we'll go on to see, that shaping of public opinion is sometimes specific and targeted, but Arty's broad goals in the West are perhaps best summed up by the words of an Arty journalist to an academic researcher the indictment quotes a few pages later.

I asked my editor what is Arty's line for this, but And he said, anything that causes chaos is RT's line. That context aside, the body of this [00:59:00] indictment is the story of one of those covert projects. A Tennessee based online content creation company, it refers to as US Company One, but which we can identify by matching up some website copy the document provides later.

Media. At the end of 2022, following a period of direct work for RT, Tenet's two founders were approached to work with a fictitious Paris based investor by the name of Edouard Gregorian, a figure whose name was repeatedly misspelled by his would be representatives and whose name Google search returns no results for.

Hold on to that fact for later, by the way. It's clear from private communications, though, that the company's two founders knew Gregorian wasn't the real deal. Between themselves, they referred to their backers as, quote, the Russians, the same term they'd used in prior correspondence to refer to RT.

There's also the fact that one founder, while awaiting a response for an invoice sent to the ostensibly Paris based Gregorian, Google searched time in [01:00:00] Moscow. Despite this, Tenet never disclosed to its viewers that the content was sponsored by RT, and Tenet's founders never registered with the Attorney General as agents of a foreign principal, which is, you know, illegal.

But who are those founders? Well, since US Company One is we can fairly easily find out that Founder 1 and Founder 2 are Lauren Chen, the Turning Point USA, PragerU and BlazeTV affiliate we've discussed previously on this channel, and her husband, Liam Donovan. And while it's not straightforwardly apparent who everyone mentioned in the document is, It is clear that the collaborators Chen and Donovan eventually hired and paid with that Russian money included Tim Pool, Lauren Southern, her Blaze TV co star Dave Rubin, and her old Turning Point buddy Benny Johnson, among others.

The indictment reveals that Chen was making tens of thousands of dollars per month coordinating Tenet, and that some of these contributors were getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per [01:01:00] video. All in all, the indictment states nearly 10 million dollars trickled from the Russian state into RT, through shell corporations, and into the hands of Tenet and their contributors.

Tenet's YouTube channel officially launched in the autumn of 2023, and in the year since has amassed over 300, 000 subscribers and over 16 million views. I would be showing you footage of all this by the way, but the channel's been deleted by the time I'm editing this. Over that period, the influence RT held over Tenet's output reportedly grew more direct.

The initial contacts who would set up the deal with Chen and Donovan, who by the way all shared an IP address, as did the so called Gregorian, suggesting that all these personas were in fact or Handless, directed Tenet to work with Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, the RT employees being charged, under the guise of hiring them as an editing firm.

But before long, the pair were corresponding with commentators directly, and by June 2024, had even started [01:02:00] posting their own content directly to Tenet's sites. Allegedly, they also successfully persuaded Chen to have commentators cover directly supplied talking points. And all this was ticking along nicely, at time of writing, their last published video was released just yesterday, until that indictment was released, and Tenet's viewers, Tenet's collaborators, the internet at large, and the mainstream media discovered the business was funded by the Russian state.

We'll get into the fallout and what this all means shortly, but just before we do, it's probably worth addressing the elephant inside the elephant inside the elephant in the room.

Russia bad? The less politically engaged among you might wonder why the Russian connection here even matters. Why is this being treated as a smoking gun? Some of the more politically engaged among you might wonder why I'm going with the Russia bad framing here. Isn't that just some jingoistic cold war relic?

Aren't we past that? If [01:03:00] America bad, wouldn't that make Russia good? Well, in a nutshell, no. The flaws a lot of folks, particularly on the left, find in the US and the West, warmongering, imperialism, corruption, worker exploitation, inequality, restrictions on civil liberties, all that, are just as present, if not far more so, in Putin's Russia.

You guys, it's still colonialism even if they didn't use boats. Anyway, what you need to know here, and I'm obviously simplifying things, is pretty much that the jabronis in charge of today's Russia have a bit of a nostalgia fixation, and think it'd just be swell if things went back to the good old days.

Not to the USSR and whichever genuine leftist sentiments may or may not have kicked off that period of history, but to Russia's imperial period. The only problem there is all the Eastern European, Caucasian, and Central Asian countries and citizens that kind of like not being under the Russian yoke, some of whom have made allies in the West for precisely that reason.

[01:04:00] Naturally then, the weaker the US, NATO, and the EU are, the more feasible Russia's clawing back of influence or land becomes, the more successful the jabronis themselves look, and the less likely it is they end up falling out the window. Remotely weakening foreign countries without launching any missiles is pretty tough though, or it was before we decided to collectively hook ourselves up to the brain rot matrix that is social media, and before the people developing that matrix figured out that throwing in a bunch of black box recommendations algorithms would make them more money by dialing up the brain rots.

Or in more scientific terms, there's a functional misalignment between human psychology, which evolved to learn and adopt beliefs based on a host of social factors, and these algorithms, which are designed simply to maximise engagement. The result of this is the tendency for algorithmic media to amplify our own biases and create false polarisation.

So, and again, this is [01:05:00] something of a streamlined history. In the time since social media became an everyday part of western life, the Russian governments put more and more resources into waging an information war on this front, through tactics like bot farms, paid trolls, and, of course, content.

The Intentions of the Adversary: Disinformation and Election Security - Disinformation - Air Date 5-21-24

PAUL BRANDUS - HOST, DISINFORMATION: information warfare efforts are robust widespread and increasingly sophisticated. But what makes them even more effective, Rand study says, is that those efforts are taking full advantage of our own weaknesses and divisions, in other words, what we are doing to ourselves. In this regard, the Russians are hardly alone.

MAREK POSSARD: And so in many cases, it's not that Russia or China or these other countries are doing this. What, in fact, is happening is they're waiting for us to kind of essentially create a tactical opportunity that they exploit, and then they can amplify it further. So we're doing it to ourselves, and then our [01:06:00] adversaries essentially exploit it. And I think that's what happens in many cases with our elections, where there might be some one-off case. There might be a court case that one is trying to have adjudicated. And then our adversaries are going to jump in the mix and start trying to amplify this stuff online or in other mediums.

PAUL BRANDUS - HOST, DISINFORMATION: They're just piling on to things that we are doing to ourselves.

MAREK POSSARD: Oh, yeah. I mean, when this issue of partisanship and actually broader truth decay in our society are actually really tactical opportunities for our adversaries. It is a Christmas gift to the Russians. It is a gift to the Chinese and the Iranians and other countries that are trying to harm our democracy.

PAUL BRANDUS - HOST, DISINFORMATION: And you say, rather disturbingly, that these are not individual silos, that these seemingly unrelated threats could happen simultaneously. Tell me more about that. How might that unfold? What should we be looking for?

MAREK POSSARD: I think the key thing we should be looking for here [01:07:00] is how one type of seemingly disconnected threat could suddenly relate to another threat. So if there's an attack on our critical infrastructure, such as our utility companies, and there is a partisan reaction and suddenly you start seeing it grow, we do have to ask ourselves, why is it growing? Is it actually homegrown in terms of the reaction to some type of crisis, which could be Attack on critical infrastructure, it could be a hurricane, it could be a cyber attack, or our adversaries trying to amplify this up further. And I think one thing that we're not particularly prepared for is having multiple adversaries jumping in at the same time. And so if there is some national crisis or a regional crisis that may affect the ability for us to carry out election in a state or locality, and then suddenly you have Russian trolls online, you might have Iranian operations operating separately, to really just kind of mishmash this [01:08:00] crisis, are we going to be in a position to be able to adjudicate it accordingly, essentially, and say, what do we need to do to get this done to carry out our elections? Or are we going to essentially just self-consume ourselves during this crisis?

PAUL BRANDUS - HOST, DISINFORMATION: At a recent summit between Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Xi said there are no bounds to our relationship, meaning military cooperation, intelligence cooperation, economic cooperation, on and on and on. Is there any evidence that you have seen that they are coordinating their efforts to interfere with their election in any of the ways that you have described?

MAREK POSSARD: So I haven't actually looked at that question specifically, so I don't want to speak to whether or not that's happening. I will say, as a hypothesis, it wouldn't be super surprising. These are very cheap operations to carry out. You don't need to invest in a [01:09:00] 10-year weapons system and dump hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D to carry this stuff out. It really is a matter of You have a direct pipeline, particularly with social media and with individuals. Essentially, all you're doing is figuring out who you want to target and you pump out content. It would be not super surprising, to say the least, if Russia and China were somehow coordinating, either explicitly or implicitly. And that very well could just be that there might be a tactical opportunity that Russia finds and they exploit. And then China jumps in in their own way, not necessarily coordinating every step of the way, but again, just finding that opportunity and being able to communicate it. You don't need to do a whole lot to gin people up, particularly in this type of election cycle where I would suspect we're going through a political realignment. And so it's a lot of exploitable opportunities to say the least.

PAUL BRANDUS - HOST, DISINFORMATION: And to your earlier point about our election system being decentralized, you really don't have to do [01:10:00] that much. And in the case of Russia and China, you really only have to look at these handful of swing states that are going to determine the election. It's conceivable they could target just two or three states that they think are going to make a difference and just focus on those. So talk about you know, asymmetric warfare in a very tiny way could actually make a huge difference.

MAREK POSSARD: Exactly. And I think the key is, is that they're not going to, I don't think it's really a huge payoff to necessarily try to hack our voting machines or try to turn individuals who are local election workers because it's such a decentralized system. There's a lot of different standard operating procedures across states, but you're right. There's a few states where the vote margins are very narrow. And if you can find a crisis that somehow relates to or is happening inside that state, it's not that hard to gin people up. And then you start casting doubt [01:11:00] more broadly on the election system based on one or two examples or one or two crises that are occurring in a swing state that could potentially directly relate to kind of the national outcome because of our electoral college. It's an opportunity for the Russians and the Chinese, the Iranians and others.

PAUL BRANDUS - HOST, DISINFORMATION: Let's shift, if we could, just for a minute to artificial intelligence. This is something that is far more top of mind than it was in 2020. Tell me about the impact of that in 2024 relative to four years ago.

MAREK POSSARD: So I had to hypothesize here. I would probably suspect that it's just going to pollute the information space. Well, I think there's two things. One, it's going to pollute the information space because it's just going to create more bullshit on the internet. And when you have more crap on the internet, it's difficult for individuals to disentangle what is true from what is a falsehood, particularly because you might have images and video that look [01:12:00] very, very realistic. The second thing is it allows our adversaries to scale their operations relatively easy. These are already cheap operations to run. You don't need a lot of money to stand up a server and maybe stand up some individuals to produce content, but this will allow you to automate that. Essentially, you're reducing the costs. to enter into this kind of operation. And we already have a lot of crap on the internet. And now you're going to have AI producing more crap, essentially polluting the information space, making it harder for regular citizens to make an informed decision based on whatever policy issue is popping up in a discussion on a given day.

Is Social Media Fueling Far-Right Riots? - Tech Won't Save Us - Air Date 8-15-24

HUSSEIN KESVANI: There are lots of live streamers and stuff who go to these protests because again, like another way of making money out of chaos is by live streaming, apparently.

And so you have these guys and you've got them everywhere who will go to protests and be like, Oh, why are you protesting? And like a lot of these channels very clearly have an intention of [01:13:00] like, you know, we promote right wing views, but we try to do it under the guise of like, oh, we're just sort of going around asking questions.

You know, these people aren't racist. They just love their country, etc. But like watching these interviews is really interesting, because even the people who are sort of there, it's not to sort of say that, oh, yeah, they don't really know why they're there. But it's more just like, And maybe it's because I also spend so much time or I have spent so much time online, but you can sort of see how the internet's kind of cooked their brains a little bit, or like quite a lot at times, I would like encourage people to watch it because like it's interesting to sort of see what happens when you're sort of navigating like a real world environment, but like you sort of believe that.

What you've seen on the internet is real. Like that is kind of the world that you understand, so for example, one of them like with us, like, Oh, why have you come to this? Like, you know, Southport protest, you know, or the right wing thing. And there'll be like, Oh yeah, I'm here to like pay my respect to the little girls who have passed away.

Okay, fine. But then like a second later, there'll be like, yeah, but you know, all these Slur inserted there like, you know, they've come in and like, you know, they take all the money and they take all the jobs and they're setting up mosques everywhere. And like, you know, there used to be a pub down the road and that's a mosque and everything [01:14:00] like that's not true.

Like there's no evidence of that, it feels like an assemblage of stuff that they've kind of read or they've seen on their phone. maybe some of it, they've also sort of invented in their head as well. so where your sort of reality kind of becomes like an assemblage of consumed online, put together by people who have sometimes nefarious ambitions, but sometimes they'll just sort of put stuff out there because you can do that.

Right. Like what's the effect of just putting out like fiction. You never know. I've also seen like right wing Twitter accounts, praise themselves for being able to like insert like pieces of misinformation map. They sort of felt. kind of got a lot more traction than they expected. That's kind of a game to these people.

I always go back to this thing that Adam Curtis said years and years ago about how eventually the internet will become this place where you go to sort of mostly go for entertainment, but you kind of never know what's true and what isn't. And it's not to say that the internet will be full of lies but it's more like You'll approach everything with this idea, but you don't actually know whether what you're reading is true or valid or whether it's not.

And for some people, that'll be like a really scary experience because [01:15:00] it'll be really dislocating and really detaching. But for other people, it'll be like immensely entertaining because again, so much of being online and so much of experiencing online is primarily for entertainment. the Riot livestreams are a form of entertainment, it's not really journalism.

The stuff that Tommy Robinson does is primarily entertainment, and he knows it. in the week before the Southport attack, Tommy Robinson had a very big demonstration in London, where he screened an hour and a half long film, where the entire film was About why he couldn't even though a court told him to stop harassing this teenager why he refused to stop harassing a teenager It was an hour and a half long film about how he was a victim because he couldn't stop harassing a teenager It's like insane But again, it like frames his ideas like well These people sort of see it as entertainment that they see it as entertainment that leads to kind of material effects and so again to kind of go back to British media, which is very right wing, like, where it has sort of struggled to kind of keep up the pace with it.

They cannot be the same type of entertainment platforms as all these other sort of, like, anarchic [01:16:00] creators. Some of them having right wing agendas and some of them having fascistic agendas, but some of them just wanting to cause chaos and mischief. And because they'll never sort of be able to sort of match to that, their only choices, really, are to try to shut them down.

And in some cases, like, what's been interesting is, like, The right wing kind of papers in the UK, oddly enough today, have had front covers, which is like, Oh yeah, the night when the fascists were sort of taken down. And it's like insane to look at, cause it's like, well, but you didn't like the anti fascists.

You've been sort of printing stuff for years and years saying how they were like destroying the country. You have kind of laid the foundations for something like this to happen. but then, you know, other right wing outlets and, you know, your sort of GB news talk TV, which are like the very right wing end of it, having to sort of accommodate a lot of these content creators purely on the basis that they know that they're never going to sort of get as much traction as these guys.

So I think it's like a very messy media environment, one where a lot of chaos can sort of ensue, but one in which like. The content creators who don't have any strings kind of pulling like [01:17:00] holding them in and no real regulation are sort of like, I can create great entertainment by sort of just framing Muslims as more of an existential threat than the Daily Mail ever could.

PARIS MARX - TECH WON'T SAVE US: Yeah, this will drive engagement and will really rile people up. So I'll get my viewers. But you were talking about how you can tell that some of these people have their brains like cooked by the Internet. And it's clear that one of those people is. The owner of Twitter X himself, Elon Musk, who has become a major right wing influencer of his own.

We talked in the past and, you know, there's been like this ongoing conversation and discussion about how Facebook has helped to fuel right wing politics in the past because of the way that it has decided to treat its platform. We know that YouTube has pushed kind of right wing extremism in its algorithms.

Twitter is not immune from that, but since Elon Musk has taken over. And the changes that he has made to the platform have made it. So people on the right basically get boosted a lot more, all of this kind of right [01:18:00] wing misinformation, these right wing narratives get boosted. And then he is also doing the work of boosting them, whether it is the anti migrant stuff, whether it is the great replacement stuff, as you were talking about.

The explicitly anti Muslim narratives. And now with these riots going on in the UK, he has been participating directly in that tweeting that civil war is inevitable. I believe that was after the first night that these went on or the second, like very early on. And just recently he retweeted this fake headline posted by Ashley Simon, who is co leader of Britain first, a far right.

Party that talked about how the UK government was going to set up detainment camps on the Falkland Islands for these protesters, which was completely false, taken from a telegram group, made up, but Elon Musk quote, tweeted it and said detainment camps. And, you know, it took a while to delete it. Like, what do you make of.

One, I guess how social media platforms in general kind of fuel this stuff, but also how when you have someone like Elon [01:19:00] Musk, who is participating in that, how does that become so much more difficult than to try to reign this stuff in?

HUSSEIN KESVANI: I think this is such a good example of how the fiction is sort of like all that's important to these people, because in the aftermath of the riots some of the right wing sort of people who participated in them, one of the things they weren't expecting, was that right wing media would Kind of turn against them or have the appearance of turning against them, which is not to say that they don't like, you know, they've sort of stopped believing in the same things, but it's more just like all the optics of this are really bad, right?

And so we can't be seen to like, so it's sort of put the writers. And so, like, one of the things I think they've sort of really latched to is the idea of , Well, we have to sort of be perpetually seen as victims, right? And so, yeah, we tried to burn down a hotel of children in it, but like, actually we were just doing it because we were scared for our children.

We were scared, but like, you know, our children's safety, why does no one talk about our children's safety and so on. And so like the element of victimization is really important. So, and this is where like fake news content or like fake kind of images and stuff become so important because really what's happening is that like, The [01:20:00] reinforcement of the victim narrative is so essential for perpetuating this movement.

Like, they need these types of grievances and everything. And I also imagine that, like, that probably is the thing that resonates with Elon Musk as well. But, like, he has to kind of perpetually see himself as a victim because, you know, his platform's not doing great and advertisers don't want to do it.

And, like, you know, I imagine he's also becoming more and more alienated by, like, people who used to be his friends.

So, like, he's probably not having, like, the best of personal times right now.

But Elon has also always fallen for like scams or fake stuff quite a lot. My impression though, is that the reason why he sort of seems to be going a lot harder on the UK, partly because we have a new prime minister who is, by his standards, like a left wing socialist.

He is not a left wing socialist by any means,

PARIS MARX - TECH WON'T SAVE US: What? I thought communism had returned to the UK.

HUSSEIN KESVANI: I feel like the UK is kind of because of like the riots and every time a riot happens, the sort of the MPs are always like, Oh, we need to ban like Blackberry. So we need to ban like whatever the sort of contemporary form of technology is.

And at the moment it's like, we need to ban like social media or we need to like put really big [01:21:00] controls and. could tell like Tiktok and Twitter and all that stuff and Twitter in particular, because I feel like for lots of journalists and lots of middle aged people and stuff who still use Twitter as their primary news source, it was very obvious and it's become very obvious to like power users and stuff like, Oh no, this is filled with fascists now.

Like it's very evident that even despite how much you try to Not see right wing stuff. It becomes more and more impossible because of who's boosting what and the messy blue check system and all that type of stuff.

SECTION B: LIVE BY THE ALGORITHM

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Live by the algorithm.

How to save culture from the algorithms, with Filterworld author Kyle Chayka Part 1 - Decoder with Nilay Patel - Air Date 3-11-24

NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: You have in the book, a meditation on the concept of taste. And that, I mean, literally throughout history, you dive into the history of people thinking about taste and what it is and where it comes from.

And that dynamic you're describing is someone has a little bit different taste or they make something a little bit different, and then suddenly everyone else has the same taste. Uh, the example that I actually really want you to talk about and help me understand is the Stanley cups right now, [01:22:00] where I've read a lot of, you know, Pieces just about what a Stanley cup is and whether they have lead in them.

And like why all these people are buying them, but it feels like it is, it is like a filter world product. That the algorithm lit upon a cup, like literally just a cup. And then everyone was like, I am the cup. Like the cup is my lifestyle. As you think about filter world, like, can you put the Stanley cup in the context of suddenly everything is the same?

KYLE CHAYKA: I think so. I mean, the Stanley cup was interesting in that the chief marketing officer of Crocs moved to Stanley and Crocs had like gone through this viral trend of being adopted by a lot of influencers and TikTok creators and stuff. And so this guy has kind of. turn the same process or strategy with Stanley, and I think it's partly that they like seeded the ecosystem, giving Stanley cups to influencers and stuff.

And it's just the fixation that the internet has on one thing at a time. So a Stanley cup like [01:23:00] starts to become this go to lifestyle accessory. First, for like, Mormon bloggers, actually. That was an early adoption group. And then it becomes almost a kind of currency on TikTok and on Instagram, where memetically, like, if all my friends have this thing, I also have to have this thing.

If all the other influencers are making Stanley Cup content, then I also have to make Stanley Cup content. I think it's almost like, on Twitter we could see this happen with discourse subjects, like there was one subject of conversation each day, and either you were jumping into that conversation or no one cared what you were talking about, except now it's, we're doing that with visual trends and physical objects, it's like, you have to be holding up that Stanley Cup or no one's going to want to watch your content, so you're kind of forced to participate in the meme, in the trend, or otherwise you get ignored.

NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: One of the tropes of decoder is that distribution has an outsized impact on the actual content [01:24:00] that people make, which is a very obvious idea, but we just come back to it over and over and over again, because we spent so much time talking about platforms. You're thinking about filter world is a broad concept, right?

Algorithms on the internet shape the culture in some big way, but YouTube has a different kind of algorithm, right? Like Stanley cups are not happening on YouTube. God forbid Stanley cups happen on X. What was formerly known as Twitter. That's a, that's a particular kind of TikTok trend that bleeds into everything else.

Do you think about the different platforms and their different aesthetics and what they prioritize and what kinds of culture they make?

KYLE CHAYKA: I think they all have different flavors. My pet theory, I think, is that each algorithmic feed, each platform generates its own kind of signature culture that fits into it.

So we're familiar with like. Instagram face, the kind of influencer plastic surgery aesthetic. Um, we're familiar with TikTok influencer voice, which is the kind of monotone syncopated packing as many words into a [01:25:00] sentence as possible. So I think there's like forms of content that work for each different platform.

And on YouTube, I mean, my favorite example of like YouTube culture is lo fi chill hip hop beats to study slash relax, which is this like ambient 24 7 never ending stream of chill drum beats with acoustic instruments and electric synths behind it. And it's all different artists composing these songs, but they're just turned into this wash of, you know, ambiguous, semi meaningless music.

And it's, like, that works for YouTube in a way, because you just leave YouTube on. It's this, uh, Streaming background and that's not how you use TikTok like TikTok that wouldn't work because you're constantly flipping through the feed. You're going to new videos. A tik tok video to be successful has to like grab you and throttle your attention immediately, whereas this YouTube content can be ambient and chill and like [01:26:00] homogenous in a soothing way. So I think there are these, like, quirks or forms that emerge from the structures of the platforms themselves.

NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: Your earliest approach at writing about filter world was Instagram and Airbnb, what you were calling airspaces as you expanded the concept into filter world, it's everything, different social networks, take on different levels of prominence in the culture. So Instagram is still huge. But I would say it is not a driver of culture in the way that it once was.

That role is now TikTok. How do you see that waxing and waning? Why do you think that change happened? Is it just young people use TikTok and that's it? Or is there something else going on?

KYLE CHAYKA: People get bored. I think partly, partly it's like, I mean, just as fashion trends change, technological trends change.

And I think we discount that too often. Like when we use the same platform for. Five or six years, we tend to start getting itchy and wanting something else. And I think it's also been this kind [01:27:00] of gradual evolution of the internet from Text, to more professionalized images, to audio and video, to TikTok, which is this kind of full featured television, essentially.

Like, when we watch it, it's as if we're watching television. So I think, like, the multimedia race has, has gone on and on, and that's changed things. It's also just, more and more of culture has moved onto the internet, I think, like, like digital platforms have absorbed. different areas of culture that used to be more offline, whether it's, you know, a television equivalent like Tik TOK or podcasts that used to be radio, like over the past decade, more things have gotten more online.

And I think that's been a major shift.

NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: I'm always curious on the effects that participating in the platforms have on people and creators. The Stanley Cup to me is actually a really fascinating example. When you are a big distribution network and you say anyone can participate [01:28:00] here, people will sort of naturally gravitate towards exactly what worked for someone else.

It's the first easiest, most instinctive thing to do. And so you can see why things spread mimetically a bunch of kids are like, well, that worked for them. I will do the same dance and participate in the culture. And that is a conversation in a way that I think like broadcast programming directors who are professionals were like, well, we can't just copy that thing.

We have to like, do something different. Right? Like there was, there's that element of like, well, I'm paid to have better ideas than the next person. That a bunch of people working for free are like, I'm just going to do the easiest thing. You can sort of see the tension there, but I'm curious if you see it particularly in a different way with Tik TOK, because there's something about the culture of Tik TOK that not only rewards that repetition, but like directly incentivizes it and makes repetition, the actual content.

KYLE CHAYKA: Yeah, I have, I'm sorry, I'm saying pet theory all the time, but another, another [01:29:00] framework to use to kind of, it's a great vocabulary, uh, framework that I have is that. And in the current iteration of the internet, we're all just like middle schoolers running through the hallways. Yeah. And so it's like, when you see some other kid wearing his hat backwards or something, you're like, Oh man, I'm going to wear my hat backwards right now.

Like it all filters out very quickly. The model of culture we have right now is more bottom up, like, like trends filter. From a grassroots level upward and then get noticed. And I think TikTok rewards that repetition because. You rehash someone else's content in order to participate. It's like making a new version of the same meme, as you were saying, is how you fill the vacuum of TikTok.

And it is how you interact with someone else and have that conversation. So rather than coming up with something new or trying to make a trend of your own, it's like the core behavior is [01:30:00] replicating a trend that already exists. And that's incentivized Like, by the algorithmic feed, by the kinds of aesthetic tools that you have, like the recommendations of sounds to use, or video editing tricks to use.

And I mean, I think you can see that replication happen all over the place, like as Twitter became, or X became more algorithmic. You saw a rash of prompt tweets, just like people asking for you to list your five favorite breakfast foods or something. And suddenly, because that worked for some people, everyone, everyone was doing it and being like, name the five opinions that everyone else hates that you have, it's like, that's not good content.

It's a kind of race to the bottom, I think.

NBC's Jacob Ward: How Technology Shapes Our Thinking and Decisions Part 2 - Commonwealth Club World Affairs (CCWA) - Air Date 1-31-22

JACOB WARD: Here's what we're going to do. I think we're going to, first of all, need to look deep inside these companies and make them civilly, and maybe even criminally liable for, you know, the ways in which they've tried [01:31:00] to manipulate our behavior, I think that it's gonna start costing these companies money.

Right now, human attention is treated as this kind of ephemeral thing. There's, it's endless, but, people smarter than me have been, saying, no, no, no. It is like. Mining and we need to regulate it. Not that we do a great job of regulating mining, but we need to get into to these companies, I think, probably through lawsuits and begin showing what they are knowing and doing.

Now that's for me the first step, but I also think there needs to be a recognition that all of that, like Star Wars, we're watching, you know, when I watched Star Wars these days and Han Solo is being told by C3PO, never tell me the odds, you know, leave me alone, nerd. Right. He's always saying, you know, don't tell me, you know, Oh, you know, Captain Solo, the chances of survival are 10, 566 to one.

Right. And he says, never tell me the odds. Listen to C3PO. C 3PO should be the hero of that movie because he's [01:32:00] right. Should not do this, you know, and our whole culture is geared and has been since the 19th century, on this idea of rugged individualism, growth at all costs is good. We're going out to the West and, pioneering our way out to a better life, you know, as opposed to thinking as a community about how are we going to support one another and what if it all goes wrong?

For me, a big part of that is going to have to be making it socially acceptable to say, here are my mental predilections. So for me, I tell anybody who you know, wants to talk to me about it. Like I no longer drink. I think it's unfair to people who suffered from alcoholism to refer to myself as an alcoholic.

I'm not sure I fall fully into that category, but I absolutely cannot drink. I've learned that about myself. And I have also learned as a result that when people say to me, Hey, let's meet up and go to a bar. I say to them, no, I would love to take a walk with you. I would love to do this other thing, but I cannot go to a bar with you.

I used to drink and I don't anymore. And that's going to mess me up. Right. Being able to [01:33:00] say, TikTok has got me, right? Being able to say, I'm having trouble with this thing, you know, making it socially acceptable to look at the odds, right? To listen to C3PO, I think is going to be a really important thing.

And then the last thing is, I think we need to stop letting culture, the modern culture as it's being dictated by some of the biggest companies. Tell us our norms. So for me right now, I'm in the process at the school that my Children are at of creating a pact with all the parents in the grades that we are in to not give our Children personal smartphones until they enter high school at the very earliest.

And I can't tell you how complicated that conversation is. It's a very hard thing to have that conversation because it involves admitting to your own difficult relationship with smartphones. you gotta sort of admit as a parent, you don't have any idea what your kid is really doing with them and what that might be.

And that you may not even know your kid fundamentally at all. it's a really hard conversation, but we have managed to get through it. And in fact, I'm on the [01:34:00] hook right now for being the guy who's supposed to write up the new revised pledge after a huge amount of really smart input. it makes my palms sweat to realize that I am, on the hook for that right now, but, it's going to require.

Communities coming together and saying, nope, I'm not going to do that because you know, the statistics show that the vast majority of parents get their cues about what's an appropriate use of technology from the ads for technology from a cutesy Alexa ads, in which the kid and the dog, trigger Alexa by accident is not adorable.

You know, they're normalizing behavior that we have not actually signed off on. And I think that we should start coming up with some civic structures for saying, no, it's too quick to say, Oh, don't be a Luddite. As if that's some sort of terrible thing. if you read up on the Luddites, they're pretty interesting group.

That's pretty interesting. You know, and I'm not saying we need to kick it all out of our lives. I love being here with you tonight, DJ, in this way, this is an incredible empowerment of our, slow thinking brain. You and I are doing right now. Fantastic. But. We have to recognize the [01:35:00] profit motive, the power, the way it's going to feel inexorable as pattern recognition systems make their way into our lives and that we have to come up with some civic structures for pushing back on them.

And I think we can, we've done it before. We're going to do it again. I just think we need to speed it up a little bit.

Internet Poisoning (with Jason Pargin) - The Daily Zeitgeist - Air Date 7-23-24

JACK O'BRIEN - HOST, THE DAILY ZEITGEIST: Do you feel like there are trends that, I think this is something we tried to do at Cracked sometimes is just in addition to debunking like myths that get spread around is like, here are the types of lies that our brain or the internet tends to gravitate towards.

And it's, you know, like one that I would say that, you know, I feel like we're seeing this process of like, you know, internet focus grouping and writers rooming a real event in real time with the [01:36:00] attempted assassination of Trump, as we've referred to. And I think. One of the themes that we're seeing there and also in the CrowdStrike story is like people have a real aversion to incompetence as being the explanation or, you know, accident, somebody fucking up.

It's just not a satisfying plot point. In your movie, like if diehard hedge, just like the story had resolved itself because the hacker had accidentally like detonated a bunch of the bombs while Hans Gruber was on top of the bill, you know, like something like that. And then it's, it's just a fuck up along the way that.

It doesn't happen, it doesn't happen in movies really because it's not satisfying the part of our brain that craves novelty and like good storytelling resists that [01:37:00] sort of thing. And so I, I believe like it's a bigger part of the story of the JFK assassination than we tend to think. And I think it's probably a bigger part of the story of the Trump attempted assassination than.

Some people are willing to, like, I, I think it seems to be pretty surface level that there is a fuck up there. But are, are there other, do you, first of all, do you agree that that's a trend and then are there other kind of trends that you've noticed as you, as you've kind of been studying this sort of the Well, yeah, but habits of.

JASON PARGIN: Like, I get that part of it is you just want to simplify the world. So for example, I have one extremely unpopular political opinion, which is, this is the perfect time to get it out when you're trying to sell a book and you've got it up your

ass,

which is that I think most of the world's problems, most of the things that frustrate you in your life are not anybody's [01:38:00] fault.

I think the world's an imperfect place, and I think it's hard to run a society in a way that's perfectly fair to every single person. I think, uh, you know, it's lots of times when prices go up or whatever. It's not necessarily that some evil person. It has a scheme, it's just, it's market forces and it's a company is trying to maximize the revenue because the shareholders demand it.

And like the, the blame for things spreads in so many directions that it just kind of disappears because it's just a system that we're all trying to survive in. And that is incredibly unsatisfying. We would love to hear that there's a villain because in a movie, if there's a problem like this, I don't know if you've seen the, um, Jason Statham, uh, film, the beekeeper.

JACK O'BRIEN - HOST, THE DAILY ZEITGEIST: I have not, but I started watching it a lot about it.

JASON PARGIN: Yeah, it's a, it's, it's a great boomer fantasy of like everything that is terrible about the world, all the way going up to the [01:39:00] president. There's like a cabal of just cartoonishly evil people that if you could kill them. The world would finally be at peace.

And that's, that's very satisfying to think of because yeah, every movie's got to have a villain, a human villain that is causing the problems. Like even a film like the Martian, which is supposed to be all about like troubleshooting and smart people and confidence porn, they still had to have like the villain character, the one guy who refused to was like being obstinate and say no to all of their plans because there's gotta be a bad guy.

And. Uh, this is something that I think is true across the whole political spectrum. Everybody wants there to be a bad guy and not just sometimes like with the pandemic. Sometimes pandemics happen. We are, we exist in nature and we actually. I don't know it's, I think most people did their best and most people didn't freak out.

And most people did what they thought was most reasonable. And I [01:40:00] don't think we like that. I think we like the thought of there being somebody we can yell at and hate. And then if we could get rid of them, everything would be fixed. That seems to be, to me, the most common bias, which is, I want to believe that somewhere there is a person, a bad person who has caused this, because then I've got an opponent and then if we could defeat them, everything would be fine.

The end. Most things in life are not like that. I, I believe.

MILES GRAY - HOST, THE DAILY ZEITGEIST: But in that version, does that sort of like absolve people of any responsibility for like what the actions of like an organization that they come like, you know, or the, the figurehead of, or how do you look at like that sort of piece of it? Like I get the sort of our yearning to be able to like, say, this is where it's all focused.

And that's like, it's in these four or five people kind of thing, but how, like at what point is there, obviously there are systems that are, have the lives of their own, but. Are you saying that everyone is just completely powerless to those things and nothing can be done or how do you score that part?

JASON PARGIN: I think that, for example, I could go on Reddit right now and I could find [01:41:00] memes talking about how the boomers ruined the world, how the boomers, when they were alive, jobs were easy.

Lifetime employment, houses were cheap. They had everything. And then they intentionally screwed over the next employee or the next generation after them because they were so greedy. And so, you know, sociopathic and, and narcissistic, if you could actually grab a random, if

you

could go grab a random boomer off the street, somebody in their seventies say, Hey, why did you run the world?

He's going to say, I worked at a muffler shop for 40 years. I don't, what are you talking about? I don't even, I rented for most of my life. I, I got to take a vacation. Like once every five years, what are you, you're talking about like the CEOs and the politicians that not, not, but it's like, no, we've now distilled all of the boomers into like one, you know, Evil person.

And guess what gang, whatever generation you are, like, let's say there's some Gen Z kids listening in this, a couple of generations from now, they're going [01:42:00] to blame you for what happens with AI. And you're going to say, I didn't do anything with AI. I thought it was stupid. I barely used it. And the kids in the future can say, well, why didn't you stop it?

And

you're going to say, I don't even know who, who did it. I don't even know who was in charge of it. Every company just started doing AI and it suddenly there was AI and all my devices. And they're going to be like, well, why didn't you, why didn't you vote to stop it? Why didn't you boycott those companies?

Why did you, and you're going to say. I was just trying to live my fricking life. I was trying to survive. No, I did not have time to go firebomb a server farm where they were, where they were operating Chet GPT 5. I was just trying to. And so what you find is you get that same answer all the way up to the president saying, look, I, I was voted, people voted for me to carry out an agenda.

They could have voted for somebody else. This was the agenda. This is what I did. I did what I thought was right. This is the most terrible truth. That nobody likes to face, which is that most people are doing their [01:43:00] best. And the, the flaws that happen are because you have different factions in society with different interests.

For example, like housing prices. Every time somebody talks about how, why housing is so expensive, they want to come up with this theory that like, there's like one corporation is secretly buying up all the houses. It's like, no, that they may be doing that. The issue is that half the country are already homeowners and they like the fact that their house costs twice as much because that's their retirement.

You have, it's not a secret cabal of guys in a shadowy room. It's an entire section of the country and their interests are separate from yours. And they're not billionaires. They're just retired dentists or whatever. And it's like, well, no, my entire retirement is based. I'm going to sell this house. When I turned 70, I'm going to move to Florida and rent a condo.

But yes, 400 percent more than what it did when I bought it in 1995. Like, no, I'm not, I don't want housing prices to go down. This is, um, you know, I, this is my retirement right here. So [01:44:00] there's times when some people just want different things from you. And if you're always trying to look for a specific villain or a cabal or a conspiracy, you're going to be disappointed more often than not.

A lot of times it's just people acting out of short term interests or out of ignorance, or, you know, they're just being oblivious, you Yeah,

MILES GRAY - HOST, THE DAILY ZEITGEIST: but is there, I mean, yeah, I guess in that's like, that feels like sort of like a bleak, like how in, in that instance, what, how would we solve things if we're willing to always say like, well, this person is just trying to do the best, not that I think, like, I get the point about like trying to find like this cabal or like darker angle as to explaining certain things like that, but does like, At a certain point, like if, how would that worldview, how do we try to change things like from that perspective?

JASON PARGIN: But things have changed. None of us would prefer to go back and live in the year 1924. Think about what you lose. If you go back, think about how many civil rights get rolled back. Think about how much shorter people [01:45:00] lived, how many more babies died in childbirth. Think about how can much more contaminated the food was back then and how nobody had air conditioning.

Like we have improved the world immeasurably because we've While everybody was yelling at each other, the normal people were just out doing their jobs and building houses and building safer cars. And there's bureaucrats that are just quietly passing, you know, ordinances that make things slightly safer.

And, and

JACK O'BRIEN - HOST, THE DAILY ZEITGEIST: yeah,

JASON PARGIN: the, you know, I, none of us would go back and live a hundred years ago, things were worse by, I think in every possible measure.

How to save culture from the algorithms, with Filterworld author Kyle Chayka Part 2 - Decoder with Nilay Patel - Air Date 3-11-24

NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: One of the things that's interesting about that idea is the influencers are sort of buffeted by algorithmic pressure, right? So they, they have to go pay attention to everything's paying, everyone else is paying attention to, and that loses specificity. But then some of them rise above the others and you get very powerful individuals who can make different decisions or take brain deals or whatever needs to happen there.

That's a very commercial, you can go give Stanley cups to a bunch of Mormon influencers and [01:46:00] make Stanley cups of thing, which is just a fascinating reality. Like that's, I don't think that has been true in the past. Next to that is the decline of media institutions, which they're not supposed to be collections of individuals in that way.

They're supposed to be brands unto themselves. With their own kind of taste. You have the Meryl Streep monologue from Devil Wears Prada in your book, right? It's like an example of how people think about these institutions. In that case, whatever runway, which is a stand in for Vogue, Vogue still exists.

Right. And it's still, it's still for now. Whatever's going on with Connie and ass is going on with Connie and ass, but Vogue still exists and celebrities still want to be on the cover because that institution still has power. My view of the platforms do not want any institutions to have power. They would rather negotiate with an infinite supply of burned out individuals that all kind of do the same thing.

This is a history of, I think the 2010s media is the decline of these media institutions. Do you see a return to that? Like someone [01:47:00] else has to play that validating role. Someone else has to provide a celebrity. Um, something that feels like a magazine cover, something that rises to that level, and that feels like the antidote to filter world, right?

The people seek this validation. People talk about Anna Wintour as though she's in the Illuminati, like literally as though she's in the Illuminati, but that's not forever. And there needs to be something that replaces it.

KYLE CHAYKA: Yeah. I mean, there needs to be like a taste making force that works and there needs to be a way that cultural ideas or people can get distribution that is not just algorithmic, though, like what you're saying has induces this nightmare for me of like TikTok covers, like, like TikTok releases a digital cover for its celebrity of the month and just makes them famous.

Like that's a scary thought. Um, But I think,

NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: but to be clear, I don't think they could, I think that would be empty, right? I think, I think TikTok, the TikTok audience would reject that kind of top down taste making from the [01:48:00] platform itself. YouTube famously tried to do YouTube originals. Like we're going to make TV shows now.

And everyone was like, why? And they just disappeared and PewDiePie went back to making PewDiePie videos, right? Like, there's something about the nature of the platform. So they actually can't do the thing themselves. They need something else to provide that role. And I don't know what that next thing is.

I think it behooves us all to figure it out, but I don't quite see it yet.

KYLE CHAYKA: No, no. And no one trusts those platforms enough to give them their tastemaking judgments. But I think, so we're in a weird, Swing of like media institutions are totally crumbling. And we're, I think we are seeing some rebuilding of that.

Like, I mean, you are a tastemaker, the verge, the verge is a curatorial force that both produces original content and directs attention at specific ideas. The last person on earth. I keep saying that's what we have, but I think like newsletters.

NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: I want to point out that the editor in chief on this podcast was like, I don't know where to leap us.

I do know where she's like from just put it there as a tastemaker. [01:49:00] Sorry.

KYLE CHAYKA: But, so, like, the rebuilding of those taste making forces is happening, I think, in newsletters. I mean, you look at, like, Blackbird Spy Play in the men's newsletter, you look at Magazine, the women's fashion newsletter. For some reason it's happening in fashion very quickly and obviously.

But I think those places will build up and grow and hopefully sustain themselves, which they will have to do by hiring more writers, like, more people. They will have to decentralize from the single person personality cult, just as magazines did, just as Anna Wintour has done. And so I think we'll see them get a little bit bigger and consolidate their presence.

Power and like YouTube channels will publish articles and make podcasts and everything else. But we are in this like rebuilding phase, I think. Yeah.

NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: I want to end with an exercise you did in the book called an algorithmic cleanse. You, you divorced yourself from filter world. [01:50:00] Uh, I feel like everyone did a version of this when Elon bought Twitter and everyone kind of reconsidered their relationship to Twitter, but you went all the way, right?

Explain what that cleanse was like, how you actually executed it and how you came out of it at the end.

KYLE CHAYKA: Yeah, this was toward the end of 2022. So it was as Musk was buying Twitter and I just hit a point where I felt so saturated by algorithmic feeds. And I'd spent the whole process of writing this book thinking about them.

I don't know. I had to escape. I was like, uh, I had to just run from this whole ecosystem. And so I, you know, paused on my accounts. I logged out of everything on my computer and on my phone. I deleted Spotify, I deleted Instagram and Twitter and everything else. And I just went cold turkey for about three months, so I was no longer getting any feeds of information.

I wasn't getting recommendations of anything. And I kind of had to figure out new ways of seeking [01:51:00] out content. Like, I had to look at the newspaper, I had to go to a library, I had to point my browser to theverge. com and see what was on the homepage. I mean, really what I found was that the internet Is no longer built for not being on feeds.

Like, particularly two years ago even, websites were not thinking so much about their home pages. Like, newsletters were less of a thing. I feel like we've come to rely so much on distribution and broadcast that we media creators like don't think enough about just having a place where people go to find things they're interested in.

NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: Do you, that, there's a real. Uh, tail wagging the dog element of this, right? Where you can want to have a different media diet. I have set up RSS readers many times for the past two years. I used to read all of my news in RSS. I used to sit in school, my laptop open and not pay attention and like go through my RSS reader.

And I remember [01:52:00] saying to some of my friends, I'm out of the internet. I finished the internet today because I'd read everything in the RSS reader. And there was a great diversity in content. No one thinks that way anymore. You open our assessor, you plug your favorite websites into it. Even ours. Candidly, even ours, and you get a bunch of stuff.

And some of that stuff is like obviously made for SEO. And some of that stuff is obviously made for other platforms. And very rarely do you see, Oh, there's an audience here that wants to read every article on this website. And that is a package, but it's coming back. Like people want to do that, right?

Like you can see there, there's. You felt that way. I have felt that way. We, we write articles about RSS readers and people read them. There's demand for it. Do you think that demand is ever going to get filled?

KYLE CHAYKA: I hope so. I mean, I tend to think wasn't the great promise of Silicon Valley and all these tech startups, like we are going to give users things that they want.

Like there's this thirst for a new form of delivery of content, better curation, like more [01:53:00] holistic ideas of what we should consume. And I hope that products arise to give us that. I think people are like restlessly questing for it right now in RSS, in newsletters, in a kind of parasocial podcast video, whatever ecosystem.

But I don't know, like, I like internet technology. I like when startups do new stuff. I hope that they take on this challenge and figure it out.

SECTION C: SOLUTIONS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section C: Solutions.

Why is Brazil's supreme court shutting down social media platform X? - DW News - Air Date 8-30-24

FABIO DE SA E SILVA: X, basically refusing to accept Brazilian laws and to comply with Brazilian judicial orders. There are some, investigations going on in Brazil. On individuals who used social media to violate Brazilian law, electoral law, as well as criminal law.

Some of those investigations are being presided over by just a small guys. And in the course of those investigations, there have been some orders for Twitter or X to bring down some of those profiles [01:54:00] and so on. And in the beginning, X would comply with those orders as just like other social media platforms, but after Mr.

Musk bought the platform, he made it very clear that he did not accept those orders and that he thinks they amount to censorship.

PHIL GAYLE - HOST, DW NEWS: Well, before, Justice Mores, followed through with his threat, X announced on X that he would not comply with the court's, instruction. Here's some of what appeared on the company's global affairs account today.

soon we expect, Judge Alexander de Mores, will order X to be shut down in Brazil simply because We would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents. Now, these enemies include a duly elected senator and a 16 year old girl, amongst others. So, Professor, what is Elon Musk referring to there?

FABIO DE SA E SILVA: He's referring to some of those investigations that I mentioned. So in this case, there was a senator who was using his, his account [01:55:00] to, for instance, incite the military against the civilian government. In the other case that he mentioned, a profile of a young girl was used apparently by her father. To docks a police officer who was working in one of those investigations.

And so it was in that context that justice more guys ordered the platform to bring those profiles down. But Mr. Musk, as I mentioned, is refusing to do that. And he's claiming that this is censorship, which I do not agree with. Because, as I mentioned, these decisions are being adopted in the context of investigations that look into violation of precedent laws.

PHIL GAYLE - HOST, DW NEWS: It's an odd decision anyway, because censorship or not, You would think , that working within a particular jurisdiction, you would just follow the law. So is there something more going on there? Why does Elon Musk, think that it's okay to disregard the laws [01:56:00] in Brazil where he wouldn't do that in the United States or even the European Union.

FABIO DE SA E SILVA: I believe, Phil, that, not only Mr. Musk, but others around the world look at Brazil nowadays as a potential, case in which a stronger push to regulate social media has been, attempted, so far not successfully, but, not only through the actions of Justice Moraes, but also through, Congress that was deliberating over a bill, last year.

There have been attempts to, place some limits on what social media platforms can do and what kinds of obligations they should have to, for instance, moderate content and avoid that misinformation as well as hate speech be disseminated on their platforms. I also think, in the case of Mr.

Musk, there is a commercial interest because, apparently his, his business wasn't doing well in Brazil, so he was already trying or planning to moving that away from the country. and there seems to be also [01:57:00] some kind of political, you know, sympathy, on the part of Mr. Musk for the Brazilian far right.

PHIL GAYLE - HOST, DW NEWS: It's interesting you say that it's not doing well commercially in Brazil. I saw an estimate today that something like 40 million Brazilians, roughly a fifth of the population, access X at least once a month, which sounds like a massive market for Elon Musk. Sacrifice in this way.

FABIO DE SA E SILVA: It is. It is a, reasonable or sizable market for any social media platform, which is a reason why many people doubts that Musk would take things as far as he did the information that we need.

Listen to here is that the branch here wasn't doing well commercially in terms of the ad that they are able to sell, for example, right? But yes, you're right that the platform is widely used in Brazil. it happens elsewhere as well. It's a platform that, that's a kind of niche platform.

So it's very much used by journalists [01:58:00] or by some, internet businesses. Yes. Or by some academics to engage in exchanges of ideas, but yeah, it's a decent number and, I think Brazilians are going to miss, X if it's really banned in the next couple of days.

PHIL GAYLE - HOST, DW NEWS: And so tell us about the judge at the center of this case, Supreme Court Justice Alexander de Mores.

Who is he?

FABIO DE SA E SILVA: He is actually, you know, relatively conservative, lawyer. He was a prosecutor in the state of San Paolo, before entering politics. I think he brings some of that, knack for investigation from. His, origins in the public prosecutor's career. He got to the Supreme Court during the term of President Temer, who replaced President Dilma Rousseff after she was impeached.

And, you know, he's always been seen as, a very conservative judge, tough on crime judge or legal scholar which he also [01:59:00] is. that makes things very interesting because nowadays the Brazilian far right suggests that he's working in line with the president when they actually come from very different camps politically.

The Battle for Truth: Social Media, Riots, and Freedom of Expression - Institute of Economic Affairs - Air Date 8-16-24

MATTHEW LESH - HOST, INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS: The latest reporting about, their response is that, they're gonna let the existing online state jackal into force, but they're gonna review it down the track with this idea and with a particular focus on Twitter, on X, on Elon Musk, on this idea that, we need to some kind of clamp down and to reduce the spread of that miss or dis information.

I'm wondering what you make of that, Clare.

CLAIRE FOX: Well, one of the difficulties is definitions and when you come to the law, this matters because the, way that dis and misinformation is treated, it's as though we all understand this is fake news, posed truth, lies, malicious lies at that.

In the riots situation. it's worth reiterating here that Hope Not Hate put forward, well, you know, I assume, by the way, tweeted or posted [02:00:00] in good faith, that there were, Muslim women having acid thrown in their faces in the height of the riots, and I was absolutely horrified, and I believed it to be true.

I thought, oh my god, things have got so out of hand that I was just thinking of the horrors of it. Only to discover, you know, the police just said the next day. Oh, no, that wasn't true and hope not hate aren't being rounded up as we speak, right? so, you know, it was like, oh, that was an honest mistake and the hundred Riots as were predicted one night and the next day hope not hate actually said, oh, yes We think that probably was a hoax, but you know, it did lead to very positive headlines and lots of anti-racists on the streets.

So I think that the difficulty we've got with the term like this or misinformation is what do they mean?

KRISTIAN NIEMIETZ: Yeah. I think a lot of people, on the pro. clamping down on this information side, seem to think that this is just another form of content moderation, that this will be the equivalent of, say, having a spam filter.

but the difference, of course, is that we can all agree what spam [02:01:00] is, and the definition of that doesn't change over time. It doesn't depend on, information that may change or, on political leanings, whereas this is very much not like that, and it's inevitably any rules about that are going to get, weaponized and, it's going to be just a social media equivalent of de banking, where with de banking, the issue is just that banks are being, hyper cautious and rationally so, finding out, verifying that a transaction is not dodgy, that it is not money laundering, is very costly, and no individual customer is super important to them, so it's just rational to say, well, I'll just shut down the account, and it's going to be just like that. It's, it would be very difficult for a social media content moderator to verify, did you maybe make an honest mistake, is the claim definitely false, all that kind of stuff, it's just far easier to say, well, This particular, post is not that important to me or to the company in the grand scheme of things.

We will just shut it down. We will just be, out of an excessive, but rationally excessive caution.

MATTHEW LESH - HOST, INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS: But obviously exception here being [02:02:00] Elon Musk who, and, and the current version of X where there, it does seem kind of a philosophical, ideological, bulwark, at least to some extent against this. I mean, I'm always reminded in terms of this just misinformation, mate, just How much our idea of what the truth was changed through COVID, and even what the authorities were telling us changed.

So, you know, very early on in the pandemic, it was the WHO repeated the Chinese lines that COVID 19 wasn't actually spreading between humans. You know, there's all this stuff about how masks were useless, and then they were compulsory, and then maybe they were useless again. There were all these instructions about wiping down groceries, despite the virus being airborne.

And this is, you know, That's all legitimate in a way, and assuming the authorities are telling you the best information they have at the time, maybe they weren't at all times, but for the most part, you know, even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, it's very difficult to manage a process around disinformation because there is no, like, one final truth and authority, so therefore you have, it's inevitably a politicized process, as you see with all these fact checkers, And then you, and in order to deal with this information, you have to give somebody the power over you.

[02:03:00] I think there's a second element to it as well. it's not just about who has the power over you, but sometimes allowing false information to be spoken about is actually important. this is actually why I think, Twitter X is doing very well, which is the whole community note situation.

the crowdsource truth finding. rather than we're taking down this information, you think it's false. We're going to, users are going to come together respond to it and make a vote to figure out what is a truer claim or what is an added context claim I found that extremely useful because.

You're not going to stop people from having a bad idea in their head, but you might be able to, give them an alternative viewpoint, and have that debate, rather than just saying, what we need to do is stop having any kind of debate in the first place.

KRISTIAN NIEMIETZ: It's also more effective, this self regulation mechanism through community notes, because, people who are getting a community note attached to a tweet are embarrassed about it, you know, it's like getting ratioed, and that's, possibly more effective than just trying to withhold default information, seeing it, but being invalidated by the community note, that's a stronger way of making the case there is a factual error here.

CLAIRE FOX: I think that's right. I think it's a sort of [02:04:00] bottom up, you know, form of intervention that's very helpful. Okay. because there's this notion that the, government are also pushing that from the age of five, you know, all teachers are to tell pupils how to identify disinformation and misinformation.

And I did a debate for a teacher's group the other night. when I posed to them various queries of what was true, what wasn't true, and so on and so forth. They couldn't handle it and I said now you think the five year olds are going to deal with this, right? they had a worldview that when I challenged their worldview They wanted to say was it misinformation disinformation that they couldn't do that in the end I pointed out these are matters of contentious politics point about community notes And this was the point I made to them was young people seeing that there are different arguments about facts, what is factually accurate or not.

Actually, that's how you learn what critical thinking is. Because you actually, if you do get community noted, as you pointed out, I [02:05:00] think I might be a bit more careful about checking my sources in the future. You're going to think about it much more. But the main problem with the way of approaching misinformation, disinformation, of removing it is that suppression leads people down rabbit holes.

It's precisely the suppression of speech which drives a conspiracy mongering, which makes people cynical about everything they hear that actually undoes the authority of truth in a genuine sense, so that it doesn't matter what you see, you don't believe it, you know, and you sort of say, Oh, well, I've, you know, the government have said that or the police have said that I don't believe them because they've tried to manipulate things.

So it's much better to have this kind of atmosphere where you have competition going on between different versions of events, that's not to be relativistic about truth, but so that you can piece together as an individual what it is you think is the case. When you were talking about community notes though, one of the things that struck me when you kind of got this collective, [02:06:00] all together we'll come up with the is Wikipedia.

I mentioned Wikipedia because Wikipedia is kind of well regarded by the establishment, it's certainly a legal entity. and I can safely say that there's been missing disinformation on my Wikipedia page since Wikipedia started. And it gets on my nerves, right?

And I can go and speak at a conference and people can read out my bio from Wikipedia and I'm mortified, right, because I sound like some complete lunatic. They haven't checked it because they believe it's true and many young people do the same. They think Wikipedia gives them a version of the truth.

Anyway, I mention this because I'm not trying to ban Wikipedia. I'm not trying to encourage the government to lock them up. But they do spread misinformation all the time, even though it's collectively done and the world has not collapsed as a consequence.

Governments Are Suddenly Shutting Down The Internet - Here’s Why - ColdFusion - Air Date 8-15-24

DAGOGO ALTRAIDE - HOST, COLDFUSION: It seems so unbelievable that the internet could be completely shut down, but the world's second largest [02:07:00] economy did that in one of its regions, for almost an entire year. We all know about China's Great Firewall. It's an advanced system for filtering the internet for population control.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: China runs the world's most complicated censorship machine.

The government actually requires Chinese internet companies to employ armies of human censors to police user generated content on their platforms.

DAGOGO ALTRAIDE - HOST, COLDFUSION: But the Chinese government also has control over internet service providers. This allows them to enforce national or regional shutdowns as needed. In 2009, the internet was cut off for 312 days in the Xinjiang region in response to riots.

Meanwhile in 2019, Russia passed the quote, sovereign internet law that gives the government the power to isolate its internet from the rest of the world.

JOHN HEIDEMANN: Telecommunications companies are large corporations and there's usually only a few of them. It's very easy for the government to reach out to the heads of those corporations and we think it's in the interest of the nation to [02:08:00] The internet has something called routing, which is how we decide where to send traffic.

And routing is managed by telecommunications companies. Other countries sometimes have very sophisticated means of routing. Intercepting some communications, but not all.

DAGOGO ALTRAIDE - HOST, COLDFUSION: But where does the USA stand in all of this? The Obama administration tried to pass an internet kill switch. Bill called the quote, protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010.

It was introduced to the Senate, but was heavily criticized and never passed. In the United Kingdom, if there's an emergency that can cause, quote, serious damage to political, administrative, or economic stability, the government can shut down the internet. The Communications Act of 2003 and the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 gives emergency powers to the government to suspend the internet, and this is done by ordering service providers to shut down internet operations.

A UK government representative said, quote, Quote, it would have to be a very serious threat for these powers to be used, something like a major cyber [02:09:00] attack. These powers are subject to review, and if it was used inappropriately, there could be an appeal to the Competition Appeal Tribunal. Any decision to use them would have to comply with the public law and the Human Rights Act.

End quote. And the passing of this act hasn't been without its detractors and critics. But as usual with government power, there is the risk of abuse, and some governments flat out just abuse this power. After Libya's devastating flood disaster in 2023, Derna, one of the cities hit hardest by the floods, experienced a significant communication blackout and complete internet shutdown.

Initially, some people thought it was because of the natural disaster, but the real reason was to stop online criticism and potential riots against how badly the government was handling the crisis, and this was at a time when 11, 300 were reported dead and 40, 000 displaced. The government obviously didn't have their priorities right, and if this isn't an absurd abuse of power, I don't know what is.

JOHN HEIDEMANN: A lot of countries have proposed we should have a kill switch. The United States, the UK, [02:10:00] Australia, have all proposed kill switches, and I was just looking before joining you. What I saw was a news report saying Australia actually has a kill switch.

DAGOGO ALTRAIDE - HOST, COLDFUSION: In Australia, an internet shutdown mechanism exists under Section 581 of Australia's Telecommunications Act of 1997.

It grants the Australian Government significant authority over telecommunications networks. Including the power to stop internet access in the interest of national security. In 2003, in the wake of the War on Terror, the Act was amended so that the Attorney General, who was the Chief Law Officer of the Commonwealth of Australia, could direct a telecommunications carrier to kill the internet, quote, either generally or to a particular person or particular persons, end quote.

Before executing the Act, He must ask the Prime Minister and Minister for Communications approval first. The amendment was rushed through, giving only four working days for anyone to raise concerns. Concerns were indeed raised, so the language was changed. The law now couldn't be used to turn off the internet for an individual or [02:11:00] organisation, only the internet as a whole.

So, that's comforting, I guess. In 2024, Malaysian Minister Azalina Othman Syed recently announced the government's plans to implement an internet kill switch. The minister issued a statement that the, quote, new legislation that includes the provisions regarding the procedure and enforcement of a kill switch, end quote, is for the purpose of analysing digital security.

That's probably as thinly veiled as it gets. The legislation will reach the Malaysian parliament in October. As mentioned earlier, around 39 countries around the world have in one way or another completely shut down access to the internet. We, as citizens of nations, need protection, if only in the interests of being prudent.

In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted something called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international legal document that outlines fundamental human rights and freedoms, such as the right to life, equity and non discrimination, right to freedom of work, freedom of education, [02:12:00] and so on.

But what about a right to the internet? Just 15 years ago, this might have sounded absurd, but today, the internet is the infrastructure on which modern society is built. Because of this, it's no wonder that the UN has declared internet access a human right and deemed internet kill switches as illegal, and this was in 2016.

In practice, however, while there's significant international pressure against internet shutdowns, there's no binding international law that bans governments from doing such actions. In Bangladesh, the primary reasons to shut down the internet, as cited by the government, was to stop misinformation and rumours from spreading.

But does it actually help?

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The busy streets of Dhaka are deserted with burnt vehicles and bricks strewn across the roads. And the protesters have gone on a rampage at many police stations and government establishments. There's a complete internet and telecom shutdown that is in effect in a move to curb the violence.

JOHN HEIDEMANN: So misinformation is a real challenge. And I guess if you shut the internet off, nobody's looking at Facebook. In [02:13:00] that sense, it's quote successful. It's a very heavy handed maneuver though. The other thing I was thinking about in misinformation, I mean, In the United States right now, there's been some debate about what role the government should have in intervening in the spread of misinformation on social media.

I don't think anyone's proposing shutting down the internet, but people are talking about the role of interactions between the government and social media sites. And how do you label misinformation on social media? And I think those are things we all have to grapple with. And there's different points of view about that.

DAGOGO ALTRAIDE - HOST, COLDFUSION: Shutting down the internet to curtail protests like in Bangladesh, Egypt in 2011 during the Arab Spring, and for election periods in Venezuela, like in 2019. are the more common excuses to kill the internet. But there's a very strange reason why some countries might end up doing it. In 2024, from May 26th through to June 13th, the internet in Syria went dark.

The reason? High school exams. This is actually a common tactic used in many countries [02:14:00] including Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and many others. The purpose is to stop students cheating in exams by using online methods. If this method really is that effective remains to be seen, but it hasn't stopped 12 shutdowns recorded in 2023 alone.

But the question is, what does everyone else in the country do at that time? I guess they just sit around and twiddle their thumbs. But it does bring up an interesting point though. What is the cost of an internet shutdown?

Beyond the tragic loss of life and injuries, the recent internet shutdown in Bangladesh has seen immense economic damage as you can imagine. According to NetBlock and their cost of shutdown tool, the total financial impact to Bangladesh has been around 393 million for five days of internet shutdown.

For the United States, daily e commerce trade is valued at 2 billion and the daily digital economy is about 5. 5 billion. So a complete internet shutdown for one day in the United States could amount to losses in the range north of 7 billion at a bare [02:15:00] minimum. But back to Bangladesh and the internet shutdown.

It's estimated that there's over 1 million freelancers that operate out of Bangladesh. That's a million people who depend entirely on the internet for their careers. And this isn't just for work within the country, but to deliver projects abroad. And suddenly, Their entire livelihood is gone, and the worst part is that they have no idea when it's coming back.

And this isn't to mention the impact on hospitals, banking, and other critical industries that rely on the internet to operate. So it's not just the dollar value, but humans and their daily life is at stake with internet shutdowns.

JOHN HEIDEMANN: Imagine the economic damage that would have if your internet was shut off for five days, you know.

I think a government's got to think very carefully before they take such a decision because of the economic implications, much less the social implications.

Enshittification Part 2: The Mechanisms That Helped Big Digital Go Bad - On the Media - Air Date 5-12-23

CORY DOTOROW: I grew up going to a great little company in Toronto called the Canadian National Exhibitions, the CNE. By 10 a.m., and there'd be someone walking around with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket. [02:16:00] As hard as you tried, you could never match the feat. So how did they get this giant teddy bear and why? Well, basically, the company made sure they won. The first person who came along and looked like a likely mark, they'd say, Tell you what, I like your face. You got just one ball in the basket. I'll give you a keychain. And if you do it again, I'll let you trade two keychains for the giant teddy bear. And the point was that if you carry that giant teddy bear around all day, other people are going to go, hey, I can get a giant teddy bear too, and put $5 down and fail to win the giant teddy bear. They may not even get the keychain. This guy is lugging around this conspicuous teddy bear doing the marketing for the rigged game where you see Joe Rogan getting $100 million for his podcast or you see TikTokers have these incredible success stories. Or back when Kindle was getting off the ground, there were independent authors who went to Kindle and reported these incredible findings. Substack. All of those early Substack writers who are guaranteed a minimum monthly. We're talking about how Substack [02:17:00] was the future of journalism. And really all that was happening is they were being given these giant teddy bears, same as those Uber drivers who are filling Uber social media with accounts of how much money they make driving for Uber. They're just luring people to go through the picker to ant pipeline.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you say the big teddy bear theory plays out big on TikTok.

CORY DOTOROW: So the thing that even TikTok's critics admit is that it's pretty good at guessing what you want. That's why most people who use tech talk just tune in to the recommendation feed. People find themselves going viral because so many people have tuned in to this algorithmic feed. And the assumption had been this is what America wanted to see right now. And so America saw it. But then a reporter from Forbes revealed the existence of something called the heating tool. And it's just a knob that's someone at TikTok twiddles to say, we're going to stick this in front of a lot of people, even though the algorithm doesn't think they'll like it. This is a way of temporarily allocating a surplus, giving goodies to the [02:18:00] kind of performer that they want to become dependent on TikTok. So maybe they want sports bros, they find a few of these guys and they give them giant teddy bears. You're viral. 10 million views every video you post. Are you really going to make like two different videos, one for YouTube and one for TikTok, especially when you're getting ten times the traffic on TikTok? And remember, you know, TikTok's got this like, idiosyncratic format. You really got to customize it for TikTok. So it's not really practical to make it for Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Maybe you'd become a TikTok first performer, right? And then they can take it away from you if they decide they've got enough sports pro content and now they want to got, I don't know, astrology influencers. They can stop promoting, stop heating the sports bro content and start hitting the astrologer content. But also, it's impossible to tell whether a performer or a writer or creative worker on one of these platforms like Substack, is getting a giant payout. Whether they've been given a giant teddy bear, whether they even know. And in fact, if you [02:19:00] and now we're getting into counter twiddling, if you get aggressive enough and trying to figure out how they're determining whether or not your videos will be shown to your subscribers. Right. If you start to reverse engineer their tools, start to pull apart their app to see if you can find the business rules, they will start to come after you for violating Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which broadly prohibits reverse engineering, violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for tortious interference with contract for trademark violation, patent violation, copyright infringement. And again, this just boils down to felony contempt to business model.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I don't know what that is.

CORY DOTOROW: That's just the idea that even if Congress never passed a law saying never displease a shareholder, that you can mobilize existing laws like copyright law to say that displeasing a shareholder becomes illegal. So, like, let's talk about iPhones just for a second. I make an app for an iPhone. You own an iPhone, you spend [02:20:00] $1,000 on that iPhone. I made the app and I hold the copyright to it. I don't want to share 30% of all my revenue with Apple. And you don't think I should have to. So I give you the app and a tool that allows you to install it on your iPhone, which belongs to you. I the copyright owner, by letting you use my copyrighted work, violate copyright law. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm hmm. It's amazing that people who talk about the free market lock it up so tight that it can't be responsive to the consumers that are supposed to operate it.

CORY DOTOROW: Oh, you know, it's even worse, right? Because it's not just that Apple, like all capitalists, hates capitalism when they're on the pointy end of it. It's that Apple did the thing that they would now sue you for two other companies. So if [02:21:00] you think about when Microsoft Windows reigned supreme in the office and Macs were getting harder and harder to use because word for the Mac or office for the Mac was so bad, the way Steve Jobs resolved, that was by having some of his technologists reverse engineer Microsoft Office and make AI work that read and write Microsoft Office files. When Apple did it, that was progress. When you or I do it, that is theft that it it's allowing maximum twiddling on the incumbent side and preventing any twiddling on the new market entrants side. You know, ad blocking is the most successful consumer boycott in history. That's what Doc Searls says. And it's only possible because the web is an open platform. But if you wanted to make an ad blocker for an app, the fact that you have to first reverse engineer the app that you have to bypass digital rights management makes it a felony. And so the ads on apps are a lot more obnoxious, not just. In terms of their presentation, but in terms of the data [02:22:00] that they gather and target with, we're all familiar with the stories about people being targeted by ads based on visiting mosques or abortion clinics and all of the other terrible abuses. That's because without the constraint of counter twiddling, the sky's the limit in terms of how much they can tell you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The FTC has lawsuits against Facebook, and the Department of Justice has an antitrust case against Google where twiddling resulted in undetectable fraud. So is there some accountability afoot?

CORY DOTOROW: I think that there's an attempt to do it. But let's go back to the best time to fight monopolies was 40 years ago, and the second best time is now. You know, there are people who say that the monopolies that we have in tech, the winner take all are winner take most monopolies that they come out of tech exceptionalism. There's just something about the great forces of history that have made tech so powerful. But, you know, Occam's Razor says we should [02:23:00] look to the simplest explanation first. And the simple explanation here is that we used to do anti-trust and we didn't get monopolies. We stopped doing antitrust and we got a lot of monopolies. I think the world of the antitrust enforcers in the Biden administration, Lina Khan, is extraordinary.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The head of the Federal Trade Commission.

CORY DOTOROW: That's right. She was a third year Yale law student just a couple of years ago. And she wrote this paper that was a direct answer to Robert Bork. So Bork's book was called The Antitrust Paradox. Her law review paper was called Amazon's Antitrust Paradox. And it was such a stinging rebuttal to Bork that it set the whole antitrust theoretical world on its ear. And just a few years later, she is the youngest ever chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and she found things like Section Five of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which wasn't that hard to find. It's right between Section Four and Section six, but hasn't been used in 40 years. And it's the article that gives the Federal Trade Commission broad latitude to act against deceptive and unfair [02:24:00] practices. And that's the basis on which she promulgated a rule banning non-compete agreements. We are seeing in Khan what a skilled technocrat can do. If you know where the levers are, you're not afraid to pull the levers. You can make incredible things happen. And we are in an incredible moment for antitrust. And it's not just her, it's Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice. It's other commissioners like Rebecca Slaughter. And it's the whole of government approach that Tim Wu crafted when he was in the White House, where every department is now being asked to use its legislative authority to go ahead and act to reduce monopoly and monopoly power across the entire economy.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from the PBS NewsHour, Pillar of Garbage, Disinformation, Tech Won't Save [02:25:00] Us, Decoder, Commonwealth Club of World Affairs, the Daily Zeitgeist, DW News, Institute of Economic Affairs, ColdFusion, and On the Media. Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks 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. And remember, we are looking for a new transcriptionist. Please send me an email if you're interested. 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 [02:26:00] episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion.

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

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#1657 Modeling Positive Masculinity: Between Tim Walz and the Manosphere, boys are looking for guidance (Transcript)

Posted by · September 24, 2024 8:20 AM

Air Date 9/24/2024

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

The positive dad vibes of Tim Walz came onto the national scene in the middle of an ongoing crisis of masculinity that stretches from the youngest generations to the oldest. Both positive and negative aspects of masculinity tie in with the general election, basically divided it right down the partisan line. And the next generation of voters, not to mention humans, are often feeling stuck between the two, with insufficient guidance from the men in their lives.

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes Hysteria, Some More News, The Brian Lehrer Show, Amanpour and Company, Dear Old Dads, and What Fresh Hell.

Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in five sections, some of them quite short. Section A. Tim Walz. Section B. [00:01:00] J.D. Vance-branded masculinity. Section C. The fallout of stoicism. Section D. Dating life, containing discussion of sex, including violence. And finally Section E. Social emotional development.

Tim Walz is The Perfect Model of Masculinity Which Contrasts Weird, Blowhard JD Vance - Hysteria - Air Date 8-15-24

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: It's been such a wild summer. But I think that the moment that the vibes went from the worst vibes possible--

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: The worst!

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: --to among the best vibes possible.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Because we needed it.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Because we needed it, which was when Minnesota governor Tim Walz, like a breath of fresh air, comes breezing in from Minnesota. And he changed the entire course of the presidential election with his just like positive Santa Claus energy. People immediately noticed that Walz reminded them of dads and uncles and relatives that they had.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah!

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Wish [00:02:00] they had. And the more we see him on the stump, the more we're seeing an example of somebody who is fully a man. Nobody would be like that guy's girly, because he is very, very much--

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Most decidedly not girly.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Exactly. But it is a model of masculinity, of kindness, cheerfulness, helpfulness, usefulness that is such a good counterexample to what we had been seeing from Team Trump, and even from in among the Democrats. Like I think we have Jamie Raskin is one person who sort of has this vibe.

But yeah, Alyssa, you're nodding.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: No, I just-- you know what it is? It's like we have been surrounded by people who are keen to tell us about all the problems, but not a lot of fixers. Like, you know, when Mr. Rogers is like, always look for the helpers, where have the helpers been? And the Republicans, more than anybody, are like, let me tell you why things are broken and who's to blame and why you should have grievance. And Tim Walz [00:03:00] just shows up with a tool belt. He's like, let's fix it. And I think that that's something that we just haven't heard in a long time. And that's no ding on Biden or anything. It's just a totally different energy, and someone who is bringing fresh eyes and fresh legs to this race.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah. So this is something that was written into our outline by Fiona, our associate producer.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: And I want to ask you this question verbatim, because I think it's so funny. I don't know--

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: I'm going to be honest.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: "Is this a hopium high that will last through November?"

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: So can I ask a question? Is that like a reference I'm not missing?

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: There's no "hopium" in the Urban Dictionary. This is just like opium and--

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Hopium instead of opium.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: It's a brand new portmanteau.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Well, yeah, I just like to make sure, because we all know I'm a little Gen X sometimes.

This was what we needed. Erin, I don't think that any of us could have felt sadder or worse for a gambit of reasons [00:04:00] after the debate. And I personally, my estrogen levels aside, not sleeping, not feeling good, not feeling joyful, feeling total despair about everything.

And we needed this. And I think, look, there are going to be pitfalls. Bad things are going to happen between now and election day. You and I both know it. But I think that we've got to take the hopium for what it is.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Mm hmm. You know, I agree with you and I find myself getting caught up in it. And, you and I have talked about this, that politicians aren't for stanning. They're--

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: No, they're people.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: They're people. They're your employees. But I think during the campaign, it is okay to get excited about the people that are trying to get the jobs that you are eventually going to criticize them when they are in it. Because--

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Of course!

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: That's what democracy is. And I find myself really, really falling hard for the Tim Walz vibe. I think a friend of mine on Instagram referred to himself as being "Walz pilled", [00:05:00] which I think we are. We're Walz pilled.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: It is. You know what, though? I think it's also because he is such a contrast. Trump aside -- we've been listening to him drone on for eight years at this point, twelve years, however long.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Too long.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: J. D. Vance, though, is such a poser, like he's such a poser. Like when he-- Look it -- I want someone who I can look at on Instagram and is like, you know what? I'm gonna bring the same smarts to fixing America that I brought to fixing this carburetor. I don't want some fucking broed out douchebag to be walking on the tarmac assaulting Kamala Harris's plane, to be like, I'm just here to see what my plane looks like.

It's like, are you in a 1985 gang movie? Who are you?

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Oh my God. It reminded me of Gaston going over to Belle's house and being like, we're getting married. And she's like, no, we're not.

I've found the archetypes that are at play [00:06:00] within the election I guess impossible for me to resist.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Cartoonish?

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah. So we have Kamala Harris, who suddenly is leaning into the kooky aunt who you can call her if you're at a party and she'll come and pick you up and she will not tell your parents but you better not do this ever again.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: See, I think I really relate to that. That is my role in life. I am the one who tells my niece, and my sister always listens, I'm like you listen JJ, someday you're gonna get in trouble. And I'm going to be the one you call. And I'm going to show up. Just remember that. And that is how I feel about about Auntie Kamala.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah. And, she'll drive you to the airport. You can stay with her for a week. She lives in the city. She's got an apartment in a tall building. Like she's got a boyfriend. I mean, the real Kamala is married, obviously, but that's the aunt I'm thinking of.

And then we have Tim Walz, who is like the guy who can fix your car and clean the gutters and cares deeply about public education. He reminds me so much, and he reminds a lot of people, of male relatives. He's like my grandpa Ryan.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Like he's my uncle Dieter.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah. 100%. And then we have [00:07:00] J. D. Vance, who is the guy your husband is friends with and they've been friends since high school, and so before he comes to town, your husband is like, look, I know he's a lot to bite off--

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: But we've been friends forever--

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: And he just needs to stay at our house for a couple of days. And he goes out and gets blasted and comes back and pees your couch.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: I was just gonna say his nickname is Detox.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: It's like the type of person who brings the mood down wherever he shows up. Like he's just--

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: A blowhard.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah, but he feels also vaguely threatening. And watching, I just think having Walz as this example of somebody who could --

And he's not just up there spreading good cheer by singing loud for all to hear. He's saying things that are aggressive. He is being the vice president attack dog that he needs to be.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: There is something about him that is like the reason I think that he feels so trustworthy to me is because he has lived the life that most Americans are living right now and he can actually relate to [00:08:00] it. And I think that there is also something about him in the reclaiming of patriotism, like I think you and I have talked a lot over the past, how many years have we done this? Five years?

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: So long.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Democrats are not great at fighting back. It's like either they go so low, like they're just not good at it. And he has really threaded the needle in a way that's like, hey, guess what? You're not gonna fucking say, you're not gonna try to make indictments or proclamations around my military service. You're not gonna do that, and I'm gonna tell you why. Because you shouldn't do that to anybody who has served, because they have given of themselves, they have made a sacrifice. And like, when he ended, when he was speaking at AFSCME, and he defended himself, which is someone who lived through the Kerry campaign, when John Kerry got swift boated by Republicans, and couldn't believe it, so didn't fight back against it because he's like Americans are never gonna believe this, but they did. And Tim Walz not only defended [00:09:00] himself, but said, you know what? I also salute and appreciate and respect your service, J.D. Vance. He's just got like the 360 response that I think a lot of people have been missing on stuff, or have not had the ability to do, because he had the actual lived experience.

Are Men Okay – SOME MORE NEWS - Air Date 5-22-24

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: Are men okay? You see, because most men have balls. Not all of them, but on average men have 1.4 balls. According to me, just making up a number. Anyway, here's some news in the form of the question we just asked: Are men okay? I only ask, because, well...

CLIP: Move forward. I'm a man. Move forward. I am a man! I am a man! I am a man! Move forward! I am a man! I am a man! Move forward! I am a man!

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: Okay, so the short answer is no. Men are not [00:10:00] doing okay. Or rather, that man isn't. But to be fair, I have been known to scream, "I'm a man" repeatedly and through sobs, but that's usually while moving heavy furniture or taking a dump. Anyway, that clip is apparently from one of those wildly expensive and so-called alpha male bootcamps that have become recently popular, if only to mock on the internet. There are so many of these now, even Jesus is getting in on the fun.

CLIP: Welcome to the Stronger Men's Conference. What God did in your life, it's meant to impact the world around you. It's meant to be multiplied, that's the plan of God for you! We can change and impact the world because we serve the strong man, Jesus Christ! He says, I will go with you, but hold on with you always! I'm gonna give you strength!

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: Aw yeah! Monster trucks, wrestling, fire, and Jesus! Boy, as a man, that felt [00:11:00] both insulting and chilling to watch. And while it's fun and easy to make fun of the many clips from these camps, this of course speaks to a larger problem happening right now. And, honestly, before now. Which is that men everywhere are struggling with their mental health as it relates to their gender identity.

Nearly three out of four of every death of despair, as in a suicide or overdose, is committed by a man. I mean, look: we're all pretty bummed out right now. Probably because of the Queen's death. She had so much life left in her!

But men, specifically young men, are even more bummed. While there was a 4 percent rise in suicides across the board, for young men, that rise was double. And that's probably in part due to men not seeking help nearly as often as anyone else. Here's a survey from Cleveland Clinic that found over 80 percent of men feel stressed, but also 65 percent of them feel hesitant to seek professional counseling. Here's another survey of [00:12:00] 1,001 adult males that found nearly 50 percent of them were, quote, "more depressed than they admitted to the people in their lives." Here's an insurance survey where one in four men admitted that they've never talked to anybody about their mental health. You get the point. Insurance ghouls don't screw around with this stuff.

But it's not just depression. Men are struggling socially, too. They are lonely. I mean, I'm not. I have tons of friends who aren't puppets. Right, Friendulous?

FRIENDULOUS: That's right, Cody!

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: See? I'm not lonely. But for example, dating is far more difficult for men. That's probably why they are having less sex than they used to. That, and their living arrangements. Since the 60s, the rate of men living with their parents has steadily gone up, to the point that there are now more men living with their parents than living alone, or with a partner, or a roommate, or like, a quirky Mediterranean cousin, or two hot chicks, or a zany source of increasing [00:13:00] sexual tension.

For women, that rate of living with your parents is lower. But they are catching up. Good for them!

We don't know exactly why men are struggling socially, but it's probably somewhat related to the fact that they aren't making enough money anymore. I mean, yeah, we're all hurting there, but men aren't going to college as much as they used to, either. Their employment rate has either stagnated or gone down.

And since 1979, men's average wages have fallen 10%, while women's wages have gone up 25%. Although I'm guessing that's in part because women were paid less than men and have to catch up. Because despite everything I just said, men still rule the world? It's still a patriarchy? Everything is still dominated by men. The richest and most powerful people are still men, just not most men. So we have a bit of a pickle dilly, a dick pilly, a seow [00:14:00] mess.

Society is run by men and largely designed for men, but the majority of men don't feel like they are in charge of anything. And so their anxiety around that is uniquely related to their gender identity.

That's why if you were to ask, let's say, certain men if there's a patriarchy or if women have problems worth considering, you'll probably get a response that strips all nuance and just gives a laundry list of various issues that men have, like this.

NEWS CLIP: Do you believe that we live in a patriarchy and it negatively affects women?

No.

CHARLIE KIRK CLIP: Yeah, so for example, men are more likely to commit suicide.

NEWS CLIP: Yeah.

CHARLIE KIRK CLIP: More likely to die at work. More likely to declare bankruptcy. Women are far less likely to be in credit card debt. Far more likely to graduate from college. Far more likely to get a high paying job.

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: Ah, you know how the left is all about victimhood and their victim mentality? Claiming that they're the victim, and Ah, I'm just sick of it! Because actually, the real victims are men? [00:15:00] Hey, quick question. All these problems that men apparently have, who made the society that created those problems? Is it the women who make you do all the wars? But these types of weirdos can frame it as a woman problem because women are more often supported and boosted in the interest of equality, because of this patriarchy that continues to screw over both men and women.

Boy, if only there were a movie about this exact dynamic, perhaps involving a magical doll world and multiple musical numbers.

I'm not saying that women have it easier, quite the opposite. We've had decades of women being told to be subservient baby cannons, and have only recently begun course correcting from that error. Women are redefining themselves beyond that role. And while the efforts to do that are extremely difficult, the message there is somewhat clear.

But with men, the message hasn't really changed much. For generations, the concept of masculinity has always been presented one specific way. Men are expected to endure physical and emotional pain with little complaint, lest we get [00:16:00] soft! Men hate being soft! in multiple ways, aha! You can trace this all the way back to the 1800s, when writer Washington Irving complained that Americans too often send their kids overseas to become luxurious and effeminate in Europe and claimed that, quote, "a previous tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness most in unison with our political institutions." You got to do that trad Little House on the Prairie life, bros!

Dating Amid Gender Differences in Politics - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 7-30-24

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Some important background is that voters under 30 have been a pretty unwavering pillar of the Democratic electorate since the late eighties when Reagan left office. So it's pretty noticeable that young men have recently been defecting. They're becoming more conservative and the Wall Street Journal gets into a whole slew of reasons for this, including a response to wokeness, a sense that white men are [00:17:00] demonized, men specifically are demonized.

So listeners, especially young people, we want to hear from you. How has this dynamic affected your dating lives or romantic relationships? Maybe your friendships. Have you seen a noticeable difference over the past few years?

It's also important to know this shift toward Trump among young men isn't among just white men who have historically leaned Republican. It also includes black and Latino men before Biden ended his bid for reelection earlier this month. The Wall Street Journal found that Trump was winning support from a majority of men under 30. And if that stays true on election day, it would be the first time the Republican Party won that demographic, young men, in over two decades.

The Trump campaign has found a lot of success in framing Trump as something of an anti-hero, and that's clearly very appealing to a lot of young men who feel like they've been left out of the narrative or marginalized by progressive politics, by what [00:18:00] they would call "woke politics", those who feel abandoned by the Democratic Party for that reason and others.

Several of the men who were quoted in this Wall Street Journal article, they said they hide their conservative views when looking for a partner because women they know have said that they won't date right-leaning men.

Also listeners, if you're a Democrat who will date a Republican, but maybe only if they repudiate Trump, or maybe you're a Republican who will date a Democrat if they, let's say, oppose socialism. Are any of those folks out there? We're opening this up to anybody who wants to talk about what it's like to be in a relationship to date at this time of such hyper partisanship.

Give us a call, 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. And, one other thing -- we have the calls are flowing in, I'm told.

But one other thing before we get to the calls is the issue involving [00:19:00] reproductive rights. The headline of this Wall Street Journal article was "America's new political war pits young men against young women" and one of the main reasons it cites for women moving further left is reproductive rights. So women are leaning more to the left on issues like LGBTQ rights and childcare. So Democratic messaging on these issues appears to be resonating more with women than men. And the Trump campaign is definitely appealing to a kind of traditionalism, when it comes to gender dynamics, a return to masculinity as a thing to be celebrated. This was something that was evident at the Republican National Convention.

We've heard some rhetoric to this regard from Vice Presidential nominee J. D. Vance, so this is a dynamic out there and our lines are open for a highly informal poll to figure out if this is a dynamic that is occurring here in the New York area. Again, give us a [00:20:00] call, text us your story, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-WNYC, 9692.

I want to quote one piece of this article here. "Young men now favor Republican control of Congress and Trump for President after backing President Biden and Democratic lawmakers, just four years ago in 2020. Meanwhile, women under 30 remain strongly behind Democrats for Congress and the White House. They're also far more likely to call themselves liberal than they were two decades ago.

“BoyMom” Author Looks at Raising Sons in an Age of “Impossible Masculinity” - Amanpour and Company - Air Date 7-9-24

MICHEL MARTIN: You know, this is a quote that stood out to us when we read the book. He wrote that, "For boys, vulnerability and privilege coexist in a complex relationship. Masculine norms and expectations confer countless advantages, but they also bring significant harm. The two come together in male socialization to create a [00:21:00] contradictory and strangely destructive combination of indulgence and neglect". Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, what do you mean by that? How do we see that?

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah. So, I think this is going back to the whole thing about privilege. Um, so obviously there are real advantages to being male in this world and we know that, but there are real harms to it, too. So the system of patriarchy that, you know, tells women to behave a certain way and oppresses women also oppresses men in certain ways, too, and cuts them off from their emotions, tells them that they have to be strong and masculine and makes people project masculine qualities onto boys right from birth. And so, in some ways, boys get very indulged, you know, there's all this research that shows that they do less chores than girls, and that they get paid more for them. And all of these things.

So, parents do indulge boys in some bad behavior, they let them get away with things, they somehow sort of give them this idea that they're kind of special, and they don't have to do these difficult things, [00:22:00] but there're also ways that they really, you know, that they're under-cared for. They don't get that engagement with emotions. They don't get hurt. Their feelings don't get heard in the same way that girls feelings do get heard. You know, we spend a lot of time listening to boys and male opinions, but a far less time listening to their feelings. And I think that this sort of under-nurture thing is where the neglect part comes in, you know, and there are very real harms to that. And we see that with adult men, we see that they're lonely. We see that they're disconnected. We see that they're disconnected from their emotions. And so, you know, this is the same system. It is complex. It's not simple. It's not like, being a man is all benefit and no downside, you know,? There are very real harms built into the system.

MICHEL MARTIN: Well, you point out that, you know, there really is a difference between, sort of neurologically, between male and female infants, how their brains develop and also just the impact of exposure to stress [00:23:00] and negative parenting, which I think was maybe... it was a shock to me. Was it a shock to you?

RUTH WHIPPMAN: It was a real shock to me, 'cause when you sort of look at the science of sex differences and you know, people co-op this science quite a lot, it's quite sketchy. So, there's this idea that boys will be boys. So, boys are rambunctious, they're tough, they're sturdy, they're angry, they're badly behaved. But actually when you look at the research, a baby boy is born about a month to six weeks behind a baby girl in terms of right brain development. So, that's the part that governs emotions and attachment and emotional regulation. So, because their brains are more immature, they're actually more emotionally vulnerable and sensitive. So, all of the kind of stereotypes, you know, really go against what a baby boy actually is. And a baby girl is born more resilient, more independent, more able to regulate her emotions. So, because of that brain fragility, it means that any kind of adverse [00:24:00] circumstances—so, you know, poverty or neglect or poor circumstances—has been shown to have a greater impact at a population level on boys than it does on girls. But because of our ideas of masculinity, you know, what we think a baby boy is, we tend to treat them with less kind of nurture and less of that intense emotional caregiving than we do with girls. So, it becomes this double whammy. They need more care, but they end up getting less, in a sense, you know, we masculinize them. There's all this research that shows that parents use a different vocabulary when they talk with girls, that they use more emotional language, they listen to their feelings more. Whereas with boys, it's more of this like physical roughhousing and wrestling type play. And so maybe boys and boys all the way through childhood really kind of miss out on that emotional engagement. We don't teach them the skills in that way.

MICHEL MARTIN: Do you think this is a new feeling? This feeling of having [00:25:00] to constantly be on your guard. Do you think that that's new?

RUTH WHIPPMAN: I think that that is an old feeling. I think that comes from very old systems of masculinity, but I think what makes it more acute now, there are various cultural forces that I think are making it harder to be a boy now. So, I think that they still have these... you know, those are old stories. Men always had to kind of man up and be tough and not be vulnerable. But I think that now there's just so many different kinds of cultural forces. I think there's this idea, that it's time for them to be quiet, from the left. They're feeling like people are talking about them as if they're toxic and harmful. I think since #MeToo, you know, quite rightly, there's this whole conversation about consent, which is great. But I think it means that they Also feel at the same time that they have to be extremely cautious that they can never overstep. So at the same time, they're kind of expected to be dominant and aggressive and to kind of make the first move and be, you know, um, the sort of [00:26:00] masculine appearing one with girls.

But at the same time, they also have to be extremely cautious and to never overstep. And otherwise they'll be seen as creepy. So I think a lot of them were just feeling like I don't know how to be. I'd rather just be on my own in my room and watch porn by myself.

MICHEL MARTIN: Oh gosh. So, what reaction are you getting? What reaction stands out to you?

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Well, I've been really surprised by actually how many men have got in touch with me and said, Oh, I feel really seen and really heard by this. And they've actually read the book, you know, I thought the book because it's called BoyMom that it would appeal mainly to women, but lots and lots of women have been getting in touch with me as well.

But also I was surprised to see men saying, you know, this is exactly what my childhood was like, you know, all these pressures of masculinity, I feel very shut down. I don't know how to be thank you for seeing this and hearing it. So the response has been mostly extremely positive. I think some people are concerned that there's like a little bit of both sides ism, you know, in the sense of like, centering boys and men [00:27:00] somehow takes away from the work that we're doing to support women and girls. And my view on that is that actually, you know, we're all trapped in this system together. That, you know, raising emotionally healthy men and boys benefits everybody in society. You know, this is not a zero sum game.

We Love Some BDE Part 2 - Big Dad Energy - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-23-24

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah, it's really interesting if you think about Andrew Tate or whatever that guy is his name and you think about Tim Walz, it's so clear that one is a real man and one is not. Just imagine those two guys meet and we're gonna have that typical, they're staring each other down, they're gonna have some sort of measuring contest, and then you think what's that going to mean? Short of, I don't know, fighting, what is Andrew Tate going to do that Tim Walz can't? Tim Walz will fix your car. He'll have repaired every door in your house. He's got WD 40. He's got a special, like a holster for it that he carries around all the time. And let's like, and anything that you would need in your real life and any reason you would think, "Hey, I sure wish I had a dad type person, a typical [00:28:00] masculine figure in my life." for anything you'd really need them for, he's just the best.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah, there are a hundred reasons to have Tim Walz in your life. There are zero reasons to have Andrew Tate in your life. Unless you're like, I gotta get rid of this hornet's nest, but I want them to take someone with them when they go! I would use him to dry toxic waste maybe, or if I had a bunch of poison I needed eaten.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: just did

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: an oil change. And you're like, we're not allowed to throw this in the trash.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Exactly. Can I throw it into an Andrew Tate? And he'd be like, "I'll rub it all over my body. And then Lithuania," and I'll be like, yeah, go ahead and do that.

And I think it's so funny that we feel the need to caveat, " except if it were a fight," because Tim Walz is never going to fucking fight Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate orders his third drink at the bar. And Tim Walz is like, "that guy's gonna try and fuckin fight someone in a bit. I'm gonna leave. Doot de doo. Hun, I'm on my way home. Oh, did I have fun? Oh, I had a great time. Me and the boys were driving around," and Andrew Tate's just getting beaten to death by a cop on the front step of the TGI Friday's where he started to fight. [00:29:00]

There's no universe where Andrew Tate is useful to anybody except Andrew Tate's mental illness. That is the only person who wants more Andrew Tate, it's Andrew Tate's psychosis. And again, the reason we are sold Andrew Tate is because Andrew Tate is the version of masculinity you can buy. You can buy a gym membership. You can buy a fancy haircut. You can buy oil to smoosh all over your

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: abs.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Buy your

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: way out of those

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: rape charges.

Well, it turns out not so much, but you can buy a lawyer to move you to Lithuania or whatever it is, but you have to earn the Tim Walz. You have to be there, you have to show up for people, you have to care genuinely, you have to have something to say. And Andrew Tate will never have that. God comes down to Andrew Tate tomorrow and it's like, "Andrew, you're a douche change your ways and try to be as much like Tim Walz as possible."

He [00:30:00] physically will never be able to do it. He does not have the things inside capable of it, which is why he has to constantly be selling his version of masculinity to everyone else. Because if you aren't selling it, if you weren't constantly pitching that commercial capitalistic version of masculinity, people recognize it as worthless, which is the thing you're most afraid of being.

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Fucking 100 percent all of that, Eli. And the other thing that this brand of particularly toxic And violent masculinity does is once you've believed in and created yourself as a solution for a violent and conflict-full world, when that's the world that you have been training for and sold yourself and all your buddies have sold each other on, what you're going to do is look for and create conflict.

So you're creating a more violent space so that your tools will be used. Because you're not going to say, [00:31:00] these are the things I value about myself as a man, and then live an entire life where none of those things actually come in handy. What you will do instead is create an environment around you where those tools, those tools of violence and aggression, are, at least in your own mind, useful. So you'll actually create a more violent world and create violent situations because that's the only tools in your toolbox, and you don't want to walk around being like, "did I waste my whole life? The whole thing?"

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: That's really interesting insight. I wouldn't give him credit enough to be doing that intentionally, but I feel like no unintentionally.

Yeah.

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah. I think it's entirely unintentional. And then you compare that to what I feel like is this service driven mindset around masculinity, where it's like, how can I be useful to others? How can I be competent and useful to others? And how can I be of service to the people that I love? And how can I extend that idea of loving service into the world in ways that [00:32:00] reflect my values and in ways that reflect my competencies. That is so much of what I see reflected in that sort of Tim Walz-esque stereotype, or prototype rather. It's so much better. It's so much better.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I don't consume any of this stuff, but I just absorb enough of it from Reddit and whatnot, but you see all the things those Tate Taints care about, and they'll be like, "you're a cuck if she's got a big body count," and it's all stuff that if you peel it back for two seconds, which these guys never do, it's all insecurity. They're all worried about the purity of the girl, that's just insecurity. You're worried that if a woman has ever found pleasure in another man, that's a threat to your entire ego as a person. It's all so weak and frail and fragile and the opposite of what you would think masculinity should be.

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And again, I think that goes back to the idea of focusing on building a masculinity based on threats and what we find threatening and what we find we are insecure about, and trying to change the [00:33:00] world to fix our insecurities rather than fix our insecurities in ourselves. There's this idea that if I'm insecure about something, that is something you have to fix about yourself, your life, society, an entire gender, whatever, rather than being like, "hey, I'm just insecure about that."

And that's part of the human condition is to not be perfectly secure, and "I have work to do." That side of the aisle, that side of the world, I should say, like that idea, it's got no solutions. There's no solutions there.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And I think it can't be, because I think deep down, people like Andrew Tate know they're not capable of being a Walz. And I know as a humanist, I'm supposed to think that given the right circumstances and bur ba bur ba da, and maybe I would love to be proven wrong about that, but I think that people like Andrew Tate and Donald Trump are so far gone down a version of poison that all they can do is poison the pool around [00:34:00] them and hope no one notices we shouldn't be swimming in poison.

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah. And there's also a total unwillingness, I think, reflected in that to ever experience vulnerability of any kind. I think you look at somebody like Tim Walz or Doug Emhoff, and you see people that are very demonstrably okay, with feeling things and being vulnerable, and I think you look at the stated goals of this Tate esque model of masculinity, and it's like, there's no vulnerability available to those men, so if you buy into that worldview, You buy into a worldview that I think just necessarily is lonelier, necessarily lacks love and lacks connection and lacks the ability to open yourself up in ways that allow you to be hurt because being hurt doesn't fit that aggressive worldview that men have to be this constantly armored stoic persona. And you look at Tim Walz, that's a guy who just [00:35:00] unabashedly loves. Doug Emhoff, who unabashedly loves. And I don't think you can like unabashedly love and accept the vulnerability that's a part of that and also have this aggressive worldview.

Rethinking Boyhood What Moms Should Know (with Guest Ruth Whippman) - What Fresh Hell Podcast - Air Date 6-17-24

AMY - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: The point you make in the book, Ruth, that really was eye opening to me is that we encourage girls to break free of stereotypes, we encourage parents of girls to raise them to subvert stereotypes and raise them without the stereotypes we might have, and then we don't do the same thing for boys at all. We don't encourage boys to subvert the masculine idea of what it is to be a friend or what it is to care about people. That's not something that we ask them to question.

"You be like a boy, and girls, you be more like boys, I guess, and then also be a girl." We don't ever turn it around and they're missing out when we don't consider that they have stereotypes too.

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah, and I think in some ways, girls are [00:36:00] encouraged, we talk about girls in this really inspirational way, which is great, " You can be anything, sky's the limit, you can do whatever you want, the future is female," and somehow we talk about boys in this quite essentializing way. So I hear a lot of, "Oh, boys will be boys, boys can't sit still. Boys are reluctant readers. Boys don't like school." All of these quite essentializing things, and it's just almost like boys are just biologically limited by these certain things, and this is just what boys like and what they like and what they are like. And we just have to work around that, and that's the best we can hope for.

And I thought that really sad in a way, because I think it's stereotypes around masculinity, around not expressing your emotions, around connection, vulnerability, the so called emotional labor piece of it, these things are really limiting for boys. And you're seeing now down the line with adult men, that there's this loneliness epidemic with men at the moment in America. One in four young men [00:37:00] says that they have no close friends at all.

And there's all these horrible statistics on loneliness. You've probably heard them all. Read about them in the news and, I think we are not giving boys a fair shake. We're not saying, you can be a full expansive human being in the way that we're saying to girls. And these are progressives who often use this kind of language about boys. You're not talking about some sort of trad wife situation. You're talking about the progressive conversation. It's still, we talk about boys in these very limiting stereotypes.

MARGARET - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: I think it's interesting talking about this idea of what we put on boys. You hear all sorts of different things about this. Some people would say, and some media certainly says, "boys are becoming completely feminized in this generation and, oh, they're soy boys" and talking points about how we're losing boys because we're trying to make them more female somehow.

Other people are seeing this side of these [00:38:00] statistics saying loneliness and lack of friendships, and I guess my fundamental question there is how much movability do you find there is, how much can we really affect outcomes here? Is it something that has to happen on a national conversation level, or is it something that happens within our own homes, or both?

RUTH WHIPPMAN: I think it's both. We can do a lot in the home to change norms and to open things up for boys. And I think a lot of it. It's about naming the problem, seeing the problem for what it is, seeing the stereotypes, because sometimes they're really invisible. I spent four years working on this book and looking at these things and they still pass me by and I'd be like, "Oh yeah," and then I'll think back to something and think, "Oh yeah, that's quite sexist or limiting." So it's quite invisible in the culture.

And I think we have to do it at all levels. We have to be having conversations like these, we have to be working within our own homes, but on a personal level, how changeable is it? I think this is one of the things that I [00:39:00] explore in a lot of detail in the book because obviously I'm like, "okay, great. After my third son was born and the whole Me Too thing was happening. And I was like, great, I'm going to just change everything, and I'm going to be able to control this really, really easily. And great. I just need to do a few things," and obviously my boys are actual people with their own ideas and their own preferences.

MARGARET - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: We always have that problem. These children are actual people. It's so frustrating.

RUTH WHIPPMAN: I think that's not a reason to give up. I think we're very comfortable when we're talking about girl socialization, we're like, there are so many harmful messages in the culture about body image or about subservience to men or about, princess culture, all of these things. And I think we can hold two truths at once. We can hold, we don't have complete control of this and they will get cultural messages that are harmful. And we can talk about them and they will probably succumb to some of them, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't address them or think about them critically.

AMY - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: Ruth, you tell a story at the end of the book about your youngest son arriving for his first day of kindergarten, [00:40:00] and it's an example of these things aren't writ large, but they're tiny and they happen all the time. And so tell that story.

RUTH WHIPPMAN: So when my third son went to kindergarten, there was this male volunteer, I think, possibly a teacher, possibly a parent who was standing by the gate and greeting all the kids as they walked in. And we were in a line of kids and there were two girls in front of my son. And the guy was like, "hi, sweetheart," and then they were, the next one would be like, "hi, sweetheart," and then my son walks in and his voice goes down like two octaves and he puffs up and he goes, "hi, buddy," and gives him a high five.

And I was like, that buddy sweetheart thing. It's so well meaning. It was so sweet. It came from such a good place, but. Sweethearts and buddies are really different. A sweetheart is a sort of nurturing, protective term, whereas buddy is like, "you're my peer." And it's almost just like a tick away from Hey buddy before you get in a bar fight.

And people already at the age of five, he's [00:41:00] this little kid who's scared going for his first day at kindergarten, he needs nurture and protection in the same way that any girl does. And buddy, it's like it's lifting him up and you can see why it's sexist both ways around. You can see why sweetheart could be patronizing or it can exclude girls from those channels of power where all the buddies get together in the locker room and slap each other on the back and make important decisions, but it really also excludes boys from that kind of nurturing.

And that was one of the huge themes that came up in the book, like right from babyhood, baby boys get less nurture than baby girls. And actually biologically at birth, baby boys brains are born more emotionally vulnerable and immature than baby girls brains. So they actually need more of that loving, supportive nurture to thrive.

And girls are generally more resilient and independent and so I think, this kind of like masculinization of boys can, be a very, very subtle form of [00:42:00] neglect in a way.

That's My Gus Walz - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-30-24

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Guys, we talked about this a little bit in the intro, but I want to talk about it just straight out and out. We saw Gus Walz's just absolutely lovely expression of affection for his dad. And so I thought in the spirit of the news media, we should go over some of the Republican reactions to that.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Can we talk more about that though? What's funny is we did the masculinity episode, and I put this in the show notes, but we had recorded on Walz and Emhoff before the DNC. We had gotten a little ahead cause time that different dads needed off. And we recorded that and, which was a great episode—stand by all of it, before having seen the just incredible displays at the DNC by both those gentlemen.

Like I thought Doug Emhoff speech was so good. It was so fucking good and relatable in a [00:43:00] real way. Like I love this election cycle for being the first time, really the first time, that I felt like there's a bunch of normal people on the top of the ticket. It like never happens.

I love Obama, but I wouldn't say he's like a normal guy. He's great, but he's a professor. Doug Emhoff, Tim Walz, and even honestly, even like Kamala somewhat, like she, they're pretty normal ass people. And I absolutely love it. And I got to say, I don't know if any of you gentlemen did this, but Lydia and I had this nice week last week, where after working our asses off and barely being awake, we would at 11 PM, grab a glass of wine and put on the DNC top couple speeches on 1.7 speed, whatever we could find time for, and we just sit and watch " Oh, this is what people that don't fucking suck are." it was great. It was so much fun.

And in that process, Man, Tim Walz's speech happens. It's funny. The different things we see, like how we perceive the world differently for so many reasons, Lydia and I, so many [00:44:00] reasons, and one of them is obviously my history with my dad and all that stuff. And I saw Gus Walz, the minute they showed him, I saw that he was already teary and I was losing. I was like, I can't cause I could just tell I could just absolutely tell right away. And then they show him crying even more. And I just lost, I was crying all fucking night with how sweet this kid is.

I didn't know anything about any whatever neurodivergence. I don't even think that matters. I didn't even know that at the time don't care. I just saw a kid that was so proud of his dad in a way that, again, to my brain, I'm like, I didn't know that could be. I'm keeping it together right now, but I spent the better part of two days, if I see like a still shot of that, I have a hard time not getting super emotional because being able to see the possibility of a relationship between father and son like that is just, to me... It's not just Oh, it's so sweet, it cracks something cold and dead in my heart, and it's just Oh my God.

And so I love this so much. I want to say this, I can't wait to roast these Republicans. But here's [00:45:00] a rare thing, when you love something so much, this happens to me pretty rarely, you love something so much it's critique proof. I was going to use Anna as an example for Eli, but now you'd still probably murder him, but there's certain things that I love so much that if somebody made fun of them, I'm like, boy, I feel bad for you. No reaction of oh, I'm mad at you, cause there's zero insecurity there. When it comes to Gus Walz, that was one of those things. I was like, boy, I just feel bad for those people. I don't even, I feel bad if Gus is seeing any of that, but there's nothing anyone could say that would take away the perfect sweetness and purity of that moment.

It's the most pure thing I've ever seen in my life.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah, look, I was joking in my intro, but literally, I wouldn't muster a punishment that bad to look at that beautiful thing and be like, "stupid" even though they're lying. And I know they're lying and there's this meta layer of everyone's lying and the social internet has destroyed our brains. Nobody knows that better than me. But underneath it, the character you've chosen on the social internet, the one that other people think [00:46:00] is you, Is one that looks at that and is like, "gay". That sucks for you. I wouldn't do that to you. I wouldn't do it. And these are some bad people. These are some shitty fucking people. We're going to talk about Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza. And if again, were I hovering my pen over the death note book of Dinesh D'Souza's Twitter, I'd be like, "I'm not going to make him tweet what he tweeted. That's not nice. He went to jail. He's done his time. He doesn't deserve this."

I also think that one of the things that we really wanted to do when creating the show is not just talk about positive masculinity and dunk on negative masculinity, but also just acknowledge how fucking weirdly masculinity is portrayed versus life, because I don't know if you guys have had this experience, but I have cried with joy multiple times in my life. I cried with joy yesterday. A friend was getting married and I was doing the ceremony and I had to practice [00:47:00] so many times so that the officiant wasn't crying at my friend's wedding because I was so joyful for her and her now husband. I had to do that work.

The fact that I had lived most of my life and had to make it to, genuinely, especially when it comes to non fictional representations of healthy joy I can't count on one hand the amount of Gus Walz showings of joy and affection I have seen in popular media, and that's fuckin crazy. Do you know how many murders I've seen? Do you know how many people kicked out of helicopters I've seen? So many more. So many more people have been kicked out of helicopters in popular media that have cried with joy.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Probably seen more people specifically killed by being put in one of those wood chippers. Specifically something horrible, more of that than Gus Walz.

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Why do you think that is? I'm curious why, cause I don't [00:48:00] disagree at all, but I wonder what is at the root? Because I think in real life, many of us have been moved to joy, but we don't want to show it in our media? We don't want to reinforce it?

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I think it just makes people massively uncomfortable. I'll tell you this, I'm gonna do y'all one better. Because Eli, I think, I won't shame Eli. There are men who are like, "Oh, yeah, I shed a tear," and what they mean is sometimes I moved to shed that single masculine tear and my eyes get a little bit red and then I can cry in a totally masculinely acceptable way.

And I'm like, "Oh no, I ugly cry. I can't chill about it because I also have some sort of depression brain chemistry. Like the minute this happens, I'm like, "Oh, God!" And I'm crying in a completely socially unacceptable way. There's the old timey "men never cry," and then there's the next level of " okay, but it has to be in this completely masculinely acceptable way. It has to be like a manly cry." Sorry, I've blown past that completely. I just can't even keep it in and that no one will ever show because it's [00:49:00] uncomfortable. I grant that's uncovered. I try to not do it around people because it's incredibly uncomfortable.

“BoyMom” Author Looks at Raising Sons in an Age of “Impossible Masculinity” Part 2 - Amanpour and Company - Air Date 7-9-24

MICHEL MARTIN: Given that you've described what a deep stem this has, how do we get out of it?

RUTH WHIPPMAN: We have to do things in the home and in the wider culture, the way that we talk about boys and men.

So I think in the home, it's really about showing boys that nurture and emotional engagement that they need. So really naming the problem in terms of they're excluded from those emotional role models from those kinds of emotional conversations and trying to correct for that and to give them that nurture to talk to them about their feelings, to listen to them, and to not just see them as tough, uncomplicated. And I think we need to recognize male interiority and male emotions and to listen to them.

And I think similarly in the wider culture, when we talk about boys and men, rather than having this conversation, which is it's a gender war time for men to shut up. I think we need to start listening to men's feelings as well, and making [00:50:00] space for that. We spend a lot of time listening to men's opinions, but a lot less time listening to their feelings.

MICHEL MARTIN: Has the way you interact with your boys changed since you started doing this work?

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah, I think it really has.

It's subtle. It's actually, it's not like I've done these five things differently. It's more of a change in my orientation towards them in our relationship. So I think it's helped me to see them better and to see them as these complex, emotional creatures, rather than... There's this stereotype of boys I hear, "Boys are like dogs. All they need is food and exercise and discipline," and actually I think seeing them as these creatures that are vulnerable and fragile and in need of more nurture rather than less has really helped me approach them in that way. And rather than trying to punish them or discipline them out of their bad behavior to see the kind of emotions driving them and to try to engage them with them in a more nurturing way.

Note from the Editor: 3 top takeaways on and for boys and men

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting [00:51:00] with Hysteria discussing Tim Walz and breaking down the masculine archetypes. Some More News looked at men being very much not okay. The Brian Lehrer Show looked at the gender political divide. Amanpour and Company dove into the complicated work of raising sons. Dear Old Dads discussed and mocked the manosphere style of masculinity. What Fresh Hell broke down how gender stereotypes influenced parenting styles from the very beginning. Dear Old Dads discussed vulnerability and repressed emotions through the lens of Gus Walz at the DNC. And finally, Amanpour and Company described the need for this to become a widespread discussion on all levels of society. And those were just the Top Takes—there's lots 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, trying to have some fun along the way. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes [00:52:00] delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, there's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app.

Members also get chapter markers in the show, but I'll note that anyone, depending on the app you use to listen, may be able to use the time codes I provide in the show notes to jump around within the show, similar to chapter markers. 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, these are my three top top takeaways for this topic that I want you to now. Here we go.

The first one is mentioned in the show today. Just in a different phrasing, and I really like this phrasing I once heard. This is for any adult dealing with boys. Here's what you need to remember.

They just got here. [00:53:00] They weren't here for the last several decades of feminist progress, and to understand all the fighting that went on to make the progress that has been made, and they need to be understood in that context of ignorance. But I just love the phrase "they just got here." It creates this image in my mind of the war of the sexes raging bitterly for decades, and these young boys show up and they're like, "hi, I'm new here? How does this place work?" And then some people. trying to be helpful, but, saying something, not literally this, obviously, but kind of effectively this, welcomes them and they're like, "Hey, yeah. There's this war of the sexes going on and your side has been winning for a long time, but the other side is starting to make some real progress and you need to be happy about that, or you're a bad person." And then the boys are just like, "But I just got here. What are you talking about, what is all this?"

That ignorance runs deep and I feel like the [00:54:00] history of the progress of women over the past several decades is so ingrained for all the people who lived through it that it's hard to. Understand what it would be like to not know all of that stuff.

Anyway, the second top takeaway is to be directed at boys themselves. So maybe you are a boy listening in which case welcome, or you know, one and you should definitely say this to them. Here's what you say, "just because someone has correctly diagnosed a problem. Doesn't mean they understand the solution."

And to expand slightly. It is much, much, much easier to identify a problem than to correctly identify the best solution to that problem. So to expand slightly more, there are plenty of stupid people on the internet who can sound smart by correctly articulating a problem related to you, your boyhood, your masculinity, how you [00:55:00] feel about life, but that in no way means that they have any good ideas for solving those problems you're having.

To me, that one piece of information given to a teenager, young teenager, someone who's spending time on the internet unsupervised, that is as good of a piece of information for them to have as any I can think of to arm themselves against the seeming siren call of the manosphere and all of the bad advice that comes with it.

And the last top takeaway for the day, I got this one from an Atlantic article, it's about the bad men in the world. And the main argument is it's better to pity than revile them. This is from the article Pity the Bad Men, or Sometimes Consider the Boar, because publications like to change titles on a whim on the internet now. From the article, quote:

The problem with pity is that it's so often [00:56:00] interpreted as a soft emotion, a synonym for empathy or compassion. Asking women to pity men is like asking the subjugated worker to pity his greedy boss. But pity, crucially, is also a weapon. It makes its object smaller and weaker while casting the pityer as solicitous and tender.

Now, it's not exactly the same, but I would argue that there's a striking similarity between that vision of pity and the current accusation of a weirdness being directed at Trump, Vance, and company. Which makes perfect sense because much of their weirdness stems from their deeply confused and self-defeating ideas about masculinity. I for one, have pitied Trump for years. He is a twisted, miserable person because his father didn't love him enough. He's some amount of wealthy, he has millions of adoring fans, and actually became president of the United States. Yet, he seems completely [00:57:00] miserable basically all of the time. How is that a model of masculinity to aspire, to? Look at the end result, it is clearly not the path to happiness.

SECTION A: TIM WALZ

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: For a better chance to find that path to happiness, we will continue to the Deeper Dives section in five topics. Next up, Section A: Tim Walz; Section B: JD Vance-Branded Masculinity; Section C: The Fallout of Stoicism; Section D: Dating Life; and Section E: Social-Emotional Development.

We Love Some BDE - Big Dad Energy - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-23-24

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I do think we have to talk about this fucking Big dad energy moment that is like infusing American politics right now. The Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, just wonderfulness of it all.

Have you guys seen all the, like Tim Walz backs into his parking spaces, Tim Walz measures [00:58:00] twice cuts once look at all this, this stuff, all this like Tim Walz stuff, and this is like a quintessential. Guys, guy, like a quintessential, like man's man in all the ways. I think that remind me of the kinds of masculinity that I think the three of us value with like none of the lack of empathy and cruelty and indifference and like inflexibility.

That is oftentimes, like, valued on the right and on the other side of this sort of, like, political spectrum.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah. He was created in a dear old dad's laboratory of, like, It feels like it, right? It's perfect. I love him.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yes. I saw a quote, which I have thought about a billion times a day since I saw it, which is that Tim Walz is the dad that Fox News stole from the country.

That's so good. That dad who got fucking turned into a slobbering, mean spirited, [00:59:00] racist idiot by Rush Limbaugh, who should have just been Tim Walz, that's Tim Walz. Tim Walz is just the guy who, like, was middle of the road. And I also think this, like, I think Tim Walz feels the way most Americans feel Especially if they haven't been brainwashed by the social internet, right?

Like I think Tim Walz is where I

MUSIC: think if you're gay and you want to marry another fellow, well, you know, I might not want to marry you cause I'll never look that good, but I, I don't want to do any planks. So that's why I'm not gay.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: They just want people to be well. And when their vegetarian daughter says they're vegetarian, they're like, you can have Turkey.

They are harmless. in their sweetness. And I, and I think that, again, one of the reasons we started this show is that masculinity has been so poisoned. And I think that Tim Walz just demonstrates the positive way that that masculinity can actually present itself.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Our guest on OA on Monday show had a really nice quote that stuck with me, where she said like, [01:00:00] he's utterly unintimidated by a changing world.

I was like, that's so, yes, exactly. Like all these fucking terrified little weak cowardly ass men, like Vance and Trump, there's it's such weakness. That's what's so frustrating is like, it's not even a manly thing. It's just weakness and overcompensating for it and being mad and being heartless. It's weakness and being cruel is translated as looked at as like, Oh wow.

He's a man. He's a macho. But like what Tim Walz is doing is my idea. If any such thing needs to exist of what a dude should be. That's, that's masculinity. Again, unconcerned with the changing world. Cause that's, let's be real. That's where the reactionary politics comes from. It's the entire thing. Yeah.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And let's also point out the bar is so low.

Yeah, it is. Right? Tim Walz isn't like, well, after I got my sex. 17th doctorate from Harvard. He's just like I think if you spend most of your time thinking about which Children with [01:01:00] which genitals should go to the bathroom. That's a little weird. That's the bar That's the bar of what's expected of men not just to be like good men But to be great men to be great men who represent us nationally You have to be like I think you should

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: talk about children's genitals less So much of like the examples out there about masculinity that have kind of become part of the social internet.

They are this performance of masculinity for other men. They have no prescriptive value. Other than like, perform this for other men, like here's how to get other men's approval. Yeah. If we all

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: do this, then none of us have to do anything. Right. Like if we all act like this, then no one can make us be considerate for a moment.

And it is focused

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: so much on like what they find threatening. Yeah. Rather than any positive values toward, you know, actually building, creating. Supporting, empathizing. There's this like really beautiful [01:02:00] service and family driven version of masculinity that I think I see so much in my dad that I've always admired.

Like jokes aside, like my dad is a service and family driven person. The meaning that he finds from his life, allowing people to cut off his son's ears. But it's about being of service to other people. My dad would never be like. Late somewhere late to the ear chopping up money. He would never like give unsolicited advice or like be judgmental about other people's lives.

Like what? He's not perfect, but like he is service driven. Like his life is a, is a service and family oriented life. And I think that that's this view that is getting lost in the social internet about how we externalize our masculinity. It's become this horrible, toxic externalization. To sort of swim upstream against feminists, you know, and like more plates, more dates, like all this kind of like really hyper aggressive, [01:03:00] not at all appealing version of masculinity.

There's this great quote from like this WAPO article that I read that I'll summarize. It said something like, this is a version of masculinity that women would run into a burning building for. This is what's actually really appealing. Not just. To other men, but to women, which is a lot of what the performance of masculinity is for when it's performative.

So it's really funny to me. And I think it's like really worth noting that like this performance of masculinity that Tim Walz is embodying is actually far more attractive. Then this sort of tate level performance that's being sold to young men. Right. I was gonna say

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Andrew Tate. Yeah.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Also, I like the way Tom said Wao.

I thought it was a slur for a good 20 seconds, so it was like, yeah, well give it

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: a second. Maybe we'll find out

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: this

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: WaPo

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I just think that that contrast is just really important and like the. The [01:04:00] kids on the social internet, they're seeing this version of masculinity embodied in these tates and these Rogans and these other assholes. That's not what people want. That's not what women are asking for. Women are asking for more Tim Walz.

Look at the response. If you want to know how to get laid. Look at the response from women. Oh, he's for Tim wall. So

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: many chicks right now. That's for real.

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And isn't that what a lot of this performance is around? Like it is when it's performative around this idea.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And I think it sort of is the porn star effect.

There is a social agreement that men want blonde hair and quadruple D boobs in a tiny ways. and big plumped up lips because that's what porn stars have, right? Generally speaking, and obviously I'm, I'm speaking in generalizations cause that's what culture does. It's what reality

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: stars have, which is kind of the same thing now.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Right. Exactly. Tomato, tomato, right? These ideas. And there are women who sell other women this idea [01:05:00] that, Hey, I am close to this thing or I am this thing. thing that your husband, that your boyfriend, that your son, that your brother wants. And if you want to be desired, you need to be like me. Right. And I think as a culture, we've gotten better, though, certainly not good at recognizing and addressing that.

And I think the male version of that is the Andrew Tate's right. Who are like women. What? Night. Teen pack abs, and they want you to be ready to fly into a murderous rage at a moment's notice, right? But because men are so unreflective, because men are so un self aware, that when those conversations about body positivity try to happen in men's spaces, We shut ourselves down in the same way that we saw like a lot of the toxic fat shaming In like the 80s and 90s and then obviously still today as well But like with less of a response than it had and so it's interesting to watch these two [01:06:00] Or in this case of Walz, just the one example of positive masculinity and positive response to it, because I think it does trickle down, right?

I think it does trickle down in a positive way that will inform young men. They can be kind and caring about the people they love and the less protected in society without losing this. Sense of manhood.

That's My Gus Walz Part 2 - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-30-24

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And let's, let's get back to Gus Walz because it's so sweet. And that is a situation where I feel like that, you know, you can ugly cry in that situation. A whole room of people is like, just loving what your dad's doing.

And your dad

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: is running for vice president of the United States. Like what, what are you fucking saving it up for Eli?

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: That's actually what I wrote down.

If not now, when, when, like, I can't imagine the sense [01:07:00] of like, And to be in that room with the energy of that room and the people and the support and the, the cheering and the clapping and you're like, and that is the guy who like loved me through riding my bike. That is the guy who made me waffles last night.

Like that's my guy. And he's standing up there. I would fucking fall apart if it was you. Like if it was you, like if it was just somebody that I knew at an intimate level and it's like, that's my fucking guy. That's my wife. That's my kid. That's my bud. Like whatever. I would, I think I would be, I don't know that I would ugly cry like that, but I don't know that I wouldn't.

I certainly would have feelings about it. Right? Like, yeah, I think if you're stoic in the face of pure joy and pride and like, That overwhelm. If you are so fucking broken inside that you're like, I must remain stoic. I am not allowed this moment of free joy and expression, like. Holy fuck, have we done a [01:08:00] bad job raising you as a society.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I think Eli and I have made this point, but like, what are you doing here then? What are you doing here? If this is not doing it for ya, if it's like, peak, I, I, I literally put on the Facebook after this, I was like, I think we might all be NPCs in a life simulator where Tim Walz gets to live the best life.

Like, like genuinely.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: It's just amazing. I hate my programming.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah, I don't know why they put Eli in there.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Nobody

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: debugged your program at all, they're just like, ah, slap it out there, it's fine. I know we're trying

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: to balance out Tim, but Sad Boy 7 is real sad. Do we want to I mean, it's real weird, like, do we need to do

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: that?

Okay. It's part of the realism, alright. Did

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: you hear him on the bonus talking about cum covered tennis balls? I really,

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I think Nope, it's necessary. To Tim Walsh, living the perfect life. It's, you know, complicated systems, you know, emergent properties. Do you want him to

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: be head of the hunting club and the gay club?

Or just one of them? Because we need to make Sad Boy 7 that sad.

We Love Some BDE Part 3 - Big Dad Energy - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-23-24

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: [01:09:00] We should talk about the Doug Emhoff part of it because I was interested in that. I think before the VP announcement, I want to talk about that just because he had a pretty high powered career.

He was a entertainment attorney and he had to resign that so there wouldn't be conflict of interest. And now, you know, it's like he's. Obviously there's notoriety with being the second gentleman, but to most men, I don't, I think that's insane. I think probably most men couldn't handle that or maybe at least a large group of them.

Oh, for

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: sure. A hundred percent. I do still think that we are enculturated. largely in a space that sort of requires men's idea of themselves to include a work at a certain level that is at least on par, if not in some measurable, or at least like conceived ways of being. More than their spouse there, if they're heterosexual,

MUSIC: right?

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Of course, that's an enculturated space [01:10:00] that we have not walked away from. We are still asking of men that they think of themselves in this way and reinforcing and rewarding that.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah. How would you guys feel about that? I would be a fan. That'd be fun. Yeah. I mean, I, I would love to take a little, little vacay.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah. I mean, you know, it's hard because I don't have a wife who is the forefront of my career. Obviously Anna does what I do and she's a part of what I do, but like, I definitely understand what it is to have an incredibly talented wife who is often the forefront of attention in her field. So like when I watch Anna, Yeah.

Yeah. In the folk music world, which is where Anna thrives. Obviously she's amazing on our shows and people adore having her at live shows and stuff, but that's the thing we do together. So it doesn't appeal to the sort of fragility that might come up where I not involved in the podcast, but in the folk music scene, I do see that.

It often gets brought up in sort of a roundabout way because Anna is such a, [01:11:00] like a well known player in the spaces where she plays music. And so people never mean it in like a negative way, but they do sort of hint at, are you mad about that? Or are you intimidated by that? You know, the example that I think of all the time is my friend, Rachel who both of you have met is like a pretty well known and pretty successful magician.

And she was talking to an interviewer. for like a pretty well known press outlet that she was being interviewed for. And they asked her, is your fiance mad that you're gone so many nights a week? And she was really blown away by the idea that like, cause you would never ask a man that right. You'd never be like, Senator, just, is your wife mad that you're not home for dinner by 5 PM?

But because she's a woman, it was just like, man, how about, how is the man who owned you feel about that? Right. And so. Yeah, I think, I think it's a really, I did have

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: to swallow an air tag. So, you know, I would raise my hand and say it would be a struggle for me. It shouldn't be, [01:12:00] I'll admit that. But like a big part of how I've perceived my value to the people around me is as the provider financially.

I know that that's insane. And I don't think that that's a entirely net positive, but it's also still true. If Haley tomorrow found some career or occupation, and it meant that I was, that she was all of a sudden the primary breadwinner in the house. I think that I would be lying to you if I said that I wouldn't quietly struggle with that.

I would be smart enough to make that a quiet struggle and to go and see a therapist. Well, you know, like, because I know inherently that that's fucked up. So I, like, I admit like fully that I think two things can be true at the same time. And that is that like, I have ideas that are probably not good, but that have benefited myself and my family.

And I think my family looks to me to fill that role and they are grateful that I fill that role. And that's a dynamic that we've [01:13:00] always had. I think if tomorrow it were reversed, it would at least be an acclimation about how I think I'd have a hard time being like. Okay. So what am I here for? And I know that that's bullshit.

I know I bring a lot to the table as a person and as a partner that is not connected to my paycheck. I'm here purely for sexual pleasure, baby. I've always said that about him. I bring a lot of energy there to the table at the very least. But like, yeah, you know, I can't pretend that like, as a 46 year old man, that I could turn on a dime in my head.

I would do it. Nobody would, I would not tell a fucking soul about it except for a therapist, but I would be like, awesome. I'd be the most outwardly supportive, a hundred percent rah, rah. But I think in my head, in my heart, I'd be like,

SECTION B: JD VANCE BRANDED MASCULINITY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: JD Vance-Branded Masculinity

Are Men Okay Part 2 – SOME MORE NEWS - Air Date 5-22-24

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: After all, [01:14:00] they want to make men great. Again, not to mention that conservative men are often the ones lamenting that they can't find a romantic partner. Probably because they want to take away their reproductive rights and treat their partners in this skewed, unbalanced way that eventually catches up to itself.

Meanwhile, noted January 6th coward Josh Hawley wrote a book literally called Manhood, The Masculine Virtues America Needs. Because manliness is often treated like a necessity for civilization. This is tied directly to nostalgia and the hard times create strong men meme you see going around. Once again, it's the same concern we've always seen.

That men need hardships like war and labor to keep them tough. It should be noted that there's actually not much evidence that men are becoming more conservative, but rather apolitical. Which, I would argue, just means that they don't realize it when they see it. They are conservative. Ultimately, the divide seems obvious.

We have these conservative leaning men who believe the generations long [01:15:00] propaganda about manliness, who also feel a resentment toward modern, liberated women who have absolutely no interest in them. And so they lost for the better days when women were To them, more tame. This is not exclusively right wing, mind you.

The internet has especially boosted nostalgia for pre 911 days. TV shows had 20 episodes a season. Mel Gibson wasn't a racist yet. We had malls and physical places to exist. And all the Gallagher we could ignore. And no one was struggling. I mean, that last one isn't true. But that's how a lot of people look at the past.

And like, yeah, you were a kid. That's why you weren't struggling. Wow, I'm so nostalgic for the carefree days of when I was a literal child and didn't need to care for anything. Anyway, undoubtedly, things got economically worse in America. But the thing about nostalgia is that it makes a tremendously effective dog whistle.

Because this decades long economic erosion just happened to take [01:16:00] place the same time that minority populations were expanding their own rights. And so people like Tate and Peterson can point to these two things as if they are related. By lamenting the good old days, they are often implying that Flying that things were better because women had fewer rights, and that feminism is why things are worse now.

It's just like how dummies like Elon Musk will look at crumbling infrastructure or airline companies and blame DEI. And so this is why the Manosphere is a pipeline to Nazi . Going back to that Beefcake fetishist Bronze Age pervert, well you see right in the name that the account is glorifying a.

mystical before time. It's no wonder that account was specifically popular with Trumpers. At first glance, you might see that his admiration for past civilizations is tied to his beliefs that men need to build strong friendships and brotherhoods like ancient Greece. Then, if you look a little closer, you might learn that this guy, under his real [01:17:00] name, wrote an entire book about eugenics.

And in fact, has proposed selective breeding as a policy. Because again, Nazi shit. It always goes back to it. And when you see right wing influencers, or right wing influencies, or moderate liberals, or why I left the left types mocking this idea by saying, Oh, so Fitness is right wing now? It's Nazism to be healthy?

We can safely and reasonably assume that they either didn't read the thing they're complaining about, or they did, and they're speaking broadly and vaguely and incorrectly about it in order to confuse the issue. Exercise is fine. It's actually good for you. Go outside, work out, stay hydrated, eat well, fall into wells, find pirate treasure, get good sleep, stick to a solid routine, develop good habits.

This is all fine. It's not man stuff, it's person stuff. It's all recommended by most people, regardless of ideology. But [01:18:00] there are elements of this, a certain viewpoint and perspective about these kinds of things that can lead to, Yes. Some Nazi stuff. Or, at the very least, just general women hating. In fact, the idea of a toxic pick up artist is almost quaint now.

A bunch of MIT researchers actually looked at the manosphere and found four distinct groups. Quote, Men's rights activists claim that family law and social institutions discriminate against men. Men going their own way. take this feeling of grievance further, arguing that society can't be amended. They often avoid women, blaming them for their problems.

Pick up artists, meanwhile, date and harass women. They believe society is feminizing men. And then there are the incels, the most potentially violent of the group. Incels abide by the Black Pill, a belief that women use their sexual power to dominate men socially. For that, incels want revenge. You can sort of see how each of these [01:19:00] manosphere types can melt into the other, and why it's so closely tied to white supremacy as well.

And this all starts with these self help grifters. Jordan Peterson isn't overtly a Nazi, but he's the first step in that direction. We actually made a quick explainer about that guy if you want to check that out and just take a few minutes of your time. Ultimately, it's an extremely enticing pitch to tell young men that all of their problems aren't actually their fault.

And then point to leftists and women and Marxists as the enemy inflicting these hardships upon them. They don't need to change, you see. It's the world that's wrong! Skinner meme! No, the other one. Take your pick, I guess. Of course, the problem is that the world isn't going to change for you, despite what the masterpiece ladyballers might want you to believe.

And so, resentment is the answer. Isn't a useful tool. There's nothing helpful in it. These people are basically saying hey young men I can help you if you listen to me and then their help is to just get mad at women It's like offering swimming lessons and then spending the [01:20:00] entire class Complaining about the ocean and of course the beauty of stuff like this is as you get madder and madder You're still going to need to tune into those god awful swimming lessons And like, hey, all you men out there, if you want to endure hardships and be strong, then maybe you need to endure the fact that women are not subservient drones and learn how to actually communicate with them.

Maybe it's actually manly to adapt. Where do you think your Y chromosome came from? And so when you think about the resilient futility of this manosphere message, the only use it has is to frustrate and indoctrinate young men. They want you to be bitter and isolated so you keep following them. It's a grift and a tool for extremists.

At the very least, it's a way to sell you crap. Heck, for some, that's the main goal.

That's My Gus Walz Part 3 - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-30-24

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Should we mock some of these weirdos before we sign off? All right. I'm going to start with my [01:21:00] favorite. This is Mike crispy head of America. First Republicans of New Jersey. Who tweeted the photo of Gus that we're all so familiar with with the caption Tim Walz stupid crying son Isn't the flex You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male congrats does baron trump cry Does he love his father of course That's the types of values.

I want leading the country doubt it

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I, part of me is like, yeah, he doesn't cry cause he's not proud of his dad. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's a big difference, right? Like if my dad was like, I accept the nomination for the Nazi party. Tom, when you get

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: that 34th guilty count, it's like, wow. Yeah. That's a lot.

That's impressive. You know? Okay. Let me say

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: something brave and from my heart. You could shoot Donald Trump through the face with a harpoon gun and then remove it using your foot as a lever against his [01:22:00] chest and Barron Trump would step back so as not to get splashed. That is the emotion Barron Trump feels for his.

Well,

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: forget about the older two. There's absolutely nothing. What happened? They don't care.

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: No. No. Well, they are unfeeling robots. Yeah. They've never had care in there. They get programmed into the uncanny valley. That is their The smooth, smooth faces.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: All right. Next up communicator and revised hair model for an off brand, like a Sheehan brand of toothpaste and culture brought back one of my favorite things that Republicans are mad about saying, quote, talk about weird and quote.

And I love that. And let me say why I love this, right? Because it's not just her once again, right? Because she is broken character a couple of times in her life. She actually did it once on Bill Maher. She was just like, hey man, like, I'm just a horrible, [01:23:00] evil this for a living. Like, I don't know what you want me to do, right?

Nobody wants to buy my children's book, Bill. And he was like, ah, good point. Uh, but like the thing that's amazing about them being mad about the weirdness thing. Is that Tim Walz so beautifully communicated that they know that this is a, that they've gone haywire.

MUSIC: Yeah.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: That they like, somehow we were following, we were grasping the iron rod of conservatism.

It's like you're

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: playing a game of werewolves and you're the werewolf and you know that they're, oh fuck, they're going to get, and you're like, oh no, but that person over there is looking really Exactly.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: This is exactly what it is. It's the desperate cry because you just you're at the end of your rod and you're like, Oh, I'm talking about cat litter.

Like I'm a crazy person talking about cat litter. This is not where I started. So when Tim Walz, the social studies teacher is like, it seems odd that you're focused on this. He's like, your kid loves you. Like I [01:24:00] just love Yeah. Fucking weird. How mad they are.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: But to be fair to them, it is very weird in those circles to have your kid love you.

They must be like, that is fucking weird. Right? Everybody. Y'all are. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. No, my kid, I actually had a heart

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: attack in front of my kid and he did this funny bit where he didn't call the police. So yeah, normal. You

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: have to wonder too, like how much they like focus group and workshopped. I know you are, but what am I as a response to this?

Like, uh, what about, uh, no, uh, no, we tried. I'm rubber in your glue. It's good. Again, when you're the werewolf, you're all of a sudden

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: you're trying to do too many calculations at once. You know, fucking no illusions knows you're the werewolf at the, at the pajama party. And you're like, yeah, but, but Lydia, did you see her?

She's, she's lying. She's lying. Liar.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Or if you're a Heath's, uh, fiance, we just automatically assume you're [01:25:00] here. So, uh, next up is convicted felon, Dinesh D'Souza, who said the kid might have mental problems, but he's acting just like Tim Walz. So what's

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Walz's

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: excuse?

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Now wait a minute, just for clarity, did he write that himself or did he plagiarize it?

Yeah, no, it's hard to say who wrote

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: that one.

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: He's a plagiarist, guys.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And then, and I obviously, I didn't include any of the just fuckin rando blue checks who gave Heil Hitler six dollars or whatever it is. Uh, Jay Weber? Conservative radio host who I think is going to lose his job over this, which is super funny.

Yeah. Oh, really? Uh, yeah. Said, sorry, but this is embarrassing for both father and son. If the Walz is represent today's American man, this country's screwed. Meet my son, Gus. He's a blubbering bitch boy. His

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: mother and I are very proud. Jesus fucking Christ. So, what I love about this, and I say that, uh, ironically, obviously, but I do think [01:26:00] it's important.

Again, I think it's okay to be uncomfortable by the ugly crying, as somebody who ugly cries. I get it. Sure! That's okay. But I do think that there's an important point to be made, that It's one thing to say, Oh, yeah, his neurodiversity may be a reason that this happened. Sure. Sure. I think there's a level that people are explaining that away in a way that makes me uncomfortable, where it's like, this guy, for example, went from that, that horrible fucking hate crime of tweet.

Oh, I didn't know he was neurodivergent, my bad. I didn't know he was neurodivergent. Right. Which tells me like. That's not it, man. I don't think, I don't think it's like, okay, any behavior like this is downright just something you can mock and ridicule in horrible terms, unless you find out there's a label you can put on the person and then you got to begrudgingly be like, Oh, I guess I'll just think those things and not say them out [01:27:00] loud.

You know, I thought I was being cruel to a,

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: uh, perfectly neurotypical teen person. Yeah. I thought I was just attacking a 17 year old, just a normal

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: child. Also, I almost created a subcategory, but we didn't have time for it in the episode and I didn't want to divert us. The followup that all of these people have done is there's a clip of Walz kind of pulling Gus.

Out of the way of a camera because Guz is so overwhelmed and so excited that they're on stage He brings the whole family and so he sort of like yanks him very gently out of the way because he's about to walk right into a fucking standing cam And they have sped that up, right? The same thing they did with the reporter lady, right?

We've sped it up to make it look like he's trying to fucking judo toss sure his son, and they're like, shame on you for treating your disabled son that way.

MUSIC: And the fact

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: that, and like that first guy I read has done it. And like the fact that every single one of them have then tried to switch a roux [01:28:00] around to be like, he's not very nice to that son, you all apparently don't like it when I'm not nice.

Yeah. He's not

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: being nice to this person. I'm actively being in a public space.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Like I love that. We just don't give a shit about that anymore. Sorry, Tom. Go ahead. I just love that. I feel like as a society we've been like, Oh no, you're being a fake piece of shit. We don't care about your fake arguments.

Yeah. Yeah. I, but

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: like I, when I watched this, I was thinking like, God, I would love to live my life such that my kids were this proud ever. That's all any healthy person should think. Like what a win. What an incredible win as a dad to have ever done anything in your life to where when you're being honored for it, or you're being noticed for it, or you're being seen for it, that your kids are this full of pride because they love you that much.

Like if we don't live our lives, not just as Gus, but as Tim to be examples like that, like that should be what we're all working toward. Like I have no idea if my kids will ever see me and [01:29:00] feel that much pride, but like, I'm gonna really try. I'm going

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: to really give it hell.

Are Men Okay Part 3 – SOME MORE NEWS - Air Date 5-22-24

CLIP: I can tell you right now, they talk about why does men not want to get married anymore. Men don't want to get married anymore. They come up with all these elaborate reasons. The main reason men don't want to get married anymore is because their girlfriend was with me.

for free. So why are they gonna marry her? That's that's the bottom line of it. Why would you? A white dress means virgin. Marry who? A girl from the club who your friends have been

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: with? Oh yeah, you know how when men are like, I can't find a good woman to be my wife. They're talking about women who go to the club and have sex with Andrew Tate.

You know how like, there aren't any women who aren't those women. But also, what does it say about Andrew Tate that he considers himself some kind of blight on women that degrades their value if they come in contact with him. Like a social canker sore they should warn kids about at school. So, what Clearly not someone you should [01:30:00] listen to about meeting women.

And yet Andrew Tate has managed to take this grift to a cult like level. He offers his Hustler University that gives paying members access to special chat rooms that do nothing but create an echo chamber of men complaining about women. This language of simps and betas and alphas and cucks. This isn't how most of the world speaks.

Like yes, you might hear people using it at first ironically to make fun of you, And then it kind of seeps into their real language, but unironically, it's this weird esoteric terminology designed to isolate men further from mainstream society, almost guaranteeing that they will never successfully find a partner and be forever caught in their manosphere.

And if they do, they'll probably resent the word partner because it implies some sense of equality. So I guess more accurately, Almost guaranteeing that they will never successfully find a pet slave. There's a pretty telling article about a reporter who took one of these [01:31:00] Manosphere programs who noted, quote, Despite paying for a course dedicated to meeting more women, few of the men I talked to in LA seem to enjoy their real life company.

What they want more than anything is to be admired by other men. This, in the end, is the true purpose of all this acquisition and abundance. Women are viewed as a resource on a par with sports cars and infinity pools, something to show off and deploy to convey your alpha status to other men. So basically, these men sign up because they are lonely, and join a cult designed to make them more lonely.

This, in turn, makes them even more susceptible to the cult and its spirals. Meanwhile, they're pushing crypto almost as their own internal economy, and heavily tying this manosphere to the promise of economic prosperity. In fact, did you know that Hustler University offers commissions to their members if they get their friends to sign up?

I'm sorry, let me rephrase. In fact, did you know that [01:32:00] Hustler University is a pyramid scheme, as in, it's very explicitly that. It's a cult. Did you know that for the low, low price of 5, 000, you can join Andrew Tate's special war room, his secret club where you can, I don't know, prepare for some kind of war.

War, I guess. It sounds silly, but it's made Tate millions of dollars doing this, which is probably why that YouTuber Sneeko also got in on this, selling a creativity kit for 50 bucks a month to help other people go viral.

CLIP: It's time to stop scrolling and start monetizing. These are the sheep, the bots I yell about.

This is the clientele that give all their money to the people at the top advertising while we sit here and scroll. Do you want to waste your time and sit here? I don't know why these people are here. Do you want to sit here all day or profit off of them? That's all I know how to do from scripting, writing, live streaming, being comfortable talking in public, vlogging.

That's what I want to teach you

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: on this [01:33:00] course. I'm sorry, but before we get into stuff that is way more relevant. You don't know why people are there? I don't even know. It's a crowd of people sitting in like an arena type environment. Look for a sign, dude. I bet there's a sign that says why people are there.

I don't want to harp on this. There are more important things to talk about, but I'm going to because man, this guy is so f ing silly. I don't know why people are even here. Look around. Ask somebody. Hey, are you tired of being online all the time? Well, you got to get out in the real world. So here I am, but why is everybody else also here?

Oh well, hey online people out there, I don't know why these people are out in the real world, but they're sheep. Like, this is just a theory, but maybe men are lonely because they're incapable of asking a stranger Hey, what's this crowd of people doing here? Anyway, the actual point of me bringing up this Creativity Kit from a [01:34:00] guy who I don't even think could define the word creativity, and if he were to ask someone why a bunch of people were sitting in an amphitheater, it would only be for content with a capital C, because he capital sucks s Well, the actual point of showing you that is that it's just scam stuff.

It's scam, it's just scams. It's that Riddler guy you saw in 3AM infomercials. They aren't actually good with money or even women. There are sex workers who have talked about how these guys will hire them to pretend to be their sexual conquests. One of these grifters, a Twitter account called Shades of Game, even admitted that he would go to clubs, pay for a VIP table, and invite women to take pictures with him.

It's just. A grift. It's so laughable and obvious, but according to these guys, the fact that I'm saying this is just another victory. To quote this article about Andrew Tate, In one guide, Hustlers University students are told that attracting comments and [01:35:00] controversy is the key to success. What you ideally want is a mix of 60 70 percent fans and 40 30 percent haters.

You want arguments. You want war. It's a war, you see, for attention. Though to them, it's for the culture. And by framing it this way, by working the haters into your grift, you've made yourself bulletproof from anyone laughing at your obvious lies and bulls t. The more people laugh, you see, the more Successful you are, after all, a huge portion of this manosphere economy is simply attracting any attention as we just talked about in our last episode, they ultimately just want engagement and they absolutely don't care how they get it.

In fact, I'm not sure they even think about the harm they are doing to young men and they are doing a lot of harm. Like, get ready for the saddest clip in the world, sadder than the ending of Homeward Bound where Shadow gets trapped in the hole.

CLIP: What did you take? F the woman. [01:36:00] F the woman. What? No, no, no. No, no.

Wait, wait, wait. We love women. We love women. But not, not like transgenders. Yes,

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: sir. We love everybody. No, no. F it. That there is Sneeko, meeting some of his fans, and perhaps realizing the extent to which he's ruined these extremely young boys. For money. The culmination of his grift. His legacy is a handful of shitty children screaming hate at him at a baseball game.

And I don't know, if that doesn't haunt him for life, I'm not sure what would. So, you know, f k that guy. His name sounds like a Star Wars alien, and that's the best thing about him. Also, f k Andrew Tate, obviously, and f k all the other weird Manosphere grifters. Or rather, don't f k them. They're gross. Young men are lost, and they are selling them maps to nowhere.

SECTION C: THE FALL OUT OF STOICISM

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Next up, Section C: [01:37:00] The Fallout of Stoicism.

“BoyMom” Author Looks at Raising Sons in an Age of “Impossible Masculinity” Part 3 - Amanpour and Company - Air Date 7-9-24

MICHEL MARTIN: It seems like what you have found out, um, in both in your book and in an excerpt that has appeared in the times that has gotten.

A lot of attention is that boys are hurting sort of describe kind of like the top line surprise for you about just what, how much boys and young men are hurting.

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah. So I interviewed many boys of different backgrounds, you know, economically, racially, uh, geographically, and The theme that kept coming up over and over again that really surprised me was just how lonely they were.

Um, and partly that was to do with like actual isolation and that showing up in a lot of data as well about boys spending a lot of time on screens and replacing that kind of real life socializing with, um, with a screen based socializing. So boys are becoming material and materially more isolated. Also, even [01:38:00] the ones who did have a lot of friends who did hang out with them felt that they couldn't really find that kind of intimate connection.

They couldn't talk to their friends about those intimate, personal, sort of more, um, you know, more vulnerable things. And those were kind of the old scripts of masculinity that were very much still in circulation. So I think the top line was kind of learning this, but also I think these boys felt very shut down.

You know, they felt shut down from that old system of masculinity, which was like. Man up be tough. Don't show your feelings. But also from these new kind of more progressive voices where it was like, you know, you're a man, you're privileged. It's not it's not your turn to speak. You need to be quiet and let somebody else have a turn.

So they kind of just really didn't know. How to be how to express themselves. Tell me some about some of the boys that you met. There's a really, really wide range, not just in terms of, you know, economic and social and racial backgrounds, but also just in the kind of type of kids that we're talking about, young men, you know, some of them were.[01:39:00]

very sort of isolated and slightly socially awkward. Some of them were, you know, these popular cool kids. But what was really interesting was more of the similarities in what they were saying than the differences. I think they all felt quite hemmed in and quite oppressed by these ideas of masculinity that were being forced on them.

So they all felt that it was very hard for them to, like, express their emotions. And Even for them to kind of name their own emotions to themselves. So it wasn't even they found it really hard, even to get to the point where they could figure out what they were feeling, let alone, um, tell their friends about it.

So that was one thing. They felt kind of isolated. They felt like they couldn't talk to their friends. A lot of them used the same expression. You know, kids from very different backgrounds used the same expression with me, which is, you can never let your guard down. They used the exact same phrase to describe what it was like to be a boy amongst male peers.

You know, that you were always on the verge of, like, getting knocked down or saying the wrong thing [01:40:00] or saying something that would, like, emasculate you in some way.

MICHEL MARTIN: So is there a particular age group that you found? To be sort of most in distress.

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah. So I think what I was looking at was this kind of micro generation of boys that were really hitting puberty, right?

As me too happened and then went through the COVID pandemic, which obviously accelerated a lot of these kinds of trends, but you know, they were in evidence before. And that sort of micro generation is now of voting age there of college age, you know, so if you were 11, um, when me to take off, you're 18.

And I think that generation we're showing that they're moving to the Right. Politically, they're becoming isolated. They're becoming resentful. I think they don't know their place in the world. They're dropping out of college or not going to college. Um, in the same way that girls are, there's this whole problem with failure to launch that this is becoming increasingly serious.

You know, that, um, while kind of young women are doing things like finding partners and going [01:41:00] to college and leaving their parents houses. Young men are increasingly being left behind, so it was that generation that I really wanted to look at and just see, you know, what's it like to grow up in this moment, you know, this very complex and very fraught cultural moment.

MICHEL MARTIN: One of the points that you make is, is that a lot of these constructs just don't mean anything to kids that age,

RUTH WHIPPMAN: right? So I think this idea of privilege, you know, it's a very real thing. And we need to educate our boys in the history of patriarchy, the history of privilege, the history of gendered violence, and all of these things.

But they are children, you know, they're not actually responsible for those things. things that happened. They didn't do this stuff. And so I think, you know, when they look at their female peers, the concept of privilege doesn't really mean so much to them. They're sort of like, well, where is all this power that we're supposed to have?

You know, this idea that you need to be quiet because you're so privileged. And they're looking at themselves, their high school kids, they have no economic capital. It doesn't really mean so much to them that [01:42:00] somebody on wall street. Who's male will get a better job or a better salary than somebody who's female on Wall Street, you know, is just so remote to them.

And I think that those those very blunt, very sort of broad brush ideas of like privilege and power and oppression. I don't necessarily apply to teenagers in quite the same way.

SECTION D: DATING LIFE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section D: Dating Life, containing discussion of sex as well as violence.

Rough Sex is the New Normal Nearly 2/3 of Women Have Been Choked During Sex! - Rena Malik M.D. - Air Date 5-10-24

RENA MALIK, M.D. - HOST, RENA MALIK, M.D.: Let's talk about porn How is porn contributing to this rise of rough sex and how is the availability and accessibility of porn in your opinion?

Or based on science and some I know you've looked at how people learn about sex through porn. How is that affecting?

DEBBY HERBENICK: Pornography is so widely available and just like many parents don't know that rough [01:43:00] sex is increasing. Many parents, not all, but many parents don't know what today's porn looks like. When they think of porn, they might think of something that they saw in the 80s or 90s or early 2000s.

It's a

RENA MALIK, M.D. - HOST, RENA MALIK, M.D.: really good point.

DEBBY HERBENICK: And porn has changed. And even though there is still porn, still some really nice high quality stuff out there. I mean, 14 year olds are not looking for like queer feminist porn. And even if they're finding it, they're not, they don't have the credit card to pay for it. Right. So there are differences with what is available on the internet, freely available, freely available in really being like pushed on you.

Right. And so the sort of free widespread mainstream stuff is really, really important. really aggressive. And so there's lots of research showing like, lots of aggression, especially directed toward women, um, for like porn that features men and women having sex. Like women again are often going to be the targets of like the choking and the hitting and the punching and the spanking and the name calling, like the really, [01:44:00] really, um, derogatory names that some of the women in our studies.

Say has been more harmful to them than some of the physical stuff that's happened because they may be called a name that triggers up memories of being abused either physically or sexually when they were younger, or that it just suddenly, even if they don't have abuse histories, they might, the name might feel so bad to them that it suddenly like it like flips a switch and things, wait, is this like an okay hookup or is this person going to hurt me?

Because why would like a. Person who liked me called me this horrible name. So there's all these things that they, that are happening in pornography and pornography is seen at really young ages. There was a common sense media report that came out in 2023 that showed that on average, kids are seeing porn at around age 12.

And I think we really have to think about that. Phrase on average, it's even earlier if it's on average, that means there's lots of seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 year olds too. And yes, there's 13 and ups also, but there's a [01:45:00] lot of children, elementary age school children who are seeing pornography. And we also know that teens are waiting on average longer to have partnered sex.

So what does that mean? If you start seeing porn when you're eight or 10 or 12, But you don't have partnered sex till you're 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. Well, it may mean that you are watching pornography and kind of soaking in these like lessons and scripts about how to have sex for five to 10 years before you ever kiss somebody.

So what we hear from a lot of young people is that those early experiences when they do have partnered sex are often really rough. They are sometimes scary. They are sometimes very much what many of us would consider to be assault. You know, it can take time to realize like what you want. It can take a lot of experience and education and confidence to feel like you can assert, I don't want this anymore, or I don't like this, or here's how I would rather be making out or having sex.

[01:46:00] So even though some young people are standing up for themselves and saying, I don't like this, it can take time. So they may have experiences that really don't feel well for three months, six months, a year, two years, five years, you know, before they really develop in a way that they can create a better sex lives for themselves.

So I really, you know, and I want to say, know much about that path yet. We are starting to see some studies. There was a study out of Sweden a couple years ago where they interviewed 16 and 17 year old girls about pornography. It wasn't about rough sex. It was about pornography. And the authors came at it from the perspective of, Hey, this is like, Sweden's a feminist country.

What does it mean to be a young woman in a feminist country? Feminist, like very feminist identified country and yet to be like watching porn. And so it was really focused on that. It was really interesting, but you could see some evidence in those, these young women's interviews where they would say, yeah, I mean, my boyfriend and I, when we start, you know, when we got together, we were doing all of these things.

And in one young woman's own words, she [01:47:00] said, you know, that we're not normal, like choking, and then they kind of looked at each other at some point and said, We don't want to do this anymore. Like this doesn't feel good to us. So I think we've got to keep in mind that pornography is very widely and freely available.

It is often seen by young children. It's often seen by accident by young children. They're not always looking for it when they are looking for it. They're sometimes finding it because they just wanted to learn about sex. Like maybe somebody told them like really good information about like how babies are made, but they were like, I can't figure it out, right?

So they wanted to see like, how does that happen? Or they wanted to see breast or vulvas or penises. But for lots of reasons, kids are getting access to adult materials and not just adult materials, but ones that are really aggressive. And we need to think about that. I think, you know, one of the things I advise and yes, your kid for parents is even for like, elementary school age kids.

If you're dropping your kid off for a play date or a sleepover, talk with the other parents about what device access is going to look like during [01:48:00] that play date or sleepover. If you're getting kids dropped off at your house, make sure that they're not on devices. You don't need them to be like accidentally, you know, stumbling upon porn and getting a phone call later from the other parents saying, why did my kids see?

So we have to like have these conversations with kids and often at younger ages than many of us who are parents thought we would be having those conversations, but it's better for it to come from us for us to prepare them and so that they can know like, Oh, if I see this, I can walk away. I can talk to you because even though you didn't want me to see this, I'm not going to get in trouble.

You know, I can come to you with questions like we want that. for our kids, that they can come to us and we can help them sort it out and answer questions about what they might have seen and how they feel about it. But we can't pretend it's not out there and that it's not happening.

The emotional toll of dating apps and why they're no longer about finding love - The Conversation Weekly - Air Date 9-5-24

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: So now we're talking today about dating apps and the way they're influencing [01:49:00] the behavior of the people who use them.

This is based on a story that you worked on a little while back, but what got you thinking about

NIHAL ELHADI - EDITOR, CONVERSATION: this topic? I was interested in the ways masculinity and what it meant to be a man was changing, mainly through social media. The internet. So I commissioned an article from Trina Orchard, who's an associate professor in the School of Health Studies at Western University in London, Canada.

And Trina's book, Sticky Sexy Sad, looked at her experiences in online dating. And she does this particular

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: type of research called self ethnography. Some people might not really know what that is, so how would you

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: describe it? So Trina is trained as an anthropologist and ethnography is a research methodology that examines how a specific culture engages in their particular customs and practices.

Self ethnography centers the researcher with it and locates them within that culture. And so what [01:50:00] Trina was doing was using her own personal experiences. with online dating and dating apps and then using her critical skills as a researcher to analyze and explore what she was experiencing in real life.

And she had some fascinating

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: findings, so we're going to hear about them, but thanks Nahal for coming on and introducing her. Thank you for having me.

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: I started using dating apps in late August of 2017. I had been I've been single for over a year by my choice, and had done a lot of personal healing. I had been sober for about three or four years by that point, and was ready to get back out in the romance situation, environment, and that's why I began using dating apps.

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: At 45, Trina found herself in a position where few of her friends had tried dating apps. I am such an

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: old fashioned stone age person, and it was quite terrifying thinking about doing dating in a totally different way than I had for the [01:51:00] majority of my life. So it took a lot of courage to make that decision to even download an app.

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: Over the course of her dating life journey, Trina had to learn to adapt to the social codes that people use to communicate with on dating apps.

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: And people were advising me to develop a thick skin because it's just a game and people are terrible and don't take it too seriously. But I wanted to connect and so I was taking it

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: seriously.

Trina's day job as an anthropologist quickly proved useful. Rather than simply participating in online interactions, she started to see them as a valuable opportunity to study online dating culture.

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: I'm trained to look for patterns as a scholar, and I just found it so bewildering and fascinating that it quickly became a situation where it was, yes, I was on these apps to meet people, but I was also very fascinated by them as a culture in the palm of my hand.

And so I began to Look at it also as [01:52:00] a kind of project and that helped me, um, survive it, frankly, because I stayed in the game longer than I probably should have, because I was really dedicated to understanding as much of this cultural environment as I could.

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: Her experiences eventually led her to publish her book where she shares and analyzes her interactions and sheds light on online dating culture more broadly.

So you recently wrote a book called Sticky, Sexy, Sad, Swipe Culture, The Darker Side of Dating Apps. What do you mean in that darker side of dating apps phrase that you've used in your title?

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: The darker side of dating apps refers to the widespread misogyny. It's streamed through these platforms and the people who use them, it refers to the way that the algorithm really shapes users experiences and it's quite addictive using these things, swiping and the way that users are rewarded for being extra productive on dating apps and also punished when we're not, [01:53:00] because you're getting people you've already said no to, as opposed to all the fresh kind of new matches in the area.

Yeah. And in terms of the darker side of dating apps, the profound amount of labor, emotional, technical that is required to find success on dating apps. At least that certainly was my experience. Yeah, it was bewildering because they're a microcosm of our society. You know, they're not. a totally different enclave or this little distinctive bubble that's just fun and games and love quite to the opposite.

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: Some of these experiences left lasting impressions both for better and for worse.

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: A couple of the men I met, they'd morphed into really significant relationships. I didn't fall madly, deeply in love with all of them, but there were shades of love, and that was really important to my evolution as a woman who was coming into herself, as a sober person, who was also finding different kinds of success [01:54:00] in my intimate life.

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: To protect the identities of the different men she stated as part of her auto ethnographic research, Trina uses colours to refer to them throughout the book.

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: The book is full of different vignettes, 13 different men who I feature as a way to trace the evolution that I went through in my dating app experience, from the first time I got ghosted to what dating was like during the pandemic.

Tell me about that first time you got ghosted. Well, it was mortifying, wasn't it? Right? Being ghosted is terrible. In the vignette, I traced The first hot kind of interactions that I had with this individual and how I was very excited and hopeful, also a little bit of trepidation, but I wanted to go for it and I wanted to meet this individual.

And then he vanished and I have no idea why, but in this instance, I was able to gather a little bit of additional information because he then matched with me three more times in the course of a month. And [01:55:00] I kept matching with him because. I wanted to meet him. It was the only way that I could connect with him to try and ask him, why are you doing this?

And I mean, the answer was woefully unsatisfactory. It was just like, Oh, I'm still in something with my ex. And it's like, yeah, but why are you connecting with me then? That has nothing to do with me in a way. I didn't get any kind of good answer. And then they just disappear and you have no recourse. You can't even text them or ask them why, because they don't exist anymore.

And a lot of people laugh about ghosting. Oh, yeah, it's just, you know, part of the game. And it's true. It is part of the game, but it feels terrible. And so that vignette is funny. And it's also really embarrassing because when it happened, I emailed Bumble customer service. Because I didn't know that I had been ghosted.

And people laugh whenever I read this one, but then they also, they remember the first time it happened to them too.

Rough Sex is the New Normal Nearly 2/3 of Women Have Been Choked During Sex! Part 2 - Rena Malik M.D. - Air Date 5-10-24

RENA MALIK, M.D. - HOST, RENA MALIK, M.D.: [01:56:00] This is, I mean, I'm, I'm just, I'm, my mind is a little bit blown today. Um, you know, you did do a study in 2021 where you looked at how children and, Teenagers used porn for education and I want to share the stats. So in terms of learning about sex when it was adolescent age, it was about 8. 4%, which is still a high number, but it went up to almost a fourth, 24.

5 percent in the 18 to 24 year old group. One in four young adults who don't have fully formed brains are learning sex from porn alone. Like, that is insane.

DEBBY HERBENICK: Or primarily from porn. Primarily. Yeah, like that's a big influence. And it's, it is, it is astounding because we always say too in sex, in sex education, like, who is the best person to teach you, like how to have sex with them?

It's that person. It's not pornography because everyone varies. And what one person likes in terms of how they are kissed or how they're touched or how they're licked or how you have intercourse or whatever. It will [01:57:00] vary from person to person. And so, so many young people, I think, feel like they have to be, you know, a great partner, right?

They have to be impressive. And there's a lot of pressure on young men to be, like, really good at sex and to somehow have this knowledge just, like, naturally imparted. Like, right away. And it's, it's not how it works, right? And so, so we really need to have, make more space for development, for trial and error, but for people to feel figure those things out with the support of books of like really good sex education because porn is something that many young people will go to or rely on or somebody sends them a link and they check it out.

I mean, I've, I remember one of the most heartbreaking ones, and I think I wrote about this and yes, your kid, cause it was so impactful to me. Was a young woman who shared in an interview that we did. It was about choking and rough sex. Pornography came up and it turned out she had started to look at it like an elementary school.

And it would be because there was a boy that was like, you know, her boyfriend, they weren't sexually active at the time, but he had shared with [01:58:00] her that he addicted to porn and elementary and elementary school. He felt like he was addicted to porn and she was so curious in her words, kind of like what these pornography actresses had that she didn't that elementary school elementary school that she went online to learn this.

And that was her introduction to porn. And it just blew my mind like that. She was a kid, you know, I think like fifth or sixth grade or something. And she was a kid and thinking, What does this adult pornography actress have, you know, that I don't, and she was comparing herself to those women who are actresses, I mean, who are adults and her and, you know, sexually explicit, you know, pornographic films and, and just, I mean, it broke my heart and, you know, and she was like, uh, Really smart kid from actually a very like wealthy like highly educated like somewhat conservative community that I'm familiar with.

So I mean, I knew where she was from. And I thought, you know, there are a lot of people who would say, Oh, no, like, you know, not [01:59:00] my not my kid. And that's actually why like, the book is Yes, your kid, because so many people think that whether it's choking, or rough sex, or pornography, or taking sharing images, many of us aren't familiar with the world as it is today, because it's not the world as it was when we grew up.

Yeah. And it is. It's so easy to think, Oh, it's just kids who are vulnerable to exploitation or abuse. And we have to say, you know, this is the world and we need to be a part of these conversations so we can support our kids.

RENA MALIK, M.D. - HOST, RENA MALIK, M.D.: Yeah, it is. It is so important. And I think, again, digging your head in the sand and acting like it's not there is not going to fix the problem.

I always share this because I think it's so important. It's really impactful for people who grew up our generation or older when we grew up watching porn was challenging. Like you had to find a tape, find a VCR, find a room where no one was and actually be able to watch that. Right? That was one. Two was you'd have to find a magazine, hide it somewhere where nobody would find it.

Find it, be able to again, find a quiet room where no one is going to walk in on you and [02:00:00] look at it. Whatever it is. It was extremely challenging to obtain, whereas now it is so easy, so easy to find freely accessible porn that is also very alarming. And you talk about this in your book, but it will talk about like incest and we'll talk about with siblings or mother in laws or whatever, like just very things that are, you know, Not normal and not appropriate, right?

Like incest is not appropriate and there's a reason that it's not appropriate, but like it's wild to me, right? And I get that some people like they see the forbidden thing. I think when you're an adult, you can see that this is not, this is just for entertainment. It is not real life and you can differentiate that.

But when you are not fully formed in your brain, you can't, you don't know. It's wild.

DEBBY HERBENICK: Yeah. And you know, I have not seen a lot of this here in the U. S. yet. There's also not really good research on it, so I don't know. But I do have colleagues in, you know, Australia, New Zealand, who have shared that in terms of the incest issue, that they have seen increases.

And, you know, they're hearing this from [02:01:00] counselors who work with kids and teens, that they've heard it from like youth workers, from law enforcement, who have seen increases in the number of young people that are, are having kind of, you know, incest experiences and non consensual ones, and that. you know, having watched incest porn seems to be connected to those.

And so they are doing, you know, some of the, my colleagues are doing a really good job of trying to like educate parents and communities and schools around these issues around like pornography. Cause it is, it's a, it's a popular genre for some people. And, um, and so what messages that sends kids that that's who you're supposed to, you know, explore with sexually, like it's, it's not healthy.

It's not. Okay. Um, it's really harmful to a lot of young people. And so we have heard, I mean, I've heard a little bit about this in the U S, but I don't think we've had enough attention on it. Um, here. So I don't know how much it's happening here, but I think it's so important to be mindful of because yes, the genres are things like that.

There's other genres, genres that are like, some people can't believe these things are real, [02:02:00] but they are. You know, like gagging somebody with a penis to the point where like you vomit. Um, and I had a very small role in working on the documentary Hot Girls Wanted, like a, you know, nearly a decade ago. And that was one of the genres, you know, that came up and, um, and I think one of the things again, being like in the sexuality field for so long, like I have met people who were involved either as like onset photographers or as actresses in pornography in the eighties and nineties.

And when you hear those people's stories, they say like, We weren't doing any of these things back then, right? Those of us who, you know, anybody who did like happen to see a magazine or a video in the 80s or 90s and stuff, like that stuff wasn't even being shown. And many of those actors will say, yeah, we were never asked to do those things.

Or even if you did, like you might've been paid such an extraordinary amount of money because it was so And so stigmatized and not Oh, you know, in some of these things just didn't happen. So whereas now there's such a competition and like the online doing it for free. [02:03:00] Yeah. And that like a lot of people who work in that industry now say, Oh yeah, we've had to like be sort of harder and rougher and more shocking to get the views.

And so the stuff that's out there. is trickier than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

SECTION E: SOCIAL EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section E: Social-Emotional Development.

Rethinking Boyhood What Moms Should Know (with Guest Ruth Whippman) Part 2 - What Fresh Hell Podcast - Air Date 6-17-24

AMY - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: You talk about the social time that boys have when they play with each other, that, um, as screen time has taken over more and more of our kids lives, that, uh, boys are even more likely to displace social time with screen time.

Um, and having two boys and a girl, that's definitely true in my house, I would say, that the, the two children who are more married to their screens, um, are my two male children. And again, do you think that's something that's essentialist or do [02:04:00] you think that's something that's socialized or is it a little bit of both?

RUTH WHIPPMAN: I mean, I don't, I think, I, I, I can't say for sure, but I know that the socialization piece is a big one and that's the one that we have control over. But the essential piece, you know, the nature piece, we'd. You know, we don't really have a lot of say over that, but there is a big socialization thing in the screen time thing.

Cause I think it's very easy for boys to use screens as a social crutch. So I don't know how old your boys are, but I think in like teenage culture, it's like playing video games online and like, um, having a friend over and being on the PlayStation. Cause I think that kind of face to face contact is quite hard for boys.

They're not socialized to do it. They're not given the skills to kind of really like talk. In that kind of emotional face to face way that girls are taught. And so these screens come along and it's really easy to just like, Oh, okay, a screen, this is going to smooth the kind of anxiety of the situation.

So you are seeing this like displacement phenomenon [02:05:00] is like quite significantly worse with boys at the moment than it is with girls. Boys are spending more time on screens than girls are, and they're spending much less time socializing. And I think it's something we really need to correct for.

MARGARET - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: So in the book, you have a lot of practical suggestions about, um, What we need to be, especially modeling, I think, right?

For our boys, a lot of this work, unfortunately, as we always say, we'd love to just tell them something or give them a pamphlet. We need to model this stuff for them. And one of the big things we need to model is, um, emotional intimacy. So let's talk about that a little bit. Why boys need it. And what it looks like from, from our

RUTH WHIPPMAN: model.

Yeah. So I think this, this starts right from birth. There's all these, this research that shows that parents sort of unwittingly project all these like masculine qualities onto boys. So when a baby boy cries, the parents [02:06:00] and people are more likely to see him as angry. Whereas when a girl cries, they see her as sad and that sort of fascinating.

Yeah. And like people handle boys more roughly. They sort of rough house with them. You know, and people have, mothers especially, have much more kind of emotionally involved conversations with their daughters than they do with their sons, right from the beginning. And they tend to speak to boys in these like shorter sentences, even a different vocabulary.

They don't use so many emotion words, they use like competition words, winning words, those kinds of things. This is frightening because as you're

MARGARET - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: saying it and my house, I'm like, yeah, that tracks, that tracks. It's all perfect.

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah. And, and me too. I mean, and I, I don't have a daughter, but I can imagine it would just be so much because this is what's been modeled to us.

And most of these things that we do are unconscious. So I think the first thing is like becoming aware of those patterns and just thinking like, Oh, do I do that? Looking inside ourselves and thinking, Oh yes, that, you know, that seems right. And then trying to correct for it. So I think really [02:07:00] engaging with boys about their emotions, which means listening to them.

And I think, you know, especially in this time of this sort of the culture wards and it's sort of like, Oh, you don't want to listen to any of boys problems because you know, they're so privileged and actually we should be listening to girls, but it's. It's really about hearing what they actually say, empathizing with them, talking to them about feelings, using that emotional vocabulary, exposing them to role models of good friendships and relational stuff between.

Boys and men, so whether that's in life or in art, you know, art being, you know, books, TV shows, movies, and just sort of keeping this all in mind. And then the other thing is just kind of nurture, you know, as I say, I think, um, it's settled, but there's like a real measurable difference in the kind of like nurturing care that baby boys and young boys get and young girls get, you know, it's like, we tend to see, you know, boys as sort of bad, not sad.

You know, that's one of the [02:08:00] phrases that I use in the book, but it's like, that starts, you know, from the angry baby boys and goes on through discipline problems in school and, you know, behavioral issues and the way that teachers deal with kids. Um, you know, and I think if we can actually look at the emotions that are driving boys behavior and sort of see them as these emotional relational beings and see ourselves, you know, as part of that, then I think that's, You know, a huge part of it.

AMY - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: There's a quote, uh, from this book that I, uh, put in Borg's. I loved it so much. He said, I'm willing to be annoying in service of this project. And the project that you're talking about is sort of questioning. Now, why is the boy not the one who can, uh, you know, be the good friend to the girl who's lonely, you know, that you question the little things and you're willing to be annoying.

You're willing to have your kids sort of roll your eyes at

RUTH WHIPPMAN: you. You become a bit of an eye roll with all this stuff. And, you know, my mom is like a feminist in the seventies and eighties. [02:09:00] You know, there was a lot of conversation about, you know, that sexist and, you know, I couldn't have Barbies and I couldn't have pink and all of that.

And I, I'm not that extreme with my boys, but I think it's like calling these things out, like just naming them. You know, we were watching the babysitters club on Netflix the other day. I don't know if you know that series and it's like, you know, all the babysitters are girls and they sort of say quite a lot of negative things about boys just in passing.

And it's like, you know, if Netflix were making a show about, you know, that was like Based on a book from the eighties that was called like science club and it was all about boys. Um, you know, so they were like four boys in science club in the like 2023 or 24 reboot of it. There would be some girls in science club But like in babysitter's club, there's no boys.

So I think, you know, I want to say to my boys, look, you babysitter, you know, it's a great way to earn money. It's a great way to care for kids. It's really fun. And like, why do you think there are no boys in here? Why do you think they're saying these negative things about [02:10:00] boys and just like pointing out because otherwise it just passes by, you know, just applying that critical lens.

MARGARET - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: I really like that approach because it feels sometimes when you have these conversations, it feels like. Well, someday all of society will change or we'll just be stuck here. And, and those kind of conversations feel to me very accessible. Yeah. Very, I mean, I, I'm definitely having conversations about gender and expression that I never had as a child with my kids.

Uh, the world changing and the conversations are changing, but also just modeling that you are available to question things, I think is so smart for kids in such a wide range of areas because it says, I'm not even sure the answer, but let's ask this question together about whether this role is correct, because I think you talk about in the book, uh, which we haven't [02:11:00] really touched on.

Some of the, like Andrew Tate influence the kind of masculine influence that is starting to affect boys, that boys are kind of falling under the, uh, influence of some influencers who are far right in cell. And I think one of the solutions is the constant willingness to have conversations about masculinity and what it looks like.

Because if you don't have them, these conversations are going to come to you at some point, because I don't know many boys who haven't at some point come home and said, actually, what if the world is this other way?

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Oh, absolutely. And you can understand why they think that, you know, it's like, why don't we have men's history month or, you know, what, you know, it's a complicated time to be a boy.

It's like, they didn't know the history, you know, they weren't there for the whole history Patriarchy and oppression against women. And I think it's like, we've got to treat those conversations [02:12:00] kindly. I think it's, um, you know, that, that I think that you can kind of panic and be like, well, you know, shut up, you know, that, that isn't open for debate and, you know, a good, and, and I think, um, we should listen to those feelings, you know, I think it probably is quite hard right now to, to be a boy and hearing about everybody else's like marginalized experience and not your own.

We have to give them the context and help them to understand why it's happening like that, but also I think there is a space for their feelings as well.

Credits

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

The additional sections of the show included clips from Dear Old Dads, [02:13:00] Some More News. Amanpour and Company, Raina Malik MD, The Conversation Weekly, and What Fresh Hell. Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks 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 bone 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 Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion.

So [02:14:00] coming to you from far outside, the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left Podcast coming to twice weekly thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.com

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#1656 How Far He Will Go: Election lies, intimidation, interference, insurrection (Transcript)

Posted by · September 17, 2024 7:44 AM

Air Date 9/17/2024