#1637 Shifting Populations, Shifting Politics: The European elections show a marginal shift toward the hard right over fears of immigration and scarcity (Transcript)
Air Date 6/21/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast. The European elections could have been worse, but they weren't great. Shifting politics among mainstream parties is legitimising far-right politics at the same time as people's concerns over immigration is being reflected in a willingness to vote for far-right parties. Sources providing our top takes today include Democracy Now!, Unf*cking the Republic, The Brian Lehrer Show, Beyond Business, The Muckrake Political Podcast, Al Jazeera, and Pod Save the World. Then in the additional deeper dive half of the show, there will be more on the EU structure and election results, immigration and the culture war, and the playbook and messaging of the far-right.
Clear Shift Toward the Far Right Anti-Immigrant Nationalists Gain Ground Across Europe - Democracy Now! - Air Date 6-11-24
AMY GOODMAN: In Europe, residents of 27 countries went to the polls this weekend for the European Union’s parliamentary elections. With nearly 400 million eligible voters, the EU elections are among the world’s biggest democratic [00:01:00] polls, which are held every five years. This year’s results ended in a strong showing for the far-right across much of the European Union, while many liberals and Green parties stumbled. Most of the far-right gains were concentrated in countries that elect a large number of seats to the EU Parliament: France, Italy, and Germany.
Incoming lawmakers can veto and shape laws, though they cannot introduce them. They also set the EU’s budget and approve the selection of the European Commission president, a powerful role currently held by Ursula von der Leyen of the center-right European People’s Party. And despite the far-right surge across much of the EU, the European People’s Party was the biggest single winner on Sunday, remaining the strongest group in the European Parliament. On Monday, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen spoke in Berlin about the vote.
URSULA VON DER LEYEN: [translated] This election on European [00:02:00] soil had two basic messages. Firstly, there is still a majority in favor of a strong Europe in the center of the political spectrum. In other words, the center has held. But it is also true that the extremes on the left and on the right have gained support. And that is why this result is also associated with a great responsibility for the parties in the center.
AMY GOODMAN: The election results triggered a political earthquake in France, where Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party won 30% of the vote, more than double President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party. In a surprise move, President Macron responded by dissolving the French Parliament and calling for snap legislative elections in France, which will be held in three weeks.
In Belgium, the prime minister resigned after his party suffered heavy losses.
In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s [00:03:00] Social Democratic Party suffered a crushing defeat, coming in third behind the far-right Alternative for Germany, which scored its best results in history with 16% of the vote.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party surged to first place in Italy, getting nearly 30% of the vote.
In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party was also forecast to finish first.
For more, we go to London to speak with Mehreen Khan. She’s the economics editor at The Times in London and a former Brussels and EU correspondent for the Financial Times.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mehreen. It’s great to have you with us. Can you just talk, start off with the overall trend in Europe, and then specifically talk about what’s happened in France?
MEHREEN KHAN: Sure. Thank you so much for having me on the show, Amy. I’m a big fan.
So, as you’ve already mentioned, there have been two major consequences from these elections. One is [00:04:00] a move, a drift towards the far-right in the competition of the European Parliament, and then this very unexpected political and potentially constitutional crisis in France.
To start off with the European landscape, I think it’s worth stressing to the listeners and to the audience that having huge surges of one party is quite difficult in the European Parliament, because you have 27 elections, which are often run on domestic agendas in 27 different countries, which are all at different points in their political cycle. But what we can say is that the two biggest member states of the European Union, in France and Germany, there has been a clear shift towards the right. And that’s the far-right in terms of the AfD, a party which used to be based around Eurosceptic and anti-Euro ideals but has moved definitively towards anti-migration, anti-Islam, sort of classic populist, nativist culture wars in Germany. And similarly, the same has happened among Marine Le Pen with her Front National party, now known as the Rassemblement National. So, they’ve had a [00:05:00] rebranding in recent years to make them seem, I think, a bit more political palatable to French voters.
I think, on the European scale, immediately nothing will change. And that’s because it’s very hard in aggregate to get huge swings towards one part of the political spectrum. There is a sort of received wisdom that the center has held, and that’s because the three main parties who made the coalition that supported Ursula von der Leyen in 2019 are still likely to have a majority. But I think looking at the aggregate, actually, ignores what’s going on at a slightly deeper level and, I think, more substantive level, where the center-right parties, the Christian democrat parties of Europe, led by the likes of the CDU in Germany, have definitely moved towards the space that was occupied by the far-right. There’s been a clear rightward drift on climate policies, so backlash against green activism, a clear move towards stronger anti-immigration policies and a rhetoric around culture wars, around Christianity, around Israel, around foreign policy, the role of European [00:06:00] civilization, which means that these formerly center-right parties are now definitely occupying territory that we used to call that of the far-right. So, in that sense, the incremental shift of European Parliament towards the right is not just because of the insurgent far-right, but also because of the mainstream parties.
And then, if we move on to France, I think this is the most unexpected political earthquake to have come from any European elections to have ever held since 1979, which is that they’ve basically created a domestic political crisis in one of European Union’s most important countries, France. And Emmanuel Macron looked at the results and decided that he wanted to confront the far-right, in quite a binary way, holding an election where most of his rivals have very little time to prepare, to mobilize or to organize. And his bet seems to be that if French voters are given a choice, a very clear choice between his party and Marine Le Pen’s far-right, that they will choose him. And even if they don’t, the possibility of having a far-right prime minister for the next couple of years, [00:07:00] before the more important presidential election in 2027. He thinks that they will do such a bad job in office that it will become clear to French voters by 2027 that this is a party that is not fit for governance, and this is a party of incompetent, unprofessional cadres, and they are not ready to run France, and, therefore, consolidate his own power base.
Europe Slides to the Right Unpacking the EU Parliamentary elections. - UNFTR - Air Date 6-15-24
MAX - HOST, UNFTR: Let's zoom out and put the EU in context. The EU formed in 1957 with six founding members: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Over time, it added members to where it stands today at 27. The EU is basically the European continent's answer to the United States. Being a member state means you agree to certain economic, agricultural, immigration, and environmental laws and policies. Most, but not all of these countries also use--or at least accept--the Euro as their currency. While not a military alliance or a single body like the United States, [00:08:00] the idea was to establish a broader, quasi-federal economic and legal framework so Europe could compete with the larger economies like China and the US, and trade on a more equal footing.
It's a complex, yet in some ways fragile alliance that not everyone in Europe loves, as evidenced by the Brexit vote a few years back. Overall though, Europeans are largely in favor of being part of the EU.
Now that said, the minority factions that are vehemently opposed to it are loud and getting louder. And that's what this election somewhat demonstrated.
Every five years, citizens of the member nations in Europe head to the polls to elect the MEPs, and more than 400 million Europeans are eligible to participate. As we said up top, the Parliament is like the House of Representatives, in that there are a bunch of open seats, 720 to be exact, representing an array of political parties from all over Europe.
So, here's the first [00:09:00] wrinkle that makes it a bit different. You can have a left wing party in France and one in Germany that appear similar when you line them up head to head, but they can fall under different umbrella parties. So the first step is to affiliate national parties with the umbrella party that most closely resembles the desires and interests of each nation. Liberalism and conservatism might have very different meanings in France and Hungary.
That's how we get seven major parties. But the individual parties can be severed from the umbrella, and that's what happened with the far-right party in Germany, for example. It's one of the quirks that makes it difficult to tally the final vote until the dust settles completely.
The MEPs that are eventually seated wind up in the Parliament, which creates legislation that is passed to the Council of the EU. So this is the body that acts, I guess, more like the Senate, if we need to draw a comparison. This council is comprised of [00:10:00] ministers from each member state. Now, in Parliament, the leader is typically drawn from the party that has the biggest majority. In this case, it's the EPP, which is a centrist party that is leaning increasingly toward the right. And we'll talk about the differences among and between these right-wing factions, because that's an important piece of the puzzle. But let's continue breaking down the structure before we get there.
Each of these bodies has a leader. There's someone in charge of the European Council, the European Commission, the Council of the EU, Court of Justice, Central Bank, and Parliament. It's why we don't really think of a central figure, like a President or a Prime Minister, when it comes to Europe. But of all of these organizational heads, It's the head of Parliament that is most often recognized as top in the hierarchy. This figure is responsible for the politics of the EU, setting the agenda, building coalitions, establishing legislative [00:11:00] priorities, and coordinating with other heads of state. Currently, that person is Ursula von der Leyen, a center-right politician from Germany. And as head of the EPP, the largest representative bloc in parliament, von der Leyen is the odds-on favorite to continue in the role. But that's where our story gets interesting.
How the EU Parliament Voted This Year - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 6-12-24
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Hello
CALLER (NETHERLANDS): Hi Brian. My daughter Johanna always pushes me to listen to you, and I do, because I try to listen to my children. Okay, the Netherlands has a very right-wing development. We had national elections not long before the European elections, and the outcome was very worrisome. The head of the right-wing party, extreme right-wing party, in the Netherlands is Geert Wilders. Mr. Wilders has strong connections with Orban in Hungary, with Marie Le Pen in France, and with the Flemish right-wing party. So, it's extremely worrisome.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Why is it [00:12:00] happening?
CALLER (NETHERLANDS): Why? For the Netherlands, I think it's a small country. People are worried about immigrants. Even if the foreigners in the Netherlands are mostly temporary, seasonal workers, that then go back after a couple of months to their own country. But that number is being exploited by the right-wing.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: How similar or different does that backlash against immigration look to you as what's happening in New York right now?
CALLER (NETHERLANDS): Oh, that's a difficult question. I think it is similar, but I feel New York is still a democratic place open to foreigners.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Cordula thank you so much for calling. Regina in Matawan, you're on WNYC, hello.
CALLER (GERMANY): Hi, hello. So I'm an immigrant from Germany, I'm here for 40 years. I grew up as the post war [00:13:00] generation in Germany after World War II. Our generation, especially in Germany, thought we had finally learned the lesson, and I'm appalled to see that we're going for another round in Europe, in the USA. There's a lot of drifting to the right and extremism.
I believe some of it is just fear and fear mongering. In Germany, definitely it has to do with immigration and fear, different and fear of running out of resources and being made to share beyond what people are willing to share.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Ah, so a fear of scarcity, or an experience of scarcity.
CALLER (GERMANY): Yes, definitely in there. And, the foreigner being foreign not fitting in. Not doing what is expected.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Thank you very much. And that so backs up our conversation with Murata Waude [00:14:00] from the New York Immigration Coalition on the show the other day. That's what he kept bringing up when I was asking him all these devil's africa questions about how many is too many all at once, what about the reasonable argument by people, or isn't it a reasonable argument by people who don't hate the other to say, "well, 200, 000 more people to New York in the course of two years, is it just too much right now?" and so is Biden's pause reasonable in that respect? And what he kept answering was, we fear scarcity. If we have the right government policies, there wouldn't be scarcity. And so it's an irrational fear of scarcity and inability to deal with it at the policy level. So, just interesting connection between what we heard on the show the other day and what Regina was just talking about.
One more, Anna in Flemington, originally from Poland. Anna, you're on WNYC. Hello.
CALLER (POLAND): Hello, [00:15:00] Brian. I was born and raised in Poland, here in the States for the last 40 years. Very happy that the center held in Poland for the European Parliament. We have the same results there as we had in the Polish election last year. So grateful for that.
And my comment is that I blame Donald Trump for a lot what's happening in Europe. We don't like to easily admit that America has such a huge influence in Europe, but it certainly does. And what's been happening specifically in Poland, and I think in other countries in Europe too, is that the right-wing parties pick up straight out of Donald Trump's playbook. The fake news, the media is the enemy of the people the blatant lies. All of that came to the fore only after 2015 and on.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Yes. And you know, what's interesting Anne Applebaum, the writer for the Atlantic who's also from Poland, has [00:16:00] a new piece that says, if you're worried about contagion from Europe's move to the far-right here in the US, don't be because we led them into it. So it sounds like you agree with Anne Applebaum. Anna, thank you very much for your call.
Does the economy matter to the far right - Business Beyond - Air Date 5-31-24
DW NEWS REPORTER: She thinks classic left-right divides over the economy are gradually being superseded by a split over cultural issues.
PIPPA NORRIS: And it's a wide range of issues, on issues like, for example, abortion or reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, human rights versus a sense of a strong state.
DW NEWS REPORTER: It helps explain why you're probably more likely to hear politicians like Donald Trump or Viktor Orban decrying the so-called "woke" agenda, then discussing economic policy.
PIPPA NORRIS: Some people again talk about populism, which is a very vague term. But really, it's about the values, about the moral issues and the social issues which divide society. And classically, of course, that includes immigration in Europe, but many [00:17:00] other issues that go along that. But I think nowadays, the idea that there's a simple unidimensional left-right spectrum is more misleading and confuses more than actually helps us to understand why these parties appeal to a wide variety of different voters.
DW NEWS REPORTER: Let's drill a little deeper into this idea that it is culture rather than the economy which has driven support for these parties.
Phillip Rathgeb is a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and he has studied far-right parties in detail. I asked him to what extent economic policy motivates these parties and their voters.
PHILLIP RATHGEB: So they had their first electoral breakthroughs in the 80s and the 1990s and that was a context where the economy was very much depoliticised. In a sense that there was a market conforming consensus, an economically liberal consensus that depoliticized the economy and thereby opened the door for the politicization of other issues--that is, immigration, asylum, gender identity. And these are the [00:18:00] issues on which these parties are in a good position to mobilize. That's their territory. That's their home turf, if you will.
DW NEWS REPORTER: Pippa Norris says the issue of immigration in particular shows how it is culture rather than economics which motivates voters to support these parties.
She points to the success of anti-immigrant parties in EU countries where the economy has performed relatively strongly over recent decades.
PIPPA NORRIS: Think about the countries which have had tremendous economic growth and a fairly generous welfare state. Think about Sweden, think about Denmark, think about the Netherlands, and think about Germany. And all of those are ones which weren't that affected by the euro crisis. In all of these countries I just mentioned, in the affluent north of Europe, there's been a strong party which has emerged in each case.
DW NEWS REPORTER: However, immigration is still connected to economic issues for some far-right supporters.
PHILLIP RATHGEB: In northern Europe, they don't go against foreign goods [00:19:00] because they have export surpluses. They don't go against foreign capital because they have a solid loyal employer and business class. But they go against foreign people in a sense that what they mobilize on is welfare chauvinism. Because these countries, they have relatively high levels of immigration, but also royalty, high levels of welfare.
So here the nationalist impulse goes against welfare entitlements for foreigners.
DW NEWS REPORTER: But the experts we spoke to believe that economic indicators do not determine where the far-right will be strong.
PIPPA NORRIS: Economic inequality at the objective level measured by, for example, inflation, jobs or unemployment, or other indicators such as GDP growth or GDP levels, does not predict where you see these parties emerging.
DW NEWS REPORTER: But are there still economic factors which determine why certain voters go with the far-right? After the Brexit and Trump votes in 2016, a common narrative was that it was disenfranchised, poorer [00:20:00] voters who had secured the paths to victory.
LIANA FIX: It certainly is a correlation, but we should also not underestimate to what extent right-wing populism is attractive to not only the lower income or de-industrialized voter base.
DW NEWS REPORTER: That's Liana Fix, a historian and political scientist, and she says it's important to note that far-right parties pick up support from voters of various socioeconomic backgrounds.
LIANA FIX: Crunching down the numbers, there's also significant support for right-wing parties that comes from middle class, higher middle class, and also not underestimate that it's not the fault of the poor who are only working for the populists, voting for the populists or for the extremists. There are also other voters that are attracted by these parties.
PHILLIP RATHGEB: These voters are not the poor. So the poor, either they vote for the left or they don't vote at all, so that the poor have really a low level of turnout. And so what the radical right is, that their electoral [00:21:00] stronghold is rather among the lower middle class and working class.
How Deep Does Right Wing Extremism Go In The Republican Party With Teddy Wilson - The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 6-11-24
JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: It's anti immigration xenophobic sort of energies, rising right-wing authoritarianism, which is something that we unfortunately always have to tell people about.
There's a couple of things that are happening. First of all, this is a gamble. —the idea of going ahead and holding snap elections. If this doesn't happen, and for people who don't know this, Macron's term—the next full election—is supposed to be in 2027, which according to my math is three years from now.
The idea, I think, is that if this isn't done there will be the specter of national rally that will be hanging over his presidency and his term as well. I think he looks at a couple of things that are just coming up. Of course, we have the Olympics that are going to take place in Paris.
And by the way, if that's part of the gamble, there are major, major rumors and fears of terrorism taking place at this year's Olympics, which probably could help National [00:22:00] Rally possibly win some votes. We could be looking at a circumstance where National Rally could gain popular support in France in these elections.
You would have Emmanuel Macron as president, and you could have Jordan Bardella, who is this 28 year old phenom within the National Rally who is incredibly scary. He's already being positioned as the future far-right ruler of France. This is a guy who doesn't even shy away from white replacement theory as one of his major ideological narratives.
The possibility is that he could become the prime minister of France. So you could have, theoretically, a divided government in France between Emmanuel Macron—who is not only a neoliberal, but has moved further and further to the right—a center right president, the far, far-right National Rally, which—part of the analysis I wanted to talk about before we moved on from this, Nick, is that centrists, like Macron, are becoming more and [00:23:00] more comfortable working with the far-right. So yes, we could have a divided government, but we could also have a France that is going along with the trajectory of what you and I have been talking about, which is the beginning of a right-wing momentum that is starting to influence, not just politics, but to bring the center further and further right.
NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Yeah. And again, I don't want to belabor the point necessarily of immigration into other people's countries, cause we're dealing with it here, as well. It's a very intoxicating argument, right? You can prey on people's fears of people just pouring into our country—they're changing the culture, all these different things. And you can get someone who is not connected to politics to get behind something like that, right? "Oh, I don't want that in my neighborhood. I don't want that," and that's what's concerning.
I actually did a little bit of research to figure out, in Europe, where are a lot of immigrants coming from that is causing so much of this hand wringing. It was interesting because it seems like Syria is the number one place, and then Afghanistan is also on—
JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: That's so weird that Syria and Afghanistan would be supplying a bunch of [00:24:00] immigrants.
I don't know of anything that Western democracies have done to increase immigrants from Syria or Afghanistan. That's weird.
NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Or with Syria itself and the leadership there, what have they done to lead to an exodus that people need to leave from there as well, right? That's the other issue. And so I'm always looking at this as like, what is the solution?
What are you supposed to do to try and tamp this down? We're going to talk about this with our guests in terms of right-wing extremism, but I'm not exactly sure. Because again, if you wanted to address the notion of people immigrating to your country, I suppose we're supposed to welcome that and be able to maximize that as a cultural thing anyway.
Instead it's becoming this lightning rod that has led to extremism and the other side. You know what I mean?
JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Well, the truth is that immigration is sort of the false thing that we're talking about. The problem isn't immigration. Like when you actually take a look at cosmopolitan liberalism, like you're [00:25:00] supposed to have "melting pots," we're supposed to bring people in and we're supposed to become a larger society change and evolve, progress, all of that.
That's not the issue. The issue is that in an age of austerity, where people feel more and more like they can't get ahead, they can't afford homes. Their work is constantly becoming more and more exploited. By the way, in the background of all this—not just in France, but in the United States—that social safety net is being absolutely shredded, right?
The line between you living a life and you falling into abject poverty and falling behind is getting smaller and smaller and eventually destroyed. As a result, what happens? White supremacy and chauvinism, they grow. Well, okay, so can we have a society where we're all living and striving and changing, or is it group versus group versus group?
And in France, for instance, you have a lot of the social safety net that's going away. Emmanuel Macron has spent most of his tenure getting rid of that social safety net and, and the [00:26:00] programs in France that are supposed to make people feel more and more comfortable—which is what happens with neoliberal globalism.
As a result, immigration becomes the cause célèbre, right? It becomes the thing where all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, it's dog eat dog already. We don't need more people coming in. We need to get rid of them." And you see that white supremacy starting to come out, which is why you have right-wing authoritarianism, not just growing around the world, France, United States, we're looking at Germany, we're looking at Great Britain, and all these Western democracies, but what you're actually watching is that the focus, is that the terms of the competition that we're talking about, these elections, it changes. Instead of talking about making the world better for people, you're talking about who deserves what scraps are remaining.
So it's sort of a false question that, unfortunately it's where—National Rally—they prevail. It's where the Republican party prevails. We even see in America [00:27:00] now where liberals are like, "Oh man, immigration really needs to be shut down. And maybe we need to close the border." Like you're starting to see this becoming a bipartisan push because you're not actually addressing the conditions that are leading to the supposed problem in the first place.
NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: I also wonder if this is also an incumbency problem, whereas if you're a sitting duck, if you're already in power and you're just right to be criticized to no end for and without much recourse. The problem with that is, is that it seems like if a authoritarian comes into power in that manner. they become the incumbent, but it takes longer for that spell to wear off. You might end up being 15 years worth of authoritarianism before you can maybe finally get to move on to something else, which we've seen. But that's a huge chunk of a lot of people's lives to have to deal with that until it's over.
JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Well, if you ever get on the other side of it. It's one of those things. You know, actually, we talked to Teddy Wilson a [00:28:00] little bit about this in the interview later, he was talking about how a lot of right-wing extremists saw Trump saying, you know, "I fixed the border problem. I built the wall," and they're like, "No, you didn't. You didn't take care of this." For a lot of people though, trump's saying, "I built the wall. I took care of immigration. And by the way, you have these scenes of brutality—of children in camps and cages—that makes people feel like the problem's being taken care of. But when, like you said, the incumbency problem, Joe Biden could not be reached for comment on this.
This is not a good time to be in charge because none of the powers that be are particularly interested in solving this. They're going to continue to do some of these right-wing things, whether it's executive actions on immigration or—Macron is shameless in this stuff. And I guarantee you, if National Rally wins, he is going to be more than happy to work with them in this government.
We're going to talk about Netanyahu in a second. He's the same way. He was more than happy to reach across to the far-right and make common cause with them. So, yeah. It ends up in a place [00:29:00] where authoritarians say, "Listen, everything is absolutely screwed up. Give us full power." And then they create the fantasy that things are being taken care of.
They don't actually take care of things, but it feels good because your enemies are upset. And because you're getting that cathartic feeling of the clash of civilizations, which is what they based their appeal on in the first place.
What is behind the rise of the far-right in Europe - Al Jazeera English - Air Date 6-11-24
JANINE DI GIOVANNI: No actually, I disagree with it because I'm deeply concerned. I am a European. I also work within the realm of foreign policy, largely in Ukraine. I run an NGO there—a war crimes unit called the Reckoning Project—but also in the Middle East. And I've worked for many years on refugee issues, most notably during the Syrian crisis, which brought so many refugees to Europe, which did trigger so much of the far-right reaction. So for me, I am looking at this through a lens of a globalist.
I'm seeing trends of popular—more populist governments. America—I just came back from three weeks working in Washington DC. I'm deeply, deeply concerned that Trump is [00:30:00] now much more of a viable option than he was before. I believe these elections will empower him in many ways, as well as voters in America.
But also I think more importantly, we have to look at something really significant, which is where these votes came from. They came from youth, right? So a lot of it came from young people who don't read newspapers anymore, but they're on TikTok. And Jordan Bardella, the French [candidate] who has led, Marine Le Pen's successor is very much a product of TikTok and of Instagram.
He's young. He's 28 years old. He's fresh faced. He has very little political experience. But the votes, the French youth, have very much shown that they are tired of establishment. Same in Germany, which is interesting. Everyone thought the far-right was going to be crusty kind of skinheads, but it's not.
I mean, there was a recent incident [00:31:00] on an Island in Germany, a wealthy Island where young people were shown singing far-right songs and slogans. So I think we need to see, look at carefully, where is this coming from?
It's also not new, you know. It didn't come out of nowhere. It's been coming for decades and, 20 years ago in France, in 2004, there were riots on the outskirts of France, which were very much a protest of youth—largely immigrants, children of immigrants from Africa and North Africa—feeling very disenfranchised with society.
I think now we are coming into a period where France is extremely vulnerable—with the wars both in Ukraine and in Gaza, and perhaps the threat of terrorist attacks, and of course the Olympic Games coming up three weeks after the vote. The new vote that Macron has called.
NASTASYA TAY - PRESENTER, AL JAZERA: Well, Janine, I want to dig into a little bit of what's happening right now in France.
I'll move on to the vote in just a moment, but you [00:32:00] mentioned Jordan Bardella, the successor to Marine Le Pen and the National Rally, as you say, 28 years old. He is, I understand, also the son of immigrants. It does feel like in the past few years that what was the National Front, now the National Rally, they've been trying to clean up their image.
They've been trying to appeal to a broader audience, and they've also shifted on policy somewhat. How much of a difference has that made?
JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Absolutely. It's really interesting to see Marine Le Pen, whose father was mired in anti Semitism, during the pro Palestinian rallies, her coming out as a defender of the French Jewish community, which of course is the largest Jewish community in Europe.
This is a real—it's not to say anti Semitism doesn't exist. Of course it does, but that she— the far-right traditionally does take a pro Israel stance, right? Because it followed Netanyahu. They see him as one of their own—an authoritarian leader who, uh, basically uses physical [00:33:00] force to crush people.
So I think this whole concept of the old skinheads—Neo Nazis that we had in Europe, say in Sweden, in Germany, in France 20, 15, even 10 years ago, is changing. And Jordan Bardella is extremely popular with the youth because people don't read newspapers anymore, or even watch. Unfortunately, they're looking at less television.
They're on TikTok and they're on Instagram. And Jordan Bardella is a hero in that. He's mastered it. He's come of age with it. So I think it's really important that we take this into account more so now than I think any other election. And I, as a European, I am deeply concerned about this, and it might not be in this immediate outcome, but I think long term projection of what will happen in Europe, we are definitely leaning more towards the right.
NASTASYA TAY - PRESENTER, AL JAZERA: Well, Katy, let me ask you then about some of the political strategy here, because if we are [00:34:00] seeing these shifts in France, you have to wonder, what is Macron thinking right now with calling this parliamentary snap election? Is he—is this about setting the scene for the 2027 presidential election? Because obviously we know that Jordan Bardella is the successor to Le Pen.
Le Pen is saying that if they do well enough he would be prime minister, so then he would end up in a, what they're calling a cohabitation government with Macron. I mean, this sounds incredibly awkward for Macron, but also potentially could show, whether or not they can govern?
KATY BROWN: I think it's kind of a dangerous idea that you should almost test the far-right in government to show that they fail to govern well.
And I think, again, with Macron, we need to think about his role in all of this—in pushing regressive policies around, for instance, the immigration bill that was passed in January this year, and [00:35:00] that was heavily criticized for pandering to the far-right. It proposed a limit on access to social security benefits for people coming to the country.
You can also think of the ban on wearing the abaya in schools in France. Again, this was pushed by Macron. And that relied, again, on these classic islamophobic tropes that the far-right use and the idea of secularism within France which is used to restrict Muslim women's rights. So, when we think about Macron's position in terms of the far-right, and now this decision to hold the election, he risks further normalizing far-right politics and giving them another form of legitimacy through this election.
So I think it's a very dangerous position that he's been toying with for a number of years.
Far Right Surges in European Elections - Pod Save The World - Air Date 6-12-24
BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: Substantively, what issues do you see the parliament having—the biggest decisions to make in the coming year or [00:36:00] two? And how might this election affect those issues?
DR. ROSA BALFOUR: There are two areas I'm worried about insofar as the gains of the radical right are concerned. The first is Europe's climate agenda. Europe has been pioneering a climate agenda. It pushed through the Green Deal, and now we're seeing that the radical right is really pushing back against A, the diktat coming from Brussels (the simple fact that Brussels is actually setting the pace of the agenda) [and] B: challenging some of the ideas that are connected to the need to green the economy.
And the problem is not so much the radical right, The problem is the fact that center right parties often respond to those instances coming from the radical right by watering down measures that have been already agreed upon. So what I'm worried about is the implementation of the Green Deal, and I'm worried that it'll get watered down.
The second area I'm worried [00:37:00] about is rights. The European Parliament has always been a very progressive actor. It has worked hard to promote human rights, LGBTIQ rights, gender issues, and a whole set of progressive issues. And the European Parliament has really pushed for them. And, um, The risk is that this whole set of issues will go on the back burner.
And there are all sorts of issues related to it. For instance, academic freedom. For instance, the degree to which human rights are incorporated in dialogue with third countries. There are all sorts of dimensions of this, and they really risk being put on the back burner if the champions of the progressive policies are silenced and if the mainstream parties feel that they should not endorse that agenda for fear of antagonizing the radical right.
BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: That leads me to one last question here, which is that we're obviously in a pretty [00:38:00] unsteady international political environment. The U. S. could swing to Trump dealing with our own divisions, China increasingly being viewed as a competitor, certainly by the U. S. and by some in Europe, Russia is in Ukraine, Middle East is on fire—
All this would suggest that now is a time when Europe would want to coalesce around a set of positions and a set of political views, but it does feel like what we just learned is it's actually gonna be harder for Europe to do that, and we'll see what happens in the French election. What does this mean for how we should look at european politics in this global context? How is Europe going to be able to speak with one voice or to take on hard issues when there's such internal divisions that we see in these elections?
DR. ROSA BALFOUR: Yeah. No, this is going to be really difficult, and if the EU sees through the next five years without fragmenting too much, that already will be an achievement. [00:39:00] If the EU manages to stick to its promise towards Ukraine, that will already be an achievement. But I don't think we can expect a European Union that is proactively engaged with the rest of the world. It's already going to be hard to find the consensus around the degree to which The EU needs to fireproof its own economic model—its own democracy— against all these threats.
One thing to look out for, I think, is there are going to be elections in the UK, soon, in July. I think one thing to look out for is how European Union can connect with its neighbors. So at least try to build a bit of a block there and some common principles which, you know, might give the region a bit, little bit more weight and clout.
And then the other, of course, is what happens in France and Germany, because we've seen very weak leadership coming from those two [00:40:00] countries and now they come out of the European Parliament elections. I mean, it's been a real bashing for them. There's going to be snap elections in France for the Assemblée, but Macron will be fully in charge until the next presidential elections that are in 2027.
In Germany, the next elections are going to be in 2025, and it looks like the center rights will win, and maybe there'll be some new leadership coming out of Germany. But at the moment we cannot assume. I think all countries, large countries, or blocs in the case of the European Union, that have all been consumed by domestic politics and unable to really engage With all the international challenges—this is going to continue in Europe for sure.
Europe Slides to the Right Unpacking the EU Parliamentary elections. Part 2 - UNFTR - Air Date 6-15-24
MAX - HOST, UNFTR: Macron has managed to piss off almost everyone in an attempt to straddle the middle and assert himself as the ultimate statesman able to meet the moment on a continent in turmoil. He's become increasingly militaristic and anti-working [00:41:00] class in an attempt to pass himself off as strong. This is, as usual, such a classic blunder on the part of the liberal bourgeoisie, always desperate to maintain power by projecting strength.
According to the Times, quote, "right-wing parties now govern alone or as part of coalitions in seven of the European Union's 27 countries. They've gained across the continent as voters have grown more concentrated on nationalism and identity, often tied to migration, and some of the same culture war politics pertaining to gender and LGBTQ issues that have gained traction in the United States," end quote.
The World Socialist website nails it when it comes to figures like Macron or von der Leyen. Quote, "The rise of the far-right is the product of the systematic disenfranchisement of the workers by nationalistic, bureaucratic organizations that the media and the ruling class promote as the 'left.' [00:42:00] Unlike the far-right, which tries to exploit mass discontent with the existing political system, these parties of the affluent middle class exude complacency and self satisfaction. Even in the face of war between nuclear armed powers, genocide, and the surge of police state and fascistic forms of rule, these organizations insist that popular opposition must be tied to debilitating alliances with parties of capitalist government and allied union bureaucracies.
"Whatever criticisms they make of the far-right, they're far more hostile to Trotskyism and to building a revolutionary movement in the European working class for socialism," end quote.
Now, I think we can all agree that a far-right nationalistic surge in Europe has a pretty terrible track record. This moment is reminiscent of another time the European nations were tested by a war on the continent that [00:43:00] drove nationalistic tendencies. After the shock of the Russian Revolution, there was this sense that Germany might be next in line for a socialist movement to take root.
Instead, the German SPD leaned into bourgeois nationalism and turned its back on populist worker movements by issuing war credits. Left movements were brutally put down, leading to the executions of key figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, effectively neutralizing the left wing in Germany and paving the way for Anton Drexler's German Workers Party, which eventually morphed into the German Nazi Party. And it all happened very quickly. How quickly? About three years.
So when figures like Douglas Murray assume patronizing postures and dismiss the correlation between far-right rhetoric and fascistic tendencies, they're either historically illiterate or deliberately obfuscating.
Snuffing out left wing movements and promoting half measures that ignore the authentic expressions of [00:44:00] disenfranchised workers is a dangerous game.
I mean, we're seeing it in the United States. Just take Biden's border policy. His half-hearted root cause strategy in Latin America ignored the larger context of economic and physical insecurity that looms over many of the originating migrant nations. It was wholly insufficient to bring about real change and failed to halt the flow of asylum seekers at the border. And so, he moved right, in an effort to steal Trump's thunder on the border ahead of the election.
At the very moment the United States needs a coordinated left wing movement to address the concerns of the working class, the so-called left is in shambles. Cornel West and Jill Stein are rounding errors in the grand scheme of things, and even they're at odds. The Bernie wing has splintered over the massacre in Gaza, and failure to mount a united, progressive front to pull the Democratic Party to the left as well. The only three candidates in contention for the [00:45:00] presidency are center right, far-right, and who the fuck knows?
The same holds true in Europe, where the far left finds itself in utter disarray and on the outside looking in, as the EPP coordinates with the likes of Maloney and Le Pen to retain power.
Capitalism will always produce half measures that betray the working class and build wealth and power among elites. It will always protect those in power and pit the bureaucrats against those they're hired to serve.
We know from our progressive meditation episode that we lost the 2024 election a long time ago and now Europe is heading in the same direction.
Left wing victories in Latin America are now the outliers in the world today, but they provide at least a glimmer of hope that leftist values can take hold. The only question is whether these lights will burn bright enough to guide progressives before capitalism's final [00:46:00] act brings about the next great war and we descend further into the climate abyss.
Final comments on the snowball effect of factors leading to a rightward shift in politics
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Democracy Now!, describing the outcome of the EU elections. Unf*cking the Republic dove deeper into the structure and historical context of the EU. The Brian Lehrer Show took calls from listeners reacting to the elections. Business Beyond looked at the cultural motivations for supporting right-wing politics. The Muckrake Political Podcast discussed France's snap election and the role of immigration in their politics. Al Jazeera also looked at refugees and the far-right in France. Pod Save the World considered some of the policy impacts the election of more conservatives may have on Europe. And Unf*cking the Republic called out the role of capitalism and the fear of socialism in abandoning the working class and making way for the right.
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 [00:47:00] manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process. To support all our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
Now, before we continue to the deeper dives half of the show, as I often do, I did some deep reading on today's topic and want to highlight one particular article. This one from The Guardian: "Don't blame voters for a far-right surge in Europe. Blame the far-right's mainstream copycats". And this is a concept that is addressed by some clips today in the show, but I also thought this provided a good breakdown. It describes multiple unrelated events or social [00:48:00] phenomenon that have collectively created a sort of snowball effect benefiting right-wing politics.
It says, "The first push came from the weakening of social ties. Take the Netherlands as an example. In the 1950s, a typical person raised in a Catholic family, attended Catholic schools, consumed Catholic media and eventually voted for a Catholic party. Today such predictable voting patterns are rare. Higher levels of education have empowered individuals to make independent political choices, breaking free from traditional party loyalties. Starting in the 1960s and gathering steam since the turn of the millennium, electoral volatility has enabled far-right parties to attract voters who are no longer bound by old allegiances. Where individualization led to 'dealignment' (voters breaking free of existing political alignments), globalisation contributed to 'realignment' (new alignments between voters and parties). Those who [00:49:00] benefited from Europe's open borders – the highly educated 'winners of globalisation' – contrasted sharply with those who felt threatened economically and culturally by these changes. Immigration became a key topic in election campaigns and these public debates, drawing more attention to far-right parties".
So, then the article goes on to describe how the right has embraced populism over fascism, emphasizing the will of the people over the elites, whereas fascism is more that traditionally hierarchical form that they hoped sort of would frame the right as the true voice of the people, and it's no coincidence that Steve Bannon refers to audience feedback on his War Room show as "vox populi", which means "voice of the people", just in Latin, because he's a douche, I guess. The rise of social media also aligns with this anti-elite [00:50:00] messaging by allowing right-wing commentators, like Steve Bannon, and politicians to connect with people directly in a way that circumvents mainstream media, which, for all its flaws, generally didn't promote extreme politics. And so if you were an extremist, you did sort of have to find your way over the top of that to get to your desired audience. And that mechanism, that need to go around mainstream media, then created the dynamic where the mainstream media is part of the bad guy. Right? And it also sort of bonds people together, like being an outsider is something that bonds people together. So, the right is sort of more fanatical in their devotion to their cause because of that outsider feel. So, the extremism of the politics helps with the cohesion of it, I guess.
The article also describes how the right has attempted to, [00:51:00] like, moderate, just in their marketing, not their policies, really. Maybe a couple, but mostly they're just making themselves look softer and cuddlier in an attempt to sway more voters. Then we come to the role of the supposed adversaries of right-wing politics. This is the point highlighted in the title. It says, "Ironically, the next big push of the snowball has come from far-right parties' main adversaries: the established mainstream parties themselves. As far-right parties become more successful, right-wing mainstream parties grew nervous. The electoral gains of the far-right often came at the expense of mainstream parties' vote shares. What should they do about it? Many mainstream governing parties adopted an 'accommodative' strategy, incorporating far-right ideas into their own policies to win back votes. Did it work? No. Studies indicate that, if anything, this strategy has resulted in more votes for the [00:52:00] far-right. Why? Because by copying some of their ideas, mainstream parties have legitimized the far-right. Once the ideas of far-right parties have been normalized. Why would those who agree with them vote for the copycat?"
And then the final piece is the power of habituation among voters, which I think the last piece sort of teed up. "People get used to things that happen repeatedly. Hearing far-right rhetoric nonstop, seeing mainstream parties move toward the far-right, and observing the far-right's increasing social media presence and vote shares, has normalized far-right ideology.
And then the article ends with a call to action, which is nothing like super-flashy and exciting. It is just the, you know, the sort of old school work of getting people to fall in love with democracy again. It says, "What can be done to stop this? Criticizing [00:53:00] far-right parties for their illiberalism remains crucial, but it is no longer sufficient. To protect our democracies, we must cultivate a strong collective consciousness of democratic liberalism. This means promoting what we value. Think of mutual tolerance, political pluralism, individual rights, and checks and balances to hold the powerful to account. In addition, we must condemn what threatens it. Educators, journalists, academics, and artists must work to strengthen citizens' democratic awareness and resilience. Only through such concerted efforts can we safeguard the increasingly fragile foundations of our liberal democracies.
SECTION A: THE EU STRUCTURE AND ELECTION RESULTS
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with deeper dives on three topics. Next up, Section A: the EU structure and election results. Section B: immigration and the culture war. And section C: the playbook and messaging of the far-right.
Germany's Chancellor Scholz alarmed by far-right surge - DW News - Air Date 6-10-24
PHIL GAYLE - ANCHOR, DW NEWS: so Chancellor Scholz is social democrat. Thank you very much. took just 14 percent of, uh, this vote. We just heard [00:54:00] him saying they can't carry on with business as usual. What do you think will actually change?
MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG: Well, good evening. I think unfortunately for Schultz, it's going to be very difficult to change anything substantially in time for the elections next year, which are scheduled for the fall of 2025. And to really turn things around in Germany by then, I think is a pretty tall order. His statement today, which Came kind of late, it came 24 hours after these election results came in.
It seems sort of like a, an act of desperation almost, he didn't really know what to say. This is the kind of thing that we've heard from him in the past. And I think his challenge is that in the eyes of so many Germans, he's It's completely lost credibility.
PHIL GAYLE - ANCHOR, DW NEWS: And so, it's not just him though, is it? There is a coalition.
There's his Social Democrats with the Greens and the Liberals. Why is it performing, this coalition? Why is it performing so badly?[00:55:00]
MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG: I think there are a number of factors here. The biggest thing right now, I think, is that the economy is stagnating and they haven't really found a way out of that. Although, unemployment remains very low in Germany. People are still feeling the economic strains. Another very contentious issue that has hit the greens quite hard is the, uh, the climate policies of this government and at the EU level.
In particular, this decision to phase out, uh, fuel burning cars by, uh, beginning in 2035. Which effectively means that Germans and other Europeans won't be able to buy the, the diesels and the, the gas powered cars that, uh, that they are so famous for in Germany. And I think that's created a lot of resentment.
Uh, and then, you know, there's still some, some lingering, uh, frustration, I would say about the, the COVID policies. That's also been a driver for the, for the AFD, but the biggest issue, and [00:56:00] I would say the issue where Schultz has really failed, even by his own standards, is in controlling, uh, migration, which is something that has been on the front burner in the domestic political debate for quite a long time.
Last fall, Schulz promised to begin, uh, deporting, uh, people from Germany whose asylum applications were rejected, um, on a grand scale. That hasn't happened. And so I think a lot of people are, are looking at him now as somebody who has basically failed to, um, to stand by the promises that, that he
PHIL GAYLE - ANCHOR, DW NEWS: made to fulfil those promises.
The big story of the day, uh, not just here in Germany but in France and elsewhere is the the performance of the, uh, the far-right parties. And here in Germany, the AFD has gained a lot of votes despite recent scandals, such as this secret conference at which they discussed deporting [00:57:00] foreigners, and despite suspected espionage by employees of the AFD's top candidates.
So why are they well,
MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG: I think it tells you something that, uh, despite these scandals, the party is still as strong as it is at around 16%. And I think the reason is is that for many voters, it is a protest and it speaks as much to the failure of this coalition that came into power at the end of 2021 as it does the To the allure of these radical policies that, uh, you know, the AFD is, is propagating now, um, you know, the, the issue of migration is not new in Germany.
It's not new in Europe, obviously. It's, it's been a, a very emotional issue for, for some time. And, uh, you know, government after government here has unfortunately really failed to address the issues that are driving [00:58:00] support for, um, the far-right, in particular, in, you know, smaller towns around the country that are seeing their infrastructure really strained by the arrival of, of so many, of so many migrants.
And beyond that, I think it's, it's also a, it's a cultural issue. There's a sense that, uh, you know, the country's culture is changing. Some people are uncomfortable with that. And here again, it seems like Schultz hasn't really, hasn't really done enough to assuage those concerns of the population.
Far Right Surges in European Elections Part 2 - Pod Save The World - Air Date 6-12-24
BEN RHODES - CO-HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD: And on the far-right, um, you described kind of differences among far-right parties. You know, some are far-right xenophobic and kind of are willing to kind of make common cause in some ways with Russia. Some are far-right and nationalist and anti Russian, right? That's just one issue. What do you think the potential is for these far-right parties to actually work together?
And, and what do you think they're trying? To do, you know, in, in, in the, in the American context, I guess it's like, uh, MAGA people [00:59:00] getting elected to Congress to kind of make it not work or something. Right? Because these are people that are usually outwardly hostile to the EU as an institution. What do you think all these far-right members believe they're going to Brussels to do?
DR. ROSA BALFOUR: Yeah, I mean the truth is that in the past many of these did very well in the European Parliament elections But then they didn't show up. So they you know, they just didn't show up. They didn't come to vote They didn't participate in the debates and sometimes they voted one way And then went home and pretended that they'd voted in another way.
So, you know, they've, they've benefited enormously by the fact that there isn't that much scrutiny, uh, with respect to what ha what happens in the European, uh, Parliament. But of course now, you know, it's not just that. together they've managed to get 25 percent of the votes, roughly, in the European Parliament.
It's also that they're doing well at national elections. So, in seven EU member states, we have governments that are either included to the radical right, or are led by the radical right, or are supported by the [01:00:00] radical right. And, you know, it could happen that after the snap elections in France, Rassemblement National will be able to vote.
become the first party and therefore another government, uh, led by the radical right. That makes it eight. And then in September, we have elections in Austria where the radical right came, uh, top in the European parliament election. So it's likely that the next prime minister, the next chancellor of, um, Austria will be, uh, uh, You know, the leader of the radical right party.
So that makes it nine governments out of 27. And that's when, you know, you need to start looking a little bit more seriously at what these parties want and what they think and not just at what they've done in the past. So you're right to ask, what is it that they want? If we take the playbook of Viktor Orbán, who has been leading Hungary for 14 years now, Um, what he wants is the economic benefits [01:01:00] of being part of Europe, that is the single market, the economic opportunities that European programs offer to member, to countries.
But what he doesn't want is the scrutiny from Brussels on rule of law. He doesn't want to conform to, uh, the sort of collective agreement over, for instance, foreign policy matters. And, um, you know, as, uh, um, Boris Johnson, who, you know, led, uh, the UK out of, um, uh, the European Union, he wants to have his cake and eat it.
And the question is, is that possible? Is it possible to have a European Union, um, that is formed of, you know, countries that are loosely hanging in there together without uh, the glue of, um, uh, deeper integration without the glue of political values that can hold them together. And that is a big question.
[01:02:00] Um, but clearly, um, at this present historical juncture, um, it is a question that needs to be addressed, um, because, you know, Europe is seriously challenged, um, internally by these political parties and externally by the international environment.
SECTION B: IMMIGRATION AND THE CULTURE WAR
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B: immigration and the culture war.
Is the Reason Fascism Is Taking Over the World More Frightening Than Fascism Itself - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 6-17-24
CALLER: I think Tom, if you take a, if you study history and you look around the world, uh, not just your own little bubble like a lot of people do, you can see there is a march toward oligarchies throughout the world. You know, there are so many places that are turning to right-wing politicians and I'd like to know who's funding all this because this isn't, and if you listen, they're all using the same playbook.
It's, it's the immigrants, it's the border, it's the gays, and if you go back and you look at Nazi propaganda, you give people somebody to [01:03:00] blame. You're not a billionaire like Trump, you're not a billionaire like Putin, you're not super rich. You know whose fault it is? It's those immigrants, it's those gay people, it's those transgender people.
And we all know who, if you're smart, you know it's the corporations who took your job and sent it to India or China or Vietnam or Mexico so they could pay somebody pennies on the dollar. That's what really happened, but it gets somebody to blame and, and there are lots of people, uh, in America and around the world that aren't doing that great.
And if they've got somebody to blame, then they don't have to look at themselves and go, Well, maybe I should have got a skilled trade. Maybe I should have got a degree and got a better job. But it, it, it seems like it, I hate to say conspiracy, but it seems like it's happening everywhere. And for it all to happen at one time, I can't say it's [01:04:00] organic.
It just didn't spring up. And the fact that they're all using the same talking points, Yep. And people tend to ignore it because I'm wondering to, you know, most corporate corporations on the media. And I think a lot of stuff we're not getting this panic button going and look around. I get what you're saying.
THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: I think there's I think there's two factors at work here. The first is that Billionaires around the world. Uh, or at least in many countries, have figured out that, uh, American billionaires have learned how to game the system. Now, in part, this is because the Supreme Court legalized political bribery, which is not the case in most other countries.
But, um, you know, they're looking at the success of, you know, the average American billionaire right now pays 3. 4 percent in income taxes. You know, uh, most people pay, you [01:05:00] know, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30%, you know, depending on their income. And so, you know, billionaires around the world are working on that kind of thing.
So there's that kind of funding of a right-wing movement. And the right-wing movement always embraces the billionaires. But I think the larger issue Is that when, when the bread crisis was happening across the northern part of Africa, this was the result of climate change. The desert had moved a hundred miles south in Syria and wiped out millions of farmers, or hundreds of thousands of farmers.
And so they all ended up in Damascus and Aleppo, you know, in the, in the major cities. Uh, you know, as homeless people, basically, and they started demanding food and, uh, and a place to live. And, and the Assad's response to that was to, to send the soldiers into the streets and shoot protesters. And that then led to riots in the cities.
So what happened was, uh, over a million and, and some argue over 2 million, [01:06:00] uh, dark skinned Syrians fled North Africa. Most of, many of them went through Libya, you know, got on boats, went to southern Italy and Greece, and then spread throughout Europe. Germany took in a million of them. I mean, a million! And, uh, embraced them.
This was Angela Merkel. Um, Sweden took in several hundred thousand, which was the equivalent of more than a million when you, to population. Um, and what has happened now is that because of local, um, discrimination, uh, local old boy networks, people tend to hire people who they know, right? People who they feel comfortable with.
And, and so these, these immigrants in Europe have not been able to get good jobs. Uh, they're very upset about it. Uh, many of them have turned to crime. Uh, they're, they've been essentially ghettoized, and so now there's this massive right-wing backlash, and it's, and it's happening all, I mean this happened in [01:07:00] England, it's happening in France, and that right-wing, that, really it's a white nationalist, it's a white supremacist backlash, or, or, uh, our tribe versus your tribe.
I mean, there's different ways to characterize it that are more or less, uh, you know, evil or benign. But that's what's really driving this process was, you know, had, had Putin never destroyed Syria? Had that flood of refugees never arrived on the southern border? That's how, uh, Viktor Orban rose to power is, uh, in 2010.
His campaign promise, um, this was at that time there was just a, it was mostly Libyan refugees. This was, you know, after, uh, we killed, uh, Gaddafi. Um, uh, it was, it was, uh, you know, Oh my God, here come the refugees. Um, so, uh, you know, it's, it's a challenge and, and it's a game that Republicans in the United States are playing too.
Although Biden now has pretty much sealed up the southern border. Uh, you wouldn't know that from [01:08:00] watching Fox News, but that's pretty much what's going on. But I get it, Anthony. I don't have any easy answer other than identifying the problem, but thank you for the call.
What is behind the rise of the far-right in Europe Part 2 - Al Jazeera English - Air Date 6-11-24
NASTASYA TAY - PRESENTER, AL JAZERA: Well, there are the elections in France, but there's also potentially another election that would be critical for the European Union, and that would be for Ursula von der Leyen's job. So, Katie, let me ask you, does she keep her job come July?
KATY BROWN: Um, I mean, it's hard to, hard to make predictions on that, but I think, um, she also in the build up to this, um, emphasized that she was open to, um, collaborating with far-right groups, uh, such as Giorgia Maloney, um, and Fratelli d'Italia. So, um, I think it will be very interesting to see how this progresses.
Um, But I think that there is a, uh, good chance that she could, um, and that that is also very worrying for the direction of travel within, uh, EU [01:09:00] politics.
NASTASYA TAY - PRESENTER, AL JAZERA: When you talk about that direction of travel, Katie, how realistic do you see being the rise of a far-right supergroup, so to speak, within European politics?
KATY BROWN: Again, I think, um, We can sort of temper those kinds of ideas by, of course, being worried about the idea of a far-right group taking power. But really, what we've seen is the center, center right politics, normalizing far-right politics. And I think that that's where we need to focus our attention. The likelihood of a far-right super group is, is very limited, but the, um, the impacts of normalized far-right politics is very real for those at the sharp end.
So I think that's where we need to focus our attention, um, and, and try to combat, um, the creeping normalization of, um, these ideas and policies. [01:10:00]
NASTASYA TAY - PRESENTER, AL JAZERA: When we talk about the normalization of these ideas, Janine, I'm going to ask you just very briefly to end here, to put this in context for us, in the global context.
When we see these trends in Europe, when you talk about the possibility of Donald Trump being re elected for a second time, where do you see the global trend in terms of populist politics going right now?
JANINE DI GIOVANNI: I think there's two things. I think first there's the media, which has had a massive effect on it.
The spread of disinformation, the rise of right-wing, um, shock jocks and, and really in a way, a kind of indoctrination of, of younger people into a way of thinking, which is either black or white. There's very little, you know, In some ways, uh, ability to interpret gray area. So I think that's really dangerous.
I also think there's just, there's, there is dissatisfaction with elite leaders, with what is seen as globalization throughout the world and, and basically wanting to see another path. [01:11:00] Unfortunately, the far-right has managed to establish themselves in, in some ways, friendlier, fresher faces. Uh, Jordan Bardella or even Marine Le Pen herself was really separated herself from her father's policies.
So this in a way, this rebranding of the new right and attracting younger voters, um, um, is, is I think something we have to take extremely seriously.
Clear Shift Toward the Far Right Anti-Immigrant Nationalists Gain Ground Across Europe Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 6-11-24
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Mehreen Khan, I wanted to ask you, in terms of the vote, the rise especially of the far-right parties, to what degree the battle over immigration and migrants from the Global South, very much like the United States, where immigration has become a huge issue in the current presidential race — to what degree do you see the potential for these extreme-right parties to continue to grow as they try to mobilize their populations against the [01:12:00] migrants coming in?
MEHREEN KHAN: Well, I think there is a clear parallel with the United States. And I would say that parallel is that rather than being a contested area, migration is an area which there is huge amounts of consensus, from the left, the right and the far-right, that Europe is a continent that is closed, whose borders are closed. I think the push towards having anti-immigration policies or tough immigration policies that stop people, as you’ve already mentioned, from the Global South coming in — this also includes laws around refugees and asylum seekers — the European Union has probably decided since 2015 that it is a continent that does not want these people in its countries. So, in that sense, the far-right has won that argument, because it’s become a mainstream consensus.
I think the areas where the far-right has shown a bit more political innovation is moving onto territories like climate change, so creating a culture war around the green transition, saying that this is expensive for ordinary people, that — you know, even bordering sometimes on climate [01:13:00] denialism. And again, if we think about the United States, there’s another parallel, and I think the far-right parties in Europe really do take a lot of cues from Donald Trump’s Republican Party. And they’ve definitely moved into more of the social sphere, so speaking about Europe in civilizational terms, in racial terms and in religious terms. And this is where I think the far-right probably is finding more appeal among voters, a kind of emotional and identitarian appeal, which does include migration but is definitely broadening out from just being a one-issue subject for the far-right. They seem to be a movement, at least, that wants to encompass all areas of policy, from foreign policy, economic policy and also social and cultural policy.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And how do you assess the failures of the left parties in Europe to gain ground? I mean, there were some which did, but for the most part, they did not.
MEHREEN KHAN: It’s difficult to assess it on an aggregate level. But if we think about some small pockets, there have been surprise successes in the Netherlands, where [01:14:00] the Greens and the Socials — and the Social Democrats, the traditional left, actually teamed up, and they did well. They became the first party in the Netherlands, second to the far-right party of Geert Wilders.
But, generally, the left has struggled to find a message, and, in particular, an economic message for populations in Europe that have basically seen stagnant wage growth, a cost-of-living crisis, very high energy prices. And I think, crucially, they have also failed to get that sort of emotional appeal, something that the far-right seem to do far better, creating narratives around identity, around people’s place in their member states, in their countries, their relationships to their governments and to each other.
It’s worth noting that if the U.K. had been a member state in the European Union — this is the first time that Britain was not participating in the European election — the left would have done pretty well, because Labour probably would have had a stonking huge vote swing in their favor. And then we would probably be talking about a social democrat grouping in the European Parliament that was close to the biggest, the EPP. So, there are lots of variables involved.
But I think you’re right that, generally, the left has [01:15:00] failed to beat the far-right, because they’ve been outflanked on so many areas, including traditional strengths which they would have seen, like creating social and economic justice and providing a sense of inclusivity and diversity. These messages have either not been pushed far enough in countries like France or have been seen to be, you know, too beyond the pale for, I think, a population in many Western European countries where there is just a very general and long-term trend towards the right.
Will The Far Right Take Over France w Cole Stangler - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 6-13-24
THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Cole. Um, Macron has called for a snap election, or you know, a quick election, which has got a lot of people baffled and in the EU elections the right in France made some real substantial gains. What I'm guessing, and I wanted to reality check this with you, is that what most of this has to do with is the immigration of brown people and Muslims into France.
Am I, am I wrong?
COLE STANGLER: Well, first, thanks for having me. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's complex. I've, I've, I've, you know, spent a lot of time [01:16:00] trying to think about, but what, um, compelled people to vote for the national rally. I attended a couple of the, the big campaign rallies they had for the European elections with Jordan Bardella, who's their new candidate.
Who may well become prime minister and you know, it is true because they you know, I'll respond to the question But on the one hand they they have kind of made a more slightly more economically populous platform Which is to say that they've they've you know, they'll talk more about protecting the French welfare state They're against the kind of austerity that that they were Favoring all that being said Yeah, but you know all that being said to your point the one You Kind of constant that you will find throughout their discourse.
No matter what is that opposition to immigration? It's what gets the biggest applause lines at the rallies, um, you know, both rallies I attended and in talking on the Southwest in Paris that those are the biggest applause lines is when Jordan Bardella the candidate promises to strip welfare benefits for foreigners when he promises [01:17:00] to deport undocumented immigrants When he talked about restoring French identity You know, that's the kind of bread and butter that gets these voters motivated to, to, to go out and support the national rally.
So, yes, it's complex. A lot of these voters are from economically, you know, disadvantaged areas. But, but at the same time, you know, that's the kind of cement, um, that, that brings it all together is that opposition. Backlash to immigration.
THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Yeah Um, which you know is fundamentally racism I think we're seeing the same thing here in the united states with trump and his Obsession with the southern border and and s whole countries and all that kind of thing.
Um in the uh, Roughly two minutes we have left. How do you see this playing out in france?
COLE STANGLER: Yeah, I mean, I think we're in a very, uh, turbulent, frightening time right now. I mean, I don't think anybody expected, and I was talking with people really from across the political spectrum, from the Macronist to the left, no one expected Emmanuel Macron to dissolve parliament and hold these new legislative elections, [01:18:00] which are slated for the end of the month in early July.
No one expected this. And there's a real chance that the national rally could do very well, perhaps even be part of a governing coalition, if not win an outright majority. And install a far-right prime minister for the first time in france since the vici era so You know, it's or have a leader as far as it's supposed to be shared.
So it's a very frightening time um But I think, you know, maybe to end things on a slightly more optimistic note, um, the parties of the left have, uh, united after just 24 hours. Macron did not anticipate them coming together and they'll be presenting candidates, um, backed by this united left front. So it'll be very interesting to see, um, you know, frightening, turbulent, but also interesting to see if the left is able to actually present a coherent alternative to the far-right, where I think at this point it's fair to say Macron has failed to do so.
THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: I understand Russia has been a big booster for Le Pen. To what extent is Russia interfering in the elections in France?
COLE STANGLER: You know, I think [01:19:00] there's lots of various documentation of Russian, you know, attempts to interfere in French politics. I will say there's a particular candidate who's quite high up on the national rallies of European elections, who now is a member of European Parliament, Thierry Mariani, who has very direct ties to.
Um, to the Russians, Russian government. Um, you know, he is gone and participated in, in, in meetings, um, to celebrate the Sham referendum in Crimea, in Crimea. And so there is, you know, it's interesting when National only has tried to downplay their support for, for Russia as opposed to the a FD in Germany.
There is a real difference there, but at the same time, you still do have this kind of ideological proximity and the links to Russia with the national rally.
.
SECTION C: THE PLAYBOOK AND MESSAGING OF THE FAR RIGHT
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section C: the playbook and messaging of the far-right.
Is Italy's government allowing the past to live on -BBC News - Air Date 6-4-24
NARRATOR: But Meloni's supporters say the issue is with the way in which anti fascists have protested over the years, both in clashes with the other side and with police.
NICOLA PROCACCINI: Being anti fascist, During the [01:20:00] fascism was a very brave act, a brave of freedom, a brave for democracy. But after the falling of the fascism, being anti fascist means violence, means a lot of young students killed.
This is why she's very clear. I always condemned the fascism, every day of my life. But, please, don't tell me to share what the anti fascists, uh, did
NARRATOR: it after the falling of fascism. If somebody looks from outside and they see Italy in 2024, with hundreds of people in the main, second city of Italy, doing, putting their fascist salutes,
NICOLA PROCACCINI: How do you think that looks?
You are fascist if you want to reintroduce the fascism in your country, not if you make the fascism salute that [01:21:00] is the Roman salute. We condemn the fascism, but more than this, it's an obsession.
NARRATOR: And so one side of Italy sees fascism and its threat as a ghost haunting the present, the other as a fantasy whipped up by the left. Across Italy, the past, politically speaking, lives on. Historical battles still part of the present. We've come to Bologna, which has always been at the centre of the fight against fascism.
Here are the names and faces of the partisans that died defending this city from the fascists in the 1940s. But then it went on to 1980 with Italy's worst terror attack. Bombings at the train station here in Bologna. by neo fascists that killed 85 people. And so fascism and anti fascism have always been at the heart of this city's, this country's, [01:22:00] political lexicon.
INTERVIEWEE: We're seeing things, uh, in these recent years that are very similar to what happened at the beginning of the regime and at the beginning of fascism a century ago. Attacks on freedom of press, censorship, um, freedom for press. the LGBTQI community, um, attacks on the liberty and freedom of women, uh, to determine what they can do on their own body.
NARRATOR: So do you feel that the fight, the anti fascism fight, is still relevant today?
INTERVIEWEE: Definitely. I definitely believe it's very relevant and I also see, um, again to strike a parallel the fact that the far-right, not only in Italy but all over the world, is sort of trying to Uh, find a scapegoat for people's difficulties in everyday lives by attacking the stranger, the person who comes from abroad, the migrant.
Uh, it's, it's something similar again to what was [01:23:00] done a century ago. Germany in some ways sort of had to address the past because there was victors and, and those who had lost the war. Uh, Italy's role was a little more ambiguous, right? So first with Hitler and then, Surrendered and there's much to be said about really grappling with that, uh, legacy.
NARRATOR: History is weaponized in a country still not at peace with its past. Sugarcoating the bitter parts of collective memory. Nostalgia given free reign.
PARTY REP: My name is Roberto Fiore and I am the National Secretary of Forza Nuova. I define myself as someone who really, uh, who has certainly got, uh, uh, some ideas and some inspiration by a certain part of fascism. Are you a fascist? If you ask me like that, I probably would say, [01:24:00] uh, yes, but I have to complete the term, um, and say I'm a revolutionary.
But are you denying that, that, that, that the fascist regime was violent and criminal?
NARRATOR: If you ask me like that, I probably would say, uh, yes, but I have to complete the term, um, and say I'm a revolutionary.
PARTY REP: Yes, absolutely, at night.
NARRATOR: Mussolini signed the racial laws. I mean, he deported, this was a regime that deported Jews to death camps, that outlawed the opposition, that put political opponents in, in, in internment camps.
Are you honestly saying that you
MARK LOWEN - REPORTER, BBC NEWS: supported those, you support those measures? The internment camps are things that happened
PARTY REP: with the war. The Americans did it, the Germans did it, the Italians did it, and so on.
NARRATOR: Talking about people who were being, who were gassed, who were shot, who were exterminated. For their religion.
PARTY REP: Fascist has never been accused of this. I'm talking about fascist as a regime. Mussolini, any All minister has never been tried for
MARK LOWEN - REPORTER, BBC NEWS: this. Do you believe that this government in power in Italy is occupying your political space? No. I believe [01:25:00] that they are
PARTY REP: freeing a lot of the political space that we're going to take.
Why? One of the main point is immigration. We have always been against immigration. Meloni has always been against immigration, sometimes with our same tone and strength. Now immigrants Last year, this year, have increased the number of 50%. Where do you think Italian people are going to go after this betrayal of, um,
MARK LOWEN - REPORTER, BBC NEWS: uh, original positions?
Your movement, or a movement like yours, would not exist and has been
NARRATOR: banned in Greece, for example, Golden Dawn, in Germany, that would never exist. You would never be able to use the symbols and the slogans that your party uses in a country like Germany. Why is that the case?
PARTY REP: Because Germany's got a bigger problem.
NARRATOR: You think Germany's got the problem rather than Italy?
PARTY REP: Yes, because freedom is freedom. [01:26:00]
NARRATOR: Neither victor nor vanquished, Italy memorialises in a way others do not the name, architecture and gestures of the regime allowed to live on.
NICOLA PROCACCINI: What do you think? We have to destroy everything. This is the, the cancel culture that we don't, uh, we don't share.
NARRATOR: The question is, does the ideology itself survive?
PARTY REP: I would say there is a silent majority that would say yes, yes, yes on a lot of our ideas.
NARRATOR: And is Italy, the laboratory of fascism, once again a political testing room?
INTERVIEWEE: What should be seen as, as a crime, as apology of fascism, is actually again downplayed as.
Oh no, it's just nostalgic. It's a tribute.
NARRATOR: The worry here is not that Italy's democracy, per se, is under threat, but that a governing party, which has not severed its historical roots, still winks to that support base [01:27:00] and that speech notions, even policies once banished are increasingly normalized
Does the economy matter to the far right Part 2 - Business Beyond - Air Date 5-31-24
DW NEWS REPORTER: One party whose anti EU position has not softened much is Germany's Alternative für Deutschland, or the AFD, currently the second most popular party in the country going by opinion polls.
That party was founded in 2013, in response to the Eurozone crisis. Understandably, it has fiercely Euro skeptic roots, which it has held on to, while it's also developing a broader, nationalistic, anti immigration philosophy.
LIANA FIX: They are still explicitly radicalizing and have sort of not toned down the language, both towards the European Union.
DW NEWS REPORTER: The AFD still regularly touts the prospect of a referendum on Germany's EU membership. It also wants the country to leave the Euro currency area. And those positions haven't harmed the party's popularity. Since July 2022, support for the AFD in [01:28:00] nationwide opinion polls more than doubled to a high of 22 percent in January 2024.
That's come down by a few points since, but the party is currently the second most popular in Germany. But the AFD is beset by controversy. They are officially designated as a suspected extremist organization. This year, there have been huge protests calling for them to be banned. One of the main reasons.
was a secret meeting the party was involved in last November with several right-wing extremists. Among the reported topics, a plan for the mass deportation of foreigners and even German citizens with a foreign background. The controversies have even led to the AFD being ostracized by others on the European far-right.
They were recently kicked out of the European Parliament grouping for far-right parties due to comments made by one of their leading candidates for that parliament, which appeared to play down Nazi war [01:29:00] crimes.
LIANA FIX: The AFD is becoming ever more radicalized, whereas other far-right parties in Europe are trying to become more mainstream and therefore to appeal to more voters.
We asked
DW NEWS REPORTER: the AFD for an interview about their economic policies, and while the party did offer us the chance to speak with one of their MEPs, They wanted to approve any answers we used after the interview. When we instead sent a list of questions to the party press office, a spokesperson responded, We just don't feel comfortable talking to DW.
The party lists many of its key economic policies on its website. Among their most prominent positions, reduce VAT and don't increase taxes, overhaul the German tax system, and leave the Eurozone. The party's parliamentary working group on the economy says the following, The AFD parliamentary group stands for the social market economy.
It is the basis of German prosperity and thus our social cohesion. We see it as our task to make the social market economy [01:30:00] Future proof critics say their economic policies would not benefit their voters,
LIANA FIX: their policies actually translated, would mean that, um, the witch will get richer and the poor will get poor.
And that's quite surprising that um, although officials of policies and declarations would actually not favor those who feel, um, left behind by the economy, they sort of. Through other topics like immigration and so on, they still appeal to those voters who don't seem to take a close look at what exactly those economic policies,
DW NEWS REPORTER: policies, policies will lead to.
And parties like the AFD have a big problem when it comes to the economy. By and large, business says it doesn't want them in power. A recent survey from the German Economic Institute, which polled around 900 companies, found that 75 percent of business executives in Germany are openly opposed to the party.
Ramona Meinzer is one [01:31:00] such business owner who sees the AFD as a direct threat to Germany's economic prosperity. She's the owner and managing director of Aumuller, a medium sized manufacturing enterprise in the southern state of Bavaria.
ROMONA MEINZER: If there's a party that, that, for example, like the IFD says, okay, we should get out of the European Union or the Euro is a bad idea.
It would really, really harm my business on that one side, but on the other side also, as I'm dependent on the international markets, like for selling my products, but also for bringing international, or workers with international background to Germany, you have, or we have to make sure that this wonderful country is, is really, is, is pictured in the right way also abroad.
DW NEWS REPORTER: She also thinks the AFD's rhetoric on migrants makes Germany a less appealing place for people from abroad to come and work in. A problem, given Germany's much publicized labor shortages.
ROMONA MEINZER: It's getting [01:32:00] harder and harder to really find, uh, yeah, enough people to, to be able to, to keep growing, which at the end of the day is so important for my business.
And yeah, so it's, it's unbelievably important that, that we, we show Germany to, to other countries and people in other countries as the wonderful. country that it is. So, and, and to show them that, that they're welcome here and, and to make sure that we integrate them and, and that they have a chance to really build their future in this, this country.
DW NEWS REPORTER: far-right parties have faced resistance from business elsewhere, but in the case of Meloni in Italy and Orban in Hungary, they have also found ways to work with business and business has found ways to work with them.
PHILLIP RATHGEB: So there is an ambiguous relationship with business. On the one hand, Business may well side with the radical right when it comes to taxation and when it comes to welfare.
If we look, uh, [01:33:00] to Hungary, um, what Orban did was to introduce a flat tax. Um, De Lega wants to introduce a flat tax. They can't for fiscal reasons. Um, Meloni wants to, uh, lower taxes and lower also minimum income scheme, um, in the interest of business.
DW NEWS REPORTER: Yet, internationally oriented companies are always likely to have a problem with far-right movements.
As the a FD are finding out,
PHILLIP RATHGEB: they feel uneasy about the rise of the radical, right? In the sense that what these parties do and, and, and Trump is perhaps the key example in this regard is to disrupt free trade by, um, stimulating a turn towards economic protectionism and economic nationalism, which is not in the interest of export-oriented companies.
DW NEWS REPORTER: The rise of the far-right in Europe has raised the specter of the 1920s and 1930s when economic crises such as unemployment. And hyperinflation helped bring in fascist rule. But there are [01:34:00] two key differences between the economies of the 1920s and the 2020s, employment and welfare.
LIANA FIX: While inflation is still high, surprisingly, we have rather A labor problem in Europe, so unemployment is very low, um, and companies are really searching for, uh, for, for, for labor.
So that is a big difference here. Um, the other example of the other difference to that historical period is that sort of social welfare structures in Europe are very strong. Um, and there was a big pandemic support package that tried to make sure both for companies, but also for individual citizens that tried to make sure To prevent exactly this sort of sliding down into unemployment, sliding down into economic crisis, and then to radicalization.
DW NEWS REPORTER: However, if an economic crisis were to emerge that threatened employment and the capacity of states to provide welfare, far-right parties are well placed to capitalize.
LIANA FIX: [01:35:00] That's obviously a nightmare that is haunting many politicians today, that an economic crisis or even an economic downturn, not as big as the economic crisis in 1929, could repeat itself and could lead to the rise of, um, right-wing parties in Europe.
What is behind the rise of the far-right in Europe Part 3 - Al Jazeera English - Air Date 6-11-24
NASTASYA TAY - PRESENTER, AL JAZERA: I'm wondering, Janine, in terms of impact on broader European policy too, just how much unity there is Within the far-right because broadly they they seem to campaign these individual far-right parties are campaigning heavily on national issues So at the european level you mentioned concerns about um the the global outlook here in terms of what might happen Um in ukraine and also i'm i'm wondering about in terms of global development and development assistance to the global south Where do you see those conversations going now as we've seen more seats for the for the far-right in at the european level?
You
JANINE DI GIOVANNI: So it's interesting. I just came back from Ukraine yesterday. Um, it, but one thing to keep in mind as [01:36:00] well is that, you know, far-right, traditionally they focus on national issues completely. So are they going to be able to put together foreign policy, um, or are they actually going to be able to work together because their whole agenda is really about working for their own country, their own identity.
So it will be interesting to see if they actually can have a coordinated effort on policy or on other broader things such as trade. Um, but going back to how they might envision their foreign policy. So we know on Ukraine, it's very split by the far-right. The AFD in Germany, of course, is very pro Russia, um, as is the PIS party in Poland.
In Italy, Giorgia Maloney, Has been very pro Ukrainian, um, but there are other parties in Italy, which are not. Hungary, of course, led by Orban, is extremely pro Putin. Um, now Ukraine right now, and having just gotten back, is in a very vulnerable position. They were waiting for a long time for the bill [01:37:00] to go through Congress, U.
S. Congress, to get them more ammunition. And more aid. Um, the, on the front lines, they're really struggling. Um, people have gone through, this is the third year of war. So people are really enduring a kind of deep psychological fatigue, as well as, you know, even in Kiev air raids at night, which keep people awake and keep them always anxious.
So it's very important to see if the, if the really, I felt extraordinary European consensus that was behind Ukraine until now will hold, um, traditionally, you know, the far-right, it is something that's beyond their, their borders. So therefore they don't have the same kind of, um, impact there. As for, As for Israel and the war in Gaza, the far-right traditionally has backed Netanyahu.
So, um, that again is troubling, as is what they might do if Trump does get in, who has said basically [01:38:00] he'll annex the West Bank and, um, fully support, let, give Netanyahu an even more green light to do whatever he wants.
NASTASYA TAY - PRESENTER, AL JAZERA: I'm interested in what appears to have been a shift within the far-right itself in Europe.
Because we're now talking about, about trying to form some kind of coherent policy, be it domestic, well, European wide or, or foreign. But previously, it seemed to be much of the conversation was actually driven by wanting to break away from Europe, and that narrative has changed. So, Katie, let me bring you in on this.
I'm wondering how you see this, this newfound power by the far-right being manifested in the bloc going forward.
KATY BROWN: Well, I think there's an interesting contradiction a lot of the time in far-right politics towards Europe. So, um, as you mentioned, there's, uh, often a kind of Euro skeptic view of the European Parliament.
Um, But they also quite often rely on what [01:39:00] Marta Lorimer calls using Europe as a, as an ideological resource. So they are also kind of, um, feeding into ideas of European identity. So, um, I feel like that is where they could, um, you know, sort of expand their nationalist politics to this European level. I did some research on far-right discourse around, um, Turkish accession, um, and they relied heavily on this idea of European white identity, uh, pushing against, um, the accession of Turkey on that basis.
So, I think that these These nationalist discourses and racist discourses, um, are often then translated onto this European level too. Um, so that's where they could, um, they could, um, kind of find more common ground between their different nationalist policies.
NASTASYA TAY - PRESENTER, AL JAZERA: Well, Janine, let me ask you then what you think this all [01:40:00] means for the debate that's ongoing about EU enlargement.
JANINE DI GIOVANNI: So mainly I'm thinking about Ukraine, um, because coming, working so closely in Ukraine, working inside Ukraine, my friends, my colleagues want to join Europe. They feel they deserve to join Europe. They believe that they have been fighting a war for Europe. They don't see fighting. I mean, of course they're fighting for their country, but they also see themselves as holding the last line of democracy against Putin, who does want to, who was.
antagonized by the expansion of NATO, but also has made it very clear of what he wants. So Ukraine has been waiting patiently to join the EU. And if the far-right does get in, um, it's pretty doubtful they will, or that it would take a, an extended period of time. And that would be deeply disappointing, especially for the Ukrainians that really have been losing their lives, suffering [01:41:00] terribly.
Um, and in many ways, what they see as fighting, fighting a war to keep democracy in Europe.
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 DW News, Pod Save the World, The Thom Hartmann :Program, Democracy Now!, Al Jazeera, BBC News, and Business Beyond. Further details are in the show notes.
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So, coming to from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com
#1636 The Supreme Court Is In Bad Shape. Like, Really Bad. And SCOTUS Is Going To Take Us All Down With Them (Transcript)
Air Date 6/14/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
We are in the middle of Supreme Court opinion season, which is not going well for any non-extreme conservatives in the country. At the same time, as scandal, corruption, and justices Thomas and Alito's refusal to recuse in the face of clear bias, is all reaching a modern peak.
Sources providing our Top Takes today include Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick, The Majority Report, 99% Invisible, and Contempt of Court with Elie Mystal.
Then in the Deeper Dive half of the show, we'll go deeper in four sections: Section A: Do facts matter? Section B: Policing medical care. C: The Republican court we've all waited for. And D: SCOTUS is a flawed system.
Opinionpalooza A Bad June Rising At SCOTUS Part 1 - Amicus With Dhalia Lithwick - Air Date 5-25-24
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: We could talk about this all year, but I want to talk about some of the stuff that you've been writing about what makes this term different, Steve. And one of them, as you point out, is that we have a [00:01:00] whole--I think crap ton is the word I want to use--of merits decisions that are coming, and they're all going to be, according to your amazing data driven classification system, going to be really important. And of those, I think a bunch are nationally significant. This is not like the terms that I am used to where there's four blockbusters in the last two weeks of June. This is an entirely different animal. And you've been trying to parse out what that means and how that is shaping May and June. And I'd love for you to give us a more fulsome explanation of how this is different.
PROFESSOR STEVE VLADECK: Sure. So it's different in two ways. They're going to sound like they're inconsistent, although I think they're coming from the same place.
The first way, and this is something you guys already know, I think a lot of folks who follow the court at all know, the court's actually doing less, right? We're on track for maybe 58 or 59 merits decisions by the time we go home for the summer and go [00:02:00] start crying again, which is going to be the fifth term in a row that the court doesn't get to 60.
That hadn't been below 60 before that since 1864. And so there's a whole universe of cases that has completely disappeared from the Supreme Court's docket. I know you guys, have talked to Orrin Kerr about his Fourth Amendment obsession and why the Supreme Court won't take Fourth Amendment cases anymore.
But Dahlia, they're taking less and yet a remarkably high percentage of what's left are major cases, right? You've got these major administrative law cases. You've got these abortion cases. You've got these social media cases, which have gotten totally, I think memory hold, right? Because so much other stuff is going on.
You've got two, not just one major gun cases. And oh, by the way, there are those two small January six cases, including one about whether former president Trump can be criminally prosecuted. So that's, depending on how you count, 18, 19, 20 major decisions that the court has to get through between now and the end of June. And they're doing three or four a week right [00:03:00] now. So the math explains itself. We're going to get just slammed the last couple of weeks of June with a ton of major decisions that are going to be controversial. They're going to be head scratching.
And I think, Dalia, that's going to pose an especially difficult challenge to folks like you and Mark and the Supreme Court press corps for who has to try to explain all of this to everybody in a way that's going to keep their attention. This is basically going to be the Friday night news dump of major Supreme Court decisions to end all Friday night news dumps.
And I think that's a real problem.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: I'm curious why you think this is happening. The slowdown of grants combined with the increase in really major grants. I am puzzled, because I feel like different justices have different philosophies about granting and there's not like one unified theory for why this is happening.
PROFESSOR STEVE VLADECK: Yeah. And indeed justice Kavanaugh at the Fifth Circuit conference two weeks ago actually went out of his way to say, I think we should be taking more cases. And in his defense, his voting pattern backs that up. He is the most common dissenter [00:04:00] from denials of certiorari among all nine of the justices, which given where he is on the spectrum is actually surprising. You wouldn't think a justice who's in the relative middle of the court would actually be the most common dissenter from denials of cert.
I think two things are going on and I actually think they are related. The first is I think the court is getting a lot of pressure from below.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: It's the Fifth Circuit.
PROFESSOR STEVE VLADECK: From my dear friends on the Fifth Circuit who at least as of now have not administratively stayed my departure from Texas.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: There's time yet.
PROFESSOR STEVE VLADECK: There is time. Some of this is because the Fifth Circuit has just gone completely off the deep end on some of these cases where the court has to take them and reverse. That's the CFPB case. That's almost certainly going to be the Mifepristone case, probably Rahimi, probably NetChoice, right? The social media content moderation case.
So part of that, Mark, is that the court has the docket where its hand is being forced. And then part of that is. the court taking cases it wants to take to mess with the administrative state.
And what's [00:05:00] remarkable to me about what Kavanaugh said at the Fifth Circuit, and what Thomas said at the Eleventh Circuit, and what Sotomayor said a little bit earlier this year, is they're all talking about working harder than they ever have, and that they're all crazy busy, and that it's not like the shrinkage of the docket has freed up time.
We know that the high profile cases take more of their time. We know that it takes more of their energy when they're going back and forth about these concurrences and dissents. And my best suggestion is that they have so many of these high profile cases that they just don't have room for the lower profiles.
I mean, guys it's, we're going to get to Memorial Day with eight grants for next year. Eight! That's insane.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: By Memorial Day, how many cert grants do we usually have? Just for point of comparison,
PROFESSOR STEVE VLADECK: More than 20.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: Okay.
PROFESSOR STEVE VLADECK: Just the norm is that by the time the court leaves for its summer recess, it has filled its October, November and December argument calendars, because it's not going to grant any more cases till [00:06:00] September.
And so even a light October, November and December calendar is usually 25 arguments before the end of the year. And that means that would require the court between now and when it rises for its summer recess to triple the number of cert grants. It's possible, but what the hell.
Whatever you think of what the court's actually doing in these cases, this rather seismic shift in the nature of its docket is a big deal. And it's something we ought to be talking about. And I don't know if there were a Congress like a Senate Judiciary Committee that actually cared about the Supreme Court, they might even think to hold hearings about these shifts in the docket.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: Imagine that. Can I just add one gloss that I think is implicit in your critique, Steve, which is that when they are slammed with all these super high profile cases under a time limit, the work product suffers, right? And I think the best example of that so far is Trump v. Anderson, the Colorado ballot removal case, right? That came down in a month because the court actually can act quickly when it wants to, [00:07:00] and they wanted to get it out before the Colorado primary. But after we all read it a couple of times, I think it became clear there was this misalignment between the majority and the dissent. They didn't quite line up. The dissent was criticizing things that weren't in the majority opinion. The majority opinion was saying things that didn't clearly reflect in the dissent's critique. And then as we at Slate discovered, the dissent, which was labeled as a concurrence was in fact, originally a dissent before being changed at the last minute, it was all very hinky. And I feel like that's going to be the issue times 15 in the next month or so, as they're trying to push out all these major cases, they're going to get sloppy. They're not going to be able to move these drafts back and forth as much as they'd like, and really nail down a final product. And the result will be mess in the law, right?
PROFESSOR STEVE VLADECK: Mess in the law, but also, Mark, I think two other things that tend to be true when the court rushes is they tend to be more honest. There's less time to sanitize what they're doing, and they tend to be madder [00:08:00] at each other.
This is why when folks talk about yes, the court can move quickly, the historical examples of decisions where the court has moved really quickly, almost no one thinks any of the actual opinions in those cases are any good. Right? Whether it's the Nazi saboteurs or the Watergate tapes case or Bush versus Gore, like the result, don't like the result, none of those are held up as models of the Supreme Court handing down a smart decision as opposed to maybe a politically expedient one.
And I think this is the problem is that because the court has this completely arbitrary obsession with clearing its decks before the summer recess--which by the way, is just something they impose on themselves; there's no statute or rule that requires them to do that --we're in for, if I can say this on a podcast, we're in for a shit storm.
And it's not just because of what the court's going to do in these cases, which is going to be really problematic, I think politically, just from a matter of the stability of law, it's going to be ugly.
How The Mifepristone Case Reached SCOTUS - Amicus with Dhalia Lithcwick - Air Date 3-23-24
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: But first this week, we preview the most [00:09:00] important abortion case to follow from the high court's reversal of Roe v. Wade back in the 2021 term. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine versus FDA was filed against the FDA and the US Department of Health and Human Services by a conservative legal group on behalf of some anti-abortion doctors in a jurisdiction in which--lucky ducks!--they could only possibly draw one judge, Matthew Kaczmarek, who had devoted his entire prejudicial career to pushing extreme right wing fringe conservative ideas into the mainstream.
Their claim was that the FDA approval process for Mifepristone, one of the two medication abortion drugs, was haphazard and slapdash and that the FDA illegally accelerated approval of Mifepristone in the 1990s, and then loosened restrictions on it in 2016, again in 2021, without any regard for its deep, profound dangerousness. Alliance for [00:10:00] Hippocratic Medicine also argued that the FDA's 2021 decision to allow telemedicine abortion and the mailing of abortion pills violates a dead letter 19th century anti-vice law called the Comstock Act. And undergirding all of this is their claim that the plaintiffs in this case had standing to bring this litigation on the basis of extremely strong feelings and very wobbly facts, but we'll get there in a minute.
Last April, Judge Kuzmarek issued a decision invalidating the FDA approval of Mifepristone outright, nationwide, because, well, as I said, fake facts, strong feelings. The Fifth Circuit cut back some of the craziest parts of Kuzmarek's decision, but left some of it in place. The Supreme Court is going to hear all of this on Tuesday, and the case is limited to two questions: One, whether the plaintiffs have standing, and whether the FDA did something bad in approving Mifepristone.
[00:11:00] To help us understand the stakes and the scope of the stakes of this appeal, we are so happy to be joined this week by Carrie N. Baker. She's got a JD and a PhD. She is the Sylvia Bauman Professor of American Studies and the Chair of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She's also a contributing editor at Ms. Magazine and her upcoming book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics, will be published by Amherst College Press in December.
Carrie, welcome to the show. Holy cow, I have a lot of questions for you.
CARRIE N BAKER: Dahlia, great to be here.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: So this case has been styled, unfortunately, as just a straight up abortion case, a kind of natural outgrowth of the reversal of Dobbs from two terms ago, but it's actually really, in very specific ways, an abortion pills case. It's a case that sweeps in decades of how the FDA [00:12:00] does licensing, the biotech and big pharma industries, what do we do about interstate mails and the ways in which reproductive medicine and telemedicine have changed, how pregnant people behave since Dobbs. And all of this starts, I think, with this pitched battle to establish, expand, and maintain legal access to abortion pills in the United States over decades.
So I would love for you to just set the table for us, Carrie, by helping me understand how this is different from the kind of surgical abortion fight we were having leading into Dobbs, and how this is kind of a consequence of Dobbs, but also a very different conversation.
CARRIE N BAKER: Abortion pills are, today, 63 percent of the way that people access abortion health care in the country. And it's probably much higher. Just a few days ago, the Guttmacher Institute released a study showing that the number of abortions in [00:13:00] 2023 topped 1 million, which is more than the last 10 years. The last time it was over a million was 2012. And a major reason why abortion access has increased despite Dobbs is because of two things: abortion pills being more accessible, and telemedicine--people being able to access abortion pills through telemedicine.
That happened recently. It happened in 2020 and 2021 as a result of COVID, as everybody began to access healthcare through telemedicine, advocates filed a lawsuit to force the FDA to allow people to get abortion pills through telemedicine. Historically, they had not been able to do that. And so people living in rural areas, people even living in states where there are abortion bans, now are able to access abortion pills through telemedicine from doctors in states that still allow abortion health care.
So, [00:14:00] Abortion pills are really the present and the future of abortion, and that's why they're being targeted in this case. The anti-abortion movement is very aware that abortion pills are the crux to controlling women's access to abortion, or people's access to abortion, and so they're going after it.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: And just to be really clear, you read those new Guttmacher numbers showing that actually the number of abortions are ticking up. And I guess the headline of that was that 63 percent of those abortions, right? We used to say, when this Mifepristone case was filed, we were like, oh, about 50 percent of abortions were using pills. That number's ticking up, too. That's an increase from, I guess, 54 percent in 2020.
So, I think your point is, this is not a moment in which Dobbs ends abortion in America. It changes how people access it, who accesses it, and this is an attempt to stave off [00:15:00] that shift by an anti-abortion movement who'd been pretty laser focused in a lot of ways on doing away with surgical abortion.
CARRIE N BAKER: Absolutely. They were laser focused on Roe, which overturning Roe did impact access to abortion pills, because in states that have banned abortion, people can no longer get abortion pills from local doctors.
But what they didn't anticipate was telemedicine. And now we have doctors in states like Massachusetts and New York and California who are serving patients in states with bans. Six states passed telemedicine abortion provider shield laws that allow them to do that. And so, about 12, 000 people living in the 14 states with bans are now getting abortion pills through these providers in the six states with telemedicine abortion shield laws.
Now, I will say those numbers from Guttmacher didn't include those patients, so the 63%, it's much higher, actually. Because those 12,000 pills a month [00:16:00] being sent to people were not included in that number. And so, yes, absolutely, this is the future of abortion care. And so that if they can get the Supreme Court to ban the pill outright and prohibit all doctors from prescribing and mailing abortion pills, then it really clamps down on access to people around the country.
Obviously, if they ban it outright, that also clamps access. I will note, though, that there's a robust underground abortion pill network that a decision by the Supreme Court will not be able to shut down.
Way Too Close Insane SCOTUS Case Could've Sunk The Country w Mark Joseph Stern - The Majority Report - Air Date 5-26-24
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: One of the things that was unique about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to insulate it from politics was to make sure that it was funded by fees it was collecting from financial service entities and through fines. And this was the grounds in which it was attacked.
What's amazing is this is, I feel like this is such a repeat.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: Yeah, so it actually draws most of its money from the Federal [00:17:00] Reserve, which itself collects money from interest on securities. So it also does collect, of course, fines and fees. That's its main enforcement mechanism. But yeah, the CFPB has been under assault since the day it was created, and the Supreme Court struck down a small part of the law that created it in 2020 by holding that the president can fire its director. As Elizabeth Warren created it, it was supposed to have one director who served a five year term and the president couldn't fire the director unless they did something really, really bad. The Supreme Court struck down that protection, which ironically ended up benefiting Joe Biden more than anyone else because he was able to fire Trump's terrible CFPB director on day one and install progressives to lead it.
But this is the other part of the attack, which is this idea that because the CFPB draws its money primarily from the Federal Reserve, it's unconstitutional. Now, just to hear that sentence, you might be scratching your head and be like, what could possibly be wrong with [00:18:00] that? A bunch of payday lenders and their lawyers at Jones Day, the law firm, concocted this theory that federal programs and federal agencies have to be regularly funded by Congress in a bill that's stamped with the word "appropriations" and that if Congress chooses to fund an agency any other way, including the way the CFPB is funded, it's unconstitutional and must be struck down in its entirety.
And I just want to be clear: these groups, these litigants and their lawyers, they shopped this theory to seven different courts, which all turned it down, basically laughed it out onto the street, before they landed their case at the Fifth Circuit and found a willing audience at the Fifth Circuit, which struck down the entire CFPB, which led to this decision.
So it's another good example of how these litigants will just go shopping to court after court until they find one, usually the Fifth Circuit, that's crazy enough to bite. That's what happened with a lot of Joe [00:19:00] Biden's vaccine mandates, and it's what happened here.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: If someone was to do a word cloud of every conversation that we have had on this program for the past four years about legal cases, the biggest two words would be in huge bold: "Fifth Circuit."
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And then "administrative state" after that?
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And then Chevron, probably.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: Doing the Lord's work, trying to get people to care about the administrative state. I appreciate it.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: But the Fifth Circuit, this is so messed up. And then I guess the other one would be me mispronouncing that Judge Kanzanski or whatever his name is--
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: Kacsmaryk, who is within the Fifth Circuit.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Within the Fifth Circuit. But before we get to just that one point, I just want to say the first thing that popped out for me, and I think Kagan ended up bringing this up, was that that's how Social Security is funded. Like Social Security is non discretionary spending, which means that every year there is no word [00:20:00] appropriations for Social Security because Congress does not appropriate money from the general budget to Social Security, it is its own self funding mechanism. They may have to raise the taxes at one point to get it to refund the trust fund, but Social Security cannot add to the deficit. It is not part of the yearly budget. And that's like the half of the government.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: So Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, pretty much every other financial regulator, including the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, a bunch of other agencies going back to pretty much the 1790s, all of them are funded in ways different from how the Fifth Circuit said everything has to be funded.
The Fifth Circuit made up this theory out of whole cloth, and essentially declared that trillions of dollars worth of spending and many, many, many parts of the government itself are simply unconstitutional and have to be struck down, destroyed [00:21:00] by judicial fiat.
I think the good news is that the Supreme Court rejected that by a seven to two vote. The bad news is that it even got to the Supreme Court in the first place because of the Fifth Circuit's total insanity and depravity. And of course that two justices still saw fit to dissent and attempt to--we can talk about this--basically trigger a recession that would have destroyed the country.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I want to talk about that, that part of the two, but walk us through, because maybe this is a good time to illustrate what, why the Fifth Circuit? How does our federal judiciary system, how does the Supreme Court get cases? And also what happened to the attempt to stop the judge shopping? I was under the impression that the federal judges had got together and said, we're gonna stop this judge shopping thing, and then it turned out to be more of like, we think that people should stop judge shopping.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: Yeah. So for your second question, that's basically what happened. There was a rebellion amongst the judges who like being [00:22:00] shopped to, people like Matthew Kacsmaryk, when the federal judicial conference said we're going to curtail judge shopping. All of these guys in the Fifth Circuit and the district courts within the Fifth Circuit said, absolutely not. How dare you? This is outrageous. Did like a full court press. And so the judicial conference ended up walking that back and urging individual courts to adopt these new guidelines, which many courts did not, including the Northern District of Texas, which is where Judge Kacsmaryk and many other wack doodles sit.
And so we are still dealing with this problem. Of course, this case originated years ago, so it wouldn't have been directly affected by this. But there's more that the Supreme Court can do. And one thing it can do is, in cases like this one, add a note at the end saying, by the way, we see how egregiously engineered this case was to be placed before the Fifth Circuit for no reason, and part of our decision is rooted in our disgust with how the lower court here manipulated the rules to help the litigators. [00:23:00] Of course, the Supreme Court didn't do that because they're still cowards and they're afraid to tackle this problem directly. But it's continuing to boil, and it's something worth keeping an eye on because the court does have other tools.
And of course, Congress could step in at any time and fix this, but Republicans don't want it to.
Fact Checking the Supreme Court Part 1 - 99% Invisible - Air Date 6-4-24
ROMAN MARS: The Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana, California, is a large granite and sandstone building from the early 20th century. It has Romanesque arches out front. Inside, there’s a courtroom, some uninspiring conference rooms, and elaborate wrought iron staircases. Last year, Jennifer Birch found herself underneath it all, standing in the courthouse basement.
JENNIFER BIRCH: It was kind of a half basement. They have little windows. It reminded me of a room that Indiana Jones might be in or something. It was very historical-feeling and like, “Okay, let’s not touch anything.”
ROMAN MARS: The Indiana Jones style room that Jennifer stepped into was the Orange [00:24:00] County Historical Archives. Jennifer was there doing research for a group called Moms Demand Action. It’s an organization that advocates for gun control and regulation. Not all the members are actually moms.
JENNIFER BIRCH: Oh no, not at all. I work alongside men, students…
ROMAN MARS: But the thing they all have in common is that they care about gun control, which is exactly why Jennifer was in the courthouse that day. Moms Demand Action had dispatched volunteers like Jennifer to courthouse basements and local archives all over the country to dig up some of the oldest, most overlooked gun laws in the nation’s history. And their goal ultimately was to fact check the highest court in the nation.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: Basically, Moms Demand Action thought the Supreme Court got it wrong.
ROMAN MARS: That’s reporter Gabrielle Berbey.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: And not just in the content of the decision. The Moms suspected that a key historical fact used to decide one of the biggest gun cases in American history [00:25:00] was just straight up factually inaccurate. The case in question was a landmark case from 2021 called New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Incorporated versus Bruen.
ROMAN MARS: If you’re a legal nerd, you probably know this case because it is a big one. The case dealt with some gun owners who had been denied permits to carry concealed firearms in New York State. The question of the case was whether a gun owner needs special circumstances for self-protection—something like a restraining order—to carry a gun hidden on their person.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: The Court ended up siding with the gun owners, essentially saying that most people should be able to carry concealed firearms if that’s what they want to do.
ROMAN MARS: This was a huge decision. It blew the top off gun restrictions across the country. But there was one thing in particular about the ruling that caught the attention of Moms Demand Action. They were fixated on how the Court explained its decision.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: In this case, the Justices [00:26:00] hinged their decision on one key historical fact. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the concurring opinion, and he said that, by and large, there were no laws about who can carry a concealed weapon passed before the year 1900–and because of that, concealed carry laws are not part of the “history and tradition of the United States.”
ROMAN MARS: Moms Demand Action looked at that fact and basically called bullsh*t. They believed that someone in the history of the United States must have tried to regulate concealed carry before 1900, and they believed this could make a difference in future gun cases elsewhere in the country. So, they set about proving it.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: So down in the Santa Ana courthouse, Jennifer Birch started from the beginning: ordinances from the 1800s.
JENNIFER BIRCH: I opened the book, and the pages were old. The writing was very difficult to read. The cursive was real.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: The archivist gave her some white gloves so she wouldn’t smudge the paper.
JENNIFER BIRCH: And I’m [00:27:00] turning these pages, which feel very brittle. The first couple… Ordinance #1 would be like, “Here’s when we’re going to meet as Board of Supervisors. And then here’s some things related to where you would put your horse and things like that.” So, I’m flipping through this, going, “I really don’t know what I’m going to find. This definitely sounds like the wild west.” But when I first saw the words “concealed weapon” in the ordinance and I thought, “This is what we’re looking for,” my jaw, I’m sure, dropped, and I may have gasped.
ROMAN MARS: What Jennifer found was a law passed in 1892 that said people in Santa Ana could not carry concealed weapons. It was a law showing that, despite what Justice Thomas claimed, concealed carry bans were in fact part of the history and tradition of the United States.
JENNIFER BIRCH: And I felt like when I first saw that, not only did my heart rate go up a little bit, but—not [00:28:00] to be overly dramatic—I felt like I was hearing their voices and their words coming at me from history. “This is remarkable. They cared about it. They cared about it a lot.”
GABRIELLE BERBEY: The Court said that, apart from a few outlying laws, the U.S. did not stop people from carrying concealed weapons for the purpose of self-defense—at least not before 1900. That was the big justification for the ruling. And yet, here Jennifer was–holding one such law in her gloved hands. And Jennifer and the other moms didn’t just turn up one law.
JENNIFER BIRCH: So we went to the next county over and kept going. I thought there’s so much that we could uncover that I’m going to keep going until I feel like I’ve exhausted every city that was incorporated prior to 1900.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: Across the country, they kept finding other laws.
JENNIFER BIRCH: We found it in every single place we looked. In small cities, large cities…
GABRIELLE BERBEY: What Moms Demand [00:29:00] Action discovered is that one of the biggest gun cases in American history was decided based on some questionable data. But it turns out this problem is bigger than just that one case, and it’s bigger than Moms Demand Action. The Supreme Court has a long relationship with bad facts.
ROMAN MARS: In 2017, ProPublica analyzed recent Supreme Court cases for factual errors. They found that, in 2013, Justice Kennedy claimed that DNA analysis and criminal cases can ID suspects with perfect accuracy. Not true.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: They also found a case where Justice Alito said that 88% of all companies perform background checks. But no one is even sure where that very specific number came from.
ROMAN MARS: ProPublica’s research even turned up in error in one of the most consequential voting rights cases of the 21st century. In the landmark case, Shelby v. Holder, Justice Roberts cited data about voter [00:30:00] registration rates. His numbers turned out to be straight up wrong. And those bad facts were then used to strip away voter protections.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: In total, ProPublica found seven Supreme Court decisions, just in recent years, where the Justices got their facts wrong.
ROMAN MARS: Sometimes these mistakes didn’t have much impact on the decision itself, but sometimes they do. Sometimes Justices hinge their decisions on these facts. So, how is it that the highest court in the nation can get their facts wrong not once but again and again and again? And what even happens when you prove them wrong?
Opinionpalooza A Bad June Rising At SCOTUS Part 2 - Amicus With Dhalia Lithwick - Air Date 5-25-24
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: So listen, I want to start with this big gerrymandering case, Alexander, that came down on Thursday. Mark and I chatted about it in a pop up episode. I guess I want to ask you both, just as a framing question, is there any way in your mind to connect up that 6-3 decision in [00:31:00] Alexander, which more or less, I think, closes the door on a whole class of racial gerrymandering claims? And the insanity, the performative insanity of Justice Alito's Teflon flag behavior, is there a through line here that you can find? Because I hate that they're being covered as different stories as front stage/backstage stories. I think they're connected. And I think maybe we should try to name it because you are two great big brains.
Steve, go first.
PROFESSOR STEVE VLADECK: I think the place to start is, what are facts anyway? And that to me is the common theme across both of these. The nerdy technical problem with Justice Alito's majority opinion in Alexander is that the Supreme Court basically fancies itself a trial court, and it is deciding for itself factual questions that the trial court decided in this case, and to which the trial court is supposed to get deference. And that may sound like a small technical problem, but it's actually an amazingly remarkable sign of disrespect [00:32:00] from an appeals court, any appeals court, to the hard work of trial judges, in this case, a three judge district court in South Carolina that, as Justice Kagan points out in her dissent, did a lot of work in this case.
I think that's the through line to me is, facts are whatever Justice Alito wants them to be. My favorite piece of his indirect relayed conversation with Shannon Bream about the upside down flag story was that he was worried about the kids at the bus stops in January 2021, when all of the local schools were closed, and there were no kids at the bus stops. When you have a loose relationship with facts in the first place, maybe you're going to be less worried about facts found by other courts that you're supposed to defer to. That's my off-the-cuff stab at trying to tie these two things together.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: I just want to add one funny thing, which is that even Clarence Thomas wouldn't fully join Sam Alito, like sifting through the record from the district court, and nitpicking at each fact. Clarence Thomas in his otherwise characteristically gonzo dissent, taking on Brown versus [00:33:00] Board of Education; rejecting one person, one vote; saying racial gerrymandering is non justiciable. He begins by saying, Oh, but by the way, it is pretty weird that the majority decided to, quote, "sift through volumes of facts and argue its interpretation of those facts." That's not how clear error review works. And so I'm not going to join that part of the opinion. Alito has lost even Thomas. And yet, there's John Roberts lining up to join. There's Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh lining up to join. And it just feels like if those justices wanted to send Alito a signal in any way, shape, or form, whether it's about the flag, whether it's about the increasingly deranged jurisprudence that he's taking a few steps too far, that could have been a good place to do it. Hey, maybe let's do some law, buster. But they decided no, no, we're all in. all in on this opinion. And that is a very depressing signal for me heading into a bad June rising.
PROFESSOR STEVE VLADECK: It's back to the politics of grievance. Alito is constantly aggrieved by everyone and everything. And [00:34:00] today he was aggrieved by Justice Kagan's majority opinion in Cooper, which he at one point accuses her of misrepresenting him, even though she wrote it.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: Yeah, I think my slightly--I want to say gentler, but it's not gentler, it's probably grumpier--version of the same point, Steve. I always use the word grumpy with Steve once in every show. It's an old inside joke that I don't care to explain, it has to do with Muppets.
But I think my version of the same point is these shifting presumptions of who is bad in the world are really interesting, right? And, as I noted on Thursday, talking about the Alito opinion, it's amazing that you just want to give the benefit of the doubt to every state legislator ever, who are picking their own voters, like they are engaged in an enterprise that is sketch to begin with. They all get the presumption of being in good faith?
Whereas, again, if you look at the immunity case, the presumption is that every single [00:35:00] federal prosecutor is a lying bastard. And it is just amazing to me how you can move through the world, creating these presumptive categories of friends and enemies. It's very Clarence Thomas. It's very Richard Nixon. It's not the way we do law.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: Who doesn't get the presumption of good faith is the plaintiffs in voting rights cases, right? Because there's this whole section where Alito says that these plaintiffs seek to transform federal courts into weapons of political warfare that will deliver victories that eluded them in the political arena, which is another way of saying vindicate the promises of the 14th and 15th amendments.
PROFESSOR STEVE VLADECK: I think there comes a point where we have to ask ourselves, if you were a justice who lived in the media ecosphere of the far right wing, and that was basically the world you consumed, and that was the information you were fed, well, how would the world look to you? And I think the answer is it would look a lot like apparently it looks right now to Justice Alito.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: Which is one other point, Steve, [00:36:00] that I think I want to drop here because I didn't actually know about this flag, I just didn't, I guess I missed a beat. I didn't quite know about the January 6thers upside down flag. I think one of the things that I keep learning is how deep, deep, deep down the rabbit hole he is. This is not Stop the Steal. This is not Don't Tread On Me. This is like an ecosystem within an ecosystem within an ecosystem that I don't even know. And it's so Interesting to me, of a piece with what you're both saying, that might knock on Alito for a long time, has been his utter failure of imagination, the inability to imagine anyone who hasn't lived his life, every single woman in the United States who wants an abortion is just invisible to him. The physicians who are in the EMTALA case, they're [00:37:00] real to him, but the women who have to be helicoptered out of state, they don't exist. And the idea that he is so far down a wormhole that he couldn't possibly imagine the lives that you and I live, that just is making my brain explode.
PROFESSOR STEVE VLADECK: There was a line, this just got, I think, run over by subsequent events. But in the Mifepristone case, when the court put Judge Kazmarek's ruling on hold last April, there was a line in his really, I think, revealing dissent about the Biden administration not doing anything to disabuse anyone of the notion that it wouldn't comply with an adverse ruling, that was a fever dream in, not even Fox News land, right? KJP [Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre] had literally stood at the podium in the press room and said, we're going to comply with whatever you do in this case.
I think the question at some point becomes less about Justice Alito and back to where Mark was, more about the others, and how much they're going to abide this kind of behavior, both in [00:38:00] his formal work and off the bench.
And that to me is the real story of Alexander is that there were no separate opinions besides Thomas, which, has problems of its own. But for Kavanaugh and Barrett and Roberts to basically sign on to this evisceration of the clear error standard, I think is not surprising, but when folks try to tell us that the court actually is not as far to the right as we think, and that it was pretty moderate and that this term was actually a bit of a mixed bag, I would like to point back to that and say, Mmm, try again.
The IVF Decision We Should Have Seen Coming - Amicus With Dahlia Litchwick - Air Date 3-2-24
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: And Alito was writing a dissent, and I was listening at arguments, and Alito was so extra pissy during arguments in the social media case, and I thought, this is a sign, this is a tell that he's writing a furious dissent, a gonzo dissent from the court's denial of a stay for Trump. And then, it all fell apart on Wednesday when the court revealed that, I guess, it took more than two weeks to write a one page scheduling order—which, by [00:39:00] the way, doesn't even expedite the case at the pace that Jack Smith requested—special counsel prosecuting Trump—or at the pace that the court itself expedited the Anderson case, kicking Trump off the ballot in Colorado.
So it seems like, as you and I have discussed too many times now, frankly, an emergency is an emergency when it interferes with Donald Trump's ability to run for president or stay out of prison, and everything else can wait indefinitely. And again, I just think that the Pope holds himself to a higher standard of transparency and integrity than the current Supreme Court majority, because they are so clearly—I hate saying this because I really let myself believe otherwise—they're in the tank for Trump. They're doing what they can to help Trump avoid prison and win the presidency. I'm sorry, I don't want to be the cynic who just says it's a partisan court, but after Wednesday, [00:40:00] I do not see how we avoid that conclusion.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: Yeah. I think there's this harder question at play here, which is there's the merits question, and we don't need to belabor... there's no merit to the Trump appeal.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: None. Zero. Frivolous.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: And then there's the shot clock question, like the doomsday clock ticking down. And I think what we're realizing is that we keep thinking, as you said, because they treated the Colorado cases an emergency, they would treat the immunity case as emergency, but those are very different kinds of emergencies. And, let's recall the COVID mitigation cases were emergencies. SB8 was an emergency. So we have to stop thinking that our emergencies are theirs, or a legal an emergency and a political emergency are the same thing. They're two totally different things, and I guess we just need to sit in that.
I'd love for you to, having just completely disparaged this entire enterprise of watching and waiting for [00:41:00] more signals from the court, can you do your best guess at the court hears this case in late April, and I don't know, I think June is the earliest we get an opinion, although people are saying maybe we could get one in May, and Judge Chutkan's gonna allow three months for trial prep, so we're looking at a September trial, and then we run into the DOJ guidance about trying cases in an election year.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: So the court is hearing this argument at the end of April, the week of April 22nd. I'm thinking maybe Thursday of that week, a special argument day, but we shall see. They didn't deign to tell us. The court issues all of its opinions by the end of June. I am very skeptical that the court will get this one out before the end of June, because there is a deep tradition of waiting to issue opinions on the Supreme Court until everyone is done writing, including the dissenters.
And this was put to the test when Dobbs leaked [00:42:00] in 2022. After Dobbs leaked, we know from behind the scenes reporting, the majority pushed to release the majority opinion as quickly as possible and just let the dissenters push out their work whenever they were finished, but there was a fight, there was resistance, and ultimately, the court decided not to take that route because this tradition is so, again, deeply entrenched in how the court operates.
But that gives bad faith actors, like Sam Alito--you look up bad faith in the dictionary, you see a picture of Sam Alito; you recoil and slam it shut and throw it out the window--that gives Alito an opportunity to simply prevent the majority from saying anything, from issuing its decision, until he's done writing his dissent, which could magically take until the very last hour or minute of the month of June before they all flee on their summer vacations.
Let's say the decision comes out at the end of June; that's three months for trial prep, if starting the very next day in [00:43:00] July, then that takes us from July to August to September. That trial prep wraps up, say, maybe sometime at the end of September, the trial begins late September, early October, the trial itself is going to take three months. The trial itself is going to be a beast. Think about voir dire in that case. Think about just picking a jury and how hard Trump will fight for every single juror. He's already said the District of Columbia, where the jury will be drawn from, is totally biased against him. So they're going to drag this out at every opportunity.
And even though Judge Chuckin is not going to play like Judge Cannon in Florida and just give him. everything and let him run out the clock on every single objection, she does have certain due process obligations that she's going to have to afford to him. So I find it impossible to imagine this trial wrapping up before November, probably after the election.
And I think we are all in agreement that if Trump wins the [00:44:00] election and assumes the presidency, he will make this go away. He will fire Jack Smith. He will have the charges against him dissolved. He can try a self pardon, but he doesn't even really need to because he will be in control.
And so under the best timeline, maybe the trial wraps up right before election day.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: Yeah, I don't think there's any good scenario. And it reconfirms this point, which is the court, under the best possible construction, is trying to look at this as not a legal emergency. Don't care if it's a political emergency. And yet the knock on political emergencies that are going to ensue from this delay, no matter what happens, are catastrophic. And I guess it just keeps bringing me back to, I cannot quite believe that one of the nine people who are making these decisions has a spouse that was actively involved in the notion that the 2020 election was stolen. It's so bananas that the bananasness of it, as [00:45:00] you say, this is how you would cover the Medicis. Look at Lord Medici and his lovely wife who was part of the insurrection. It's bananas.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: Three others who were, of course, appointed by Trump.
And can I just add one gloss here? While I'm on a tear, I think the best defense, and I think Jack Goldsmith has offered a version of this, is that if there's an emergency here, it's a political emergency that Trump needs to face trial before November, because if he wins, he'll make the charges go away. And that's not a true emergency in legal terms. And so the court has no reason to play ball with Jack Smith.
Okay. Let's flashback to early 2021. Trump has been on his execution spree, killing as many federal prisoners as he can before Biden comes in and imposes his promised moratorium on capital punishment.
There is a case right at the end on January 15th, where the Trump administration wants to kill one last person, and a lower court blocks it. And the Trump administration basically [00:46:00] goes to SCOTUS and says, Hey, if you don't let us kill this guy now, and say this is an emergency and clear away the stay and let us inject him and kill him, then we all know Biden's going to come in and allow him to survive and indefinitely pause the execution. And we think that's an emergency and a reason for you to let us move forward with this execution. And the Supreme Court agreed. And the Supreme Court said in so many words, this is an emergency. We will clear away the stay and all of the lower court impediments. We will allow you to execute this one last person because Biden is about to come in and impose a moratorium.
That was an emergency to the Supreme Court. And this, all of this, is not. And if that does not prove that there is something worse than the bad legal reasoning going on, that there is some deep, corrupt partisanship at play here, I just don't know what [00:47:00] can.
SCOTUS Flag Neighbor Exposes Alito’s BS Story- The Majority Report - Air Date 6-7-24f
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Clarence Thomas has received millions of dollars, dwarfing any other number of gifts, because now he's had to go back and basically check off which gifts he's gotten, et cetera, et cetera, because he was caught not recording these things.
Millions of gifts from Harlan Crow, a billionaire who was recruited by Leonard Leo, who was the former head of the Federalist Society, the guy who's basically in charge of taking care of the judges. When Clarence Thomas, 20 years ago, threatened to quit the court because he didn't have enough money to function, Leonard Leo introduced him to what became his new best friend, Harlan Crowe, a billionaire, who then proceeded to pay for things like his mom's house, his kids' private school education, and take him on private jet vacations multiple times a year for years.
And Clarence Thomas decided, you know what, my life as a justice is not so [00:48:00] bad. I think I'll stay on the court. It's almost like getting your pay off. It's really having your cake and eating it too.
And so while Clarence Thomas, clearly--and I don't know if he changed any of his votes--he just found a benefactor who appreciated his work and paid him to stay on the court, essentially.
Sam Alito refuses to recuse himself from any case involving Trump in January 6th, despite the fact that his wife now clearly was flying flags in support of, and according to him, his wife--Alito had nothing to do with it, of course. Except for the problem is, is that now it seems the story he told Congress in sending a letter and explaining the incident was at the very least, according to a person involved in this story, a serious mistake, if not an outright lie.
This is [00:49:00] Sam Alito's neighbor, on CNN, the other day. This is Emily Barden, Sam Alito's neighbor--Baden, excuse me.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Very close to Biden.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, apparently. Here she is explaining that Sam Alito either made a big mistake when he said the wrong things to Congress, or he lied.
NEWS CLIP: And and so, okay, so now let me get to the upside-down American flag, and go through this in a bit of detail, because I think here is where your point about what he is alleging happened here does not comport with the timeline.
So the flag is flying. Justice Alito says his wife flew it because she was, quote, "greatly distressed" by her disputes with you. And in a letter just explaining his motivation to put up the flag He says, and I quote him again, Emily, "A house on the street displayed a sign attacking her personally" -- I guess that's the you are complicit or you know that you were just talking about but that you say was not directed at her -- "and a man [00:50:00] who was living in the house at the time trailed her all the way down the street and berated her in my presence using foul language, including what I regard is the vilest epithet that can be addressed to a woman," which is the c word. Now let me just break this down.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I was going to say, is it liberal or is it like, you have, you know, you, you have your own job. Yes.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: No Fault Divorce Supporter.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: You have the right to vote. Okay, go back.
NEWS CLIP: It can be addressed to a woman, which is the C word. Now, let me just break this down, Emily. You say it was you who said those things. It was not your now husband. But you say Alito is lying here for another very basic reason. Can you explain?
So I, At best, he's mistaken, but at worst, he's just outright lying. And there was a neighbor who even witnessed this and witnessed me using that [00:51:00] unfortunate term. And what else I said in that interaction is so important.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Hold on a second. I just want to say, kudos to this lady for owning up for saying that word, and also for deploying it in perhaps one of the most appropriate and maybe the only appropriate circumstance, one can deploy that.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: A righteous slur. Yep. A hundred percent.
NEWS CLIP: What else I said in that interaction is so important, and I hope it's not getting forgotten in the discourse around the word.
In that interaction, she approached us, started screaming at us, used all of our full names, which to me felt like a threat because you're a stranger. We don't know you. You don't know us. How do you know our full names? And I just, I started yelling, How dare you? Because they both were there at the same time. I said, How dare you? You're on the highest court in the land. You represent the Supreme Court of the United States. You're behaving this way. You're yelling at a neighbor. You're harassing us. [00:52:00] How dare you? Shame on you. And I did use the word. So if that in any way distracts from that real message, I do regret using the word because the message is important.
It's like the power imbalance between these people and me. I am, I'm, I'm nobody to them. And the fact they took umbrage with my sign is telling enough. It shows like a bias.
And I want to talk about that, but just to be very clear on the timing, he's saying that she put up the flag because you said those things.
But when we look at, there was actually, you called 911 on that day. There's actually a police report about that incident. And that shows that the timing doesn't work, right? The flag was up before. The flag picture that the New York Times had was weeks before that incident actually happened where you called her that word.
So what he's saying here, you're saying at best mistaken, but it certainly is just, it's categorically by the dates not true, right? She didn't put the flag up for that reason.
Absolutely 100%. And that's what I want to really drive home to [00:53:00] people is that this happened on February 15th. And we know that because they had been harassing us so long that we were like, we need a paper trail of this. We better call the cops right now. Like I said, these are federally protected people. They have security detail. They represent the judicial system. They are the law. And I am just a regular person. And so yeah, we called the cops that day. It was February 15th. And I think the photo of the flag was on January 17th.
Yes. So the timing doesn't add up.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah. We haven't seen such a righteous neighbor since Rand Paul's neighbor.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, exactly. But here's the thing: There's no argument as to whether Alito lied about this. There's no argument. There's a paper trail. He's lying to Congress. What's it going to take for John Roberts to stand up and say, okay, this seems to, like, it's going a little [00:54:00] far here, and the guy should recuse himself, he's lied to Congress, we know that he was the source of a leak during the ACA decision back in 2012, there's every reason to believe that he was the leak of the Dobbs decision came from him. And the guy is a category. He lied to Congress. This is a Supreme Court justice. And the idea that Dick Durbin is not hauling these people into Congress, even if he can't impeach them, because he doesn't have the votes, is just--
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Even if they won't show up. Bring that neighbor on, not on CNN. Why is she on CNN instead of a hearing that Dick Durbin is holding, right? She lives right around the corner in Washington, D. C. It'd be pretty easy to figure out the situation.
OFF-CAMERA VOICE: Material witness about this political symbolism coming from--
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Exactly.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: About this political symbolism, and now every reason to [00:55:00] believe that the Supreme Court justice has made a deliberate lie to Congress. Not a great look for one of nine people who basically dictate the laws of this country.
Delegitimize The Court - Contempt of Court with Elie Mystal - Air Date 8-22-23
ELIE MYSTAL - HOST, CONTEMPT OF COURT: Having explained kind of how we got here, what do we do about it? Because while it's great to say, Oh, we should empower Congress more, I imagine, I can play the thought experiment of going into John Roberts' house and saying, John Roberts, you should use less power, and him escorting me to the door. Certainly, Neil Gorsuch barely thinks the federal government should be allowed to exist, certainly doesn't think that any executive agencies, like the ones you were mentioning that Congress deployed after reconstruction, certainly Neil Gorsuch doesn't think that any of those agencies are allowed to exist. So, how do we go about depowering the court when the court itself is the institution that says, [00:56:00] We have all of this power?
NIKOLAS BOWIE: Yeah, so you can think of a few obstacles in the way of Congress or the American people disempowering the court. Some are legal and some are cultural. So, to the extent that you focus on the legal obstacles, but you don't address the cultural obstacle, so you're like, the Supreme Court decides what the constitution means, so if Congress tries to stop the court, the court will just say it's unconstitutional. At that point, you've lost. Because that's true, you know, the court, John Roberts is not going to agree to, like, cede the enormous amount of power he has. That's, you know, would be a revolutionary act of, uh...
ELIE MYSTAL - HOST, CONTEMPT OF COURT: He's not Cincinnatus, all right?
NIKOLAS BOWIE: Right... generosity. But, the key thing is it's cultural, so, going back to Dred Scott, Congress's and the American people's response to Dred Scott, some of them were like, awesome! We're going to form a country that's like based on this idea. But for the people who [00:57:00] remained part of the United States, the response to Dred Scott was not, Rats! I guess we'd have to wait for Chief Justice Taney to die so we can replace him with a better judge. It wasn't even, let's pack the court with better people. It was, We do not think the court should have this power, so we are going to ignore this decision. So, in 1862, so five years after Dred Scott, in the middle of the Civil War, Congress passed a law that said, Slavery in the territories is abolished. No more slavery in the territory. The holding of Dred Scott, one of the holdings of Dred Scott was Congress cannot regulate slavery in the territories. Congress has said, No, we just disagree with you. And we're going to enforce this ourselves using our own people rather than, you know, comply with this decision that we regard as deeply immoral and an inappropriate interpretation of the Constitution.
When the court started [00:58:00] exercising this power more after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, some members of Congress were like, Hey, you know, everything the court does is a consequence of federal law. So if the court is trying to assert its supremacy over us, we should just take away its power to do that. So there were some bills to prohibit the court from issuing orders absent the support of three quarters of the Supreme Court, on the theory that you need super majorities of congress to overcome a presidential veto, so surely a Supreme Court veto should not be even more powerful than that. Some members of congress said, Let's control the membership of the court. Some members of Congress said, Let's control the funding that the court receives. Let's change how the court operates. Some members said, Let's take away its power to issue certain types of orders. So, when it comes to what they call "political questions", the court would not have jurisdiction to decide them.
And all of these options [00:59:00] have been employed in the subsequent century and a half; they remain available today. And so it's really just a matter of asking, What do you think Congress would need to do before Chief Justice Roberts would say, Okay, I give up. And the answer is, it's actually not a legal question at all, really. It's just a question of, like, what do you think you could politically do to reassert democracy?
Note from the Editor on some of Alito's finer absurdity
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Amicus, discussing the Supreme Court in the big picture. Then Amicus dove into the Mifepristone case. The Majority Report looked at the practice of judge shopping. 99% Invisible looked at the long history of the court getting their facts wrong. Amicus discussed the gerrymandering case, followed by Trump's appeal and how the court treats different emergencies. The Majority Report got into some of the corruption of the court. And Contempt of Court looked into the history of how and when the court started gaining power.
And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the deeper [01:00:00] 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 interesting topics, all while making each other laugh and the process. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
Now, before we continue onto the deeper dives half of the show, I just wanted to really highlight a couple of things about Alito. He's really getting a reputation among court watchers as the guy who will try the least to cover the fact that he's a partisan hack and he will go to extreme lengths to twist any logic to come to the conclusion he wants. And he doesn't seem to really be ashamed of it. And so [01:01:00] there are a couple of instances that really drive this home and they're worth going over.
The first is great, because it assures you that it's not just the left being critical of Alito. This from "The Republican Parties' Man Inside the Supreme Court" from Vox: " Alito published a dissenting opinion, claiming that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brain child of Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, was unconstitutional. The opinion was so poorly reasoned that Justice Clarence Thomas, ordinarily an ally of far-right causes, mocked Alito's opinion for 'winding its way through English, colonial and early American history", without ever connecting that history to anything that's actually in the constitution.
So, that's hilarious. It's kind of like if Marjorie Taylor Greene were to advise someone to like, bring it down a few notches, if you want to be taken seriously, right?
The next is Alito's refusal to recuse himself from cases involving [01:02:00] January 6th in the wake of the news about his home flying political flags very much in line with the flags insurrectionists flew. The plain law in the federal code about judges and justices needing to recuse is really simple. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned". And as any first-year law student will tell you the word shall is pretty important in that sentence. It's really unambiguous. While the bar set is actually pretty low, in that impartiality only "might reasonably be questioned". Now, Alito's argument for not recusing himself depends not at all on the actual law, but instead entirely on the voluntary, toothless ethics code [01:03:00] the Supreme Court wrote for themselves last year. That code, on recusal, starts with "A justice is presumed impartial and has an obligation to sit unless disqualified". And then it goes on to set a higher bar for what would require recusal, which basically includes stuff that justices can just think in their own heads and rationalize that, Well, if a person knew all the context and all the things that I know about how unbiased I am, they would never doubt me and that's enough reason for them to not be disqualified. The actual line in their code about the duty to recuse being triggered is when a "reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances would doubt that the justice could fairly discharge his or her duties".
So, that's great for self-rationalization, not so great for our transparency and keeping faith in the institution of the court. But I gotta say [01:04:00] the real master stroke. Is that he basically turns the question on its head. So that instead of erring on the side of recusal, for the sake of maintaining trust in the courts, as the federal statute clearly requires, he points to the voluntary ethics code that again says "A justice is presumed impartial and has an obligation to sit unless disqualified", and just throws up his hands and is like, Well, I chose not to recuse myself, therefore I have to sit. Right? He's rationalized his own impartiality. And then, because he hasn't been disqualified, he has an obligation to sit. If he doesn't sit, that would be against the rules. So, yeah, maybe the actual rule says you "shall" recuse if there's any doubt, but by their own written rules, he's like, Ah, I wish I had more flexibility, but I don't, I really have to sit in on these cases.
And [01:05:00] there's one last one that sparked a very old thought of mine. I realized about 10 or 15 years ago that a lot of the arguments I was hearing from conservatives on a whole range of topics we're so badly argued that they were the kinds of things that I could remember thinking when I was a child or a teenager but had grown up and grown out of those, like, really bad, simplistic ways of thinking and Justice Alito has gone ahead and reminded me of something I used to think long, long ago. And it goes into his rationale for allowing racial gerrymandering. Basically, if you just don't call it bad, if we just say that it's political. And don't question whether it's also racial then you can go ahead and do it. So, recently, just coincidentally, I was looking at an old year book of mine and saw where I had been asked to give a quote to put next to my picture for like a club or a class that I was [01:06:00] in. And boy, did I say something that did not age well. It didn't age well, but it's the sort of thing that should have been entirely expected from a 17 year old White guy who grew up surrounded by people who almost entirely looked like me. The quote I gave to the yearbook was—and I have to say, it's not just that I now think that the sentiment is wrong, but also, like, listen to how obnoxious I was to phrase it as a sort of faux, old timey biblical-esque kind of bullshit to try to make it sound profound, like, maybe I was trying to be ironic or something, but I sorta doubt it—so the quote I give to the yearbook was "Judge not the action, but the intention within it". What a douche. That should be written in calligraphy on the founding documents of all of the private social clubs dedicated to [01:07:00] protecting entitled assholes from ever having their entitlement questioned. It is the classic argument that as long as a person had good intentions or can even make a passing argument that they sort of had good intentions, then they should be able to get away scot-free with whatever damaging, discriminating, harmful thing they did, policy they advocated for, what have you. In fact, it's really the bedrock principle of the don't-call-me-a-racist brand of racists these days. Racists have been spending the past several decades perfecting the art of justifying racism by other means, while claiming to abhor overt, old school, race-based hatred. In fact, they now regularly claim that the worst thing a person can be called is racist, regardless of whether, for instance, policies they support are well-known to disproportionately hurt people of color.
Which brings us to Alito's justification [01:08:00] for racial gerrymandering. From this article from Vox, "The Supreme Court's new voting rights decision is a love letter to gerrymandering", it says, " Alito frequently disdains any allegation that a White lawmaker might have been motivated by racism and he's long sought to write a presumption of White racial innocence into the law. His dismissive attitude toward any allegation that racism might exist in American government is on full display in his opinion: 'When a federal court finds that race drove a legislature is districting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature engaged in offensive and demeaning conduct,. Alito writes, before proclaiming that 'We should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches'".
So basically. It's too offensive to accuse someone of racism, even when their actions have demonstrably negative outcomes for people of color. [01:09:00] Therefore, actions with racist outcomes are allowed and shall not be questioned because, as every racist will tell you, being accused of racism is actually worse than racism itself. And as always, this is where I point out that there are multiple definitions of racism at play in the world today. And so the two basic sides of this debate really aren't even talking about the same thing. Anyone who really cares about justice doesn't give much of a shit about what people intended, what's in their hearts, because that stuff doesn't matter. Only outcomes matter—harm matters. Actions are racist if they cause harm based on race, not because of intentions or the hate someone may have in their heart. But now with all the depth of insight of a sheltered 17 year old dude, Alito has decided that questioning racial harm is so offensive to those who claim to have [01:10:00] good or at least exclusively political and not racial intentions that we're just not allowed to make those accusations anymore.
SECTION A: DO FACTS MATTER?
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with deeper dives on four topics.
Next up section a do facts matter. Section B policing medical care section C the Republican court. We've all waited for and section D. SCOTUS is a flawed system.
Who Gets to Lie Online - Amicus with Dhalia Lithwick - Air Date 3-16-24
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: Okay, so let's talk about Murphy because I think it's largely been framed as a case about what's called jawboning, right?
This is the Biden administration. In some heavy handed ways and some much more chill ways, uh, telling social media platforms to remove content that's not true about COVID to, uh, take down things that are, you know, false and inflammatory, but it intersects absolutely with the interests of election workers.
[01:11:00] Why?
GOWRI RAMACHANDRAN: Even though false information about COVID and vaccines is really the focus of a lot of the plaintiffs arguments in this case, and the lower court orders in this case, a huge number of defendants were actually sued in this case, many agencies All across the federal government and included in that list was, uh, CISA, which is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
So this is an agency that was formed in the wake of the 2016 election, in fact, and whose job it is to assist state, local, and tribal officials with, uh, Cybersecurity response and really just protecting election infrastructure against interference. So it has a big impact on election workers that CISA was one of the defendants in this case because the original court order where the [01:12:00] plaintiffs won actually swept in groups like CISA and other elements of the federal government and enjoined them from talking to the social media companies with the purpose of, you know, them engaging in some content moderation under their own policies.
It enjoined that. for all kinds of speech. It wasn't restricted to just, you know, vaccine information. So what happened is that even though that court order has been stayed because the Supreme Court took up the case, it has really chilled government officials from sharing information with and being in touch with.
social media companies. So that means all the work that these agencies were doing in the run up to the 2020 election is not happening and certainly not at the kind of scale it was happening before. So that means notifying the social media companies when they become aware of a user on their platforms that [01:13:00] appears to be an agent of a foreign government and is spreading propaganda on the platform, right?
Senator Warner, in his role on the Intelligence Committee, he actually mentioned earlier this week that Since July, when that original district court order came down up until about two weeks ago, there had been zero communication between federal agencies that have this election expertise and security expertise, zero communication between those agencies and social media companies, which is a real problem.
He noted rightly that the CEO of Metta, Mark Zuckerberg, even said after the 2016 election, if there's You know, foreign agents on our platforms spreading misinformation tell us we want to do something about it. We voluntarily want to do something about it. So please tell us. And then that is what occurred after that, really, to credit the government.
They did it. They [01:14:00] formed a relationship with the social media companies and provided them this information. And then that communication stopped after this district court order, and it didn't even, it doesn't seem that it really restarted immediately after the order was stayed. So it does have a really big impact where we're actually getting less cooperation than we did in the run up to the 2020 election.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: And I'm going to just ask you the Captain Obvious follow up, but that is, it's not as if attempts at election interference have stopped, right? It's not as though, oh, it stopped because there's no foreign entities that are trying to influence elections, or there's no malefactors here in the US who are trying to Put election misinformation out there.
It stopped not because it's not needed, but because of just vast confusion about what can be said now. And so, you know, the larger point is, and you make this to the social media [01:15:00] entities here want to do this. They don't feel like they're being. Coerce, they feel like this is an essential piece of cooperation that has to happen.
The stopping of it is not in the interest of either party, right? The government who wants to be able to warn that bad election information is being disseminated and the platforms that want to warn their users.
GOWRI RAMACHANDRAN: Yeah, absolutely. It's not because the problem has gone away that this communication has ground to an almost halt.
So every. sort of threat assessment, intelligence assessment that has been publicly released since 2020 has indicated that the threat of attempted foreign interference in elections, including through sort of propaganda or disinformation or influence operations on social media platforms. is still there.
And specific countries are often named in those [01:16:00] federal intelligence assessments. And it makes sense, right? Because what we saw on January 6th, 2021 was really evidence, and the whole world saw it, that it's not that expensive to engage in, uh, influence operation. using various channels within the United States, including social media platforms, and actually cause major disruption.
That was a huge disruption on January 6th, right? It was an attempted interference with the peaceful transfer of power. And I actually like to say that when Congress was under assault that day, they were actually serving in their function as election officials. They actually have a election official sort of function to receive all those electoral votes and count them up, uh, on, uh, on that one day.
So they were really [01:17:00] being attacked because they were fulfilling that role of fairly counting all the votes and declaring the accurate winner and sort of fulfilling the will of the people. And so what, you know, I think that showed the whole world is that you don't need to hire a really sophisticated, you know, computer hacker to get into our voting machines.
You can cause a lot of disruption through these. influence operations. So by no means has that threat abated. If anything, there's all kinds of motivations for people to engage in that again. And unfortunately, as we also have seen in the wake of the 2020 election, there are a lot of elements Within the United States, domestic elements who are motivated to and have been engaging in the spread of false election information.
Fact Checking the Supreme Court Part 2 - 99% Invisible - Air Date 6-4-24
ROMAN MARS: In the 1980s, one man did try and proposed the Court do something about its fact problem. His [01:18:00] name was Kenneth Culp Davis.
ALLISON ORR LARSEN: Kenneth Culp Davis was a very famous law professor who taught administrative law. And Professor Davis’ view was we should have something sort of like the Congressional Research Service that helps the courts.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: Basically an entire research department to help the Court parse through all of these outside facts coming in through briefs and just general research. Kenneth went on speaking tours throughout the country, preaching the need for real change in how the Court educates itself.
FRED SCHAUER: We came out of a recognition that judges were looking at outside facts all the time and wanting to add some more discipline to that.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: [FIELD TAPE] What happened to Kenneth Culp Davis’ proposal?
FRED SCHAUER: Nothing.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: [FIELD TAPE] Why not?
FRED SCHAUER: Courts are [01:19:00] reluctant to sort of delegate their responsibilities to others. Judges are comfortable with their own knowledge–maybe too comfortable.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: Kenneth’s proposal didn’t get anywhere because the Court thought that any fact-checker would be too political–that no one could be objective enough to sort through and fact-check all the information that comes into the Court.
ROMAN MARS: It’s been about 50 years since the Court rejected Kenneth’s vision for reform. And the situation today is possibly even worse because we’re not just dealing with the issue of what is in the briefs. We’re also dealing with the problem of where those amicus briefs are coming from.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: The amicus briefs of today are no longer the quaint little letters we saw showing up after the Brandeis era. Now we have a certified amicus brief industrial complex. Lawyers today don’t just wait for experts [01:20:00] supporting their views to weigh in. They actively reach out to people or interest groups they want to write in. And they’ll dictate what precisely they want those amicus briefs to say.
ALLISON ORR LARSEN: We call it “amicus wrangler” and “amicus whisperer.” So, you need somebody who recruits. “You know what? It’d be great if we had a historian to say this. Oh, you know what? We should get the military leaders to say that.” And then you sort of coordinate the messaging so that the Supreme Court receives the information that you want the Supreme Court to receive from the people that you want endorsing those views.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: Those recruited amicus briefs might have good facts. They might not. They could be written in good faith. But, again, they might not. Either way, hundreds of these amicus briefs flood into the hands of law clerks who have no capacity and no system for fact-checking. And that is the information that the Supreme Court uses to make its decisions.
ALLISON ORR LARSEN: And it’s all a much more [01:21:00] orchestrated dance than people otherwise believed.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: It’s like Brandeis and the legal realists opened up the faucet to facts, and now we’re drowning in them.
ROMAN MARS: The result of the amicus brief industrial complex is that, in the worst case scenario, the side with more money can drum up more amicus briefs, and that gives them a huge advantage. And even in the best case scenario, there’s essentially an information deadlock. The Court has a ton of very convenient facts from both sides. And in the end, it’s up to the Justices and their chosen clerks to decide which facts to actually believe.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: The idea behind the Brandeis Brief was that if only the Justices could have access to all the background information they needed, they could make a rational decision. But more information doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
ROMAN MARS: Because of this fire hose of information, there is always an amicus brief for the opinion that you already hold.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: What ends up happening today is that a bunch of parties send [01:22:00] in amicus briefs–some which inevitably contain errors–and the Justices end up cherry-picking the facts that align with what those Justices value most, which in the case of our current Court is very clear. They’re by and large obsessed with one thing.
SPEAKER 1: But then you look to history and tradition–
SPEAKER 2: You go right to history and tradition–
SPEAKER 3: If we’re looking at that history and tradition–
SPEAKER 4: And the relevant history and tradition exhaustively surveyed by this Court–
ROMAN MARS: The current Court has put a lot of emphasis on history and tradition.
ALLISON ORR LARSEN: And that means you have instructions from the Supreme Court to the lower courts, “Go ahead and review all of the history of, for example, firearm regulations in this jurisdiction. And come up with the history and tradition.” So, is that quest a factual one or a legal one or a little bit of both? I think that’s a really important question, and I think we’re just now beginning to wrestle with it.
ROMAN MARS: [01:23:00] This very specific, very consistent lens of history and tradition is what brings us back to the courthouse basement, where volunteers like Moms Demand Action have been looking for concealed carry laws in archives across the nation.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: Remember, the moms are trying to find evidence that the whole premise of the Court’s ruling in Bruen was just straight up factually wrong. And the Moms did find proof. Justice Thomas said that before 1900 concealed carry laws were not part of our history and tradition. And yet Jennifer Birch and the Moms Demand Action volunteers found a ton of these laws in archives all across the country.
ROMAN MARS: But here’s the thing–here’s the worst part. This information was sent to the Justices in Bruen. Historians had written amicus briefs to the Court, already pointing out that concealed carry bans existed in the 1800s. It’s just that you also had historians arguing the exact opposite. It’s not clear what information [01:24:00] was true or false in any of these briefs or even which ones reached the Justices. What is clear is that, out of all these briefs, the Justices made a choice about which pieces of information they took as fact.
ALLISON ORR LARSEN: So you had historians on one side and historians on the other. So, you had some historians saying, “Actually, there’s a long history and tradition of regulating the right to carry out in the open,” and then historians on the other side saying, “Nope, not at all. The right to bear arms has included the right to open carry, and the New York law in question is an outlier.” So, it ultimately was up to five Justices to decide which slate of historians they believed.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: [FIELD TAPE] So, the amicus briefs kind of became a battleground of who gets to say what history is?
ALLISON ORR LARSEN: Yes.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: [FIELD TAPE] So let’s say that the Justices do their factual research and then they get something wrong. They [01:25:00] cite a source that has incorrect information, but then that’s in the final decision. What happens when–let’s say–they do nothing?
FRED SCHAUER: Nothing. The short answer is nothing.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: [FIELD TAPE] But why? Why nothing?
FRED SCHAUER: I think it was Justice Jackson of this Supreme Court who said, “We are not final because we are infallible. We are infallible because we are final.”
GABRIELLE BERBEY: [FIELD TAPE] Yeah, that’s so hard for me to sit with.
FRED SCHAUER: Somebody’s got to have the last say, and very often judges have the last say. There are lots of things in the law and lots of things in the Constitution that we might now think of as politically or morally or even empirically wrong, but it’s there. [01:26:00] That’s what makes it authoritative. That’s when parents with some frequency say to their recalcitrant children, “Because I said so.” “Because I said so” is a big part of the law.
Who Gets to Lie Online Part 2 - Amicus with Dhalia Lithwick - Air Date 3-16-24
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: So you mentioned that there was a district court injunction that was very sweeping, and then the Fifth Circuit, in hearing this case on appeal, rolled back some of that injunction, but again, very vague, very sweeping.
sweeping, widespread uncertainty, as you noted above, about how this is to be implemented and what kind of communication between federal agencies and local election officials could continue. And then there's this test. The federal government seems to have been ordered not to have, quote, consistent and consequential communications with social media.
Companies. I don't know what that means. Can you just talk a little bit about the [01:27:00] utter confusion of the current state of play? And you noted that the injunction was lifted over the dissents of Justices Thomas and Alito and Gorsuch, but the court is hearing a case. In some sense, it almost doesn't matter because the confusion on the ground is already operative, right?
GOWRI RAMACHANDRAN: Yeah, so I am hopeful that after the court hears the case, they can lend some clarity to the situation. Um, I don't think it will be possible for them to undo all of the damage that has been done and all of the chilling of both government agency and As you mentioned, independent researchers speech, it's really their speech that's being chilled.
And I don't think the Supreme Court will be able to undo all of that damage. But I do hope they'll be able to lend some clarity. So, you know, there's a lot of twists and turns to this case, as you mentioned, and that's been That's part of [01:28:00] what I'm sure has created the confusion and the apprehension on the part of people who are trying to correct the record on elections.
You know, initially there was this sweeping injunction. It even had an exception in it, actually, for communications related to foreign disinformation efforts. But if you think about it, if you're operating on the fly, it's hard to know when you see a post that says that a bunch of ballots are being thrown out in Maricopa County, it's hard to know where the person or the bot that is putting that online.
is located, right? And who are they answering to? Is that a foreign disinformation effort? Or is that a local, domestic disinformation effort? Or just a voter who's really confused and saw something that they didn't understand? So in real time, when these things are happening and propagating around the internet, An [01:29:00] order like that that says, Don't worry if it's foreign disinformation, you won't be violating a federal court order is not very comforting, you know, particularly to a researcher who says, Well, I can identify the disinformation I can identify this pattern of behavior, but I don't, you know, have the resources and certainly not at a in a speedy way to figure out if this is foreign disinformation effort or not.
So, we had this already when it started out, really difficult to apply district court order. Then the Fifth Circuit said, you know, some of the defendants that are subject to this really didn't engage in any coercion, so it doesn't make sense for them to be enjoined in this case. And actually, CISA was one of the defendants that initially, the Fifth Circuit said, there's nothing they've done that's coercive.
But then the Fifth Circuit in October essentially said, nevermind, the CISA is subject to this order. And they said the [01:30:00] reason was that CISA was essentially forwarding on reports from local and state election officials of problematic things they were seeing online about elections. And they said that in and of itself, Despite the concession, essentially that that's not coercive to tell people I saw something false on your platform, despite the fact that's not coercive, they held that that as a legal matter actually causes the social media platforms content moderation decisions to be state action.
Then we have the Supreme Court stay that says none of that stuff is in effect anyway while we're waiting, we're getting the briefing and we're having the case being argued. And so you can understand why it's a really just confusing and chilling situation for people that just want to correct the record and really play their part in making sure that if people are going to [01:31:00] go online looking for information about elections.
They're most likely to see the right thing.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: I'm hearing you say, and tell me if I'm reflecting back more than you're saying, that in a sense, this is scaling up just the general proposition that you don't need misinformation or disinformation. You just need these potent weapons of chilling speech. And so in confusion about who can be trusted, right?
In other words, this just feels like the sort of classic Hannah aren't, you know, it doesn't even matter if nobody trusts that election workers are being truthful and honest. If nobody trusts that the government warnings are truthful and honest. If we're in a moment where even though there's a stay, nobody.
feels comfortable doing their job to make sure that truthful speech prevails, then the [01:32:00] aggregate effect is more confusion and mayhem and mistrust in the entire election apparatus.
GOWRI RAMACHANDRAN: You're right that, you know, if entities successfully engage in this sort of multifaceted attack on people who are trying to spread the truth, that it can have the same kind of effect as actually winning this sort of lawsuit would have because the chilling effect can be so strong.
I am hopeful that some of this damage can be Reversed though, uh, one, because the Supreme Court may be able to bring some clarity to this case, some clarity to what are, you know, the guardrails around the government communicating with big tech, and then that's gonna clearly provide some guidance to independent researchers and members of civil society as well.
I'm also hopeful that the You know, as this issue is brought to light [01:33:00] more, as folks like Senator Warner are bringing to light the fact that this communication has ground to a virtual halt, that maybe some of the lawyers who tend to be a very cautious profession, We'll see that there's downsides to being overly cautious, especially when your mission is to really, or part of your mission is to help the public and to do what is most beneficial for the safety, security, you know, of our free and fair elections.
I hope that calling some attention to this chilling effect will motivate some of the attorneys who are probably giving some really cautious advice to their clients, you know, agencies in the federal government, motivate them to see, uh, the costs of being overly Cautious and really help them highlight things like the exception in the district court order for communications about foreign disinformation or for that matter, communications [01:34:00] that are criminal, like criminal threats that are being made online and also help them really take, you know, whatever guidance we got from the Supreme Court in this case and apply it in a Thank you.
Pro democracy manner.
Fact Checking the Supreme Court Part 3 - 99% Invisible - Air Date 6-4-24
ROMAN MARS: Nearly 50 years after the Brandeis Brief, the issue of segregation reached the Supreme Court. As part of the case, the Justices set aside what they assumed about the world and read as much as they could about the psychological impact of segregation. And now, thanks in part to that outside information, segregation is unconstitutional.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: Or in Roe versus Wade, where Justice Blackman holed himself up in the Mayo Clinic Library in Minnesota to read everything he could about the medical science of abortions. None of that would’ve happened before Brandeis and the legal realists stepped in.
ROMAN MARS: There’s no arguing with the fact that the Brandeis brief changed the game. It also did exactly what Brandeis hoped it would. The Brief let progressive [01:35:00] lawyers pull a whole wealth of information into the courtroom so they could keep social reform moving forward.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: Which seems like a good thing. In a way, it does make sense to bring the Justices down to earth from their high-minded, lofty legal theories. The realists thought they’d created a world where judges would learn the real facts on the ground and make better legal decisions because of it. But when the rubber hit the road, things went a lot differently than they imagined.
ALLISON ORR LARSEN: And you wonder, “Do we want the Justices just burying their heads in the sand and not thinking about the context of the decisions–the decisions they make that are going to affect millions of people?” No, I don’t think that’s a better world at all. But there’s other things to consider in terms of who is telling them what and for what purpose.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: Here’s the thing though. The Brandeis Brief was–at its core–a tool. The progressives weren’t the only ones who could wield [01:36:00] it. While the reformers were out celebrating wins like Brown v. Board and Roe v. Wade, they had set in motion a change that would eventually derail some of their biggest wins.
ROMAN MARS: And at the center of that change was a thing called an “amicus curiae brief” or “amicus brief” for short.
ALLISON ORR LARSEN: It stands for “friend of the court.” It’s a Latin phrase.
ROMAN MARS: You’ll also hear these referred to as “amicus briefs,” which is also right.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: These are briefs that are typically written by people or organizations who don’t have any role to play in the case. They’re not lawyers for either side. They just have an opinion about how the judges should rule and why. So, they write an amicus brief saying how they think the case should go.
ROMAN MARS: Amicus briefs are pretty benign in theory. The idea is that they give perspective, research, or context about an upcoming case. Unlike regular briefs where the lawyers in the case write in, these are written by people outside the case. [01:37:00] Anyone–any member of the public–any organization can submit these briefs. All you need is a lawyer registered with the Supreme Court Bar to help you file.
ALLISON ORR LARSEN: The ones I think that are the most influential on the Court are briefs that add facts–expertise that they might not get from the record below or from the party briefing.
ROMAN MARS: In a way, amicus briefs are exactly what legal realists like Brandeis wanted. They’re a means of getting information from the real world into the courtroom.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: Amicus briefs flowed into all the big cases of the 20th century–Roe v. Wade Bush v. Gore–and slowly, over the decades, they became a fixture of the courtroom. Then in 2003 came a case that pushed the amicus brief past its humble origins and into the spotlight.
ARCHIVE: The opinion of the court number 02241, Grutter against Bollinger, will be announced by Justice O’Connor.
ROMAN MARS: The case was a challenge to affirmative action at the University of [01:38:00] Michigan. And as part of the case, amicus briefs poured in from interested parties. The Justices heard the case, they read the briefs, and they made a ruling, in this case, upholding affirmative action. But here’s where the game starts to change.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: When Justice O’Connor delivered her opinion in the case, explaining why the Court cited the way it did, she mentioned one specific amicus brief that the Court had received. It was submitted by members of the military in support of affirmative action.
JUSTICE OCONNOR: High-ranking, retired officers and civilian military leaders assert that a highly qualified racially diverse officer corps, drawn in large part from college ROTC programs, is essential to our nation’s security.
GABRIELLE BERBEY: This was a big deal. For the first time, Justices were showing that not only do they read these briefs, amicus briefs actually play a big role in helping them make decisions–so much so that they’ll cite them in their [01:39:00] opinion announcements. At the time, this military brief actually helped save affirmative action.
ROMAN MARS: When Justice O’Connor referenced specific amicus briefs in an official Court decision, it sends a clear message: if your side sends the right amicus brief, that could decide the case.
ALLISON ORR LARSEN: So it was in many ways a debutante moment–a coming out party–for the power of amicus briefs, I think, that led members of the bar to realize, “You know what? We really have a chance of influencing the Court’s decision here. And we need to think strategically about who we get to say what.” So, there’s just a dramatic uptick–a dramatic growth spurt–of amicus briefs.
ROMAN MARS: It became clear very quickly that amicus briefs were powerful. But in the words of Spider-Man’s late, great Uncle Ben, “Power is a hell of a drug.”
GABRIELLE BERBEY: [01:40:00] If amicus briefs started out as tools for Justices to help them understand facts about our world, they were now essentially weapons for both sides of a case. And the fact that amicus briefs were now an integral part of the Court highlighted one tiny, little design flaw–namely that there is absolutely no mechanism in place for making sure that anything in those briefs is actually true.
ROMAN MARS: The dirty secret here is that the Supreme Court doesn’t have any fact-checking mechanism for amicus briefs. None. There’s no fact-checking for anything that the judges read to decide their cases. To be clear, there’s a fact-checker for this podcast right now; these words right here are being fact-checked. Hey Graham. And yet for the highest court in the land–the Court making decisions that changed the course of millions of lives–nothing.
SECTION B: POLICING MEDICAL CARE
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B policing medical care.
Will SCOTUS Slam the Door Shut on Pregnant ER Patients - BOOM! Lawyered - Air Date 4-24-24
IMANI GANDI - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: What a day. Today was, I found it confusing. I'm not gonna lie. I was a little bit [01:41:00] like confused because the tenor of the arguments to me, it seemed like Only the women wanted to talk about what this case is really about. And I remember when I was thinking about, um, what our podcasts around this case would be like, and I said something to you about the spending clause, and I remember you said to me, you were like, Imani, we are not spending any significant time talking about the spending clause.
And what did the men do today? They spent a significant amount of time. Talking about the spending clause as opposed to the actual catastrophe that will occur if they say to ER doctors in abortion hostile states like Idaho and Texas. Yeah, no. Abortion is not a mandated stabilizing treatment. Ever.
Abortion is not healthcare. Ever.
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Right, right. And I did tell Imani that we should not pay any attention to the spending clause arguments because it wasn't a significant part of the underlying litigation. It was barely briefed at the Supreme Court. Idaho [01:42:00] just kind of sua sponte with the help of some other states.
Look at you with the sua sponte. I mean, I may be turning 50, but I still have a couple sua spontes up my sleeve. But no, Idaho and states just kind of on their own raised it at the stage of the litigation, which also smacks a little bit of the Dobbs strategy, right? Like, say, hey, hey, hey, just uphold Mississippi's 15 week ban under the Roe and Casey framework.
Actually, just kidding, reverse it all, right? So like, there's some shenanigans there, but I think To your point, the mostly men wanted to talk about the spending clause because it avoids the reality that Solicitor General Preligar and the women justices on the court refused to ignore. And that is the fact that patients are being airlifted out of Idaho, um, that this is a situation that will only get worse.
And you can't in good faith say, well, [01:43:00] no, actually we can comply with the law. Wink wink. Right. Like it's bad. It's bad. And I want to talk about
IMANI GANDI - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: that because, okay, the spending clause, it basically, it's an argument about about legislation that is enacted pursuant to Congress's spending power. And the argument for this spending clause claim is that EMTALA is not entitled to preemptive effect because it was enacted pursuant to Congress's spending clause.
And the response to that is, so what? Yeah, like the supremacy clause applies irrespective of the powers that Congress used to pass certain legislation, whether it's enumerated powers, whether it's spending power, it doesn't matter. Right. The supremacy clause says that federal law reigns supreme. There's no carve out.
For spending cost statutes, right? Right. And so if the federal government is going to give you money is going to give a Medicare funded hospital money, it is perfectly within its right to attach conditions [01:44:00] to the receipt of that money. And one of the conditions for under EMTALA is If a patient walks in and they have an emergency condition, you got to screen them.
If they, if, if their emergency condition is going to cause their health to deteriorate, you got to provide stabilizing treatment. The issue here is, is an abortion ever stabilizing treatment? And according to Idaho, the answer is basically no, not really. And that's just the callousness with which he was making, uh, Attorney General Turner was making these arguments on behalf of Idaho is, I found it shocking.
For example, Sonia Sotomayor was just firing hypotheticals off about various catastrophic pregnancies. Yes. And she said, essentially, I'm paraphrasing, pregnant patients will present with a serious medical emergency. Condition that doctors in good faith can't say will lead to death, but will present a potential loss of an organ or serious medical complications.
Those doctors can't perform abortions in those [01:45:00] scenarios. Is that what you're saying? And Turner's response was basically. No, those abortions cannot be performed. And at first he tried to pretend like he was a doctor and had some knowledge about what sorts of catastrophic abortion situations might occur.
He says, you know, well, if that hypothetical exists, then yes, Idaho law says that abortions are not allowed. How is, I find that so just craven that I struggle to understand how you can get up in court and make that argument.
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Yeah, I mean, as I said to you in Slack, um, as we were finishing up arguments, the fact that we're even here having a debate about how sick a patient needs to be before a state is required to step in and provide some kind of medical treatment means we've already lost.
We've already lost. And the Supremacy Clause argument just becomes a cover for the fact that what Idaho and the [01:46:00] conservative legal movement is fine with happening is pregnant patients becoming disabled, losing future fertility, having all sorts of a parade of medical conditions that do not equal death, but will not provide them access to abortion care.
So, you know, pregnancy is risky. Abortion is a lot safer. Conservatives said with their whole chest today, they're fine with pregnancy becoming a mass disabling event in this country if it means that there are no abortions available.
IMANI GANDI - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: That is grim. That's grim. One thing I really did love about, uh, Prelogar's, her presentation was the way in which she made the point that what Idaho is doing is patient dumping of another kind.
Yes. Because EMTALA, the purpose [01:47:00] behind EMTALA was to prevent federally funded hospitals from tossing indigent patients out into the street or transferring them to another hospital where, you know, they think if they think that they're not going to be able to get any reimbursement for the money that they spend treating people.
And then Tala says, you can't do that. Right. So what is Idaho doing? They may not be dumping indigent patients, but they sure are dumping pregnant patients. Pregnant patients in emergency crises, they have no problem dumping them. They're air lifting. I mean, how many times did a solicitor general prelogar say that they're air lifting patients out of Idaho?
That's patient dumping. And I really appreciate that. She made that point.
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Absolutely. And I just think she was prepared. For the worst of the bad faith arguments by the anti choice conservatives on the bench here. She was really masterful in that. I mean, she was really masterful in detailing the medical conditions at stake here in respect.
to this idea [01:48:00] that M Tala is serving as some sort of widespread abortion mandate, right? Creating federal enclaves of abortion care. If only we could get federal enclaves of abortion care anywhere, right? Right. That would be a significant improvement in what we are. But she just was very well prepared to handle that, whether it was coming from Justice Alito, whether it was coming from Justice Roberts, even in her back and forth with Justice Barrett, who, you know, sometimes seemed to be saying, excuse me, what, to the reach of Idaho's argument.
I don't think that Barrett's ever going to be on our side here. Right. Um, and we saw that in the way with her and, um, preligars. Uh, back and forth
Elie Mystal on Why You Don't Need to Like SCOTUS Anymore Part 1 - Boom! Lawyered - Air Date 4-12-24
IMANI GANDI - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: They looked at these arguments and I want to read a quote that, uh, Madiba Denny, you know, she writes for, uh, balls and strikes.
She just has a new book out about originalism. Um, I don't know if it's out or. Out yet or not, but, um, she's I blurbed it. So I already read it. It's good. Okay, she's brilliant. I'm looking forward to reading it. Um, but she's strong. [01:49:00] She summed up the case this way, quote, like the losers who ask if I were the last man on earth, then could I go out with you?
These medical professionals are asking if I were the last doctor on earth, then could I force you to give birth? And that's really ultimately what I, what the case is about for me, right? The small cabal of Christian doctors and dentists who say they are being forced to complete abortions, despite the federal law conscience protections that are available to them, and that say they don't have to perform abortions.
And it just seems to me that. You know, one of the things that Aaron Hawley, who's Josh Hawley's wife, Josh Hawley of the Insurrectionist Hawleys, who, by the way, I will always, I will always point out is the only Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee who has not been given money by Harlan Crow.
Like, he's so odious. That not even a Nazi memorabilia enthusiast is willing to give that man any money. So I just think that that's important to note, but Aaron, [01:50:00] I like marble
ELIE MYSTAL: Nazis, not, not living ones.
IMANI GANDI - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: And so, you know, Aaron Hawley kept pointing out that these doctors are so harried and stressed out and they're being asked to scrub in to perform these abortions against their conscience.
And they don't have time to go up to the 14th floor and, you know, talk to the hospital administrators and lawyers to find out what their protections are. And that just seems like a case of that's too bad, right? Like the rules are in place for you to use them. And if you are a doctor, an ER doctor, you don't want to help people, you don't want to do your job, then the law says you can go ask for conscience protection.
The law doesn't say get together with a bunch of other jamokes and then file a lawsuit saying that you don't want to do your goddamn job. And so, I mean, am I wrong? In A, my assessment that the case isn't going to be as bad as we think it is and that you and I are on that same page and that people like Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch just seemed like, what are we doing here with these jackasses and their ridiculous standing arguments?
ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, look, there's so many things wrong with that case, [01:51:00] but yes, we're on the same page, and I'll start at the beginning, I agree with you, it's always important to point out, just because you never know who's going to be listening to these shows, ladies, if you are going to your dentist for reproductive healthcare, somebody has told you a lie!
That's not how it works! Just straight up. All right. So with that said, um, when you let's, let's start with, with where you started this idea that Aaron Hawley was pushing that the real problem with these doctors and dentists who never prescribed the abortion pill, never had an abortion, never had a medical abortion and have nothing to do with their case.
Aaron Hawley's argument is that sometimes they have to scrub in to the emergency room to go treat people who are suffering what she called Complications from the abortion pill. That is A. Not true. There are not complications from the abortion pill in the way that Aaron Hawley was mentioning it. B. To the extent that you have to scrub in to the [01:52:00] emergency room to, quote, perform an abortion.
That's because a woman is dying! That's because a woman is about to die! And you, as the doctor, are needed to provide medical care to a dying person! If you've got a problem with that, you need to get your ass out of the medical profession entirely and go start a seminary.
IMANI GANDI - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Well, if I may, if I may play devil's advocate for a moment, because this is one of the things that I've been focusing on in the last couple of weeks.
There is a lot of daylight between what federal law requires, which is stabilizing treatment if a person's health is deteriorating, right? If the person's health is in serious jeopardy, you give them the abortion. Versus state law, like Idaho's law, which says you gotta be on death's door. Before we're going to give you the, an abortion, right?
It's the difference between state law saying abortion only protect the life of the pregnant person and federal law saying you get an abortion [01:53:00] to protect the health of a pregnant person. So I think what these doctors are saying is that there are these pregnant women, pregnant people who are coming into emergency rooms.
who don't really have emergency, they just feel some kind of way about their pregnancy. And so they're going in at the last minute and saying, Hey man, I kind of need an abortion right now. Can you help me out? And that's not how it's happening. But even if it were, even if there were a case, Where there is an abortion that might be needed to save the health, but if they didn't get the abortion, they wouldn't necessarily die.
How is it that that's where we're living? How is it that we are living in that gray area with these anti choice doctors and dentists saying, well, we don't want to have to make a quick judgment as to whether or not the abortion is needed to keep the person from dying. Versus to keep the person from having their health in serious jeopardy.
Why are we having that conversation?
ELIE MYSTAL: And it's also, as you point out, you already have a conscientious objection protection, right? So if you don't want to perform the abortion, don't, if you think that there's a, if you [01:54:00] think that it's a gray area and you're the kind of person who looks for gray areas to find a way to not give pregnant people medical care.
If you want to think there's a gray area, you don't have to scrim in there. There are, there are literally laws in place that PR that protect you. As the doctor from performing procedures that you do not morally feel are valid. So again, get your ass gone from the hospital and let somebody who's willing to help step in scrub in in your place.
That's the that's the rule already in place. You don't have to take away the entire abortion bill to protect your conscientious bigotry. In any event, as you pointed out, the Supreme Court didn't seem to go for it, and, and it really started with Neil Gorsuch, who, again, no fan of women, no fan of abortion rights, but just couldn't, couldn't deal with the standing issue.
Right. There's a really good reason why Neil Gorsuch can't deal with the standing issue. Because Neil Gorsuch understands that if you accept the standing issue here, then you have to accept the standing issue in a whole lot of [01:55:00] cases that Neil Gorsuch doesn't think you should have standing on. Right? The environmental standing issue, for instance, that Neil Gorsuch specifically brought up.
This is the James Ho, um, Doctors have standing because pregnant people are like wildlife and there are people who enjoy seeing just their round bellies and their glowing visages and they're deprived of the roundness of the belly. If, uh, people take I mean, this is Hozart, I'm not making this up. No, he's that's actually the argument.
This is the actual argument. So, Neil Gorsuch brought that up, and he was like, I don't agree with that! I think that's stupid. And of course, he thinks it's stupid because that argument has been used in the past not to control the bodies of women, but to Protect wildlife, right? It's a way that you stop polluters.
You say like, Hey, I like going to this national park. And when you dump oil all over it, you ruin my quote, aesthetic, you know, uh, uh, benefits. And that's an argument to sue [01:56:00] polluters. So Neil Dorsett doesn't want you to sue polluters. Right? He wants you to be able, he wants polluters to be able to destroy the environment, and if that means some pregnant people and or manatees have to be allowed to, you know, do what's necessary to protect their health, Neil Gorsuch is fine with that, right?
So, he was very against the standing argument. The, the real difficulty was Amy Coney Barrett to me. I mean, it was, I would say it was funny in this kind of macabre, gallows humor way. Because she's so Desperately wants to ban the abortion bill, right? You can hear it in her voice. She thinks it's wrong. She wants to get rid of it.
She couldn't get, she couldn't get over the standard. She kept coming back to the standing issue, just trying to find a way. And the Aaron Hawley couldn't get her there. Could just couldn't get her there. And every time Aaron Hawley slipped up. Oh, man, the, the. The best. I listened to the whole hour and a half of the argument.
Um, as I know you did listening to all four of the Supreme Court women [01:57:00] just dunk on Aaron Hawley was like life giving. It was like, it was always flipped up. Kagan, Jackson, so they were just on her ass like white on rice. It was, it was really nice to, to listen to, um, just, just to, just to deal with that ridiculousness.
So yeah, I don't think that Mephriston is going to be banned.
The IVF Decision We Should Have Seen Coming Part 2 - Amicus With Dahlia Litchwick - Air Date 3-2-24
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: This IVF conversation is not the problem. It's a manifestation of a problem that is sprawling that you and professor Roberts have written about for years. And I just want to be very. clear that one of the reasons we wanted you on the show is because the category error we made for years after Roe was talking about this as an abortion problem, we're falling into the adjacent category error of now having a conversation about IVF.
And you were always critical of the laser focus of groups like Planned Parenthood, who who were so focused on abortion that they [01:58:00] missed the trees, we're about to do the same thing. We're certainly doing it in the press around Alabama and IVF.
DR. MICHELE GOODWIN: That's right. Well, you know, as I've said for many years, that rights is a plural.
And yet the reproductive rights movement for decades basically had its eye on abortion and not on what would be all of the other spokes on the wheel that would convey rights. And just by comparison, if you think about the civil rights movement, what the people involved in it were so deeply concerned about was not just Brown v.
Board of Education. They didn't just sort of wipe their hands and say, Okay, Okay. Now we've reached the motherland. We don't have to care about employment and housing and accommodations and whether you can actually walk through the park in your neighborhood or swim in the pool in your neighborhood, all the myriad satellites.
We knew that civil rights [01:59:00] contained all of that. That was, it was deeply understood. And so we're talking about from the start, a flaw, a flaw in, in, uh, Conveying and conflating rights with just about abortion, and your point is well taken in terms of the wake of Alabama, this sense that, okay, now this is all about IVF, rather than the broader satellite of so many issues, the basic understanding, contraception, sex education, employment, et Economics, you know, it's interesting to think about the midterm elections and this sense that it was going to be this Republican tidal wave and that no one was thinking about abortion and it's about the economy, it's about gas prices, as if women don't buy gas.
As if women don't have to pick up the kids, pick up their parents, be a caregivers to others, commute all around town, as if women aren't concerned about economics, whether they are in a marital relationship, or they're single [02:00:00] and having to think about how do you make ends meet? How do you put food on the table?
How do you do all of these kinds of things? And then how do Keep yourself from being policed by child welfare services if you somehow slip and don't do it well and are thought of being negligent towards your kids because they don't have the newest clothes or shoes or because they don't have adequate funds for lunch money and all of these things.
Of course, women are thinking about these matters and what black women understood Good. And have intergenerationally for centuries, because let's be clear, what's been on the minds of people very recently pales in comparison to how long, how long Black women and Indigenous women have had to be confronted with these questions about family and reproduction.
From the very start and understanding that laws measuring [02:01:00] surveilling their reproduction were not matters that were new, but the very foundations of American law, which so many people don't really understand, and even in law schools, they don't grapple with. But the very first laws of the United States determining and How parenting would come about, that there would be this thing called matrilineity, that children would inherit the status of their mothers, and from the very start, a campaign that would say, you inherit the status of your mother, meaning that it doesn't matter who your father is, if your mom is an enslaved black woman, That will be your future.
It doesn't matter if your father is the owner of the plantation or owner of plantations. It doesn't matter if he's, you know, the owner of the big business of the railroad or any of those things, you will forever be fastened to her status. And then what that means in its real application, which was so denied, ridiculously denied, in the way in which we've addressed reproduction, and that is to say, [02:02:00] Thomas Jefferson famously wrote about on his plantation, he preferred for there to be women and girls rather than men because he said they were turning a profit every year or two.
And Dahlia, as we know, Thomas Jefferson was not talking about, Oh, black girls just pick cotton at a more feverish rate than do black boys and black men. He wasn't talking about black women are better with rice and sugar cane than it would be black men. He wasn't talking about, Oh, they're just so sturdy in how they handle tobacco.
Thomas Jefferson was conveying to other politicians and other planters in writing, which you can find at the Monticello website. He was conveying this as a means to show that forced reproduction imposed on black women and girls was something that was profitable and that would render profit to people who would follow this advice that he was giving.
But he was not alone. We see these histories written everywhere. out in the advertisements of the [02:03:00] 1700s and the 1800s, and there they are, you know, when people are advertising unabashedly to sell their breeding wenches who are 12 and 13 years old. Well, what makes someone a breeding wench? How does she get to be a breeding wench at 12 and 13 years old?
when they're advertising for the return of The breeding wench who was 14 that escaped with her two year old daughter, Maria, who's mulatto. What does that mean? Our failure to understand and piece together, here is this history that is telling us so much about the lengths to which people will go in order to exert power, in order to capitalize off of the reproduction or lack of power, associated with reproduction of the most vulnerable in our society.
And I just wanted to share that to give more context so that we're not just navel gazing at the matters of the moment, but that rather to [02:04:00] understand a legal history that dates back centuries. And to understand then the social and cultural milieus and practices that allowed those legal histories to maintain and persist over time.
Will SCOTUS Slam the Door Shut on Pregnant ER Patients Part 2 - BOOM! Lawyered - Air Date 4-24-24
IMANI GANDI - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Can we talk about Sam Alito? Just like Do we have to? I mean, I know we have to, but yes, we have to. First of all, you know, going back to the spending clause, he was nitpicking the spending clause. Like he'd never even heard of it before. Like at one point he literally just sort of threw up his hand and says, I don't understand the theory.
After you said on Twitter that the solicitor general went all schoolhouse rock on him. Like she explained to him what the spending clause is. And this dude just was like, I don't understand the theory and then wanted to move on to something else. And what was that? Something else? Personhood. Fetal personhood.
Fetal personhood. The Amtala Statute. Talks about a quote unborn child. It talks about a pregnant woman or her unborn child. If a pregnant woman walks into an emergency [02:05:00] room, they may not be having a personal crisis or a health crisis that is going to affect their health. But their unborn child, for example, I believe one of the examples was a prolapsed umbilical cord, for example, that threatens the health of the quote unborn child, but not the health of the person.
That's why that language is in there. It's. to protect the patient who wants to be able to go into a, into an emergency and know that their health is going to be taken care of and the health of their quote, unborn child is going to be taken care of. But Alito seems to think that because the phrase unborn child Appears in the statute that the statute somehow embraces personhood.
Yeah. Doesn't that tell us something? That's what he asked. Doesn't that tell us something that the, that the phrase unborn child is used? What does that tell us, Jess?
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: It tell us that Sam Alito is a jamoke and a political operative on the court who is paving the way for a future personhood argument to be made directly to [02:06:00] these conservatives.
Because yeah, Emtala does have the phrase unborn child in it. It also has the phrase active labor in case. Justice Alito was concerned. And as the Solicitor General made very clear, this is where medical standards of care come in and direct what happens to a patient in emergency situations, right? And I think this point is, is so important.
If a patient comes in and they are presenting with an emergency, And their pregnancy happens to be beyond the point of fetal viability, then the standard of care is to induce labor, right? Like this is not abortion up to the point of birth, which is the point that Sam Alito is trying to make also, right?
Like that point was very clear. And then absolutely laying breadcrumbs for the conservative legal movement in terms of how to define a fetus as an [02:07:00] individual under, say, for example, the Dictionary act, which I literally almost had my head explode in that exchange as a way to square with other lots, right?
And other statutes. So there's that. And then there was also that weird hypothetical that Amy Coney Barrett offered up with a patient. who would need abortion care at 15 weeks, which I felt was a really big tell as well, as that's currently the public facing position of, uh, conservative and Republican operatives on a national abortion ban, that this is the reasonable position.
Well, you know, Amy Coney Barrett just floated that trial balloon in the middle of these arguments as well. And I mean, Preligar was just. Such a professional, right? She's like, no, if Congress wanted to expand protections explicitly to say you always treat the developing pregnancy no matter what, they would have named the fetus as an individual and they didn't.
Like, can we move on here? But Sam would not move on.
IMANI GANDI - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: You would not move on. [02:08:00] I mean, it's just, I, it, I can imagine that he feels emasculated intellectually by Prelogar. I mean, it just, in all of their interactions across cases, he, it seems like he's like, yeah, yeah, put me in coach, put me in coach. I'm going to get her this time.
And then he says some ridiculous shit and she always has a very calm, a very measured, a very smart response.
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Right, right. And like the Idaho attorney general, what a sleeper. Right. Of an argument like that. He I mean snooze zero charisma. Not that I want this to be like all razzle dazzle necessarily, but man, and I mean I don't know.
I just I felt like In general the personhood argument. We knew it was gonna come up But it's not like it just came up once, right? Sam Alito went back to it again. And each time he went back to it after getting pretty severely [02:09:00] intellectually smacked around by Preligar on constitutional principles. Yeah,
IMANI GANDI - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: yeah.
And I do want to point out, not to keep going back to this unborn child thing, but you know, the Attorney General for Idaho, uh, said, you know, well, wouldn't it have been weird for Congress to amend this statute to require care for the unborn child, regardless of what's going on with the mother, it would be weird.
He kept saying weird for Congress who have regard for the unborn child, but then mandate termination of the unborn child. And preloger nailed her response in that Congress wanted to make sure that if a pregnant person presented with a problem with her unborn born child, then that care would be provided to her.
And or her unborn child, depending on who needed the care, but the care offered to the quote unborn child flows through the person carrying it, right? It flows through the pregnant person, right? It's a pregnant person who decides whether or not to terminate the fetus doesn't get to like Punch an arm through the stomach and like put a thumbs up or a thumbs down, [02:10:00] but that's just not how it works, and I find it so frustrating, and it seemed like the Solicitor General did too, because she kept making that point over and over because these ding dongs on the bench either didn't get it or were willfully being obtuse, and it's probably the latter.
SECTION C: THE REPUBLICAN COURT WE’VE ALL WAITED FOR
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached section C the Republican court we've all waited for.
Way Too Close Insane SCOTUS Case Could've Sunk The Country w Mark Joseph Stern Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 5-26-24
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Well, I
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: just wanted to briefly sort of wrap on the CFPB thing if I can, because I think that's a really good point. So like the what happens is it's these payday lenders who are challenging the CFPB because they want to um, Put these extortionist loans out and collect all this interest and screw people over.
So the housing industry, which is like not a bleeding hard industry, let's be clear, like housing, housing people and bankers come into the Supreme Court and they're like, Hey, we also don't really like the CFPB because sometimes it like finds us. But we just want to let you know that CFPB and they told us to the Fifth Circuit to with the Fifth Circuit didn't care.
The CFPB actually provides what we call safe harbor protections for housing lenders and builders. [02:11:00] So if you sort of follow these basic rules and you are sued, uh, and you're a housing lender, you can rely on the CFPBs protection to fight away that lawsuit to fight over legal liability. If that is taken away, which is what would happen if the CFPB is struck down, lenders would not lend anymore.
Okay? Because they would be subject to Endless litigation and liability for anything they do across all 50 states. There would be no federal umbrella protection. Lenders would stop lending, which means that builders would stop building, which means that both the loan and construction part of the housing industry would dry up entirely.
The banking industry, of course, relies on that aspect of lending to keep its own assets going. So the banking industry would likely tip over into a collapse like 2008, which would set off almost certainly a global recession. This is not hypothetical. This is one of the key features of the CFPB that we don't talk about enough.
It wasn't just protecting consumers from payday lenders and all that stuff. It was [02:12:00] shoring up the industry so that it could have a set of rules that would prevent a collapse like Oh eight. And so if Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch, who are the two dissenters in this case, If they had gotten their way, if they had destroyed the CFPB, we would not be having a conversation right now.
We would be running to our banks to withdraw as much money as possible to stash under our beds because this case was quite literally a direct challenge to America's ability to maintain a functioning economy in 2024.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Uh, it's a good lesson too. If, uh, if you have a cousin or a little brother who is a libertarian, Ask them how we work that out, uh, between our own separate private judiciaries, uh, that would, uh, deal with.
Um, uh, you know, lawsuits against lenders in that instance, but all right, so let's move to, uh, Louisiana, this, um, this, uh, case was about, um, and [02:13:00] you know, it really makes you think like maybe there should be some type of thing like called preclearance. It's with a voting rights act, uh, where maybe, uh, people couldn't mess around with, uh, gerrymandering and what, but, um, putting that aside, uh, this is, um, there was back in 2022, a, um, an Obama appointee, um, for the district court of the middle district of Louisiana.
Uh, there was an illegal racial gerrymander. And so, uh, this is that's where we were in 2022. Um, uh, black voters in, uh, uh, Louisiana make up something like, um, uh, was a 40 percent of voters. And, uh, there was only one out of six or one out of, um, uh, congressional, uh, districts where they were a majority. So they were clearly.
Something was going on there that [02:14:00] diminished, um, black people's voting power.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: So, so right. And so the Supreme Court famously then issued that decision last term that sort of revived the Voting Rights Act and said, actually racial gerrymandering is still bad. And so the district court judge there was vindicated.
And the Louisiana legislature was ordered to redraw its map. So the Louisiana legislature draws a map with a second district that has a near majority of black people. So now you have a map that looks, you know, significantly more like the racial breakdown of the state. You've got two districts that are likely to elect black representatives.
So what happens then? Well, A group of conservatives then go to court and say this new map, which is ostensibly fairer and compliant with the Voting Rights Act, is actually unconstitutional under the equal protection clause because the new district is just too black. There are too many black people receiving too much representation in this new district.
So we think it has to be [02:15:00] struck down. They are lucky enough to draw a court and We don't have to get into the details, but it's actually a three judge court that two of the judges are trump appointees and the two trump appointees are essentially trolling the Supreme Court here. They step in and they strike down the mouth and they say, you know what?
This is just too much power for black voters. We can't accept this. This is a race based redistricting decision. And so even though we're less than a year out from the Supreme Court saying that these kind of districts are actually required by federal law, it's We're going to say that this one is unconstitutional, and everybody scrambles up to the Supreme Court to get an answer because, of course, elections in Louisiana are not that far away, and they sort of need to know what maps they're going to be using.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Now, my understanding is that part of the argument, and there was an Alabama case, right, that had basically made, supposedly made this moot on some level, um, that the Supreme Court had issued on. But my understanding is, is that the, um, The the plaintiffs here were [02:16:00] arguing that the the districts were not compact enough that one of the one of the one of the elements of redistricting is sort of just like a general principle is that you want the districts to be as as compact as possible as opposed to I guess there's one in Louisiana that sort of like.
Is a thin one that runs almost like the entire length of the state in the middle, almost like it was like a spine in some way. Um, and that's, was their basis of their argument. And that, um, it, In shooting that down, the Supreme Court is opening the door for other types of like sort of gerrymander hijinks.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: So compactness is Something that the Supreme Court has called a traditional factor of redistricting But it's not an iron law because another factor that's key is something called communities of interest so let's say that there's Here's a sort of micro example. [02:17:00] There's a big Caribbean community outside of D.
C. In one particular part of Maryland, right? The way that they have organized their lives and businesses and whatever is not into a compact district, but they're placed in the same state senatorial district that looks a little funky because they're deemed a community of interest in the state felt that they should elect a representative who could represent their interest or a state senator.
So that is sort of the other feature that's intention with the compactness. issue. Um, and in this case, a big fight was, well, can you sort of collect black communities in a district and say their communities of interest and, uh, put them in a district that looks a little bit funky? Or is the district so weird looking and so contrived that it's obviously unconstitutional.
And I think this district was very different from the one in Alabama that the Supreme Court struck down. Okay. The district in Alabama that was struck down, it was like this snake that went around and sucked. up every black community that it could [02:18:00] and was designed to prevent black people from living anywhere else so that it could just be this one deeply black district and everybody else could be in their own lily white district.
The Louisiana district was different. It did have a majority black population. It did look a little bit funky. I think that the state legislature, and I don't really want to give it to them because, you know, these were sort of cynical Republicans, but I think they were trying to follow, for the most part, the court's order, the original court's order, which was that your districts are not giving black people representation in the congressional delegation.
You have to draw another one that will boost their representation. And so these are the two sort of, like, These are the two polls against which all redistricting law has to go through. And it's sometimes difficult to see if one is veering too far one way or the other. Does that make sense?
Elie Mystal on Why You Don't Need to Like SCOTUS Anymore Part 2 - Boom! Lawyered - Air Date 4-12-24
IMANI GANDI - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: So, you know, we've established that Sam Alito just, you know, DGAF, right? He does not care. But Roberts was supposed to be the guy that cared. Right. You know, he's the guy [02:19:00] during his confirmation hearing talking about, Oh, my job is just to call balls and strikes. Like what happened to that guy?
What happened to the guy who was concerned about the legitimacy of the court? Like, what do you think is going through Robert's mind right now? Because he's presiding over the most lawless and anti democratic Supreme Court. And he was the guy who was supposed to be the upstanding, like sensible conservative.
ELIE MYSTAL: No, Roberts is getting exactly what he wanted. He's not getting it in the way that he wanted it, but he's getting exactly what he wanted it. And I look at Roberts vis a vis the more extremist version of Republicans on the Supreme Court. And the same way that I look at kind of the Republican party. Vis a vis Donald Trump, Donald Trump brings Republicans victory.
Donald Trump does what Republicans have always wanted to do. Policy wise, there is almost no difference between Donald Trump and Mitt Romney. [02:20:00] The difference is breeding. The difference is grooming. The difference is that Mitt Romney wants all those same things without calling people rapists and murderers, without literally raping people, without grabbing them by the pee.
Like, Mitt Romney wants the same things, he just doesn't need to fuck Stormy Daniels to get it, right? But their conclusion is the same. And people forget that about the Republicans. Donald Trump is nothing if not a standard issue freaking Republican policy person. He just does it with, you know, increased racism and misogyny and idiocy and danger and
IMANI GANDI - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: whatever.
He's their id. He's the Republican id. Right?
ELIE MYSTAL: That is how I think Roberts views Alito or Thomas, um, or, or, or Gorsuch, right? They get to the same point. How they get there, completely different. Yeah. And Robert wants to get there slowly, [02:21:00] incrementally. Robert wants to boil the lobster, right? Raise the temperature slowly and slowly until the lobster is cooked, and it doesn't even know what happened, right?
Alito just wants to stab it with a knife. He's just like, Give me that lobster! He's just, Ah! Right? He's just, Right. He wants to crack the lobster. Roberts wants to slowly boil the lobster, but in the end, they're eating your rights. Like, in the end, they're coming for you. They just are coming from you from two different angles.
So I think that's the thing. What is interesting about Roberts? And I think this also goes for Barrett to some extent. Um, The 5th Circuit is a problem for them. Because, right, the, like, there are conclusions that those alleged moderates want, and then there's the 5th Circuit, which is in straight off the chain YOLO mode.
And it just, the 5th Circuit is just embarrassing them. At this point, right? Because the fifth circuit is [02:22:00] thinks that it's I've made the analogy and one of my pieces for the nation that the fifth circuit basically downloaded the FedSoc, the FedSoc app. But doesn't quite know how to use it, so they're just kind of like spitting out the conclusions, but they're doing it in this torturous, embarrassing, stupid, legal way.
And Roberts, and to some extent Barrett, are trying to like clean up just the, just the refuse that the Fifth Circuit keeps dumping. On their desk while preserving the very evil and disastrous outcomes of the fifth circuit is trying to get. That's why you had the, uh, the, the judge shopping thing from the judicial conference, which, you know, and if people don't understand the judicial conference is made up of chief justice, John Roberts, chief justices of the various circuit court courts, some district courts, and it's like some retired judges.
It is John Roberts, his mouthpiece. The judicial conference is John Roberts trying to make rules for [02:23:00] the entire federal judiciary. So when the judicial conference says, we're going to stop this drug shopping thing, we're going to stop Matthew Kazmaric, we're going to stop the emperor of Amarillo. That's John Roberts being like, I am sick of y'all.
Like y'all need to chill. Right. But of course, what's the fifth circuit do? What does the Northern District of Texas do? Yeah, Judicial Conference, go sit on it. Right. Right. They literally told the Judicial Conference that they just weren't going to follow the, the new guidelines. And since the Judicial Conference is just an advisory board, it's not Congress, they can do that, right?
So like, that's, that's the inter, that's the push pull within the Republican caucus. They, uh, on the Supreme Court and in the federal judiciary. All of the Republican appointed just, justices in generally want the same things. There's just a sense of how we go about getting those same things with one wing or Roberts, a Barrett kind of more [02:24:00] interested in getting those things the right way.
And, uh, the, the Alitos and the James Hoes and the Matthew Kaczmarek's being like, you know, let's just do it and be legends right there. It's a fire festival versus the Burning Man version of the same thing.
Way Too Close Insane SCOTUS Case Could've Sunk The Country w Mark Joseph Stern Part 3 - The Majority Report - Air Date 5-26-24
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: The whole
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: thing is poison pills. It's a giant poison pill. Either the Supreme Court now uses that principle to block progressive decisions. You know, say that a judge says that some absentee voting restrictions are unconstitutional. The Supreme Court is going to use the same rule to block that decision and say it's too close to an election.
You can't make it easier for people to vote. And then this whole case is just a mess because like I was saying, you've got this legitimate interest in boosting black representation in Congress and boosting, you know, the But the proportional representation of black voters, but at the same time, you've got this concern about districts that are sort of contrived to ensure that only black people live in them.
And you've got to navigate between those two things. [02:25:00] Republicans are really, really good at sort of scheming to make every district that's too black, look like it's unconstitutional and make districts that are too white look like they're just fine.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Uh, and, you know, if I'm, uh, in a Republican dominated, uh, state.
I'm just gonna wait until we're eight months out from an election to say no more, uh, mail in ballots, no more, uh, we're closing half of the, uh, polling stations, and then I know I'm protected. And I can do that every year. Back
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: in the day, before Shelby County, you couldn't. You had to run everything by the Justice Department, but now preclearance is over so you can do whatever you want.
And yes, the legislature can change the rules just before an election, but the judiciary can't step in to block them, even if they're patently unconstitutional.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Wonderful. Um, Uh, let's talk about, um, uh, Sam Alito. Um, the, uh, back in the [02:26:00] day when Scalia was still alive, we used to call Alito, Scalito. And uh, one of the hallmarks of, uh, Anthony Scalia was that he like particularly towards the end of his, uh, his, his career was writing his opinions.
More or less sound like he cribbed him from, uh, right wing talk radio. Yeah. And, uh, it seems like, uh, skeletal is really, really worthy of the name at this point.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: Uh, I would say that Sam Alito has always been worse than Scalia. You know, Scalia had a period from like the eighties through the sort of mid aughts when he had this strong judicial philosophy and included things like deference to administrative agencies, by the way, that was coherent and didn't necessarily exclusively tow the Republican line and jurist to watch.
I think starting around 2005, he started to sort of lose his mind or get brain Poisoned by Fox News. And late stage Scalia was indeed [02:27:00] an embarrassment. Um, but he had that phase where he had a real philosophy. Sam Alito has never had a real judicial philosophy. His only philosophy is whatever Republicans want to do, they get to do whatever Democrats get to do.
They can't. He has always been a partisan hack. I mean, by far, he has the most partisan voting record. And so I'm not surprised that he and his wife, Martha, and by the way, is a big, anti abortion advocate and very big in the sort of conservative Catholic circles in D. C. that the two of them run in. I wasn't surprised that they did this thing.
flag upside down thing. I think they were entirely aware that it was a symbol for stop the steal. I think both of them absolutely believe the 2020 election is stolen. And I think there's a direct link between those personal views at home and Alito's own judicial writings and decisions, which are consistently attempting to call into question the integrity of the 2020 election.
And we'll probably try to call into question the 2024 election as well.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I mean, you read the New York Times article on it, and it's, it's unambiguous as you say, Mark, right, this is [02:28:00] involving a dispute that, uh, he allegedly had with one of his neighbors because they had a sign that was critical of Trump that had an expletive on it, and then he responded in this manner, but like Dick Durbin is now saying, NBC News reporting today, Okay.
that they're not going to take up the matter and look into it in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Like, why does it stop here? Is it, is it politicking? Is it an election year? Because there should have been even more robust probes into Clarence Thomas, and now we're not even going to look into this, even though we're talking about How democracy is on the ballot.
It's pretty, pretty bad politics at a base level.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: And I don't even need to ask, like, what if Katonji Brown, Jackson's husband did something similar to this, like Republicans would actively march to her house with pitchforks. There's a huge double standard here. And I think it shows that even well over a year out from the Clarence Thomas.
bombshell reporting by ProPublica about his billionaire benefactors and donors and all that stuff. Uh, Senate Democrats are still not playing [02:29:00] hardball at all when it comes to the judiciary. They're not even playing softball. They're not even playing. They're not playing. They're not playing at all. They just packed up their toys and went home.
They are scared of these justices for no good reason. Right? Like the Democratic base is not exactly a fan of Justice Alito or Justice Thomas, but senators are, for some reason, terrified of the repercussions of, say, calling them before the Senate Judiciary Committee, asking a few basic questions like, do you think the 2020 election was stolen?
Um, or did you accept a huge amount of money to rule in favor of your best friend? They are, uh, I think not up for the job. They are not the, the men and women for this moment. It's specifically the men, people like Dick Durbin, I'll say. Um, and, uh, it's hopefully a lesson for future Democratic Senates if they exist, don't put moderate squishes who are into conciliation in charge of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
This is about the worst place that Dick Durbin could be in the Senate. [02:30:00] If someone like Sheldon Whitehouse were in that seat, it would be a lot different. But Democrats decided they wanted to be conciliatory. Right. And so this is the path they've chosen the path of doing nothing.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: We should also say that, um, there was a report, um, to yesterday that, uh, that Alito sold Bud Lightstock as a, in the wake of, um, uh, of the, um, the, the, I guess the, the hullabaloo over Dylan Mulvaney.
Um, He sold his stock and bought cores or something like, you know, um,
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: by the way, it should not be owning individual stocks, owning, selling, whatever it's like he, he and Roberts are the only ones who do that. The other ones have it in a blind trust. He and Roberts are the only ones who can be like, yes. Bud Light, they have a transgender spokeswoman on Instagram.
Time for me to sell [02:31:00] off this stock and buy some court. Like the fact that that's even possible for a Supreme Court justice is in itself pretty insane.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Um, it is amazing to me that we're not having hearings on this. I mean, it is so obvious, uh, from the reporting and the hearings should just be like, we're just going to invite the reporters.
We will invite the justices to come and defend themselves if they want. Uh, they won't come, but let's hear this story. Because Clarence Thomas clearly basically said, I'm going to quit the court unless, uh, I get some type of financial support. And then all of a sudden, He's introduced by, uh, Leonard Leo, uh, to a billionaire and now they're best friends.
Um, that's a great story. And I mean, I imagine, you know, the Alito is probably not best friends with a billionaire, but there's a couple of billionaires who like him and, uh, you know, [02:32:00] subsidizing his flagpoles or whatever it is. This is just, it is. Crazy how the Democrats, Dick Durbin in particular, and Leahy was the same, are refusing to acknowledge what's going on there.
It's almost like It's, it is, it's, it is the highest form of denial that I think could possibly exist. I mean, they're on
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: the judiciary committee. That's what their job is. I think that the dream of an impartial court that majestically dispenses equal justice to all is a narcotic. And these guys are still addicted to it.
After all these years, they're still addicted and it's gonna take something even bigger. bigger to shatter that. Honestly, if Bush v Gore didn't shatter it, I don't really know what was. Maybe we just have to wait for a new generation that doesn't have the scales on their eyes. But I truly think that these, these senators have just grown up and built their identities around this notion that the Supreme Court is so majestic it can't be touched.
And even as it corrupts itself [02:33:00] and falls into disarray and shame, These senators are essentially propping it up through their inactions rather than launching real investigations that they have power under law to do.
Will These SCOTUS Justices End American Democracy - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 5-31-24
THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: It's what, what to do about Sam Alito is the question here. Jamie Raskin published a piece in the New York Times yesterday, uh, suggesting that there are a couple of things that can be done about Alito and Thomas refusing to recuse themselves. Uh, the first is, and he points out, is that there is a law which applies to the Supreme Court.
It says, you know, it, it, it refers to all federal judges, well all judges in fact, and, and it says, and I quote, any judge, any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned. Now the law says any justice.
The only federal judges who are called justices, and this is a federal law, [02:34:00] are on the Supreme Court, so this clearly refers to the Supreme Court. So, if Alito and Thomas impartiality can reasonably be questioned by, for example, having their wife involved in an insurrection attempt against the United States, or flying the flag of the insurrection attack, uh, attempt, excuse me, then, These justices are in violation of the law, so what do we do about that?
Merrick Garland, the, uh, the, uh, Attorney General of the United States, can prosecute them. He can charge them with a crime, with a violation of this law, and he should. Now, you know, Raskin is saying, oh yeah, he can do this, I'm, you know, of course you and I both know that, you know, Merrick Garland has the spine of a jellyfish, this, this ain't gonna happen.
He's, he's terrified of Republicans. Or he's one of them. I mean, who knows? When, when [02:35:00] Barack Obama wanted to put somebody non controversial on the Supreme Court, he went to, to the, uh, senator from Utah, Warren Hatch, and said, you know, who will be acceptable to Republicans? And Orrin Hatch said, well, Merrick Garland's a good guy.
And Orrin Hatch is a hardcore right winger. So, you know, there you go. But, so, number one, that could happen. And number two, Jamie Raskin's other suggestion is that the other seven justices on the court could simply get together and say, hey guys, knock it off. You guys, you have to recuse yourselves. We're not going to put up with this.
Chief Justice Roberts could order it. But again, you know, That would require a majority of the right wing justices on the court who, uh, you know, and, and three of them are on their, on their inappropriately at the very least, illegitimately at the most, to take on their two right wing colleagues, and that ain't gonna happen.
I mean, we can dream, [02:36:00] I'd love to see Alito and Thomas prosecuted. You know, have, have, uh, have, uh, the DOJ appoint a special prosecutor. But I'm not holding my breath.
SECTION D: SCOTUS IS A FLAWED SYSTEM
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now section D SCOTUS is a flawed system.
Delegitimize The Court Part 2 - Contempt of Court with Elie Mystal - Air Date 8-22-23
ELIE MYSTAL - HOST, CONTEMPT OF COURT: What does it mean on the ground? to delegitimize the court, to strip the court of its supremacist function, right? Because a lot, let's put it like this, a lot of this podcast, a lot of my work is focused on court reform and specifically court expansion, right?
Yeah. And that's great. That's fun. I think that that would work, but it fundamentally, you know, Kind of presupposes the idea that these nine, or in my case, 29 or 30, however many you want, justices do have some kind of overarching, controlling role of our society, and I'm trying to kind of change the kinds of people who get to make those decisions.
But that's not really delegitimizing the court. That's rearranging the deck chairs so they stop stabbing me in the face on the way down. Right. One of the reasons why I like [02:37:00] your work is that even as simple as like, you, you don't talk about these people in the kind of genuflecting tones, um, that a lot of us have been trained to kind of talk about the justices.
But beyond kind of rhetoric, what does delegitimization mean? actually look like when it's applied to this court?
RHIANNON HAMAM: Yeah, I have two thoughts and I think both of them come from my background and readings as a prison abolitionist, right? In prison abolition, when we're talking about abolishing the prison industrial complex, we are talking first, you know, people ask, well, how do you get rid of prisons, right?
How do you de legitimize the Supreme Court? It's a co equal branch of government in the constitution, right? What, what you're thinking about actually in terms of at least in the short term, um, is shrinking its power. You know, court expansion does not abolish the Supreme Court, right? But what it does is shrink individual justices power.
So it's not only about changing who is making the decisions on the court, which is extremely important, but [02:38:00] it's also about making sure John Roberts, Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, right? That they don't have the outweighed Disproportionate massive amount of power that they have over the institution right now.
So that that goes to shrinking power, right? Other structural reform proposals, things like jurisdiction stripping, right? That also shrinks the power of the Supreme Court. That is towards a what I would call sort of an abolitionist goal that is towards a delegitimization process structurally of the Supreme Court as we have it now.
Now, another idea that I have that really comes from prison abolition as well, and I think speaks to your question about like, what does this look like on the ground? Okay. So for normal people in my community, right, teachers and doctors and bus drivers, right? How are they thinking about the Supreme Court and how do we de legitimize the Supreme Court in their minds and in their lives?
You know, something I've learned from prison abolition also is [02:39:00] about, The power of imagination, the system that we have does not have to be this way, we are capable of imagining a legal system that is truly about equality and justice for all. And we have the power to think about how we want that structure to look right.
So it's about building people power, but I actually have a few examples of this happening. Already. Okay. One example is in the reproductive justice space. So Dobbs, of course, overturned Roe v. Wade last year. Many states across the country soon, uh, banned abortion, but there are a few things that people are doing on the ground that, uh, basic.
Can we curse on this podcast? Yes. We
ELIE MYSTAL - HOST, CONTEMPT OF COURT: have the
RHIANNON HAMAM: explicit tag
ELIE MYSTAL - HOST, CONTEMPT OF COURT: all ready to fucking
RHIANNON HAMAM: go. Right. Okay. But there are a few things, massive impact that community organizations are having right now that say fuck Dobbs. Fuck your Supreme Court, [02:40:00] right? In state legislatures, five states, including Colorado and Massachusetts, I believe, have passed SHIELD laws to protect healthcare providers in their states who provide any healthcare that is legally protected in that state, which includes prescribing and sending abortion pills to anyone in the United States, right?
That's an example of state lawmakers acting, saying, You know what? Okay, Dobbs says what it says. We're going to do what we can do that circumvents that is around and outside the scope of that awful ruling and then community support networks. I talked about people power, right? They are now providing free abortion bills to people living in states with abortion bans.
You know, dozens of companies offer abortion pills now at low cost online, some less than 50. Delivery is within a few days. That is because groups said, fuck the Supreme Court, we don't care what they say. We're going to support people making reproductive choices for themselves, their families. their communities, no matter what [02:41:00] the law says.
We operate outside of this. The Supreme Court does not speak for me, right? Um, I think there's another example in the case of student loan debt. There's a great organization called the Debt Collective. I read a wonderful book published by them called Can't Pay, Won't Pay, The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition.
Ooh. They're, they're, yeah. Um, you know, their stance, they have written the model, uh, executive order for President Biden, their stance, even after the student loan debt case where the Supreme Court said, um, that 10,
ELIE MYSTAL - HOST, CONTEMPT OF COURT: 000 for everybody. Yeah.
RHIANNON HAMAM: Stole 10, 000 from everybody. That's right. Uh, the debt collective says President Biden could cancel all student loan debt today with an executive order.
He could do that today. And then what? Right. What's the Supreme Court going to do about that? Right. I don't accept your decision, Supreme Court. Thank you so much. We are operating outside of the scope of power, the scope of authority that you think you have. [02:42:00] Labor organizing, I think, is another really good example of this people power delegitimizing the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has played a massive role in weakening unions. You know, ever since the passage of the NLRA, right? But you get workers acting collectively, you know, uh, I'm just thinking about the recent UPS workers threatening a strike, right? You get workers acting collectively. Corporations do not have a choice.
The people's power Is way too massive, right? Our economic power together outside of the legal system outside of the structure of judicial supremacy is where the power lies and is where I think we would do well to connect that we are delegitimizing the power of the Supreme Court when we are organizing in these ways.
Way Too Close Insane SCOTUS Case Could've Sunk The Country w Mark Joseph Stern Part 4 - The Majority Report - Air Date 5-26-24
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Okay. So walk us through for people to understand how our federal judiciary works. Because I said 200 judges, you said not the circuit court because we were talking about the federal district courts. Um, and what, what's the difference?
Just walk [02:43:00] us through the different hierarchies and how a case makes it to the Supreme Court.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: Yeah, so for the vast majority of cases, a lawsuit or complaint is filed in a federal district court. The federal district judge in that court gets to oversee the case, issue a decision. In theory, cases are supposed to be randomly assigned to these judges.
By law, in fact, cases are randomly assigned to one judge on the court. So even though it's called the Northern District of Texas, for instance, that's one court, it has a bunch of different judges who sit on it. But what these judges have done is put themselves in what are called single judge divisions.
So they'll set themselves up in places like Amarillo, Texas, or Wichita Falls, Texas, where they are the only federal judge in that geographic area. and they will invite litigators to walk into their courthouse and file a case, which is then not randomly assigned to any judge within that district court, but assigned directly to them.
That is what Matthew Kaczmarek keeps doing. He just recently, by the way, blocked the new [02:44:00] law that Congress enacted and directed Biden to implement that closed the gun show loophole. Um, so this is still very much happening. whatever that judge does, it then gets appealed to the court of appeals that oversees those courts.
So here for texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, that is the fifth U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The vast majority of cases, something like 99 percent of cases, they End at the Court of Appeals, right? The Supreme Court is lazy. The Supreme Court only takes like 60 cases a year. Even Brett Kavanaugh says that that is a ridiculously low load and he's right.
So most of these cases are just ending at the circuit courts and the circuit courts therefore get to make most of the law in the country. Even if a circuit court gets it wrong, it might not be a decade, even 20 years until the Supreme Court steps in to reverse it. The Supreme Court can take its sweet time.
So this is how we just to be clear.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: You could have one set of laws, essentially, in the 5th Circuit, and another one in [02:45:00] the 8th Circuit, or, uh, the 4th Circuit.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: Correct. And that is when the Supreme Court's supposed to step in. We call that a circuit split, but again, the Supreme Court has gotten kind of lazy, or gun shy, or something, and it hasn't been resolving those splits.
So, we have very different law in different parts of the country, and that is It's especially true when it comes to immigration law because the Ninth Circuit oversees California and it's very liberal and the Fifth Circuit oversees Texas and it's extremely conservative. So basically migrants who come in through Texas have a much lower chance of being able to vindicate their rights under law, like the right to seek asylum and have a credible fear of persecution hearing if they come in through Texas than in California.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And we should say the reason why, uh, the Fifth Circuit. Texas, Louisiana, um, uh, Mississippi and Mississippi versus, um, uh, the, the, the circuit, uh, the California circuit is because the senators nominate from these states [02:46:00] nominate these people to the, uh, that court. And if they don't want, um, if they have a problem or, or they suggest, I should say, Uh, to the white house, the white house then nominates those people.
But if they have a problem with it, they withhold their blue slip. And of course, only Democrats now when they're chairing the judiciary committee recognize that tradition. When the Republicans come in, blue slips are no longer effective.
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: That's exactly right. For, for circuit court judges especially. And so when Trump came in, uh, McConnell was like, we're not doing this.
We are stacking the courts of appeals because Mitch McConnell better than anyone understands that you don't have to win elections if you can just capture the courts. They will do everything for you. Um, and so McConnell held open or directed Texas as senators to hold open seats on the fifth circuit under Obama.
So when Trump came in, it wasn't just that some judges strategically retired that they did. It was that there were vacancies awaiting Trump [02:47:00] because Republican senators had used the blue slip process to keep those seats open and ensure that a democratic president wouldn't be able to fill them. That's why.
Today, the Fifth Circuit has this lopsided majority of sort of, I call them judicial arsonists, judicial nihilists. They're a combination of Trump appointees and insane appointees of previous Republican presidents who have sort of banded together to be the vanguard of the new conservative rights.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And they're, they're, uh, I mean, It's likely it seems to me that if Donald Trump gets into office and, uh, has a, um, uh, a seat or two available on the Supreme Court, the Fifth Circuit's going to have a, uh, uh, there's going to be a nominee from that, that circuit, right?
MARK JOSEPH STERN - WRITER, SLATE: Yeah. So that's the other thing that's going on here. A lot of odd things. Judges on the Fifth Circuit appointed by Trump all think they're going to be the next Supreme Court appointee under a Republican president, probably Trump 2. 0. So we have people like Jim Ho, who is, uh, going [02:48:00] out there doing this tour, talking about how So Judge shopping is amazing.
It's the best thing ever that it's horrible that anyone would ever oppose it. He talks about abortion as this moral tragedy. He condemns like abortionists all the time. He talks about how liberals want to bring the woke constitution into effect and we need like these brave conservative warriors for the judiciary to stop them.
I mean, he's like a Fox news talking head, similar thing with Andrew Oldham, similar thing with Kyle Duncan. These are the Trump appointees who go out there. They are the ones. Boycotting Columbia. They say they won't hire law students as clerks from Columbia because of the protests. They're the ones who go on TV, go to sort of student groups and shout at them and say things like, you know, you're all woke liberals.
Uh, they are auditioning to get a seat under the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court might. Try to send these signals to them too subtly, in my view, that they should rein it in. But to them, that just proves they're doing a good job because universally, I think at this point, like the thought [02:49:00] leaders of the Republican legal right think that Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch were all mistakes and that they need to do better next time.
Delegitimize The Court Part 3 - Contempt of Court with Elie Mystal - Air Date 8-22-23
ELIE MYSTAL - HOST, CONTEMPT OF COURT: I want to jump right in to the question of The Supreme Court's power. How is the Supreme Court so powerful? How did we get here and how do we ever get away from it? I think
NIKOLAS BOWIE: one way of getting at the question is thinking about when has the Supreme Court disagreed with Congress about the constitutionality of one of its laws.
And so the way in which a lot of law professors have answered that question is by looking at Marbury versus Madison in 1803. And that case is often cited as. It's the origin of the Supreme Court's power of judicial review, and the Court said it's emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.
But one funny thing, there are a few funny things about that as an origin story. I think the most interesting thing is the Court wasn't actually disagreeing [02:50:00] with Congress about anything. Like, the case involved a federal law that someone invoked and asked the court to enforce it. And the court basically was like, this law does not apply in this context.
And we don't think it can, because that would be unconstitutional. But so the first time the court actually took a law that Congress passed, And said, we just think that law is not constitutional and we just disagree with Congress is Dred Scott versus Sanford in 1857, in which the court said that Congress doesn't have the power to abolish slavery in federal territory because it violates the property rights of slave owners.
And when the court announced that, this is the first time the court disagrees with Congress about the constitutionality of a law. You know, most people, when they read it, were like, what? Really? You really just said that, like, you know, the entire platform of the Republican Party, which is calling for the non extension of slavery, is unconstitutional?
We can't decide this important question for ourselves? And [02:51:00] so, the Republican Party responded to that case by basically just running against the court. Like, where did this power come from? It certainly has never been used before. We don't think it should exist. We think that, you know, the American people can decide this.
And when Abraham Lincoln, you know, was inaugurated president in 1861. You know, he's like, we can have a system in which the Supreme Court decides all these really important questions, but the candid citizen must confess that we would cease to be a government of the people if we handed all of that power to this eminent tribunal.
And so it wasn't really until after the Civil War, after Reconstruction, and the rise of the labor movement when the American people as a whole started to accept this idea that when it comes to the most important constitutional questions, The Supreme Court should be able to have the last word. And so it was very much a part of a cultural counter revolution to movements on the left, to, you know, create multiracial democracy, to create [02:52:00] safe and healthy working conditions, uh, an empowered labor movement.
And the court basically grabbed on to striking down these federal laws, and a lot of social conservatives signed on, thinking, I like what they're doing. Uh, let's keep it up.
ELIE MYSTAL - HOST, CONTEMPT OF COURT: I would argue as well that one of the, the big expansions of the Supreme Court's power in this country happened in direct response to the reconstruction amendments.
So you're kind of talking about the first time the court. openly, I don't want to say defied Congress, openly disagreed with Congress's interpretation of the Constitution. But when you look at some of their Reconstruction era cases, the slaughterhouse cases, for instance, and then certainly leading up to Plessy v.
Ferguson, what we have is a court that is not just disagreeing with the President or Congress, it's disagreeing with the amendments. foisted onto the Constitution, arguably over their objection, [02:53:00] to cable those amendments, to cable those Reconstruction amendments, to weaken them, to lessen them, to make them less robust than perhaps even the writers of those amendments thought they should be.
And the country just went along with that. Just was like, Oh, yes, of course, the 15th Amendment shouldn't actually apply to anybody. Oh, yes, of course, the 13th Amendment only applies. to the freed slaves. That, that wasn't what was in the text of those amendments. That's something that the Supreme Court kind of did on its own.
Yeah, so I think
NIKOLAS BOWIE: it's important to be precise about what is wrong with the court. Like, what is the real source of the problem? And for me and my colleague, Daphne Renan, the source of the problem Is the Supreme Court's power to invalidate federal law, to say there is no institution in the country capable of interpreting the Constitution better than us.
And that even if Congress writes the 14th [02:54:00] Amendment, gets it ratified, and then starts enacting laws to enforce the 14th Amendment, We are better than them at interpreting that amendment and deciding what it means. And so, you know, when Congress proposed the 14th Amendment, it did so in a context where all of these southern states were actively resisting it.
Like, Congress had to deny representation to, like, representatives from southern states until their states adopted multiracial constitution, and then those new state legislatures ratified the 14th amendment. So Congress knew states were going to be super hostile to enforcing all of these new reconstruction amendments.
And so what they attempted to do was like, try to enforce These new amendments, any way they could, they created new agencies, like the Freedmen's Bureau, and said, go enforce this. They told the military, like, if you see the Klan, stop them, arrest them. Uh, and they told federal courts, you know, enforce the Constitution [02:55:00] against hostile state actors.
If you see a state actor violating the Constitution, enjoyed them. And the problem began not just because the court had like bad opinions about what these amendments meant, which was certainly an issue, but that even when Congress went ahead and said, and here's what we think the 14th amendment means. So in telling you to enforce it, here's some guidance.
The court responded to that by saying, I don't know, that seems really aggressive, Congress. Do you really think the 14th Amendment empowers you to pass an anti discrimination law? Do you really think the 15th Amendment empowers you to pass a voting rights law that affects, you know, private citizens? We don't think so.
And so Congress passed all these laws in the Reconstruction era. They passed a Civil Rights Act, they passed a Voting Rights Act, they passed laws to prevent lynching. And the Supreme Court struck those down. And so it was only because the court disagreed with Congress about its own power, that Plessy versus Ferguson or cases like it were even an issue.
[02:56:00] Because when Congress was passing civil rights laws, Louisiana couldn't adopt a segregation ordinance because that would have been unconstitutional. You know, it would have been illegal to segregate, but it was only after the court struck that down that states like Louisiana and Virginia and the rest of the Jim Crow South said, Oh, it looks like we have this ally in the court we can get away with a lot.
And then when people invoked these federal laws saying, Hey court, aren't you supposed to stop these constitutional violations? The court's response was, Oh, you know, that's a lot of work. I'm not really sure that we have the power. Besides, you know, slavery ended, you know, 20 years ago. Surely black people can stand up for themselves.
And so it's, it's the real, it's the disagreement with Congress that like, begins the rest of the issue and remains the root of the problem today.
Credits
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at [02:57:00] 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected].
The additional sections of the show included clips from Amicus with Dhalia Lithwick, 99% Invisible, BOOM! Lawyered, The Majority Report, The Thom Hartmann Program, and Contempt of Court with Elie Mystal. Further details are in the show notes.
Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our [02:58:00] regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion.
So, coming to from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.
#1635 Democracy on the Decline: The US is not alone in facing threats to democracy and others countries that are farther along are showing how democracies fail (Transcript)
Air Date 6/11/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
Democracies don't break all of a sudden in a moment of crisis; they fail slowly over time, and only by knowing the warning signs and responding effectively to the threat before it's too late can the worst be averted. And the US is not alone in facing threats to democracy, so today we look both inwardly and outwardly at the practice of democracy.
Sources providing our Top Takes today include TLDR News Global, Tufts University, Vox, Velshi, Democracy Docket, The Marxist Project, the Democracy Paradox, Why is This Happening? with Chris Hayes, The Chauncey DeVega Show, and Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good. Then in the additional Deeper Dive half of the show, there'll be more on the dissection of democracy, international democracy, the cult of Trump, and democracy in action.
Why and Where is Democracy in Decline? - TLDR News Global - Air Date 2-21-24
JACK KELLY - HOST, TLDR NEWS GLOBAL: How [00:01:00] do you measure democracy? Well, as a concept it goes beyond just elections, and there are a range of possible indices we could use. For the purpose of this video though, we're going to use the EIU's index, which includes electoral processes and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. Globally though, all factors apart from political participation have declined since 2008, and declined further during the pandemic when civil liberties were curtailed.
So with that in mind, is democracy at risk? Unsurprisingly, wartorn countries and authoritarian regimes are at the bottom of the EIU's democracy list, and most of this regression occurred among the non-democracies, suggesting that the authoritarian regimes are becoming more entrenched and hybrid regimes are struggling to democratize. For instance, Taliban-run Afghanistan came last for a third [00:02:00] consecutive year. The biggest decliners though were Gabon and Niger, which both experienced coups in 2023. In fact, the average score for subSaharan Africa dropped to its lowest since the index began in 2006.
But region-wide data shows that every region in the world, apart from Western Europe, faced a democratic decline, with Latin America experiencing the greatest decline for the eighth consecutive year.
Moving away from the EIU data though for a moment, how have democratic elections fared in 2024 so far?
Now we made a video on a number of major elections, so if you want to check those out then you can, but so far a worrying number of elections have been interfered with or even suspended, and constitutional limits have been defied. So we're not even two months into the year and it's not looking great for democracy.
So, why could democracy be in decline? Well, [00:03:00] the integrity of democratic practices and institutions, summed up by the EIU's metrics, are, as we see it, threatened by the increase in three main factors: technology, lawfare, and apathy to authoritarianism.
So, our first reason is the uncurtailed growth of technology, which has enabled the spread of disinformation and media manipulation to influence elections at an unprecedented rate by both foreign actors and domestic groups. For instance, there's the fast growth of AI technology and deepfakes which have been used in attempts to interfere with elections. They're also getting increasingly hard to debunk, as media regulations and laws fail to keep up with technology's fast growth.
On top of this, AI can also enable online censorship. For example, according to Freedom House, in at least 21 countries there have been legal frameworks set up to require or encourage [00:04:00] online platforms to use machine learning to take down disfavored sociopolitical or religious speech.
Aside from AI, short form videos have distorted political campaigning around the world. The newly-elected Indonesian president, accused of human rights abuses during his time in the military under the dictatorship of his former father-in-law, rebranded himself during his campaign as a dancing cuddly grandpa in TikToks, some viewed over 20 million times. And then finally, group messaging platforms like WhatsApp have moved political discussions into opaque private messaging groups, where the degree of fast-spreading misinformation is difficult to ascertain.
In fact, Freedom House has published that at least 47 governments have deployed commentators to manipulate online discussions in their favor, double the number from a decade ago.
But it's not guaranteed that democratic institutions will always be outwitted by developing tech. [00:05:00] Taiwan, for example, was able to push back against disinformation campaigns from China in its January election, with information campaigns from fact-checking groups and the election commission.
But it's not even just technology. Our second reason behind the democratic decline is the use of lawfare, a very broad term which essentially means the use of law as a weapon when used illegally or fraudulently. And courts have been used to tilt the electoral playing fields by hobbling opposition candidates and parties.
Interestingly enough, the increased use of lawfare in the past years could paradoxically be seen as a sign of progress. In the past, authoritarians stuffed ballot boxes or fixed the counts. However, better monitoring of elections have made this harder to do, leaving lawfare as their favored method instead. In the past couple of months, in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Senegal, Venezuela and Russia, opposition leaders and parties have been disbarred by courts for [00:06:00] very dubious reasons.
But the third potential reason for this backsliding is that as the world is increasingly defined by great power competition, the various powers and axes are seeking to shore up their own positions. For the Western world, supposedly the defender and promoter of democracy, this can mean working to uphold democracy in certain countries. But in other cases, it means democracy is taking a back seat in favor of stability and security. The West, for example, has courted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, despite increasing violence used against minorities and democratic backsliding. Well, because, well, India is an important bulwark against China.
Meanwhile, European countries, seeking alternative supplies for fossil fuels since Russia invaded Ukraine, have turned to nondemocracies like Qatar and Azerbaijan. Similarly, seeking to address cross Mediterranean migration, the EU sought out a deal with [00:07:00] Tunisia's president, who has overseen the erosion of democratic progress since the country's 2011 revolution.
Ultimately then, this year could be critical for democracy, and so far, developments are concerning. But what about the 50-odd elections that are still to come? Some of these will be charades, such as in Belarus and Russia, but even those expected to be free and fair will face challenges from home and abroad.
Of course, the United States will be a key country to watch. Donald Trump's attempt to subvert the 2020 election, coupled with his multitude of legal difficulties, present a significant challenge to the country's institutions. and mean that this year's election has the potential of deeply destabilizing the country, with its ripples felt around the world.
But the next months aren't all doom and gloom. In the graph we mentioned at the start of this video, all democratic metrics have declined except political participation, which has massively increased since 2008. [00:08:00] So while democracy around the world might be on shaky ground and facing a difficult year, the silver lining is that even amidst this, it seems that more people across the world are determined and able to engage in political participation.
Is Democracy Under Threat? - Tufts University - Air Date 10-12-22
MOON DUCHIN: I do think that we're in for a period of challenges to democracy on several frontiers. We have challenges in the form of public trust. We have challenges in the form of courts that have shifted quite a bit. And we're in for a period where we get to see just how resilient our democracy is.
DANYA CUNNINGHAM: I'm concerned about a country that actually experienced a coup attempt. In so many ways, I think people feel that their government is not addressing the key crises that are impacting their lives. At a civic level, people don't trust each other. [00:09:00] There is a sense of the other as a threat.
BRIAN SCHAFFNER: Democracy is at risk right now, largely, I think, because we are so polarized as a country. I mean, not just polarized in a political way, but also polarized in a social way, so that essentially our political allegiances, whether we're Democrats or Republicans, overlap so much with who we are as people in terms of our identities now much more so than they did in the past. And so it just makes everything seem much more dire and important every time there's an election.
KEI KAWASHIMA-GINSBERG: It's become a spectator sports. You watch active people and politicians play together somewhere far away and it has nothing to do with us. And that's probably how we let us believe that democracy is secure. Democracy doesn't need or help. And it's eroding and it's really, really struggling.
PETER LEVINE: We have terrible voter turnout in the U. S. If you have low turnout, you get certain people voting. On one hand, you get people who are more advantaged, better educated, more privileged, but on the other hand, [00:10:00] you also get people who are much more partisan and often more radical, and you've left out a whole swath of people who are often closer to being in the middle. And so you get a distorted. Politics out of low turnout.
MOON DUCHIN: The kind of insistence of fraud where there's little evidence for fraud. I've been seeing, litigation pop up where people don't like the outcome of an election, so they allege that it had to have been rigged, and it's a pretty closed world view. If you didn't win, it was rigged. And we're seeing that not just from the top, but at a lot of different levels.
PETER LEVINE: In order to really like a democracy, you have to be willing to lose, because a democracy is a system of voting and majority wins. And I'm not sure that Americans have actually ever been that enthusiastic about the idea that they want a political system where they can lose. And when people realize, which they do periodically, that their fellow citizens don't agree with them, quite often they will actually prefer, and say that they would prefer, an authoritarian leader who they [00:11:00] regard us right over majority rule. And so I think that's part of the phenomenon that we see globally.
KEI KAWASHIMA-GINSBERG: When I think about eroding democracy, part of what we're not doing is really being committed to truthfulness of the information that we're getting and sharing. We're just so tired sometimes, and we're not really searching for the right information, and we're just letting it pass by.
BRIAN SCHAFFNER: Politicians sort of understand now that anger is a mobilizing emotion. So if you've ever been on an email list for a politician, you'll probably notice that the emails are centered not around " here are these policy things I want to do", but more around " here's something outrageous the other side has done and you should be angry about this". And if people are mostly getting involved in politics because they're angry, it's going to make it even harder for politicians to compromise. Because if you're essentially making people angry at the other side as a way of getting them motivated to vote, then how are you going to then, once you're in office, turn around and make deals with the other side to make good policy?
DANYA CUNNINGHAM: Democracy is a [00:12:00] frail and precious organism, and so it is a living thing that must constantly be tended to and cared for. It is precious because it is all we have to keep from descending into chaos and lawlessness. We have to be able to have agreement with each other that we will attend to building a peaceful and fair society. And that requires us to have a certain kind of empathy and regard for each other, and that takes work. We can come to understand each other and figure out together what we ought to do in order to preserve each other's well being. And so that is the work of democracy.
The decline of American democracy won't be televised - Vox - Air Date 6-22-17
CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: Trump's firing of former FBI director James Comey has gotten a lot of media attention, in [00:13:00] part because it's really easy to explain why it matters. If Trump fired Comey over the Russia investigation, that would be obstruction of justice, which is a crime. But a lot of what worries political scientists about Trump is tougher to explain in a sound bite like that. Because for the most part, it's stuff that's totally legal.
AZIZ HUQ: It turns out that government officials can exploit weaknesses in the law in ways that are destructive to the rule of law as a whole.
CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: This bearer of bad news is Aziz Huq. He's a law professor at the University of Chicago and he's written a lot about a concept called democratic backsliding. Backsliding is what happens when a democratically elected government starts attacking the institutions that make democracy work. And Huq argues that what makes backsliding so dangerous is that it's really hard to know when it starts.
AZIZ HUQ: In many other countries, the way that we see democratic backsliding happening is through a series of discrete legal changes, each of which is on their own, completely lawful.
CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: A great example of what backsliding [00:14:00] looks like is Venezuela's Former President Hugo Chavez. Chavez was elected as a democratic populace, but over time he changed.
CNN NEWS CLIP: And while remaining popular Chavez has been anything but democratic.
CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: He got frustrated with opposition from courts and the media, so he started doing things like firing judges, using anti defamation laws to silence journalists, and even describing unfriendly news organizations as, "enemies of the homeland." what's scary about Chavez's story is that he didn't need a military coup to screw up Venezuela's democracy.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The man who came to office by democracy is doing everything he can to snuff it out.
CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: He did it legally, by slowly turning his supporters and political allies against the country's democratic institutions.
AZIZ HUQ: Autocrats and other parts of the world have gone after those institutions very early on in the process of backsliding.
CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: And that's what worries political scientists about Trump. Trump shows a deep distrust of America's democratic institutions. He lashes out at judges, calls [00:15:00] journalists the enemy of the people, accuses watchdog agencies of conspiring against him. He questions the legitimacy of an election that he won. His White House stonewalls reporters to avoid answering questions. He is suspicious of the mechanisms that limit his authority.
DONALD TRUMP: This is an unprecedented judicial overreach.
CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: And he encourages his supporters to be too. That is a catastrophic thing to be happening in a democracy. It's how democratic backflighting starts. But the thing is, none of this is illegal. As long as Republicans in Congress go along with it, there's nothing to stop Trump from publicly criticizing basic democratic institutions.
AZIZ HUQ: Our constitution just doesn't do a very good job of protecting us against certain kinds of democratic failure. Whether we're in a moment of democratic backsliding really depends upon the character of our political leaders.
CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: Which brings us to back to Comey, and why it's so hard to talk about democratic backsliding without sounding paranoid. We live in a media environment that is [00:16:00] really bad at putting things in context. That is designed to bombard us with breaking news and discrete pieces of information. And that makes it hard to identify democratic backsliding when it starts. Because unless it clearly breaks the law, it's really tough to explain why any one Trump tweet or scandal poses a threat to democracy. So when Trump calls a federal judge a "so called" judge, it's just a one off comment.
CNN NEWS CLIP: Does anyone honestly believe President Trump is going to ignore this judge's order because he's a "so called" judge?
CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: When Trump calls the press the enemy of the American people, it's all talk.
CNN NEWS CLIP: He sounds like a broken record. It's just kind of like, what else you got Donald Trump?
AZIZ HUQ: I don't think that new media are well designed. to tell this kind of story, because those media are designed to convey information in very small chunks. The real story is not the discrete action at a particular moment in time, but some bigger picture.
CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: Democratic backsliding is one of those things that you can't really see from up close.
AZIZ HUQ: It is only when you look at changes in the aggregate that [00:17:00] one sees the effect upon democracy as a set of institutions and practices.
CARLOS MAZA - HOST, VOX: That doesn't mean that Comey stuff isn't important. Obstruction of justice is obviously a big deal. But some of the biggest threats to democracy are way less dramatic, way more normal looking. And if you're waiting for the CNN chyron announcing that it's time to panic, you're gonna be waiting for a long time.
How Republicans are fueling Russia and China’s global effort to undermine democracy - Velshi - Air Date 5-11-24
ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: In this remarkable article, you conclude that Russia and China are doing this, this influence peddling, with the goal of electing Donald Trump. Talk to me about why you think those countries stand to benefit from that.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: So, first it's important to step back a little bit and understand what it is that they're doing. These are countries, and it's Russia, China, but also others, Venezuela, Iran, other autocracies, want to stay in power, and their most important opponents are people who use the language of human rights, of freedom, [00:18:00] of liberty, of democracy. They need to undermine those groups, they need to put them out of business, they need to convince their people that these ideas have no meaning and no purpose.
One of the inspiration for People who fight for democracy in countries like Russia and China has always been the United States. And of course, the United States doesn't always live up to that, those ideals itself, but it stood for those ideals in the world. And Donald Trump is a leader who does not stand for those ideas. In fact, he mocks them.
He himself is transactional. He has indicated he would do deals with whoever is most powerful and putting him in charge of the United States, especially after January 6th, which was also understood around the world as an assault on American democracy, an assault on our Capitol, would undermine the idea of democracy that so many people aspire to in so many different places. It's not that complicated a story, but it takes place on [00:19:00] a big scale, and I think it's important to understand the whole context.
ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: I want to get even farther into that context, because obviously we've discussed the fact that if Russia and Ukraine is not concluded by election and inauguration time, it probably won't be, that is an advantage to Vladimir Putin.
But more importantly, we have the most election a year in recent history. More people are going to the polls around the world, and many of those countries are countries in which voters are giving up some of their rights. India, it's happening right now. What's the larger goal? If this isn't just about Russia/Ukraine, if this isn't just about China and Taiwan or China and relationships, how does this work in terms of undermining the concepts of democracy in America? You just elect enough people to Congress who just don't believe democracy is that important a thing?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: It's even broader than that. It's convincing Americans that they shouldn't care about rights. It's convincing Americans that they shouldn't care about America's role in the world. Convincing Americans to withdraw from the world, not to stand for any kind of ideals as we have done for the last several [00:20:00] decades.
There's a larger game as well, which is the autocratic narrative. Which is now shared by so many countries and also by some Americans is pretty clear. It's that autocracy is secure and stable and safe. Democracy is divisive, degenerate, and declining. And those in the United States who also say these things and who argue these things are also arguing in essence for a change of our politics, for deeper change, they're hoping that if and when Donald Trump has a second term in office that he will continue undermining rights. That he'll, for example, replace our independent civil service with loyalists. That he will change the way the United States is run. It's a convenient narrative for them, and it's a convenient narrative for autocracies in other places.
ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: We have seen how this propaganda is causing havoc at the Capitol. You wrote that Republicans are both active participants and passive recipients of the propaganda. This reminds me of the conversations we used to have about disinformation and misinformation.
Some people put it out and [00:21:00] others willingly receive it and spread it. Talk to me about how the difference is there and what you do about it. Can you convince some of these Republicans in Congress? Be careful you're getting fed a lot of bad information here.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: The best spokesman for that are other Republicans, and we've seen them starting to speak out in the last few days.
One of the difficulties, though, now, and this is maybe another important point for people to understand, is that there are independent groups, there are researchers, there are academics, there are a lot of scholars and people who study this system and who seek to understand how it works. And one of the things that this Republican Congress has done over the last few months is tried to undermine them, create conspiracy theories around them.
Blacken their names, prevent them from having influence, convince social media companies not to pay any attention to them. There, there's a there's a project almost not only to put out authoritarian propaganda, but also to undermine the people who seek to expose it and explain it.
And so one of the first steps we need to take is to, [00:22:00] is for the government, the media, and everybody who understands what's at stake. To make sure we have those people's back, to put pressure on social media companies, to listen to them again to continue to take down foreign propaganda, which they had been doing in 2020 and to continue, and to continue to search out this problem to define it and to explain it.
How Republican Attorneys General are Undermining Voting Rights - Democracy Docket - Air Date 6-3-24
PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Twenty-three of the country's 27 Republican Attorneys Generals are currently in court arguing that only the Justice Department, not voters, can file lawsuits to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Mark, explain to us why this argument is so dangerous.
MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: You know, Paige, we talk a lot about how the Voting Rights Act was gutted in Shelby County versus Holder. What Shelby County did was it took away one of the big tools of the Voting Rights Act. But other tools in the Voting Rights Act remained. And so that's why you continue to see the litigation that's going forward around redistricting in states like Alabama and [00:23:00] Louisiana and in Georgia, where groups and voters have brought cases saying that the maps that were passed in those states violate the rights of black voters to not having their votes diluted in the creation of unfair maps. In plain English, in Alabama and Louisiana, the Republican legislatures drew maps with one black opportunity district, and black voters were able to bring lawsuits to say, hey, that's not fair to our community. You have drawn maps that prevent us from exercising political power. And in both of those states, the federal courts have agreed and have said that there needed to be a second black opportunity district.
Well, how are Republicans trying to gut this part of the Voting Rights Act and some others by saying that private litigants can't even bring cases? They're saying that the only people who can enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and some other key provisions of federal law is the Department of Justice.
That's crazy. That has never been the [00:24:00] case. There has been the right of a private right of action, the ability of ordinary citizens who have been injured by these state laws, harmed by these illegal maps, to bring cases. And the overwhelming majority of Voting Rights Act cases that have been brought and have successfully vindicated the rights of minority voters to fair election laws, to fair maps, the overwhelming majority of those have been brought by private litigants, by organizations like the NAACP, by civil rights groups, by voting rights groups. It's what a lot of the work my law firm does is when we talk about representing black voters in cases and winning relief, we're talking about bringing private litigation.
Well, the Republican attorneys general are now latched onto a fringe argument where they want to gut the Voting Rights Act by basically taking away the ability of these private litigants to bring these cases.
PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Has this argument been successful anywhere in [00:25:00] court so far? And if so, what has been the impact?
MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: So they've had success one place, okay? Only one place so far, in a case out of Arkansas that went up to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the court that covers the state of Arkansas as well as some other states. And that circuit has said that they agree with this fringe argument, that they agree that there is no pride of a right of action. But that's the only place they've had success so far.
Now they're pushing it elsewhere, but so far they have not had success. They've lost this argument in the Fifth Circuit, which is critical because it's a very conservative circuit, but it also is a circuit that covers Texas. It's a circuit that covers Louisiana. It's a circuit that has a lot of Voting Rights Act cases within it, but they're pressing this argument all over the country. They're pressing this argument, for example, in the 11th Circuit. Now, anyone who thinks Brad Rassenberger is a hero, you gotta read my article in Democracy Docket how he's just another Republican vote suppressor. He is [00:26:00] advocating this theory in a case out of Georgia to try to say that there is no private right of action.
PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: So if Republican officials are arguing that only the DOJ can file these lawsuits, has the Justice Department gotten involved? Have they said anything about these cases and these arguments?
MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Yeah, look, DOJ knows that they need the help. This is not a negative on DOJ, right? DOJ is doing as much work as it can do across a range of issues, and it's got its hands full. But it simply can't cover the territory that private litigants can. So DOJ agrees that there should be a private right of action. Again, that's not because DOJ is not up to the job. But of course, what's interesting, Paige, is that the Republicans don't want private right of actions, but do you think they want to provide more funding to DOJ to bring more claims under the Voting Rights Act? No, of course they don't.
It's like they don't want there to be private funding of election offices, but you don't see the [00:27:00] Republicans trying to appropriate more money for our election officials to do their job. They want to starve democracy of money. They want to starve the Department of Justice of the resources to enforce the Voting Rights Act, and at the same time say that there's no private right of action so that private litigants can't bring these cases either.
Democracy vs. Autocracy: An Unproductive Dichotomy - The Marxist Project - Air Date 11-6-23
M. - HOST, THE MARXIST PROJECT: The dichotomy between democracy and autocracy, between democratic and authoritarian states, is an often used rhetorical instrument by the right, and even the left. It is employed to assess and justify geopolitical strategies, in painting democratic states as righteous, while labeling those operating outside the rule-based international order as authoritarian.
To be sure, there is an undeniable and material difference between autocracy and democracy. A society that condemns its women to servitude and degrades them to the status of commodity is surely less sustainable politically or defensible morally than its progressive counterparts. A country that is ruled by a dynasty rather than by an [00:28:00] elected body is almost always closed off to progress, social justice, and basic liberties.
But what exactly is a democracy? Is it simply the presence of free elections and multiple competing parties? Some authorities on the matter like to say that this is the recipe for democracy, but most of us would probably agree that it is insufficient. After all, parties can be captured by private interests, ballots can be manipulated, or the entire electoral system could be structurally designed to exclude actual popular input.
Another common approach is describing societies as having democratic values and norms, which are then ostensibly translated into formal political and judicial processes. This is certainly a better understanding, as it reflects ingrained attitudes and perspectives of an entire society, rather than vacuously describing the letter of the law.
However, we are ultimately displacing the central concern. If democracies are characterized by societies with [00:29:00] democratic values, then what exactly are democratic values? Much has been written about supposedly democratic countries and their shared values. In the field of political science, the so called democratic peace theory is one of a few consistent postulates that is treated virtually as a law.
The theory goes that democracies do not fight wars with each other because their governments are more accountable, the public is generally wary of conflict, and the societies share a common set of values. Democratic peace theory has found considerable statistical support through decades of study. Such observations about democracies extend into broader social discourse, where it is said that citizens of democratic nations abhor all forms of oppression and injustice. Conversely, the same people will often claim citizens living in autocratic societies have a predisposition to authoritarian methods. The Russians, for instance, are supposedly a people that prefer a ruler with an iron fist. One can imagine that such [00:30:00] characterizations quickly reduce themselves to banal colonialist dogma about the superiority of Western democracies, and the countries that strive to emulate them, over the regressive autocracies of the East.
Though it may be obvious to most of you watching this video, these sentiments are desperately under problematized in the Western mythos. How true is it that the American society has been fundamentally freedom loving and democratically inclined? Certainly, the U. S. has a rich history of popular movements for emancipation, enfranchisement, and liberation, but parallel to this history is one of slavery, genocide, segregation, white supremacy, and imperialism. To this day, the national psyche of the country elevates the ultra rich above the ordinary, and posits that those who have almost nothing deserve their lot in life. Is a society that necessitates unemployment for economic efficiency, and punishes the homeless for merely existing in public, truly freedom loving?[00:31:00]
While the majority of Americans struggle to make ends meet, socialized services and collective bargaining continue to be villainized by some of the loudest voices in the political arena. This is to say nothing about the January 6th coup attempt and the nearly half of the country that seems eager to embrace fascist slogans.
In her book, White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Eisenberg details how the founders of the United States were often staunchly opposed to any semblance of democratic governance. The early governors of the colonies styled a society so rigid in its class makeup that one might best describe it as a hierarchy of castes.
Puritan settlers punished individuals for wearing clothing above their station, and enforced rigid social roles at birth. The colonies regularly depended on slave and coerced labor, often legislating class boundaries in a way that made them insurmountable. John Locke envisioned a new nobility and serf class in the [00:32:00] colonies.
Thomas Jefferson promoted social engineering and eugenics. Benjamin Franklin sought to curb class division by way of endless territorial expansion. The most important figures of early American history had their differences, but they were all united under the common banner of contempt for the poor. None of the above demonstrates an unwavering commitment to democratic values.
To be clear, the point here is not to condemn the American people in a broad sense. Much of the progress that has been made took the sacrifice and tireless effort of activists, revolutionaries, organizers, and the public itself, which has tended to overwhelmingly support pro social policies. Rather, the idea is to challenge the notion that there is something special about the American, or even the Western, psyche.
The myth of the West's democratic roots is just that, a myth, that has been carefully repeated over the centuries. A society that offers the public practically no control over the workplace or the economy, and limited control [00:33:00] over the political structures, is not only far from being a democracy, but is quite far from being democratic.
By contrast, it is similarly misguided to describe a national mythos as ahistorically authoritarian. How can we describe the Russian people as fundamentally authoritarian when the October Revolution was one of the most explosive and transformative revolutions in human history? How can the Chinese people be predisposed to hierarchical politics if not even a lifetime ago they fought a cataclysmic civil war to destroy all vestiges of feudal oppression?
Such dramatic historical events beg the question: from where do the people draw a profound desire for emancipation if their national culture is undemocratic? There are a number of obvious responses to these thoughts. For one, there are no monolithic national cultures. There is no uniform affinity for freedom over order. These characterizations are sloppy historical work that omit important caveats and counterpoints. There [00:34:00] are democratic and authoritarian tendencies in all societies. Democracies can be unexpectedly authoritarian, and despotic regimes can contain within them surprising horizontalism.
Rather than ahistorical national cultures, there are evolving institutions and norms that are overdetermined by complex material processes. Only the ebb and flow of the constituent elements of these complex systems can explain how a democratic society could give birth to an authoritarian one, and vice versa.
The persistent characterization of a democratic and authoritarian camp serves ideological interests. Oftentimes, democracy is a thinly veiled substitute for Western liberal polity, complete with the racist colonial tropes about civilizational sophistication in the face of Eastern despotism. Insisting that the West is democratic also works as a legitimizing mantra. Democracies mean accountability and popular rule, implying [00:35:00] that the people have chosen the status quo. Conversely, any authoritarian regime cannot be popularly legitimate, by definition. This works as an added layer of political justification for the democratic bloc. Embargoes, interventions, and invasions are a lot more palatable if you can convince the public that the government in question has no popular support.
The result is a tale as old as time, or at least as old as imperialism. The civilized camp is morally superior and bears the burden of civilizing their non compliant counterparts. Of course, the banner of democracy is happily dropped if the autocrat in question happens to favor the interests of foreign capital. The U. S. had no problem supporting the Marcos regime in the Philippines, but could not abide by Assad in Syria. Pinochet was a fine ally, but Gaddafi had to be removed.
Ultimately, where it is used, this civilizational categorization becomes a favorite of policymakers, both for its value in justifying the domestic [00:36:00] circumstances and for its utility as a foreign policy instrument. We should not allow ourselves to be fooled by this primitive sleight of hand.
The sooner we can acknowledge that most of the supposed democracies in the world are barely democratic, the sooner we can work towards higher standards. Democracy should mean truly popular control over both politics and economics. It should require a deeply embedded commitment to public welfare and management of a collective future. Until we have done away with exploitation, discrimination, imperialism, and oppression of all forms, we should think twice about calling ourselves democratic.
When Democracy Breaks: Final Thoughts with Archon Fung, David Moss and Arne Westad Part 1 - Democracy Paradox - Air Date 6-4-24
JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: I’d like to ask each one of you if there was a case that really surprised you or caught you off guard in terms of how democracy broke? Because I’m sure that you guys were familiar with most of the cases. Some of them are very famous, like Germany. But was there one that really stood out to you that made you think [00:37:00] differently about democratic erosion and democratic breakdown?
ARCHON FUNG: The chapter that I found quite surprising was the chapter on Turkey. There you have the institutions of democracy defended by a secular elite in the military. The country is overwhelmingly Islamic, so you have this tension between what we think of as neutral, liberal, democratic institutions defended by a vanguard that ends up tipping because there’s a large majority able to be mobilized by a leader on popular, ethnonationalist, religious nationalist grounds. So, what does democracy mean in that context? Is it the vanguardist, liberal, secular elite that is championing the forms of liberal democracy that we’re accustomed to, or is it a less varnished, [00:38:00] more populist will of the people? We struggle with that tension throughout many chapters in the book.
DAVID MOSS: I thought also this idea that the rhetorical vilification of the political opposition, what an impact that had, and how consequential it was, up there with other types of democratic erosion. The ongoing demonization and vilification of opponents seemed to have had a really large impact. I was struck by what a large impact it made.
ARNE WESTAD: I think for me in many ways, Justin, the most surprising one was the one on Weimar Germany. Not because I don’t know the background for the collapse of Weimar Germany; most historians think they know something about that. But because of the way in which it was set up and structured. So, it’s Weitz who was the one who wrote that chapter and underlined the ongoing, almost continuous attacks at democratic institutions and maybe especially on the institutions that were set to handle the kind of [00:39:00] difficulties that most people in Weimar Germany knew that the new republic was going to face, and how over time, those attacks, both on the left and the right, ended up eroding most of the belief that had existed in the early years with regard to those institutions. It then took an acute crisis, the economic and financial crisis of the late 1920s, to overturn the whole system. But the preparation for all of that had happened beforehand through the attack on the institutions of the Republic.
JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: One of the things that I got out of the book was the way to think about democratic breakdown over the course of history, like the way that democracy is not something that is exclusively a phenomenon of the postwar era, but as something that has existed dating all the way back to ancient Greece, and some scholars have even made arguments that it existed in various forms even before that.
So your book really [00:40:00] brings in the ideas of thinking about democratic breakdown at different points in history. So, what I’d like to know from you is how has democratic breakdown really changed over time? Because I think of democracy as having changed a lot over time as well. Democracy in Athens is very different than democracy today. So, has democratic breakdown also changed over time?
ARNE WESTAD: Obviously, it has changed over time and each of these cases are individual cases in a way that is connected to the historical situation around the time in which you face a democratic breakdown. But I think our view is that you can still learn a lot from the discussion that contrasts the different kinds of cases, even though they are set at very different moments in time.
I do think there are some things that they have in common. The one that I mentioned earlier on about the attack on the institutions – if you don’t want to call it democracy, at least there’s some [00:41:00] institutions that preserve some degree of pluralism, both within society and within the state – that’s something that you see, albeit at different degrees and in different ways, in most of these cases.
Another aspect that struck me in all the cases, I don’t think every single one, was how rapid rises in social inequality contributed to some of the tensions that brought about the collapse of democracy. Not in a very simple way, not in a very straightforward way. Those who believe that there are necessarily distinct social causes in an immediate sense for all of these events are probably wrong. It helped to destroy the common approach to the value of these institutions and the value of participatory democracy itself. On that, I think, there is very little doubt.
A lot of people, a lot of different settings, were asking, what does this system actually do for me? What is the value for me, both in ethical, moral, political, but also in economic and financial [00:42:00] terms for me to come out and actually defend that system? If you are in a situation where you feel that your situation compared to others in social and economic terms is getting consistently worse, then your willingness to, not necessarily act against the system, but help protect the system, that willingness is much reduced.
JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: Do you think that there are more similarities in terms of democratic breakdown throughout history than there are differences? I mean, I know that each one of these cases is unique in its own right. But as we’re making comparisons between them, should we be more focused on how similar they are or how different each one of them are, particularly as democracy evolves over time?
DAVID MOSS: I think it’s hard to put a quantitative ranking on difference versus similarity, because they’re different places in different times, but also different countries. They’re really quite dramatically different in so many ways. And yet there are some commonalities. You asked [00:43:00] about change over time, maybe some of the most striking changes, I think, is just in the 21st century, which is we’ve seen a different kind of breakdown, what’s often called illiberal democracy. So more of a reliance on majoritarianism, but not the liberal protections of minority rights and the right to dissent. And so often in the past, there’s been a distinction between fast and slow breakdown. Fast like Weimar, Germany, so you see a rapid seizure of power and collapse of democracy. Whereas in Venezuela in the early 21st century, you see a slow breakdown. It’s hard to say what day, what month, even what year democracy broke down because there was a majority-picked president. But then the president chipped away at liberal protections, chipped away at minority rights, chipped away at the rights of the opposition, chipped away at all the constraints on presidential power, such that democracy as we know it disappears. What day and what year, what month it disappears is hard to say.
I think that a slower, more gradual [00:44:00] breakdown, the illiberal democracy, that’s characteristic of the 21st century so far, and quite a difference from the 20th century and before.
Protecting Voting Rights with Eric Holder - Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast - Air Date 2-20-24
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: This independence of the Justice Department is such an important point right now because it ends up being an enormously important constitutional protection. And as we conceive of what might be a second Trump term, possibly, where he has basically said, he’s going to use it to prosecute his enemies.
Now, Jeff Sessions, I think, was a terrible attorney general in most ways, but on this question of independence was decent. He was not completely a supplicant to Trump. He didn’t just do what was ordered. And he had some sense, I think, deep within his person and how he conducted himself, of this notion of independence. That it was important that he be independent. He appointed a special counsel. He did a bunch of other things. William Barr, much less so, right? William Barr much more of a sort of lackey.
The question becomes like, imagine a second term with a vacancy appointment, right? So, a temporary AG, not confirmed by Senate. And Donald Trump says, I want you to [00:45:00] open criminal investigations into Joe Biden and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Chuck Schumer and --
ERIC HOLDER: And Eric Holder.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: And Eric Holder. So, what is protecting us from that eventuality, other than the norm-abiding of an attorney general who recognizes that’s totally unacceptable?
ERIC HOLDER: Well, you got at least one protection and that’s the career folks who work at the Justice Department. But I caution everybody: what Donald Trump says he is going to do, which not to politicize the Justice Department but to weaponize the Justice Department, is something that could come to pass. And he’s had a term to learn how to weaponize the Justice Department.
And so it won’t be just, who is the attorney general? It will also be, who is the deputy attorney general? Who is the head of the criminal division in the Justice Department? Who are the various U.S. attorneys who populate the U.S. attorney’s offices around the country? Who will these U.S. attorneys hire? Because you could have a whole bunch of career people say, you know, that’s crazy. We’re not going to do that kind of stuff. But [00:46:00] new employees hired by these new U.S. attorneys could in fact go to courts, impanel grand juries, and start up investigations of the very people who you just talked about.
Now you may ultimately get to a place where even though these are bogus investigations that they have done, that you can’t win in court, you will generate cases that undoubtedly will be reported on, that will have a negative impact on the reputations of the people who come under investigation and will have, I suspect, some kind of cowing impact on people who are the enemies or perceived to be enemies by the president in terms of the way in which they express that opposition.
You know, if you’re a congressman and you’re against what Trump’s going to try to do with NATO and you want to raise your hand and you know that if you do that, well, the Justice Department is going to just start picking through your life to see if there’s a way in which they can just gin up an investigation. Forget about a prosecution or a victory in a criminal case, just an investigation.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: Yes.
ERIC HOLDER: And what’s the impact of that going to be on your reelection efforts [00:47:00] and just your reputation, you know, more generally? So, this is something I think we got to take, you know, be very, very mindful of, but it is really kind of the norm. It is the norms that have to hold and I think that he will just try to blow through.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: Yeah, I mean at one level, right, there’s a constitutional protection for due process, which this kind of thing would be a violation of. And there’s the protections of a grand jury and, you know, for actual prosecution. But your point, which I think is the really scary one, right, is that you can make a lot of pain for a person through just investigation. And he seems very focused on that. I mean he basically is threatening to do it. Every time he says, look, if I don’t get immunity, then every ex-president will be subject to this. I read as him saying, we’re going to do this to Joe Biden, if I get into office. I mean I think it’s plain as day that’s the promise. But it’s more than just a criminal division. I mean one of the forgotten stories of the Trump administration --
ERIC HOLDER: Yes.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: -- is that the Trump Department of Justice stepped in to block a merger that Time Warner wanted to do with AT&T, I believe. And they blocked it. It was sort of surprising because the sort of progressive anti-monopoly [00:48:00] folks wanted them to block it, and that was not the people running the Trump Justice Department. And later it was revealed, I don’t think it’s quite smoking gun, but I think we have sufficient evidence, that it was because he was mad at CNN, which is owned by Time Warner for their coverage and its First Amendment protected speech.
That’s really wildly dangerous stuff. And we’ve seen in places like Turkey and Hungary and other places, that is a very common means by which authoritarian sort of presidentialist dictatorships influence democratic landscapes. And I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are on that.
ERIC HOLDER: Yes, people, in a way that I just described, focus a great deal on what the authority of the Justice Department is when it comes to its criminal authorities. You know, the ability to investigate and to indict people, indict corporations, so that’s one thing. But the Justice Department is composed of a whole range of other divisions that can be used improperly to advance the agenda of a corrupt president or to go after, again, the perceived [00:49:00] enemies of a president.
There’s an antitrust division, there is a civil division, there’s an environmental, natural resources division. There are a whole range of divisions within the Justice Department, that if used inappropriately, can have an impact on almost every component of our lives, whether it’s in commerce, whether it has to do, as we talked about before, with the criminal law, when it comes to the media.
I mean there are a whole range of things. I mean if General Motors decides that it wants to, you know, continue making electric cars and emphasizing that, and this is something that, for whatever reason, Donald Trump thinks that he doesn’t want to have occur.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: Yes, he said that.
ERIC HOLDER: Just go through the menu of, you know, what’s at the Justice Department, which division should we sic on --
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: Right.
ERIC HOLDER: -- General Motors to go after them and come up with a way in which we make that conversion to EVs difficult, if not impossible.
Rich Logis Escaped the Trump - MAGA Cult -- Heed His Warnings About Its Power and Extreme Danger to America - The Chauncey DeVega Show - Air Date 8-29-23
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA - HOST, THE CHAUNCEY DEVEGA SHOW: Did you ever think that you would see a political moment like this? Because I saw coming years ago—a black working class person, someone who's a [00:50:00] student of politics. These things are cyclical. We never purged white supremacy, which is America's native form, Jim and Jane Crow, fascism from this country.
But just thinking about what we were watching, growing up in the 80s. So, how do we go from Larry Bird in that moment to this? How do you make sense of it?
RICH LOGIS: I have to be entirely candid and transparent, Chauncey, with you. No, I didn't see this moment. One of the problems with being so anti two party system as I was, which led me to support Trump, is that it creates a lot of ignorance, and ignorance is very powerful.
Once one is in that traumatic world, and there's all the mythologies, and there's the hyper partisanship, I didn't have any interest in real history. I had an interest in "the Democrats are existential threat to America. Hillary Clinton was an existential threat. I believe that." When someone believes that—and there was no logical reason that I had to conclude that, Chauncey—which looking back on it, how did you come to that conclusion?
The answer is it wasn't really logical. It really was not. I'm not deflecting responsibility. I'm fully responsible for how I thought and how I voted. [00:51:00] But if one believes that Hillary Clinton was an existential threat, as I did, someone will support anyone or anything. So all of the factors that brought us here today, I have, in my life, proactively, and in a prorated, retrospective way, gone back and looked at what I consider to be more objective real history.
Looking at that real history, to your point on this, it begins to explain so well why this has happened. In the modern era, what I've come to realize, not that it started, but in the modern era, the election of President Obama accelerated a lot of the right wing traumatic mythologies. And then you had the Tea Party. And then you had Trump. And then you had COVID, and you had the 2020 election, you had the insurrection— and that's all in the span of 13 years?
I mean, that's a traumatic 13 years. We've not caught our breath from it, and we still haven't. And while I want to remain optimistic about the outcome that I think will happen next year democratically, I'm not naive about this fact. I know that the combination of the MAGA [00:52:00] voters, primary voters, combined with the fact that most Americans are apolitical—which apoliticism is a bubble unto itself—our politics are unpredictable. I know there is no guarantee here. So when we look at everything that's happened—and, to your credit, you saw it happening, and I suspect because you saw it happening at a time when maybe a lot of people weren't, you weren't really listened to.
So while I can't change the past, I am working really as feverishly as I can to make amends for the future. Because I consider what I did—my decisions—to have contributed to the problems. Yes, I'm one person. Yes, I'm one vote. But I don't look at it that way. I look at it, I need to take responsibility.
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA - HOST, THE CHAUNCEY DEVEGA SHOW: Now you said something very important there. You mentioned Fox News. I was talking to Tim Wise about this, and I've talked to other folks in this years long journey, this disaster. I've been asked to go on Fox News, all the big shows. So as a matter of principle, I will not go. Because Bernie is gone, and we saw what they did with that footage. Cornel West repeatedly goes on those shows, I don't know if he's doing it now. Point being, I can [00:53:00] understand the to-and-fro with some of this audience, but you're dealing with a fully propagandized public.
RICH LOGIS: It would be difficult for some of the Fox viewers to hear what I say and part of that reason it would be difficult for them to hear it is that part of leadership is telling people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.
Now, I fully concur with this point about just how traumatized the Fox audience is.
If I were going to go on Fox, one of the points I would raise is to tell the audience that you've not heard from just a regular everyday person who was very deep in that rabbit hole. Why I left—I would get on a show, whomever the host is, and I would say, I want you to be honest with yourself and ask yourself some questions.
Number one, is it possible that some of my beliefs, my outcomes, my conclusions, my opinions, is it possible some of them are mistaken? Not saying they are, but is it possible that they're incomplete? That they are too black and white? That they lack [00:54:00] nuance? And the only reason, Chauncey, I'd go on, it's not to change a bunch of minds, but because I have a suspicion that those who'd be watching have never had anyone actually address them that way, which is firm, but I think fair and humanizing.
None of them, I believe, have been asked that question by someone and, not just that, being asked that question by a person like myself. I suspect that for some of them hearing that it would get them to pause just a little bit. Now maybe they pause for a moment and say "Well, yeah, that's a good point. Maybe. Ah! But you know what? The other side is just—they're an existential threat. So, yeah, I don't like this one side, but the other side is worse."
Chances are most would say that. But even if I got to one person, just one, I would consider it a resounding success. Because I know they will not have heard the way that I would frame it to them.
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA - HOST, THE CHAUNCEY DEVEGA SHOW: Help me! Help folks not of the MAGA world, not of—it is a cult, it meets the criteria of a cult.
How do you reason with those who are unreasonable? How do you talk to people, accepting your premise, who have been [00:55:00] fully propagandized, who are in a cult and want to be in it?
RICH LOGIS: To use some figurative language, although I suppose for some it might be literal, to the members of a cult, it's the outside world who are the crazies.
In the MAGA world, the trauma of that world is, you know, for as much as the Republican Party talks about identity politics. The community that MAGA provides, and it does provide a community, there is a kind of identity politics within that community, because there's a unity against common targeted enemy.
Democratic Party, Democrat, RINOs, the "Republicans In Name Only", the Romney type Republicans in the country—we used to look at those types of Republicans just as dangerous as a Democrat. That's how we used to look at them. When we were in that world—and I look back on it and I think about how much trauma I put myself under—for me to go to those right now, who have that cult mindset it's again back to the topic of affliction.
I mentioned earlier, bring [00:56:00] the news to the afflicted book of Isaiah. The book of Romans says, "Be patient in affliction," and that reconciliation to try to do that—it's going to require a lot of incremental work because unfortunately for some of those who are in the MAGA world, they are never going to leave it. I don't think as a country, and I'm concluding myself in this, I don't think we quite grasp the harm that has not only been caused, but we're going to see the residual effects of it for years to come.
And I just accept that. I'm not going to live in denial of it. But over the course of the next—we'll call it in the short term next year or two—there is going to have to be a moment where the MAGA voters are spoken to and addressed in such a way that they are not used to being spoken to. And that way of being spoken to is—again to not dehumanize them—but we have to somehow with whomever might be persuadable, we have to create doubt about their beliefs, about their support, [00:57:00] about their adherence to MAGA.
I don't think I've got the sole answer for it. I don't think there is a singular good answer to this. It's going to require some, in addition to the patience, it's going to require some collaborations with people we may not politically agree with and may not normally collaborate with. But if we feel like it's in the interest of the country and our democracy and our institutions, we're going to find a way to do it.
"The President of Forgetting" - Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good - Air Date 3-13-24
SPENCER CRITCHLEY - HOST, DASTARDLY CLEVERNESS: Most of us in the U. S. have been spared the necessity of knowing history, and instead, we've been able to live as if the world was created at our birth. But people in Central and Eastern Europe have already been trammeled by the history that has just now caught up with us.
They've been trying to warn us about it for decades. Back in 1979, The Czech writer Milan Kundera warned what it's like to live under what he called "a president of forgetting." In his case, the Soviet controlled Gustav Huzak. [00:58:00] Huzak knew that in order for Czechs to believe in totalitarianism as their future, they had to forget their history.
This is from Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. If Franz Kafka is the prophet of a world without memory, Gustav Huzak is its builder. You begin to liquidate a people by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it. Give another culture to it.
Invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is, and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster. Our president of forgetting is every bit as hostile to history as Huzak was. He invents an alternative Great America—one that no one who believes in the founding vision of America can ever call great.
And in one [00:59:00] of history's notorious rhymes, our president of forgetting is also obedient to a Russian dictator. The distinction between them, without much of a difference, is that Huzak answered to a communist Russian dictator, while Donald Trump is ever so eager to please a fascist Russian dictator.
And yet Trump commands the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans, who are descended from a generation willing to die free, rather than live under fascism. The Polish writer Czesław Miłosz watched friends, highly educated, apparently free thinking friends, Embrace authoritarian rule, under both Nazi and communist occupation.
In The Captive Mind, Milosz describes how it happened, one convenient step after another. One compromise leads to a second, and a third, until at last, though everything one says may be perfectly logical, it no longer has [01:00:00] anything in common with the flesh and blood of living people. Because forgetting is easy, and remembering can be very hard, People will cooperate in their oppression, and even assist in the oppression of their neighbors.
Václav Havel watched it happen, as an author, poet, playwright, and resister, before he became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia. In his essay, The Power of the Powerless, he describes how a post totalitarian system succeeds by simply training people to accept pervasive dishonesty. How many of us do that every day?
Havel writes, "Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did. Or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life [01:01:00] with it, and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system."
To keep freedom alive, Havel tells us, we must continue to live truthfully. Even when that isn't allowed, we can find small parts of our lives where it's possible and try to make them bigger. We can and must remember what freedom is like and remind each other, day by day.
As Kundera wrote, also in the book of Laughter and Forgetting, the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivions.
Notes from the Editor on those who defend authoritarians against criticism during D-Day commemoration
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with TLDR News Global analyzing how democracies decline. Tufts University looked at the factors that put democracy under threat. Vox, back in 2017, that looked at how it was legal actions by Trump that were often the most concerning regarding democracy.
Ali Velshi on MSNBC, spoke with Anne Applebaum about [01:02:00] Russia and China's efforts to undermine democracy. Democracy Docket discussed the threat of racial gerrymandering. The Marxist Project laid out why the space between democracies and autocracies is often greater than we'd like to believe. Democracy Paradox looked through historical examples of failed democracies.
On Why is This Happening? Chris Hayes spoke with Eric Holder about Trump's plan to weaponize the justice department against his political enemies. Chauncey de Vega spoke with a former MAGA cultist who's now speaking out against the lies he once believed. And Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good described the importance of forgetting the past in order to enter a period of autocracy.
And those were just the top takes—there's a lot more in the deeper dive sections—but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all manner of important and interesting topics while trying to take a lighthearted angle at it at the same [01:03:00] time. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support. There's a link in the "show notes" through our Patreon page, if you prefer, or from right inside the Apple Podcast App. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
Now, before we continue on to the "deeper dives" half of the show—I know this is a heavy topic, existential questions about the future of democracy and all that.
So I thought I'd share one of the lighter takes on our current threat to democracy. The New York magazine Intelligencer had a short piece on conservatives' angry reaction to Biden's anti Nazi D-Day speech. Now first, it should be admitted that it's obviously true, that Biden was using the speech warning about the dangers of authoritarian tyranny, [01:04:00] as demonstrated in World War II as a modern warning against those same forces now ascendant in the GOP and elsewhere. However, he didn't actually mention anyone or any party by name. So it ended up being a nice sort of rhetorical trap wherein warning about tyranny and defending democracy. Has gotten the right to respond with anger to those ideas.
From the speech, "Now we have to ask ourselves, will we stand against tyranny against evil, against crushing brutality of the iron fist. Will we stand for freedom? Will we defend democracy?"
And then from the article writer, " What part of that do conservatives object to? Trump doesn't claim to be an isolationist, a lover of dictators or an opponent of democracy. They insist he doesn't want to break up NATO and only wants to toughen up the allies. His supporters only take attacks on these things as an attack on [01:05:00] Trump, because they understand he actually loves dictators believes in isolationism and hates democracy."
Pollock, one of the conservative commentators. Hilariously uses as evidence of Biden's scrupulous criticism, the following line: "The D-Day heroes fought to vanquish a hateful ideology in the thirties and forties. Does anyone doubt they wouldn't move heaven and earth to vanquish the hateful ideologies of today?"
And the article continues. Hearing the reference of 'hateful ideologies' Pollock's response is: "Hey, that's us!" Which is of course the classic rebuke, right? "Hey, I resemble that remark."
So. I said I was going for a slightly lighter angle, but it's also important to remind people of this, I'm about to say, you know, whenever possible. From a different New York magazine article, it says , "Trump is an admirer of Putin and reportedly of Hitler, even. Trump [01:06:00] truly supports neither Ukraine nor NATO. As I write this, it still seems insane, unimaginable that these are sentences about a once and possibly future American president, but they are real, if unfortunately, so familiar by now that Trump often benefits from our failure to be shocked all over again. Just two days before Putin's attack on his neighbor Trump called him a 'strategic genius' on the campaign trail. Trump frequently speaks about his great relationships with the world's current crop of autocrats and tyrants praising Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un for their strength while ranting about the weakness of the west. When Trump was president, he told his White House chief of staff, John Kelly—a decorated former Marine general —that he wanted America's officers to be more like Hitler's in their unquestioning loyalty to him. He routinely calls his enemies, 'vermin' and 'human scum,' echoing Hitler's language. And Kelly has said that Trump even told him [01:07:00] that Hitler did some good things."
Going on the article quotes from an unpublished resignation letter written by Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "It is my deeply held belief that you're ruining the international order and causing significant damage to our country overseas that was fought for so hard by the greatest generation that they instituted in 1945. It's now obvious to me that you don't understand that world order. You don't understand what the war was about. In fact, you subscribed to many of the principles that we fought against."
So when conservative pundits react in anger to Biden using the D-Day commemoration to criticize fascists and authoritarians from both the past and present, it seems to me that the only reasonable solution is for them to not nominate fascist authoritarians, to represent their party.
SECTION A: DISSECTION OF DEMOCRACY
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with deeper dives on four [01:08:00] topics.
Next up Section A: "Dissection of Democracy," Section B: "International Democracy," Section C: "The Cult of Trump," and Section D: "Democracy in Action."
Freedom in the world is measurably declining… what can we do? - Disorder - Air Date 3-9-24
ALEXANDRA HALL HALL - HOST, DISORDER: This is the 18th consecutive year where freedom in the world has declined. So explain in a bit more detail what some of these trends are and then let's get to the whys and what's, what should we do about it.
MIKE ABRAMOWITZ: So The core trend is that global freedom declined for an 18th consecutive year, which really means that every year for the last 18 years, there have been more countries who have experienced declines in political rights and civil liberties.
And those that had improvements. Now, last year was kind of interesting because for the first time in 17 years at the time, there had been a narrowing of the gap. And so we had thought that maybe it might be a turning point, but that was not to be the case. This [01:09:00] year, we had 52 countries that declined and only 21 that improved.
That is really a pretty wide gap. And so it's really was a very bad year for democracy. I think we have to recognize that while. We're in this period of decline, we are still way ahead of where we were either at the end of World War II or even 1973, which was a trough for global democracy. And we've had, after 1973, the first 30 years of the report, a tremendous growth in democracy.
So now I think 88 countries are considered democracies compared to 44, 50 years ago. So ...
ALEXANDRA HALL HALL - HOST, DISORDER: 44, God, that's so few.
MIKE ABRAMOWITZ: Yeah. So even though there's been a. A recession, we're still ahead of where we were. And I think that is something that gives you hope, but you also don't want to take things for granted. I think there's a great line from Ronald Reagan, which I'm going to butcher, but he said often that [01:10:00] freedom had to be fought for every generation.
And it's only a generation from being extinguished. And I read, I think that you really feel that when you are in an organization like Freedom House. And while some people will say to you, well, things are not so bad. Well, yes, but if the current trends continue, they could get a lot worse. So we cannot take this for granted.
I think that the three trends that we highlighted in 2023, number one was there were widespread problems with elections, violence, manipulation. Then you had countries like Cambodia, Guatemala, Poland, Turkey, Zimbabwe, where incumbents tried to control the electoral competition, hinder their political opponents.
Or really prevent them even from taking power. That was something that happened in Guatemala. After Mr. Arevalo, who is the new president there, was fairly elected in an election there. And I think the other two would be armed conflict, often driven by authoritarian aggression, caused death and [01:11:00] destruction and imperiled freedom.
I still think that one of the major challenges to freedom is right there in Ukraine, where the invasion of Ukraine has helped degrade basic rights in both occupied Ukraine and the Ukraine that remains free. and also prompted more intense repression in Russia itself. And I think, you know, another area that we're concerned about is Myanmar, where civilians bore the brunt of a civil conflict that stemmed from the 2021 military coup.
I think the other trend that I think I would just highlight is the rejection of pluralism, which is, you know, we define as a peaceful coexistence of people with different political ideas. religions or ethnic identities. And that is something that is also, we're quite concerned about.
ALEXANDRA HALL HALL - HOST, DISORDER: So this is the year of elections.
There are elections taking place around the world, including in the US and the UK. I now have American citizenship, so I'm even more engaged in American political developments than I was [01:12:00] before. So which are the elections that we should be looking out for this year? And do you see this problem of.
Election rigging, or manipulation, or demonization of political opponents. Is that also happening here as well as in other countries?
MIKE ABRAMOWITZ: Couple points to make about elections. First of all, I think we should pause and reflect upon the fact that the most repressive authoritarian countries in the world, feel they have to have an election, right?
You think about countries like Iran and Russia, just to name two of them. There is nothing that is free and fair about elections in Iran or Russia. They are a joke, a sham, a farce, whatever you wanna call it. But Putin has to go through the exercise of having what he calls an an election because election has acquired a great power that people don't accept the kind of [01:13:00] legitimacy of a government unless it.
Except, you know, unless they have an election. And I think that's a good thing, and I think that's a hopeful sign in the long term for the power of democracy, because the fundamental democracy is about other things than just having an election, but having an election is absolutely critical to a successful democracy.
I think the second point that I would make is that there are just some global trends with elections that are concerning. I mean, just two or three just to point out. One would be the rise of social media and the changes in media have really made the ease of spreading disinformation and propaganda much easier.
And so, The presence of that in many different countries and then elections around the world is a challenge for elections and for the credibility of democracies. I think number two, you see incumbents really trying to tilt the playing field on [01:14:00] behalf of their candidacies to the extent of rewriting the Constitution as it happened in El Salvador so that, you know, Yeah, a clear rule against one term for each president.
And they basically rigged the election. So you Kelly could have another term. And I think that we've seen that around the world. And I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is that even when. Someone wins a free and fair election, entrenched powers go out of the way to try to prevent that person from taking power.
So I think there are a lot of very concerning trends about elections that we highlight in our report this year.
When Democracy Breaks: Final Thoughts with Archon Fung, David Moss and Arne Westad Part 2 - Democracy Paradox - Air Date 6-4-24
JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: The idea of democracy breaking still gives the indication that there’s a moment where democracy moves into something that is not democracy. What is the line that would represent the moment when you move from democratic breakdown? I mean, can we actually identify that moment? Does it matter to identify the exact precise [01:15:00] moment when a country moves from democracy to autocracy or at least not democracy?
ARCHON FUNG: Well, I think in the extreme cases, you can tell on either side pretty easily. Then your question is what’s the threshold? I guess many of my colleagues would have a minimal democracy definition where you absolutely know when there is no longer a contest between more than one party in a regular way. A lot of comparative political scientists would sign on to that definition still. I guess for me, it’s a fuzzier threshold in which contestation is just no longer viable within the institutions that exist and then you have to go extra-institutional. My colleague Erica Chenoweth, studies civil resistance. Once that’s the main path of contestation, it’s no longer democratic. So, for me, it has to do with the ability to contest. [01:16:00] Sometimes that’s in elections, but it’s also in many, many other spaces. When that’s just no longer viable. You’re probably not in a democracy anymore.
JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: That makes Turkey a really problematic case because this past year you had extremely competitive elections and you had municipal elections where the opposition was not just competitive but they actually won in a number of different municipalities. So, does that mean that we should still think of Turkey as being somewhat democratic or do we think of that as being a case of actual complete breakdown? Is it a country that is suffering extreme forms of democratic erosion or has it crossed that threshold where it’s no longer democratic anymore?
DAVID MOSS: I think that this idea that something being broken is binary isn’t actually quite right, not only with regard to democracy, but really almost anything else. If you think about whether your car is broken, if it doesn’t move at all and [01:17:00] doesn’t start at all, it’s broken. But what about if it only starts 1/10th of the time or what about if it moves, but it only goes about three miles an hour? Or what about if sometimes the brake works and sometimes the brakes don’t work? Different people are going to say that that car is broken depending on some configuration. But we might take a vote or something to decide whether it’s broken. Different people are going to think different things. Certainly, when it doesn’t work at all.
There are binary elements, but I think as with anything, there are elements that are not binary. We can look at a democracy and we can say not every feature is working. But a lot of features are working and broadly do we see a commitment to majoritarianism in decisions? Broadly, do we see protection of minority rights and the right to contest? If we say yes, we say it’s a working democracy. As those begin to break down, especially those protections on dissent, on opposition, on running a competitive election as a member of the opposition, [01:18:00] especially as those weaken different people at different times will say it’s broken and they may backtrack. They may say, wait, it seemed broken. Now it’s actually working a little better.
I don’t think it’s a complete binary, even with the word broken, which sometimes might feel like it’s binary. That’s one of the things that you’re pointing out and that we struggle with in the book. Different people are going to see it differently, but I would say we did all decide on these cases that, ultimately, even if we can’t name the exact moment in time, there was a breakdown. The car – in this case, the democracy, wasn’t working.
ARNE WESTAD: Specifically with regard to Turkey, I think it is difficult because no one would argue that there are no forms of competitive democracy in today’s Turkey. But at the same time, as David alluded to earlier on in this conversation, I think it’s pretty clear that for a very large number of Turkish people, they have lost faith in much of the promise that democracy seemed to hold out to them when it was restored from authoritarian rule in the late 20th century. So, there is a trajectory [01:19:00] here, but the key for us, at least the key for me, is this depends very much on who you ask. When you get a system in which almost everyone feels that the system somehow does not work for them, that’s one element of the system.
In Turkey, be it the Kemalist institutions that were put in place in the early 20th century or the way of rule that President Erdogan has developed that doesn’t work for them, it’s not part of their vision of what a democracy should be. Then you know that there is trouble. Then you know there are significant weaknesses in terms of the political system that would not be recognized by many people who live under it as being democratic. I think this is one of the most important issues for me in terms of thinking about what we can learn from these cases is that all of those approaches would be different. I mean, those are situational. Those are based on historical and cultural and political differences that come out in the case.
ARCHON FUNG: Justin, to the Turkey case and then associated cases that we don’t really write about like Hungary and [01:20:00] maybe even India and other places, this goes to maybe the changing form of autocracy rather than the changing form of democracy. John Keane points out in his book, The New Despotism, that the new despots, unlike the old ones, have to conduct these quasi-democratic rituals as part of their own legitimation. One of them is elections. Another is public polling. This makes them very nervous because they think that they’ll probably win and in Putin’s Russia, almost certainly he would win.
But there’s a little bit of insecurity there because sometimes they don’t go your way and they know this. So, it may be a permanent democratic opening in the way that the new despotisms work. It seems like there has to be that minimum doorway to some minimum contestability in which things could go bad for the despot in a way that wasn’t quite true in prior eras of autocracy.
JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: [01:21:00] The Athenian chapter is interesting because it emphasizes not just democratic erosion and democratic breakdown, but also democratic recovery. But if we look at all of the different historical cases, any of the cases that date back to the 70s or earlier, they all eventually became thriving democracies later on. It makes me wonder whether when you suffer democratic erosion, if there’s really a point where democratic breakdown becomes almost inevitable. That to create democratic recovery, it needs to recover almost out of a complete breakdown, almost tabula rasa, if you will.
That’s one of the thoughts in my mind that I’d like to pose to you guys is whether democratic erosion, once it hits a certain point, does it become almost like a whirlpool where it just sucks you in to eventual breakdown [01:22:00] or can you recover your democracy at any point of the backsliding episode? Is it possible to recover from severe democratic erosion right at the point of democratic breakdown?
DAVID MOSS: I think there’s no way really to know. Certainly, in this book, we only looked at cases where they ended in breakdown. We can’t say if a country might’ve had a large amount of erosion and then it recovered. We’re not looking at those examples and beyond that it’s hard to put a number on it. We haven’t yet figured out how to do it, but it’d be great. V-DEM is trying and they have their method and others are trying. It’s hard, especially historically to have a lot of confidence in a number. So, it’s a little bit hard to say this one has more erosion than the other in very fine-grained ways. I’m not sure if we know the answer to that. That said I know the US example a little better than some of the others.
If you look at the US there was always a great deal of what [01:23:00] I would call political hypochondria. People always thought the democracy was breaking. From 1800 forward, they thought the Republic was breaking and except for in the case of the Civil War, they were always wrong. If you think about the restrictions, for example, just to give one very notable example, on black voting rights in the post-bellum period up through the 1960s, this is a very significant degree of political erosion and the country takes an awful long time, but is able to begin to rectify that particularly with respect to voting. So, I think you can have significant degrees of erosion.
If you look back again in the antebellum period in the United States, one of the reasons for the push for public education was the belief that small-d democratic values were eroding and that public education was necessary to correct that. Now, there was also a lot of bigotry associated with public education and a Catholic-Protestant fight and lots of things going on. There was this sense that there was erosion and here’s an institution [01:24:00] that can help address it. I don’t know how you measure in the fine grained way you’re talking about and we don’t know if a country that’s had significant erosion can come back without the breakdown, but I would tend to think that the possibility may be there.
Three experts on why democracies are facing growing threats globally - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 12-10-21
NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: President Biden said there's a global competition between democracy and autocracy. Which side is winning in Latin America?
MIRIAM KOMBLITH: Unfortunately, I have to say that I think autocracy is winning.
Unfortunately, this is a region of the world that, until recently, praised itself of having all the countries in the democratic field, except for Cuba, and that has been a 60-year, long-lasting dictatorship. However, nowadays, we have — in addition to Cuba, we have Nicaragua and Venezuela, and we have a significant slipping into authoritarian trends both on the right and on the left.
And what's really worrisome is these authoritarian trends are being promoted from within, elected officials, [01:25:00] players, parties inside democratic systems that are pushing their own countries against the will of the people, in many cases, towards authoritarian regimes.
NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Helen Kezie-Nwoha, we have seen coups in Guinea, Mali, Chad, Sudan, the highest number of coups in afternoon in 40 years.
Each, of course, have their own local causes. But what's behind what Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently called an epidemic of coups?
HELEN KENZIE-NWOHA: The democratic process in Africa has been mired with a lot of corruption in electoral processes.
You will find politicians taking advantage of poverty, a large number of unemployed youths, buying votes during elections, making elections not credible. We have also seen increasingly marginalization of minority groups, ethnic groups.
We see also increasingly social and economic inequalities [01:26:00] that have also led to agitations by people calling for changes in government. Once people are calling for changes, the army takes over. And when they took over, they also used elections itself to manipulate themselves into power, making it even worse for people.
NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Heather Conley, how are leaders in Hungary and Poland especially challenging democracy, weaponizing cultural values, and how are other leaders in Europe, frankly, taking their example?
HEATHER CONLEY: Hungary, under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has really been a leader in establishing an illiberal handbook, so restricting constitutional capabilities for an opposition to be able to express themselves, reduce media freedoms, so any media voice has to be supportive of the government, is controlling the judicial branch, making sure that there can't be any meaningful investigation [01:27:00] into a government.
Mr. Orban's handbook has now been adopted in Poland, increasingly in Slovenia. In part, it's to ensure the current government can maintain its political power and its base, and making sure that the opposition cannot do that.
NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: So, let's talk a little bit in each region about how some local forces are fighting this.
Miriam Kornblith, let's start with you.
What do we see in terms of resistance in Latin America to these anti-democratic trends? How are people fighting back?
MIRIAM KOMBLITH: There is a lot of fighting back against the authoritarian trends.
Even in the case of Cuba, for the first time in 60 years, people took to the streets. There's a very vibrant civil society in Latin America that is fighting back. They are looking for transparency, anti-corruption. They're looking for rule of law, for independent judiciary, for independent legislative branches. There are lots of courageous, [01:28:00] innovative and very committed people fighting back.
NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Helen Kezie-Nwoha, you talked a lot about elections. Why is it important for the world to try and support African election infrastructure?
HELEN KENZIE-NWOHA: Civil society organizations and others bodies are working very hard to ensure that electoral processes are more transparent, despite the militarized nature of states within Africa.
Although there's been a lot of works in terms of sensitizing the citizens on the rule of law on elections, you find that the environment itself is not conducive for civil society.
NICK SCHIFRIN - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Heather Conley, we have seen major protests across Poland. Can something like that make a difference?
HEATHER CONLEY: Absolutely.
So, you really are seeing a pretty significant social mobilization. But is it enough? You have governments that have all the tools. They control the media, they control the funding sources, and they [01:29:00] are able to use their majorities to pass through new laws.
But I think we're seeing some real improvements. So we see this as well in the European Union withholding pandemic relief funds from both Poland and Hungary because of the democratic backsliding, may, in fact, have the greatest leverage, in addition to strong U.S. engagement.
SECTION B: INTERNATIONAL DEMOCRACY
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section B: "International Democracy."
“More Than a Symbolic Victory”: Mexican Women’s Movement Paved Way for Election of 1st Female President - Democracy Now! - Air Date 6-4-24
LAURA CARLSEN: After 200 years of democracy and 65 male presidents, the populace elected a woman for the first time, with an overwhelming majority. Now, this is more than a symbolic victory. What it means is that there’s an example for younger women that women can be leaders, that they can gain the support of the population, and they offer greater horizons for younger women as they begin to think about their own futures. It also means — and I’ve been talking to women from other countries, for example, in Chile, with [01:30:00] Michelle Bachelet as president, two terms, and also in Honduras, Xiomara Castro — that there’s a number of doors that open for women’s equality and policies that have to do with women’s equality. For one thing, there’s usually greater dialogue. There are more channels of dialogue. For another, there’s the support that women presidents can give each other, especially within this region, in terms of promoting gender equality policies across the region. This could be a path toward greater gender equality, and which is obviously very key to democracy within the region.
Now, in the clip that you played, Claudia Sheinbaum credited women before her with her victory. And it’s very important to recognize this. She owes a lot to women’s movements within Mexico. Women’s movements in Mexico began fighting decades ago for gender parity and equal representation [01:31:00] in political positions within the country. And it has not been an easy fight. We’re talking about a country with a traditionally macho culture which has now achieved a landmark in democracy that even the United States has not achieved. They began by requiring quotas in candidacies. They would get a legislation passed, and then the parties would find loopholes. They would have to close up the loopholes. They began to push for laws against political violence and gender-based violence that would disqualify or even threaten women for being women. And little by little, they made this progress, until, also with the support of Claudia Sheinbaum’s party and — the Morena, they achieved parity in the cabinet and within Congress at certain points in the recent history. So, all this was very important for her arriving.
Now, [01:32:00] the current government has not had a good relationship with women’s movements. Women’s movements have been dissatisfied particularly with the lack of progress on the key issue of gender violence. We saw massive demonstrations of over a million people throughout Mexico on March 8th, International Women’s Day, protesting against the lack of progress and what they see as relative indifference of the government toward women’s demands to reduce it and protect them. And, in fact, the president has been dismissive and at times even attributed their criticisms to a manipulation of the right wing.
There’s an expectation that the relationship will be different with Claudia Sheinbaum. The current government does have feminists who are involved in it. There’s an expectation that feminists will join this government, as well, and that there may be new policies to direct the issue [01:33:00] of violence, of gender-based violence. Femicide in Mexico is very high. It’s kind of hard to pin down the numbers, because it has a different legal definition in different entities. One of the things that she’s proposing is that there be a federal definition of “femicide” and that it be a crime that’s prioritized for prosecution, contributing with groups of lawyers for women who denounce crimes of gender-based violence. There’s a series of proposals, most of which are fairly similar to what’s been put — been in place before. So, women are looking to see a more aggressive policy. However, there is an expectation that there will be some changes here, and particularly in the tone.
Claudia Sheinbaum is a very different type of politician from Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He was obviously the wind in her political sails to be able to achieve a victory which is a 30-point margin. It’s greater [01:34:00] than even most of the polls assumed. She’s winning, by the latest figures, which is over 95% of the vote counted, by 59% to 28% to her closest rival, another woman candidate, which is interesting, from the right, Xóchitl Gálvez, as you mentioned. And so, his popularity, which has been consistently above 60% throughout his six-year period, significantly contributed to her win, as well as the popularity of his programs. These programs, which are called the Fourth Transformation, which means the fourth moment of significant change in the history of Mexico, from independence, the reform and the revolution, giving it this historic dimension, are really based on social programs where a majority of Mexican families are receiving benefits from the government. And that was reflected, as well, in the vote. So, she has promised [01:35:00] to continue with that.
And one of the big debates is: How much will she create her own mark on this presidency? Mexican presidents typically have a great deal of power, which means that former presidents typically fade into the background. But there is some question about how much she’ll be able to do that. She has, of course, insinuated that this kind of a question is sexist, which you could definitely see it that way, and has said that she has a commitment, because there’s a public mandate to continue with these policies, but that she will indeed be her own person.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Laura, I wanted to ask you, in terms of Sheinbaum’s policies toward the United States, and, of course, the very hot-button issue of immigration. We’re hearing that President Biden is about to issue an executive order that will effectively begin to close down the border for [01:36:00] migrants or people seeking asylum from through Mexico into the United States. Your sense of how Sheinbaum will be — attempt to deal with the Biden administration, or whichever administration takes office next January, in terms of immigration?
This is a critical issue. And so far what she’s repeated is the slogan “cooperation with respect.” The current government has walked a fine line in its relationship with both the presidency of Donald Trump and the presidency of Joe Biden, and particularly, of course, on the issue of immigration. Claudia Sheinbaum has not defined a very detailed plan for what Mexico will do with immigration. And so far what that policy has been is to toe the line of U.S. anti-immigrant policies that are focused on containing immigrant flows. There’s a lot of talk of going to the causes, creating jobs that would enable [01:37:00] people to remain in their home countries, particularly in Mexico and Central America. And what we haven’t seen, the investment that would correspond to really making that kind of a policy work. She has said that she will emphasize that. She has said that she will respect human rights. But we see a huge participation of the National Guard in immigration control, which has led to massive violations of immigrant rights here in Mexico. And she has certainly not said that that will stop.
LAURA CARLSEN: With the closure of the right to request asylum in the United States, Mexico has to receive these thousands of people. It is very likely that Claudia Sheinbaum will agree to receiving these people. Mexico has refused to be a third safe country, which is a formal agreement saying that everyone who wants to request asylum has to do it in the first safe country they pass through. But they have agreed to a number [01:38:00] of programs that require them to receive people who are technically waiting to go through a legal process in the United States. It will be a constant negotiation. It’s a very tricky negotiation. There’s always a sore point of national sovereignty involved, that Mexican governments, both López Obrador and now Claudia Sheinbaum, will defend. But they also know that they cannot anger the United States, at the risk of economic repercussions.
If it’s Donald Trump, that risk is even greater. And she will have the additional factor that he’s a misogynist. It will not be easy for a woman president to deal with Donald Trump. We’ve already seen his relationship with Angela Merkel, for example, in Germany. So, the challenges are great.
Indian Elections - Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - Air Date 6-6-24
JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: If you're wondering how there's been both substantial growth and increasing poverty, that is because India's economic gains have been widely [01:39:00] unequal. By some estimates, just one million people now control around 80 percent of India's wealth.
And as they've gotten richer, much of the country has gotten poorer, even with all those bags of grain with his face on them. Under Modi, the country has fallen in the Global Hunger Index and now sits below North Korea and war torn Sudan. And you would think That all of this would be fertile ground for Modi's critics to exploit.
But, it's actually hard to do that in India. For one thing, it's difficult to confront him to his face, because he hasn't held a single press conference in India in the last ten years. And the interviews that he's granted have been the exact opposite of hard hitting. What criticism there is of Modi often gets suppressed in India, sometimes in a pretty heavy handed way.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Publications that have done stories critical of India's leadership, like the BBC, recently saw their offices raided on charges of tax evasion or money laundering. One of the country's most popular news channels that reported critically on the government, [01:40:00] NDTV, had its founders raided for bank fraud.
JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: It's true, not only were the founders of NDTV raided, but a few years later, a billionaire with close ties to Modi bought it, and its tone is now much friendlier to him.
Basically, if you criticize Modi, there's a pretty good chance that things are going to get very unpleasant for you. And given that we're here in America, I'm honestly not too worried about Moti's goons coming after me, but on the off chance that their reach does extend this far, you know what? Fucking try it!
You want to try and shut us down for being critical? I dare you! Do you have any idea who I am? I'm Bill fucking Ma, and my show has been on for, holy shit, over 20 years. And if you want to take us down, take your best shot. I, Bill Ma, would welcome it. It is no wonder. India is currently ranked 159th out of 180 countries for press freedom, that is 19 places lower than when Modi first came to power.
But it's not just national media, local outlets have been targeted too. This network in Kerala was suddenly taken off the [01:41:00] air by the government in 2020 for reasons explicitly linked to its content.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The shutdown was triggered by the channels reporting on anti Muslim riots in Delhi in February 2020.
According to the notice from the Information Ministry, MediaOne's coverage was biased and critical of the role of the Delhi police, and of a Hindu nationalist outfit, the RSS. The ban was soon reversed, the channel back on air. But the signal was clear, fall in line or else.
JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Yeah, that's not good. Because that crackdown creates a clear chilling effect, where media outlets may well be intimidated out of criticizing Modi.
And that could actually help explain why Hotstar, the platform that we were on in 2020, mysteriously chose to block our episode criticizing. And look, there are plenty of reasons to not watch this show. Depressing subject matter, too much profanity, and the very fact that the frantic pace of my talking voice causes dogs to, and this is a medical term, go nuts.
Also, the show seems biased, it's too long, I prefer Jimmy Fallon, Kimmel, Colbert, [01:42:00] Seth, or James Corden. Hi, Mum, by the way. Whatever your reason, at least it's your choice, not someone else's, to not watch. What I'm saying is, Meaningful criticism of Modi is scarce on TV in India. In fact, many veteran anchors who were critical of him have migrated to sites like YouTube instead.
But the government may soon be able to help heavily regulate digital media too. It's pushing a law which could mean that anyone making social commentary online would have to adhere to advertising and program codes prescribed by the government. Meanwhile, an amendment is working its way through the courts, which would establish a fact check unit, allowing the government to identify fake news about itself And order it to be taken down.
And I actually have a lead for that fact check unit. Check out the batshit claim that Modi stopped the war in Ukraine. Because there's a weird video going around that he should probably get taken down. And it's not just the press who found it hard to take on Modi. The same goes for his political opposition.
He's currently facing off against a coalition called the Indian National Developmental [01:43:00] Inclusive Alliance, or INDA. India, for short. A monumentally weak name for a coalition. The first I in India stands for Indian. It'd be like if the H in HBO stood for HBO. Which it obviously doesn't, it stands for Hank.
Hank's box office. The India Coalition. This election is led by the Congress Party, the face of which is Rahul Gandhi. And while his party never stood a realistic chance of challenging Modi, even so, its campaign has been significantly hampered by the fact that just weeks before this year's election began, tax agencies moved to freeze their bank accounts.
And on the same day that that was announced, the head of one of India's other opposition parties, And look, those could be just more lucky, complete coincidences for Modi. Except for the fact that over the years, multiple politicians who've opposed the BJP have found themselves facing charges of fraud or financial malfeasance.
Only for those charges to suddenly stall or be [01:44:00] dropped when they switch parties and join the BJP instead. There's even a term for this, the washing machine, where supposedly dirty politicians come out clean once they switch sides. And it is a completely open secret there.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: One opposition politician who joined the BJP in 2022 left the cat out of the bag when he said he sleeps easier now that he's a member of the ruling party.
I also had to switch to the BJP. Now I'm stress and tension free. All is good. No official inquiries, no investigation, and I can sleep peacefully. I'm tension free. Wow!
JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: It is so universally understood. Everyone in that audience laughed, and laughed so hard, honestly. I'm a little bit jealous. It kind of makes me wonder if I should have spent our last show admitting to political corruption, instead of, what were we talking about?
What, corn? I did 25 minutes on fucking corn, and people watched it? What exactly is this show? [01:45:00] But in general, and to put it mildly, It seems good to be on Modi's good side, and very, very bad to be on his bad side. And that brings us back to his attacks on Muslims. As I mentioned earlier, he and his party are adherents to Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva.
It used to be a fringe ideology, but is now mainstream. And it's been said, nobody has done more to advance this cause than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And Muslims, as India's largest religious minority, have borne the brunt of this. Early this year, Modi famously opened an over 200 million dollar Hindu temple, showing up personally to help consecrate it.
Which might seem benign, until you learn that temple was built on the former site of this mosque, that was demolished by a Hindu mob in 1992, in an incident that set off riots, reportedly killing over 2, 000 people, most of them Muslim. So it's a site of tremendous pain. And the symbolism of opening a temple on that exact spot has been called the crowning achievement of a national movement aimed at establishing Hindu [01:46:00] supremacy in India.
But the damage here isn't just symbolic. In the climate that Modi stoked, Muslims have been lynched by Hindu mobs over allegations of eating beef or smuggling cows, an animal considered holy to Hindus. And then, there's been this.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Muslim owned buildings are literally being bulldozed in what the government calls a crackdown on illegal construction and accused criminals.
A brand of bulldozer justice all too common in India.
JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: That is awful and it's happening so much now that bulldozer justice has become a commonly used term. In fact, the bulldozer itself has become a Hindu nationalist symbol and it's been featured during election victories and in political rallies. This hardline BJP leader has even earned the nickname Bulldozer Baba.
And with anti Muslim hate speech and violence on the rise, it is no wonder many are feeling increasingly targeted and in incredibly grim ways.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Muslim shopkeeper Shamsher Ali feels like he's being pushed out. [01:47:00] Anything can happen at any point. That is the amount of hate now. Violence against Muslims is on the rise.
A Delhi police officer was caught on camera last month kicking a group of Muslim men, praying by the side of the road. The video went viral. The officer suspended. Another police officer arrested for killing three Muslims on a train, praising the prime minister while standing over their bodies.
JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Yeah, and it's worth remembering, that is not a bug of Modi's leadership, it is a feature.
So given all of this, what can we do? Well, for those of us who don't live in India, nothing really. Also, asking a British person, what should we do about India, is a little bit dangerous, as we tend to have quite a lot of ideas, none of which should be listened to. But as an international community, it seems past time to stop the uncritical, thawning praise of a man who is, to put it mildly, a deeply complicated figure.
So maybe we could at least stop comparing him to Bruce Springsteen. [01:48:00] And when you talk about what he's done for India, at least acknowledge that while, yes, he's responsible for giving bags of grain to people, he's also responsible for some getting sent bulldozers. And it should be possible to acknowledge the good things that Modi's managed to do for India, while acknowledging that many Indians live in active fear of what he seems more than happy to represent.
El Salvador’s "Cool Dictator" Bukele Begins Controversial 2nd Term with Backing from Biden & Trump - Democracy Now! - Air Date 6-4-24
AMY GOODMAN: President Bukele’s inauguration comes as his government continues to enforce a state of exception in El Salvador, a so-called war on gangs that’s led to the detention of nearly 80,000 people since 2022, many without charge or access to due process. Human rights groups have warned of gross violations and torturous conditions inside overcrowded Salvadoran prisons and estimate at least 240 people have died in police custody.
Despite growing concerns for Bukele’s authoritarianism, the Biden administration sent a high-level delegation, led by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, to the inauguration. Just three years ago, Biden officials had [01:49:00] refused to meet with Bukele in D.C. amidst concerns of his anti-democratic rule. Also in attendance at Saturday’s inauguration in San Salvador was Argentina’s right-wing President Javier Milei, Donald Trump Jr. and several Trump allies, including Florida Congressmember Matt Gaetz, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Protesters gathered outside the Salvadoran Embassy in Washington, D.C., to call out the Biden administration’s recognition of what they called an illegal and unconstitutional second term for Bukele.
CONSUELO GÓMEZ: [translated] We know that your government knows of the kidnapping and deaths of our children and families in Bukele’s jails. President Biden, it shames us that your government decided to participate in the inauguration of a new dictator in El Salvador.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to San Salvador, where we’re joined by Roman Gressier, a French American journalist, reporter with El Faro English, covering Central American politics. His latest piece for El Faro English is headlined “Biden [01:50:00] and Trump Camps Jockey for Favor in Bukele’s New El Salvador.” El Faro’s editorial board also recently published an op-ed titled “A Dictatorship Is Born.”
Explain the significance of this inauguration, the second term of Bukele, who describes himself as the “coolest dictator.”
ROMAN GRESSIER: As you noted in the introduction to this segment, this is essentially the evolution or the fulfillment of a process that’s been developing at least since 2021, when the Constitutional Chamber and the attorney general were removed in the first day of the last legislature, when Bukele’s party had achieved a supermajority in the elections. So, they removed the Constitutional Court, or Chamber, which then dramatically reversed course, just three, four months later — I believe in September of that year — ruling, despite six articles of the Constitution, that Bukele could seek reelection. So, that was [01:51:00] essentially the first stepping stone. And the following year, he declared that he would indeed run for reelection. And late last October, just minutes before the enrollment deadline as a candidate, he did indeed register as a candidate for reelection, without resistance from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal or other institutions. And on February 3rd, he was reelected with over 80% of the public’s support. And he was just sworn in on Saturday.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And, Roman, if you could explain to our viewers and listeners why Bukele has such deep support among so many Salvadorans?
ROMAN GRESSIER: Well, I think it has to do with a number of factors, first and foremost being the state of exception, which, while it has been very repressive, as you had also identified in the introduction, does hold the strongest support among the — [01:52:00] in the electorate and in polling. We saw throughout the election that the government, in fact, did not hold very much — did not do very much campaigning at all. The president did not do very much campaigning at all. It was more of a — and there weren’t future-looking proposals, such as, “We want to do this or that.” It was more a victory lap, stressing the reduction of gang presence, the dramatic reduction of gang presence in communities across the country. And there were even ads being run prior to the election suggesting that if the opposition, quote, “were to return to power,” then there would be a dramatic unleashing of gangs from the prisons, and this could only be avoided if the president’s majority in the Legislature were to continue.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And could you talk about the Bukele government’s crackdown on journalists and [01:53:00] human rights defenders? You yourself were among a group of journalists who were surveilled by the Bukele government with the Pegasus spyware.
ROMAN GRESSIER: That’s right. At the time, in late 2022, when we announced the Pegasus surveillance, extensive Pegasus surveillance, of El Faro, there were also multiple other newsrooms who were touched by that, as well as human rights organizations, columnists. It was very extensive. And I would suspect that if more people were to subject their phones to the same tests that we ran, we would have an even broader picture of what that surveillance truly looked like. But the digital surveillance certainly has been strong. The context of digital — of in-person and digital intimidation has also been very — has been ever present.
Just a few days before — two days before inauguration, if I’m not mistaken, the government announced arrests against nine [01:54:00] historic FMLN leaders, accusing them of plotting to plant bombs throughout the capital. And the audio that the police posted online didn’t speak of that in those terms. It spoke of a product that could not fail, etc. And one legal aid organization that knows the defendants asserted that they were speaking of firecrackers that are often used at protests.
So, the broader context or the undertones of inauguration have been very tense, hostile at times. And at inauguration itself, there were snipers on the rooftop, on rooftops close to the event, the military checking people who were coming in and out. So, the whole context definitely had militaristic undertones to it.
AMY GOODMAN: Roman, as we begin to wrap up, you’ve got Bukele detaining over 80,000 people since 2022, many without charge, in his so-called war on gangs. You have the Biden [01:55:00] administration, just three years ago, officials refusing to meet with President Bukele in D.C., given the human rights abuses or his tendency toward authoritarianism. Now you have a high-level delegation, led by Mayorkas, being present at the inauguration. And you have the right wing there. You have Florida Congressmember Matt Gaetz. You have Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host. And you have Donald Trump Jr., clearly representing Donald Trump. Why? What are their interests?
ROMAN GRESSIER: Yeah, it was interesting — it was interesting to see these what appeared to be parallel U.S. delegations at inauguration on Saturday. On one hand, you have the Biden administration, who, after the initial ruling by the Constitutional Court — actually, even before that, after the removal of the last Constitutional Court in May [01:56:00] 2021, they were extremely critical, as were most of the countries in the hemisphere, or many of the countries in the hemisphere. And that posture gradually changed. So, by the next year — actually, even adding one more step to the picture, when interim U.S. Ambassador Jean Manes left the country in around November 2021, the U.S., by that time, had compared Bukele’s ambition to seek reelection to Hugo Chávez. And she left the country saying that she didn’t — she believed she didn’t have a partner in the country at that time. So, the criticism was very broad. But by the following year, what Juan Gonzalez — the other Juan Gonzalez, the former national security adviser to President Biden, told El Faro English essentially said in a public forum the following year was that, you know, “There are different interpretations of the Constitution, and we’ll let the people decide.” [01:57:00] And at that point, things were more ambiguous. And by this year, the administration has settled into a posture of steering clear of the question of unconstitutional reelection and focusing on efforts to draw closer to the Bukele administration. I think part of that has to do with the fact that when the current U.S. ambassador faced his Senate hearing, Florida Senator Marco Rubio stressed that we don’t — and I believe this is a direct quote. He said, “We don’t have to applaud everything that they’re doing, but there is a national security interest that should also be balanced.” So, I believe that’s what is afoot on the side of the Biden administration.
And as for the Trump orbit, there has — Bukele was very close to the Trump administration and to U.S. Ambassador Ronald Johnson, who was there. There was an extensive cooperation on migration, efforts to stop migration to the U.S. at Mexico border. And in recent months, [01:58:00] you could say in the past year, as things have been particularly delicate with the Biden administration and there was a lot of uncertainty as to the tenor of the relationship, Bukele was very openly courting the U.S. far right. He was meeting with Tucker Carlson on his show, taking other steps. And it was very evident that there was a mutual affinity. And basically, the visit by Donald Trump Jr. confirmed. It was the most public sign of what had been understood for some time, which is that Bukele does, in fact, bet on and support the return candidacy of Donald Trump.
How to Dismantle a Democracy - Analysis - Air Date 2-19-24
DAVID RUNCIMAN: In the 1990s, there were these sort of fantastical visions of a democracy where you'd have nightly referendums where the people would choose on whatever the question was by clicking on their screens, whatever the technology was in the 1990s, policy choices for the government. So none of that has ever come to pass.
Instead, he says, technology is all [01:59:00] too often being used to damage democracy. If you think about the dawn of the digital technology age, the great hope was that this technology would provide the tools for citizens to expose their government. It was meant to be the great vehicle of democracy. democratic emancipation.
This is thought to be a democratic technology because it puts information in the hands of citizens. And I think what we have learned is that there is a massive power imbalance here. And actually the scope and the capacity to use and manipulate information lies with governments. They have far greater power to do this.
They have far greater appetite to do it. They have far greater capacity to do it.
MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: Amos Lipovich from Freedom House says the Turkish government is one of many, which is keen to check out what people have posted on platforms like X, often many years ago, to see if it offers potential to go after them.
AMY SLIPOWITZ: If you kind of get on the bad side of the Erdogan government, they'll just go back through your social media history, look [02:00:00] through your tweets, go back 10 years even, and find something that's not true.
that seems to be critical of the government and use that to investigate or prosecute them. So it also leaves this kind of digital trail that can threaten arrest at any moment.
MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: Turkish President Erdogan won't have to face the jeopardy of another presidential election now until 2028. But for the country normally referred to as the world's largest democracy, crunch time is fast approaching.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Modi is generating an immense amount of enthusiasm today, there's almost a frenzied atmosphere inside the rally.
MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: India is holding elections in two months time, with Narendra Modi seeking a third five year term in office. 900 million people are registered to vote. There are six recognized national parties, dozens of regional parties, and more than 2, 000 unrecognized ones.
Surely that shows a thriving democracy.
LARRY DIAMOND: The grip of the ruling party, [02:01:00] the BJP, just keeps tightening.
MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: Not according to Stanford University's Larry Diamond, who's concerned that, in fact, increasingly, it's just one party in serious contention. That's Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP.
LARRY DIAMOND: People are self censoring.
A lot of people won't, even in intellectual life, say certain things on social media in public for fear of being prosecuted. Businesses and independent media know that the taxman cometh with a political hatchet if they say too much that is critical of the government or the ruling party.
MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: Forget the Marines.
Sending in the tax authorities is a perfect way to intimidate your opponents. While most of us would agree companies and individuals who evade tax should be investigated, Larry Diamond says some suspect it has become a political tool in India to silence opposition.
LARRY DIAMOND: An independent research institute, not, you know, not one of the most oppositional ones [02:02:00] whose name probably I should leave out so that their plight isn't made even worse than it already has become, had to close down because they said modestly critical things and the tax man came.
That's the strategy now.
MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: The Indian Income Tax Department has raided an impressive number of organisations. The charities Oxfam and Amnesty International and several news websites which have been critical of its BJP party. The BBC has not been immune. In February last year, its Delhi offices were raided for three days over allegations of tax evasion.
Larry Diamond believes the Indian media has taken note.
LARRY DIAMOND: Many Indian newspapers now have become so quiet, so tame, even so servile. Their owners have huge business interests, and they don't want the tax man coming.
MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: The governing BJP party denies that journalists are being targeted, and believes [02:03:00] that much of what is happening is part of an orchestrated propaganda against the government.
But observers say India is using the courts to silence high profile opponents with the sorts of charges which would not have been brought before. For decades after independence, the Congress Party dominated Indian politics. But in March last year, one of its senior leaders, Rahul Gandhi, was sentenced to two years in prison for defamation after surname at an election rally.
He was also later disqualified as a lawmaker.
JENNIFER GANDHI: The prosecution of Rahul Gandhi, who is a prominent figure due to his family name and his position in the Congress party, but actually using the law to prosecute him in such a clearly manipulative way to prevent him from standing in the election is probably a pretty prominent low point.
MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: Jennifer Gandhi, no relation to Rahul, is professor of political science and [02:04:00] global affairs at Yale University. In August last year, India's Supreme Court suspended Rahul Gandhi's conviction. But Professor Gandhi says it's not just the final verdict that's important. It's the amount of time, money and energy political opponents have to expend in fighting their cases.
JENNIFER GANDHI: I mean, just think about the amount of energy and resources that those people who've been targeted by the government, how much they have to muster to defend themselves. It's a scary prospect, right? That you'd have to find counsel who's willing to represent you, who's not intimidated themselves by what the government could do to them.
MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: India's neighbours, Bangladesh and Pakistan, have a combined total population of around 400 million people and have both held elections this year. In January, Bangladesh Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, secured her fourth straight term in a controversial election. The [02:05:00] main opposition, Bangladesh Nationalist Party, boycotted the poll after mass arrests of its leaders and supporters.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Pakistan goes to the polls this week, but there are questions about how free or fair these elections will be. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan is disqualified from running An
MATT QVORTRUP - HOST, ANALYSIS: India's great rival and neighbour, Pakistan, has jailed former Prime Minister, a past captain of the Pakistani cricket team, Imran Khan and his wife, for seven years after voiding their marriage.
He was already in prison after having been found guilty on corruption charges. The week before the couple were convicted of profiting from state gifts, even the cricket bat, the symbol of Khan's PTI party, was banned from appearing on ballot papers for February's elections. That may seem like a small detail, but in a country where there are high rates of illiteracy, it's likely to confuse voters.
Anne Applebaum says smearing your opponent and trying to question their [02:06:00] integrity. It's part of the playbook.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: If you can undermine someone and destroy their credibility and harass them and ruin their lives, then you depress their followers and their admirers as well. It can include accusations of corruption.
It can include harassment, you know, tax inspections or forcing people to produce lots of documents about their financial status. You can just say you think they're good, you know, you think they're well meaning, you know, you think these are idealistic people. They're not, they're corrupt.
SECTION C: THE CULT OF TRUMP
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, Section C: "The Cult of Trump."
Jon Stewart Tackles The Trump Conviction Fallout & Puts The Media on Trial - The Daily Show - Air Date 6-3-24
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: For Democrats, of course, the challenge is how do we exploit the moment politically without giving the impression that this was the plan all along? Republicans needed to employ a slightly different strategy.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: This was a sham rigged political show trial from the very beginning.
This is the most outrageous travesty
I've ever seen. This was not law, this was not criminal justice, this was politics, this was a political smear job.
LAURA INGRAM: I [02:07:00] guess we all need, what, to shop at Banana Republic from now on? Because that's what it feels like, yeah, a Banana Republic.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: After this trial, we need to shop at Old Navy, because our country is a sinking ship.
It was a sham, a sham, this trial. A sham, I say. It was a sham. I'm shopping at Old Navy. The trial was a sham. Yes, we impaneled grand juries and submitted evidence and cross examined witnesses. But how is Donald Trump or his family not allowed on the jury? Outrageous! our justice system wasn't a sham, but certainly applying our justice system to Donald Trump was.
SENATOR TIM SCOTT: This is the weaponization of the justice system against their political opponent.
This is a justice system that haunts Republicans while protecting Democrats. [02:08:00]
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Oh my God! The justice system hunts Republicans while protecting Democrats. Someone should mention that to such unprotected Democrats as Senator Robert Menendez and Congressman Henry Cuellar, both facing corruption charges brought by our Department of Justice.
Not to mention, Hunter Biden was facing jury selection in a federal gun charges trial. F ing today! Through your sham upitization, the good hearted and good intentioned denizens of MAGA tania have finally been pushed too far.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Be ready, because on January 20 of next year, when he's former president, Joe Biden, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh said Trump should, quote, Make and publish a list of 10 high ranking Democrat criminals who he will have arrested when he takes office. These
MEGYN KELLY: Democrats will rue the day they decided to use lawfare to stop a presidential candidate.
It won't be Hunter Biden the next time. [02:09:00] It's going to be Joe Biden. It could potentially still be Barack Obama. It could still potentially be Hillary Clinton.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: It could be Barack Obama.
Perhaps it is time for those on the right to begin to examine what it might be like to investigate Hillary and William Clinton. Or perhaps to do it continuously and relentlessly for the last 30 years. But! To admit their own political gamesmanship, their own attempts at weaponizing justice, their own relentless pursuit of opponents, their own dehumanizing rhetoric towards the left, would be to allow a molecule of reality into the airtight distortion field that has been created to protect Magadonians from the harsh glare of the world.
It is a place where a moment such as this next one can pass without so much as a gasp of [02:10:00] what planet do you live on? For it is clearly not ours.
WILL CAIN: You famously said regarding Hillary Clinton, lock her up. You declined to do that as president.
DONALD TRUMP: I didn't say lock her up, but the people don't say lock her up, lock her up.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: What the f k? You never said lock her. I think I remember you saying it to her face at a debate.
HILARY CLINTON: It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.
DONALD TRUMP: Because you'd be in jail.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: To be fair, I apologize. guys. You did not say the words, lock her up, you only used a phrase synonymous with locking her up. Lock her up! Lock her up! Again, apologies. You didn't say lock her up, you merely gave [02:11:00] the thumbs up to thousands of others chanting lock her up. But that doesn't mean he literally said lock her up, although to be fair, he literally said lock her up all the f
DONALD TRUMP: ing time.
So Crooked Hillary, Crooked Hillary, you should lock her up, I'll tell ya. For what she's done, they should lock her up. Lock her up is right. Lock up Hillary.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: three of them? And that, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you is why we need courts.
Whatever flaws the American justice system has, and they are legion, especially for non billionaire former presidents, [02:12:00] it does appear to be the last place in America where you can't just say whatever the f k you want regardless of reality. Trump knows this better than anyone.
DONALD TRUMP: Now I would have testified, I wanted to testify.
The theory is you never testify because as soon as you testify, anybody. If it were George Washington, don't testify, because he'll get you on something that you said slightly wrong, and then they sue you for perjury. You would have said something out of whack, like it was a beautiful sunny day and it was actually raining out.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Yes, our jails in America are filled with incompetent weathermen. I'm telling you, officer, I thought thundersnow! 20 percent is still a chance! Don't take me away! Don't take me away! This is why the law and order right hates court procedures when applied to them. Courts are the last remaining guardrail that has a [02:13:00] standard of evidentiary presentation.
It is the last place where you have to prove what you say and you see the difference in what they say out of court versus what they say in court. Here is Trump on the 2020 election, out of court.
DONALD TRUMP: This is a fraud on the American public. We know there was massive fraud. It was a rigged election, 100%.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Here are his lawyers in court.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: This is not a fraud case. We are not alleging fraud in this lawsuit. We're not alleging that anyone's stealing the election.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Here is Rudy Giuliani pleading before the Court of Seasonal Landscapers. What happened there? It's a mix up. He's pleading, but not in the actual court.
RUDY GUILIANI: It's a fraud. An absolute fraud.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: And what does Giuliani say about that in court?
RUDY GUILIANI: If we had alleged fraud, yes, but this is not a, [02:14:00] this is not a, a fraud case.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: It's not a fraud case in court where I would need evidence. It's only a fraud case out there amongst the sod and the mulch where I can say whatever I want. Fox News says that Dominion voting machines rigged the election for Biden out of court.
SIDNEY POWELL: They were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist. The whole situation was carefully calculated and created to steal the election from President Trump.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: But in court, Fox was forced to pay 787 million for false statements. The difference between in court and out of court is that in court, someone can say, prove it. [02:15:00] And the problem is that most of the time in this country, our political leaders are not in court. They are here on TV where the news media has decided that there's really no such thing as reality.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: We now live in two utterly different universes. These two Americas are living in two different realities. We're living in two different realities. Americans are living in two, for the most part, two very different realities right now.
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: No, you're thinking of the multiverse. We are all living in one reality, and it can be the news media's job to litigate the parameters of said reality.
What the courts do really well is look backwards and reconstruct the realities of what happened. The news media could do the same, but what they do instead [02:16:00] is look forward and wildly speculate on the future.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: If Donald Trump is the nominee,
and if he is convicted of a crime, could you support him? If he's a convicted felon, if he is the Republican nominee, does that mean you're still going to vote for him?
He
could be convicted before November. Would you still support him then? Will you commit to certifying the 2024 election results, no matter who wins?
Let me look forward. Will you accept the election results of 2024, no matter what happens, Senator?
JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: No matter what, Senator. Voting irregularities, ant overlords, voting machines that suddenly transform into fighting robots, voting booth powers activate, will you still certify?
Who f ing cares? No one knows what the future holds. Ask this person what it was about the 2020 election that they found objectionable, and then litigate the realities of their objections to the election to them, in front of them, so when they say to you, I never said locker up, you can say, [02:17:00] I object!
Jack Posobiec Welcomes END OF DEMOCRACY - Says They "Didn't Get All the Way There on Jan 6th!" - Dollemore Daily - Air Date 2-24-24
JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, DOLLEMORE DAILY: When Republicans tell you who they are, when they say who they are, and what they stand for, and what they believe Believe them, because they're not even hiding it anymore. It used to be like this, this cute little game they'd play. Oh no, voter ID is, that's not racist.
We just want to have voter security. Even though there have been Republicans on tape, long, time after time after time saying that they want voter ID in place because it diminishes minority vote. They've said it. They've admitted it. They tell on themselves. And we're in a place now where Donald Trump has given these people permission to be the worst versions of themselves.
To say the worst, most horrible things just right out in the open. And it doesn't really even get covered. Jack Posobiec is the guy who he either came up with or just was a guy who really ran with the conspiracy about the pizza gate. You know, the comet ping pong pizza here in [02:18:00] Washington, D. C. That they said there was a Uh, some kind of a child abuse ring in the basement, you know, the pizza place that doesn't have a basement that apparently was running something out of their non existent basement that, that initiated some psycho from North Carolina to drive to North, to, to, to Washington DC and discharge a firearm in an effort to stop what was taking place in this pizza place.
The thing that wasn't taking place in the basement that didn't exist. That's Jack Posobiec, him and Cernovich and Alex Jones. They're all of the same ilk. They're all cut from the same cloth. They are white supremacists. They are conspiracy theorists. They'll rabble rousers. They're real, real pieces of work.
And Jack Posobiec isn't just your random. Uh, fringy, cringy, conspiracy theorist. Now he holds weight within the Republican party. He's been given platforms. He's, he's, he sought after to speak. And this [02:19:00] was CPAC two days ago where Jack Posobiec sidled up next to Steve Bannon, says exactly what their intent is, what their mission is, what their end state seems to be, and that is to end democracy in America.
And he's not, he's not being cute. He's not being funny. He gets an amen brother from Steve Bannon. When they say what they want, believe them.
JACK POSOBIEC: All right. Welcome. Welcome. I just wanted to say welcome to the end of democracy. We're here to overthrow it completely. We didn't get all the way there on January 6th, but we will, we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with, with this right here.
We'll replace it with this right here. Amen. That's right. Because all glory, all glory is not to government, all glory to God.
JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, DOLLEMORE DAILY: Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to [02:20:00] overthrow it completely. We didn't get all the way there on January. but we will endeavor to get rid of it. So all of you conservative trolls out there who watch and comment, what do you say to this? The same group of people who, it wasn't an insurrection. It was a tourist event.
It was at the very worst, a trespassing event. It was a protest that got a little out of hand. It was a happy family reunion, says Michelle Bachman. All of these things have been said by, by Andrew Clyde, by Michelle Bachman, by Tucker Carlson, by Deon Clark. Even Jack Posobiec. So if you tried to end democracy on January 6th, that wasn't an insurrection, you're saying in one breath, it wasn't an attempt to overthrow the United States government by ending a or overturning a free and fair election.
You say that, but then also you [02:21:00] say, we're here to end democracy. We didn't quite get it done during our insurrection. Listen to what they say. These people treat it like it's a game. You see, clout is a currency in Republican circles. They don't care if the country is harmed as a direct result of it. They don't care if we all suffer, if some of us don't get a say in governance, in self governance.
You know, the system that was set up by our founders, that these people so go on about, that is all outlined here within the confines of this document, the Constitution of the United States. The document they claim to revere, that they wave around like a prop. They don't care. They don't want democratic rule.
You know, as much as it's not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic, which is a form of democracy. So much so they think it's a game that they literally constructed a game [02:22:00] out of the insurrection. Here is the J6 insurrection pinball machine that was at CPAC. They're calling it an insurrection. The January 6th insurrection.
The Peaceful Transfer of Power Is at Stake - Democracy Docket - Air Date 5-31-24
PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: You recently wrote an article describing the asymmetry of election denialism in the country. Explain to us what you mean by that.
MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Yeah. So, you know, I was inspired to write this because I saw a poll out of Arizona that said that, um, half of Republicans in the state want Donald Trump to contest the outcome of the election if he loses. Before the election has taken place, before a single ballot has been cast, before there can be any claim of fraud or irregularity, they already want him to conduct the election, whereas when you look at the number on the Democratic side, it is like 10%.
Right? So there is an asymmetry in how election denialism has set up the two parties, where one party is like, We definitely want to contest the election no matter what. Where one candidate in the person of [02:23:00] Donald Trump is saying, Oh, I won Minnesota. And you're looking at it and you're like, Wait a second, what do you mean you won Minnesota?
Like you lost Minnesota by over 200, 000 votes. And his party believes him. And you have one candidate in the person of Donald Trump who at a rally in New Jersey says, I'm going to win New Jersey. He says, I'm going to win New York. And then you have another party who is like, well, we are committed in the Democratic party, who's committed to the peaceful transfer of power.
Who's like, we really want Joe Biden to win, but we also want to make sure they're free and fair elections. Who does not believe that Joe Biden won Alabama in 2020. Who does not believe, breaking news, that Joe Biden is going to win Mississippi. Or, uh, or Louisiana in 2024, and who is not lined up to say that if, if Donald Trump wins, you know, Arizona, no matter what, no matter what, Joe Biden needs to contest the outcome of the election.
So there is this grave asymmetry between the two parties. And what that is doing is [02:24:00] creating a real threat. To the peaceful transfer of power, because if you have a party that says, no matter what, we believe that, that there needs to be an election contest, no matter what, the election cannot be legitimate.
If, if Donald Trump doesn't win, then how can you have a peaceful transfer of power if that party loses? And so I'm very, very, very worried about this.
PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Republicans are quick to point out that some Democrats in 2016 called Donald Trump's election illegitimate.
So how is that any different from GOP election denialism?
MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Yeah, it's, it's apples and oranges. I mean, let's just start with some basic facts. In 2000, uh, Al Gore lost by a few hundred votes after the Supreme Court halted a recount. Uh, he immediately conceded. In 2004, John Kerry lost by, uh, by a few thousand votes in a, in a single state of Ohio.
And the next morning he conceded, uh, in [02:25:00] 2008. In 2016, uh, Barack Obama won, and John McCain and Mitt Romney conceded in 2016, the election. You ask about Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump the night of the election to concede. The next morning she gave a speech conceding saying that Donald Trump needed our support 'cause he was going to be our president.
Okay. So this is mythology that, that, that somehow, uh, that, that there is a parallelism here. Now are there, were there questions raised by Secretary Clinton and others? Myself and others about the tactics? Donald Trump used to win the election? Absolutely. And by the way, in a courtroom in New York City, those, some of those, uh, some of those concerns have played out in a criminal trial.
And by the way, not the only criminal trial that, uh, Donald Trump's, uh, supporters have been involved in related to the 2016 election. So, sure, there are people who, who believe that Donald Trump won that election by doing some really terrible things, some really illegitimate things, [02:26:00] including perhaps falsifying records and paying off porn stars.
Uh, but that is not the same thing as saying that, that, that we are challenging that the vote totals were inaccurate, that, that, that, that somehow they were illegal ballots. That has never, that has not taken place on, uh, among Secretary Clinton or her supporters. And so this is a total, total. Uh, false, uh, false comparison.
PAIGE MOSKOWITZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: Since 2020, we have seen contests against election challenges fail. We have seen indictments for people involved in efforts to overturn elections in Arizona, Georgia, Washington, DC. We've seen states change their laws around election certification, fake electors. Do you think any of the things that have happened since 2020 would discourage Republicans from trying, you know, to vote?
January 6, 2. 0.
MARC ELIAS - HOST, DEMOCRACY DOCKET: So look, again, this is part of what I write about, um, uh, in the democracy docket piece. I, I think that, [02:27:00] that unfortunately it's gotten worse, not gotten better, right? I mean, the fact is that election denialism is much, much more central to the identity of the Republican party and the Trump campaign in 2024 than it was in either 2016 or 2020.
I mean, in 2016, you know, you could point to a number of things that Donald Trump campaigned on. He campaigned on building a wall, which was ridiculous. Uh, he campaigned on a whole bunch of sort of ridiculous economic theories, trade policies, you know, in 2020, he, you know, he again, campaigned on a whole bunch of, of, of things that he had done while he was president, a lot of which were lies, but they related to when he was president. In 2024 the only thing he's campaigning on is election or not. I mean, if you think about it, you know, he waffles back and forth on a bunch of other issues. But the only thing he is consistent about is that, uh, he believes that the election was stolen in 2020 and will, and that, uh, that there will be massive fraud in 2024.
And [02:28:00] that Republicans need to be prepared, uh, for that. So election denialism is the central tenant of the Republican party and his campaign, and his claims about election denialism have become much more outrageous. I mean, we've gone from, you know, him lying about the results of 2020 in a handful of states, now he's lying about the results of 2020 in states like Minnesota, which he lost by seven percentage points.
So it's gotten much worse. It's also, by the way, Page, gotten much worse among the Republican party. There were people in the Republican party who were. Donald Trump in 2016. A lot of them, there were people pushing back against Donald Trump's election denialism in 2020, not enough Republicans, but there were some.
Look at the parade of Republican on a Sunday television. It's like literally a convention they hold every week for invertebrate, um, you know, invertebrate politicians, you know, in which they prostrate themselves on TV every week saying that they don't necessarily agree that The, uh, Joe Biden won in 2020, and predicting fraud in [02:29:00] 2024.
Uh, people like Tim Scott, who was supposed to be a moderate. People like Marco Rubio, who we are constantly told is one of the sensible Republicans in the middle of the Senate. These people are now far Full out election deniers. They are showing up at his criminal trials wearing matching suits and ties.
The Speaker of the House showed up wearing a matching suit and tie. I mean, there is nothing left to the Republican Party other than election denialism, which is why they kicked out Ronna McDaniel, replaced her with a more reliable and aggressive election denier, and why they now have Donald Trump's daughter in law running the RNC.
Former Republican strategist raises alarms about GOP in 'The Conspiracy to End America' - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 10-24-23
AMNA NAWAZ - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: In your book, you lay out five driving forces on the right that you say are working in concert basically to end our democracy. You list them as propagandists, the support of a major party, financers, legal theories to legitimize actions and shock troops.
But I want to begin with this idea of support of a major party, because you draw a pretty alarming comparison.
In the book, you write: "What happened within the Republican Party in 2016 [02:30:00] was a repeat of the rise of national socialism in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany."
You're arguing that the Republican establishment's acceptance of Mr. Trump echoed the German establishment's acceptance of Hitler. What are the parallels you're talking about here?
STUART STEVENS: Yes, it's interesting.
For a long time, there was sort of a trope that any time you compared anything to 1930s Germany or World War II, it reduced it to sort of absurdity. But I take a very different view, because I think the parallels are striking.
What happened in Germany was that the ruling class, mostly Prussian aristocrats, realized that they had lost touch with the working class, and they thought that they could control Hitler, that he would be someone who could connect them to the working class and take them into power.
And it's really exactly what happened with the Republican Party. Mitch McConnell said that he was confident that Trump would change, that they would change Trump, that they were the mainstream conservative and [02:31:00] Trump would adapt to that.
And it just proved to be incredibly naive, and it's still playing out. And every chance the party has to turn against Trump, they go in the other direction, and they embrace him more.
AMNA NAWAZ - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: There are some along the way who've rung the alarm, so to speak, like Mitt Romney, for example, whose campaign you ran in 2012.
STUART STEVENS: Yes.
AMNA NAWAZ - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: He criticized Donald Trump, but then he considered joining his Cabinet.
So, you can't really argue that some folks didn't see the danger. Is the story here that they just chose to ignore it?
STUART STEVENS: It's a fascinating question, because it is very difficult to find anyone in the Republican Party who will say in private that Donald Trump was a great leader, that Donald Trump is someone that they admire on any sort of personal level.
And yet they have basically turned over the party to him. And I think that what happened here was that Donald Trump, in some sort of animal instinct, realized that the Republican Party [02:32:00] ultimately did not believe in all the things that we had said that we believed.
What we said were values turned out to be marketing slogans, and that he realized that if he could give the party power, the party would go along with whatever he wanted. And that literally is what's happened now. And it's extraordinary.
I don't think we have seen anything like this in American history, just a complete collapse of a party. But it's the reality. It's the world that we live in, and it's not going to change. And there's a good chance he will be reelected president.
SECTION D: DEMOCRACY IN ACTION
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And, finally, Section D: "Democracy in Action."
The Separation Of Church & State Is Eroding - Why, America? with Leeja Miller - Air Date 6-5-24
LEEJA MILLER - HOST, WHY, AMERICA?: If you ever find a Supreme Court decision these days to be incredibly fucked, I encourage you to seek out the dissenting opinions of the case. More often than not, Justice Sotomayor is the voice of reason, laying bare the absolute fuckery happening on the highest court of the land in every dissent that she writes.
It's both cathartic and disheartening. to read her dissents, and I do not envy her job right now. In case after case, this Supreme Court has made it [02:33:00] very clear that they do not care about facts, they do not care about precedent, and they don't even care about basic rules of standing. Nor do they care about trust in the institution as a whole, or even attempting to appear impartial.
They have an agenda, and they're sticking to it. 250 years of precedent be damned. And this turn towards irresponsible judicial activism is clearest when it comes to the withering away of the long established wall between church and state. Religion has a terrifying ability to justify just about anything.
Genocide against Native Americans? Manifest destiny, baby. Slavery? Practically a favor. How else would the inferior races have found God and salvation? Rampant inequality? Prosperity gospel. If you got it, you must deserve it. And look, I'm not out here to fight anyone about their personal religion, believe what you want.
My point is that religion is uniquely potent, and therefore, And the US already grants people, well, certain people anyway, a huge amount of freedom to practice their beliefs. Even to the point that their right to free expression bumps right up against other people's right to not be forced to practice a religion.
These are all the [02:34:00] states that allow religious or belief based exemptions for school immunization requirements. In every one of the colored states, Parents can say, no thank you, I would prefer not to vaccinate my child for measles or whooping cough or meningitis. And then their little crotch goblin just gets to skip off to public school without their shots, endangering everyone else.
Super religious families enjoy a lot of freedom when it comes to isolating and indoctrinating their own children. And on the third day, God created the Remington Bull Action Rifle. So that man could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals. Amen. And yet, conservative Christians have made it clear that that's not enough.
The free exercise clause has been weaponized by the Christian right to strengthen their calls of victimization, to claim persecution at the hands of Democrats, to say their way of life is under attack, when in reality they are simply living under a government that has full control. For decades, made it very clear that imposing your religion upon someone else is never a right you had to begin with.
Your rights cannot be under attack when they aren't your rights at all. They [02:35:00] forget that they live in a society with other people, and so their freedom to practice religion must be balanced against the rest of our freedom from having religion imposed upon us. But that is unacceptable, and so the religious right has set to work not only systematically changing the laws in their favor, but also vilifying the groups that require them to compromise by balancing their freedom to, and our freedom from, religion.
The gays and the trans kids require that the Christians allow them to exist, god forbid. The people who want to end their pregnancies require that the Christians allow them to exist. Notice that the trend is, freedom from beneficiaries are simply trying to exist, while freedom to beneficiaries are trying to exert control over others.
Basically, your freedom from having my religion imposed upon you is violating my freedom to practice my religion by imposing it upon you. Yes, Susan, that's how it works when you exist in a society of people who are different from you. Or I guess you could go the Nazi way and just try to exterminate the ones who are different from you Oh, you're already trying to do that?
Another way you can [02:36:00] tell that the encroachment of Christianity into the well established separation of church and state is getting worse, not better, is because the population is less religious than ever, but our elected officials remain about as religious as they have ever been. Nearly 30 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew between 2020 and 2023 said they consider themselves religiously unaffiliated.
Since 1980, the number of Americans who identify as Christians has dropped by more than 20 percentage points. From around 90 percent in 1980, on par with Congress that year, to 68 percent today. Yet 88 percent of the voting members of Congress today are Christians. That number has only dropped by 3 percent in the last 45 years.
Why? I couldn't find a single straightforward answer about the cause of this over representation phenomenon, but I have a theory. There are three major hurdles to running a successful campaign that I think being a church member would help a candidate overcome. One, networking. Churches have listservs.
Dwindling Lyft serves, but Lyft serves nonetheless. And being a member provides access to highly connected, very well funded communities who don't have [02:37:00] to pay those pesky taxes, and opportunities for reputation building. Like learning to golf or pretending to enjoy cigars, being a person of faith is a great way to rub elbows with powerful, wealthy, well connected people.
Number two, moral proxy. Humans love patterns, almost as much as we hate thinking. So when a religion offers a shortcut to understanding something as consequential as a political candidate's moral compass, you're darn tootin we're gonna take it. To many religious people, the idea that a person is capable of having a moral compass without being guided by a 2, 000 year old book is unthinkable.
Where do you learn how to be a good person without it being beaten into you through shame and cult like conformity to a belief system? Instead of politicians having to prove that they have a moral compass by walking the walk, they can just say, Look, I'm a Christian man. I go to church every Sunday. And we, somehow, despite years of proof to the contrary, believe that that automatically means that they are a good person led by a strong moral compass.
And number three, picky active voters. White evangelicals are more politically active than the average population. More evangelicals are registered to vote, and more of those registered actually [02:38:00] show up to cast a vote than the average eligible citizen. This means that even though white evangelicals represent a relatively small percentage of voters, their nearly unified bloc can have a major impact.
A 2021 Pew survey found that 85 percent of white evangelical voters identify with or lean toward the GOP. In the past three decades, the share of white evangelicals who associate with the GOP has risen by 20 percentage points, and the share identifying as or leaning Democratic has declined by 20 percentage points.
And who are these loyal Republicans eager to vote for? Another Pew survey found that among major religious groups, white evangelical Protestants were especially likely to find it important that political candidates share their religious views. Americans are less religious across the board regardless of age, but people over 65 are the most religious age group currently alive.
They also vote more consistently than other age groups, especially in local elections. A 2021 study found that the average age of white evangelical Protestants in America was 56, the highest age of any denomination. So, these folks are older, more organized, more politically active, [02:39:00] more Republican, and more invested in religious alignment with their elected officials.
When considered together, all these factors help explain the over representation of Christians in Congress. So, to answer the fervent questions in my comment section, I'm Yes, there is a separation of church and state. No, that doesn't mean that our elected officials have ever distanced themselves from their own religious identities, but yes, that means that we have decades of Supreme Court precedent establishing very clearly what the state can and cannot do in order to protect the general populace from having religion forced upon them, while balancing that same general populace's right to practice religion freely.
However, in recent years, Christian conservatives have done everything in their power to do away with the freedom from religion and focus solely on the victimhood of the righteous Christian crusader who has been forced to bend the knee to the heathenist ways of the godless woke left. And it's only getting worse.
So what do we do? Vote. Y'all, Project 2025 is no joke, and it will hit Trump's desk the day he enters office if he wins. We say Ronald Reagan ruined [02:40:00] everything, but that was 45 years ago, and there's nothing we can do to change the past, but we can at the very least vote now to try to avoid me having to make t shirts 40 years from now that say Trump ruined everything.
Though frankly, by then, if he wins, this place will likely be a burnt apocalyptic hellscape. Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are both in their 60s. Seventies ripe for just conveniently and casually retiring. Say next year, should Trump win the presidency virtually ensuring another full generation of a conservative court with little deference to precedent or respect for the institution they represent.
So for the love of God, vote. Stay vigilant, and prove that it's possible to be both moral and godless by supporting mutual aid and building community outside hierarchical church structures.
"Propaganda Machine": NY Congressmember Jamaal Bowman on AIPAC's $25 Million Campaign to Unseat Him - Democracy Now! - Air Date 6-6-24
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: The primary is coming up fast. I think June 15th begins early voting. Can you talk about, I mean, the kind of history that’s being made in this reelection bid for your seat?
REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN: Yes. It’s unprecedented. I believe AIPAC is spending more money [02:41:00] in this race than they have ever spent before. You know, they are bombarding my constituents with ads, ironically, that have nothing to do with Israel, even though they are a lobby group for Israel.
And so, it’s been overwhelming for the district. The district is actually pretty tired of it and frustrated by it and angered by it, because they know my record. They know what I’ve done the last three years, bringing in over a billion dollars to the district, reducing gun violence, investing in mental health and substance abuse, investing in affordable housing, etc. But they also know my work for 10-and-a-half years in this district as a middle school principal. So, for AIPAC to come in and try to hurt my reputation and manipulate people with disinformation and, in some cases, outright lies is pretty despicable.
And it is mainly because I called for a permanent ceasefire back in October, [02:42:00] and we have been consistent in calling what’s happening in Gaza right now an ongoing genocide. So, AIPAC cannot have that. They don’t want anyone to be critical of the state of Israel, even though an honest critique will lead to the ongoing safety and security of the people of Israel and, hopefully, get us a free Palestine, which is the objective, first and foremost.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: AIPAC super PAC United Democracy Project has already spent over $10 million on commercials alone to target you. This is one of the TV ads.
UNITED DEMOCRACY PROJECT AD: Jamaal Bowman has his own agenda and refuses to compromise, even with President Biden. Bowman voted against the president’s Infrastructure Act, against rebuilding roads and bridges in New York, against replacing lead pipes. And Jamaal Bowman voted against President Biden’s debt limit deal, putting Social Security and Medicare payments at risk, along with our entire economy. Jamaal Bowman has [02:43:00] his own agenda, and he’s hurting New York. UDP is responsible for the content of this ad.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Jamaal Bowman, if you can respond?
REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN: My agenda is the people’s agenda. My agenda is Medicare for All. My agenda is a Green New Deal. My agenda is assuring we put forward President Biden’s full agenda, which includes universal child care, universal pre-K, paid leave for the first time in U.S. history, historic investments in affordable housing. We have an affordable housing crisis right now, and President Biden, with Build Back Better, was trying to move forward on that issue. And we were working with him to move forward on affordable housing and all of Build Back Better, but it was stopped in the Senate by Senator Joe Manchin.
And my opponent, being a top recipient of AIPAC money and funded by racist MAGA Republican billionaires, [02:44:00] is already bought and paid for and in the pocket of AIPAC. And just like Joe Manchin, he is going to serve his donors, not the people.
And so, the people of our district have to ask themselves, “Do I want another Joe Manchin in Congress serving donors, or do I want to continue to support Congressman Bowman, who has dedicated his entire life?” I have dedicated my entire life to serving children, to serving families, to uplifting education — I come from the working class — because I know that the only way our democracy works for everyone is if we really support those who have been least, lost, left behind, historically marginalized, historically neglected and left vulnerable. That is unacceptable. That is what we have to change.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Interestingly, I’m looking at Haaretz. They say, “Bowman has charged both AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel with weaponizing antisemitism and primarily targeting Democratic candidates who are women and people [02:45:00] of color.” If you can talk about the major funders of AIPAC? I mean, this is historic, the amount of money they’re expected to spend in this election cycle, not only in your race, but around the country. It’s believed to be what? Over $100 million?
REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN: Yeah. Again, it blows you away, the sheer amount of money they’re looking to spend. And they have donors like Paul Singer and others like him who support Supreme Court justices who have supported the gutting of voting rights. Many of their donors support taking away a woman’s reproductive rights, taking away affirmative action. They support at least 109, I believe, election deniers, people who did not want to certify or members who did not want to certify the 2020 election results.
So, this is a right-wing organization. This is an extreme organization. This is a racist organization. [02:46:00] And they’re the ones trying to come in and buy this seat from a majority-minority community with their first Black representative finally speaking up for justice, equality and our collective humanity. It’s really, really gross, when you think about the spending.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: If you can talk about the Jewish groups that have rallied around you, Democratic Congressmember Bowman?
REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN: No, thank you for that, because just like the African American community, the Jewish community is not a monolith. So, we have tremendous support from organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace, Bend the Arc, Americans for Peace Now, IfNotNow, The Jewish Vote, the [c][4] arm of JFREJ, and many others.
And so, yes, there are Jewish constituents who want me to have a different approach to Israel in general, and specifically a different approach to what’s happening [02:47:00] in Gaza, but there are many Jewish organizations and many Jewish constituents who support the work I’m doing and understand very clearly that a pathway to peace forward has to include a free Palestine.
We can fight antisemitism and have a free Palestine at the same time. You can criticize Israel, you can criticize Zionism, and not be antisemitic. And it’s been very challenging having these conversations, because AIPAC and others, with their propaganda machine that’s been in place for many years, do not engage in these conversations. And the only way to create a better world and a better democracy and a better Israel and a free Palestine is through honest, open conversations that move us forward.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I’m looking at a piece in The Intercept that says, “As AIPAC has started to spend directly on elections, the group aligned itself with far-right Republicans. During the 2022 cycle, AIPAC endorsed more than 100 [02:48:00] Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.” If you can talk about the latest news about the congressional invite to Benjamin Netanyahu, who the International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan is now seeking indictments against for war crimes in Gaza, to address a joint session of Congress?
REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN: Yeah. I’m in complete disbelief. I’m horrified by that invitation. I can’t believe we are doing this. You know, when you think about and when I think about my Palestinian constituents, my Muslim constituents, my constituents who stand up for justice and humanity, who have been fighting to end this genocide in Gaza, what we see is the continued not just ignoring, but [02:49:00] dehumanization of Palestinian people. By inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress, we are stating to Palestinians that your lives do not matter. Your lives are less sacred, less precious and less valuable than other lives, particularly the lives of those Israeli lives. And it’s particularly disgusting because most of the people who have died in Gaza, been killed in Gaza, are women, children and babies. I can’t believe we’re inviting him here right now.
Election Deniers In Government Plot To Steal 2024 Election - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 6-5-24
THOM HARTMANN - THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: A Republican, uh, on the Fulton County Election Board, now this is down in, in Georgia, Fulton County of course is the Atlanta area, an area that, uh, well, Fannie Willis is the district attorney for example. Um, but this, this uh, white Republican lady, Julie Adams is her name, uh, she is one of five board members, uh, who certify [02:50:00] elections.
And she's also the, uh, uh, affiliate of the Tea Party Patriots, which has now become, uh, an election denying group. It was, you know, kicked off by the Koch brothers back in the day to, to fight against, uh, socialized medicine, uh, uh, aka Obamacare. Um, but now it's kind of gone its own way and turned into just another kind of right wing weird crank group.
Uh, she's also the regional coordinator for the southeastern states in the so called Election Integrity Network. Election integrity is a buzz phrase that Republicans use for preventing black people from voting, basically. And, uh, the EIN, Election Integrity Network, is a national group now that has recruited election deniers to try to fill spots in local election offices in communities where there are a lot of black voters, so that they can simply refuse to certify those elections so that those black votes don't get counted.
And, uh, she helped [02:51:00] start the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition after, uh, in 2022, attending the national, uh, EIN summit. And, uh, so, in May, uh, well, this is May, last week, or maybe two weeks ago, uh, Georgia had their primaries. And, uh, Fannie Willis, by the way, got re elected, as did the judge in that case, Scott McAfee.
Uh, Or at least won their primaries. I can't say they got re elected. Um, but they got re elected, you know, they won their primaries. But Julie Adams, this fifth member of the board that certifies the results, refused to certify the results. And, uh, she said that the reason why was because she wanted a bunch of additional information.
And the additional information that she was asking for would have basically just ground the entire system to a halt. Uh, she wanted to, you know, she wanted copies of all [02:52:00] the ballots, she wanted, uh, I mean, just insane stuff. It was just crazy. And, this is happening all over the country. That these election deniers from this, uh, we don't want no black people voting, uh, EIN group, have, uh, or are refusing to certify elections.
It's crazy. , and this is a, essentially in the primaries here, this is a dress rehearsal for this November. And you know, that's, that's how Trump tried to steal the election in 2020, was with the fake electors. Uh, you know, that the fake electors kind of blew up in his face. But if the real electors, or if the people who certify the election, that defines the real electors.
refused to certify the elections at the state level. See, they were trying to get at the federal level. You had 147 Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted [02:53:00] against certifying the election in 2020. Uh, that which is, you know, about, what, 60 or 70 short of what would have been necessary to shut down the election and throw it to the House of Representatives.
And, I guarantee you, they're gonna try to do that again this, this fall. If Trump loses. I, I, you know, hopefully, knock wood, you know, uh, please God, uh, when Trump loses. But, uh, in any case, this is, you know, part of their strategy. And, uh, one of Trump's, uh, former lawyers, Cleta Mitchell, uh, founded the Election Integrity Network.
Uh, we don't want no black people voting, uh, their in their unofficial motto. And she was on that phone call where Trump was, uh, telling Brad Rassenperger that if he didn't find 11, 000 plus votes, To put him over the top, that Rafson Perjure, the Secretary of State of Georgia, could be facing jail time.
Trump threatened him. And that, of course, is what Fonny Willis wants to charge him with. [02:54:00] And, um, and of course what the Republicans in Georgia are trying to prevent from happening. But, uh, the day after the primary, uh, Uh, uh, Adams had filed a lawsuit against the Fulton County Board, uh, to try to get all this information that she said she needed.
Um, you know, it's just, it's just gumming up the works. I mean, it's just, uh, very straightforward stuff. So keep an eye on this. This is, this is an early warning system. This is a sign, this is, like I said, this is a rehearsal. These people are practicing for what they're going to do this fall. In order to try to throw the election to the house.
Because in the House, you know, under the 12th amendment, if an election, if, if neither party, if neither Biden or Trump reach, assuming those are the candidates, if neither one of them reaches, uh, 270 votes, [02:55:00] then there is no Electoral College decision. It has to 50 percent plus one person. And if that does not happen, Then the fallback is that the House of Representatives selects the president.
And when they do that, each state has one vote, and that vote represents the will of the, of the majority of the people on that state's congressional delegation. So if you've got a congressional delegation that's got, you know, seven Republicans and two Democrats, like I believe North Carolina does, um, then, you know, they're gonna vote for Trump.
And, it turns out that there's 27 states that are majority Republican controlled, and, you know, only 23 that have, uh, either, uh, balanced, uh, representation or majority Democratic control. So, if a, if the election gets thrown to the House, Donald Trump will become President. And the Republicans know this. And, uh, that's what they're working toward, that's what [02:56:00] this is all about.
Margaret Huang : Fighting Hate and Protecting Democracy - Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People - Air Date 3-27-24
MARGARET HUANG: We have identified individual candidates running for a political office as extremist candidates. And that is something that the SPLC Action Fund does. That's our C4.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: So, there's a bad boys list and that comes out once a year or?
MARGARET HUANG: It's come out around election times every year. And we haven't been doing it that long. Our C4 has only been around for six years.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: Who's been on the list recent?
MARGARET HUANG: Some names you might recognize, but there are also some folks who are running for local or state office who might not be familiar. But you can find those on our website as well.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: Okay. But just throw a name out now though.
MARGARET HUANG: Sure. So Marjorie Taylor Greene's made it on the list. This is not a surprise.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: No.
MARGARET HUANG: Yeah. There are a few others. We actually just recently uncovered that Congresswoman Greene has a white nationalist working for her who has formal affiliations with extremist organizations. I think that he no longer now works [02:57:00] there.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: What's the trend line look, because it's hard to judge from reading media? It is worse?
MARGARET HUANG: It is worse in some ways. So, let me explain. There has always been hate and extremism in this country, since before it was founded. And the organization of that hate and extremism has never been as open, as coordinated, as well funded, and as tied to political leaders as it is now.
These groups have traditionally been more on the extremes. Now, of course, in the deep South during Jim Crow, there were political leaders, law enforcement leaders who were part of the KKK. So, that's familiar.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: Is it the George Wallace days?
MARGARET HUANG: But we haven't seen that since the end of Jim Crow. Right?
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: We're getting close.
MARGARET HUANG: And [02:58:00] what I'm trying to say is, it's a return. So it's not new, we've seen it before. But we are going back to a moment where it is inextricably tied to people in power and seeking to return to power in ways that we have not seen for decades.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: And do you this as a last gasp, desperate play for survival and the trend is not their friend? Or this is just how it's going to be forever?
MARGARET HUANG: It's not inevitable. No, it's not. The key here is that this is coming as part of a backlash. They're recognizing the changes that are happening in the country.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: Demographically.
MARGARET HUANG: Demographically, the values and morals of the younger generations who are growing up and coming into power, they're not aligned with this way of [02:59:00] thinking. And it is a bit of a last gasp, but only if we stay organized and aware and push back.
If we don't turn out in record numbers to reject this in 2024, we may lose the opportunity to have our democracy pushback. Because our opponents have been very clear that they're going to take away all of the powers of participatory democracy. This will become much more of an autocracy, of a fascist state. And that is when we are really in trouble, because we won't be able to organize at that stage.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: And it would be very difficult to dig yourself out of that hole?
MARGARET HUANG: Very difficult. Not impossible, but it will be much more difficult and likely much more violent.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: Even with people of color becoming the majority, it still will be hard?
MARGARET HUANG: Absolutely, because they're suppressing the vote now, Guy. If you look at the states where the Southern Poverty Law Center has offices, work, staff, [03:00:00] we are seeing hundreds of bills to suppress the vote in each of our states, every year. They're going after people of color, they're going after people with disabilities, they're going after women.
They're going after young people, they're going after senior folks. There's not a constituency that they haven't identified ways to suppress their vote. And the more that we let them do that, who will be voting in the end? That's when we lose our power.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: And call me naive or stupid, but how can you believe that is going to be a winning strategy in the long run?
MARGARET HUANG: For some of them, I don't think they care about the long run. If they did, we wouldn't be seeing the crisis and climate issues, right? They're really only thinking about themselves at this moment. Maybe their kids, probably not. So, I don't think these are people who care about the long term.
I think they're people who are in it for their own benefit [03:01:00] right now. I think for the rest of us who are worried about the future, who have to think about what happens next, it's a very different calculation.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: And how do you think they came to have this kind of mentality?
MARGARET HUANG: I think people like having power. I think once they've had it, they're unwilling to share or give it up.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: This is a depressing interview.
MARGARET HUANG: I don't mean it to be, because I'm not actually demoralized by this. If anything, I feel strongly motivated. And I'll tell you, we see stories all the time, even in the deep South where some of these challenges are the biggest, I think, there are communities that are organizing and fighting back. The organization that happened in Georgia over the last decade.
GUY KAWASAKI - HOST, REMARKABLE PEOPLE: The Stacey Abrams Movement?
MARGARET HUANG: Stacey Abrams Movement, and the movement of so many other strong Black women who led the organizing effort in [03:02:00] Georgia has transformed the way that people in that state feel about their relationship to government, and the accountability that they expect elected officials to have.
Is it sustainable? We've got to keep working on that. But they've shown us how to do it. And we are trying to replicate that incredible model across all of our states in the South to really build strong leadership, strong communities who understand what their priorities are and what they're going to stand for.
Credits
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected].
The additional sections of the show include clips from Disorder, Democracy Paradox, the PBS NewsHour, Democracy Now!, Last Week Tonight, [03:03:00] Analysis, The Daily Show, the Dollemore Daily, Democracy Docket, Why, America? with Leeja Miller, the Thom Hartmann Program, and Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People. Further details are in the show notes.
Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Aaron Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our [03:04:00] Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion.
So, coming to you from far outside, the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the best of left podcast coming to twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.com.
#1634 Abortion as the Tip of the Iceberg: the fight for privacy, bodily autonomy, and functional democracy are the path forward after the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade (Transcript)
Air Date 6/7/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
Banning abortion is wildly unpopular and also one of the primary motivators for the group most strongly supporting the Republican party and Donald Trump: the Christian right, which has transformed both the party and politicians into extremists made in their own image, threatening the lives and health of millions and sacrificing democracy in the process.
Sources providing our Top Takes today include Lectures in History, The Weeds, Technically Optimistic, Consider This and CounterSpin. Then in the additional Deeper Dive half of the show, there'll be more on criminalizing abortion, abortion extremism in the Republican party, abortion in the legal system, and what there is to do now.
Abortion and Reproductive Rights - Lectures in History - Air Date 3-16-24
MARY ZIEGLER: So, I think now often when we think of reproductive rights and justice, we think of them in the context of criminalization and criminal laws, but that's a relatively recent phenomenon. So if you go back far enough, and [00:01:00] there's a dispute about this that was reflected in the Supreme Court's decision in 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. the majority led by Justice Samuel Alito. suggested that in the United States, to some degree or another, abortion had always been a crime at any point in pregnancy. he might have said, or might have believed, something similar about contraception. But the reality was that for much of United States history, Either passing or implementing criminal laws regarding reproduction would have been very difficult, in part because it was all but impossible to identify when someone was pregnant before quickening, or the point at which fetal movement could be detected. Distinguishing whether a drug was a contraceptive, an abortifacient, or a drug that simply helped people who were having irregular menstruation was all but impossible, and physicians relied on highly unusual and ineffective methods to test whether someone was pregnant or not. Touching someone's abdomen was considered off limits and inappropriate at a time when women and other people who could get pregnant were often hidden behind [00:02:00] screens during examinations.
So physicians, to tell if people were pregnant, would do things like examine their noses and mouths, which you might be surprised to learn did not result in reliable diagnoses of pregnancy.
So at this time, there was a sort of sense that there were female remedies that might influence pregnancy one way or another. And, for the most part, state laws didn't apply until quickening, the point at which abortion was most often criminalized. There were exceptions to this. There were laws, for example, poison laws that regulated drugs that could kill pregnant people early in pregnancy, particularly starting in the 1840s after a series of high profile deaths from poisonous concoctions used to end pregnancies.
There were some states that treated abortion as a misdemeanor early in pregnancy.
There was very little regulation of contraception at all until the late 19th century. And that was to change because of two independent social movements. The first was what we would view as an anti-abortion movement, though by no [00:03:00] means a fetal rights movement, that began in the mid-19th century and was led by physicians in the American Medical Association, including Horatio Storer, who's pictured here.
The American Medical Association was new at the time and medical education in general did not in any meaningful way resemble what we would see today. So there were no real licensure rules in a modern sense. Medical education was completely foreign and often not very credentialized at all. The difference between a so-called regular physician and a midwife or a homeopath selling medicines in the pages of the nation's newspapers was sometimes hard to distinguish. And the doctors in the American Medical Association were looking for a way to set themselves apart professionally.
They also were worried about what they saw as a grievously differential birth rate. What they would have viewed as white women, Anglo Saxon Protestant women, were having fewer children. And as the 19th century continued, this disparity would only grow, so much so that when it had [00:04:00] been normal in the United States for decades for the average family to have eight children, that number would decline to three by the end of the century. And disproportionately, Storer worried, that decline was coming in families he viewed as the best American families. At the same time that immigrant families, disproportionately Catholic, were having more children.
He argued, too, that life began not at quickening, but at conception, and that only physicians like him, physicians with the expertise to understand science, knew when life began, and that this was what distinguished them both morally and professionally from the midwives and others who'd disproportionately been serving pregnant people for the centuries before.
Storer lobbied for laws that would punish not only physicians for performing abortions, but patients for procuring them, to use his word. Abortion at this time was still synonymous with miscarriage. So the crime he proposed was the crime of procuring an abortion or miscarriage. A crime that he [00:05:00] proposed should be punished the most harshly when a patient was married, because a married person having an abortion was a married person rejecting their duties to their partner, or in this case, he would say their husband, as much as it was their duties to the nation.
Storer began promoting these laws in state legislatures in the 19th century, and gradually convinced legislatures in most states to introduce laws, although they rejected some of the harshest proposals that Storer introduced. It was relatively unusual for state laws to authorize felony punishments for abortion seekers. And virtually all, with the sole exception of New Hampshire, included exceptions for the life of the pregnant person, something that Storer also was not particularly concerned about in his proposal.
Storer wasn't alone in wanting to regulate reproduction in this era. This handsome gentleman, Anthony Comstock, was part of the picture too. Comstock's proposals were very different though. He was not concerned with what he saw as the taking of fetal life. He was concerned [00:06:00] instead with what he saw as obscenity. So, Comstock's business model first developed in New York in the late 1860s, came about because Comstock, by his own account, was a compulsive masturbator who worried that exposure to pornography was damaging the nation's fabric, for young men and women alike. He proposed a New York law that would define a much broader class of materials as obscene, everything from medical textbooks to art involving nudes, as well as abortion and contraception, which he defined as obscene, too.
Indeed, not just abortion and contraception, but any remedy for female troubles, as he would put it. Because there was, of course, no way at the time for anyone to discern consistently whether someone was pregnant, or whether a drug acted as a contraceptive, an abortifacient, a menagogue for regulating menstruation or as a placebo or a snake oil remedy.
Comstock's model that passed in New York in 1868 then quickly went national. With the advice of a Supreme Court Justice named William Strong, [00:07:00] Comstock went to Congress and convinced them to pass the Comstock Act, which made it a federal crime to mail any of the items listed in the Comstock Act, as well as receive them, subject to up to several years in prison and a hefty fine.
So Comstock's perspective was different. He wasn't invested in protection of fetal life. He was invested in stopping sex. He argued that the problem with abortion and contraception was that if people knew they were available, they would have what he called incentives to crime. Essentially, they would be able, as he put it, to conceal their sin because they would be able to have sex without consequences.
And so both of these models quickly spread. There are state Comstock laws. This was an era when, for the first time, state laws of many parts of the nation criminalized birth control, many of them on Comstock's model.
And significantly, there was always a close connection between reproductive rights and freedom of speech. Comstock's model criminalized not only the mailing of items used for things like contraception and abortion, but [00:08:00] also information about either one. So there was always a sense that telling people about how you could get these things or how you could do these things was as deeply problematic in his view as the doing of the things themselves.
Abortion and the erosion of privacy - The Weeds - Air Date 4-10-24
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: and since the Supreme Court made its decision in Dobbs, overturning Roe v. Wade and the right to an abortion, reproductive rights have been at the center of our national consciousness. Two of the latest headlines come out of Arizona and Florida.
NEWS CLIP: A historic ruling just handed down from the Arizona Supreme Court on abortion access in our state. The justices ruling...
Florida Supreme Court ruled the state's constitution does not protect abortion rights. The ruling allows a trigger law to go into effect in 30 days...
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: The Florida Supreme Court ruled that a six week ban gets the go ahead. Now, that's not really surprising news. Lots of states have rolled back abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe. But something in the Florida state constitution makes this decision particularly interesting.
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: [00:09:00] So, Florida has this provision in its constitution which says that every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from government intrusion into the person's private life.
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: Article 1, Section 23 of the Florida state constitution guarantees a right of privacy. And until the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion had long been considered a private issue.
Arizona has similar language in its constitution. It says, "No person shall be disturbed in his private affairs or his home invaded without authority of law." Despite this language, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that an 1864 law that makes abortion illegal, except in the case to save the life of the mother, can take effect. That news broke while we were finishing up this very episode.
Now, there are differences in the context for the language in these state constitutions. The language in the Arizona state constitution came [00:10:00] long before Roe, and Florida's was added post-Roe. While they're different, they have one thing in common: neither state's Supreme Court found it sufficient to protect the right to abortion. And all of this is evidence that Dobbs has shifted the very concept of privacy in the US. And that has us asking, do we still have a right to privacy?
That's the question I posed to my colleague Ian Millhiser. He's a senior correspondent here at Vox, where he covers the Supreme Court. He's been spending a lot of time thinking about this lately.
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: So let's talk about what the right to privacy is. This is something that developed really over the course of almost an entire century of various Supreme Court decisions. The idea behind a right to privacy is that there are certain parts of our lives that are private, that the government does not get to decide for us, that we, you know, decide for ourselves after talking to our own families, after praying to our own gods. And these are decisions like, [00:11:00] do I want to have a child? Who should I marry? Who are my sexual partners going to be? How am I going to raise my children? You know, all of these questions, the Supreme Court said over the course of many years, are just not decisions that the government gets to make for you. These are decisions you make for yourself.
One of the important components of the right to privacy is, am I going to have a child, when am I going to have a child? So wrapped up in that was the right to contraception and the right to an abortion. When the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, when it abolished the constitutional right to an abortion, it claimed that this was an abortion-only decision. You know, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion where he said, 'I'm not coming after any of the other privacy rights. I'm not coming after the right to marry. I'm not coming after the right to contraception'. And I guess the question is, how much can we trust these guys? And so the answer to your question of, do we still have a right to privacy, is we don't know. The [00:12:00] constitutional rights are only as good as the personnel that sit on the courts.
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: Yeah, I wonder, is the right to privacy, it seems like it's literally all about the sexy stuff. Like, it's either gender or sex or marriage. It seems like it concentrates on these specific parts of our lives.
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: A lot of it is sexy stuff. It's not all sexy stuff. But I think that, if there is a unifying theory, it does tend to be stuff about the family, even sexuality. I mean, the idea is that, you know, when you have a sex partner, they are auditioning to become a member...
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: [laughing]...to become a member of your family.
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: ...to become a member of your family, right! Exactly. And then when you have sex, there's the potential for creating children., So, you know, that is also tied up in the notion of the family. So, like, there is this idea that, you know, the way that the United States government is set up, you have the federal government and Congress is responsible for some things, you have state governments and they are responsible for other things, and I think the family was thought [00:13:00] of as another zone of autonomy, where there's some things that just don't belong to the government at all. They are family decisions. And, you know, how you raise your children, your sexuality, whether you use contraception, whether you're going to have a child at a particular moment, all of that got roped into this broader concept that we now call the right to privacy.
Digital surveillance and reproductive rights - Technically Optimistic - Air Date
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: I should say, I know Sue personally. I'm on the board of Planned Parenthood and we've spoken a lot about the state of things, and how urgent everything feels right now. But when I talked to her for the show, I pitched a conversation about technology's role in reproductive rights. And it's not that she wasn't interested in talking about technology, it's just that she's skeptical about putting too much faith into it. She's worked too hard, and she's seen too much.
SUE DUNLAP: I find myself being very regressive when it comes to [00:14:00] systems. We have to have redundancy, we have to have workarounds, we can't have a single point of failure. So when I was thinking about electronic health systems, I am loathe to live in a world today where there's an interdependence and a vulnerability. And when I think about data sharing, that's what I think of.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Can you give me a lived experience that you've been having of what women are actually going through right now?
SUE DUNLAP: Yeah, one story that for me, and there's so many stories that could break your heart. This one is a patient from Texas, chronic health condition, traveling here for an abortion, "here" being Los Angeles, so from Texas to Los Angeles, Texas to California, and we asked her for her most recent blood work. And what she shared was that the second she had even a [00:15:00] whisper, an inkling that she might be pregnant, she stopped going to any doctor whatsoever, even as she had this chronic health condition that needs to be regularly managed and monitored, because she doesn't want any record anywhere in any system in Texas that could suggest that she might be pregnant.
Now that would be true on paper. That's not specific to technology, as opposed to on paper, but when we think about what that means in the context of technology, it's horrifying to me. I just don't live in that world today, and nor do the people who I see traveling across state lines for what we know is very safe healthcare, but that is criminalized, marginalized, and increasingly creating victims.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: In the United States, even before Dobbs, people seeking abortions [00:16:00] faced unique challenges. Despite the right to an abortion being enshrined in the Constitution, some states still put plenty of obstacles in the way. And now, without Roe, there are some terrifying new obstacles.
SUE DUNLAP: One of the early data points in this post-Roe era tells us that one in three women who are pregnant or seeking abortion who find themselves in the criminal justice system by way of that pregnancy are essentially turned in by healthcare professionals or medical social workers. So, what I worry about when I try to balance what patients need in the moment and the potential for long term consequences and even criminalization is, there is no good answer, right?
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: When you criminalize abortion, you are criminalizing the people who seek abortions. It's a staggering coming together of healthcare and the criminal justice system. [00:17:00] Who is out there who could even be in a position to try and tackle this?
MELANIE FONTES RAINER: I'm Melanie Fontes Rainer. I am the director at the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Ah ha!
MELANIE FONTES RAINER: For anyone paying attention, I don't think anything that's happening right now is a surprise, right? I think a lot of this was highly predictable. And so I think in some ways we've been able to try to prepare as much as we can. But there's a deficit of information when it comes to, do people even know that we exist?
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: If you've never heard of the Office of Civil Rights that's inside the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, to be honest, I hadn't either.
MELANIE FONTES RAINER: Every single federal agency has a Office for Civil Rights. We are the second biggest one. Our office is unique to any other civil rights office because we don't just do civil rights, right? So, civil rights is a heavy mandate. It's a big lift, like non-discrimination in health programs and activities, making sure people are treated properly and getting their entitled benefits. Because we're [00:18:00] thinking about what does it mean to be discriminated against because you're pregnant, or what does it mean to now be targeted because of who you are and have your data targeted because of who you are and the kind of health care you're seeking and where you live? But we also do privacy under HIPAA. We are the only federal office that does both of those things.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It first passed in 1996, and it was a massive effort on the part of the federal government to do some rulemaking around personal health information, electronic medical records, in particular. You might know it from your own doctor's office. It's HIPAA that grants U. S. patients the right to view their own medical records.
MELANIE FONTES RAINER: So first, if you, Raffi, sought to get your own medical records from your provider, you have a right under HIPAA. It's called the HIPAA right of access provision. You could go in, and for a reasonable cost and a reasonable amount of time, your provider must give you your records. So, that's like a tenet of HIPAA.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: It's [00:19:00] also HIPAA that says health care providers have to alert the government if patient data is ever compromised.
MELANIE FONTES RAINER: A hospital system, a dentist, an insurance company, they're required to file a breach report and disclose that to the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services so that the public can know when these breaches happen. Those are the rules that protect your Protected Health Information from impermissible use and disclosure, meaning, did somebody have a permission to use and disclose this data in the first instance? Are they protecting it? Things like cybersecurity, we have a significant role in enforcement here, and whether or not there's been a breach.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Back when the law passed in 1996, Congress gave themselves three years to come up with a set of national security standards and safeguards for the use of electronic healthcare information, as well as a set of privacy standards for Protected Health Information.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Every American has a right to know that his or her medical records are protected at all times from falling into the wrong hands, and yet [00:20:00] more and more of our medical records are stored electronically.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: That was good. It would take pressure off the states and introduce a framework, not only for privacy, but for what to do when privacy was violated.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Today, with the click of a mouse, Protected Health Information can easily and now legally be passed around without patient's consent. I am determined to put an end to such violations of privacy.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: So, in 1999, President Clinton announced the first version of what would come to be known as the HIPAA Privacy Rule, although it wouldn't get finalized until 2002, and it wouldn't go into effect until 2003, and it would be significantly modified by the HITECH Act of 2009, as well as the HIPAA Omnibus Rule of 2013. I mean, okay, even by modern congressional standards, this is a really confusing patchwork of laws. But the HHS Office of Civil Rights has a specially designated role in the HIPAA [00:21:00] framework.
MELANIE FONTES RAINER: And so, we enforce and implement HIPAA. The HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification rules. The HIPAA Privacy rule gives permissions and those permissions means that covered entities, whether it's a health insurance company or a health provider or a pharmacy, they have discretion as to whether or not they believe that the permission is being met and whether or not they disclose the Protected Health Information.
Anti-abortion hardliners want restrictions to go farther. It could cost Republicans - Consider This - Air Date 5-23-24
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Abortion rights has been a motivating political issue for generations, and this year might be the most intense for those on both sides of the issue. NPR's Sarah McCammon reports on the anti-abortion rights activists who want to ramp up restrictions, criminalize patients who pursue abortions, and ban procedures like IVF.
SARAH MCCAMMON: For decades, protests outside clinics that offer abortions have been a pretty common scene in many communities around the country. Less common: protests at fertility [00:22:00] clinics that offer the procedure known as IVF.
NEWS CLIP OF PROTESTOR AT FERTILITY CLINIC: How many children are in the freezer here? How many?
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: That demonstration took place outside a fertility clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina last month. Dozens of protesters lined both sides of the street, as one of them preached and shouted Bible verses toward the closed front door.
NEWS CLIP OF PROTESTOR AT FERTILITY CLINIC: The fruit of the womb is the reward!
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: They were organized by a group of activists who described themselves as abortion abolitionists, who recently spent a long weekend in Charlotte meeting and strategizing. Matthew Wiersma, who's 32, is from Gainesville, Georgia.
MATTHEW WIERSMA: We want to ban IVF. We want to criminalize IVF.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Using the language of the anti-slavery movement, abortion abolitionists like Wiersma say they oppose all abortions, no exceptions. Many are also speaking out against IVF, at a time when most Republicans are stressing their support for the procedure. [00:23:00]
DONALD TRUMP: I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious, little, beautiful baby.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Speaking in February, former President Donald Trump noted that most Americans, including most who oppose abortion rights, support access to IVF. His comments came after Alabama's Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through the process should be legally considered children. Republicans there rushed to pass a law designed to protect providers from legal consequences.
T. RUSSELL HUNTER: Pro-lifers are scared to death of that, because IVF has not been thought about.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: T. Russell Hunter leads Abolitionists Rising, a group of activists that hosted last month's gathering in North Carolina. He accuses mainstream anti-abortion groups of being too willing to accept incremental restrictions and inconsistent in their message.
T. RUSSELL HUNTER: You can't say life begins at conception, okay, but we're going to allow abortion in the first five weeks, you know? Well, if life begins at conception [00:24:00] and you believe that human life must be protected, well, you're stuck, logically.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Hunter, who is based in Oklahoma, opposes IVF, which often produces extra embryos that are then frozen or destroyed, and he believes that embryos should have legal rights. Speaking to activists last month, Hunter said that means charging patients who seek abortions, and anyone who helps them, with murder.
T. RUSSELL HUNTER: So, we think and we know that the mother is the abortionist, or the father is the abortionist, whoever it is that's the abortionist needs to be punished, and we're not going to lie about it in order to be friends with the world, because that is precisely what the pro-life movement's done, and is doing.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: That's a departure from the long standing public position of most anti-abortion rights groups who've argued that women seek abortions under duress and that penalties for violating abortion laws should target providers, not patients themselves. Mary Ziegler is a law professor at the University of California, Davis.
MARY ZIEGLER: And [00:25:00] increasingly, on the pro-choice side, you have voices of people saying, either, you know, abortion is really important healthcare, and there's nothing wrong with it, women understand what it is, and choose it, or people in the abortion storytelling world saying, you know, I felt no regret about abortion, I felt relieved, I felt happy. You know, these statements that I think abolitionists also have really weaponized.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Christine Harhoff lives in Texas and has been involved in anti-abortion activism for well over a decade.
CHRISTINE HARHOFF: We're dealing with different types of women.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: She says she's met women who were reluctant to have abortions.
CHRISTINE HARHOFF: But so many other women who are loud and proud and, you know, like we had, what was it, a year ago, two years ago?, the mothers were taking the abortion pills on the steps of the Supreme Court on national TV. You know, they were not ashamed at all.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Harhoff says she's frustrated that even after the fall of Roe v. Wade, even in [00:26:00] Texas, where abortion is banned, women are still taking abortion pills. She's been talking with lawmakers in Texas and neighboring states like Louisiana and Oklahoma, trying to promote legislation that would treat abortion as identical to homicide.
CHRISTINE HARHOFF: And the penalty could be anything from nothing at all, if she was truly innocent, truly forced into that abortion, to a fine or community service, to yes, some jail time, and possibly even the death penalty if the court, the judge, the jury all deemed that to be an appropriate penalty for that particular situation.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Harhoff's position is by far the minority. Even among abortion rights opponents, like Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, a major anti-abortion group that opposes prosecuting patients.
KRISTAN HAWKINS: I don't think that, you know, that's our focus or has been or will be our focus.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: Hawkins describes abortion abolitionists as social media trolls who do more harm than good and don't represent the [00:27:00] mainstream of her movement.
SARAH MCCAMMON: The pro-life movement opposes throwing mothers in jail who we believe are the second victims of abortion. Does that mean that every single mother doesn't know what's happening? No, that doesn't.. There are some mothers who, I agree, likely know that abortion kills a human child. But that's not the strategy that's going to end abortion in our country.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: On the subject of IVF, Hawkins' group and others have raised ethical concerns. She's described the fertility industry as underregulated. Rachel Bitecofer, a Democratic political strategist, says the line between the mainstream anti-abortion movement and the abolitionists is quite thin.
RACHEL BITECOFER: You know, if you radicalize people and tell them to gain power, and that's what Republicans did. They've been targeting those folks for 25, 30 years now with ever increasing hyperbolic rhetoric about abortion. So, if you accept that abortion is murder, then it [00:28:00] makes sense that you have pretty rigid requirements to stop it, you know, at all costs.
MARY LOUISE KELLY - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: So far, abortion abolitionists have been mostly unsuccessful in pushing through laws that define abortion as homicide. But they've made some strides in state legislatures, including a bill that made it to Louisiana's House floor in 2022. In an interview with Time Magazine published last month, former President Trump said he'd be open to letting women who have abortions be prosecuted. He said he'd leave that question up to the states.
Abortion and Reproductive Rights Part 2 - Lectures in History - Air Date 3-16-24
MARY ZIEGLER: So this was the beginning of what would become massive anti-abortion protests outside of clinics, which were not viewed the same light as hospitals.
It was in this era, too, that anti-abortion groups did not at all back away from the idea of fetal personhood. The overwhelming focus of the anti-abortion movement in the years after Roe was what they called the Human Life Amendment, a constitutional amendment that would change the meaning of the word "person" in the 14th Amendment to apply to a fertilized egg, or [00:29:00] any other, an embryo or fetus.
The Human Life Amendment was so important to the anti abortion movement that when members of Congress suggested it would be easier to get an amendment through that said states had the right to do whatever they wanted about abortion, anti-abortion activists overwhelmingly rejected the idea, saying it would essentially reaffirm Roe, which in their view stood not for the proposition that there was a right to abortion particularly, but that there was no right to life for a fetus. This struggle for the Human Life Amendment brought the anti-abortion movement into electoral politics, as the movement desperately strived to find allies in Congress and state legislatures who would support a Human Life Amendment. And it ultimately brought the anti-abortion movement into an alliance with the Republican Party, which in the era of Ronald Reagan came to embrace the movement and the Human Life Amendment as a potential path to power, a way to peel off conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestants who had voted Democratic often for reasons of economics, but who could be convinced [00:30:00] to change to the Republican Party as a result of the abortion issue.
It was in this era, too, that the anti-abortion movement stumbled upon a more consequential strategy, what we would think of as kind of incrementalism, or a death of a thousand cuts. And this began with the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment was the brainchild of Henry Hyde, a long-term legislator from Illinois who proposed that Medicaid patients should be unable to get reimbursed for most or all abortions.
And at the time, the Hyde Amendment, which is part of an appropriations bill, passed with the votes of both Democrats and Republicans, at a time when abortion rights was already becoming a Democratic cause. Why that was in part was because people in the Democratic Party believed the Supreme Court would take care of it and strike down the Hyde Amendment. And it was in part because there was already less emphasis put on access for low income people than would be or really ought to be the case.
The Hyde Amendment passed in 1976, and it had immediately significant impacts. A large percentage of people pursuing abortion in the 1970s in the [00:31:00] United States were Medicaid recipients, and by most estimates, upwards of 200 or 250,000 patients each year who otherwise would have had abortions, were prevented from doing so as a result of the Hyde Amendment.
The Hyde Amendment also ensured that people who were low income would have to rely on an intricate network of abortion funds and private charities for money to seek out abortion. And that in some ways is what became of the grassroots of the reproductive rights movement in the immediate aftermath of Roe: they all went in to service and access work. Which is part of what I think explains the lack of somewhat of the visible grassroots in the post-Roe era.
There was, of course, an early reproductive justice movement, too, that argued that what had become the so-called pro-choice movement, which sought to protect the right recognized in Roe, was not enough. And this movement, in part, took its inspiration from an epidemic of sterilization abuse. Women of color in this era and other people of color were being involuntarily sterilized, sometimes under existing eugenic sterilization laws, sometimes [00:32:00] under no legal authority at all. Physicians were notorious in cross parts of the South for offering what they called Mississippi appendectomies, in which patients who went in for childbirth or other services were involuntarily sterilized without their knowledge or consent, again, particularly in states like Mississippi.
The problem was particularly acute in Puerto Rico, where large percentages of women at some point in their reproductive lives were sterilized, often with questionable or no consent. And so activists, like Helen Rodriguez Trias, who's pictured here, argued that any movement for reproductive rights had to be not just a movement for freedom from the government, but a right, a movement that sought to protect people using the power of the government, right? A movement that would say the government should guarantee informed consent, the government should guarantee the means for people who want to have children to have them. And Rodriguez Trias and her colleagues founded organizations like the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse in 1974 and broader multi-issue groups like a group called CARASA or [00:33:00] R2N2, both of which were reproductive justice groups founded in the late 1970s.
But none of these groups succeeded in slowing down the attack on abortion rights and other forms of reproductive health care. Where that attack turned ironically involved two improbable things, Sandra Day O'Connor and Akron, Ohio, which don't usually go together. So Akron, Ohio was the site of an ordinance that had been marketed by the anti-abortion movement as a model for the rest of the country. And it's constitutionality ultimately came before the Supreme Court in 1980, after O'Connor had become Ronald Reagan's first Supreme Court nominee. The anti-abortion movement hated Sandra Day O'Connor. They thought she was a supporter of abortion rights and a feminist and generally just gross. And, she, to their surprise, dissented from an opinion by the court striking down this Akron ordinance, not only to say the ordinance was constitutional, but to say that Roe itself was fatally flawed. And that if Roe itself was fatally flawed, it was at least deserving of some [00:34:00] reconsideration.
So the anti-abortion movement, which had been utterly unable to get a constitutional amendment off the ground, needed a plan B. It was unable to get that constitutional amendment off the ground when Ronald Reagan was in power, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, and when it seemed as if Republicans had fared better than usual in state legislative elections. There was still no prospect of a personhood amendment, and no prospect even of agreement on a second best solution for the anti-abortion movement. So if there was going to be no personhood amendment, what could there be? Well, there could be control of the Supreme Court. And with control of the Supreme Court, there could be the upholding of more laws like the Hyde Amendment, which would mean less access to abortion, and a right to abortion that would mean very little or less and less in practice, a right that people would feel less compelled or energized to defend.
And with that, ultimately, too, in the long term, could be a Supreme Court that would recognize a fetus as a person, in a way that an American public that seemed to reject the principle never might.
And so with this, the anti-abortion [00:35:00] movement proceeded to focus on incrementalism, looking for laws that could be argued to be consistent with Roe and then defending them before the courts.
And the movement too began to look for arguments that would cement its relationship with an emerging conservative legal movement.
Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation, Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone - CounterSpin - Air Date 4-5-24
RACHEL K. JONES: So we know from decades of medical research that mifepristone is safe, effective, and widely accepted by both patients and providers. And Guttmacher's own research has established that the majority of abortions are done with medication abortions: 53 percent in 2020.
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: So what would we expect, immediately and then maybe longer term, if this effort to make mifepristone unavailable, if that were to actually go through, what sort of impacts would you be expecting.?
RACHEL K. JONES: Okay, so there's actually a lot that we don't know about what's gonna happen or what would happen if the Supreme Court were to impose restrictions on mifepristone. But again, it's important to recognize that any restrictions that are put in place are not based on medical science. [00:36:00] We do know that it would have a devastating--any restrictions that were put in place would have a devastating impact on abortion access. Again, 53% of abortions are medication abortions.
Currently 55% of women in the US--only 55 percent of women in the US live in a county that has an abortion provider, and if mifepristone were taken away, that number would drop to 51%. But it would have a big impact. There are 10 states that would have a substantially larger notable impact. So about 40 percent of clinics in the US only offer medication abortion. And so again, there's 10 states where if this was taken, if these clinics were taken away, if these providers were taken away, that substantially large proportions of people would no longer have access to abortion. And some of these are states that are actually supportive of abortion rights. States like Colorado, Washington, New Mexico. And again, just one example, in Colorado, it's currently the case that 82 percent of women living in Colorado live in a county that [00:37:00] has an abortion provider. If mifepristone were no longer available, this number would drop to 56%.
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: I think it's important the way that Guttmacher links health and rights, and the way that your work shows that access, sometimes media presented as though we're talking about the United States and rights to access to abortion in the United States, but it varies very much, as you're just indicating, by region, by state, and then also by socioeconomic status. So there are a number of things to consider here in terms of this potential impact. Yeah.
RACHEL K. JONES: Definitely. Again, we know from decades of Guttmacher research on people who have abortions, that it's people in disadvantaged populations, low income populations, people of color, who access abortion at higher rates than other groups. And so by default, any restriction on abortion, whether it's a complete ban, a gestational ban, a ban on [00:38:00] a certain type of method, on a medication abortion, it's going to disproportionately impact these groups that are already, again, at a disadvantage.
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: Well, and I think particularly when we're talking about medication abortion, if you know, you know, if you never thought about it, then maybe you never thought about it, but there's a difference between having to go to a clinic where maybe you're going to go through a phalanx of red-faced people screaming at you and the ability to access that care in other ways. It's an important distinction. Yeah?
RACHEL K. JONES: Definitely. One of the benefits of medication abortion of mifepristone is that it can be offered via telemedicine. If there's a consultation, it can be done online or over the phone, and then the drugs can be mailed to somebody. There are online pharmacies that can provide medication abortion. This means that people, right, don't have to travel to a clinic, that they don't have to, in some cases, travel hundreds of miles to get to a clinic, that they don't have to worry about child care and [00:39:00] taking off time from work.
So, again, medication abortion has the ability to-- has for a number of people made abortion more accessible.
Abortion and the erosion of privacy Part 2 - The Weeds - Air Date 4-10-24
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: And I guess that goes back to RBG's argument about, like, No, this is about gender discrimination versus right to privacy.
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Exactly. And this is why, you know, again, if I were to do this from scratch, I think that Justice Ginsburg is correct, that the feminist right, you know, the right to be free from gender discrimination, that is a better source of rights, like the right to contraception and the right to abortion than this right to privacy, which, again, it's developed over 100 years, it's not like this came from nowhere. But that came from an iterative process of the court exercising its own authority, relying on very vague provisions of the Constitution.
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: And you wrote this piece about the right to privacy, and in it, you end it with these four different ways that this can play out. [00:40:00] It's almost like a choose your own adventure, except we don't actually get to choose. There are nine people in black robes that get to do it for us, but what are those scenarios, and how would we get there?
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: I mean, I will say we do get to choose. All of this is going to be decided, potentially, by the next election, and certainly by upcoming elections. So, one possibility is that Justice Thomas wins, and the right to privacy ceases to exist. You know, no more contraceptive right, no more right to marry the person you... you know, the government could potentially throw you in jail because they don't like who you're having sex with, in that world. And, that's not going to happen now. I mean, Kavanaugh said he's not going to vote for it. But if Donald Trump is elected and he puts more Clarence Thomas's on the Supreme Court, you know, we could very easily be in that world. I mean, this is going to be decided by this election.
There's two different versions of if Kavanaugh's view [00:41:00] prevails. So, like, if we keep the Supreme Court we have forever, and like, Brett Kavanaugh is the king of America, everything depends on what Brett Kavanaugh believes. We know that Brett Kavanaugh has said that he will not, with the exception of abortion, roll back existing rights that the court has already said is part of the right to privacy. So, he's not going to overrule Griswold. He's not going to overrule Lawrence. The court has not said that a right to gender affirming care is implicit in the right to privacy, and we just don't know where Brett Kavanaugh is going to fall on that. You know, given that he is a conservative Republican, I'm not optimistic that what he thinks is going to be good for trans rights, but, you know, I want to analyze him in a journalistically rigorous way. I have my suspicions about what he thinks about this issue, but we don't know yet.
And then the fourth possibility is, you know, I mentioned that there are Christian right groups that want to use the right to privacy to achieve their own [00:42:00] goals. So, you know, it is entirely possible that, if Trump wins, he could just appoint a bunch of hacks to the Supreme Court, and the right to privacy becomes a weapon that's used to, say, target trans inclusive bathroom policies.
I should mention there's a fifth possibility that I didn't discuss in my piece. The fifth possibility is that Biden wins. And if Biden wins, you know, he could potentially replace Thomas and Alito, and then we have Roe v. Wade back. Then we have the full bore right to privacy back in place.
So, you know, again, if I have one central message in this entire interview, it's that what the Constitution says does not matter. The right to privacy comes from the vaguest provisions of the Constitution. You know, if you look at what just happened in Florida, there's no doubt that Florida's privacy amendment, which is much more specific than what's in the U. S. Constitution, was enacted to codify Roe v. Wade. But there's a Republican court in Florida, and so that right doesn't exist anymore.
[00:43:00] All of this depends on judicial appointments. And at the federal level, judicial appointments are made by the president. So, you know, the future of the right to privacy is going to be decided, potentially forever, in the next election, and certainly in elections moving forward. You know, who picks the justices will decide whether this right remains robust and whether it remains a right that we recognize as the right to privacy that we have today, or whether it becomes a weapon that's used by the Christian right.
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: It's just all so vague and unpredictable, and I realize it would be very idealistic and, you know, probably more than a little bit naive to expect something like, Oh, let's get a constitutional amendment that says these things explicitly and codifies this right to privacy. And, you know, right now it is up to the interpretation of the Supreme Court. And clearly the makeup of that court changes over time. Like, you know, we have our eyes on 2024, but there will be a 2028 [00:44:00] and a so on and so forth until, you know, Lord knows what happens. But, what options do we have to make it a little more predictable? Like, can it be? Or is this sort of just the nature of the Constitution, the nature of the country? Like, there are just some things that will kind of always be up in the air, depending on who's in power.
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: I think one of the biggest lessons from the post-Trump Supreme Court, is that the Constitution means whatever five justices say it means. You know, we didn't lose Roe v. Wade because anything changed in the Constitution itself. The document we have now is virtually identical to the document we had when Roe was handed down. What changed was the membership of the Supreme Court. And that has two big implications. The first big implication is that politics still matters. If Joe Biden is elected in 2024, he can appoint different justices, and those different justices can give us back Roe v. Wade.
Even if he's not [00:45:00] elected, you know, one thing that we're seeing right now that's a little surprising is that the Republicans are sort of the dog that caught the car when it comes to abortion. In Alabama, the state supreme court tried to ban IVF, and approximately five minutes later the Republican state legislature passed a law overturning that because Republicans realized just how horribly unpopular it is. Donald Trump just put out a statement where he sort of hems and haws and says, I'm very proud that I appointed the justice who overruled Roe v. Wade, but also this is a state issue now I don't want Congress to do anything. And you know, he said that because he knows that the Republican party's position on abortion is unpopular and he's unlikely to get elected if he says what they have historically said about abortion.
Now that said, I think that we should be very cautious because, again, the Constitution says whatever five justices say it means. It doesn't [00:46:00] matter if Donald Trump is going to sign a law banning abortions. What matters is if he is going to appoint justices who will ban abortions.
So we are in this period where everything is in flux. The Republican Party is running scared. They don't want to do things in the honest way and pass a law banning abortion, but they might be able to be willing to do it in a more underhanded way, and appoint justices who will ban abortion that way.
Digital surveillance and reproductive rights Part 2 - Technically Optimistic - Air Date 5-15-24
AMY MERRILL: The mission of Plan C is to normalize the self directed method for safe, self-managed abortion. So, it started as an idea, a concept, a question: why don't we have access to abortion pills by mail in the U. S.? And it's evolved into a robust public health directory of information and creative campaigns where we suggest and introduce this information in ways that is understandable for people about ways that we can be reclaiming abortion and have agency over this reproductive health [00:47:00] need as the country spirals.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Plan C's central operation is to facilitate getting abortion pills to people who need them via the mail.
AMY MERRILL: Abortion pills are a reality in all states. That's kind of the core information that still so many people don't know. Even if you live in this state that has shut down abortion access and all these other ways, you still have options. Pills are not a panacea, I want to say, too. There's always going to be a need for in person care. We advocate for all options to be available. That's also not the reality that we are living in in the U. S. And so our focus really is on expanding the notion of abortion, introducing this method of abortion pills and self directed care.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Plan C is also committed to providing resources and support for people who get abortions. That includes legal and financial support. But also mental and emotional support as well.
AMY MERRILL: Part of our acknowledgment at Plan C is recognizing the transformative nature of this method of the pills and the [00:48:00] opportunity for demedicalization, the opportunity for ultimately the pills to go over the counter. And that recognition is grounded in a global context that all around the world, people in other countries are already doing this by the millions. It's very common, it's more accessible, and it's known to be a method that is safe and effective. The World Health Organization calls it an essential medicine. All of that is already true.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: As early as 2013, Amy began seeing abortion pills available through online medication vendors.
AMY MERRILL: We call them also websites that sell pills.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Many of them were operating overseas, unregulated, and pills would take weeks and weeks to arrive. So, from early on, Plan C's goal was to provide a safer, quicker alternative to the websites that sell pills. And then...
AMY MERRILL: I mean, the beginning of the pandemic was a wild time for everyone, but we were sitting there at our computers going, Oh my gosh, this is the moment. If there [00:49:00] was ever a moment to introduce a new idea, which is accessing pills by mail, accessing care virtually, it's now.
But then the commerce routes started to shut down. The flights were stopping, things weren't being imported, and that became a mini crisis that suddenly shipments weren't coming into the US. And so, simultaneously, the providers were looking more and more closely at these restrictions on mailing the pills, questioning, is this really the case? I mean, this is kind of crazy. Most of our other medications, the individual could go online to an online pharmacy and place their order and just do it. And this particular one has these antiquated requirements that it must be dispensed by a provider. You know, it's very patriarchal. It's very medically unnecessary. And these inquiries were moving forward. Providers were figuring out what they could do. And then the FDA rolled back the restrictions on medication abortion, on Mifepristone, [00:50:00] which are called the REMS.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: That stands for Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies, which are drug-specific guidelines put out by the Food and Drug Administration.
AMY MERRILL: So suddenly the REMS were lifted and these services popped up.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: So it's just interesting to note again, we're dealing with a convergence of two things here, which shape the future: the permissive environment around telemedicine, due to the pandemic, and the loss of privacy rights, due to Dobbs.
AMY MERRILL: With the overturning of Roe, we absolutely updated our information to reflect the changing status, to help people understand the implications of the case and how it impacted state by state access to abortion. We are also advocating for some digital privacy recommendations on our site, or rather, we're putting them right up top.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Plan C connects with online privacy organizations, like the Digital Defense Fund, in order to provide people with concrete advice [00:51:00] for safeguarding their personal data.
AMY MERRILL: So, we've spent many years gathering all of the best tips and best practices to present them to folks along the way. So using privacy-enabled browsing, you know, browsers are typically always tracking people these days. It's gathering this history of what someone has done, where they've gone. There's another recommendation to turn off location services on your phone. That's something that has come up in the abortion issue, of people having a record of their physical location. People are using encrypted text, so there's an app called Signal that folks are using for encrypted texting.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: And real quick, in case you missed it, I talked to Meredith Whitaker, Signal's president, in Episode 2.
AMY MERRILL: And oftentimes the providers are recommending that the patient download one of these encrypted services before going back and forth. So that's often baked into the telehealth intake process. There's also recommendations around email. There is a VPN, a virtual private [00:52:00] network, that will hide your device's IP address.
You know, it's not that, I don't want to create the impression that all of these services out there are being nefarious. I mean, there's a lot we could talk about, of course, with tech and how data is being collected and used. It's business, right? We think of this in terms of keeping a clean digital footprint. It's less about surveillance and more about someone who is coming after a person who had an abortion, who's trying to build a case and is trying to collect that digital footprint in order to make the case. So, you know, these are the steps that are recommended in order for that digital footprint to be clean and that person to maintain control over their experience.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: I agree with everything you said, but at the same time, it seems desperately unfair that we have to make the care seeker do all this work.
AMY MERRILL: Absolutely.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: And that responsibility doesn't fall somewhere else. Like, [00:53:00] these are complicated things.
AMY MERRILL: Yeah, um, that was a big concern that came up after Dobbs. Every individual's assessing their own risk. It is an information game. The challenge is to get all this information out there to raise their awareness to the fact that there's a flip side to all of these technologies that track data.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Yeah.
AMY MERRILL: I do appreciate the way that the veil is being lifted for us. I would say, like, I appreciate that actually, yeah, these conversations are happening more openly about what is actually happening with these technologies. How can we learn more about how they function so that we know what we're opting into. We have no idea what these apps are doing with our data, right? So, now I think we're in the process of swinging back to a place where we have an opportunity to be a little more conscientious about the way we're living our life with technology.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: It's better if we make explicit choices, not implicit choices. And I feel like with a lot of this tech, we've just implicitly chosen to use it and don't fully explore the trade offs that we're [00:54:00] making.
AMY MERRILL: I love, love that description. Yep. There's ways that companies can step up. That's actually critical, I think, from a human rights lens, that companies that deal in data start to really assess the severity of the situation and take steps to proactively land on the right side of history with this stuff, you know, to protect their users from being caught up in a completely unjust, unconstitutional risk of a legal case against them for seeking their health care.
Note from the Editor on the abuse produced by abortion restrictions
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with Lectures in History, discussing the history of abortion and contraception in the US. The Weeds, in multiple clips, looked at abortion and the constitutional right to privacy. Technically Optimistic examined how data is being weaponized against pregnant people. Consider This look at the real restriction extremists. Lectures in History described the push for fetal personhood. And CounterSpin watched the media watch the court on further abortion cases.
And those were just the top takes. There's a [00:55:00] lot more in the deeper dive section. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics often trying to make each other laugh in the process. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon ,pageor from right inside the Apple podcast app. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
Now, before we continue on to the deeper dives half the show, I just wanted to add in another element of restricting abortion access that is often overlooked, I think. And since a couple of articles have summed it up real nicely, I'm just going to go ahead and read a bit of each into the record here.
So, the first is from The Intercept. "Sterilization, murders, [00:56:00] suicide: bans haven't slowed abortions and they're costing lives". So, this article says, "For women in abusive relationships, to get pregnant is to risk your life. The narrative is well-documented. A violent, intimate partner sensing the impending loss of control over his wife's or girlfriend's body, and the arrival of a competitor for her time and attention, even if he wanted the baby at first, grows increasingly possessive, volatile and assaultive. His menacing behavior erodes not just her freedom but also her will to take care of herself. She grows depressed, skips prenatal clinic visits, eats poorly, and smokes drinks and uses drugs more, all to the detriment of her own and her fetus's health. Sometimes the partner's violence turns murderous. 'Women who are pregnant or recently gave birth are significantly more likely to be killed by an intimate partner [00:57:00] than women of the same age who are neither pregnant nor postpartum,' writes the authors of a new study from Tulane university. The harder it is to end a pregnancy the more danger women are in. Looking at the states with multiple abortion restrictions alongside their rates of intimate partner homicide committed against women and girls ages 10 to 44, the researchers found a 3.4% rise in the state homicide rate with each restriction enforced between 2014 and 2020. The authors acknowledge the limits of their methodology, but extrapolate that nearly a quarter of those murdered were associated with the statutes."
And then from the New Republic magazine article "Dobbs was a gift to domestic abusers", they bring in another element. And it says, "Abusive partners can also use state anti-abortion laws to intimidate and threaten partners who had an abortion. If/When/How operates it's [00:58:00] helpline for questions and support about abortion and the law through which it has observed the impact of antiabortion laws and legal cases. ' Before Dobbs people did contact the helpline because they feared an abusive partner could use their abortion or knowledge of a pregnancy against them', said Ling. But since, calls have increased, and with survivors " weighing the risks of their abusive relationship against their access to abortion." Along with the helpline getting more calls, Ling said, “we have seen the threats from abusers become more specific. Some have threatened to call the police on family members who help them access abortion. Other abusers have falsely claimed it is a crime to leave the state, or [that] their victim has to have their consent to get an abortion. And abusers are weaponizing the rising abortion stigma against their victims, suggesting that their decision to get an abortion will harm them in unrelated court proceedings". [00:59:00]
So, if you weren't angry enough already, thanks to those writers for highlighting yet another consequence of abortion restrictions. And just in case there's any question, or if you need to respond to any limp objection to this criticism based on the idea that you know, Oh, well, no one intends for abuse to increase, just know it doesn't matter. Those in the grassroots who support and those in politics who ultimately vote for extremist abortion restrictions, don't get any pass on the consequences of those laws, based on maybe some of those consequences being unintended. Which, by the way is a pretty questionable proposition in and of itself when dealing with mostly religious conservatives who tend to believe in strict father morality and the hierarchical ranking of men above women. But even for those who may be genuine and feeling bad about increased abuse and murder, due to their policies, that buys you no forgiveness until you work to undo the [01:00:00] damage. As for the rest of us, the more harm caused will just act as fuel for the campaign to take our policy back in the same direction.
SECTION A: CRIMINALIZING ABORTION
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with deeper dives on four topics. Next up, criminalizing abortion. Followed by, abortion extremism in the Republican party, abortion in the legal system, and what is there to do now?
Abortion and the erosion of privacy Part 3 - The Weeds - Air Date 4-10-24
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: Yeah, I think this issue of privacy, you know, you name all these instances, like, you know, we have contraception, we have same sex marriage, we have same sex sex, sex outside of marriage, gender affirming care, all these different forms of healthcare, and I think this Issue of privacy is most well known in the Roe v.
Wade case, and when she was alive, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was very critical of the right to privacy being the reasoning behind the Roe decision. Can you talk about what her argument was?
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I mean, she was obviously a very significant judge, but probably [01:01:00] the most significant impact she had on the law was before she became a judge, you know, when she was still a lawyer, she was a very important feminist civil rights lawyer in the 1970s.
And there's a provision of the Constitution that says no one shall be denied the equal protection of the walls. That has traditionally been thought of as something that prevents race discrimination, and like, certainly the history of it, like, it's part of the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was essentially the treaty.
that between the North and the South that ended the Civil War. And I mean, that was a war about slavery. So it makes sense that we think of this as a race provision, but it's broadly worded. It says no one shall be denied the equal protection of the law. Not just, you know, black people won't be denied or, you know, people of a certain race won't be denied.
And so Justice Ginsburg's insight was this is something that should apply to types of discrimination that are similar in character to racism. Sexism is similar in [01:02:00] character to racism in that, you know, it is irrational. It judges people based on traits that don't have anything to do with their ability to contribute to society.
These are just arbitrary prejudice that we've held onto for a very long time. And the Constitution should always be also protect against that kind of thing. And she successfully convinced the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment should be read not just to protect against race discrimination, but also to protect against sex discrimination.
And she saw the contraceptive right and the abortion right as part of that broad project. You know, the idea was that a woman cannot thrive in society. They cannot, you know, achieve the same professional heights. They cannot compete in the workplace. If they are constantly under threat of being taken out of the workforce for nine months at a time or more because they are pregnant, that they need to be able to control that aspect of their life if they are going to have equality in society.
[01:03:00] And, you know, personally, I find that argument more persuasive than the right to privacy argument. I mean, I think. A contraceptive and abortive rights, they make more sense if you think of them as feminist rights. I think that that, you know, hews more closely to the text of the constitution. I also think it leads to a less freewheeling judicial power, where judges are just inventing rights on the fly.
But that's sort of the dog that did not bite. Bark in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence because the most important feminist legal decision was Craig v. Boren in the mid 1970s. It was two or three years after Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. So the Supreme Court had not yet embraced that language of equality that Justice Ginsburg advocated for when Roe v.
Wade was handed down. And so that whole line, the right to privacy jurisprudence, sort of developed independently of the feminist jurisprudence.
Abortion and Reproductive Rights Part 3 - Lectures in History - Air Date 3-16-24
Uh, eugenics, uh, as a [01:04:00] concept, was a term coined by Francis Galton, um, a cousin of Charles Darwin in the late 19th century. Uh, and the idea that Galton had was that if you could breed livestock to improve its genetic qualities, Why not breed, as Galton wrote, human beings to have better genetic qualities?
And exactly what eugenics would mean legally was complicated for some time. So some, uh, scholars and legal thinkers argued that there should be legal incentives for the quote unquote right sort of people to get married. Um, there were, for example, better baby contests, where the purported genetic quality of infants would be rewarded with cash prizes or apple pies.
And of course, there were much more interest in negative, what's called negative eugenics, right, using the law to prevent the quote unquote wrong people from having children. Initially, some of these laws focused on access to marriage, on the theory that if people We're for example, suffering from sexually transmitted infections, they shouldn't get married.
[01:05:00] But then, of course, reformers quickly realized that people could have children and have sex without getting married, and turned instead to compulsory sterilization laws, which are on the books, were on the books, in, uh, more than 30 states in the United States, including California, which was one of the nation's leaders in compulsory sterilization.
Uh, these laws applied to people we would now recognize as having, Mental illnesses or disabilities, but to a much larger class of persons as well. California, for example, often targeted persons who were viewed as sexually promiscuous on the theory that sexual promiscuity, particularly in women, was a sign of feeble mindedness or genetics.
Um, overwhelmingly, the people targeted by these laws were already in state institutions. Uh, they were overwhelmingly low income people. Initially, they were overwhelmingly white people, in part because of either de jure or de facto segregation, ensuring that people of color had no access to state institutions or services at all.
Um, this was to change after World War II, [01:06:00] when people of color, particularly black people, made up the overwhelming majority of sterilization victims as sterilization moved south. The eugenics movement changed the status quo when it came to abortion and contraception in a few ways. Obviously, in a sense, the eugenics movement was compatible with what had come before, because just as has been the case with Storer, Or Comstock.
The message of the eugenic movement had been that, of course it was the role of the state to control who reproduced and how. Um, albeit in a different way, the claim of authority from Eugen of eugenics was not moral as Comstock's was, or even Christian. It was, uh, it sounded in scientific expertise.
Eugenicists simply knew better than everyone else the argument went about who should reproduce. On the other hand, the idea of eugenicists was that more reproduction was not always an unmitigated good. And in fact, that certain circumstances, it may make sense for certain people not to have children at all, or not to have more children.
And that the cost of having children, not just to the individual, but to the [01:07:00] state, was something that the state could take an interest in. It was at this time that the first birth control movement organized and that movement had to varying degrees involvement in the eugenic movement itself. Um, so you see here pictured Margaret Sanger, who some of you, most of you know as the figure who coined the term birth control, the founder of Planned Parenthood, who began her career in the 19 teens connecting birth control to socialism and the rights of workers.
And transitioned in part to enli trying to enlist the support of eugenicists, who were at the time enjoyed popular backing across the ideological spectrum. Um, everyone from, uh, conservative Catholic activists to members of Congress viewed themselves as supporters of eugenicists. And Sanger, who was deeply pragmatic, believed that her cause, which she saw as an individual right to birth control, would be more popular, um, if it were embraced by eugenicists too.
Some of her colleagues, including Mary Ware Dennett, who's pictured to her left, rejected this [01:08:00] idea of courting eugenicists and instead framed birth control as an issue of democracy. Dennett argued that it was unreasonable to assume under the Comstock Act that Americans were incompetent to decide on birth control.
If the for themselves when to have children, much less when to consume information about birth control. And that it was inconsistent with the idea of democracy to patronize Americans in this way and to deny them this kind of information. The fight for birth control gained supporters outside of the white community, two prominent, uh Activists like W.
E. B. Du Bois and Mary Church Terrell, who's pictured here, endorsed the use of birth control in their communities, even as birth control, like many movements of the era, um, had ties to eugenics. The birth control movement, for the most part, didn't embrace the idea of a right to abortion at all, although precisely what it was embracing was complicated at a time when no one knew how drugs worked.
So common drugs that were marketed at the time [01:09:00] Like, uh, Miss Lydia Pinkham's remedy, for example, um, were sold as contraceptives and abortifacients and many viewed them as placebos that didn't work at all. So precisely what a right to birth control would entitle you to was ambiguous, even if no one was endorsing abortion on its face.
In fact, if anything, Sanger argued that abortions, which were dangerous at the time, one of the leading sources of maternal mortality and morbidity, would result in part because access to contraception was denied. There had also been an unspoken consensus about how criminal abortion laws would be implemented that had applied for this era.
Overwhelmingly, when an abortion was justified had been left to the discretion of physicians. who could invoke exceptions for the life of the patient. But the difference between life and health of the patient in the 19th and early 20th centuries was non existent at a time when maternal mortality and morbidity rates were high, even compared to the [01:10:00] shameful current standards for maternal mortality and morbidity that we still experience.
So the upshot tended to be that physicians were rarely prosecuted for abortion unless a patient actually died. Um, and then often were prosecuted using the dying declaration or dying words of the patient themselves. Um, competent practitioners, by contrast, were rarely prosecuted at all, and even those who did face prosecution often weren't facing long prison sentences and sometimes came back to practicing abortions after their prison time ended.
After the 1940s, this changed pretty dramatically for a few different reasons. Um, First, it was no longer easy to deny that abortions were occurring. In the 1930s, rates of contraceptive and abortion use increased exponentially during the Great Depression. Abortions were still unsafe, as was pregnancy, and entire hospital wards were dedicated to people suffering the complications of illegal abortions.
So the idea that abortion is just not something that happens here was no [01:11:00] longer possible. to maintain. Um, at the same time, prosecutors began to see abortion as more of a problem in the aftermath of World War II at a time when Americans were encouraged to have bigger families as part of the war effort and the rebuilding of the country after the war.
Um, being pro baby and having a big family was seen as a kind of antidote to communism at a time when the And the Soviet Union's embrace of smaller families and working women was seen as distinctly un American and un Christian. And conversely, abortion providers were seen as distinctly un American and un Christian as well.
Digital surveillance and reproductive rights Part 3 - Technically Optimistic - Air Date 5-15-24
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Take, for example, what happened in Nebraska
NEWS CLIP: in the summer of 2022. A teenager in Nebraska and her mother are facing multiple charges after Facebook's parent company, Meta, turned over their private messages.
Police say their messages prove the teen had an illegal abortion. Of course, [01:12:00]
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: tech companies have to comply with law enforcement when they really are in possession of data that's been subpoenaed. Privacy centered apps like Signal get around this problem by using end to end encryption. They simply don't have the unencrypted version of the messages sent on their platform.
But even Google, whose revenue is clearly tied to surveillance advertising, is making some adjustments. In December of 2023, they stopped storing location data on their servers, claiming in a blog post that your location history is now stored right on your phone. Now some privacy watchdog groups question whether or not Google has really fully implemented this switch.
But the point is that companies really could step up, as Amy is saying. Not only would this insulate our data from law enforcement, it would mean finally taking some responsibility off of individual careseekers. So tech companies can do better. But [01:13:00] so could Congress.
KEVIN WILLIAMS: Donald Trump campaigned on overturning Roe v.
Wade, and he successfully did it by appointing justices who in fact overturned Roe v. Wade. Now states can do whatever they want.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: This is Congressman Ted Lieu, the representative from California's 36th District.
KEVIN WILLIAMS: And then some of these states have very aggressive Republican attorney generals. who will prosecute people who seek reproductive health care, who get abortions, and we don't think folks should be tracked on whether they went to a reproductive health clinic or in some of these states who are looking at banning contraception or who want to ban abortion.
You know, in vitro fertilization, we don't think people should be trapped if they go to an IVF clinic or if they go to a place that sells contraceptives. And that is the gist of the legislation we're trying to get through. The
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: bill is called [01:14:00] the Reproductive Data Privacy and Protection Act, and it was introduced this past March by Representative Liu and four of his colleagues in the House.
KEVIN WILLIAMS: Law enforcement can make demands of private sector companies. in a way that they wouldn't be able to do if Congress passed a law saying you can't do that. So for example, even if the tech companies, let's say, did the right thing in my view and said, look, we're not going to give you the data on this user who visited an abortion clinic or reproductive health clinic and law enforcement gives them a subpoena, well, you know what?
The tech company has complied. This proposed
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: law would prohibit this. It would ban all sorts of communication about an individual's reproductive or sexual health, whether electronic or otherwise, from being used against that individual. These incidents that we've been talking about, when someone's Facebook messages or any kind of digital data is used to criminalize pregnant people?
This bill would just outlaw all of that.
KEVIN WILLIAMS: [01:15:00] BUTT. There's one problem. I frankly don't think it's going to happen in a Republican controlled Congress, but if the house flips next term, then I think this legislation could get passed. So,
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: beyond reminding everyone that election day is Tuesday, November 5th, what else can we do?
Elections won't change the makeup of the Supreme Court. And there's a scary possibility that the Dobbs decision was only the beginning.
NEWS CLIP: Today's arguments not only brought hundreds of protesters on both sides of the issue, it was also the first abortion related hearing before the Supreme Court since the conservative majority eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.
Nearly two years ago, CNN
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Paul Reed, this past March, the court heard a case that has major implications for the availability of mitrione, the medication that's used in nearly two thirds of all abortions in the us. A decision is expected in June.
MELANIE FONTES RAINER: [01:16:00] Absolutely, we're keeping a very close eye on that case.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Amy Merrill of Plan C again.
MELANIE FONTES RAINER: The case is not about making Mifepristone illegal or taking it off the shelves. It's rolling it back, again, to these early REMS, these restrictions, so that it would be prevented from being put in the mail by U. S. based providers. And I wish I had a crystal ball, but I don't. We'll have to, we'll have to wait and hear.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: This might be an impossible question to ask, but has technology been a net positive for reproductive health?
MELANIE FONTES RAINER: Oh, yeah. I, I would say absolutely. I am a big, Bit of a tech optimist, but I think, yes, technology is allowing people to access information from anywhere they are. Technology is the reason this whole system of pills by mail is proliferating in the U.
S. You know, it's that same system is making abortion pills available in all states for folks living in rural areas, for folks that don't have hundreds and hundreds of [01:17:00] dollars to drive or go to an in person clinic. And so, yes, I think that is all net positive. And I also believe that technology. is best thought of as a tool to get us where we want to go.
We judge it as good or bad, depending on whether it's serving our needs or whether we feel like it's controlling us or we're controlling it, you know, but it's a tool. It's our job to be stewards of it, to figure out what we want out of it, to regulate it when it's appropriate. It's looking ahead. You know, at Plan City, we talk all the time about our vision of the future.
I sometimes feel like progressive movements in the U. S. are often just fighting against something that is going wrong or in the way or whatnot, but we really want to be envisioning the future that we want to build. And that's why I believe that this is a really hopeful conversation that truly there's a beautiful vision here of liberation, of people being more in control.
People having more autonomy over their well being, their futures, their reproductive health and outcomes.
SECTION B: ABORTION EXTREMISM OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [01:18:00] You've reached section B: abortion extremism in the Republican party.
Texas Republicans Want To Execute Women Who Defy Them - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 5-30-24
THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: equal protection is the phrase that the anti-abortion freaks use to describe a requirement that they want to have put into law that killing a, a fetus Or to quote the U. S. Supreme Court, an unborn child, um, is the exact same thing as killing an actual born child, or an adult, in other words, homicide. And down in Texas, the Texas Republican Party is putting together their platform this week, and one of the proposals, which looks like it's going to be built into their platform, is calling for, quote, equal protection.
Now, two other states have tried this before. South Carolina and Georgia have both tried doing the same thing. Uh, they didn't succeed in either case. Uh, these, these were actually legislative attempts in South Carolina and Georgia, and they, they tried to pass [01:19:00] laws saying that an abortion is homicide, essentially.
That, that equal protection is given to unborn children as it is to, uh, real children. Um, but this is You know, pretty straightforward. And they're right up front about it. I mean, one of the Republicans, this is Representative, State Representative, Stephanie Klick. Um, who is a Texas Republican, but she's not an anti-abortion absolutist.
Uh, attacked her primary opponent, David Lowe, who's also a Republican, who does want the Equal Protection Law to be applied to abortions. She said, quote, The legislation he prefers would give the death penalty to women who had an abortion. I don't support that. What I support is the Republican Party of Texas platform on abortion, which is the same laws that protect you and me, protect everyone else, to include pre born children.
I'm sorry, that's what he said in response. So she said, the [01:20:00] legislation he prefers would give the death penalty to women who had an abortion. I don't support that. And he says, yes, you're right. He said, what I support is the Republican Party of Texas platform on abortion, which is the same laws that protect you and me, and protect everybody else, to include pre born children.
In other words, if you get an abortion in Texas, you can get a lethal injection. You can get put to death by the state. And these are not fringe groups anymore. I mean, there was once a time when this was very much the fringe. But, no longer. I mean, since 2022, Republican lawmakers have introduced at least 26 bills calling for abortion to be considered homicide.
And women who get abortions to be subject to life imprisonment or the death penalty. Pretty much every anti-abortion leader, this is Jessica Valenti who's writing about this by the way over at her Substack [01:21:00] newsletter, Jessica. substack. com. Uh, she writes, pretty much every anti-abortion leader and organization in the country signed onto a letter last year calling for, quote, equal protection for children in the womb.
And you know, not only, by the way, this has larger implications. It's not just women who get abortions. If a woman in Texas, if this becomes law, and again, you know, this is, Texas is now the third state to suggest this should become law. Or where Republicans are suggesting this should become law. And more than 22 pieces of legislation have been introduced in various states to make this law.
None of them have succeeded so far. But if this becomes law, that fetuses have the same protection under the law as do children, actual children. And a pregnant woman is seen in a bar or restaurant having a sip of wine, [01:22:00] she could be arrested for child abuse. If she smokes a cigarette, she could be arrested for child abuse.
I mean, that's, that's where this is going. And to take it even weirder, you know, there have been several women who had, uh, the story, in fact, the stories that get a lot, you know, the most high profile stories about abortion in the media these days, are stories of women who have, Uh, such severely damaged, malformed, birth defected, uh, fetuses, that there's no way they can survive outside the womb, and yet, the Republicans want to force them to give birth, rather than have an abortion.
I mean, there's, there's, you know, we've all seen, in fact, we had one of those women on this program about a month ago, or maybe two or three months ago. Well, the Texas Republican Party. has two other pieces to their [01:23:00] platform that apply to abortion. One is that they want, uh, all children in the state to be forced to watch anti-abortion propaganda videos.
And the second is that they want the state to, quote, close discriminatory loopholes that fail to protect pre born children suspected of having a fetal anomaly, end quote. In other words, if a woman is carrying a fetus that is known to have, you know, profound birth defects that will cause it to die, they want to force her to give birth to that thing rather than have an abortion.
I, you know, I, I think just five years ago, before Trump was elected and started putting over 300 right wing judges on the courts. We would not have even imagined this was possible. This is how quickly things change. When [01:24:00] you put fascists in charge of a country. And people were amazed at how quickly Hitler changed Germany.
Or Mussolini changed Italy. How quickly Modi is changing India right now. Uh, you know, how quickly Xi changed China. We're seeing, now China didn't go from a democracy to something else, but, you know, things change, things can change really rapidly when you have really committed, uh, politicians. Meanwhile, Project 2025, now Project 2025 is, this is the plan for the next Republican president.
It might be Trump in 2025, it might be J. D. Vance in 2028, or Ron DeSantis, or whoever, you know, whoever runs for president in 2028 on the Republican side. But they want to eliminate requirements that health insurance provides for birth control, number one. Number two, they want to require insurers to cover, quote, fertility awareness based methods of family planning.
In other words, [01:25:00] the rhythm method. They want your insurance company to tell you, instead of giving you birth control pills, we'll give you a brochure explaining That there is this, you know, week long period during the, during the four weeks of your cycle when you're most likely to, uh, to become pregnant.
They also want, uh, another part of Project 2025 is calling for funding a federal study into the dangers of birth control pills. The senior researcher associate at the Heritage Foundation, who's in, leading this project around conception, Emma Waters, she said, quote, I've been very concerned with just the emphasis on expanding more and more contraception.
We want to make sure women are getting the thing that's best for them. And Trump recently said, yeah, I'm looking at banning contraception. Now, he walked that back the next day. It's possible he didn't know what the word contraception meant. But, you know, I'm [01:26:00] guessing he heard the word in a conversation.
The Trump administration also overhauled the Title 10 program, which provides birth control, STD screenings, and reproductive services to low income people. He basically ended all those services. Joe Biden reversed that. And Project 2025 calls for reversing Joe Biden's reversal. In other words, going back to where Poor people can't get birth control, can't get screened for sexually transmitted diseases, can't get any kind of free reproductive services.
Not the job of government to provide anything to poor people.
Why Trumps Abortion Video Needs Some Follow-Up Questions - Brian Lehrer A Daily Podcast - Air Date 4-9-24
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: If you took time from obsessing on the eclipse yesterday to take in any political news, you're You probably know that Donald Trump staked out a new, or is it new, position on abortion rights now that there is such a backlash, right, ever since he fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise to get Roe vs.
Wade overturned by appointing anti Roe justices to the Supreme Court. [01:27:00] He appointed three. They did what Trump promised, as you all know. And in elections and referenda ever since, voters, even in red states, have made it clear that, by and large, they want women to have the right to choose. So, a little Trump history here.
In 1999, when he was first being looked at as a potential presidential candidate, he said this on NBC's Meet the Press with host Tim Russert when asked if he supports even late term abortion rights.
DONALD TRUMP: I'm very pro choice. I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. I cringe when I listen to people debating the subject.
But you still, I just believe in choice.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Trump in 1999. But when he was running in 2016, he had the memorable exchange with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, which ended like this.
MUSIC: Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no, as a principle? The answer [01:28:00] is that there has to be some form of punishment. For the woman?
Yeah, there
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: has
MUSIC: to be
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: some
MUSIC: form.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So, in 99 he was pro choice, by 2016 he wanted women behind bars, yesterday he released a video on Truth Social which answered one question but begged several others.
DONALD TRUMP: My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, The states will determine by vote, or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land.
In this case, The law of the state. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that's what they will be. At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart, or in many cases, Your religion or your faith.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Very confusing clip, actually, and we'll discuss why, and talk broadly about [01:29:00] abortion continuing to develop as an issue in the presidential and congressional campaigns this year with Molly Ball, senior political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Hi Molly, welcome back to WNYC.
MOLLY BALL: Hi, thanks for having me.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So there are the things Trump said yesterday and the things he didn't say. We have more clips, but by way of background first, why did he say anything in a new video on the issue rather than just let his record of overturning Roe stand on its own?
MOLLY BALL: Well, that's a very good question. I think he seems to want to put this issue to rest.
But as you say, the statement that he did put out raised as many questions as it answered. So it certainly didn't do that. However, he has been under a lot of pressure to, uh, take a position on the many lingering questions that the overturning of Roe v. Wade, uh, created, uh, because that Supreme Court decision nearly two years ago now did send the decision making back to the states.
It raised a lot of [01:30:00] questions about how we move forward as a nation, whether there ought to be some kind of federal legislation creating a framework for when abortion is or is not allowed, uh, how states, uh, should administer this, uh, things like medication abortion, which is currently before the Supreme Court.
Uh, there's all sorts of policy areas that, uh, And that the Supreme Court decision actually opened up and that we have seen policymakers in various states and at the federal level be engaged with and so, uh, certainly activists on both sides of this issue do not see this as a closed issue and there's a lot for, for politicians to take a stand on.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: To take one of the things you just mentioned first, the Supreme Court case that they're currently deciding on whether to ban the abortion medication, the Priston. Has Trump taken a position on that? Do you know?
MOLLY BALL: He has not. I have not seen anywhere where he has even commented on that. And that's one of the many, uh, outstanding questions that, that he has [01:31:00] yet to answer.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: And on what he did say yesterday, he said, leave it to the states, but he did not say explicitly that he would oppose any kind of national restrictions if a Republican Congress were to send him some, though a lot of people are hearing it that way. Leave it to the states means no federal ban. Is it clear?
Uh, that he drew the line somewhere.
MOLLY BALL: Absolutely not. If anything, uh, it seems like a message that was almost designed to be unclear. He has said in the past many times that he believes there could be some kind of accommodation or compromise that pleases everyone. Uh, but I think we all know that this is an issue where you, where you can't please everyone because it is so divisive, so polarizing, and because people do feel so passionately, uh, on, on all sides of this issue.
Uh, but he, he seems to have wanted to take a position that would be perceived as moderate. He's said many times, uh, that he views As a political loser for the Republican party, and that's a statement that checks out. We have seen [01:32:00] public opinion really move toward, uh, the pro-abortion rights side of this issue.
In the years since Roe was overturned, we've seen it be a very galvanizing, mobilizing issue for voters, if not always for. Uh, the Democratic Party and its candidates. Uh, and so, you know, Trump doesn't want to lose the presidential election by taking a very hard core pro life stance, and he was criticized by many voices in the pro life movement for the stand that he did sort of take, because of that, and because, as you say, there are a lot of pro life people, anti-abortion rights activists who would like to see some kind of federal limitation, who would like to see a national framework passed by Congress that would say no abortions after a certain number of weeks.
We've seen that proposed, uh, in Congress, uh, and, in fact, get a lot of Republican sponsors in the, in the Senate, uh, right up to before Roe was overturned. [01:33:00] Uh, so, Trump, as you said, strongly implied that he would not support something like that, but he did not come out and say that he would veto such a bill if the Congress were able to pass it, and that's one of the many ambiguities that his statement left.
SECTION C: ABORTION IN THE LEGAL SYSTEM
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now section C: abortion in the legal system.
Abortion and Reproductive Rights Part 4 - Lectures in History - Air Date 3-16-24
We've seen two, count them two, U. S. Supreme Court cases on abortion in one term after Dobbs told us that the federal courts were out of this game, uh, one of which, um, involves the FDA's authority to approve Mifepristone, a drug used in more than half of U. S. abortions. The case also involves a claim that the FDA never had the authority to make abortion pills available via telehealth because Anthony Comstock's law was never repealed and is argued to make it a federal claim to mail abortion related items today.
There's another case involving the Federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. Which, uh, the Biden administration has argued requires access for abortion to patients in certain medical emergencies. [01:34:00] Uh, this claim this case also involves the claim by states like Texas and Idaho that federal law actually treats an unborn child as a patient, and that some states like California may be prohibited from providing access to emergency abortions because of the federal law, rather than required to do so.
And finally, of course, as we saw just in the past few weeks, there's the ongoing struggle for fetal personhood. Um, if you were wondering, like, what is the next Roe v. Wade for the anti abortion movement, it was and always has been fetal personhood, but now that Roe is out of the way, the campaign for fetal personhood has intensified considerably.
Um, it's reflected in state laws recognizing the personhood of fetuses for purposes like tax deductions. Um, and child support laws, and recently in a decision of the Alabama Supreme Court, um, holding that for the purposes of the state's wrongful death of a minor law, uh, a frozen embryo is a child or person, and that therefore, suits for the destruction of embryos can be brought.
Um, as wrongful death suits. Uh, these claims are all designed eventually [01:35:00] to return, ironically, not to Congress, not to state legislators, not to voters, but to the U. S. Supreme Court. Because we've seen, um, after Roe surmised, ironically, that when voters are faced with questions involving reproductive rights and justice, they tend overwhelmingly to support reproductive rights and justice.
And so instead, uh, groups that have long complained about the, So, anti democratic courts interjecting themselves into questions of reproduction are instead seeking out courts and arguing that as a matter of the Constitution's original public meaning, access to abortion, potentially access to IVF, potentially access to contraception, is itself unconstitutional.
So when people ask me sort of my favorite question is people usually not from the United States And I think a lot of people in the United States ask me, when is this going to be over? And the answer is probably never, right? Um, but I think one of the other things that's clear in the history of reproductive rights and justice is that it's always very much been a story about, uh, the health of democracy, right?
Who gets to vote, whether you get to vote at all, how money is influencing how you vote. [01:36:00] And so I think in terms of how this turns out, a good barometer will be how healthy is the democracy in the first place.
Abortion and the erosion of privacy Part 4 - The Weeds - Air Date 4-10-24
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: All right, so what is the first court case in which privacy is the central question?
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: There have been essentially three waves of Supreme Court decisions that we now think of as right to privacy decisions, although the earliest cases didn't use that term. So the earliest cases are two cases from the 1920s called Mayer v.
Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters. And these cases dealt with essentially the right to choose how to raise your children. Mayer was a case where Nebraska passed a law that forbade schoolteachers from teaching students in a language other than English. And there was a schoolteacher who was, who was, who charged with the crime because the teacher taught the German language.
And like that that was a crime in [01:37:00] Nebraska. If that case had come up today, it would have that would have probably been struck down on First Amendment grounds. I mean, obviously, free speech means you can teach someone to speak German. But, um, the court instead saw this as part of a right to choose the upbringing of your children.
And if you want your children to learn the German language, you Send them to school where they learn the German language. Pierce was a similar case. This was an Oregon law that, it targeted all private schools, but the real target was parochial schools. It was an attempt to ban Catholic parents from sending their kids to Catholic schools.
And the court struck that down. You know, if that case came up today, it would have been struck down under the free exercise clause of the Constitution, the provision saying that you have a right to exercise your religion. But the court in the 1920s saw this as a part of this right to raise your children.
And then that was the first wave of what we now think of as right to privacy decision.
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: And, and that's really interesting, especially in the context of now, when [01:38:00] you're thinking about the. current parental rights movement we're seeing in a lot of states?
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, no, I mean, the interesting thing about the early right to privacy cases being about the right to raise your children is you're seeing a divide within social conservatives and within the Christian right about what they think about the right to privacy.
Because in the second wave of right to privacy cases, these started to sweep in not just the right to, you know, choose how you raise your children, but the right to decide whether or not to have children at all. And so you're the second wave of decisions. That's Griswold, the 1965 decision involving contraception.
There were a few other contraception decisions that followed that. And then Roe v. Wade in 1973. These are right to choose whether or not to have children cases.
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: Yeah. Can you talk about Griswold v. Connecticut? You know, we've talked about it on the show before, but give us a refresher. Like what. What was that case and why is it important?
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Griswold is an odd decision. I think to understand Griswold, you have to [01:39:00] understand, like, what happened in, like, the 30 or 40 years prior to Griswold. The 1920s cases, Mayer and Brown, if they had been decided today, they would have been decided under the First Amendment. They would have been decided under an explicit, what's called an enumerated right that is, like, written into the Constitution.
Instead, the court invented this right that is Not mentioned in the Constitution, you know, the right to decide how to raise your children, and that's just how courts operated in the 1920s. You know, this was what was called the Lochner era. Lochner said that there was a so called right to contract, and what the right to contract was, was the right to enter into a labor contract where you're paid terrible wages and you We're ridiculously long hours.
You know, there's a right of employers to exploit their workers. That's not mentioned in the Constitution either
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: right to a job that sucks. Okay, right,
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: right to a job that sucks. That was essentially what what the right was that was that was created in Lochner. And [01:40:00] during the New Deal, this idea that court should be finding unenumerated rights was discredited.
And it was discredited, you know, because of Lochner, you know, because of these hot, very anti worker decisions that the court had handed down. And so Griswold is a weird decision because they want to recognize a right to contraception, but they want to make it look as little like Lochner as possible. So they have this sort of tenuous reasoning that like, well, the Constitution protects these other things that deal with privacy, you know, protects you against the police searching your home without a warrant.
And so the language that the court used was penumbras and emanations. Somewhere within the penumbras and emanations of these existing enumerated right to privacy is a broader right to contraception. There was a theory behind that. You know, the theory was that if [01:41:00] it's a crime to have contraceptions, if it's a crime to use birth control, if it's a crime to use a condom, then the police can search your bedroom or can search a married couple's bedroom for evidence of, like, illicit condom use.
For evidence of like, ooh, you've got an illicit diaphragm in there. We're gonna have to throw you in jail. Yeah,
JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: I'm just like imagining a scenario where they're like, I need to check for an IUD, and I'm like, that sounds, that sounds terrible. No.
IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, that was what the court wanted to prevent, was the idea was the sort of police investigation that would have to go on in order to determine that you were violating a contraception ban would be so offensive.
Think about modern forms of contraception and, like, the sort of search that the police would have to do in order to determine that you're using it. And so Griswold, you know, the insight was that there's something so offensive about the police being able to make this kind of [01:42:00] investigation that we're just going to take it off the table.
And that was how sexuality sort of got wrapped into this right to privacy.
Why Trumps Abortion Video Needs Some Follow-Up Questions Part 2 - Brian Lehrer A Daily Podcast - Air Date 4-9-24
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Let me also replay the clip of Trump from yesterday, and get your take on the confusing way this ends. If we are arguing about, or not arguing about, but if we're discussing whether Trump is trying to sow as much confusion as clarity, listen carefully as he says, up to the states, but then implies that it should actually be up to to each pregnant woman, if they want to hear it that way.
DONALD TRUMP: My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number [01:43:00] of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that's what they will be.
At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart or, in many cases, your religion or your faith.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So, did you hear that at the end, when he threw in, you must follow your heart or your religion or your faith? Uh, that makes it sound like he supports an individual's right to choose as opposed to a state legislature's right to choose for you, but I don't think that's his position.
MOLLY BALL: Interesting. I mean, I heard that more as, uh, a political statement saying you must follow your heart in terms of how you vote on this, but as we know, this is something that Trump does all the time. He, he speaks in these, these confusing and ambiguous ways or he just, you know, Blatout takes multiple positions on an issue, uh, and he counts on that to muddy the waters and to allow people to hear whatever they want to hear.
And so, uh, the hope [01:44:00] is that, you know, people sort of give him the benefit of the doubt and say, well, I think he's here and someone else can hear it completely differently. Uh, and then, you know, the, if they, for people who are looking to, to, to get to yes and voting to, for Donald Trump, it gives them sort of permission to hear whatever they want to in his various conflicting statements.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Yeah. We're going to talk about Florida now in this respect, Molly in brief, what just happened there?
MOLLY BALL: I was actually in the legislative chamber in Tallahassee when the legislature passed the current six week ban in Florida. What has just happened is that the Florida Supreme Court has allowed that six week ban to go forward.
Previously, the state had a 15 week limit that also had I believe yet to be implemented, uh, pending this, the, the Supreme Court's decision. So, on, starting on May 1st, there will be a ban on abortions after 6 weeks in Florida, which is before many women even know that they're pregnant, so many people [01:45:00] consider it.
Uh, effectively a complete abortion ban. Prior to this, Florida was the only southern state that hadn't restricted abortion and had become sort of an abortion haven for that reason. But on on the basis of polling, it is the most pro choice red state. Uh, at the same time, the Supreme Court issued another opinion allowing an abortion rights ballot initiative to go on the ballot.
This is a if 60 percent of voters support it, which is a quite high bar, would allow for a right to abortion up to fetal viability, which is the limit in Roe v. Wade, about 23, 24 weeks. So many, including the Biden campaign, are hoping that this will prove a powerful motivator getting people to go to the polls and vote for abortion rights, particularly, I think, for Democrats, the fact that there will be a six week ban in place for about six months before the election.
They're hoping we'll sort of [01:46:00] demonstrate to people what it's like to live under this sort of a regime, and then they will have an opportunity to change it.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: And I think Michael in Miami has something to say about this. Michael, you're on WNYC, hello from New York.
CALLER: Hey, Brian. Hey, Molly. Thank you so much for taking my call.
Brian, you've been my lifeline to New York, living in Florida for the last couple years.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Thank
CALLER: you. So, I appreciate it. We still live in Inwood, uh, not too far. Uh, I think this is the supercharge. I don't think people really understand how supercharging this is going to be for Florida. The Senate race is only three points.
The Biden Trump race is only seven, and we need 60 percent to get this passed. Thank you. I think it's going to be such a big influx of money and energy and power into this state that I think could, I don't know if it'll flip it all the way presidentially, but I could certainly flip it for the Senate and, and particularly the fact that this six week ban is going to infect in the next few days, [01:47:00] um, and, and I think people are going to realize how their rights are being taken away.
It's very direct. We've got this right being removed and then a ballot measure right in November. It's almost perfect. It's almost It's the best thing I think could have happened to Florida.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Michael, thank you very much for checking in. Call us again from down there. Molly, let me linger with you for a second on this 60 percent point.
You mentioned it. Michael mentioned it. Um, I didn't know about it. Am I hearing it right that it will take 60 percent of the vote in Florida to enshrine abortion rights?
MOLLY BALL: That's correct. So, this measure could get a majority of the vote and still would not pass. That is the threshold for ballot measures in Florida.
So, if you recall, in Ohio, for example, the last one of these ballot measures that passed, uh, the abortion rights side did win in Ohio, but it got 57 percent of the vote. Uh, so, [01:48:00] that's a very high bar to clear, and, uh, we will see if, uh, Uh, if Florida's able to, to, to clear it.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Um, it, it can work either way, right?
I guess the anti-abortion rights camp likes the fact that it's 60 percent because it takes that 60 40 majority, not 50 percent plus one. But maybe what Michael was hinting at there is that because the abortion rights proponents would need to get to 60%, it's even more of a turnout thing. Generator than it would be if it was 50 percent plus more than you think.
MOLLY BALL: It's possible I could also see an argument going the other direction that it's harder to motivate people when It's this hard to to pass something because they may not have a hope that they could actually get there We've seen this be, again, a very mobilizing issue in ballot initiatives, but not necessarily for candidates.
I covered the, the Florida gubernatorial election in 2022, when the [01:49:00] Democratic candidate, Charlie Crist, uh, was hammering this issue very hard, saying, you know, Ron DeSantis has already banned abortion after 15 weeks, and he's going to do further limits if you reelect him. DeSantis, of course, went on to win that election by nearly 20 points.
So, uh. Mm hmm. It's not necessarily clear that voters will take this and apply it to candidates, whether it's the Senate race, uh, between Rick Scott and his Democratic opponent, or the presidential race. Uh, but we, but what we have seen, uh, is that when abortion is on the ballot as an up or down issue, it does make a lot of people feel uncomfortable.
Go to the polls and those people tend to be Democrats and liberal leaning independents. So the hope is once you get those people out, you know, maybe they're not motivated to go vote for Joe Biden or vote against Rick Scott, but once you get those people to the polls, that's the way they're going to vote.
SECTION D: WHAT IS THERE TO DO?
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section D: what is there to do now?
Digital surveillance and reproductive rights Part 4 - Technically Optimistic - Air Date 5-15-24
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Through no fault of their own, Americans seeking reproductive [01:50:00] health care find themselves restricted, monitored, and under the threat of prosecution.
And because this seems so unfair, and so outside their control, It's strange that the best data privacy advice we have for them is just strong encouragement for people to take control of their data themselves. We seem to be passing the buck. We're not so much helping them as telling them to help themselves.
And as we talked about at the beginning of this episode, when we heard about Dr. Janet Vertazy's experiment to keep her pregnancy offline, opting out of mainstream internet services. can lead you to some strange places, and is itself sometimes seen as suspicious. But Director Fontes Rainer maintains that, when it comes to data privacy, you are your own best resource.
AMY MERRILL: The best advocate for my own privacy is going to be me, right? No one's going to care more about my privacy than me. Within the healthcare [01:51:00] space, we know that a lot of healthcare providers are using web tracking technologies to better understand their patient consumer populations. And in those web tracking technologies, we have some authority and we have reminded providers in particular that if you're going to use these types of technologies, take steps to be compliant with HIPAA, making sure first and foremost that you have a business associate agreement, which is basically an agreement between Google, Metapixel, these web tracking applications and the hospital, so that if there is a breach, if there is an impermissible use or disclosure of that data, it's protected.
Because if it's not, then those providers are just exposing individual protected health information, which is not compliant with HIPAA. I have limited jurisdiction, so to just like put a disclaimer, I have limited jurisdiction over that kind of data, right? So like I can't always do something.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Can I just try and make this more concrete for the people who might be listening, Director?
Are you effectively saying [01:52:00] don't use these apps? Is that basically the message I should take away?
AMY MERRILL: I'm saying you should not be storing protected health information on your phone. In a Google app, in any sort of, you know, there was a lot of attention on period trackers when DOBS first happened, right? And a lot of steps were taken to try to get those individual apps to change how they were tracking data.
But, you know, We know that there are gaps in the regulatory authority and enforcement.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Gaps? Big enough for apps, I guess.
NEWS CLIP: Fertility and period tracking apps have some of the most sensitive reproductive information.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: The new HIPAA reproductive privacy rule does a lot to protect people who receive out of state care.
That woman who traveled from Texas to California doesn't have to fear the results of a blood test might make it back to law enforcement in Texas. That's huge. But the data collected by birth control apps is still potentially dangerous.
NEWS CLIP: There is no difference in the data from your reproductive [01:53:00] choices than the pair of shoes you looked at online.
It's treated exactly the same in the law right now, and that's what the problem is.
KEVIN WILLIAMS: Leading up to DAWBS, we have been talking a lot at Planned Parenthood in and around making sure folks feel educated around what was changing within certain states. Kevin Williams
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: is the VP of Digital Products at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where he's worked for over a decade.
KEVIN WILLIAMS: Over one in three women, plus many more folks that identify as trans and non binary, are without access in their states. And so, obviously, that is Very, very important for us to get ahead of, and, you know, we've had to really be progressive and think how to take users through this very complex matrix now of what the laws are and where access is, and it's very confusing.
It's a very challenging process.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: [01:54:00] Kevin and his team have been doing digital outreach in the face of two overlapping challenges. The suddenly remote healthcare environment of the COVID pandemic and the confusing, restrictive landscape post dops. And as both of these events led more and more patients to seek healthcare information online, he knew that Planned Parenthood had to be exceedingly cautious in how it treated personal health data.
KEVIN WILLIAMS: So birth control and period tracking seemed like something for us to
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: explore. Planned Parenthood's own fertility and period tracking app is called SpotOn, and it's been around in some form since 2016. From
KEVIN WILLIAMS: the beginning, I'll just say, privacy and security has always been an area of focus for us. We believe that your personal health care data should never be used against you.
We don't sell data. It's very important for us, even at the ideation and design stage, to be [01:55:00] We don't collect information and sell it for advertising purposes. We don't collect the information, store it places. And I think that that is the common industry standard of collecting that information. And so what was interesting was when all of the noise In and around concerns around privacy came up.
There was a lot of focus on period trackers and folks were deleting their apps. And we had to spend a lot of time educating people around, um, understanding what we were doing was different than some other period trackers.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Planned Parenthood's app stores data locally on your phone rather than in the cloud.
KEVIN WILLIAMS: Planned Parenthood, we speak a lot about how important Privacy and security is to us. And so I think in a lot of ways, users and communities expect us to show up in this way. We've focused on thinking about accessibility, thinking about how we, uh, educate people to be empowered. I think [01:56:00] that privacy is a top priority for us and we stand by that.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Okay. So you've been talking about how some of the values of Planned Parenthood, like transparency and data privacy, like kind of make it into your work as a product designer. Which makes me want to ask you, like, how do you think about accountability here? Like, as a developer, but a developer in this, you know, particularly urgent space?
KEVIN WILLIAMS: It's a good question because we've been talking a lot in and around accountability as well. There's a real challenge on what accountability we have as an organization, providing care as a trusted brand there to support people, and then also holding big technology accountable as far as educating people on how to use these fancy devices that, you know, have the most sensitive information that they have available.
So when our team comes together thinking about what we should build and design, I mean, First and foremost, we [01:57:00] work very closely with our information securities team, our general counsel and legal advisors and folks are brought into that process right away in the beginning so that we are thinking bigger than just the moment.
We're trying to be more thoughtful about what the idea is going to look like in execution and iteration over time. You know, there's so much conversation around weaponizing of data these days, and there's a lack of trust. And so. Positioning ourself as a trusted resource is been really important to our social media and communications team, just because there's just a, you know, it's next level out there right now.
Yeah, it's a wild west. Yes, it is a wild west right now. Totally is. We've become so dependent on big technology. We really need to find a way to use this data for good. I think there's a lot of noise in and around the [01:58:00] exploitation of data, but there's some real societal shifts that that need to be observed.
And I think part of the challenge with that is what information is being collected, where it's being stored, who's monitoring it, how is it being exchanged in between and across organizations? And I just would really like to have more conversations about that.
NJ Rep. Mikkie Sherril On Abortion Nationwide, And Campus Protests In Her District - Brian Lehrer_ A Daily Podcast - Air Date 5-1-24
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Let's start with the judge shopping bill. Can you explain what that's about?
REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: Yes, so, you know, what we've seen in some of the anti-abortion tactics is judge shopping, meaning that there are certain divisions within our, uh, judicial system that have only one judge.
So for example, if you come, uh, if you bring a case to court in New Jersey, um, you don't know which judge you are going to get to hear your case. You could have a judge appointed by Biden or Obama. You could have a judge appointed by Trump or [01:59:00] Bush. You don't know. There are multiple judges that might be picked to hear your case by the assigning judge.
However, in some of these divisions, especially, you know, in some more remote areas, there is only one judge. So that you know, if you take your case to that court, you have One person that will hear it. And so that can, uh, ensure the outcome you want in certain cases. And certainly we saw that with the Mifa Prestone case.
So what my bill does is say you have to have more than one judge if you are going to bring a case that will impact the st the rights of people nationwide. So in that type of case with say, a nationwide ban on something or impacting a nationwide law. that you have to bring your case, uh, to a division or a department that has more than one judge.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Don't all sides in all cases judge shop if they can? And if so, how can a bill prevent it [02:00:00] in ways that would kind of advance what you're, uh, Erin Clayton, MAGA, QAnon,
REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: Deon Clark, Transcriptionist Quartet, enshittification, MAGA, QAnon, Deon and go to some of the most conservative judges in the nation to determine the outcome.
We want a more fair process. And certainly, they may draw a very conservative judge, but I think we want somebody to put forward a case where they are trying to make a very fair case and can't sort of game the system or determine the outcome based on where they bring that case.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So, The bill would explicitly do that, how, and do you think you have enough support in the Republican House of Representatives to get that bill to the President's desk?[02:01:00]
Work to the Senate.
REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: So the bill would specifically say that if you are trying to, um, bring a case that would impact people nationwide, you have to bring it into a district or division that has more than one judge, um, so that you can't sort of predetermine exactly the judge, uh, that is going to hear it.
Um, and, uh, you know, it's hard to say, we've had, uh, trouble in this Congress, I think, gaining enough support to get, um, Very non controversial things done. It's been very hard. So in this Congress, trying to find that group of support will be difficult, but I think we've seen movement in the Senate. Schumer introduced a similar bill, um, and I think that he's seen some bipartisan support there.
So hopefully we can build on that in the House, because really this is, this is something that, um, You know, when we're talking about rights, uh, that we want to protect in our [02:02:00] courts, um, you know, the very things that protect us against, um, some very conservative justices could protect people against some very liberal justices, so, or judges.
So I think this is an area where we could find, um, wide bipartisan support, and just trying to create a more fair justice system.
BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So the MIFA Pristone case was an inspiration for this bill. I see you're also concerned about another Supreme Court case on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.
What's that?
REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: So the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, um, called EMTALA often, Is a case heard, being heard before the court or just was heard before the court and we expect an upcoming decision, um, that is a case where Idaho had a trigger law, meaning that once Roe was overturned, that law would immediately go into effect, um, and it was one of the most draconian laws [02:03:00] regarding abortion care across the nation.
So, you could basically, um, You only get, as far as health care for women, abortion in the case of if you were seeing the death of a mother, um, so what EMTALA says in, and how that has been interpreted is to provide what, what is called stabilizing care, but what that really means is, look, if you are in a medical situation, if you are suffering, um, a medical problem with your pregnancy, abortion may be the way that.
The, um, the way that the medical center can treat you. And in cases such as placenta previa, um, hemorrhaging, other areas, it's really an important part of reproductive health care. We're seeing in too many cases that when doctors wait until the actual life of the mother is at stake, not just the health of the mother, they're making decisions that will put the mother at risk of [02:04:00] never being able to conceive again.
Transcriptionist Quartet, enshittification, MAGA, QAnon, Transcriptionist Quartet, enshittification, to conduct an abortion if it would save the reproductive organs of a mother and the answer was really very unclear because I think the answer is no under that law and so health care providers are not protected in that case and in Idaho you can be put in jail.
Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation, Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone Part 2 - CounterSpin - Air Date 4-5-24
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: Well, if you talk to staunch anti-abortion people, the conversation is, is very rarely about science or about medicine, you know? Um, but then some of them and their media, Folks will throw around terms that sort of suggest that they're being science y, you know, they'll talk about viability or heartbeat, or they'll say it's about [02:05:00] concern about the safety of drugs.
And I just wonder, as a scientist who actually is immersed in this stuff, what do you make of the reporting on the medical reality of abortion? And would more knowledge help inform the broader conversation or is it just two kind of different conversations? What do you think?
RACHEL K. JONES: Right, I definitely think it's two different conversations.
Like I said, we have decades of scientific medical research establishing that medication abortion is safe, effective, and widely accepted. People who don't support abortion choose to ignore the science and the safety and dig for their own factoids and, and supposed scientific facts to support their arguments.
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: It's so strange how the media debate always seems to start again and again at point zero, you know, as though there were no facts in the matter or, or no experience. And as though women aren't And, uh, we're looking for [02:06:00] experts on their own experience, you know? Um, well, finally, we see things like the Women's Health Protection Act, you know, federalizing the right to abortion.
I know the law is not necessarily your purview, but, you know, In terms of responding to these court moves and these state level moves, do you think that federal action is the way to go?
RACHEL K. JONES: Certainly, that is one solution, right? The Women's Health Protection Act would enshrine the right to abortion federally.
But we also need, and especially in the current environment, I don't want to say Women's Health Protection Act is pie in the sky, but given everything that's going on right now, we also need federal and state policy makers to step up to restore, protect, and expand access to abortion. A lot of these restrictions are imposed.
I mean, quite frankly, you know, the right to abortion was removed because of Roe, and that allows states to impose pretty much any restriction that they want to. We're seeing from all [02:07:00] these, uh, different laws that are being implemented, and so it really is a lot of times at the state level, and certainly in the current environment, the state level is what we might need to focus
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: on.
And then anything you would like to see more of or less of from journalism in this regard? Thank you very much.
RACHEL K. JONES: You know, on medication abortion, it seems like the media is actually doing a decent job of covering the issue, of acknowledging, again, the decades of research showing that medication abortion is safe, effective, and commonly used.
I guess the only issue we might have is one that you see anytime that abortion is the subject of media stories, and that is a lot of times reporters think, well, if they have to Take a fair and balanced approach. That means that they have to talk to the people who oppose abortion. And again, when this is about science and facts and research, then you don't need to talk to people who don't believe in it, don't believe in sound science, or who are going to ignore the science.
Again, decades of, of solid [02:08:00] medical research.
Digital surveillance and reproductive rights Part 5 - Technically Optimistic - Air Date 5-15-24
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Even if you know about hipaa. You probably have at least a few misconceptions about it, according to director Fontes Rainer.
I think there's a lot of misinformation about HIPAA in the first instance, whether it's to doctors and hospitals or patients. And I have been told from people, right, you know, oh, well, HIPAA protects me for X, or HIPAA protects my data on my phone, or HIPAA protects me when I do X, or I'm going to get my records because of HIPAA.
And some of that is true and some of that isn't true. We all do everything on our phones now, and I think a lot of people have a very unrealistic expectation of privacy and expectation of protection when they think it's just, oh, it's my medical information, so it's protected, right?
Not right, unfortunately.
AMY MERRILL: There should be a business associate agreement in place so that data is protected, but oftentimes there isn't. So oftentimes you may be using some app on your phone that is not a HIPAA covered entity, it's not a business associate agreement, you're just using it, and so you are making yourself exposed.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: HIPAA makes many [02:09:00] concrete requirements about how healthcare providers have to treat medical records. The same is true of all sorts of private companies in the healthcare space. That's the function of these business associate agreements that the director just mentioned. But, HIPAA makes no provisions for technology companies.
AMY MERRILL: So one of the first things my office did last summer was we put out, literally, here's how to take this into your own hands even when HIPAA doesn't apply, right? Like basic things, right? Turning off, tracking things, tracking off geolocation, making sure you're not storing protected health information on your phone, on your tablet, on your devices in the first instance.
Don't store it into the Google Cloud. Don't store it into the Apple Cloud. Don't Because these things can be searchable, identifiable, and sometimes they're not protected.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: So this is the problem, and it's twofold. HIPAA goes so far, but falls short of protecting many sources of healthcare data for the 21st century American.
And in a landscape without the protections of Roe v. Wade, it also [02:10:00] became clear that HIPAA had huge gaps in it when it comes to reproductive healthcare. And when you take those two issues together, then you're at the intersection of data privacy and abortion rights.
SUE DUNLAP: I'm gonna turn again to a story here.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Again, here's Sue Dunlap of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles.
SUE DUNLAP: We recently had a patient here in Los Angeles who had started in Georgia, then went to South Carolina, got sent back to Georgia, then went. to Florida, then from Florida, flew to Los Angeles, all because there were various abortion limitations and bans.
The very first thing when one of our doctors came into my office to sort of explain what had happened, he said, she came with a stack of papers that made no sense. Would having had one seamless electronic health record have made her experience better? In a perfect world, [02:11:00] yes. Sure. But I can also tell you that what was contained in those papers was also informed by fears or fears.
around the limitations in each state. So what a doctor in California might expect versus what a doctor or a practitioner in a state where abortion is becoming criminalized might be able to offer are also very, very different. So, Again, I'm stuck in this in between where I can tell you what we aspire to and want isn't here today.
What should we do now? I think we have to live in both. I don't think it's a, this is the solution, health records. I think that's naive. Our patients live in a different world and that's exacerbated by dramatic differences across geography, which frankly are only going to become more intense. It just starts to create a dynamic that [02:12:00] is not going to work and isn't compatible with the beautiful vision of shared electronic health records, which is that.
Patients can travel, and they can get the best care possible. And so an electronic health record starts to become the path to transfer those disparities.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Sue reminds me that in real life, tech doesn't live in a vacuum. In a world where your own data can be weaponized against you like this, what might seem like a simple, obvious solution to a technologist, like electronic health records, becomes a huge social issue, an emblem of the loss of autonomy and surveillance.
And not just surveillance. For many Americans seeking reproductive care, simply visiting the doctor generates a dystopian digital scarlet letter. It could lead to your being fined or jailed, or to an awful self destructive cycle where in order to avoid getting arrested, you avoid seeing a doctor. Post [02:13:00] Dobbs America is a place where people have to choose.
Should I risk prosecution? Or should I risk getting sicker? And for pregnant people, the choice is even starker. States with restrictive abortion laws have made it so your data can very literally be the difference between life and death. That's post Dobbs America. But Melanie Fontes Rainer is trying to steer us out of this nightmare.
And she's trying to do that by fixing HIPAA.
AMY MERRILL: So, in this space that we live in now in post op, a lot of reproductive health care providers, reproductive health care clinics, OBGYN facilities, they are very aware of that. Trying to misuse data, trying to track women, going on fishing expeditions, none of this is new.
Those kinds of providers are very familiar with the landscape and they know the law. Oftentimes before you have surgery, what do they do? They give you a blood test [02:14:00] to make sure you're not pregnant. And now you have a medical record, whether or not it's related to your reproductive health care, that now affirmatively states whether or not you're pregnant, that someone wants to have, that someone could track you.
And so those are the instances I worry about because your medical record through your electronic health record can be everywhere, right? I've had people tell me, you know, uh, we had a patient, she went to California for an abortion. When she went back home, just stayed at. The provider said, I see you had an abortion in California, right, and now they may hand over those records.
And so, you know, that's why we have proposed a rule to actually take it a step further. We have a proposed rule that will actually prohibit those disclosures in the first instance.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: It's called the HIPAA Privacy Rule to Support Reproductive Healthcare Privacy. Yeah, that's right, privacy's in there twice.
And back when I spoke with Director Fontes Raynor, it was just a proposal. But on April 26th, it became official.
NEWS CLIP: Thank you for joining [02:15:00] us, uh, to discuss today's major announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: The new rule protects patients and providers. Because it basically says, if reproductive healthcare was given or received in a state where that care was legal,
AMY MERRILL: That information about that healthcare cannot be used or disclosed by that healthcare provider or health plan for an investigation to impose liability on the individual or the provider.
NEWS CLIP: There is one thing Dobbs did not take away, and that is the right of Americans to their privacy.
RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: That's HHS Secretary Javier Becerra. He's speaking at a press conference announcing the new rule, with Director Fontes Rayner at his side.
NEWS CLIP: We took action the moment the Dobbs decision became public. We're not stopping.
AMY MERRILL: The idea, right, that me as an individual, as a human being, that I can't travel somewhere to where the healthcare is lawful to receive lawful healthcare on my dime, [02:16:00] that that's not legal and that my state thinks they own me, that is bananas.
Credits
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected].
The additional section of the show included clips from Lectures in History, Technically Optimistic, The Weeds, The Thom Hartmann Program, The Brian Lehrer Show and CounterSpin. Further details are in the show notes.
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 all those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up [02:17:00] today at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app.
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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.
#1633 Fights for Fair Pay, Journalism vs Sensationalism, Billionaire Bailouts, and Addiction Capitalism: Sports are a Microcosm of the Ills of Society (Transcript)
Air Date 6/4/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. Seemingly, the late Pope John Paul II said that, "Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important", referring to European football, of course. And arguably that could be extrapolated out to all of the other sports that people also invest much of their lives into following. But it's not just for the importance that people put on sports that it becomes a good topic for a political podcast; it's because the problems that arise within the systems of sports, are the same problems we all face everywhere, which makes them a good lens through which to understand the mechanisms of broader society: the fight for fair pay, both journalism and addictive games functioning under capitalism and unfair benefits for billionaires, all resonate far beyond the bounds of the
players, owners and fans of sparks clubs. Sources providing our top takes today, include the University of Iowa, the PBS [00:01:00] NewsHour, Brett Coleman, LeBatardShow, MSNBC Reports, Robert Reich, and The Current. Then, in the additional deeper dive half of the show, there'll be more on the new world of pay for play for college athletes, the folly of taxpayer funded stadiums, sports journalism and capitalism, and the impact of addictive sports gambling.
Pay for Play: Should College Athletes be Considered University Employees? Part 1 - University of Iowa - Air Date 3-28-24
DAN MATHESON: I want to set the stage for the tectonic shift that is facing college athletics right now. It didn't happen overnight, and the path that has led to this moment provides much needed context for a full discussion of the issues that we're going to have tonight.
I want to begin by going back to 1984. In that year, the NCAA lost the antitrust lawsuit known as the Board of Regents case. In that case, the Supreme Court found that the NCAA's restrictions on the number of football games that could be televised each week were illegal [00:02:00] restraints on trade and commerce under antitrust law.
But there was a silver lining for the NCAA in that defeat: the Supreme Court acknowledged in its decision that some restraints on trade and commerce are necessary for college football to exist and wrote, quote, "The NCAA seeks to market a particular brand of football, college football. The identification of this product with an academic tradition differentiates college football from, and makes it more popular than, professional sports to which it might otherwise be comparable, such as minor league baseball. In order to preserve the character and quality of the product, athletes must not be paid, must be required to attend class and the like." End quote.
"Athletes must not be paid." That dictum by the Supreme Court in 1984 became a foundation upon which the [00:03:00] NCAA based its legal strategy and its justification for amateurism for decades to come. But the protection the NCAA relied on from that Supreme Court decision would eventually come to an end, which I will talk about in a moment.
20 years after that Board of Regents decision, legal challenges to the NCAA's amateurs and rules began like a snowball at the top of a mountain that grew as it tumbled downhill, and today the NCAA is at the bottom of that mountain, looking up at an avalanche coming at it.
I want to briefly walk you through a few of those important legal challenges to amateurism that have taken place over the past 20 years and set up the issues that we're considering tonight.
First, in 2004, we have Jeremy Bloom. Jeremy Bloom was a unique [00:04:00] two-sport athlete who played college football [for] Colorado, but also was an Olympic-level skier, and he sued the NCAA because the NCAA denied his request to sign name, image, and likeness deals as a skier outside of his college sport. This was long before our current NIL environment that we've become so accustomed to. The NCAA won that lawsuit, and succeeded in holding off what was a very high-profile challenge to its authority. But in doing so, it sparked a national debate over the fairness of its amateurism rules.
Five years later, in 2009, the next legal challenge took Jeremy Bloom's fight one step further. That was a class action antitrust lawsuit known as the O'Bannon case. In that case, college athletes challenged the NCAA's amateurism rules that restricted them from profiting from [00:05:00] their name, image, and likeness in video games. This was the lawsuit that brought down the very popular EA college sports games that probably many of you students here played while you were younger. The O'Bannon case was an antitrust case, just like the Board of Regents case. So in deciding the O'Bannon case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was influenced by the Supreme Court's statement in the Board of Regents that athletes must not be paid. In the O'Bannon case, the court ruled that offering student athletes, quote, "Cash sums untethered to educational expenses is not minor. It is a quantum leap. At that point, the NCAA will have surrendered its amateurism principles entirely and transitioned from its particular brand of football to minor league status." End quote.
That decision by the Ninth Circuit to protect NCAA [00:06:00] amateurism rules against payments unrelated to educational expenses further emboldened the NCAA and further enraged a growing number of amateurism skeptics.
Right around the same time as the decision in the O'Bannon case, another case challenging amateurism rules was decided in a different legal venue by the National Labor Relations Board. In 2014, The Northwestern University football student athletes sought recognition as a labor union by the NLRB. In that case, an NLRB regional director found the football players to be employees of Northwestern. But on appeal, the full NLRB in Washington, DC chose not to exercise jurisdiction over the case, because doing so, it said, would create instability in labor relations in college football. [00:07:00] So the players couldn't form a union, but the NLRB clarified it was not deciding whether the regional director was right or wrong in finding them to be employees, which helped further stoke the flames of the debate.
So in about a 10 year period, starting in 2004, you had the Bloom case, The O'Bannon case and the Northwestern case. And while the O'Bannon and Northwestern cases were going on, another class action antitrust lawsuit known as the Alston case was filed against the NCAA and that one would end up going to the Supreme Court.
The Alston case went a step further than the O'Bannon case in that the plaintiffs challenged any NCAA restrictions on college athlete compensation, not just NIL restrictions in video games.
But by the time that case was litigated up to the Supreme Court, it was trimmed [00:08:00] back to a more limited focus on whether the NCAA was violating antitrust law by placing restrictions on educational benefits to student athletes. On that more limited question of educational benefits, the Supreme Court unanimously found the NCAA restrictions to be in violation of antitrust laws. And--this is significant--the Supreme Court rejected the NCAA's reliance on the Board of Regents decision and its "athletes must not be paid" comment as being some sort of safe harbor to protect the NCAA against amateurism challenges.
The Supreme Court noted in Alston how dramatically the economics of college football and college sports in general had changed in almost 40 years since the Board of Regents case, and emphasized that it would be unwise to rely on what was a stray comment [00:09:00] by the Supreme Court about student athlete compensation rules in Board of Regents, when those rules weren't even an issue in that case.
Taking things one step further in the Alston case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion that signaled to future plaintiffs that at least one member of the Supreme Court would entertain a more expansive takedown of the NCAA's amateurism rules. Justice Kavanaugh delivered a searing indictment of amateurism that concluded with the following passage. Quote: "Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not [00:10:00] above the law." End quote.
What the historic $2.8 billion settlement to pay NCAA players means for college sports - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 5-24-24
GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: So I think it's safe to say the days of the amateur student athlete, college athlete, those days are over. Help us understand how significant this moment is.
PAT FORDE: Yes, this is the death of amateurism, which has basically been on the books forever in college athletics.
So it is a significant milestone. The castle walls of amateurism had been eroding for years, most specifically starting three years ago, when name, image, and likeness payments were first approved, but this is a major acceleration from that.
This provides, as you noted, back damages to four years' worth of college athletes who are no longer in their sports, and then also a framework to pay for a decade going forward. So this is a lot of money being transferred from the traditional coffers of the athletic administration, coaches, athletic directors, facility usage into — directly into the [00:11:00] hands of the players and it being done by the schools themselves.
That's the real change here.
GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: How soon could we see these payments start going out to student athletes?
PAT FORDE: I think it's going to be about 14 months from now, 15 months, setting into the 2025-'26 academic year. That's kind of what the target is right now.
There's still a million loose ends to this, so there's a lot of work to be done on the details, but that's the target date for when you will start seeing major sums of money going directly from institutions to the athletes.
GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Yes.
How are schools thinking about compensating athletes in those sports that generate a lot of revenue versus those that don't, so, say, the star football player, the star basketball player versus the star pole vaulter?
PAT FORDE: Well, how this actually is going to be divided up is going to be one of the great sources of curiosity and ultimately controversy, I would imagine.
As it stands now, it seems like the [00:12:00] preponderance of thought is to make this an institution-by-institution decision. This will not be like a nationally mandated pay scale. There will not probably be conferences dictating how much is going to go to which athletes or which sports. It'll be up to each school to decide whether they can afford a full $21, $22 million a year in revenue for the athletes or if they want to pay something less than that, and then that is divided up.
Obviously, the football players, the men's basketball player and probably increasingly women's basketball players will get the majority of this, but then, even within the team, what sort of parameters are put on in terms of performance or recruiting star power or experience as far as who gets what? That's all that's good going to be have to be sussed out at the institution level.
And it's going to be quite, I think, a process to get to those deliberations.
GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Yes.
To the point about women's sports, how does Title IX [00:13:00] factor into the financial calculus here?
PAT FORDE: Well, that's going to be another fascinating element of this, because, obviously, Title IX has really changed the game in terms of allowing females equal opportunity or near-equal opportunity to play their sports in college to the men.
But is equal opportunity the same as equal compensation? So far, in the NIL era, it hasn't been, that most NIL dollars have gone to men's football — or men's basketball and football players. So does this ruling have an effect on that and say, no women have to be compensated in a similar manner in terms of the actual outlay of money or just maybe the number of female athletes has to be somewhat commensurate or proportional to the men?
And then you decide what the money is. But that's going to be, I think a great major flash point of this, and I think we're going to be hearing a lot about that in the next year-plus.
GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Yes, and one flash point is, how do these colleges and universities go about paying these student athletes without really [00:14:00] classifying them as employees? How are they weighing that question?
PAT FORDE: That's an attempt to thread the needle here by the NCAA and by college athletics. Once again, they have been playing the thread needle game for time immemorial of these people probably are employees in a business setting, but they don't want to be classified as such and they don't want to have to face antitrust legislation along those grounds.
So what they are hoping is for the significant movement here to get the attention and the motivation of Congress to help come up with some antitrust exemption for college athletics to protect it from further lawsuits and to have a system where athletes are sharing in revenue, where they are being compensated, but they are not necessarily considered employees of the university.
GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Hmm.
And lastly, Pat, this doesn't replace the NIL, the name, image and likeness opportunities for those student athletes that are able to take advantage of them?
PAT FORDE: It doesn't. No, NIL [00:15:00] is still going to be an ongoing fact of life. It'll be fascinating to see how much money is still in an NIL sort of pool versus what's now going into a strict, straight university reimbursement pool and if donors are necessarily less inclined to give NIL money now through a collective or otherwise, because they're already seeing athletes getting paid by the school itself.
But NIL will still be part of the dynamic and there will be schools that want to spend more than the $21, $22 million cap. And so they will turn to boosters or collectives and say, hey, can you help us out with this star quarterback over here? We'd like to give him some more money.
So the NIL era is changing, but it's not going away.
Pay for Play: Should College Athletes be Considered University Employees? Part 2 - University of Iowa - Air Date 3-28-24
ALICIA JESSOP: If you follow my journey in sports, I've had the privilege of writing for some of the greatest publications in the world. And when I started in journalism, you can go back to the very end of ruling sports, I said, I believe that there [00:16:00] are good stories about sports in this world. I am tired of hearing the negative stories, particularly about the NCAA. I knew there were good stories out there and I set out to tell them.
But very quickly I realized that were there were some problems and I had a front row seat to Identifying them and addressing them. So now i'm going to go on script.
It's easy to paint the NCAA as the big bad wolf, and admittedly it's something that I have done. But doing so loses sight of how we got to where we are today.
Since the filing of O'Bannon, the focus on college sport has shifted from the field of play to the court of law. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on legal fees, only for massive blows to be dealt at every level of the American court system to the NCAA system of governance. In fact, in two legal challenges the association faces today, the House and Hubbard cases, it risks the possibility of having to pay damages greater than $5.1 billion. Repeated defeat calls [00:17:00] for a scapegoat, and in the world of college sports, the easy scapegoat to blame is the head governing body for college sport.
The story, though, of how we got where we are today, where examining whether college athletes are employees is something we're all spending our time doing, doesn't begin with O'Bannon, as we've examined here already. Nor does it start with NIL in 2021. I agree with Josh, and if I could redo this, I would go back to 1906.
I start 73 years ago, though, with the 1951 NCAA convention. And as I tell this story, I'm going to let you decide where blame lies. Is it with the head governing body? Is it with the universities? Is it with the media companies? Is it good old American greed? Or perhaps, can we stop laying blame and recognize that there is enough at the table for all to adequately be fed?
24 years before that fateful 1951 convention, a 21-year-old who lived the first 14 years of his life [00:18:00] without electricity unveiled an invention that would change the world. In a lab on San Francisco's Green Street, Philo T. Farnsworth wired to his fundraiser, quote, "The damn thing works," when after years of thinking, his contraption transmitted the first electronic television image.
It would be an understatement to say that television changed the American way of life. In 2023, 97 percent of the 125 million households in this nation owned a television. The average American spends three hours a day watching that device. Binge watching has become a common aspect of today's existence. But Farnsworth's invention hadn't proliferated American society in 1951. In fact, at that time, 96 percent of American households owned a radio, where only 12 percent owned a TV. As we are experiencing today with artificial intelligence, the potential reach and impact of new technology can spur fear in a populace awaiting its full rollout. [00:19:00] So it's not surprising that the three-person committee charged by the NCAA with figuring out what to do with what was called the, quote, "television problem," perceived that television posed the possibility of shaking up the status quo. If fans could watch games on TV, would they attend in person? If they didn't attend in person, what would happen to athletic department revenue? The committee determined, quote, "that the television problem is truly a national one and requires collective"--that's the key word there--"collective action by the colleges."
This is where the plot thickens. As the main character of our story, the NCAA's attempt to solve a " problem" ended in actually creating a bigger one, one that would embed the organization in decades worth of legal battles that it continues fighting today. To get the television problem under control, the association launched an association-wide TV plan that limited football teams exposure to two games per season. When one school, [00:20:00] Penn--and I'm not talking Penn State, I'm talking about the Ivy League school, which had televised all of its home games in the decade prior--pushed back, the association threatened to kick it out, and every team that had it scheduled for games that season canceled those games. So, needless to say, Penn acquiesced and hopped back on the system.
In 1981, modifications were instituted into the plan wherein the NCAA negotiated an overarching four year, nearly $132 million deal with ABC and CBS. Each of the networks would carry 14 games per season. However, while they could negotiate directly with the schools the right to carry their games, there were limitations around what games could be covered. Schools could only be shown no more than six times in a two-year window, four of which nationally. And they would be paid out of that $132 million pot with the NCAA specifying ideas, but not requirements, for how the money could be allocated. [00:21:00]
Since the turn of the 20th century--so this is the 1890s coming into the 1900s--marketplace competition has been a distinguishing aspect of the American economy. On July 2nd, 1890, Congress enacted the Sherman Antitrust Act. We are living today in a period of wide division in our American Congress, but this was a piece of federal legislation that everyone was on board with. One congressperson voted against it and it passed unanimously in the Senate. This law was enacted to combat the rise of trust that thwarted competition in this nation, like the Standard Oil Trust.
And so it was in the spirit of competition that in 1981, the NCAA's then-unchallenged television plan received its first real shake up. I don't consider Penn's attempt a real shake up because they backed down too quick. That summer, a group of schools organized as something called the College Football Association, hereafter the CFA, and they went [00:22:00] to ABC and CBS's competitor, NBC, and negotiated their own TV agreement. Pretty smart. Needless to say, the NCAA did not appreciate this because it would give these schools, quote, "an unfair competitive advantage to have more of their games broadcast on television and subsequently the ability to generate even greater revenues."
Unlike Penn though, two of the CFA schools, Oklahoma and Georgia, lawyered up. They sought a preliminary injunction preventing the association from disciplining them or interfering with their contract. Three years later, the case reached the United States Supreme Court. The seven to two decision by the court in Board of Regents versus NCAA deemed that the NCAA's television plan violated the Sherman Act, as it amounted to a restraint on trade and price fixing.
This decision singlehandedly reshaped the landscape of intercollegiate athletics forever. That's because it opened up the marketplace for college sports tv rights. And the market quickly [00:23:00] responded. Where once 82 schools fought for a piece of a $132 million dollar deal, now schools and conferences could individually land lucrative deals, expanding their exposure and coffers. Notre Dame was the first to the market. I always love asking people who say that they're Notre Dame fans if they went there. Nine times out of ten, they didn't go there. And when you unpack why they're a Notre Dame fan, it's because they grew up watching the games on NBC. They were first to market, striking a five-year, $30 million deal.
And then the Southeastern Conference was the next to follow with its first conference deal, inking a five-year, $100 million agreement with CBS that continued until last year.
Considering the athletic success of these programs across the last four decades, what opportunity was born from this initial financial advantage? Today, the valuation of the broadcast agreements for just the four biggest NCAA D One conferences, the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, and Southeastern conferences, along with the association's deals for men's [00:24:00] March Madness, the NCAA's other 40 championships, and then the separately-organized college football playoff, top $36.4 billion. So we're not talking about mid major conference TV deals. We're not talking about D2 or D3. $36.4 billion. That's a far cry from the $132 million allocated in 1981, which adjusted for inflation would be worth about $450 million today.
This influx of broadcast revenue into the college sport ecosystem has brought increased spending. In 2022, football bowls subdivision head football coaches saw a 15.3 percent rise in their average annual salaries. This is coming out of COVID. Ask the average American worker what raise they saw in 2022. USA Today data shows that public Power 5 conference schools will pay their head football coaches an average annual salary of [00:25:00] $6.2 million. These schools also pay their head men's basketball coaches average annual salaries of $3.35 million. In fiscal year 21 to 22, D1 FBS program spent $1.86 billion on college coaches' salaries, and another $2.04 billion on facilities and equipment. That same year, $1.19 billion was spent on athletic scholarships. I wish I had a whiteboard to write the number.
So we're spending more on coaches salaries and facilities than we're spending on the entirety of college athletes.
We are living in an age where there is infinite money to pay an in-demand coach and install lazy rivers and put-put courses in athletic facilities, but mention paying college athletes and suddenly the well dries up.
Sports Media has changed forever. - Brett Kollmann - Air Date 7-15-23
BRETT KOLLMANN - HOST, BRETT KOLLMANN: We are now firmly in an era where individual personal brands In sports media are king, and they [00:26:00] supersede pretty much everything else, including the corporate brands of the networks that employ those people. If you look at everything that's happened at ESPN over the last month or so, signing Pat McAfee to a mega deal, which he left an even bigger deal with FanDuel to take that deal with ESPN, and you overlay that with the unfortunate layoffs that happened at the same time, and it can feel weird, seeing the dichotomy of a whole bunch of talent get let go while at the same time they sign one talent for a lot of money. And I understand where those mixed feelings come from and why there's a lot of confusion about the state of sports media.
And as somebody who used to work in sports TV for a long time, I was in the trenches as a PA at NFL Network, cutting highlights, being in the control room for NFL Red Zone, doing graphics on Red Zone for years, working on virtually every single show that existed at that network at some point in time. And also at the same time doing local sports media at Time Warner Sportsnet, which was later [00:27:00] Spectrum Sportsnet, doing Lakers coverage, Dodgers coverage, Galaxy, Conca Cap, all that kind of stuff. Even going back to my time in high school, I started doing field cam work when I was 16. I started doing technical directing and directing when I was 17. So I spent a lot of my life in sports TV. And then I left all of that to YouTube for also almost a decade at this point. So I've been on both sides of the fence here. I have watched this transition happen, literally even to myself. So I feel like I'm in a unique position to comment on the state of sports media, and maybe give a little bit of context of what's actually happening at ESPN, or at least what I think is happening at ESPN.
First things first, I do want to express as much empathy as I possibly can for everybody that did, unfortunately, recently get let go at ESPN. It was --I think it was twenty total on-air talent got let go. A lot of them, yes, were in very expensive [00:28:00] contracts. They were making great money. And I don't think that matters. And my buddy, Brandon Perna, made a great point when he did his video about this topic that for a lot of the folks that were on-air talent at ESPN that were not former professional athletes themselves, being on air at ESPN is literally their dream job. That is the pinnacle of the profession. That is what you work for is to be an on air talent at ESPN. And they had that. And unfortunately they got let go. And so these are people that literally in many cases lost their dream job. And regardless of the dollar amount of their contract, I think that it just sucks, right? Nobody wants to go through that. And so I empathize with that because it's a very hard thing to have everything you wanted and then have it slip through your fingers. So I want to express empathy first and foremost for those people.
But I also want to explain the network perspective on why those layoffs were probably necessary from Disney's perspective. I do not believe that [00:29:00] Disney would have made those cuts unless they absolutely had to. Because typically, at least in this business, if a contract is not generating the revenue that they need in order to pay for that contract, they're just going to let it expire.
But these were outright layoffs. They were ending these contracts early. And I don't think they would have done that if Disney+ was not losing literally one and a half billion dollars a year. Disney+ has been a disaster for them financially for a lot of reasons, and there's a whole bunch of videos on YouTube that dive into why Disney+ has failed. But that has had an impact on the entire company as a whole.
And so in order to make ESPN profitable, there's really only two paths they can take. The first path is obviously, hiring talent that they think is going to bring in enough eyeballs to generate ad dollars so they can be profitable. And the second path is cutting expenses, which means cutting talent that they do not believe is bringing in enough [00:30:00] eyeballs to generate enough ad dollars to pay for those salaries.
And I do want to make a point here that these are two separate paths and two separate decisions. They're not necessarily linked together. There's not some salary cap that Disney has to adhere to where, oh, we have to cut all these contracts so that we can bring in Pat McAfee. It's really more like we're bringing in Pat McAfee because we need somebody that can generate eyeballs and get money injected into this company again, through advertising. And at the same time, unfortunately we need to get rid of contracts that we do not believe are bringing in revenue. Hence the layoffs.
All these people that got laid off, I don't think that they would have got laid off if Disney felt that they were a plus on the balance sheet, as callous as that sounds. They need to make money. They need to be profitable. Because Disney+ is just an anchor on the entire Disney business, globally. Disney+ is dragging everything down. So ESPN has to make money. [00:31:00] And I think that those are the two paths that they're taking simultaneously.
Now, for everyone else that is still at ESPN or FS1, or NBC, or print media, or any other outlet, anybody that's in sports media--and I know a lot of them are probably going to watch this because I know many of them all across these different outlets, so I'm sure a lot of them are going to see this video at some point--if you're watching this and you're in the industry, I want you to be aware of where sports media is right now from a consumer perspective.
Let's talk about what actually works in modern sports media and why a lot of legacy outlets are now having to play catch up with new media like YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and all the hundreds of creators. that are slowly but surely ripping eyeballs away from those networks.
With the rise of all these different social media platforms, sports fans now have more options than ever for where they consume their sports content. Yes, they [00:32:00] could turn on a debate show in the morning while they're getting ready for work, which let's be honest, that format now is basically just background noise while people make their coffee and toast a bagel. But if they don't like the debate format, they don't have to watch that anymore. They're not locked in to network television. They can get a million different things from a million different sources. If they still want live sports content in the morning, that's a little bit more lighthearted and not so combative, they could throw in Pat McAfee. If they want something that's edited or prerecorded that just lives on YouTube, they can watch Tom Grossi's 30 in 30 series every morning. They can throw on Brandon Perna. They can watch The Pivot. They can watch FlemLo. If they want fantasy content specifically, like on-demand fantasy content because they're getting ready for their drafts, they can watch the Underdog Fantasy Channel, they can watch BDGE. If they want Madden content to get ready for the Madden release coming up, they can watch Bengal.
There's so many options now. They don't have to watch First Take if they don't want to watch First Take. [00:33:00] This is not the 90s anymore. The audience is no longer captive. And I feel like it's taken a lot of legacy media outlets, in particular TV networks, it's taken them way too long to catch on to that fact.
For the first time ever, ESPN has to truly convince sports fans to watch their content over the hundreds of other content creators now that are making stuff for free. They never had to do that before, and they've had to change their entire content strategy as a result. And again, they're doing it a lot later than they should have. But I at least do want to give them credit for finally catching up.
And everything that they've done over the last three weeks, by the way, in my opinion, is part of that new content strategy. ESPN is now taking a step back and they're not focusing so much on having the network brand be at the forefront. And instead they're letting individual talent brands take the spotlight.
Dan Le Batard Tells Stephen A. Smith He Hates What He and Skip Bayless Did to Sports Media - LeBatardShow - Air Date 12-28-23
DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: I hate what you two have done to sports [00:34:00] television.
STEPHEN A. SMITH: You could say that all you want to. I would say, who the hell are you to sit up there and say, me and him? What about you? What the hell were you, living under a rock, teaching at Miami U? You were part of it too? You ain't innocent?
DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: I'm talking about all the imitators that you have birthed, all of the imitators that are all over the place thinking, without the journalism credentials, that the point of all this is to turn it into an argument on television.
STEPHEN A. SMITH: Well, I would take umbrage at what you're saying in this regard, Dan. Those people who don't have a journalism background, who don't exercise journalistic ethics and beyond, how are we responsible for that, when our background is based on that?
Skip Bayless was a journalist for decades. I was a journalist for decades. We came, we come on television and [00:35:00] those ethics are applicable. The fact of the matter is, is that when I take a position, it's the same kind of position I would take right in the column. The difference is instead of writing 800 words and being limited to that space. I get to talk for a few minutes on each subject.
When was it, when did it happen that I ignored the fact that I was a journalist for the Winston Salem Journal, The Greensboro News and Record, The New York Daily News, and then The Philadelphia Inquirer, before I went to CNN/SI and then Fox Sports, and then ESPN? When was it, when did it occur in my career that I ignored the journalistic tenets that came with the job?
DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Oh, it's not ignoring them, it's that they shrink in the face of the need for the argument as entertainment. It's that Kellerman offers too much nuance, so we have to make it, in the form of entertainment, we have to... it's not that it's ignored, it's that the journalism becomes less important. It's the argument, it's the sparks, it's the debate [00:36:00] that needs to be carried.
STEPHEN A. SMITH: Yeah, but where you're missing the boat, and I'm actually surprised that you're missing it, Dan, is that it's not about us. It's about the money. The fact of the matter is, is that somewhere along the lines, social media came into play. And even with YouTube, you have the ability to monetize your product. People look at whatever it takes to monetize those products, you know, their product, and they prioritize that, and that dictates what they do. If you are on social media, and guess what? You don't have to go to college and you don't have to take 18 credit semester hours like I did each semester. And you don't have to get a bachelor's degree. And all you got to do is go on YouTube, talk smack, find a way to build subscribers and viewers per episode and monetize [00:37:00] your brand, and you get to bypass all of that stuff. And there's an industry that's been put in place that allows you to do that. And you've elected to do that just to get paid. How the hell is that Skip Bayless and Stephen A's fault? Or Dan Le Batard for that matter. Or anybody else. They created those platforms. It's allowed to be monetized. People see that that has the potential to pay you more than a $75,000-$90,000 salary working in newspapers. Everybody don't have space for you to do talk radio, or a television show. So you figured out a way to do this, rather than punch a clock, work a nine to five in corporate America, at whatever job you're doing. And that's basically been more beneficial monetarily to you. How is that Skip Bayless, Dan Le Batard, Stephen A, Wilbon, Kornheiser, or anybody else?
DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Well, I don't think entirely, right?, that this category that [00:38:00] I'm talking about is something that I fit in just because you and I have had a long relationship. I don't think we've ever had an argument on or off the air. Like, the argument is not something that I pursue. I'm not saying it's not good for television. I'm not saying that. I just know that the show that you did with Skip Bayless was one kind of show. And then the one you did with Max was a different kind of show, at least in part. And you've said publicly that you didn't like how Max wasn't interested, as interested in the argument, in the sparks, as you were.
STEPHEN A. SMITH: What I'm saying to you is this: if people want to watch Dan Le Batard and they've come to know Dan Le Batard, they have an expectation of what they're getting when they click on the Dan Le Batard. And if you want to stay in business, you have to give the audience to some degree what they expect. Long before First Take was ever number one, [00:39:00] PTI was. PTI with Mike Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser had been number one for 20 years. First Take has been number one in the mornings for 11. Nine years before we ever came along, nine, 10 years before we ever came along, they were doing it.
DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: So, I should blame them. I should blame.
STEPHEN A. SMITH: No, no. No, no. What I'm saying is no one said it about them. No one said it about Around the Horn, which was there years before we arrived. No one said it about Jim Rome or what he's doing, and you know how great Jim Rome has been. The list goes on and on. Mike and the Mad Dog.
DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Oh, but...
STEPHEN A. SMITH: Mad Dog's screaming, Mad Dog been screaming since 1987.
DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Oh, but you mutated it though. It's fair to say that you turned up the volume on all of it, that there are more flames around what you guys are doing.
STEPHEN A. SMITH: You're gonna sit up there with a straight face, Dan Le Batard and say, I turned up the volume on Mad Dog Russo.
DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: No.
STEPHEN A. SMITH: Are you, have you lost your mind
DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: On the argument...
STEPHEN A. SMITH: Are you crazy?
DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: On Wilbon and Kornheiser, you guys turned up the volume, uh, you guys...
STEPHEN A. SMITH: Okay. Okay. What [00:40:00] I'm saying is, is that I just named you a plethora of shows that existed before we ever came along. That's what I'm saying. We didn't create it. We saw what was there and we maximized it to the best of our ability. Just like you do. You'll go into what you don't like or whatever and I respect that. You know that. But what I'm trying to say is that you ain't no innocent birdie in all of this.
You've attacked many people over the years. Now, you might have had a platform where you're joined with dudes and y'all are not a debate show, so you're not debating somebody, but you've gotten into debates on your own show with people. You've gotten into arguments on your own show with people. I don't know if that former executive for the Florida Marlins will ever be in business again after the way you excoriated him because you were upset at the assets that he traded away.
You have been holding people accountable for decades. And because you don't have [00:41:00] somebody to volley back off, you know, volley off back and forth with, oh, you innocent? You're not. You're a part of it, too, and I'm saying it's not a bad thing. It's a great thing, because your intellect, your perspectives, and everything in between are very fresh, they're informed, they're not ignorant, they're not devoid of facts, the fact of the matter is, you bring a fresh perspective, and there's a lot of people out there that want to be Dan Le Batard.
So why are you tripping? You're right here with the rest of us!
Report Finds That Sports Owners Use Their Teams To Avoid Millions In Taxes- MSNBC Reports - Air Date 7-14-21
STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: We're learning more about the money behind the scenes, off the court, after a bombshell report from ProPublica detailed how mega rich sports team owners use their teams to avoid paying taxes.
Take Steve Ballmer, for example. He's the billionaire owner of the LA Clippers. According to this report, he only paid 12 percent in federal income tax in 2018. That is a lower rate than players like [00:42:00] LeBron James, who plays at the Staples Center, and more shockingly, a lower rate than the typical food worker at the Staples Center. But here's the real scandal. Don't be mad at Ballmer. Look to your lawmakers. All of this is totally legal.
Let's dig deeper and bring in one of the reporters who broke this story, ProPublica investigative reporter Robert Federucci. Robert, our tax code allows sports team owners to take deductions on team assets, like their cars, that depreciate in value. Uh, you don't get to deduct your car. Walk me through how this works.
ROBERT FATURECHI: Yeah. So, I mean, the original idea, right, is if you have a widget factory, you purchase a widget-making business, over time, the assets that make up that business—so, the widget conveyor belt, the widget maker—are going to break down and you're going to have to replace them. They lose their value. [00:43:00] So, for sports teams though, the assets are media deals and player contracts and franchise rights. These are assets that sort of automatically regenerate. And not only do they not lose value, they typically rise in value. But nonetheless, owners are able to write them off and they're able to write off almost the entire purchase price of the team.
STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: They rise in value a lot. So, how much money is the government losing by allowing these write offs to exist? Why on earth are they letting all this happen?
ROBERT FATURECHI: Sure. So, take Steve Ballmer, for example. We found that during a recent five year span, he reported $700 million in losses from the Clippers. What that means is that he was able to pay about $140 million less in taxes. That number is inevitably only going to grow and probably grow [00:44:00] dramatically. What this tax treatment does for owners, essentially, it allows them, if they're profitable, it allows them to tell the IRS they're actually losing money, and if they happen to actually be losing money, they can tell the IRS they're losing vastly more money, and that money, you know, those losses cancel out profits from other ventures, and they don't have to pay taxes on them.
STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: Okay, this is completely insane because we're sitting here looking at an infrastructure deal and how we're going to pay for it and talking about taxing rich Americans, families whose household makes 400 grand or more. Four hundred grand, these team owners blow their nose with 400 grand and they are not paying taxes. Legally. Are there any lawmakers pushing to close these loopholes? And if so, how do we do it?
ROBERT FATURECHI: Sure. So, I mean, one type of response we got from owners was, Look, if you take away this amortization benefit, the entire American [00:45:00] economy is going to break down. But in reality, not too long ago, sports teams were not able to take these kinds of write offs. The IRS would insist that the assets that they were writing off actually had, you know, real lifespans and were actually losing value. It wasn't until 2004 that Congress completely threw their hands up and allowed all types of assets to be written off in this way. So, you know, it didn't always work this way. And, you know, like you said, it's in the hands of Congress and the president to change it.
STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: Okay, you heard it here first. The entire American economy will not collapse if this is changed. People who defend this say that owners do have to repay the taxes,, if and when they sell the team, but that's like getting a massive interest free loan from the government. And this is how super rich people operate—I'm just going to borrow and borrow and borrow—when regular people out there would never be able to get a loan like that from the [00:46:00] government.
ROBERT FATURECHI: Sure. And not just that. I mean, a lot of owners will die while holding their team. And if that happens and you pass your stake onto an heir, the heir never has to repay those taxes that you save. That's just a loss for the American government.
The Sports Stadium Scam - Robert Reich - Air Date 2-10-23
Robert Reich: Billionaires have found one more way to funnel our tax dollars into their bank accounts, and if we don't play ball, they'll take our favorite teams away. Ever notice how there never seems to be enough money to build public infrastructure like mass transit lines and better schools? And yet, when a multi-billion dollar sports team demands a new stadium, our local governments are happy to oblige.
A good example of this billionaire boondoggle is the host of the 2023 Super Bowl State Farm Stadium. That's where the Arizona Cardinals have played since 2006. It was built after billionaire team owner Michael Bidwell and his family spent years hinting that they would [00:47:00] move the Cards out of Arizona if the team didn't get a new stadium. Their blitz eventually worked, with Arizona taxpayers and the city of Glendale paying over two thirds of the $455 million construction tab. State Farm Stadium is not unique. It's part of a well established playbook. Here's how stadiums stick the public with the bill.
Step number one— "Billionaire buys a sports team." Just about every NFL franchise owner has a net worth of over a billion dollars—except for the Green Bay Packers, who are publicly-owned by half a million "Cheeseheads." The same goes for many franchise owners in other sports. Their fortunes don't just help them buy teams, but also gives them clout, which they cash in when they want to get a great deal on new digs for their team.
Step number two— "Billionaire pressures local government." Since 1990, franchises in [00:48:00] major North American sports leagues have intercepted upwards of $30 billion worth of taxpayer funds from state and local governments to build stadiums. And the funding itself is just the beginning of these sweetheart deals.
Sports teams often get big property tax breaks and reimbursements on operating expenses, like utilities and security on game days. Most deals also let the owners keep the revenue from naming rights, luxury box seats, and concessions—like the Atlanta Braves' $150 hamburger! Even worse, these deals often put taxpayers on the hook for stadium maintenance and repairs.
We taxpayers are essentially paying for the homes of our favorite sports teams, but we don't really own those homes. We don't get to rent them out. And we still have to buy expensive tickets to visit them. Whenever these billionaire owners try to sell us on a shiny new stadium, they claim it will spur economic growth, from which [00:49:00] we all benefit, but numerous studies have shown that this is false.
As a University of Chicago economist aptly put it, if you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark. But what makes sports teams special is they're one of the few realms of collective identity we have left.
Billionaires prey on the love that millions of fans have for their favorite teams. This brings us to the final step in the playbook— "Threaten to move the team." Obscenely rich owners threaten to, or actually do, rip teams out of their communities if they don't get the subsidies they demand. Just look at the Seattle Supersonics.
Starbucks founder Howard Schultz owned the NBA franchise, but failed to secure public funding to build a new stadium. So the coffee magnate sold the team to another wealthy businessman who moved it to Oklahoma. Now [00:50:00] that'll leave a bitter taste in your mouth. The most egregious part of how the system currently works is that every dollar we spend building stadiums is a dollar we aren't using for mass transit, hospitals, housing, or schools.
We're underfunding public necessities in order to funnel money to billionaires for something they could feasibly afford. So instead of spending billions on extravagant stadiums, we should be investing taxpayer money in things that improve the lives of everyone. Not just the bottom lines of profitable sports teams and their owners.
Because when it comes to stadium deals, the only winners are billionaires.
The gambling problem in sports - The Current - Air Date 4-3-24
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: Walk us through the basics of this—who is Jontay Porter and what is he accused of?
JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: So Jontay Porter is one of the backup centers for the Toronto Raptors. He's on a G League contract, which is a two way deal where he plays sometimes for the Toronto Raptors, sometimes for their minor league team in Mississauga, [00:51:00] Ontario—the Raptors 905—and what he is accused of doing is purposely exiting games early to have an effect on proposition bets. And I'm going to define proposition bets for you, Matt. Yes, please. For your listeners, because it's important. It's important to this discussion. A proposition bet, commonly known as a "prop bet," is a kind of bet that isn't on the outcome—the result of the game.
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: It's not about the win or the loss.
JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: It's not about the win or the loss. It's about a player's performance. Famously during the Super Bowl, people will bet on what color Gatorade is going to be poured over the winning coach. That's a prop bet. It has no bearing on the outcome of the game in Jontay Porter's case they will have put together parlays for online book makers where it's how many points will he have in the game? How many rebounds, how many assists? Jontay Porter, in two games left early, meaning that anyone who bet the under [00:52:00] on him to get a certain number of points, a certain number of rebounds, a certain number of assists—if they picked the under, they won lots of money.
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: I was reading about this, and they were saying that in some cases, some of these bets were five figures.
JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Yes.
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: They were placed on him. He left one of those games just four minutes in, saying that he had an eye injury that was re-aggravated or something like that, and there's a lot of money that's at stake here.
JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Yes. And the money is an important thing. So if you place a bet online on a player prop bet, like the kind of bet we're discussing, most bookies only allow you to place a bet of a $1,000 to $2,000—it depends on the bookie. These are bets of $10,000, $20,000—which is why they got flagged as suspicious because it was so much and, with all due respect to Jontay Porter—
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: He's a fringe player.
JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: He's a fringe player. And frankly, he was only getting the opportunity to play because starting Raptor Center, Jakob Poeltl is injured—he has a torn ligament in his [00:53:00] hand. So, Jontay Porter was getting more playing time that he wasn't able to take advantage of because he was leaving the games early.
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: Who— I mean, I'd said that some of the suspicion here is that perhaps he was involved in this, aside from being on the court, that he may have had other involvement.
Who is being suspected of placing these bets?
JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: That's part that's not really disclosed yet. It's the MBA that's investigating this case and they haven't given a lot of information. When I reached out to them and other investigating bodies about this investigation—if it's even happening—the reply is, "We're looking into it."
They offered no other details, including who placed those bets. It's just that ESPN report that says several different parties were placing bets of $10-20,000 on Jontay Porter leaving games early.
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: Is the suspicion that he could have placed bets on himself?
JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Allegedly, I mean it if he's not placing them himself Then the suspicion would be that he is working in party [00:54:00] with people who knew that he would leave the game early.
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: And why would he do such a thing? Is this just about cash money? Like, do you make lot of money in these bets?
JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: In these situations that would be the case. Yeah
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: We heard his brother there. Have the Raptors said anything about this? Has Jontay Porter said anything about this?
JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Jontay Porter has not been made available and although, Raptors head coach Darko Rijakovic has made comments and, the team officially has no comment and, we asked players about it, they don't know anything.
Darko Rayakovic was asked specifically, "Did you think it was weird when Jontay pulled himself out of the game twice?" He said, well, of course I trust my players. Like, if my player tells me he's sick, I'm going to listen. Cause why wouldn't you, right?
And the other players on the team also said we don't know anything. This is upsetting, but we know, they all said, we know as much as you do. Like they learned as we did as news broke.
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: We introduced this by saying that there were a couple of different things unfolding. [00:55:00] One is this issue of Jontay Porter and the NBA. The other one is the baseball superstar caught up in a different gambling scandal. Just briefly walk me through that. What do we know about what may have happened there?
RICHARD DEITSCH: Yeah, so there's some conflicting reporting when it comes to Shohei Ohtani—who, if you want to think about it in a modern context is your modern equivalent of Babe Ruth— and what Shohei Ohtani is saying is that his longtime interpreter, but "intrepreter" is really probably not even a fair description, it's his longtime very, very close compatriot and friend— had a gambling problem. And ultimately, because, allegedly, the friend had access to Shohei's funding, was able to pay off significant debts— close to five million dollars—using Shohei Ohtani's money to pay off these debts. Where it gets a little interesting and suspicious, if that's the right word, is that the story [00:56:00] had changed.
Initially, the story, which the interpreter told to ESPN in a 90 minute interview, was that Shohei Otani had paid off this problematic gamblers' debts because he cared about his friend and wanted to help him out. The framework of all this is that we're not necessarily dealing with bets that you make in legal gambling entities in the United States.
This was done through an illegal bookmaker. So Major League Baseball, just like the NBA, has said they're investigating this. Looks like the U. S. Attorneys are investigating the bookmaker in California, and we'll see what happens. The cynic would say that the investigation may be a little bit like Casablanca because I'm not sure how much baseball would like Shohei Ohtani to be under the microscope.
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: People have been betting on sports since sports have been played, probably. [00:57:00] How different is this now? How big is the sports betting industry right now, Richard?
RICHARD DEITSCH: It's massive. People who live in Ontario obviously can get a little sense of it because it's very, very hard to watch any program on SportsNet or TSN, depending on the medium, without being inundated with gambling ads.
Just think of the population in the United States compared to Canada—it's 10x. So that's how much more you'd be inundated in the United States. I think, at this current juncture, there's 38 states where sports gambling is legal in the United States. There's still some big ones out there that are expected to become legal. So, you really can't, essentially—if you are a sports fan, I would say even a casual sports fan in the United States, you really cannot escape the sports gambling element. It's essentially everywhere. And I would also say, just to be fair, as people who work in the media, there's almost no sports entity that, that has some kind of [00:58:00] content or media play that doesn't have some kind of affiliation with a gambling network.
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: John, you were nodding along as Richard was saying that. I mean, ESPN has a sports betting analysis segment, HockeyNet in Canada, other sports as well. How entwined now is this with pro sports?
JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: There's official sponsors who are bettors.
After the Jontay Porter news broke, we spoke to veteran forward Garrett Temple, who in addition to being one of the veterans in the Toronto Raptors locker room, he's also a vice president of the National Basketball Players Association—their union—and we asked him about it and he said, yeah, it's kind of awkward we're not allowed to bet on basketball. And that's the NBA rule. They can't bet on the NBA, or the WNBA, or the G League, or any associated basketball product. But we have official sponsors, like DraftKings and FanDuel. You see it in the arenas. The Toronto Blue Jays have it.
MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: These are these legalized entities here.
JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Yeah, these are legalized entities in Ontario, and they are in business, literally "in business," with [00:59:00] Major League Sports.
Note from the Editor on the value of sports to building community
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with the University of Iowa in two parts, discussing the new pay-for-play rules. Same with the PBS NewsHour. Brett Kollmann looked at the changing landscape of sports journalism. LeBatardShow hosted a debate about the economic drive towards sensationalism. MSNBC Reports discussed sports owners using their team to avoid taxes. Robert Reich explained the scam of publicly-funded stadiums and The Current looked at the problems of sports gambling. And that's just the top takes; there's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section.
But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process. To support our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support--there's a link in the show notes; through our [01:00:00] Patreon page if you prefer; or from right inside the Apple Podcast app.
If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
Now, before we continue onto the Deeper Dives after the show, I have just a few thoughts.
I occasionally find it sort of amusing to repeat the fact that I paid quite a lot of attention to sports up until 1997 or so. I was pretty deep into it, mostly watching baseball, football, and hockey. Then at the wise old age of 13 or so, I took stock of my sports-watching time commitments and realized I was basically wasting my finite time here on earth watching sports. So I stopped, cold turkey, and never went back.
And then it took another 25 years or so for me to soften my stance on the wastefulness and unimportance of watching professional sports.
Now I see it as a worthwhile lens through which to [01:01:00] observe society, even if I don't follow teams closely or watch the games myself. And I also have a better impression of those who watch sports, particularly as an excuse to come together, spend time with friends and family, share special moments, make memories, that kind of thing.
In fact, just today, I realized that when I was quite young, most of my sports watching would have been done with my older brother. But by the time I was 13, he'd moved out of the house. So when I decided that watching sports was a waste of time, what I really may have been feeling was that watching sports alone was a waste of time. And I pretty much still agree with that.
But in terms of using sports as a window into the nature of culture and society, sports documentaries are actually a great place to start. I've definitely watched more sports documentaries in the last two years than I've watched sports games in the past decade. And I found them very insightful often [01:02:00] or revelatory, depending on what you're trying to get out of it sometimes.
With all that said, it's still the fact that producer Deon here at the show is a sports fan, that I am reminded to take time now and again to focus on the intersection of sports and politics. It's Deon who reminds me that sports are important because they're a microcosm of the rest of society.
For instance, as maybe a parallel to the influence of money in politics and how that distorts what politicians do and what they vote for and what laws were able to pass, and how we get a distorted perception of ourselves as to what our country believes in. I think like, gun safety laws that we cannot get passed. And we think, well, I guess the country doesn't believe in it. But no, that's the influence of money.
So think of that compared to the sports system being overly consumed by capitalism and gambling. It will distort the game out of recognition. It will be hard to say whether [01:03:00] what we're looking at is a reflection of reality at all. Or if it ended up with a simulated version of sports to watch where the influence of the betting system throws everything off. And if that is the case, then what are we all even doing here, right? Deon made this point to me, to which I responded, speaking of the concern over reality just being a simulation, aren't we having that same problem with the entire universe as a whole? He said, Sports really is a microcosm. Sort of makes you think.
DEEPER DIVE A: PAY FOR PLAY
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with deeper dives on four topics. Next up, "Pay for play." Deeper Dive Section B: "Stadiums, Our Great Folly" and—by the way—I know it's a deep cut, but one of the rarely used secondary definitions of the word "folly" is, "A costly ornamental building with no practical purpose built in a large garden or park," which doesn't exactly describe stadiums, but [01:04:00] comes a lot closer than it should.
So I just want to make sure that you enjoyed that double meaning wordplay along with me. Anyway, that's section B. Deeper Dive Section C: "Sports Journalism" and Section D: "Sports Gambling."
Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger: What NCAA Suit Settlement Means for Paying Players - The Rich Eisen Show - Air Date 5-23-24
KIRK MORRISON - HOST, THE RICH EISEN SHOW: These antitrust lawsuits that are being, that are going on right now, I'm seeing conferences or agreeing to the payout, but where's the money go? Is it going to the players or going back to the institutions? What, what does this pay out from these antitrust lawsuits that have been going on? I'm trying to keep up Ross and I'm like, how does it, what does this involve the players or no?
ROSS DELLENGER: Yeah, it definitely involves the players and it is complicated. You know, the, the settlement and it should be finalized by the end of the week, by, by Friday, uh, I will, I'll show you a portion of it should be finalized at least the NCAA in the power five conferences, which are the six defendants. in the case, they will have authorized the settlement by Friday.
It's got a long way before it's actually finalized. But the settlement right now, according to documents of [01:05:00] sources who are knowledgeable about it, will include kind of three parts. So The first part is the back damages to athletes owed NIL payments before NIL was implemented. There are four years before NIL, four years before athletes could earn compensation from their NIL.
Those athletes around 12, 15, 000 of them is the estimate will get, will be distributed, um, 2. 8 billion. That's the, that's the back damage and settlement to those athletes. So that's the first. Part of the settlement. The second part of the settlement is kind of the forward thinking part where, um, schools will be permitted, not required, but permitted to share revenue with athletes.
Um, we don't know exactly the specific amount, but it will probably be around 20 to 21, 22 million dollars. a year per school can can share with [01:06:00] athletes. It's kind of like there's a salary cap that will be put on that of around 2122 million. But that will fluctuate as the settlement, which is 10 years in length, goes on.
So that's the second part. And the third part, it's kind of a re Structured NCAA, um, where power conferences will have more control. Uh, we'll be able to create their own rules and probably enforce them. There'll be probably be a new enforcement arm. There'll be some changes to some other kind of granular things, scholarship limits, roster, things like that.
KIRK MORRISON - HOST, THE RICH EISEN SHOW: So we know that the money's going to be coming in Ross, is that what you're saying with all of these expansion of. Conferences. I saw that yesterday, though, that the college football playoff will now expand, um, its viewership opportunities, not just from ESPN, but now TNT will now hold, um, a first round matchup, I believe to first round matchups in the first couple of years, and then they'll have quarterfinals and we'll see where that [01:07:00] goes along.
But it just shows you now that college football has expanded viewership opportunities. That's more money. And now this money can now go into the pockets of the student athletes. But if I'm a volleyball player or water polo or soccer, am I entitled to what the football revenue brings in from these TV contracts?
Or is this going to be something that the NCAA is still trying to figure out how to disperse these collective television contracts coming into each university?
ROSS DELLENGER: That is, that is a key issue is how you distribute, you know, if you hit the cap, if a school hits the cap around 20, say this around number 20 million, because of the federal title nine law, which requires higher education in education institutions to share, to offer equal opportunity to men and women.
Do you have to split? down the middle. That 20 million is 10 million go to football and men's basketball, say, and then 10 million [01:08:00] go get spread out to women athletes. A lot of These women's sports, obviously, um, in the grand scheme of things, right? Um, call schools, millions of dollars. They, they lose, they lose money.
Most of this money, as you mentioned is coming from, is generated from TV contracts in ticket sales around, around football, uh, in, in a little bit of men's basketball. So how do you do that? Do you, do you follow. The title nine law, are you required to follow the title nine law and do you split the payments or is there a way around this where you can give more of the, the money to the players who sport generated, which would be football and men's basketball.
It is a key question in all of this. Uh, and so is these booster collectives. Do they continue outside of the university offering athletes money? And does that money Count toward the cap. I don't think it will. Um, so there's a way to potentially for schools to circumvent the cap by going outside with their [01:09:00] booster collective.
And there's a way toe potentially circumvent title nine by either by either not doing it or going outside as well. So a lot of questions still on the disbursement of the money to athletes.
“Amateurism Is Dead” - ESPN’s Jay Bilas on the Future of NCAA Sports - The Rich Eisen Show - Air Date 5-29-24
RICH EISEN - HOST, THE RICH EISEN SHOW: With the court cases and a settlement, it appears, between the NCAA and, um, I guess the Jeffrey Kessler led class, um, of players. I imagine, um, I might be botching it, but what is happening here and what's your prediction as to what happens next, if you don't mind?
JAY BILAS: Well, a lot's going to depend on what Judge Claudia Wilkin does, uh, the, the federal court judge out in California.
So she has to approve this settlement. The settlement's basically in two parts. One of them backward looking damages, uh, for the harm that was caused by players due to the antitrust violations of the NCAA. And that's in the neighborhood of 2. 8 billion payable over 10 years. The [01:10:00] other is revenue sharing.
That's the forward looking piece of this. And my understanding after reading what I've read is that players are going to be eligible to receive up to 22 percent of revenues going forward. That's a cap. And my question for the court when the settlement is presented is what other cap is there? Whom else is subject to a wage cap other than players?
Because coaches are gonna be able to be paid as much as a school wants to pay 'em. Uh, and I don't, I don't think players should be capped, absent some sort of collective bargaining agreement where the players agree to it. To me it's not enough. And what what's clear to me is the NCAA through this settlement is gonna try to take this to Congress and say, here's a framework that we've agreed to with, uh, with the, the plaintiff's lawyers and the plaintiffs in the class.
We want you to put this into law so that they can cap [01:11:00] all this at 22 percent and that and that doesn't even mean that they have to pay anything to players if they don't want to. I think the market will dictate they have to, but a 22 percent cap with the way revenues have exploded are continuing to go up in college sports to me doesn't sit well with me.
We'll see if it sits well with the, uh, with the players and what their objections. Uh, to this settlement and objections going forward. But one thing we know for sure, rich amateurism is dead. I think it was dead a long time ago, but they pulled the plug. Now they're going to be the players are going to be paid directly by their universities now, which was a long time coming.
And that hopefully will mean contracts for the players and they can put buyouts in them. So the schools feel like they have some more protections. But amateurism is now dead. It's, it's purely professional sports. And the only thing that differs from the NBA or the NFL is, uh, is they, the players have to be enrolled in school.
That's it.
Pay for Play: Should College Athletes be Considered University Employees? Part 3 - University of Iowa - Air Date 3-28-24
ALICIA JESSOP: I'm a big believer in the power of education. I'm a first generation college student. My father, who experienced [01:12:00] homelessness as a child, preached to me that education was my way out. I bought the sermon. I've been privileged with an incredible life and career thanks to my undergraduate and legal educations.
I also understand the value of a college scholarship. My father spent 40 years working on a factory line in the Coors Brewing Company. He and my mother provided me with a great life and home, but they didn't have the cash to finance my legal education. I was 38 years old when the 100, 000 I borrowed to pay for that education was finally paid off.
I say that to make apparent that I don't tread lightly when I say that most revenue producing college sport athletes are employees. Let me be clear. I do not believe that every college athlete is an employee. Rather, I believe that the two regional NLRB offices in the Northwestern and Dartmouth cases and the head NLRB in the Northwestern case got it right when they said that the right to control test is the correct test to apply to assess whether a college athlete is an [01:13:00] employee.
The right to control test looks at the level of control an employer exerts over how a worker does their job. By evaluating a set of factors, the greater the level of control exerted across those factors, the more likely it is that a worker is an employee who can access the benefits of the National Labor Relations Act.
I'm not gonna go through the factors, because that would be kind of boring. Not to say it's gonna be boring if someone else does it, but I'm going to give you some examples of control that I've seen in my experience as a journalist, as a lawyer, as a professor. Here's where I've seen control. It's not seeing the men's basketball players in my class at the university of Miami for close to a month during the school year, when they went on to win the NIT.
It's not because they were ditching those young men were always in class. They weren't in my class that month because the university kept them out on a business trip and kept them in New [01:14:00] York or the Northeast instead of bringing them home to go to school. It's a college football player falling asleep in the front row of my class because the television network scheduled a midweek game in a different state and he didn't get home until 4 a.
m. It's the quarterback in my class staying afterward to ask me if I know what the symptoms of a concussion are. When I tell him, no, I'm a lawyer, not a doctor, and ask why he's asking, he says, did you see what happened to me? No, I say, He says, my molar got knocked out in the game and coach told me to stop being a P word and go back and play.
Think about your molar getting knocked out. The amount of force that has to come across your head for a molar to fall out, and then not to be held out for one play seems a little problematic to me. It's the student I met who I mentioned earlier who had the reading skills of probably a 6th grader, but made it into two top 50 universities because he had NFL level talent.
I love it. [01:15:00] It's a student not being able to pick a science major because it conflicts with their practice schedule It's me spending my free time helping young men who played college sports around this nation find jobs after their playing career ends Because as one who competed at the university my missouri told me Nobody ever told him what he was capable of other than football.
And the football program demanded so much of their time that they didn't gain internship experience or meaningful networks during their college experience.
Coming back to where I started, I don't think the head governing body for college sports wanted to be where we are today. Where very valid arguments exist for the employee status of college athletes. Some may say that their television plan was an attempt to hold monopoly power, but I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I think they wanted to preserve the amateur nature of college sports and keep greed out of the game. But the Supreme Court's decision in 84 open Pandora's box and the reality of [01:16:00] college sports today is that is it is a 25 billion annual generating enterprise whose power and control is largely held by media companies and the conferences benefiting grandly from those media deals.
These media companies call all the shots. They schedule the games. They drive the bargaining power at the negotiation table to the point where West Coast schools leave historic conferences to join East Coast schools, increasing both the travel footprint and missed class time for their college athletes and the revenues that said schools generate.
D1 revenue producing college athletics is not an extracurricular. It is big business. We see this in that the expenditure for college coaches salaries and facilities often topples those of their professional counterparts. We know it's a big business because schools that say they don't have money to pay college athletes are spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists, hundreds of millions of dollars on legal fees [01:17:00] and possibly billions of dollars in legal damages to preserve the status quo.
As I mentioned at the outset, repeated, repeated defeat in the court of law calls for a scapegoat. Who got us to where we are today? I'll leave that for you to consider. But as sport tells us, repeated loss also calls for a new game plan. And if the NCAA wants to put an end to the litany of legal challenges it faces, it needs to turn course.
Turning course requires more than accepting that college athletes can benefit from the right of publicity that is afforded to every American. College athletes didn't gain some new right. Their right was finally restored to them through NIL. It requires coming into compliance with the law in full. And such necessitates understanding when and how the right of control test indicates that some Namely division one revenue producing sport college athletes are employees of their respective universities I know what some of you are thinking right now Here's some questions that [01:18:00] might be rolling through your head But where is the money going to come from to pay these athletes too?
Is this the end of women's and olympic sports? You What are the unintended consequences of this legal status? I've already talked a lot, so I'm not going to address those in full, but I'm happy to more. But I'll give you a few thoughts on each. I tell my students to question everything, so I hope that you'll do the same.
Don't buy that there is no money in the system. Likely this will require the reallocation of funds. Top college coaches will see pay reductions. Strength trainers will no longer earn $1 million per year. The stadium and facility spending boom will slow. Beyond that, a review of Power 5 Conference Schools 990 Forums, one of my current favorite activities, shows that there's cash in the coffers.
We were told that NIL would mean the death of women's and Olympic sports. That threat has not become reality. Instead, we are living in a time where thanks to an [01:19:00] incredible athlete from your own university, women's college basketball is seeing unprecedented success. We see from the viewership and ticket sales numbers for women's college basketball this season that opening up a market can produce greater demand for a product.
Olympic athletes now have longer windows also to financially benefit from their incredible gifts. What though of the unintended consequences? First we must recognize that the potential horror stories thrown around by those against recognizing the employee status of d1 Revenue producing sport college athletes are already true.
These things are already happening on college campuses People warn that if college athletes are recognized as employees, they would be quote fired for poor for poor poor performance Tell me what is different between that scenario and a coach, maybe one of the greatest coaches in college football history, routinely gray shirting college athletes to build winning teams.
[01:20:00] People today sport, people today say sport is the wild, wild West. My maternal grandfather was a cowboy and I'm not sure he would agree with that analogy, but the system is currently being shaken by the slow breakdown of the cartel with new additions like NIL and the transfer portal. The NCAA continues unsuccessfully and to the tune of millions of dollars in lobbying fees trying to persuade congress to grant it Antitrust immunity and deem college athletes to not be employees The likelihood of congress passing such bills is as good as caitlyn clark not being the number one overall wmba draft pick.
DEEPER DIVE B: STADIUMS, OUR GREAT FOLLY
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering deeper dive section B: stadiums are great folly.
Why Are Taxpayers Paying For Stadiums? - Long Story Short - The Daily Show - Air Date 10-27-23
DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Right now, we're in a sports stadium building boom, and just about every one of them is funded by taxpayers. So how are billionaire team owners able to get these sweetheart deals? Easy. When asking for taxpayer subsidies, Teams come to a community like a dude asking for an open marriage. [01:21:00] Nah, girl, it's not just good for me, it's good for you, too!
Now, they say these stadiums will spread economic growth throughout the community.
These owners also claim these stadiums will increase property values. Which is one of the biggest lies in the world. What kind of psycho is like, Yeah, I want 50, 000 drunk idiots pissing on my stoop every night. No way, bro. If any drunk idiot's gonna piss on my stoop, it's gonna be me. Next, they promise to donate money to the community or build affordable housing.
And if none of that works, uh, they threaten to move the team. And it usually works, because even though using taxpayer money in stadiums is usually unpopular, losing a team could end a politician's career. Like, for example, if Mayor Eric Adams lost to the Knicks, he would be deported. All the way back to his real home in New Jersey.
But the truth is, a lot of the time, those owners are bluffing, and we know that because they admit it. [01:22:00]
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: David Samson, the former president of the Marlins, largely credited with being a Pulling off the worst stadium deal for Miami Dade taxpayers. It's actually a pretty easy playbook. I get a lot of credit for doing the Marlins Park deal, but it really wasn't very difficult because Miami did not want to lose its baseball team and all we had to say is that we're ready to leave Miami if we don't get a deal done.
Let me ask you, were the Marlins going to leave Miami, David? Truly. Absolutely not.
DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: See? These guys are full of shit. They were never going to leave Miami, because no one ever leaves Miami. Like, even people who are just visiting don't leave Miami. Now the cousin who went to a bachelor party six months ago, he's still in a club partying with BBLs. So, the teams get their free subsidies, and now that they have their brand new stadium that boosts their value.
But don't worry. Because in return, the city gets hundreds of millions of dollars worth of jack shit.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Economists who study stadium subsidies say little or none of the money makes it back to taxpayers. One [01:23:00] economist estimated that the contribution of a professional baseball team is similar to that of a mid sized department store.
As a University of Chicago economist aptly put it, if you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark.
DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Wait, that's an option? Yo, I wish they'd drop a giant bag of money in my neighborhood. Like, rest in peace to the person it lands on, but it'd be a payday for the rest of us. So the economic boost they promised doesn't pan out. And I know that personally, because I saw that in the Bronx. In exchange for that 20 acres of parkland, the Yankees promised to donate 40 million to affected areas.
But the media community has not seen a dime from the team. And more immediately, And more importantly, we haven't seen a World Series in like 20 years, though. Like, if you want to screw my community out of 40 million, fine. That's business. But me [01:24:00] not getting a ring, that's personal.
I mean, at the very least, these teams could toss out some more shirts during games. Like, how do you have 25, 000 fans in an arena and only toss out ten T shirts? And they're all size XL? Do mediums cost more? And also, could we please get a T shirt cannon that can hit the 300s? What the f? Up top in the row!
Up top! And the thing that really gets me heated These stadiums aren't even that old. Stadiums for the Braves and the Rangers last like 20 years before they built new ones. You can't be replacing a stadium that Leonardo DiCaprio would still hit.
I'm not gonna be in Titanic 2. Sorry. But you know what the worst part is? How much this sucks for the fans. Because suddenly the team they've been rooting for their whole lives starts extorting them for a fortune. And all they can do about it is to go to the stadium, And cuts out the owner, which is what they did in Oakland.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Check this out. [01:25:00] A's fans packing the Oakland Coliseum for the first time in what seems like forever to send a blunt message to the Athletics top brass. A season best crowd of nearly 28, 000 A's fans came out to the Coliseum for what was deemed a reverse boycott, which encouraged owner John Fisher to sell the team so it can remain in Oakland.
instead of moving to Las Vegas. Tonight, you should call us cheers. South Shore sucks! South Shore sucks! Fisher, get the hell out of here. 30, 000 people are going to show up tonight to show John Fisher that he sucks. That's how you do it. Listen, I'm an East Coast boy, but Oakland, paying
DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: 20 to cuss out a man you've never met is big New York energy. Respect.
Nick Wright won’t be a Chiefs fan if they move to Kansas - What's Wright? With Nick Wright - Air Date 3-31-22
NICK WRIGHT - HOST, WHAT'S WRIGHT: The public funding of stadiums is one of the [01:26:00] most It's something that I promise you, history will not look upon fondly when people are like, oh, what was one of the reasons American infrastructure and public schooling all seem to fail?
And they're going to be like, well, there's money issues, a lot of things. And then they're going to be like, oh, well, that's funny because all these municipalities sure seem to find a billion dollars when they needed it to build a stadium that's going to be used a dozen times a year. With that said. There are certain cities in America that I think you can justify the public kicking in some dollars to the team and Buffalo might be one of them.
So here's, here's my general point. Take your top 15 cities in the country. All of them should come together, have a meeting of the mayors or the governors of the states, however you need to do it, and make a pact and all a nice little collusion against the leads. Guys. [01:27:00] None of us are ever paying a dime.
You know why? Because pro sports leagues want to be in New York. They want to be in LA. They want to be in Dallas. They want to be in Houston. They want to be in Miami. They want to be in DC. They want to be in San Francisco. Their threats to leave are hollow threats. We never need to pay a dollar. If we're a major American city for a team, the leagues want to be here.
The owners have the money. Let them pay. Now, a city such as Buffalo, you can make the argument that the difference between Buffalo and Schenectady is one thing, that they have pro sports, they have the Sabres and the Bills. And that I, you know, I've said for a long time growing up from Kansas City, what's the difference between Kansas City and Des Moines?
Well, aside from the history of Kansas City and the amazing barbecue and the jazz, all that, the real contemporary difference was. Kansas City had the Chiefs and the Royals and Des Moines didn't. So I [01:28:00] do understand why a small city might feel incentivized to make sure their team doesn't move. So I get why the bills are doing it right.
The Buffalo's doing it. It's the state of New York that's doing it. And I know these two headlines aren't exactly, uh, aligned, but around the same time, I found out the state of New York's going to kick in about 800 million for the Bill's stadium. I read in the New York times. Our new governor say there's about an 850 million New York state public school shortfall.
You got to piss me off to be totally honest. But I, if you're Buffalo, if you're green Bay, if you're a small city that is kind of just happy to have a team, I get why you might want to make sure the team never leaves. But big cities should never pay a dollar to these leagues. They get tricked by them.
They're never leaving. Pro sports leagues are never leaving New York. Or LA or the cities I mentioned, they want to be there, so don't [01:29:00] get tricked into it. Speaking of the Chiefs, looks like we're gonna talk about them for a moment.
DAMONZA BYRD: Speaking of stadiums. Yeah. Is it possible that the chiefs end up leaving Arrowhead?
NICK WRIGHT - HOST, WHAT'S WRIGHT: Okay, so listen, Arrowhead Stadium is loud and it's a fine stadium. It's not state of the art, but it's fine. It also is in the, it's in the middle of nowhere. It is 30 minutes from downtown Kansas City. The closest restaurant to Arrowhead or Kaufman is a Taco Bell. The closest hotel is a Drury Inn. Arrowhead's not ideal. It's not an ideal location. The reason the idea of the chiefs leaving is touches a tendon for me is there was a rumor. They might cross state lines into Kansas. The Kansas city chiefs, Our Kansas city, Missouri's team. And there is a big difference between being from Missouri and being from Kansas.
The audience may not care. The Kansas city and we'll get it. If people, if you're from [01:30:00] out, you're like, oh, I'm from Kansas City, and they're like, oh, you're from Kansas? No . I'm from Missouri. And the idea of the chiefs crossing the state line will, I'm not saying I won't be a fan.
This is what I'm going to say. This is what I will say. If the chiefs move to Kansas, my fandom ends when Patrick Mulholland. That's it. I'm just telling you when Patrick Mulholland retires, I'm out. If they move to Kansas.
Former A's Bruce Maxwell calls out Oakland A's owner John Fisher for Vegas move - Edge of Sports - Air Date 5-3-24
DAVE ZIRIN - HOST, EDGE OF SPORTS: I want to talk to you about the Oakland A's, their move to Sacramento, and then their subsequent move that's coming up in 2028 to Las Vegas.
You're the person I wanted to ask this. What, what, what was your impression when you played for the A's of Oakland? as a baseball town.
BRUCE MAXWELL: It was incredible. The environment. I'm a very, I'm a big history buff when it comes to baseball. Um, my dad's favorite team was the Oakland A's and my dad's from Indiana.
Um, it's just with that team, [01:31:00] it's history. You know, it's, it's one of the oldest organizations in baseball. The players that have come through there, the winning the environment, what they've done for the city of Oakland itself. It's really given the community. a staple in a, in a, in a sports team. And that's something that you cannot allow to leave.
You cannot allow that to, to move to another area because now you're turning Oakland into almost like a wasteland when it comes to sports. I know they, they lost the warriors, the Raiders moved this and the other, but I feel like. The Oakland A's have been more of a pillar of the community than either one of those teams.
So it's upsetting and it's, it's honestly, it's bothersome to see that being allowed to happen. It's like taking the Cubs out of Chicago.
It's like taking the Dodgers out of LA. Um, it can't happen. It can't happen. [01:32:00] So it's devastating to, to see, uh, their moves and the fact that it's just allowing, they're allowing it to happen, uh, because of greed and because of, uh, the lack of.
Uh, the lack of stature when it comes to the city of Oakland.
DAVE ZIRIN - HOST, EDGE OF SPORTS: Yeah, what does this say about John Fisher, the owner of the team? He inherited all the money from Gap Clothing. That's where his 3. 3 billion come from. That's his net worth. What does it say about John Fisher that he's so willing to remove the team from Oakland when he clearly has the financial means to keep them there as long as he wants to?
BRUCE MAXWELL: It just says that he's selfish. And it's about as clear as I can be with that, um, it's the fact that the fans in the city of Oakland have seen him gouge our prospects and our players over the years. And then the Oakland A's fans have still been loyal and stayed loyal while watching their very players be all stars and important [01:33:00] players for their teams.
Um, the fact that he has the financial means to move the team, but not the financial means to upgrade the stadium, to upgrade the locker rooms, the field itself, to put more money into the contracts of players, to keep fans coming in wanting to support the Oakland A's. The fans took a stand and, and I would too, in that situation, especially again, for such an historical team, these people in Oakland, man, they grow up and teach their kids the love of the Oakland A's.
Even to this day, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a culture up there. It's not just another team. And I think with John Fisher, he doesn't care at the end of the day. He doesn't care about the workers who've been working there for 40 years. He doesn't care about the kids and the grandparents and the great grandparents that have been coming to Oakland A's games that have had season tickets for 40 [01:34:00] years.
He doesn't care about that. He wants new and shiny things, but he could easily have made those shiny things. In Oakland, he just didn't want to be there and for him to be able to move the team without a batter of an eye. It's disappointing and it's upsetting for the people of Oakland, but also for a lot of us that I can't speak for everybody else, but it saddens me.
I played seven years with those that organization. And the whole time it was history. You have Ricky Henderson, Dave Stewart, Vita blue, all these guys coming into spring training, working with these, working with the kids. So in phase, right? All of that is because of the Oakland ace. It's not because, Oh, they're just big leaguers.
No, they, they spend a good chunk of their careers playing for this team, winning for this team. And it's part of their lives. So to see it be uprooted to a very, a new place for whatever the reason may be. It's, it's, [01:35:00] it's bothering me.
DAVE ZIRIN - HOST, EDGE OF SPORTS: You know, I'm really glad you mentioned the stadium workers, because as awful as it is to move the team, there have been some articles about how generations of people have worked for that team and Fisher's disregard for them is just another mark against him to me as somebody who cares about the sport.
I mean, clearly he does not.
BRUCE MAXWELL: He doesn't. And I went back, um, this off season. Um, I was, I was coaching with kids, uh, with a couple of my former teammates in Palo Alto. And when we, when I got there, I went to an A's game within about a week to go see my coaches and things. Uh, cause I, when I was there, the coaches are the same minus Bob Melvin, but they're the same.
And, um, I walked up in the players area and same security guards. They gave me a big old hug. They were like, great to see you. It's been forever. Mind you, I haven't been in the big leagues since 2018 and God, I don't remember their names, but a hundred percent. [01:36:00] They remember me and the people that men, men, the parking lot, the people that, that check you before you go into the locker room, uh, the people on the field, the grounds crew, I spent most of my time talking to all those people because Those are the people that make the difference in our days every day.
And so for him to be able to uproot that team and put all of those people out of a job, just willingly, it's, it's upsetting. And it's cruel at the end of the day, it's cruel.
DEEPER DIVE C: SPORTS JOURNALISM
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached a deeper dive section C: sports journalism.
Pat McAfee Gets Torn Apart by Famed Sports Writer - TYT Sports - Air Date 10-26-23
PAT MACAFEE: Andrew Marshawn is a rat.
RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: There's no doubt Pat McAfee's tenure with ESPN has been entertaining, yet simultaneously troubling. Famous sports writer Greg Doyle has a bone to pick with the sleeveless ex punter because of instances such as this.
AARON RODGERS: I'm 48 hours in, and I consulted with a now good friend of mine, Joe Rogan.
I'm thankful for [01:37:00] people like Joe stepping up and using their voice. And this If, if, like we learned, if science is Dr. Fauci, you're damn right I'm defiant.
RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: And this.
AARON RODGERS: Mr. Pfizer said he didn't think he'd be in a vax war with me. Didn't a back floor? Me? This ain't a war homie. This is just conversation. But if you want to have some sort of, uh, dual debate, have me on the podcast, I'm gonna take my man RFK, junior.
Okay. . Okay. As an independent. Hell yeah. Right? And he can have, you know, Tony Fauci or some other crat and we can have a conversation about this.
RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Okay. And this. Where he ripped Travis Kelsey Doyle, a longtime media member, sees through it and is called out Rogers McAfee and ESPN in his column.
AARON RODGERS: You know, I think there's some sentiment that there's some sort of moral victory out there that we hung with the, you know, with the Champs and.
And that, uh, you know, our defense played well, and, and, you know, [01:38:00] uh, Pat didn't have a crazy game, and, uh, you know, Mr. Fizer, we kind of shut him down a little bit, he didn't have, you know, his, like, crazy impact game. Obviously, he had, you know, some yards and stuff, but I felt like, for the most part, you know, we played really tough on defense, especially the last three quarters.
RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Because he can't stand seeing this. Here's what he wrote. Every Tuesday, Rogers emerges from his rat hole and looks around smugly, enjoying the smell of his own breath, and says something really, really stupid about vaccines. And because we live in this cult of fame, liking and believing and even electing people only because they're rich or famous, people believe Rogers so he's out there, every Tuesday, saying something that makes us less safe.
It's because As Awful Announcing put it, Rogers went from the thinking man's quarterback to an anti vax buffoon allotted time on McAfee's show to ramble about life saving medications with zero pushback whatsoever even if the information he was offering was at best misguided and at worst harmful, penned Sean Keeley.
[01:39:00] Doyle has worked in the Indianapolis market for decades at this point. Even doing radio shows with a former Colts player named Sean Keeley. Pat McAfee. They have somewhat of a history, one can say. Which makes his article even more of a must read. He'd write McAfee is allowing and enabling Rogers to spew misinformation.
He'd bring up McAfee being found to pay the quarterback more than a million dollars to appear on his show, and third, according to Doyle, McAfee doesn't believe Rogers for a minute. Doyle, it becomes quite evident, lays the blame on at McAfee's feet for all of this. Rogers was a four time MVP with the Packers, but his anti vax gibberish makes him a harmful member of the human race.
McAfee lets it happen, Doyle wrote. Rogers has done McAfee's career a huge service by appearing on his show. Pat was going to take off regardless because he's that good, but Rogers appearance put booster fuel into [01:40:00] the rocket ship. And not just that. Not to be misremembered, this was first taken on by a long time NFL media member.
Pat McAfee is getting a massive pass for allowing Aaron Rodgers to spread disinformation and lies that could lead to people dying. He tweeted, McAfee would reply, You're not picking and choosing what to report from my show in an attempt to mislead people, are you? That'd be a style of misinformation, right?
You were probably saving the world at the time, but how come you didn't cover this with a video of Charles Barkley?
AARON RODGERS: I've been taking monoclonal antibodies. Ivermectin, zinc, vitamin C and D, HCQ. And I feel pretty incredible.
PAT MACAFEE: Okay. So you said a lot there.
RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Doyle then ends his piece with this. Unlike Rogers and people of his ilk, people who think they're the smartest guy in the room.
McAfee is the smartest guy in the room. He also was born with a second serving of empathy. He's a good man with a good heart. Pat McAfee. He understands [01:41:00] vaccines are the only reason the war is over. The only reason the good guys won the biggest and most important questions Doyle poses. In his piece are these.
Why is ESPN allowing this? And why is Pat McAfee a willing accomplice?
Are Athletes a Threat to Sports Journalism? - Karen Hunter Show - Air Date 5-28-24
RODERICK MORROW: Do you find any difference in this, uh, approach that the players have where they're like considering themselves the new media, uh, As compared to, you know, the classic traditional media. Um, are you finding that there's a, a, a real separation or difference between their approach and, and, and the approach that at the networks?
CHRIS BROUSSARD: Oh yeah. Like, like Rob Parker really gets upset about it. Now he has a, uh, journalism, uh, masters from Columbia. Um, he teaches sports writing at USC. So he's really into it and he gets upset because On their podcast, the athletes generally don't push back on one another. So if you're doing a podcast and one [01:42:00] player says, yeah, I think Paul George is better than LeBron.
Now, in a lot of cases, I'm just throwing that out, but in a lot of cases, it might be, Oh, wow. Okay, cool. Whereas the natural pushback is hold up. What are you talking about? You know? And so Rob is constantly complaining about, you don't get the full story. You don't get the pushback. From the athletes. But I say that's true, but what I do like is that you get to see the athletes in their own space and their natural, like as writers, what I was trying to do when I interviewed an athlete, I always was trying to get them to be comfortable.
And to not give cliche quotes and just, okay, I'm speaking to the media. Let me have my guard up. I wanted them to just be their normal selves and then convey that to the audience or the readers. And you get that in the podcast, like with Kevin Garnett's with Paul [01:43:00] Pierce or what, you know, they're just being their natural selves.
They cussing, they talking like they would in the locker room. They're not worried about, you know, coming off a certain way for the media, but that tells you that shows you what they're really like. So I think there's a real value in that. So I like what they're doing. It is a little different from what we do, but.
You know, there's space for all of us. Do you feel that
RODERICK MORROW: animosity too? Cause like, I feel like the new media thing is also a little bit of animosity towards the old media where it's like, y'all ain't doing it right. We're, we're going to show you how to do it. And I'm, and I'm not gonna lie. I miss a little bit of the conflict because I do like the pushback.
I do think the media has a job to fact check and, uh, and, and to be there in the space to say, Hey, that thing you just said, you need to explain that a little bit more out. So I kind of missed that a little bit.
CHRIS BROUSSARD: Well, no, that's why I said you could listen to both because they're not journalists. They're in the media space now, but they're not journalists.
They're not doing [01:44:00] investigative reporting. They're not probing. They're just talking, which is cool. There's a space for that, but you still have to go to the real journalist if you want to get some pushback and another side of the story. And something like that. But, um, the, the thing is to athletes, they don't like being criticized, which is normal.
I mean, wait, who likes being criticized? I'm told Rob will jump on. I'm like, don't nobody like being criticized, you know, they used to say. Y'all didn't play in the NBA, you don't know what you talking about, you know, and try to play the the player card on you. But if you notice, they don't like being, uh, criticized by Charles Barkley, right?
Phil O'Neill, Kendrick ver you. They just don't like criticism, period. It is not whether you played or not. And so that's where I think maybe the animosity can come from, but you know what's happening. They're criticizing. [01:45:00] Yes. They're criticizing other players too. Cause what we do, what I do on television and the radio and what they're doing on their podcast, it's like you in the barbershop.
Debating who's better between Michael and LeBron. We're just doing it on national television or radio. And so we have to answer for it. I might see LeBron at a game or see, you know, somebody, and you have to answer for it, whereas when you in the barber shop on your couch, you can spout all this stuff. And never see a player and not have to answer for it.
So.
RODERICK MORROW: I am, I am kind of looking forward to our first podcast fight, you know, like we're like Draymond green seas, Pat Bev. And like, we just, the gloves come off. Like, we think it's a basketball fight, but we find out, Oh no, it's cause of episode seven, you got to go back and
CHRIS BROUSSARD: listen. Well, that's, that does make it interesting for the guys that still play, that have to.
Podcasts and our [01:46:00] players, current players. Cause you really have to answer for the stuff you say.
Can You Afford to Watch the NFL This Year? - That's Good Sports - Air Date 5-17-24
BRANDON PERNA - HOST, THAT'S GOOD SPORTS: Welcome to That's Good Sports, I am Brandon Perna, and if you want, you can sign up for That's Good Sports Minus. What's That's Good Sports Minus? It's nothing. You sign up, you give me your money, and then you EAT IT! You shut up, and you give me your money for nothing! That's why it's called Minus! I hope you do have a war chest of extra Funds, if you wanna watch every NFL game this season.
Start cutting costs, okay, for unnecessary things in your life. Baby food, heart medicine, car insurance, to make room for your NFL viewing expenses. The NFL will now have games on YouTube TV. For the Sunday ticket, Amazon Prime, Peacock, ESPN and now two Christmas games on Netflix. I know a lot of people are complaining, but if you remember, What Jesus said, who's birthday is literally on Christmas, What a coincidence.
But he said, [01:47:00] With man, this is impossible, but with God, capitalism will save us all. That is how you get saved. By me, Jesus of Prophets. What, if Harrison Butker can use Jesus to push some weird bullshit narratives, So can I, so can I. That's America. How we will consume NFL and sports games in general is changing.
And the almighty dollar still rules this evolution of screens. Personally, I already have Netflix. I've been paying for that shit since it was DVDs. So I really don't care that games will air on that streaming service. I have all of the damn streaming services, plus cable. I hate that I have to pay for it all, but it's kind of my job, so I justify it.
That said, I want to break down what this means for us viewers, how much it's going to cost us, and if it's a good or bad thing for us in the long run. And the answer might surprise you. No, it won't.
Let's go back 11 years to the exact moment it all changed. [01:48:00] DirecTV was king with its exclusive rights for NFL Sunday Ticket. If you wanted access to watch every game of your favorite team out of market, DirecTV was the only way to do it. I know, I had it when I lived in Sin City, Los Angeles. Yes, technically it's the City of Angels, but after what I witnessed on Hollywood Boulevard, it will always be Sin City in my heart.
We watch NFL football on our phones now, right? And we don't even think about how that wasn't a possibility 12 years ago. DirecTV changed that with the Manning Bros.
AD: So now's your chance to have football on your phone and football in your pants.
BRANDON PERNA - HOST, THAT'S GOOD SPORTS: Now I did a video review of that commercial in the early days of this struggling YouTube channel Which predates the NFL YouTube channel, by the way, the NFL didn't create a channel until 2014 So you had to rely on idiots like me to get a chance to see highlights from your team's games. Now highlights are thrown in your face [01:49:00] Face, anytime you open up your phone, they're no longer a treasure worth hiding, but a readily available foundation of life that is simply consumed like breathing air.
Now, I say all that to emphasize that getting access to the NFL on your mobile device was a huge shift in the NFL's approach to making their product more available. Part of me believes that's what they are doing right now by making games available on services like Netflix. You can also argue that it makes its reach more limited because not everyone has Netflix.
If I were you, I'd blame Tom Brady who broke the Netflix football cherry via his roast. Would you like a massage? Which. He has said, as a parent, he now regrets doing because it greatly affected his children. As a fellow father, I agree. And if any of you are out there, and you're in a, a rare, and I mean rare, more rare than winning the lottery type situation where Netflix asks you if they can host a roast in [01:50:00] your honor, that as a parent, you should say no.
Do not, do not do a net, If you're a parent. Unless, of course, you are Harrison Butker, then definitely do it right now. I find it hilarious that one of the most prepared quarterbacks in NFL history didn't do his homework yet. On what a roast is. It's also wild to me that Tom made sure to protect Robert Craft from the massage jokes, but failed to see how his recent divorce and having a teammate that killed himself in prison, who was in prison for murder, might be, uh, the things that the comedians go hard on and ultimately offend and affect his family.
Anyway, why is this shift to streaming services happening? Duh, it's it's money right? It's money. Netflix is reportedly spending close to 150 million per game for the two christmas games and this is actually a three year deal with a couple more games coming in 2025 and 2026. Now last season an average of [01:51:00] 29. 2 million people watched the nfl games on tv. That's why Netflix is willing to pay. In addition to that, Netflix is hoping to see the big subscriber boost like Amazon saw two years ago when it took over Thursday Night Football. I forget the numbers, but they were insane. Johnny, throw them on the screen.
And also what Peacock saw when it had its exclusive playoff game this year. While we all might publicly complain about this on Twitter, it turns out that a bunch of people who signed up for Peacock, uh, just for that game, um, Didn't cancel. Peacock saw 2. 8 million people sign up and subscribe and 71 percent of those news subscribers kept paying for Peacock I don't know if those subscription numbers will translate to Netflix Or how many people stayed signed up after those seven weeks because I was too lazy to look it up.
Netflix has two regular season games that look nice on paper right now, but the must watch aspect of those Christmas games is far less compelling. Plus, I think [01:52:00] in general, Netflix has a much larger piece of the streaming service subscriptions already compared to Peacock, so I don't know if they get the big boost.
But that's what they're banking on. Now, a benefit that doesn't really get mentioned too often in all of this discussion is that Thursday Night Football on Amazon is actually a better viewing experience than it was when the NFL Network hosted all of those games. On Amazon, you have multiple broadcast options plus Prime Vision, and for hardcore fans like me, that shit's cool.
I'm not sure if a platform like Netflix can up the ante with the presentation for just two games a year, and for a company that has, uh, little to no revenue. Live production experience, the Brady Roast was good, went off without a hitch, but according to my wife Jess, their Love is Blind reunion live show was a disaster.
If they fuck up NFL games,
Netflix will look more like Quibi or PlayStation Vue after Chief Steelers and Ravens fans get done with them. They're just starting to enjoy some success again. For Netflix, it's willing [01:53:00] To drop a giant chunk of change on NFL games, because they're proven to work. For them, it's a lot less risky than spending that kind of money on a series that flops.
Tanks. Space forces, if you will. Like the NFL, Netflix was king of streaming for a very long time, but as that market became widely more competitive, they have to make some power moves. Netflix is betting on a massive influx of new subs, but for those two games. And while it's not a playoff game, Christmas is a smart play as that's when we're all in a pretty good mood and we don't have issues spending a little more money.
What's 20 bucks when I just dropped a thousand on my dumb kids who do not entertain me like football and only bring me the same misery my football equally provides? I will gladly give this for entertainment. Here's the loophole the NFL discovered, okay? They have more games than they know what to do with.
Thursday night football survived waves and waves of criticism about player safety [01:54:00] because a stand alone primetime game in the middle of the week blew up. does numbers. The NFL realized it can still satisfy all of its TV agreements because it has 14 to 16 games every single week. Plus, the game on Peacock still had fucking commercials even behind the paywall.
They can handpick one or two of their games on any week and then sell that to Netflix. And not disturb their billion dollar TV deals with Fox, NBC, CBS, and ESPN. I also think the COVID year, where they had to reschedule games, showed the league how much maneuverability they had to move games around, like chess pieces.
Which is why we have games on pretty much everything. Every day of the week at different points this year. Then you had Christmas fall on a Sunday in 2022 and a Monday in 2023 and boom, holy fuck, the NFL destroyed the holiday once formally monopolized by the NBA.
DEEPER DIVE D: SPORTS GAMBLING
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now deeper dive [01:55:00] section D: sports gambling.
Is the sports betting industry a huge mistake? - Good Work - Air Date 2-9-24
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: In 2013, the American Psychological Association officially classified gambling as an addiction. Meanwhile, since its 2018 legalization, sports betting has generated a gangbusters amount of economic activity in the US $220 billion. In just the first five years it was legal. There are now over 16 million average monthly users of the most popular sports betting apps.
And next year, online sports betting revenue is expected to approach 12 billion dollars. But to understand this growth trajectory, we gotta talk about something called Daily Fantasy Sports. Daily Fantasy is an online version of Fantasy Sports. And according to my wife, a terrible reason to have my phone out during our kid's baptism.
Fantasy is when you pick a bunch of real players, assemble a fake team out of them, and keep trying. But around 2010, a new turbocharged version of fantasy came onto the scene, where you could set new lineups as often as every day, play in apps on your phone, and crucially, put money down on the results.
KENNETH VOGEL: So you [01:56:00] had two competitors that really arose to the top of the market here, DraftKings and FanDuel.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Kenneth Vogel is a New York Times investigative reporter who was part of a team that wrote a series of major stories about the betting industry's rise in America.
KENNETH VOGEL: And they made a business out of fantasy sports and allowed players to win. Wager, not wager, but put money on the performance of their teams.
They would push back against the use of the term wager there.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Even though gambling on sports was still broadly illegal, Congress had previously determined that fantasy sports were actually a game of skill, not luck, meaning that putting money on the results wasn't gambling. Which reminds me, a lot of an argument my high school friend Chaz used to make about the pullout method.
The gray area in which these fantasy companies operated was pretty controversial. Even at the time. A lot of state attorney generals and even some sportsbook CEOs publicly said that they considered Daily Fantasy to be gambling. But the industry saw it differently.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: So you don't view what you do here at Daily Fantasy?
Uh, FanDuel is [01:57:00] gambling. No. That's a word that isn't used very much around here, I take it.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Still, FanDuel and DraftKings clearly understood that they were operating in murky waters, and made a huge lobbying push to defend themselves. And they were pretty successful. By 2017, 19 states had passed laws explicitly legalizing daily fantasy sports.
But this effort wasn't just about creating a legal framework for daily fantasy. The industry's big kahuna was still out there, swimming around in the deep waters. Just waiting to be caught. I'm talking about full on sports betting.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Breaking news to the Supreme Court this morning, striking down the federal ban on sports betting.
Now it leaves it up to the states.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: When that happened, the industry was ready to get lobbying, thanks to their powerful network of relationships in state capitals that they built during their daily fantasy push.
KENNETH VOGEL: There was a lot of like, whining and dining. That was, that was my colleague, Eric Lipton, and a photographer who went out to, um, This is a party that, uh, was sponsored by the industry or by lobbyists who were representing the industry.
The lawmakers [01:58:00] were smoking cigars and drinking expensive scotch that was provided by the lobbyists and sort of schmoozing with them as the debate was unfolding a few blocks away in the Capitol.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: The industry's main arguments for legal sports betting, both then and now, are to fight black market gambling.
JASON ROBINS: There's this big illegal market, and there's no consumer protections, no tax revenue being generated. Why don't we just bring that in house?
MATT KING: A lot of states are understanding that it's really just common sense legislation to allow mobile sports betting. Uh, it raises tax revenues and it puts an illegal market out of business.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: And look, I know it's easy to go around bashing these corporate CEOs. Especially when they got this mid as hell Zoom background. What, is this a map of the lands you plan to conquer? Why do you have a Bla black and white photo of the industrial revolution behind ya. Come on, Matt. It could be worse. You've got some work to do, buddy.
But my point, which I'm making very clearly and without getting sidetracked, my point is that the gambling black market is a problem, and regulating it would generate [01:59:00] tax revenue.
TIMOTHY FONG: One of our biggest concerns, we have so much of the unregulated sports betting market, right? So these are the websites, uh, that are based in who knows where.
They take all electronic betting. You know, financing, so they're, they're not subjected to the regulations of the state. But trying to shut them down is impossible because you don't even know where they exist.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Now, it's impossible to know the exact size of the black market at this time, but some estimates had Americans illegally betting as much as 150 billion per year.
But the industry's second point was that if states did vote to legalize, It would instantly create tax revenue.
KENNETH VOGEL: One of the things that the industry, sports betting industry had going for it, you know, after 2018 was, uh, you know, it's, um, sort of a perverse way to think about it, but it was the pandemic. I mean, the pandemic put a real dent in state budgets.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: So the black market, the promise of tax revenue, state budgets, absolutely decimated by the pandemic. It was the perfect storm for sports betting companies to capitalize on and capitalize. It was
OLIVER BARNES: [02:00:00] There's a huge investor appetite around it. The companies are turning over massive amounts of money.
Everyone's very excited.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Oliver Barnes is a reporter for the Financial Times who's been covering the gambling industry both in the U. S. and the U. K.
OLIVER BARNES: Lawmakers are also quite excited, right? Because you're sitting in a state that's yet to, um, legalize sports betting. You have a whole load of tax revenues you can just switch on there overnight.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: But in reality, many states who have voted to legalize have seen less tax revenue than expected.
KENNETH VOGEL: The industry, the sports betting companies and the gambling trade groups push for lower tax rates.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: While lobbying for legalization in states like Kansas, the industry argued that the best way for states to maximize their tax revenue would actually be to tax betting companies less because it would create an easier market for the companies to operate in.
Okay, whatever you say, Mr. Businessman. Alright.
But in 14 jurisdictions that legalized and followed the industry's tax advice, revenues in 2022 were nearly 150 million less than predicted. And in [02:01:00] addition to negotiating lower tax rates, the industry also convinced many states to classify huge chunks of their advertising spend as tax write offs.
KENNETH VOGEL: When we talk about deductions for advertising and marketing, what we're really talking about is the promotional bets.
And so, what that is, is you see an ad and it says, get your first 100 of like, free bets, or like, we'll match your first 100, or what have you, and this is like an incentive that the gambling companies are using to bring in new customers. And what they did was they convinced lawmakers in most states to allow them to deduct the cost of these promotional bets.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: In 2022 alone, the industry gave out almost 1 billion in these promo bets, costing states more than 120 million in potential taxes. States are losing money on promotional bets. I'm losing money on promotional bets. You and I aren't so different after all, Kansas. Maybe this could work out between us. And though tax revenue generated by the industry post legalization has been underwhelming, you might say the opposite [02:02:00] about its approach to marketing.
AD: Spreads to cover, overs to hit, and chances to live bet from the first sound to the final whistle. Download BetMGM. You know what to do.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: The industry spent about 300 million on TV ads in 2023, and an estimated 1. 8 billion in local markets. This marketing push even made it to college campuses. One deal between Michigan State and Caesars Sportsbook let Caesars Caesarize part of its campus. Another between Colorado Boulder and Pointsbet gave the school 30 every time one of their students signed up for the app and placed a bet.
Granted, there was a lot of backlash to these deals. The lead gambling industry trade group now prohibits marketing on college campuses. And since then, Michigan State, Colorado, and other schools have canceled their partnerships. But what's so bad about these ads anyway? Getting caesarized sounds fun!
RICHARD DAYNARD: It's a public health issue.
Is that this is an addictive product.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Oh, I get it. Too fun. Richard Daynard is the lawyer who designed the litigation strategy against the tobacco industry, resulting in Big Tobaccy [02:03:00] coughing up over 200 billion dollars and changing the way they market cigarettes. We lied and told him we were 60 Minutes and he agreed to tell us about his next target, the sports betting industry.
RICHARD DAYNARD: There's the denial of, you know, of dangers. Presenting this thing as simply a harmless way to have fun. March 10th of last year of 2023. That was the day that sports betting was unleashed in Massachusetts. It was just massive marketing. You know, there'd be trash containers. It'd be on the side of buses, uh, as well as on, uh, you know, television.
Just about anything you turned on would have an ad for, you know, one of the companies.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Unfortunately, it's been a while since I've turned anything on, professor. Daynard's Public Health Advocacy Institute recently backed a lawsuit in Massachusetts against DraftKings, and its focus is on one of those fun tax write off promotional ads.
According to the lawsuit, DraftKings knowingly and unfairly designed a 1, [02:04:00] 000 sign up bonus. The 1, 000 comes in the form of additional bets, which customers could only get if they first deposited 5, 000. Risk 25, 000 within 90 days, and bet on events with worse odds than 3 to 1, which doesn't sound like I'm gonna get 1, 000.
RICHARD DAYNARD: The idea is for you to continue to bet, which is the way you develop and heighten an addiction, which is you keep at it, you keep doing it. We hope to, you know, encourage that. You know, other litigation, this is hardly the only deceptive ad running in the United States.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: And there is some backlash building.
TIMOTHY FONG: We don't see cannabis ads on TV, do we? We don't see a lot of tobacco ads on TV anymore. And all that has an impact on what people think and feel about that product, right? When you look at the gambling ads right now, they're all 120 percent positive.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Regulators in Ohio. Doled out almost a million dollars in fines last year to betting companies for advertising that customers could make free bets.
Massachusetts and other states have moved to legally ban advertising on college campuses. And all the way up [02:05:00] there in Maine, lawmakers proposed banning cartoon characters, celebrities, athletes, and entertainers from being able to appear in ads. Which might sound extreme to us here in America, but is actually very simple.
Similar to the way that lots of other countries regulate gambling advertising.
OLIVER BARNES: In the UK there's like a whistle to whistle ban on football matches. You can't advertise like during a football match. In terms of like TV commercials. Because of the advertising environment where you're bombarded with ads, it's very difficult to kind of escape that habit of like recurrent gambling.
DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: The UK has also banned gambling logos on the front of Premier League jerseys and other regulators wanna move even further. In Australia, gambling ads are banned during games between 5:00 AM and eight. And Belgium and the Netherlands have fully banned gambling advertising on TV, radio, newspapers, and in public spaces.
And these regulations are all a reaction to the way that gambling has proliferated in these countries post legalization. The UK Gambling Commission earlier this year said that as many as 2. 5 percent of their adult population could be problem gambling. Meanwhile in Australia, citizens lose more [02:06:00] gambling per capita than in any other country.
And some worry that if this continues If the U. S. isn't careful, we might not learn from these more mature markets.
The NBA’s Sports Gambling Issue Is Worse Than You Think - Hoop Reports - Air Date 4-27-24
HOST, HOOP REPORTS: On December 19th, 2023, four games were scheduled, setting the stage for an unbelievable turn of events.
I'm not usually one to gamble, and I've never placed an online bet in my life, but let me tell you, this was one of the most incredible sports bets I've ever seen. It was a four leg parlay, meaning four specific outcomes had to align for the bettor to claim the prize money. Here were the conditions.
Brandon Ingram needed to score the first basket in the Grizzlies vs. Pelicans game, Zach Collins in the Spurs vs. Bucs game, Steph Curry in the Celtics vs. Warriors game, and finally Jeremy Grant in the Sun vs. Blazers game. Each of these events was necessary for the bet to succeed. The odds were staggeringly set at 4, 428 to 1.
Translating to a mere 0. 02 percent chance of success. Yet on this day, one daring individual defied these odds, turning a modest bet [02:07:00] of 2 and 50 cents into an astonishing 11, 000 after researching other astonishing online sports gambling wins. Including two unbelievable six leg parlays on three point shots that turn 25 into over 100, 000, I gained insights into the world of online betting, specifically about prop bets and parlay bets.
Now, some of you might already be familiar with these terms, but for those who don't engage in betting, like myself, this was quite enlightening. Essentially, a prop bet is a wager on a specific occurrence within a game, rather than on the game's final result. For instance, instead of betting on the Warriors to win, one might bet on Steph Curry to score 50 points, Draymond Green to get ejected, or Klay Thompson to miss all his three point attempts.
You get the idea. A parlay bet, however, involves combining several of these prop bets. Each event included in the parlay must occur for the bet to pay out. This is precisely what led to Jontay Porter getting caught. He placed a bet that was so [02:08:00] obvious it triggered an alert from gambling sites. Actually, he made two significant errors.
The first mistake involved the prop bet set for him on January 26th, which were five and a half points, four and a half rebounds, which were One and a half assists and 0. 53 pointers made. If you're wondering why these aren't whole numbers, like five points or four rebounds, it's to prevent something known as a push.
A push occurs when the final result of a bet matches the set number exactly, meaning the bet neither wins nor loses and all wagers are returned. Well, just 4 minutes into the game, Jontay had already racked up 3 rebounds and 1 assist. This meant there were just 2 more rebounds or 1 more assist that would cause anyone who bet on him, including himself, to lose the bet.
As a result, he abruptly left the game, citing a re aggravation of an eye injury.
On the following day, during their daily report, DraftKings announced that the under on porter had been the most profitable bet for props that night. Then [02:09:00] on March 20th, in a game against the Sacramento Kings, a similar incident occurred. His over under bets for the night were set at seven and a half points and five and a half rebounds.
And just about three minutes into the game, Porter exited citing an illness and did not return.
This meant anyone who had bet on his unders immediately won the prop bet. While initially Porter's season statistics might make you question the logic of placing those types of bets. The truth is, due to injuries to Scotty Barnes and Chris Boucher, Porter's playing time had surged to about 20 minutes per game.
So, in the 4 games preceding this, he averaged 7 points and roughly 5 rebounds. But, anyway Once again, DraftKings reported that this outcome was the top moneymaker for the night across all NBA bets. What made these cases even more suspicious was the fact that the average NBA player prop bet usually falls between 1, 000 and 2, 000, but the bets placed on Jontay Porter were significantly higher, ranging from 10, 000 to 20, 000.[02:10:00]
In fact, during the March 20th game, one bettor placed a staggering 80, 000 on a parlay bet. This bet was that if Porter scored 7 points or fewer and grabbed 5 rebounds or fewer, the bettor would win 1. 1 million.
However, the sports betting operators flagged this as suspicious and froze the wager. This action triggered the investigation which NBA Commissioner Adam Silver Issuing a permanent ban on Porter. What's somewhat ironic about this situation is that Adam silver himself played a significant role in bringing sports gambling into the mainstream in the United States.
Back in 2014, when he wrote a piece for the New York times advocating for the legalization of sports betting, using the phrase out of the underground and into the sunlight to express his stance. He also emphasized in his writing. Any new approach must ensure the integrity of the game. However, the inherent challenge lies in the fact that sports betting, and maintaining the integrity of the game, simply cannot coexist.[02:11:00]
Over time, human nature's insatiable greed for money will inevitably take a hold and begin to exert its influence over games. This has been evident in numerous scandals throughout sports history. The 1919 Black Sox scandal, where eight players were accused of throwing the World Series for money. The 1980s Boston College basketball point shaving scandal where players manipulated scores for betting gains.
The 2000 Spanish Paralympics basketball scandal involving athletes faking disabilities for medals and sponsorships. The 2000 Hansi Kronje cricket match fixing scandal where a captain accepted bribes to influence match outcomes. The 2007 Tim Donaghy NBA betting scandal where a referee rigged games he officiated.
The 2011 Turkish football match fixing scandal implicating over 30 games. These are just a few examples of the widespread betting scandals that have plagued professional sports globally. They span various sports and nations, but share a common motive, manipulating game outcomes for financial gain. Apart from the [02:12:00] Jontay Porter incident, the true extent of betting related issues in NBA games remains largely unknown until they surface publicly.
However, given the substantial financial stakes involved, there's a valid argument to suggest that such occurrences may be more widespread than commonly perceived, implicating both players and referees. In fact, some retired NBA players assert that there's actually a significant number of referees involved in gambling activities nowadays.
RASHAD MCCANTS: Do you think it's another ref that's in the NBA right now that's like him? A club of them. I think it's a club of them. We clearly see the discrepancies in certain games where the swing for Vegas hits the numbers, right? These are elements that bookies know about, gamblers know about. Hey man, this is a game we need Luka out.
He gets two technicals before halftime.
HOST, HOOP REPORTS: One counter argument to this notion is that the NBA players and referees already earn substantial salaries. So, why would they risk their careers for additional money? [02:13:00] However, as highlighted earlier, the potential financial gains from betting can far exceed their regular earnings.
For instance, the individual who placed the 80, 000 parlay bet on Jontay Porter stood to make over 1, 000, 000, more than double Porter's salary. However, in the case of Tim Donaghy, despite having a successful career with a comfortable salary of 300, 000 per year as an NBA referee, he still succumbed to the temptation of making extra money through illicit means.
These days, when you think about prop betting and parlay bets, you realize there's a ton of ways to cheat the system. Like even though I've never placed an online bet and likely won't just spending a few minutes brainstorming gave me some ideas on how referees can manipulate outcomes without getting caught.
For instance, imagine placing a parlay bet on a player getting exactly 5 fouls, but his team still winning by 10 points. As a referee, or a team of referees, orchestrating such an outcome might not be too difficult without anyone noticing, but the [02:14:00] potential payout could be huge. And that was a quick example I came up with in 5 minutes, without any professional refereeing or betting experience.
Just think about what experienced individuals could do in this scenario. That example should give you a quick glimpse into the extent of betting that occurs in sports. To be fair, the NBA claims to closely monitor all activities, and even has an internal team consisting of lawyers and full time data scientists dedicated to investigating any irregular bets or line movement.
However, the reality is that Pandora's box of sports gambling has already been opened, and the methods of gamblers will only become more sophisticated over time. Consider this, if the NBA couldn't effectively stop James Harden from exploiting the rules to draw fouls for a significant portion of the 2010s, how can they hope to regulate an industry where transactions amount to 50 to 80 billion dollars every year?
CREDITS
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at [02:15:00] 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected].
The deep dive sections of the show included clips from The Rich Eisen Show, University of Iowa, The Daily Show, What's Wright? With Nick Wright, Edge of Sports, TYT Sports, the Karen Hunter Show, That's Good Sports, Good Work, and Hoop Reports. Further details are in the show notes.
Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get [02:16:00] instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion.
So, coming to from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.
#1632 SiliCON Valley: The False Promises, Enshittification Economics, and Misguided Adventures of the Twits of Tech (Transcripts)
Air Date 5/28/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast. Now, everyone knows the rule about not meeting your heroes because they'll so often disappoint you. Well, today, we look at the most disappointing yet most idolized false heroes of our day: the titans of tech and the zany hi-jinks they've been getting up to recently. Sources providing our top takes today include Jacob Ward, More Perfect Union, Decoder, Internet Today, Today, Explained, ColdFusion, There Are No Girls on the Internet, and Zoe Bee. Then in the additional sections half of the show, we'll dive deeper into "That word you keep using", in which tech bros misunderstand the world, "SiliCON Valley, Emphasis on the CON", "Microsoft the Destroyer", and "Thank You for Your Service", in which people doing good work, get fired.
When a tech company like OpenAI doesn’t get the dark message at the heart of science fiction - Jacob Ward - Air Date 5-21-24
JACOB WARD - HOST, JACOB WARD: A couple of quick thoughts on Scarlett Johansson and her threatening legal action against OpenAI. For anyone who doesn't know, [00:01:00] she says that she was approached back in September by Sam Altman saying, Will you please voice our new chatbot? And she said, No, thank you. And then two days before the demo, she says she was approached again, directly by him, and asked to reconsider. And before she had a chance to respond, they went ahead and debuted this new voice that sounds eerily like her, right? And it is a reference of course, to the 2013 film Her by Spike Jones and, you know, Sam Altman even says "Her" in a tweet that he put out around the time of the demo.
So, a couple of things. First, the utter railroading of normal inputs, you know, when you don't get permission for a thing, you do it anyway, is a classic... it's a hallmark of tech folks who think about democratic inputs only up to the point that they get in their way. That's been my experience, but two—and this is the big one I want to [00:02:00] talk about—is the lack of imagination and, in some ways, lack of understanding of the point of the art you are copying, in this case. So, the 2013 film Spike Jonze directed is about a utopian, technologically harmonious landscape. People living in New York and Shanghai in this new tech world that seems quite nice. But the commentary at the heart of the film, this is what Spike Jones says, is that it's about how human beings could not connect with each other even under those kinds of circumstances, or maybe even especially under those kinds of circumstances. Like, it's supposed to be not an embracing of that kind of technology, but using the technology to reveal something really broken in us, right?
And so the co opting of "Her", of the character from Her, is like, it reminds me of sales managers using Alec Baldwin's [00:03:00] incredibly traumatizing speech in Glengarry Glen Ross: "What's my name? My name is fuck you". You know, uh, "I wear a Rolex on my watch and you'll be taking the bus home". Sales managers use that to like exhort their employees to do a better job. I've heard story after story of people getting that, being shown that video as a part of a sales training. When in fact, that movie, David Mamet's script is all about critiquing the horror and the emptiness of that life and how having a terrible boss in a sales environment is the worst kind of sort of capitalist doom, right?
And so this feels so similar to me that you would use this character, who's supposed to typify the emptiness at the heart of humanity, that tech is trying and failing to fill, that you would use that for your product is just like...[sigh].
So, anyway. It's not going to hurt their business prospects, right? They're still making a [00:04:00] tremendous amount of money and they're going to make a tremendous amount of money and they're going to plow forward. I am interested to see the way that this changes the public relations strategy of OpenAI and their reputation in the world. Because, when this beloved actress goes hard at them, I think that's going to change their perception a little bit. But just the lack of imagination really galls me.
How Peter Thiel Got Rich | The Class Room ft. Second Thought More Perfect Union - Air Date 11-10-22
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: Thiel's good grades and familial wealth earned him a spot at Stanford University, for undergrad and law school, where he got into his first venture, an alternative student newspaper aimed at conservatives, the Stanford Review.
The publication was Thiel's response to what he perceived as a takeover by the "politically correct." It seemed designed to offend, calling the school's sexual assault regulations too strict, excoriating diversity initiatives, and attacking anything that questioned Western culture.
The Review was the beginning of Thiel's later network. Many of the students who wrote for or staffed [00:05:00] the far-right newspaper would end up as Thiel's future business partners.
Stanford is also where Thiel was introduced to philosopher and professor René Girard, who influenced Thiel's worldview. Gerard wrote about how humans intently imitate each other, and how that holds society back. He specifically pointed to humans' competitive nature holding back scientific and technological progress. Thiel really connected with this viewpoint, and it fueled his belief that monopolies are actually a good thing.
PETER THIEL: If you're a startup, you want to get to a monopoly. You're starting a new company, you want to get to a monopoly.
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: Before graduating, Thiel wrote one last op-ed for The Review, where he said that the PC alternative to greed is not personal fulfillment or happiness, but anger at and envy of people who are doing something more worthwhile. So, what was more worthwhile to Thiel? The money business. Peter joined up with a few young engineers building a new way to send payment digitally--pretty revolutionary in the late 90s. The company started as Confinity, a play on infinite confidence. It briefly became [00:06:00] X.com, as partner Elon Musk insisted, but eventually became PayPal. Staffing up, Thiel recruited some of his friends from the Stanford Review. The anarcho-capitalist views of that contingent were essential in the founding of PayPal, he explained at Libertopia 2010.
PETER THIEL: The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world. We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never gonna agree with you, through technological means.
And this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: You might think of PayPal today as a harmless mechanism for buying vintage movie posters on eBay. But the real goal was to completely destroy the global order of currency.
PETER THIEL: Well, we need to take over the world. We can't slow down now.
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: In a PayPal All Hands meeting in 2001, [00:07:00] Thiel told staff, "the ability to move money fluidly and the erosion of the nation-state are closely related," as they were building a system to move money fluidly. But just a few months later, Thiel took the money and ran. PayPal went public with an IPO.
PETER THIEL: We were the first company in the US to file after 9/11.
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: Shortly after, PayPal sold to eBay. Thiel's 3.7 percent stake in the company was worth $57 million. What happens when you give a guy who wants to remake the world into one that follows his own twisted political vision $57 million? Well, it's not great. Look at his investment in Patri Friedman, a young Google engineer, pickup artist blogger, amateur model, and grandson of Milton Friedman. Which, don't get us started on Milton Friedman. But Patri had a big idea: build artificial islands at sea to house lawless libertarian utopias. Peter Thiel got wind of this and offered Friedman $500,000 to quit his job at Google and get started on the project. Thiel [00:08:00] truly saw starting new nations as the same as starting companies.
Really, he said it.
PETER THIEL: Just like there's room for starting new companies, because not all existing companies solve all the problems we need to solve, I think there is also, there should also be some room for trying to start new countries, new governments.
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: But starting countries is difficult.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What if you start over in a new country, some African country with a few billion dollars and build up, build it from the ground up?
PETER THIEL: We've looked at this, we've looked at all these possibilities. I think the basic challenges are that, it's not that easy to get the country. you might have, it's, you might not want to be stuck with the people you already have. And then, actually, the basic infrastructure may actually cost quite a bit more. You want to do something that works much more incrementally and organically.
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: Friedman eventually left the Seasteading Institute and Thiel's involvement seemed over. But let's look at the last part of that quote: "do something that works much more incrementally and organically."
After giving up on starting a brand new country, Thiel set [00:09:00] about refashioning the country he already lived in. This is how Peter Thiel used the venture capital mindset to seize political power. Presumably to the chagrin of Thiel's friends at Libertopia, he immediately got involved with the CIA. His next company was Palantir, a surveillance and data tech outfit. And seed funding came from In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture capital firm dedicated to funding projects that would be helpful to the CIA.
The firm isn't officially run by the CIA, but there is a revolving door of staff between the two. And the firm is colloquially referred to as the CIA's private equity firm. Palantir eventually did help the CIA, and the FBI, and the CDC. And a host of other governmental organizations that would have gotten Thiel booed right out of Libertopia.
But to Thiel, it didn't matter that he didn't live in some anarcho-capitalist utopia, because he was building his own using his enormous wealth. Thiel exploited systems within the existing libertarian-but-only-for-billionaires system, like his tax trick. [00:10:00] ProPublica unveiled in 2021 that much of Thiel's wealth is held in a Roth IRA, a type of tax-free investment fund meant for retirement. The amount you're allowed to contribute is capped at a few thousand dollars a year. But in 1999, Thiel turned two thousand dollars he had in his account into PayPal stock, an investment which paid off. When Thiel was the first large investor in Facebook, that half a million dollar Angel investment immortalized by this guy who looks nothing like Thiel in the social network, was just a restructuring of his tax-free retirement fund.
He can eventually withdraw the over $5 billion in the account tax-free. The average IRA has 0.00008% of that. Thiel's Libertopia friends have to pay high taxes, but Thiel won't on a large portion of his wealth.
Then there's litigation financing. The ultra rich can actually gamble on court cases. They fund legal fees for a lawsuit, then take a percentage of the winnings if they pick the right side. It's completely legal. [00:11:00] And Thiel used it to silence free speech. After Gawker, an online news and blogging outlet, outed Thiel as gay, he set his eyes on destroying them. When Gawker posted a shadily-acquired sex tape of wrestler Hulk Hogan, Thiel bankrolled Hogan's lawsuit against the publication. Gawker was bankrupted, and Thiel made a profit.
Thiel uses his inordinate wealth and investment principles to get richer, to destroy the free speech of others, and to live in his own libertarian paradise.
Another big investment area is in ideas, pretty chilling ones. Let's look at the Dark Enlightenment Movement, which Quartz calls "an obscure neofascist philosophy" and media researcher David Golumbia calls "the worship of corporate power to the extent that corporate power becomes the only power in the world." One of the movement's loudest voices is blogger Curtis Yarvin. Thiel has invested heavily in Yarvin startups, basically funding a big portion of the Dark Enlightenment movement. And it's obvious the movement mirrors Thiel's beliefs: complete corporate [00:12:00] control.
Google's Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web - Decoder with Nilay Patel - Air Date 5-20-24
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: Can I put this into practice by showing you a search? I actually just did this search. It is the search for best Chromebook. As you know, I once bought my mother a Chromebook Pixel. It's one of my favorite tech purchases of all time. So this is search your best Chromebook. I'm going to hit generate at the top. It's going to generate the answer. And then I'm going to do something terrifying, which is I'm going to hand my phone to the CEO of Google. This is my personal phone.
SUNDAR PICHAI: Yeah.
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: Don't dig through it.
So you look at that and it's the same generation that I have seen earlier. I asked him for best Chromebook and it says, here's some stuff you might think of. And then you scroll and it's some Chromebooks, it doesn't say whether they're the best Chromebooks. And then it's a bunch of headlines. Some of it's from like Verge headlines. It was like, here's some best Chromebooks. That feels like the exact kind of thing that an AI-generated search could answer in a better way. Like, do you think that's a good experience today? Is that a waypoint or is that the destination?
SUNDAR PICHAI: I think, look, you're showing me a query in which we didn't automatically generate the AI.
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: Well, there was a button that said, do you want to do it?
SUNDAR PICHAI: But, let me let me push back, right? There's an important differentiation, right? There's a reason we are [00:13:00] giving a view without the generated AI overview. And as a user, you're initiating an action, right? So we are respecting the user intent there. And when I scroll it, I see Chromebooks. I also see a whole set of links, which I can go, which tell me all the ways you can think about Chromebooks.
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: Yeah.
SUNDAR PICHAI: I see a lot of links. So we both didn't show an AI overview in this case. As a user, you're generating the follow up question.
I think it's right that we respect the user intent.
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: Yeah.
SUNDAR PICHAI: If you don't do that, right, people will go somewhere else too, right? I think so. I, you know, so.
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: I'm saying the answer to the question. I did not write, what is the best Chromebook? I just wrote best Chromebook. The answer, the thing that identifies itself as an answer, is not on that page.
And the leap to, I had to push the button to Google pushes the button for me. And then says what it believes to be the answer, is very small. And I'm wondering if you think a page like that today is, that is the destination of the search experience, or if this is a waypoint, and you can see a [00:14:00] future, better version of that experience?
SUNDAR PICHAI: I'll give you your phone back. I'm tempted to check email right now out of habit.
Look, I think the direction of how these things will go, it's fully tough to predict. You know, users keep evolving. It's a more dynamic moment than ever. We are testing all of this. This is a case where we didn't trigger the AI overview because we felt like our AI overview is not necessarily the first experience we want to provide for that query because what's underlying is maybe a better first look at the user.
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: Yeah.
SUNDAR PICHAI: Right. And those are all quality trade offs we are making. But if the user is asking for a summary, we are summarizing and giving links. I think that seems like a reasonable direction to me.
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: I'll show you another one where it did expand automatically. This one, I only have screenshots for.
So this is Dave Lee from Bloomberg did a search. He got an AI overview and he just searched for JetBlue Mint Lounge, SFO. And it just says the answer, which I think is fine. And that's the answer. If you swipe one over, I cannot believe I'm letting the CEO of Google swipe on my camera roll, but if you swipe one [00:15:00] over, you see where it pulled from. You see the site it pulled from. It is a word for word rewrite of that site. This is the thing I'm getting at, right? The AI generated preview of that answer. If you just look at where it came from, it is almost the same sentence that exists on the source of it. And that to me, that's what I mean. It's at some point that the better experience is the AI preview. And it's just the thing that exists on all the sites underneath it. It's the same information.
SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, the thing with Search, we handle billions of queries, you can absolutely find a query and hand it to me and say, could we have done better on that query? Yes, for sure. But when I look across, in many cases, part of what is making people respond positively to AI overviews is the summary we are providing clearly adds value, helps them look at things they may not have otherwise thought about. If you aren't adding value at that level, I think people notice it over time. And I think that's a bar you're trying to meet. [00:16:00] And, our data would show over 25 years, if you aren't doing something which users find valuable or enjoyable, they let us know, right away. Over and over again, we see that. And through this transition, everything is the opposite. It's one of the biggest quality improvements we are driving in our product.
People are valuing this experience. So there's a general presumption that people don't know what they are doing, which I disagree with strongly. People who use Google are savvy. They understand. And I can give plenty of examples where I've used AI overviews as a user. Oh, this is giving context. Or, maybe there are this dimensions I didn't even think in my original query. How do I expand upon it and look at it? Yeah.
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: You've made oblique mention to OpenAI a few times, I think.
SUNDAR PICHAI: I actually haven't, I think--
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: you keep saying others, there's one other big competitor that is, I think a little more--
SUNDAR PICHAI: You're putting words in my mouth, but that's okay.
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: Yeah. Okay. Well, I would say, I saw OpenAI's [00:17:00] demo the other day of GPT 4.o, Omni. It looked a lot like the demos you gave at IO, this idea of multimodal search, the idea that you have this character you can talk to, you had gems, which was the same kind of idea. It feels like there's a race to get to kind of the same outcome for a search-like experience or an agent-like experience. Do you feel the pressure from that competition?
SUNDAR PICHAI: Well, I mean, this is no different from Siri and Alexa and we worked in the industry, I think when you're working in the technology industry, I think there is relentless innovation. We felt a few years ago, all of us building voice assistants, you could have asked the same version of this question, right? And, what was Alexa trying to do and what was Siri trying to do? So I think it's a natural extension of that. I think you have a new technology now. And it's evolving rapidly. I felt like it was a good week for technology. There was a lot of innovation I felt on Monday and Tuesday and so on. That's how I feel.
And I think it's going to be that way for a while. I'd rather have it that way. You'd rather be in a [00:18:00] place where the underlying technology is evolving, which means you can radically improve your experiences which you're putting out. I'd rather have that anytime than a static phase in which you feel like you're not able to move forward fast.
I think a lot of us have had this vision for what a powerful assistant can be. But we were held back by the underlying technology not being able to serve that goal. I think we have a technology which is better able to serve that. That's why you're seeing the progress again.
So I think that's exciting. To me, I look at it and say we can actually make Google Assistant a whole lot better. You're seeing visions of that with Project Astra. It's incredibly magical to me when I use it. I'm very excited by it.
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: It just brings me back to the first question I asked, language versus intelligence. To make these products, I think you need a core level of intelligence. Do you have in your head a measure of this is when it's going to be good enough? Or I can trust this? On all of your demo slides and all of OpenAI's demo [00:19:00] slides, there's a disclaimer that says, check this info.
And to me, it's ready when you don't need that anymore. You didn't have "check this info" at the bottom of the 10 blue links. You don't have check this info at the bottom of featured snippets necessarily.
SUNDAR PICHAI: Right. You're getting at a deeper point where hallucination is still an unsolved problem, right? In some ways, it's an inherent feature. It's what makes these models very creative. It's why it can immediately write a poem about Thomas Jefferson in the style of Nilay. It can do that, right? It's incredibly creative.
But LLMs aren't necessarily the best approach to always get at factuality, which is part of why I feel excited about Search, because in Search, we are bringing LLMs in a way, but we are grounding it with all the work we do in Search and laying it with enough context, I think we can deliver a better experience from that perspective.
I think the reason you're seeing those disclaimers is because of the inherent nature, right? There are still times [00:20:00] it's going to get it wrong. But I don't think I would look at that and underestimate how useful it can be at the same time. I think that would be a wrong way to think about it.
Google Lens is a good example. When we did Google Lens first, when we put it out, it didn't recognize all objects well. But the curve year on year has been pretty dramatic, and users are using it more and more. We get billions of queries now. We've had billions of queries now with Google Lens. It's because the underlying image recognition, paired with our knowledge entity understanding has dramatically expanded over time.
So I would view it as a continuum. And I think, again, I go back to this saying, users vote with their feet, right? Fewer people used Lens in the first year. We also didn't put it everywhere. Because we realized the limitations of the product.
NILAY PATEL - HOST, DECODER: When you talk to the DeepMind Google brain team, is there on the roadmap a solution to the hallucination problem?
SUNDAR PICHAI: It's Google DeepMind, but are we making progress? Yes, we [00:21:00] are. We have definitely made progress, when we look at metrics on factuality year on year. So we're all making it better. But it's not solved.
Are there interesting ideas and approaches which they are working on? Yes. But time will tell. But I would view it as LLMs are an aspect of AI. We're working on AI in a much broader way. But it's an area where I think we're all working definitely to drive more progress.
Elon's Reputation is Hurting Tesla - TechNewsDay - Internet Today - Air Date 4-4-24
ELIOT, HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: A lot of the appeal that Tesla cars have had for a while among consumers is increasingly at odds with the fact that the man who owns Tesla is a total jackass. Ten years ago, Teslas were among the few all-electric vehicles available on the market, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk was a super genius who was going to save the world.
Fast forward to more recent years though, and there's a lot more options for electric cars out there, while Tesla hasn't had a major model redesign in about half a decade. Instead, apparently focusing all of its design [00:22:00] efforts on the stupidest car ever. Just the dumbest thing you've ever seen in your life.
RICKY, CO-HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Saw another one on the road yesterday and gave it a very enthusiastic thumbs down out the window. And I saw him see my thumb. And I know it hurt. Because he's the one spending the money.
ELIOT, HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Elon! People are giving me a thumbs down on my car!
RICKY, CO-HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Can you somehow block them from the freeway, Elon?
ELIOT, HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: And yeah, meanwhile, Elon Musk's public persona, and the public perception of him, has steadily drifted from real-life Tony Stark to "what would happen if Howard Hughes and Henry Ford had a baby with all of their worst traits and also a crippling addiction to social media and ketamine?"
RICKY, CO-HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Now unlike most titans of industry who mostly avoid the spotlight, and for good reason, Elon Musk has gone out of his way to not only provide a clear look into his mind via social media, he's purchased a popular social media platform and reshaped it in his image. An image that a lot of people find incredibly off-putting. But is it bad for business? On the Twitter side, yes, [00:23:00] obviously. But what about Tesla? We've heard people online and in real life talk about Elon's dumb bullshit affecting their car shopping preferences for a while now. But now, we finally have the data. Here's Reuters just this week. "The ranks of would-be Tesla buyers in the United States are shrinking, according to a survey by market intelligence firm Caliber, which attributed the drop in part to CEO Elon Musk's polarizing persona. While Tesla continued to post strong sales growth last year, helped by aggressive price cuts, the electric vehicle maker is expected to report weak quarterly sales as early as Tuesday."
ELIOT, HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: And yeah, side note, so Reuters published this on Monday, and that quarterly sales prediction, it proved to be accurate.
RICKY, CO-HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Uh oh!
ELIOT, HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Here's the Washington Post on Tuesday. "The delivery numbers reported Tuesday come as Tesla faces soft demand for electric vehicles, high interest rates, a string of lawsuits against its technology, and controversy surrounding its chief executive, Elon Musk. Musk had warned during a January [00:24:00] earnings call that Tesla would experience a 'notably lower growth rate' this year as the company invests in a next generation vehicle it plans to start building in 2025. Tesla said it delivered 387,000 vehicles to customers in the first quarter, down 20 percent from the previous quarter and down more than 8 percent year-over-year. Ahead of Tuesday's report, Wall Street analysts generally expected Tesla to report 443,000 deliveries for the quarter, according to Wedbush Securities Analyst Dan Ives. Tesla shares fell 4. 9 percent on Tuesday."
RICKY, CO-HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: So yeah, Musk said straight up, this would be a bad quarter. So Wall Street analysts tamped down expectations, and the numbers still somehow managed to be even worse than those lowered expectations.
Anyways, back to that Reuters article: "Caliber's consideration score for Tesla, provided exclusively to Reuters, fell to 31 percent in February, less than half of its high of 70 percent in November 2021, when it started tracking consumer interest in the brand. [00:25:00] Tesla's consideration score fell 8 percentage points from January alone, even as Caliber's scores for Mercedes, BMW, and Audi, which produced gas as well as EV models, inched up during that same period, reaching 44 to 47 percent. Caliber cited strong associations between Tesla's reputation and that of Musk for the scores.
"'It's very likely that Musk himself is contributing to the reputational downfall,' Caliber CEO Shahar Silberschatz told Reuters, saying his company's survey shows 83 percent of Americans connect Musk with Tesla."
That's what happens when you become the face of your big company, and--
ELIOT, HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: This is what happens when you refuse to take our patented advice,
RICKY, CO-HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: to simply shut the fuck up!
And no, he went and did the other thing. He opened the fuck up. He bought a social media platform and continued to post.
ELIOT, HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Yeah. It is wild, like this was--
RICKY, CO-HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: And he said everyone has to read my posts, and MrBeast's posts. You have to. You will see that MrBeast video about being locked in a [00:26:00] grocery store 25 fucking times this week. I don't care who you are! Not Mr. Beast's fault. Elon Musk, clearly with his foot on the scale.
ELIOT, HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Yeah, I mean, people associate Elon with Tesla, which at one point was a great, it was a great asset. Wow. Not only are these cars cool, but Elon's pretty cool too.
RICKY, CO-HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Yeah. I can drive a car just like that guy.
ELIOT, HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Yeah. He's going to make us all live on Mars. Yeah. And it's gonna be awesome, and he's gonna save the earth, and
RICKY, CO-HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: And he's building solar panels into roof tiles!
ELIOT, HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Yeah, we're all gonna have roofs that look like roofs, but they're solar roofs. And he's gonna save those children trapped in that cave, with giant, bullet-shaped, rigid submarine.
RICKY, CO-HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: Yep, and he's gonna dig a big tunnel.
ELIOT, HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: And we're all gonna be getting in tunnels, and getting around real fast. Bye bye traffic!
RICKY, CO-HOST, TECHNEWSDAY: But yes, as you can imagine, being that popular and the face of a company so large and so reliant on your image and marketing of it, could end up being detrimental when you inevitably turn into an alt right asshole.
Crypto’s crown prince in court - Today, Explained - Air Date 10-3-23
SEAN RAMESWARAM - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Where did Sam [00:27:00] Bankman Fried fit into that world?
ZEKE FAUX: Sam was a schlubby guy. His uniform was cotton shorts, an FTX t-shirt, and then really messy, curly hair. He acted like he had no respect for the traditional institutions of, whether that was Washington or the venture capital world or Wall Street, and yet all the people in these various worlds were obsessed with him and competing to hand him billions of dollars. You know, the U. S. Senate were inviting him to DC.
CORY BOOKER: So, Mr. Bankman Fried, I'm going to interrupt you because I've only got 30 seconds left, and I'm offended that you have a much more glorious afro than I once had. Um, uh, so really quick...
ZEKE FAUX: So, he created this image that he was the guy who understood it all, kind of like the only honest guy in crypto, if you can believe it.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: He worked at a Wall Street trading firm called Jane Street. And it's a very [00:28:00] successful trading firm and his pedigree and background at Jane Street is part of what helped him get to the level that he got to.
Well, what SBF did was he operated under this philosophy of effective altruism. It basically says you make money to give away money.
ZEKE FAUX: Sam made his first money in crypto with this one weird trick. Back in 2017, Bitcoin, on a Japanese Bitcoin exchange where Japanese people traded, cost $11,000. And in the United States you could buy one for $10,000. So, this is something that's unheard of in mainstream finance, but in theory, you could buy one Bitcoin on an American app, zap it over to a Japanese app, and make a thousand bucks right there. So, not only did he do it, but he immediately figured out how to borrow tens of millions of dollars to do it at, as much of this as possible. And within a few [00:29:00] weeks, he had exploited this arbitrage to the tune of something like 20 million bucks in profit. This profit seeded his crypto trading hedge fund, which he named Alameda Research. Sam picked the name Alameda Research because it sounds innocuous. Banks at the time did not want to be involved in crypto.
SAM BANKMAN-FRIED: We just knew that was going to be a thing. And that if we named our company, like, Shitcoin Day Traders, Inc., like, they'd probably just reject us. But, I mean, no one doesn't like research.
ZEKE FAUX: Alameda Research was a hedge fund that traded all kinds of cryptocurrencies and, in theory, exploited, you know, cool arbitrages like this Japanese one. After a couple years of doing that, he, as he tells the story, realized that many of the crypto exchanges where Alameda did business were pretty subpar compared to the ones [00:30:00] that he was familiar from his time on Wall Street. And that's when he decided to start FTX.
REPORTER: Why create an exchange when there were already so many big global players out there?
SAM BANKMAN-FRIED: Yeah, I mean, the basic answer is that we didn't think any of them had nailed it.
ZEKE FAUX: FTX, which was a crypto exchange, which basically just means it's an app where you can trade all these crypto coins similar to E*TRADE or Robinhood or something like that. His app wasn't even the most popular one, but so many people were trading crypto that venture capitalists had valued FTX at 32 billion dollars.
REPORTER 2: Today, your valuation is?
SAM BANKMAN-FRIED: It's, uh, 32 billion internationally and, uh, 8 in the U. S.
REPORTER 2: How old is your company?
SAM BANKMAN-FRIED: About two and a half years.
REPORTER 2: Two and a half years. Okay, let's talk about...
SEAN RAMESWARAM - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: When do we start to see cracks?
ZEKE FAUX: FTX's downfall [00:31:00] began with a sarcastic tweet. One of Sam's lieutenants had written something nice on Twitter about Sam's biggest rival, "CZ", the head of Binance, which was the biggest crypto exchange. Under this nice post, Sam wrote sarcastically,
TWEET VOICEOVER: Excited to see him repping the industry in DC going forward. Uh, he is still allowed to go to DC, right?
ZEKE FAUX: The joke is that he's an international fugitive, which is not entirely untrue, but also not a very nice thing to joke about on Twitter. A couple weeks after this tweet an article came out in the crypto news site CoinDesk that was kind of confusing, but it revealed that Sam's hedge fund Alameda owned quite a lot of a token called FTT, which was essentially stock [00:32:00] in Sam's exchange FTX. Then, also on Twitter, Sam's rival "CZ" tweeted that he would be selling off his FTT tokens. He wrote,
TWEET VOICEOVER: We won't pretend to make love after divorce. We're not against anyone, but we won't support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs.
ZEKE FAUX: I mean, this wouldn't necessarily seem like a big deal that, you know, a rival company is selling its stock in your company, but it kind of set off a run on FTX where other people who owned FTT tokens started to sell them too. And as the price went down, it made people start to worry about the stability of FTX, and investors who had sent money to FTX to use it to bet on other cryptocurrencies started taking their money out. In theory, this shouldn't be a problem. If people have sent money to [00:33:00] FTX to gamble with, then FTX should have no problem giving the money back. Sam went on Twitter and told people,
TWEET VOICEOVER: FTX is fine. Assets are fine.
ZEKE FAUX: But it turned out FTX did not have the money that it needed to repay clients and after more and more tried to ask for their money back, eventually it was revealed that FTX did not have this money. In fact, eight billion dollars had somehow disappeared and FTX had to file for bankruptcy.
SEAN RAMESWARAM - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Where was all that money?
ZEKE FAUX: It turned out that when you sent a thousand bucks to FTX to buy some "doggie coin", or dogecoin, and then you saw in the app, you know, that you now owned, you know, 2000 doge coins, in fact, what was really going on is that that thousand dollars that you had sent in was being lent to Sam's hedge fund, Alameda [00:34:00] Research, which was taking it to other exchanges to make all sorts of crazy bets.
SEAN RAMESWARAM - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Is that legal, Zeke?
ZEKE FAUX: No. After FTX declared bankruptcy, I contacted Sam and said, I'd like to talk about what had happened and hear his side of it. So, I flew down to the Bahamas and we spent 11 hours, basically trying to answer that question.
His argument is that many of the people who traded on FTX were these hedge funds, like Alameda, and that part of the deal was that FTX would give them loans that were secured by assets. And since this is a crypto world, the security was not gold or real estate or something like that. It was random coins. So, his explanation was that the borrowing was permitted, the customers should have been [00:35:00] aware of it, and that he did not realize how out of hand it gotten.
SAM BANKMAN-FRIED: Some part of it was just literal distraction. I really should have spent some time each day taking a step back and saying, What are the most important things here? Right? And, like, how do I have oversight of those and make sure that I'm not losing track of those? And frankly, I did a pretty incomplete job at that. I spent a lot...
ZEKE FAUX: The idea that he would just not count his money to the point that eight billion dollars could just go missing without him knowing, it just seemed really implausible to me
SEAN RAMESWARAM - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: It sounds like he was trying to tell you a story. What do you think the real explanation was in that moment?
ZEKE FAUX: The amazing thing is that Caroline Ellison, the CEO of Alameda, she had actually told her version of the story to all of the employees in a way that I found to be more credible. [00:36:00] In November, 2022, while FTX was in this financial distress, there was a moment where it looked like Sam's rival "CZ" was actually going to bail out FTX and buy it. So, for a couple of days there, the people at FTX kind of thought they were in the clear. And during that time, Caroline Ellison called a meeting of all her employees at Alameda. And at this meeting, she essentially confessed. She said to all the employees, Hey, I'm really sorry, but Alameda has taken out all these loans from FTX and we invested it in illiquid, which means hard to sell, things. And like, that's why we're in this trouble. But good news is, you know, "CZ" is bailing us out and hopefully the customers can get all their money back from him. And the employees were just like floored and they said, Wait, who knew that Alameda [00:37:00] was borrowing the customer funds for it's crazy crypto bets? And Caroline said, me, Sam, and then two other top lieutenants. And then one of the employees said, Well, who decided to do this? And she said, um, Sam, I guess.
The prosecutors who are now trying Sam have a recording of this meeting. So, this is Caroline who thinks that no one will ever find out and they're in the clear, in the moment, admitting to the crime. Which I think is, uh, pretty strong evidence.
The Entire OpenAI Chaos Explained - ColdFusion - Air Date 11-27-23
DAGOGO ALTRAIDE - HOST, COLDFUSION: On the 22nd of November, only five days after he was fired, OpenAI announced that they'd reached an agreement with Sam, and they had a new board, too. Sam posted on his X account that he was excited to return to OpenAI and continue the strong partnership with Microsoft.
Greg Brockman also came back into the fold, announcing his return with a picture. [00:38:00] Except for Adam D'Angelo, the old board members had all left. They were replaced by Brett Taylor, the former co CEO of Salesforce, and Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary. Emmett Shearer, who was the interim CEO for just 72 hours, seemed to be happy with the outcome, judging from his tweet.
So, just as abruptly as it started, the five day long saga ended with Sam Altman back at the wheel. Now, the major question is, why did the board fire their CEO in the first place? The answer is complicated and murky. There is no official explanation, only rumours and speculation so far. But, based on some reports, we can piece together some possible factors.
Please keep in mind that this is just the situation at the time of writing. The board claimed that they had some disagreements with Sam about how the company was run, and also that Sam wasn't always truthful to them. This seems like a bit of a weak reason to fire a CEO who was negotiating a deal to sell [00:39:00] shares to investors at a whopping $86 billion valuation.
That should be a big achievement for any company, but OpenAI is not a typical company. It's a bit different to the other tech giants out there. In a nutshell, OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non profit with a mission to create artificial intelligence that would benefit humanity. At its formation, it had a celebrity team of founders, including Elon Musk. Musk would leave in 2018 due to a conflict of interest. Since then, Sam Altman has been leading the firm.
He established a for profit arm that raised billions from Microsoft. The main reason was to fund the expensive research and development for their AI models. Sam Altman was in charge of the for profit section. However, the whole firm was set up in such a way that the non profit faction had the ultimate power and it was controlled by the board members.
This odd structure left Sam and Microsoft at the mercy of the board, and they were skeptical of corporate expansion. Besides Sam [00:40:00] Altman and Greg Brockman, other board members included Ilya Sutskever. We've already mentioned him quite a few times now—he is a prominent researcher in the AI field and is very vocal about AI safety.
Then there's Adam D'Angelo, a former Facebook executive and co founder of Quora. There were other notable names on the board. It would seem like there's an ethos struggle within the company—does OpenAI go all out and try to make as much money as possible? Or do they stick to their core value of making AI that will benefit humanity?
Sam has a knack for spotting trends, though he's been working on some other side projects that were beyond the reach of OpenAI's safety conscious board. One project that raised some eyebrows was WorldCoin. It was a crypto venture that used eyeball scanning technology, and was marketed as a potential solution for AI induced job losses—a stepping stone to universal basic income.
He was also toying with the idea of launching his own AI chip making venture to reduce the over reliance on NVIDIA. He reached out to sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East for a [00:41:00] potential investment in the realm of tens of billions of dollars. Additionally, he pitched to SoftBank Group another multi billion dollar investment, this time in a company he planned to start with former Apple design maestro, Johnny Ive.
The focus was AI oriented hardware. These projects were seen as distractions by some of the board members. They wanted their CEO to focus on OpenAI and its core mission. To escalate matters even more, Sam found himself in conflict with Sutskever, who formed a new team in July within the company dedicated to controlling future, "Super intelligent AI systems." the dispute reached its boiling point in October when, according to a source familiar with the relationship, Altman made a move to reduce Sutskever's role in the company.
Fast forward to November 6th. It was the day that OpenAI hosted its first developer conference in San Francisco. Sam Altman made several announcements regarding customized versions of ChatGPT. It's going to enable users to make task specific chatbots. These custom GPTs might operate [00:42:00] independently in the future. That's a major red flag for safety concerns.
And the last reason—a possible AGI breakthrough. According to Reuters, an additional concern may have been simmering within the company. The report suggests that some staff researchers penned an internal letter to the board, cautioning about the discovery of an advanced AI with the potential to pose a threat to humanity.
These researchers flagged the potential danger of this new model in their letter, but did not specify the exact safety concerns. There has been no official statement from OpenAI regarding these letters. But they did acknowledge a project called Q*.
ANDREW CHANG: Because first, I need to be real with you. It is very hard to know right now what Q* actually is.
We know from Reuters reporting that, according to their sources, it may be some kind of powerful artificial intelligence discovery at OpenAI. The company behind ChatGPT and that there are fears it is so powerful it could [00:43:00] threaten humanity. That sounds really dramatic, but this discovery was apparently alarming enough that at some point after a group of OpenAI researchers took their concern to the board—like, "Oh my god, are you all aware of what this company is working on?"—the CEO, Sam Altman, was fired.
DAGOGO ALTRAIDE - HOST, COLDFUSION: Now it gets a little murky here, but some believe that this project could be the highly anticipated AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, which is capable of outperforming humans in any economically viable task.
ILYA SUTSKEVER: The day will come when the digital brains that live inside our computers will become as good, and even better, than our own biological brains. We call such an AI an AGI—Artificial General Intelligence.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: It was a step towards Artificial General Intelligence. I know it sounds complicated, but simply put, it's artificial intelligence that is more powerful than humans. Now, OpenAI staffers believe that this could threaten humanity.[00:44:00]
So some of them wrote a letter to the board. This could also be the reason for the firing of Sam Altman.
Scarlett Johansson’s Open AI voice fight shows the need for consent in tech - There Are No Girls on the Internet - Air Date 5-21-24
BRIDGET TODD - HOST, THERE ARE NO GIRLS ON THE INTERNET: Full disclosure, I was already working on putting together an episode re watching Spike Jonze's 2013 movie, Her, starring Scarlett Johansson's voice as an AI assistant. I really wanted to compare and contrast what the movie thought AI integration with our life would be like and what it actually has been like 10 years later. I'm really excited that the movie Her is part of the public conversation right now because it's one of my favorite movies.
If you haven't seen it, I don't want to give too much away, but Scarlett Johansson is the voice of Joaquin Phoenix's AI software. The movie imagines a future where AI is less like Siri and more like a real human. People in the Her universe fall in love with AI. They have friendships and real meaningful relationships with AI, and that's partly because AI sounds like a real human person who speaks to you and behaves like a person would, not like a robotic voice.
And as I was [00:45:00] preparing for that episode, the whole thing with Scarlett Johansson really blew up. And the more I thought about it, honestly, the madder I got. Last night I was getting ready for bed and I was sort of angrily brushing my teeth, and I found myself thinking about this yet again. And the kind of chorus in my mind that I kept saying over and over to myself was that these tech guys just think they own whatever woman they want.
Because to me, this is not even really about Scarlett Johansson, it is about what happens when consent in technology is violated again and again and again. And how it erodes the trust that we should be able to count on being at the center of our tech experiences. And how it reinforces that the most powerful companies in our world, who are shaping our collective futures, consistently demonstrate that they cannot be trusted to simply respect people, especially when those people are women.
Okay, so here's what's going on. OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT and a major player in the AI space, has [00:46:00] been flirting with integrating voice technology to ChatGPT since around last year. But last week, OpenAI finally revealed a new conversational interface for ChatGPT that they called Sky. Yep, just like a lot of voice technology, Sky has the voice of a woman. But Sky also has a voice that is really similar to the one that Scarlett Johansson used to play the AI assistant called Samantha in the movie Her. But then, OpenAI suddenly disabled this feature over the weekend. Grand opening, grand closing.
And this comes after OpenAI's head, Sam Altman, who you might remember we made an episode about, he was fired for something, we don't totally know what, but it seemed to be related to his lack of honesty, and then he was rehired and is now basically doing whatever the hell he wants. Well, Sam Altman was talking up this integration and comparing it to the movie Her and talking about how we'd finally have AI that felt like a real human that you could be friends with, which is a plot line right out of the movie, which spoiler alert, I do [00:47:00] think that some of these tech geniuses might actually be low key misunderstanding the takeaway from the movie. But anyway...
So, shutting down this new voice technology after Sam Altman was driving so much anticipation about it, everybody, myself included, was like, what is going on, what's the story there? So then on Monday, we get the real tea, which is that Scarlett Johansson told Wired in a statement that OpenAI actually reached out to her to ask her to be the actual voice of their new conversational interface, and she declined, twice, and that OpenAI basically just used her voice anyway, or at least a voice that sounds a lot like her voice. And OpenAI's Sam Altman even tweeted a reference to her work in the movie Her when announcing that new chat JPT voice interface. So there isn't really a ton of plausible deniability on his part even.
Okay, so this is what Sky, OpenAI's, not Scarlett Johansson's, voice integration sounds like.
SKY CHAT BOT: I [00:48:00] don't have a personal name since I'm just a computer program created by OpenAI, but you can call me assistant. What's your name?
BRIDGET TODD - HOST, THERE ARE NO GIRLS ON THE INTERNET: And here is Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the A. I., Samantha, from the movie Her.
HER MOVIE CLIP: Well, right when you asked me if I had a name, I thought, yeah, he's right, I do need a name. But I wanted to pick a good one, so I read a book called How to Name Your Baby, and out of 180, 000 names, that's the one I like the best.
Wait, you read a whole book in the second that I asked you what your name was?
In two one hundredths of a second, actually.
BRIDGET TODD - HOST, THERE ARE NO GIRLS ON THE INTERNET: It sounds pretty similar to me, and ScarJo agrees. Here's what she told Wired in a statement.
"Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt, by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives, and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI.
He said he felt my voice would be comforting to people. After much [00:49:00] consideration, and for personal reasons, I declined the offer. Nine months later, my friends, family, and the general public all noted how much the newest system named Sky sounded like me. When I heard the release demo, I was shocked and angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference. Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word, Her, a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human.
Two days before the chat GPT 4.0 demo was released, Mr. Altman contacted my agent, asking me to reconsider. Before we could connect, the system was out there. As a result of their actions, I was forced to hire legal counsel, who wrote two letters to Mr. Altman and OpenAI, setting out what they had done, and asking them to detail the exact process by which they created the Sky Voice. Consequently, [00:50:00] OpenAI reluctantly agreed to take the Sky Voice down.
In a time where we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity. I look forward to resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected."
So I really applaud Johansson here, and I think this is the first time that there has been a legal dispute over a sound alike that is, as far as we know, not AI generated. And I think it could set a precedent for this kind of thing going forward, especially for voice actors and creative professionals who can't afford lawyer's fees or a big lawsuit if their likeness or voice is used this way without their consent.
Her statement is also just a good reminder that Johansson has been here before. She is one of the most targeted celebrity figures for AI deepfaked images. So, finding out that OpenAI actually asked Scarlett Johansson to work on this twice, and when she said no, they just found a [00:51:00] sneaky workaround to do it anyway, enrages me. It enrages me as a voice professional, it enrages me as a creative, and it enrages me as a woman. You know, when I say on the show that the exploitation of women is baked into technology in a lot of ways from the ground up, that these are features and not bugs, this is a great example of what I mean. It matters that a company like OpenAI would build their anticipated voice system in a way that has the exploitation of a woman baked into its earliest foundation. And this is not happenstance. It colors how they see women and other marginalized people as just available to take from in service of them making money to create their vision, a vision that by design ignores and exploits us. Like, don't these people understand that no means no?
I should say that OpenAI says that they did not actually steal her voice, but I also want to say that I 100 percent do not believe them at all. Here's OpenAI's statement.
"We support the creative [00:52:00] community and worked closely with the voice acting industry to ensure we took the right steps to cast ChatGPT's voices. Each actor receives compensation above top of market rates, and this will continue for as long as their voices are used in our products. We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinct voice. Sky's voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson, but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice. To protect their privacy, we cannot share the names of our voice talents."
So, here's my opinion about what's actually going on. I believe that they probably did work with a human voice actor and they probably intentionally picked a voice actor that sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. And I think they had this person ready to go, whether or not Scarlett Johansson agreed to do this or not. I don't think they really cared about actually having Scarlett Johansson's permission, and they were going to either use this sound alike or use Scarlett Johansson's real voice. Because in addition to his single word, "Her" tweet, Sam Altman, [00:53:00] the head of OpenAI, also said that the new AI voice technology, "feels like AI from the movies." openAI's chief technology officer, Mira Murati, said that that was all a coincidence.
But even still, it's like they want to have it both ways. They obviously want us, the public, to be associating their new technology with the AI in the movie Her, and they're clearly trying to capitalize on that for this rollout, but they want to have all of that and benefit from all of that without actually having the consent from the real human woman behind the voice in the movie that they're referencing. As Bethany Frankel might put it, it is a cheater brand.
Fascism and the Failure of Imagination - Zoe Bee - Air Date 5-9-24
ZOE BEE - HOST, ZOE BEE: Imagination doesn't make money, or at least it's not guaranteed to make money. Imagination means creativity, and creativity means risk. When you make something new, you don't know if it's going to be any good or if it'll even work in the first place, it's inherently risky. So you have to do this balancing act of being creative enough that [00:54:00] your ideas can sell, while not being so creative that your ideas are so new that they're scary. You can't have too much imagination. You need just enough imagination to come up with new stories, new iterations on old ideas, new sequels for established properties, but the way those stories are told, the underlying structures of them, have to stay the same. You're free to come up with new stories, as long as those stories fit within a three act structure, are written in standard English, and meet industry standards of form and style. Even in business, where people say they want innovation, what they really mean is innovation within certain boundaries. Imagination is for making small adjustments to pre existing, safe bets. We see this in education, too. When we teach students about the world, we teach them how to exist within it, not how to change it.
We teach them the status quo, how to solve equations, and how to write research papers, and how the government works. [00:55:00] We don't teach them to ask if those equations are the only way to solve the problem, or why research papers have to be written like that, or whether the government should work that way. We're not training students to imagine new ways of doing things, we're training them to do what an authority figure tells them to.
The premier example of this kind of education can actually be seen in everyone's favorite propaganda outfit, PragerU. Like I've talked about in another video, PragerU's lesson plans are bad. I think that this is all indicative of just how vapid PragerU's view of schooling is. Their lessons don't include real activities or real discussions because they simply cannot imagine a lesson that isn't someone standing at the front of a classroom talking at a bunch of children who are silently sitting at their desks with a worksheet in front of them. They say that they want to change the future of education in America, but what they're providing with these lesson plans isn't some kind of [00:56:00] educational revolution, it's boring.
Now they actually just recently came out with their first real class, something that is actually being used for real academic credit in New Hampshire schools, and I was thinking about doing a little video on it because when I was looking into it earlier, it looks so bad, and I think that it is just endlessly fascinating how PragerU sees education. So let me know in the comments if you want me to take a look at their econ 101 class so you don't have to.
But, anyway, all of these lessons, even their craftery art videos, all just come down to students following directions and doing things the right way. There's no room for imagination or critical thinking or creativity, because they don't care about that. They don't care about kids asking questions or expressing themselves or daring to do things differently. They care about kids doing what they're told.
But there's still a deeper question here. [00:57:00] Why do schools and businesses not value imaginative thinking? It's like they're afraid of imagination, like they can't risk people trying new things. But risk is only a bad thing if whatever you're holding onto, whatever the status quo is, is so valuable that you just cannot possibly chance losing it. And that's interesting, right? Like, we're all so invested in keeping things how they are that now we see any suggestion to change things as a threat. You can do whatever you want within the system we've given you, but don't you dare try to come up with a new system. Imagine things that fit within this box, don't you dare try to imagine a new box, or especially no box at all. The only value imagination has is to support our structures, not create new ones.
But what we need to remember is that these structures that we're living within [00:58:00] they're all made up. To quote Ruha Benjamin in her book Imagination Manifesto, Imagination does not just animate sci fi inspired scientific endeavors or explicitly creative pursuits like Broadway musicals, viral TikTok dances, and Jean Michel Basquiat's paintings. Imagination is also embedded in the more mundane things that govern our lives, like money, laws, and grades. Everything was imagined. Language, taxes, marriage, borders, democracy. They're all just ideas that we either collectively agreed to believe, or that powerful enough people forced us to. It's like roleplay. It's that suspension of disbelief.
Like, we all know that money is just pieces of paper, but we've all agreed to the social contract that says this piece of paper has value. That's what people mean when they talk about something being a social construct. These things are only as real as we all decide they are. [00:59:00] And that's all well and good, except, as Benjamin goes on to say, lest we forget. Designing cruel, oppressive structures involves imagination, too.
Early on in the making of this video, I was planning to title it Fascists Have No Imagination, but that's not quite right, is it? It's not that fascists don't have an imagination, clearly they do, it's the fascist imagination that allows people to imagine children as killers, imagine entire ethnic groups as vermin, and imagine themselves as the rightful rulers. Fascists have an imagination. It's just that their imagination sucks. Their imagination is cruel, rigid, and static, and this cruel, rigid, static imagination is what I'm calling the fascist unimaginary, and it lies at the heart of bigotry.
The fascist imagination puts people in boxes based on arbitrary traits, and then refuses to imagine that they could ever leave that [01:00:00] box. White supremacy cannot imagine Black philosophers. Patriarchy cannot imagine women leaders. Cisheteronormativity cannot imagine trans people existing. The fascist unimaginary shows up in our art, too.
We've been imaginative enough to invent dwarves and mermaids, but we couldn't possibly imagine Black dwarves or mermaids. We can imagine magic wielding TTRPG characters, but not ones in wheelchairs. We can imagine post apocalyptic sci fi super soldiers, but not ones who are trans. So, we do have an imagination, we've imagined so many things, all these systems and concepts and fictions, we just can't imagine any further. And that kinda doesn't make sense, right? How can we be imaginative enough to live in this world of concepts, but not imaginative enough to create new ones? What is it about the fascist unimaginary that has gotten us so stuck?
Note from the Editor on the misplaced excitement in private corporations pushing big technological advancements
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard [01:01:00] clips starting with Jacob Ward, discussing the lack of imagination among the tech elite who don't understand the value of art and culture they're crushing. More Perfect Union told the story of Peter Theil. Decoder spoke with and challenged the CEO of Google about the enshittification of their search. Internet Today discussed the influence of Elon Musk's nose diving reputation. Today, Explained, recorded last fall and before his conviction, discussed Sam Bankman-Fried. ColdFusion looked into the chaos at OpenAI when Sam Altman got fired and then rehired. There Are No Girls on the Internet explained the case of OpenAI getting a soundalike AI voice to Scarlett Johansson after she turned them down. And Zoe Bee described the terrible imaginations of fascists.
And that's 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 [01:02:00] 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 these 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. And 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 have just a few thoughts. I was thinking about the confluence of techno-optimism and the current state of hyper-capitalized private companies driving technological advances in ways that are both honestly, somewhat utopian and unmistakably dystopian at the same time. And I wonder myself, how do we get here in the big picture? And I thought about the last great age of [01:03:00] nationalistic pride in science driven by the Cold War and the Space Race, and realized that the last time people cared this much about science and advancement, it was basically socialized.
There was the GI bill paid for a bunch of People to go to college, and then even for people who paid for it themselves, the cost of higher education was extremely low. So that gave a stepping stone for everyone who is interested in the sciences to get into it. And then the big projects themselves that people could join up with we're also being carried out by the government, most notably the Apollo program. So I was glad to read that, I wasn't the only one making this connection while reading a new piece in the Atlantic about the Scarlett Johannson kerfuffle, the writer quotes another piece from 10 months ago about Sam Altman in which it is explicitly recognized that democratic control over scientific advances is not an option in our current society.
" As with other grand projects of the [01:04:00] 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we're no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality."
So, what I would argue, without getting too derailed into the current state of late neoliberal economics that has poisoned society for the last 40 years and sapped all ability for collective action through government because we've idolized corporations and the individuals who run them, but without getting too far down that road. I would argue that the excitement that people feel for the current age of technological advancement, for those who do, I don't put myself in that category, but for those who do, I feel like their excitement is being filtered [01:05:00] through the historic analogy of the Space Race era, which was democratically controlled, and from which many of the benefits were also democratically shared.
For instance, inventions famously like Velcro made by the government along the way during the space program, didn't become patented for private enrichment, but were made public as they were owned by all of us collectively. So this sort of, "where's my flying car" kind of nostalgia for an age of technological advancement that we hope might finally be upon us after feeling like we've been robbed of it, because, " if we went to the moon in the '60s we should be a lot further ahead than we are now," this sort of nostalgia and excitement is I think leading people to root for the success of private companies who are currently ascendant right now, in the same way that Americans and Soviets would have rooted for the success of their respective space programs.
But it [01:06:00] won't just be a small degree of difference between the outcomes of a successful government venture, any successful corporate venture. There's a growing recognition that corporations function as defacto feudal, dictatorial, fiefdoms, and they just happened to be within the context. Of democratically run countries. So the difference between corporations racing to remake the world with artificial general intelligence or to populate the galaxy rather than governments having control of such projects, along with the mandate to work for the good of all the people won't just be the difference between whose logo is slapped on the side of the project. It will be the difference between continued democracy as we know it and corporate feudalism and technocracy.
DEEPER DIVE A: THAT WORD YOU KEEP USING…
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with deeper dives on four topics. Next up. That word you keep using. Section B. Silicon valley emphasis on the con. Section C Microsoft, the [01:07:00] destroyer and section D. Thank you for your service.
How Tech Bros Get Sci-Fi Wrong - Wisecrack - Air Date 3-7-22
MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: The TLDR of Foundation is, One big brain man is so good at math. that he can accurately predict the future. He discovers that the galactic empire is doomed. So he takes a bunch of the best scientists to another planet to build a new empire.
A scientific meritocracy. The series is rooted in that old chestnut, American exceptionalism. Which as your 7th grade social studies teacher told you, it basically just means America is uniquely great. This notion especially took off after World War II, where America established its dominance. In its early chapters, Foundation seems to endorse this view.
But Asimov wrote the Foundation series over a long period, with a nearly three decade gap in the middle, and the core ideas he communicated changed to reflect the times. By the end of the series, Foundation had challenged the post war ideas at its core, exploring the follies of imperialism and exceptionalism within the context of Basically, the protagonist's initial goal of single handedly starting this new [01:08:00] world is sharply critiqued.
In fact, Asimov made it well known that he based the overall arc of the series on the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. But the big boys of Silicon Valley also have some more mainstream sci fi interests. Take Star Trek. We probably don't need to explain this classic to you. With its utopian federation of forces, planets, and exploration of complex social and philosophical issues.
It's a series defined by its idealism and total standing of justice and equality. People Who worked with Steve Jobs named his ability to push you to do seemingly impossible things his reality distortion field, a term straight out of the track. And real life Scrooge McDuck Jeff Bezos has been outspoken about the influence that the show has had on him.
He almost named Amazon a MakeItSo. com after Picard's famous catchphrase. Make it so. And the complex voice controlled computers of the Enterprise were a direct inspiration for Alexa. Perhaps most tellingly, Vezos ended his high school valedictorian speech with a Star Trek quote. He [01:09:00] said, Space. The final frontier.
Meet me there. Vezos also tacitly forced William Shatner to look at his childhood Trek fan art. Billionaires. They're just as embarrassing as us. So, we've established the enormous influence sci fi has had on Silicon Valley. And hey, in some ways, knowing that these people enjoy the genre is kinda cool. And when some of the most powerful people in the world are sci fi nerds, it's going to have an impact on the culture.
But even if they share the interest of the hoi polloi, their lives are so radically different from ours, that they may be taking away something totally different from our shared sci fi faves. Let's go back to Snow Crash, which is set in a real world dystopia. Everyone lives in burb claves, which are described as a city state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything.
Everything within these burb claves has been corporatized, including the law. Meaning that big corporations can say, legally kill you for minor criminal infractions. So if [01:10:00] you work for, say, Amazon, you would likely live in the Amazon burb clave. In the world of Snow Crash, corporations basically have full control over government and society.
Not that this could ever happen in our world. And this has forced those seeking freedom into the metaverse, a place free from corporate control. It's essentially an anarchist technocracy, and the only boundaries are set by the technology you have access to. This is where companies like Meta miss the point.
Because even if other companies contribute to the Metaverse, Meta is always going to have more control. If they host the servers, if their infrastructure is what it's built upon, then the Metaverse will never be free from corporate oversight. Meta isn't going to allow anyone within the coding shops to mess around with the source code, because the company has invested time, money, Money and brain power into its design.
The metaverse of Zuckerberg's dream is one that's been divided up into multiple corporate controlled walled gardens, each with their own terms of service and currencies. [01:11:00] This ironically resembles the hellish corporate reality of snow crash more than its anarchist digital metaverse here, a tech billionaire with the.
unique ability to turn a sci fi vision into reality seems to have missed the critique at the heart of that fictional vision. And this isn't the only example of a tech bro missing some vital points from their favorite content. Take Foundation. When Musk talks about escaping climate change by moving humanity to Mars, a feat that only he is aware of, brave or willing enough to undertake, it's easy to see the connection.
Musk gets to step into the role of the big brain man who anticipates our doom and works as a private entity to solve the problem. But in being the man who built and therefore owns and operates his proposed Martian colony, Musk also takes the role of the head of the meritocracy. He contributed the most, so he's in charge.
However, in painfully ironic news, That's the very concept that the Foundation series explicitly [01:12:00] disavows, but in Musk's fantasy, he is the exceptional man with both an idea and the scientific know how to realize it. Every launch that SpaceX undertakes has the underlying goal of building towards Mars colonies.
But a one man led colonization mission and foundation isn't the solution. It's a recipe for social collapse. So not exactly something the average tech billionaire should be looking to imitate, right? But we do have one tech pro whose role model is objectively, a pretty good guy and a true bald King. Jeff Bezos is such a big tracker that he says he idolizes Enterprise Captain Jean Luc Picard.
Which is interesting because Picard is defined by his strong sense of ethics and morals, arguably even more than other captains in the series. Whereas Kirk is brash and headstrong. Picard is measured and deliberate. Kirk will make mistakes and do the right thing eventually, while Picard will agonize over the decision [01:13:00] to avoid making the mistake in the first place.
Now, we're not claiming that Bezos doesn't consider all his options before making a decision. You don't get to be a big time capitalist baron without thinking things through. There is a disconnect between the example that Picard sets and Bezos public facing actions. Here's a couple of Picard quotes to show what we mean.
In First Contact he says,
STAR TREK CLIP: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.
MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: In Next Generation he says,
STAR TREK CLIP: First time any man's freedom is trodden on. We're all damaged.
MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: And also in Next Generation,
STAR TREK CLIP: I have to weigh the good of the many against the needs of the individual and try to balance them as realistically as possible.
MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: These aren't outliers. They all demonstrate [01:14:00] Picard's fundamental character. He's all about altruism and bettering mankind at large. In contrast, Jeff Bezos has a literally unspendable amount of personal wealth, which he keeps adding to.
JEFF BEZOS: It's fine being the second wealthiest person in the world.
That actually
MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: And Amazon has roundly been exposed for exploiting workers. Regardless of your stance on those issues, and whether or not you agree with Picard, Bezos's actions are clearly contradictory to the fictional man he idolizes. If Picard were real and he met Bezos, it's clear he'd bar his application to the Federation.
So, who cares Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos are big ol sci fi nerds with poor critical reading skills? Honestly? Everybody should, due to their outsized influence on government and society. This implication is especially stark when you compare the wealth of these heads of big tech to, say, national space agencies like NASA, which are vastly underfunded.
So our forays into the galaxy are yoked into a billionaire [01:15:00] space race that's enmeshed with the egos of the bros involved. What's more, big tech has a ridiculous amount of money to spend on lobbying, tailoring legislation to best suit their needs, arguably at the expense of everybody else. Zuckerberg and Meta are already trying to colonize the internet and developing nations, transforming it into some VR driven hyper monetized corpo land that would fundamentally change how we interact with one another.
Digital platforms have become a key aspect of our social interactions, and the people in charge of them have relative freedom to do whatever they want. Zuckerberg and the metaverse. Musk and his Mars colonies. Bezos. and wearing cowboy hats. They're all billionaire passion projects that either are or have the potential to fundamentally change reality for all of us in ways both tangible and conceptual.
Driven by their love for, but perhaps not coherent understanding of, sci fi, these platforms are shaping the world we live in and what we imagine the future could look like. With [01:16:00] so much at stake perhaps it's no wonder that William Gibson, one of the most prophetic sci fi authors of all time, once said that he has explicitly decided not to write certain ideas into his books because he worried that they'd be misunderstood and possibly imitated.
How Socialism Built Silicon Valley (To Defeat Socialism) - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 8-11-19
MARGARET O'MARA: We're at a moment of, um, you know, people aren't feeling particularly great about the tech industry.
So it's so much so that I find myself, um, I try to, you know, remind some critics of, well, you know, we are carrying around super computers in our pockets. Like there have been some upsides to this whole operation, but there's, but you're right. There's always been a government presence and it's both in the kind of Keynesian, you know, pour money into the system of the, you know, pre 1970s period and, and very much, you know, around defense and, and, and aerospace.
And then after the seventies, the government is still there in its, you know, in, you know, how is the other way, what's the other way the American. Government, state, uh, aides, uh, enterprise and individuals, it's through the tax [01:17:00] system. So you have, you know, tax breaks for, um, you know, capital gains taxes that benefit venture capitalists and other investors.
You have, um, you know, tax breaks for, that are, some of which are targeted towards the electronics industry or for scientific purposes. Based industry, um, that again are very generative, but also are, you know, shows that there is there's effectively a federal, you know, that the government's giving a boost, um, to to these industries, but doing it in a way that allows for enough creativity iteration and, you know, Private enterprise to flourish, um, and, and people to try and fail, uh, that, and, and also does it in such an indirect way that oftentimes the people who are the beneficiaries of it feel like they did it on all on their own.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Right. That seems to me to be highly problematic because when we get, when we go out, when California, let's say, or when, when the federal government gives a capital gains break, uh, to these companies or any type of tax breaks, what they're really [01:18:00] doing is saying, we're giving you free services. Right. It's because it's not just we're, we're, we're giving you a tax break.
It's like, we're providing you all the things that you need in terms of an environment in which to create this stuff. We're just not going to charge you for it. And so it's, we're giving you services in kind really as an investment. Rather than a tax break, we're just giving you free services. And the other thing that strikes me, too, about why California succeeded, and it goes to show that I, that I think from a, from a statutory standpoint, um, this provision where it, um, where it did not, where, where it did not allow for non compete clauses and contract law.
Will you explain that? Because that I think is, is. Is huge. And it's still very much like those type of questions are, you know, are still very much, um, uh, highly relevant across American society. It's, it seems to me, and it's a [01:19:00] very good indication. We talk about, uh, the government stepping in to the field.
to the so called freedom of contract. This was really huge. It seems to me in terms of the development of Silicon Valley, we, will you walk us through that?
MARGARET O'MARA: Yeah. So non compete clauses essentially are, you know, things that are appended to employment agreements saying you cannot leave our employee and then go to a direct competitor.
You can't be, you know, in a, in a, in a, particularly in a knowledge, Sector where the people and the ideas are the raw materials, it's really limiting that, that free movement of, of people and ideas across companies. California does not allow those, and this is an inter, you know, I'm in Seattle, Washington State, for example, does, you know, does allow non-compete.
And, and you can even see this kind of reflected in the two ecosystems of these two tech hubs. Um, which is, you know, Seattle has been long been, it's changing now, but it was kind of, it's kind of a. by one company at a time. You know, first Boeing, then Microsoft, now Amazon. Um, although [01:20:00] that's changing quite a bit.
But down in the valley, you have this Perpetual job hopping and you have people moving from one firm to another starting from the 1950s on that, you know, and with that, they're sharing ideas, they're creating this network, which for which is really critical to, you know, going back to your why California question or why the valley, you know, one thing the valley has that The Boston does not is this.
It grows in isolation. It's a very sort of specialized economy and very tight, small and tightly networked. Everyone knows each other. Everyone, you know, their kids play on little league together. They go and drink beer after work together. They work together, not at just one company, but multiple companies.
And then they go on to become a venture capitalist that funds the next generation of companies and on and on and non compete, this legal environment, contractual environment is very important. There are also so many other. California specific things that are feeding in, you know, the, the Pat Brown era investment in [01:21:00] social infrastructure, broadly defined everything from public, uh, public schools to higher education, kind of the Clark Kerr era, higher education, the expansion of public higher ed in California during the.
During the 50s and 60s, the building of roads, building of public infrastructure of all kinds, it, it enables this, this society of, of these, this path for tremendous upward mobility for so many people who happen to be there at the time, where you see these, you know, someone like Steve Jobs, who's comes from a family and his dad had a high school education and he's a product of California public schools.
But heck, there was a, there was a computer lab in his high school in the late sixties. Um, and, and this is, you know, he's able to kind of get on this incredible escalator because in part because of this public investment, which of course changes dramatically after the late 1970s.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Well, I, I, uh, tell us how, well, I, before we get to how that public investment changes, um, but, uh, you, you write [01:22:00] that.
The, uh, homogeneity of the, of Silicon Valley was both it's, it's greatest strength and it's, it's greatest weakness. Um, explain that for us.
MARGARET O'MARA: Yeah, well the, you know, I, I refer to the valley as the, Entrepreneurial Galapagos. It grows up. I mean, it's first of all, it starts off very, it's very remote. It's rural.
You know, it's far, far away from Wall Street in Washington. The national papers don't report on Silicon Valley unless they're putting it in air quotes until like the early 1980s. It's, it's You know, it's a very kind of off to the side of the main action and that allows these very distinctive species to, to, to develop an ice in isolation of sorts, um, not only tech companies and an engineering focused businesses, but law firms and venture capital firms and marketing firms that are all devoted to, to, uh, to bringing up these, these companies.
And there's a, there's a very specific personal [01:23:00] dimension to all of it because the model of venture backed. Startups is you find a person who with promise with a promising idea and oftentimes they're a young man in his early 20s who has no business experience. Um, he comes with an engineering degree.
He's never really run anything. And so you need this whole kind of concert of services and firms that are helping you mentoring you in many different ways. And when you're making a bet on an untested person, you're often going with. Okay. You're going with, okay, this person graduated from Stanford's Masters in whatever.
That's a recognizable, you know, that produces good people. Um, this person is, um, you know, knows, used to work at this other company or knows someone I know. And so there's a lot of hiring and investing. Based on existing social networks and ties. So, when you're starting from a place to [01:24:00] a world that is entirely male and almost entirely white in the 1960s, the world of engineering, a world in which, you know, women were not We had a department chair could sort of decide they weren't going to allow women in their classes.
There were very, very few technical women in, um, in the, that world then. And those that were kind of learned on the job, but despite obstacles. And so you have this very homogenous, Pool that you're picking from and when it becomes a multi generational phenomenon. I mean, the, the real talent of, uh, the, the magic of Silicon Valley is time that you have multiple generations of people making, making it big in a company they founded or being part of a very successful enterprise.
Then they become the investors of the next generation. They're picking the winners. They're looking at the younger, you know, 20 somethings who are coming up with big ideas and saying, all right, I'm going to invest in this. Person. And oftentimes it's investing in the man, investing in the person as much as the idea.
And so [01:25:00] this is how, you know, when you're again, going with what, you know, it's very hard to let some new voices and new people in the room.
Peter Thiel And His Dorky Little Goons – Some More News - Air Date 11-2-22
CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: In a piece for Vanity Fair, journalist James Pogue details the inner workings of the new right.
The latest evolution of the alt right, post left, neo reactionary movement that seeks to distinguish itself from both the Reaganism of the 80s and Bush era conservatism. As I alluded to before, the New Right is not a unified ideology. As Pogue explains, members come from a wildly diverse set of political backgrounds, from monarchists to Marxists to the literal Unabomber, who some New Rightists call Uncle Ted.
But the idea at its center, the core tenet that makes the New Right a movement at all, is the underlying belief that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.
Pug points to [01:26:00] Curtis Yarvin, friend of Peter Thiel, and an ex programmer and blogger who goes by the online name Mencius Molebug. Many people in the new right will ironically call him Lord Yarvin, because apparently this guy cannot get enough Star Wars names. Menstrual Mold Grub is credited as a co founder and or prominent voice for the Neo Reactionary or Dark Enlightenment movement.
It's basically a bunch of alt right Silicon Valley bros that, like Teal, believe that democracy is not compatible with freedom and want to replace it with a vague techno monarchy. Sounds kind of familiar, right? Yarvin once put out a blog post called The Case Against Democracy with a listing of red pills that he considered to be truths because, and this can't be understated, these guys are dorks.
They're also pretty f ing fashy and border on white nationalists. Yarvin himself has blogged that although he doesn't consider himself a white nationalist, he recognizes that many of his readers are, and said he would also [01:27:00] read and link to white nationalist content. Which sure sounds like something a white nationalist would say.
By one account, Yarvin once gave a speech where he defended Hitler's decision to invade other countries, calling it Here's another blog where he doesn't seem to understand why people hate the Nazis the most, which includes the quote, On the other hand, and then there's more, and like, do I, do I need to finish that quote?
But, but, okay, to be fair and balanced, his other hand is pointing out that the Soviet Union also did mass murders. Okay. Yes, both things can be bad. Of course, this isn't a video on Lord Yarnish Dildo Bug, the totally not racist who uses liberal democratic hypocrisy to get you to sign up for fashion adjacent neo feudalism, but it's important to talk about him because he's a man deep in Peter Thiel's circle.
Theil has funded Yarvin's startup, and they will [01:28:00] correspond to discuss the politicians that Theil backs. Yarvin and the New Right, like many far right groups, believe in a fundamental conspiracy where the people at the top hold so much power, it strips agency and freedom away from everyday people. He calls it the Cathedral because nerd, and part of his belief is that there's no single entity running the show.
In fact, he believes hardly anyone who participates in it believes that it's an organized system at all. Instead, it self perpetuates by rewarding media that goes after threats against the established order, like nationalists, libertarians, and anti vaxxers. Social media, according to Yarvin, only accelerates this cycle, since the best way to get clicks from someone is generally to reaffirm their worldview, which in Yarvin's eyes reaffirms the cathedral.
In other words, he's describing, like, Capitalism and the status quo or social norms, something that has existed for as long as society exists. But since he's a tech bro at heart, he's decided that this is a brand new thing he's invented and is now giving it a silly name. The [01:29:00] solution, in the eyes of Yarvin and the New Right, is to is for a big strong boy to take power back from the cathedral and replace the whole system with a regime structured top down like a startup.
But it's like, super not a dictatorship, you guys, that's not how it's gonna turn out. In that aforementioned speech where he defended Hitler or whatever, Yarvin also gave his solution to reboot the government. As a first step towards the goal, Yarvin advocates for retiring all government employees, or RAGE, a super chill and not at all scary acronym, and replacing them with what he calls a national CEO.
These days, Yarvin is super duper careful not to use the word dictator, but not because he doesn't think we need one, but rather the optics around that word are a tad bit bad. To quote Yarvin, if you're going to have a monarchy, It has to be a monarchy of everyone, which, when you think about the definition of monarchy for more than a second, is a completely nonsense statement.
That's like saying you want to have water, but only if it's a DRY water. [01:30:00] And that's how we get back around to Thiel, who, as we have mentioned, also seems to think a country should be structured like a corporation. Autocratically, from the top down, under a single ruling figure. Whether Yarvin and the New Right have influenced Theil away from his purely libertarian roots, or Theil has come to these positions on his own, it doesn't really matter.
Because either way, both Theil and Yarvin believe this stuff. And Theil is willing to pour his money into supporting people and causes that further these beliefs.
Before 2016, Thiel had dipped his toe into conservative politics, donating around 3 million to Ron Paul's campaign in 2012, and another 2 million to Ted Cruz the same year.
But as we've already discussed, Teal's politics, which mirror much more closely to Yarvin and the New Right's beliefs, were never all that in line with mainstream Republican values. So when everyone's favorite loud boy Donald J. Trump came along in 2016, saying and doing things that had previously been considered unsayable and undoable, Theil saw a chance to [01:31:00] finally get out of the stasis of the status quo.
And so he jumped on it, donating 1. 25 million dollars to Trump's 2016 campaign and speaking in support of Trump at the Republican National Convention.
PETER THIEL: I'm not a politician, but neither is Donald. He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.
CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: Oh, he's just like, A regular guy. I was honestly expecting some kind of, like, dark mist or something.
A guy hooked up to a bunch of tubes, maybe. After Trump won, Theil was appointed to the President Elect's transition team. And Trump reportedly told Theil he was a very special guy. Which is, like, kind of a weird thing to say to a grown adult, but whatever. It's Trump, that's how he talks. Despite this early strong start to their friendship, Things didn't stay quite smooth for long.
In 2018, the New York Times quotes Thiel as saying, there are all these ways that things have fallen short, pointing to his hopes that Trump would end the era of stupid [01:32:00] wars, rebuild the country, and move us past the culture wars. In this sense, Thiel is completely correct, in that Trump did not do any of those things.
Though, why Thiel thought he Would do those things in the first place is beyond me. In 2020 Theil notably and intentionally stayed on the sidelines Avoiding endorsing Trump or making any major political donations at all Whether he did this because he still had major issues with the way Trump had handled his first term or simply because he thought Trump Wasn't going to win is anybody's guess.
But regardless, Theil stayed out of the 2020 presidential election and thereby avoided having any personal stake in the ensuing debate about whether or not the election was rigged. You know, that debate .That's somehow still going on almost two years later. But now, as we approach that two year mark, Theil is stepping out of the shadows once more like the spooky venture capitalist that he is to financially back 16 conservative [01:33:00] candidates for the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.
Many of these candidates, who include J. D. Vance, Blake Masters, Eric Schmidt, Kevin McCarthy, and Ted Internet Creep Cruise himself, have embraced the pervasive lie that Donald J. Trump won the 2020 election. While Thiel hasn't said publicly what he personally believes about those election results, it doesn't really matter.
It should be clear by this point that Trump was just a sweaty tool in the Thiel toolbox. Thiel box! Tealbox, to achieve his own political ends. And these new candidates are more of the same.
DEEPER DIVE B: SiliCON VALLEY, emphasis on the CON
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering deeper dive B Silicon valley emphasis on the con.
Google Search Is Died, Enron Musk - The Daily Zeitgeist - Air Date 5-14-24
In 2019 there was a bloke called Ben Gomes, who is the head of Google search. Ben Gomes had been at Google since 1999. So basically the beginning, he worked directly with Sergey and Larry.
He is, and there are tons of articles about him where everything he talks about, he's talking like, like a Renaissance painter. He's like, I believe the connectivity between [01:34:00] data, like he's so romantic about it. So on February 5th, 2019, he gets through a connection of events, something called a code yellow, which is an internal Google thing that says there is a problem that's significant.
There are higher codes, but they're extremely rare. Code yellow itself is actually pretty rare. So what happened was this code yellow was the revenue and ad side of Google saying Google search, you are not making us enough money. You need to make us more money. And also, and this is very important, the amount of queries going into Google is not growing enough.
Now, little side note for you. Queries, in this case, is referring to the amount of times that people search. Now, if you think about it for just a second, Is that necessarily connected to how good Google is? Not necessarily. In fact, if there are less queries, maybe Google's better. Yeah. Maybe they found what they were looking for.
Right. Yes. Yeah. Which does not work for Google. Right. So Google is [01:35:00] then in this little farts of the code yellow and between Ben Gomes and some other guys, there's a conversation where he says, Hey guys, I feel like Google is getting too close to the money. Google seems to only care about growth. After about a month, they resolved the code yellow and there's a big email thread and there's a ton of emails that I'm just leaving out, but I'm summarizing as quick as possible.
There's also on the sidelines, this guy called Jerry Dishler, who was a, one of these noxious VP types who was kind of like, yeah, guys, we need to make more queries and we need to make more money. So could you just do that? Right. So the code yellow comes to an end and it turns out that the guy behind it is a guy called Prabhagar Raghavan.
Who was then the head of advertising at go ahead of ads on Google and Ben Gomez sends out a thing to a bunch of people who are all congratulating each other saying we got through this great job. Everyone probably got a response saying, Yeah, actually, engineering did that. You didn't do it. He didn't do anything.
Wow. So email. So these emails came out through Department of Justice is antitrust hearing. I realize [01:36:00] this is a lot of history. In 2020, Prabhagar becomes head of Google Search. So he takes over Google Search from the idealist guy, Bengo. From the idealist who worked on Google Search from the beginning. So he came in, he was mad at Bengo.
And basically pushed him out. And also, to be clear, this query's metric is insane. Having more queries means nothing. And in fact, these emails kind of detail that he takes over in 2020. Now, if you really think about it, Google started to get really bad in like 2019, 2020, and has got significantly worse constantly since 2020 to an end of 29, well, mid 2019.
They added this to mobile, but they put it fully onto desktop as well. In 2020, they made the change to make it harder to tell when something is an ad on Google now. Yeah, I definitely noticed that change. They made a bunch of changes to make Google worse. It used to be pretty easy. There was like a [01:37:00] background.
It seemed like pretty clear that they had a internal discussion and we're like, well, we don't want the product. We don't want to be tri actively tricking people. They, it was funnier than that. They were just like, yeah, we need to see the numbers go up, please. Make number go higher now. Line go up now. Yep.
But yeah, at some, like during the two thousands, like it was like, there was a balance of like, we need this to be a product, a product that people want to use and we need to make money off of ads, but they they've hit a point where they don't really give a shit if it's a product that people. Want to use it seems like it's that.
And also within these emails. And again, this is from the department of justice is suit against Google for monopoly. So, Hey, what monopoly could they have? And what's really stark about it is. What Mr. Rug's previous job was. [01:38:00] So can you think of a, what would the worst job that pre could be previously held by someone running Google search?
Just think about it for a second. You might not get it, but just, just think. What is the worst company he could have worked for that isn't like, I don't know. So different? Yeah, different conflict. Because like one of the worst would be Google ads. Mr. Raghavan ran search at Yahoo, 2005 to 2012. In that period, they went from, I think like a 33 percent market share versus Google's 36 percent to literally doing a deal where Bing would power Yahoo. Yeah. Yeah. Let me just fact check you real quick.
Let me go Yahoo that. Nope. Never been said. That's never been said by anyone. It's It's crazy because you read this thing. You read this story. And you read the emails. And I was writing it. And I was like, is this someone messing with, but this is ridiculous, right?
Because the emails are so grim. There's one with this guy, this engineer called Shashi Thakur, [01:39:00] who's like, can we tell Sundar Pichai about this and stop this? Dude, that's the CEO of Google and his former job was McKinsey. Yeah. Yeah. They're on the right side of a lot of things. I was going to say, bread prices, Oxycontin.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's wild because. You read this story and you're like, it couldn't be this obvious, could it? And the timeline is just perfect. And I will, I will actually say something, I'm previewing something I'm working on. The only time I've ever seen worse than this story is in my next newsletter about Facebook.
Well, you don't have emails in this chain where someone is like, yeah, actually, it's good. The product sucks, right? I actually like this. This is good. I've got documents where there's someone writing, yeah, here are the changes we've made at Facebook to increase engagement that made Facebook worse, right?
Worse for the user. And it, and guess who, guess what? COO of Facebook, [01:40:00] Sheryl Sandberg until 2022 McKinsey. Yeah. No kidding. The people that run Facebook right now, all product managers, all growth people. This is the, this is tying it back to Google. The people in charge are management consultants, ads people, revenue people.
They're not the people who build anything.
Silicon Valley Deserves Your Anger - Tech Won't Save Us - Air Date 3-14-24
ED ZITRON: A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece where it was saying why everyone has kind of turned on tech. And long and short of it is, tech made a ton of promises in the 2010s and they delivered on a lot of them.
They were like, your files will be wherever you need them. You won't have to use physical media, you'll be able to stream stuff. And they delivered! Genuinely. I know that, like, streaming is extremely questionable as an industry at times, and cloud computing is Not great in many ways, but for the large part, tech actually delivered stuff.
There was cool things that people could use. The jumps between iPhones were significant. There were new laptops that were just that bit much faster. It felt exciting. And then around the mid 2010s, so the around when Waymo first announced one of their first [01:41:00] robot car things, when Elon Musk started talking a lot about Autopilot, well, that was when the Apple Watch around came out as well.
It's almost like the tech industry got frozen in amber. There were new things, but things stopped being exciting, and all of the things that we were told were coming. Robots, AI, automated companions, all of these things, Never showed up and I think as we speak right now, we're kind of seeing what happens when you fail to deliver, but you still get rich because tech has existed with these massive multipliers and made all of these people obscenely rich and people have kind of accepted it because they said, well, it's how we got iPhones.
It's how we got cloud computing, it's how we got all these things. Tech hasn't done anything like that for a while and their big magical trick is AI. Which is doing what exactly is AI doing for a consumer today much more than Siri was doing five, six, seven years ago? It isn't on top of that. It's so expensive, but everyone's putting all this money into this very expensive, [01:42:00] not super useful tech.
It just feels like, especially off the back of what we're like, Less than a year since the SVB thing happened. I'm just a bit worried. It could be okay. Things as a business operator in this space feel better, but I don't know. I am very worried about this push of AI, not just for the fake job thing, but also because I don't know.
It costs too much and it does nothing.
PARIS MARX - HOST, TECH WON'T SAVE US: Yeah, I think that's really well put. And I think there's a lot in there for us to dig into through the course of this conversation. And we'll return to the AI stuff a little bit later, but it stands out to me that, and of course, when you say SVB, that's of course, Silicon Valley Bank and the employees that happen there for listeners who might not remember, but we're in this kind of AI push this moment where this is all, you know, supposedly going to change everything.
And. It's interesting to me that you point back to the mid 2010s is this moment when a lot of stuff really significantly changed in the sense that they started making these huge promises. They were not able to fulfill on these promises. You know, the stuff that we actually got [01:43:00] from these companies were not, you know, these big steps forward, but we're like kind of incremental steps as things also seem to be getting worse and worse and worse.
And we can talk about that as well. But the mid 2010s was also kind of the last AI boom moment, right? When AI was going to replace all the jobs and all this kind of stuff.
ED ZITRON: I had a client in 2016 telling people, oh, we'll have, it will ingest all your knowledge and be able to answer questions in a chatbot 2016.
What's different?
PARIS MARX - HOST, TECH WON'T SAVE US: It's funny too, because like there was an article I read the other day that was about Apple and how it was like behind in the generative AI thing. And it was like, this is such a big threat to Apple's business model because everyone's going to be using these generative AI models. And it's going to make the voice assistant so much better.
And Apple has had so much trouble with voice assistants. And it's like, nobody liked the voice assistants the first time around, like, It never caught on. Like, Amazon has largely like disinvested from it. Sure, Lex is still around, but like, it's not a focus like it was a few years ago, [01:44:00] because it was just another one of these things that they pushed out and like, didn't really catch on with people.
And the generative AI moment isn't going to change that.
ED ZITRON: And actually, there is one thing that I left out that's very important as well. 2021 was a watershed moment. For tech in the worst possible way. It was the first time I think tech has really just tried to lie. Metaverse and crypto, what did they do?
They didn't do much. They did, however, make a bunch of guys really rich, but it's the first time I saw just like an outright con on consumers where it was like, Hey, metaverse is the future. You've got to be part of this. What is it? It's a thing you've already really seen, but we would like you to claim this is the future.
Cryptocurrency. What does this do? Nothing! It might make you rich, but it probably won't. So you have this two year period where 2021 seemed like everything was going to be okay. Everyone was going to get rich. Biden administration. Everyone's doing well. Money was frothing around. And no one really knew because I don't think most people know macroeconomics, myself [01:45:00] included.
So a lot of people didn't see it coming when. Interest rates screwed everyone and you, everyone at once realized, Oh, wow. The tech ecosystem was built on a form of financial con kind of venture capital wasn't held accountable. And so now they're trying to push through AI and it's like, well, no, we saw the metaverse that didn't do anything.
We saw crypto that didn't do anything. Tell us what this will do. It's the same McKinsey freaks telling us that this is the future.
PARIS MARX - HOST, TECH WON'T SAVE US: And, you know, the crypto and metaverse moment was like, okay, there are these visions, there are these ideas, but like, there's nothing tangible here that's really making anything better.
It's just like, how can we extract more money from people by forcing them into these features or making them believe it for a little while, whereas in the past, sure, they, you know, Lied about a ton of things and over promised about a ton of things, but there was often something tangible there that they believe, you know, there could actually be a follow through on.
And in part, it makes me think back to like the dot com boom moment where you also had a lot of these companies that really had [01:46:00] no foundation to them, but we're riding this wave. up as there was just all of this money that was flooding into the space. And it seemed like there was also a moment of that in those kind of pandemic years when there was a bunch of money flowing, it had to go somewhere.
So here's all these scams and cons to absorb it, right?
ED ZITRON: Yeah. And I think the Another part of it, and I've written about this a great deal, is generally before this, and you know, it's not perfect, I know there are plenty of examples where they didn't, but these companies found ways to grow that somewhat benefited the customer, didn't always totally do it in the nicest way, but it kind of benefited them, there was a way of it looking, you go, okay, they're making stuff for people and the people will use it right now. I think people are waking up to the fact that tech companies are willing to make their things worse to make more money. And I think that they are more aware of it than they've ever been. And I know I'm somewhat self serving and that this is my raw economy thesis.
However, I do think that there is coming a time when people are going to realize, why are these tech companies worth 20 [01:47:00] billion when they make things worse? Why is it that Microsoft is worth, what, three trillion dollars, and they're just flooding money into this system, ChetJPT, and Copilot, and all these things?
They can't even explain why you'd use it. The Super Bowl commercial, for Copilot, it was so weird, it was like, Oh yeah, do the code for my 3D open world game. Give me Mike's Trucks, a logo for Mike's Trucks, which just doesn't work in practice. It's so weird. They spent 7 million on this commercial and you'd watch it. And you're like, not even they can come up with a reason why you need generative AI. That's crazy, man. I don't remember another time in this industry when I was just like, oh yeah, no one, like no one can tell you why they're selling it.
They're just like, oh, it's the future and you should buy it today. Please use it. Please use it now. We need you to use this so that the markets think we're growing at 10 to 20 percent every quarter and so that Satya Nadella can get, he must make at least 30, 50 million. Sundar Pichai from Google gets 280 million or something or 220 million in 2022.
[01:48:00] These guys are insanely rich, but they're creating nothing. I'm all over the place because this stuff is making me a little crazy. I'm not going to lie.
PARIS MARX - HOST, TECH WON'T SAVE US: One of the pieces you wrote recently that I read in preparation for this interview was really going into that, right? How a lot of these companies we have been seeing it like slowly more and more over time.
Like if you think about Facebook, like making their product worse so that it could extract more money from people and get more data off of people to feed into, you know, these broader kind of considerations that they had around making more money off of what everyone's doing on their platform. But over time, you know, yeah.
People are talking about a lot now, but I think you've still seen it for the past number of years. The Google search engine getting worse as it's become more, you know, oriented toward the needs of advertisers versus the actual users who are using it. And like again and again, whether it's social media platforms and other things that happen online, there has been this slow degradation of the quality of these things because there's this need to extract more and more profit from it.
And The options for where you're going to make that profit have [01:49:00] become fewer as, you know, the real growth in this industry and the real innovation has tapered off. And so now it just becomes really extracting as much as possible from what is already there. Even if that means the experience and the actual quality of the product has to decline in the process.
DEEPER DIVE C: MICROSOFT THE DESTROYER
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Deeper Dive C: Microsoft, the destroyer.
The One Where Microsoft Admits Game Studios Are F_cked (The Jimquisition) - Jim Sterling - Air Date 5-20-24
JIM STERLING - HOST, JIM STERLING: Studio closures. They occur when a game's studio is failing.
They occur when a game's studio is succeeding. Like with the mass layoffs game publishers routinely indulge in, publishers shutting down studios. are motivated far less by the studio's performance and infinitely more by a perpetual drive to cut costs and please shareholders, all in the name of perpetuating the ridiculous myth that a company can get richer and bigger literally forever.
The myth of perpetual growth. Like I have reminded viewers for a while now, publishers axe people's jobs and shut down developers regardless of success, and sometimes because of it. Since the better a publisher does, the more pressure there is to [01:50:00] cut those costs, so it looks like they're making more money.
It's an unsustainable system, which is why the industry is such a tumultuous and unstable fucking mess all the time. And if you're one of the five people still watching this shit, you'll know that already. So, Why are we talking about it this time? Well, we've got some absolute piss drivel excuses from a Microsoft executive to laugh at.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Microsoft has been among the very worst. In fact, it may very well be the worst instigator of studio shutdowns and mass layoffs. Responsible for thousands of ruined lives in the name of pleasing a handful of already incredibly wealthy people. All these harmful, maliciously callous, cost cutting methods, at a time when the company is spending obscene, offensive amounts of cash to buy other companies in its attempt to create a de facto monopoly in the game industry.
Most disgustingly, those huge purchases of Bethesda and Activision have been a direct [01:51:00] cause of layoffs. And closures with Microsoft most recently treating itself to the shuttering of Bethesda's subsidiaries, arcane Austin Alpha do games, and perhaps most shocking of all Tango GameWorks. So what does Xbox leader Sarah Bond have to say for her company's habit of consuming other companies and upending thousands of careers in the process and continuing engaging in mass layoff?
Rather than cutting the executive class's extreme salaries and bonuses, or at the very least, maybe not spending literal billions to buy shiny new toys. Well, it turns out she has very little of worth to say at all. As if to unintentionally suggest that executives truly have no compelling arguments for their despicable behavior, and completely fail to justify it when they try and contrive some.
The last year or so in video games, largely, the industry's been flat. Wimpered Bond in an interview that has since blown up for how pathetic it is. And even in 2023, we saw just some tremendous releases, tremendously [01:52:00] groundbreaking games, but still, the growth didn't follow all of that. There it is. That word. Growth.
I love that, within a couple of sentences, Bond essentially backs up everything I've said about corporate motivations for years. Perpetual growth, at any cost, so long as the cost isn't felt by anyone but the employees on the ground level. It's not enough to make money, it's not enough to be successful, you have to keep growing, no matter how big and powerful you already are.
Ah, the slightest drop and the investors panic and pull out. It's fucking nonsense. It's funny though, this interview with Bummed has been criticized for being weak, but if anything it's making an incredibly strong case. It just so happens to be making my case. Anyway. Sorry, let's let Bond continue talking about the growth not being there.
A lot of that's related to our need to bring new players in and make gaming more accessible, but all of that has been happening at the same time that the cost associated with making these beautiful AAA [01:53:00] blockbuster games is going up, and the time it takes to make them is going up. Oh, and there that is.
One of the all time classic fucking excuses squirted out by people so rich they could fund an entire game's development and still be rich. Games are just too expensive to make! Oh, oh, pity the poor multi billion dollar business that can always find money to give management million dollar bonuses just for sitting on their fucking arses.
Pity the poor companies boasting of record revenue and raking in billions off the back of predatory in game economies. PLEASE And pity the poor companies to whom the expense of making games is happening at them. It's not a decision they're making. They're completely powerless. They're just the ones with complete and total fucking power.
Once again, a massive corporation pleads poverty and tries to claim it can't afford to do the thing it's in the literal business of doing. I've heard it too many times. I'd heard it too many times in 2014, let alone 2024. Oh, this ain't [01:54:00] tired. Overplayed excuses applied to every shitty business decision, as companies who make and sell games have spent over a decade trying to tell us they can't afford to make and sell games, while boasting to their shareholders about how much money they're pulling in by making and selling games.
The fact Bond is trotting out by far the laziest and most worn out argument really only says one thing. Microsoft thinks you're a gullible fucking moron. Who can't remember the last dozen things they've used this argument for. At some point, games have to make money! As Naughty Dog once famously said, while enjoying a lucrative sponsorship deal between Uncharted and Subway.
Fucking disingenuous c shutdowns, the Xbox president was no less offensive than she's already been. It's always extraordinarily hard when you have to make decisions like that, she lied. When we looked at those fundamental industry trends, we feel a deep responsibility to ensure that the games we make, the devices we [01:55:00] build, the services that we offer, are there through moments.
Even when the industry isn't growing, when you're through a time of transition, the news we announced earlier in the week is an outcome of that, in our commitment to make sure that the business is healthy for the long term. What? No, seriously, what the fuck was that? State of your corporate spiel, mate.
That was just words, just a bunch of buzzwords thrown together with waffling, obfuscating vaguery. Borderline salad, even. Like, this was the bit I was most looking forward to tearing apart, the excuse for the closures, but what? There's nothing to tear apart, she fucking said nothing! But anyway. She continues talking bollocks with all the commitment of a terminal bellend.
Tango Gameworks last year saw massive critical acclaim and enjoyed commercial success with Hi Fi Rush. A game many would put forth as one of the best made in years. But as we've already seen, success doesn't count [01:56:00] for much in an industry designed only to reward those who are already wealthy.
JIM STERLING - HOST, JIM STERLING: Tango's closure shocked the gaming community, but sadly, I can't say I was surprised. Disgusted, yes. But I'm not surprised by any studio's closure, no matter if they've just launched a complete stinker, or released one of the most popular games of the year. Does Sarah Bond have any thoughts on that? No, no, hang on, scratch that.
Does Sarah Bond have fucking useful thoughts on that? You already know the answer. You know, one of the things I really love about the games industry is that it's a creative art form, and it means that the situation and what success is for each game and studio is also really unique, said the executive literally trying to re litigate the definition of success.
There's no one size fits all to it for us, and so we look at each studio, each game team, and we look at a whole variety of Factors when we're faced with sort of making decisions and trade offs like that, but it all comes back to our long term commitment to the games we create, the devices [01:57:00] we build, the services and ensuring that we're setting ourselves up to be able to deliver on the problems that we're facing.
You'll notice she talked a lot of shit about all the hard decisions and all the different criteria, but didn't actually explain any of it. Didn't explain what the criteria was for Tango's shutdown. What did success mean for Hi Fi Rush? What did Hi Fi Rush have to do in order to save Tango Gameworks?
Sarah Bond, once again said nothing. But in doing so, said a damn lot. What she's said, what she's admitted to, is what I've been fucking saying for ages. Success don't matter. It won't save you. If you release a failed game, you'll be shut down. If you release a successful game, You'll be shut down.
Because once you've made the claim that success is a vaguely defined idea that means different unique things depending on whatever it is the publisher feels like doing at the time, you've told your subsidiaries, your [01:58:00] employees, one thing. You are damned. Damned if you win. Damned if you lose. Damned if you do, and you don't.
Damned the second you signed the bottom line and sold your studio to a merciless, callous corporation that defines success not by success, but by whatever saves them the most money in the short term. Fuck what Bond said about long term thinking. Corporations aren't built for that. They're built for whatever gets them.
Them lurching to the next financial quarter with the illusion that it's making all the money in the world and still somehow finding change behind the couch cushions.
Microsoft's New AI Will Turn Your Computer Into a Privacy NIGHTMARE - Zaid Tabani - Air Date 5-23-24
ZAID TABANI - HOST, ZAID TABANI: For the last few months, Microsoft has been doubling. tripling, quadrupling down on the AI revolution in any way it can. It's integration of chat GPT into Bing, the 10 billion investment they made into open AI back in 2023. Also, Microsoft is entitled to up to 49 percent of. The for profit arm of open AI.
That doesn't mean they own it, but they're, they're, they're good friends. And listen, I don't need to tell you already [01:59:00] that the speed of how all of this has developed has raised a lot of concerns for a lot of people. There are a plethora of critiques on AI as well as support for AI being a tool that will enhance human's lives.
You know, the debate well, but it all got muddy this week when Microsoft announced a new feature for Windows 11 called recall. Recall is a new feature coming to Windows 11. That's going to be included in Microsoft's copilot plus suite of AI tools and essentially what the feature does. Is it has the computer take constant snapshots of what you're doing at the time on your PC, what programs you have open, what websites you're browsing, and it stores them in an archive to essentially create a history of what your activity has been on your computer.
That's searchable to you. So if there's a website you saw a few months ago, and you want to go back to it, you can immediately look it up. And when you find the snapshot, recall is supposed to be able to recreate that state of your computer. At any time, think of it as a super advanced version of system restore, or at least that's what I think Microsoft thought they were [02:00:00] pitching to everybody.
That being said, I think taking snapshots of everyone's PC every few seconds and storing them in an archive is a terrifying privacy nightmare, which is exactly how it came off. Because yes, if you've ever had a windows PC, Or honestly, any computer. There are times where your computer just starts acting weird, and you hope to God that it has a state it was in before.
Or, sometimes something you found on your PC or a website, you don't know how to get back to, and you wish you could just, Oh, what was it I was looking at the other day? All of that is useful, until it's not. When it's terrifying and falls into the hands of bad faith actors. And listen, this immediately sparked backlash.
Tons of people were like, what the fuck? This seems like an insane privacy nightmare. Not even talking about the bloatware you'll get on laptops in general, or what devices are sending information. Microsoft responded to all this by saying that, listen, all of the snapshots that are taken by recall will only be stored On the local person's PC.
Microsoft's not going to keep any of those in the cloud. [02:01:00] In fact, none of those even reach the cloud or Microsoft at all. They're all encrypted stored locally on your PC at all times. And you can tell the program to delete certain things, to not monitor certain apps and IT professionals can disable recall altogether.
Although I will say that after this backlash, I'm pretty sure Microsoft is going to bake that feature in, in some way, shape, and or form just to cover their bases. But listen, even if recall doesn't share those snapshots with other users, even if Microsoft has no access to them and is not allowed to see those snapshots or use them for any targeted advertisement, that is a good thing.
We still live in 2024, where there are tons of data breaches all of the time, where information privacy is a huge debate, and where our machines are asking us stuff like, hey, do you want us to share diagnostics about a machine? Is, is this part of diagnostics? This isn't the 50s anymore, where you have to only worry about criminals breaking in and stealing things from your safe.
You have to worry about Data thieves, that is a serious [02:02:00] issue in 2024. People get shit stolen from them all the time. It is scary. And listen, I'm not gonna give you a scared straight, so you look over your shoulder for some creepy guy with a laptop outside of your house. I'm just saying having a history of what websites you've been to and what stuff you're looking at on your computer.
In an archive can be scary. And even if it's encrypted, that doesn't mean it's uncrackable. And those are just bad faith actors. Think about governments. And I don't want us to get too tinfoil hat here, but the U S and multiple other governments have dozens of surveillance programs for searching or accessing your computer and interpreting that information, how they will in a very imperfect political environment.
And look, this is not the only major AI innovation that's come out in the last like two, three weeks, Google has recently integrated AI into their search engine in general. And that has yielded very mixed results. I can tell you from using it for a little bit. Yeah, it's actually sped up a few things, but at the same time, it's told users that they [02:03:00] should drink pee.
And a lot of times it feels like it's scrubbing information from other sites and just presenting it, which Google already did, which already had a bunch of controversies for. But also, the AI is pulling information from multiple different sites to create its overall answer. Which kind of hurts the sites you're searching for, doesn't it?
And oh, you think that's the only bad AI news. Guess what? We have more bad AI news. Scarlett Johansson's voice was stolen. I'm sorry, not stolen. Imitated. I'm sorry, not imitated. Strongly hinted at being imitated or stolen by the creator. Of ChatGPT After a meeting with Scarlett Johansson When she was like, no, I don't want you to use my voice And then after it launched, the creator going Hey, do you, are you sure?
Can we, can we please? And now the voice has been taken down because Look, Scarlett's like, I already starred in her I don't want to make it a reality, do you not see The fucking point of that movie? And she wants An investigation into it This is what I'm trying to make the video about. There are obviously serious issues with AI in terms of content theft, uh, [02:04:00] job displacement and disruption, privacy and the ability for people to function.
Like, look, there are a ton of debates about that going on. And like I said, there are many people who tout AI's positives, which are positive. There are benefits. Here's the issue and, and regardless It's going too fast, which is reckless. People tend to constantly send me things about AI music when it happens, right?
If you don't know, music has been dipping its toes into AI for fucking years now. You remember the Drake diss track where he used Tupac's voice on the AI? That's been available before chat GPT. That's been available for a while now. There was a plugin that lets you sound like Kendrick or like A$ AP. I remember those plugins coming out, but every time somebody sends me.
Something from Suna or anything like that. I'm not necessarily scared because that algorithm is trying to do something that's fundamentally not how music works. The value benefits of what it could be aren't necessarily compatible with the industry it's trying to replace. So I'm not necessarily worried about [02:05:00] that.
Even though there are some concerns, like if you, if you, if you extrapolate it, and I'm trying to be open minded, that's not what worries me. What worries me Is people doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on this technology because they think it's the gold rush and making stupid mistakes that fuck a lot of people over and create a more dangerous precedent for the world where None of the benefits of AI exist People lose jobs, or information, or privacy, or vocations, or things are stolen, and all of a sudden things are way more unstable, far more reckless, with no guardrails.
And if you know what this sounds like, it sounds like fucking NFTs. And ironically, a lot of the proponents of AI Are NFT bros and listen, I don't want to compare them entirely because these are two different things, but it's very clear that the culture from NFTs and just, just go, just, just, just rock it off.
Right. Is pervading into AI. Which is significant. It's not fake. It's very [02:06:00] real. All of the dangers and the benefits of it are absolutely real. But when you are given like a magic car, and it can do every it can cook your breakfast, it can fly, it can do everything, and you just step on the gas? And just go, look at how fast I can go!
You're gonna fucking crash! Because you haven't learned this car yet. You don't know what the dangers of it are. You don't know what the benefits of it are.
DEEPER DIVE D: THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now deeper dive D thank you for your service.
What’s Going on With Tesla Superchargers? - Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Air Date 5-9-24
MARQUES BROWNLEE - HOST, WAVEFORM: Tesla laid off, they just blew up their entire supercharger team. It's just gone. Yeah. Specifically, it seems like Elon just did it one day.
DAVID IMEL - HOST, WAVEFORM: Wait, they shut down the superchargers?
MARQUES BROWNLEE - HOST, WAVEFORM: No, no, they laid off the entire supercharger team. Now, for those unfamiliar, Tesla superchargers pretty important part of Tesla, right?
Um, for when we talk about electric cars, almost every time we talk about Tesla's advantage, we talk about the supercharger network, which is if you need to charge this car on a road trip somewhere, the only reliable, [02:07:00] consistently reliable way to do that from our own experience for years has been the supercharger network to the point where one by one over the past few months.
Basically every EV maker that ships cars to America is going to be switching their port or shipping adapters To the NACS port to see to use tesla supercharger network because it's such a big selling point here So all that being said Tesla very suddenly laying off the entire Supercharger team, which includes all of the permitting, all of the site maintenance, all of the, uh, future planning, and basically just shutting down growth of the Supercharger network, like, nipping it right on, on that day.
ANDREW MANAGANELLI - HOST, WAVEFORM: Over 500 people.
MARQUES BROWNLEE - HOST, WAVEFORM: Yeah. Seems like a pretty bold move.
ANDREW MANAGANELLI - HOST, WAVEFORM: Yeah,
MARQUES BROWNLEE - HOST, WAVEFORM: um, I think everyone sort of assumes that it's for cost cutting and, you know, Tesla stock price is doing one thing and we want their, you know, profits to do the other thing. And so, you know, there's a lot going [02:08:00] on and pretty crazy ruthless business decisions get made by this guy all the time.
So, yeah, the supercharger team is the latest victim. Completely gone. Uh, I don't know. How do we? I feel like this is going to go.
DAVID IMEL - HOST, WAVEFORM: Yeah. It's kind of wild because like you said, everyone is moving to NACS and that layoff included Rebecca Tannoushi, who was the senior director of EV charging and was the person that pretty much like handled all of the deals, convincing all of the other companies to switch to NACS.
MARQUES BROWNLEE - HOST, WAVEFORM: Yeah.
DAVID IMEL - HOST, WAVEFORM: So they kind of finished doing that and then now the entire team is out. And there were a bunch of employees that literally said they were breaking ground on new locations. And then they just got the news and all of a sudden they just have to stop.
MARQUES BROWNLEE - HOST, WAVEFORM: Yeah. So it seems like at some point we're going to feel the effects of it.
And I think it will be, well, okay. So there was an Elon tweet about how, Oh, we're stopping growth and we're focusing on just maintenance and uptime. Yeah.
ANDREW MANAGANELLI - HOST, WAVEFORM: I was just gonna say like that, my initial thought on this and I don't follow stock prices. I don't know anything about [02:09:00] business, but like when I first saw this, it felt like, Oh, we built this crazy supercharging system.
Yeah. Yeah. Everybody loves it. It's the most reliable. Everybody's going to it now. Thanks for building it later. Like, yeah, it's easier to maintain something that you built already, even instead of building it, but it seems like there's more of it. Yeah.
DAVID IMEL - HOST, WAVEFORM: Well, except for the fact that the amount of cars using it is about to like five X.
ANDREW MANAGANELLI - HOST, WAVEFORM: Yes. I don't think it's a good decision, but my first thought was like, it feels like they did it all. And I feel like we see that in tech a lot. It's like, Oh, thanks for building this awesome software or something like that. Interesting. Good luck building something somewhere else. We have what we need now.
DAVID IMEL - HOST, WAVEFORM: The peace of mind, knowing that you're always going to have a supercharger nearby is so important to like ownership of an EV. Yeah.
MARQUES BROWNLEE - HOST, WAVEFORM: Sorry to interrupt. There's a lot of upcoming locations on the map where people are like, I can't wait for that one because then I can finally do this route. I can finally do this drive.
Right now it looks like those aren't going to happen. Uh huh. So, yeah, that's, that's a bummer for those.
DAVID IMEL - HOST, WAVEFORM: Yeah. He tweeted Tesla still plans to grow the supercharger network just [02:10:00] at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on a hundred percent uptime and expansion of existing locations. So I don't know if that means just adding more stalls to existing locations.
Yeah. The uptime is already pretty dang good. Like they've had very good uptime historically. Yeah.
ANDREW MANAGANELLI - HOST, WAVEFORM: I could see focusing on uptime. Like you said, if it's going to be so many more people, maybe there's a higher opportunity of the uptime not being as good and focus on that, but. Even if that is the focus firing 500 people and slowing the growth of the network, because no matter how good the network is, if we're talking about gas cars, the network looks like crap.
MARQUES BROWNLEE - HOST, WAVEFORM: Yeah. That's the, that's the two sides of that car. It's like when you compare the Tesla supercharger network to gas cars, it seems like they need to have a lot of growth to do, but on the other side, when you compare the supercharger network to everyone else, no longer needing to build up their network because they all just signed on to do NACS.
It's like, yeah, we won. No one else is going to come close to the Tesla supercharger network. No need to build it up anymore. Yeah. [02:11:00]
ANDREW MANAGANELLI - HOST, WAVEFORM: It, it feels like when we're talking about like, even just Tesla or Rivian in vehicle software, you're like, this is the best in vehicle software of any car and you're like, how's it to an iPad?
It's like, well, it's terrible.
DAVID IMEL - HOST, WAVEFORM: Yeah.
ANDREW MANAGANELLI - HOST, WAVEFORM: So like, yeah, there's still so much room for growth here.
When a tech company says it’s disbanding its standalone safety/ethics/alignment group - Jacob Ward - Air Date 5-19-24
JACOB WARD - HOST, JACOB WARD: I've been mostly not thinking about the tech business at all lately. Honestly, since I left NBC, I've been mostly just hanging with my kids and surfing. And that's been fantastic.
But, as I occasionally check into the news, I get more and more alarmed. And one of the things that's really alarming me right now is, OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT and the rest, which is rapidly releasing frightening new products --amazing new products, but frightening as well--has just lost the two executives in charge of what's called their super alignment team. In the AI world, super alignment is this notion that we need to--and I think no one would disagree with this--bring AI into alignment with human values before it gets out of [02:12:00] control. Well, the two executives in charge of that lofty mission have left OpenAI. Ilya Sutskever, and this guy, Jan--I've never said his name out loud, so I don't know how to say it, I only know how to spell it--Leike? Jan Leike? Lika? Anyway, Jan has gone off on X, formerly Twitter, saying that his team has been sailing against headwinds for some time inside the organization, that shiny new products have been pushing his team's concerns aside, the priorities of the organization he doesn't agree with anymore, and he says it's time to go. He says that safety is not being prioritized the way he wants it to be. He very notably pointed out a lack of computing resources made available to his team, and this is the big thing because that's what's expensive about doing AI is running these huge processing centers that do the compute to make it possible to train AI and run all of your requests for [02:13:00] cat videos and knock knock jokes.
And so he and Ilya Sutskever are out. And OpenAI for its part says they're disbanding the super alignment team. And they're instead going to integrate their work and the safety considerations into the broader landscape of OpenAI. We have seen this before. Other big companies have disbanded their standalone teams and spread them through an organization, or that's what they claim.
But what we've seen over and over again is that when you set up an adversarial think tank whose job it is to fight with the executives and try and push for different priorities than just pushing out product quarter after quarter, eventually that adversarial relationship reaches a breaking point. And in a shareholder-driven environment, I think it's just very hard to stay true to your lofty ideals about trying to support something like a super alignment team, even though the purpose of that team is [02:14:00] to keep your product from ruining the world. Literally, that's what this job is all about, in theory.
Sam Altman has replied to this departed executive also on X and basically says, I agree it's something to worry about and we're going to keep working on it.
And so anyway, I'm going to go back to surfing.
Closing 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 WiseCrack, The Majority Report, Some More News, The Daily Zeitgeist, Tech Won't Save Us, Jim Sterling. Zaid Tabani, Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast, and Jacob Ward. 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 [02:15:00] in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our impressively good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion.
So, coming to from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.
#1631 Body Neutrality in the World of Ozempic: Reassessing Weight, Body Positivity, Physical and Mental Health, and even the Economics of Body Size (Transcript)
Air Date 5/24/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast in which we will assess the impact of the new diet drugs on physical and mental health in the context of our unhealthy food system and societal fatphobia. Sources on our front page today include The Gray Area, Today, Explained, Consider This, What the Actual Fork, and The Majority Report. Then in the additional sections half of the show, we'll dive deeper into the business of desire, bias and risk, and body neutrality.
The world after Ozempic - The Gray Area - Air Date 5-13-24
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Let's start with the basics here. What is Ozempic, for people who don't really know anything about it?
JOHANN HARI: I remember the exact moment I asked this question for myself. It was the winter of 2022 and it was the end of the pandemic and I got invited to a party for the first time in all those months. And I decided to go and in the Uber on the way there, I was feeling a bit self-conscious because I gained loads of weight. So I was going to a party that was thrown by an Oscar-winning actor. I'm not saying this just to name drop, [00:01:00] it's relevant. I suddenly thought, Oh, this is going to be fascinating because everyone I know gained weight. It's going to be so interesting to see these actors kind of looking different, right? With a bit of podge on them. And I arrived, and it's not just that they hadn't gained weight, everyone was gaunt, everyone was thin, and I was kind of wandering around in a bit of a daze, and I bumped into a friend of mine, and I said to her, Wow, looks like everyone really did take up Pilates during lockdown. And she laughed at me and I said, what are you laughing at? And she said, well, you know, it's not Pilates, right? And she pulled up an Ozempic pen on her phone. And I don't remember ever feeling so conflicted about anything as what I learned, the kind of basics I learned in the next couple of days.
So we have a new kind of weight loss drug, which works in a completely new way, on new mechanisms in your gut and in your brain that produces massive weight loss. The average person who takes Ozempic loses 15 percent of their body weight. The average person who takes Minjaro, which is the next in this class of [00:02:00] drugs, loses 21%. And for the next one that's coming down the line that will be available next year, the average person loses 24 percent of their body weight, which is only slightly below bariatric surgery.
And I remember as soon as I learned this, I don't remember any topic I ever learned about where I felt so profoundly conflicted as I did about these drugs. Because I immediately thought, well I know that obesity causes all sorts of health risks. I'm older now than my grandfather ever got to be because he died of a heart attack when he was 44. Loads of the men in my family get heart attacks. My dad had bad heart problems. My uncle died of a heart attack. So I thought, wow, if there's a drug that reverses obesity, that could be really big for me. But I also thought, come on, I've seen this story before, right? Every 20 years or so, a new miracle diet drug is announced, millions of people take it, and then we always discover it has some terrible side effect that means it's pulled from the market, leaving a wave of devastated people in its wake.
So to really [00:03:00] investigate this, I ended up going on this really big journey all over the world, from Iceland to Minneapolis, to Tokyo, to interview the leading critics of these drugs, the leading defenders of these drugs, and really dig into what actually what. are these drugs and what are they going to do to all of us?
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Well, you mentioned how we've had these miracle drugs in the past. Again, it's perhaps too soon to say, but what makes this one different, or potentially different?
JOHANN HARI: Lots of things. So the first is that it works on a completely new mechanism. If you ate something now, Sean, your gut would produce a hormone called GLP 1. And we now know that's part of your body's natural signals, just saying, Hey, Sean, you've had enough, stop eating. But natural GLP 1 only stays in your system for a few minutes. So what these drugs do is they inject into you an artificial copy of GLP 1, but instead of lasting for a few minutes, it stays in your system for a whole week. So it has this bizarre effect. I'll never forget the second day I took [00:04:00] it because I took it to research it for the book. I was lying in bed, I woke up, and I had this really strange sensation. And I couldn't locate in my body what it was that I was feeling. And then I realized I wasn't hungry. I had woken up and I wasn't hungry. I don't remember that ever happening before. And I went to this diner near where I live and I ordered what I used to order every day which was a huge brown roll with loads of chicken and mayo in it. And I had three or four mouthfuls and I couldn't eat anymore. I felt full. So one of the things that's different is we know that these drugs produce a feeling of satiety that lasts, the feeling of being full and having had enough. And we know that they produce sustained weight loss over a significant period of time.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: How confident are we in these early results?
JOHANN HARI: Well, there's an extremely high level of confidence that it produces significant amount of weight loss. There's been hundreds of studies involving tens of thousands of people. And that's just in its use for obesity. These drugs have also been used for diabetics, for other purposes, which gives us some insight onto [00:05:00] the safety risks around the drugs as well. So yeah, huge numbers of people. Yeah. As robust a finding as you get with any new drug.
The Ozempic economy - Today, Explained - Air Date 2-23-24
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: Okay, so last summer I saw you tweeted, "10 years from now, it'll be obvious GLP 1 drugs were a way bigger deal than AI". Okay, so you're saying Ozempic is going to be a bigger deal than ChatGPT and the end of the world and everything. That's a major thing to say. Can you make the case?
JOSH BARRO: Well, sure. So, first of all, I think AI and software more broadly have generally been oversold in terms of their economic effects, and I think that GLP 1 drugs are a really important advance because being overweight is so common. A majority of U. S. adults are overweight, and so I think these are drugs that are ultimately, they're going to be appropriate for more than half of American adults, and I think people are going to have good results from them, and in the long run, they're not going to be prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain, like they have been in the last few years. So, I think. it's going to be a really widely used medical intervention that is going to have a lot of positive effects for people.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: [00:06:00] And so, for someone who says, who's listening to this and says—Yeah, that's actually really great. Like half of all people potentially could get this drug—make the case that this is a big deal for the economy, for people whom that might slide past.
JOSH BARRO: Well, so I think it's in a few ways. One is that being overweight, and especially being obese, is a significant medical risk factor. And that has costs. It has costs in terms of medical care that people need because of conditions that are related to that, whether that's heart disease or diabetes or even joint problems. And then it also causes an increase in risk of disability. And that, you know, that obviously is a human problem, but it's also an economic problem. It means that people can't work in the way that they once did, either that they can't work as many hours or they can't work as long into their lives. And so, because I think it will reduce the disability rate, I think that will show up in productivity.
And then it's also going to change the way people consume. There's [00:07:00] been this sort of weird fixation in a lot of the press coverage on things that people might consume less of.
CLIP: Well, switching gears here, Walmart, seeing a slight pullback of shoppers. The company's U. S. CEO has told Bloomberg that they're seeing an impact on shopping demand from people taking the diabetes drug Ozempic.
JOSH BARRO: And that might be true on some micro levels, and there are specific businesses that you might be in where this drug is probably bad for you. But the thing is that people, if they're not going out and spending their money on Doritos, they still have that money. And in fact, maybe they have a little bit more money because they're a little bit more productive. And then they can go out and find other new things to spend that money on.
So, basically, if you're not in an industry that has specifically negative effects on consumption and demand from Ozempic, you should tend to be thinking of that as an industry where there will be positive effects. People will have more money around, more time around to spend on your product.
Weight loss is a huge source of frustration for people. It is widely desired. People who are overweight, you know, they want to lose weight. But most things [00:08:00] don't work well.
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JOSH BARRO: People bang their heads against the wall and they end up feeling bad about themselves and they spend tremendous amounts of time and money on things in an often futile pursuit of weight loss. And if you instead have this intervention that works quite well and requires much less effort on the part of the consumer, that frees up time and money again to go spend on other things.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: Okay, so business and Wall Street are paying attention to Ozempic. Business and Wall Street are not the same thing. But I want you to kind of untangle those two for us. What has that looked like so far? Is it entirely hand wringing? Who's looking at the optimistic side of this and saying, Oh, guys, all this money could be good.
JOSH BARRO: Yeah, well, I mean, so obviously the first answer is the drug companies that make these drugs, that they, you know, this is a tremendous business for them. [00:09:00] And we're just seeing, you know, a small part of the addressable market here. And of course, it's, you know, weight loss is one of the major indications for these. They're also, they're diabetes treatments, and there's, you know, diabetes is a tremendous problem, and that is also a huge market. And so, you know, you see Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, potentially Pfizer, which has a drug in the pipeline, you know, they're going to make a lot of money off this. And the prices that people are seeing right now are eye watering. List prices over $`1,000 a month. The effective pricing for Wegovy seems to have come down this year. Zepbound, which is the Eli Lilly competitor to Wegovy, that's going to be pricing at approximately $550 a month for people whose insurance is not paying for it.
And so, you know, if the Pfizer drug comes onto the market and as Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk ramp up production, I think there will be price competition that pushes those prices down somewhat farther, but the market's very big. So those drug companies are obviously going to make a lot of money from that. I mentioned the junk food thing, you also see, you know, Wall Street analysts have been interested in asking questions about this on earnings calls. [00:10:00]
CALLER: I'm wondering your perspective on the GLP1 drugs and the impact on restaurant demand, maybe Darden's restaurant demand. I'm not going to ask your average BMI for your customers, but, um...any perspective? I know it's something that's on investors' minds, so I figured I'd ask.
JOSH BARRO: There was a discussion that United Airlines might save millions of dollars a year, because of passengers being lighter and therefore taking less fuel to carry them.
CLIP: One study done by the Jefferies Financial Group found that if the average airline passenger lost 10 lbs., it could dramatically impact how much fuel planes need to fly, equating to 80 million dollars in savings in annual fuel costs per airline.
JOSH BARRO: So, it's sort of an interesting fact that you'll have millions of dollars in fuel savings a year, but it's not that large relative to the overall cost of running an airline. I think part of the reason that you've had this fixation on the negative economic effects is that it's very easy to identify, you know, [00:11:00] Doritos and products like that where you'll have the decline in consumption, and basically you're likely to see the increase in basically every other category. So it's not necessarily going to be a large increase. You're not going to look at the income statement of a company and say these profits were due to Ozempic, but you should see a broad-based improvement in the areas where people are going and spending their time and their money that they used to spend on other things on those
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: Just this morning, I was reading a story in Fortune Europe. The CEO of Novo Nordisk says that scared CEOs are calling him to, like, just discuss. And he didn't, he wouldn't tell Fortune who it was. And so they speculate that it's a lot of, like, potentially fast food companies, basically companies that deal with what we put in our mouths. But, like what you're saying sounds so sensible to me and I try hard to think of CEOs as sensible people who, like, game things out. Why do you think they seem so shook?
JOSH BARRO: Well, I think first of all, it's uncertainty, and, you [00:12:00] know, people, they know their business. They have a view on their customers. Their customers are about to change in some way. I mean, I don't know what it's like to run a fine dining restaurant in New York right now where, because, you know, the market penetration for these drugs is not that high yet. But if you have, you know, certain settings with, you know, especially affluent customers who might be trendsetters in certain areas, you might be seeing a lot of your customer base on this. Are they sending back way more food than they used to on their plates uneaten? So I'm sure you're starting to see some industries where you're at actually starting to see critical mass with customers. And the customers are different. And even if in the long run it's going to be an opportunity ,they have to figure out how to capitalize on that opportunity, and that's challenging.
There's also a specific matter in the United States, which is that employers pay for healthcare expenses. Right now, the drugs are very expensive, and they are sometimes being covered by insurance, even though they're very often not being covered by insurance. And that's a really large expenditure for whoever is the payer. And so that could be a private company if you have someone with private health insurance. In the long run, this is also going to be an issue for the US government and [00:13:00] therefore for taxpayers.
Have the new weight-loss drugs changed what it means to be body positive - Consider This - Air Date 5-13-24
JUANA SUMMERS - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: There is a lot of noise, particularly for women, around what it means to have a healthy body: how you get it, and how you keep it. Don't eat carbs, don't eat fat, do eat protein, run, do yoga, lift weights. But at the end of the day, having a healthy body has been synonymous with one thing: being thin.
Yet in recent years, that idea has been challenged by body positivity activists who have preached a message of 'healthy at any size'. And now with the arrival of a new class of weight loss drugs, often referred to as miracle drugs, is the body positivity movement at risk of fading away? It's a question that New York Magazine contributing writer Samhita Mukhopadhyay grapples with in her recent article, "So, Was Body Positivity All a Big Lie"?
She joins me now to talk about her article. I want to start by talking about this idea that being healthy and being thin are the same thing, which is one of the main things that [00:14:00] you get into in this article. Let's start there. How do you see it?
SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY: The conventional wisdom has long been that, you know, no matter what your health problem is, if you go to the doctor, the doctor is going to tell you to lose weight, right? Like, irrelevant of, you know, how your blood work may be or how your mobility issues are or your fitness level. And in the last couple of years, starting with body positive activists, but then also, you know, there's been quite a bit of research on this in medical science, they are seeing that the relationship between the size of your body and your health is not as linear as we have long thought, right? And, so, your fitness level really matters. Your proportions matter, your blood work matters. And I think that one of the things that we're really grappling with this in this moment is that we're still a culture that loves thinness, right? And so it's really hard to separate that from health. We have so internalized this idea that if you're fat, you're [00:15:00] unhealthy. And if you're thin, you're healthy.
JUANA SUMMERS - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: I mean, as you're talking, I'm sitting here thinking about so many interactions I have had with healthcare professionals over the years, where you come in with an ailment and it's like, well, How many calories are you burning? Or are you active enough? Or what's your normal lunch or dinner routine look like? And it can just be so frustrating. How do you think it is that we got to a point culturally where these two things are so intertwined in what I think many would argue could be a problematic way?
SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY: You know, we have a culture that worships thinness, right? And so, you know, Hollywood reinforces this, media reinforces this, and it's really always been the, like, thin at any cost, right? Like, we've never criticized what people have to do to get thin or how healthy that may be, whether that's physically healthy or healthy from a mental perspective, from like a psychological perspective, right? But I do think that, you know, both this media reinforcement of a type of, you know, what is considered the ideal body size, really fused with also [00:16:00] this idea of taking weight and our health, which, let's be honest, there are personal factors that lead to our health outcomes, but a lot of them are systemic, right? Like access to healthy food, having grocery stores in your neighborhood, living in an environment where you feel comfortable going for a walk, right? Like, all of these things that are really systemic issues that impact health outcomes. I do think it's both this internal process of, you know, we judge ourselves if we gain a little weight where, Oh, I'm like losing control. I'm not eating right. I need to do this. And those might be true also, right? Like we know when we're not being our best selves and we're not taking care of ourselves. But the way that the systems, both our society, our culture, and the medical system, continue to reinforce that, I think has made it very hard to disentangle those two things.
The world after Ozempic Part 2 - The Gray Area - Air Date 5-13-24
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Another part of the book that I do want to discuss a little bit here, is the story of how we got to this place as a society, and the main character here is the modern food industry. What did you want to say about this in the book? [00:17:00] What should people know about this dimension of the problem?
JOHANN HARI: So I guess the most important thing to know is just how recent and unusual the obesity crisis is. You have 300,000 years where obesity is exceptionally rare. So what happened? We move from eating mostly whole foods that are prepared on the day, to eating mostly processed and ultra-processed foods that are assembled in factories, made out of chemicals in a process that isn't even called cooking, it's called manufacturing food.
And it turns out that processed food affects our bodies in a completely different way to the kind of food that human beings evolved to eat. There's a brilliant scientist called Professor Paul Kenny, who I mentioned before, head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai. He grew up in Dublin in Ireland and he moved in his twenties to San Diego to do his PhD I think. And he quickly clocked, Whoa! Americans do not eat like Irish people did at the time. They eat much more processed food, much more junk food, much more sugary and salty food. And like many a good immigrant, he assimilated, [00:18:00] and within a year he'd gained 30 pounds. And he started to feel like these foods weren't just changing his body, they were changing his brain, they were changing his cravings, they were changing what he wanted.
So he designed an experiment to test this. It's very simple. He got a load of rats and he raised them in a cage. And for the first part of their life all they had was the kind of nutritious whole foods that rats evolved to eat for thousands of years. And when they had that food and nothing else, they would eat when they were hungry and then they would stop. They never made themselves fat. They seemed to have some kind of natural nutritional wisdom when they had the food they evolved for that just said, okay, stop now.
Then, Professor Kenny introduced them to the American diet. He fried up some bacon, he bought some Snickers bars, and crucially, he bought a load of cheesecake. And he put it in the cage. And they still had the option of healthy food, but the rats went crazy for the American diet. They would literally dive into the cheesecake and eat their way out. Just [00:19:00] completely, kind of, slicked and caked in this cheesecake. They ate, and ate, and ate, and ate. The way Professor Kenny put it to me, within a few days they were different animals. And they all became very severely overweight quite rapidly.
Then Professor Kenny did something that to me as a former junk food addict seems pretty cruel. He took away all that American food and left them with nothing but the healthy food again. He was pretty sure he knew what would happen, that they would eat more of the healthy food than they did before, and this would prove that junk food expands the number of calories you eat.
That is not what happened. What happened was much weirder. They refuse to eat anything at all. When they were deprived of the American food, they would rather starve than go back to eating healthy food. It's only when they were literally starving that they went back to eating it, right?
Now all this shows, and we have a huge amount of evidence for this in humans, there's something about the food we're eating that is profoundly undermining our ability to know when to stop. It is destroying our satiety. And what these drugs do is they give us back [00:20:00] that satiety, right? The way one scientist put it to me, Is there satiety hormones? And when you see it like that, you realize, one professor, Michael Lowe in Philly said to me, they're an artificial solution to an artificial problem.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: The point you were making earlier about how disevolved or maladapted we are to this environment, we evolve under conditions where salty, sugary, starchy foods were very hard to come by. And now these unhealthy, super processed foods are cheap and omnipresent. And I'm not saying it's impossible to be healthy in the modern world, but as you say in the book, we have built a system that almost deliberately poisons us. Which is insane.
JOHANN HARI: Yeah, it's catastrophic and it's profoundly harming our health. And it didn't have to happen, it's not an inevitable effect of modernity. It's the effect of allowing the food industry to systematically poison the minds and bodies of the country.
Now, they're not doing that because they're wicked Bond [00:21:00] villains. They're doing that to make money. But we've allowed them to do it and they have lobbied to prevent laws that would have sensibly prevented this, and they've massively pumped our heads full of bullshit. So you think about from the moment we're born, we are bombarded with imagery telling us to eat things that are really bad for us. And I include myself in that, by the way.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Well, they kind of are the Bond villains, right? I mean, some of them are. There's a bit in the book where you talk about an internal memo from 1998 from a company that makes biscuits. The memo was talking about how to market their shit food to kids.
JOHANN HARI: And they're literally saying we've got to get them when they're young. We've got to get them to shape their tastes before they're making rational choices, right? And they talk about well, let's use cartoon characters, let's advertise in kids TV, let's give our shitty food free to school so that when they go home, they demand it. Yeah, these are reprehensible people.
As angry as I am with the food industry--and [00:22:00] I am very angry with them, I think it's despicable and they should have made different moral choices--I'm more angry with the society that didn't regulate them, right? Because those companies are maximizing profit for their shareholders. That's what the company is built to do. The bigger issue is not just moral condemnation of them. I don't think that gets us very far, they're not going to morally change. The issue is why have we not regulated them, so we end up with this shitty choice of do I continue with a risky medical condition or do I take this risky drug? That choice didn't have to happen, and that choice does not have to be the choice for the next generation of Americans, if we get this right. We can fix this. We don't have to let our kids grow up in this trap. It's really important that people know that.
And if that sounds very pie in the sky, I would say, think about smoking, right? Think about when we were kids. When we were kids, people smoked everywhere. People smoked on the subway, people smoked on planes, people smoked on game shows. The doctor used to smoke while he examined you. I remember that when I was a kid. There's a photograph [00:23:00] of me and my mother where she's breastfeeding me, smoking and resting the ashtray on my stomach, right? Now, I'm speaking to you from Britain. The British government has just begun the criminalisation of smoking. That's an enormous public health transformation.
We can make similar changes like this. I've been to places that have begun to do it, but it requires first an honest reckoning with how this happened and what it is physically doing to us.
Body Neutrality - What The Actual Fork Podcast - Air Date 8-11-23
JESSI KNEELAND: So, I used to work in the fitness industry when I lived in New York City. And I had, it was pretty successful. I went under, my business name was Remodel Fitness. I got a lot of media and press. I worked with a lot of kind of big names for clients. I worked with actresses, models, like, it was awesome. Because I love strength training and I love how empowering it is. And honestly, when the modeling agency would send me a new girl who had literally never set foot in a gym before, and I like introduced her to dumbbells or whatever, it was just the best feeling. Like, there was so much about it that I really loved. And I'm a total [00:24:00] nerd for the science of training and all of that stuff. But what never sat right with me was the fact that pretty much every single person who walked in was looking to change how they looked, in order to change how they felt. Like, that was the plan. If I could just change XYZ about my body, I know I would feel confident and happy and all of the things.
And, like, some of those changes weren't realistic or sustainable or whatever. And so there were times where I was giving people advice that I was like, I mean, if you want to get there, this is how you can do it, but I don't recommend it. Like, think of all the things you have to give up. Like, why would you do that? And it never quite felt right, but I was very much in the diet culture world. So I was like, you know, had not heard of intuitive eating or anything like that.
So, I did what I did and then I eventually realized that, like, all of the same conversations were happening across the board, whether you were a Victoria's [00:25:00] Secret model or a mom trying to get in shape after a baby. Like, we were always having the same kinds of conversations about body image. And it just didn't feel good to be, like, Yeah, sure, I can help you with that by changing your body. A: not always! Like, that's not true all the time. In fact, a lot of the time what they wanted wasn't possible. And then also I would see people hit those goals and still not feel good.
So clearly it wasn't about how you actually looked or all the models would feel amazing all the time, right? And that wasn't happening. So, eventually I discovered things like intuitive eating, health at every size. I just started learning a lot more about where this stuff comes from and decided that that wasn't the path I wanted to take. The fitness and strength training can be an amazing tool, but they're just one tool and I wanted to have a whole bunch of tools to help people feel good in their bodies. So, I got my life coaching certification and started doing the work I do now.
[00:26:00] But body neutrality was not a term at the time, so it was like body positivity, body acceptance maybe. So, it kind of evolved. I mean, as I learned the term, I was like, Oh, yeah, that's like what I do. But until you know the name of something, you don't necessarily know how to talk about it.
So it's evolved over time, but a lot of the work that I do now is stuff that I've just observed in my coaching practice, 'cause I've been doing this for like a decade now, this kind of work around body image, and learned a lot, you know? And I really was obsessed with figuring out what body image issues are actually about. If they're not about how you look and they can't be solved that way, then what can solve them? What are they really about?
So, yeah, that led into the content that got me the book deal, which is the 4 Body Image Avatars, which is just a system I used, honestly, to help people like understand that there was something else going on, that it wasn't just about how you look, and also to help people identify what that [00:27:00] might be for them quickly and easily. So, I started putting that content out into the world. It led to a book deal and my book just came out like a month ago. So yeah.
JENNA WERNER - HOST, WHAT THE ACTUAL FORK: Congratulations!
JESSI KNEELAND: Thank you!
JENNA WERNER - HOST, WHAT THE ACTUAL FORK: That is incredible. Tell us more about the book. What it is, what it's about, and maybe can you backtrack a little bit and define what is body neutrality?
JESSI KNEELAND: So, when I first heard the term 'body neutrality', it was presented as like an alternative to body positivity, because the mainstream messaging around body positivity was, like, that you should be able to love every inch of your body, you know, just like feel sort of a constant stream of goodness and affection and warmth towards your body.
And that again just started to feel unrealistic and unsustainable and it made people feel worse about themselves. So, I was like, okay, that can't be it. Body neutrality was sort of an alternative where you could just sit in the middle. You're not too attached to how you look, so [00:28:00] therefore you don't get too upset when you don't like it.
And I really loved that, but I think it was also at the time kind of posed as like focusing on what your body can do, which is a good start for sure, but is not in my understanding now in any way a complete definition of body neutrality, because if you're attaching to what you can do, you're still attaching to your body and that sets you up for the same issues.
So it's about really just stripping away all the false or inflated, like, significance and meaning and interpretation and narratives and beliefs about your body that sit on top and make us, basically, give our body so much power that it can ruin your day, ruin your month, send you down unhealthy spirals. By stripping those things away, you kind of end up in a place where your body doesn't have any power over you. Therefore, whether or not you prefer how you look to be how you look, it just doesn't really matter. It's like, you can look in the mirror, have a bad hair day and you're like, roll your eyes and move on, right? You don't be like, Why is [00:29:00] my hair so shameful and bad? Like, most people, anyway. It's the same thing with your body. Like, if you can get to a place where you look in the mirror and go, this isn't how I prefer to look today, but it is what it is, and then you move on, that's great. That's a huge improvement. And for most people, it's a lot more realistic than looking in the mirror and preferring what you see every day.
So, to me, that's what body neutrality has evolved into. And my book is called Body Neutral: A Revolutionary Guide to Overcoming Body Image Issues. And it's about sort of introducing the concept of body neutrality, as I understand it, and then also giving like a step by step instruction for people to move toward it, to move from the body image suffering place where it has all this power, to the place where you're free from all that power. And you can just, you know, say to yourself, This isn't my favorite thing, but it also doesn't have the power to like ruin my day, ruin my life, like, my self worth is not attached to this, so I can just move on.
Examining America's Unhealthy Obsession With Fitness w. Natalia Mehlman Petrzela - The Majority Report - Air Date 6-24-23
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: What you wrote about, and I haven't really thought about the fitness industry as [00:30:00] broadly as, of course, you did in your book, and you also worked in it as well. The idea that the private sector has essentially created this explosion of gyms, fitness classes, equipment, everything kind of in the private space, and that is really what is associated with fitness, specifically in the United States, as opposed to outdoor public spaces where everyone can work out together for free. I mean, what was your take on that, particularly because I know you've worked at places like Lululemon that are clearly at the center of this.
NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA: [Laughing] Slightly privatized, part of that sector. Um, yeah, no, absolutely. So, like, there's this kind of two big picture narratives that I try to trace over more than a century. And one is how exercise went from being something considered sort of like shady and weird and suspicious and narcissistic, you know, for men and [00:31:00] women in different ways, it was considered inappropriate, to being something that in a culture where, we are so divided on basically everything, most people agree exercise is good for you. Like, I don't care who you voted for, that's kind of a consensus position.
On the other hand, what's so sad to me is exactly what you hint at there, which is that despite these moments in our history, when that consensus almost yielded like great public infrastructure for recreation, for physical education, pools, parks, all that kind of stuff. Instead, it's actually a private industry that has run with that idea that exercise is good for you. It makes you a good person. It's like, you know, integral to mental health and to spiritual health and to community and all that. And for the most part that's something that we're sold as a product, as opposed something as opposed to something that were guaranteed as kind of a right of humanity or citizenship.
And so, you know, part of this book is I kind of look at, I don't want to say the rise and fall, but the rise and kind of, you know, dubious [00:32:00] state of the physical education profession. And also like what happened to some of these policy initiatives, you know, like in the Cold War where the idea was introduced that fitness is part of being a good American. And there were some real problems with the assumptions of like the way that works, but it was considered to be a public priority. We've largely lost that.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah. And that's what I think maybe drive some of the resentment or pushback like, well, one, when Michelle Obama was saying there should be healthy eating in schools, a lot of that's just like, Well, you're a Black woman, so there's resentment there, right? Like, just general racism about anything she does. But, also because it's not introduced to the public as a public good, providing for the fitness and nutrition of human beings. But it's such a privatized space at this point that I think there's natural gatekeeping and frustration from average people. I mean, you talk about how only 20 percent of [00:33:00] Americans actually fall under the category of exercising regularly and are able to use these systems and that's because we have a sickness in this country called capitalism that keeps people out of these spaces. But like that alienating element, I think there's a connection there.
NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the reasons that the whole exercise ethos is so appealing in our country is because it's so individualistic, right? There's this appealing mythology, everything about the myth of the self-made man and self made fashioning. What more appealing place to think that's really possible than the gym? All you need is to get outside and have some motivation and willpower. And if you don't do that, it's on you. And that is so dominant in our kind of fitness culture. So, I try to say, Actually, that's a really unfair assumption. And that's so disempowering and doesn't even account for why 80 percent of people are not, you know, getting the recommended daily minimum of exercise. And with the books about fitness, you know, it's connected to all these [00:34:00] other aspects of inequality in our country. Like if you live in a neighborhood without tree cover, it's that much hotter to go outside and run however many days of the year. If you live in a body where you're considered suspicious or vulnerable when you go out for a job, I don't care if you have all the willpower in the world, you're going to be less likely to do that safely. Very similarly, if you even think about housing and, you know, how long it takes you to get to work, or if you work unpredictable shift labor, like, how hard is it to be able to work this into your life? And so, you know, that's something that I really try to, like, stay on topic with fitness. I would say this is connected to so many other aspects of inequality and like more individual willpower and gumption, though yes, you do need that whoever you are to get off the couch and work out, we probably all sometimes need that reminder, that is not the solution here or the problem.
What Ozempic can't fix - Today, Explained - Air Date 2-26-34
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: There's a knee-jerk reaction I've seen to almost everything that you just laid out. And the knee-jerk reaction [00:35:00] is there are now drugs that can fix this. What was your first reaction when you started reading that there is a class of drugs that really seem to be helping people lose weight?
KATE MANNE: So I want to be clear that I'm not against these drugs in any blanket way. But when it comes to weight loss, I do worry that these drugs are getting a bit overhyped for a bunch of reasons.
One is just in terms of the math of it. So these drugs do have a greater effect, at least in the short term, than diet and exercise, which tends to take between five and 10 percent of people's weight off, and then the weight comes back really inexorably. Whereas these drugs look like they lead to an average of about 15 percent weight, according to pretty optimistic estimates under pretty ideal conditions with a pretty select group of patients. So it's more than diet and exercise, but it's not vastly more. And it does look like the weight comes back again, really [00:36:00] inexorably following discontinuation.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: What is it that we're actually thinking when we're thinking, Oh, Ozempic is the solution to everything?
KATE MANNE: I do think there's a lot of anti-fat bias that can be betrayed by that reaction of, Oh, fantastic, we can eliminate an entire class of people. And it's complicated because many people who are in that high weight category do want to lose weight. And I don't want to be dismissive of that desire and it's being based in something real, which is, I think, mostly fatphobia. But there are also a lot of us who are happy with our bodies the way they are. And the expressive potential of having this message around that says, you really need to change your body because now we can, and why wouldn't you want to change? It doesn't just feel insulting sometimes, it can feel like we're not really welcome in the world anymore, that people just look at our bodies and wonder why we haven't [00:37:00] availed ourselves of a solution to what for many of us seems like a bodily non-problem in simply having more flesh in our bones.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: And it's not as though, if we're talking about the US today, it's not as though when we talk about people in bigger bodies that we're talking about this tiny, tiny, tiny minority.
KATE MANNE: No.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: We're talking about many, many, many people.
KATE MANNE: It's between two thirds and three quarters of Americans, upwards of 70 percent of Americans are either overweight or obese, according to the BMI charts, which are super problematic, but nonetheless, about 70 percent of Americans have a claim to be somewhat fat.
And yet, it is something where that doesn't necessarily drive more acceptance of fatter bodies, rather it drives a sense that we're a crisis, we're a problem, we need to be fixed or else, in ways that don't always track the epidemiological evidence that suggests that people in the quote unquote overweight categories aren't at greater health risks in [00:38:00] terms of all cause mortality than their so-called average weight counterparts.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: I want to draw kind of a crude comparison here, but bias or prejudice against minorities is a thing that happens, you encounter people who are different, who are not like you, and your back goes up and you think there's something wrong with them, and then more of those people move in, and then a couple years down the line, the biases seem to go away. Like, in polite society, we don't stare crosseyed at people in interracial marriages, for example, because we're used to this now. America is this constantly changing society. And yes, we still do have racism and biases, but there are, I think there are theories that if you interact with people more, you become less likely to be prejudiced against them.
Why do you think that is not happening with people in bigger bodies?
KATE MANNE: What you've just laid out is a very good summary of what's called the contact hypothesis, that contact with members of marginalized groups [00:39:00] will have this effect of diminishing prejudice. And I think, in fact, the empirical evidence suggests that the contact hypothesis is not especially reliable for any form of marginalization.
But when it comes to fatness in particular, I think it doesn't work for a couple of additional reasons too, which is that a lot of fat people ourselves feel like there's a thin person waiting to come out triumphantly, like after the next diet or exercise plan, or set of Ozempic shots or whatever it is, that we're really not fat people deep down, that somehow the thin person is going to emerge victorious. And so we don't really identify as fat people and lobby for political change and momentum. We don't demand thin allies stand up for us. And we don't really necessarily see this political platform building where people of a certain size, despite our ubiquity, we're not really standing together in solidarity.
So, [00:40:00] yeah, I think the fact that a lot of fat people feel kind of ashamed and isolated and are trying to change, not the world, but our bodies, means that we don't always get the political coalition building that would be desirable in this arena.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: Earlier this month, an article came out in New York Magazine, and this article asked rhetorically --it was written by a person in health care--and it asked rhetorically, what if Ozempic is just a good thing?
Do you think it's possible at all that we may be freighting this with too much confusion over whether it's good or bad, or if I celebrate the existence of it, does that mean that I don't like fat people? Do you think possibly there's a simpler way to cut through this?
KATE MANNE: So I think we're suddenly worried about this drug for some of the wrong reasons. So one point that that article made that I did like is, look, why should we insist that people do this the hard way, when for [00:41:00] many people losing weight through diet and exercise is not just hard, but nigh on impossible? Easier is actually better. It's just a fallacy to think that harder is better. I call this the harder better fallacy in my work.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: It's very American.
KATE MANNE: Yeah. If it's harder, that's actually worse, all else being equal. So, that particular story featured a patient of that physician who had a lot going on. She was unhoused, she was a wheelchair user, she was a Type 2 diabetic, and she was put on Ozempic and she'd lost 10 pounds over a month.
Why was the focus on her weight loss rather than the things that this woman obviously needed in her life, like access to fresh foods and reliable health care and a home? She needed housing. And yet, the idea was, let's celebrate, Ozempic is such a good thing because she lost 10 pounds. I'm just not sure this relentless focus on [00:42:00] weight would do such a patient many favors.
The world after Ozempic Part 3 - The Gray Area - Air Date 5-13-24
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: One of the reasons I identified pretty early on in my life as on the political left is I would constantly see these arguments about this or that societal problem. And I thought conservatives overestimated the role of agency and choice, and liberals seemed more tuned to the realities of the incentive structure that we live in and how those constrain our actual choices. And this is the same dynamic I struggle with here, right? Like, sure, people need to make wise life choices. I get that. We need to exercise more. We need to eat as well as we can. But if you're poor or working class, eating healthy is expensive. Finding the time to work out, if you're a single mom or working two jobs or whatever, is hard. So I guess what I'm asking is how do we avoid tumbling into a post-Ozempic world that's even [00:43:00] more unequal than the world we already live in?
JOHANN HARI: You know, you're totally right. My grandmother left school when she was 13. She raised three kids on her own because her husband died when he was very young of a heart attack. And, my grandmother came home dog tired from a day cleaning toilets, working bars. And the one comfort she had in her life was eating stodge and carbohydrates, and she ate a lot of them and became very obese. And anyone who criticizes her is an asshole. So, you're absolutely right. There's the inequality of access to healthy food, and then there's just, it's really stressful to be poor. And you don't have many comforts when you're poor. And one of them is food. With Ozempic, there's some possible scenarios for how this might play out now, and one of them is a pretty dystopian one, which is that these drugs work, that the benefits outweigh the risks, but they are only accessible to a tiny elite. So you have the real housewives of New Jersey get to be super skinny, and the real school children of New Jersey get to be diabetic at the age of 12, right? That's a real risk. I [00:44:00] think it's possibly the most likely scenario, given the current configuration.
It's not because the drugs are inherently expensive. The drugs cost about $40 a month to manufacture. It's because of the patenting system and the insane way the American medical system works. I live half the time in the US, half the time in Britain. When I'm in Britain, I buy these drugs for about 200 pounds a month. What's that, $280, something like that? When I'm in Las Vegas, it costs me like $1,000 a month, right? This disparity in drug prices happens in the U. S. the whole time. It's madness and it's insane that the United States tolerates this. It doesn't have to be that way. There are all sorts of ways that we can bring down the price. And the price will come down anyway in eight years time, because in 2032, Ozempic comes out of patent. So eight years from now, these drugs will almost certainly be in pill form. You can already get the pills, but the pills will be more effective. At that point, I anticipate, if we don't find really horrific side effects, I would guess half the American population will be taking them.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Wow.
JOHANN HARI: And don't take my word for it. Look at the markets and what they're [00:45:00] saying. Jeffrey's Financial just did a big report for the airlines saying prepare for the fact that you're going to have to spend far less money on jet fuel, because the population is about to become much thinner and you're going to have to spend a lot less money on it. The CEO of Nestle, Mark Schneider, has been making very nervous noises about the future of their ice cream market. Even think about little things. There's a company that manufactures the hinges for hip and knee replacements. Their stock is down, because fewer people are going to be having hip and knee replacements, because the main driver of those operations is obesity, and a lot fewer people are going to be obese.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I mean, some of that sounds really overstated to me, in terms of the impact. Talk me through that a little bit. If even if half the country is taking this drug and losing 20, 25 pounds or whatever the case may be, is that really going to be significant enough to tank airline prices and up in the market in that way? That seems wild.
JOHANN HARI: I think you have to think about it in the wider context. In terms of the consequences of this, by [00:46:00] many measures, obesity is the biggest killer in the United States. If you can massively reduce the biggest killer in the country, yeah, that has enormous consequences. It also has huge cultural consequences, by the way, in all sorts of complex and much more worrying ways about what young women aspire to be like, what the young women they see around them look like.
But yeah, I don't think it's overblown to say, if you can reduce the biggest killer in the society, and you can transform how people look, and how they move, and how their bodies work, and what kind of illnesses they get, that's pretty, pretty big.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: If 50 percent of the country is taking this, then presumably that will include kids--young kids and teenagers. And I read what you wrote about this in the book. And it is appropriately nuanced, but man, I just--I don't know what to think about that.
JOHANN HARI: The first thing I feel when I think about this is profound anger. It was the angriest I got when writing the book.
So the first thing we should say is, it is an outrage that parents are being put [00:47:00] in the position where they have to make this choice. It isn't happening in countries that made better societal choices. We shouldn't allow it to continue.
But my biggest worry about these drugs, for myself and for these kids, is we just have no idea about the long term effects. These drugs are activating key parts of the brain, right? I had a quite chilling conversation with one of the neuroscientists. She was explaining to me which brain regions we know are affected by these drugs. And I remember saying to her, so what else does that brain region do? And she said, oh, memory processing, control of your gut. And I was like, oh, well, just the trivial stuff then.
Of course, this raises the question, if you are chronically activating these parts of the brain and you think about an eight-year-old child, to have the benefits throughout their life, they will have to take it for, what, 80 years? What will be the effect of that? The answer is, we have absolutely no idea.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Is that the biggest concern for you in terms of the risk? Just simply the unknown?
JOHANN HARI: It's the biggest risk for me personally, [00:48:00] because a lot of the risks don't apply to me. I'm obviously not going to get pregnant. I've never had thyroid cancer in my family. I didn't experience a loss of pleasure in food. The one that I'm most worried about, this is not for myself, but eating disorders in young women.
So prior to the pandemic, we already had historically high levels of eating disorders among American girls. It is overwhelmingly girls, although there are of course some boys. And then during the pandemic, incredibly, it rose from the already historically high level. And I am extremely worried about what happens when people who are determined to starve themselves get hold of an unprecedentedly powerful weapon to amputate your appetite. My biggest worry is that we will have an opioid-like death toll of young women who starve themselves to death using these drugs who would not have been able to without these drugs.
Now, there's a lot we can do to prevent that. At the moment, you can get these drugs from a doctor on Zoom. Doctors on Zoom are not good at assessing your BMI. These [00:49:00] drugs should only be prescribed in person, by doctors who have training in detecting eating disorders. That's not perfect. There's still holes in that system, but it would prevent a lot of this harm.
Have the new weight-loss drugs changed what it means to be body positive Part 2 - Consider This - Air Date 5-13-24
JUANA SUMMERS - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: You've written in this piece and in others about your decision to go on Mounjaro. You've described it as a choice that you struggled with and you've now been off of that medication for months. I'm curious, how do you personally think about that? How has that experience changed, if it has, the way you feel about your body?
SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY: Yeah, it's been really hard. The medication does a lot of different things. You don't crave food as much. Your relationship to food really changes. So fried food is really hard to digest. If you eat too many sweets, you get really sick. And so there were certain things that happened while doing it, where my body would have a really exaggerated reaction to something that I would have normally just eaten and been like, Oh my God, I'm being so bad. And it was like, no, you're being real bad, girl! [00:50:00] Stop eating this! And so that did force me to eat fresher foods and more vegetables and more fruit. And I was craving, like I always wanted something crunchy, so I wanted crunchy salads and things like that. And that did actually have an impact on my behavior, even coming off the medication and without it, I can tell how I feel when I'm eating well or I decide to indulge, which I do. I'm human. I love food. And I'm the child of immigrants. We have delicious food. I eat rice, all of these things. But really figuring out how to balance that.
And what my doctor had originally said about increased mobility was true. I had gotten to a point where, for me and for my body, the size of my body was impacting my mobility in very subtle ways, but they were painful. And as I get older, I was feeling knee pain and ankle pain. And as I started to move more, really all I did was I started walking, I started going on these five to seven mile hikes and walks.
And that mobility really changed my outlook. It changed my mental health. It changed my body. [00:51:00] And so even as I am gaining back some of the weight, I've managed to maintain some of the lifestyle changes. And I think that that's a really key piece of this that we don't talk about as much, which is, how can this actually be used strategically to support people that do want to take better care of themselves.
JUANA SUMMERS - HOST, CONSIDER THIS: You've been open about this. You've written multiple times about your experience on Mounjaro. And since then, what has that experience been like for you?
SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY: It's been really hard. It took me two months to write this piece. And I think part of it is, it is very hard to color within the lines that have been drawn for us in this conversation. It's either that you completely support it. You want to take it. It's a great medical intervention. We should all want to be thin, right? That's the dominant narrative.
But then the counter narrative is also that we accept our bodies as we are. And as I write about in the piece, a lot of pressure within the community to say that any move [00:52:00] towards weight loss is perpetuating this idea that thinness is the ultimate ideal.
And so, part of what I wanted to, I was like, this is messy. I don't even have all the answers. But I just know that the way that I am navigating this as somebody who is a feminist, someone who is committed to body positivity, but also somebody who was facing some serious health-related concerns that I wanted to address and get ahead of, I could not be alone in this experience. And so, yeah, it's been challenging, but it's been overwhelmingly positive in terms of the outreach that I've gotten and how many people have shared their own personal stories. My DMs are paragraphs and paragraphs of heartbreaking, gutting stories of people going to the doctor, the experiences that they've had, or mobility issues, or just so many different experiences that people have had, or even celebrities have reached out to me and said, I was feeling really judgmental about these drugs. And this really helped me understand how I should really be thinking about it. So it's been good.
Note from the Editor on the metaphor of the new show format
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The Gray [00:53:00] Area, in multiple clips, speaking with Johanne Hari about the benefits of Ozempic and the food system that necessitates it. Today, Explained looked at the impact of Ozempic on the economy of its home country, Denmark. Consider This discussed weight and health. What the Actual Fork explained body neutrality. The Majority Report looked at the privatization of exercise and fitness. Today, Explained examined fatphobia through the new lens of Ozempic. And Consider This discussed a personal experience with weight loss, drugs, and body positivity.
And that was just the front page. There's a lot more to dive into in the additional sections of this audio newspaper. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics often trying to make each other laugh in the process.
To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at [00:54:00] bestoftheleft.com/support (link in the show notes), through our Patreon page, if you prefer, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. .
And now before we continue onto the sections half of the show, just a couple comments on the existence of the sections half, which, today, happens to be a little bit less than half, while on other days it might actually be far more than half. The feedback on the new format of the show has been pretty good, few exceptions. So, we're going to keep going with the experiment. However, the constructive criticism that I definitely agree with the most is, I received a text message from a commenter who said it would be wise to use a more modern metaphor for the show than a newspaper with a front page, and then the further sections deeper in. 'Cause like sooner or later, there won't be anyone who remembers that that's how [00:55:00] newspapers used to work. But this commentator, like myself, admitted to not being able to think of a better metaphor. And the thing is with the rise of algorithmic newsfeeds, there's basically no metaphor that can bridge the gap between information organized by type and information organized by a black box into a single, endless scroll. For instance, it might be a good idea to liken the time codes to navigate between sections of the show, to something like a navigation bar, similar to how a news site will provide quick links to various news topics. That's newer than a newspaper, however, I'm in my forties and I feel like I can count the number of times I've actually used one of those new site navigation bars on one hand. And I'm sure that number drops to zero for many. In fact, full disclosure. I had to look up what that bar was called because not only do I not use it, but I don't even think about it enough to know its name. And then, you know, for the young people in my life, if they want to learn about [00:56:00] something they just searched for it a couple of times in their social media app of choice to train their personal algorithm to passively feed information to them on that topic until they think to pay attention to something else or until the algorithm decides to throw them a curve ball and they get distracted by something else and they go down a new rabbit hole. In any case, you know, none of that is something I'd like to build a metaphor out of.
But speaking of metaphors, you know, about like 10 years ago, there was a big fight inside Apple about whether their iOS operating system needed to be designed with visual metaphors that make digital things on the phone look like real world things. Like, I think the most famous example is the note pad app had a bit of torn paper at the top, the way a real notepad does to signal to you the user that this is like a note pad. And design a thing [00:57:00] to be similar to other things, but made of different material is called skeuomorphism and to be anti-skeuo morphism people at Apple ended up winning that debate. They're like, look, we don't need metaphors anymore. Things that are on the phone just are things that are on the phone and people know how to use them.
So, perhaps that's the real lesson here. Maybe it's just that people don't really need metaphors as often as some designers fear they do. I designed the longer format of the show and felt that urge to create a metaphor to explain it less people be confused. Also, I thought that newspaper idea was sort of fun in like a nostalgic kind of way, but I guess that'll only get you so far. So, maybe instead of a metaphorical newspaper, what you heard in the first half were the key points or top takes or something like that. I'm happily accepting suggestions on what to call that, but you know, like the key ideas, the big thoughts, [00:58:00] the... anyway, send your recommendations for what to call that.
And what you're about to hear now in the second half is something like the deeper dives. I don't know, that sounds modern enough.
DEEPER DIVE A: BUSINESS OF DESIRE
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with the deep dives and the rest of the show separated into three categories. The business of desire, bias and risk. And body neutrality.
Examining America's Unhealthy Obsession With Fitness w. Natalia Mehlman Petrzela Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 6-24-23
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: It's become a symbol of affluence right in the way that other say, you know, say diamonds were in the housewife era or the right kind of dress like, um, uh, or in the pre Jack Lane era before it became more mainstream, like the it's amazing how quickly it turned from a, uh, an empowering branding to something that causes like general, Uh, alienation or like a, uh, another sense of anxiety about not being enough.
Absolutely. And I mean, you
NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA: [00:59:00] see, like, starting really in like the late 1950s with some of the early kind of chain gyms. I talk about these tanny health spas. There's so much effort and there's so much. smart to realize this, that these entrepreneurs put into like selling the idea that exercise is not this like gross, weird thing that happens in basements with like big dudes pumping iron.
This is about an affluent lifestyle and they're like tropical fish tanks in the gyms and like they sit, they all say they have like, which I think is disgusting, but that's supposed to be this kind of sign of luxury that goes with exercise. But, you know, you see versions of that well into today. And to me, like big picture, it really speaks to how we think about exercise in this country as like somewhere between labor and leisure.
I think as opposed to like the diamonds or the fancy car or the expensive. cocktails, like people are actually more comfortable in some ways, spending a lot of money on exercise because like, well, that's work and that shows that you are, you know, investing in yourself and in [01:00:00] health and those are virtuous things.
Whereas the kind of overt conspicuous consumption of more flashy things, you know, there are people who are into that, but there are more people who are uncomfortable with it. One moment just recently, I think that might interest like your particular audience is like, one thing that I realized is like, you know, we have the financial crash in 2008, 2009, obviously so many people losing their homes, foreclosures, all the rats.
It's also the rise of boutique fitness in that moment, which is like the highest price point at that time. And one of the ways that I argue that I think that that actually makes sense is that. It's also the moment when social media really comes out and people are pressured to perform their lives all day, their consumption habits.
It's no longer really tasteful to show off a lot of money and spending and fancy life if you have it, but to show off, Oh, I spent, you know, 30 on this exercise class because I care about health or a hundred dollars on these yoga pants. That's sort of as a little bit more culturally acceptable because we so sanctify the pursuit [01:01:00] of health and fitness.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, the, the, the sanctifying part is, is fascinating to me. Um, but it's just like, can you expand on that point about it, uh, becoming a consumptive, uh, performative element? Because, it, it, Fitness being consumption, I don't necessarily think is a concept that might come naturally to people when they think about it.
NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA: Yeah, so I mean, if you think there's this really big turning point in the 1950s in the Cold War where, you know, exercise had been suspicious and weird for all the reasons that we said, and then there's this sense that Well, actually like the good life that Americans are living and that we say to the, you know, the Soviet union, like we've got all these great things.
We've got suburbs and cars and TV sets and frozen food and all these things. There's some people who look at the results of that on American bodies. And they're like, actually this thing that you Trump it as an example of American strength is actually making us weak and like. [01:02:00] Eisenhower and JFK jump right on this.
JFK is like, um, you know, condemning the soft American and the pages of sports illustrated. And they start to have this kind of, um, promotional program to have fitness programs, recreation, physical education in schools, like to be a good American is to be fit. That kind of falters, like it's never really very well funded.
The kind of pressures of the cold war change all these people who are actually like, what are you doing? We shouldn't be preparing like, you know, these fit people. We should be spending on science and technology. That side of like the cold war pressure kind of wins out. But what you have is this whole generation of entrepreneurs who are like, yeah, it makes you a good American.
And it also shows that you have money to spend. And it's also almost a little bit of like, you know, a kind of Protestant work ethic. Like you can show off that you're working hard, come spend money and do that and come join these communities, gyms, health clubs, et cetera, to [01:03:00] find like minded people who want to work on their bodies in the same way.
And so that's kind of like the general idea. And then it takes different shapes. Like you see, you know, um, This idea that like working on your body is part of like a fully actualized self and that it's up to you, the individual to take your health in your hands. That is so appealing across the political spectrum.
And, you know, I write about like feminists who are like, yeah, like take the power back from these doctors in white coats. Black Panthers saying versions of the same thing. And then you've got these like hardcore libertarians and people at Oral Roberts University who are like, yeah, like, you know, you know, it's up to you, personal responsibility.
Don't wait for some government like healthcare handout, get out there and run on the open road. And you really see that ideology with, with exercise at its center. Being something embraced across, um, you know, the political landscape landscape and thus marketed really, really effectively, especially as we get into an era of austerity politics, [01:04:00] when a lot of funding for all kinds of public programmings, he and otherwise fall away.
And, uh, yeah, it's, it's great. It's really something and it's really depressing. Like I read all these PE journals, physical education journals, and like in the late seventies, early eighties, they're like, our time has come, you know, for our profession, like this is going to be the boom moment for phys ed.
And it never really happened in part because a lot of those programs were defunded and people who would have gone into PE, I heard again and again in my interviews were like, Oh, Actually, I can make all this money making VHS and, you know, connecting with all these communities in other ways. Can you imagine I would have been a phys ed teacher?
And to me, that's so sad, because that's where most Americans will first encounter exercise. And it's seen as this kind of, you know, depressing path. And I think that's
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: unfortunate. And,
NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA: you know, we don't pay our teachers
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: enough, right? Like that's, it's a part of We've commodified this space so entirely, as you lay out so well in your book, that it, it's, it keeps, uh, people who might be talented in that sphere from entering [01:05:00] into the public sector, because what is the public sector, um, for exercise?
And something that you said really reminded me of, like, when you talked about how there's the Protestant work ethic, uh, being displayed physically, if you're physically fit. It's that. It's that. It's also the fact that you're, as you also, I'm kind of reiterating, you're wealthy enough to have the time to do this.
Uh, you're also wealthy enough to probably go to a boutique fitness club like Equinox or Lifetime. Um, or, the third thing here too is, I've read about this in connection to like, analyzing the Kardashians and their social, um, what, what they kind of epitomize about our culture, is that, um, There's this new era of, like, beauty and fitness where displaying the work and money that goes into your body is a big part of the beauty standard, which is why when people say, oh, they look fake, that's kind of the point, because it's showing I have the money and the funds to make my face [01:06:00] contoured in a way through surgery, through injections, whatever, that can also display my wealth.
The Ozempic economy Part 2 - Today, Explained - Air Date 2-23-24
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: Okay, so you guys export the groundbreaking medication and the United States exports the culture trash. Tell me about the company that makes Ozempic Entwigovi. Novo
MICHAEL: Nordisk is worth about 530 billion dollars at the moment.
Totally staggering numbers. It's in the top 20 most valuable companies in the world right now.
CLIP: Novo Nordisk is Europe's most valuable company. It takes the top spot away from luxury goods giant LVMH which sells Louis Vuitton handbags and Hennessy cognac.
MICHAEL: And for a small country like Denmark, that is a, like, a huge thing and something that I don't think any economist or analyst would have expected just, like, five years ago.
CLIP: Novo's market capitalization has surged from about 100 billion in 2020 to a high of 461 billion earlier this month, bigger than [01:07:00] Denmark's entire GDP.
MICHAEL: Novo Nordisk has more than doubled its market value for in the last three years. Wow. So it was a big, it was a big company in Danish terms, but it was nowhere near the top of the world when we look at market value.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: What does Denmark's economy look like in this height of Ozempic kind of age?
MICHAEL: A good way to just to describe that is just to referring to an interview I did with a Top analyst in the Danish National Bank a few months ago. He said basically if it wasn't for Denmark's pharmaceutical Industry and by that he really means Novo Nordisk Because they are by far the biggest.
The Danish economy wouldn't have seen any growth last year.
CLIP: If you strip out the pharmaceutical sector which is now dominated by Novo, the Danish economy actually shrank by 0. 3%.
MICHAEL: We have seen countries close to us in Europe, um, where the economy has not looked great at all for the last [01:08:00] year or so. Um, so it makes a huge difference for Danish economy, um, at the moment.
And You know, on top of that, Novo Nordisk is by far the largest taxpayer in this country and it also is contributing a lot to Danish education, to Danish science, so it plays a huge role in the Danish economy these years.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: Do you see those changes?
MICHAEL: Do the average Dane feel that the country is becoming richer?
Maybe they don't, but they can see that in certain parts of the country where Novo Nordisk has its largest activity, um, Novo Nordisk is completely reshaping these parts of the country. I myself grew up in a country where Quite small town where Novo Nordisk has its largest factory. And they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into that small town for the last couple of years.
When I go back to visit my mom who lives in Kelombo, when you drive into the city now, there [01:09:00] is like huge factories.
CLIP: Located just one hour drive from the capital city of Copenhagen, You will find the industrial cluster of Kalimbor, home to the world's largest insulin manufacturing plant, where Nova Nordisk employ around 3, 500 staff.
MICHAEL: For a lot of years, Where you would see young people, when they go to high school or go to college, they would move away from the city. There have really been not many reasons for them to return. I think that has changed a lot.
When you get closer to the city, you can see buildings, you can see huge cranes, a lot of trucks are driving past you. When you go there in the afternoon, a lot of cars is there, people are commuting to uh, Calambo, and that is a huge difference from what you saw before.
CLIP: There are so many jobs already for engineers.
That's, that's the good part about [01:10:00] having the education here in Calambo, is because we have all these companies, so we are surrounded, so it's so easy to get a job afterwards.
MICHAEL: This is, um, has become a city that is, um, thriving. People are suddenly speaking English, English at the bakery and, um, and they are demanding, you know, like international schools and even in, in the suburbs.
So it has brought about a lot of change.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: Do you know the concept of resource curse?
MICHAEL: Um, let me in on that.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: That is when an economy becomes over, It becomes over dependent on one thing. So you will see this in the Middle East with a country that only has oil. Yeah. Um, does anyone ever say, what if we become too dependent on Wegovy and Ozempic? What if we're an Ozempic economy in 10 years and then bop, bop, bop?
MICHAEL: Some economists stress that there is a risk to countries who is significantly dependent on [01:11:00] just one or a few companies. And one example of that is, um, The country very close to us is Finland, who in the 2000, the early 2000, heavily dependent on their biggest company at the time, uh, Nokia, the cell phone manufacturer, as I'm sure you know.
But, um, when Apple and other producers overtook Nokia, um, in the late 2000s, the Finnish economy stagnated for almost 10 years.
Most economists does not consider this as an very, as a very imminent threat to, uh, the Novo Nordisk, but more as a thing worth fighting for. Thinking about, and the reason for Novo Nordisk and Danish businesses to stay frontrunners on pharmaceutical issues, but also other high technology, uh, businesses.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: This has me wondering about your predictions for this drug because, um, So many people [01:12:00] want it and so many people could be helped by it. It seems to me that there is no end to just how big we'll go via and Osempic could be. What are your predictions for what this might mean in, in five years, in 10 years for your country's economy and for its people?
MICHAEL: The market for weight loss drugs, uh, if you ask most analysts is, you know, like
CLIP: huge. The market potential is, uh, I would say almost unlimited. The demand outlook is incredible and the biggest problem right now for Nordisk is producing enough. They cannot meet demand.
COMMERCIAL CLIPS: It's
MICHAEL: quite difficult to get your head around what would this mean for Nordisk.
For Danish economy, how large can Novo Nordisk become, but also what do these drugs mean for our perception of what obesity is? Would we at some point get to [01:13:00] where almost everyone is taking some kind of medication to control your weight, and who's going to be selling that? Is that Novo Nordisk? It might be.
The world after Ozempic Part 4 - The Gray Area - Air Date 5-13-24
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: So if we're talking about this, this hormone, that's not just in your gut, but also in your brain, does that mean that this drug could potentially be a general anti addiction drug, a drug that bolsters your capacity for self control, as opposed to just a weight loss drug.
JOHANN HARI: Because this is a hormone that's made in your gut, it was thought that these drugs primarily affect your gut, that they work by slowing down your gastric emptying or some other mechanism.
And that's true, and there is certainly an effect on your gut. But we also know that you have GLP 1 receptors, not just in your gut, but in your brain. And so, It's increasingly clear that these drugs work primarily not on your gut, but on your brain. If you give these drugs to rodents and then you cut open their brains, you see that the drug goes everywhere in their brain and The [01:14:00] neuroscientists I interviewed and the science they produced strongly suggest that these drugs work primarily by changing what you want, by changing your cravings and your desires.
There's a huge debate about how that works and it's slightly disconcerting to interview the leading neuroscientists and say, Okay, you're saying this works primarily on my brain. What's it doing to my brain? And they all said a very erudite vision of ah, We don't really know. There's also a huge debate about both negative and positive effects that may be happening.
There is debate about whether it's causing depression or even suicidal feelings in a minority of users. So what we know at the moment is we have a huge amount of unbelievably promising evidence in animals. So I interviewed loads of scientists who've been doing experiments on this. Think about, for example, Professor Elisabeth Jarlhag, who's at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
What she does is they get a load of rats. And they get them to drink loads of alcohol and get used to it. And rats quite like getting drunk. They wobble around their little cages. And so they give rats alcohol for quite [01:15:00] long periods of time until eventually their cage looks like a bar in downtown Vegas.
And then they inject them in the nape of their neck with GLP 1 agonists, the active component in, in ozempic and wagovi. And what they find is a dramatic reduction. In how much alcohol they consume. It's usually about 50 percent. And we discover that they get less dopamine when they drink alcohol. They like it less, they crave it less, they'll put in less effort to get it.
It really does change the amount they want alcohol. But initially it was thought, okay, well that could just be it. These drugs reduce your desire for calories, obviously alcohol has caloric content, maybe it's just that. So other scientists then experimented with drugs that don't have any calories in them.
For example, Professor Patricia Grigson, who I interviewed, is at Penn State University, got rats to use fentanyl and heroin heavily. gave them GLP 1 agonists, found they used significantly less. Uh, Dr. Greg Stanwood, who's at Florida State University with mice, gave mice [01:16:00] cocaine. When they give them GLP 1 agonists, they discover the mice use far less cocaine, again, by around 50%.
We have very little amount of human evidence. We've got a lot of anecdotes, a lot of people I spoke to who started to take Ozempic and saw their addictions go away. But very little human evidence. We are a little bit of a mixed picture. We know that these drugs reduce smoking, but only if you combine them with a nicotine patch.
We know they reduce alcohol use, but only for people who are heavy drinkers at the start. We'll know a lot more in the next few years because there is a huge number of trials going on. But you've stated rightly, the most optimistic possible scenario, which we should probably Treat with caution, but equally shouldn't dismiss, which is that actually this is not an anti obesity drug, that this is a drug that boosts self control across the board.
Now we need a lot more evidence before we start backing up statements like that, but it's, I would say it's not totally implausible.
DEEPER DIVE B: BIAS AND RISK
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering deeper dive section B bias and risk.
What Ozempic can't fix Part 2 - Today, Explained - Air Date 2-26-34
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: Kate's first book was about misogyny. Her new book is [01:17:00] called Unshrinking, How to Face Fat Phobia. You will perhaps not be shocked to hear that she believes the two are related.
KATE MANNE: So during my final two years of high school, I entered an all boys school the year it integrated in Australia as one of three girls. Oh, I know. It was really a rude introduction to the subject of misogyny and it meant that for me as a then chubby teen, I really encountered an enormous amount of fatphobia, which was the way misogyny manifested itself.
Um, I was called a fat bitch. I had that scrawled on my locker as well, which was I was doused with fish oil to be the kind of ultimate expression of misogynistic disgust towards the female body. And I ended up being voted the person most likely to have to pay for sex at the final Oh my God. The high school leavers assembly.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: What a horrible place. [01:18:00] Okay, so the idea I think generally for most of us is, okay, when you're a teenage girl, boys are terrible and then everybody grows up and they grow out of this. Is that what you
KATE MANNE: found happening? So things suddenly got better for me personally, and I was relieved to find that what I had encountered in those forms of bullying and cruelty was usually not nearly as explicit when it came to ways I was treated as a fat adult, but it was still there.
And certainly my research into this back this up, that fat phobia in particular isn't really getting better. It's actually on the rise according to some measures.
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: Right now there's a big body positivity movement underway. It definitely seems to have reached the mainstream. There are podcasts like Maintenance Phase, which is very, very popular.
CLIP: Guys, it's great over here. It is like genuinely so phenomenal. Whatever your size is to get right [01:19:00] with the body that you have is the body that you have. Why don't you take care
NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY,EXPLAINED: of it? Companies will have plus size models. Fashion brands, fashion labels will have plus size models. It definitely seems if you're looking for evidence that things are getting better, I feel like you can definitely look around and be like, Oh yeah, I see it everywhere.
Things are getting better. You're saying data doesn't necessarily show that. What are you, what data are you looking at? What are you finding?
KATE MANNE: Yeah, so Harvard researchers in 2019 published a really interesting study showing that when it came to prejudice and bias across various categories, they looked at race, skin tone, disability, age, sexuality, and weight.
And they found that Anti fatness, so weight bias, was the only form of implicit bias that was actually increasing. And it was also the form of explicit bias that was decreasing the most slowly. So one possibility is that we've seen more body positivity and more [01:20:00] representation, but also pretty bad backlash to those.
progressive social movements.
CLIP: We know beauty standards. We know what's attractive and what's not attractive. It's not fatphobic to have a preference. It's not fatphobic to not be attracted to overweight people. You're not allowed to like yourself if you're thin, and God forbid you wear a bikini and say you're proud of your body when you're thin, then you get routinely attacked.
And at the same time, it's sending a signal to other women that they shouldn't want to better themselves.
KATE MANNE: So I think it has a number of manifestations. and that makes it something systemic that occurs across different sectors of life. So it happens in education. It means that fat children are more likely to be bullied in school.
It's probably the most common basis for childhood bullying, according to the research I've seen. It's also something where teachers harbor negative stereotypes about fat students, holding that they're less able and less gifted as they gain weight, even though there are test scores. Objective measures of [01:21:00] achievement haven't changed.
It's something that we see in employment. And finally, we see huge gaps in terms of the treatment patients get within the healthcare system. So, fat patients are subject to a number of really pernicious stereotypes. We're seen as lazy, non compliant, weak willed, having done this to ourselves. And doctors tend to blame any and every symptom that we come to seek treatment for on our weight rather than looking at the true cause of those symptoms.
CLIP: It was very scary to sort of exist in a body that I thought was failing me and have medical professionals who didn't seem to take me seriously.
KATE MANNE: So there was another really interesting and telling study of physicians that showed that physicians don't just harbor implicit bias against fat patients, they harbor explicit bias.
They will say that they are less willing to [01:22:00] help fat patients, that they regard fat patients as more of a waste of their time, and that fat patients are more likely to annoy them.
The world after Ozempic Part 6 - The Gray Area - Air Date 5-13-24
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I'm always wary of treating symptoms, not causes, and in this case, it is one of the bigger risks that the availability of these drugs will prevent us from dealing with these systemic problems that we have with the food industry and pop culture and that sort of thing. And if it does in fact make it harder for us to deal with these systemic problems, what is the net good over the long haul?
JOHANN HARI: I wrestled with that myself and I still wrestle with that. One person I put that to, I said, you know, will it undermine the political pressure to deal with the food system? And this is a very prominent person, I won't say who, but said, what pressure to change the food system? You won't ever find a more popular person than Michelle Obama, a more charismatic and brilliant communicator.
Even Michelle Obama couldn't get any political [01:23:00] traction for this. She couldn't get any political traction for the idea that you should physically move your body. I mean, that was regarded as controversial. Let's get our children to move. I think that's too pessimistic. I do believe we can build political pressure around this, but I don't.
Feel I can say to people you should incur negative consequences now Because it will create more political pressure further down the line to make it better for future people
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I I get it and I wouldn't I wouldn't tell that to anyone else either but we have Benefit of being able to think dispassionately about this in conversations like this.
We're removing ourselves from the immediate emotional impact of it But yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's just it's not there's not easy answers for sure I guess the dream scenario is many people start taking these drugs. They work. Our collective health skyrockets. And then, as you say in the book, that awakens us to the insanity of the situation we got ourselves into.
And then maybe that spurs reform. [01:24:00] I don't know if it's going to play out that way, but That's the timeline I would sign up for
JOHANN HARI: in the range of scenarios from the most pessimistic to the most optimistic. Obviously, the most pessimistic is that this is like the diet drug fen fen in the 1990s, hugely popular front page of Time magazine said the new miracle weight loss drug, 18 million fen fen prescriptions, and then we discover It causes catastrophic heart defects and lung problems.
It gets yanked from the market, leads to the biggest compensation payout in the history of the pharmaceutical industry. That's quite unlikely, given what we know about the diabetics, but it's not inconceivable. If that's the most pessimistic, the most optimistic is precisely, as you say, that the drugs work, that the benefits outweigh the risks, and that we wake up and go, how did we get to this point?
Right? I think the probably most likely scenario is somewhere in the middle. That's very disconcerting.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I think what We don't know yet scares me as much as what we do know excites me and I guess I'm just conditioned to believe that there are no [01:25:00] biological free lunches be a smaller free lunch if it says one of the last things you write in the book is that these drugs are going to change the world for better or for worse.
So what do you think it'll be for better or worse?
JOHANN HARI: I think it'll be both. I think it'll be better for people like me, who had heart attack risks. I think it'll be much worse for people with eating disorders. And I don't think there's a kind of moral calculator where you can put me not dying of a heart attack versus a person with eating disorders dying because they were able to starve themselves.
I don't think you can really make those calculations. We can definitely take the steps needed to protect those people with eating disorders now and many of the other risks, you know, warning people with thyroid problems, warning people who are pregnant, and, uh, whole range of things. It's definitely both, but I can't measure out the proportions yet.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I'm inclined to say for the better. That's just a wild guess.
JOHANN HARI: A hundred years from now, someone in the smoking ruins of our civilization will find this episode [01:26:00] of this podcast and go, Sean, did he get it right? They'll know. I mean, to
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: me, the big hinge is the access question, right? We have to get that right, that we have to get that right.
If we don't, if this becomes a drug for rich people, that will be a moral catastrophe. Yeah.
JOHANN HARI: Oh, it'll be disgusting. That's an eight year window. Right? We've got an eight year window until Ozempic goes out of patent, at which point they'll be able to manufacture it for 40 a month, for anyone. So we've got eight years in which this could be confined to a small elite, and that's scandalous, and lots of people will die in that eight year window who could have lived.
And then 2032 onwards, we don't have that dilemma.
What Ozempic can't fix Part 3 - Today, Explained - Air Date 2-26-34
ALICE FULWOOD: For most of my life, as long as I can remember, I have felt like there is this sort of pressure or this idea that the sort of right way to be, the right sort of way to look is to be thin.
COMMERCIAL CLIPS: Here's how I went from thick to thin in six months.
You want to keep the focus on vertical lines.
KATE MANNE: Here's my easy breezy [01:27:00] diet routine. It's how I stay thin with minimal effort.
ALICE FULWOOD: It seems to be sort of all around us in the ether a lot of the time. And it's one of those things that I had sort of taken, uh, almost as a sort of given. And one day I was sort of at home working, um, and actually my husband, uh, called me into his office to show me a chart that he was looking at which was on the CDC website and it plotted BMI against income and all over the world there is a sort of negative relationship between BMI and income so the richer you are the thinner people tend to be and What was really striking about this chart is that they'd broken out that line into men and women.
And for men, there actually was no correlation at all. This sort of line was, was almost completely flat. Uh, but for women, the line sloped very sharply downwards. And I sort of, in that moment, had this realization that You know, there's this sort of pressure that [01:28:00] women feel, this sort of, you know, the, the, the vibes in the ether, I guess.
It's not just, you know, vanity or magazines. Actually, you know, perhaps there's this really powerful economic incentive that being thin as a woman, uh, helps you to become rich in a way that it maybe doesn't for men.
COMMERCIAL CLIPS: Do you think that women are aware of this on some level?
ALICE FULWOOD: Yeah, I think this is a sort of great point because I, it's obviously, you know, sort of a chicken and egg situation, well, sort of, why do beauty standards exist and why are they potentially enforced by the market?
And I think there sort of is an underlying awareness. There is a sense that people that do well on TikTok and social media, they tend to be, you know, thin and attractive. People who do well in the workplace. But I also think there is sort of an element of you either don't sort of fully recognize, or in some ways potentially sort of self deceive.
You know, a lot of the time when you talk to women about whether they want to be thin or whether they want to look a certain way, people say [01:29:00] that they're sort of trying to lose weight for sort of wellness and health.
CLIP: The Daily Habits of Thin People. If you are solely focused on thinness, Losing weight and being skinny, you're not going to be successful in the long term.
As I always say, when you focus on health, you lose weight as a side effect, but when you focus on weight loss, you lose health as a side effect.
COMMERCIAL CLIPS: I was thinking about how my friends and I, when we're talking about like, like expensive Pilates classes. We'll refer to it as like, it's an investment in me. And it's not like we're following that down the rabbit hole and being like, and next year I'm going to get paid more.
But there is the language of economics when we're talking about like, Oh, it's expensive. It's 50 bucks, but I'm going to do it.
ALICE FULWOOD: It is interesting. I did start to think about it in that sort of, you know, okay, you're almost making like a capital investment in yourself that will pay dividends and you don't really know sort of when or sort of what those might be.
But I think sort of in general. the sort of that this way of thinking about the issue actually sort of makes a lot of sense.
COMMERCIAL CLIPS: [01:30:00] All right. So you saw this chart and you decided to report on whether there is an economic penalty for not being thin. Where did you start?
ALICE FULWOOD: I mean, the sort of first thing I did was I went off and I sort of looked to see whether this was true in other countries.
This sort of trend seems to hold in wealthy developed countries. It's very different in developing countries. countries, but it seems to hold sort of across the Western world. And then I started thinking about sort of the reasons that people often think that there might be this sort of negative relationship between weight and income because that was not a new piece of information.
So that's something that I think a lot of people are aware of. The sort of novel thing was that it only seems to hold true for women. And from that, sort of point I felt like a lot of the explanations people had sort of come up with in the past for why there might be a negative relationship between income and weight.
Um, you know, they didn't tell the whole story. So often they were things like, you know, if you live in poverty, it's very difficult [01:31:00] to carve out time to go to the gym. It's sometimes you don't have access to sort of fresh fruits and vegetables. It's sort of difficult to, to eat well. And I think all of those things are true, but they can't be.
be the sort of main reason for this correlation, because they would hold true sort of equally for men and women. So there sort of has to be something else going on here. Um, and then I sort of started reading a lot of the academic literature on, you know, in the workplace, if you look at women's wages and you sort of control for things like their degrees that they've taken, so your bachelor's, master's, doctoral degrees, if you control for the types of jobs they do, all these kinds of things, is there still a sort of wage penalty for Uh, BMI or weight, um, and a lot of the, the literature does sort of back that up.
Uh, there does seem to be a penalty for overweight women, uh, particularly highly educated overweight women in the workplace.
COMMERCIAL CLIPS: When we talk about, for example, like the gender wage gap, we can say, Oh, for every dollar that a man earns, a woman might be earning [01:32:00] somewhere between 60 and 80 cents. And those stats get like pretty firmly entrenched over time. Were you able to figure out if thin women make more money over time than women in bigger bodies.
Could, could you tell us how much more money we're talking about or what that adds up to?
ALICE FULWOOD: Yeah, I didn't actually come up with a sort of neat as, uh, as neat a, uh, stat as the sort of like 80 cents on the dollar. Um, but the figure that I put in the piece at least was that for an overweight or obese woman, so someone with a BMI of above 30.
It is roughly as beneficial for her to lose 50, 60 pounds, um, in weight to get her BMI back into that normal range, uh, as it would be to do an additional year of education. So about sort of half as valuable as getting a master's degree. Wow. That seems to be the magnitude of the, um, of the penalty.
COMMERCIAL CLIPS: And, and what you're saying is [01:33:00] the same does not seem to hold true for men.
ALICE FULWOOD: I think we have to be a sort of bit careful about that because there, there are papers that say that sort of, uh, especially for sort of very, very overweight men, there are penalties in the workplace. I'm sort of willing to believe that sort of men are discriminated against, especially if they're sort of very overweight, um, as well.
But I think that the distinguishing thing for me about how this seems to affect women is that, um, It seems to be sort of very pervasive across all kinds of careers at every level of income. The relationship is so strong, um, that it shows up at this macro level. That you can sort of look at this chart of sort of generalized population of women, um, and, and you can still see this sort of very strong relationship.
DEEPER DIVE C: BODY NEUTRALITY
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached a deeper dive section C body neutrality.
The world after Ozempic Part 5 - The Gray Area - Air Date 5-13-24
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Well, I think this relates to another tension you deal with in the book, which is that, you know, on the one hand, the body positivity movement.
Has been good in lots of ways. We've shattered stigmas and around weight and all of that, [01:34:00] but on the other hand, it's just a biological fact that carrying too much weight leads to bad health outcomes. And if we can conquer that, that would be a pure unmitigated good. Can we embrace this medical revolution without unwinding some of that cultural progress we've made, which is connected to these issues with, with eating disorders and the like?
JOHANN HARI: I really agonized over this question, and one of the people who really helped me to understand it and think it through was an amazing woman named Shelley Bovey. He's basically the person who introduced body positivity into Britain. So, She grew up in a working class town in Wales, where she was, as she describes herself, the only fat girl in her school.
And one day when she was 11, her teacher said to her, Bovey, stay behind after class. So she stayed behind, thinking, what have I done wrong? And the teacher said to her, You're much too fat, it's disgusting, go see the school nurse, she'll sort you out. So kind of [01:35:00] shaken, Shelley went to see the school nurse.
The school nurse said, why are you here? She said, well, the teacher says I'm too fat. She said, take off your clothes, I'm going to inspect you. She took off her clothes, and the, School nurse said, this is disgusting. You're a greedy pig. Stop eating so much. Just berated her. So Shelly left and her whole life she was soaking up abuse and insults like this.
And it made her hate herself and hate her body. In fact, she, she told me she hadn't ever looked at her body when she was showering. Even she'd never looked at her body naked because she hated it so much. And then she learned about the Body Positivity Movement, which had obviously begun in the U. S., that was saying, this is just a form of bigotry and bullying and cruelty and we don't have to take this shit.
And Shelley introduced it to Britain, right? I heard of her for the first time, I remember seeing her on TV when I was 10 years old, when she was presented as this kind of laughable madwoman. And she really pioneered opposing stigma and she remains proud to this day of the work she did, rightly so in my view.
But Shelly also faced another problem. She was extremely obese and she was finding it hard to walk. [01:36:00] In fact, she was in a wheelchair a lot of the time and her doctor told her she had heart problems. And she really began to wrestle with, well, am I betraying my body positivity if I talk about the harm caused by obesity to my health?
And she began to say, well, what kind of body positivity would it be that would judge me for keeping my body alive? That doesn't seem like body positivity to me. She lost an enormous amount of weight through calorie restriction and exercise and became much healthier and she stands by everything She said about stigma, but she said it's not either or It's not either you're against stigma or you're in favor of reducing obesity where possible It's both and if you love someone who's obese You want to protect them from cruelty shaming and bullying and if possible you want to protect them from diabetes heart disease dementia So to me, there's no playoff You Between those two.
But I think your question goes to a wider and deeper problem. And actually, weirdly, of all the time [01:37:00] I spent writing the book, the worst moment for me was what might seem like a small moment in some ways. But I've got a niece called Erin. She's the baby in my family. She's the only girl in her generation.
And she's 19 now. But last year, when I first started taking the drugs, we were FaceTiming. And she was kind of teasing me about how good I look. She said, I didn't know you had a neck. I didn't know you had a jaw before. And she said, I was kind of laughing and we were, she was saying, Oh, you look really good.
And then she looked down and she said, well, you buy me some Ozempic. And I thought she was kidding. And I laughed. She's a perfectly healthy weight. And then I realized she wasn't joking. And I thought, Oh shit, have I undercut here all the advice I've been giving her since she was a little girl. And I think there's sort of two quite different things here, but they're very hard to separate culturally.
There's overweight and obese people who are taking these drugs to be a healthy weight. And then there are people who are already a healthy weight or indeed skinny. who are taking these drugs to be very thin. They're in fact incurring health risks in the opposite direction. Like
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: the actors at the party.[01:38:00]
JOHANN HARI: Exactly. None of them were fat to start with, right? And again, we can look at historical examples. Between 1966 and 1968, the number of young women who felt they were too fat exploded. You think that's really weird? What happened between 1966 and 1968? It's a very short period. What happened is a new model known as Twiggy was presented as the face of beauty of the 60s.
Now it's not Twiggy's fault. She was naturally skinny. Very few girls look like Twiggy, right? A new thinner body norm was created and that made more girls hate their bodies. I'm very worried about that dynamic. I think that is in fact happening now. And it's not like young girls didn't already have a nightmare set of pressures on them.
Of course they did.
Body Neutrality Part 2 - What The Actual Fork Podcast - Air Date 8-11-23
SAMMY PREVITE - HOST, WHAT THE ACTUAL FORK: so obviously there's so much nuance to this conversation because you wrote a book on it. So there's a lot of density to it. But for those listening who are like, that sounds like a dream to not spiral and spend so much time hating my body, obsessing about my body.
I wish I could just be neutral. What are some of the biggest takeaways from your [01:39:00] book or tips or places for listeners to start with body neutrality?
JESSI KNEELAND: So the first thing I think is really important, and this is where I start with every new coaching client, is we talk about how your body image issues exist for a reason.
Like there was. a very good reason that you developed, uh, this relationship where you gave your body so much power or it ended up with so much power over you. Um, a lot of it is just a, a really clever sort of adaptive coping strategy to solve something at some point, or offer you something that you needed, or at least try to do.
Try to offer you something that you needed at the time that it developed. And so what I think happens is a lot of people come in for this kind of coaching. They're like, I don't even know why I care about this. Like, I shouldn't care about this. I just can't stop obsessing over it. And I'm like, step one.
Yes, you should be obsessing over it. It served a purpose. Let's just find out what it is. That's all. Because if we treat it like the enemy, then it's really no different than [01:40:00] treating our bodies like the enemy. And there's very little wiggle room there. You can't do a whole lot. So the first step is to acknowledge that you have these body magicians for a reason and to kind of, kind of a weird way of putting it maybe, but like to give them the respect they deserve because they helped you or tried to help you survive in some way.
And then once you Come from that place. There's a lot more compassion, a lot more, um, like for yourself, you know, self compassion. There's a lot more curiosity that can enter the conversation. Like, instead of being like, why am I like this? I'm so broken, like, and so weak and, you know, whatever. Irrational.
You can start going, oh, I wonder why I might have developed this. I wonder what problem my body image issues might be. be trying to solve for me. I wonder what needs my body image issues might be trying to get met for me. Like, when you can approach it that way, a whole world of interesting stuff opens up.
That's where your next step has to live. Like, you have to be able to start looking in the space of, [01:41:00] how are you trying to help me? Rather than, why are you here, you big jerk, I hate you. Like, it just doesn't work to do the work from that place, you know? So I would say the first big takeaway is really acknowledging that they serve a purpose.
Um, they showed up for a reason and they're trying to help or protect you. And then the next step is to figure out how. How they're helping you specifically. Cause there's so many ways that this can be. For example, like, if you, uh, became obsessed with, you know, dieting, counting calories, that kind of thing.
It could have been a strategy to distract yourself from pain or fear or uncertainty at a certain age that just stuck. It could be a way of, okay, if I can lose weight, I'll be accepted and, and feel like a sense of belonging and value. Great. That's like a whole strategy on its own to solve the problem of not feeling like you belong or not feeling like you have value.
There's so many things that could be going on, but until you identify it, you don't stand a single chance of actually being able to heal it, which is why so much of body positivity stuff, [01:42:00] like, you know, the goal may have felt unrealistic, but also there was no strategy to get there. It was like, you should love yourself.
Okay, go ahead. Um, and this is like a lot more practical and I'm so passionate about helping it feel practical so that people don't just feel overwhelmed by the process, like, almost like it's a choice. I just have to stop hating my body. Because it's not a choice. The thing serves a purpose. It's not going to go away until it no longer has a purpose.
So that's the work.
JENNA WERNER - HOST, WHAT THE ACTUAL FORK: I love how you just framed that and I feel like it just reminds me of to put in like a Sammy analogy like it reminds me of like whack a mole right like we like identify why the mole is popping up like it's just going to keep popping up elsewhere so it's like instead of feeling the way I'm interpreting it is instead of feeling the guilt or shame or fear or embarrassment or whatever Feeling that you're feeling around your body or the coping mechanism that you used, it's like giving [01:43:00] it purpose almost.
Am I taking that the right way?
JESSI KNEELAND: Yeah. I mean, I don't even know that we're giving it purpose. It has a purpose. Like we're just trying to identify what that purpose is. And obviously most people, because our lived experiences are so complex, the society we live in, there's so many factors happening. It's never this straightforward, but if it were as simple as just You developed an obsession with looking good in order to, um, make people be nice to you.
Let's say it was that, right? It's like a safety mechanism. You want kindness, you want connection. So you become obsessed with how you look in the hopes that looking a certain way will earn you those things. Well, you're definitely going to get really mad at your body. And feel really disappointed and betrayed by your body anytime someone's not nice to you.
Right. But the truth is your body just does not have the power to make people be nice to you. It was an impossible job you gave it. So it's no wonder then that over time with that kind of subconscious strategy, you end up. [01:44:00] Freaking hating your body. You're like, how could you do this to me? I gave you one job.
And it's like, I literally, I can't, like, no matter how thin you are, no matter how conventionally, like, you, it just doesn't have that power. And so it makes a lot of sense that you would end up, it would like, Maybe start as a coping strategy on a simple level and then get more and more of that hatred and baggage over time because you feel like it's letting you down over and over and over.
But through body neutrality, once you identify that, then you can start creating a different strategy for, uh, perhaps not making people be nice to you because that's not like a super, uh, possible, uh, strategy to create, but you could at least say like, I would like to build resilience when people are not nice to me.
For example, I would like to have built up the skill of handling that in a way that doesn't totally knock me down or make me question myself. And also, hey, I want more connection. That was another piece of it. I'm going to go create the skill [01:45:00] set or fear facing or whatever it is I need to do to have more abundant connection in my life.
Let's say you get to the You know, you're like moving into that at a certain point. You're never like, Oh, Hey, my body is great. Now you just stop thinking about it because when your needs are actually getting met, that you were hoping your body would meet for you, then your body doesn't have to meet them for you.
And it just fades. So that's when I say it doesn't have power anymore. Like on the other side of this body neutrality journey, it's really just the most anticlimactic ending of any story. Like all of my clients are like, Oh, you know what? I haven't even thought about that for months. I'm like, Did you ever think that would be possible and they're like no weird, but it's not like this big reveal like I feel Neutral all of a sudden it's more like I've just been thinking about other stuff and that hasn't crept in and this is why it's cuz Of course, it's gonna be a constant source of like obsessive thoughts when you have given your body a task to like Make your life be okay.
[01:46:00]
The world after Ozempic Part 7 - The Gray Area - Air Date 5-13-24
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: A huge part of the book is your own experimentation with Ozimbic and, you know, look, I should stress that your experience is your experience. It's a sample size of one. Uh, it may not be the experience someone else will have. Um, but it nevertheless is, Relevant. How long have you been taking it?
JOHANN HARI: It's been a year and four months now.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: And how much weight have you lost?
JOHANN HARI: 42 pounds. I went from being 33 percent body fat to 22 percent body fat. It's an enormous.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: And one thing you talk about in the book is feeling not quite depressed, but feeling emotionally dulled. I think it's the phrase that you use in the book. How would you explain that distinction between not feeling depressed, but feeling emotionally dulled?
Because they're certainly similar.
JOHANN HARI: Yeah, you know, it's funny, my friend Danielle was pregnant the first six months I was taking the drugs and every time I saw her it was like we were on reverse trajectories, like she was swelling and I was shrinking. And I remember saying to her one day, this is really weird, I'm getting what I [01:47:00] want, I'm losing loads of weight, but I don't actually feel better.
And there seems to be, although there's much debate about this, a significant minority of people who experience, you know, Something like that. And we know with a parallel bariatric surgery, which is the best form of medical assisted weight loss we've had up to now, after you have bariatric surgery, in fact, your suicide risk almost quadruples.
And 17 percent of people who have that surgery have to have inpatient psychiatric care afterwards. And I'll show you why that might be. So obviously one potential theory is the brain effects we've been talking about and other brain effects. I actually think for me, it was something different. Seven months into taking these drugs, I was in Las Vegas, I was researching for a different book I'm writing, and I went, really on autopilot, I went to a branch of KFC, I've been to a thousand times, the one on West Sahara, and I went in and I ordered a bucket of fried chicken, which is what I would have ordered a year before, and I ate a chicken drumstick, And I suddenly thought, shit, I can't eat the rest of [01:48:00] this.
And I really felt like an epiphany. Oh, I'm just going to have to feel bad. Right. And I realized, and there's a lot of evidence for this. What these drugs do is they interrupt your eating patterns. And one of the consequences of that for many people. Is they bring to the surface the deep underlying psychological factors that make us ovary in the first place.
So for me, I realize, you know, I had been using food to manage my emotions and calm myself down, going right back to when I was a very small child. I grew up in a family where there's a lot of addiction and mental illness. And one of the ways I dealt with that was just by numbing myself with food. And you can't do that Ozempic.
For a lot of people, that transition is very bumpy and some people never make that transition. They just remain feeling really bad.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Are you scared to stop using it?
JOHANN HARI: I'm not going to stop using it. And for me, um, it's for a very simple reason. So I actually think some of the best evidence for what these drugs will do to us, we can get from looking at this parallel.
Because up to now, it's been extremely hard to lose huge amounts of weight and keep it off. I mean, some people can do [01:49:00] it purely by calorie restriction and exercise, but that's actually surprisingly rare. So we've got good evidence from bariatric surgery. And as we know, bariatric surgery is a horrible, horrifying thing.
Grizzly operation. One in a thousand people die in the operation. It's no joke. But if you have bariatric surgery and reverse your obesity, the benefits are absolutely staggering. In the years that follow, you are 56 percent less likely to die of a heart attack. 60 percent less likely to die of cancer, 92 percent less likely to die of diabetes related causes.
In fact, it's so good for you, you're 40 percent less likely to die of any cause at all. And we now know the drugs are moving us in a similar direction alongside some risks. And for me, that just decided it, right? So many men in my family have heart problems. I've been worried about that all my life. So I'm not going to stop taking it.
If. We ran out of supply, which I really worry about, not only that I would regain the weight and regain the heart risk, but I actually may gain more weight than I had [01:50:00] before. So yeah, I worry about that.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Are there any other potential downsides that researchers are thinking about?
JOHANN HARI: When you talk about the risks, a lot of the scientists say, absolutely, rightly, actually, we've got quite a lot of evidence here on these drugs.
Diabetics have been taking them for 18 years. So they say, look, If they cause some horrific short to medium term effect, it would have shown up in the diabetics by now. If it made you grow horns, the diabetics would have horns, right? And that's a good point, and it should give us some sense of security.
But equally, some other scientists said, Okay, if we're going to base our confidence that these drugs are safe on the diabetics, let's really dig into the data around the diabetics. So, for example, there's a brilliant French scientist called Jean Luc Failly, and what he looked at was a very large group of diabetics who use these drugs, and then he looked at a comparable group of diabetics who were very similar in every other way but didn't use these drugs.
And what him and his colleagues calculated is these drugs, if they're right, [01:51:00] Increase your risk of thyroid cancer by between 50 to 75 percent.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: That's significant.
JOHANN HARI: Yeah, as he said to me, it's important to understand what that doesn't mean. That doesn't mean if you take the drug, you have a 50 to 75 percent chance of getting thyroid cancer.
If that was the case, we'd be having bonfires of Ozempic all over the world. What it means is, if you take the drug, whatever, if he's right, and this is highly disputed, If you take the drug, whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start, that risk will increase by between 50 to 75 percent. Now, other people say thyroid cancer is relatively rare, 1.
2 percent of people get it in their life, 82 percent of people survive. Nonetheless, I was extremely alarmed by that. Against that, lots of other scientists said to me, well look, even if that's right, you've got to compare it to what would happen to your cancer risk if you just remain obese, right? And actually.
I was stunned by the evidence about the cancer risk just from being obese. One of the biggest [01:52:00] preventable causes of cancer in the United States and Britain is obesity. So, the thing I think we have to do, you have to look at two competing sets of risks here. The risks of obesity and the risks of these drugs.
And there isn't a pat answer to that. It's a weird thing to start the book so divided and then go on this huge journey and read, you know, hundreds and hundreds of studies and interview so many experts. And here I am at the end of it. I know much more about the benefits and risks and what it's going to do to the culture.
But to be honest with you, Sean, and this hasn't happened to me with my books before, I'm still really, really conflicted. I don't really know.
Closing 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 us 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, Today, Explained, The Gray Area, [01:53:00] and What the Actual Fork. Further details are in the show notes.
Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. 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 [01:54:00] Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.
#1630 Unrivaled Global Arms Dealer: Officially and Illegally Exporting the US Gun Culture Around the World (Transcript)
Air Date 5/21/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left Podcast in which we explore whether by the U.S. Government playing matchmaker for the domestic weapons industry or through the illegal trade of the "Iron River," the facts of the U.S. being the leading seller of weapons around the world, fueling violence and conflict, oppression, and rights abuses. Sources on our front page today include American Prestige, Big Take, The Take, Facepalm America (great name by the way), Democracy Now, The Inquiry, Jacobin and Johnny Harris.
Then, in the additional sections half of the show, we'll dive deeper into the U.S. as a global arms dealer, guns flowing into Mexico and our domestic gun policy.
News - Biden's "Red Lines" for Gaza, Ukraine Hits Oil Facilities, US Leads Global Arms Sales - American Prestige - Air Date 3-15-24
DANNY BESSNER - HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: Let's end with some great news, and that is the United States has expanded its lead in terms of global arms. So Derek, can you update us?
DEREK DAVISON - HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: So the newest report from the Stockholm [00:01:00] International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, which looks at arms sales around the world and does them in five-year chunks, so every new report is about the five-year period leading up to when that report comes out. And their latest report was --they released it on Sunday --found that the US has increased its share of global arms sales to more than 40%, I think somewhere around 42% in this new report. The expansion, --they were already the global leader, but they were in this sort of mid thirties, I think, so it's a significant increase. It comes mostly at the expense of Russia. Since the war in Ukraine, the Russian military is retooled to primarily focus on fighting the war and also, I think, there's squeamishness about maybe purchasing Russian weapons these days. So their share of global arms sales fell by over half in this report, and they've now slipped behind France, which is another beneficiary, it has risen to second place.
But really I think that the main focus [00:02:00] here is that the US is cornering the market on selling things to kill people, which is the thing that we do best. So congratulations to everybody involved.
DANNY BESSNER - HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: Congratulations, everyone!
DEREK DAVISON - HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: We're always so proud to to be successful in these sorts of things.
How Washington Plays Matchmaker For The US Gun Industry Part 1 - Big Take - Air Date 10-30-23
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: Jessica, your story starts with a scene of the SHOT Show, this big convention in Las Vegas. Can you tell us about the SHOT Show?
JESSICA BRICE: It's the world's biggest firearms industry event. It officially stands for the shooting, hunting, outdoor trade show. It happens every January in Las Vegas and some 50,000 to 60,000 gun makers, dealers, enthusiasts flood into this convention center to learn about what's happening in the industry, to make deals, to close deals.
The buyers are there to find the weapons that they're then going to bring back to their stores and sell on. And that includes international buyers who want to meet up with the big gun makers and they want to get access to those products.
And really it's a [00:03:00] networking event that's inside the industry. It's not open to the public. You have to be involved in the firearms industry in order to get a ticket.
MICHAEL SMITH: And there's a whole ecosystem, sort of, of events that go along with this. For example, one day where all the sellers take buyers out to the middle of the desert to this giant shooting range where they can just try all the cool guns that they want to see how they fire.
And there are also lots of dinners between clients and their suppliers. And then there's this whole ecosystem of influencing, people networking for social media, trying to promote brands that will hopefully sell more. But the main point is for the gun industry to sell more guns.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: And Jessica, you're right about how a little bit out of the way in a less glamorous part of the event is one of the most important groups there, and it's the US government.
JESSICA BRICE: Yes. The Department of Commerce works with a number of trade shows. It's not just the SHOT Show that it works with. It works with something like 30 trade shows every year, and it brings international buyers [00:04:00] to meet up with American companies that want to do business abroad. It does that for electronics, it does that for concrete, it does that for dental equipment. But one of the more controversial products it does that for is guns.
So in that corner of the SHOT Show, you have the International Trade Center. It's in one of the ballrooms that has the partition walls and the burgundy chairs. And there's a lot of bureaucrats basically standing around and what they're doing is they're meeting up with the people that they invited from abroad, whether that's Brazil or Peru or Mexico or Asia somewhere or from all over the world, they bring these buyers into Las Vegas and then they help them set up these meetings with American gun makers and for a fee, they'll even sit in on these meetings and help close those deals.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: Mike, how does the Commerce Department find all of these people to bring to the US to [00:05:00] go to the gun show?
MICHAEL SMITH: So the Commerce Department has what it calls specialists. They post in embassies around the world, and their main job is to match buyers of US good with sellers of US goods.
Some of these specialists specialize in guns. That's one of the turfs that they have to drum up business for. They basically talk to entities that are interested in buying guns. And then they just go out and make contacts with these buyers, and then they open up a whole world of services that the US government through Commerce provides to essentially get buyers together with sellers in the United States.
JESSICA BRICE: These specialists, they're foreign commercial service specialists around the world. They typically tend to be foreign-born specialists. So they're foreign-born hires. And the reason for that is because the American officers will rotate in and out of embassies and consulates on two- or three-year stints, but you need the foreign, the locals who are there, they're working there for decades and they're maintaining [00:06:00] those business relationships.
So when the American officers come in, they're ultimately the ones who are always calling the shots. But they're tapping into this network that has been built for 20, 30 years.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: So Mike, the Commerce Department is trying to find buyers. The people they're bringing to Las Vegas, what are some of the countries they're bringing them from?
MICHAEL SMITH: So these specialists really work in embassies around the world. You have some posts in Asia, in Europe, and some posts in Latin America. In our story, we really focused on Latin America, and we found examples of a commerce specialist bringing gun buyers up from Brazil, from Peru, and from different countries in Central America.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: So all told, how many different buyers coming to the SHOT Show are there as essentially guests of the Commerce Department?
MICHAEL SMITH: This goes back to an agreement that the SHOT Show made with the Commerce Department in 2013 to make a concerted effort to [00:07:00] bring more gun buyers up from around the world, basically.
In the first year, 2013, they brought around 370 buyers to SHOT Show. But by January 2023, of this year, that number had surged to more than 3,200 buyers. So that gives you a sense of the scope and the growth we've seen in international buyers being basically brought up by these specialists around the world.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: Is it working? Are exports of US guns rising as a result of the Commerce Department's efforts?
JESSICA BRICE: One of the frustrating things about how the Department of Commerce operates is that there's no transparency because it involves corporate trade secrets. So there's no real transparency around this program and how it works.
We don't know how much in sales the Commerce Department officials are helping to broker. We don't have a real clear insight into how much exports have climbed because of this program. But we do know that between [00:08:00] 2018 and 2022, we saw a 300 percent increase in semiautomatic rifles and handguns coming into Brazil.
MICHAEL SMITH: After President Trump came into office, he basically put the approval process for gun exports into the hands of the Commerce Department, the same department that has these specialists around the world. After that happened a couple of years ago, gun exports from the United States jumped to $16 billion, and that's almost 30 percent above historical averages.
So there you can see how things have changed for the better for gun makers.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: And Jessica, does the Commerce Department work with gun advocacy groups or trade associations for the industry?
JESSICA BRICE: It's not working directly with the gun advocacy groups, but it works with the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which is the industry group, the trade group that runs SHOT Show.
The NSSF, which is how they're known, they're actually more influential in terms of lobbying money being spent in Washington than the NRA [00:09:00] is these days. A lot of people know the NRA. The NRA has traditionally said that they represent the gun owner. The NSSF represents the gun manufacturers, right? And so who's paying those membership dues? It's the Glocks and the Rugers and the Smith and Wessons. All the companies are part of the NSSF. And they're spending almost twice as much money every year to push through laws that are more favorable to gun makers. They advocated for this shift to put Commerce Department more in control and have more oversight over the gun exports.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: One of the concerns that the US government has had in the past with gun exports is making sure that they don't go to countries where there are unstable governments, where there are reasons to believe that guns could be used for violence. Is that still something that the US government monitors very closely before they make deals for foreign gun sales?
MICHAEL SMITH: It's [00:10:00] unclear how closely they monitor it. The Commerce Department has taken over processing and essentially approving gun exports--licenses, they're called. But the State Department, they have the right to look over an export license and stop it if they want. That has happened sporadically from what we can tell, but it's difficult to know how steadfast their policy considerations are and exactly what criteria they use to come up with those decisions.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: And what has the Commerce Department said about this when you asked them about the program?
JESSICA BRICE: This topic spans the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Commerce. And of all of those departments, and not to mention all the embassies, many of which we tried to reach out to, the Commerce Department is the least transparent. They don't offer any information regarding how many people they send to SHOT Show every year, what sort of resources are dedicated towards the effort, how many folks [00:11:00] are out in the world recruiting and building these lists and these group trips to Las Vegas every January.
Bloomberg entered in with a Freedom Of Information request, so-called FOIA, trying to get even the most basic of numbers. We actually have started up a lawsuit trying to get this information, but they really, really are closed lipped about the entire process.
Can a lawsuit stop Mexico’s ‘iron river’ of guns? - The Take - Air Date 8-13-21
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: Tell me about this lawsuit that the Mexican government has recently filed. Why did the government take this step?
JOHN HOLMAN: They're filing a lawsuit against 11 gun manufacturers and some quite famous ones as well amongst them. They've got Colt, they've got Smith & Wesson, they've got quite a lot of big names. Basically what they're saying is that those companies have been negligent in the fact that there's guns that they're selling that are ending up in Mexico.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The lawsuit alleges that the companies knew they were contributing to illegal arms trafficking.
Mexican officials hope the lawsuit will put a dent in crimes committed [00:12:00] by illegal firearms.
JOHN HOLMAN: Actually, the Mexican foreign minister went even further than negligence. This is actually a lucrative market the Mexican government seems to be saying that these manufacturers are going after. That's what they want to stop. They're asking for compensation. They're hoping about $10 billion that will go into the Mexican Treasury. But they said that apart from the money, primarily, they want these companies to start self-regulating so it's not this sort of sea of weapons heading towards Mexico with everyone washing their hands of it.
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: How likely is it that it's going to succeed?
JOHN HOLMAN: That's the big question, and it was asked actually—we were in the briefing with one of the government's top lawyers from the foreign ministry and he said that he wasn't certain that it was going to succeed, but basically they were going to give it their best shot.
Now running against it is the fact that in 2005 in the United States there was a statute that introduced widespread protection against gun companies from lawsuits and [00:13:00] legal action from victims of gun violence.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: California Congressman Adam Schiff calls the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or "PLACA," a deeply destructive bill that protects gun manufacturers from any responsibility for how their products are used, even when they're used to commit a crime.
But groups like the National Shooting Sports Foundation say this is just another attempt by democratic lawmakers to demonize constitutionally protected products.
JOHN HOLMAN: Now, what the Mexican government's hoping is that because they're outside of the United States, they can still be able to do this because they're not within the United States and that statute won't protect the gun companies against their legal action.
That's their hope, and we have to see how that plays out. This isn't going to happen overnight. This is going to be quite a long drawn out process.
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: Mexico's gun laws are strict. In fact, there is only one place in the entire country where you can legally purchase a gun, and that's in [00:14:00] the capital—on a base.
So, you mentioned a "sea of weapons," are there any estimates about how many weapons are being trafficked from the U. S. into Mexico?
JOHN HOLMAN: The foreign ministry said that the government estimates that half a million weapons are coming across from the United States to Mexico every year. And they said that they're causing at least 17, 000 homicides—those weapons.
They call it an "Iron River," that's what they call it, that's coming across the border, from the United States into Mexico.
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: That Iron River has been the subject of a lot of research and reporting on both sides about where the guns come from and how they get across. This is Eugenio Weigend Vargas.
EUGENIO WEIGEND VARGAS: I'm the research director for gun violence prevention at the Center for American Progress.
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: That's a think tank based in Washington, D. C.
EUGENIO WEIGEND VARGAS: Throughout my life I've been living in the United States and Mexico back and forth, but for the last 10 years I've been living in the United States.
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: And like many people with ties to [00:15:00] both countries, Eugenio is used to driving back and forth—he was just in Mexico last week—but he's also observing with the eyes of a researcher.
EUGENIO WEIGEND VARGAS: I've done that many times in my life, you know, where I've driven from the United States to Mexico and the checkpoints are pretty weak. They randomly maybe check a vehicle every 20, 25 vehicles. Usually when I drive across the border, I'm never stopped, which makes it very easy to hide maybe 10 or 15 rifles in the back of your car and never get stopped.
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: He's hypothetically speaking, of course. And in Eugenio's line of research, that's tough to watch.
EUGENIO WEIGEND VARGAS: It's a bit, frustrating not to see that, you know, that the problem exists and there's nothing really going on, except there's a big sign that says "Trafficking guns to Mexico is illegal. Don't do it!" But, you know, I'm not sure that that sign has any impact or has incentivized anybody from not trafficking guns to [00:16:00] Mexico.
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: So it's pretty well known now that the border controls are weak, but that's not where the story begins. It starts with how the guns get to the border in the first place, and that's part of Eugenio's research.
EUGENIO WEIGEND VARGAS: There's a high level of guns within the United States, but there's also a lot of ways in which those guns can easily get diverted.
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: One of them is called "straw purchasing."
EUGENIO WEIGEND VARGAS: Straw purchasing basically is a person who is legally able to purchase a gun without a problem, but does so on behalf of a third person—usually an individual that is prohibited by law to purchase a gun.
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: Straw purchasers are sometimes caught by police or federal agents, but in the U. S., there's no law making gun trafficking a federal crime. It's usually considered a paperwork violation, not a felony, and rarely means prison time. And this has been a problem for years.
This federal agent spoke to Al [00:17:00] Jazeera about it back in 2018.
US FEDERAL AGENT: What we could really use is a firearms trafficking statute, because that would allow us to go after not only the straw purchaser, but the entire network of people that are getting these guns to arm the cartel.
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: But straw purchasing isn't actually the easiest way to get a gun.
Buying from a dealer requires a background check and a record of a sale, among other things, but for traffickers, there's a way to get around that—and that's private sales. Including at gun shows.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: What's called the "gun show loophole." Gun shows have been going on for as long as I can remember. Uh, and I don't think there's anything wrong with them.
Uh, it's a good place to get a good deal.
EUGENIO WEIGEND VARGAS: Gun shows are gatherings at convention centers, parking lots, even parks—where people just gather around to sell guns and other gun related accessories like holsters, stickers, but you also see the AR 15 rifles, the AK 47 displayed on [00:18:00] tables. You see some gun dealers there.
Federal firearm license dealers must conduct a background check before any gun sale. Those are required by law. Gun dealers at gun shows are required to run background checks on any sales, but in this case private sellers are not required to run background checks meaning that anybody that is prohibited by law from purchasing a gun can go to a gun show and get a gun with no questions asked.
Even a person that intends to traffic that gun or a person that is prohibited by law because it has, for example, a history of domestic violence. As of now, 22 states require some form of background check during private sales. However, in 28 states, this requirement simply does not exist.
MALIKA BILAL - HOST, THE TAKE: And that includes two border states, Texas and Arizona.
These private sales are a well known issue in the U. S. gun control debate, but some of Eugenio's visits to gun shows were also focused close to the [00:19:00] border.
EUGENIO WEIGEND VARGAS: You see all these rifles on display on tables, keeping in mind that they're only about two, three miles from the Mexican border—meaning that anybody can drive to a gun show,
approach a private seller and get any type of weapon that they're selling, including an AR 15 rifle. Gun shows happen every weekend across America, so it's very easy on any given weekend to acquire a gun.
How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border: With Guest Ieva Jusionyte - Facepalm America - Air Date 2-27-24
BEOWULF ROCHLEN - HOST, FACEPALM AMERICA: So the far right in America is always talking about, and the language they use is obviously pretty offensive, but an influx of illegal aliens—but there's also a huge influx of guns that goes from the U. S. Into Mexico, isn't there?
IEVA JUSIONYTE: That's correct. Influx, or you could say the "Iron River" of guns flowing southbound.
BEOWULF ROCHLEN - HOST, FACEPALM AMERICA: So, the dynamic here, I mean, these aren't [00:20:00] isolated things. They don't just happen to be like seeking asylum. There are really terrible conditions in parts of Mexico, and that has to do with the guns that create, in part, the violence. That— I mean, it's all connected together, isn't it?
IEVA JUSIONYTE: That, yeah, that's like putting two and two together. When I was doing research on the border, primarily for my past book—that is, looking, helping refugees and asylum seekers and migrants who get injured trying to get into the United States—only then I started noticing these signs on all the southbound lanes on the border crossings to Mexico that says guns and munition are prohibited in Mexico.
And I thought, huh. How interesting. So, these people are fleeing something that is clearly the result of our obsession with guns, our very powerful gun industry and gun dealers [00:21:00] that sell the guns that create those conditions of violence that then people are trying to run away from. Obviously, it's not the same for all refugees, but for Mexicans particularly.
Mexicans remain the largest group—the national group of people who are encountered in the U. S. Mexico border.
BEOWULF ROCHLEN - HOST, FACEPALM AMERICA: It also certainly ties in, I would think, with the massive demand for drugs just to the north of Mexico in our country. So we're demanding that drugs come our way, and we're insisting that essentially that massive amounts of guns be exported.
It sounds like a ready made situation for horrors, doesn't it?
IEVA JUSIONYTE: The drugs? Yes. We want the drugs and the drugs are supplied by various groups of organized. Criminal organizations in Mexico that compete for these routes to supply us the drugs. In order to compete they need firepower. They need weapons that they [00:22:00] cannot get in Mexico, but it's very easy for them to get them in the United States.
In Arizona, Texas, southbound inspections are almost non existent on the border. There are about 10, 000 gun dealerships in states bordering Mexico. So it's definitely connected to the drugs that we want. And we send the guns that enable the supply of drugs.
BEOWULF ROCHLEN - HOST, FACEPALM AMERICA: Now, it's interesting that you say that the inspections are "virtually non existent."
I mean, I watch sometimes—there's a program on National Geographic that is focused on how agents at various ports of entry are, seemingly, meticulously checking through everything and finding stuff all the time. But you're saying from your observation, your studies and what you found, that's not really the case.
IEVA JUSIONYTE: Well, there are plenty of border patrol agents and [00:23:00] officers that work for Customs and Border Protection, but they are focused on what is getting into the country. So they are focused on confiscated drugs. They're focused on finding people who don't have authorization to enter the country and they are much, much less interested in catching guns going in the opposite direction in terms of allocating how many people are staffing, which lanes, mostly they care about northbound and not southbound flows of goods.
BEOWULF ROCHLEN - HOST, FACEPALM AMERICA: Right. So, "you can check out, but you can't check in," in a manner of speaking. You once worked as an EMT along the U. S. Mexico border. What was the impact that you saw that these weapons have?
IEVA JUSIONYTE: Well, I actually before I started working as an EMT on the U. S./Mexico border, I was also an EMT and paramedic right here in the United States. I started in Massachusetts and Florida, so I have seen the impact of gun violence [00:24:00] in our communities in the United States.
When I moved to the border, the injuries that we saw were not necessarily, immediately visible because the people who are running away—they were not running away because they got shot. They were running away because a family member was kidnapped or another person in the family was shot or they were threatened through extortion rackets.
So very few of them actually showed gunshot wounds by the time they presented at the border, but they had various other injuries associated with a travel to, to cross the border. So, like, fractures and if they fell off the wall or dehydration, if they travel through the desert. So these are also the consequences of guns, but they are not immediate. And that's why the very title of the book is Exit Wounds. It's not so narrowly physical wounds where the bullet [00:25:00] leaves the body, but it's what are the broader social effects that make the entire community or society, injured, wounded, impacted by our gun laws and guns themselves.
BEOWULF ROCHLEN - HOST, FACEPALM AMERICA: It's the wounds that cause people to leave the country as opposed to the wounds that they receive specifically, literally and physically.
U.S. Eases Rules on Exporting Military Technology to Secure Role as World's Leading Arms Dealer - Democracy Now! - Air Date 10-16-13
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: In a boon for military contractors, the United States is relaxing controls on military exports, allowing some U.S.-made military parts to flow to nearly any country in the world with little oversight. ProPublica reports, beginning this week, thousands of parts for military aircraft can be sent freely around the world, even to some countries currently under U.N. arms embargoes. Previously, military firms had to register with the State Department and obtain a license for each export deal. That allowed U.S. officials to screen for issues including possible human rights violations. But now, tens of thousands of items are shifting to the Commerce Department, where they fall under looser controls. The changes were heavily lobbied [00:26:00] for by military firms including Lockheed Martin, Textron and Honeywell. The U.S. already heavily dominates arms exports market: In 2011, the U.S. concluded $66 billion in arms sales agreements, which accounts for nearly 80 percent of the global market.
To talk more about this, we’re joined by Bill Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.
Bill, we thank you very much for being with us. You’ve just completed a report on the Obama administration’s loosening of controls over U.S. arms exports. Your latest book, Prophets—that’s P-R-O-P-H-E-T-S— Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. Talk about what this Obama administration relaxing of the sending of weapons and parts means.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Sure. I think the amazing thing, which you mentioned, is that the United States already dominates the trade. It’s not clear they can make a lot more money here, but they’re trying. And one of the things that will happen is, if you’re a [00:27:00] smuggler and you want to do a circuitous path through a third-party country, those countries are now getting license-free spare parts, surveillance equipment and so forth, that can then go on to a human rights abuser, to a terrorist group. And detecting this is going to be much more difficult without the State Department licensing process.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: How did this happen?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the industry has been pushing for this for two decades, and they have a couple points of leverage. Of course, they have campaign contributions. They’ve got people on the advisory committees that help develop these regulations. They’ve done studies making bogus claims about the economic impacts. And the Obama administration, more than even the Bush administration, bought into industry’s arguments—argued, “Well, we’re going to streamline this. It’s going to make things more efficient. We’re going to get the economic benefits.” And I think they took a great risk in taking those industry suggestions, not looking hard enough at the human rights proliferation and anti-terrorist implications of that. So, I think they may have had good intentions, but I think [00:28:00] they tilted way too far towards the industry.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Several trade groups have been calling for this easing of restrictions on arms exports. Lauren Airey of the National Association of Manufacturers said in an interview with ProPublica that foreign competitors are, “Taking advantage of perceived and real issues in U.S. export controls to promote foreign parts and components—advertising themselves as State-Department-free.” Can you comment on that?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Sure. This is an anecdote that comes up frequently, but there’s never been any documentation of how common this is. The Commerce Department was asked in a congressional hearing, “What’s the economic downside of the current system or the upside of your reforms?” He said, “We haven’t looked at that.” So they really haven’t looked at the economic effects. In fact, if it’s easier to export production technology to build U.S. parts overseas, this reform could actually make it worse for U.S. jobs, even as it helps the big companies, like Lockheed Martin, outsource their components globally.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, talk about, Bill Hartung, the countries that can get these weapons and these [00:29:00] parts.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the first round is NATO allies, but includes countries like Bulgaria, countries like Turkey, which have had bad records of keeping those parts within their countries, keeping them from being transhipped to destinations that the U.S. would not want to see them in—places like Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia during its most repressive periods—basically, almost anywhere in the world it’s now going to be much easier to do this kind of roundabout sale. But also, many parts are going to be license-free altogether, so they can go almost anywhere in the world, other than perhaps Venezuela, Iran, China, in certain circumstances. The whole globe, basically, is going to get an easier deal in terms of getting access to U.S. military technology, without very many questions asked.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Can you explain, as even the Obama administration is pushing for more gun control at home, how this happens now?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think they [00:30:00] promised this to industry. They see it as a big achievement that they’ve undertaken since Obama’s first term. They have taken a look at the firearms issue. They’re going slow on rolling out those regulations, because they know it’s a very sensitive item. People, like the gun lobby, want no new restrictions, and in fact to roll back restrictions on gun exports. So I think there may still be room for leverage here over the administration, because they have been kind of shy about putting forward what they’re going to do about guns, ammunition, small arms or light weapons—which are among the biggest problems in terms of getting into conflict zones. I think there might still be some hope there to turn them around, but it will take some pressure, which so far we haven’t seen a great deal of pressure from the Congress on this.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Countries like Bahrain, that’s cracking down on its own people protesting human rights abuses there?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Exactly. Bahrain will probably have an easier time getting U.S. weapons. Saudi Arabia has just gotten a $60 billion deal, the biggest in history, for attack helicopters, fighter planes, guns and ammunition, armored [00:31:00] vehicles. And they’ve been helping Bahrain put down the democracy movement there, also obviously repressing their own people. So, not only are the sales at record levels, but they’re going to some of the most undemocratic countries in the world at a time when they’re supposed to be—our policy should be to support democracy in the Persian Gulf and Middle East, not help the oppressors, as some of these sales will do.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: What should President Obama be doing differently, Bill Hartung?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think, for starters, there should be a moratorium on any new changes in these regulations. Let them see what the first round—what the impacts are, which I think they’re going to see are going to be quite negative. Second of all, for things that have gone over to the Commerce Department, are not—unvetted by State, there should be new laws to say, well, Commerce has to use the same criteria as State, in terms of vetting for human rights. I think also they should look at what the economic impacts are really going to be. Instead of making these claims about how it’s going to be wonderful for U.S. jobs, really dig in and see how many jobs are going to be exported as a result of letting this technology flow more freely. I think if we can get him to do those three [00:32:00] things, we could probably blunt the most negative consequences of these so-called reforms.
Can Mexico win its battle with US gun companies? Part 1 - The Inquiry - Air Date 3-7-24
ADAM WINKLER: In the U. S. Constitution there's an individual right to bear arms, and the courts have interpreted that provision to mean that people have a right to keep firearms in their home for personal protection and carry guns on the public streets in case of confrontation with criminals or others who might pose a threat to them.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: And that's all needs regulating. So let's start with the industry.
ADAM WINKLER: In the early 2000s, Congress passed a law providing immunity for gun makers and gun dealers when their guns are used to commit a crime. That law, known as the Protection for Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, has basically made it very difficult to sue gun makers when their firearms are used to commit crimes and other harms.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: So does it also work to protect the gun industry from being accountable, then?
ADAM WINKLER: Yes, it does. While the gun industry remains accountable for things like producing a defective [00:33:00] product. If you buy a firearm and it explodes in your hands you can sue the gun makers the way you can sue the maker of your toaster if it explodes when you use it.
However, when it comes to gun violence, when the firearm is used as it's intended—to fire at another person—then the gunmakers are off the hook and are not accountable when their firearms are diverted into the black market.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: Legal protection was a top priority for the powerful gun rights group the National Rifle Association. It lobbied hard to make it happen.
ADAM WINKLER: The gun makers pushed for that immunity, along with gun rights activists, out of concern that lawsuits would put the gun makers out of business. That immunity was adopted shortly after the tobacco companies reached a record settlement that involved billions and billions of dollars, and the gun makers were worried that they would face similar kinds of lawsuits and face daunting liability claims if they didn't have this federal [00:34:00] immunity.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: Mexico also has the right to bear arms in its constitution, so its lawsuit against U. S. gun companies isn't challenging that. As well as federal legislation, there are also U. S. state gun laws, and some are more liberal than others. The route used to smuggle firearms from states with more relaxed laws to ones with stricter rules is known as the "Iron Pipeline."
ADAM WINKLER: These are ordinary highways that people drive cars on and obviously have millions of cars on them every day. So the fact that a car might be driving by and in its trunk have several hundred firearms—it'd be very difficult for the police to know about and to stop. So the Iron Pipeline is incredibly difficult to police and to supervise.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: The main U. S. agency for enforcing federal gun laws and cracking down on trafficking is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or the ATF.
ADAM WINKLER: The ATF is moderately effective. It's generally an [00:35:00] underfunded agency with 400 million firearms in America and really no difficulty getting firearms from one state to another because of the lack of internal borders within the United States.
The ATF faces a daunting challenge in trying to enforce our gun laws.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: But when it comes to the border, Mexico needs to play its part.
ADAM WINKLER: If you were to drive a car from Mexico into, say, California, that car is definitely going to be stopped, its occupants checked, and very possibly its trunk or other aspects of the vehicle searched and inspected.
However, that same vehicle going from California to Mexico will not be stopped and inspected by American Border Patrol. And Mexican Border Patrol is not nearly as aggressive as American Border Control in keeping things out.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: Mexico originally filed its lawsuit in 2021 in Massachusetts. A year later, a court there threw it out because of the immunity law.[00:36:00]
Mexico successfully appealed, arguing it is exempt from that law as a sovereign nation. It also claims that the flood of illegal guns across the border is a result of deliberate business practices by U. S. gun companies.
ADAM WINKLER: Mexico definitely has a daunting case to prove that the gun makers are liable—even if they can bring their case in courts—that they have knowledge and that they intentionally did or negligently manufactured or marketed these firearms in a way that made it almost certain that they were going to Mexico.
How the US privatized WAR - Jacobin - Air Date 5-14-24
RANIA KHALEK - HOST, JACOBIN: When the U. S. launched its war of aggression against Iraq in 2003, Eric Prince's new venture, then called Blackwater, was quick to take advantage of the U. S. 's radical new privatization agenda. Blackwater soon won its first $27 million no-bid contract to provide security for Ambassador Paul Bremer, who headed the so called Coalition Provision Authority, the U. S. 's colonial administration in Iraq. [00:37:00]
By 2007, it had won $1 billion in contracts from the State Department alone. More than half of these contracts were awarded without competition or tender. In just a few years, the secretive institution emerged from its swamp to become one of the most important players in the so-called War on Terror.
This was a marriage of convenience. Private companies are not required to report deaths and injuries among their mercenary forces. And they even enjoy greater impunity than the lawless U. S. military itself.
On September 16th, 2007, the world witnessed that impunity. At around noon, a Blackwater convoy of four armed vehicles arrived at Baghdad's Nisour Square. Soon, the mercenaries opened fire on unarmed civilians passing through the square in their cars. Panicked, the Iraqi drivers began to flee the scene, but the mercenaries shot at the fleeing cars. [00:38:00] In all, 17 civilians were murdered, and more than 20 were injured in what some have called Baghdad's Bloody Sunday.
The Iraqi government called the attack an act of deliberate murder, but Blackwater insisted that it acted in self defense. The State Department backed them up. Not long after the massacre, Eric Prince testified to Congress. Remarkably, not a single question was asked about Nisour Square. But the question of civilian fatalities, which were well documented, did come up.
Prince's strategy? Denial.
ERIC PRINCE: The people we employ are former U. S. military law enforcement people. People that have sworn the oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
RANIA KHALEK - HOST, JACOBIN: Then added.
ERIC PRINCE: They, they bleed red, white, and blue.
RANIA KHALEK - HOST, JACOBIN: After the Nisour massacre, Prince's ambitions grew further still.
He announced that Blackwater would now become a full spectrum [00:39:00] initiative and began to bid for new Pentagon contracts. In the years that followed, Blackwater established a new mercenary operation staffed by soldiers from all around the world, an intelligence agency staffed by former CIA operatives, an aviation division with dozens of aircraft, and even a line of armored personnel carriers.
When the U. S. flew suspected terrorists around the world to so-called black sites, Blackwater's flight records match those of known torture camps, suggesting that it played a role in the kidnap and torture program. Blackwater came to recruit mercenaries throughout Latin America, often recruiting former fascist foot soldiers, who themselves took part in campaigns of torture and massacre.
But it didn't stop there. Blackwater came to recruit mercenaries from around the world at a scale that may never be known. In [00:40:00] 2016, some 200 Sudanese mercenaries working for Blackwater were killed in a single strike in Yemen. All along, Blackwater moved further and further into the shadows.
During the U. S. 's wars in West Asia, private equity firms began to invest in private military companies. War is a safe bet. Endless war means endless profit. So these investment firms went on a buying spree that's not only continued to this day, it has accelerated.
According to research by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, private equity firms were responsible for 42% of all takeovers in the U. S. private defense sector in 2019. These funds face no requirement to disclose the financial status of their purchases. Through them, entire armies disappear into black holes where their size or activities can no longer be traced.[00:41:00]
Meanwhile, the profits continue to pile up. In 2023, Joe Biden requested $842 billion for the U. S. military budget, which is roughly three times more than China's military budget and 10 times higher than Russia's. Based on figures in previous years, over half of that money is likely to have gone to private contractors.
Blackwater, which is now rebranded as Constellus Holdings, is among them. The new company brings together a range of private mercenary companies with other dull names like Triple Canopy, Tidewater Global Services, National Strategic Protective Solutions, and International Development Solutions. All are owned by Apollo Global Management Inc., a private equity giant based in New York City, which bought Constellus in 2012.
From the tunnels of Gaza to [00:42:00] the streets of Raqqa, we often hear whispers of mercenaries fighting on behalf of the U. S. But how many wars are these private armies really involved in? How large will these corporations become in the future?
What's their political reach? Who decides where they fight? And when? And against whom? Blackwater's legacy means that the answers to these questions may long remain. hidden. War has been pushed into the shadows. Accountability has been eroded so deeply that the US can deny its active involvement in several wars of its own making.
In many ways, we knew where we were headed. In 1961, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an ominous warning in his farewell address about the grave implications of the untrammeled growth of the military industrial complex.
PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER: The potential for the disastrous [00:43:00] rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic process. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
RANIA KHALEK - HOST, JACOBIN: This misplaced power has now grown beyond all reasonable proportions. It won't rein itself in. The question is, who will?
How Washington Plays Matchmaker For The US Gun Industry Part 2- Big Take - Air Date 10-30-23
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: Jessica, one thing you write is that part of this story isn't just exporting US guns, but also exporting US gun culture to the places where US gun makers are looking to sell their product.
JESSICA BRICE: Exporting guns--you know, most countries in the world don't have the tolerance for weapons or the demand for weapons that the United States has. And so it's not as easy as just reaching some deals and shipping [00:44:00] these guns abroad. You really need that gun culture to rise up in these places, to change the politics, to allow those guns to come in and to allow that market to bloom. And that's part of this effort. It's not just about signing contracts. It's also about getting advocates and politicians on board with the pro-gun agenda.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: And Mike, who is pressing in these other countries to change their culture to make them more receptive to US guns?
MICHAEL SMITH: We looked at a couple of countries that basically have adopted American-style gun culture to a certain degree: Brazil and Peru. In Peru, it was very interesting. You have to go back almost 15 years when a member of the NRA advocacy family--they don't have formal ties, but they like each other--it's called Safari Club International. It's a hunting rights advocacy organization. They found a man named Tomas Saldias, a Peruvian hunter, who was getting a graduate degree in Texas. And [00:45:00] he really wanted to learn how to lobby for gun rights like they do in the United States. And they basically took him under their wing.
When we spoke to Tomas Saldías, he explained to us how Safari Club International worked very closely with him over years, not only teaching him how to lobby, they took him to Washington and showed him how you go visit your congressman. They also gave him a little bit of money to cover his travel expenses. It was a volunteer job, but he got paid to go back to Peru, first organizing a regional gun rights advocacy organization to try to push for liberalized gun laws across Latin America, but he also lobbied the Peruvian Congress to stop an attempt to basically ban almost all guns in civilian hands in Peru. And he was quite successful. Congress blocked it. You can basically own as many semiautomatic assault rifles as you want, if you're a licensed gun owner, or pistols. It's quite a dramatic change that came about largely because of the influence, financing and sort of inspiration of the [00:46:00] US gun lobby.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: It seems hard to believe that one man's lobbying could be so effective. What was the argument that persuaded so many lawmakers in Peru to change their minds?
MICHAEL SMITH: Well, Saldías was very clever in how he went about this. You have to understand that in Peru, lobbying is not part of the culture, especially not grassroots movements to get stuff changed. People don't have the culture of just going to visit their congressman saying, hey, I'm your constituent, you got to do what I want. But that's exactly what he did, because he learned in the United States.
And he also took advantage of the fact that the president was under fire. The opposition in Congress wanted just to get anything they could to take him down, so to speak. And so they really embraced this idea of this president cracking down on the rights of law-abiding citizens to own guns. And he really used that quite effectively and convinced Congress almost single-handedly to block this effort to restrict gun ownership in Peru.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: And what did Safari International have to say about this?
MICHAEL SMITH: Well, they were very proud of the work he did. [00:47:00] They put out press releases about his work. They brought him up to SHOT Show in 2014 after he organized this regional gun rights organization. And they had a news conference that they basically sponsored for him. They helped write his remarks that he gave at that news conference. And then they went on to follow his career and publicly call him out in the good way for the work he was doing on behalf of gun rights in a place like Peru.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: Jessica, you're in Brazil. And that was another country where the gun culture changed quite a bit.
JESSICA BRICE: Brazil has always had pretty restrictive gun laws. Bolsonaro came in and that was one of the platforms that he campaigned on was this idea that law-abiding citizens have a right to protect themselves, because Brazil is a very violent nation and there are a lot of illegal guns on the streets. It's not like there's no guns here. There's lots of gun violence. He came in on this promise to start allowing everybody to have guns so that they can defend themselves. And within two weeks of taking office, he blew that [00:48:00] market open. He just allowed basically anyone who had the will, they were able to get access, they were able to get a license. And they were able to own types of firearms that no one had ever seen before. His son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who's also a lawmaker and also pushing the pro-gun agenda, he'd been to SHOT Show several times, and they had a real tight relationship with the former ambassador in the United States and with the Department of Commerce and the Foreign Commercial Service.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: But now, Bolsonaro's successor is pushing back a bit on this.
JESSICA BRICE: Yeah. Bolsonaro's successor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, he's actually a returning president. He was in office at the start of the century and he was the one who had pushed through many of the really tight gun laws that Brazil had. When Bolsonaro lost the election and Lula took over, on his first day of office, he reversed that. He required anyone who had purchased guns to re-register in a national registry. He blocked all these [00:49:00] shipments of guns that had been purchased, and they were stuck at ports and in Georgia and Florida. He's since shut down the market.
But what you're seeing is that culture, that gun culture is still very alive and well. Lula's bans are based on decrees. They're not based on laws. That's the real important change that we've had in Brazilian culture recently in that Bolsonaro used to be the only pro-gun lawmaker, and now we have more than a hundred in Congress. And that's rising. Every year, you're seeing that rise, and it's probably not long before we actually get some laws on the books that open this market up.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: Mike, just to be clear, in places like Peru in Brazil where there are these efforts to make the culture more receptive to guns. That's not the US Commerce Department doing that work. Is that right?
MICHAEL SMITH: No, it's more the gun advocacy groups in the United States.
JESSICA BRICE: I think we want to be really clear that it's not the Department of Commerce that's [00:50:00] pushing this cultural change. They're pushing business opportunities for American gun makers.
The lines are really blurred between the folks who are acting as activists and advocates for the changing culture and the people who are the business representatives for those organizations. And sort of the center of gun culture, it's SHOT Show.
If you're a gun lover, there's no cooler place on earth than to be than SHOT Show in Las Vegas every January. That's where a lot of this is happening. They're all mingling. You have US government officials, you have advocates, you have lobbyists, you have the business folks. They're all mingling in that same universe.
WES KOSOVA- HOST, BIG TAKE: The Biden administration has come out for greater gun control measures. The president signed an executive order to try to crack down on so-called ghost guns that don't have serial numbers. Is there any effort [00:51:00] inside the Biden administration about whether they want the Commerce Department doing this kind of work?
JESSICA BRICE: There's no indication that's the case. No matter who we reach out to within the government about this program, no one wants to talk about it. It's happening on foreign soil. It's not something that's really, really, really front and center to an American audience. It's something that they just declined to comment.
MICHAEL SMITH: Yeah, it really is a mystery, just because we don't have much insight into what's going on and the administration hasn't really spoken about it.
The one thing we have been able to discover is that there have been instances where the State Department has decided, okay, we really shouldn't be exporting guns to this particular country or they should be restricted. Like the example of Peru, where there were some really violent protests at the beginning of this year and 50 people were killed by police mainly in these protests. And so the State Department started raising concerns about the human rights situation in Peru, and [00:52:00] putting a freeze on issuing new export licenses.
But that's a temporary freeze and Commerce officials have told gun importers in Peru that this will probably be worked out at some point. It's unclear how enduring that will be and whether that will be applied in other places with similar issues.
Why the US Sells Weapons to 103 Countries - Johnny Harris - Air Date 3-6-24
JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: If weapons are a currency for influence, and the US is using that currency to buy stuff, to buy influence or stability around the world, does that actually work the way that the Pentagon and the United States government think it does? The short answer is, sometimes, but not really. Where weapons really do work is in keeping alliances strong.
BILL HARTUNG: There's no question some countries welcome it, allies like Korea and Japan and so forth, Australia. And it probably does cement those relationships, make it more likely they'll support the US in a crunch.
JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: But when it comes to trying to use weapons [00:53:00] as an incentive to get countries to behave the way you want them to, that's where it kind of starts to break down.
And the best case for this is Saudi Arabia. You can see on this map, we give a lot of weapons to Saudi Arabia. The Obama administration approved loads of weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia, and in doing so, we had some strings attached: a big one being that those weapons could not be used to violate human rights. Or from the horse's mouth, genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, serious violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, attacks directed against civilians who are legally protected from attacks or other war crimes as defined by 18 U. S. C. 2441. Translation, Saudi Arabia is not to use these weapons against civilians in any of their conflicts.
And yet, as Saudi Arabia has been waging this war against Yemen, they've done exactly that, using American weapons. They've bombed hospitals, weddings, and even a school bus. And we know that this is [00:54:00] American weapons because investigators and journalists have looked at the wreckage of these attacks and looked at the actual serial numbers, concluding that these are American weapons, but they flow through these lines.
BILL HARTUNG: Although Saudi Arabia used the bombs, most people in Yemen viewed it as an American war. Sent arms to Saudi Arabia that would slaughter people. In Yemen, but it was sort of this notion of, well, they're an oil supplier, they're bulwark against Iran, and those so-called larger strategic interests overrode the human rights imperatives.
JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: Shout out to Bellingcat, the open source investigative journalism project that helped uncover a lot of this stuff.
So Saudi Arabia isn't obeying the conditions that we put on these weapons. And Congress tried to pass a resolution that said that they were going to cut off some of this military aid that we were giving to Saudi Arabia. The problem is, a lot of the power to approve these weapon sales rests with the executive, the president. So President Trump actually vetoed this resolution. And even under the Biden administration, even though there was [00:55:00] like a brief pause, the weapons have kept flowing, making it very clear that this leverage that the US thinks it has, because it's the provider of all of these weapons, is actually kind of reversed. Turns out Saudi Arabia has a lot more leverage than we thought.
JEFF ABRAMSON: You know, the ideas of the United States has kind of captured Saudi Arabia by having this weapons and defense arrangement that the Saudis need to rely on us, they will do things that we ask them to do, or I think the opposite is now happening. Saudi Arabia has been able to turn the tides and say, Hey, if you don't provide this, we'll find an alternate partner. The relationship has been perverted.
JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: Okay, but Saudi Arabia is a monarchy. Maybe we have better luck influencing fellow democracies. So let's look at Israel, who receives more military aid from the United States than any other country.
JEFF ABRAMSON: I think Israel is the prime example of the lack of leverage that you would think a well-developed, long-term weapons relationship would have.
JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: The US government has come out and [00:56:00] said that they are not happy with the way that Israel is conducting its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. And yet what we see here is an effort to push more military aid to Israel without any pause or withdraw of these weapons transfers.
JEFF ABRAMSON: And that's the reality of the arms trade is that we can hope countries will take things into mind. We can tell them we want to do things, but ultimately they end up making local decisions for their local needs.
JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: There's a lot more cases just like this. Like the Philippines, where the Duterte regime has used American weapons to carry out a brutal war on drugs, murdering and jailing civilians in the process.
What's confusing about this is that, in some sense, the weapons are working for US interests. We sell them these weapons. We give them these weapons. We buy their support in deterring our enemy. But in the process, these weapons that we use as our currency are used for other things that have nothing to do with deterring our enemy.
And sometimes it gets really out of control. Like, we give a lot of weapons to Turkey, a [00:57:00] NATO ally. Turkey will then transfer that to its proxies in Syria who will use them to fight against American-backed rebels that are also using US weapons. So American weapons are being used on both sides of a conflict.
It just feels a little bit like deja vu from the book that was written a hundred years ago, stating that this was a problem. And it still kind of is.
The other big issue with using weapons as your main currency for influence around the world is that weapons don't just go away. Back in the 80s, the CIA transferred a bunch of weapons to rebel fighters in Afghanistan who were fighting against the Soviets. Decades later, those same weapons were being used by those fighters and their descendants to fight against Americans who were then invading Afghanistan.
Same thing happened in Libya. We gave a bunch of weapons there and they leaked out and ended up in the hands of militants and insurgents in Syria and South Sudan.
So if weapons are this currency that don't actually give us [00:58:00] leverage and that can create more danger than stability, why do we keep making them and sending to over 100 countries?
There's a lot of answers to that question, but one of them has to do with money. There's a lot of money in making weapons. There always has been since the Industrial Revolution. Lots of these weapons are made all over our country, intentionally creating a network of jobs that no congressman ever wants to vote down. If a congressman votes to make fewer weapons, they could be voting against a factory or production facility in their district. Add to that, that some of our lawmakers own shares in these companies. If these companies make money, they make money. And yet they're the ones approving the money that goes to these corporations--a massive conflict of interest that we've reported on before in a previous video on insider trading.
What you get is this military industrial complex, a permanent economic [00:59:00] business machine, that is incentivized to make more and more weapons, both to prepare for war and provide national security, but also to keep people rich, and to keep the constituents of lawmakers happy.
So, in short, one of the reasons the map looks like this is to keep a bunch of private corporations nice and rich.
Note from the Editor on the problems with looking for good or bad intentions
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with American Prestige reporting on the U S increasing its lead in arm sales. Big Take described how the U.S. plays matchmaker for domestic arms dealers.
The Take explained the lawsuit trying to stop Mexico's Iron River. Facepalm America described more of the impact of gun smuggling into Mexico. Democracy Now, from back during the Obama administration, explained how the U.S. eased rules on exporting military technology. The Inquiry continued discussing the lawsuit attempting to stop gun smuggling.
Jacobin looked at the practice of privatizing war with military [01:00:00] contractors. Big Take, explain to that gun culture must also be exported along with guns to the rest of the world. And Johnny Harris looked at the impact of arm sales on international leverage and corporate ledgers. And that's just the front page.
There's more to dive into in the additional sections of this audio newspaper, but first a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process. To support all our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new "members only" podcast feed that you'll receive sign up to support the show at BestofTheLeft.com/support (link in the show notes), through our Patreon page if you prefer, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app.
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And now, just before we [01:01:00] continue onto the sections-half of the show, I have a few thoughts. I feel like this is one of those topics that can so easily slide into the preconceived notions of whoever is hearing it. All of the same facts will be presented, but one person who, for instance, believes in the U.S. being a beacon of goodness will argue that either the weapons are doing good in the world or, at the very least, our intention was to do good in the world so we should be thanked at best or held the blameless at worst.
But another person who sees the same facts, but has a perspective of the U.S. as an entity that can do almost no good, and has in fact been ultimately, you know, behind basically every bad thing that's happened around the world due to our imperialistic proclivities, will see the arm sales through that lens with the country—or at least the power brokers running the country—having an almost malevolent intent to mess up the world as much as [01:02:00] possible in order to profit from the chaos.
To be clear, that's not just a perspective from foreign adversaries or anything like that. Increasingly we've been hearing from people who consider themselves to be on the far left, who hold these kinds of reflexively anti-U.S. opinions. Now, unsurprisingly, there are problems with both of these extremes. For those with rose-tinted glasses, it hardly needs explaining that insisting on assuming the positive in the U.S. makes it much harder to find problems that may actually be able to be solved. The first step is so often just admitting that there's a problem.
But the other view is similarly wrong-headed, not because it's wrong to be critical of the U.S., or even to look at any new issue with a skeptical eye. It's that reflexively always assuming the worst and ill intent just means that you're going to end up being wrong too often. Thinking of the country or the people who run it, particularly when it comes to issues of international [01:03:00] conflict, military aid and arm sales, as operating with either benevolent or malevolent intent just means you're starting off walking down the wrong path of logic right from the start. That doesn't mean you're always going to be wrong about your conclusions. But we all know it's possible to come to the right answer for the wrong reasons.
Much more accurately and much less likely to lead to conspiratorial thinking is to understand systems thinking—understanding that people need not have ill intent to be part of a system that, for instance, sells weapons that end up having negative consequences. But that individual good intentions aren't enough to excuse the system. The more the politics of the right has slid into the conspiratorial abyss the more we all began to hear about "they" —the omnipresent, all powerful, "they" at the heart of every system, be it governmental, corporate, media, and it's the inner desires and [01:04:00] intentions of "they" that are responsible for how everything is playing out.
This is the heart of conspiracism—the belief that rather than the world being a complicated place with lots of interlocking moving parts, being driven by old entrenched patterns and systems with global capitalism, always being in the mix, that it's actually just the will of powerful people pulling hidden strings that's making things happen.
And to my dismay in the years, since the beginning of Russia's war in Ukraine, I've been hearing that framing of "they" more and more from some on the left or maybe who were previously on the left and don't really know where they are now. "What they're doing," "what they don't want you to know," et cetera. What I wish people would understand is that this framing, as an argument, is just as silly and facile as those who dismiss real problems by saying, "It's okay, they meant well."
So go easy on [01:05:00] individuals, they're likely not as evil as some would have you believe, but don't let perceived intentions of individuals cloud deserved criticism of the systems in place that need to be overhauled because they're the source of the problem. Go easy on people, hard on systems. That's not just the answer to our real problems. It's also how to get to those answers without getting wrapped up in conspiracy or delusion in the process.
And now, we'll continue with the rest of the show. Next up, section A "Global Arms Dealer," section B "Guns to Mexico," and section C "Domestic Gun Policy."
SECTION A: Global ArmsInside Biden’s Secret Arms Deal - Deconstructed - Air Date 9-22-23
MURTAZA HUSSIAN: For the past year and a half, Pakistan has been talking about this secret document that no one had seen until recently, but which showed — allegedly, according to former Prime Minister Imran Khan — that the U.S. had privately pushed for his removal from power. Since Khan’s removal last year, Pakistan has been embroiled in a huge political, economic, and [01:06:00] security crisis, effectively, but no one had seen this document until we published it last month, and it did show that the substance of Khan’s claims, that U.S. diplomats from the State Department had encouraged his removal and, even, you could say, threatened or incentivized the Pakistani military to make his removal happen, was true.
And it did, actually shed some light on this issue, which in Pakistan is still ongoing, and which, still, is really at the core of the crisis in that country of 200-million-plus people, which is: who controls the country, who should control it, and who gets to make the calls behind the scenes? And, really, Khan’s claims of how his own dismissal took place had a lot more substance than his critics had said for a long time beforehand.
RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: Yeah. And the crux of the dispute — if you want to call it that — between the United States and Khan was Ukraine, and was what they called Khan’s, quote-unquote, “aggressively neutral position,” vis-à-vis the war between Ukraine and Russia. And, you [01:07:00] know, we’ve kind of made fun of that phrasing, “aggressively neutral,” because it is kind of absurd.
On the other hand, he was, actually, kind of aggressive about it the day before meeting with Don Lu in this critical moment, where Lu tells the ambassador that they basically want Khan gone. He was responding to EU complaints about his neutrality by saying, “we are not your slaves.”
So, yeah, I understand. As absurd as the claim is, I understand what he means by aggressive neutrality.
MURTAZA HUSSIAN: Yeah. Khan is a very famously bombastic, you can say, populist figure, in politics, and he does not dress up his statements in the diplomatic niceties that someone may expect. He’s quite blunt about it and, certainly, this seemed to provoke the United States or antagonize them. And the degree to which they were upset about it maybe wasn’t clear in public statements but, behind the scenes, what the State Department was saying, clearly they were quite, quite angry about Khan’s position.
And that’s another thing that no one knew [01:08:00] about the cipher, is what exactly was the core and substance of the dispute? It turns out that it really was about Ukraine and Pakistan’s stance on it which, while neutral was not that different from, say, India’s stance or Bangladesh’s stance on the conflict, they’re trying to take a nonaligned position in a conflict which really wasn’t in their region, and that seemed to step on the prerogatives of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, particularly as it relates to the Pakistani military.
RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: And you also have to have a little bit more power than Pakistan had in order to hold that neutral position, it seems. India and even some of the Gulf countries who are somewhat aligned with the United States have taken somewhat of a nonaligned position, but they can stand on their own two feet. And it seems like what the United States said here is that you can’t. Like, we can push you over, and we now have more context for what happened since then.
So, Khan is removed from power in April of 2022. At this point, the war is two months old. You’re already starting to see [01:09:00] the Ukrainians running low on munitions, because they were not expecting a long drawn-out war. The U.S. industrial base is also not in a place where it can produce these low grade weapons at scale. We can produce a hundred-million-dollar F-35 that falls out of the sky and gets lost and builds around it an entire orbit of executives and lobbyists, but we don’t make a lot of bullets and artillery shells. And so, for that we needed Pakistan.
Talk a little bit about the new reporting, and what we’ve uncovered about what Pakistan’s role was, vis-à-vis this war, after Khan was ousted.
MURTAZA HUSSIAN: Well, a very good point you made was that Pakistan was kind of vulnerable to this kind of external pressure from the United States, because its economic situation is so dysfunctional. And one thing we’ve learned now is that the IMF bailout that Pakistan received earlier this year, and which it’s really banking on to extricate itself from this significant economic crisis which it’s experiencing, was [01:10:00] encouraged or came to fruition with the great help of the United States, for Pakistani cooperation and support in the war in Ukraine, provision of these weapons, sales of which, the capital generated thereof, was used to facilitate the financing of this loan. And, certainly, also to curry the political favor necessary to make the loan happen.
So you have a situation where the U.S. has very great disproportionate influence in the IMF. Pakistan’s dependent on the IMF for financial support, financing loans and so forth. And the U.S. can say, well, implicitly or explicitly, we won’t open the taps for your economic well being if you don’t give us what we want politically in this sense.
So we kind of see very, very great detail in the story how things really work behind the scenes, the dealmaking that takes place at elite levels beyond what is said publicly, which is much more anodyne and sterile, you could say, or more diplomatic, you could say, in the public positioning. It was a lot of horse-trading [01:11:00] taking place behind the scenes.
And, unfortunately, I think that the ugly part of this deal is that there’s a crackdown taking place in Pakistan right now — it’s being led by the Pakistani military — to dismantle Khan’s party and suppress pretty much all dissent. And this loan has effectively helped finance that crackdown. It’s allowed them to postpone elections, it’s allowed them to solidify their own hold on power, which should be temporary in anticipation of elections, but seems like it’s much more long-lasting than that.
And it’s all going back to an arms deal. It’s an arms deal for … Bombs for billions, you could say, that’s what’s holding the current Pakistani regime in place.
RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: And so, to help us walk through and unpack this, we’re also joined by Arif Rafiq, who is a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute. A lot of his focus area is on Pakistan and South Asia. He’s also a political risk analyst that focuses on that region.
Can you talk a little bit about the role of the IMF here? As somebody who was observing this unfold beginning in early [01:12:00] 2022, what was the role of the IMF here, and what are the implications of what we’ve uncovered here?
ARIF RAFIQ: The IMF effectively serves as life support for the Pakistan economy. Pakistan is a habitual patient of the IMF. So, this is currently the 22nd or 23rd IMF program for Pakistan in its history. And so, every, I would say, three to five years, the country enters some kind of new IMF program, and that’s because the country goes through what are called boom-bust cycles. It grows at above average rates for a couple of years and its economy heats up, and it begins to run out of money to finance its own budget as well as its external liabilities.
So, Pakistan is a net importer. It imports energy — as well as some food items and other things — to fuel its economy as well as feed its [01:13:00] people. And its export base is quite weak. And so, it constantly needs the influx of funds from the IMF, as well as IMF partners, to help enable it to finance its imports, and then also address its budgetary needs.
And so, the IMF routinely comes in, and Pakistan is a sort of a longtime patient of the IMF. And, basically, the IMF plays the role of preventing Pakistan’s economic collapse. It doesn’t help the country in terms of its broader economic transformation and developing economy, an economy that meets the needs of its people, but it is there to prevent an all-out collapse.
MURTAZA HUSSIAN: You described the situation of the boom-bust cycle in Pakistani politics. I believe there’s something with Pakistan’s political economy which contributes to that. And you mentioned civil-military relations earlier. The Pakistani military obviously has a very disproportionate share in Pakistan’s economy [01:14:00] itself. It’s a big real estate holder, it controls other industries.
How does this military control of the economy lead to this chronically dysfunctional economic situation?
ARIF RAFIQ: Yeah. There is an imbalance in Pakistan’s economy, and its economic policies are largely aimed at or disproportionately aimed at privileging the few in the country, and that includes its political and economic elites, as well as the military. The military is a major economic player in the country. It owns a significant amount of land as commercial property. It also manufactures corn flakes, meat, and other goods. And so, it’s very analogous to what we have in Egypt and other countries, where the military is just a big player in the economy.
So it receives these undue benefits, in terms of privileges, in terms of market access and things like that. And, ultimately, what that does is it creates a kind of a domestic economy where the rules of the game are served to privilege the [01:15:00] few. And then, Pakistan’s elite doesn’t invest in competing in the broader global market, and that’s why the military and other major economic actors can benefit from the sheer demand in a country with a population of 240 million. But that is not a pathway toward creating a sustained economic growth that can last over a decade or two, as we’ve seen in countries like Bangladesh — which was formerly part of Pakistan — India, Vietnam, and many of the Southeast Asian countries that have seen some of the world’s fastest growing economies.
So, the rules of the game are aimed at privileging the few, and that produces this imbalanced economy. And then the IMF comes in, and this is a very tortuous exercise that repeats itself every few years.
RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: And so, what we reported in this most recent article is that the weapons production began roughly in August by Pakistan [01:16:00] for the United States, for the benefit of the Ukrainian military. And then, by the spring of 2023 — so, that’s this year — the IMF publicly tells Reuters and Bloomberg and other news outlets that claims made by Pakistan about its progress toward the next round of IMF financing are not quite accurate. You know, that Pakistan was saying “We’re good, everything’s on cruise control. It expires the end of June 30th, but we should be good. The next round is coming in.”
IMF says, not so much. You need — I think, correct me if I’m wrong — roughly $6 billion, you need to come up with collateral from these other countries in order for us to put forward our financing. And, all of a sudden, at the end of June, the money uncorks.
So, we can add to this now through our reporting, that Pakistan went to the United States and said, we want this weapons program and the financing that’s coming through it to count toward filling this gap.
Josh Paul Reveals The Truth Behind US Arms Supply to Israel - Laura Flanders and Friends - Air Date 11-7-23
JOSH PAUL: Many of these laws. [01:17:00] require the department to come to some sort of a determination, uh, before any sanctions or withholding of assistance occurs. Uh, if you never come to the determination, you've never broken the law. Uh, that said, I believe that the legal standards are rather lapsed, lacked, and lacking.
Uh, and I believe that we should be holding ourselves to a stronger standard. Uh, part of this also comes down to questions of interpretation of law.
LAURA FLANDERS - HOST, LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS: You also said that it is in the hands of higher ups. Who would that be? The final determination?
JOSH PAUL: I think the, the, the, the main policy decisions on Israel right now are being made, uh, from the top down, uh, which again is atypical for most arms sales.
They sort of bubble their way up, uh, from the bottom. You get an application from a partner or from a U S company. seeking a certain military capability. Uh, and that's a debate that, you know, gradually bubbles up to the decision makers. Uh, in this instance, the decision was made, uh, and therefore there was no space for that, that bubbling for that debate.
LAURA FLANDERS - HOST, LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS: At [01:18:00] the top is the president. Is he ultimately responsible? Of
JOSH PAUL: course, these are his authorities.
LAURA FLANDERS - HOST, LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS: So what can be done, I'm sure there are people in our audience who, whatever, wherever they stand on culpability for this particular round of violence, want to see an end to it, and want to see peace. What Can they do right now to perhaps to support civil service like the ones you're hearing from who are saying, we're still deciding to be inside trying to do good.
Are there things civil society outside can do to support people like that?
JOSH PAUL: Yeah, there are three things I will point to. The first is a bit of a cliche, but it really does matter. Contact your member of Congress, contact your senator. I worked in a congressional office. And I know how we used to sit down with the member of Congress on a weekly basis.
Review the call logs and go through them and say, okay, we've had five calls on this side. We've had seven calls on that side and that really does inform how members of congress think about their votes Uh, so that that really is an important thing to do the second thing is [01:19:00] I would say reach out to your local media Uh, there are reporters for what's left anyway of local media, uh who cover?
Um local communities and how they are reacting to world events Make sure they're getting your side of the story And the third thing of course is is organized and there are some good organizations already out there uh, so that the So for example, there is the alliance for peace building Uh, is, is one organization, uh, who does a lot of good work bringing communities together around both local conflict resolution and global conflict issues.
So I think those are the three things I would recommend.
LAURA FLANDERS - HOST, LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS: Do we have a moment now with President Biden coming out right after you resigned, actually, um, urging Congress to approve, I think more than a hundred billion dollars in aid for Israel, Ukraine, and I think Taiwan. Um, is there a moment now?
Especially to stop any of that, or is it gonna go no matter what?
JOSH PAUL: I think it's an important moment to talk about it because it [01:20:00] highlights it, right? And the debate inevitably will go away in several months. This won't be something that is on the top of everyone's minds. And while it is, I think this is the opportunity to make an impression.
Is it going to change anything in the short term that I can't say. I think we've have seen a slight shift over the last few days in the administration's approach. I think we've seen a change in tone, a greater focus on Palestinian civilian casualties and the harm that could be done. But in terms of the actions that underlie that, uh, when we look at a supplemental request that has billions of dollars for arms and a hundred million dollars, uh, for humanitarian relief in Gaza, for example, uh, I, I think I'm skeptical that the short term will make any difference, but I think the long term is much more promising.
LAURA FLANDERS - HOST, LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS: You talked about the harm that could be done and even as we speak, people are being killed. Um, as we record this, um, Raji Sarani, the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in [01:21:00] Gaza, spoke on Democracy Now and basically said, Palestinian civilians are in the eyes of the storm. They are the targets.
PALESTIAN: They, they destroyed Gaza. I mean, it's unbelievable. This army, Targeting only civilians and civilian targets. Towers, houses, hospitals, churches, mosques, schools, sheltered places, ambulances, nurses, Doctors, journalists, this is the most ethical army, this is the most ethical army in the world. This is the mighty Israel, it's might and power, targeting civilians.
They are doing war crimes, crimes against humanity, persecution for 2. [01:22:00] 4 million people. For the last 18 days. How are you
LAURA FLANDERS - HOST, LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS: thinking about any of
JOSH PAUL: this? That's right. And if I may, I mean, I saw a report today about a Palestinian family from the north of Gaza, uh, who moved, uh, following the Israeli direction to do so, uh, only for a large number of the family members to be killed in the South of Gaza, uh, when the Israelis struck there.
There is no escape within Gaza. Uh, and for those of us who have experienced war, we know that. Uh, the trauma, the screech of a no flying F 16 followed by explosions day after day after day. Even if you are not physically harmed is an irreparable trauma.
LAURA FLANDERS - HOST, LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS: We've seen this past week in October 20th, Israeli aircraft dropping flyers on northern Gaza saying that anybody who refuses to abide by the, what amounts to a forced evacuation or forced, um, relocation order from the north to the south will be considered, um, in league with the terrorists or a terrorist and subject to being killed.
How do [01:23:00] you, what's your sense of that? Is that legal?
JOSH PAUL: So, let me first say that Israel does have a right to respond to Hamas's brutal, violent attack, no question. The Geneva Conventions prohibit the forced relocation of civilians within an occupied area. And so, I think there is a good legal question to be raised there.
I am not a lawyer. Uh, but I think one can only look at what is, at this point, 1. 3 million Palestinians within Gaza who are reported to have been dislocated from their homes, uh, many of those homes of course now destroyed and they won't be able to go back to them, um, to, to raise these sorts of questions and to ask that question I think is very legitimate.
LAURA FLANDERS - HOST, LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS: Yeah. Please take a moment to subscribe to our newsletter and you'll get information on all of our programming including the weekly premiere on YouTube and our upcoming shows. Please subscribe at lauraflanders. org. I mean, my hair is on fire. You don't see it, but I feel it. Um, partly I've been. I would say that mine
JOSH PAUL: is too.
LAURA FLANDERS - HOST, LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS: Yours [01:24:00] obviously burnt up. Um, you lived in Ramallah. As you say, you served in Iraq. Uh, you, I mean, you, you worked in Iraq. Um, for those of us who have seen this up close, uh, this is a moment of despair and fury. And I wonder, Um, holding all of the civilian victims in our hearts at the same time. I certainly, um, feel and weep for those whose families have been torn apart by the attacks of Hamas, whose relatives are held hostage still.
But with all of that in your heart right now, how do you make sense of your effort and those of your colleagues to try to insert human rights? kind of rules on war, because it's almost seems inevitable that in the name of right to defense right to reprisal, um, governments do whatever the heck they like.
JOSH PAUL: So, I mean, there are [01:25:00] laws of war. They're not always necessarily enforceable. And of course, the U. S. has prevented the Palestinians from seeking restorative justice or justice of any kind through the International Criminal Court. Um, so I think it's important to note that there are laws that apply, there are rules of conduct, and there are basic standards of human decency that apply.
I think at the end of the day, as you said, what we're talking about here is not, does not boil down, should not boil down to Israel right or wrong. What we're ultimately talking about is the right of civilians, whether they be Palestinian or Israeli, to live in peace, to feel secure in their homes. very much.
secure from rocket attacks and secure from F 16 drop precision guided munitions. And I hope that this administration, uh, can take a look at our own historic policies, uh, both, uh, in Israel and drawing from our experience in the region, not all of which is positive by any means, [01:26:00] um, and, and push Israel and push all the parties, uh, towards a solution that is more just and that provides the peace.
people who just want to live their everyday lives and raise their families deserve.
LAURA FLANDERS - HOST, LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS: Like what? What would that solution look like? What would you propose right now if you still had your job inside the State Department?
JOSH PAUL: So I think there are two streams there. One is with regards to the transfer of arms to Israel right now, which is of course what I was most directly involved in and what I retired over or resigned over.
Um, and with regards to that, again, I would, I would ask the Biden administration to follow its own laws, uh, its own policies that it has set and just to simply apply the same standard. In the same space for debate to Israel as it has permitted, uh, or encouraged, uh, for, for conflicts and for partners, uh, elsewhere in the world.
SECTION B: GUNS TO MEXICO
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B guns to Mexico.
Can Mexico win its battle with US gun companies? Part 2 - The Inquiry - Air Date 3-7-24
DR. LEON CASTELLANOS-JANKIEWICZ: The Mexican case is now changing the assumptions in the sense that it is no longer straightforward or thought that the responsibility of the arms industry [01:27:00] stops at the store.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: Mexico is the only country bringing the lawsuit against U. S. gun companies, but other nations are watching very closely.
DR. LEON CASTELLANOS-JANKIEWICZ: In Latin America, between 70 and 90 percent of gun deaths occur with firearms that come illegally trafficked from the United States. We see the same trends in Central America, in countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador.
And also in the Caribbean and countries such as Jamaica.
Now Belize and Antigua and Barbuda have supported Mexico's claims in the U. S. courts by filing briefs directed to the judges who are looking into these cases and telling them that they have similar claims. Issues and similar concerns regarding the weapons that get to their jurisdictions to their territories from the United States.
Some of these countries might be interested in filing lawsuits against the same companies [01:28:00] in the U. S. courts if Mexico's bid for more accountability is successful.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: And lack success, if it happens, could be transformative.
DR. LEON CASTELLANOS-JANKIEWICZ: A win from Mexico in this case would fundamentally change the way in which gun manufacturers behave in three important ways.
Manufacture, marketing, and distribution. When it comes to manufacture, Mexico alleges that the way in which these products are made involves configurations that are easily modifiable to increase their lethality. Now Mexico would like these companies to produce these weapons in ways that makes it Very, very hard to convert them into higher caliber or repeat fire weapons.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: And just like the Sandy Hook lawsuit, the tone of gun company marketing is also in Mexico's sights.
DR. LEON CASTELLANOS-JANKIEWICZ: As for distribution Mexico has shown, through forensic evidence, that most of the firearms that are found in Mexican crime scenes are coming from a [01:29:00] cluster of gun stores that are situated along the border with Mexico in Arizona and Texas, mostly in the state of Arizona in Maricopa County.
Mexico has brought separate proceedings against the gun stores in Arizona for complicity in arms trafficking. And so the way in which Mexico is bringing this lawsuit By using both sides of the supply chain from, first of all, addressing the manufacturers in the federal courts in Boston, but also the gun stores in Arizona, is a strategy that might bring many actors across the supply chain into compliance.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: Mexico's gun company civil lawsuit hasn't been tried in court yet, so there's still a way to go before we find out how it ends.
DR. LEON CASTELLANOS-JANKIEWICZ: The companies will have to present evidence, and so will Mexico, and that means that the case will go into a discovery phase, where the practices of the gun companies in terms of marketing, [01:30:00] production, and distribution will have to be disclosed.
This information will be able to be used by potential buyers. Victims and plaintiffs in other cases as well.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: If the lawsuit was settled, that would mean no trial and no public disclosure of confidential gun company documents. But the expectation is that won't happen here.
DR. LEON CASTELLANOS-JANKIEWICZ: And so Mexico, one of its main objectives with this litigation, is to bring out into the open the business practices which, according to Mexico, are negligent and which are affecting its citizens and causing loss of life within the United States and across the border.
For And without that disclosure of evidence, Mexico would not be interested in an out of court settlement.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: The Mexican government says the cost of the law enforcement response to the cartels is going up, while opportunities to boost income from tourism and foreign investment are being lost. It's suing the gun companies for 10 billion U.
S. dollars in damages.
DR. LEON CASTELLANOS-JANKIEWICZ: It is highly [01:31:00] unlikely that the judge in any phase of this case would order the gun companies to pay that exorbitant sum. Of course, there will probably be some kind of figure that a judge will try to put on The reparations that are awarded to Mexico should they find in favor of that country.
CHARMAINE COZIER - HOST, THE INQUIRY: So can Mexico win its battle with U. S. gun companies?
It's managed to clear the immunity law that's blocked other legal actions. So that's definitely a win. But there's still a long way to go. The trial hasn't started, so we don't know what either side will produce. But the Mexican government needs compelling evidence to prove its claims against the U. S.
gun companies and what they know about trafficking. Mexico may have tough firearm laws, but as our expert witnesses have noted, its own border controls are far from robust. It's going to be a long and expensive process with no guarantee of success. Whatever the outcome, the lawsuit is [01:32:00] already making a mark.
Other countries are watching and waiting.
Ieva Jusionyte, "Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border" (U California Press, 2024) - New Books Network - Air Date 4-15-24
IEVA JUSIONYTE: Most journalists get into covering crime, uh, Almost involuntarily, or they, they fall into it because they are working on a different issue, maybe reporting on, on just community affairs or local politics, or in Juan's case, it was local business, um, in, in, in Nuevo Leon. And then when, uh, Violence erupted because there was this, um, more competition between organized crime groups that traffic drugs to the United States.
And this violence became more apparent in the communities that journalists were covering. They, that, that was just their new story that a lot of them began to pursue. Um, and, uh, it, it was, um, it's also one that once they started this work. It is [01:33:00] difficult to get out of it, despite the threats. So, um, one, they become invested in the story or committed to this issue, uh, that makes it difficult to kind of abandon because the story doesn't end.
They're the organized crime groups continue competing. The government continues. Being implicated in, in extrajudicial killing. So the story has been continuing for many years. It's, it doesn't end. And the journalists who began that beat also feel almost some of them, I would say, trapped in it. Uh, On the one hand, they do have the sources.
It's something they are already familiar with, but also, um, there was, by talking to them and talking to Juan in particular, there is something more to it. So Juan was telling me that he. He just got submerged into this world of the narco. So it's a, it's a dark, kind of dark, dark [01:34:00] beat that has a big, uh, impact on your, on your, um, mental health, on your family life.
But once you get into it, leaving it is, it's, it's hard. There is, there is something to say about leaving the adrenaline behind and the adrenaline of the beat. Yes. But it is also, um, something that. Although it haunts you, uh, you kind of, um, you're resigned to this that this is your life. This is what you are good at.
So I think maybe in a way it can, in some cases, be maybe similar to, to ethnography too. We just get, get used to and, um. It's hard to get out.
REIGHAN GILLAM - HOST, NEW BOOKS NETWORK: And so in the book, um, another group of people that you feature are gun smugglers and the U. S. federal agents who investigate them and, um, who. Uh, track [01:35:00] them and hope to, to catch the smugglers.
Um, yet the border, it seems to present this problem for U. S. agents and that they don't have jurisdiction in Mexico. And so how much are these, you know, U. S. agents, um, how much can they accomplish, uh, around the flow of guns, you know, with, with their invests and arrests and with these investigations that they're undertaking?
IEVA JUSIONYTE: That's such a good question. So in, in the U. S., the main agency that's responsible for all federal gun crimes, sort of tracking guns, uh, investigating gun crimes, punishing, uh, gun dealers or gun traffickers that, uh, violate laws, it is the ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. And it is one of the, least powerful agencies, very understaffed, uh, very, um, afraid of [01:36:00] politically, of political repercussions if they speak up and if they ask for more resources.
So in, um, I, I have one chapter in the book that, um, looks back at this operation, Fast and Furious, that became very politicized. Uh, and, uh, it was about ATF agents letting guns be trafficked to Mexico in order for them to figure out who are the ultimate buyers, where are these guns going to. Well, the fact is that they lost track of a lot of them and they lost track because Their jurisdiction, as you said, ended at the border.
Now they are much more careful. So they changed. Um, and I, when I tell the stories of these other agents that, that I got to, um, spend a lot of time with recently doing this research. So they don't let any guns cross the border. They try to intercept them at any cost before they get into [01:37:00] Mexico. But there is this mistrust between U.
S. and Mexico, between. authorities, um, the institutions. So it was in, in Mexico, there was very bad, um, um, memories of this operation. How could the U. S. government authorize sending guns to organized crime groups in Mexico? And there was no, nobody was really made responsible for that. And those guns are still in Mexico, but there were also other, other instances when the.
DEA agents, uh, Drug Enforcement Administration, they were working on some cases related to organized crime group members that were the Zetas, and they shared the information with their counterparts in Mexico. That information leaked, and this organized crime group executed a lot of people in, in Allende, Coahuila, which is another place I do write about in the book.
So there is both, um, There is this mistrust [01:38:00] both because of what U. S. agents did in the past and both also of how difficult it is to trust personnel in Mexican institutions that have these relations with organized crime. So it is, um, it is very difficult. Uh, at the same time, it is the only way, because gun guns, um, uh, kind of, they.
It's very difficult to solve an international trafficking crime only working in one country. Um, so I don't know, I, as an anthropologist, I don't know whether I can have, I can, uh, offer solutions for how they can, uh, increase cooperation, but that's definitely a, the only way forward.
SECTION C: DOMESTIC GUN POLICY
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You have reached section C domestic gun policy.
Why America's police look like soldiers - Vox - Air Date 6-25-20
MADELINE MARSHALL - HOST, VOX: In the 1980s, police in America looked more like this. The U. S. 's crime rate had been [01:39:00] doing this. And President Reagan called for the military to work more directly with the police for the war on drugs.
PREIDENT RONALD REAGAN: Drugs are menacing our society. We must move to strengthen law enforcement activities.
MADELINE MARSHALL - HOST, VOX: Congress agreed, and over the next few years passed a series of bills to give police access to military bases and equipment, for the National Guard to assist police with drug operations, for the military and police to train together, and eventually to have the military loan police departments their excess leftover equipment for free.
This would become known as the 1033 program. Police departments got assault rifles like M 16s, armored trucks, and even grenade launchers. This And before long, it started to have an effect on how police police. We can see that in the number of times SWAT teams were used. Departments that had deployed them about once a month in the 80s were using them more than 80 times a year by 1995.
Almost all of these appointments were for drug related search warrants, [01:40:00] usually forced entry searches called no knock warrants. The police were becoming militarized, and people noticed. This 1997 article said it made police look like an occupying army.
In February of 1997, two men robbed a bank in North Hollywood, Los Angeles. They had automatic rifles and body armor. The police didn't.
By
the time it ended, a dozen police officers were injured. In the aftermath of the shootout, California police demanded they be equipped with assault rifles, like the AR 15.
But so did police in places from Florida to Connecticut. And that same year, the 1033 program was expanded, dropping the requirement that police departments use the equipment for drug related enforcement. Now any law enforcement, even university police, could access leftover military weapons for any reason.[01:41:00]
A retired police chief in Connecticut told the New York Times, I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted. Because complete records on these loans weren't kept until 2015, we don't know exactly how much equipment was given out in those early years. But we do have data on how much of it police departments still have, from each year it was given out.
And you can see a steady growth in the program for most of the 90s and 2000s. And then something happens around here.
PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA: The rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.
MADELINE MARSHALL - HOST, VOX: In 2011, the U. S. military formally withdrew its troops from Iraq. That meant the military had a lot of equipment, and one less war to use it on.
So it became available to the police. This is a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle, or MRAP. It's among the most controversial equipment given out under the 1033 program. And we know from the data that police departments still have several hundred of them that they got in [01:42:00] 2013 and 2014, but none from 2015.
That's because in August of 2014, the 1033 program became national news.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: We just said hands up, don't shoot! And they just started shooting!
MADELINE MARSHALL - HOST, VOX: A police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, had shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown. Afterwards, the community's protests were met by heavily militarized police, who pointed sniper rifles at them as they marched.
Tear gas in armored tanks became a familiar sight in Ferguson, Missouri. The
PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA: police departments around the country have been getting a lot of this type of equipment.
MADELINE MARSHALL - HOST, VOX: President Obama responded with an executive order curbing the 1033 program.
PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA: We've seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like There's an occupying force as opposed to a force that's part of the community that's protecting them and serving them.
MADELINE MARSHALL - HOST, VOX: Two years later, President Trump's administration reversed it.
JEFF SESSIONS: We will not put superficial concerns about public safety.
MADELINE MARSHALL - HOST, VOX: But by that point, the 1033 [01:43:00] program had become a lot less important anyway. This chart shows that by 2016, most MRAPs loaned out their funds. went to smaller police departments. That means when larger cities today have MRAPs and other military gear, it's often because they've bought it themselves.
And that's because police having military gear and weapons no longer depends on any one government program. It's now a part of how police see themselves.
ARTHUR RIZER: But the thing that I think is really important is with that equipment comes a certain mentality.
MADELINE MARSHALL - HOST, VOX: This is Arthur Reiser. He's a former military police officer, former civilian police officer, and now studies police militarization.
A big part of his research is about that mentality. And he shared a poll he did of police officers with us.
ARTHUR RIZER: I asked officers, you know, do you have any problem with police officers routinely on patrol carrying military grade equipment or dressing in military type of uniforms? And the vast majority of those officers told me, no, I [01:44:00] have no problem with that.
And then the second question I asked is, do you think it changes the way that officers feel about themselves and their role in policing? And the vast majority of officers again said, Yes, and what they said was it makes them more aggressive, more assertive, and it can make them more violent. And then finally, I asked them, How do you think the public perceives you?
And the vast majority said it scares them. They know that it scares the public. They know that it makes them more aggressive or more assertive. And that can be dangerous. But they don't seem to care.
MADELINE MARSHALL - HOST, VOX: There are definitely times when it's been more clearly beneficial for the police to have this equipment. For example, during the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, Orlando police used an armored military vehicle to stop the shooter. But those moments tend to be the exception. Today, this equipment is still mostly used by SWAT teams for executing drug related search warrants.
And more than [01:45:00] half of those are still no knock warrants. The kind that Louisville police were executing when they killed Breonna Taylor. And in the case of the Ferguson protests, the Department of Justice found that the heavily militarized presence served to escalate rather than de escalate the overall situation.
The military and the police are supposed to serve different purposes. A military protects an us from a them. A police officer is supposed to be a part of the us. But when police think of themselves as soldiers, that can change.
ARTHUR RIZER: What is the police officer gonna do with an assault rifle when he's facing a protest?
You know, seriously, when you give someone a hammer, why are you surprised that everything looks like a nail to them?
Why US gun laws get looser after mass shootings - Vox - Air Date 7-28-22
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: In 2020, a study tried to determine the impact of mass shootings on gun policy. They looked at 25 years of high profile mass shootings. Then they looked at gun legislation passed during that time. Over 3, 000 laws [01:46:00] across all 50 states. When they took a closer look at those laws, a pattern emerged that, at first, seemed unsurprising.
State legislatures controlled by Democrats were more likely to pass tighter gun laws. Republican controlled states typically loosened gun laws. But they found a key difference. Mass shootings didn't have any statistically significant effect on the number of laws passed by Democrats. While for Republican legislatures, a mass shooting roughly doubles the number of laws enacted that loosen gun restrictions in the next year.
JAMES BARRAGAN: To arm more teachers, for example, or arm more school staff.
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: That's James Varagan, a politics reporter at the Texas Tribune.
JAMES BARRAGAN: There is more access to guns afterwards. A state like Texas would go more towards pro gun policies in the aftermath of a gun shooting.
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: Texas has some of the loosest gun laws in the nation, and that matters for people all over the country.
JAMES BARRAGAN: People probably don't know about the importance of, [01:47:00] uh, state gun laws and really state laws in general. Our gun laws at the federal level had been frozen in time since basically the 1990s, which allowed the states to have a much bigger role and a much bigger influence in how gun culture played out in their jurisdictions.
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: Let's look at Texas. In 1991, a gunman killed 23 people at a Luby's restaurant in Killian, Texas. A woman there named Susanna Hub lost both her parents in the shooting. She believed she could have stopped the massacre and turned her experience into a crusade for loosening gun laws.
SUZANNE GRATIA: I'm mad at my legislators for legislating me out of the right to protect myself and my family.
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: It worked. In 1994, Texas elected a new governor, George W. Bush, who made it legal to carry a concealed gun his first year in office, and set off a trend in the state that's continued for decades. For example, in 2012, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting drew [01:48:00] attention to gun laws across the country, Texas responded a few months later by creating a program allowing some school employees to carry guns in school.
In 2017, a gunman killed 26 people at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs. Within two years, Texas made it legal to carry weapons in places of worship. But after the Santa Fe High School shooting, Governor Greg Abbott did something unusual. He asked lawmakers to consider a red flag law, which would allow authorities to take firearms away from a person courts deemed dangerous.
JAMES BARRAGAN: Uh, that is not something that Republicans in this state often do.
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: Flo and Scott were also pushing for legislation in response to Santa Fe, like laws that would hold parents accountable if their guns were used by their children to harm people. They also pushed to make it harder to buy ammunition online.
FLO RICE: Our shooter, he just checked a box and said, yes, I'm 18, and they delivered it to his [01:49:00] doorstep. You can't get alcohol delivered without showing proof of ID or something, but he ordered ammunition.
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: Their hope for stricter laws was in line with Texas public opinion. Polling showed only a small minority of Texans supported loosening gun laws, and just over half supported tightening them.
FLO RICE: We thought it was common sense that this would be done.
SCOT RICE: They came to Flo's hospital room the week of the shooting. And we had the governor, lieutenant governor, we had congressmen, we had senators, their wives, there's chief of staff all in her room at one time, at least 20 people and said, we're going to take care of you.
We promise we'll be there for you. We'll fix this.
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: But in the end, these proposals, along with Abbott's openness to red flag laws, went nowhere.
JAMES BARRAGAN: After gun rights supporters went after him, the gun culture is strong. But the gun lobby itself also exerts a lot of pressure on Texas politicians.
FLO RICE: There were bills that were put out there, but they [01:50:00] never made it out of committee.
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: Later in 2019, two shootings in West Texas just weeks apart prompted Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to suggest another tighter gun policy, closing background check loopholes.
JAMES BARRAGAN: That is a very strong comment from a lieutenant governor who is very pro guns, who is very friendly with the NRA. But Republican leaders were saying, we may have problems here.
Democrats are pushing to take over the state house. That For the first time since 2003.
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: After elections were over, with Republicans still in control, in 2021, Texas passed constitutional carry. There would no longer be a requirement for Texans to have a license or receive any training to openly carry handguns.
FLO RICE: For me, it's very scary because if I see someone in public with a gun, I will panic. Um, that's going to send me into an anxiety attack.
JAMES BARRAGAN: That constitutional carry law that, uh, the state legislature passed in 2021 had been rejected by [01:51:00] Republican leaders. But as, uh, the Republican party has gone further and further to the right on issues, you get a fringe of the party that is much more vocal about, uh, all kinds of issues, including gun rights.
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: In recent years, a better organized gun control movement has seen more success with tightening laws in some states. But the movement to expand gun access isn't stopping. In 2002, fewer than half of the 50 states had one party in control of both the state legislature and the governor's office. Today, three quarters of the states do.
That means in the places where Republicans or Democrats have full control, they can push through new gun laws with little chance of a veto.
JAMES BARRAGAN: So what happens, um, and you see it in state house to state house, is one state passes a law that is very successful for one side of the aisle. And then, um, Another state house adopts a very, very similar law.
RANJANI CHAKRABORTY - HOST, VOX: Remember that constitutional carry [01:52:00] law in Texas? Today, 24 states have similar laws on the books for that, too. And more than 400 local governments across 20 states have adopted variations on a Second Amendment sanctuary law, meaning a city, town, or county refuses to recognize any state or federal gun laws.
that they believe violate the Second Amendment.
JAMES BARRAGAN: These things get replicated, they get cloned, they go from state to state, and they essentially make up this patchwork of laws throughout the country.
Closing credits 5-21-24
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 like. 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 Deconstructed, Laura Flanders and Friends, The Inquiry, New Books Network, and VOX. Further details are in the show notes.
Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin [01:53:00] Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting.
And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestofTheLeft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast App. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community. Where you can continue the discussion.
So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC.
My name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left Podcast coming to you twice weekly thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from [01:54:00] BestOfTheLeft.com.
#1629 Hitting Where it Hurts in Our Era of Negative Partisanship: Messaging left-wing politics amid cultish politics (Transcript)
Air Date 5/15/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left Podcast in which we, in a cultish era of in-group out-group politics and media, seek to find messaging for progressive partisans to achieve electoral success.
Sources on our front page today include The Gray Area, the PBS NewsHour, Amanpour and Company, Deep State Radio, and Future Hindsight. Then in the additional sections half of the show, we'll dive deeper into identity, political rhetoric, messaging, and those pesky independents.
Everything's a cult now - The Gray Area with Sean Illing - Air Date 4-27-24
DEREK THOMPSON: I'm not sure that I've ever been able to go deep on it. I'm very interested in, and I've always been very interested in, culture, which I suppose is worth defining. Culture is the way that we think about the world and the way that we influence each other's thoughts about the world. And that can be through entertainment, it can be through religion, it can be through fashion and [00:01:00] clothes. But it's the memes and ideas and ideologies that not only influence our own sense of reality, but other people's sense of reality.
And I've always been interested in how people's sense of reality comes to be. So you can start with the late 19th century when the concept of a national reality was first possible, at least in America. You had technologies like the telephone and the telegraph that allowed newspapers to share information and report on information that truly was national. It allowed information to travel much faster than it had ever traveled before. And so suddenly in the late 19th century, we had the possibility of a national, and even international, somewhat real time shared reality.
And that shared reality might have come to its fullest expression maybe in the middle of the 20th century with the rise of television technology. You had just a handful of channels that were reaching tens of millions of people. And at the same time, you also had the [00:02:00] rise of national newspapers and maybe the apogee of national newspapers in terms of their ability to monopolize local advertising revenue and become just enormous machines for getting tens of millions of Americans to read about a shared reality.
And so you move from the 19th century with sort of the birth of this possibility of a shared reality into the 20th century where you really have the rise of a kind of monoculture, which was never really possible for the vast majority of human history. And what I'm interested in is the possibility that the Internet has forever shattered that reality; that we are, in a way, going back to the pre-20th century, where culture is actually just a bunch of cults stacked on top of each other, a bunch of mini local realities stacked on top of each other. And that we maybe will never have anything like monoculture ever again, because the Internet in a weird way thrusts us back into the 19th century. [00:03:00] And there's all sorts of fascinating things that can unspool from the fact that monoculture and shared reality, as we briefly came to understand it, is dead.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Yeah, I think basically all of that is right. And I'm going to try to resist the temptation to start chewing on too much of it because I don't want to get ahead of ourselves here. I think it would be helpful first to also define another term that we're going to throw in a lot here. And it deserves to be defined clearly so that people know what we're talking about.
And that term is "cult." How do you define a cult?
DEREK THOMPSON: I think of a cult as a nascent movement outside the mainstream that often criticizes the mainstream and organizes itself around the idea that the mainstream is bad or broken in some way.
So I suppose when I think about a cult, I'm not just thinking about a [00:04:00] small movement with a lot of people who believe something fiercely. I'm also interested, especially in the modern idea of cults being oriented against the mainstream. That is, when they form, they form as a criticism of what the people in that cult understand to be the mainstream. And cults, especially when we talk about them in religion, tend to be extreme, tend to be radical, tend to have really high social cost to belonging to them.
You, today, especially in the media and entertainment space, have this really interesting popularity of new influencers or new media makers adapting as their core personality the idea that the mainstream is broken, that news is broken, that mass institutions are broken, that the elite are in [00:05:00] some way broken and elite institutions are broken.
The fragmentation of media that we're seeing, and the rise of this anti-institutional, somewhat paranoid style of understanding reality, I see these things as rising together in a way that I find very interesting.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: That whole message, the "They don't want you to know the real truth," "They, the mainstream, aren't covering the real news or the real stories." What is the seductive power of that? What is the psychological reward of defining yourself against the normies in that way?
DEREK THOMPSON: There's a lot of possible answers here, but I guess I'll start with a favorite philosophical touchstone of yours. Speaking of the 19th century, let's go to Nietzsche.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Yes.
DEREK THOMPSON: I think it's about power. I think that cults, speaking of will to power, give people who feel like they don't have status or don't have power or don't have a clear understanding of or theory of the case of the world, [00:06:00] it gives them all of that. It gives them power. It gives them a kind of weapon of status, and it gives them a theory of how the world works.
If you're frustrated, for example, about COVID policies in 2020, 2021, it's not very empowering to say that nobody really understands what's going on and everyone's just doing their best in the fog of pandemic. That's not a very empowering message. It might be true. It actually is quite close to the truth, I believe, of our often failing elite institutions. But for many people, I think it is more empowering and more attractive to identify a clear nemesis. Maybe it's Fauci. Maybe it's Trump. Maybe it's someone else in the CDC or the FDA. It's much more empowering to say, I know this person is the enemy and everything that goes wrong with [00:07:00] COVID policy, I can blame it on them.
When we think about why is anti-institutional or anti-elite messaging so popular these days, I think it's hard to separate the fact that a lot of people are searching for status, searching for a sense of power and understanding and identity. And here you have the possibility of finding and settling on a message that says, I know who the good guys and the bad guys are. And once you have that clear division of who is good or who is bad, well, that goes so deeply, I think, to what makes cults so powerful. Here is your in group, and here is your in group defined by the out group. And that kind of out-group animosity not only goes aerodynamic on social media for a variety of reasons, I also think it sits very well with us when we're confused about the world and how it works.
Examining how U.S. politics became intertwined with personal identity - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 3-8-23
CLAIRE JERRY: Every president has encountered division of some type, much of it partisan, protests, civil unrest, much of it rooted in those very things Washington was concerned about.
JUDY WOODRUFF - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: [00:08:00] Inside the exhibit on the presidency at the National Museum of American History in Washington, curator Claire Jerry hears echoes of the divisions today in our country's past, starting with our very first president, George Washington.
CLAIRE JERRY: In his farewell address, he said he was really worried about three things for the country. He was worried about regionalism, partisanship and foreign entanglements, and especially the partisanship issue. He was not a believer in parties that would take the lead over ideas. And one of the things he says in the address is that the unity of government made us a people, and we should be justifiably proud and committed to that.
CARROLL DOHERTY: The country is more divided, certainly along partisan lines, than we've seen it.
JUDY WOODRUFF - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: In our first story, we heard from the Pew Research Center's Carol Dougherty and Jocelyn Kiley about how divided the country has become, and how hostile members of both parties now are to the other side.
JOCELYN KILEY: I think one way to think about this is, is that [00:09:00] people have internalized partisan identity maybe in a way that we didn't really see, say, three decades ago.
MICHELLE VITALI: I do think that things have broken down. I have neighbors that we wave to each other, and that's the extent of our relationship now.
JUDY WOODRUFF - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: That's a feeling we've heard from our viewers too. The conversations about current events and politics have become far more divisive and personal.
FABIAN GONZALEZ: Those items that are in the news today--COVID, immigration, politics, abortion, and the list goes on--I'm not free to speak about any of those things because I fear the consequence of a conversation I don't feel like I can have.
KARA ELLIS: It's really hard because these are people I care about. These are people I'm close to that I've grown up with, I've lived in the same house with. The underlying current between all of us is very tense.
SUDHANSHU MISRA: I would like to talk about politics, discuss [00:10:00] politics with my friends. I would like to share ideas, exchange notes with them. But unfortunately we are at a dead end, where there is a wall.
LILLIANA MASON: Decades ago, we disagreed over things like the role of government or the size of government or what we wanted the government to be doing. And with those types of divisions, we can find a compromise.
JUDY WOODRUFF - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: Lilliana Mason is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who draws on social psychology to try to better understand our political divisions.
LILLIANA MASON: What we're seeing today is, is the divide is much more about our feelings about each other. We are angry at one another. Democrats and Republicans don't trust one another. We are more likely to dehumanize people in the other party. We think that they're a threat to the country. And these types of feelings are not the kind of thing we can compromise with.
JUDY WOODRUFF - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: Mason opened her first book, Uncivil Agreement, with the story of Robber's Cave, a famous social science experiment from the [00:11:00] 1950s when researchers brought 5th grade boys to a summer camp outside Oklahoma City. The boys, all white, were separated into two teams: one calling itself the Rattlers, the other the Eagles. They were allowed to bond. And then, after a week, the groups were introduced to each other.
LILLIANA MASON: And they immediately wanted to start competing. So they wanted to have baseball games, all kinds of different kinds of competitions to prove that they were the best. So they started calling each other names. They accused each other of cheating. They tried to sabotage each other. The competition got so intense that ultimately they had to stop the experiment because they were throwing rocks and they were becoming violent.
And that experiment was used to talk about the sort of innate nature of humans to form groups, to become proud of the groups that we're in, to want our groups to be better than the people that are not in our group, and ultimately, to compete against another group if we [00:12:00] feel like they are threatening the status of our team.
JUDY WOODRUFF - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: Jumping ahead from George Washington's warning at our founding about the danger of political teams.
FABIAN GONZALEZ: It is with pride that I face before this convention. For President of the United States, the name of Dwight David Eisenhower.
JUDY WOODRUFF - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: To the 1950s, when our political parties were far more ideological mix than today, with conservative and liberal wings in both camps, and when someone like General Dwight Eisenhower was courted by both parties to run as their standard bearer.
CLAIRE JERRY: Eventually, he chose a party, but yet was still elected with overwhelming support from the American people. And that would have been true, I think, regardless of which direction he had gone.
LILLIANA MASON: In 1950, the American Political Science Association actually put out a report saying we need the parties to be more different, because people don't know which party to vote for because they can't tell the difference between them and so they can't make a responsible decision. [00:13:00] And ultimately, what they suggested was that the two parties should really stand for some very different policy ideas.
LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON: We must not fail. Let us close the springs of racial poison.
JUDY WOODRUFF - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: In the 1960s, the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act by Democrats helped usher in a major realignment of the parties, with many Black Americans becoming Democrats, as many White Americans opposed to integration left that party. Layered on top of that broad reorganization along racial lines, the 1980s witnessed the mobilization of the socially conservative Christian Right, as well as business interests aligned with Republicans.
And eventually came the rise of partisan talk radio, cable TV news, the Internet and social media, exacerbating the divide along partisan lines.
LILLIANA MASON: Ultimately, what ended up happening is that our [00:14:00] society changed in such a way that our parties started becoming different on their own. Not based on the policy preferences, or not only based on policy preferences, but based on what Democrats and Republicans looked like, what kind of religious services they attended, what kind of cultural television shows they watched, where they live. And so they started really becoming different from each other in a social way, not just in a sort of policy way.
Trump’s Speech to Israel-Gaza w. Jason Stanley on the Politics of Language - Amanpour and Company - Air Date 11-16-23
HARI SREENIVASAN - REPORTER, AMANPOUR AND COMPANY: You have a new book out called The Politics of Language, and it is happening and dropping at a time when there is so much language to be discussed. My first example that I want to pull up is former president Donald Trump at a speech on Veterans Day. He said, "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, [00:15:00] that lie and steel and cheat on elections". But, tell me, when you see that, when you heard that, what went through your mind?
JASON STANLEY: Okay, there's a bunch of stuff to unpack in that statement. Let's begin with "vermin" and move to the claim that Joe Biden is a Marxist and a communist, essentially.
So, when you speak, you attune people to certain things. So you attune people to things in the world, in this case, rats, and you attune people to practices, in this case, things you do with rats. But this kind of hate speech, because that's what it is, it attunes its audience to a practice of dealing with vermin.
The concept of genocide is complicated in this case because it's being applied to political opponents and not an ethnic group. But we have to remember that the Soviet Union [00:16:00] intervened in the definition of genocide to make sure it didn't apply to political opponents, or else Stalin would have been accused of genocide. So this is politicide, politicidal speech, and we can't forget that.
So, now the second aspect of this is the overbroad use of Marxist and communist. That one is familiar from the well-known writings of say, Hitler , where Hitler said, essentially, any pro-democratic. person, the Social Democrats, any political opponent was a Marxist. So, this overbroad use of Marxist was used in the 1930s by the Nazi party to incarcerate anyone accused of this charge, which meant Social Democrats, the political opponents of the conservatives. And we have to remember that in the 1930s, until Kristallnacht in [00:17:00] November 1938, the people who occupied the concentration camps were Hitler's political opponents, the pro-democracy forces who he falsely labeled as Marxists. And you know, it's absurd to say that there's any kind of dramatic Marxist or communist movement in the United States today.
HARI SREENIVASAN - REPORTER, AMANPOUR AND COMPANY: What do you mean by "politicidal"?
JASON STANLEY: "Politicidal" is targeting a class of political opponents for extermination. So, for example, in Indonesia in 1965-66, Between 500,000 and 1. 2 million communist party members were murdered by the government. That was a politicide. Stalin committed politicides against many of millions of his political, what he perceived as his political opponents. So, it's targeting political opponents rather than. ethnic or religious groups.
HARI SREENIVASAN - REPORTER, AMANPOUR AND COMPANY: I do want to point out something else that he said later in the same speech. He said, [00:18:00] "The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within". What sort of actions do you think, you know, when you talk about attuning an audience, what does it do to an audience when they hear their leader say things like that?
JASON STANLEY: So, it cleaves the audience into his supporters and the opponents. And the opponents are being said to be so destructive, such an existential threat, that nothing they say can be taken at face value. That you can't trust anything they say, because, you know, in war you can't trust your opponent, if your opponent is telling the truth in war, saying something in war, they're just doing it in order to deceive you. So, the idea here is to create a friend-enemy distinction. And, as we say in our book, the friend enemy distinction has a communicative consequence. [00:19:00] And that communicative consequence is you shut out the voices of your political opponents. So, he is trying to create a wall between Democrats and him and saying to his supporters, Look, this is not about discourse. This is about us versus them. They are an existential threat to the nation. Don't talk to them, incarcerate them.
HARI SREENIVASAN - REPORTER, AMANPOUR AND COMPANY: So in this context, your book, your new book, The Politics of Language, you're really saying that so much of the conflicts that we are seeing around the world today have a pretty significant component, where the language used to describe them, the opponents, and the framing, either—what, is an accelerant? Or entrenches people onto one side? How would you describe it?
JASON STANLEY: Well, as the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine said, you know, "Everything is mixed between world and language". Separating out what language does and what [00:20:00] "world", what factuality is, is very difficult. And there's like a feedback loop, if you will, between the speech and the actions. And it's certainly the talking strengthens the background ideology, you know, you talk about vermin, you link it to say, in this case, a stolen election, and then you do a feedback loop. So, you repeat it, you link it to the background ideology. Germany in 1931, according to Claudia Kuntz, the scholar of Nazism, was the least antisemitic country in Europe. If you expected a genocide, you would have expected it, say, in France, in Western Europe that is. So, but by 1939, it's the most antisemitic country. And that's because of this kind of feedback loop, this kind of repetitive linkages between vermin and the targeted people. And then you have to link it back, as the Nazis did, they linked [00:21:00] this back to the Jews, German Jews, or the world Jewish conspiracy, supposedly betraying the Germans in World War I, which, as Timothy Snyder has pointed out, is like the current situation. They're saying that these hidden Marxist forces betrayed the country by stealing the election and we need revenge.
Hit 'Em Where It Hurts A Conversation About How Dems Can Win in November with Rachel Bitecofer - Deep State Radio - Air Date 2-8-24
DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Well, you know, I say this as a compliment although it may not sound that way at first, but you've become kind of the anti-Michelle Obama because Michelle Obama is like, 'when they go low, we go high'. And you're, you know, I think your message, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, is kind of like, Well, sure, you know, own your accomplishments, but going low actually works in this environment. And by going low, I mean going negative, you know? And you explain that better than I can. So , maybe this is a time to explain.
RACHEL BITECOFER: Yeah. [00:22:00] I mean, not to pick on Michelle Obama, because there's nothing, frankly, I mean there's a lot of things that are special about Michelle Obama, but her thought that, you know, no matter how nasty these people get, we should maintain our integrity and dignity, I would say is very reflective of the average Democrat, especially working in the industry, okay? But what I'm here to say is that when Republicans go low, we have to hit them where it hurts. Okay? And that front half of the book where I described the heuristic of partisanship, how much it matters and all the stuff that Republicans have done, and also that most voters don't pay attention. I mean, 40% of people who could have voted in 2020 didn't even bother to vote when the rest of us felt we were in this moment of existential crisis.
So, getting people to understand, like, people don't know anything, right? So, we have to be the ones to tell them that if the Republicans are running campaigns that are... the way Republicans do persuasion is very distinct and I lay this out in the book. In 2004, they dabble in it. By 2010, they institutionalize it. They don't [00:23:00] do median voter theorem persuasion: Oh, David, you're here and here and here on policy. I am too. Vote for me. And I have a great qualification background. You can trust me.
Republicans don't do that anymore at all. What they do in persuasion messaging is tell people the Democrats are crazy socialist and they're going to turn your boys into girls, right? Like, it's very much not selling them. It's pushing that swing bucket away from voting for us. And so that's the transition that we have to learn how to make. So, it's not just about negativity because Democrats have always run negative ads. They just never run any effective negative ads. They're always about corruption and shit that people... all voters think everybody's corrupt, number one. And also they don't see the personal effect of corruption on them. So, with the Republicans, it's not just that we're getting rid of this base message versus the persuasion message, and these two separate universes like the Republicans do, and putting in one message that both motivates the base, [00:24:00] your independents that lean with you, and pushes those swing voters away from voting Republicans. We're doing that in a way that is tying a threat to the voter, not to some other out group that they may or may not care about, because humans are wired for in-group tribalism. So, we got to hit people and tell them, you know, women, especially women in like states like California, the Republican party is going to pass a national abortion ban and leave you nowhere to run, right? Like it isn't, Hey woman in a safe blue state in a safe blue place, you should go and show up and vote because your sister in Alabama is threatened. Okay? Like, that's what the liberal, probably, the impulse would be to message on this because we care about others. And we think everyone cares about others. No one cares about others except for super duper liberals. Almost everybody is more introspective. And that's why it's not just about making the strategic pivot. It's about the type of messaging you're pushing out, making it personalized, hyperbolic, [00:25:00] not 'Republicans plan to slash social security' or 'cut social security': 'Republicans are coming to steal your retirement'.
DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Right. And that becomes strong. And also, you know, you talk about going negative as you can specifically on different candidates. You know, it strikes me though, in reading it and listening to you talk, that we've essentially entered a period, and it began with Ronald Reagan, I think, and what I consider the first 'big lie', which is government is your enemy, right? And, you know, they found that that kind of worked for reasons you've just alluded to. And we've gotten to the point, we've seen it this week as kind of the apotheosis of this, where they're actually against getting anything done. They're all about having something to run against. They're all about, you know, how are they going to be negative on the Democrats? [00:26:00] And these other issues, you know, Democrats are like, 'But we'll do your border deal. You know?
RACHEL BITECOFER: We'll give it away, too, right? I mean, who would ever thought Democrats would ever say, we'll give you massive border security investment with no amnesty for anyone?
DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Yeah, right. And yet, because we now have a country full of people who are pro-government and anti-government and politicians who are, you know, political leaders in the traditional sense, and then a whole party of what I would call anti-politicians. You know, it's like matter and antimatter. They're out to destroy the institutions, destroy the value base underlying the institutions, attack anything. They're sort of an immune system that's gone mad, to go to a different kind of [00:27:00] metaphor, where it just will attack anything that works in the body politic.
And, so, the impulse... you know, I go to meetings with fancy Democrats in Washington and in the administration and stuff and they're like, Well, here's our agenda, and we have an agenda and they don't have an agenda. And back in the Hillary Clinton days, it was like, Well, here's a white paper and it's got 91 points in favor and they don't have that long white paper. And, to me, the sort of essential message of your book is you've got all the Democrats. The issue is how are you going to pick up any votes? And if you're going to pick up a vote, the way you've got to do it is bump them off of their candidate, move them away from it.
RACHEL BITECOFER: Not the candidate, the party, right? But yes, the candidate is not... so like in the [00:28:00] Democratic campaigns, the candidate is alone, almost, centralized, the focal. In Republican campaigns the candidate is part of a team. That team is the Republican team. That team is good. And the opposition, no matter who they are, they could be Joe Biden, and they're going to say they, he wants to defund the police. He's a socialist and his guilt by association is that he's also a Democrat.
Employ Negative Partisanship w. Rachel Bitecofer - Future Hindsight - Air Date 3-21-24
MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: Well, I have to say, I found your book so refreshing. You don't mince words about having to go on offense to elect pro-democracy candidates. Like you just said, we just need to make sure that everybody understands what the overarching message should be for Democrats. So let's talk about the fighting words that lead to winning political power. And you just talked about how dangerous Republicans are. And we know that we need to make freedom the Democratic brand. What would be the overarching message you want all Democrats running for office to communicate this year?
RACHEL BITECOFER: You know, with the Democratic Party, you're talking about very different party than the Republican Party. And we've [00:29:00] allowed those differences to kind of hamper our strategic changes, right? We're like, Oh, we can't do this because we're not all White people. We're not all conservatives. And I'm like, no, no, no, listen, it doesn't matter if your issue is climate change, gay rights, women's rights, whatever it might be in that Democratic coalition. It comes under the same threat from the Republican Party. So, that the threat to freedom, the threat to your 'health, wealth, freedom and security', is what I call it, it can tie into all these different constituencies within the Democratic Party and unite them under one broad theme. And so, getting people to do that is so important because when you think about Republicans, they pick something, it could be immigration, it could be crime in 2022, it was all crime. In 2021 in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, who was the Republican candidate there, ended up kind of upsetting the Democratic front runner for the governorship. And what they did was they painted the entire election theme around some issue I [00:30:00] had never even heard of, called CRT. Okay? They take something that even me had never heard of in January of 2021 and made it the defining issue voters were telling pollsters about in the fall of 2021. And the way they did that is that they focused all of their messaging around this one thing, even though individually, the candidates probably have many different things that they're focused on. And certainly Glenn Youngkin is a business-type conservative. He would be focused on economics normally. But instead, he ran on wedging this idea that we're indoctrinating White children to feel guilty in schools. And they all amplified that message through their media, through all three of the statewide races, even though, you know, most of those things had nothing to do with CRT in school. So, getting Democrats to understand, if the electorate doesn't know anything, and our goal is to make sure they know at least one thing—your freedom's under threat—then it becomes about repetition and centralization. [00:31:00] And you need everybody pounding that same refrain over and over and over and really harping on the issue.
MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: Well, you just mentioned about the coordinated messaging from the Republican Party up and down the entire infrastructure and how, if your a Democrat, it feels like nobody got the memo.
RACHEL BITECOFER: No doubt. And think about, like I said, you know, CRT in schools is not an issue that any of those candidates cared about, I bet you. You know, like maybe some of the deep red districts, like the true cult believers did. But most of the swing race Republicans in Virginia that cycle, if you were to ask them as candidates, what is your issue?, I am certain no one wrote CRT down. Okay? But they all understood the power of this thing that, you know, they understand ambiguity is actually an asset. With us it's like, Oh, you know, we can't call them fascist because no one knows what that is. And I'm like, no one knows what a socialist is either but after 10 [00:32:00] years of calling us that they know one thing about socialism: Democrats, it's connected to Democrats, right? So, you know, I think it's really important for us to get over this hump. It's certainly something I'm highly focused on for 2024, making sure that the Biden team's running a good message frame. They're going to be running under this banner of 'threat to democracy'. They're going to be making that threat personal and concrete, not, you know, abstract and top level, but about individual freedoms and rights that people stand to lose under this new MAGA regime that wants to come in. But the swing races for the House and the Senate also need to be pounding that they need to be really hitting the voters hard about freedom on abortion issue. That is the most salient issue. The voters are not shy about that. They're pretty clear about the power, I mean, thinking about disenfranchising half of the population, stealing a constitutional, right? I'm here to tell the male analyst and others, You don't get over it. It doesn't go away. It doesn't, you know, recede in the background. In [00:33:00] fact, as we've been subjected to headlines, coming from places like Texas ,of medical torture of women, it's going to get stronger. And that's why I push very hard for people to understand the electoral power of focusing on Dobbs and Republican big government intrusion into your private life. It's the way that you win power. If your issues, climate change or whatever else, you have the power to do the policy. But right now we like to kind of mix those two things up. You know, we're running on our favorite policy things, whether or not those are the most effective things to optimize winning.
Everything's a cult now Part 2 - The Gray Area with Sean Illing - Air Date 4-27-24
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I don't want to overstate this, but is American politics just a bunch of cults now?
DEREK THOMPSON: American politics is definitely more powered by negation than it used to be. I think for a lot of voters, the power of negative partisanship has made it easier for people to explain what it is they're against than to explain what it is that they're for.
It's fascinating to me [00:34:00] that among, say, Republicans and among Trump voters, it didn't seem to me like a lot of people that were Trump supporters had a clear theory of how, for example, he would reduce inflation. They were clearly upset about inflation, and they clearly thought that Biden was to blame for it, but when you scrutinize Trump's policies, when you look at the fact that he wants to extend tax cuts, which is somewhat inflationary, and he didn't want to cut spending in lots of places, which is inflationary, and he wanted to impose a 10 percent tariffs on imports, which is inflationary, you add it all up, and it actually seems like Trump's economic policy is more inflationary than Biden's, but this never seems to make contact with the discourse about Trump.
And part of that, I think, is the fact that politics today is more about what we oppose than what we stand for. Is there something culty about that? I think maybe. And I think it's possible that as more people get their news from sources that are [00:35:00] small pirate-like organizations that are trying to oppose the mainstream rather than define an alternative clearly, that I do think there's a cult-like mentality to that.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I like this because I'm grasping for a better word than "polarized" to capture what's happened, because it's not like we're sorted into coherent ideological groups. It isn't really about ideas or arguments or policies very often. It is more that people inside these tribes or groups cannot even imagine what people outside their group are thinking or even how they're living, because we don't talk to each other, we live in different places, and a lot of our political and social lives are lived virtually.
DEREK THOMPSON: I definitely think it's the case that identity seems more important to politics than it used to be. I remember in my [00:36:00] conversation with various sociologists and economists and anthropologists when I was doing my cult research, is that at one point I was asking them, what would it mean to you for everything to become a little bit more cultish? And one of them made the really interesting observation that we've gotten so damn good at making products with good physical attributes, at making good enough stuff, that the commercial war of the future won't be about value or quality, it'll be about identity. Are you the kind of person who buys this product, rather than, is this a product that does more for you?
When you transpose that to politics, it is at least a little illuminating, that idea that the commercial war of the future will be more about identity--who are you--than value. What can this do for you? Because that would seem to describe [00:37:00] or predict an election in the near future that is less about policy and more about, let's just say it, vibes.
And that is, in a way, the election that we're headed into. It's kind of astonishing to me how little we're hearing about policy, how little we're hearing about any kind of policy debate, how little even this election seems to be about policy at all. Like when I think about the last 20 years, I feel like there's a policy theme to almost every single election. This election clearly has an identity theme, but I'm not sure it has a policy value theme.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I don't think I'll ever be able to say politics is fully post materialist, but I have been on the vibes bandwagon for a while now. And, I co-wrote a book about the history of media and democracy a couple of years ago. And the main thing we track in that book is this pattern that recurs throughout [00:38:00] time, whenever there's a revolution in communication technology, it is hugely disruptive to society in lots of unpredictable ways. I mean, you were talking about the phone and the telegraph earlier, but the thing about newer technologies like radio and TV, for instance, is that they really helped create something like a mass culture. The public was more or less watching the same movie we call reality. And for all the downsides of that, and there were many, it did have the benefit of grounding society in a shared reality. Do you think of that loss as a genuine cultural and political crisis? Or is it possible that it's just another period of technological change, not that different from earlier periods, and we'll figure it out?
DEREK THOMPSON: I do think that in so many ways, we're just going back to the middle of the 19th century. We're going back to the historical norm, rather than being flung into the exosphere, [00:39:00] into some unprecedented state of popular discombobulation. The idea that a shared reality, a shared national reality, in real time is even possible is so historically young.
Just one quick aside: I was doing some reporting for the book that I'm writing right now and saw in an Eric Hobsbawm book called The Age of Revolutions that when the Bastille fell in 1789, a canton 30 minutes away from Paris didn't realize the French Revolution had happened for a full month. That was the speed at which information used to travel. It was the speed at which a man could ride a horse or walk next to his horse. You need a whiz-bang technology that can somehow transmit at something like the speed of light, certainly one would hope the speed of sound, information across vast distances. You only had that with the invention of the telegram and the telephone and then later radio.
[00:40:00] So I think if you want to know where we're going, look where we came from. In the 19th century, of course, we had lots of chaos, but we also had an American democracy for decades and decades. So it's not obvious to me that the erosion of the monoculture or the erosion of the news mainstream is anathema to American democracy. But I do think that it probably shatters the very brief dream of everyone getting together and sitting down on a couch and watching the same Walter Cronkite Hour. I mean, that is never coming back. And whatever benefits and drawbacks of that world--and there are drawbacks of having the news be controlled by a handful of, in all likelihood, white men who probably lived on the coast and therefore had a very pinched view of what was important in the world--there are drawbacks of that world. But we're never getting it back. There's no putting the software [00:41:00] genie back in its box.
Hit 'Em Where It Hurts A Conversation About How Dems Can Win in November with Rachel Bitecofer Part 2 - Deep State Radio - Air Date 2-8-24
DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: You actually said it In two different ways here and slightly contradictory, although I don't think it is and that is, you talk about democracy, you talk about dictatorship, and those sound like kind of big highfalutin ideas. Now, the fact that Trump wants to be a dictator should never be normalized. And Biden and Harris and everybody else should be running against that. But what I've seen, and I'm a part of the group that actually thinks Kamala Harris is extremely effective, and what I've seen in her on the road.
When she is effective is she's going in and saying, "you're a woman. They're taking away a fundamental right of yours." And when you go into another group and you say, "you want to marry who you choose, they're not going to let you marry who you choose". We can break it down, and should break it down, into the rights that are going to [00:42:00] go away. In the middle of this election year, quite apart from all the trials and everything else... And I'm very grateful for your existence on Twitter because you're one of those people who I find shares my breakdowns. You and I both simultaneously had a, "Clarence Thomas is kicking off this hearing today," moment, which is kind of like, what the fuck?
But it seems to me the more specific you can make the fear with the audience, the more you can say, because that's what happened a lot of women. They were like, well, what could go wrong? And then all of a sudden, they no longer controlled their rights. And so a bunch of suburban women and a bunch of people who supported Trump in 2016 said no more. And every single one of the polling events that's taken place since then, the Democrats have outperformed by 5, 6, or 7% because those people said, "Oh, my God. Now I see." Isn't that poor?
RACHEL BITECOFER: That's exactly it. I [00:43:00] don't know, maybe I'm not a very literal person now that I've raised an autistic child. I understand how some people are very literal about language, okay. So when the Biden campaign says they're going to run on a democracy theme, that doesn't mean they're going to talk about democracy in an abstract concept. It definitely means, as you're seeing with the stump stuff from Kamala Harris, it's about taking that to be concrete, and I acknowledge in the book, the strategic shift with the party starts in time for 2022 and help blunt that red wave.
But I say in the book, we could have done these things though, without the issue of Dobbs repeal to make what it means to lose freedom, the threat of freedom from the Republican party, from an abstract concept or threat to an actual tangible concrete, like a DAC, it was the, literally the manna from heaven. If they wanted to seize power and put in an autocracy, the worst thing that could have happened to them was Dobbs, because it has allowed us to define what it [00:44:00] means to lose freedom.
And so we talk about Roe if you saw my Twitter, you probably know all through '22 since Roe repeal, I'd be like, you must wedge Roe, Roe, Roe, Roe, Roe, and not to find it about choice and reproductive freedom and women's healthcare, okay. Whoopty shit, no. Describe it as freedom. These big government Republicans, cause Republicans primed the pump for us for 50 years, turning people against the government. We might as well use that brand against them and make people afraid of a Republican in your bedroom, making decisions on whether you're going to live or die. And it has to be that kind of messaging, not stuff about women in red states, not stuff about poor women, because yes, they're going to suffer the most guys, but where we should represent,people who are most vulnerable and most marginalized in the society, like trans people, is not in our messaging to win [00:45:00] elections okay. That is that's cross purpose. We should be designing messaging that does the job of moving voters to the polls for us and making sure they don't vote for Republicans, and if that's best done, it's focused, very laser like on Dobbs repeal and and los of freedom, to describe threat to democracy and make that tangible, then that is how you do it.
To me, when you look in a layout in the midterms, the places that ran this new strategy, Michigan, Arizona, how great those candidates did, and then I lay out the old school strategy, it's nothing new about it was ran in 2010 by Democrats, 2014, 2018, 2016, whatever. It is the sell the candidate, "I'm not one of those Democrats. I'm bipartisan. I'm moderate. Look at my biography," And they all got hammered. And not only did they lose David, they all lost to MAGA extremist, to JD dance, who's like an out and out fascist. So [00:46:00] those voters obviously never got the message that they're facing an extremism threat from the Republican party. They are not going to know that when many people, all they know about Republicans right now, they know Trump, but they think Republican, they think good for the economy, good on national defense. That's all they know. They don't know who any political politicians are.
DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Quite apart from the fact that both of those things are not only demonstrably wrong...
RACHEL BITECOFER: Definitely demonstrably wrong.
DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Profoundly wrong.
RACHEL BITECOFER: You can see this in polling data. Just last week, I was watching them report on like, look at this advantage Trump has on the economy. Well, that's issue ownership, okay. And so if we want people to know that the Republican party is an extremist cult, because we know it and we see it, we're going to have to bring in those people who are not looking at any of this and make sure they know it. And everywhere they ran on that, defining the Republican as an extremist, as a threat to people's freedom, we cleaned it up. And if we can [00:47:00] put that into the swing map, from the state legislative races on up to the House, to the Senate, to the governor, to the presidency in 2024, we might just be able to save ourselves.
Employ Negative Partisanship w. Rachel Bitecofer Part 2 - Future Hindsight - Air Date 3-21-24
MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: I always ask this question towards the end of our conversation, what are two things an everyday do to have better tools in their civic action toolkit? And in this case, I'm curious what an everyday person can do to turn the tide on the fundamental lack of interest in politics and democracy and to help establish a healthy civic culture. And I know it's a little bit out of left field because we just talked about messaging, but I kind of feel like if we had more people interested, we would have a different kind of politics.
RACHEL BITECOFER: Oh, we certainly would. So I talk about it in terms of climate change and wildfire. Right now we have a wildfire. It is threatening to burn us all down in November. We have to put this wildfire out, and the only way to do so is to beat it electorally, and beat it big. But, at the end of the [00:48:00] day, we still have climate change. So, at that point, it comes into what you're asking me about, how do we fix this and what can individual people do?
So in terms of putting out the wildfire, every single person who hears my voice is an influencer. It doesn't matter if you have 165,000 followers on Twitter or 100, you're still influencing people. And you're also influencing your personal network. And you know people like this. I have friends that vote, but they don't really follow anything. We have to make them look. We have to make Americans eat their civic vegetables. They're not going to watch news, so then our job is then to inform our friends, the people on our timelines, using those communication tools intentionally to make sure people hear about the threat to democracy.
It can be very hard to talk about. So I'm so proud that Biden's willing to talk about fascism that some of our country's most notable historians have been very, very vocal about the similarities between the modern Republican Party and a [00:49:00] fascist movement. And I think it's important that people get over their fear of looking silly and start to explain to people what's happening within the Republican Party and what their plans are for America starting in 2025. They aren't shy about it. They wrote a whole manual from the Heritage Foundation for a transition into autocracy. It's called Project 2025, The Manual for Leadership. They're hiring young conservatives into a data bank that they plan to On replacing all of our career merit based civil service employees with they want to purge out the civil service. And once they do that stuff, they'll be able to consolidate power.
So it really is time to panic. If we panic now, we might be able to prevent democratic progress. catastrophe. If we wait until the democratic catastrophe is obvious to everyone, the lesson I learned from three years of studying the rise of the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes is that it's too late.
You have to panic in advance. Very hard for humans to do, so it really takes [00:50:00] everybody influencing their own sphere of influence. People are much more likely to trust people they know or are related to, so please use your own personal networks and make sure every voter that you can shows up to vote on election day and votes a full D for democracy ticket.
MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: Yeah. Here, here. Good advice. You're so passionate. I love it.
So looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
RACHEL BITECOFER: Whoo. Election results keep making me hopeful. I say in the book, I'm just part of a bunch of people who are pushing the messaging strategic machine forward. But we could have done all that work and, without the Dobbs repeal, I don't know that it would have still had the same effect in thwarting the red wave. So what makes me hopeful is this, we didn't run perfect strategy in 2022 everywhere, and we still did okay. What gives me hope is that we're going to have good strategy across the board in 2024. We're going to repudiate [00:51:00] fascism at the ballot box. We're going to force the Republican party to finally splinter, fall apart.
It needs to do something because it used to be like our party, 70 percent establishment, 30 percent progressive base type person. And in the Republican party that has flipped in 10 years. It is now majority base controlled, and that is why, even with Mike Johnson, he can go one day killing border security for them and giving Ukraine to Putin, but the next day, if he doesn't tow the line on a Mayorkas impeachment vote or whatever, MAGA is right after him, threatening to vacate him.
You don't want to be in a position where you have radicals in charge of your party. And unfortunately, the Republican Party has put us all in that position. So what gives me hope is that we'll win in 2024. We have to win the presidency or I think the changes that are going to come are gonna be fast and furious to our how we operate in the U.S.
Parchment only helps us if people are [00:52:00] willing to abide by it, and unfortunately, all it takes is the willingness to say I'm suspending the Constitution and a party willing to stand by and let him do it. And I think the Republican Party has demonstrated, especially with the reaction to Jan 6, that they are just the kind of party that would be willing to stand by and let somebody do that.
So it gives me hope that we're going to win in 2024 and that that will give us some momentum to start fixing our civic culture. Our civic culture has to be fixed. We cannot go on with a population that is too dumb for democracy.
Summary 5-14-24
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with The Gray Area, discussing the nature and cultural impact of cults. The PBS NewsHour laid out the history of how we came to our polarized political era. Amanpour and Company featured Jason Stanley explaining Trump's politicidal rhetoric. Deep State Radio looked into the messaging differences between Republicans and [00:53:00] Democrats. Future Hindsight highlighted the pitch for the left unifying under a message of freedom. The Gray Area discussed our politics through the lens of cults. Deep State Radio looked at the messaging of freedom through the loss of abortion rights. And Future Hindsight finished off with a call to action to amplify the influence of this messaging. And that's just the front page.
There's a lot more to dive into in the additional sections half of this audio newspaper, but first, a reminder that the show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process. To support our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support, there's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page if you prefer, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. And if a regular membership isn't in the cards for you, [00:54:00] 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.
And now we'll hear from you.
Thoughts on future elections - Craig from Ohio
VOICEMAILER CRAIG FROM OHIO: Hey, Jay! and Best of the Left, this is Craig from Ohio, and I just listened to the episode about inequality and taxation. And at the end, the subject that has been on my mind a great deal lately, as it has Nick's and yours, of the election in November for President. I thought of three additional things to add that, like I said, have been on my mind.
One is that, if Biden is reelected, it will effectively end this generation of leaders. I mean, of course, they've been on the stage for way too long, but Biden will be done. Trump will be done, gone forever from our having to worry about him or think about him ever again. But also, The generation of liberals that Joe Biden has worked with [00:55:00] represents, they're just going to be moving along.
So that leaves us with room for a much better candidate, possibly in 2028, which is in danger if Trump and the Republicans are returned to power. We may not have an option for a robust primary that a Democrat can win in 2028, and one candidate that I am certainly intrigued at the possibility of having as president would be Shawn Fain. I think it would be fantastic to have a labor leader in the highest seat of power. So that would remain a possibility if Trump is defeated.
And then lastly, the people that are, of course, I understand, furious about the genocide in Israel. If voting against Biden to punish him and the Democrats would at the same time be rewarding the far right wing in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu and the rest of the right wingers would love to have an authoritarian [00:56:00] autocrat in the United States to back up all of their desires to completely remove Palestinians from that territory.
So that was it. Wanted to add those three things. Thanks for everything. Still love the show, as always. Bye bye.
Note from the Editor on the importance of finding common-but-adaptable messaging for the Left
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now, before we continue onto the sections half of the show, I have just a few thoughts. Thanks to Craig who dialed (202) 999-3991 to leave that message. It's not often you get to hear someone taking the time to look far enough into the future to see hope on the political horizon regarding the inevitable turn of the generational wheel in party leadership. As for the rest of the conversation today, discussions around political messaging always remind me of something that I heard shockingly long ago now, but that has always stuck with me.
If I'm still remembering correctly, which is highly questionable, a Clinton advisor turned media pundant Paul Begala was making a similar argument about the need for Democrats to get on the same page, [00:57:00] read from the same set of talking points, even he said, if they were ever going to get through to voters in a strong and consistent way. But then, the host of the show that he was commenting on, asked Begala if he himself would be willing to follow talking points provided to him by the party and he said, no. He felt that it would be too important for him to be able to say exactly what it was that he thinks rather than to follow the party line, which is not surprising.
Democrats have always been that way, which is why they've never been particularly good at following talking points, and their messaging is never super consistent. It's something that I list as a positive attribute that makes me like the left more, but it's definitely a negative attribute in terms of presenting a clear argument to voters of what the more left of the two parties actually stands for.
So considering the daily talking points probably won't ever work for the Democrats. I really like the idea of developing communication [00:58:00] strategies that individual politicians and pundits would actually want to voluntarily adopt and tweak to make their own. That's why having an umbrella theme like "Republicans take away freedom" is a good starting point. From which everyone can adapt their own messaging for the issue that they are focusing on.
There's more on all of this coming up. In the show notes, you'll find timestamps for easy navigation to each topic section. In addition to the timestamped members also enjoy the use of full chapter marker support. For non-members, due to the nature of podcast ads, and this is completely outside my control. Timestamps are more approximate than they are exact. If it's ever possible to make it work better, I certainly will. And now we'll continue with the rest of the show.
Next up, Section A - Identity in Media and Politics. Section B - Political Rhetoric and Action. Section C - The Power of Messaging. And Section D - Independents and Low-Information Voters.
SECTION A: IDENTITYEverything's a cult now Part 3 - The Gray Area with Sean Illing - Air Date 4-27-24
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: The sort [00:59:00] of super abundance of these cults or micro cults or whatever you want to call them online really is fascinating to me. You know, I'm not on TikTok. I use YouTube, but you know, it's mostly for videos that show me how to remove the muffler from my motorcycle or change a diaper with one hand or something like that, you know, but it does seem genuinely new to have these super powerful affinity groups in YouTube and TikTok organized around people almost no one outside of those groups have ever even heard of.
I still don't know what the hell Mr. Beast is, but he appears to have like 10 trillion followers and probably half a billion dollars at this point. That is a new thing.
DEREK THOMPSON: I do think it's a new thing. And I also agree that this kind of fragmentation of culture has no rewind button on it. It is only going to go forward.
I suppose it's like time itself. I would ask you a question, though, Sean. What do you think is the difference between a [01:00:00] cult and a fandom? Interesting question. Because as you think about it, I think some of these things that we're talking about. a person who loves Taylor Swift and buys Taylor Swift water mugs and Taylor Swift t shirts and Taylor Swift sweatpants.
These people are not members of a Taylor Swift cult. They're not going to sacrifice themselves for Taylor Swift, at least the vast majority of them, I suppose, are not. They really, really like her, the same way that people really, really like the Beatles. The same way that, actually, in the 19th century, Lisztomania, not just a great song by Phoenix, I believe it was also a crazy fandom about The piano player and composer Liszt.
People were just obsessed with how wonderful he was on the keys and so Lisztamania became a thing in Europe. Dramatic fandoms, I think, are actually Rather old, and they [01:01:00] are old and distinct from what I would think of as cults. When I think about a cult, I think what's very important about the definition of cult that I have in my head is that cults aren't just for something.
They are against something. They are small, anti mainstream groups that are for something. a raid around a set of rules that organize themselves to oppose the mainstream. So the reason I think that it makes more sense to think about Tucker Carlson's fandom as being inculted rather than Taylor Swift's is that Taylor Swift is not asking her music listeners to not listen to Olivia Rodrigo.
She's just like, here I am. I'm at a concert, pay a thousand dollars to see it. Whereas Tucker Carlson is very dramatically And very explicitly trying to make his followers distrust the mainstream media. And that I [01:02:00] find interesting and more cult like than I find a phenomenon like Taylor Swift.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Yeah, that's interesting.
So in some ways you make that shift from fandom to cult member when Your identity or membership in that group is defined by a negation when you're defined by what you are not by what you stand against.
DEREK THOMPSON: That's right. And the last that I would add is that I think in terms of the classic definition of cult is that when you think about cults in terrorism or in the military or the mafia or crime gangs or in religion, there tends to be what I suppose an economist would call costly.
The signaling. That is, it costs something to be in that group. And I don't think it costs a whole lot to be a Taylor Swift fan, just as it didn't cost a whole lot to be a Beatles fan. But I do think it is costly, for example, to refuse to take a vaccine and harbor and espouse a conspiracy theory about it, [01:03:00] especially when people around you think that you're crazy.
Right? That seems to be more costly, in terms of costly signaling, than just being a fan of a popular artist.
Examining how U.S. politics became intertwined with personal identity Part 2 - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 3-8-23
JUDY WOODRUFF - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: Lilliana Mason argues that this stacking of identities on top of one another into what she calls a mega identity has reinforced our basic human instinct for inclusion and exclusion, and that that helps explain the tribal politics we see today.
MICHELLE VITALI: I was a practicing Catholic for most of the years that I lived here, and I just didn't Needed to bow out completely, um, because I don't understand where, um, this sort of militancy is coming from. And in fact, um, it seems to have been created out of whole cloth in order to get people to show up at the polls, show up at events, show up at March for Life in Washington or whatever the cause may be.
EDWARD JACACK: Everything from dating sites, right? I, uh, have been single through, uh, a lot of this Trump era and the first line in the dating sites, no Trump or no Trump or no Trump. I get it. But [01:04:00] probably you and I, and by the way, I'm not a Trumper, but you and I could probably agree upon 70 percent of how society works and the things we go ahead and want.
FABIAN GONZALEZ: Whereas before we are Americans, we're going to make us win. And now it's going like, no, it's about this little faction of. Political idealism, and my side is right and your side is wrong, and there ain't no Miller.
LILLIANA MASON: Not that we've never had partisan animosity. The difference is that now, because of our sort of progress in terms of civil rights, not just for black Americans, but for all Americans who have previously been marginalized, including women, is that we have associated the two parties with different sides of that story.
Essentially the left is now taking the position of we want a fully egalitarian, pluralistic, multi ethnic democracy. We've never fully had it, but we want to make it happen. And what Trump has been saying, right, make America great again, is the definition of going back in [01:05:00] time. And so there is this conflict between do we want to move forward or do we want to move backward?
That means that every time we have an election, And an election is basically a status competition, right? There's a winner and a loser. Rather than it's just being our party that wins or loses, now it feels like our racial group and our religious group and our cultural group is also winning or losing. So that makes the stakes feel a lot higher to us on a psychological level.
We don't have a place to go together, right? That's much more of a tug of war rather than a negotiation.
JUDY WOODRUFF - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: Back in a storage room inside the museum, among collections of presidential fine china, History that is not yet fully written or understood.
CLAIRE JERRY: We're always looking for what sort of says the moment, um, and these two slogans certainly say the moment of January 6th.
JUDY WOODRUFF - REPORTER, PBS NEWSHOUR: Signs collected after the insurrection of January 6th. When supporters of President Trump attempted to stop the transfer of Power, Mason's [01:06:00] most recent book predicts that our divides today over our identities and competing visions for the country's future will likely lead to more political violence, but that it's all ultimately up to our leaders.
LILLIANA MASON: People listen to leaders. We've run some experiments where we've had people read messages from Joe Biden and Donald Trump, for example. A message that tells them violence is never okay. We should never engage in violence. When people read that message, they become less approving of violence. Our leaders are able to guide their followers toward violence or away from violence.
Whether or not they encourage their supporters to engage in violence is actually up to them. And our future is going to depend on that outcome.
SECTION B: POLITICAL RHETORIC IN ACTION
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B political rhetoric inaction.
'Hit 'Em Where It Hurts' urges Dems to go on the attack against Republicans - MSNBC - Air Date 2-7-24
JOHNATHAN LEMIRE - CONTRIBUTOR, MSNBC: We can take down the list here. Some of them we played the ads, whether it was Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Senator Fetterman there, Governor Whitmer, Senator Kelly. These are examples of 2022 of Democrats who effectively used these sort of negative partisanship.
And part of that though, and this would be applicable to this [01:07:00] presidential campaign as well, because you write That is really hard to sell legislation to voters to convince them, Hey, we did good things were helping your lives. And that's something that this president has had a problem with. His legislative record is, is by any measure robust, yet he seems to be getting no credit for it.
And his approval ratings are low.
RACHEL BITECOFER: Exactly. So, you know, I mean, there's a. It's a strong movement in the party to do more credit claiming and I get that and I think it's important. But at the end of the day, it's about the contrast, right? So it's not just that he gave seniors 35 insulin. It's that every single mega extremist Republican that branding phrase, even though it's a mouthful, I say it every time extremist Republican or mega extremist or whatever it is with the candidates name so that I can brand them.
That's why it's so important to do that. You have to make sure that you're, you know, reiterating it over and over and repeating it.
WILLIE GEIST - HOST, MORNING JOE: Claire and Republicans certainly giving Democrats a lot to work with of negative partisanship with candidates like Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz and Carrie Lake and Blake Masters and Mark Fincham and the list goes on and on and on.[01:08:00]
CLAIRE MCCASKILL: Yeah. So, um, speaking of those candidates, I think we are ignoring at our peril to important Senate races this year because everybody needs to understand something. We do not control the Senate unless we win either Florida or Texas. It doesn't happen. So let's talk about going after Rick Scott and Ted Cruz.
You talk about a field that is full of flowers to pick in terms of contrast. What about that, Rachel? What, how, how aggressively can we go after these two guys in order to hold on to the Senate, which is so important to this country?
RACHEL BITECOFER: Oh, Claire. I'm so glad you're highlighting that because it's the truth.
Either Texas or Florida will have to place replace our West Virginia and potentially this three way race in Arizona. So it's a must win situation. And when you think about someone like Rick Scott, I mean, this is a man that has proposed eliminating social security and medicare, a 5000 tax 5, 000 yearly tax on middle class families.
And [01:09:00] he's got the charisma of like a piece of dead wood, right? So we should be able to go against him. My, my, my fear is that if I was running the Florida Senate strategy, instead of trying to focus, I mean, you have to do the bio ads and all of that, but most of the money is going to be spent defining Rick Scott as an extremist who's going to steal your freedom.
or your retirement. And, you know, if you run a campaign against Rick Scott, it's a far easier likelihood to pick that seat up than if we're trying to do the old strategy of biography and and bipartisanship messaging.
'Our message resonated with voters' Democrat wins Alabama special election- Morning Joe - Air Date 3-28-24
MARILYN LANDS: My baby had, you know, um, an underdeveloped brain, a heart, lungs, kidneys, you know, just complete organ devastation. And the baby would not survive. When I heard the news, when, when we really understood the full impact of the news, um, I just, I mean, the rug had been pulled out. from underneath us and, um, I, I, I [01:10:00] just couldn't imagine how this could have happened.
Um, and I cried for days, you know, as we were trying to sort everything out. Um, it just,
it seemed so unfair.
The doctors all advised that I terminate the pregnancy. All three doctors said, this is absolutely what you need to do. Your health is at risk because these babies often don't even survive. and can die in, in utero. But this isn't just my story. This is our story. It's the story of thousands of women every year who must grapple with non viable pregnancies and potentially fatal complications.
It's the story of tens of thousands of families who cannot afford to travel hundreds of miles to get the care they need. And it's the story of millions of women who live in places [01:11:00] where MAGA extremists are devising new and cruel ways to further erode our most basic freedoms. These men do not understand or care about women's health, but I do.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI - CO-HOST, MORNING JOE: That was, uh, newly sworn in, now Alabama State Representative Marilyn Lanz, telling her heartbreaking abortion story. Lanz flipped Alabama's 10th district for Democrats this week, running on a platform of repealing her state's restrictive abortion law and protecting access to IVF. And she joins us now. Uh, I'll bring in for this interview also NBC News political analyst, former U.
S. Senator Claire McCaskill, also with us for this conversation. So, congratulations on, on your race, um, and, and Ms. Lanz, a lot of people are looking at the results, um, in your race as an indication To what to come, [01:12:00] uh, what's to come for Republicans, uh, given their very, uh, extreme views on women's health care and being the why in what drew people to the polls to vote for you.
Do you agree with that in terms of the outcome?
MARILYN LANDS: Absolutely. And, um, one of the things that that we saw and observed at the precincts that day was more women were voting than normal. So, I think we really, our message resonated with voters, and they were very motivated to come out and vote in this special election, which has notoriously low turnout rates, but we did much better than we expected.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI - CO-HOST, MORNING JOE: Did you get feedback personally, anecdotally on a local level, um, for sharing your story? Um, such a deeply personal and, and a devastating story.
MARILYN LANDS: And because of it, I heard so many other stories. I was really blown away [01:13:00] by the amount of women and families that shared their, their own stories of heartbreak and struggles.
Watch VP Harris slams Trump in Arizona over battle for abortion access - MSNBC - Air Date 4-12-24
VP KAMALA HARRIS: .
This fight is about freedom. This fight is about freedom. And the freedom that is fundamental to the promise of America. The promise of America is a promise of freedom. In America, freedom is not to be given. It is not to be bestowed. It is ours by right. And that includes the freedom to make decisions about one's own body and not have the government telling people what to do.
However, as we know, almost two years ago, the highest court in our land, the court of Thurgood and RBG, took a constitutional right that had been recognized as [01:14:00] From the people of America, from the women of America, and now in states across our country, extremists have proposed and passed laws that criminalize doctors and punish women.
Laws that threaten doctors and nurses with prison time, even for life, simply for providing reproductive care. And then just this week, here in Arizona, They have turned back the clock to the 1800s to take away a woman's most fundamental right, the right to make decisions about her own body. This decision by the Arizona State Supreme Court now means women here, the women here, live under one of the most extreme abortion bans in our nation.
No exception for rape or [01:15:00] incest, prison time for doctors and nurses, and abortion made illegal before most women even know they're pregnant. The overturning of Roe was, without any question, a seismic event, and this ban here in Arizona is one of the biggest aftershocks yet.
This law was passed in the 1800s before Arizona was even a state, before women could even vote. What has happened here in Arizona is a new inflection point. It has demonstrated once and for all that overturning Roe was just the opening act, just the opening act of a larger strategy. To take women's rights and freedoms part [01:16:00] of a full on attack, state by state, on reproductive freedom.
And, and we all must understand who is to blame. Former President Donald Trump did this. During his campaign in 2016, Donald Trump said women should be punished for seeking an abortion. Don't forget that. He said women should be punished. As President Donald Trump hand picked Three members of the United States Supreme Court, because he intended, intended for them to overturn Roe, and as he intended, they did.
And now, because of Donald Trump, more than 20 states in our nation have bans. Now, because of Donald Trump, one in three women of reproductive age in our country live in a state [01:17:00] that has a Trump abortion ban. And let us understand the impact of these Trump abortion bans, the horrific reality that women face every single day now in our country.
Because since Roe was overturned, we all know the stories, and I'll tell you, I have met women who were refused care during a miscarriage. I met a woman who went to the emergency room and was turned away repeatedly because the doctors were afraid they might be thrown in jail. I For helping her and it was only when she developed sepsis that she received care I visited a clinic in Minnesota and met with courageous Dedicated medical professionals who see clinics like theirs forced to close denying women across our country access to essential and life saving [01:18:00] care breast cancer screenings Contra sap is contraceptive care paps Donald Trump is the architect of this healthcare crisis.
And that is not a fact, by the way, that he hides. In fact, he brags about it. Just this week, he said that he is, quote, proudly the person responsible for overturning Roe. Proudly responsible for the pain and suffering of millions of women and families. Proudly responsible that he took your freedoms and just minutes ago standing beside Speaker Johnson, Donald Trump just said the collection of state bans is quote working the way it is supposed to[01:19:00]
and as much harm as he has already caused a second Trump term would be even worse. Donald Trump's friends in the United States Congress are trying to pass a national ban. And understand, a national ban would outlaw abortion in every state. Even states like New York and California. And now, Trump wants us to believe he will not.
Sign a national ban. Enough with the gaslighting. Enough with the gaslighting.
We all know if Donald Trump gets the chance, he will sign a national abortion ban. And how do we know? Just look at his record. Just look at the facts. Y'all know I'm a former prosecutor. Just look at the facts. Congress [01:20:00] tried to pass a national abortion ban in 2017, and the then president Trump endorsed it and promised to sign it if it got on his desk.
Well, the great Maya Angelou once said, when someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Donald Trump has told us who he is. And notice that Team Trump have an additional plan to attack reproductive freedom, a plan that they intend to implement on day one, even without Congress. They want to use another law from the 1800s, it's called the Comstock Act, to ban medication across all 50 states, no matter if it's currently legal or not.
So here's what a second Trump term looks like. [01:21:00] More bans, more suffering, and less freedom. Just like he did in Arizona, he basically wants to take America back to the 1800s. But we are not going to let that happen,
because here's the deal. This is 2024, not the 1800s, and we're not going back. We are not going back.
Joe Biden and I trust women to know what is in their own best interest. And women trust all of us to fight to protect their most fundamental freedoms. So Arizona, this [01:22:00] November, up and down the ballot, reproductive freedom is at stake. And you have the power to do it. to protect it with your vote. It is your power.
SECTION C: THE POWER OF MESSAGING
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached section C the power of messaging.
Employ Negative Partisanship w. Rachel Bitecofer Part 3 - Future Hindsight - Air Date 3-21-24
MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: Let's go back to the immigration bit because we're in the wake of the second and now successful vote to impeach Secretary Mallorca's and before his hearing, he submitted this multi page letter, which I doubt anybody read, but I, I read it.
It was very reasonable, you know, but it's also sort of like this whole age old thing that Democrats do. They rebut with the facts, you know, snooze, boring, or try to persuade with the logic of a policy prescription. Also boring. Nobody cares. Like you said. So what could the secretary have said in these hearings?
Because I feel like it's really just political theater and still nobody's understanding that this is what this [01:23:00] is. In your mind, if you had been in his ear, what would you have whispered?
RACHEL BITECOFER: I think it's very important that we define it as Trump wants the border open, right? He's the one that killed border security.
So every time they bring up the word immigration, the strategic objective of Biden or anybody else that's opening their mouth should be to get the sentence across Donald Trump killed bipartisan border security. If you read the front half of this book, you're polling data, understanding polling data is going to improve a lot because you're going to understand how is it that Donald Trump Issues and a public edict vote.
No, kill this bill. And yet when we poll people, why did border security fail? More people say it's Biden's fault than Donald Trump, right? The reason is, is that no one knows that. And so it's our job to make sure that the voter hears Donald Trump killed border security. And so we need the politicians to say that sentence in whatever else they're going to say on the [01:24:00] issue.
They need to make that point clear. Um, and I think it's important for us to be clear, Donald Trump just killed border security because we need the public to know. And the reason that the obstruction strategy has worked so good for them, and they started the strategy, by the way, in 2010, it was an articulated strategy when they were out in the wilderness.
I mean, in 2009, the conversation was after the Iraq war debacle and the Great Recession was the Republican Party going to be DOA in terms of Congress and the Senate for a decade. because of how bad the brand took a hit. And within a year, Michael Steele's picking up 63 house seats for the Republican Party, right?
I was like, okay, I got to understand how that happens. And you know, at the end of the day, how it happens is that Republicans understand how to obstruct and then use public civic illiteracy to make it look like the president's inept. Do you see what I'm saying? So like they're able to say Biden wants open [01:25:00] borders, and they know that most of the public's not going to know that they just had the best chance they've had in four decades, the most conservative border security bill.
This is the third time that they've killed comprehensive border security, by the way, since 2006. John McCain, voted against his own bill, just like Linkford did with his, right? In 2006, because he wanted to be the Republican nominee in 2008, and that was when the party first started to radicalize on abortion.
In 2013, same issue, the Senate passes a bipartisan bill over the filibuster, so hard to do, send it to the House where Republicans have complete and total control, because the majority party Rules the roost in the house. The minority party has literally no power, and they killed the bill then, and now they've just done the same thing.
And yet, when you ask people, why didn't border security happen with Obama, it's, even in the left, even amongst activists who are not normal people, they are much more likely to blame it on Obama. Then on John Boehner. Okay, [01:26:00] so we have to make sure that we're assigning blame, taking credit. If you're a senator and you're excited about 35 insulin, good.
Let's say, hey, Democrats got you insulin. All the Republicans voted against it. Our brand up, their brand down. We're credit claiming because people like to do that, but we're also getting that contrast in and, you know, pounding a refrain basically, which is Democrats give, Republicans take.
MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: Yeah, that's a great example.
Well, you also dedicate a whole chapter to giving wedgies, as you call it, which is to say using wedge issues to accomplish what you call the two goals of negative partisanship. And I'm going to quote you now, quote, turn out voters from your team and to disqualify the opposition in the eyes of swing voters.
RACHEL BITECOFER: That's how Republicans do persuasion. We do persuasion. You do persuasion. To sell a candidate on their biography and on their policy promises, [01:27:00] like median voter policy appeals and, you know, appeals of bipartisanship. And what this book is designed to do is to get people to realize, actually, Republicans stopped doing that a long time ago.
They don't do that. They didn't sell J. D. Vance to Ohio. They made sure Ohio would not buy Tim Ryan.
MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: Right. Yeah. Well said. Well said. Well, so you suggest a number of ways for Democrats to wedge various issues. And my favorite one actually was about wedging rural America, where Republicans have controlled politics for more than two decades.
Of course, we know notoriously, rural Americans are primarily Republicans. So tell us about how a good wedgie would sound about rural America.
RACHEL BITECOFER: Yeah, so when we get to rural America, you know, here's the thing, voters are mad, right? They're always mad because stuff's never great. We're living through the best, literally the best human experience any human has ever had in the whatever, 30, 000, 40, 000 years of humans [01:28:00] crawling on the face of the earth.
We're the first people that have the opposite problem of starvation. We have too much food, we have a calorie surplus, we're living at a time where we can regrow organs out of pig stuff. I mean, it's an incredibly, wonderfully rich time to be alive. No one cares. No one knows that, right? So, if you're gonna be angsty and mad, and they are, Especially about economic stuff, probably we want to do, instead of telling him not to be angsty, because that's not going to work, and instead of saying, well, you know, we know you're mad and that both parties have let you down because that's also not going to work in terms of branding and winning stuff.
We tell people the story of what happened to their rural community because the Republican Party has ruled the roost there for 20 years and their record is absolutely dismal. They've totally eviscerated. rural America. And at every turn, vote in ways that harm rural America, particularly with Medicaid [01:29:00] expansion, which ended up costing many rural communities their hospitals.
And that is still ongoing, right? So, to me, what you do is you come in and you stop being micro. It's not just that Trump is a scab, though that is a helpful brand he uses in the Midwest. It's about telling the story to working class America, which is not just white anymore, working class America, the Republican Party steals your stuff and gives it to their rich donors, right?
If we try that, we don't know if it will work. But we do know telling them, I'm not one of those Democrats, and reaffirming the GOP's attack, which is that the Democratic brand is bad and there's something wrong with Democrats. We might want to go into rural America and run the race as a referendum on the Republican Party's rural record, which I just laid out is, is dismal in many ways.
I mean, if you're a rural voter right now, you're not having a high probability of being able to keep your children in the [01:30:00] town that you're living in because they have no economic opportunity. And the reason why Reaganomics, starve the beast, divest. And that's why we've seen a real decimation in rural America.
It's a compelling story and it's one you can lay squarely at the feet of the Republican party.
POLL Republican Policies VERY Unpopular With Voters - The Majority Report - Air Date 3-26-24
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: That's what they're talking about here. Then If that's not enough, they want to mess with social security. The single most successful government program probably we've had in this country, maybe ever. Keeps two thirds of our elderly out of poverty and when your parents are not having to eat cat food in their retirement, you can save money to send your kid to college or to buy a home or whatever it is.
They have a plan for Medicare too, and it's called, uh, Basically privatization. Yep. They call it a premium support model. This is what Paul Ryan [01:31:00] wanted to do, which is, um, we just subsidize your private, um, it's basically Obamacare, but for everybody. And not even the Obamacare. It is, uh, the privatized part of Obamacare as opposed to the expansion of Medicaid.
And I'm sure. I am sure, uh, if they're in a position to do this, they're also going to say insurance companies can rip you off like they used to. Of course. Um, and then we should also say they also, uh, in their, uh, budget, which even though has nothing to do with money, uh, that life, uh, begins at conception act.
Which would grant rights to embryos, and, um, If you grant rights to embryos, I have a feeling these embryos are going to rise up, And, uh, say, hey, wait a second, this whole, um, IVF thing? Yeah. Part of us get thrown out. We're not going to want to do that. We
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: don't want to do that, and it's really cold in the freezer where we're kept, so.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: [01:32:00] Exactly. And they will just scream and scream, those, uh, embryos, uh, In the bastulae. Or what is it called? Basulots? I have no idea. Blastocytes. Um, also, we should just add, that, uh, the Republican study committee in their 2025 budget, which involves fiscal sanity to save America, um, instead of raising taxes on really wealthy people, it calls for a rollback of, um, free lunch.
In fact, a ban on free lunches. They want to eliminate the community eligibility provision from the school lunch program, uh, which allows certain schools to provide free lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Democrats should run on this. Democrats should put, like the way Tim Walz did in Minnesota, this should be just like every governor in the [01:33:00] country.
Begin to certify free lunches for school, for, for kids in school.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: But you see the dilemma that the Republicans have.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Well, this is a wish list to head off like essentially the criticism of Mike Johnson for getting Democratic votes on his budget, I'd imagine. That's the strategy, right?
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Well, this has been in works even before that, I think.
I mean, the problem they have is that when they come out with their proposals, they realize no one likes this. Yeah. And so they have literally nothing to run on. Um, the Democrats at least. By not fulfilling a whole host of their promises that people want, at least have stuff to claim that they're running for.
But Republicans, even in theory, the only thing they can run on is their racism and [01:34:00] xenophobia, but that has a lid on it. Uh, frankly, and so they, they are stuck in this problem of not being able to, um, offer really anything, anything beyond we're going to protect you from the non existent caravan that is, uh, marching in our way.
Um, let's talk about, uh, the most encouraging polling that, um, Biden has seen in a while. Um, again, Let me just read a couple of quotes in this Axios thing. There was a, um, GOP's top fundraising committee for state level leaders, uh, says that Biden doesn't hurt candidates down ballot in the way that some presidents have in the past.
I think something that we've all been aware of, like there is a unique problem with Joe Biden as a candidate. [01:35:00] And, but broadly speaking, people like the Democratic policies and Democrats more than the Republicans, at least in this context. The memo advised, steer clear of making the election a singular referendum on Joe Biden.
Now the problem is, is that's exactly what Joe Biden also wants. Don't make this a referendum on May. Make it a question of choosing between me and Donald Trump. So they're, they have a, they have a challenge here. The memo advised using Biden as your crutch. Said campaigns need to make an affirmative case for GO policies.
GOP policies. The problem is that nobody likes the GOP policies. They much rather prefer, um, Let's Go Brandon as a campaign slogan. Uh, we must learn from the missteps of 2022 cycle and not solely target Joe Biden in our campaign messaging. They have
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: nothing else to message with. That's, that's the problem.
The problem for the Republicans is what, is, because, is Trump [01:36:00] and the fact that they are Republicans. The problem with the Dem, for the Democrats is that, in fact, actually, things for them domestically are set up quite well in terms of negative partisanship. But Biden is so demobilizing and is seemingly making all the wrong choices over the past, uh, year or so, that it's a question of does he sufficiently, uh, depress turn out so that thethat advantage doesn't necessarily matter?
But it seems like his State of the Union actually did have an effect. I thought the speech was good politically, like, it was like, okay he's beginning to go on the offensive. And the polling seems to reflect that even though I, I, I, there were some skepticism about whether it would change anything. I, um, uh, were you here that day after?
I, it was the day, the day after I left for vacation. So, yeah.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, no, I mean, um, well, I think we were talking to, I can't remember who it was. Was it Ryan Grim or was it, uh, Digby? I, I found the State of the Union speech, I mean, aside from the fact that, you know, um, uh, [01:37:00] I'm angry about the, the, the The, the, uh, Israel Gaza stuff, and I don't think he, you know, I would have liked him to address that more and up front.
I thought the speech was a huge, uh, win for him. The, uh, the quick polling afterwards did not show any bump, but Go and Google how many times people have said, He's old. And can't do the job since then. I like that it killed that entire narrative.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: He also was emphasizing Social Security and Medicare in the speech and taxing the rich.
And then we saw a week later, that polling that we highlighted about how when you emphasize Social Security and Medicare versus Trump, it gives, Oh yeah, he has like a 55 to, it was 51 or something, but still sizable compared to the neck and neck stuff.
Everything's a cult now Part 4 - The Gray Area with Sean Illing - Air Date 4-27-24
DEREK THOMPSON: To go one level deeper here, I think sometimes about what does it take to be a successful media [01:38:00] entrepreneur these days?
Like, let's say that you and I want to launch some new podcast that explains the world to people. We want it to be really, really popular and really, really powerful. One I think easy blueprint to steal from is to say that what we need to prove is that everyone else is wrong. Like, the first thing that a new entrant into the market has to do is to demonstrate why it's necessary to the consumers of that market to have a new entrant in the first place.
And the easiest reason is that the marketplace of ideas Is broken in some way, and so what I see is a lot of new influencers and a lot of new media companies entering the market with the theory that the media, capital T, capital M is broken, and that tends to be the thesis that they exercise over and over and over again, and it creates this really interesting and somewhat even paradoxical dynamic where lots of people trust a media in order to understand the world, but because every media is [01:39:00] telling them to distrust the media, capital T, capital M, everyone distrusts the media while loving their own individual media.
It's sort of the berserk example or berserk implication of, you know, love your Congressman, hate Congress. But I think it does create a very bizarre dynamic in terms of trying to understand what's happening in the world when you have so many different News entrants and news entrepreneurs that really are, I think, highly incentivized to sort of in cult their audience and tell them that there is a conspiracy against them.
Employ Negative Partisanship w. Rachel Bitecofer Part 4 - Future Hindsight - Air Date 3-21-24
MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: In terms of CRT, I wanted to turn back there because I feel like, maybe not exactly CRT, but wokeism is still on the agenda for a while. Republicans, especially at local levels or on school board elections. So what would be an effective rebuttal for Democrats when it comes to CRT or wokest education?
RACHEL BITECOFER: I mean, I wish I could be on Meet the Press one day with Ron DeSantis when [01:40:00] he starts talking about wokeism and how he has to protect children from it, because the second a Republican makes the mistake of uttering the phrase, protect children in my presence, they're going to get hammered for letting our children get slaughtered by weapons of war at school.
And I'm going to ask them, why do you want our children to die at school? Just like they would do to us, right? So it's about pivot and attack. In Virginia, I wrote, you know, in the CRT chapter about my frustration and, you know, this is when I was first trying to get in to the pit of democratic electioneering, that we were responding to CRT by proving it wasn't real, that showing how great Toni Morrison's book is or whatever, right?
And what we should have been doing is Oh, the Republican Party wants to make an election about education? Great! Because the Republican Party's record on public education, it's dismal. Okay? They came in with their Reaganomic stuff in the 80s and utterly decimated America's K 12 infrastructure. Our public schools have been [01:41:00] in decline every year since then, and it's the Republican Party that killed them.
So it should be a conversation where it'd be like, come into my web, little You know, mosquito. I'm happy to have a conversation about protecting Children with a party that's letting them get slaughtered every day at school.
MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: Hmm. Yeah. So pivoting and attacking on something that really does hurt because, of course, they are the party that is preventing.
gun safety
RACHEL BITECOFER: and voters do not know that. So like, okay, if you ask a voter, which party wants to take away all your guns, Democrats, okay. If you ask people which party wants pro pot, higher minimum wage, climate change action, whatever it is, all of our popular stuff that we've made really popular gun reform.
They don't connect it immediately to us, right? And that's because we have developed a messaging system that bleached out partisanship. So we talked about the bad guys as the NRA, big pharma, big oil, Congress, [01:42:00] generally. And you do that because when you're smart and you're informed, you read Congress and you saw the headline yesterday or whatever about the immigration bill get killed.
So you immediately know, Oh, that was Republicans in Congress. Normal people do not know that. They will not know that. Unless you tell them. We have to be assigning blame to the Republicans. Wide brush. All Republicans. Right? Not most Republicans. Just because somebody says they're not going to vote yes on it or doesn't support a national abortion doesn't mean they're not going to vote for it.
And they don't give us that kind of quarter. They don't say, oh well, Joe Biden doesn't want to defund the police. They branded him, even though he said publicly, I don't support it. They still run him as a defund the police candidate. And we have to do the same thing. We have to do the same thing because if we do not, we're not going to win.
And if we don't win, People who are these marginalized groups that we care about are going to be the very first people to suffer.
MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: Well, [01:43:00] tell us a little bit more about taking credit and giving blame strategy, because we've heard so many times now in the news where Republicans tout the federal dollars that are coming into their district, even though these very same Politicians voted against the Inflation Reduction Act or the American Rescue Plan Act.
And then progressives, of course, on Twitter go bonkers. They're like, oh, my God, you know, these hypocrites. But then, of course, the elected Democrat says nothing. Give us an example of effective branding up for Democrats from the get go.
RACHEL BITECOFER: I mean, it comes from the members, right? The most important message narrative setters we have are our electeds.
And so, you know, big part of my work is about getting to them to give them an explanation of like, okay, look, if you were to watch like election analysis today or anytime, you're going to hear election analysis kind of from a practitioner angle. And so candidates, you know, they're, they're practitioners are not.
Like studying it systemically or institutionally. So [01:44:00] it's really important that at the end of the day, why does the Republican messaging machine work so well? Well, it's two reasons. They've built an ecosystem and there are people behaviorally, Republicans love, like the old people love Fox news, right? We have people who don't really like politics, but we'll vote for the left.
So we're very diverse in all of our media. Even the people that do listen to the news, which isn't much of a By any means, the majority of us, okay, we're very diverse in our selections. They are very, very centralized. Almost all Republicans trust one thing for news and that's Fox. I don't trust anything else.
And so they have that amplification, but what makes it so powerful folks is the other side of it. And this is something we can fix. And that is, you know, they come up with an attack. It's a border invasion. They all start using the phrase border invasion. From the party committees, the House Oversight Committee chair accounts, from everything official, all the electeds, [01:45:00] and the press covers the politicians, right?
So they pick up the narratives from these politicians and they start talking about, Oh my God, Joe Biden, what is he going to do with this border crisis? So we need to understand That we're stronger together, that we would be best off to have a talking point memo that we operate off of where everyone's on message, everyone's pounding things like nowhere to hide national abortion ban.
If you just keep saying nowhere to hide national abortion ban, you're branding for people in these safe blue districts and states in particular, like the threat is to you, right? You know, getting the electeds on the same page is to me a very important strategic shift that we're still working towards.
SECTION D: INDEPENDENTS AND LOW-INFORMATION VOTERS
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, this is section D independence and low information voters.
Hit 'Em Where It Hurts A Conversation About How Dems Can Win in November with Rachel Bitecofer Part 3 - Deep State Radio - Air Date 2-8-24
DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Presumably, independents are less You know, uh, uh, you know, sort of [01:46:00] Attached to to one one side or the other it's let their identity comes from being independent to some degree How do you pick them up or is it as as I think you indicated earlier a mirage?
RACHEL BITECOFER: No, it's not a mirage. I mean the swing bucket is important You gotta win the independent vote and you know, that's why with all this doomsaying in the polling I'm still very confident a the hard data the special elections keep coming out Really hot for Dems and they have since Dobbs was repealed, but also because, you know, at the end of the day, like you've got a, you know, in polling 30, 40 percent of any poll who claimed to be in, and you separate out the leaners because you ask them, well, do you lean one way or the other?
And, and now when a good pollster does data, they group all the partisan leaners into the partisan camp and keep them out of the pure independent poll. Okay, so now we're talking about 15 percent not 30, taking half the half the indies away. What is going to motivate those people [01:47:00] is, is narrative imagistics, right?
And so when you, when you, when you say, oh, they're probably, there are people like that, my mother in law, she is so well researched and she's completely, you know, and she couldn't be rationalized and appealed to, but that's not really typical. Most independents are actually very low information voters.
They don't feel an obligation to civically participate because they were socialized into civic participation, maybe from military or whatever it was, but they don't feel the interest that fires ideology that puts you into a camp. Do you see what I'm saying? And so really they're tuned out and they're going to tune in and what will matter and dictate their vote is that final narrative that they hear.
And if that narrative is coming from the right, don't vote for Joe Biden. He's a scumbag. Socialist who's gonna, you know, do all these, he's gonna steal all your money or whatever it is. He's going to let your family get murdered by brown people. That's what their messaging is. I'm not being hyperbolic, right?
Then, um, and, and our message [01:48:00] is we passed a historic infrastructure bill and did this and this and this and got you 35 insulin. I'm here to tell you folks, which the brain is going to respond to. It ain't going to be your wonky deliverables, right? So although it's important to define because there is a perception of ineptitude that the republicans have been careful to To perpetuate by blocking action on things like immigration There's a perception that biden hasn't done a lot when the record speaks a whole different truth, right?
So you can't ignore credit claiming but it's not and it's not it ends in a means it's in other words. It's necessary But it is not sufficient. You have to go in and make sure that independent voters in Wisconsin, in Arizona, in Georgia, Georgia, walk into that ballot booth. And when they look at the ballot and they see D they think democracy.
Okay. Like they think. Okay, I've got to vote for this, this party, this brand, because this is the brand that's going to protect my freedom. And [01:49:00] it relies on all the swing races from the state legislative, house, senate, governor's, presidency, to make that narrative a cacophony and that's why it takes total buy in.
We've already got buy in from the top. The Biden Harris campaign is going to run an effective referendum campaign. They're going to give the electorate a choice. They're going to do a referendum on Trump's crazy and remind people what it's, what, what it was like and what it will be like when he's a dictator.
But at the end of the day, it takes the rest of us, as you were alluding to, to be hammering that as well. If we want to create a noise that can even somewhat take on the cacophony that they're able to make with their ecosystem, media ecosystem, we do not have a media ecosystem that is centralized and political and can be deployed for the purpose of winning campaigns.
Right? So we have to force the media to talk about what we wanted to talk about and what we wanted to do is make sure voters are afraid of the Republican Party,
DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: right? Although we do, you know [01:50:00] that we live in a different age. It's not 2016. It's not an age. You know, I know this seems recent to some people, but it is actually light years ago.
Well, that's distance. It was a long time ago. The 2016 scene. You know, you still do big TV buys and you're trying to send a message and on TV networks, TV networks are essentially irrelevant right now. It's, you know, if somebody runs an ad, they see it on social media, social media is the vehicle. So you, we actually have an infrastructure in place to overnight has an organized message delivered by a million people or 10 million people that reaches 200 million people.
If. You know, if it becomes important enough for people to do it.
RACHEL BITECOFER: And that's why, you know, when I taught, when I work, I do a lot of pro bono on top of my paid consulting, you know, and what I do, and that's mostly grassroots. Right. So what I'm doing with them is saying, look, listen, I know your issues, climate change.
Okay. But it falls under this [01:51:00] democracy, dictatorship threat. There's not going to be any help for the earth under a Trump dictator. So getting Democrats out of like. They're very distinct camps because they're very activist based group. It's not an ideological movement like the Republican party is and forming an umbrella ideology, freedom, right.
To, uh, to kind of bring in all these disparate things, but you're right. We have exactly what we need because pop culture is liberal. It has a liberal bias because it's cool. Okay. Taylor Swift.
DAVID ROTHKOPF - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Has 293 million followers. That's
RACHEL BITECOFER: exactly right. Because they are a minority, a very small minority when you get down to like the Tucker Carlson's of the world, right?
But they have big loud media voices. So if all of us could say to ourselves, yeah, my, my, my passion issue is education, but right now I'm going to talk about threat to democracy and the threat of the Republican party. And I can do that in the education context, but But I'm not focusing on a policy proposal.
I want to push Congress [01:52:00] to do next time. Well, guess what guys, every time you're doing that a you're detracting, you're making shit look normal. That's not normal. We're in a existential crisis and our only hope for survival is to make sure that average Americans who watch the bachelorette and have never heard of Joe Scarborough vote and vote for D all the way up and down the ballot because they see that D and they think democracy.
Why Voters Are Down On The Economy, In Their Own Words - FiveThirtyEight Politics - Air Date 5-2-24
GALEN DRUKE - HOST, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT POLITICS: So when we look at polling, we see that The economy is still pretty high up on folks lists, and according to Gallup polling on the most important issue, it still ranks number one. But other things have increased as well. I mean, we've seen in particular that immigration has risen to now almost match the economy in terms of most important issues facing the country.
We also see just questions of leadership. quality of leadership, other things have sort of risen and fallen and maybe aren't as high on the number one most important issue. But we see folks saying that it might decide their [01:53:00] vote, things like democracy or abortion or what have you. I mean, to what extent did some of these other issues come up?
And even for the lean Trump group, were things like immigration ever trumping the economy?
MONICA POTTS: For the Trump group, they cared a lot about immigration, and people said immigration and the economy are my top issues. They didn't really single one out or the other out, but a lot of times, too, people saw those things as connected.
Like, we can't deal with the economy while the border is in crisis. And I have to say, too, that they, what they volunteered about the immigration situation was sounded a lot like Republican messaging. It was, you know, the border is out of control. Biden's not doing anything on the border. They're just rushing in.
They're voting. People who aren't citizens can vote. And so they had a lot of, I would say, a mix of misinformation and some information about what was happening on the border that was influencing how they were talking about it. And for the Biden [01:54:00] group, they also had other things that they cared about, and that was mainly democracy, things like personal rights.
A lot of people mentioned abortion unprompted. So they really care about a woman's right to choose. They saw the Supreme Court decision. And the anti abortion sentiment in the Republican Party is infringing on personal rights. So I think that even though voters care about the economy, when all is said and done, that may not be the sole factor that they vote on.
GALEN DRUKE - HOST, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT POLITICS: Yeah. I mean, was there anything that came up, like we said, there's these moments where personal experiences come to the fore. Were there any moments that really just sort of surprised you?
MONICA POTTS: There were a lot of things that I didn't exactly know how to place. There was a woman who works in I. T. In a follow up interview, she told me that when she was trying to hire people under the Trump administration, she had to go to extra lengths to justify why she might be hiring somebody outside of the country, like why she might be offshoring a job, or why she might be trying to hire someone who wasn't a U.
S. citizen. That was her memory. [01:55:00] But then, uh, under the Biden administration, she felt like that had all gone away and that all these jobs were going overseas. And she said that that was her personal experience, that she was involved in this in her own firm. And I had a hard time kind of placing at what exactly that might be that she was talking about.
There have been some shifts in policy and executive orders about immigration and hiring foreign workers, um, between the two administrations, but nothing that would really account for her personal experience. So that really surprised me.
GALEN DRUKE - HOST, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT POLITICS: Was this a Biden or Trump leaner, and was she describing a dynamic that she was unhappy about, that she thought that Trump's policies on offshoring IT jobs were better?
MONICA POTTS: Yes, she was unhappy about it. She was a Trump leaner. And what she and other Trump leaners said, and even some Biden leaners said, was that we really had to start putting America first. That messaging from the Trump campaign. Of putting America first really resonated with a lot of Trump leaners that they felt like American [01:56:00] workers had to be put first.
The American economy had to be put first and they liked that part of Trump's message.
GALEN DRUKE - HOST, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT POLITICS: Yeah, and to that point, one sentiment that really united. both the Biden leaners and the Trump leaners here. Was that America First message? And specifically when it comes to foreign aid and the recent aid package to Ukraine and Israel, et cetera.
This here, we're going to listen to, um, a Biden leaner. Talk about that.
VOTER: Biden is constantly giving money away to other countries when we got our own problems here. What are we? Are we the Mother Teresa for every other country? It's crazy, man. Take her home first. Then you help out when you can with other people, you know what I'm saying?
Like if I can't pay the bills here I'm gonna help another kid. It's the same thing with our country, bro We are in such debt, but yet and still we constantly giving money away and you see homeless people all over the place
GALEN DRUKE - HOST, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT POLITICS: So that is how somebody who says he's planning on voting for biden or leaning biden [01:57:00] Is feeling Did we hear specifically about people being upset by the recent, you know, 95 billion foreign aid package that was passed?
MONICA POTTS: This took place a little before that, but people in general were upset about Ukraine aid, Israel aid, aid to foreign countries in general. They felt like it was an opportunity missed to take care of things at home, that dollars going overseas prevented dealing from the problems that we have here and helping people here.
And, you know, I have to say here, the reality, this comes up a lot, but the reality is that U. S. foreign aid and, you know, in general is usually less than 2 percent of the federal budget. The Ukraine aid, even though in comparison historically it's been pretty massive, is still less than 1 percent of the U.
S. GDP. But people feel like it causes us to miss opportunities to help people at home and that it makes more sense to solve all of our own problems first [01:58:00] before we start, you know, helping other people with their problems.
GALEN DRUKE - HOST, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT POLITICS: Yeah, I think that's an important point. And going into a campaign, I mean, a lot of what we're going to hear about the economy is messaging.
And to the extent that you can keep a message simple, it'll probably resonate more with voters or be more memorable. And that is something that, of course, we've seen polling specifically post the Iraq War that folks really feel like America has spent a lot of time helping others abroad while things have gotten difficult at home.
And obviously that gets exacerbated. When people feel down on the economy, right, like post the financial crisis or during this period of inflation, it becomes not a, oh, we're all doing well, so why question how we're helping folks abroad, but we're in a tight spot. What are we doing helping folks abroad? I think that's right.
MONICA POTTS: And I'll say too that I think the, when I asked people what they wanted to see a president do about the economy, they weren't that specific, but they, one of the things that almost everyone I spoke to wanted was to hear [01:59:00] the president saying, we know things are tough for you. We know things are tough right now, and this is how we're going to make it better.
And they felt like they were being gaslit by all the news about how great the economy is doing, you know, that they see see that the job market is doing great in the headlines and they hear it on the evening news and they feel like that's not true and they're not hearing the truth about the economy.
Closing 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 Gray Area, The PBS NewsHour, Morning Joe, MSNBC, Future Hindsight, The Majority Report, Deep State Radio, and FiveThirtyEight Politics. 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. [02:00:00] Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community. Where you can also continue the discussion.
So, coming to you from far outside, the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.
#1628 New Era of Antitrust for a New Era of Capitalism, Mega-Corporations and Big Tech (Transcript)
Air Date 5/11/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast in which we delve into the effort to turn theory into practice in opening up new ways of thinking about antitrust lawsuits attempting to reign in big tech and other mega corporations, which are operating in a new phase of capitalism, some argue.
Sources today include Planet Money, The BTLJ Podcast, Factually with Adam Conover, and The Majority Report, with additional members-only clips from The Majority Report.
FTC Chair Lina Khan on Antitrust in the age of Amazon - Planet Money - Air Date 11-3-23
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: The origins of antitrust law go back to the Gilded Age. Listeners who've heard parts one and two of Planet Money's series on antitrust in America will know the backstory to this history.
But here's a quick recap. The late 19th century saw the rise of these massive new companies, these trusts as they were called, like John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which were using their sheer size to push competitors out of the market.
LINA KHAN: So the antitrust laws at the federal level were passed back in [00:01:00] 1890 against the backdrop of this phenomenal industrial revolution that had delivered a lot of technological gains and progress, but had also concentrated power over these new industries and a very small number of hands. So you had farmers, for example, who are often dependent on a single railroad that was going through their town and they saw how that concentrated power could result in discrimination. It could result in arbitrary price hikes. There was a sense that who was winning and who was losing in our economy was not based on who, on the merits, was offering the best products or services or prices, but really the whims of these gatekeepers. And so there was a big movement to really push Congress to pass a set of laws to rein in some of this unchecked power. In 1890, you had the Sherman Act that was passed. In 1914, you had the Clayton Act, the FTC Act—which created the Federal Trade Commission.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: Is that your favorite one? [00:02:00]
LINA KHAN: Yeah, I think it has to be.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: Over the next 60 years, the government took a pretty aggressive approach to policing anti competitive behavior, regularly stopping companies from merging, or even breaking up companies they argued had gotten too big. Until the 1970s, when there was a backlash to all this aggressive enforcement, and the pendulum swung the other way.
A new way of thinking about antitrust started to take hold, which essentially said the fact that some shoe manufacturer or pie company is gobbling up market share from its competitors isn't necessarily a bad thing. The only thing we should really be worrying about is whether actual consumers are harmed by things like rising prices or fewer kinds of products.
What mattered should be consumer welfare, and that "consumer welfare standard," as it was christened, set the stage for the next 40 years. Antitrust regulators became a lot more hands-off. The market—the thinking went—would solve a lot of these problems all [00:03:00] on its own.
LINA KHAN: There was a view that if you ever had, monopolization in the economy, and that monopoly started to hike prices or hurt its customers, that monopoly power would be disciplined by a new set of companies that would rush in and try to take business away from the monopoly.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: This new paradigm in antitrust thinking was spelled out most famously by a legal scholar named Robert Bork in his book The Antitrust Paradox. Antitrust, he argued, the law that's supposed to help competition, was actually harming it by intervening on behalf of particular companies. That was the paradox.
And Bork's view? That has become mainstream. That was the paradigm Lina Khan decided to attack when she was a law student at Yale back in 2017, when she wrote a provocative paper for the Yale Law Journal playing off the title of Bork's famous book, The Antitrust Paradox.
LINA KHAN: The paper was called Amazon's Antitrust Paradox.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: And what was the vision you laid out in that paper for what needed to change when it came to antitrust policy in the U. S.? [00:04:00]
LINA KHAN: So that paper that I wrote as a student in a very different role than the one I'm in right now, basically argued that the shift in antitrust that we had seen in the 70s and 80s now created serious blind spots in how we enforce the laws against monopolies, and those blind spots were especially acute in digital markets.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: In her paper, Lina pointed to the wave of social media platforms and online marketplaces—places like Amazon—that had come to define this new internet economy. These new business models, she argued, they'd started to pose whole new kinds of antitrust threats that couldn't be captured by a narrow definition of consumer welfare based on things like price or product variety.
LINA KHAN: One of the arguments was that a focus on short term price effects, for example, could disable us from recognizing monopoly power in its earlier stages, especially in digital markets—there can be a real premium on getting big as quickly as you can. [00:05:00] When you're looking to do that, you may not be focused on short term profits in the same way.
You're really looking to expand to build a huge user base, to build market share, and so some of the tactics that firms can deploy in those early stages can be anti-competitive, but they can really fall off the radar from antitrust enforcers if they're just looking at, for example, price or output as key metrics.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: In her 2017 Law Review article, Lina argued it was time to drastically shift our approach to antitrust enforcement. To return, in many ways, to the spirit of the original antitrust laws that had led to the breakup of Gilded Age behemoths like Standard Oil. The paper suggested that similar action needed to be taken now, by taking steps that included potentially breaking up Amazon.
Lina argued that focusing too narrowly on consumer harm had allowed a handful of tech companies and digital platforms to get so big and powerful. It had become nearly impossible for new businesses to compete. Antitrust [00:06:00] enforcement, she said, needed to go back to a more proactive approach. The paper went kind of viral, people went bananas, and it helped catapult Lina and a wider group of scholars calling for antitrust reform into the public sphere.
For a lot of scholars, it was a rallying cry, though others saw this reform movement as backsliding and dismissed it as a kind of vintage way of looking at monopolies. They called it "hipster antitrust."
Apple's Antitrust Problem - Professor Talha Syed - The BTLJ Podcast - Air Date 3-10-24
STUDENT INTERVIEWER IMAN ESLAMI: We'll get to discussing the Apple case in a bit, but first I wanted to see if you could help situate us in the current moment in antitrust. Why are we seeing so much antitrust litigation targeting technology companies in recent years?
PROFESSOR TALHA SYED: So, there's a number of explanations, but I would really single out two things.
First, is a bipartisan support in Congress for reviving antitrust concerns against big tech. For very different reasons, to some extent, but some overlap. Conservatives—republicans—are very much concerned about big tech's speech dampening [00:07:00] effects—their effect on political speech. And that's symbolized by Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, and so on. And then, liberals—progressives—are as or more concerned about big tech with respect to economic inequality and economic power. So, we have conservatives worried about their political reach, and progressives also concerned about their economic inequality and economic power. And we see the two sort of come together in the 2022 House Report on Competition in Digital Markets.
It's a 364 page report that, "Looks into the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, and their business practices to determine how their power affects our economy and our democracy." So I think that's one big source of the revival.
And then the other one I would single out is the rise of what's called the neo Brandeisian movement in antitrust. And I think we'll talk about that more, but just to single out one [00:08:00] thing, the current chair of the FTC—Lina Khan—is one of the pioneers in the legal academy of the neo Brandeisian movement. In fact, her 2017 article on Amazon's antitrust paradox is a bit of a touchstone of reigniting that—sort of reviving—antitrust scrutiny of big tech.
STUDENT INTERVIEWER IMAN ESLAMI: You mentioned the neo Brandeisian movement, and I think we'll touch on that a little bit later, but I wanted to focus on the first thing you mentioned—that there's bipartisan support for this current antitrust movement. In your class, you talk about how the current moment in the legal world and economics is one you didn't expect.
It's a fundamental realignment of the American political economy. And you talked about kind of four eras of legal theory, starting with classical liberalism up to the Great Depression, past the Great Depression there was the era of the New Deal and welfarism, and then in the 1970s, the emergence of neoliberalism.
But today you say there's a fundamental realignment, and it's one you didn't [00:09:00] expect. Can you explain if I was correct in my summary of your four moments, and why is there a fundamental realignment occurring right now? Can you explain this evolution and how we understand a fair and decent society in the context of technological innovation?
PROFESSOR TALHA SYED: Terrific. Yeah, I think you have it exactly right. My understanding is that you have to understand the American legal political economy— American political economy—in terms of different epochs or eras in which there is a sort of consensus—ideological and institutional settlement. And I think the ones that —the ones you mentioned, the last three are from, as you said post Civil War until about the 1930s, which I'm gonna call "classical liberalism."
Then the 1930s to about the 1970s, the "New Deal era of welfarism," and then the 1980 or so, or 1970s to, I would say today, "neoliberalism." I think it's becoming increasingly clear to everyone that we're having [00:10:00] a tectonic plate shift realignment, and right now we're in a period of fundamental change and a new ideological institutional settlement hasn't yet been forged, and we're in a period of real struggle about that. So, it's kind of an exciting and disorienting period.
I want to say a couple of things about each of these settlements, just to help ground the analysis of antitrust to follow. In the classical liberal period, we can understand many areas of law and policy—private law, federal law, constitutional law—to be structured by a guiding idea which was fundamentally, I would say, usefully summarized in terms of a couplet.
One, markets left to themselves produce liberty and prosperity. Therefore, "Laissez-faire." Leave them alone. Don't interfere. And I think this was the banner under which many areas of law [00:11:00] and political economy developed in the classical liberal period. And then what happened was a sea change that began, in fact, in the 1890s with the rise of the big trusts.
And then it kept going until finally it came to a head in the 1920s and the 1930s with the Depression. And here there were two fundamental motifs as well. One, markets left to themselves may fail to be competitive. Sometimes markets left to themselves may result in collusion, combination, or ruinous competition in which one firm is left standing. So, left to themselves, markets are not always competitive. Second, even competitive markets may, left to themselves, fail to produce social welfare. And so, the first idea was the foundation of antitrust. Left to themselves, markets may fail to be competitive. And the second idea was the foundation of consumer protection laws, [00:12:00] labor protections, macroeconomic policy, and so forth—all the things we associate with the New Deal revolution.
Then what happened—starting in the 60s, in Chicago with Ronald Coase, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Bork, Aaron Director—was a two-pronged attack on this New Deal consensus. And the two-pronged attack was, first, markets don't fail nearly as often as you think.
What you call a market failure is often just a transitory form of market dominance, which will soon enough be overtaken in a gale of competitive destruction or creative destruction. And second, even when markets fail, the government solution is often worse than the market failure. Governments can be captured or have informational problems, and therefore it's better not to intervene so much.
So the neoliberal period is, of course, a post New Deal resurrection, and [00:13:00] that's why it's called neoliberal. It's not classical liberalism. It's not just saying markets never fail and so on. It's saying markets do fail and antitrust has a role, but it's a smaller role and a more cabined idea of regulation.
And that has clearly been challenged ever since the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and so on. And with the election of Trump in 2016, I think it became clear to more people that we're in a fundamental period of sea change, realignment. And which way it falls, that's not going to be clear for a few years yet.
FTC Chair Lina Khan on Antitrust in the age of Amazon Part 2 - Planet Money - Air Date 11-3-23
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: Lina pulled a move from earlier in her career, when she studied the impacts of monopoly power on chicken farmers by talking to them directly. She teamed up with the DOJ to collect information directly from the public about how mergers have worked in the time of online platforms like Facebook, Amazon, or Uber.
LINA KHAN: We got a lot of input. We did a bunch of listening sessions with farmers, with [00:14:00] nurses, with health care workers more generally, with journalists, with musicians—really, with people across the economy to understand, on the ground, what has it looked like when you've seen mergers in your sector, and what have the real world effects been? We got thousands and thousands of comments, a lot of them from workers who had noted, for example, the ways in which mergers that have gone through have ended up resulting in their pay being cut, their work schedules becoming less predictable, their working conditions becoming worse.
We heard from small businesses, independent businesses about how mergers have resulted in them being muscled out of markets—not because they can't compete, not because customers don't want their products, but because firms that have merged have been able to use their muscle to bully firms and push them out.
So there are revisions that we put forward this summer, for example, address platform markets for the first time ever. They address labor markets, they make clear that the agencies are going to look at how mergers could [00:15:00] potentially limit competition. Not just in ways that will harm consumers, but also in ways that could harm workers and labor.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: The FTC and DOJ put out a draft of the new merger guidelines this summer and they give you a sense of how Lina is exploring broader types of harm than many of her predecessors. The FTC is now looking not just at how consumers might be harmed by a merger—by higher prices or less product variety—but also at how a merger might affect, you know, workers.
And in speeches and articles, she's also talked about harm to digital security—harm to privacy. But the merger guidelines are only one tool she has to change the way companies behave. For this agenda to have any real teeth, it comes down to filing actual lawsuits against companies that Lina Khan and the FTC allege have broken antitrust law.
And with those lawsuits, she's taken some pretty big swings. We asked Lina to walk us through four of those lawsuits. The first one was a case the FTC refiled against Facebook, arguing that some high profile [00:16:00] acquisitions from the last decade or so shouldn't have been allowed.
LINA KHAN: One of the claims there was that Facebook had become dominant on the desktop market. Then they quickly saw that the market at a later stage was shifting to mobile, and they saw that firms like Instagram and WhatsApp instead were threatening to become more dominant in the mobile space and make Facebook irrelevant. So we allege Facebook made those acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp because it viewed them as a threat in the mobile market.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: The FTC is arguing that the courts should unwind the deal, force Facebook to divest itself of WhatsApp and Instagram. We reached out to Facebook's parent company, Meta, for comment, and they referred us to a previous statement in which they say, "Our investments in Instagram and WhatsApp transformed them into what they are today. They've been good for competition and good for the people and businesses that choose to use our products." The court has not yet made a decision on this case. The FTC's lawsuit is still pending, but the case shows [00:17:00] how Lina Khan and the FTC are now thinking about why it's so important to stop anti competitive acquisitions earlier in the process.
The idea is that if regulators aren't paying close enough attention to emerging markets, especially in tech, huge dominant firms can just buy up any would be rivals and scuttle that market before it ever really gets going.
LINA KHAN: These technological inflection points can be really important moments of new competition, so the incumbents oftentimes feel threatened during these moments. We want to be making sure that we're not allowing dominant monopolies today to also solidify their monopoly power in tomorrow's markets through these acquisitions.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: And this is the underlying philosophy that's also motivating the second lawsuit we're going to talk about.
Another case the FTC brought against Facebook—this one after it had been rebranded to Meta. Meta was trying to acquire a virtual reality company called Within Unlimited. And even though that VR market was still in its [00:18:00] tiniest infancy, the FTC argued that Meta's behavior was still anti competitive because it preempted competition that might otherwise bloom in the virtual reality space.
So Lina and the FTC used an old legal theory that hadn't been used much for decades, since basically before the whole backlash against aggressive antitrust enforcement.
LINA KHAN: The FTC's case seeking to block Meta's acquisition of Within was really about what's known as "potential competition." The claims in the case included noting that Meta had actually been planning to enter this market itself and then ended up doing this acquisition in ways that short circuited that organic competition that we would have seen if Meta had organically looked to enter. So that was one of the counts. We also noted that just the mere fact that Meta was potentially going to enter also ended up disciplining the existing players in the VR market.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: Now in the case of Meta/Within Unlimited the courts decided not to block [00:19:00] that acquisition. Tell me a little bit about what happened in the decision and what lessons you're taking from that.
LINA KHAN: Look, we only bring cases where we believe there's a law violation, and our team did a terrific job putting together that case in a very compressed period of time. It's true, , we did not win and we were disappointed by that, but the court's decision also had a whole set of really important determinations about how this potential competition doctrine applies in digital markets.
In this case, one of Facebook's argument was that this doctrine is so old, it doesn't even apply to these markets. And the court firmly rejected that. It said, "No, this potential competition doctrine is alive and well, even in markets like digital markets, even relating to virtual reality," and it noted a whole set of important ways that that doctrine applies in this market and gave us a whole set of wins that we can build on in any future cases.
But of course, anytime we have setbacks in the court, we look closely at those [00:20:00] opinions and try to figure out what we do better.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: According to the court, the argument the FTC made in this case was, "impermissibly speculative," but the court did accept potential competition as a valid argument in theory, and Lina sees that as a kind of win.
How to Fight Monopoly Power with FTC Chair Lina Khan - Factually! - Air Date 11-8-23
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: When you're thinking about working with the courts, I was really struck by--I read one of Tim Wu's wonderful books a couple years ago, and his account of how this sort of transition happened was that the school of thought arose that all that mattered when judging a merger was whether prices went down. And one of the advantages was, that's very easy for a judge to understand. When we're talking about very complex financial transactions, and so the companies can just go say, Oh, the prices are going to go down and the judge is, Okay, well, as long as they are, bang! And so to some degree, it seems like you're part of a shift in a school of thought. But there's a bunch of people who maybe still have an older school of thought that you are not totally [00:21:00] in control of. And so I wonder, is it about trying to move the boulder a little bit by a little bit and making your case, and trying to change the overall body, or?
LINA KHAN: So look, the laws themselves talk about things like unfair methods of competition, monopolization. They don't say that can only manifest through increases in price. And so the laws are broad and flexible. And they're like that for a reason, because Congress recognized that, in 1890 or 1914, we can't foresee all the different ways that firms are going to monopolize markets unlawfully, and so we want to create flexibility. We want these statutes to be durable, to last over time. But what that means practically for us as agencies is that we need to continue to apply those laws to the new fact patterns that we're seeing. And the burden's on us to be persuading the courts and explaining to the courts why these traditional, century old laws should apply in this way in these new markets.
And, we've [00:22:00] already had some successes. Shortly after I joined the FTC, the court just tossed out the complaint against Facebook and we had an opportunity to refile it. After we refiled it, we actually got a really good decision where we survived the motion to dismiss. And the court recognized that, for example, degradations of privacy by Facebook itself can also be an indication of market power. And so that was important because, especially in some of these digital markets where people are paying with their data rather than with their dollars, what harm looks like and what exercise of monopoly power looks like will be different, right? If you're not paying any dollars, it's not an increase in dollars that you're going to be suffering, but say an increase in data that you're surrendering that you didn't actually want to.
And so we've already seen some incremental advances. I think there's a lot more opportunity. We're also in court on the consumer protection side in a case relating to Kochava, this company that we allege [00:23:00] has been making people sensitive geolocation data available to third parties in ways that's compromising people's privacy. And in that case, the court also has recognized that harms to privacy can intrinsically be a harm under the FTC statute.
So we're already seeing some progress. Of course, there's a lot more to do. We have more cases in the pipeline. Another area where we've been very active is our dark patterns work. So dark patterns--
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: I love this. Please.
LINA KHAN: Dark patterns are basically these manipulative design tactics that firms can use online when designing their website or apps to try to nudge you in some places rather than another.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: When they make the close box really hard to find on the thing they want you to opt into.
LINA KHAN: Exactly. Exactly. And so, again, we have our traditional statute going back 100 years, and we're now applying that to these dark patterns online, and saying that the method of deception might be different, but it's deception all the same, and the tools that companies [00:24:00] have to do it in digital markets is just going to look different. And so that's another area that we've been successful.
We're also doing a whole bunch of rulemakings, and so related to this, one of our rules right now is going to require that companies make it as easy to cancel a subscription as they do to sign up for one.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: That would be incredible.
LINA KHAN: Because firms use all these dark patterns to make it easy to sign up.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: I have been paying an embarrassing amount of money to my cable company for years because I don't want to call them on the phone, because I know that they're going to read me the whole script about--and I just I can't deal with it. I'm like, fine.
LINA KHAN: Yeah. So this is our click to cancel rule. We've got a lot of positive feedback about it.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Incredible.
LINA KHAN: We're also going after junk fees. So these are the fees that are surprise fees that come on at the end of your transaction. They're called things like service fees, convenience fees. Somebody was just telling me about an email fee that they saw just to get
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Even Uber has this. Okay, there's this charge, that charge, driver benefit charge--that's before a tip, it's infected really almost everywhere.
LINA KHAN: [00:25:00] Right. And it's frustrating for consumers. It's costing people billions of dollars. But it also harms honest competition, right? Because what it does is that it hurts the firms that are being upfront with you about what the total price is. And if you're on the front end saying, hey, it's just $10, but then by the time you get to the checkout, it's actually $18. The firm that advertised as $16 on the front end is going to lose out. And so there's a real dimension of this that's also going to promote honest advertising rather than dishonesty.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Because it's a way to make it look like you're getting a discount when you don't. And if some amount of people don't notice, then that's some unfair competition.
So when you say that you're putting rules in place, or is the merger guideline a rule? Does it count as a rule? Or is it a guideline?
LINA KHAN: Good question! It's guidance. So it technically doesn't carry the force of law, but we hope it can be persuasive and instructive.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: That was my question where there's laws made by Congress, there's the rulings by judges, but you're able to put out rules which [00:26:00] are somewhere in between. What status do these rules and guidelines have?
LINA KHAN: Yeah. So the guidelines are just looking to be persuasive. But when we do rules, those do carry the force of law. And so, for example, if we're able to finalize our click to cancel rule, our junk fees rule, that will mean that if a company engages in a violation of these rules, it'll be on the hook for money, we'll be able to take them to court, we'll be able to require that they pay back the victims. And so these rules actually do effectively carry the force of law, and that if they're violated, we can take enforcement action.
We also proposed a rule in January that would eliminate non-compete clauses from people's employment contracts, which is another rulemaking that's really important to us.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: So that would eliminate non-compete clauses, what, just like nationally?
LINA KHAN: Yeah, as we've proposed it, it would ban them nationally in people's employment contracts. There are minor exceptions for if you're looking to sell a business. But [00:27:00] these non-compete clauses started off in the boardroom, but they've really proliferated across the economy. And so you see security guards, fast food workers, but also journalists, engineers, health care workers, and so we've heard so many stories about how these non-competes a) are being used in coercive ways such that they're hurting workers. Our staff estimate that American workers are making $300 billion less because of these non-compete clauses. And it also means that there's just less job opportunity, right? These non competes actually lower wages, not just for people who are directly covered by them, but even for other workers. Because if you're covered by a non-compete and you're less likely to leave your job, that means there's less job opportunity, even for the workers that are not covered by the non-compete. And so overall, there's just less churn.
Trial Of The Century Is A Secret No More w Luke Goldstein - The Majority Report - Air Date 12-21-23
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Let's go back. The case is about the fact that Google is the default search engine and are [00:28:00] they essentially making it impossible for any other search engines to emerge when they have essentially cornered the market on how you access it? For instance, right now, if I go to my iPhone and I put in the URL some term: Luke Goldstein, it'll take me to Google to search you. And I never made that choice. It's just default.
Let's go through what's the evidence that default makes a difference? And if I can change this? And I think Google, their mantra was "it's four clicks away" or something. Explain that.
LUKE GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, exactly. Okay. I'll take this step by step. So just first of all, this is the first major monopolization case that's been brought by the government in almost 20 years. The Microsoft case was the last major one. So to win these kinds of cases, it's a Section two Sherman Antitrust Act. You have to prove, first, that a [00:29:00] company holds a monopolistic position based on a certain amount of market share, which is somewhat flexible. But in this case, that's not really up for dispute. Google, by its own admission, has well over 90 percent market share of search engine, the search engine market.
Then the second step is you have to show that the company has used its monopolistic position to harm competitors here. What the government argues is that these default search agreements are, really, the kind of bread and butter. But what defaults do is they automatically give Google a certain amount of scale, because people are just set up, preinstalled to use Google. They get a huge amount of traffic with that. And the traffic, the number of search queries on Google's devices, basically gives an advantage to refine the machine learning that drives the algorithm and improve the search engine function [00:30:00] for its product.
And Google is also collecting huge amounts of data through all that traffic. The data is the premium factor for advertisers, which is, of course, how the company actually makes money. So that scale and data advantage is basically an insurmountable barrier for any kind of upstart rival search engine that's trying to get into the market, that's trying to build a better product, or as we heard from some of the witnesses in this case, a completely different kind of business model for search engine. So we heard from this company called Neva that, probably not many of you have heard of because they had a very hard time getting off the ground. It was actually run by--the CEO was a former Google employee who knew the inner workings of the company, knew how the defaults worked, and said in open court, default agreements are one of the main reasons why we could never get any traction. They wanted to build a privacy-focused search engine that you would pay essentially a [00:31:00] very small subscription to use it. And they would make the revenues that way rather than selling advertising. When they would try to get distribution deals from carriers, internet companies, they would have meetings with executives and they would say, we'll let you on, but we're going to have to restrict your traffic basically, because we have this agreement with Google. And if there's anything that comes close to violating that contract, we could lose a huge amount of. money. And we're wary of doing that.
So the government brought forward a bunch of--
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: That's literally like saying Yeah, we'll feature your product in our store, but if it starts selling a lot, we're going to have to take it off the shelf.
LUKE GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, exactly.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: If you succeed, we're going to have to stop you. It's amazing.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And then I think then that's where we're at with the anti-monopolistic element of this is, should this company be able to be a one-stop shop for all of this kind of internet usage, because it creates anti-competitive incentives just based on the size alone.
If you could just respond to that, Luke, but [00:32:00] also, if you could expand more on what you talked about how they hoard data, and how useful that is in terms of maintaining a revenue stream, because the products that Google has come out with recently. I'm old enough to remember that Google Glass that went nowhere, you've got that how outside of that are they, that seems to me from the outside, how they make their money with the collection of all that data.
LUKE GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, absolutely.
Two quick points here, and then I'll expand it out.
I mentioned these smaller competitors, Neva, there's another one, BranchMetrics. But the default agreements are not just this kind of --it's a carrot and a stick. So there's a carrot in that they're handing over all this revenue to the big companies in this kind of oligopolistic arrangement. It's also a stick in that Apple at one point, as we learned through evidence that was eventually made available to the public, Apple had actually considered at one point creating its own rival search engine. And when Google caught wind of [00:33:00] this, they sent them essentially a warning shot that was like, no default placement, no revenue share. We're going to take away the billions that we hand over to you.
Apple also considered creating a choice screen that you could decide what you wanted your default to be. And Google said the same thing, we'll punish you by taking away all this revenue that we're handing over to you.
Apple's Antitrust Problem Part 2 - Professor Talha Syed - The BTLJ Podcast - Air Date 3-10-24
STUDENT INTERVIEWER IMAN ESLAMI: So on January 5th, 2024, the New York Times reported that the DOJ is in the final stages of investigating Apple, and could file a sweeping antitrust case targeting the company for its anti-competitive strategies as soon as March of this year. This is not the first case against a large tech company in recent years, as we've talked about, but as the most valuable tech company in the world, having yet to face major antitrust litigation in this neo-Brandeisian moment and in this fundamental realignment, this feels significant.
What do you think are the merits of an antitrust challenge to Apple?
PROFESSOR TALHA SYED: So, I can't know for sure, I can't say for sure, we don't know because the details [00:34:00] are scant yet of what the theory is. But for as best as we can surmise from media reports and from prior cases against Apple, in particular Epic versus Apple that went to the Ninth Circuit but was not given cert at the Supreme Court. What we can surmise is that fundamentally the case is going to revolve around the extent to which Apple is tying various secondary products, like its Apple Watch, its iMessage app, and the App Store itself, to the iPhone. So that's the fundamental idea. Apple has the iPhone, this juggernaut, and then it has a series of other products, which it seems to interlink in very technologically or contractually sticky ways, so that they are privileged by iPhone users against competitor products.
So, I think that's the [00:35:00] fundamental central theory, a set of tying theories, if you will. And, now, the Epic versus Apple case, the Ninth Circuit decision, didn't directly, at least in the opinions, attack the tie between the iPhone and the App Store as a platform. But it seems to me this is the most promising theory. The most promising theory it seems to me is very much like the old Microsoft case in the nineties, when Microsoft was alleged to be tying its Internet Explorer to its Windows operating system.
So, I think here, the most plausible argument is Apple is tying the Apple Watch, the iMessage app, but most importantly, the Apple App Store to the phone. And that this is being done for the sake of leveraging its monopoly or market power in the smartphone to get market power [00:36:00] in smart watches or in app stores or in pricing the commissions of app suppliers to iPhone users. That to me is the most promising theory.
STUDENT INTERVIEWER IMAN ESLAMI: But what do you think if Apple comes back and says people are buying all the products in our ecosystem because our products are just better?
I think back to myself. Before starting law school, I bought a new MacBook. I bought an Apple Watch, because I've been using the iPhone for almost 15 years now. And it just makes sense, the integration between all the products is helpful for me. And I think this is something that consumers might, you could argue, that consumers might want.
So, how do you think the government will argue against Apple saying that our products are just better?
PROFESSOR TALHA SYED: So that's really great. And we have to separate three different arguments lurking in what you just said, which is, I think, exactly what Apple's going to say. And I think two of the arguments are plausible, but one is less so, right?
So, one argument that we already know, and we have Tim [00:37:00] Cook being cited, is to say Apple does not have market power or dominant market power anywhere. But I don't think that's really the claim. The claim isn't that Apple doesn't have market power. The point is, possessing market power isn't in itself illegal under Sherman Act Section 2.
What's illegal is not having a monopoly, but monopolization. And monopolization means the pursuit or acquisition of monopoly power through illegitimate or exclusionary or anti-competitive or willful means. And so fundamentally Apple's argument has to be that it legitimately got market power in the smartphone market through a better product, and it's now legitimately recouping its investments in that product through higher commissions and others might charge for app suppliers on the App Store. And it's legitimately integrating the App [00:38:00] Store with its phone, with the Apple Watch, to provide what it calls "the walled garden" of security and privacy and interoperability for customers--a better consuming experience. So that's Apple's best argument. Not that they don't have market power, but that they have market power legitimately acquired in one market. And that they're not illegitimately now leveraging that market power for market power in other markets. That's their best argument, but I'm not sure it holds up, because you can provide consumers integration in a more optional way. It doesn't have to be technologically sticky or fixed that the App Store is, or contractually fixed at the App Store is your default or only way of getting apps. Of course it's not your only way, but for most consumers it is.
And so, if consumers truly wanted the benefits of the walled garden, there are arguably [00:39:00] lesser restrictive ways that Apple can provide those benefits without using its market power in the smartphone market to extend or increase market advantages in smartwatch or application platform markets.
And so I think that's fundamentally where the argument has to come down: Is Apple's walled garden integrated market argument going to hold up, or do we say, well, no, there's a lesser restrictive way that's substantially lesser restrictive on competition to provide consumers the option of this integration while still opening up access to iPhone consumers, other smart watchmakers, other app developers, other app stores.
FTC Chair Lina Khan on Antitrust in the age of Amazon Part 3 - Planet Money - Air Date 11-3-23
JEFF GUO, HOST, PLANET MONEY: Another one of her big swings? The FTC's attempt to block what are called vertical mergers. That's when companies buy up other companies in their industry that they don't directly compete with, like a car company buying a smaller tire manufacturer, for example. [00:40:00] Under recent mainstream interpretations of antitrust law, vertical mergers are generally seen as okay. They're not seen as anti-competitive. They're even seen as a way to improve efficiency, which is good for consumers.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: But, Lena Kahn argues, those mergers can come at a big cost. They can give a company too much power in an industry. And you can see this argument playing out in case number three, the FTC's attempt to block Microsoft from acquiring a video game company called Activision Blizzard.
JEFF GUO, HOST, PLANET MONEY: Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, they aren't direct competitors. Not exactly. Microsoft makes the popular gaming console, the Xbox, while Activision Blizzard makes games. But the FTC's case argued that this merger could allow Microsoft to starve other video game platforms, like the PlayStation, from getting access to big Activision games, like Call of Duty.
LINA KHAN (2): We've generally had a market where you could have platform agnostic content developers that are able to reach video [00:41:00] gamers through a whole set of platforms. And there's a risk that if this acquisition goes through, we'll instead see a shift to a series of walled gardens that will make it much more difficult for organic content to be getting to video game users.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: But the courts decided again in this case against the FTC. They let Microsoft's vertical merger go through, saying the FTC hadn't proven the deal would hurt consumers, though the FTC is still pursuing a case post merger.
JEFF GUO, HOST, PLANET MONEY: This leads us to the fourth and final case that Lena walked us through, the one that many people across the world of antitrust had been waiting for for years. This fall, the FTC brought a case against the subject of her famous law school paper, against Amazon.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: But the crux of the FTC's case against Amazon rests on more conventional antitrust arguments about consumer welfare, that Amazon had had a policy that harmed its third party sellers, which ultimately had harmed consumers.
LINA KHAN (2): So our lawsuit lays out how [00:42:00] Amazon is, for example, harming the millions of merchants that rely on Amazon to access consumers. In today's digital economy, if you want to be visible in e-commerce, you generally have to sell on Amazon, and the lawsuit lays out a set of tactics that Amazon has deployed against those merchants that we believe are anti-competitive. It has basically dictated policies that say, if you sell on Amazon, you can't list your products on any other website for a price that's lower than what you're listing on Amazon. And one reason that ends up being problematic is because Amazon has also been hiking the fees that it charges these merchants. So these merchants face higher costs on Amazon, but are not able to raise their price on Amazon to reflect those higher costs. And instead they have to either raise their price on other websites, or they just stop selling anywhere else entirely, because Amazon is so punitive when it does see [00:43:00] that people have listed their products elsewhere for a lower price.
And so at the end of the day, Amazon's tactics are actually resulting in higher prices, not just on Amazon, but across the rest of the economy. And if you step back, in a healthy, competitive market, if you have a company that's raising prices for its customers and making the service worse, you should expect competition, right? It creates an opening for new businesses to come in and take business away from that incumbent. But we really haven't seen that successfully in this market. And we allege that in part because Amazon has engaged in illegal tactics to block rivals. And so it's able to harm its customers without really paying the price that it should in a competitive market.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI - HOST, PLANET MONEY: One thing that a lot of people have pointed out about this case is that it's not exactly the same prescription you called for in your famous law school paper. That frames the harm on terms that are familiar to the consumer welfare standard way of thinking about monopoly power. Help us understand how your kind of thinking and strategy has [00:44:00] changed between the time that you wrote that paper and now what you're bringing as chair of the FTC.
LINA KHAN (2): I'll say as a general matter, the exercise of doing independent research and writing an academic paper is very different from being a law enforcer, where you have subpoena power, you can investigate what's really going on, and ultimately you're charged with, if you bring a complaint, making sure you're alleging law violations and setting up that case to succeed in court.
But that said, I'll also note that when you have the monopoly playbook, there are different life cycles of where you can be at any given moment. And the tactics that a firm will take to achieve monopoly power, to become a monopoly, will look different from the tactics that it deploys once it's become a monopoly and is really focused on protecting that monopoly and exploiting that monopoly power.
And so the case that we brought really reflects Amazon in the year 2023 and what we believe is now extraction mode, where having cemented its monopoly power, having locked out rivals [00:45:00] through this illegal tactics, it's able to extract from customers, both on the consumer side as well on the seller side.
And so that's what the case is about. If enforcers had investigated and decided to bring a case a decade ago, there's no doubt that the set of tactics that would have been focused there would have looked different.
BONUS Real Estate Fees Crushed By Anti-Trust w David Dayen - The Majority Report - Air Date 3-26-24
DAVID DAYEN: The issue is that the national association of realtors and a bunch of large brokers have set up these conditions that mandate the 6% commission. And one way they do it is they control what is called the multiple listing service or the MLS. And if you're on Zillow, if you're on Redfin, and you're looking for houses, which, used to be the province of the buyer's agent, only the buyer's agent had, you know, the listings of what the houses were, now everybody has it because of these websites, so, like, why do we need a buyer's agent?, is a question. But the only way that you can get your house on the MLS as a seller is [00:46:00] if the agent stipulates specifically that how much of a commission they're going to give the buyer's agent. So, this is collusion, right? This is the seller's agent saying ,I will give you part of my fee and that is the condition for which I will list this home so everybody can see it. And so the seller's agent has to do that. The buyer's agent then knows, Okay, this house is listed, which means I know what amount of money I'm getting. A house that's unlisted, that's a for sale by owner, for example, I don't know how much I'm getting. So, the buyer's agent can steer their customers away from homes where they get a smaller fee.
And so, this has been in place for a long, long time. And finally some plaintiffs' lawyers put together a class [00:47:00] in Missouri that said this is an illegal price fixing conspiracy. And they won the case. And they won the case with an insane verdict, that was given by a jury, of 1.8 billion dollars. And that was just for sellers of homes in Missouri, right? This is not the whole country, 1.8 billion. And because it's an antitrust case, you can triple the damages. So, the judge could put that at 5.4 billion dollars just for Missouri. That verdict came out last year. It ended up spurring a bunch of copycat cases. The National Association of Realtors was on the hook for tens of billions of dollars which they don't have. And so what they did was they settled this case, just last friday for I think 418 million dollars.
But more important than that, [00:48:00] they said, Okay, we will end this rule that in order to get listed on the MLS you have to split the commission. And what this is going to likely do is create new standards in the industry that will dramatically drop the amount of commissions that sellers pay, and to a certain extent buyers pay, and that is likely, according to economists that have looked at this, to be a 30% reduction in these fees.
By the way, the US pays the 6% commission, in the UK the commission is more like 1%. So, we have the highest commissions on real estate in the world, and this ruling, and the settlement is going to likely bring those more in line with the rest of the world, which means a savings of about 30 billion dollars for people who buy and sell homes. This is a hundred [00:49:00] billion dollar a year business, real estate commission.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Nobody does middlemen like we do middlemen here. I mean, all this sounds like, you know, managers in show business and sort of the double dealing that happened with, you know, the manager becomes the executive producer and all of a sudden they're working both for the buyer and the seller at the same time, essentially.
All right, but okay, so let's talk sort of like practically what we can maybe expect, because the seller is still responsible ostensibly for 3% of the seller agent. Do we know how this... let's put it this way: Is there going to be any standardization? Because like I know in New York City, it 's been that 3%, but if you go upstate, you can have the option of paying your seller-broker and hiring them and getting some type of exclusive deal with them, and I [00:50:00] don't know if they end up getting the commission or not at that point, but it's a different relationship that's not available, I think in New York City. So I don't know what it is in other places.
DAVID DAYEN: I think you're going to see a lot of innovation in this industry. And the example to look to is travel agents. We don't really use them anymore unless you're a large business that is conducting a great deal of travel, there really aren't a lot of travel agents out there. And that is because companies sprouted up and said, Hey, you can book this and we'll make it real easy and you can book this on your own. I think that's the kind of thing that you're going to start seeing with respect to the buyer side of the business. So, you could see a buyer agent put up an offer of, Hey, I'll do this for a flat fee, $2,000 I'll do it for a flat fee. And that would be a tremendous savings. They're going to undercut that competition because there actually will be competition now. And I think the [00:51:00] buyer is going to have a lot of better options. Now, it won't seem like better options because the buyer will have to pay that maybe up front and make an arrangement with their agent up front. Whereas now they just hire an agent and they kind of feel like they don't pay them, but they do, because it all gets folded into the price of the sale.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Right.
DAVID DAYEN: And so these commissions are a portion of that sale price. So, what you're likely going to see is the sale price come down you know.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So I've been looking at a house for, whatever it is, $250,000, and this comes out this ruling comes out, and they've made this change, theoretically, I'm looking at that thing and it should all of a sudden be like, $10,000-15,000 less or something like that, right?
DAVID DAYEN: Yeah. And I think that the dynamics of the market are such that that is what's going to happen. And so it's really a reduction of fees, junk fees, you could [00:52:00] say, on on real estate sales, but it will look like a reduction of prices in the cost of homes.
BONUS Trial Of The Century Is A Secret No More w Luke Goldstein Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 12-21-23
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: There was a quote that you had in your piece—I can't remember what it was—along the lines of, like, We don't have to spend anything on improving this thing. We've locked it all up.
LUKE GOLDSTEIN: Yeah. It's almost even better. I'll tell you some of the backstory behind that. That full document that that's from is, it's one of Google's top executives, I believe it's the vice president of advertising, who's comparing Google's business model to drug markets and cigarettes in terms of how lucrative it is. And that was a major moment in the fight for public access in the trial. Google and the Department of Justice were fighting over whether that document was going to be presented in open court. And this was just one of many, many such instances. Google pushed as much as it could to keep proceedings of sensitive, you know, documents and evidence, they wanted them to be in closed door [00:53:00] proceedings rather than open court. And in that moment, in the fight over that document, Google also took this opportunity to try to kind of admonish the Department of Justice because they had been publishing evidence shown in open court on a sort of digital portal on its website, which to my understanding, and from other people I spoke to, is fairly common practice for these kinds of cases.
The judge got mad at the Department of Justice for not informing him that they'd been doing this, and he told them to take down all the public evidence that was already being shown in open court. And that's when a Bloomberg reporter, Leah Nylen, actually stood up from the audience section and protested this decision and said, this is important public access, it's public evidence, we would like to have a third party representative from the press in the room if you're actually going to go forward with this. That was this kind of watershed moment when a lot of outside outlets started to, kind of [00:54:00] realize that, Well, you know, why aren't we hearing that much of what's coming out of this courtroom? There were a number of articles about how...
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I want to just, I would just want to, I want people to understand the context of this, 'cause this really is extraordinary. And because, the judge had decided there would be no audio feed for this court. Now, why is that important? Because if there's an audio feed, you can be anywhere in the country. Where was this? This took place in where?
LUKE GOLDSTEIN: DC District courthouse.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: In DC. So,you could be in New York. You could be in San Francisco. You could be a tech reporter. You could be an antitrust lawyer. It doesn't matter. You could be a reporter. You could literally report on the case from afar. Instead, everybody has to go. And there's a limited amount of resources to send people. But then on top of that, you have veteran reporters of antitrust cases, and there's really not that much of a beat for that as much anymore, because the last one was Microsoft, which we should say, very similar case in terms of default, but we can talk about that in a moment. [00:55:00] And it really is sort of—I mean, I don't want to overhype this—but like a reporter gets up in the middle of a case, it's not, it's not like they're party to this case. They're just in the, basically, the peanut gallery saying there's something really going on here.
And it's interesting because to me, what really provides insight is, the judge is intimidated, it feels, like from the beginning by Google, on some level, and just acquiesces. The DOJ, I think Matt Stoller is quoted in your piece saying the DOJ, they just want to win. And if they buck up against the judge, the judge could be predisposed to being annoyed by the DOJ and they feel like they can win because they have access to it and they can just make this case.
But it's amazing how the judge is both intimidated by what the defendant, and then when there is light [00:56:00] shined on this dynamic, in a dramatic fashion—and we've had people on, I think, reporting on how all of this stuff was being kept secret, and it doesn't make the same splash—but when this reporter stands up, then other reporters, particularly The New York Times, are sort of like, almost embarrassed or, slash, see a thread they can pull and the whole process starts going.
So, she gets up there from Bloomberg and says, This is wrong. And then what happens?
LUKE GOLDSTEIN: Yeah. So, there's this kind of arrangement, as you described, that is really led by Google. I mean, it became clear in the first couple of weeks, Google devised this strategy that was, you know, We want to control the narrative coming out of this courtroom and so we're going to try and just block as much information as possible and kind of just hope to sweep this under the rug. People will sort of tune out. We think that'll [00:57:00] work in our favor. And judge Mehta, in the early court proceedings, had this quote when they're just figuring out procedural stuff, and he says, you know, I'm just, I'm slightly paraphrasing here, but not that much, he says, I'm just a mere trial judge. I don't understand how complicated technology markets work. So, you know, I'm going to more or less defer to Google here. And that was kind of maybe like the original sin of the trial. He actually admits this later on.
And as you said, the Department of Justice, you know, they're trying to win the case. They don't want to be an irritant, really. They want to stay on the judge's good side. So, there's this really kind of awkward complicity between the parties. Leah Nylen stands up and at that point, I also should note that that week, over half of the proceedings had been in closed court session. So, the other thing that does for press access: it was kind of a boiling point, is what I'm saying. So, [00:58:00] you're a reporter and you're in DC, okay? You've already overcome that obstacle. You show up, there's no trial list when you show up for that day in court, you don't know how much of it's going to be in open court. A lot of people just stop showing up. I mean, you don't have copy to turn into your editor by the end of the day. Most of the reporters are just kind of hanging out in the hallway. Hoping to, see when they can get back in the court or, put a mic in some lawyer's face who's coming out of this closed court session.
So, that moment with Leah Nylen kind of breaks this spell and the judge sort of eases off and from the rest of the court, for the rest of the trial, I mean, it's all in in open court. That was one actual, kind of concrete victory. But there's this other problem, which is that Google wants to have this review process for evidence that's already been shown in open court, for the posting of those documents. And the judge kind of acquiesces, allows for there to be some kind of [00:59:00] streamlined process for both parties, DOJ and Google, to decide on this. But Google kind of has a veto. And the delays to all that evidence and transcripts getting out is what then gets The New York Times it involves and files this motion to protest the public access and the trial.
Final comments on the new show format tried out in the campus protesters episode as well as a retraction
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with Planet Money, describing the history of antitrust law. The BTLJ Podcast explained the sudden rise in interest in antitrust action. Planet Money continued talking with FTC chair, Lina Khan, about her thoughts on the need for a renewed antitrust movement. Factually with Adam Conover also spoke with Lena Khan, who explained that the courts are beginning to see things like privacy as relevant to monopoly power. The Majority Report discussed the current case against Google. The BT LJ Podcast looked at the arguments against Apple in their antitrust case. And Planet Money finished off with Lina Khan discussing the impact of vertical mergers. [01:00:00]
That's what everybody heard, but members also heard bonus clips from The Majority Report discussing the case against the real estate companies artificially locking in higher than reasonable commission structures for themselves. And The Majority Report also looked at how the case against Google went from closed sessions to open court, a win for journalism.
And now to wrap up just a couple of quick notes about the previous episode on the campus protest against Israel's war in Gaza, the first is to issue a retraction, which I am not sure I have ever had to do before. So this is new.
In short, there was a comment made by a college activist referring to stories they'd heard, which is always a questionable way to start a sentence before conveying information, that turns out to be almost certainly untrue, and at the very least unsupported by any reporting that I could find.
And to be clear, I did hear this comment in the production process, [01:01:00] about how the Israeli military was treating the bodies of dead Palestinians in relation to hundreds of bodies being discovered buried next to a hospital. And I thought to myself, Really? I better check on that. And then I forgot. Now the hundreds of dead bodies next to the hospital seems to be true. And even the story of bodies being buried, exhumed and reburied also seems to be true, likely because Israel's military were hoping to ID hostages who had been killed, so they were digging up bodies to take DNA samples or in any other way, ID the bodies. But any accusations beyond that, which originally appeared in the show, but have now been removed, can't be supported with evidence.
So we regret the error. Like I said, I always had my doubts and I simply forgot to double check them. And as a big believer in knowing the difference between [01:02:00] explanations and excuses, I know exactly what the explanation is for why I forgot to check. I can tell you all about how the week leading up to the publication of that episode went and you'd be like, oh yeah, that does somewhat explain it. But still, that is not the same as an excuse. So I don't mind simply taking it on the chin for this one. And I only bother to explain further to say that I truly don't believe that this was an example of a systemic problem with the show or our curation process or editorial guidelines or anything like that. It is very much rather a specific circumstance with a specific, unfortunate result.
And speaking of specific and unique circumstances, if you haven't already heard the episode on campus protestors, please do, because it's an experiment with a brand new format of the show. I mean, well, actually it's both exactly the same and completely different from what you're used to. It's the first major change I've tried out in like [01:03:00] 17ish years. So I would love to hear your thoughts on it. My hope is that listeners will like to have the option to dive deeper into specific subtopics related to the main thrust of the show, in what I'm referring to as extra lettered sections, like in a newspaper. But for those who like things the way they are, they can stick with the front page, which will continue to be the same show you know. That's the idea so far, but I am happy to hear suggestions, criticisms, whatever you've got to help make any changes to the show as good as they can be.
So that is going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about this or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected].
Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our [01:04:00] 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. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny 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 continue the discussion.
So coming to from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestoftheLeft.com.
