Transcripts

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left Podcast. China is an undeniable force in the world relating to several major political issues, and to address their influence without a deep understanding of the history, context, and current dynamics would be to invite 100 years of humiliation.

Sources providing our top takes today include More Perfect Union, Siming Lan, the Financial Times, Our Changing Climate, TLDR News Global, Wendover, and Johnny Harris. Then, in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there'll be more on China's economic foreign policy, the EV wars, the tech and space race, and escalating tensions.

Joe Biden's Radical Worldview - More Perfect Union - Air Date 6-27-24

NARRATOR: In 2000, Clinton normalized trade relations with China, supporting the country's entry into the World Trade Organization.

ALAN GREENSPAN: The addition of the Chinese economy to the global marketplace will result in a more efficient [00:01:00] worldwide allocation of resources and will raise standards of living in China and its trading partners.

ROBERT REICH: Chinese exports flooded America and really were responsible for a large percentage of the losses of manufacturing jobs in the United States.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: And when the jobs disappeared, the shops, the banks, the people, disappeared too.

NARRATOR: Between 1998 and 2021, the US lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs due to trade policies.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: There's no future here with 75 percent of your refrigerators being built in Mexico.

They promised basically jobs for our kids if they wanted them. That's not happening.

RANA FOROOHAR: There was a real Faustian bargain that was made in the 1990s onward. We outsourced our entire industrial commons in exchange for cheap stuff.

We decided to stop making things and start consuming things.

One of the [00:02:00] beauties in some ways of the neoliberal system, at least for those that were buying into it, is that it was simple. As long as share prices were going up and consumer prices were going down, there was no problem. As long as companies were getting richer, things were supposedly fine.

NARRATOR: Amidst all of that wealth creation, America's middle class saw its share of national income decline.

RANA FOROOHAR: That's the sort of dirty little secret of neoliberalism, which is that, yeah, the pie got bigger, but fewer people got a slice of it.

All the things that make us middle class: education, health care, housing, the price of these things didn't go down. Indeed, the price of these things rose. At the same time you get a lot of cheap consumer goods, you also get a cost of living crisis. So it's a very dangerous paradox.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Please welcome the next [00:03:00] president of the United States, Mr. Donald J. Trump!

TODD TUCKER: It took, I think, essentially the 2016 election, where both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump critiqued that mainstream view for policymakers in Washington to really wake up to the reality of what they had wrought.

DONALD TRUMP: They say Trump is starting a trade war. I say, no, the trade war ended a long time ago, and the United States lost because our leaders didn't take care of our people and our companies. The era Of global freeloading and taking advantage of the United States is over, it's just over.

RANA FOROOHAR: There was a kind of a "coming to Jesus" moment under Trump, but the problem with the Trump administration is it didn't have any policy prescription for the US itself. It simply said, China's bad, we're going to slap tariffs on China.

NARRATOR: But at the same time, another, more ambitious policy plan [00:04:00] was being developed elsewhere. A senior advisor to Hillary Clinton was shaken by the loss in 2016. He traveled to Ohio, Colorado, and Nebraska to talk to Americans from across the political spectrum.

The result was a report, "Foreign Policy for the Middle Class," co-authored by Jake Sullivan.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: My national security advisor, I choose Jake Sullivan, and it helps steer what I call a foreign policy for the middle class.

RANA FOROOHAR: Biden comes in and says, we need an entirely new philosophy of growth.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Is based on a simple premise that will reward work, not wealth, in this country.

RANA FOROOHAR: He's created what some people would call Bidenomics, what some people would call a post-neoliberal world.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I don't buy for one second that the vitality of American manufacturing is a thing of the past.

RANA FOROOHAR: What this means is that he's decided to prioritize not just share prices and not just consumers, but jobs, [00:05:00] incomes, communities.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Today, we're getting to work to rebuild the backbone of America, manufacturing unions, the middle class.

NARRATOR: Over the past four years, The Biden administration has quietly translated that worldview into a multi-trillion-dollar set of policies.

TODD TUCKER: You have to go back to the 50s when the statistics were created to find anything comparable to the level of manufacturing investment that we see right now.

NARRATOR: That investment can be broken down into three pieces of legislation: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,

a massive infrastructure bill,

the Inflation Reduction Act,

helping to fuel a boom in clean energy all across the United States,

and the Chips and Science Act,

RANA FOROOHAR: boosting domestic semiconductor production.

We have not seen an infrastructure program this big since the Eisenhower era. We haven't seen ambition that government could do this much, I would argue, since FDR.

NARRATOR: Under Biden, investment in manufacturing construction has surged to more than triple the average rate of the [00:06:00] 2010s. And those investments are flowing disproportionately to counties where unemployment is highest.

TODD TUCKER: It could be ultimately trillions of dollars that get invested in the economy, targeted not at what private industry is focused on in recent decades, like stock buybacks and other policies that redistribute income upwards. Instead, we're seeing companies invest in real places with real workers for the first time in generations.

MORE PERFECT UNION REPORTER: How's it been? How's it impacted your life?

WORKER 1: Man, tremendously. My life completely changed, man. I got things now that I never thought I could have.

WORKER 2: Now we're in a position to where we have 19-, 20-year-old people that are working and are thinking about their future.

WORKER 3: It set you up for the future, medical, dental, vision, pension, something to fall back on when it's all over with.

NARRATOR: After decades of stagnating wages, these investments are creating well-paid jobs with good benefits. And that's by design.

TODD TUCKER: There's something called the Investment Tax Credit that's a part of the Inflation [00:07:00] Reduction Act.

NARRATOR: Think of it like layers in a cake.

TODD TUCKER: What it does is say that the public sector will help businesses cover 6 percent of their capital costs if they are just investing in a clean energy technology that we find interesting.

But you can get five times that amount if you're also paying prevailing wages, and running apprenticeship programs. You can get an additional 20 percent of that if you're investing in a low income community, 10 percent if you are investing in a community that's been historically reliant on the fossil fuel industry, and an additional 10 percent on top of that if you are using Made in America supply chains.

If you take all of the layers in the cake, companies could see up to 70 percent of their capital costs covered.

NARRATOR: These types of policies are an attempt to shift companies away from the financial logic that has dominated corporate behavior for decades.

TODD TUCKER: Take an example like Cleveland Cliffs. This is one of the country's premier steel manufacturers. In recent decades, they've engaged a lot in stock buybacks, to [00:08:00] reward their shareholders. Now they're working with the United Steelworker Union to build clean steel in places across the country.

NARRATOR: But in a global economy built by decades of free trade, what's to stop jobs like these from getting wiped out again?

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: You're about to get a clear view of China's capacity to build.

This is a really big moment for the global economy.

NARRATOR: The US has accused China of a practice called dumping: flooding the market with a surplus of goods, like electric vehicles or solar panels, at artificially low prices.

JANET YELLEN: We've seen this story before. When the global market is flooded by artificially cheap Chinese products, the viability of American firms is put into question.

NARRATOR: China has that surplus in part thanks to years of careful planning and massive government subsidies. But weak environmental and labor standards are also a factor.

TODD TUCKER: The worry is that if we are just importing the lowest cost [00:09:00] products, that it will undermine labor standards here at home, and undermine the US economy.

NARRATOR: Biden has kept Trump's China tariffs in place and recently announced new tariffs on Chinese goods.

RANA FOROOHAR: I thought Trump was right to put tariffs on China. I think Biden was right to continue them, not for punitive reasons, but because within the current system, China is not playing by the rules

NARRATOR: of the game.

The Biden administration's tariffs on China are targeted in the same sectors where it's investing at home, like steel, semiconductors, and clean energy. The goal is to protect the jobs created in those sectors from being undercut by cheaper imports.

RANA FOROOHAR: You simply cannot say, I'm going to outsource the entire clean energy transition to one country and not have any of those jobs in my own country and expect there to be a country left after that.

Just like it took 40 years for neoliberalism to play out, it's going to [00:10:00] take many years and even decades for the post-neoliberal era to play out. You look at, for example, in upstate New York, what's happening with the building of a semiconductor industry from the ground up. That's a 10-year process.

Big sea changes, like the one we're going through, are complicated. They're complicated to message.

It's hard to say we're moving from one political economy to another. That's not something that you message on Fox or MSNBC.

NARRATOR: Biden's new economic worldview hasn't been at the center of most political coverage. Instead, we get coverage like this.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: During his speech, the president made a gaff, saying, quote, Let me start off with two words.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Made in America. Made in America.

NARRATOR: But there is a coherent policy experiment happening here: a response to decades of neoliberal economics. Whether voters choose to continue that experiment could dramatically shape the future of the American [00:11:00] economy.

TODD TUCKER: So I think after one term of Trump and one term of Biden, we have a decent sense of how they're going to govern.

Trump broke with the neoliberal era when it came to trade. But he kept in place a lot of neoliberal policies like cutting taxes for the rich and deregulation.

ROBERT REICH: We've tried neoliberalism. What happened during those 45 years was that wages stagnated, Wall Street exploded, big banks got bailouts. Most Americans really came out on the short end.

And it pains me to say this because I was part of previous administrations. I was in the Carter administration. I was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. I think that these administrations accomplished a lot of good things. But, looking back historically, those administrations did not change the neoliberal consensus.

Joe Biden is changing it.

Why China Doesn't Identify with the West, Explained - Siming Lan - Air Date 9-23-22

SIMING LAN - HOST, SIMING LAN: A question that I got asked the most when I was living in England was: How [00:12:00] do you feel about China's CCP? And as a citizen, how could you put up with a dictatorship and not want to do anything about it? I always felt tongue-tied at the question because I could totally see where people came from.

PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: The process of democratization

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: with China's leaders about our deep concerns over religious freedom and human rights.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The progress of those countries in the former Soviet bloc that embraced democracy stand in clear contrast to those that did not.

SIMING LAN - HOST, SIMING LAN: On an intuitive level, I just knew China was different. But at the time, I couldn't put that in words other than telling people, well, I really wish you get to know China a little bit better.

And that is why in this video, I take it upon myself to explain why China's one party authoritarian rule gained so much consensus among Chinese people; and more importantly, why China seems so resistant to the criticisms from the West when it comes to its political system.

Before I do that, I just want to first point out the value and the thought tradition in the West because that is really important [00:13:00] to understand China and why we have such a big difference. Stay with me here, it will get more interesting.

For those of you who live in a western democratic society, people tend to have a more independent and autonomous understanding of a person. People are born with natural rights and they have all the freedom to pursue what they want to do, given that they don't harm the interests of other people. If we dig a little bit further, this thought tradition can date back all the way to people like Hobbes, as he famously argued in Leviathan, "I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition: that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner."

Government exists out of consent from people who voluntarily give up their rights so that the government can protect their long-term interests. And so politics is about administering justice and securing human rights.

The West's concern with the legitimacy of government is furthered by liberal [00:14:00] thinkers like Locke and social contract theories like Rousseau and Tocqueville. These people provide a plethora of intellectual foundation to make sure that the state does not have absolute state power. And that is why in the UK, neither the parliament, nor the judiciary, nor the monarchy has absolute monopoly over political authority. And in America's Constitution, the Bill of Rights, it protects civil liberties like freedom of speech, human rights, private properties, and limit arbitrary state power.

Okay, here's the thing. In China, our political tradition and system remained pretty much the same until 1911 when Qing Dynasty fell apart. And that was only because Chinese people finally realized that Qing government could not defend China from foreign invasion.

For thousands of years, Chinese people had been living under an imperial system and an all-encompassing school of thought called Confucianism.

Back in the olden days, Confucianism is kind of like Christianity, but [00:15:00] nowadays in China, it is still permeating into every inch of the Chinese society, including politics. Unlike Hobbes and Locke, Confucius taught us to think of ourselves in relation to something else: our family, our society, our community, and our country.

We have a moral code called filial piety. Under this ethical code, children are supposed to be obedient to their parents, wives to their husbands, and people to their rulers. People higher up in the hierarchy are considered as a benign authority, which means that they are meant to take care of their subjects in terms of their well being and happiness.

So that's why when it comes to the ruler of the state, just as a father was expected to make decisions on behalf of his family, so too was the ruler expected to make decisions on behalf of his people. The ideal government for Confucius was government for the people, not of or by the people.

Naturally, the legitimacy of the government falls [00:16:00] upon its ability to take care of its people. It includes things like economy, safety, and livelihood. If you look at the word "country" in the Chinese language, which consists of two characters, goa and ja; goa means state, and ja means family.

First, we have the state, and then we have families. Without the state, families cannot survive. And that is why, culturally speaking, Chinese people are so used to the idea of knowing your places instead of demanding equal political participation. In a word, we don't have the tradition of citizen participation and democratic ideals. And that predisposes us to accept a strong authoritarian government that uses tradition to bolster its rule.

Okay, I know now you might be asking, but what about Taiwan? Taiwan is both Confucius and democratic. So they aren't necessarily incompatible, right?

The second piece of the puzzle is found in the 20th century mainland China. And there's something really important to know. [00:17:00] After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the time you called "the century of humiliation," China's top priority has always been state building and fighting off the imperialist powers. China at the time was still marred by territorial invasion from foreign powers, burden from all kinds of indemnities from the loss of war, civil strife among the warlords and a raging inflation. On top of that, China did not have a political system to protect its people and reunite the country. We tried the Republic of China in 1912. We also tried constitutional monarchy in 1916. Both of these did not work. Finally, we have two political parties with a bit of power and some vision to rebuild China: the Kuomintang, the GMD, and the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party. Both parties favored an authoritarian one-party government during the war, but for the GMD, Kuomintang, its goal is to use the [00:18:00] authoritarian government to rebuild the country and reunite people before it transitioned into a liberal democracy. For the CCP, its goal is to eliminate class struggle and create an egalitarian, classless Chinese society. Both parties didn't like each other and didn't really put their heart into building a coalition government. So they ended up going to a civil war after Japan was defeated.

At this point, you can safely assume that the direction China took had everything to do with the vision of the CCP. The party's leader, Mao Zedong, at this point was pretty much done with using democracy to save China. And in his famous piece, "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship," you can see this attitude.

From the time of China's defeat in the Opium War of 1840, Chinese progressives went through untold hardships in their quest for truth from the Western countries. In my youth, I too engaged in such studies. For quite a [00:19:00] long time, those who acquired the new learning felt confident that it would save China. But imperialist aggression shattered the fond dreams of the Chinese about learning from the West. It was very odd. Why were the teachers always committing aggression against their pupils? For him, the only path to restore China's greatness was to follow the path of the Soviet Union.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Mao comes for help to his old Soviet comrades. He is a classic Marxist. He wants Soviet money, Soviet machines, Soviet technicians. A 30-year friendship treaty is signed. China gets a $300 million loan. Later will come machinery and advisors.

SIMING LAN - HOST, SIMING LAN: Through revolutions to create a classless society and eradicate all the imperialist powers inside China.

In China's early state building, it basically copied the system of the Soviet Union, including its constitution, one party dictatorship, the Leninist centralism to ensure the CCP control, and the land reform to [00:20:00] abolish the private property. The rest is history.

China is the way it is, not only because it has an intellectual foundation, but also it is a result of wars, trauma, self determination, and international influence. It is also a representation of the proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

I know at this point you might want to argue with me and say, well, all of that doesn't quite excuse the fact that China has suffered so many catastrophes under the CCP government, things like the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution. You know, things like that would never happen in a democratic country, because we have process, we have system, we have accountability. That is a solid point. And I won't even defend it. We have a very flawed system. But we are only looking at how China came about, and why it is still existing, and how it makes sense to its people.

Which lends on to my last point, the reason why China seems so resistant to the [00:21:00] criticisms from the West when it comes to its policies in foreign affairs, politics and economy is because Chinese people share a very, very nationalist narrative towards the past. Remember the term "100 years of humiliation" I talked about when I mentioned the Chinese history, the time when China was invaded by foreign powers, and were suffering from war. That is a big, big part of our collective memory and how we remembered our solidarity. It goes something like this: China as the Zhong Guo, the middle kingdom, had once fallen from grace. And we Chinese people had struggled through the war. Finally, we achieved independence and supercharged our economy. That kind of makes us entitled to having our own values and systems and ways of doing things. It's the interplay of culture, of history and national grievances that make up the [00:22:00] consciousness of the Chinese people today.

Yes, you can say it: we are proud, resentful and have a boulder of chip on our shoulder.

Has China's Belt and Road Initiative been a success? - Financial Times - Air Date 10-30-23

YUNNAN CHEN: In this period following the global financial crisis, the Chinese government pumps a huge amount of capital into a domestic economic stimulus. So you see massive infrastructure construction, a huge domestic investment in heavy industries. And around, 2011, You're already seeing excess capacity and a bit of an overheated economy. In this period is when we also see the government trying to push companies and exporters to go out to seek more lucrative, better returns in international markets. They also inject capital into China's policy banks and financial institutions, which enables them to provide the financing to support Chinese companies to win these contracts overseas.

JAMES KYNGE - HOST, FINANCIAL TIMES: It's really extraordinary that over 10 years, nearly a trillion US dollars has been [00:23:00] lent by these Chinese financial institutions for some of the recipient developing countries. Has this made a really big impact?

YUNNAN CHEN: We've seen huge railway projects, some mega projects as they're called, in the form of standard gauge railways in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya. High speed railways in Southeast Asia, in the case of Jakarta going through Laos. Also several port investments in Kenya, in Pakistan with the China Pakistan economic corridor. And in a lot of these places, this hard infrastructure is also tied into wider investments, a lot of which has also come from Chinese state owned enterprises and private companies.

So you see the establishment of industrial zones, which are trying to bring in greater foreign direct investment.

JAMES KYNGE - HOST, FINANCIAL TIMES: And so really, that seems like there's been a lot of very positive activity. Have you seen, clear impacts on the ground?

YUNNAN CHEN: Chinese investments have brought, local employment. They have increased incomes in some [00:24:00] areas, and they also have transform the landscape of cities across Ethiopia, across Africa, for example, in providing this much needed infrastructure.

JAMES KYNGE - HOST, FINANCIAL TIMES: But there has also been quite a lot of controversy around the BRI.

YUNNAN CHEN: Infrastructure overall is a very high risk sector. They're very, very long term investments. They take a very long time to really come to break even or to even make money. But what they do serve is a bit more of a public goods function. That said, there have been a certain number of Chinese projects that, have really struggled once constructed in making that economic rationale make sense.

JAMES KYNGE - HOST, FINANCIAL TIMES: What we read about now is that the Chinese government is having to bail out quite a few countries that were part of the BRI. One of the consultancies that we quoted in the Financial Times recently said that over the three years from 2019 to [00:25:00] 2022, the Chinese government was paying out 104 billion US dollars to bail out countries that had fallen down on borrowing through the BRI. How does China feel about being the lender of last resort to these developing countries?

YUNNAN CHEN: I don't think China is necessarily bailing out the recipient countries rather than bailing out its own banks. In the end, a lot of this finance, it's lent to the borrowing country, but ultimately it goes back into paying China's policy banks or commercial banks. And in the end it is the Chinese contractors that benefit.

JAMES KYNGE - HOST, FINANCIAL TIMES: Well, that's a very interesting point. So in a sense, this money is being lent by China to prevent, defaults by countries to Chinese financial institutions that have lent to the BRI.

YUNNAN CHEN: Exactly. There's been a systematic issue of moral hazard with a lot of these infrastructure projects. You have borrowing countries that. [00:26:00] have wish lists of infrastructure projects that they want to construct. You have Chinese companies who want to win these contracts, and you have Chinese policy banks and financiers who want to support these companies to go out.

And so in all of this, we've seen a period of exuberance, particularly in the early part of the 2010s, and then a bit more of a pullback, particularly after 2016. The critical juncture is when China loses a quarter of its US dollar reserves after the 2015 stock market crisis. And after that, you really see a growing conservatism and a bit more of a pullback and a bit more of a reassessment of the risks the financial sector is taking overseas and also domestically.

JAMES KYNGE - HOST, FINANCIAL TIMES: Going forward, do you think that the Chinese government is prepared to continue with these BRI bailouts? Are we going to see tens of billions of US dollars every year, being spent by the Chinese government to bail out these BRI projects, or are we going to see something different?

YUNNAN CHEN: Because of the way [00:27:00] in which these banks operate, they're also policy oriented institutions. What that has meant is that there's been a little bit of a kicking the can down the road approach when it comes to dealing with projects that are facing difficulties or borrowers who are struggling to repay the loans. Banks have generally been very unwilling to right down or make any kind of concession or debt relief that requires them to take a hit on their balance sheets. And in turn, I think what we've seen from the central bank is as well, trying to keep these financial institutions afloat and keeping them financially healthy so that they can continue to operate without having to agree to significant cuts or write downs in their portfolio.

Whether that's sustainable, I think, is to be seen.

JAMES KYNGE - HOST, FINANCIAL TIMES: So what do you think comes now then? is China falling out of love with the BRI? Is China going to stop the lending, to the Chinese? [00:28:00] The BRI projects or are we already seeing actually a decline in the level of lending to BRI? What do you think the future holds for all of this?

YUNNAN CHEN: The impact of COVID, I think, was really already a tail end of a very dramatic decline in overseas official lending. And there's clearly been a bit more of a pullback and a greater risk aversion from China's policy banks, as well as the ability of China's policy insurer to finance and to underwrite this overseas lending.

I don't think this means the end of the BRI as a narrative, and certainly with the forum this month there is still a very top level political commitment to what the BRI represents in terms of China's relations and as a platform to engage with the global south and with developing countries. But the rhetoric has shifted already. We're seeing more mentions of small and beautiful projects, a greater emphasis on a green BRI that's more [00:29:00] sustainable and prioritizes cleaner, greener forms of infrastructure investment.

Why China Isn't the Problem - Our Changing Climate - Air Date 5-5-23

CHARLIE KILMAN - HOST, OUR CHANGING CLIMATE: Asia's most populous country is by far the world's biggest polluter. But here's a little secret, that wasn't always the case. For most of the last two centuries, ever since fossil fuels were siphoned out of the earth and burned into the air, China wasn't even on the map in terms of emissions.

England, and soon after the United States, spent most of the 19th century and all of the 20th century pumping millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere well before China did. Emissions that have locked the world into soaring past the maximum amount of CO2 we can release for 1.5 degrees and even 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Winds stacked up against those two centuries of emissions, China's pollution seems a little less intense.

This doesn't mean that China's current trajectory isn't worrying, but instead that when we consider carbon emissions, we need to consider them cumulatively. Carbon dioxide can linger in the atmosphere for up [00:30:00] to 300 to 1,000 years. When we look at it from this perspective, the United States and Europe are the real culprits. They account for the most communal emissions since 1750. The United States alone is responsible for a quarter of all the world's historical emissions, while China has emitted just half of that.

So as much as politicians in the United States like to point at China's current annual emissions and claim that the country has to be doing more, the reality is that the US and its European counterparts were the ones that dug us into this deep climate crisis hole in the first place. That being said, US emissions have been dropping, and it seems like they're handing off the shovel to China, who's now furiously digging us deeper into a hole of climate chaos.

In 2008, China had a smog problem. The Olympics were right around the corner and Beijing looked like this. There were days upon days when people couldn't go outside because the air quality was [00:31:00] too low. But when you glance back through history, China's smog problem was nothing new. Beijing looked very much like LA in 1955 or London in 1952.

But China wanted blue skies for the 2008 Olympics, and in an effort to lighten heavy pollutants spoiling the air, they tightened air quality standards and restricted car use around major cities, initiatives that they continued sporadically and then in force after 2013. This seems to have worked.

While it still exists, China's smog problem has certainly improved as a result, but the coal plants at the source of these dark clouds are still firing away. It's here, at the heart of the coal furnace, where China's emissions problems lie. Coal powers China. Plain and simple.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: China's projected to build as much as 1,230 gigawatts of new coal-fired power capacity until 2025.

CHARLIE KILMAN - HOST, OUR CHANGING CLIMATE: To fuel the massive increase in energy consumption over the last two decades, China has turned to mining and burning coal in its three [00:32:00] northern regions of Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Shaanxi. Deemed the coal triangle, these three provinces produce 70 percent of the country's 4 billion ton yearly coal output according to Carbon Breed. Coal that then gets shipped around the country to fuel heavy industry like steel production, as well as fuel the explosion of residential energy use.

Because the fact of the matter is that China's energy use today is gargantuan. Taken all together, China's population uses 43, 791 terawatt hours of energy per year, which is almost double that of the United States. This coal soaked energy means that China's yearly emissions are substantial. China generated 11.47 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2021 alone, accounting for 27 percent of the whole world's emissions footprint. For perspective, the US accounted for 13. 5%.

But here's the thing, China is also the most populous country in the world. It's home to almost four times more [00:33:00] people than the United States. So when you narrow down into emissions per person, China is actually pretty efficient. It ranks 48th against the per capita emissions of all other countries. The United States is 14th. So while China's overall emissions and energy use is certainly large, we can't ignore the fact that its people are creating significantly less impact than many other countries—especially if you factor in exports, because China is the factory of the world.

The carbon dioxide churning out of its coal plants is attached to phones and shirts that are bought up by Americans and Europeans thirsty for a good deal. As a piece from Carbon Brief notes, gleaning information from China's state media, the prefecture of Dongguan produces 1 in every 3 toys, 1 in every 5 smartphones, and 1 in every 10 pairs of trainers globally. So when we take exported goods out of the picture, China's emissions drop by 14%, while the United States footprint rises 7. 7%.

But regardless of China's current emissions, per [00:34:00] person efficiency, or historical responsibility, the fact of the matter is, they are still on an unsustainable path. In part, this is due to their continued construction of bigger and bigger coal plants and expansion of oil pipeline infrastructure across the country, negating any renewable technology expansion, which we'll talk a little bit about later.

In a time when Chinese leadership needs to be doing the exact opposite, they are increasing fossil fuel output. Chinese coal production reached a record high in 2022. That is what's causing a graph like this. Emissions in China are still on the rise, and they need to be rapidly curbed in order to stave off catastrophic climate change, a fact which the Chinese government recognizes and actually seems to be acting on. The question is, are they doing enough?

The Escalating Sino-Philippine South China Sea Dispute Explained - TLDR News Global - Air Date 6-26-24

GEORGINA FINDLAY - HOST, TLDR NEWS GLOBAL: The South China Sea is a 3.5 million square kilometre bit of sea that lies, unsurprisingly, south of China and Taiwan, in between Vietnam and the Philippines, and north of Brunei and Malaysia. It holds two groups of islands, the [00:35:00] Spratly Islands in the south and the Paracel Islands in the north. The dispute is basically a territorial dispute between those six countries about who has territorial rights in the area. And a lot of the tension revolves around China's somewhat expansive claim.

China claims historic rights to about 80 to 90 percent of the South China Sea via what's known as the Nine Dash Line, which is based on an unofficial 1936 map by Chinese cartographer Bai Meichu. China's claims are clearly inconsistent with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which China is a signatory, which defines a state's territorial zone as being 12 nautical miles from a state's coast, and it's exclusive economic zone as being 200 miles. For context, the furthermost point of China's Nine Dash Line is about 1200 miles from its shore.

Obviously, China's claim has also generated some tension with other South China Sea countries, not just because it contradicts their own territorial claims, but also because, at the moment, each of the six South China Sea countries occupies at least one [00:36:00] island in the Spratlys or the Paracels, which they sometimes have to defend from Chinese aggression.

Now in the 1990s and 2000s, this wasn't really a problem, and the various countries didn't really fight over the islands. However, since about 2010, tensions have steadily escalated, largely because that's when the CCP started militarizing and developing the islands, including dredging the nearby seabed to artificially make them bigger.

Now the CCP weren't actually the first to do this. Vietnam and the Philippines, for example, had engaged in similar practices in the past. But the scale of the Chinese program is unmatched, and in the past couple of years, China has also begun developing previously unoccupied features, in violation of an agreement signed by the South China Sea countries in 2011.

The CCP's increasingly forward leaning policy here is probably a reflection of their growing anxieties about trade dependencies. For context, the South China Sea is the second most used sea lane in the world, after the Dover Strait, and something like 60 percent of China's total trade and 80 percent of its oil imports transit [00:37:00] through the region.

Anyway, Chinese policymakers have long worried about the possibility of a trade embargo cutting off their essential imports in the event of a conflict, and controlling the South China Sea mitigates these risks. Beijing's anxieties here have only been exacerbated by the US, which started performing what it describes as freedom of navigation exercises around the area in about 2013, and then stepped up their frequency under Trump. This basically involves US vessels sailing near or around features claimed by China, essentially exercising their rights under the U.N. Charter on the Law of the Sea and asserting the Charter's legitimacy by violating China's illegitimate maritime claims. It's worth noting that this is pretty hypocritical, because the US senate hasn't actually ratified the charter, but it still goes around enforcing it.

Anyway, tensions have subsequently been on the rise ever since, but things have become especially dangerous between China and the Philippines in the past few months. The China Philippines dispute mostly centers around the second Thomas Scholl, which is basically a protruding [00:38:00] reef about 200 kilometers from Palawan, but more than 1,000 kilometers from China's southern Hainan island. The shoal is widely considered part of the Philippines, and an international tribunal in 2016 ruled that China had no legal rights to the shoal, which lies within the Philippines exclusive economic zone.

The shoal has been occupied by a contingent of Philippine marines since 1999, when the Philippines deliberately ran a World War II era ship called the Sierra Madre aground on the reef to reinforce its territorial claim. These marines have to be resupplied every month or so, and for the past few months, Chinese ships have been trying to interrupt these resupply efforts using increasingly violent tactics, including water cannons, lasers, and even melee weapons.

This is probably because China suspects the Philippines of secretly reinforcing the Sierra Madre, which is sort of falling apart. While Manila denies this, last week the FT reported that officials close to the situation had privately admitted that they had indeed reinforced it. This has provoked irritation from the CCP, which has basically been [00:39:00] waiting 25 years for the ship to disintegrate so they can nick the shoal.

Anyway, things came to a head on Monday last week, when the Chinese Coast Guard rammed a Filipino resupply boat while brandishing makeshift spears, which ended with one Filipino soldier losing their finger. It's not clear from the footage whether or not the Chinese Coast Guard actually boarded the Filipino ships, but comments by Filipino soldiers claiming that their weapons were seized suggests they did, at least temporarily. This would be an unprecedented escalation, but not entirely unforeseen, given that just last week Beijing published new regulations allowing its coast guard to both board and use lethal force against foreign ships in its claimed territorial waters.

Now, Manila have since said that they don't quite consider the incident to be an act of war. And Filipino President Marcos Jr. has in the past said that it would require the death of a Philippine service member or citizen, "by a willful act", for the Philippines to declare war.

Nonetheless, this is deeply worrying for two reasons. Firstly, the two sides are stuck in an escalatory spiral. [00:40:00] While they've committed to a bilateral negotiation on the issue sometime in July, it's hard to see these talks coming to a productive conclusion, given that neither side has shown any willingness to give up its territorial claim.

Secondly, the Philippines has a 70 year old mutual defense treaty with the US with a NATO style Article 5 clause. And if Manila did deem Beijing's actions to constitute war, it would oblige the US to get involved. In March, the US secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin confirmed that the treaty extended to the South China Sea, and last week, US secretary of State Antony Blinken reaffirmed what he described as America's ironclad commitments to the Philippines. Whilst public comments suggest that China doesn't want war with the Philippines, let alone the US, and World War III still looks overwhelmingly unlikely, if the past few years have taught us anything, it's that escalatory spirals can be surprisingly hard to diffuse.

Why China's Economy is Finally Slowing Down - Wendover - Air Date 3-21-24

SAM DENBY - HOST, WENDOVER: From the perspective of China's central government, this did not appear to be the simple result of high demand clashing with constrained supply. After all, supply was at an all time high. [00:41:00] Almost a quarter of the country's housing units sat empty. There millions upon millions of completely habitable apartments bought and paid for but never inhabited. It just simply did not make sense for a country to simultaneously have some of the highest housing development rates in the world, some of the highest price growth rates in the world, and some of the highest housing vacancy rates in the world. Unless, of course, one considers the rather clear conclusion.

The value of housing had decoupled from its actual utility. It had become so attractive as a store of wealth that it was being traded based on its role as a financial asset, rather than its role as a place to live. This is a familiar and growing phenomenon across the wealthy world. Institutional investors are as involved in residential real estate as ever. But the extent of the issue in China was on another level. In 2018, a full 87% of home buyers already had another residence, indicating that, in a lot of cases, they were buying almost [00:42:00] solely as an investment.

From the perspective of the central government, this presented two issues. The first was the obvious. Skyrocketing prices made it increasingly difficult for everyone but the country's rich to find a place to live, which, as anywhere, has downstream effects in contracting labor supply even where it's in high demand. But the second issue was the more pressing one. The rapid expansion in vacancy rates demonstrated that the sales prices of property were stretching far beyond their intrinsic value. The prices weren't supported by the actual utility of the housing itself, and they weren't even supported by constrained supply. Rather, they were almost fully supported by the belief that prices would only continue to rise further. That's to say, the housing market had formed into a bubble. So, to avoid letting it burst on its own, the only question was when and how to pop it.

The answer was August 2020. Then, the central government rolled out three red lines: [00:43:00] three rules the property sector would have to follow or else face severe growth restrictions. Each was about reining in financial risk. First, developers couldn't have more in liabilities than 70% of the value of the assets the company itself owns. Second, developers couldn't owe more in debt than the totality of what the company itself is worth in equity. And third, developers couldn't owe more in short term debt than what it has in cash at a given moment. Even if a developer did not violate any of the red lines, they'd be capped at 15% year over year growth in debt, while if they violated one, the cap would be 10%, two, 5%, and if they violated all three red lines, they couldn't grow their debt obligations at all.

But these three red lines were far from a theoretical threat. Evergrande, after all, had a debt to liability ratio of 81% and a cash to short-term debt ratio of 67%. They were over-leveraged and short on cash, meaning they violated two red lines. And their net debt to equity [00:44:00] ratio was 99.8%, just a hair's breadth from the third red line. And thus, their cycles started to break. Evergrande had millions upon millions of apartments already sold to buyers, yet not completed. To pay builders and suppliers and others to complete these projects, they had to borrow more, yet faced with new restrictions due to their violation of the two red lines, they just simply couldn't. So, their cash reserves dwindled, their existing obligations remained the same, yet they had little ability to reverse course by launching new projects. And even if they could, the market had changed.

China was both the first and last major economy with significant COVID restrictions. As much of the rest of the world regained a sense of normality, China elected to vaccinate its population with generally less effective, domestic-made, traditional vaccines, as opposed to the more effective, novel mRNA-based jabs used elsewhere. So, to quell the various outbreaks that still arose after widespread vaccination, the country [00:45:00] maintained far stricter COVID policies than the rest of the world. Overall, economic productivity declined, and therefore, the entire economy and each individual's finances took a disproportionate hit. Simultaneously, the country's migrant worker class reversed course.

Individuals who had previously moved from their rural hometowns to cities, seeking brighter economic prospects, returned home. During the pandemic, for the first time in recent history, the quantity of migrant workers in cities declined. While this was accelerated by lower demand for labor in cities during the pandemic, many also pointed to the high costs of housing as why the higher salaries in cities were no longer worth it.

And finally, decades of demographic change were catching up with the nation. The steady decades-long decline in birth rates meant those in China's notably young core home buying age, centered at 29 years old, were beginning to represent a smaller and smaller fraction of the overall population. Even if the overall population stayed steady, for the moment at least, the proportion likely to buy a [00:46:00] home had begun to shrink.

So, Evergrande not only was prevented from taking on debt, it was also starting to struggle to generate money through additional sales of new projects. The two key money-generating stages in the cycle just were not working like they used to. But they still had debt to pay off and apartments to finish, so, backed into a corner, the company started rummaging for cash. Rather inexplicably, in 2018, it had established an electric vehicle manufacturing division that itself, perhaps even more inexplicably, included a major senior care division, but in 2021, it courted Xiaomi to see if they would buy a majority stake. Talks eventually stalled, and no sale was made. It also reportedly courted buyers for its stake in the championship winning Guangzhou FC soccer club, but considering Evergrande was losing millions of millions of dollars a year through that ownership, it also failed to sell. It was able to sell off its 18 percent stake in an entertainment joint venture with Tencent for $273 million, but this was ultimately a drop in the bucket [00:47:00] compared to what the company needed to right the ship.

So, ultimately, the death spiral began on Monday, December 6th, 2021, not with a bang, and not even with a whimper, but rather, with just simply nothing. That day marked the end of a grace period for already late payments on a set of bonds, but it came and went, without payment, or even an explanation of when payment might come. Then Tuesday passed with nothing more, and Wednesday, and by Thursday, with investors still unpaid, Fitch Ratings, one of the world's big three credit rating agencies, declared Evergrande in default. This was effectively the official, although largely ceremonial, signal to the financial world that they should not lend money to Evergrande, because they might not get it back.

As a property developer, a business model almost entirely centered around debt, default is pretty close to the end of the line. Even if the company could get loans, they'd be at such a high interest rate to offset the risks to the lender that the effective [00:48:00] cost of property development would be uncompetitive relative to the market. In fact, Evergrande did have an easier time than the average company in such a dire situation finding lenders, since many believed the company was too big to fail, such an instrumental part of the Chinese economy that the CCP would bail it out to avoid an economic crisis.

But that bailout never came. After a year or two sputtering along, restructuring debt, shedding off assets, cost cutting, in January 2024, a court in Hong Kong determined that it was just simply impossible. Evergrande could not be saved, the cycle could not be restarted, and the only option was to strip it for parts and make creditors as whole as possible.

But the crux of China's challenge is that this isn't just an Evergrande issue. While it was the largest, most dramatic example highlighted in international media, the forces that slayed the giant are putting pressure on almost every single property developer. Country Garden, another giant, appears just [00:49:00] months behind Evergrande, and after years on life support, is teetering towards liquidation. Dozens of other developers are in default, and over a hundred billion dollars of debt payments from the Chinese property sector have failed to get paid.

There are quite a number of forces putting pressure on the Chinese economy—their demographic shift, their deindustrialization, their increasing insularity—but the way the property sector has weaved itself so integrally through the nation means it serves to magnify every single one of those issues. At base, the fact that the sector accounts for an outsized portion of its gross domestic product means it simultaneously can account for an outsized drag on gross domestic product. But it also has a propensity for negatively impacting the demographics of people most central to China's economy. Stock market crashes, for example, have an impact on all, but impact those who have a higher portion of their income in the stock market most, which tends to be wealthier individuals and institutions.

The Chinese property sector, however, is a key [00:50:00] source of savings and investment for the nation's middle class. This demographic is the one most likely to have an outsized portion of their net worth tied up in a single Evergrande apartment that might now never exist. Money has just simply disappeared, and there's a gaping hole in the middle of the Chinese economy.

The Chinese property sector was always going to collapse. Its highly leveraged debt-fueled foundation was never strong enough to support itself in anything but the most gangbusters periods of growth. It was fundamentally flawed from the get go, so some sort of crisis always had to happen. So, what's happening in the Chinese economy is essentially a controlled demolition.

But this does represent a uniquely tenuous position for the central government. The Chinese social contract, unsaid but always understood, is that individuals sacrifice personal liberty in exchange for common economic prosperity. While dissent, of course, appears, since nobody truly gets a choice whether to make that trade off, a huge portion of the population [00:51:00] wholeheartedly believes in this social contract.

After all, it's hard to argue with the means when the end is 800 million people lifted out of poverty. But that's now history. If Xi Jinping can't deliver his end of the bargain, if the common economic prosperity wanes, then the question in everyone's minds is why they should have to deliver theirs.

Our New Global Economy - Johnny Harris - Air Date 12-20-23

JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: People in the 90s would have never guessed what direction this story is about to go. The Soviet Union had just fallen. Free trade and global capitalism had unambiguously beat communism. And the magic of the free market was seen as the solution for pretty much everything.

Free trade had just ended global conflict between these great superpowers. Maybe forever. Free trade was eradicating global poverty. Free trade was pushing countries to adopt democracy. And here's Bill Clinton, giddy about how good it's all going, predicting that free trade would bring democracy to China.

BILL CLINTON: The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people. Their initiative, their [00:52:00] imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.

JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: Free trade would prevent our age old human curse—war—by so deeply entangling countries in mutually beneficial deals that it wouldn't make sense to fight. After all, free trade had turned Europe from a continent ravaged by war to this tightly knit group where everyone's holding hands and smiling together. Why wouldn't this naturally just happen to the whole globe?

China continued to make stuff and send it to the United States. Our dependency on them and them on us continued to grow and that would surely prevent any conflict, right? Um, no. It's looking like that's not how it's what's going to turn out. In fact, it's kind of the opposite.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The new tariffs from both sides went into effect earlier this morning.

The US has imposed 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports.

China is our military's most consequential [00:53:00] strategic competitor and pacing challenge.

JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: In a relatively sudden shift, governments around the world are undoing a lot of this globalization. This solution to all of our problems, they're rejecting it.

India is paying companies to keep their production within their own borders, especially for important industries like pharmaceuticals and electronics. South Korea is giving taxpayer money to companies to produce green energy infrastructure, instead of waiting for the free market to come build it. Japan is paying companies to move production back to Japan and to move their supply chains away from China.

Australia is using taxpayer money to encourage mining companies to establish the processing of rare earth mineral facilities within their borders instead of abroad. Nigeria is imposing restrictions on foreign goods that they want to see produced domestically, like rice and cement. They don't want to be reliant on other countries.

And then you've got Europe, where tons of countries are investing government money and protecting homegrown industries that have always been directed by the global economy, like energy, agriculture, and [00:54:00] cars. The government getting involved in these markets incentivizes companies and consumers to make and sell these products in-country as opposed to looking abroad at the global market.

And of course, leading out on all of this is the OG of the modern free market global economy—the United States—who is suddenly changing course from how they've been operating all the way up until, like, Obama. Like, Obama spent a great deal of his time trying to increase free trade, especially with Asia, then first under Trump and now under Biden, the US is overhauling its economic policy to turn back some of this free trade. And what's crazy is that both Republicans and Democrats seem to agree that we should do this. And fast.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: There is no reason. We have the capacity.

JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: Some of these policies include huge government spending bills like the CHIPS Act, which would allocate over 50 billion government dollars to companies that produce microchips here in the United States instead of in Asia where the free market had pulled them to set up.

This is also happening in other [00:55:00] industries that the government has deemed vital, like critical minerals, cars, and clean energy. But they're not just giving subsidies, like, it's not just government money washing down on all these industries. It's also barriers. Biden is imposing tariffs on imports, which protects domestic producers of certain industries because they no longer have to compete with the global market.

They're also banning American companies from selling certain products to China. They're increasing scrutiny on any investment that comes in from places like China. Like, this is a big shift. And the question is, what happened? How did we get from this—free trade heyday that was supposed to usher in world peace—to this?

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Markets have been whipsawed all morning and now afternoon by this ongoing trade war with China.

JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: The short answer is one word, the answer to all of this: protection.

Here's my list of four "protections" that best explain this big shift in economic policy. First, workers, which we already kind of talked about briefly with the [00:56:00] China shock. For all the winners of the global economy, there were lots of losers. And a lot of them were communities who found themselves out of work as their jobs went to cheaper overseas locations. Now, listen: economists argue as to how big of a problem this actually was, and you can read all about it in my sources. But the point is that closed factories and unemployed communities in the Rust Belt have a major psychological effect on people who fear that their jobs might just disappear, either abroad or be taken over by AI. So the government is trying to calm people down by pumping money into certain sectors to keep jobs in America.

The next big realization about the global economy: it doesn't really care much about how much carbon it pumps into our atmosphere. Our world is barreling towards a very real climate crisis, and governments realize they're gonna have to force the market to get serious about things like electric cars, solar panels, and other green infrastructure. The free market is not going to incentivize this. And if it doesn't happen, we're going to have a much bigger problem on our hands.

[00:57:00] One of the best parts of the global economy is that our products get made by materials that are being tossed around the globe at the perfect time, at the perfect place, to all come together to be made into a final product, all to arrive at a shelf at some store so that we can purchase it. These supply chains are insane, and they cross the entire planet. And it works great, until the world shut down in a global pandemic, leaving people around the world without the products that they either needed, or just kinda got used to having.

Again, economists argue about how big of a deal this was. A lot of them are like, no, the supply chains held up really well during COVID. But regardless of what some academic economist is saying at MIT, all of us are left with a pretty bad taste in our mouth about supply chains after COVID. The system feels too fragile. A lot of us feel too reliant on a fragile system of far away global connections that could be rocked at any moment, which has led to these protectionist policies that these governments hope will bring supply chains back inside of their borders.

Okay, finally, and perhaps the most [00:58:00] important explanation in all of this is that Bill Clinton was totally wrong. Free trade didn't incentivize China into a democratic revolution. The world did not join together in one big free trade market, too entangled to fight with each other. In fact, quite the opposite has happened.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Relations between the world's two largest economies are at their most tense in years.

JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: After joining the global economy, China got really rich really fast. They've kind of started to challenge the US at its own game, and now they have one of the biggest militaries on the planet, and they use that military to assert their influence around their region. They use their newfound wealth to project influence around the world by building stuff or giving loans to people. And they're kind of trying to dethrone the United States as the one who's calling the shots on the global economic order.

I made a whole video about this that you can go watch if you want, but the big point here is that the US is worried about the rapid rise of their rival across the ocean. Especially when the rise of that rival is in part fueled by American technology, specifically, these [00:59:00] little silicon chips—microchips—that make weapons smart, and that will be the brains that power the AI revolution. A lot of Joe Biden's protectionist policies are actually just aimed right at China, trying to stop them from using our own tech to get ahead of us. (Again, I made an entire video about microchips, you can go into that. Kind of made a video about a lot of these things.) But yeah, Joe Biden is also trying to get the supply chains for these microchips out of China's neighborhood, meaning out of Taiwan, bringing them back inside our borders to places like New Albany, Ohio, nice and safe in the middle of our continent.

So, you're going to see a lot more moments like this with American presidents or politicians with hard hats on speaking at construction sites.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Folks, we need to make these chips right here in America to bring down everyday costs and create good jobs. America is back and America is leading the way.

JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: This last point is kind of a brutal recognition for a lot of people, including me, to be honest, that our [01:00:00] theory that we would all be more peaceful if we were more economically entangled is kind of wrong, at least for now. In fact, these economic entanglements are looking like they might turn into tools of conflict as opposed to preventers of conflict. Like, China has a near monopoly on a lot of the rare earth elements that we need to make a ton of very important products, including military weapons. And if push comes to shove, they could very realistically use this as leverage and cut us off in the exact same way that we cut them off microchips. I mean, this just happened. Vladimir Putin turned off the pipelines that pumped a natural gas into Europe, the gas that is needed to heat the homes and run the factories, showing us that economic entanglements can actually be a weapon and flipping this whole theory on its head.

But yeah, Joe Biden is pouring money into bringing production home and he has a lot of support from all sides of the aisle. This is like economic nationalism. The government is getting involved to undo some of what the free market did in its heyday, which was to distribute [01:01:00] production of stuff where it made the most economic sense, not where it protected people.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: That means we will invent it in America and make it in America. And we're going to make sure we include all of America.

JOHNNY HARRIS - HOST, JOHNNY HARRIS: So, that's where we're at. The world is reacting to some weaknesses that they see in the global free trade system. They're putting up barriers in the name of protection. And no one's really sure what that means. Like, it's kind of hard to not look at this and draw some parallels with the 1930s, when a series of economic crises led countries to put up trade barriers in the name of protection, which then led to ever greater economic strife, leading to unrest and eventually culminating in the Second World War. But don't read too far into that. I'm not trying to, like, do one of those things where I'm like "every hundred years, history repeats itself". That's not what I think is happening here, but there's some similarities that we should probably just keep an eye on.

Final comments on how Joe Biden can become a hero in the wake of his debate with Trump

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with More Perfect Union, explaining the shift in macro economic thinking from Clinton to Biden. Siming [01:02:00] Lan described the history of China to give context for today. The Financial Times looked at China's Belt and Road Initiative. Our Changing Climate put China's carbon emissions into historical context. TLDR News Global explained the escalating tensions with the Philippines in the South China Sea. Wendover broke down China's housing market and their broader economic shutdown. And Johnny Harris thought about the consequences of our changing global economic system.

And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section.

But before we continue, I wanted to address the fallout of the Trump-Biden debate. It's all anyone can talk about, and so I thought I would too, because I think I have something to say that I am not really hearing anywhere else.

So skipping past the panic and the circling of the Biden campaign wagons and not wallowing in all of the reasons to fear that Biden will not be reelected by voters, paving the way to a second and much worse Trump administration. [01:03:00] Not even spending time to talk about the extremely legitimate reasons why fans of Biden might not want to depend on him in his condition to be president, not just for the next seven months, but for the next four and a half years.

Skipping past all that, I want to talk about how inspiring it would have been and still could be if Joe Biden were to fully embrace his role as the transitional figure he pitched himself as.

He said he wanted to save the country from a second Trump administration and act as a bridge to the next generation. Well, he succeeded in the first goal in 2020. And as we're hearing in the show today, he's acting as much more of a transformational figure in the White House than anyone would have had the right to guess. You can look back in the archives of this show and find predictions dating back years saying that the age of neo-liberalism not only needs to end, but is [01:04:00] destined to end, and soon. And Joe Biden--though I would not have predicted it--met this moment in time and is acting, along with Congress and all of those in his administration whose job it is to actually execute policy priorities, to change the economic direction of the country after four or five decades of bipartisan consensus on free market capitalism.

Now he's no Marxist and he certainly doesn't have the charisma that Obama did. But somehow his team is managing to deliver potentially era-defining change that is genuinely hard to believe in, and yet is actually happening.

The ideal scenario for me would have been for Biden to announce that he would not be seeking reelection during his inauguration speech. It would have been inspiring as hell. "You know, I commit to you today four distraction-free years of getting [01:05:00] things done for the American people. I will not be wasting my time thinking about reelection or campaigning. I am here to do the job. Right?"

That's the message. That's what he could have said.

Meanwhile, there would have been no ambiguity for those seeking to continue the work that he would have started. The American people would have been giving years to get to know the Democrats on deck, waiting to lead the next generation.

Knowing that Trump would almost certainly run again, it would have been all too easy to guarantee that he would be seen as the old candidate, no longer fit for office, if he ever were, forced to stand opposed to relatively young and exciting Democrats, promising a slate of policies that the majority of people genuinely prefer. It could have been the first lopsided election in decades.

Meanwhile, long before the debate, polls showed that sometimes as many as three quarters of Americans--so obviously lots of Democrats in there--Felt [01:06:00] that Biden was too old for a second term. Not necessarily too old for his first, not too old to finish out what he started, but too old to go again. And it was in this context that the structural forces of politics hanging on the single fulcrum of Biden's personal decision to run again prevented any would-be viable candidates from having the opportunity to mount a 2024 campaign, because mounting a campaign against Biden would have been fruitless and divisive, and everyone knew it. But a fresh campaign season with new candidates running with the blessing of the president would have been an injection of excitement that voters express themselves to be desperate for every single time they're asked.

When you choose to run for reelection on the premise that democracy is on the line and start by going against the preference of 75% of the population, it should be immediately apparent that something has gone awry.

But it's not too late to be an [01:07:00] inspiration. Knowing when to step away is often more heroic than stepping up in the first place. Think of George Washington's decision to not seek a third term as a lesson to the country about the need to move away from monarchy. Think about a parent's decision to step back and knowing that their child has learned the skills they need and is ready to succeed on their own. And the senior citizen who knows when it's time to hand over the car keys for their own safety and the safety of others. These are acts of heroism.

And in the context of democracy, adhering to the will of the people is never a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength to do what is difficult--maybe not what you would even personally want to do--to uphold the ideal of democratic input and representation that every citizen should hold dear.

Biden has the opportunity now to be that inspiration, to fulfill his promise to be a bridge to the next generation, having completed a successful one-term presidency. Not one that I've agreed with on every issue, obviously, but [01:08:00] that's not the reasonable bar to describe success.

Politically, these are the options we have before us. If Biden steps aside, he will be endlessly thanked for his service, and his legacy will be remembered in practically glowing terms.

Under the circumstance, the result of the election could still go in one of two ways. For that eventual ticket of candidates, they will either be hailed as victors, or thanked for their effort, just as Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton were thanked for theirs in recent decades. You may have disagreed with him on some policies or campaign strategies as I did. But there was never the sense that their decision to throw their hats in the ring in and of itself was questionable.

Alternately, though, there is a much darker scenario that would not only irreparably tarnish Biden's legacy, but potentially tear the party apart in a way that made the dustup between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders look tame by comparison. [01:09:00] Not even considering for a moment the disaster that would be a second Trump term, the healing that would have to happen after a Biden loss to Trump would cause chaos in the party at the exact moment in time that the need for unity and resolve would be at its absolute height. And for all of his efforts, all of his decades of service, Biden would not even be thanked. In fact, it would be a large question as to how many people would be able to find it within themselves to forgive him.

Now on that high note, before we get back to the show, a quick reminder that July is our membership and awareness drive. If you get value out of this show, let this be the time that you decide to chip in to help sustain its production, and tell some friends about it to help grow our base of support. As thanks to those who helped make the show possible, we release weekly bonus episodes in which the production crew here takes center stage to hold conversations on serious topics while also remembering to laugh, even [01:10:00] if it's just so we don't cry sometimes.

Plus, of course members get ad-free versions of every regular episode. And for this month, memberships are 20% off. So sign up now and keep that discounted price for as long as you keep your membership.

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SECTION A: CHINA'S ECONOMIC FOREIGN POLICY

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

Next up section a. China's economic foreign policy. Section B the Evie wars section. See the tech and space race and section D escalating tensions.

Kidnappings and ghost towns on China’s Belt and Road: 10 years of Xi Jinping’s masterplan | Dispatch - The Telegraph - Air Date 9-7-23

SOPHIA YAN - HOST, DISPATCH: Khorgos was described as the new Dubai, a one stop shop that would revolutionize global trade, complete with factories producing goods for export, plus warehouses, shopping centers, hotels, and more. And at the center of it all, a dry port [01:11:00] with faster shipping times than routing by sea.

Asset Seissenbank is deputy CEO of the Special Economic Zone, where the dry port is located.

ASSET SEISENBECK: Dubai and Khorgos are located in the center, yeah. It looks same, background are same, yeah. So, yeah, I believe that with the impact of our partners, our government, we will reach the scales and the level of Dubai.

This is a huge strategy, it's a huge plan, infrastructural plan. I mean, I strongly believe that One Belt, One Road will bring For the developing countries, more and more chances to trigger the development of their economy. I believe that these projects will bring for the local people more and more business chances also.

SOPHIA YAN - HOST, DISPATCH: So far, China has emerged the main winner. Porgos allows China to [01:12:00] export more quickly its cheap goods, and export its technical know how. Representatives showed us a factory in the special economic zone backed by investors from Afghanistan. Chinese materials and machines churning out nappies and sanitary pads for export to Russia.

Signs are everywhere that Kazakhstan has not benefited in the same way. The village of Nurkent, built for people working along the border, is a far cry from the urban jungle of Dubai. Only a few thousand residents in a town that was supposed to house more than 50, 000 people by now. We drove around the small settlement in a matter of minutes.

Our footage shows just how little has been built on this side of the border. This monument marks the continued expansion of Nur Kent. The idea was that as border cooperation grew between China and Kazakhstan, that this whole region would flourish. But as you can see, ten years on, [01:13:00] after China launched Belt and Road, it hasn't really delivered on the promised benefits.

Most residents we met enjoy the small town life and prefer Nurkent to stay as it is. A warm community where everybody knows each other, with just a few shops and restaurants right across from the schools. More Chinese influence worries those living just miles from the border.

NURSAPA NURQADYR: I'm concerned because the Chinese do not invade by waging a war. They gradually enter the country, increase their population, and assimilate. They have the resources to buy many things, and they are interested in Kazakhstan land.

SOPHIA YAN - HOST, DISPATCH: Belton Road has been criticized as paving the way for China's regional and military expansion. In Tajikistan, a secret Chinese military base has been built right on the border with Afghanistan and China. BRI hasn't delivered on its promise, and many countries are struggling to [01:14:00] repay loans. Governments are estimated to have hidden debts of at least 385 billion.

China has even taken control of foreign assets when countries are unable to repay loans. One third of BRI projects have been plagued by corruption scandals, labor violations, environmental hazards, or public protests. Nations are now rethinking their involvement. Italy, the only G7 country to join BRI, wants to back out.

Some worry that China's BRI expansion will mean less natural resources for the rest of the world. Increasing use of water in China is just one example. drying up a river that flows downstream into Kazakhstan, Vladimir Muravsky, who leads birdwatching tours has witnessed the water levels fall.

VLADIMIR MURAFSKIY: For agriculture, for fields.

So what you're in fields [01:15:00] mostly, you know, you've seen that land. So it's a good fertile land, but without water it's nothing, it's just the sand. But with water, yeah, so you can grow anything.

SOPHIA YAN - HOST, DISPATCH: Are you worried about environmental damage here as China uses more and more water upstream?

VLADIMIR MURAFSKIY: Sure I am, but, uh, you know, if I'm worried or not worried, Who cares?

Chinese don't care, for sure. Kazakhstan, it's always between, you know, between two empires, Chinese empires and the Russian empire. Here we, in Kazakhstan, we have so much land and area and stuff inside it and, uh, not too many people.

SOPHIA YAN - HOST, DISPATCH: Those I spoke with fear growing Chinese Kazakh cooperation will put them at greater risk.

Has Africa gained from China's infrastructure plans? - Focus on Africa - Air Date 10-20-23

AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: Beijing hosted a big meeting of [01:16:00] leaders from around the world , many of them from Africa. They all had one thing in common. They were part of the Belt and Road Initiative, a long term investment in infrastructure made by China. Chinese President Xi Jinping launched it in 2013 to bolster road, rail, and sea infrastructure in countries China had an economic interest in.

Beijing has invested nearly a trillion US dollars in the initiative, most of it as loans. So how successful has the Belt and Road Initiative, BRI for short, been for the countries that are part of it? The short answer is, it's mixed. We'll take a look at how Zambia fared in a moment, but let's first find out what the intention was of the initiative.

Damali Sali is a trade facilitation expert in Uganda.

DAMALI SALI: China says that the Belt and Road Initiative is to ensure that there is global infrastructure development so that there is a global connectivity and to facilitate global [01:17:00] trade. So China, I would imagine from their mind, they want to open up bigger markets, probably for their goods and services so that they can access those markets.

In addition to that, they would like to open up pathways within which they can get raw materials to further their industrialization. Africa's perspective on the other hand is that Africa as a continent has a huge infrastructure gap. I was reading a report from Africa Development Bank which said that Africa's infrastructure gap is a hundred billion dollars per annum.

So Africa needs a hundred billion dollars per year to plug that infrastructure gap in order to connect. So we have a lot of trade Corridors like road trade corridors that are mapped out or railway trade corridors that are mapped out infrastructure corridors that are mapped out, but we don't have the funding to do so.

And the traditional funding that's available, say, for example, if you look at the IMF loans from the IMF, only 4 percent of loans. From the IMF actually go to the African continent.

AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: Are there different objectives in different African countries? You know, when they deal with China unilaterally, is it the same strategy that all African countries or Africa as a [01:18:00] region approaches China?

DAMALI SALI: I think it's not the same. And I feel like Africa as a continent, we need to come up, I think, with a framework within which we engage these major bodies. For example, like in East Africa, there are three major infrastructure pieces in which China is important. The first one is the Kenya standard gauge railway.

That's the railway that was supposed to come from Mombasa to Nairobi into Uganda, Kampala. It was supposed to go to Juba, South Sudan, and then go to DRC. Now, China was supposed to fund that entire piece. However, it's funded it from Mombasa to Naivasha. So it never did get to Uganda, won't get to Dubai, won't get to DRC.

Also, in addition to that, they say, at least the Kenyans, if you read any articles around that, they say that it was too expensive, very costly, and It may be difficult for them to repay it back because now it actually stopped, stopped midway. So there's no cargo going back and it was supposed to move cargo from Mombasa into the hinterland and back so that it can pay for itself.

So there is that negotiation that happened now with the Kenyan government and China, which may or may not result into the intended [01:19:00] purpose.

AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: If you look at China's objective in setting up the Belt and Road Initiative, specifically in African countries and African countries and what they had hoped to achieve by embracing China as a funder, as a lender, are there satisfied customers all around?

DAMALI SALI: Infrastructure development takes up quite a bit of time to be able to see the real impact, the real results and everything. In the short term, of course, some of the things that people are seeing or are complaining about is the cost of those arrangements. The cost of those loans, how you're required to pay back.

AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: So what are the implications of that for African countries that China is almost the only option here because so many countries are so highly indebted to China and China's economy has been experiencing headwinds as well along with other economies around the world. That puts African countries that rely on China for funding of infrastructural development projects in a very difficult position, doesn't it?

DAMALI SALI: It absolutely does. We need more alternative financing sources because we still have that gap. And if you look at the Africa continental free trade area where we agreed as a continent to trade with each other, [01:20:00] currently Africa only trades with the. Each other only 15 percent of the goods that it actually trades globally only 15%.

If you compare it to Europe, Europe trades with each other 60 percent of the time, and yes, Africa only trades with the other 15 percent of the time.

AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: It's the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative. What would you say to optimize this relationship should be happening?

DAMALI SALI: As a continent, we need to sit down and say, what are our asks from China actually in this infrastructure development for our continent?

What are the asks? What do we negotiate for? What rights do we negotiate for? What are the things we negotiate for around environment, around labor, environmental safeguards, around structuring the loans in a way that will not purely, purely exploitative to that whatever country. And as a bloc, we can negotiate better compared to one country going bilaterally to negotiate.

AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: Damali Sali explaining that it's all about trading and negotiating with each other. But let's explore the big D. It's the question that comes up each time you mention Africa and China in the same sentence. Zambia is one of those countries facing a [01:21:00] debt crisis. Ishmael Zulu is a development economist based in Lusaka, and we turn to him to help us understand China's role in Zambia's current economic predicament.

ISHMAEL ZULU: The situation Zambia finds itself in is one in which it is not. able to service its debt. It's debt to GDP ratio had risen to over 100%. So put simply, when we look at the GDP, which refers to how much Zambia is producing as a country compared to what it owes, you find it's over 100%. So Zambia's Gross domestic product.

Well, the last statistic that we have, according to the world bank is 22 billion us dollars and our total debt stock. So this is including internal debt and external debt is over 30 billion us dollars. And most of that is owed to China. A significant proportion is owed to China. However, [01:22:00] our debt is mixed.

So we have euro bonds that we gave out as a country, which constitute a large share of our commercial debt. So it's not only China.

AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: So let's take China because the Belt and Road Initiative is 10 years old. What does China Zambia have to show for what it owes China.

ISHMAEL ZULU: Yeah. So there have been several infrastructure projects.

Zambia relies, I think over 90 percent of our electricity is sourced from hydroelectric power. And, uh, one of the projects that China was funding is what is known as the climate. KA gorge, lower hydro power project. There was also dual carriageway, and so this is a road that goes from the capital city, Lusaka and Zambia, all the way to the copper belt, which is the mining province.

Another big one was the airport that we currently have the Can account International Airport.

AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: Would you say that for the debt crisis that Zambia finds itself in right now and what was done with the [01:23:00] money that it's worth it?

ISHMAEL ZULU: It's mixed, so it's definitely mixed. A lot of the projects, so Zambia being a developing country, needed resources to fund its infrastructure development.

Otherwise, many of the developmental goals that we set out to achieve would not be met if we did not have the resources to fund them. However, there have been a lot of concerns, especially. around the transparency of these conversations and how the debt had been procured. Because you'd find that many people were not aware of how these deals were negotiated, what the terms are, what the interest rates are, when we're expected to pay this debt.

This information has not been publicly available for majority of the debts that were procured. And as a result, you would find that there'd been many cases because of that. Secrecy. We saw a lot of inflated prices where you see cases of corruption coming up.

AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: What's China's approach to Zambia's debt [01:24:00] distress?

Will they come down hard on Zambia if Zambia can't pay its debt?

ISHMAEL ZULU: The challenge with responding to that question is the lack of transparency in the deals that have been signed. So in a positive light, we know that the Chinese president had committed to renegotiate about 6 billion of Zambia's debt. So it shows that there is that willingness and political will to look at the relationship that we have between Zambia between developing countries and China itself.

And there is that room to renegotiate some of those deals.

AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: On balance would you say that it's been a beneficial relationship and it should continue?

ISHMAEL ZULU: It's definitely one that should continue given the historical project successes, but definitely moving forward, there is a big, big call for transparency in the way that we are relating with China.

China-Africa Relations in the Era of Great Power Competition - The China in Africa Podcast - Air Date 5-9-24

C. GÉAURD NEEMA - HOST, CHINA IN AFRICA: The progress of an international community in the crisis that we see, for example, in Gaza, makes it really much more difficult today for the West to come with a [01:25:00] narrative to try to kind of lecture African countries.

And it's also opening doors for the narrative for China in Africa, when China is saying that we need to reform the international system. We need a new rule based order because the one that we have right now is much more US western centered than anything else. And because of how we see their behaving, this kind of narrative will start to take shape in Africa, where you have a lot of head of state who say yes, we really don't agree with the way the West does things.

And especially when we saw how they reacted with the war in Ukraine with Russia and the way they behaving right now in Gaza. face toward Israel, you kind of wonder why the double standard and African country when they see that when they listen to that, they're kind of like that makes sense that for us, the international rule based order is not really fair as we it was presented to be.

It's much more hypocritical kind of rule based order. And when China comes and say, you know, you need to support me to have [01:26:00] a new configuration of the rule based order, they kind of say, Yeah, we're gonna go with you.

OVIGWE EGUEGU: Very good analysis, by the way. Very convincing. The first thing I want to say regarding to that is we don't even need the Russians or the Chinese to come tell us that the system is unfair.

Because since independence till now, generation after generation of leaders, even after independence, we could see how unfair several countries were treated, even in the decolonization process. The reason you have Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Having course today, I've seen all of the agreements and parks with France that they are counseling.

If you read those documents, there's no way you would agree that a sovereign country will sign this or this is even a fair arrangement. So overall, we on our own have been very, very vocal without any foreign partner telling us this is unfair. We know what unfair is because we actually went through colonialism and then the decolonization process.

Was very, very incomplete in several ways. And since we've seen Russia [01:27:00] and China with the West, having a lot of contention in their relationship with China, Russia, trying to build an alternative system, China doesn't, and many countries, I would even say do not recognize the rules based international order, as it is said, because.

Nobody knows what the rules are Exactly. You know, the international, the international law, which we know based on the UN charter, this is what all countries, at least countries who are in the UN system have agreed to. And that is very clear for everyone to see. We know what happens when there's a, where there's conflict somewhere, what organ the UN is supposed to act, and what the role of United Nation Security Council, they came up with United for Peace Formula several years ago.

That is well established, but the rules based international order comes across to anyone who has paid any attention to it, you know, as essentially, and I've described this in a discussion to say, it's like myself and my friends, we set up rules and then we're going to impose it on the [01:28:00] rest of the world.

Without them even knowing what the rules are. So we just decided what the rules would be and when and where it should be applied. So that's a challenge and African countries, in my opinion, they do not want to be cajoled and not, nobody actually wants to be cajoled into such a system. Some people want to play within it if they win.

I told this to a few friends during an event, actually with a US based organization. I said, look, if we had countries like Japan and South Korea in Africa, countries who won under the hierarchy and the system that was created post 45 and even post Bretton Woods, you will find many allies on the continent of Africa.

C. GÉAURD NEEMA - HOST, CHINA IN AFRICA: Definitely. No question asked.

OVIGWE EGUEGU: But the way it is on the continent of Africa is that you can't find winners of the current system. So why would you not expect champions to emerge from a continent where there were no winners, right? So over the decades, all we've just had is countries who have not been able to industrialized or you're just told you know what you're just [01:29:00] going to be commodity suppliers.

That's fine.

C. GÉAURD NEEMA - HOST, CHINA IN AFRICA: Let me stop you there for a moment. Is it the international system at fault or is it internal country bad governance at fault in that case?

OVIGWE EGUEGU: Ah, that's a very interesting question and I would really like us to go in this direction. So let's look at When we left colonial era, many countries nationalized their resources, right?

So we had that in Ghana, we had that in Zimbabwe, in many countries across the continent, they saw that as a way to build some form of industrial base, and then piggyback off protectionism, then they progressively liberalized. There was not a single country that didn't face pushback from the West. And as at the time, the West, is the, and still is to a large extent, the home of foreign capital.

They were the ones that can give you access to technologies. They were the ones that can give you access to capital to invest. In the first place, in this moment, China was not the big player. Then for the USSR to some extent. was an actor, but overall, if the [01:30:00] model that was built when Germany, the United States, France were still industrial powers was importing raw materials from former colonies now to the factories.

Well, that's what African countries were faced with. When you nationalize the money to build your industrial supply chain, it's not going to fall from the sky. You still need to go to where capital was, and capital wasn't coming from the West because they do not want African countries to go in that direction.

So it is not written down as we will not let you industrialize. Or we will not let you go into the local refining of your resources, but it's just by withholding capital that is what you get where there was no alternative. But now if you look at Zimbabwe, for instance, just last week we saw news in Mokoto in Zimbabwe, see what they've been able to achieve, for instance, and what they're trying to do with steel, with lithium.

If you see what Indonesia is also doing with nickel, for instance, Indonesia is able to block nickel export role and say, we want to do this. But why are they able to do it now? Because [01:31:00] they have alternative people who can make those investments. If it was only the West that could put capital into Indonesia, they will not be able to succeed in doing what they are going to do.

C. GÉAURD NEEMA - HOST, CHINA IN AFRICA: So basically, China offered an option for many African producing countries now to kind of have a leverage to be able to exist in that international order by providing capitals to those African countries to start the refining, right? That's what you're saying. If I understand correctly, that China now basically China offered option to African country to have a certain level of agency.

I'm not sure that I agree with the president's statement that had the but withholding capital because I'm not going to get in that debate, but let's face it. Many African country had corruption. We had regime that was richer than the country. We had regime that was embezzling billions of billions of dollars that could have been used for the economy that could have been used for refining that could have been used for processing.

But you're going to see most of those country. I'm going to take Zaire, my country, [01:32:00] DR Congo today. We had president that we had, that was producing a lot, but millions of millions were just embezzled for personal wealth and personal gain. So we cannot just really say that it international rule based order was set against us.

I know it was not set for us for sure that for sure it was not set for us because we are not parts of it when the system was set, we are not parts of it. So basically when you're not there, if something is set, you can assume safely that it not set for your gain. That's. Quite clear for me, but we cannot also say that it was actively walking into making us and keeping us poor.

When we overlook the fact that many of our heads of state were just corrupted. They had money. You take a country like Gabon, you know, money's there, but the picture was there, but you have the bonus family with billions of billions having castle in Europe and everything. That's just beside the point to get back to what you're saying.

Yes, [01:33:00] China arrivals in Africa now today offers that opportunity for many African country producing country since you talk about resources to be in that space where they can now have urgency, they can now ask for refineries, they can now ask for processing Zimbabwe is now winning having first level lithium processing put into the ground last year, up to last year, they're like five to six now lithium processing that are running in the country, which is a good thing.

So Yeah, China has offered that opportunity that I think that many countries are now appreciating in Africa.

OVIGWE EGUEGU: Yeah, of course, again, they don't offer the agency, all they offer is opportunity and that is why you find in many cases countries are saying, see, I will tell you, there are many, I've spoken to so many people across the continent that they come up as pro China, but to the extent that what they really want is Just to have the China option, because if you're in a system where you're only beholding to only one party kind of hegemony, which we've seen, and we've been at the bottom of the system that's currently changing now, you don't need to [01:34:00] tell an African what his place is in the current world order.

It's very clear. Just look at the last 50 years or having that option. It's precisely why you find so many takers for what China represents.

SECTION B: THE EV WARS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B: the EV wars.

Why China is winning the EV war - Vox - Air Date 6-7-24

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: The first major reason for why China's companies were able to develop their EV battery is due to a huge amount of government support. Roughly 20 years ago, China was on track to become the world's largest importer of oil, so electrifying its car fleet would help it become more energy independent. Not to mention a growing air pollution problem in China's cities, in part due to car emissions.

IIARIA MAZZOCCO: What the EVs had going for them was that the head of the Ministry of Science and Technology was a big believer in this and his sense was that Chinese companies were just never going to be able to compete on internal combustion engine technology. That's how you get this package of policies that really supported what Chinese government defined as new energy vehicles.

ZEYI YANG: Companies making the [01:35:00] cars Can get a subsidy whenever they sell a car. We're also talking about they're getting cheap, like, land leases from the government. They're getting cheap loans from the state owned banks.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: According to one estimate, from 2009 to 2022, the Chinese government gave out 29 billion in the form of subsidies, research spending, and tax breaks to the EV industry.

And starting around 2009, Local governments also gave Chinese companies an instant market by contracting them to electrify their bus and taxi fleets. The city of Shenzhen's fleet of 16, 000 buses was electrified by BYD before it became the world's largest EV company. To get consumers on board, governments offered them generous subsidies too, along with other benefits.

SEAVER WANG: Like discounts on charging. favorable parking, traffic congestion related policies that EVs get a break on. EVs actually have a different colored license plate even, so it's very visible. And so people see, Oh, that's an EV. They get all the special treatment.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: But the battery wasn't very good in the early days.

And so the Chinese

IIARIA MAZZOCCO: government goes in and starts [01:36:00] introducing stricter standards on batteries. Saying, well, you only qualify for this credit if your battery density reaches this level.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: Consumer EV sales in China exploded. And when it did, the government did something important to protect their own battery industry.

When foreign car companies like GM and Tesla wanted to sell their EVs in China, the government made a rule that their cars must use Chinese made batteries to qualify for consumer subsidies. China's central government phased out consumer subsidies in 2022, but the demand had been created. In 2024, over half of new car sales in China were electric.

ZEYI YANG: This is like a milestone because half is a big thing. It means that the majority of the people are actually preferring EVs over

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: The second way Chinese battery companies became so dominant is through the supply chain for the battery components. The type of battery that typically goes into electric vehicles is called a lithium ion battery.

The forming components of the battery cell are the cathode, the anode, the electrolyte solution, and a [01:37:00] separator. The cathode is usually packed with nickel, cobalt, and manganese. The anode uses graphite, and the electrolyte is made up of mostly lithium salts. Over the past several years, Chinese companies started acquiring ownership stakes in mines around the world where these minerals exist.

ZEYI YANG: So they're sure that if we control the production, then we control the price.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: The effect is that Chinese companies control significant percentages of the world's supply of the minerals needed for batteries. But where China really controls the supply chain are the steps after mining. No matter who mines the minerals, China refines a vast majority of them.

This is the step where factories grind down raw mined materials and extract the desired mineral from it.

IIARIA MAZZOCCO: It's pretty polluting. That's why you don't see that much refining happening in developed countries.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: Chinese plants then also manufactured the vast majority of the four components of the EV batteries, the cathode, the anode, the electrolyte and the separator and put them together to make the battery sell.

IIARIA MAZZOCCO: Because you already had pretty developed manufacturing for [01:38:00] batteries aimed at electronics. So BYD is actually one of those examples. They started by producing batteries for electronics in the 90s and then it got into producing EVs.

SEAVER WANG: The US was never a battery manufacturing player. Historically speaking, in lithium ion, it was previously Japan and Korea, and China has now superseded both.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: China's control of the battery supply chain is so encompassing that after the Biden administration passed a rule saying no more than half of the battery's components or minerals could be Chinese sourced to qualify for tax credits, only an estimated 20 percent of EV models qualified. With their market dominance, Chinese companies have been able to lead the world in battery innovation.

In the past two years, Chinese companies figured out how to avoid using the two most expensive battery minerals, nickel and cobalt. They did this by innovating on battery technology called Lithium Iron Phosphate, or LFP. In 2023, CATL announced an LFP battery that could power a car for [01:39:00] 370 miles on just a 10 minute charge.

And BYD has developed their own version of an LFP battery. P battery too.

ZEYI YANG: It's called blade battery. It's like a very thin, very long blade. Um, but basically they're saying that by using that shape, it can bring more batteries into the same space. So in that way, like the same size of a car can travel farther.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: Today, LFP batteries are a growing share of all EV batteries. And nearly all of them are manufactured in China. But not for long. CATL has built battery plants in Germany and has plans to build one in Hungary for the European auto market. And Ford ended up finding a home for its CATL battery plant in the town of Marshall, Michigan.

The project has triggered a US house investigation. But if it goes through, it will be the first LFP plant in the US all of these factors have made Chinese EV batteries virtually impossible to avoid in the global transition to electric vehicles. Was there not a viable alternative?

JIM FARLEY: No, there wasn't. LFP technology is, [01:40:00] is very well developed.

The battery business is a global business. And, um, this was, there were no alternatives.

LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: There are some concerns about whether China's government support of the EV industry amounts to unfair global competition, as well as human rights and environmental concerns associated with China's battery industry.

The US is investing their own government support to build up its battery industry. Bloomberg estimated it would cost 82 billion for the US to meet their own domestic demand by 2030. So it might be possible in the future. But that's no help right now when we desperately need to transition to electric vehicles to wean ourselves from fossil fuels.

And US automakers are struggling to give consumers affordable options. So for now, we'll have to decide whether our desire to keep our distance from China outweighs our goals of going electric.

EV Tariffs Won't Stop Chinese Cars - CNBC - Air Date 6-5-24

MICHAEL DUNNE: I'm not exaggerating when I say what China, the challenge that China is presenting the world, including the United States, is unprecedented. You know, in the case of the Japanese and Koreans, when [01:41:00] they came into the United States, We were able to persuade, maybe coerce a little bit, Hey, if you want to sell here, you have to build your transplant here.

But they could own it. And they were our allies and ultimately they were more dependent on us than we were on them. They were, they were more, in China's case, we don't have that kind of leverage with them.

ROBERT FERRIS - HOST, CNBC: China has the capacity to make half the world's cars, four times as many as the US typically makes.

Annual demand within the country is about 25 million units. That leaves 15 million cars for export. Nearly as many as the US can sell in a good year. China sent five million cars to over 100 countries in 2023, making it one of the largest exporters in the world.

MICHAEL DUNNE: You see Chinese cars now in virtually every market except for the United States and Canada.

And because there's so much capacity at home and the market at home is, has a price war, the Chinese automakers [01:42:00] themselves are super motivated to To get out and push their products into Europe, the United

ROBERT FERRIS - HOST, CNBC: States. A mix of favorable policies and a booming economy got them to where they are today. China welcomed foreign automakers into the country beginning in the 1980s, and especially after some policy changes in the following decade.

Rules were simple. Foreign firms could sell cars in the country as long as they partnered with a local Chinese automaker. Chinese firms also made some cross border investments. Chinese automaker Zhili bought Volvo cars from Ford, for example. And finally, many companies are government owned, and even private firms receive generous subsidies.

Notes EV maker BYD received 3. 7 billion between 2018 and 2022, for example.

MICHAEL DUNNE: In state capitalism, the objective is we're going to build a world powerhouse auto industry. To get there, we need great companies, but always, by the way, at the local, provincial and federal level, we'll also offer all kinds of help.

[01:43:00] So the Western auto maker, look at that and say, How in the world are we competing?

ROBERT FERRIS - HOST, CNBC: But Chinese

companies have also built strong products.

SAM FIORANI: When they came to the Detroit Auto Show 15 years ago, their cars were not competitive. You could see the quality issues with those vehicles as you sat in them, as you played around with them.

Now, the cars are much higher quality. They are very competitive once they're hitting the ground.

BILL RUSSO: And they pay attention to all the configuration of every seat in the car, not just the driver's cockpit. That's what I think. obsoletes the traditionally designed and styled vehicle.

ROBERT FERRIS - HOST, CNBC: Bill Russo, a former Chrysler executive, says the Chinese have been extremely successful in developing new business models based around software and services.

Many recent entrants have backgrounds in technology, electronics, and mobile devices markets.

BILL RUSSO: When the iPhone came, the Nokia products went away quickly. That's what's happening in China now in the car.

ROBERT FERRIS - HOST, CNBC: American consumers are also receptive to Chinese cars. [01:44:00] Nearly half of respondents in a recent survey said they are familiar with Chinese vehicle brands and 76 percent under the age of 40 said they would consider buying a Chinese car.

Consideration then declined significantly among older consumers. Grappling with this new reality, tariffs have become a popular political tool, especially with former President Trump beginning in 2018. Auto executives at the time, famously Tesla CEO Elon Musk, decried what they considered an imbalance between U.

S. and Chinese trade rules. Lately, it is the Biden administration who is focused on tariffs. First and foremost, EVs. Tariffs on them will increase from 25 percent to 100 percent in 2024. The administration says China's extensive subsidies and non market practices have led to substantial risks of overcapacity.

Chinese EV exports grew 70 percent from 2022 to 2023. They're also raising tariffs on an array of materials used in car making. Lithium ion batteries. [01:45:00] Graphite, magnets, steel, aluminum, and semiconductors. China controls more than 80 percent of certain segments of the EV battery supply chain, the administration said.

That leaves US supply chains vulnerable and risks national security and clean energy goals. Some politicians are pushing for even harder restrictions. The industry's response is mixed. Labor leaders are in support, for obvious reasons. So is the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. The auto industry's major trade association, Tesla CEO, Elon Musk criticized the tariffs, but even he had said earlier in 2024 that without trade barriers, most Western automakers would be demolished by Chinese competition.

They can sell EVs cheaper than the cheapest fuel burning cars. And according to some are way ahead of competition in software and tech, but Russo is skeptical of tariffs. The Trump era trade war may have been a missile aimed at Beijing, But it landed squarely on Detroit, [01:46:00] he once wrote. Two things happened.

First, the trade war drove up the costs of a lot of parts American automakers source from China or elsewhere. GM and Ford both reported that the Trump tariffs in 2018 saddled them each with an additional 1 billion in steel and aluminum costs. Secondly, it likely accelerated the globalization of Chinese companies looking to circumvent trade rules.

By making investments beyond their own borders.

BILL RUSSO: They're, they're building factories in Mexico. They're building factories all over the world, Africa, middle East, Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Southeast Asia. There's never been a bigger, uh, effort by China to de China eyes its supply chain than right now

ROBERT FERRIS - HOST, CNBC: if elected Donald Trump pledged to place a 100% duty on any car made in Mexico by a Chinese company.

Policy analysts say doing so would violate the terms of the very agreement Trump made with Mexico. [01:47:00] It might also cause further friction with the country, which in 2023 became the US 's largest trading partner. In any event, executives like Russo argue that these measures are delaying the inevitable.

American firms need to face up to the fact that Chinese companies have extremely competitive and attractive products, and American consumers want them. If

BILL RUSSO: you can make Aspirational products affordable with configurations that surprise and delight the users of that platform. That's a universal value proposition.

And sorry, Americans buy Chinese stuff and have been for decades, have been enjoying the benefits of that. And in terms of affordability forever, if you shut that off, all you're going to do is make it more expensive.

MICHAEL DUNNE: There are alternatives. Take a page from what China did 30 years ago when it was just starting out and it said, Hey, you want to come into our market, the United States?

Welcome. But by the way, in order to sell here, you have to manufacture here. You have to build plants here. And when you manufacture here, you have to [01:48:00] form a joint venture with an American company that will own half of the business. Oh, okay. And, um, by the way, we'd like you to export from America too, so that we.

Get extra benefits of you being here.

BILL RUSSO: We can do the same. That's called flipping the script. The problem isn't that we have to keep them out. The problem is we should let them in to give ourselves the benefits of the DNA that they've been able to create. And then, but do it under a guided process. Do it with policies.

And right now nobody's writing those policies. Nobody's writing policies that allow some of the benefits of globalization and scale and product configurations and technologies to flow back to the Western world. And that's going to really weaken the, it's not going to help the industry. It's going to weaken the industry if we, if we don't allow that to happen.

ROBERT FERRIS - HOST, CNBC: And even though there are no Chinese branded cars for sale in the US yet, more than 100 Chinese owned automotive companies have a presence in the United States [01:49:00] already. They are concentrated in Detroit and Silicon Valley, and there are Chinese auto suppliers scattered across 30 US states.

MICHAEL DUNNE: But you'd never know it because we don't see Chinese cars on American roads, so it doesn't occur.

No, no, what? That can't possibly be true, but it is. They're here. They're getting ready for the time when it's right to enter and sell their cars to Americans.

The Real Reason The U.S. Doesn’t Want Chinese EVs - The Hustle - Air Date 5-7-24

CAYA - HOST, THE HUSTLE: Let's go back to the 1950s. This is a post war economic boom. Breeding ground for baby boomers and three car companies dominate the US car market. GM, Ford, and Chrysler. And suddenly, this new car company comes into the market in 1957, and then another one around the same time.

Nobody wanted these companies around. The big three didn't want competition. Americans in general were salty. You know, against their enemy from World War Two, so much so that Nissan actually had to change their name and slowly, but surely, these cars picked up popularity because these Japanese cars were reliable and affordable and fuel efficient.

European cars were added to the mix around this time as [01:50:00] well, but those were not your average family car. In 73, the oil crisis came, so US production had just peaked and all Arab exporting countries had banned exports of oil to any country supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Oil prices skyrocketed in America, and even though the embargo ended in 1974, oil prices remained really high through the decade.

And while consumers were happy, US car manufacturers were not. And with pressure from lobbyists and unions, the US government was not too happy about this Japanese car invasion either. In the 80s, Reagan ran his campaign on this agenda to slow Japanese car imports. And it kind of worked. He negotiated export restraints and convinced these Japanese companies to establish manufacturing plants in the US, which meant jobs and some tax money, at least until those workers eventually got replaced, not by other foreign car manufacturing companies, but by machines.

But that's another story. However, the silver lining of the story is that we ended up with better, more fuel efficient, more reliable US made cars. Competition helped the big three [01:51:00] step up their game. It's like the five stages of grief, which we're actually going to revisit soon. By the mid 2000s, Asian automakers accounted for a whopping 40 percent of US car sales.

Meanwhile, the US government was far behind. bailing out Detroit. It's a wound that the government and the economy remember vividly. Since then, American brands and Tesla specifically have acquired a large wedge of the US EV market share. But American brands and European brands have really struggled to make these cars affordable.

But China is a different story. Take BYD for example, China's star player and as of 2024, the largest EV manufacturer in the world. They started as a battery company in 95. This will be important later. They pivoted into cars in 2003, and finally they launched their debut BYDF three in 2005. You can cut a lot of costs when you make your own batteries and you know when you just copy another car's design.

But Peck works. Tesla made an average of $8,200 per car in 2023 and 18% gross margin. [01:52:00] DYD made about $1,700 per car on a 26% gross margin. So. How the hell do they get away with making a car at a fraction of Tesla's production costs? Take this example. This is the BYD Yuan Plus, their crossover SUV, the equivalent to a Tesla Model Y.

At the beginning of 2023, the estimated cost of materials and manufacturing for a Tesla Model Y was 39, 000. The Yuan Plus sells in China for just 16, 000. That is the sale price, which means that the cost of materials of making this car has to be around 13, 000. That's a third Of what Tesla's paying and how different.

You've got your touchscreen, comfortable space, nearly 300 miles of range, and honestly a very decent finish. Much better than what you would get from a 16, 000 car in the US so, is this car cooler than a Tesla? Okay, maybe no. Is there, uh, BYD car floating in space playing David Bowie? [01:53:00] Okay, no, but this is a perfectly fine vehicle.

It's affordable. It's available in Costa Rica and it has all the support and the warranty that you expect from a dealership. So in the case of Tesla, the 61 kilowatt hour battery in a Tesla Model Y is estimated to cost the company around 6, 200. They outsource those batteries to companies like Panasonic, LG, and rumor has it to BYD as well.

BYD was a battery company, remember? So. For the 50 kilowatt hour battery on their Yuan plus. They just make it themselves, and it costs them as little as 3, 000 per battery. Yes, of course, cheaper labor is a factor. Yes, Chinese government subsidies are a factor too. But the bottom line is that really affordable electric cars exist, and we just can't buy them in the US.

This fresh version, 4x4. Well, it's doing something about it this time. During the 2018 trade war with China, Trump set an additional 25 percent tariff on Chinese made cars. But before you go out [01:54:00] and blame Trump for all this, we should say that the Democrats are very much on the same page about the tariffs to Chinese cars.

And there's a bill currently in the Senate. to raise those tariffs to 100 percent BYD has made it clear that they don't want to enter the US market and the reason is very simple these Chinese companies don't want the trouble of going to a market that doesn't like them that doesn't want them they have plenty of room to get cheap cars to the rest of the world and quite honestly they're making a killing at that market and they're getting stronger and dominating the world in the process so it seems that this time around the US is patching the problem with tariffs Rather than looking to innovate and beat the competition.

Latin American countries generally don't manufacture their own cars. So they are just consumers benefiting from cheaper alternatives. It doesn't really affect their job market, but Japan has also been invaded by Chinese cars and they do care about their own car manufacturing jobs. But instead of patching that with tariffs, they're looking to innovate.

For example, Nissan and Honda are teaming [01:55:00] up to develop their own EVs together. Their auto industry. needs to stay competitive. The US government seems to be playing this very poor balancing act between reducing CO2 emissions and then getting votes, getting re elected, especially from swing states like Michigan, the single state where the most car manufacturing jobs are.

And caught in the very middle of this balancing act, is the US government. is the rest of us as consumers. I mean, it's not an easy problem to solve. On one hand, you can just slap tariffs on the problem, stop Chinese car imports, which preserves American jobs, at least until machines replace them. But that's bad for consumers who have to deal with more expensive cars.

It certainly slows down the country's efforts to reduce carbon emissions, and the US is already far behind the rest of the world on this. But more crucially, I think it puts American car manufacturing at a disadvantage. You see this in Latin America a little bit. People who want a luxury car, they'll generally buy a European car.

And people who want an affordable car, they'll buy Asian. And American cars are kind of stuck in the middle of these two, and they're not winning at [01:56:00] either game. Sure, Michigan votes are crucial to the election. You have to keep those constituents and those unions happy. But this patch policy is handing EV dominance to China on a silver platter.

SECTION C: TECH AND SPACE RACE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Next up, section C: the tech and space race.

China's Space Program is Insanely Ambitious... Here's Exactly How - Astrographics - Air Date 6-14-24

SIMON WHISTLER - HOST, ASTROGRAPHICS: Today, we want to highlight Two missions, Shengzhou 8 and Shengzhou 9. Shengzhou 8, conducted in November 2011, was an uncrewed flight designed to test the docking capabilities of the Divine Vessel.

And where should a Divine Vessel dock? Well, that would be at a heavenly palace, of course. Heavenly Palace 1, or Tiangong 1, is in fact China's own orbiting space lab, active since September 29, 2011. In June 2012, it was time for a crewed mission, Shengzhou 9, to dock at Tiangong 1. Tiangong 1. Tiangong 1. The crew of three included China's first female aut Lou Yang and spent 10 days aboard the Heavenly Palace testing both automated and manual docking systems.

The small orbital space station measuring only 10.4 meters in length was designed to remain in service for only two years [01:57:00] and to remain un crewed for most of that time, Yangon one was DEF facto put in sleep mode in June, 2013 and officially shut down in March, 2016. In September of that same year, the CNSA and the CASC launched a second orbiting lab Ong two, also designed as a temporary state.

On October 19, 2016, the Second Heavenly Palace was visited by the 11th Divine Vessel, crewed by Jing Hai Pen and Chen Dong. The two Taikonauts spent 30 days aboard the tiny station, performing technical experiments and releasing a satellite. But as mentioned, the first two Tiangongs were not designed to last.

Tiangong 1 went through a controlled deorbiting process, eventually plummeting toward Earth and blazing up over the South Pacific on April 2, 2018. Tiangong 2 followed suit in July of the next year. The first two heavenly palaces were much needed dry runs. Transcripts for the establishment of a permanent, fully operational Chinese space station.

This next endeavor kicked off in April 2021, with the launch of the module Tianhe, or Harmony of the Heavens. In July 2022, Tianhe was expanded with the second [01:58:00] compartment, Wentian, or Quest of the Heavens, and the station was completed with its third module, Menqian, Dreaming for the Heavens in October 2022.

Harmony, quest and dreaming have thus completed this new station also called Ang Go. The Palace is under the administration of the Chinese Man Space Agency or CMSA, who has plans to keep it constantly crude by a minimum of three auts for the span of 10 years. Much like the International Space Station, Ang Go will be used to conduct a vast array of scientific experiments in fields such as stem cell and regenerative medicine, or quantum precision measurements in parallel to the Xang J in Tiangong missions.

The CNSA and CASC were also developing the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, named after the moon goddess Chang'e. The main characters in this first phase of the project were the uncrewed lunar orbiters Chang'e 1 and 2. Their role, successfully enacted in November 2007 and October 2010, was to develop a 3D map of the moon's surface to identify an ideal landing spot.

This was in preparation for Phase 2, with two more unmanned crafts, [01:59:00] Chang'e 3 the lead role. Number 3 launched on December 2nd, 2013, propelled into space by Airbus A320. A long marched 3B rocket note the reference to Mao's Long March, a key event of the civil war against Nationalist China. Chang'e 3 would not just orbit around the moon like those bums wanted to, oh no, it was time for a soft landing.

The craft touched down on lunar 14, before deploying its rover, Yutu. And fun fact, in Chinese mythology, Yutu is the pet rabbit of the goddess Chang'e. The engineers at CASC did not fully trust Chang'e 3 to succeed, and thus had kept another lunar lander as a backup. But due to No. 3's success, this humble benchwarmer was promoted to front line player and landed on the Moon on January 3, 2019.

Obviously, it brought along its own perra. But what made the Chang'e 4 mission impressive was the landing spot, the Von Kármán Crater located on the far side of the Moon. The Chinese space agencies had thus achieved a first for humanity, soft landing a craft on the Moon's hidden face. At the time of writing, this successful series has spawned two more installments.

[02:00:00] Chang'e 5 launched on November 23, 2020, and was the first mission in the entire project to return to earth after collecting 1.7 kilograms of samples from the moon's surface. Changi six took off on May 3rd, 2024, and is yet to return. Number six will return to near the Von Carmen crater on the moon's far side for another collection and subsequent delivery of samples.

But why stop at the moon on January the 23rd 2020, the Chinese space agencies launched their first independent mission to Mars Tian when one or Heavenly Questions the craft reached the red planet's orbit on February 10, 2021, from where it deployed a lander and a rover, Zhurong. More heavenly questions will follow.

Tianwen 2 is scheduled to launch in 2025 for a double mission, which may conclude only in the 2030s. The first part of the voyage will be dedicated to collecting material from an asteroid. Tianwen 2 will then sling around Earth for a second collection from a comet. The follow up mission, Tianwen 3, will also lift off around 2030, flying off to Mars.

Its objectives will be to collect rock samples from the Red Planet and return them safely Wave lead to earth for analysis. [02:01:00] Tian when for should follow shortly after with an even more ambitious destination. Jupiter, the remote controlled craft, will conduct flybys of Jupiter and its moons before settling in a around Callisto.

From there, the probe will conduct a rare flyby of the icy planet. In the 2040s, this intense schedule will be made even busier by an expansion of the Changi program scheduled to kick off in 2030. The Chinese space agencies are envisioning five consecutive launches after 2030, which will deliver the necessary components to assemble a permanent base on the Moon South Pole.

This will be entirely robotic at first, but will be joined by a crew of Ticanauts in 2036. This project is similar in scope and timing to NASA's Artemis and Gateway programs, which makes for an exciting race to establish a permanent human presence on the moon. So we're talking about at least eight major launch missions to take place between 2025 and 2036, without taking into account test runs, missions to Tiangong, and satellite launches.

It makes sense that one key priority for CASC is to enhance the cost effectiveness of the launch [02:02:00] phase. To achieve this, it's investing in rockets like the Long March 10 and 11, which are propelled by solid rather than liquid fuel. Solid fueled rockets, in fact, allow for the use of mobile launchers, which are more agile and way cheaper than traditional launch platforms used for liquid fueled rockets.

CASC has also kick started the development of a new version of the rocket Long March 9, which is due by 2030. This new incarnation of the number 9 should have The launch a payload of 150 metric tons to low Earth orbit, or 50 tons to the Earth Moon transfer orbit. More importantly, it will consist of three stages, one of which will be reusable.

And that's the key achievement, as reusability will allow for significant economies of scale. Clearly, making the most of available resources is high up China's agenda. And if you're going to explore space, you may as well make the most of what you find up there. CAI scientist Wang Wei has in fact already conducted a feasibility study to build an end to end logistics system which will scale.

Ban the entire solar system, this system to be operational by the year 2100 will harvest resources such as water from the moon, [02:03:00] or even metals and minerals from near earth, asteroids, Mars, and Jupiter satellites. In other words, it's a grand scale plan for extraterrestrial mining. So how realistic is this?

Only time will tell, but on a possibly more achievable scale, the Chinese Society of Astronauts Space Solar Power Commission, has announced another plan to harvest a less tangible energy source in the words of its director leaning in the future. We are looking at building a space solar power station, which according to the current plan, will possess the power capability of a billion watts.

So the gigawatt level and the mega project will be operational for commercial use. The future Space Power Station will likely have a scale of more than 10,000 tons programs described thus far. Are all rooted in a desire to further space exploration and technological advancement. However, as is often the case with space programs, the shadow of the military looms large.

The People's Liberation Army or PLA oversees many of these programs, and Tiger Norths are routinely recruited from the armed forces in a more direct way. The PLA has been active in developing [02:04:00] satellite systems dedicated to signal intelligence or to assist precision guided weapons. Just to quote a statistic, of all 585 2001 to 2020, 229 had military utility.

One of those launches was for the final satellite in the Beidou network, a navigation system managed by the PLA to rival the more widespread GPS system owned by the United States. And speaking of orbital rivalries in 2020, China unveiled its plans to develop a mega constellation of almost 13,000 satellites, GU Wang, which will challenge the starlink array set up by SpaceX.

The purpose of Gua Wang is to provide fast, reliable internet via satellite across the globe, especially in poorly serviced areas, according to an April, 2023 report by the Washington Post. However, there is. A risk for the Gua Wang Stalin rivalry to spill outside the boundaries of commercial competition.

According to the post Chinese military researchers are concerned that the Stalin Communications Network may quote, pose a major national security threat to Beijing following their successful use in the UK war, hence the Chinese military. May call for the [02:05:00] Guaweng project to be accelerated and weaponized.

According to unnamed Chinese sources, the PLA may call for Guaweng satellites to be equipped with laser and microwave weapons, which, quote, can be used to damage the reconnaissance payloads that may be carried by the Starlink satellites. Or more traditionally, to conduct cyberattacks to paralyze Starlink's communication network.

The Guowen Project and PLA's space capabilities are two topics we will need to expand on in future videos. In fact, every program we touched upon today deserves its own deep dive, so let us know in the comments which one you'd like to see next. For the time being though, we can only conclude that China's plans to explore and exploit orbital and transorbital space are unparalleled.

I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's a game where you have to keep up your game if you want to keep pace with the Chinese space agencies. Are we looking at a future space race? It's our opinion that a new space race has already started, one more complex and unpredictable than the good old variety between the US and the Soviet Union.

More global and regional players have now [02:06:00] entered the fray, besides the United States and China as rival or allies, Russia, Japan, the ESA, India, as well as private enterprises such as SpaceX are all getting in on it. Peace out. While there is the ever present risk of militarization of space, our hope is that an increasingly crowded market will stimulate instead cost efficiencies, research and development, and the advancement of all mankind.

This Is How Huawei Shocked America With a Smartphone - Bloomberg Originals - Air Date 11-17-23

ROSALIE E'SILVA - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: The chip industry distinguishes chips by referring to them in nanometers, or billionths of a meter. That's about half the diameter of a DNA double helix.

IAN KING: Basically, the smaller you can make a transistor, the better you can make the capabilities of a chip.

If you're looking at Samsung's latest Galaxy, or obviously Apple's iPhone, These devices are going to be based upon chips that are using three nanometer technology.

ROSALIE E'SILVA - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: US export controls were aimed at keeping China's tech capabilities eight to ten years behind the US but the Kirin 9000S chip found in the Mate 60 Pro demonstrated that it may only be four or five [02:07:00] years behind the world's most advanced technology.

IAN KING: This chip was, was made with seven nanometer production and that is a lot closer to where the industry is, to the state of the art, than the US had been hoping. The

ROSALIE E'SILVA - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: So, how did Huawei and SMIC pull this off? In recent years, the majority of the world's most advanced chips have come from here, Taiwan. And there's one single company that makes most of them, TSMC.

In the past, the Huawei unit HiSilicon was able to design chips that it delegated TSMC to manufacture and import. The US sanctions stopped that.

DEBBY WU: China does seem to be able to find its way to find its way. alternatives when there is a lack of Western technologies available.

ROSALIE E'SILVA - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: The single most important piece of equipment for making the most [02:08:00] advanced chips is what's known as an extreme ultraviolet lithography or an E.

U. V. Machine. It took decades to develop, and each one costs more than 100 million. They're able to etch patterns into chips as small as three nanometers. Only one company in the world makes them. The Dutch firm ASML. ASML

IAN KING: hasn't been allowed to export its EUV machines to China. Never. It has been allowed to export something called DUV, a different type of technology, an older type of technology.

It was thought that by basically limiting them to that type of technology that they'd never get beyond a certain stage. What we found, and this chip would appear to indicate, is that actually they were able to squeeze the capabilities of this DUV machinery to get way more advanced lines in those pieces of silicon than the U.

S. had hoped.

ROSALIE E'SILVA - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: Bloomberg reporting [02:09:00] discovered that SMIC did actually use some of these older D. U. V. machines from A. S. M. L. But the key question is whether it can produce a component at scale and efficiently enough to make it cost effective. In fact, the reason the handsets sold out may have had more to do with supply, not enough chips, than demand.

It also means it may be harder to get to the next stage, below 7 nanometers.

GINA RAIMONDO: I was obviously, I the right word, upset, brave, you know, when I saw the Huawei announcement. The only good news is, if there is any, is we don't have any evidence that they can manufacture 7 nanometer at scale.

IAN KING: On what's called the China Hawk side of the equation, this is the last chance that America has to cut off China from access to advanced technology.

DEBBY WU: Some Republican lawmakers are now calling for the Biden administration to cut off Huawei and SMIC from American [02:10:00] technologies completely. In

IAN KING: the short term, there's likely to be a degradation of their capabilities. But if you look at this from a long term perspective, you've given them Every, every incentive in the world to go out and do it themselves.

DEBBY WU: China remains the biggest semiconductor consumer and if the companies like Intel and NVIDIA loses this major market, that means that they could generate significantly less revenue and hurt their ability to continue to innovate and keep the US ahead of China.

IAN KING: Chinese spending plans on semiconductor have been widely reported to be in excess of 100 billion.

That's three or four times the annual spending of a major chip maker like TSMC. Given that kind of capital, given that kind of patience, there is a chance that they will get to advance capabilities over time.

SECTION D: ESCALATING TENSIONS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section D: Escalating tensions.

Can We Compete With China While Avoiding War? - Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft - Air Date 5-28-24

KELLEY VHLAHOS - HOST, QUINCY INSTITUTE: One of the things that bugs you is that there seems to be a school of [02:11:00] thought that economic competition with China is completely divorced

from the security question. In other words, no one who is supporting, you know, no one who is supporting punishments against against Beijing, whether it be sanctions or against companies or exports into China or the pressuring of allies to isolate Chinese markets or talking about decoupling, whatever veer into the Security well realm when in fact, as you have pointed out to me, supporters of these policies, including the Biden administration, often use national security reasons to justify all of those actions.

The Chinese for their part, do the same thing. Um, you call it a security dilemma in the economic realm. Can you talk more about that?

JAKE WERNER: I talk to people on both sides of the aisle, um, who, who think that we have real security problems with China. Um, they worry about the possibility of violent conflict. Uh, but they think that we can push [02:12:00] and antagonize China in the economic realm. Without any kind of limit, because it has no danger of building up towards some sort of, uh, war or conflict, uh, in, in some third country.

Um, I think that that, uh, that is quite unrealistic. Uh, we, we look at the history of major great power conflict over the last, uh, Uh, 120 years or so. All of those conflicts were rooted in economic competition. World War I came out of a competition over which country could dominate, uh, markets and raw materials in the colonized world.

The conflict between, uh, Japan and the United States that led to Pearl Harbor that ultimately came out of a question of who would be able to dominate commerce in China. And of course, the Cold War was also really fundamentally about who would dominate the industrial capacity of Western Europe and Japan.

Um, so we see historically that economic tensions build into security conflict, the most disastrous global conflicts of the last century. [02:13:00] Um, and we see that happening now in the US china relationship. Uh, there is, uh, what is thought on both sides to be a zero sum game. Um, question over who is going to dominate the high value sectors in high technology industries, who is going to dominate the export markets for those goods and who will be able to dominate the sourcing of the raw materials that are necessary to produce those goods.

Increasingly we're seeing the two sides, uh, in a sort of escalatory arms race in, in, in the economic realm. Um, so I actually, I actually agree with, um, What my co panelists have said, um, quite a bit, uh, actually, uh, the, the issue is rather that I think we need to take into the, into account the very real danger that even as we need to attend to the, the core economic problems in the United States, we also need to figure out a modus vivendi with China so that this doesn't spin out of control into the kind of global conflicts that, uh, that we've seen historically.

And, and how do you do that? I think, I mean, if we, Of course, in capitalism, economic competition is a fact of everyday life. It doesn't always [02:14:00] spin out into a world war that only happens every couple of decades or so. So what makes the difference between everyday economic competition, uh, and the kind of zero sum existential economic competition that leads to war?

Uh, I think it's the choice between, uh, between open competition. On the one hand and exclusion on the other in an open competition, you're constantly meeting your adversary, , in some space, whether that's a sports stadium or, or a political debate or in a commercial market, the competition is constantly renewed.

Uh, there's possibilities for the other side, even if they lose this game to come back and win the next one. Uh, it's an ongoing connection between the two competitors and exclusion is quite different than that. That is severing the connection between the two sides, making sure that there is no competition.

Uh, right now in D. C., everything that we do that antagonizes China, we call competition. But in reality, the vast majority of these things are exclusion. They're actually cutting off competition, whether that's preventing China, Chinese businesses from [02:15:00] buying advanced semiconductors, cutting Chinese businesses out of the American market.

Making it illegal for Chinese citizens to purchase land in the United States. Um, uh, blocking, uh, the Chinese construction of undersea cables. These are, these are, these are really core vital interests that the United States wants to do these things precisely for, for the same reason that China thinks that they're core vital interests.

Uh, and when you pursue exclusion, around core vital interests, that is incredibly provocative, violently provocative. If it's in some realm that China is interested in and can just sort of like move its efforts elsewhere, fine. That's not a big deal. If it gets to vital interests, then China is going to respond in kind.

And we're already seeing that kind of, uh, escalatory spiral in the economic realm. So I don't, I don't dispute the problems that, uh, that Sagar and David have raised. Um, I, I think they, they require, uh, Very serious attention, but as part of our, our thinking through those things, we also have to find a way to accommodate the desire to grow and to improve the prospects of the people [02:16:00] of both China and the United States.

DAVID GOLDMAN: There's an old joke about the Austro Hungarian empire, that it was a tyranny tempered by incompetence. I think the same can be said about American technology policy towards China. We certainly impose serious costs on China. Yeah. But when, uh, president Trump, I believe in April of 2019, put a ban on higher end chips to Huawei, most American analysts said that will finish off China's 5g program that won't be able to roll it out without the higher end chips.

Well, six years later, China has 3. 8 million 5g base stations and we have a hundred thousand and their 5g is real 5g. It's about three or four times as fast as ours. And that's having a big effect in their industry. They've managed to work around it with lower end chips. Huawei shut down, virtually shut down his handset business because you need the better, the faster chips [02:17:00] to run 5g.

But then, uh, last September they demonstrated that they could produce domestically with the technology they had higher end chips that were good enough to run a 5g smartphone and they could kick the stuffing out of Apple in the Chinese market. So we have not really stopped the Chinese from proceeding with their plan.

We've imposed substantial costs on them. My guess is maybe even a half percent of GDP per year. It's a big cost, but they're willing to pay it. The chief technology officer of Huawei told me in an interview, oh, a year ago, you don't understand the Chinese. The guys are Australian. That's it. If we have a problem, we'll put a thousand engineers on it.

And if that doesn't do it, we'll put 10, 000 engineers on it. And China graduates more engineers than the whole rest of the world combined. So I've got a lot of them. So whenever you [02:18:00] put a specific problem in front of the Chinese, uh, they'll attack it and most of the time they'll solve it where we really shine and the Chinese don't is in the unknown unknowns and innovation. Uh, it's the kind of maverick eccentric antinomian problem with authority rebel that did most of the great innovations of the digital age in the United States. So I convinced that if we pick our spots and we put the resources behind innovation, the way we used to during the cold war, we'll leapfrog China in many areas, but it won't work to try to stay ahead of them or suppress them in every area. It's a matter of picking our spots and being excellent in really key areas.

Will China And The U.S. Go To War Over Taiwan? - AJ+ - Air Date 6-30-24

SAKHR AL-MAKHADHI - HOST, AJ+: China, officially named the People's Republic of China, is currently recognized by the UN and most [02:19:00] countries in the world. Taiwan, officially named the Republic of China, is only recognized by 12 countries and does not have a seat at the UN. And here's where it starts to get complicated.

The Chinese government says there is only one sovereign nation under the name China, meaning that Taiwan is a part of China. And the Chinese Communist Party is the government of that China, but the elected government in Taiwan insists that Taiwan is already its own country.

To get to the root of this problem, we have to go back in time to 1912, when imperial rule ended in China, and a new government, called the Republic of China, or ROC, was founded. The Nationalist Party became the ruling government of China, while also fighting the Communist Party in a civil war. After nine years of fighting, the two parties paused the conflict to fight against Imperial Japan, when it invaded and occupied the country in 1937.

The [02:20:00] Second Sino Japanese War was fought. Some estimates say that Japanese soldiers raped tens of thousands of women and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians in China's then capital Nanjing.

The conflict is part of what China's government calls its Century of Humiliation, referring to the nearly 100 years of military defeats when China had to cede territory. 1945, foreign powers like Japan, France and Britain. Taiwan was one of the territories ceded to Japan by Imperial China. After Japan surrendered at the end of World War II, Taiwan was returned to the ROC.

When the Communist Party tells its own history, the return of these Chinese territories, including Taiwan, serves as a symbol of victory in its fight against imperialism.

BRIAN HIOE: I, I think war just begets smart war, and I think with nationalism, oftentimes you just have past tragedies used to justify future military action. Brian Hugh [02:21:00] is a journalist and writer and a founder of New Bloom, an online magazine that focuses on Taiwanese politics and youth. And with regards to these contemporary claims from China over Taiwan.

That could lead to further tragedies, further warfare, and that's also in the name of nation, and territory, and land, and, uh, national glory in that sense. After Japan pulled out of China in 1945, the struggle for power between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party resumed. 210, 000 Communists are dead or wounded in the battle, while some of the 50, 000 Nationalists wounded are evacuated by air to rear areas.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Despite the horde of Communist captives taken, the city All to the rest. The rest is history. The Communist Party's victory in the civil war resulted in the birth of the People's Republic of China, or PRC, and the Nationalist Party moved its government to Taiwan. But that is far from explaining why mainland China is recognized by most countries today and still wants [02:22:00] to claim Taiwan.

SAKHR AL-MAKHADHI - HOST, AJ+: For the next few decades, the PRC and ROC were ruled separately across the Taiwan Strait under authoritarian dictatorships. Mao Zedong led Mainland China from Beijing until his death. On the island off China's southeastern coast, Chiang Kai shek imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan, despite local resistance.

That period became known as the White Terror. Those who didn't support a total war with the PRC were labeled and persecuted as communist sympathizers. Tens of thousands of people were arrested for holding different political views from the government. For And at least 1, 200 were executed. For two decades, the two governments exchanged fire across the Taiwan Strait.

The Nationalist Party wanted to retake China, and the Communist Party wanted to squash the ROC's leadership. Neither succeeded. And they both claimed to be the sole government of China. But what did other [02:23:00] countries think? The ROC, led by the Nationalist Party, governing both the mainland and Taiwan, was a founding member of the UN in 1945.

After the Nationalists fled to Taiwan, the UN continued to only recognise the ROC, even though it just controlled Taiwan. After the PRC's founding, other Soviet aligned countries quickly recognised it as the government of China. Later, more and more countries joined them. In 1971, most UN members voted to expel the ROC and instead approved the PRC to represent China.

Let's take a pause and zoom in here. Because the 70s were an important decade When the PRC joined the UN, the US still had not recognized it. In fact, the US has played a big part in the tug of war between China and Taiwan.

BRIAN HIOE: Taiwan has historically played a role for the US in terms of, uh, regional containment policy.

SAKHR AL-MAKHADHI - HOST, AJ+: [02:24:00] When Japan withdrew at the end of World War II, the Communist Party gained control of northern China. which had partly been held by the Soviet Union. And the US sent troops to make sure the Nationalist Party maintained control of southern China, including Taiwan. After the defeated Nationalists fled to the island, again, the U.

S. sided with them.

BRIAN HIOE: I think particularly the US historically backed Taiwan in the interests of anti communism and propped up a right wing dictatorship here.

SAKHR AL-MAKHADHI - HOST, AJ+: During the Vietnam War and the Cold War, Nationalist Party led Taiwan provided regional and non combat military support to the US. American backing was crucial to the Nationalist Party's military and political ambition.

The ROC planned several military offenses on the mainland during the 60s, when Mao's China was suffering from famine and political turmoil. But the operations couldn't be carried out. Due to the lack of US support. Between 1949 and 1965, the US provided Taiwan with nearly 4 billion worth of military and [02:25:00] economic aid.

Before the PRC joined the U. N. in 1971, the US also deliberately delayed its membership from being approved. Then this happened.

RICHARD NIXON: My hope out of, uh, the beginning that we have made on this journey that many, many Americans, particularly the young Americans who like to travel so much, will have an opportunity to come here as I have come here today with Mrs.

Nixon and the others in our party. In 1972, a US president visited the PRC for the first time after its founding. This became a turning point in US china relations. Entrenched in the Vietnam War and the Cold War, The American government saw an opportunity to finally form relations with the PRC and to isolate the Soviet Union when its rift with China was growing wider.

SAKHR AL-MAKHADHI - HOST, AJ+: The United States recognizes the government of the People's Republic of China as a sole legal government of China. In 1979, 30 years after [02:26:00] the PRC's founding and eight years after it joined the UN, the US officially recognized the PRC. But in classic US tradition, the American government was still It signed the Taiwan Relations Act, which legally mandates the U.

S. to provide arms for Taiwan to defend itself, and says that any attempt to use force against Taiwan would be of grave concern. But it doesn't say whether the US would go to war. What followed after the ROC lost both its U. N. seats, and its official recognition from the US would change Taiwan's course completely.

With the world embracing the PRC, China's then paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, led economic reforms that made China a powerhouse in the US dominated global capitalist system. Meanwhile across the strait, in 1979, tens of thousands of activists and supporters gathered in Taiwan's second largest city, Kaohsiung, to demand press freedom and an [02:27:00] end to one party rule.

Police beat protesters and injured over a hundred people. Leaders of the protest were tried in military court and punished with harsh sentences, including life imprisonment. What is now known as the Formosa Incident kick started the democratic movement in Taiwan. Under public pressure, the government started allowing non nationalist party candidates to participate in national elections.

Martial law started loosening and eventually ended in 1987. For more UN videos visit www. un. org Since then, Taiwan has gone through numerous legislative and government reforms.

BRIAN HIOE: At the day, there is this anxiety about distinguishing oneself from China. But then I think particularly in contemporary times, that is increasingly tied to that Taiwan is democracy and China is not.

I think a lot of contemporary Taiwan's political identity is very pluralistic, because there are all this diverse influences, whether from that the original Hapsar are indigenous, there's different ways of Han migration, that Taiwan went through the Japanese colonial period, and the KMT period, and so I think that [02:28:00] often leads to the framing that these are all different historical factors that some which are quite tragic contribute to the making of contemporary Taiwanese identity.

SAKHR AL-MAKHADHI - HOST, AJ+: Today, the majority of people in Taiwan identify as primarily Taiwanese, some as both Taiwanese and Chinese, and only 3 percent as primarily Chinese. This shifting identity is reflected in the fact that the Democratic Progressive Party won an unprecedented third term in the presidential election in 2024.

The party built its platform on supporting Taiwan's independence from China, while the Nationalist Party, which has long abandoned its dream of overtaking the mainland, is now seen as the party that favors closer ties with mainland China. The majority of people in Taiwan today want to maintain the current state of de facto, but not formalized, independence.

Though, support for pursuing independence slowly has also increased over the past few decades.

Sarah Cook on China's Expanding Global Media Influence - Democracy Paradox - Air Date 9-20-22

JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: Can you provide an example that surprised you as you were putting together the [02:29:00] research where China clearly overstepped its bounds or did something new to influence media abroad?

SARAH COOK: So, there’s one individual example I can give, but I think part of what really surprised me was the constellation of certain things. So, one example that is new and would not have happened before and stood out and I think connects to the shock of what’s happened in Hong Kong is the fact that Hong Kong authorities are also getting into the business now of threatening news outlets and website servers in other countries. So, for example, one of the reports I actually worked on was the Israel report.

So, a Hong Kong government official wrote to a local web service provider in Israel, because they were hosting a website of Hong Kong democracy activists and asked them to take down the website. Part of what they did was they said, ‘The hosting of this website violates the National Security Law in Hong Kong and your employees could be at risk.’ Because the national security law actually [02:30:00] includes an extraterritorially broad provision. So, the company did initially take down the website. Then there was a brouhaha and a lot of public backlash and they put it back up. Which I think epitomizes the overall findings of the report in some ways of these more aggressive influence efforts but also the corresponding backlash in different countries.

Then I think that company actually said, ‘We’re going to institute better screening of these requests.’ So, then it actually built up a deeper, longer-term form of resilience. But I think that’s just one example of how what’s happening in China and what’s changing in China and Hong Kong does have ripple effects globally. I think the other thing that just surprised me in terms of overall findings is the sheer scale of content placements in mainstream media in country after country, we’ve counted over 130 news outlets of 30 countries that were republishing content that was produced by Chinese state media outlets or the Chinese embassy. So, [02:31:00] these state media outlets are actually formally under the control of the Communist Party’s propaganda department.

So, basically, they’re producing content that’s then being inserted, sometimes labeled, sometimes kind of labeled, sometimes not labeled or deliberately disguised into newspapers, television programs, radio to a lesser extent, because it’s just not as widely used around the world, in country after country in multiple mainstream media outlets. Just the sheer scale of that is really breathtaking. I think there’s other questions about how impactful it is, but that’s just something that a few years ago wasn’t happening on that scale. They’ve really put a lot of effort into it. In sixteen countries we found upgraded or new agreements that were what were facilitating that kind of injection of content. Just the sheer scale of readership and viewership of that is kind of mind boggling to be honest.

JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: When did China really start to expand its media footprint? I mean, it feels like it’s been in [02:32:00] recent years, but some of these media outlets like Xinhua have existed for a long time. So, when did it really kind of take its media operations global?

SARAH COOK: So, all of these media outlets for the most part existed within China for a long time. So, Xinhua is a core element of the domestic propaganda apparatus. The foreign influence really started in the Chinese language media space after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, because there was so much support for the protestors among the Chinese diaspora. That really caught the Communist Party by surprise. So, they felt like, ‘Wow, we really need to do something about this.’

That’s when some of these techniques like the inserting of content which they call ‘Borrowing a Boat to Reach the Sea’ where Chinese state sources piggyback onto local media to reach their audiences. That first emerges in the Chinese language space. Getting friendly business people to buy out media outlets started happening in the mid-nineties with some outlets in [02:33:00] Malaysia and in Hong Kong. In the 2000s, you saw it in Taiwan. So, I think you definitely see this element of tactics and experimentation happening in the Chinese language. Then I think what’s newer is that over the last 5-10 years there has been an uptick in trying to expand this globally. Some of this precedes Xi Jinping. Hu Jintao, his predecessor, was actually the first one to really invest some serious money in expanding the Chinese state media outlets in telling them to quote, “Go global.”

Because of some of the filings from the Foreign Agents Registration Act, we know how much money an outlet like the state-run China Daily was spending on inserting content into local US media. There was a huge jump around 2009. It more than doubled in like a couple of years and then it stayed at a very high level of at least a million dollars a year, more than that, even $2 million a year since then. So, it started before Xi Jinping, but Xi Jinping has definitely [02:34:00] emphasized it more. I think in general Xi Jinping is much more aggressive. So, under Hu Jintao there was some of this kind of censorship pressure happening, especially in Chinese language media and major international media and pressure on foreign correspondents.

But now we found in 24 out of the 30 countries local journalists facing some kind of intimidation or pressure or cyber-attacks or cyber bullying related to coverage of China. When I did my first report 10 years ago that just wasn’t happening. So, that kind of evolution into the local mainstream media expansion into so many different languages with a more aggressive approach is something that’s much more recent, maybe in the last five years.

JUSTIN KEMPF - HOST, DEMOCRACY PARADOX: Has Xi Jinping changed tactics that they’ve used in terms of China’s media influence campaign throughout his tenure? I mean, how have you seen things change as Xi Jinping has been in power over the course of his 10 years?

SARAH COOK: So, I [02:35:00] would say, I think some of what happens outside China actually mirrors some of what’s happened inside China in that Xi Jinping actually gets the internet. He understands social media. He’s much savvier than his predecessors and he understands how to control it. So, one of the first things he did when he first came to power was there was actually a fairly vibrant social media space and conversation. There were heavily censored topics, but you still had breaking news that was getting ahead of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus back in 2011-2012. And these are all on domestic platforms, so like Weibo, which is kind of a Chinese version of Twitter, because Twitter is blocked. So, it was already pretty censored, but it was pretty freewheeling. There were some real political and social conversations and sharing of information critical of the government.

So, Xi just squashed that. He came in and basically issued new rules. He arrested and detained some really influential social [02:36:00] media people, even people like businessmen, people who weren’t necessarily political dissidents or anything like that. So, some of these platforms are just a shadow of what they were before in terms of the space for some of the public conversations outside of the control of the Communist Party. And I think that savviness does translate internationally. There’s been a much greater emphasis in investment on local languages, like I said. We’re not just talking about Spanish or Arabic. We’re talking about Hebrew, Romanian, Sinhala, and Swahili. They have accounts and in the 30 countries we looked at, we found at least one account or local diplomatic outreach that was in the local language and in many countries more than one local language.

So, I think that’s one element of savviness and engagement. Now some of that is very genuine about Chinese culture and Chinese food, but then you get some form of falsehood or disinformation or misleading content related to conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19 denials and mudding the waters about what’s happening in [02:37:00] Xinjiang or other kinds of anti-American narratives based on not quite full truths. So, I think it’s that there’s engagement, but it’s also more aggressive and covert. So, what we’re seeing overall is we find that the tactics are becoming more sophisticated, more covert, and more coercive. That just really came through as we were going across the sets of different countries and some of the sophistication is in how covert it is.

Some of it is, again, how do you tap into local influencers and get them to repost content? So, there’s often some trickery involved. Some of it is co-opting the local political elites and media owners to suppress coverage of the local outlets. That we found in 17 countries. So, that was actually relatively common where it’s not just the Chinese embassy picking up the phone and telling a journalist not to cover this, but a local official, a ministry representative, [02:38:00] or a media owner who either themselves got a call from the Chinese embassy or have their own business or other interests related to China and find that it’s not a good idea to be publishing this or that report at a particular moment.

Pentagon Ran a Secret Anti-Vax Campaign to Undermine China at the Height of the Pandemic: Reuters - Democracy Now! - Air Date 6-20-24

JOEL SCHECTMAN: Basically, what we found was that when COVID-19 broke out in January, February 2020, obviously, the entire world was not prepared for what was going to happen next. But in certain areas of the national security establishment in Washington, immediately they saw this through the kind of prism of this kind of new cold war with China, right? And the issue is that that had already been heating up. And there’s this idea in Washington now that China and Russia have been just very successful with these kind of information operations, these kind of propaganda campaigns, of the type that the U.S. used to [02:39:00] also do a lot during the Cold War. But there’s this idea that Russia and China had really gotten ahead of the United States in the years since the Cold War. And, you know, in 2016, you have the hacking and leaking during the election to affect the outcome of the election. And there’s this idea that China has really been, like, getting ahead in that sphere, as well, in, like, influencing allies and spreading misinformation.

And that’s the backdrop to what happened in 2020, where COVID breaks out, and then, immediately, or within a few months of the outbreak, China starts spinning this narrative that not only was COVID not created in China, but that it was actually brought to China by the United States military, that maybe it came out of Fort Detrick or maybe it came through a military service member who was participating in a sports competition there. But they start spreading that narrative, and it starts — and, you know, from the Pentagon perspective, there was just [02:40:00] this, like, tremendous anger that this narrative was starting to take hold in other — in countries, you know, like the Philippines and Southeast Asia. And so they felt that they had to strike back.

And the other thing that was going on at that period was that even in the early days of the pandemic, the U.S. was starting to come up with a vaccine response, but one that was going to really put, like, America first. It was a very, like, America-first vaccine policy, whereas very, very early in the pandemic, China came out publicly and said that it was going to try to make its vaccines publicly available in the developing world, right?

And all of this starts to play out in the Philippines, which is a country that traditionally was a very close U.S. ally, right? And traditionally, it’s a very close U.S. ally, but had started to move away under President Duterte, had started to move away from the United States and started to move toward China anyway. And then the [02:41:00] pandemic breaks out, and Duterte cuts this deal with China that it’s going to be first in line for China’s vaccine that’s under development. And at the same time, Duterte says, “OK, I’m going to also get rid of these old U.S. military agreements that we have. They’re no longer relevant.” And so, within the Pentagon and within Washington, there was this fear that they were going to lose the Philippines, so to speak.

And so they launched this secret propaganda campaign in the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia to try to denigrate China’s vaccine. And what made it particularly controversial, I think, or controversial now — right? — to look back at it in hindsight, is that it’s not that U.S. was secretly — not just that the U.S. was secretly denigrating a vaccine at the height of the COVID pandemic, which by itself is kind of problematic, but it was doing this at a time that no other vaccine was going to be [02:42:00] available in the foreseeable future, right? Like, the United States’s vaccines did not become widely available in the Philippines for like 10 months — for 10 months after they got the Chinese one. So the Chinese one was really the only game in town in the Philippines for like almost the first year of — for almost an entire year.

And so, you know, you have Sinovac, which is really the only one that most Filipinos were able to access, and the Pentagon was using these kind of secret social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook to say that this vaccine was harmful, that it was dangerous, that it was at least ineffective, and that China caused the virus to start with, so, ergo, you know, how can he trust any vaccine that comes out of the country that created the virus itself, right? And they were using these kind of fake accounts that sort of purported to be Filipinos and [02:43:00] trying to really stir up this message that, you know, I mean, what’s your track record with Chinese products? Right? They’re all fake, right? You know, what have you seen in your own life? You’ve seen that Chinese products are fake. How can you trust a country that always creates fake products to make a real vaccine? The vaccines are —

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I mean —

JOEL SCHECTMAN: — going to be fake, too. Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: This is extremely significant, given how many people died in the Philippines of COVID without taking the vaccine. I mean, you have that quote in your piece. “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud,” said one senior military officer. How many people died in the Philippines?

JOEL SCHECTMAN: Yeah. So, I’m trying to remember, like, by the end of the — by the end of COVID, how many people passed away. But it was — I mean, you’re talking about a number that reached into — [02:44:00] you know, that reached far past the tens of thousands, right?

And there’s no question — it’s very hard to measure, like, the efficacy of a secret campaign like this and say, OK, how much did it move the needle. But I think if we judged it by its intentions — right? — like, the intention was to make people hesitant to take Sinovac — there’s no question that, to the degree that that was successful, it was incredibly harmful. There’s all kinds of public health research in the Philippines that shows that vaccine hesitancy, specifically towards the Chinese vaccines, led to a large number of deaths, because, again, that was the only vaccine that was available from like February 2021 almost 'til early 2022. It wasn't the only one, but it was almost the only one, right? Like, it was the only one you could reliably get at that point in the country. And the fact that people were so afraid of taking that because of their [02:45:00] history of sort of suspicion towards China really had like a very adverse impact. Now, it’s hard to say exactly how much the Pentagon throwing fuel on that fire, like, how much of an impact that had. But if you judge it by its intentions, to whatever degree they were successful with their intentions, it was incredibly harmful.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: You suggest, toward the end of your piece, Joel, that there is a kind of broader move underway within the U.S. military to get more involved in clandestine propaganda to undermine adversaries like China and Russia — both of these countries, of course, criticized by the U.S. precisely for deploying these methods. Can you explain?

JOEL SCHECTMAN: Yeah. So, like I was mentioning earlier, there is this idea that the U.S. has been flat-footed in sort of responding to Chinese and Russian covert propaganda efforts. And there’s this idea that, you know, [02:46:00] we’ve been like a little bit too hesitant, a little too kind of moralistic in our response. And as a result, we’ve kind of, like, ceded this sort of information space battlefield to them. There’s this idea that we need to kind of fight fire with fire, the United States needs to take the fight back to the adversary in that realm, and that it needs to envision psyops, as they call them, as having a much bigger role in sort of shifting the — you know, kind of shifting the political dynamic — right? — that psyops, their role is not just in a hot, like, war, dropping leaflets, encouraging surrender, but it really needs to be part of this kind of ideological battle and potentially be used to kind of undermine civil society within, like — you know, within our adversaries.

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 [02:47:00] us a text at 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from The Telegraph, Focus On Africa, The China in Africa Podcast, Vox, CNBC, The Hustle, Astrographics, Bloomberg Originals, The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, AJ+, Democracy Paradox, and Democracy Now! 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 a gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today ay bestoftheleft.com/support or [02:48:00] through our Patreon page. And we're offering a 20% off discount for this month only. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community where you can also continue the discussion.

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

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#1639 Migrants and Refugees on Fortress Earth: Our politicized, fortified, industrialized borders in the US and Europe (Transcript)

Posted by · July 02, 2024 2:30 AM

Air Date 7/2/2024

Full Notes Page

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

Border security around the world continues to take turns for the dark and dystopian as right-wing sentiment against migrants and refugees continues to escalate to the extreme.

Sources of providing our Top Takes today include Democracy Now!, It Could Happen Here, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the PBS NewsHour, and Your Undivided Attention.

Then in the additional Deeper Dive half of the show, there'll be more on the politicization of the border, brutal border enforcement, the border industrial complex, and migrant stories.

First Illinois Latina Rep. Praises Biden's New Immigration Executive Order But Slams Border Shutdown - Democracy Now! - Air Date 6-20-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: For more, we're joined by Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez of Illinois, where it's estimated one in 10 children in the state has an undocumented parent. Ramirez is the first Latina congressmember to ever represent Illinois. She's also married to a DACA recipient who'd benefit from this new [00:01:00] Biden executive action.

On Tuesday, she and her husband, Boris Hernandez, attended Biden's White House announcement. Congressmember, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you explain in detail what exactly President Biden has now put into effect and how it affects your own personal family?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ:: Yeah, Amy, it's a personal --it's an announcement that hits personally, right? I'm married to my amazing husband, Boris, who came at the age of 14, who is DACA. And we've been going through this process for about three years to adjust status.

But here's the reality. There's an assumption that if you marry a US citizen, you automatically become a US citizen or a green card holder in this country. Most people don't understand that in order for you to be able to get permanent status here, you have to actually apply through a marriage adjustment status that requires, if you enter this country unauthorized, [00:02:00] like you just heard from the southern border, for you to pay a 10 year bar back in your home country.

So what that means is that if someone is married to a US citizen, as a family, they want to stay together. The current law requires them to go back to their country with absolutely no guarantee that they will be approved to re-enter the country. Anything can happen in that time. And in some cases, people are waiting 10, 11, 12 years back in Mexico, in Haiti, Ecuador or wherever their home country is--in essence, separating families and which is why there are over 500,000 individuals made up of these households who are still in the shadows.

On Tuesday, that changes that. It means that no longer will you have to go back to your home country in order to be able to go through your adjustment status. You will be able to stay with your family here and raise your children and apply for your legal permanent residency [00:03:00] as well as a 3-year work permit.

It's major. It literally means keeping families together in mixed status. It means that US citizens like me who are married to non-citizens won't have to worry that at any given time if they're in their DACA that the program ends and they'll be undocumented completely or if they're not DACA that at any moment in the shadows they could be deported.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I want to ask you about the timing of this, both right before the presidential election debate between Biden and Trump, but also right after President Biden just issued one of the most restrictive immigration policies ever declared under a recent Democratic administration. It shuts down the US-Mexico border, denies asylum to most migrants who don't cross into the US via ports of entry, and limits total asylum requests at the southern border to no more than 2,500 per [00:04:00] day. Can you talk about what he's done now and what he did just a few weeks ago?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ:: Yeah, Amy, let's be honest, two executive orders that could not be more different from each other. One of them is restricting people's ability to seek asylum in this country, which I have publicly denounced, and I continue to denounce, I said to Secretary Mayorkas, this does not change the fact that that EO must be repealed as soon as possible. And then one, which is the one he should have done two weeks ago, which is giving an opportunity for families to stay together, helping Dreamers, particularly those that were not eligible through the timeline to be able to get DACA to finally get a professional visa.

Two different things. One is about what our Administration is doing about the southern border and actually reacting to Republicans who, which, by the way, I have said, it doesn't matter what you do on border, and it [00:05:00] doesn't matter how terrible you are or how great you are in immigration, Republicans will continue to attack Democrats on immigration because this is the number 1 issue that they are convinced will allow them to win the White House. And so I continue to say, be the administration that shows stark difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden as it pertains to immigration.

Tuesday was a good step in that direction. What he did two and a half weeks ago was not. And so I think we need to be very, very clear. We have to continue to allow people to seek asylum is a human right in this country. Amy, I was in Panama. I saw the worst of the worst situations. Women with children seeking asylum, many of them have made it to our southern border and they should be welcomed. We should provide resources. We should ensure that we're working with our neighbor countries to also extend protections. And people like me or a woman who I just heard who is about to give birth to [00:06:00] her child, who is undocumented, who has gone to school here, should be able to stay with her family.

The system has been broken, Amy, since the 80s. And it's funny how Republicans continue to say, Biden is trying to extend through executive action amnesty. Last I checked, Reagan was Republican. And frankly, that's why my parents are US citizens today.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Congressmember Delia Ramirez, you are also the co-sponsor of the American Families United Act. Can you explain what that would do?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ:: Yeah, look, this is the comprehensive bill to be able to provide immigration reform. And that's actually, Amy, what we continue to work on. Tuesday was a great step forward, but Amy, let's be honest, there's so many people left behind. I knew, and it was mixed emotions, when we were at the announcement, that there are a number of family members who don't fit this category.

Frankly, Boris was [00:07:00] happy, but if you really asked him directly, he was so sad. Because for him, it extends protections, but for Wesleyan Hernandez, his brother, who's DACA, married to a non-citizen, his status does not change. And the program ends tomorrow, he is left in limbo. My tío chilano, he's still, after 34 years in this country, still left in the shadows.

The bill, what it does, it actually provides expansive, comprehensive immigration reform, bringing the largest number of people into status. Many of them, most of them, unless they're children, contributing to this country, paying taxes, it will provide them a pathway to legal permanent residency. Therefore, citizenship, work permits. And that is honestly the thing that we should continue to work on.

But Amy, you and I both know that the Congress that I am in dehumanizes people that look like my husband, people like my tio chilano, and we don't see Congress passing that bill this year. But we should be doing everything in our power [00:08:00] to ensure that if we gain the majority, there's no BS excuses next time that we pass the bill.

EU Border Enforcement, Part 1 - It Could Happen Here - Air Date 6-4-24

MICK: Europe is no stranger to migration and migrants, and it is something that has been happening in waves over the past three to four decades. In the early nineties, there were multiple waves of migrants from Albania to other european countries. The main cause of this was the isolationist policies that were enforced by the communist regime that was in charge there. The unrest that followed at the end of the regime, and the crisis of Kosovo--for those unaware, Kosovo had a war with Serbia for independence and Kosovari people are largely ethnic Albanians with the same language. And because of this, it was easier for Albanians to merge with the Kostafari refugees and use that to migrate further and easier into Europe.

Other waves are close by. Other geopolitical events, such as the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, which I [00:09:00] think Mia and Roberts covered in their episode on self-immolation, and much more known to everyone, the wars in Syria and Libya.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: My interest in the border has always run parallel to my interesting conflict in reporting on conflict, and it's just become such a recurrent experience to either learn about conflicts at the border here because somebody is telling me about them, or learn about often like repression of ethnic or national or religious minorities because someone here tells me about them, or to go somewhere. I was in Syria in October, was in Iraq. And then return and see people from there at our border.

And as people will be aware, the asylum system--and we'll cover it later--the asylum system allows people who are very in danger of persecution for various categories to apply for asylum. It's not functioning. It's not functioning in the EU, it's not functioning in the US. I've seen that persecution with my own [00:10:00] eyes and the consequences of it, and I've seen people try and get away from it.

Every single time I'm in somewhere like that, people will ask me for help, and it is fucking heartbreaking to be like, yeah, the country that you see flying the F-16s or the F-35s over your head, the planes that cost more than this entire town makes in a year. No, we can't have a functioning fucking immigration system. Like in the case of the US, it's this app which doesn't work and you can only use it north of Mexico City.

And this broken system leads to people--they're not getting in a boat across the Mediterranean, crossing the Darién Gap, walking across the mountains in northern Mexico because they want to have a better iPhone. They're doing it because whatever the alternative is seems worse, and it's worth-- People are fully aware that they're risking their lives on these journeys.

It's not that they live without access to news and the internet. They know about the deaths in the Mediterranean, they know about the Darién Gap. When I talk [00:11:00] to migrants who haven't crossed the gap, like I was talking to group of Colombian migrants two or three days ago, and they were coming in to the US through an area east of Hocomber, which is very rugged and very mountainous, and they were coming into an open air detention site where border patrol holds them. And I was talking to them. I say, how many of you walked, how many if you flew? Most of them flew and then were able to walk forward. The ones who walked, everyone was like, oh shit, that's horrible, like you must have seen terrible things. They're very aware of how dangerous these journeys are. The reason that they're taking them is because it seems like staying at home would be more dangerous.

ROSE: Yeah, although I would like to add that it's not every migrant is a real refugee, and not every migrant has to be a real refugee.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yes.

ROSE: At least as the definition was established in the fifties by a bunch of pretentious guys who decided this is a good reason to migrate and all other reasons are not.

At first, yeah, [00:12:00] at first I worked in Greece and that was mainly with people of what are considered objectively real or good refugees, like people from Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria. Whereas when I was working in Bosnia, it was mainly people from Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan. And a lack of opportunity can be a very good reason to move. I think most white people who moved to America did so because of that.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yeah.

ROSE: Not because they were imminently bombed in their home countries, but because they wanted to make something out of their lives and they didn't have opportunities at home.

And I think this whole concept of refugee is meant to distinguish between good and bad reasons to move, and good and bad people, migrants in the end.

People can do really dangerous things for giving their children a better life, and if their children are not immediate danger.

And the other thing I would like to stress is that I think the migration regime that we see today is very [00:13:00] tightly connected to colonization and decolonization. For example, specifically in the Midlands, Surinam was a Dutch colony and one of the reasons why the Dutch government agreed with decolonization was because the Dutch society started to get worried about all the Black people showing up. And something similar happened with the independence war that Algeria fought against France. France preferred to give them independence rather than give them equal rights and access to the French territory.

Creating those barriers and keeping people in the Global South after these countries became independent is very tightly connected with decolonization, but of course especially with new colonization and new ways of controlling people in the Global South and exploiting them.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yeah. If we look at the US context, the United States government has managed to engineer this compromise where capital travels freely across the Americas and people don't. So it's possible for them to exploit lower wage labor, for [00:14:00] US companies to exploit lower wage labor in Mexico and other countries to the south, but not for those people to come and seek a better way, a better way of living in the country that is consuming the products of their labor.

And so this is obviously not new to people, this is a thing that's appartist had highlighted in 1994 and it's been the case for thirty years.

But yeah, in the US because the United States and colonialism in a somewhat less overt way, although often in a pretty over way, it's facilitated undemocratic regimes and a low quality of life for people all across specifically the Americas, but also the rest of the world. And it's now seeking to prevent those people from coming here after it destabilized their countries, or in the case of climate change, again, like the consumption habits of certain countries that have had an impact on people all around the world, to include people in more dire economic circumstances. And it shouldn't be any less, we shouldn't have any less empathy or solidarity with [00:15:00] those people because no one's bombing them and they just want to chance for their kids to do the same shit. Like I moved to America and I was 21 because there weren't many jobs for me at home.

ROSE: There's something very arrogant about thinking that you can decide whether someone else has a right to exist.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Totally.

ROSE: And I think that's what migration policies are.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yeah, and as you pointed out, they were established after the Second World War with a very narrow set of categories. Not only do you not include climate change, but also generalized violence, the generalized violence.

ROSE: Yeah. Actually fleeing from a war is not making you a real refugee according to international law, which is something people don't know. So like an average Syrian refugee is actually legally not a refugee. They are fleeing indiscriminate violence, but they don't have a right to political asylum.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yeah, or like people in Ecuador. I've talked to people from Ecuador a lot, and they'll be like, well, you've seen men, they took over the TV station. So there's some gangs took over a TV station there recently, and it's an armed takeover. And then as you can see, would you want your child growing up there if you had [00:16:00] children? And of course it's a very compelling argument. And if I was in their position with young children--a guy I met the other day, his son needed medical care that he couldn't obtain in his country. That's a perfectly valid reason for coming here. But none of those things count for asylum to those people that are either lumped into quote unquote "economic migrants," which is still like people have a right to a living wage and to be able to pay for their family, to have the things that they need to survive and thrive.

But you're right, the asylum system is very narrow.

Migrants & Refugees, the Pope & Volkswagen - Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - Air Date 5-26-24

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Our main story tonight concerns Europe. You know, that thing Belgium is in. If you've watched the news at all lately, you cannot have missed what has been happening there.

NEWS CLIP: Europe's migrant crisis is getting worse by the day.

A migrant crisis spiraling out of control.

Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers are risking everything.

A human wave washing over Europe's southern shores.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants have streamed into Europe, the largest influx there since [00:17:00] the end of World War II.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Wow. The largest since the end of World War II. And remember, millions of people back then were searching both for a better life and for the booth where it was rumored you could slap dead Hitler.

And look, the scale of this story can be hard to get your head around. Hundreds of thousands of people are on the move just within Europe and another four million are being hosted in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. And when numbers get that high, they can be hard to comprehend. It's like when someone tells you the size of the audience of NCIS New Orleans: 17 million people? How's that even possible? How many Navy-based crimes could there possibly be in New Orleans? This doesn't make any sense! And when you are dealing with a mass of people that large, you really want to be a little careful with how you describe them. Unfortunately, David Cameron, noted alleged swine fallatio enthusiast, recently referred to a "swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean", and that [00:18:00] language matters. Because a swarm of anything sounds terrifying, no matter what it is. If I hear, there are a lot of kittens coming my way, I'm going to be delighted. But if I hear there is a swarm of kittens approaching, I'm grabbing a shotgun and I'm getting to high ground, because I'm not gonna let those furry fuckers take me alive.

And here in the U.S., some in the media have chosen to reduce the migrant population to one simple stereotype.

NEWS CLIP: A new video surfaces online showing why some are worried Europe is opening its doors to potential terrorists.

Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.

Those are reportedly Muslim refugees on a train in Europe chanting "Allahu Akbar" or "God is great". Now, to be clear, we're not saying that any of those people are terrorists or in any way affiliated with a terror group, but it does highlight just how many of these refugees who are fleeing violence in Iraq and Syria [00:19:00] are Muslim.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Okay. Okay. First, you don't get to claim that you're not calling those people terrorists when your lower third says, "Terrorists inbound?" If you are really not saying they're terrorists, maybe change that to something more accurate like, "People take train", or "Some wear hats, others less so".

And second, describing that as a new video that sheds light on the migrant crisis is a little misleading, because in researching this story, we found a version of that same video uploaded onto YouTube, back in 2010, well before this migrant crisis even began. And if you are going to use misleading old footage to try and make people frightened of Muslims, why stop there? Just go the whole way and use a clip from True Lies.

NEWS CLIP: Now, to be clear, we're not saying that any of those people are terrorists or in any way affiliated with a terror group, but it does highlight just how many of these refugees who are fleeing violence in Iraq and Syria are Muslim.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: That's [00:20:00] only about ten percent more racist than what you did. So, look, let's just take a step back, because for the record, these people are coming from many different countries and fleeing everything from civil war to economic stagnation. And while each story is unique, many of them are heartbreaking.

NEWS CLIP: Noujain is 16 and from Kobane in Syria. Disabled from birth, she cannot walk, and made the dangerous crossing from Turkey last week.

NOUJAIN MUSTAFFA: I've been trying many things for the first time during this journey, like a train and a ship. So, uh, I just enjoyed it.

INTERVIEWER: You enjoyed it?

NOUJAIN MUSTAFFA: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: You're the first person I've met who said that.

But to understand why, you must know the world she escaped from.

NOUJAIN MUSTAFFA: Imagine you're 16 and you're always afraid to be dead at any minute.

INTERVIEWER: What is your dream?

NOUJAIN MUSTAFFA: I have to be an astronaut to go out and see, and find an alien. Yes. So I [00:21:00] want to meet the queen. Yes.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Oh, I think that girl absolutely deserves to meet an alien and the queen, and also, if she has time, a real human with feelings. But, unfortunately for Noujain and so many like her, Europe has yet to create an effective system to process this influx of people.

Every country has a different application process, and some are totally overwhelmed and underfunded. We actually got our hands on a couple of registration forms that were given to refugees upon arrival. This one was handed to a Syrian asylum seeker arriving in Greece on September the 5th. It tells him to return for registration on December the 21st. And that could be a tricky three month wait, because he's not allowed to work in that time. And yet, that is nothing compared to this form, given to an Iraqi refugee in Turkey, telling him to come back on June 15th of 2017. Which sounds bad, before you notice the pink sticky note added at the bottom, clarifying [00:22:00] that his actual date will be February 19th, 2020. And that is ridiculous. These people can't go five years without working. They're refugees, not René Zellweger.

Tunisia, EU scrutinized for harsh treatment of migrants along route from Africa to Europe - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 8-7-23

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: Risk death in the desert or drown at sea. Those are the terrible choices facing sub-Saharan Africans trying to reach Europe via Tunisia.

Twenty seven migrants are missing, feared dead, after their rubber dinghies capsized in rough seas south of the Italian island of Lampedusa this weekend. The Italian coast guard rescued 57 people and recovered the bodies of a young boy and a woman who succumbed to the waves before deliverance arrived.

And this is the fate they were trying to avoid, being abandoned in the Sahara Desert, one of the most unforgiving places on earth. Other sub-Saharan Africans with the same European dream have been dying of thirst after being dumped by the Tunisian authorities on the Libyan border. [00:23:00]

This mother and her small child are among the latest victims, lying next to an empty water bottle and not far from a man who also succumbed to extreme heat and dehydration.

LAUREN SEIBERT: Over 300 people that are still currently trapped at the Tunisia Libya border in the desert, and they've been trapped there for weeks.

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: Human Rights Watch. Researcher Lauren Seibert is an expert on the dangers facing migrants in Africa.

LAUREN SEIBERT: You have children, you have women, you have deaths that are increasing. You do have Libya border guards that are reporting deaths every few days.

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: Fatemah Ibrahim from Nigeria is terrified as Libyan border guards approach.

"We won't hit you", says this officer, as he tells a colleague to give her water. "We won't hit you. Don't be afraid". As the Libyans dispense the smallest of mouthfuls, Fatemah Ibrahim explains why they're in peril.

FATEMAH IBRAHIM: In Tunisia, the [00:24:00] police arrested us, beat us, and took our phones and all our money. They told us to go to Libya, and my people kept saying Libya is very bad. They left us without water and food. They put us there and then left.

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: Tunisia's authoritarian president, Kais Saied, is being blamed for what is turning into a 21st Century pogrom. Accompanied by a jaunty soundtrack on his Facebook page, Saied presents himself as an international statesman, greeting leaders such as Italy's right wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. But many critics condemn him as a dictator who propagates racism.

In February, Saied told security forces to stop all illegal migration and expel those without documents.

PRESIDENT KAIS SAIED: We are African and we are proud to be Africans. We give help to those [00:25:00] who come to us, but we refuse to be neither a pathway nor a land to settle in.

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: A campaign of arrests and expulsions created a wave of fear among sub-Saharan Africans and Black Tunisians.

Pro-refugee activists took to the streets of the capital, Tunis, to protest the new measures, but Saied was unrepentant.

PRESIDENT KAIS SAIED: We are being subjected to vicious campaigns from mercenaries, traitors, foreign agents, and shady parties. Today they want to change the demographic composition of Tunisia. It's a plot and they get paid for it, and they got paid in other fields to attack the state and the Tunisian people and their identity

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: Saied's remarks have been widely condemned for provoking racial violence between Tunisians and migrants. The death of a Tunisian in July was one of the catalysts that led to the expulsions to the desert. [00:26:00] Despite the clashes, European Union leaders had no qualms about visiting the presidential palace to do business with the man who seized power two years ago, crushing democratic aspirations of the nation where the Arab Spring began in 2011.

The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, pledged 100 million dollars to help Tunisia police its own borders, with the lure of a further billion dollars in aid.

URSULA VON DER LEYEN: We need to crack down on criminal networks of smugglers and traffickers. They are exploiting human despair and we have to break their reckless business model.

So we will work with Tunisia on an anti-smuggling operational partnership.

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: The EU country which benefits most from this deal is Italy. The island of Lampedusa is just over 100 miles from Tunisia and has been a landing zone for tens of thousands of asylum seekers for years. Italy's Prime Minister, Giorgia [00:27:00] Meloni took office last autumn on an anti-migration platform.

GIORGIA MELONI: The partnership with Tunisia has to be considered as a model for building new relations with North African neighbors. All these, a few months ago, would have been unthinkable. And I want to say it with a level of pride, but also with a level of gratitude to the European Union.

ANAND MENON: The rhetoric around this deal is a rhetoric of preventing people drowning, whereas everyone knows that the reality is about preventing people coming to Europe. That's the political priority in Europe.

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: Anand Menon is professor of European politics at King's College London.

ANAND MENON: Europe has cash, and North African states have space to build these camps to house these migrants. We should remember that, of course, the European Union paid Colonel Gaddafi way back in the, sort of, 2009-2010 to do exactly the same thing, to make sure migrants didn't make the crossing.

So, politically, you see the rationale, but it makes the [00:28:00] European Union complicit in human rights abuses in these camps. What does this say about Europe? I mean, what it says about Europe is that Europeans and European politicians are terrified by migration from Africa and will do anything it takes to stop it, even if it means dealing with dictators such as in Tunisia.

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: These people were rescued from the desert by Libyan authorities. Their protest took place during a media facility with a border guard unit.

IBRAHIM BANGUA: Some people are sick. We ask them for solution, no solution, every day they come with weapon for us. We are not fighting, we are just a migrant.

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: Tunisia's actions are a welcome distraction for its neighbor, Libya, another country on the migrant trail with a dreadful reputation.

NATASHA TSANGARIDES: Our legal advisors, who work with survivors of torture every day, describe Libya as armageddon. They describe it as complete hell on earth.

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: Natasha Tsangalides is the Associate Director [00:29:00] of Advocacy with Freedom from Torture, a British non profit.

NATASHA TSANGARIDES: People experience such high levels of trauma and PTSD following their time in Libya, being subjected to open air slave markets, being sold off at auctions, being subject to rape and torture.

MALCOLM BRABANT - SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR: But for human rights activists, discussions about the morality and cynicism of the European Union and its North African partners are taking second place to the issue of life and death in the Sahara.

How do you see this ending?

LAUREN SEIBERT: Honestly, if the Tunisian government does not take action to save these individuals lives by allowing humanitarian aid immediately to access the zone, and if it does not also facilitate the evacuation of these people, you're gonna see extreme numbers of deaths. And you've got children there. More children could die. It's just really catastrophic.

Why Are Migrants Becoming AI Test Subjects? With Petra Molnar - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 6-20-24

PETRA MOLNAR: Yeah, the UN and other types of international organizations are a key player in the kind of ecosystem of power and innovation and border tech because they're [00:30:00] really powerful actors. They set the agenda and the norms around, again, kind of what we see as innovation and why we should be collecting more data. That's kind of a given. If you go to a lot of UN policy documents and different pronouncements, data is in there, right? We need more data, we need to collect more information. But what's tricky from a legal perspective and a governance perspective is that international organizations are this kind of third space, right? They're not a private sector company and they're not a state. So, how do you regulate them? What kind of governance mechanisms exist? Oftentimes it's kind of an in-house, you know, ethics statement, for example, on biometric data collection. This all sounds really kind of up there and theoretical, so I'll bring it to the ground to the example you mentioned with Rohingya refugees.

So, Rohingya refugees have been escaping Myanmar for many years now and finding shelter or refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. The UN is active in Bangladesh and has been collecting data from refugees there, and it came out a couple years ago that [00:31:00] they inadvertently took this collected data and shared it with the Myanmar government, the very government that the refugees were fleeing from.

Now, if we are assuming that this is an accident, it's a pretty big one, because it's extremely sensitive personal information that often was also collected in situations that were maybe not totally driven by consent, right?, because the power dynamics are there. Can a refugee really opt out of data collection if they're in a camp that's administered by the United Nations, right? It's very different than you and I going to a grocery store and saying, oh no, you know, I don't want to participate in the survey or I don't want to give you my information, because you can just go home. That's not the dynamic, right?, that people on the move face. And the fact that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees made such a big mistake is very telling. Because what's happening with other actors in the space, what kind of data retention practices do they have, or data sharing practices too, you know, what is really happening? So much of it, again, happens in that kind of murky, opaque [00:32:00] area that's very difficult to penetrate by journalists, by lawyers, by human rights monitors, because so much is done by third party actors like international organizations that don't have to report in the same way that states do, or even the private sector does.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: You know, if I'm a country, I would say there's going to be some kind of border arbitrage that if I don't beef up my border, then refugees are going to be turned away from countries that have a beefier border, and they're just going to flow to me. So, I really don't have a choice anyway. So, I guess what would you say to them? And really what I'm looking for is, this is not a kind of binary answer. There's not a yes or no. This is like a way that we move. This is a verb. This is an adaptive process. And from your vantage point, what would be a better adaptive process? How would we be doing the process of deciding what is okay and what's not okay in a better way acknowledging how fast everything is [00:33:00] moving?

PETRA MOLNAR: You know, maybe this seems again too simplistic, but it's about talking directly with people who are impacted by the technology and who are hurt by it, because it is now, I would say, pretty robustly documented that border technology infringes on all sorts of human rights and has potentially even led to loss of life, right, at the U.S.-Mexico border.

So, if we know all of that, and then we also see this kind of race to the bottom that states are engaged in, I think that's absolutely right, of beefing up their borders, like, really strengthening border security and not wanting to be the country that says, oh, well, okay, my doors are open, like, what are the incentives there?

I think we need to have a conversation about some no-go zones, frankly, when it comes to technology. I mean, we tried that with autonomous weapons and that still hasn't happened, right? And that's really like the sharpest edge of this conversation. But yeah, what about robo dogs? What about predictive analytics for border enforcement?

What about data that's collected as part of a DNA sample? Are we [00:34:00] actually okay with that as a society? And if not, then we really need to draw some red lines under this. A moratorium at the very least, but a ban actually, I think, is definitely something that needs to be explored. And I think it's a little short-sighted too, actually, on part of a lot of what, you sometimes we call receiving countries, so countries like the United States or Canada or the EU that have been historically in the last few decades the receiving point for people on the move.

It's very short sighted to see migrants and refugees as a threat because a lot of people contribute very highly to countries that are their second home, right? And I think we've lost sight of that. Like, the fact that everything's now weaponized against this kind of specter of migration is incredibly shortsighted. Because if we are going to be dealing with larger and larger numbers of people on the move in the future, it's actually an opportunity to think about, well, how do we uphold people's human rights? How do we actually function as a society that respects human dignity [00:35:00] and, and wants to be a functional place where people can thrive and raise their Children and contribute to local economies? That's really what we need to be talking about here.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: I'm just curious, what, if any, are the bright spots, or the bright people, that you would point our attention to, for where we get hints of, like, trailheads for hope? Like, we, you know, we're gonna have more climate refugees. We wish we could choose about this, but we can't. There's gonna be more people on the move, and as you said, deterrence isn't gonna work because it is a matter of life and death. And so we need examples of, you know, integration working better, refugee camps working better, and ways that technology can play a positive and helpful role in that. Is there any other examples of that you want to mention?

PETRA MOLNAR: Sure. I mean, there's really inspiring practices when it comes to, for example, education technology and making sure that children in conflict zones are able to still learn when they're on the move or when they're in refugee camps. There's all sorts of really interesting projects out there that are kind of bringing the classroom to the child that's mobile.

You know, other inspiring [00:36:00] things that, that I can kind of think of are just ways again that, for example, you know, journalists are thinking about telling different stories and kind of focusing on technology as a way to level the playing field in the kind of vast power differential that we're talking about.

And that's something that we're trying to do at the Refugee Law Lab, which is kind of my academic hat. My colleague, Sean Rehaag, for example, he's more on the kind of data science side, but he's looking at, for example, using big data sets to crunch numbers and look at, for example, refugee decisions in Canada to create information for refugee lawyers to be better informed on how a particular judge might render their decision. Very, very helpful because again, you're dealing with attorneys who might not have the same level of resources as a government lawyer might.

So, there are definitely bright spots when it comes to using technology as well to kind of meet in the middle and, you know, work against the kind of differentials in power and privilege and even the kind of norm setting that it comes to, like who gets to [00:37:00] innovate and why. We really need to find ways to kind of talk to each other more about this.

Final comments on our summer membership drive

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Democracy Now! discussing DACA and the American Families United Act. It Could Happen Here looked at some of the history of migration waves into Europe. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver discussed the Islamophobia rampant in the language used to describe migrants headed to Europe. The PBS News Hour reported on the harrowing trip to Europe from North Africa being attempted by desperate migrants. Your Undivided Attention drew the connection between border security and the spread of surveillance technologies.

It Could Happen Here compared the tragedy inherent in the migrant experience with the profit of the border industrial complex. And Your Undivided Attention looked for new ways of thinking about how to manage borders.

And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the deeper dive sections.

But first I need to kick off our summer sale membership and awareness drive. We make [00:38:00] the show here because we think that it's the kind of show that needs to exist in the world. Hopefully you listened for a similar reason, but, to keep the show going, we need to ask you for money every once in a while and, frankly, your help in spreading the word of the show. Podcasts like this one don't benefit from algorithmic recommendation engines the way shows do on video-sharing and social media platforms, and this show just doesn't translate to YouTube as well as others. So, that leaves us with the old-fashioned method of people who care enough about it telling others about it.

On the money angle, we're offering a little incentive to sign up as a member of this month with a discount offer. You can support the show and hear our full members-only bonus episodes along with ad-free regular episodes for 20% off. If you sign up this month, you will lock in that price for as long as you keep your membership.

As for spreading the word about the show, there couldn't be a better time. As election season is swinging into full gear. [00:39:00] This show is the antidote to the breathless barrage of up-to-the-minute updates that fill the 24-hour news cycle. We go deeper and on a broader range of topics than almost any other show all while highlighting the great works of others that can turn into a sort of roadmap for anyone seeking further media recommendations.

To me. That sounds like the kind of show more people should know about.

And to help you with all this, I happened upon a reasonably good idea in an Ars Technica article recently titled "Give Yourself a Day to Tackle All Your Recommendation and Subscription Guilt." Hopefully it won't take you a full day, but the underlying idea is pretty solid. The writer addresses the problem that so many of us have with the constant knowledge that there are independent creators out there who need and deserve our support. But we rarely take the time to give it.

To make that nebulous scattershot set of [00:40:00] thoughts about who you want to support that sort of comes to mind randomly more manageable, the writer recommends blocking out some time and knocking them out all at once.

The article says, "Declare a tech guilt absolution day. Sit down, gather up the little computer and phone stuff you love that more people should know about, or free things totally worth a few bucks, and blitz through ratings, reviews and donations.

Pull your brain about the little phone, computer and email things you like and know could use a little boost (Ahem).

This could be a one-time donation, a Patreon or newsletter subscription, writing out a couple of nice sentiments about something more people should know about, or taking the 30 seconds to log in and rate something, thumbs up or five stars."

But then, recognizing the issue with subscription fatigue, the writer also points out that this could be a time to reorganize priorities. "Subscription fatigue is real and little donations [00:41:00] add up, so go ahead and make a budget for this exercise.

You might consider checking your existing subscriptions and cycling the money from canceling.

One of them into something more relevant. I personally felt great turning the rest of the year's Hulu subscription into Patreon dollars for my favorite podcast." Very on point. I appreciated that.

And then the writer concludes based on their experience of setting aside a bit of time to tackle this task—critical to the survival of those of us struggling in the attention economy—that it really does make the process much more manageable. So if that sounds like something you've been meaning to do for awhile, take this as your opportunity to support the creators you love and spread the word so that others can get the same value you do.

To support us, just head to BestOfTheLeft.com/support and grab your discounted membership, and then tell someone about us.

SECTION A: POLITICIZATION OF THE BORDER

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, we'll continue with deeper dives on four topics. Next up, Section A: "The Politicization of the Border," [00:42:00] Section B: "Brutal Border Enforcement," Section C: "The Border Industrial Complex," and Section D: "Migrant Stories."

Immigration with Alejandra Oliva - You're Wrong About - Air Date 6-11-24

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: So yeah, I thought that a fun place to start today would be with Ronald Reagan.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: He's always fun. Reagan's never not fun. It's, you know, when we lose. Things on such a massive scale and on such a scale of civil rights and human rights, it feels like it's, it's also important to sometimes take a moment and just talk about, like, if we weren't fighting for just the basics, what the world could look like and how, for example, if abortion wasn't so politicized in America, which, you know, recently did a great job on our show explaining how suddenly that happened and who made it happen.

Like abortion could not just be a non life threatening experience in terms of the fear of, you know, being identified, being harassed, being in a clinic that gets bombed, but it could be nice [00:43:00] and people getting abortions deserve to be taken care of and pampered a little bit, you know, and have, what if, what if you had a nice robe?

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: And I think this also means that our communities look different than they might if immigration was something that was easy or natural or, you know, Even, like you said, like, having a nice experience of abortion, what if we provided a nice experience of immigration that didn't involve, like, being constantly threatened with deportation and miles and miles of paperwork?

What if instead you could, like, show up at a community center and have English classes taught by somebody who lived near you, and have somebody be like, hey, I'm gay. Don't go to that grocery store. That's the bad grocery store in the neighborhood. Come with me. We'll do our shopping at the good one. I'll show you like they have good deals on Tuesdays.

So that's when I go and just kind of have community and local welcoming and have richer, more interesting, more nuanced communities for all of us.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: Oh my God. And so we're beginning with Reagan. I mean, I'm not surprised, but I am [00:44:00] intrigued.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Yeah. During the Reagan administration, Congress passed, and then Reagan signed into law, a huge, huge undocumented person amnesty that would allow hundreds of thousands of undocumented people to get on the path to citizenship, which, if you look at that from today's politics, if you think about what it would take for Not just a Republican president, but like the Republican president to pass that kind of legislation today.

Like, it feels unimaginable.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: What do you make of that? Like, how does, when did you learn that? And what was your, what were the stages of grief you went through?

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: So I can't remember, like, exactly when I did, but it felt like a window into a different world. Like, what could have happened? What could have changed so much that now the Republican, like, baseline argument is we should have a completely separate system?

[00:45:00] no passage of people just capital. But I want to take Nancy to

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: Tijuana for clams.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Exactly.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: Sorry.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Reagan also, he had the amnesty, but I think on a lot of other immigration issues or like, uh, foreign policy that creates immigration issues was a much, much more complicated figure than just like he said that people could be on a path to citizenship.

So I think we should start by setting the stage, especially because so much of this like foreign policy that was going on during Reagan's time is like what is leading to, for example, the tremendous amount of Central American immigration that we have coming to the U. S. today.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: And how much of that is Reagan's fault, actually?

I bet. So much of

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: it. Oh, God. We had, as a country, had kind of been involved in Central America since the 1960s when we decided that communism was the thing that [00:46:00] was happening there. But Reagan really like doubled down and a lot of those civil wars got notably worse in the 80s, I would say. The Civil War in Guatemala began sort of including this Widescale genocide of indigenous Mayan people who lived in the country, thousands and thousands of people died at the hands of CIA trained military Reagan support for the Contras in Nicaragua, I think, was one of his most direct interventions into the politics of one of these countries that didn't wasn't just like we're going to support people but basically he armed and funded and trained a group of separatists to unseat an elected socialist government The Salvadoran Civil War was going on at that time.

Why were we so upset about? Communism that we were sending that much money and that much support and why was this such a huge, huge deal [00:47:00] as we were funding all of this? It just seems wild.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: As Baby's sister explained in Dirty Dancing, the idea of the domino effect, and that if one country goes communist, all the others will fall and eventually America and the world.

And that's why we have to fund this horrible war. Yeah, these stories that forgive the sins that we commit in order to fight an imagined enemy never seem like enough.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Wars. are very good at several things, but one of them is creating displaced people and refugees. And so, kind of from the 1960s to the 1980s, we start seeing increasing numbers of people from the countries in which we are living.

waging these sort of shadow wars through funding, through weapons, coming to the U. S. and becoming visible presences in and around the country. So a lot of Central American people, a lot of Vietnamese people are coming. I [00:48:00] read some statistic at some point that before the Vietnam War started, there were like less than 100 Vietnamese people in the entire United States.

And by the time it ended, There were a lot more than that.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: Setting aside all the bigger questions about the idea of borders and the idea of countries and, you know, not to hand it to John Lennon, we just, you know, in a more finite sense, if you destroy someone's home, then I don't know, shouldn't you give them a new one?

Isn't that your job at that point?

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Yeah, it's people that are coming to the U. S. because it's kind of seen as the last safe haven, the last line of safety. And we are, in some cases, giving people asylum, or in some cases, sort of giving them other kinds of protected statuses that don't put them on a path to citizenship, but do ensure that they're not being deported.

Or we're just, you know, deporting people immediately.

Migrants & Refugees, the Pope & Volkswagen Part 2 - Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - Air Date 5-26-24

NEWS CLIP: Disturbing cell phone video appears [00:49:00] to show migrants at the main refugee camp here being fed like a herd of caged animals in a holding pen.

It's a shocking video that has garnered attention from around the world. As waves of desperate migrants sprint from a holding camp in Hungary. A camerawoman appears to trip a man running with his child in his arms. The woman also kicks other migrants as they run, including a young girl. Now, the camerawoman is out of a job.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Oh, I'm sorry, she lost her job. That's absolutely terrible. Don't worry, I'm sure she can find a new one on actualmonster. com. To be fair She later apologized, saying, I'm not a heartless, racist, children kicking camera woman. Which I can only presume means she's a loving, accepting, children kicking camera woman, because the children kicking part is not really up for debate anymore.

And even those countries who are offering to take refugees are sometimes making those offers in the most insultingly

NEWS CLIP: selective way. [00:50:00] Slovakians saying that, um, that they're only going to give asylum to, uh, to Christians. They don't want, uh, Muslims, uh, migrants coming into the country, Muslim asylum seekers.

Not least because they haven't got any mosques. Oh, I'm sorry,

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Slovakia. You can't take Muslims in because you don't have any mosques. You do know you can build those, right? Mosques don't naturally occur in the wild due to erosion or particularly devout beavers. Muslims Muslims can live anywhere that other humans can live.

Muslims are not like dolphins trying to resettle in Scottsdale, Arizona. And when refugees Poles are not being excluded on the basis of religion. They're being accused of being lazy freeloaders. Just listen to one Polish MEP address the European Parliament.

NEWS CLIP: If we abolished all benefits, then people who don't want to work and want to live from benefits wouldn't come to Poland and the rest of Europe.

People who want to work are precious, however [00:51:00] they are sent back and we accept only those who don't want to work. It's ridiculous policy leading to invasion of human trash. Let us be clear, human trash, human garbage that doesn't want to work.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: Human garbage? Those are some pretty strong words coming from the Polish Six Flags guy.

And what he said is not just offensive, it's also wrong. Research has shown that while there is some small cost in the short term, eventually, an influx of lower wage immigrants into a community tends to raise wages for everyone else. And a working paper published last year by four economists found that immigration benefited local populations in 19 of the 20 industrialized countries they studied.

And think about that. Adding immigrants makes things better 19 times out of 20. That's a success rate matched only by Bacon and Paul Rudd. And incidentally, it's just a little hard to hear these migrants and refugees being called lazy, considering how hard [00:52:00] many of them have worked to reach Europe in the first place.

You really want to talk about lazy migrants, I'm a lazy migrant. I left a country by airplane, and the only things I was escaping were fog, public indifference, and an almost certain future as the turtle of Prince Harry's entourage. I didn't want to be royal turtle. I didn't want to be royal turtle. And the maddening thing, the maddening thing here is, Europe doesn't even need to do this for good reasons.

It can do it for selfish ones, because as a continent, it is in dire need of new citizens.

NEWS CLIP: According to the U. N., the average woman needs to have 2. 1 children to maintain the population of a developed country. But in the European Union, every single country is below that 2. 1 level. By 2050, some countries, like Greece, Portugal, and Germany, will see their populations drop by double digit percentages, according to Pew.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: That's true. If Europe doesn't open its doors to more [00:53:00] migrants, this is not the changing face of Europe they should be frightened of. This is. This one, right here. And look, not every single asylum seeker is going to be the perfect economic wellspring. But instead of worrying about the hypothetical downside of letting these migrants in, Countries should be more worried about the actual downside of turning them away.

If for no other reason that you might miss out on someone like Najeen, who seems like she would improve any country that would have her. Just listen to how she taught herself English. How did you learn to speak such good English?

NEWS CLIP: At home with my favorite TV show. What's that? It's days of our lives with, uh, with this sunny nature struggle.

Yeah, I love them both.

JOHN OLIVER - HOST, LAST WEEK TONIGHT: How can you not want this girl in your country? She loves days of our lives. She loves it. She loves days of our lives. And specifically, she loves EJ and Sammy. In fact, even after weeks of total hell, [00:54:00] mortal danger, and inhumane treatment, Najeeb's biggest complaint is that the show actually killed off EJ, who was her favorite character.

Immigration with Alejandra Oliva Part 2 - You're Wrong About - Air Date 6-11-24

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: So the bill was widely considered a failure by the right because the first election after this happens. California extremely decisively flipped from a red state to a blue state and everyone was like, ah, it was those damn immigrants.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: Because they've created a bunch of new voters who are going to vote Democrat. Is that why?

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Yeah. And like, I really think that that is why, for example, a lot of like the stuff that Obama tried to get past didn't work because they were all like, well, remember the amnesty in the 80s and how that went for us.

And so.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: And so then they were like, never again. Yeah,

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: it like really poisoned

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: it. It is interesting that like the most you ever hear politicians saying anything about anyone Latino is the Latino vote. What about the vote? Is the vote okay? Is the vote [00:55:00] ailing? How's the vote? Is he sick? Is he well? Is he struggling?

Are we taking care of the vote? How's the vote doing? Does the vote need help? It's like, what about the people making the vote?

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: So that is Reagan's amnesty.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: All right. They tried to do something. They decided they would never try it again, like me going to a Zumba class in 2012. Beautiful.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Oh, God. Yeah. So then, Up next, I kind of want to lump in Bush Sr.

and Clinton into one little lump. Clinton's going to get his own section later, but I want to talk about NAFTA. So NAFTA is the North American Free Trade Alliance, and it is a trade partnership between Us and Mexico and Canada and Reagan came up with it and Bush senior sort of negotiated all the fine points and then Clinton got all the credit because he signed it into law.

Classic case. I don't want to spend a [00:56:00] ton of time on this. It's not explicitly immigration policy, but I think it does. It did so much to change the way that we think about immigration in this country and especially like immigration and labor stuff. And it also changed a lot of extremely basic things about how people lived in Mexico and the U.

S. At the very basic level, if you are an economist, please don't email me. This is very, very basic. At the very basic level, NAFTA made it easier for money to flow back and forth across the border. So it made it easier for U. S. companies to set up the shop in Mexico. It made importing things like corn or pork or whatever.

for Mexico or doing the growing of the corn and the pork in Mexico and bringing it to the U. S. a lot cheaper. And it made it much, much harder for small farmers and landowners to keep doing the work that they had been doing because they were getting priced [00:57:00] out of the economy anyways.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: Because fuck farmers, am I right?

Fuck farmers. Fuck little farmers, according to the American government. Yeah. Fuck farmers who aren't forced to use copyrighted seeds. We hate that.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: The interesting thing is that this affected farmers on both sides of the border.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: So

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: as big farmers are able or big farm, like Conglomerates are able to start doing this work in the U.

S. and in Mexico. U. S. corn prices rise. It's great if you are growing like a million billion acres of corn a year. It is less cool if you are. A small diverse farmer in the US who is trying to make a living.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: And

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: so you have this kind of two part shift. A lot of US jobs are going to Mexico and it's this very, very public, very visible, like we are closing down this plant in Ohio.

We are reopening it in like Reynosa or [00:58:00] Matamoros or like a border city.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: What a great way to create a sense of unity between two nations.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Exactly. And so I think you start seeing this feeling of like, Oh, Mexicans are stealing our jobs.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: If someone stole my TV from me and sold it to someone else, I would not call the new owner of it the thief.

I would call them lucky. And I would call the person who took it from me responsible. If I see it as a family, it makes sense to me, right? Where if you see your employer, the company you work for, maybe that your parents worked for as a parent figure, then it's like, it's harder to imagine a world where they're not in charge than it is to just blame someone who maybe feels more like a sibling.

It's like we're, I don't know. It feels like, yeah, the way that we are trained to see companies as caretakers. It's like we were so perfectly set up for this to be the next move.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: You know, you think about like a mid sized town in [00:59:00] Ohio where the company is kind of the only game in town. You work there, your dad worked there, all your neighbors work there.

Most of the people who are working a job are working in the same place, and then suddenly they close up shop, and it, yeah, it feels a little like a divorced dad starting a new family, and you're

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: like, And it's always the hot wife who gets blamed.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: But also, fuck those new kids.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and like there are so many towns that exist because a company decided to build a factory there, right?

Like that it's so much a part of our history that we just call them company towns and it used to be so normal. It isn't anymore. And that again, kind of by the same token, like if you destroy someone's home because of a war that you created where they lived, then you're responsible for them in the same way.

I think that. If your company created a plant, you know, in a town that then perhaps even sprang up around it where there was nothing before, because suddenly you would create a [01:00:00] jobs, you know, created a world and, you know, maybe an entire intentional community meant for these workers, then you can't just leave, you know, and a stockholder would say you can just leave, but

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: yeah,

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: but human ethics don't say that

Why Are Migrants Becoming AI Test Subjects? With Petra Molnar Part 3 - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 6-20-24

And you talk about examples of far right governments who turn around and use the same technology tested at their border on their own citizens to start strengthening their regime. And you give examples, I think, in Kenya, Israel, Greece. Could you just elaborate on some of the examples? Because I think if people know where this goes, then it motivates how do we get ahead of this more?

Sure.

PETRA MOLNAR: Yeah, I think it's important, yeah, to bring it back to political contexts because all around the world we're seeing the [01:01:00] rise of anti migrant far right groups and parties making incursions into, you know, the political space, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in major ways. And, you know, I think it's an open question what's going to happen in the United States this year, right, with the election that you guys have coming up.

What I've seen, for example, in Greece. is that parties that are very anti migration normalize the need to bring in surveillance technology at the border and test it out in refugee camps, for example, and then say, okay, well, we're going to be using similar things by the police on the streets of Athens, for example, you know, in Kenya, similar things with normalization of just the border.

kind of data extraction for the purposes of digital ID are then used and weaponized against groups that already face marginalizations like Somali Kenyans, Nubian community, and smaller groups like that. So again, I think the fact that there is this kind of global turn to the right and more of a fear based kind of response to migration.[01:02:00]

motivates more technology and you again see this kind of in the incursion of the private sector kind of normalizing some of these really sharp interventions and say oh well you know what we have your solution here you are worried about migration and the other let's bring in this project and then all lo and behold you can actually use it on you know protesters that you don't like or sports stadium fans who are too rowdy and and you know groups like that as well

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: okay so we just talked about kenya and greece in the context of other governments But what about Israel?

What, what's their role in all this? Are they using these technologies at their borders?

PETRA MOLNAR: Yeah, for sure. I mean, Israel is definitely a nucleus in everything that we're talking about today. And I also felt compelled to go to the occupied West Bank for the book because it's really the epicenter of so much of the technology that is then exported for border enforcement in the EU and at the U.

S. Mexico border, right? But what is really troubling in how Israel has been developing and deploying [01:03:00] technology is that Palestine has become the ultimate testing ground, a laboratory, if you will. Surveillance technology is tested on Palestinians, both in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, and then sold to governments around the world for border enforcement.

And, and all of these projects that are normalized in these situations then can get exported out into other jurisdictions.

SECTION B: BRUTAL BORDER ENFORCEMENT

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: "Brutal Border Enforcement."

EU Border Enforcement, Part 1 (Part 2) - It Could Happen Here - Air Date 6-4-24

MICK: I found a very nice scholarly article that breaks down

how the EU borders work and makes a very clear

distinction between the different layers that protect fortress Europe. These

layers will be called the paper border, which largely consists

of visa policies and similar bureaucracy that regulates movement to

the EU and within it. Then we have the iron border,

which is exactly what you imagine it to me, it's

the [01:04:00] physical structures and forms of control that we put

up to keep people out. And then we have the

post border, and that's about the reception of migrants, migrant

shelters and similar constructions that keep migrants and refugees ostracized

and isolated even after being allowed access into the EU

and having started a asylum process. For those stories, we

should turn to Rose when we get there, because she

is much more on the ground experience than I have

with this, So we'll start with the paper border. During

the mid eighties, the EU started to propose and enact

a series of treaties and policies that in effect strengthened

the external borders and loosened the borders within Europe. I

think no one is particularly interested in this series of treaties,

so I will name the only one is the Shangan Treaty.

This treaty essentially [01:05:00] unites the external borders under EU command

rather than as a task for individual states. In practice,

this also means that you citizens who have a proper

documentation can move really between countries who are who have

signed the sang In Treaty for holidays or work loose.

You and I we could move to Germany tomorrow if

we wanted to, and I have little to know obstacles

in terms of like documentary.

ROSE: Were economically independent though, like that is very crucial about

your friend. Enough movement is conditional on.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: You making money, yeah, having enough money to support yourself.

But you can move like this is very funny. Pissed

off British people who are living in Spain right when

they when Britain brexited, because they hadn't realized that they

would impact them. They you know, like.

ROSE: Was only the Polish that we yeah, like the undesirable migrants,

but yes, assume themselves to be desirable.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yeah, well, yeah, [01:06:00] I don't think we use the word

expat right like Bridge would use the word expected its

describe a migrant from Britain to Spain like it's yeah,

it's reallyiculous. I mean, I've lived in front in Spain,

of fift in Belgium and I was, I guess, somewhat

economically independent. Made twelve thousand years a year as a

bike racer, but that was you know, I could do that.

It's very easy for me, but it is.

ROSE: I do think it's important because I think it's one

of those post border things that what we see for

some point in analyts is that most homeless people here

are not the undocumented migrants. They are not the refugees

or Dutch people that they're EU migrants. So people have

low paying jobs, break their legs, get kicked out of

their houses and their jobs, and are not welcoming to

homeless shelters because an endlands says, well, you are not

economically independent. There were, Yeah, so this is also part

of the migration regime, and this is also part of

keeping migrants exploitable. Even if you use citizens have the

right to work, they don't. [01:07:00] They're only allowed to work.

We only want them if they bring in econo profits.

We don't want them when they're sick or neat or whatever.

MICK: Yeah, and then mostly we want them for jobs that

we feel too good to actually do. When I was younger,

I used to work in a greenhouse, and there's an

immense amount of people from like Poland or other Eastern

European countries coming there because Dutch people tend not to

want to work in a greenhouse. It's one of those things.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: It's an extension of that, like a colonial perspective, right

that like, these are not jobs for.

MICK: Us exactly because you get your hands dirty and we

can't have that here. To put the whole thing about

the paper border into less academic term, the EU started

to act like a nation state and started to make

sharp distinctions between native and non native European citizens. I

think it's worth [01:08:00] pointing out that what counts as EU

is also a how was it? European identity. It's very

closely tied to geographical location and therefore also implicitly linked

to Christianity. Countries that are largely non Christian but connected

to Europe tend to be excluded. Turkey is partially in

Europe but not part of the EU, and Bosnia Herzegovina,

which is a majority Muslim country, is also excluded from that.

But much like Turkey is being tempted with the whole

maybe you can join if you do this and that,

but we're not really committing to that. That, however, is

a story for another time. Maybe The point that I

want to make here is that the visa program for

Europe is based on geographical discrimination. Countries outside the geography

of Europe are blacklisted and cannot gain access to the

papers that they need to [01:09:00] legally enter the EU. This

bureaucracy prohibits people from entering the EU before fences or

border guards have even entered the equation, hence the paper border,

since entering or crossing without a paper visa is nigh impossible.

€210 million EU-Mauritania deal Money in exchange for curbing migration to Europe - DW News - Air Date 6-7-24

TOMI OLADIPO - HOST, DW NEWS: Let's speak now to Hassan Oud Mokhtar, a researcher and consultant and the author of the forthcoming book, After Border Externalization, Migration, Race and Labor in Mauritania. Hassan, it's good to have you on the program. Welcome to DW News Africa. Now, North African countries, have been the main exit point for migrants going to Europe.

So give us some context as to why or how West African countries like Mauritania have become major hubs as well. Well,

HASSAN OULD MOCTAR: Thanks for inviting me to be here. And I guess the context goes back to 2006 when for [01:10:00] Mauritania, at least Departures increased quite significantly from the West African coast to the Canary Islands upwards of 32, 000 people arrived on the islands over the course of that year.

And as a result of those arrivals, there have been a slew of measures, both militarized security measures on the part of European states and Spain in particular. In addition to more soft developmental measures like jobs at origin programs and youth employment programs all with the aim of preventing people from leaving the coasts of West Africa to Europe.

They have had various degrees of success over the years, but as the recent arrivals over the past couple of months and The latter half of 2023 in particular, as they indicate there is as of yet little little outright success in the prevention of those departures from West African

TOMI OLADIPO - HOST, DW NEWS: countries like Mauritania.

And just clarifying, [01:11:00] so these people are both Mauritanians and people coming from other, uh, other countries as well, using Mauritania as a, as a route? Thank you very much.

HASSAN OULD MOCTAR: Yeah, that's correct. Primarily people using Mauritania as a route.

TOMI OLADIPO - HOST, DW NEWS: And, and so you're saying that this deal between the EU and Mauritania, uh, will not achieve its aim?

HASSAN OULD MOCTAR: Yes, in the immediate term, I think it might succeed in preventing departures, maritime departures. So from the coast of Mauritania to the Canary Islands but I think the broader aim of preventing so called irregular arrivals in Europe will not be achieved by this deal. I think people will continue to migrate through unauthorized channels most likely through the border post between the Moroccan western Sahara and Mauritania and travel overland and [01:12:00] that the roots will disperse in response to these kinds of deals.

And I'm saying this just on the basis of what has happened in the region since 2006, when, as I mentioned, the initiative to kind of externalize migration controls to Mauritania and to other countries in the region was initiated.

TOMI OLADIPO - HOST, DW NEWS: And Hassan, if the EU were to still pursue this, um, this plan as, as it were to, to cut down migration numbers, is there a better way it can collaborate with countries like Mauritania at achieving this?

HASSAN OULD MOCTAR: Yeah, I think so. I think the first is vastly increasing the scope for legal migration into European territory. Um, this is something that is promised within the deal. There is one Aspect of it that calls for a [01:13:00] increase in, uh, I think both students student visas for Mauritanian nationals.

In addition to I think circular migration schemes. But given that, as we said earlier it's primarily not Mauritanian nationals who are trying to get from Mauritania to Europe. I'm not convinced as to how effective that particular measure will be because it's essentially promising a certain and very limited, it must be said, degree of mobility for Mauritanian nationals to Europe in exchange for non Mauritanian migrants who happen to be in Mauritania being policed and kept where they are.

So I think vastly increasing the scope for legal migration and of course the scope for Applying for asylum for international protection across the EU, not just in Spain, would reduce the number of people migrating through illegal channels. It's been long argued in migration studies scholarships that a restriction in visas and [01:14:00] avenues to migrate legally Increases, as I said, the costs, financial and human costs of the journeys to Europe rather than stopping them.

And it also, for those who do make it it has the kind of perverse consequence of Preventing them from going home because it will be that much difficult to come back. So, if it were the case that it were possible to migrate legally there would be less of an incentive to stay in a European context or any destination context

TOMI OLADIPO - HOST, DW NEWS: once,

HASSAN OULD MOCTAR: uh,

TOMI OLADIPO - HOST, DW NEWS: one had arrived.

EU Border Enforcement, Part 1 (Part 3) - It Could Happen Here - Air Date 6-4-24

MICK: Okay, so the next part is the Iron Border. This

is very similar to what people already think of, but

but somehow worse. The Iron Border is a collection of fences, walls,

barbed and razor wire, or even fortified enclaves such as

Suta and Melilla in Spain. Sorry for butchering those names.

It is both the Trent and a performance. It's meant

to project [01:15:00] security for people within the walls. It shows

that EU uses an iron fist to protect Europeans from

irregular or illegal immigrant migration. What is more important to

highlight it also makes for very good outreach media for

right wing and fascist platforms. Refugees will continue to breach

those fences and the photographs and videos of it made

for very good propaganda about how borders need to be strengthened.

The fenced borders of Europe have increased from three hundred

kilometers in twenty fourteen to a shocking two thousand and

forty eight kilometers in twenty twenty two.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yeah, that's substantially than the US we have. Of course

it's America, so it's miles. But the most generous estimate,

based on pre existing war repairs Trump wall building is

seven hundred and forty eight miles. That was actually I

would say about seven hundred and fifty because I've seen

[01:16:00] construction happening since then, so that's what like eleven hundred kilometers,

And it's you know, we're just just behalf of what

the EU has.

ROSE: And I think for me, like when I when I

was at the physical borders, like the border walls, I mean,

it feels like a military zone, like I was on

the Hungarian border. There's drones, there's super heavily weaponed soldiers

walking around, like helicopters flying around. It's like it's a

very intimidating feeling. But if you talk to the people

crossing the fence, the fence is kind of a joke

like you can just bring Yeah, you can just go

to a gardening shop and buy a stairs or like

a ladder and just put it over the fence. You

can buy a super simple scissor that you would use

in the garden to cut your vegetables and you kind

of cut the fence open with it. People were building tunnels,

like of course it is. It takes time to us

and it's so in that sense, it's it's a hindrance.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: But the [01:17:00] entire.

ROSE: Promise that if a wall holl stop people is indeed,

it's just a political game, and the politicians know that

it's not true. It's it's just a way to show

how tough they are and how rough they are.

So most

of the European borders are equipped with razor wire, and

that is literally like knives wire, you know, like it

is like it's razors blades. Yeah, so the border in one hand is

kind of useless, but at the same time it is

really built to be as cruel and as harmful as possible.

And I know a lot of people with a lot

of scars on their bodies just from those razor wires.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yeah, like Lbit Technologies has massive, multi tens of million dollar

contracts for border surveillance where I live. The raiser ware that you

mentioned is everywhere out here. Right. It doesn't work, it

gets cut eventually, it gets blankets thrown over it, but

in the meantime it hurts people [01:18:00] and the wall. It's right,

there's also walls between it's rail and Palestine, between Kurdistan

and Turkey. What they, at least these larger ones do

is is they force people. The US Wall is also

one that's entirely breachable. I've seen people climbing it. I've

seen people climbing again this week. I've seen people go

under it, I've seen people go through it. I've seen

people go around it. But what it does tend to

do is force people into the more remote areas where

they didn't build wall, and those areas are where you're

more likely to die. And every year that we've built

more wall, we've seen more deaths. And as someone who

engages in mutual aid, every year that they build more wall,

we have to think about where will people go, how

will they get there, what state will they be in,

How can we make this journey less deadly? And that

becomes harder and harder for us. You know, we did

a water drop on Sunday. It took us five hours

to hike a very small section of this trail that

people hiked in order to surrender themselves, just as they

would if they could come [01:19:00] through a port of entry.

No more deadly.

ROSE: Yeah, I think that's kind of sum sort of most

migration policies or migration like obstacles to migration in Europe

as well, they don't actually stop migrants, but they do

hurt them, and they do push them into danger or actual.

MICK: Deadly Yeah, because you're never going to stop it, but

you can use like quote unquote deterrens in the hopes

that will all slow down, but you're just going to

get people hurt and killed.

ROSE: Yea. Yeah, that is like how incredibly cynecle the border is.

I think that the main deterrence is the people dying,

and that this is part of the political game to

disencourage migrants.

SECTION C: BORDER INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Next up, Section C: "The Border Industrial Complex."

Immigration with Alejandra Oliva Part 3 - You're Wrong About - Air Date 6-11-24

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: Was our homeland insecure before 9 11? We just weren't worried about it. Presumably.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Yeah, so like [01:20:00] immigration stuff used to be kind of spread across the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor and like sort of, you know, are immigrants involved with like the immigration justice system? Are they looking for jobs?

Like what, what are they up to? And depending on that we will put them in a specific department. And now it is, it all sort of gets grouped up and put into the Department of Homeland Security and also given a ton more like enforcement responsibilities and funding. And so suddenly we get the existence of ICE, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

And ICE was created to quote, prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorist and criminal activities, particularly as they were sort of like moving across borders. So like money laundering, um, terrorists moving across borders, things like that.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: All these terrorists that [01:21:00] suddenly were around.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Yeah. And so when ICE was funded, a lot of people were like, wait, what exactly are you doing? What's the point of this? To the point that in 2004, a year after the Heritage Foundation, which is well known for its, uh, supportive organizations like ICE. We're like, why does this exist? And it's like, main mission is covered by other, by other organizations and other agencies.

Let's just fold it into CBP, Customs and Border Protection. Like they're not really doing anything unique. But instead we were like, oh, we'll just give them more money and they'll figure out what to do with it. And that is how we have the ICE of today.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: Federal agencies always do better when they have a bigger sandbox to play in.

Yeah, and everybody's so thrilled with how that's gone. Yeah,

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: no, it's been really, really successful.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: If someone is like, I am a time traveler, what is ICE? [01:22:00]

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: It's an enforcement agency, which basically just means that they're like immigration cops. They have this really loose mandate, which means that they run the detention centers where people are kept while they are, you know, sort of in the immigration process.

They also do workplace raids. They also have been known to like, go onto Greyhound buses and demand to see people's papers. They will. serve out warrants to arrest people. Like they're very in public life and in public spaces kind of trying to catch out undocumented people, arrest them, and deport them.

Every new president that has come in and kind of been like, oh, I guess I like run this organization, has tried to give them different kinds of parameters to operate under. Like Obama was like, we're going to stop ICE from going after families. We're just going to make them go after people with criminal records.

And then Trump was like, ICE gets to get [01:23:00] deployed in sanctuary cities and liberal cities and they get to do whatever they want there. They get to arrest everyone. They get to do racial profiling. I don't care. Or like, I do care and I want them to do more of it. And the way this happened relates to to this funding question.

So in

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: 2009,

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Congress gives them funding that says you have to maintain a certain number of beds in immigration detention at all times. Doesn't matter if there's anyone in those beds, you just have to like, we're paying for them. You should think about filling them. And suddenly ICE goes, Oh, okay. And those beds are partially in private detention centers, but they also contract with local, like, state and county jails.

So, the Freedom for Immigrants has this really great, like, interactive map where you can see whether your local county jail has an ICE contract and holds ICE detainees and [01:24:00] where your closest ICE detention center is, because there is one in just about every state. So, all of a sudden, they're responsible for all of these.

beds in jail and they start filling them

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: as one might imagine they would.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: It's, uh, there's actually this really interesting, relatively recent report from detention watch network called, if you build it, ice will fill it. And it shows that whenever I opens up a new contract or gets like a new detention center, In an area, the number of ICE arrests will go up in that area.

If there's a new ICE detention center in your town, suddenly more people from your town will be going to fill that detention center.

SARAH MARSHAL - HOST, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT: Yeah, this is why we will never truly be able to learn about the world through narrative alone. Because not just the kind of stories that make it into like Netflix shows or biopics or, you know, pieces of fiction that everybody [01:25:00] is.

Is telling you to watch or based on a true story, but like even the kind of journalism that makes it to you, right? Because newspapers run on circulation or, you know, at this point, they run on clicks. Like, yeah, nonfiction narrative is affected by this as well. The fact that the stories that really tell us, I think the true depth infrastructural and it comes down to it.

Yeah. Stuff like this, stuff like, you know, prison contractors, right? The question of like, who is providing the meals for the people in the prisons and jails where you live? It's probably somebody who put in a very low bid and was therefore selected by the government because they promised to do it for a very low price because nobody cares what inmates are eating because they don't vote and the people who care about them don't matter as far as voting is concerned.

And so. Obviously, the best way to save money is to treat them as if they're not human and potentially endanger [01:26:00] their lives. And that's, that's not gonna work as a 2020 segment, right? It's not thrilling enough. There isn't an easy to pick out hero or villain. It's just another wheel.

Why Are Migrants Becoming AI Test Subjects? With Petra Molnar Part 4 - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 6-20-24

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: It strikes me that if I was a VC, I'd be looking at the UN's estimate that by 2050 there'd be 1. 2 billion climate refugees and saying, oh, that's a great market. There's a huge incentive for me to invest.

This border ecosystem is just going to grow. And so I'm curious right now, like, what are the actual, the companies that are in there? Um, let's dive a little bit into this, like, very perverse incentive.

PETRA MOLNAR: For sure. I mean, It's kind of mind boggling the amount of companies that are involved. And some might be familiar to listeners, um, it's, it's the big players like Palantir, Clearview AI, Airbus, Thales, um, actors like that.

But what I found particularly disturbing is some of the [01:27:00] small and medium sized companies that kind of, you know, sneak under the radar. Pun fully intended, you know, and are able to present these projects in a way that are seen as inevitable. There's one company in particular that comes to mind, um, when you ask your question.

And it was a company that was started by a 20 some year old tech bro in Silicon Valley, if I can put it this way. And he thought it would be a good idea to put a taser on a drone and then have this drone fly around the U. S. Mexico corridor, picking out people and tasing them and waiting for the border patrol to come.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Here's a clip from the demo video the company created when they were trying to market this.

CLIP: When the drone detects an intruder, control of the drone is shifted to a human operator at a nearby border control office. Then the controller pilots the aircraft down and interrogates the suspicious person.

PETRA MOLNAR: Luckily this didn't get rolled out in real life, but he got VC money for this. [01:28:00] How can that happen? How is that even possible, right? Well, because it's lucrative and there are very few regulations that would prevent, um, a company like this from operating.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Do you want to talk about why, you know, there's more latitude for trying on more of these kinds of things here versus, you know, Silicon Valley not being able to deploy robodogs in the streets of San Francisco or L.

A.? You know,

PETRA MOLNAR: I think a lot of this has to do with just the fact that we really are dealing with differences in lived experience. And I know that might sound a bit simplistic, but I do think it has a lot to do with the fact that the people who are thinking about and innovating and developing a lot of this technology, oftentimes don't interact with the communities that it's hurting.

You know, I sometimes when I talk to the private sector, I like to go around the room and ask, you know, who's an engineer? A couple of hands go up. Who likes to code? A couple more hands go up. Who's ever been in a refugee camp? Not many hands. And I mean, I'm simplifying it a bit because of course there's diversity in the private sector space too, but [01:29:00] what we're seeing is it breaks kind of along this power differential again.

And when you don't regularly interact with people who are on the move, who might be refugees, Or let's also broaden it out, who maybe have been victims of predictive policing or who have had to use an algorithm to see if they would be eligible for welfare. Again, it just becomes kind of divorced from the real life applicability of what is being done in the private sector for the sake of innovation and all of that.

And I do think, you know, I mean, there are clearly projects and companies that are being weaponized against people on the move and people who are marginalized or in war and things like that. Like the company we were talking about with the drone and taser. But I do think some of it is still going on.

about just lived experience and not having those kind of connections and and seeing what actually is happening beyond just the development and innovation phase. And we even see that kind of in these framings that are so common now, right? AI for good, [01:30:00] tech for good. But good for who?

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah, I think I read in your book that the industry is projected to have a total of 68 billion dollars by 2025.

Do you want to give any other numbers about just the size of the fortunes that can be made here? I think the fact that this is just a huge growth industry is important for people to get.

PETRA MOLNAR: Yeah, definitely. I mean, we've been seeing kind of this exponential rise of the border industrial complex. Um, and 68 billion is I think just scratching the surface because we're again talking about a very lucrative market where not only do we have to pay attention to the kind of border enforcement companies, but also military companies who are now making incursions into that space.

And so militarization of borders and using military type technology Transcribed like robodogs and all sorts of different things that are also making their way there is also again kind of inflating these numbers and the rise not only just in the U. S. but also at the EU level and the international level as we are seeing projected numbers of migration rise in the coming decades.

That's kind of inevitable at [01:31:00] this point I think.

SECTION D: MIGRANT STORIES

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And, finally, Section D: "Migrant Stories."

EU Border Enforcement, Part 2 (Part 2) - It Could Happen Here - Air Date 6-5-24

MICK: Uh, it's a fundamental principle of international law that forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country in which there would be improbable danger of persecution. Based on race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

That being said, I'm aware even like the Dutch government has sent like LGBTQI people back to countries where they could be like persecuted for that. So again, those rules seem to be very optional. So what follows now is two examples of border practices that I think are particularly egregious. So on October 3rd, 2022, Abdullah Mohammed, age 19, a Syrian refugee attempted to cross the Bulgarian Turkish border.

After being pushed back by border guards, they threw [01:32:00] stones at the border. I want to emphasize here at the border itself, not at the

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yeah.

MICK: After this, a shot rang. and Abdullah fell to the ground with a bullet lodged one centimeter away from his heart. He survived and was interviewed by Lighthouse reports.

He states that there was an intent to kill when he was shot. That's his belief. The bullet also pierced his hand, which is now partially paralyzed. There seems to be no justification or reason whatsoever for border guards to have shot or to have shot with live ammunition. This was the first time that such an incident was caught on video.

If you want, you can find it linked on Lighthouse Reports, attached to the article about this incident. The video is not as bad as you might think, but watch at your own risk. As far as I'm aware, there have [01:33:00] been similar rumors before, but this was the first incident that has entered the public record. or the first time it was actually documented.

Uh, needless to say, no one should be shot for attempting to cross a border. Uh, I don't care about anyone's opinion or bad faith nuances. People have a right to apply for asylum. And as far as I'm concerned, this was a deliberate and calculated attempt at murder.

ROSE: Yeah, I do think there have been quite a lot of videos of people being shot.

And definitely people making statements about it and just having the actual bullet in their body to prove that it happened. Yeah. It happened in Croatia. It happened in Greece. Greece has a habit of shooting at boats as well, and in that way making people drown. Yeah. And of course, apart from the shootings, which I would say on the European borders that they are still kind of rare, the, yeah, the pushbacks and the violence and the [01:34:00] torture is, yeah, the evidence of that is like, uh, an enormous pile.

Yeah. When I was working in Bosnia, I think that was in 2018 19, there was no video footage of a pushback and there was a journalist who volunteered with us for a while and they were the first one to film it. But in the past years, there have been like many, many horrible videos of people being beaten up and actual torture.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yeah, of course, in the US under the pretense of protecting us all from the coronavirus, which still killed millions of people in this country. We, we have something called title 42, which allow border patrol to, uh, quote unquote repatriate. People to Mexico, even if they weren't Mexican, and just drop them back in Mexico to include laterally transferring them, which is a pseudonym for kind of trafficking them halfway across the country and then [01:35:00] dumping them in a place where they have no connections, no money, and no way of establishing themselves, right?

And this led to Massively increased a fatalities at the border because people are trying to avoid border patrol rather than coming in and surrendering themselves for asylum. It's like, as we see now and massively increasing counters at the border encounters don't necessarily represent unique individuals, right?

This is my I will beat this fucking drum until I die. But apparently Our colleagues at the New York Times haven't worked it out yet. Um, Wall Street Journal, almost every NPR, every big outlet in the United States that likes to commission border reporters who don't live on the border will tell you that, that like the number of migrants went up.

An encounter is an encounter. If someone crosses and then gets bounced into Mexico and then crosses again and does that five times, that's five encounters, it's the same person. Um, BP doesn't come, doesn't keep. records of unique individuals under title 42. We [01:36:00] didn't keep under title 42. We don't know how many people, but we know that more people tried to cross.

And we also know that every time you try to cross, you risk your life. And so we certainly know that more lives were put in danger because of this policy, because again, like turning someone back, it's not going to stop them, especially when you're dropping them in a country where they don't want to be and where they're not from.

Like the people aren't just going to be like, Oh, okay, cool. Um, I'll stay in Mexico. Um, like that has not historically been the case.

ROSE: Yeah, we had exactly the same kind of juggling with numbers. I remember people in Bosnia, some of them would get pushed back like 40 or 50 times.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Damn.

ROSE: And so they would be counted as individual stops.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yes.

ROSE: Indeed. So it would sound as if there was like, I don't know, tens of thousands. And I was like, It's really not that many though, you

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: know? Yeah, yeah, we were saying the same thing. So they would

ROSE: just literally count the same person again and again and again.

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: Yeah,

ROSE: and also I would like to say that, like, yes, it is the border, like the EU [01:37:00] border countries, but it is also much deeper into the territory.

So, we externalize the border towards, like, uh, Libya, Niger, and, and, and way further even. But we also internalize the border, so we would find, we would have people who had made it to Austria, uh, or Italy, and they would get caught in Austria or Italy, be pushed back to Slovenia. Uh, taken over by Slovenian police, brought to the Croatian border, taken over by Croatian police, often in Croatia, get tortured, and then be dumped on the Bosnian border, which would be the EU border as well.

So this, this is what they call chain pushbacks. And, yeah, I, yeah, so I worked in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is non EU, uh, so we would get the people after they had been, you know, Pushed back. Yeah, the, the things that people have done, like, border guards have done to migrants are, yeah, I don't, I don't know if you actually want to use this footage, but it's like, it's [01:38:00] really, really gruesome.

Like, in Bosnia, they would, there would be, like, snow for, like, they have very long and very cold winters. They would take away people's shoes and socks and like make them walk for five hours on their feet. So one of the main tasks of our volunteers, our medical volunteers was amputating toes. People would, yeah, people would come back with broken bones, broken skulls, people would be sent back with just their underwear at minus 20 degrees Celsius.

I don't know how much that is in the U S.

€210 million EU-Mauritania deal Money in exchange for curbing migration to Europe Part 2 - DW News - Air Date 6-7-24

ANNE-FLEUR LESPIAUT - REPORTER, DW NEWS: Lala grew up in Senegal and in Mauritania, where she has long dreamed of a better life. By the time she was 30, she'd saved enough to pay for a pirogue to take her from the capital Nouakchott to Spain's Canary Islands and a future in the EU.

It's hard for her to recount the ordeal she suffered. [01:39:00]

LA LA (TRANSLATION): There were all sorts of nationalities, Senegalese. The police themselves came to take us to the beach. The big boat to take you to Europe is waiting out at sea. Small boats come to pick you up and take 20 people on board, 20 people, 20 people. Not everyone could get on because there were so many of us.

More than 100 or so people, only 80 were lucky enough to get on. I've seen people who almost went mad. Sometimes people fought with each other, but the captains have big knives. They threaten you and tell you to shut up, or they'll throw you on the beach and they're not kidding.

ANNE-FLEUR LESPIAUT - REPORTER, DW NEWS: But it wasn't to be. After four days at sea, drifting without fuel, they ended up on a beach in northern Mauritania. [01:40:00] The foreign nationals will be deported, but Lala, as a Mauritanian, was simply released. I haven't been

LA LA (TRANSLATION): able to sleep since I got back.

When I sleep, I feel like I'm still in the boat that was rocking

in the sea.

ANNE-FLEUR LESPIAUT - REPORTER, DW NEWS: Ali knows all too well. He's a fisherman who has seen the hopeful and the desperate taking their leave by night. 50 migrants, he says, cramming themselves into a fishing boat designed for a crew of six. And the sea knows little mercy.

ALI (TRANSLATION): Look, someone sent me this photo. Of a dead person. These are corpses.

Look, there's a little baby here.

He's such a powerful image.[01:41:00]

ANNE-FLEUR LESPIAUT - REPORTER, DW NEWS: Nouadhibou's port is full of pirogues, traditional fishing boats that the human traffickers have made into their business model. One smuggler wants to buy a pirogue for his next departure and agrees to tell us about the authorities and the restrictions. He too wants to conceal his identity.

The

SMUGGLER (TRANSLATION): first one there is a police boat. The second is a coast guard.

ANNE-FLEUR LESPIAUT - REPORTER, DW NEWS: It's

SMUGGLER (TRANSLATION): hard to get out of here illegally.

Look at that baroque there from Papafowl. That's a big baroque. You can put a lot of people in it. You saw it. For this kind of pirogue, there are controls to see if they're going fishing or for something else.

ANNE-FLEUR LESPIAUT - REPORTER, DW NEWS: Mohamed arrived here two months ago. [01:42:00] He is a welder by trade and has one aim, to reach Europe. As a day labourer, he earns the equivalent of 10 euros a day, which he spends on food, water and somewhere to live.

MOHAMMED (TRANSLATION): You've seen the people here. We are looking for work.

ALI (TRANSLATION): It's not easy.

MOHAMMED (TRANSLATION): Morning and night we come and

ALI (TRANSLATION): work.

MOHAMMED (TRANSLATION): We don't

ALI (TRANSLATION): earn. I've been here two months. I work anywhere.

MOHAMMED (TRANSLATION): You travel part by part.

ANNE-FLEUR LESPIAUT - REPORTER, DW NEWS: For Lala too, despite everything she has suffered and the huge sums of money she has spent, she is still determined. She tells us that however horrible her memories are of being at sea, she would do it all again to get to Europe, where she hopes to earn a living.

In this city of 140, 000 [01:43:00] inhabitants, more than 30, 000 are like Lala and Mohamed, waiting to leave. But many find themselves trapped for months. Even years, saving what little they earn to be able to afford a boat to Europe.

EU Border Enforcement, Part 2 (Part 3) - It Could Happen Here - Air Date 6-5-24

MICK: So, uh, I'm sure you've, you've heard this story before, but still, I think it's very much worth repeating. So, uh, on June 14th, 2023, Uh, the Adriana, a ship on its way to Greece, uh, capsized and subsequently sank.

The boat allegedly had the capacity for about 400 people, but carried around 750. Of all those lives, uh, 104 were saved. 82 were confirmed dead and up to 500 are missing and presumed dead, the majority of which are women and children. I'll refer back to the Lighthouse Report who did a reconstruction of the incident, which [01:44:00] makes this even worse that it already is.

Transcriptions and witness statements obtained by Lighthouse Report, Der Spiegel, Monitor, uh, S I R A J L P S, Reporters United, and the Times strongly suggest that the Greek Coast Guard attempted to conceal their own involvement in this tragedy. Nine survivors were asked to make statements, none of which appeared to blame the Coast Guard.

Uh, different suggestions were given for the capsizing, uh, blaming it on the age of the ship, or the lack of life jackets. Um, four of these statements contained near identical phrasing. It was later discovered that one of the translators was a coast guard himself. Uh, there were other translators, all of which were sworn in on that very day.

Uh, later in Greek courts, six of those nine stated that the coast guard did in fact tow the boats before it went down. Two [01:45:00] survivors told Lighthouse Reports that certain parts of their testimony was omitted in the transcription. To clarify that a bit. Because of what I said earlier, that migrants have or are obligated to apply for asylum in the country in which they arrive.

It's become a habit of like Coast Guard and Frontex to drag them to certain areas of water that are part of, for example, Italy or Greece. This particular one boat may have been, uh, An attempt to drag the boat to Italian waters, so the Greeks didn't have to take them in. So, to quote the report from Lighthouse, 16 out of the 17 survivors we spoke to said the coast guard attached a rope to the vessel and tried to tow it shortly before it capsized.

Four also claimed that the Coast Guard was attempting to tow the boat to Italian waters, [01:46:00] while Four reported that the Coast Guard caused more deaths by circling around the boat after it capsized, making waves that caused the boat's carcass to sink. End quote. Not great bedtime stories, um, if you ask me.

Yeah, I think that's fucking horrible. There's just no words. Like, yeah,

JAMES STOUT - CO-HOST, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE: yeah. I got nothing. I got nothing to say. Like I don't think anyone should Be okay with it.

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 You're Wrong About, Last Week Tonight, Your Undivided Attention, It Could Happen Here, and DW News. Further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for [01:47:00] listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes.

Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet. Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to 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 or on our Patreon page, where memberships are currently 20% off for the month of July. 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 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 [01:48:00] donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.com

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#1638 AI: From Killer Apps to Killer Robots, the Present and Future of Artificial Intelligence Spans the Spectrum (Transcript)

Posted by · June 28, 2024 2:30 AM

Air Date 6/28/2024

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

AI, like all technologies, won't be all good or all bad. In fact, my favorite understanding of emerging technologies is that they often bring simultaneous utopia and dystopia-- though many tend to focus on the benefits, while only discovering the drawbacks later.

Sources providing our Top Takes today include Vox, Linus Tech Tips, TED Talks, Global Dispatches, the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast, DW News, Your Undivided Attention, and Tina Huang.

Then in the additional Deeper Dive half of the show, we'll explore more current uses of AI, potential uses of AI and the ethics we need to consider, and regulating AI.

Interesting note before we begin: The first clip you'll hear today is from Vox, in which they explain the hidden ubiquity of AI. And as it happens, the video itself is an example of that, [00:01:00] as it was sponsored by Microsoft's AI Copilot program, and also Vox just signed a deal with OpenAI to repurpose their human-written journalism to train OpenAI's models. And part of that deal is for Vox to gain access to OpenAI's tech to develop their own strategies of how they want to incorporate AI into Vox. Classic.

We’re already using AI more than we realize - Vox - Air Date 2-28-24

CHRISTOPHE HAUBERSIN - HOST, VOX: Imagine a day like this: You do some exercise with a smartwatch, put on a suggested playlist, go to a friend's house and ring their camera doorbell, browse recommended shows on Netflix, check your spam folder for an email you've been waiting for, and when you can't find it talk to a customer support chatbot. Each of those things are made possible by technologies that fall under the umbrella of artificial intelligence.

But when a Pew survey asked Americans to identify whether each of those used AI or not, they only got it right about 60 percent of the time.

ALEC TYSON: Some of these applications of AI have become fairly ubiquitous. They almost exist in the [00:02:00] background and it's not terribly apparent to those folks that the tools or services they are using are powered by this technology.

CHRISTOPHE HAUBERSIN - HOST, VOX: That's Alec Tyson, one of the researchers behind that Pew study. When Tyson and his team asked respondents how often they think they use AI, almost half didn't think they regularly interact with it at all. Some of them might be right. But most probably just don't know it.

ALEC TYSON: We know about 85 percent of US adults are online every day, multiple times a day. Some folks are online almost all the time. This suggests a bit of a gap where there seem to be some folks who really must be interacting with AI, but it's not very salient to them. They don't perceive it.

CHRISTOPHE HAUBERSIN - HOST, VOX: So, why does that gap exist? Part of the problem is that the term "artificial intelligence" has been used to refer to a lot of different things.

KAREN HAO: Artificial intelligence is totally this giant umbrella tent term that is now, it's become a kitchen sink of everything.

CHRISTOPHE HAUBERSIN - HOST, VOX: That's Karen Hao. She's a reporter who covers artificial intelligence and [00:03:00] society.

KAREN HAO: In the past, there were distinct disciplines about which aspect of the human brain do we want to recreate? Do we want to recreate the vision part? Do we want to recreate our ability to hear, our ability to write and speak?

CHRISTOPHE HAUBERSIN - HOST, VOX: Giving a machine the ability to see became the field of computer vision. Giving a machine the ability to write and speak became the field of natural language processing. But on their own, these tasks still required a machine to be programmed. If we wanted machines to recognize spam emails, we had to explicitly program them to look out for specific things, like poor spelling and urgent phrasing. That meant the tools weren't very adaptable to complex situations.

But that all changed when we started recreating the brain's ability to learn. This became the subfield of machine learning, where computers are trained on massive amounts of data so that instead of needing to hand code rules about what to see or speak or write, the computers can develop rules on their own. With machine learning, a computer could learn to recognize new spam [00:04:00] emails by reviewing thousands of existing emails that humans have labeled as spam. The machine recognizes patterns in this structured data and creates its own rules to help identify those patterns. When that training data hasn't been structured and labeled by humans, that method is called "deep learning." Most of the time people talk about AI now, they're not talking about the whole field, but specifically these two methods.

Improvements in computing power, together with the massive amounts of data generated on the internet, made possible a whole new generation of technologies that leveraged machine learning. And existing ones swapped out their algorithms for machine learning too.

KAREN HAO: A lot of the "how" in the back has been swapped into AI over time, because people have realized, oh wait, we can actually get an even better performance of this product if we just swap our original algorithm, our original code out for a deep learning model.

CHRISTOPHE HAUBERSIN - HOST, VOX: Now machine learning and deep learning models power recommendation for shows, music, videos, [00:05:00] products, and advertisements. They determine the ranking of items every time we browse search results or social media feeds. They recognize images like faces to unlock phones or use filters, and the handwriting on remote deposit checks. They recognize speech in transcription, voice assistance and voice-enabled TV remotes. And they predict text in auto complete and auto correct.

But AI is seeping into more than that.

KAREN HAO: There has been this tendency over the last 10 plus years where people have started putting AI into absolutely everything.

CHRISTOPHE HAUBERSIN - HOST, VOX: Machine learning algorithms are already being used to decide which political ads we see, which jobs we qualify for, and whether we qualify for loans or government benefits, and often carry the same biases as the human decisions that preceded them.

KAREN HAO: Are you actually automating the poor decision making that happened in the past and just bringing it into the future? If you're going to use historical data to predict what's going to happen in the future, you're just going to end up with a future that looks like the past. [00:06:00]

CHRISTOPHE HAUBERSIN - HOST, VOX: And that's part of the reason why it matters to close that gap between those who knowingly interact with AI every day and those who don't quite know it yet.

ALEC TYSON: Awareness needs to grow for folks to be able to participate, In some of these conversations about the moral and ethical boundaries, what AI should be used for and what it shouldn't be used for.

AI is a Lie. - Linus Tech Tips - Air Date 6-13-24

LINUS SEBASTIAN - HOST, LINUS TECH TIPS: The classic definition of AI is probably best illustrated with fictional examples. It's what you see in sci-fi creations like Commander Data, HAL 9000, and GLaDOS. These are computers or machines that demonstrate a capacity for reason, however naive, twisted, or alien it might seem to us meatbags.

Now, you'd be forgiven for thinking that that's still the definition of AI. A lot of people seem to think that it is. But in reality, the meaning of words is ever shifting, and we would now refer to these characters as having AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. What you're referring to as AI, then, is in [00:07:00] fact Narrow AI, or as I've taken to calling it, ANI. ANI is not a general intelligence unto itself, but rather another component of a fully-functioning system made useful by specialized algorithms and data processing utilities forming a complete artificial intelligence system.

Didn't think I could make that point in the style of Richard Stallman's famous interjection? Well, I could--haha! But I also didn't have to. That previous paragraph was actually written by GPT for Omni. And this is exactly the sort of thing that modern AI does very well. And that's because most of the time when we hear the term AI, We're actually referring to machine learning, a subset of AI involving algorithms that can analyze patterns in data. They get trained on things like text, multimedia or even just raw number outputs, and using this training data, they identify patterns through statistical [00:08:00] probability. They can be further trained through reinforcement learning, then, by rewarding correct outputs and punishing incorrect outputs--kind of like training a hamster.

The results allow these algorithms to summarize, predict, or even generate something seemingly new. And in many cases, they are so impressive that a good machine learning system can be indistinguishable from classic AI or AGI.

Well then Linus, if it looks like an AI and it quacks like an AI, what's the difference?

Well, artificial narrow intelligence is limited to specialized tasks. GPT 4 Omni, specifically, is a large language model, which means that it is trained to understand and generate natural language, like the words I'm speaking now. It's basically an autocomplete on steroids. What sets it apart from your phone's keyboard, though, is that it can also process information based on patterns that are learned during training, including definitions, [00:09:00] mathematical formulae, and so on and so forth. That makes it capable of generating unique output that wasn't part of its training data. GPT has traditionally been incapable of image, video or audio generation. There are other types of generative models, like Sora, Suno, or Dali, that feature their own specific talents, but most of them are incapable of operating outside of their specific niche, and all of them are limited by their training data in a similar manner.

And because they are limited by their training data, in many cases, the answers that they give resemble their training data, which, if you're an artist or a photographer and your work gets added to a model, is probably not your idea of fair use, much less a good time. Worse, when generative models are faced with a concept that they don't understand, or they simply run out of tokens, they can begin to hallucinate. That is to say, they just make things up as they go. Which is why sometimes you get eldritch abominations like these.

With [00:10:00] that said, these limitations don't mean that machine learning AI is a dead end. It's been deployed very effectively for diagnosing diseases and in other highly complex scenarios where the data is dense and the conclusions require interpretation.

These specialized models are extremely useful. They're just also extremely not new. Simple neural networks have been in use for decades for things ranging from handwriting recognition to web traffic analysis. And yes, even video game AI and chatbots. The main difference is that they run much faster on modern hardware.

If I had to distill down what artificial narrow intelligence really means then, I would say it's like having a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters with a thousand pieces of reference material for what the outputs are supposed to look like. With enough trial and error then, they do arrive at a point where they're likely to spit out a correct or at least correct enough solution. Then, we [00:11:00] take all those monkeys and we take a snapshot of the model state and we start feeding it inputs for both fun and profit.

What ANI is to a brain, then, is kind of what a single app is to a computer. It's a building block, it's something your brain is capable of, but it's just one of its many, many functions.

Shifting gears a bit, then, what would artificial general intelligence look like? Well, it would need to be able to handle everything we've talked about so far, just like your brain can take some past experiences and turn them into a new creation. But again, like your own brain, it would need to be able to run many of these models concurrently and continuously train and iterate on them rather than relying on fixed snapshots. Only then would an AGI have the ability to truly learn and adapt to new things, bringing it closer to that classical definition of AI, and really blur the lines between machine learning and machine consciousness.[00:12:00]

The problem is, even if we had software that sophisticated, we are nowhere close to being able to run an AGI, even on a modern supercomputer, let alone on your AI smartphone.

But, all right Linus, you still haven't explained why any of this is even a problem. I mean, free range meat is just marketing bollocks too, so who cares?

Well, truthfully, in most cases, I don't. I mean, Cooler Master's AI thermal paste snafu: I was never bothered by it, because I never expected my paste to be sentient anyway. But, there are situations where this kind of marketing can have an impact on user safety, and therefore does matter. Let's talk about Tesla.

Mr. Musk has said, among other things, that any vehicle from 2019 onward will be able to reach full autonomy. And he's certainly put out some impressive demos, both canned and even in the form of public beta software that you really can use. And that's really cool. [00:13:00] But unfortunately, it isn't much more than that.

You see, to operate a vehicle safely, it's not enough to be trained with images of painted lines and traffic cones, stop signs, pedestrians, vehicle telemetry data. It's not even enough to be trained to predict the likely maneuvers of nearby vehicles and life forms. On the road, anything can happen, and by definition, by it's very definition, ANI is not capable of handling an edge case that it has never seen before. Even if it was, by the way, I have some really bad news for you Tesla owners out there: Hardware 3. 0 has about 144 TOPS, or trillion operations per second worth of processing power. For context, Windows 11 Recall, a feature that does little more than take screenshots and analyze your PC usage for search, asks for 40 TOPS.

Now to be clear, TOPS is not a be-all, end-all measure of performance, and there is no way that [00:14:00] Microsoft has optimized the code for Recall nearly as much as Tesla has for full self driving. But this should still illustrate the point that Tesla either did, or should have known, that a vehicle with the AI capabilities of a family of iPhone 15 Pro users would never achieve that kind of real-time contextual awareness that's required for complex situations like operating a motor vehicle, and they misrepresented its capabilities in order to sell more software that was never going to leave beta.

That is going to be a doozy of a class action. And it's a common story that has led to this current mess where fuzzy definitions and impossible promises have turned AI into this meaningless buzzword, like all the rest of them. All of them refer to legitimate, useful technologies, some of which have really come to fruition. But their meanings have become diluted with overuse. And it means that when computer cognition finally happens, we're gonna have to call it something completely [00:15:00] different in order to differentiate it from all of the marketing wank.

What Is an AI Anyway? | Mustafa Suleyman - TED - Air Date 4-22-24

MUSTAFA SULEYMAN: Imagine if everybody had a personalized tutor in their pocket and access to low-cost medical advice, a lawyer and a doctor, a business strategist and coach--all in your pocket, 24 hours a day. But things really start to change when they develop what I call AQ: their actions quotient. This is their ability to actually get stuff done in the digital and physical world. And before long, it won't just be people that have AIs. Strange as it may sound, every organization from small business to nonprofit to national government, each will have their own. Every town, building and object will be represented by a unique interactive persona.

And these won't just be mechanistic assistants. There'll be companions, confidants, colleagues, friends, and partners as varied and unique as we all are. At this point, [00:16:00] AIs will convincingly imitate humans at most tasks.

And we'll feel this at the most intimate of scales: An AI organizing a community get-together for an elderly neighbor. A sympathetic expert helping you make sense of a difficult diagnosis. But we'll also feel it at the largest scales: Accelerating scientific discovery. Autonomous cars on the roads. Drones in the skies. They'll both order the takeout and run the power station. They'll interact with us, and of course, with each other. They'll speak every language, take in every pattern of sense data, sights, sounds, streams and streams of information, far surpassing what any one of us could consume in a thousand lifetimes.

So what is this? What are these AIs?

If we are to prioritize safety above all else, to ensure that this new wave [00:17:00] always serves and amplifies humanity, then we need to find the right metaphors for what this might become.

For years, we in the AI community, and I specifically, have had a tendency to refer to this as just tools. But that doesn't really capture what's actually happening here.

AIs are clearly more dynamic, more ambiguous, more integrated and more emergent than mere tools, which are entirely subject to human control. So to contain this wave, to put human agency at its center, and to mitigate the inevitable unintended consequences that are likely to arise, we should start to think about them as we might a new kind of digital species.

Now, it's just an analogy. It's not a literal description, and it's not perfect. For a start, they clearly aren't biological in any traditional sense. But just pause for a moment and really think about what they already do. [00:18:00] They communicate in our languages. They see what we see. They consume unimaginably large amounts of information. They have memory. They have personality. They have creativity. They can even reason to some extent and formulate rudimentary plans. They can act autonomously if we allow them. And they do all this at levels of sophistication that is far beyond anything that we've ever known from a mere tool.

And so saying AI is mainly about the math or the code is like saying we humans are mainly about carbon and water. It's true, but it completely misses the point.

And yes, I get it. This is a super arresting thought. But I honestly think this frame helps sharpen our focus on the critical issues. What are the risks? [00:19:00] What are the boundaries that we need to impose? What kind of AI do we want to build, or allow to be built?

This is a story that's still unfolding. Nothing should be accepted as a given. We all must choose what we create, what AIs we bring into the world--or not.

These are the questions for all of us here today, and all of us alive at this moment. For me, the benefits of this technology are stunningly obvious, and they inspire my life's work every single day. But quite frankly, they'll speak for themselves. Over the years, I've never shied away from highlighting risks and talking about downsides. Thinking in this way helps us focus on the huge challenges that lie ahead for all of us. But let's be clear There is no path to progress where we leave technology behind. The prize for [00:20:00] all of civilization is immense. We need solutions in healthcare, in education, to our climate crisis. And if AI delivers just a fraction of its potential, the next decade is going to be the most productive in human history.

Here's another way to think about it: In the past, unlocking economic growth often came with huge downsides. The economy expanded as people discovered new continents and opened up new frontiers. But they colonized populations at the same time. We built factories, but they were grim and dangerous places to work. We struck oil, but we polluted the planet.

Now, because we are still designing and building AI, we have the potential and opportunity to do it better, radically better. And today we're not discovering a new continent and plundering its resources; we're building one from [00:21:00] scratch. Sometimes people say that data or chips are the 21st century's new oil, but that's totally the wrong image. AI is to the mind what nuclear fusion is to energy: limitless, abundant, world-changing.

And AI really is different. That means we have to think about it creatively and honestly. We have to push our analogies and our metaphors to the very limits to be able to grapple with what's coming. Because this is not just another invention. AI is itself an infinite inventor. And yes, this is exciting and promising and concerning and intriguing all at once. To be quite honest, it's pretty surreal. But step back, see it on the long view of glacial time, and these really are the very most appropriate metaphors that we have today. Since the beginning of life on earth, we've been [00:22:00] evolving, changing, and then creating everything around us in our human world today. And AI isn't something outside of this story. In fact, it's the very opposite. It's the whole of everything that we have created, distilled down into something that we can all interact with and benefit from. It's a reflection of humanity across time. And in this sense, it isn't a new species at all. This is where the metaphors end.

Here's what I'll tell Caspian next time he asks: AI isn't separate. AI isn't even, in some senses, new. AI is us. It's all of us. And this is perhaps the most promising and vital thing of all that even a six-year-old can get a sense for.

As we build out AI, we can and must reflect all that is good, all that we love, all that is special about humanity: our [00:23:00] empathy, our kindness, our curiosity and our creativity. This, I would argue, is the greatest challenge of the 21st century--but also the most wonderful, inspiring and hopeful opportunity for all of us.

How to Limit the Threat of "Killer Robots" and Autonomous Weapons That Are Changing Warfare - Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters - Air Date 3-13-24

MARK LEON GOLDBERG - HOST, GLOBAL DISPATCHES: Can you make this real for listeners who, again, might have a hard time wrapping their brains around what a battlefield use of AI drones 10 years from now might look like, and also why that might be a problem. AI, it's super intelligent, right? It should be able to distinguish combatant from noncombatant.

PAUL SCHARRE: Yeah. I think in the near term, the uses will be probably isolated and the effects in the battlefield will probably not be massive. There is this time disconnect between what's happening out in the civilian space with AI and militaries, because it just takes militaries a while to adopt the technology. In the longer run, I think the odds are good that artificial intelligence and autonomy will [00:24:00] transform the battlefield in very profound ways. That may take some time, 10-15 years, maybe several decades, but one could certainly envision a future where there are lots of weapons that are operating autonomously, that are searching and attacking targets on their own. They're still built by humans and designed by humans and launched by humans, but once sent onto the battlefield, they have quite a degree of freedom that they don't have today, and have some measure of ability to operate intelligently.

One of the concerns that people have raised is that these systems might get it wrong. I think anyone that's interacted with the computer knows that they make mistakes, and these could have very severe life and death consequences. Another concern is that this leads to a sort of slippery slope towards militaries maybe being more liberal or less concerned about civilian casualties and civilian harm. And you could have situations where militaries delegate that to the autonomy [00:25:00] and say, "the algorithm is handling that," but the consequences for civilian harm could be quite severe, and we could see a lot of civilian casualties.

MARK LEON GOLDBERG - HOST, GLOBAL DISPATCHES: So in 2022, the United States declared that it would always retain a "human in the loop", for decisions to use nuclear weapons. I know the UK adopted a similar policy as well. Russia and China have not. Can you just explain the dangers of combining artificial intelligence and autonomy with the use of nuclear weapons. It seems obvious, but what are the scenarios that security experts like yourselves are particularly concerned about?

PAUL SCHARRE: The risks do seem obvious. I think there's been maybe more than one science fiction movie about the risks of plugging AI into nuclear weapons. So I think it's notable that the US and UK have made this statement. A couple of things are worth pointing out. One is that. It's not actually the case that there's no use of AI or autonomy or automation in nuclear operations In [00:26:00] fact, this is another area where various forms of automation have been used for decades, dating back to the cold war, but humans are very firmly in control of nuclear launch decisions.

As we see more AI being adopted I think the value here is having a clear and unambiguous statement that humans will always be in control of any decisions relating to nuclear use. So what are the real risks here? I don't think it's that someone plugs ChatGPT into a nuclear weapon, no one's proposing that. But we have seen, for example, Russia and before them, the Soviet Union, design and build systems that I think would have a degree of automation and risk that many in the US and other defense circles might be quite uncomfortable with.

One is the perimeter system that the Soviets built, which Russian defense officials have said is still operational today, that's a semi automated "dead hand" system. So there's still a human in the loop, but the way that it's designed to work is that once [00:27:00] activated, if there were a first strike that wiped out Soviet leadership, this automated system would have mechanisms to automatically detect that and then pass launch authority to a relatively junior officer sitting at a bunker. There's still a person there, but that is certainly risky, and I think concerning when you think about nuclear stability to have those kinds of automated procedures in place.

And then there's more recently, a uncrewed undersea vehicle, a robotic undersea vehicle that Russia is building called Poseidon or Status-6 that is reportedly nuclear armed—nuclear powered actually, nuclear reactor—and would be designed to carry out a nuclear strike. Again, I don't think the risk here is that the, robot would decide one day to put itself to see, but that you could imagine robotic systems or drones that have nuclear weapons on board them that get lost, that go astray, and that escalate attention or even lose a nuclear weapon [00:28:00] and all of which would be very troubling.

MARK LEON GOLDBERG - HOST, GLOBAL DISPATCHES: So what would be some sensible regulations that would limit if not prohibit fully autonomous weapons?

PAUL SCHARRE: I think one of the challenges right now is a lot of the debate internationally, and countries have been coming together since 2014 through the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the CCW, has been painted in this kind of black or white distinction of either we could have a preemptive, legally-binding treaty that bans autonomous weapons, or we have nothing. And we just proceed where we are today, which is we have the law of war and they would apply to autonomous weapons, but nothing specific that's different.

And I think that both of those are options. There's, I think, downsides to doing nothing, and I don't think politically, really, that a comprehensive preemptive ban on autonomous weapons is likely, given where we are with the technology in the international sphere.

So I think there's a couple different regulatory approaches that are also worth being [00:29:00] considered. One would be a broad principle in international law about the role of human decision making. We never had this before, we never needed it. But that's not a bad idea to have a broad principle like we have principles of proportionality and distinction to set a broad concept of what the role is that humans are needed in the use of force.

I think there could be rooms for a more narrowly targeted ban on anti personnel autonomous weapons that would target people. Those have some unique challenges. Certainly on the nuclear side, I think that's another area where some unique rules might make sense that are specific to nuclear weapons. Nuclear power is agreeing to have a human in the loop.

I think some steps on improving reliability of AI enabled systems through better testing and evaluation would be useful to make sure that we reduce the amount of accidents or the risk of accidents. And then, it might be worse countries considering rules of the road for how drones [00:30:00] operate in contested areas as they have increasing amounts of autonomy to avoid potentially damaging incidents where we might see air or maritime drones interacting with one another and causing potentially dangerous and unwanted incidents.

MARK LEON GOLDBERG - HOST, GLOBAL DISPATCHES: Like an autonomous American drone confronting an autonomous Russian drone, and that's somehow escalating.

PAUL SCHARRE: Exactly. Or even a drone encountering a crewed vessel somewhere else from a potentially competitor nation, and the autonomy takes some action. It does whatever it was programmed to do, which might have seemed like a good idea at the time it was programmed, but one of the really important distinctions between what machines can do in humans is machines just don't have the ability to see the bigger picture, to understand the broader context.

So you can give a human direction like, "hey, listen, you always have the right to defend yourself, but don't start a war." You can tell a human that, and they may not know exactly what that [00:31:00] means in an instant ahead of time, but they can take that sort of broad guidance of, "okay, this is the broader context I'm in. We don't want to escalate things if we don't need to," and they can use their best judgment. In some of these tricky environments that we see militaries operate in contested areas in the Middle East and the Black Sea and the South China Sea and elsewhere, and you can't tell it to a machine. It's just going to do whatever it was programmed to do, and that might not be what you wanted in the moment.

How Much AI Regulation Is The Right Amount? - FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast - Air Date 6-13-24

GALEN DRUKE - HOST, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT POLITICS: According to an Elon University poll, 54 percent of Americans describe their feelings towards AI with the word "cautious" and 70 percent of Americans believe that AI could significantly impact elections through the generation of fake information videos and audios.

I think there has been a lot of attention paid to the potential impacts of AI on this election. In fact, a little less than a year ago, we did an episode on this podcast that was titled something like the first AI election. So far, I think the general sense has been that the [00:32:00] anticipated or maybe worried impact of AI on the election has not born out. Obviously, as you cited, there was the case during the New Hampshire primary, but that this election has not thus far looked very different as a result of AI.

Would you agree with that? Do you think that that would maybe be like coming to conclusions too soon? What is your take on that?

GREGORY ALLEN: It's definitely coming to conclusions way too soon. Let me give you a few data points that strike me as really interesting. Folks might remember in the 2016 election, the Russian intelligence services were involved in creating a lot of disinformation based content, and that was coming out of the Internet Research Agency, if memory serves, it's definitely the IRA out of Russia. And that had hundreds of people working in an office in Russia, and every day they're waking up, they're clocking in, and they're cranking out deceptive information content. But there's a problem, which is most of them don't speak great [00:33:00] English. So a lot of the stuff that they're writing has the common hallmarks when English is your second language and Russian is your native language.

Well, just recently, OpenAI announced that they have detected both Russian and Chinese intelligence services using their platform to generate disinformation in advance of the election with a politically motivated intent. And I think what's really interesting there is that OpenAI/ChatGPT does not make grammatical mistakes, and OpenAI/ChatGPT does not require you to hire hundreds and hundreds of people.

And what we've seen in the text domain, which was already achievable before, now that same sort of synthetic media automatically generated stuff, highly customized stuff, it can be more audience targeted, audience calibrated, we can now bring that to audio, video, images at massive scale with capacity.

And I think there's two scenarios to think about here. number one is just massive [00:34:00] scale. What percentage of 4chan today, Is disinformation that to some greater or lesser extent, has its origins in potentially foreign content created by AI? I don't know. I don't think a reliable survey has been done or really could be done on that topic at the present time. That's a sort of scale based attack. The other attack that I would really be concerned about is just an incredibly precise, perfectly timed attack.

GALEN DRUKE - HOST, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT POLITICS: Like the October surprise p tape or n word tape, or Biden falling down or appearing to have a stroke or whatever—in the 2016 or 2020 election, people would have a stronger sense of whether or not it was real, but today, whether it's real or not, people will just not know.

GREGORY ALLEN: Yes, exactly. The right information, the right media at the right time can really be the hinge moment in really important moments in history. And my question then becomes, "could something actually make an impact on the [00:35:00] U. S. election?" As a starting hypothesis, I would say yes, it definitely could, and we should be taking steps now to make that chance go down.

GALEN DRUKE - HOST, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT POLITICS: So essentially, even if we don't have the blockbuster use of AI that people might be afraid of, such as a deep, fake in October, there could be effects of AI that are a lot less sexy, which is just the kind of information that's being spread on the Internet amongst people using social media or whatnot. But also, given the nature of our election cycle and October surprises, it could be far too soon to come to any conclusions about the impact of AI on this election.

GREGORY ALLEN: Yeah, just because something bad hasn't happened yet doesn't mean something couldn't happen. If the year before the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, you said "there's never been a nuclear safety disaster, that means we'll always be safe." You'd be an idiot. And I think the same thing strikes me as the truth about election interference with AI. I don't know. It would be wrong of me to say that I know 100 percent that AI election interference [00:36:00] will be a big problem and a big phenomenon this year. But I do feel like I know that it could be a big phenomenon and a big problem. So I think that's enough to justify our taking steps to mitigate that risk.

GALEN DRUKE - HOST, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT POLITICS: As you mentioned, it seems like the most immediate focus in Congress would be AI uses related to the upcoming election. But beyond that, is it clear that there is the political will to regulate AI in different ways when it comes to copyright? As you've mentioned, or what's mentioned in this roadmap, for example, is a privacy bill that will, of course, affect AI. Is there bipartisan support for those things? What comes next after we've addressed the upcoming election?

GREGORY ALLEN: I think privacy is going to be really tough to pass at the federal level. At the state level, I think this is happening. It's already happened in some states. I also think at the international level, ChatGPT was briefly banned in Italy for noncompliance [00:37:00] with GDPR, the existing big European privacy regulations.

I mentioned that because all of these companies operate both in the United States and Europe, and usually when they're forced to comply with European regulation, they just do that worldwide because it's simpler than trying to calibrate what they do based on different jurisdictions. So that's, I think the story on privacy. I think that's a really tough one.

Intellectual property. I think it's a really rough political debate. There's very entrenched special interests on both sides, but one of them might win. I think we'll probably have that fight in 2025, would be my guess.

Here you have to separate the two types of AI systems that you might want to regulate. Historically, when we've been talking about AI, when the EU AI Act was first drafted, they did not have ChatGPT on their minds. The first draft of the EU AI Act predates ChatGPT. And the reason why I mentioned that is before large language models, most AI systems were [00:38:00] application specific. If you have an AI system that is a computer vision, image recognition system, if you give it a bunch of pictures of cats, it's going to be good at recognizing cats, it's not going to be good at recognizing military aircraft or tanks or something like that. Historically, AI systems are very application specific.

What's interesting about, ChatGPT and the other large language models is that they're not application specific. It will give you medical advice. It will give you legal advice. It will give you entrepreneurship advice. It will give you life coaching or psychotherapy, type of advice. And so you have these individual systems that are so diverse in the number of applications that they can do that you might want to regulate those as an entity.

In the case of the EU AI Act, for example, they separate the sector specific regulations, which is the low risk, high risk, unacceptable risk, risk pyramid, and that's based on what the AI system is doing. But then they also have this set of regulations around what they [00:39:00] call general purpose AI systems that pose a systemic risk, and that's just regulating the technology because of its capabilities.

Here's what's interesting, I think, there and in the United States and elsewhere. The regulations, at least in the legislation, mostly say, "thou shalt follow the standard" And by the way, standards coming soon, we promise. That's what's so interesting is they've actually, mandated the development of standards, and then they've mandated the following of those standards. So right now there is no existing standard for what constitutes the responsible development and the responsible operation of a super general purpose, super capable AI system like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, but those are coming.

And I think that's what also the U. S. Kind of has to wrestle with is do we only want to continue this existing paradigm of application specific regulation? [00:40:00] Or do we also want to regulate based on the technology overall? So far, all we've done in the latter case is mandate some transparency and reporting requirements.

How AI causes serious environmental problems (but might also provide solutions) | DW Business - DW News - Air Date 4-29-24

EMILY LESHNER - HOST, DW BUSINESS: aedifion is capitalizing on AI's ability to read and analyze data in a sliver of the amount of time it would take the world's best researchers to do the same.

This speed is what makes AI so valuable to researchers and scientists looking for solutions to the climate crisis. Scientists are now using AI to map Antarctic icebergs 10,000 times faster than humans, and to track deforestation in real time, to better predict weather patterns, and to suggest more efficient waste management systems. There's no doubt AI has the potential to do good things for the climate, but not everything about it is a gift to the environment.

Take this hum, for example, which residents in Chandler, Arizona hear 24/7. It's the sound of a data center processing [00:41:00] the billions of requests it gets throughout the day. Think of AI as the brain and data centers as the body that supports the brain to work. There are more than 8,000 data centers in the world. According to the International Energy Agency, data center energy consumption is expected to double in 2026 to what it was in 2022.

JESSE DODGE: When I started doing AI research a decade ago, I could run most of the AI systems I was using on my laptop.

EMILY LESHNER - HOST, DW BUSINESS: This is Jesse Dodge. He's an AI research scientist.

JESSE DODGE: But today we're using supercomputers. Some of the large AI systems that people are familiar with, like the chatbots or the image generation systems, those run on really large supercomputers and consume a potentially very large amount of electricity.

EMILY LESHNER - HOST, DW BUSINESS: These very large amounts of electricity produce very large amounts of heat, and also that hum you just heard. To keep the data centers from overheating, they must be cooled down. [00:42:00] And this is usually done in one of two ways, using air conditioning or water, and lots of it. Let's say I engage in a 15 question conversation with ChatGPT over how I could be more environmentally conscious. Experts calculate I would be consuming about a half liter of fresh water. And this is where AI can be a little problematic.

JESSE DODGE: Access to clean water is competing with local uses for it.

EMILY LESHNER - HOST, DW BUSINESS: This is what got Google into a bit of hot water soon after it announced plans to build a $200 million data center in the working class neighborhood of Cedillos in Chile.

SEBASTIÁN LEHUEDÉ: We all use Google search and other Google tools. So initially the neighbors were quite happy that Google had chosen this area for building their data center.

EMILY LESHNER - HOST, DW BUSINESS: This is Sebastián Lehuedé, an AI ethics and society lecturer at King's College, London.

SEBASTIÁN LEHUEDÉ: They saw it as synonymous with progress, [00:43:00] development, a new pole of innovation in the area.

EMILY LESHNER - HOST, DW BUSINESS: But once they took a look at Google's environmental impact report for the data center, they were startled by what they learned.

SEBASTIÁN LEHUEDÉ: They found out at some point that this Google data center was going to use 168 liters of water per second in an area facing drought.

EMILY LESHNER - HOST, DW BUSINESS: A drought that is now in its 15th year and caused elected officials to ration water in the capital of Santiago. But after fierce protests from the community, the permit was put on hold. A local environmental court told Google it needs to modify how it plans to cool its servers. And Google's plans for a data center in Uruguay also faced pushback when locals learned how much water it would consume.

And water isn't the only natural resource that AI requires. It needs a lot of electricity too. And most of that electricity still comes from burning fossil fuels, which released the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. [00:44:00] Training a single AI model produces more than five times the amount of carbon dioxide emissions generated from a car in its lifetime. That's including the emissions to manufacture the car and its fuel consumption once it leaves the factory. It's an astounding amount. Training an AI model and then ensuring its continued existence through large data centers is a massive drain on natural resources and also drives up what researchers call embodied carbon.

JESSE DODGE: So that's going to be the amount of, carbon it took to build the hardware. Just starting by mining the rare earth minerals that goes into the GPUs, shipping that across the world to then be manufactured into a GPU, and then shipping that GPU to its final destination at a data center. That does incur a really large environmental impact.

EMILY LESHNER - HOST, DW BUSINESS: It's this impact that companies like Microsoft are trying to take into account as they set climate goals. Microsoft says it's aiming to be [00:45:00] carbon negative by 2030, not just neutral. but negative. And one way it's hoping to get there is through Bolivia. More than 9,000 kilometers from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, is a biochar facility operated by ExoMAD Green. It turns forestry waste into something that's called biochar, which is essentially charcoal.

ExoMAD Green will produce the biochar, containing carbon dioxide, and bury it underground, where it can enrich the soil and keep CO2 from getting into the atmosphere. Microsoft has bought 32,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal credits, but that's a tiny fraction of its overall annual emissions. We don't know how much of that will grow with AI.

That's one way that Microsoft can continue to expand its AI operation and data centers while saying it's still on path to being carbon negative. But is that effective enough, or is it just a [00:46:00] form of corporate greenwashing?

JESSE DODGE: If we do something like bicarbon offsets, that doesn't negate the action that we took.

EMILY LESHNER - HOST, DW BUSINESS: Meaning that doesn't undo the carbon emissions that we've produced.

JESSE DODGE: These two things don't cancel each other out.

EMILY LESHNER - HOST, DW BUSINESS: As AI advances, governments and regulatory bodies are trying their best to keep up. This year, new AI rules passed by the European Parliament will go into effect, impacting businesses like aedifion. The EU AI Act does reference the impact of AI on the environment. It asks that AI systems are developed and used in a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner, though it doesn't really spell out what that means. Chile's AI laws, which were drafted before the EU rules, but aren't nearly as comprehensive, don't address environmental impact either.

SEBASTIÁN LEHUEDÉ: I think what's concerning is not only that this is not. being addressed enough, as it should, but also that the voice of the people affected by it is not considered. So [00:47:00] even if you look at research, the press, quite often they report on the environmental impact, but they don't report on how the situation can affect the livelihood or the wellbeing of the communities participating within the value chain of artificial intelligence.

EMILY LESHNER - HOST, DW BUSINESS: If operating a data center for your AI model Is the reason why a community doesn't have access to drinking water, is that still sustainable?

SEBASTIÁN LEHUEDÉ: We need those voices to participate as well in the governance of AI. So if the UN, for example, is coming up with new regulation, it would be great to be able to hear those communities as well, because those communities, they're not against technology or AI, but that what they will say is that if we want AI, it has to be built in dialogue with local communities.

Why Are Migrants Becoming AI Test Subjects? With Petra Molnar - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 6-20-24

AZA RASKIN - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: I really want to know about like, well, how does the technology diffuse? Like, what's the path? What are warning signs, if at all, of it going from the border to a broader society? Where have you seen that happen? I think people seeing that path, if there is that path, is really important [00:48:00] for understanding why we might want to get ahead of it now.

PETRA MOLNAR: Yeah, for sure. And, you know, when I get asked this question, I always think about how best to answer it because I do think it's important to keep the kind of context specific to the border sometimes, because it is this kind of high risk laboratory that really impacts vulnerable people. But at the end of the day, it doesn't just stop at the border.

And that's a trend that I've been noticing the last few years for sure. So, if we go back to the robodogs that were announced by the Department of Homeland Security for border purposes in 2022, just last year, I think it was May, the New York City Police Department proudly unveiled that they're going to be rolling out robodogs on the streets of New York City.

And one was even painted with black spots on it, like a Dalmatian. So, again, very proud of its kind of like surveillance tech focus. And I should say, the robodogs were before piloted in New York and in Honolulu during the COVID 19 pandemic for surveillance on the streets, and then after public outcry, surprise, surprise, were pulled.

So again, [00:49:00] the border tech stuff doesn't just stay at the border, but it then starts proliferating into other spaces of public life. And, you know, we've seen similar technology like drones and different types of cell phone tracking be deployed against protesters and even things like sports stadium surveillance. There is some work being done in the European Union on some of the technologies that are deployed for border enforcement and for criminal justice purposes, also then being turned on, you know, people who are enjoying a football game or a soccer game, for example.

I think that's the interesting thing with tech, right? It might be developed for one thing and then repurposed for a second purpose and sold to a third purpose. And it just kind of flows in these ways that are difficult but important to track.

AZA RASKIN - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah, there's sort of a version of 'build it, they will come'. It's like build it and it will be used. You know, one of the other things we picked up from your book is you talked about a policy I'd never heard of called CODIS, which you say moves the US closer towards construction of a discriminatory genetic [00:50:00] panopticon, a kind of dystopian tool of genetic surveillance that could potentially encompass everyone within the United States, including ordinary citizens, when they've not been convicted or even suspected of criminal conduct. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

PETRA MOLNAR: Yeah, that's the other kind of element of this dystopia. The fact that, you know, your body becomes a border in a way, not only just with biometrics, but also with DNA collection. And there's been different pilot projects kind of rolled out over the years. Again, how is that possible, right? Like, have we agreed to this as people who are crossing borders? The fact that states are now considering collecting DNA for border enforcement is very dystopic. Because I think that's ultimately what it is about, the fact that each of these incursions is moving the so called Overton window further and further.

You know, we're talking, at first it's biometrics, then it's robodogs, then it's DNA. What is it going to be next, right? And I don't mean to just fear monger or kind of [00:51:00] future-predict or anything; this is based on years of work across different borders and seeing the appetite for a level of technological incursion that I don't think it's going to stop anytime soon.

AZA RASKIN - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Where have there been examples in the world where things have gone the other way around? Where it's not just a temporary, like, public outcry and robodogs get taken back, but, like, something really significant has happened, where a surveillance technology from the border gets rolled back because it really doesn't fit a country's values.

PETRA MOLNAR: I will say we are catching this at a really crucial moment because there are conversations about, well, how do we regulate some of this? Like, do we put some red lines under some of this technology? And there were some really, really inspiring conversations being had at the European Union level, for example, because it went through this really long protracted process of putting together an AI act, basically, the first regional attempt to regulate AI. And even though in the end it didn't go as far as it, I think, should on border technologies, there were [00:52:00] conversations about, for example, a ban on predictive analytics used for border interdictions or pushback operations or using individualized risk assessments and things like that.

I think traction on these issues can be gained by kind of extrapolating from the border and making citizens also worry about biometric mass surveillance and surveillance in public space and things like that, and finding kind of moments of solidarity among different groups that are equally impacted by this. And that is where the conversation seems to be moving, less from now we're fact finding and showing all these kind of egregious human rights abuses, which are still happening. But like, what do we then do about it together collectively?

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: It seems like one of the ways to motivate public action to regulate this is to show how, you know, what starts at the border to deal with "the other" and the immigration that's coming into the country, then later can get turned around to be used on our own citizens. And in your book, you actually have [talked] about how the global push to strengthen borders has gone hand in hand with the rise in [00:53:00] far-right politics, to root out the other. And you talk about examples of far-right governments who turn around and use the same technology tested at their border on their own citizens to start strengthening their regime. And you give examples, I think in Kenya, Israel, Greece. Could you just elaborate on some of the examples? Because I think if people know where this goes, then it motivates how do we get ahead of this more?

PETRA MOLNAR: Yeah, I think it's important to bring it back to political context because all around the world we're seeing the rise of anti migrant far-right groups and parties making incursions into, you know, the political space. Sometimes in small ways and sometimes in major ways and, you know, I think it's an open question what's going to happen in the United States, this year, right?, with the election that you guys have coming up.

What I've seen, for example, in Greece is that parties that are very anti migration normalize the need to bring in surveillance technology at the border and test it out in refugee camps, for example, and then say, okay, well, we're going to be using similar things by the police on the streets of Athens, for example. [00:54:00] You know, in Kenya, similar things with normalization of just kind of data extraction for the purposes of digital ID are then used and weaponized against groups that already face marginalizations like Somali Kenyans, Nubian community, and smaller groups like that.

So, again, I think the fact that there is this kind of global turn to the right and more of a fear-based kind of response to migration, motivates more technology. And you again see this kind of in the incursion of the private sector, kind of normalizing some of these really sharp interventions and say, Oh, well, you know what, we have your solution here. You are worried about migration and "the other", let's bring in this project. And then, Oh, lo and behold, you can actually use it on, you know, protesters that you don't like or sports stadium fans who are too rowdy and groups like that as well.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Okay, so we just talked about Kenya and Greece, in the context of other governments, but what about Israel? What's their role in all this? Are they using these technologies at their borders?

PETRA MOLNAR: Yeah, for sure. I [00:55:00] mean, Israel is definitely a nucleus in everything that we're talking about today. And I also felt compelled to go to the occupied West Bank for the book because it's really the epicenter of so much of the technology that is then exported for border enforcement in the EU and at the US-Mexico border, right? But what is really troubling in how Israel has been developing and deploying technology is that Palestine has become the ultimate testing ground, a laboratory, if you will. Surveillance technology is tested on Palestinians, both in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, and then sold to governments around the world for border enforcement. And all of these projects that are normalized in these situations then can get exported out into other jurisdictions.

Big Tech AI Is A Lie - Tina Huang - Air Date 4-30-24

TINA HUANG - HOST, TINA HUANG: Back in 2023, Google came up with this very impressive demo of Gemini.

AI DEMO: Tell me what you see. I see a squiggly line. What about now? It looks like a bird to me. What if I add [00:56:00] this? The bird is swimming in the water. It has a long neck and beak. It is a duck.

TINA HUANG - HOST, TINA HUANG: Really impressive, right? But unfortunately, it came to light that this demo is a bit deceptive, but actually still pretty impressive. Which is why, when Gemini Ultra came out in 2024, I was really excited to try it out. I tried replicating the results of the Gemini demo by prompting Gemini with the same prompts and seeing what came out of it.

And, drumroll please, this.

AI DEMO: The image you sent me now appears to show a drawing of a snake on a piece of white paper. The snake is long and slender with a small head and forked tongue.

TINA HUANG - HOST, TINA HUANG: Right, definitely a snake. Now in a more recent conference, they came up with these new autonomous agents. Super fancy, really, really impressive.

GOOGLE SPOKESPERSONS: Gemini for Google Workspace is our AI powered agent to quickly identify threats. You can use Gemini in security operations. We're seeing really interesting creative agents.

TINA HUANG - HOST, TINA HUANG: But when I excitedly tried to replicate this with their Vertex AI builder:

TH: Can you help me log my pet [00:57:00] into this system?

AI: I can help you with that. Can you please provide me with your pet's name and ID?

TH: My pet is a goldfish and does not have an ID.

AI: What is its name?

TH: My goldfish name is Bobby.

AI: I'm sorry I'm having trouble creating a new pet profile for your goldfish. There is an error loading the agent.

I was again sorely disappointed. Seems to be a trend.

Now, combine this together with a pop up message from Gemini, which states, "Your conversations are processed by human reviewers to improve the technologies powering Gemini apps". I don't know, one could maybe even start hypothesizing that maybe Google is faking its AI capabilities?

And of course, they are not the only ones. Amazon has these just walk in stores where you're supposed to be able to go inside, grab anything that you need, and then when you walk out there is facial recognition technology and AI, of course, that's able to charge your credit card automatically, or so they say. According to the [00:58:00] information, there was in fact over a thousand Indian associates that were watching the cameras and labeling footage of shoppers: "An employee who worked on the technology said that actual humans, albeit distant and invisible ones based in India, reviewed about 70 percent of sales made in the cashierless shops as of mid-2022".

It's just insanity, the amount of lies that we as a public are supposed to be able to tolerate. Like, seriously, what the f***. These companies are becoming more and more reckless, to the point that they're just blatantly disregarding, say, safety of the general public.

For example, one of the biggest ironies is the fact that Sam Altman's whole, like, ousting ordeal last year as the CEO of OpenAI was linked to concerns over AI safety. Yep, remember 2015? OpenAI was a AI safety research company. Seriously, I think this is really just crossing the line here, all for the sake of gathering more investor money. And it's like actually insulting by feeding the public this continuous lie about how they're still doing everything for the public, for the future of humanity, for [00:59:00] everybody.

Trickle down economy is defined as a theory that tax breaks and benefits for corporations and the wealthy will trickle down and eventually benefit everybody. Like this. Filling the cup of the top wealthy people would eventually trickle down to all of us.

Sam Altman, of course, is a big proponent of this. In his 2021 essay called "Moore's Law [for] Everything", he states, "The key three consequences of the AI revolution is to, 1), this revolution will create phenomenal wealth. The price of many kinds of labor, which drives the cost of goods and services will fall towards zero once sufficiently powerful AI 'joins the workforce'".

And 2), "the world will change so rapidly and dramatically. that an equally drastic change in policy will be needed to distribute this wealth and enable more people to pursue the life they want".

And 3), "if we get both of these right, we can improve the standard of living for people more than we ever have before". The way that he proposes we should offset the job loss to the common folk is to have UBI, universal basic income, that is from [01:00:00] corporate and property tax rates alone.

Yeah, I don't know about that. Since when has the rich ever wanted to give away their wealth and pay more taxes? We now know that so much of the philanthropy that these really wealthy people do is also for the sake of tax breaks. So, sorry to break that illusion, if you still have that illusion. I'm not an expert here, and that's like a whole other can of worms, but I mean, I'm not going to be holding my breath on that one.

In reality, trickle down economy works more like this. The cup of the wealthiest and the most powerful just keep getting bigger. Case in point, the recklessness that we've seen in these big tech companies trying to get more investor money, they're not exactly focusing on trickling it down to the rest of us and really actually helping us, you know, benefit society.

I mean, no wonder the employees in these companies, when you start asking them questions, they end up getting pretty uncomfortable. But hey, please let me clarify here: Iam not attacking these employees from big tech [01:01:00] companies. I mean, that would also make me hypocritical because I worked at Meta, a big tech company. I also know many people that work at these big tech companies, and I don't think that they're bad people, like they're willingly contributing towards this mess.

It gets really complex because as I'll talk about later, AI very much has this ability of bettering humanity and the people working at these technologies can clearly see that. But what leadership says that they're doing versus what they're actually doing just doesn't line up.

So, before you click off this video full of doom, I want to show you that there is hope in AI doing tremendous good in this world. Actually, a lot of hope because there is no clear winner of AI right now. There is no company that has a monopoly.

MOVIE CLIP: Truly open means open to everyone.

TINA HUANG - HOST, TINA HUANG: Introducing the counter movement of closed source proprietary big tech technology: the open source movement. Open source refers to a type of software whose source code is made available to the public and can be modified and shared by anyone. It's built on principles of collaboration, transparency, and [01:02:00] community-oriented development.

It's basically the opposite of big tech AI. This movement's been around for quite some time now and there's been really big successes that we've seen from the open source community. For example, Red Hat, founded in 1993, became huge in supporting professional enterprise-level Linux distributions. The Apache Software Foundation founded in 1999 is also responsible for a lot of the open source software that are the foundation to the internet and many web technologies today. MySQL, PostgreSQL, anybody that uses databases are probably familiar with these open source databases. GitHub that really brought together the open source community. Coding languages. like Python, JavaScript, these are all open source and many of you all use it today.

These are just a few examples. What makes me really happy now is that the open source community has really stepped up the game in this whole AI situation. If you just scroll through Hugging Face, which itself is an open source collaborative ML/AI platform, you'll see lots and lots of open source AI models. And people are developing open source consumer products as well. We [01:03:00] have the 01 Light, which is a voice interface for your home computer. It's open source and allows developers to build on top in order to create their own unique agents.

ChatDev is another very interesting open source agent initiative. It's a collection of intelligent autonomous agents that work together to form a software company. For example, a CEO agent, a CTO agent, a programmer agent, tester, etc, etc. These agents work together in order to accomplish a task that the user sets out. I really recommend that you play around with it. It's super easy to use and really cool how it works.

Anyways, there is this open source AI push, and given the financial viability that has already been proven in other open source projects previously, many investors are also willing to invest in open source projects and companies. As individuals, you watching this video as well, I hope, will start thinking more about contributing towards open source. Whether that be just volunteering, contributing towards open source, using more open source products or even building your own businesses and startups, which by the way, is probably a lot easier than you think, especially [01:04:00] if you use AI to help you out.

Hey, at least check out the free HubSpot resource book. I think with open source, we'll be able to make a big step forward towards the realignment of AI innovation and development with the benefit of humanity as a whole.

Final comments on the nature of misalignment between AI and human wellbeing

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with Vox, explaining that we're already using AI more than we realize. Linus Tech Tips explained the changing definitions of AI. The CEO of Microsoft's AI division that gave a TED Talk, which laid out a very rosy vision of the potential future of AI. Global Dispatches in contrast described how AI can and will be used by militaries on the battlefield, up to and including the automating of nuclear weapons. The FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast discuss the threat of AI to elections and the need for regulation. DW News explained the relatively hidden water usage of AI. Your Undivided Attention highlighted the use of AI technologies for surveillance. And Tina Huang critiqued big tech's [01:05:00] tendency to overpromise and underdeliver on AI projects, all in the pursuit of investor money.

And those were just the Top Takes; there's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, 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 page, if you like, 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 Deeper Dives half the show, I just wanted to talk a bit more about the deals being made between journalists accompanies and AI developers.

I mentioned at the top of the [01:06:00] show that Vox had signed a deal, which was reported on, on the same day, I think, as the Atlantic signing something similar. Both publications wrote articles, actually critical of the move of their own parent companies, which has always fun to see. But the article from Vox laid out an old thought experiment and breathed new life into it, with additional analysis that I thought was worth sharing.

So the article is titled, "This article is OpenAI training data," and it starts with a quick description of the old paperclip maximizer thought experiment. " Imagine an artificial general intelligence, one essentially limitless in its power and its intelligence. This AGI is programmed by its creators with the goal of producing paperclips. Because the AGI is super intelligent, it quickly learns how to make paperclips out of anything. And because the AGI is super intelligent, it can anticipate and foil any attempt to stop it and will do so because it's one [01:07:00] directive is to make more paperclips. Should we attempt to turn the AGI off, it will fight back, because it can't make more paperclips if it's turned off, and it will win because it is super intelligent. The final result: the entire galaxy, including you, me and everyone we know, has either been destroyed or been transformed into paperclips."

Now there's a good chance that you've heard that one before, but it's worth repeating because it reminds us of the nature of maximization. When people or corporations or AIs attempt to maximize for one thing, there will always be trade offs, sometimes extreme trade-offs. In the case of the paperclip concept, the thought experiment is teaching that great care must be taken when programming an AI system that will be an efficient maximizer by its nature.

But the lesson, just as the nature of maximization itself, can be extrapolated out into other realms. I would certainly put capitalism on that list. [01:08:00] Capitalism is designed to maximize wealth, which isn't inherently evil, just like figuring out the most efficient way to make paperclips isn't inherently evil. It's the trade-offs that end up tripping us up. Think runaway climate change.

Now ideally, our economic system would be in perfect alignment with creating human wellbeing, human flourishing, human happiness, or, you know, if we were exceptionally enlightened, we would understand our own wellbeing to be an extricable be linked with all other aspects of nature, living and inert, and we would want to align our economy with a sort of whole-earth wellbeing. Instead, our economics is only concerned with financial wealth, which is only useful to humans, and is at best an approximate stand-in for wellbeing, but it is certainly not synonymous with wellbeing.

Similarly, there are businesses--this podcast included, frankly--that exist within our economic system that forces [01:09:00] their multiple priorities to be at least slightly misaligned. For instance, producing the best possible journalism and making the most amount of money are certainly not in alignment. Even way before the age of internet news and New York Times games like Wordle driving revenue, it was known that sports coverage and scandal brought in the funds to newspapers needed to subsidize the hard reporting efforts that cannot support themselves.

And all of this brings us back to journalistic companies striking deals with tech companies, because they need the money.

Back to the article. Quote: "I've seen our industry pin our hopes on search engine optimization, on the pivot to video, and back again. On Facebook and social media traffic. I can remember Apple coming to my offices at Time Magazine in 2010, promising us that the iPad would save the magazine business. [01:10:00] It did not. Each time we are promised a fruitful collaboration with tech platforms that can benefit both sides. And each time it ultimately doesn't work out, because the interests of those tech platforms do not align, and have never fully aligned, with those of the media." End quote.

But what I would like to point out is that in all of the time people have been worrying about the rise of AI and the dangerous potential for a small misalignment of intentions to result in a disaster like that of the paperclip thought experiment, precious few have thought to turn their gaze to the companies directing the development of AI systems. As we know, for-profit companies' incentives are not aligned with the longterm benefit of the planet and everything on it; far from it.

So how will they design AI with the best alignment of incentives? And moreover, how can they even go through the process of developing that AI [01:11:00] without the trade-offs of the process being catastrophic in the same way that runaway climate change was the trade-off for all of the benefits we gained from fossil fuels?

Back to the article. Quote: "AIs aren't the only maximizers. So are the companies that make AIs, from OpenAI to Microsoft, to Google, to Meta, companies in the AI business are engaged in a brutal race for data, for compute power, for human talent, for market share, and ultimately, for profits. Those goals are their paperclips. And what they are doing now, as hundreds of billions of dollars flow into the AI industry, is everything they can to maximize them." End quote.

And as those companies maximize their profits, their goal will be to extract as much value out of the raw data and human talent as they can, so that their AIs are as capable as possible, so that they can maximize the revenue they generate. For [01:12:00] example, Google is including AI responses to questions that now disincentivized users from clicking through to source material. So Google still earned ad dollars from your search, but the humans who wrote the source material that that AI drew on for its answers will earn less, due to getting less and less traffic to their sites.

So the article wraps up, quote: "If you can't connect to an audience with your content, let alone get paid for it, the imperative for producing more work dissolves. It won't just be news. The endless web itself could stop growing. Bad for all of us, including the AI companies. What happens if, while relentlessly trying to hoover up every possible bit of data that could be used to train their models, AI companies destroy the very reasons for humans to make more data. Surely they can foresee that possibility. Surely they wouldn't be so single-minded as to destroy the [01:13:00] raw material they depend on. Yet just as the AI and the paperclip thought experiment relentlessly pursues its single goal, so do the AI companies of today. Until they've reduced the news, the web, and everyone who was once part of it to little more than paperclips."

SECTION A: MORE CURRENT USES OF AI

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with deeper dives on three topics.

Next up section a. More current uses of AI. Section B potential uses of AI and the ethics we need to consider. And section C regulating AI.

Landlords Using Shady Algorithm To Raise Rents | Judd Legum - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 6-15-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Tell us about real page and then give us the timeline of what's been happening on that.

JUDD LEGUM: Yeah. And, uh, and this was a story that was really broken open by ProPublica a couple of years ago, um, about real page, which is a, Software program that is used by many corporate landlords, particularly any large building with a bunch of units.

That's really what it's optimized for. And the [01:14:00] landlords feed in all of the information well, beyond what you could get on Zillow or publicly available information, vacancy rates, what they're actually charging all the fees, everything that there is. And then. This program spits back out a recommended rent for that unit.

But what's insidious about this process is that essentially so many corporate landlords are using it that they know. They don't need to go underneath that recommendation because the building around the corner is also using real page and is also going to be using these prices. And what we, what they found is, since the corporate landlords have adopted this, uh, in large numbers, the rents have gone up and up and up and up.

So, that's, that's essentially how this, how the system works is that it's, it's. [01:15:00] Effectively collusion via software where they can all they're not sitting in a smoke filled room, uh, fixing the prices of. Uh, rent in a given area, whether it's Atlanta or Seattle or wherever it is, but they're doing so via this software algorithm.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And I, I gotta say, like, I don't remember this element of the story until I read, uh, your piece on it. But if there's also sort of like a mafia quality to this where they say, look, if you're going to use this software, you cannot undercut the price that we give you because then you're screwing up everything.

JUDD LEGUM: Yeah.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And that seems to be a big giveaway.

JUDD LEGUM: Yes. They have people who are monitoring it, who are making sure you're in compliance with their recommendations. And actually, if you price your, uh, apartments too low, uh, too many times, you'll get kicked off. Uh, the the system [01:16:00] and so we actually have learned a lot more, uh, in the last 2 years since that ProPublica story came out because there's been a series of class action lawsuits.

There's also been lawsuits filed by, uh, the attorneys general in in D. C. and elsewhere too. So. That process has started to, um, reveal even more information about how the whole system works.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And, um, maybe you write that, um, um, uh, that it's deploying real paid software in, in one case, uh, in Houston, uh, resulted in pushing people out with higher rents, but ultimately increased revenue by 10 million.

So they're making a ton of money off of this. The landlords. But there, I mean, that's the beauty of like price fixing, right? It's like, I know I can sustain this higher than market price. If everybody sustains this higher than market price.

JUDD LEGUM: Yeah, and it's [01:17:00] essentially gotten rid of negotiation. It used to be you could go to rent an apartment.

They sell you. Here's the price 3, 000 a month, whatever it is, you go into the rental office and you say, you know, I'd really like to pay 2900 a month. Um, now, part of that is there's a housing shortage. But the other part of it is RealPage has made it clear that you are not to negotiate these prices. And they, and the corporate landlords can feel confident because before they might know, well, if I won't give these people 100 or 200 off, they're just going to go around to a corner to another nice building and those people will do it and I'll be left with an empty unit.

But they know if those people code two blocks down, they're going to run into the exact same pricing scheme and the exact same reluctance to negotiate under any circumstances. So that's really what's driving the prices up. There used to be a say, get heads in beds. You know, when you, when you ran these big buildings, the idea is [01:18:00] keep them full, but RealPay just kind of, Uh overturned that philosophy and now they're they're really holding the line on prices Even if they have to keep a couple of units empty for a little bit

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Uh you cite in uh, one of those hours one of those lawsuits this one in arizona that in phoenix 70 percent of multifamily apartments units listed in Phoenix metropolitan area are owned, operated, or managed by companies that have contracted with RealPage.

Uh, a lawsuit in D. C. 60 percent of large multifamily buildings, 50 units or more, set prices using RealPage software. These numbers, I don't know, I mean, they may have gone up since then. Um, and we don't really know, I mean, we can't, do we know, like, I don't know. Can we look at boston at new york and at, um, the dallas chicago?

I mean do we have a sense of like just how ubiquitous this real page software is or is it? Only piecemeal information.

JUDD LEGUM: Well, it's really piecemeal at this point [01:19:00] because Uh, you when the when their suits filed, they can do discovery, they can get information about what's going on. Uh, there's, there's are some ways to sort of to see, uh, and to and people have tried to collect data, but we don't have a full sense.

We don't know, um, what the full scope is. And by the way, there was a competing software company, uh, that. Had somewhat of a different approach to how it advise these corporate landlords to manage their properties. It was purchased by real page. So it's really the whole purpose of it. And they even say this in their marketing materials is you can charge.

More than the market price would bear otherwise, which, which is a pretty clear indication that you're doing something to subvert the actual competitive market. Um, and, you know, this is in the context of a housing shortage, so the prices would be going up anyway, [01:20:00] but the level of price increases that we've seen, especially in major metropolitan areas has far exceeded.

Even the inflation that we've seen in some other. Um, you know, uh, areas

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: and, uh, like you say in the piece to Jeffrey Roper, who created the real page algorithm explained that quote, if you have idiots undervaluing it, uh, if undervaluing, in other words, undercutting what they have all sort of agreed, they're going to charge.

It costs the whole system. I mean, the idea that that's the whole, they've sort of given away the game at that point, right? Because the whole system that they're saying all these different landlords, they shouldn't be in a system. Uh, I mean, if it was up to me, maybe we would just like, uh, nationalize some of these places, uh, or have, uh, uh, the city or state takeover, and then it would be a system, but there shouldn't be a private, uh, cartel essentially, um, [01:21:00] Saying what undervaluing is at that point.

JUDD LEGUM: Yeah, and it works on so many different levels because one of the ways that you used to be able to get a good deal on an apartment is people move in and out randomly. So, at certain times, there might be a flood of apartments that become available just just out of random chance. If you come in during that time, you might be able to get a good deal because all the buildings are competing with each other.

But in addition to setting the prices at a high level and keeping the moving up and up and up the, through the software, all the different buildings make sure that there's not too many units. Available at any given time, they'll hold them back so that it's always an artificially constrained market, which is pretty classic as far as if you're going to collude and price fix, that's what you might want to do.

AI Edits from Landlords Using Shady Algorithm To Raise Rents | Judd Legum - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 6-15-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Tell us about real page and then give us the timeline of what's been happening on that.

JUDD LEGUM: This was a story that was really broken open by [01:22:00] ProPublica a couple of years ago, about real page, which is a, Software program that is used by many corporate landlords, particularly any large building with a bunch of units.

That's really what it's optimized for. And the landlords feed in all of the information well, beyond what you could get on Zillow or publicly available information, vacancy rates, what they're actually charging all the fees, everything that there is. And then. This program spits back out a recommended rent for that unit.

But what's insidious about this process is that so many corporate landlords are using it that they know. They don't need to go underneath that recommendation because the building around the corner is also using real page and is also going to be using [01:23:00] these prices. Since the corporate landlords have adopted this, in large numbers, the rents have gone up and up and up.

So, that's essentially how the system works it's. Effectively collusion via software where they're not sitting in a smoke filled room, fixing the prices of. Rent in a given area, whether it's Atlanta or Seattle or wherever it is, but they're doing so via this software algorithm.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And I gotta say, like, I don't remember this element of the story until I read, your piece on it. But if there's also sort of like a mafia quality to this where they say, look, if you're going to use this software, you cannot undercut the price that we give you because then you're screwing up everything.

JUDD LEGUM: Yeah.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And that seems to be a big giveaway.

JUDD LEGUM: Yes. They have people who are monitoring it, who are making sure you're in compliance with their recommendations. And actually, [01:24:00] if you price your, apartments too low, too many times, you'll get kicked off. The system and so we actually have learned a lot more, in the last 2 years since that ProPublica story came out because there's been a series of class action lawsuits.

There's also been lawsuits filed by, the attorneys general in D. C. and elsewhere too. That process has started to, reveal even more information about how the whole system works.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So they're making a ton of money off of this. The landlords. But there, I mean, that's the beauty of like price fixing, right? It's like, I know I can sustain this higher than market price. If everybody sustains this higher than market price.

JUDD LEGUM: Yeah, and it's essentially gotten rid of negotiation. It used to be you could go to rent an apartment.

They sell you. Here's the price 3, 000 a month, whatever it is, you go [01:25:00] into the rental office and you say, you know, I'd really like to pay 2900 a month. Now, part of that is there's a housing shortage. But the other part of it is RealPage has made it clear that you are not to negotiate these prices. And the corporate landlords can feel confident because before they might know, well, if I won't give these people 100 or 200 off, they're just going to go around to a corner to another nice building and those people will do it and I'll be left with an empty unit.

But they know if those people code two blocks down, they're going to run into the exact same pricing scheme and the exact same reluctance to negotiate under any circumstances. So that's really what's driving the prices up. There used to be a say, get heads in beds. The idea is keep them full, but RealPay just kind of, overturned that philosophy and now they're really holding the line on prices Even if they have to keep a couple of units empty for a little bit

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: You cite in one of those hours one of those lawsuits this one [01:26:00] in arizona that in phoenix 70 percent of multifamily apartments units listed in Phoenix metropolitan area are owned, operated, or managed by companies that have contracted with RealPage.

A lawsuit in D. C. 60 percent of large multifamily buildings, 50 units or more, set prices using RealPage software. These numbers, I don't know, I mean, they may have gone up since then. Can we look at boston at new york and at, the dallas chicago?

I mean do we have a sense of like just how ubiquitous this real page software is or is it? Only piecemeal information.

JUDD LEGUM: Well, it's really piecemeal at this point because when their suits filed, they can do discovery, they can get information about what's going on. There's, there's are some ways to sort of to see, and to and people have tried to collect data, but we don't have a full sense.

We don't know, what the full scope is. And by the way, there was a competing software company, that. Had somewhat [01:27:00] of a different approach to how it advise these corporate landlords to manage their properties. It was purchased by real page. So it's really the whole purpose of it. And they even say this in their marketing materials is you can charge.

More than the market price would bear otherwise, which is a pretty clear indication that you're doing something to subvert the actual competitive market. And, you know, this is in the context of a housing shortage, so the prices would be going up anyway, but the level of price increases that we've seen, especially in major metropolitan areas has far exceeded.

Even the inflation that we've seen in some other. Areas

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: and, like you say in the piece to Jeffrey Roper, who created the real page algorithm explained that quote, if you have idiots undervaluing it, if undervaluing, in other words, undercutting what they have all sort of agreed, they're going to [01:28:00] charge.

It costs the whole system. I mean, the idea that that's the whole, they've sort of given away the game at that point, right? Because the whole system that they're saying all these different landlords, they shouldn't be in a system. I mean, if it was up to me, maybe we would just like, nationalize some of these places, or have, the city or state takeover, and then it would be a system, but there shouldn't be a private, cartel essentially, Saying what undervaluing is at that point.

JUDD LEGUM: Yeah, and it works on so many different levels because one of the ways that you used to be able to get a good deal on an apartment is people move in and out randomly. So, at certain times, there might be a flood of apartments that become available if you come in during that time, you might be able to get a good deal because all the buildings are competing with each other.

But in addition to setting the prices at a high level and keeping the moving up and up and up the, through the [01:29:00] software, all the different buildings make sure that there's not too many units. Available at any given time, they'll hold them back so that it's always an artificially constrained market, which is pretty classic as far as if you're going to collude and price fix, that's what you might want to do.

Lavender & Where's Daddy: How Israel Used AI to Form Kill Lists & Bomb Palestinians in Their Homes - Democracy Now! - Air Date 4-5-24

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Lavender was designed by the military. Its purpose was, when it was being designed, to mark the low-ranking operatives in the Hamas and Islamic Jihad military wings. That was the intention, because, you know, Israel estimates that there are between 30,000 to 40,000 Hamas operatives, and it’s a very, very large number. And they understood that the only way for them to mark these people is by relying on artificial intelligence. And that was the intention.

Now, what sources told me is that after October 7th, the military basically made a decision that all of these tens of thousands of people are now people that [01:30:00] could potentially be bombed inside their houses, meaning not only killing them but everybody who’s in the building — the children, the families. And they understood that in order to try to attempt to do that, they are going to have to rely on this AI machine called Lavender with very minimal human supervision. I mean, one source said that he felt he was acting as a rubber stamp on the machine’s decisions.

Now, what Lavender does is it scans information on probably 90% of the population of Gaza. So we’re talking about, you know, more than a million people. And it gives each individual a rating between one to 100, a rating that is an expression of the likelihood that the machine thinks, based on a list of small features — and we can get to that later — that that individual is a member of the Hamas or Islamic Jihad military wings. Sources told me that [01:31:00] the military knew, because they checked — they took a random sampling and checked one by one — the military knew that approximately 10% of the people that the machine was marking to be killed were not Hamas militants. They were not — some of them had a loose connection to Hamas. Others had completely no connection to Hamas. I mean, one source said how the machine would bring people who had the exact same name and nickname as a Hamas operative, or people who had similar communication profiles. Like, these could be civil defense workers, police officers in Gaza. And they implemented, again, minimal supervision on the machine. One source said that he spent 20 seconds per target before authorizing the bombing of the alleged low-ranking Hamas militant — often it also could have been a civilian — killing those people inside their houses.

And I think this, the reliance on artificial intelligence here to mark those targets, and basically the [01:32:00] deadly way in which the officers spoke about how they were using the machine, could very well be part of the reason why in the first, you know, six weeks after October 7th, like one of the main characteristics of the policies that were in place were entire Palestinian families being wiped out inside their houses. I mean, if you look at U.N. statistics, more than 50% of the casualties, more than 6,000 people at that time, came from a smaller group of families. It’s an expression of, you know, the family unit being destroyed. And I think that machine and the way it was used led to that.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: You talk about the choosing of targets, and you talk about the so-called high-value targets, Hamas commanders, and then the lower-level fighters. And as you said, many of them, in the end, it wasn’t either. But [01:33:00] explain the buildings that were targeted and the bombs that were used to target them.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah, yeah. It’s a good question. So, what sources told me is that during those first weeks after October, for the low-ranking militants in Hamas, many of whom were marked by Lavender, so we can say “alleged militants” that were marked by the machine, they had a predetermined, what they call, “collateral damage degree.” And this means that the military’s international law departments told these intelligence officers that for each low-ranking target that Lavender marks, when bombing that target, they are allowed to kill — one source said the number was up to 20 civilians, again, for any Hamas operative, regardless of rank, regardless of importance, regardless of age. One source said that there were also minors being marked — not many of them, but he said that was a possibility, that [01:34:00] there was no age limit. Another source said that the limit was up to 15 civilians for the low-ranking militants. The sources said that for senior commanders of Hamas — so it could be, you know, commanders of brigades or divisions or battalions — the numbers were, for the first time in the IDF’s history, in the triple digits, according to sources.

So, for example, Ayman Nofal, who was the Hamas commander of the Central Brigade, a source that took part in the strike against that person said that the military authorized to kill alongside that person 300 Palestinian civilians. And we’ve spoken at +972 and Local Call with Palestinians who were witnesses of that strike, and they speak about, you know, four quite large residential buildings being bombed on that day, you know, entire apartments filled with families being bombed and killed. And [01:35:00] that source told me that this is not, you know, some mistake, like the amount of civilians, of this 300 civilians, it was known beforehand to the Israeli military. And sources described that to me, and they said that — I mean, one source said that during those weeks at the beginning, effectively, the principle of proportionality, as they call it under international law, quote, “did not exist.”

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, there’s two programs. There’s Lavender, and there’s Where’s Daddy? How did they even know where these men were, innocent or not?

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah, so, the way the system was designed is, there is this concept, in general, in systems of mass surveillance called linking. When you want to automate these systems, you want to be able to very quickly — you know, you get, for example, an ID of a person, [01:36:00] and you want to have a computer be very quickly able to link that ID to other stuff. And what sources told me is that since everybody in Gaza has a home, has a house — or at least that was the case in the past — the system was designed to be able to automatically link between individuals and houses. And in the majority of cases, these households that are linked to the individuals that Lavender is marking as low-ranking militants are not places where there is active military action taking place, according to sources. Yet the way the system was designed, and programs like Where’s Daddy?, which were designed to search for these low-ranking militants when they enter houses — specifically, it sends an alert to the intelligence officers when these AI-marked suspects enter their houses. The system [01:37:00] was designed in a way that allowed the Israeli military to carry out massive strikes against Palestinians, sometimes militants, sometimes alleged militants, who we don’t know, when they were in these spaces in these houses.

And the sources said — you know, CNN reported in December that 45% of the munitions, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, that Israel dropped on Gaza were unguided, so-called dumb bombs, that have, you know, a larger damage to civilians. They destroy the entire structure. And sources said that for these low-ranking operatives in Hamas, they were only using the dumb munitions, meaning they were collapsing the houses on everybody inside. And when you ask intelligence officers why, one explanation they give is that these people were, quote, “unimportant.” They were not important enough, from a military perspective, that the Israeli army would, one source [01:38:00] said, waste expensive munitions, meaning more guided floor bombs that could have maybe taken just a particular floor in the building.

And to me, that was very striking, because, you know, you’re dropping a bomb on a house and killing entire families, yet the target that you are aiming to assassinate by doing so is not considered important enough to, quote, “waste” an expensive bomb on. And I think it’s a very rare reflection of sort of the way — you know, the way the Israeli military measures the value of Palestinian lives in relation to expected military gain, which is the principle of proportionality. And I think one thing that was very, very clear from all the sources that I spoke with is that, you know, this was — [01:39:00] they said it was psychologically shocking even for them. That’s the combination between Lavender and Where’s Daddy? The Lavender lists are fed into Where’s Daddy? And these systems track the suspects and wait for the moments that they enter houses, usually family houses or households where no military action takes place, according to several sources who did this, who spoke to me about this. And these houses are bombed using unguided missiles. This was a main characteristic of the Israeli policy in Gaza, at least for the first weeks.

The AI Revolution is Rotten to the Core - Jimmy McGee - Air Date 9-15-23

JIMMY MCGEE - HOST, JIMMY MCGEE: There are hundreds of schemes for machine learning at this point, but neural networks are the most popular, and most of the concepts behind neural networks apply to everything else in the field, too.

Neural networks are simplistic models of brains. Networks of neurons. A very low resolution picture of our brains is that we take in some stimulus, Say the [01:40:00] light bouncing off a painting, then something happens in the brain, then we feel an emotion or sensation. There's an input, an output, and something in the middle.

And that's exactly how every beginner course describes a neural network. A layer of input nodes, one or more hidden layers, then a layer of output nodes. Hidden layer is kind of a misnomer though. The hidden layers themselves aren't a black box, and tweaking them is a big part of developing a neural network.

The data that these hidden layers produce Usually isn't meaningful to us, though. It's only used by the network, and that's probably where the hidden comes in. Explainability. Figuring out why an AI makes decisions the way it does is a big problem in machine learning, because AI doesn't follow a line of reasoning the way a person would.

Nodes are another abstract concept. There's no obvious correspondence between a node and what the computer is actually doing. Really, node just means function. And in machine learning, nodes are usually taking a vector, doing something to it, [01:41:00] and passing it on to the next layer. We could have each hidden node add up the values of everything connected to it, for example.

The secret sauce is in weighing the inputs. In real brains, some connections between neurons are stronger than others. There are still lots of questions about the human brain. But the idea is that these connections and their strength affect our thoughts and actions somehow. Since an artificial neural network is just functions sending and receiving numbers, you can multiply each of these by some factor to make it bigger or smaller, more or less influential.

The network on screen is a toy example, but neural networks are always made to achieve some goal. Let's say our input is a picture of a letter, where the brightness of each pixel is an input, and the output is a guess for what letter it is. This is just a big pile of math. It's cool that we can make a machine with billions of adjustment knobs, but we're not going to do all that work by hand.

Thankfully, neural networks can be trained to adjust their own parameters. If I have a [01:42:00] photo of a letter that I know is a B, then I can compare that to what the network guesses. This pair of image and text is a piece of training data, and big networks will go through millions or billions of them. Weights are usually randomized at first, So the network will probably say the letter is an A, X, P, and C all at once.

But we can calculate how wrong the network is, and use this to adjust the weights, so it gets a little bit better every time. If it's 20 percent confident that the letter B is the letter A, then we need to reduce the weights that influence that guess. Gradient descent is the piece of statistical magic that made the AI revolution possible.

If you're on a hill, The gradient where you're standing is an arrow, or a vector, pointing in the steepest direction. Following this gradient is the fastest way to climb the hill. Going backwards from the gradient is the fastest way to go down the hill. An error function is like a hill that represents how wrong each of our weights is.

So if [01:43:00] you take the gradient and go backwards, the network will slowly move toward zero error. In my example, it gets better at guessing letters. It's a pretty goddamn cool idea, but there are no miracles here. The concept I just described was laid out in a paper from 1958 as a theory for how the human brain works.

So, it's not exactly revolutionary, but layers of interconnected nodes still make up the structure of all those headline grabbing AI systems we see today. You would hope that that example network, the letter classifier, would learn to recognize patterns in the strokes of letters, or at least do something intelligible.

But the weights that a neural network comes up with look just about random, and a lot of the architecture behind neural Today's machine learning systems is based on somebody trying something new that happens to work. Sometimes, you can say that they make the whole gradient descent process more efficient.

But with current setups, there's never going to be some obvious improvement reflected in the hidden data [01:44:00] itself. You're never going to get a line of reasoning from AI. Famously, you can use these things to generate media, like images and music, from a text description.

Google's Deep Dream was one of the first generative models that made headlines. It started as a network for classifying images, but they were able to sort of run the system in reverse, and have it hallucinate nightmarish faces in existing pictures. The original model was made for an image recognition contest that ImageNet ran in 2014.

ImageNet made a dataset of just under 15 million images, which it doesn't own the licenses for. With new technology, the line between research and commerce is growing. And big companies often use this fact to just manifest destiny whenever they want and make us live with the consequences. Scraping millions of images and sticking them in a public dataset is a huge ethical question mark, even in an [01:45:00] academic context.

But once an economy springs up around these datasets, they're hard to get rid of. This is a lesson we've learned over and over. Companies rush to market with leaded gas or asbestos insulation, and by the time we understand what they've done, entire swaths of the planet have brain damage and lung cancer.

Google mastered this principle with AdSense, a surveillance system that probably knows your heart rate and body temperature right now, google's data harvesting operation became a load bearing piece of the internet before the public understood digital privacy, and now we can't get rid of it. ImageNet popularized scraping the internet for training data, and the project has all the same problems that we're dealing with now.

It's very biased. They stole all the pictures, and they use questionable labor practices to label them all.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk bills itself as a micro task marketplace, a place for simple, short jobs that still require a human to complete them. I wanted to join the program as a [01:46:00] worker, but Amazon didn't bother approving or denying my request. The site is apparently so bad that workers have to use a bunch of extra scripts to actually do their jobs.

And you can't get any decent work there until you've done hundreds or thousands of human intelligence tasks, also known as HITs. A platform like that was a perfect fit for the ImageNet project, and they used it to label early versions of the dataset back in 2008 or 9. They gave workers a set of pictures and some objects to identify.

Workers would mark each picture if it contained the target object. If that sounds familiar, it's exactly like solving a CAPTCHA. In fact, we've all been helping Google train its neural networks for years. These companies have a very dubious concept of consent, and we'll see a lot more of that later. You literally have to help train an AI to access many websites.

At least ImageNet paid the Turkers. But with that said, Mechanical Turk's workforce does skew toward people with no other [01:47:00] options. Oscar Schwartz, writing for IEEE Spectrum, rightly identified that mTurk is designed to make human labor invisible. Jeff Bezos called them artificial artificial intelligence, and Turkers are described offhandedly as a horde, in an article that I read creaming itself over ImageNet.

Turkers were earning a median 2 per hour in 2018, and the situation hasn't really changed in the years following. These people are invisible, poor, and very easy to exploit. Mechanical Turk is slavery as a service, but it was also the first of a new breed. Turkers are generalists, but the AI revolution needed specialists.

Appen is one of many companies specifically selling data labeling for machine learning. Their crowdsourced labor came mostly from Kenya and the Philippines at first, but when Venezuela's economy collapsed, they started snapping up jobless refugees. A journalist for MIT profiled a [01:48:00] Venezuelan app and worker.

And the situation seems pretty dire. Workers have no line of communication with the company, they have to be constantly at their computers ready to accept tasks, and like Mechanical Turk, the site barely works. Appen can afford to push people as hard as they want, because there's a huge labor supply and the workers have nowhere else to go.

They congregate in discords and write scripts to make things tolerable. Because its workers are contractors, Appen pays out like a slot machine. Some tasks offer pennies, some don't even work, and some will offer hundreds of dollars, a relative fortune. I think a good rule of thumb is that any company that has to write a slavery policy is probably up to something.

SECTION B: POTENTIAL USES OF AI AND THE ETHICS WE NEED TO CONSIDER

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B: potential uses of AI and the ethics we need to consider.

Reimagining A.I. | John Wild - Planet: Critical - Air Date 5-16-24

JOHN WILD: Tsiolkovsky studied kind of the physics of his time and et cetera. And he developed some of the first practical device, uh, designs for like the space [01:49:00] rockets and the, the equations required to, for space travel.

And he did this in 1896. This, these kinds of like developments in kind of the technology of space travel emerged from following Federer, realizing that if you ended death and resurrected the dead then the planet would get overrun quite quick. So it was, so it becomes necessary to leave the cradle of the earth.

Does that make sense in the logic?

RACHEL DONALD - HOST, PLANET: CRITICAL: As logic? Sure.

JOHN WILD: The reason this becomes interesting is because Tsiolkovsky is basically the founder of the Russian space program and the former Soviet space program. His rocket designs are currently like, I'm not, not exactly the same, but are, are [01:50:00] the forefathers of our current rocket design. So you've got this link between kind of quite fascinating and crazy.

Uh, futurist imaginaries linked with technology, which ultimately developed the, uh, US space program, but how does this link with Silicon Valley? Well, if you look at say Ray Kurzweil, so you know, Ray Kurzweil is kind of the profit for Google's AI

program

I think he's probably the chief engineer.

Yeah. But he also believes in, uh, moving towards immortality. He wanted to be the first person to kind of end death. So, it, there's, like, a lot of these ideas that came from cosmism. I've been translated directly into the kind of AI tech circles, [01:51:00] which circulate. So, so Kurzweil is a serious technique, uh, player within the AI world, particularly in Google.

And this idea of extending life or eradicating death is part of the discourse which circulates within, within this community. Uh, that, that would be, uh, kind of groupings, which call themselves extropia, extropianism, extropianists. So that's not sure how you say it properly, but these ideas link directly to actual technical production.

So, so things like the Fitbit and the quantitative self movement. So the idea of like monitoring your health and maximizing health. Which you must have come across because that's part of the kind of like tech scene.

RACHEL DONALD - HOST, PLANET: CRITICAL: Human optimization.

JOHN WILD: Exactly. This human optimization comes out of this attempt to extend [01:52:00] life and eradicate death.

So you can see how the kind of cosmism is kind of like part of it. Kind of plagiarized really right into these kind of like tech ideas, which then like find themselves being sold on Amazon as Fitbits or various other optimization technologies. Uh, Kurzweil himself. In an interview in a film called, I Human, declared that one of his driving force for developing artificial intelligence, and you've got to remember that this is a chief engineer, is to resurrect his own father.

RACHEL DONALD - HOST, PLANET: CRITICAL: Oh my god.

JOHN WILD: So, so it's, so you've got Federer repeating himself right at the top of the kind of Google development chain.

RACHEL DONALD - HOST, PLANET: CRITICAL: Oh, God.

JOHN WILD: And, and, and taking a kind of slightly, uh, uh, a slight side move here. But when we talk about artificial [01:53:00] intelligence, uh, in tech circles, it gets broken down into, Uh, three different areas. The first one's narrow artificial intelligence, which is what we, what we have at the moment, which, uh, it's, it's mainly what we call machine learning.

So it's narrow in that it can do very intelligent activities, such as playing go or chess or predicting texts, but in a very narrow domain,

the next, like the day to day of. Uh, company like OpenAI. Is the development of artificial general intelligence. Now, artificial general intelligence is in Google AI terms, kind of the equivalent of human intelligence. So it's this, this ability to [01:54:00] abstract and apply intelligence to multiple domains. So, it's wider. But this idea of a general intelligence, which is, is what people are striving for an artificial general intelligence.

When you look at what a general intelligence is, then that's actually rooted in the uh, statistic statistician, Charles Spearman and the idea of the G factor, but Charles Spearman. Was a eugenicist and his reason for developing this, ranking of general intelligence was to rank human intelligence for selective breeding, et cetera.

So you've got this, you've got this kind of, this drive for artificial general intelligence. But when, when you actually work out what general intelligence is I mean, Spearman developed this to support his colonial policies, et cetera.

Trying to prove that perhaps other humans were less intelligent for various reasons. [01:55:00] So you've got this kind of hierarchical drive within artificial intelligence for basically a superhuman, or an intelligence, which is beyond human in that kind of way. And just to link him back to the cosmist kind of ideas.

You see that the idea of colonizing the solar system or spreading intelligence to the solar system is, is something which is a core concept. Within AI development circles. I mean, it's also the reason why tech billionaires are building their own spaceships. If you think of space X, blue origin, they're all, they're all influenced by, by these imaginaries. And I'm sure there's probably a lot of people saying I'm over exaggerating this at this point, but I just want to give you a couple of quotes. So this is from, Jürgen Schmid, Schmidhuber, who developed the, uh, natural language [01:56:00] model, which is used in Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. This is his understanding of what he's doing. He says, so, I'm not a very human centric person. I think I'm a little stepping stone in the evolution of the universe towards a higher complexity. It is clear to me that I am not the crown of creation, and that humankind as a whole is not the crown of creation.

But we are setting the stage for something bigger than us, that transcends us, and will go out there in a way where humans cannot follow and transform the whole universe, or at least the regional universe. So I find the beauty and awe in seeing myself as a part of this much grander theme.

How will AI change the world? - TED-Ed - Air Date 12-6-22

STUART RUSSEL: There's a big difference between Asking a human to do something and giving that as the objective to an AI system. When you ask a human to fetch you a cup of coffee, you don't mean this should be their life's mission [01:57:00] and nothing else in the universe matters. Even if they have to kill everybody else in Starbucks to get you the coffee before it closes, they should do that.

No, that's not what you mean. You mean all the other things that we mutually care about, they should factor into your behavior as well. And the problem with the way we build AI systems now is we give them a fixed objective, right? Algorithms require us to specify everything in the objective. And if you say, you know, can we fix the acidification of the oceans?

Yeah, you could have a catalytic reaction that does that extremely efficiently, but you know, consumes a quarter of the oxygen in the atmosphere, which would apparently cause us to die fairly slowly and unpleasantly over the course of several hours. Um, so how do we avoid this problem, right? You might say, okay, well, just be more careful about some of these things.

specifying the objective, right? Don't forget the atmospheric oxygen. And then of course, some side effect of the reaction in the ocean poisons all the fish. Okay. Well, I meant don't kill the fish either. And then, well, what about the seaweed? Okay. Don't do anything. That's going to cause all the seaweed to die [01:58:00] and on and on and on.

Right. And the reason that we don't have to do that with humans is that humans often know that they don't know all the things that we care about. If you ask a human to get you a cup of coffee, you know, and you happen to be in the hotel Georges Sank in Paris where the coffee is, I think, 13 euros a cup, it's entirely reasonable to come back and say, well, it's 13 euros, are you sure you want, or I could go next door and, you know, get it.

And it's a perfectly normal thing for a person to do, right? To ask, you know, I'm gonna repaint your house, is it okay if I take off the drain pipes and then put them back? We don't think of this as a terribly sophisticated capability, but AI systems don't have it because the way we build them now, they have to know the full objective.

If we build systems that know that they don't know what the objective is, then they start to exhibit these behaviors, like asking permission before getting rid of all the options in the atmosphere. In all these senses, Control over the AI system comes from the machine's [01:59:00] uncertainty about what the true objective is.

It's when you build machines that believe with certainty that they have the objective. That's when you get a sort of psychopathic behavior, and I think we see the same thing in humans. What happens when general purpose AI hits the real economy? How do things change? Can we adapt? This is a very old point.

Amazingly, Aristotle actually has a passage where he says, Look, if we had fully automated weaving machines and plectrums that could pluck the lyre and produce music without any humans, then we wouldn't need any workers. That idea, which I think it was Keynes who called it technological unemployment in 1930, is very obvious to people, right?

They think, yeah, of course, if the machine does the work, then I'm going to be unemployed. If you think about the warehouses that companies are currently operating for e commerce, They are half automated. The way it works is that on old wayhouses, where you've got tons of stuff piled up all over the place, and the humans go [02:00:00] and rummage around and then bring it back and send it off, there's a robot who goes and gets the shelving unit that contains the thing that you need, but the human has to pick the object up.

out of the bin or off the shelf, because that's still too difficult. But, you know, at the same time, if you make a robot that is accurate enough to be able to pick pretty much any object, and there's a very wide variety of objects that you can buy, that would, at a stroke, eliminate three or four million jobs.

There's an interesting story that E. M. Forster wrote where everyone is entirely machine dependent. The story is really about the fact that if you hand over the management of your civilization to machines, you then lose the incentive to understand it yourself or to teach the next generation how to understand it.

And you can see Wall E actually as a modern version where everyone is enfeebled and infantilized by the machine, and that hasn't been possible up to now, right? We put a lot of our civilization into books, but the books [02:01:00] can't run it for us. And so we always have to teach the next generation. If you work it out, it's about a trillion person years of teaching and learning and an unbroken chain that goes back tens of thousands of generations.

What happens if that chain breaks? And I think that's something we have to understand as AI moves forward. The actual date of arrival of general purpose AI, you're not going to be able to pinpoint it, right? It isn't a single day. It's also not the case that it's all or nothing. The impact is going to be increasing, so with every advance in AI, it significantly expands the range of tasks.

So, in that sense, I think most experts say by the end of the century, we're very, very likely to have general purpose AI. The median is something around 2045. I'm a little more on the conservative side. I think the problem is harder than we think. I like what John McAfee, who was sort of one of the founders of AI, when he was asked this question, he said, well, somewhere between five and 500 years, and we're going to need, I think, several Einsteins to [02:02:00] make it happen.

AI and the future of humanity | Yuval Noah Harari at the Frontiers Forum - Yuval Noah Harari - Air Date 5-14-23

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: I guess everybody here is already aware of some of the most fundamental abilities of the new AI tools--abilities like writing text, drawing images, composing music and writing code. But there are many additional capabilities that are emerging, like deep faking people's voices and images, like drafting bills, finding weaknesses both in computer code and also in legal contracts, and in legal agreements. But perhaps most importantly, the new AI tools are gaining the ability to develop deep and intimate relationships with human beings.

Each of these abilities deserves an entire discussion. And it is difficult for us to understand their full [02:03:00] implications. So, let's make it simple. When we take all of these abilities together as a package, they boil down to one very, very big thing: the ability to manipulate and to generate language, whether with words, or images, or sounds.

most important aspect of the current phase of the ongoing AI revolution is that AI is gaining mastery of language at a level that surpasses the average human ability. And by gaining mastery of language, AI is seizing the master key, unlocking the doors of all our institutions, from banks to temples. Because language is the tool that we use [02:04:00] to give instructions to our bank and also to inspire heavenly visions in our minds. Another way to think of it is that AI has just hacked the operating system of human civilization.

The operating system of every human culture in history has always been language. In the beginning was the word. We use language to create mythology and laws, to create gods and money, to create art and science, to create friendships and nations.

For example, human rights are not a biological reality. They are not inscribed in our DNA. Human rights is something that we created with language by telling stories and writing laws.

Gods are also [02:05:00] not a biological or physical reality. Gods, too, is something that we humans have created with language by telling legends and writing scriptures.

Money is not a biological or physical reality. Banknotes are just worthless pieces of paper, and at present more than 90 percent of the money in the world is not even banknotes; it's just electronic information in computers passing from here to there. What gives money of any kind value is only the stories that people like bankers and finance ministers and cryptocurrency gurus tell us about money. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and Bernie Madoff didn't create much of real value, but, unfortunately, they were all [02:06:00] extremely capable storytellers.

Now, what would it mean for human beings to live in a world where perhaps most of the stories, melodies, images, laws, policies, and tools are shaped by a non-human, alien intelligence, which knows how to exploit, with superhuman efficiency, the weaknesses, biases, and addictions of the human mind, and also knows how to form deep and even intimate relationships with human beings.

That's the big question. Already today, in games like chess, no human can hope to beat a computer. What if the same thing happens in art, in politics, economics, and even in religion? When people think about [02:07:00] ChatGPT and the other new AI tools, they are often drawn to examples like kids using ChatGPT to write their school essays. What will happen to the school system when kids write essays with ChatGPT? Horrible.

But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about the school essays. Instead, think, for example, about the next US presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of the new AI tools that can mass produce political manifestos, fake news stories, and even holy scriptures for new cults.

In recent years, the politically influential QAnon cult has formed around anonymous online texts known as Qdrops. Now, followers of this cult, which are millions now in the US and the rest [02:08:00] of the world, collected, revered, and interpreted these Qdrops as some kind of new scripture, as a sacred text.

Now, to the best of our knowledge, all previous Qdrops were composed by human beings, and bots only helped to disseminate these texts online. But in the future, we might see the first cults and religions in history whose revered texts were written by a nonhuman intelligence. And of course, religions throughout history claimed that their holy books were written by a nonhuman intelligence. This was never true before. This could become true very, very quickly, with far-reaching consequences.

Now, on a more prosaic level, we might soon find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions [02:09:00] about abortion, or about climate change, or about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with entities that we think are fellow human beings, but are actually AI bots.

Now the catch is that it's utterly useless--it's pointless--for us to waste our time trying to convince an AI bot to change its political views. But the longer we spend talking with the bot, the better it gets to know us and understand how to hone its messages in order to shift our political views or our economic views or anything else.

Through its mastery of language, AI, as I said, could also form intimate relationships with people and use the power of intimacy to influence our opinions and worldview.

Now, there is no indication that AI has, [02:10:00] as I said, any consciousness, any feelings of its own. But in order to create fake intimacy with human beings, AI doesn't need feelings of its own; it only needs to be able to inspire feelings in us, to get us to be attached to it.

Now, in June 2022, there was a famous incident when the Google engineer Blaik Lemoine publicly claimed that the AI chatbot Lambda, on which he was working, has become sentient. This very controversial claim cost him his job. He was fired. Now, the most interesting thing about this episode wasn't Lemoine's claim, which was most probably false. The really interesting thing was his willingness to risk and ultimately lose his very lucrative job for the sake of the AI chatbot that he thought he [02:11:00] was protecting. If AI can influence people to risk and lose their jobs, what else can it induce us to do?

SECTION C: REGULATING AI

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section C: regulating AI.

Current, former OpenAI employees warn company not doing enough control dangers of AI - PBS Newshour - Air Date 6-5-24

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: So tell us more about who is behind this open letter and what specifically they're asking for.

BOBBY ALLYN: Yes it's a number of current and former OpenAI employees.

I actually spoke to one of them just today. And what they're saying is really loud and clear. They think OpenAI is too aggressively in search of profits and market share and that they are not focused on responsibly developing A.I. products.

And, remember, this is really important, Geoff because OpenAI started as a nonprofit research lab that was — its aim when it was founded was to develop A.I. products, different than, say, Meta or Microsoft or Amazon, which are these huge publicly traded companies that are competing with one [02:12:00] another, right?

OpenAI was supposed to be a nonprofit answer to big tech. And these employees say, look, it looks like you're operating just like big tech. You're pushing out products too quickly and society just isn't ready for them.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: The letter lays out a number of risks and warnings, including — quote — "the loss of control of autonomous A.I. systems, potentially resulting in human extinction."

Human extinction. What do these folks know that we don't?

[Laughter]

And how seriously should we take this concern?

BOBBY ALLYN: It sounds pretty dire, doesn't it?

And it goes back to this kind of nerdy phrase that A.I. researchers like citing known as P[doom], P meaning what's the probability and doom being — well, we know what doom means. And they like bringing this up because the theory is, if A.I. gets really smart, if it becomes super intelligent and can exceed the skills and brainpower of humanity, maybe one day it will turn on us.

Now, again, this is kind of a theoretical academic exercise at this point, that these sort of [02:13:00] killer robots would be marching around cities and at war with humanity. I don't think we're anywhere near that. But they are underscoring this, because, look, that's sort of a hypothetical risk.

But we're seeing real risks play out every single day, whether it's the rise of deepfakes, whether it's A.I. being used to impersonate people, whether it's A.I. being used to supercharge dangerous misinformation around the Web. There are real risks that, according to these former employees, OpenAI doesn't care enough about and isn't doing much to mitigate.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Well, in other OpenAI news, the media world seems to be split over whether to partner with the company.

The company recently announced paid deals with the Associated Press, "The Atlantic," Vox Media, which allows them to gain access to these media outlets' content to help train their A.I. models. Meantime, you got The New York Times suing OpenAI over copyright infringement.

How do you see this all shaking out and what are the arguments on both sides of this debate over whether [02:14:00] to actually work with OpenAI?

BOBBY ALLYN: Yes, OpenAI has publishers by the scruff of their neck.

OpenAI systems were trained on the corpus of the entire Internet, and that includes every large broadcaster and newspaper you can think of. And there, as you mentioned, are two camps emerging now. In the one camp are the publishers who say, you know what, let's strike licensing deals, let's try to bring some revenue in, let's play nice with OpenAI, because we have no choice. This is the future. OpenAI is going ruthlessly towards this direction. Let's try to make some money here.

And then you have newspapers like The New York Times who are in the other camp and have chose the other direction, which is, no, no, no, OpenAI. You took all of our articles without consent, without payment. Now you're making lots of money off of the knowledge and reporting and original work that goes into, say, a New York Times article. We don't want to strike a licensing deal with us. In fact, your systems are based on material that was stolen [02:15:00] from us, so you owe us a lot of money and we do not want to play nice.

So, the way it's really going to shake out, I think, is, you know, some publishers are striking these deals. Others will join The New York Times' crusade to go after OpenAI. But it's a really, really interesting time, because, no matter what, they have this material, right, Geoff?

I mean, ChatGPT, every time you ask it a question, it is spitting out answers that are based in part on New York Times' articles, Associated Press articles, NPR articles, you name it. So that's just the future. So the question is, do you strike a deal or do you take them to court? And we're just seeing different sort of strategies here.

Former OpenAI Engineer William Saunders on Silence, Safety, and the Right to Warn - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 6-7-24

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: If you try to ground this for listeners, like, you, you're taking a big risk here with your colleagues at OpenAI, and you're coming out and saying, We need a right to whistleblow about important things that could be going wrong here.

So far what you've shared is sort of more of a technical description of the box and how do we interpret the neurons in the box and what they're doing. Why does this matter for safety? What's at stake if we don't get this right?

WILLIAM SAUNDERS: I think, you know, you can take suppose we've like taken this box and it like [02:16:00] does the task and then, you know, let's say we want to take every company in the world and integrate this box into every company in the world where this box can be used to, you know, answer customer queries or process information.

And let's suppose, you know, the box is like very good at, you know, giving advice to people. So now, you know, maybe CEOs and politicians are like getting advice and then maybe as things progress. Into the future, maybe this box is generally regarded as being, you know, as smart or smarter than most humans and able to do most jobs better than most humans.

And so now we've got this box that nobody knows exactly how it works, and nobody knows sort of how it might behave in novel circumstances. And there are some specific circumstances where, like, the box might do something that's different and possibly malicious. And again, this box is as smart or smarter than humans.

It's right in OpenAI's charter that this is, like, what OpenAI and other companies are aiming for, [02:17:00] right? And so, you know, maybe the world rewards AIs that try to sort of, like, gather more power for themselves. If you If you give an AI a bunch of money and it goes out and makes more money, then, you know, you give it even more money and power and you make more copies of this AI, and this might reward AI systems that, like, really care more about getting as much money and power in the world without any sense of ethics and what is right or wrong.

And so then, suppose you have a bunch of these questionably ethical AI boxes integrated deeply into your society, advising politicians and CEOs. This is kind of a world where you could imagine, gradually or suddenly, you wake up one day and like, humans are no longer really in control of society. And, you know, maybe they can run subtle mass persuasion to, you know, convince people to vote the way they want.

And so, it's very unclear how rapidly this kind of transition would happen. I think, you know, there's a broad range of possibilities. But some of these are [02:18:00] on timescales where it would be very hard for people to sort of realize what's going on. This is the kind of scenario. So, that keeps me up at night, that has sort of driven my research.

You want some way to learn if the AI system is giving you bad information. But, we are already in this world today.

AZA RASKIN - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: I think what we've established is a couple things. One is that, like, William, you're right there at the frontier of the techniques for understanding how AI models work and how to make them safe. Um, that I think what I'm hearing you say is There's sort of like two major kinds of risks, although you said there are even more.

One of them is if AI systems are more effective at doing certain kinds of decision making than us, then obviously people are going to use them and replace human beings in the decision making. If an AI can write an email that's more effective at getting sales or getting responses than I am, then obviously I'm sort of a sucker if I don't use it.

[02:19:00] The AI to help me write that email. And then if we don't understand how they work, something might happen and now we've integrated them everywhere, and that's really scary. That's sort of like, risk number one. And then risk number two is that we don't know their capabilities. I remember, you know, GPT 3 was shipped to at least tens of millions of people before it was, uh, anyone realized that it could do research grade chemistry, or that GPT 4 had been shipped to 100 million people before people realized it actually did pretty well at doing theory of mind, that is, being able to strategically model what somebody else's mind is thinking and change its behavior accordingly.

And those are the kinds of behaviors we'd really like to know before it gets shipped, and that's in part what interpretability is all about, is making sure that there aren't hidden capabilities underneath the hood. And it just leads me actually to sort of a very personal question for you, which is, if you've been thinking about all of this stuff, like why, why did you want to work at OpenAI in the first place?

WILLIAM SAUNDERS: So one, you know, one point to clarify interpretability is certainly not the only way to do this, and there's a lot of other [02:20:00] research into sort of like trying to figure out what are the dangerous capabilities and even try to predict them. But it is still in a place where nobody, including people at OpenAI, knows what the next frontier model will be capable of doing when they start out training it or even when they have it.

But yeah, uh, the reasoning for working at OpenAI came down to, um, I wanted to do the most useful, cutting edge research. And so both the research projects that I talked about were, you know, using the current, like, state of the art within OpenAI. The way that the world is set up, there's a lot more friction and difficulty if you're outside of one of these companies.

So if you're in a more independent organization, You know, you might have to, you have to wait until a model is released into the world before you can work on it. Uh, you have to access it through an API. And there's only sort of like a limited set of things that you can do. And so, the best place to be is within one of these AI labs.

And, uh, that comes with some strings attached. [02:21:00] What kinds of strings? So, while you're working at a lab, you have to worry about if you communicate something publicly, will it Be something that someone at the company will be unhappy with. In the back of your mind, it is always a possibility to, you know, be fired.

And then also, there's a bunch of, you know, subtle social pressure. Like, you don't want to annoy your co workers, the people you have to see every day. You don't want to, like, criticize the work that they're doing. Again, the work is usually good, but the decisions to ship, you know, the decision to say, like, we've done enough work, we're prepared to put this out into the world, I think is a very tricky decision.

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 The [02:22:00] Majority Report, Democracy Now!, Jimmy McGee, Planet Critical, TED-Ed, Yuval Noah Harari, the PBS NewsHour, and Your Undivided Attention. 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. And 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 [02:23:00] show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion.

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

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#1637 Shifting Populations, Shifting Politics: The European elections show a marginal shift toward the hard right over fears of immigration and scarcity (Transcript)

Posted by · June 21, 2024 2:30 AM

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.

Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can [01:42:00] join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion.

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

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#1636 The Supreme Court Is In Bad Shape. Like, Really Bad. And SCOTUS Is Going To Take Us All Down With Them (Transcript)

Posted by · June 14, 2024 2:30 AM

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

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.

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#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)

Posted by · June 11, 2024 2:30 AM

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?

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

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

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

So, coming to you from far outside, the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the best of left podcast coming to twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.com.

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

Posted by · June 07, 2024 2:30 AM

Air Date 6/7/2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital surveillance and reproductive rights - Technically Optimistic - Air Date

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Ah ha!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMY MERRILL: Absolutely.

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

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

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Yeah.

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

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

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

Note from the Editor on the abuse produced by abortion restrictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

SECTION A: CRIMINALIZING ABORTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KEVIN WILLIAMS: Donald Trump campaigned on overturning Roe v.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tech company has complied. This proposed

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

This bill would just outlaw all of that.

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

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

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

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

Nearly two years ago, CNN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SECTION B: ABORTION EXTREMISM OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But you still, I just believe in choice.

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

MUSIC: Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no, as a principle? The answer [01:28:00] is that there has to be some form of punishment. For the woman?

Yeah, there

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: has

MUSIC: to be

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: some

MUSIC: form.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So, in 99 he was pro choice, by 2016 he wanted women behind bars, yesterday he released a video on Truth Social which answered one question but begged several others.

DONALD TRUMP: My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, The states will determine by vote, or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land.

In this case, The law of the state. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that's what they will be. At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart, or in many cases, Your religion or your faith.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Very confusing clip, actually, and we'll discuss why, and talk broadly about [01:29:00] abortion continuing to develop as an issue in the presidential and congressional campaigns this year with Molly Ball, senior political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Hi Molly, welcome back to WNYC.

MOLLY BALL: Hi, thanks for having me.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So there are the things Trump said yesterday and the things he didn't say. We have more clips, but by way of background first, why did he say anything in a new video on the issue rather than just let his record of overturning Roe stand on its own?

MOLLY BALL: Well, that's a very good question. I think he seems to want to put this issue to rest.

But as you say, the statement that he did put out raised as many questions as it answered. So it certainly didn't do that. However, he has been under a lot of pressure to, uh, take a position on the many lingering questions that the overturning of Roe v. Wade, uh, created, uh, because that Supreme Court decision nearly two years ago now did send the decision making back to the states.

It raised a lot of [01:30:00] questions about how we move forward as a nation, whether there ought to be some kind of federal legislation creating a framework for when abortion is or is not allowed, uh, how states, uh, should administer this, uh, things like medication abortion, which is currently before the Supreme Court.

Uh, there's all sorts of policy areas that, uh, And that the Supreme Court decision actually opened up and that we have seen policymakers in various states and at the federal level be engaged with and so, uh, certainly activists on both sides of this issue do not see this as a closed issue and there's a lot for, for politicians to take a stand on.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: To take one of the things you just mentioned first, the Supreme Court case that they're currently deciding on whether to ban the abortion medication, the Priston. Has Trump taken a position on that? Do you know?

MOLLY BALL: He has not. I have not seen anywhere where he has even commented on that. And that's one of the many, uh, outstanding questions that, that he has [01:31:00] yet to answer.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: And on what he did say yesterday, he said, leave it to the states, but he did not say explicitly that he would oppose any kind of national restrictions if a Republican Congress were to send him some, though a lot of people are hearing it that way. Leave it to the states means no federal ban. Is it clear?

Uh, that he drew the line somewhere.

MOLLY BALL: Absolutely not. If anything, uh, it seems like a message that was almost designed to be unclear. He has said in the past many times that he believes there could be some kind of accommodation or compromise that pleases everyone. Uh, but I think we all know that this is an issue where you, where you can't please everyone because it is so divisive, so polarizing, and because people do feel so passionately, uh, on, on all sides of this issue.

Uh, but he, he seems to have wanted to take a position that would be perceived as moderate. He's said many times, uh, that he views As a political loser for the Republican party, and that's a statement that checks out. We have seen [01:32:00] public opinion really move toward, uh, the pro-abortion rights side of this issue.

In the years since Roe was overturned, we've seen it be a very galvanizing, mobilizing issue for voters, if not always for. Uh, the Democratic Party and its candidates. Uh, and so, you know, Trump doesn't want to lose the presidential election by taking a very hard core pro life stance, and he was criticized by many voices in the pro life movement for the stand that he did sort of take, because of that, and because, as you say, there are a lot of pro life people, anti-abortion rights activists who would like to see some kind of federal limitation, who would like to see a national framework passed by Congress that would say no abortions after a certain number of weeks.

We've seen that proposed, uh, in Congress, uh, and, in fact, get a lot of Republican sponsors in the, in the Senate, uh, right up to before Roe was overturned. [01:33:00] Uh, so, Trump, as you said, strongly implied that he would not support something like that, but he did not come out and say that he would veto such a bill if the Congress were able to pass it, and that's one of the many ambiguities that his statement left.

SECTION C: ABORTION IN THE LEGAL SYSTEM

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now section C: abortion in the legal system.

Abortion and Reproductive Rights Part 4 - Lectures in History - Air Date 3-16-24

We've seen two, count them two, U. S. Supreme Court cases on abortion in one term after Dobbs told us that the federal courts were out of this game, uh, one of which, um, involves the FDA's authority to approve Mifepristone, a drug used in more than half of U. S. abortions. The case also involves a claim that the FDA never had the authority to make abortion pills available via telehealth because Anthony Comstock's law was never repealed and is argued to make it a federal claim to mail abortion related items today.

There's another case involving the Federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. Which, uh, the Biden administration has argued requires access for abortion to patients in certain medical emergencies. [01:34:00] Uh, this claim this case also involves the claim by states like Texas and Idaho that federal law actually treats an unborn child as a patient, and that some states like California may be prohibited from providing access to emergency abortions because of the federal law, rather than required to do so.

And finally, of course, as we saw just in the past few weeks, there's the ongoing struggle for fetal personhood. Um, if you were wondering, like, what is the next Roe v. Wade for the anti abortion movement, it was and always has been fetal personhood, but now that Roe is out of the way, the campaign for fetal personhood has intensified considerably.

Um, it's reflected in state laws recognizing the personhood of fetuses for purposes like tax deductions. Um, and child support laws, and recently in a decision of the Alabama Supreme Court, um, holding that for the purposes of the state's wrongful death of a minor law, uh, a frozen embryo is a child or person, and that therefore, suits for the destruction of embryos can be brought.

Um, as wrongful death suits. Uh, these claims are all designed eventually [01:35:00] to return, ironically, not to Congress, not to state legislators, not to voters, but to the U. S. Supreme Court. Because we've seen, um, after Roe surmised, ironically, that when voters are faced with questions involving reproductive rights and justice, they tend overwhelmingly to support reproductive rights and justice.

And so instead, uh, groups that have long complained about the, So, anti democratic courts interjecting themselves into questions of reproduction are instead seeking out courts and arguing that as a matter of the Constitution's original public meaning, access to abortion, potentially access to IVF, potentially access to contraception, is itself unconstitutional.

So when people ask me sort of my favorite question is people usually not from the United States And I think a lot of people in the United States ask me, when is this going to be over? And the answer is probably never, right? Um, but I think one of the other things that's clear in the history of reproductive rights and justice is that it's always very much been a story about, uh, the health of democracy, right?

Who gets to vote, whether you get to vote at all, how money is influencing how you vote. [01:36:00] And so I think in terms of how this turns out, a good barometer will be how healthy is the democracy in the first place.

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

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: All right, so what is the first court case in which privacy is the central question?

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: There have been essentially three waves of Supreme Court decisions that we now think of as right to privacy decisions, although the earliest cases didn't use that term. So the earliest cases are two cases from the 1920s called Mayer v.

Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters. And these cases dealt with essentially the right to choose how to raise your children. Mayer was a case where Nebraska passed a law that forbade schoolteachers from teaching students in a language other than English. And there was a schoolteacher who was, who was, who charged with the crime because the teacher taught the German language.

And like that that was a crime in [01:37:00] Nebraska. If that case had come up today, it would have that would have probably been struck down on First Amendment grounds. I mean, obviously, free speech means you can teach someone to speak German. But, um, the court instead saw this as part of a right to choose the upbringing of your children.

And if you want your children to learn the German language, you Send them to school where they learn the German language. Pierce was a similar case. This was an Oregon law that, it targeted all private schools, but the real target was parochial schools. It was an attempt to ban Catholic parents from sending their kids to Catholic schools.

And the court struck that down. You know, if that case came up today, it would have been struck down under the free exercise clause of the Constitution, the provision saying that you have a right to exercise your religion. But the court in the 1920s saw this as a part of this right to raise your children.

And then that was the first wave of what we now think of as right to privacy decision.

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: And, and that's really interesting, especially in the context of now, when [01:38:00] you're thinking about the. current parental rights movement we're seeing in a lot of states?

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, no, I mean, the interesting thing about the early right to privacy cases being about the right to raise your children is you're seeing a divide within social conservatives and within the Christian right about what they think about the right to privacy.

Because in the second wave of right to privacy cases, these started to sweep in not just the right to, you know, choose how you raise your children, but the right to decide whether or not to have children at all. And so you're the second wave of decisions. That's Griswold, the 1965 decision involving contraception.

There were a few other contraception decisions that followed that. And then Roe v. Wade in 1973. These are right to choose whether or not to have children cases.

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: Yeah. Can you talk about Griswold v. Connecticut? You know, we've talked about it on the show before, but give us a refresher. Like what. What was that case and why is it important?

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Griswold is an odd decision. I think to understand Griswold, you have to [01:39:00] understand, like, what happened in, like, the 30 or 40 years prior to Griswold. The 1920s cases, Mayer and Brown, if they had been decided today, they would have been decided under the First Amendment. They would have been decided under an explicit, what's called an enumerated right that is, like, written into the Constitution.

Instead, the court invented this right that is Not mentioned in the Constitution, you know, the right to decide how to raise your children, and that's just how courts operated in the 1920s. You know, this was what was called the Lochner era. Lochner said that there was a so called right to contract, and what the right to contract was, was the right to enter into a labor contract where you're paid terrible wages and you We're ridiculously long hours.

You know, there's a right of employers to exploit their workers. That's not mentioned in the Constitution either

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: right to a job that sucks. Okay, right,

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: right to a job that sucks. That was essentially what what the right was that was that was created in Lochner. And [01:40:00] during the New Deal, this idea that court should be finding unenumerated rights was discredited.

And it was discredited, you know, because of Lochner, you know, because of these hot, very anti worker decisions that the court had handed down. And so Griswold is a weird decision because they want to recognize a right to contraception, but they want to make it look as little like Lochner as possible. So they have this sort of tenuous reasoning that like, well, the Constitution protects these other things that deal with privacy, you know, protects you against the police searching your home without a warrant.

And so the language that the court used was penumbras and emanations. Somewhere within the penumbras and emanations of these existing enumerated right to privacy is a broader right to contraception. There was a theory behind that. You know, the theory was that if [01:41:00] it's a crime to have contraceptions, if it's a crime to use birth control, if it's a crime to use a condom, then the police can search your bedroom or can search a married couple's bedroom for evidence of, like, illicit condom use.

For evidence of like, ooh, you've got an illicit diaphragm in there. We're gonna have to throw you in jail. Yeah,

JONQUILYN HILL - HOST, THE WEEDS: I'm just like imagining a scenario where they're like, I need to check for an IUD, and I'm like, that sounds, that sounds terrible. No.

IAN MILLHISER - SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, that was what the court wanted to prevent, was the idea was the sort of police investigation that would have to go on in order to determine that you were violating a contraception ban would be so offensive.

Think about modern forms of contraception and, like, the sort of search that the police would have to do in order to determine that you're using it. And so Griswold, you know, the insight was that there's something so offensive about the police being able to make this kind of [01:42:00] investigation that we're just going to take it off the table.

And that was how sexuality sort of got wrapped into this right to privacy.

Why Trumps Abortion Video Needs Some Follow-Up Questions Part 2 - Brian Lehrer A Daily Podcast - Air Date 4-9-24

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Let me also replay the clip of Trump from yesterday, and get your take on the confusing way this ends. If we are arguing about, or not arguing about, but if we're discussing whether Trump is trying to sow as much confusion as clarity, listen carefully as he says, up to the states, but then implies that it should actually be up to to each pregnant woman, if they want to hear it that way.

DONALD TRUMP: My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number [01:43:00] of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that's what they will be.

At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart or, in many cases, your religion or your faith.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So, did you hear that at the end, when he threw in, you must follow your heart or your religion or your faith? Uh, that makes it sound like he supports an individual's right to choose as opposed to a state legislature's right to choose for you, but I don't think that's his position.

MOLLY BALL: Interesting. I mean, I heard that more as, uh, a political statement saying you must follow your heart in terms of how you vote on this, but as we know, this is something that Trump does all the time. He, he speaks in these, these confusing and ambiguous ways or he just, you know, Blatout takes multiple positions on an issue, uh, and he counts on that to muddy the waters and to allow people to hear whatever they want to hear.

And so, uh, the hope [01:44:00] is that, you know, people sort of give him the benefit of the doubt and say, well, I think he's here and someone else can hear it completely differently. Uh, and then, you know, the, if they, for people who are looking to, to, to get to yes and voting to, for Donald Trump, it gives them sort of permission to hear whatever they want to in his various conflicting statements.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Yeah. We're going to talk about Florida now in this respect, Molly in brief, what just happened there?

MOLLY BALL: I was actually in the legislative chamber in Tallahassee when the legislature passed the current six week ban in Florida. What has just happened is that the Florida Supreme Court has allowed that six week ban to go forward.

Previously, the state had a 15 week limit that also had I believe yet to be implemented, uh, pending this, the, the Supreme Court's decision. So, on, starting on May 1st, there will be a ban on abortions after 6 weeks in Florida, which is before many women even know that they're pregnant, so many people [01:45:00] consider it.

Uh, effectively a complete abortion ban. Prior to this, Florida was the only southern state that hadn't restricted abortion and had become sort of an abortion haven for that reason. But on on the basis of polling, it is the most pro choice red state. Uh, at the same time, the Supreme Court issued another opinion allowing an abortion rights ballot initiative to go on the ballot.

This is a if 60 percent of voters support it, which is a quite high bar, would allow for a right to abortion up to fetal viability, which is the limit in Roe v. Wade, about 23, 24 weeks. So many, including the Biden campaign, are hoping that this will prove a powerful motivator getting people to go to the polls and vote for abortion rights, particularly, I think, for Democrats, the fact that there will be a six week ban in place for about six months before the election.

They're hoping we'll sort of [01:46:00] demonstrate to people what it's like to live under this sort of a regime, and then they will have an opportunity to change it.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: And I think Michael in Miami has something to say about this. Michael, you're on WNYC, hello from New York.

CALLER: Hey, Brian. Hey, Molly. Thank you so much for taking my call.

Brian, you've been my lifeline to New York, living in Florida for the last couple years.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Thank

CALLER: you. So, I appreciate it. We still live in Inwood, uh, not too far. Uh, I think this is the supercharge. I don't think people really understand how supercharging this is going to be for Florida. The Senate race is only three points.

The Biden Trump race is only seven, and we need 60 percent to get this passed. Thank you. I think it's going to be such a big influx of money and energy and power into this state that I think could, I don't know if it'll flip it all the way presidentially, but I could certainly flip it for the Senate and, and particularly the fact that this six week ban is going to infect in the next few days, [01:47:00] um, and, and I think people are going to realize how their rights are being taken away.

It's very direct. We've got this right being removed and then a ballot measure right in November. It's almost perfect. It's almost It's the best thing I think could have happened to Florida.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Michael, thank you very much for checking in. Call us again from down there. Molly, let me linger with you for a second on this 60 percent point.

You mentioned it. Michael mentioned it. Um, I didn't know about it. Am I hearing it right that it will take 60 percent of the vote in Florida to enshrine abortion rights?

MOLLY BALL: That's correct. So, this measure could get a majority of the vote and still would not pass. That is the threshold for ballot measures in Florida.

So, if you recall, in Ohio, for example, the last one of these ballot measures that passed, uh, the abortion rights side did win in Ohio, but it got 57 percent of the vote. Uh, so, [01:48:00] that's a very high bar to clear, and, uh, we will see if, uh, Uh, if Florida's able to, to, to clear it.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Um, it, it can work either way, right?

I guess the anti-abortion rights camp likes the fact that it's 60 percent because it takes that 60 40 majority, not 50 percent plus one. But maybe what Michael was hinting at there is that because the abortion rights proponents would need to get to 60%, it's even more of a turnout thing. Generator than it would be if it was 50 percent plus more than you think.

MOLLY BALL: It's possible I could also see an argument going the other direction that it's harder to motivate people when It's this hard to to pass something because they may not have a hope that they could actually get there We've seen this be, again, a very mobilizing issue in ballot initiatives, but not necessarily for candidates.

I covered the, the Florida gubernatorial election in 2022, when the [01:49:00] Democratic candidate, Charlie Crist, uh, was hammering this issue very hard, saying, you know, Ron DeSantis has already banned abortion after 15 weeks, and he's going to do further limits if you reelect him. DeSantis, of course, went on to win that election by nearly 20 points.

So, uh. Mm hmm. It's not necessarily clear that voters will take this and apply it to candidates, whether it's the Senate race, uh, between Rick Scott and his Democratic opponent, or the presidential race. Uh, but we, but what we have seen, uh, is that when abortion is on the ballot as an up or down issue, it does make a lot of people feel uncomfortable.

Go to the polls and those people tend to be Democrats and liberal leaning independents. So the hope is once you get those people out, you know, maybe they're not motivated to go vote for Joe Biden or vote against Rick Scott, but once you get those people to the polls, that's the way they're going to vote.

SECTION D: WHAT IS THERE TO DO?

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section D: what is there to do now?

Digital surveillance and reproductive rights Part 4 - Technically Optimistic - Air Date 5-15-24

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Through no fault of their own, Americans seeking reproductive [01:50:00] health care find themselves restricted, monitored, and under the threat of prosecution.

And because this seems so unfair, and so outside their control, It's strange that the best data privacy advice we have for them is just strong encouragement for people to take control of their data themselves. We seem to be passing the buck. We're not so much helping them as telling them to help themselves.

And as we talked about at the beginning of this episode, when we heard about Dr. Janet Vertazy's experiment to keep her pregnancy offline, opting out of mainstream internet services. can lead you to some strange places, and is itself sometimes seen as suspicious. But Director Fontes Rainer maintains that, when it comes to data privacy, you are your own best resource.

AMY MERRILL: The best advocate for my own privacy is going to be me, right? No one's going to care more about my privacy than me. Within the healthcare [01:51:00] space, we know that a lot of healthcare providers are using web tracking technologies to better understand their patient consumer populations. And in those web tracking technologies, we have some authority and we have reminded providers in particular that if you're going to use these types of technologies, take steps to be compliant with HIPAA, making sure first and foremost that you have a business associate agreement, which is basically an agreement between Google, Metapixel, these web tracking applications and the hospital, so that if there is a breach, if there is an impermissible use or disclosure of that data, it's protected.

Because if it's not, then those providers are just exposing individual protected health information, which is not compliant with HIPAA. I have limited jurisdiction, so to just like put a disclaimer, I have limited jurisdiction over that kind of data, right? So like I can't always do something.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Can I just try and make this more concrete for the people who might be listening, Director?

Are you effectively saying [01:52:00] don't use these apps? Is that basically the message I should take away?

AMY MERRILL: I'm saying you should not be storing protected health information on your phone. In a Google app, in any sort of, you know, there was a lot of attention on period trackers when DOBS first happened, right? And a lot of steps were taken to try to get those individual apps to change how they were tracking data.

But, you know, We know that there are gaps in the regulatory authority and enforcement.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Gaps? Big enough for apps, I guess.

NEWS CLIP: Fertility and period tracking apps have some of the most sensitive reproductive information.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: The new HIPAA reproductive privacy rule does a lot to protect people who receive out of state care.

That woman who traveled from Texas to California doesn't have to fear the results of a blood test might make it back to law enforcement in Texas. That's huge. But the data collected by birth control apps is still potentially dangerous.

NEWS CLIP: There is no difference in the data from your reproductive [01:53:00] choices than the pair of shoes you looked at online.

It's treated exactly the same in the law right now, and that's what the problem is.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: Leading up to DAWBS, we have been talking a lot at Planned Parenthood in and around making sure folks feel educated around what was changing within certain states. Kevin Williams

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: is the VP of Digital Products at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where he's worked for over a decade.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: Over one in three women, plus many more folks that identify as trans and non binary, are without access in their states. And so, obviously, that is Very, very important for us to get ahead of, and, you know, we've had to really be progressive and think how to take users through this very complex matrix now of what the laws are and where access is, and it's very confusing.

It's a very challenging process.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: [01:54:00] Kevin and his team have been doing digital outreach in the face of two overlapping challenges. The suddenly remote healthcare environment of the COVID pandemic and the confusing, restrictive landscape post dops. And as both of these events led more and more patients to seek healthcare information online, he knew that Planned Parenthood had to be exceedingly cautious in how it treated personal health data.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: So birth control and period tracking seemed like something for us to

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: explore. Planned Parenthood's own fertility and period tracking app is called SpotOn, and it's been around in some form since 2016. From

KEVIN WILLIAMS: the beginning, I'll just say, privacy and security has always been an area of focus for us. We believe that your personal health care data should never be used against you.

We don't sell data. It's very important for us, even at the ideation and design stage, to be [01:55:00] We don't collect information and sell it for advertising purposes. We don't collect the information, store it places. And I think that that is the common industry standard of collecting that information. And so what was interesting was when all of the noise In and around concerns around privacy came up.

There was a lot of focus on period trackers and folks were deleting their apps. And we had to spend a lot of time educating people around, um, understanding what we were doing was different than some other period trackers.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Planned Parenthood's app stores data locally on your phone rather than in the cloud.

KEVIN WILLIAMS: Planned Parenthood, we speak a lot about how important Privacy and security is to us. And so I think in a lot of ways, users and communities expect us to show up in this way. We've focused on thinking about accessibility, thinking about how we, uh, educate people to be empowered. I think [01:56:00] that privacy is a top priority for us and we stand by that.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Okay. So you've been talking about how some of the values of Planned Parenthood, like transparency and data privacy, like kind of make it into your work as a product designer. Which makes me want to ask you, like, how do you think about accountability here? Like, as a developer, but a developer in this, you know, particularly urgent space?

KEVIN WILLIAMS: It's a good question because we've been talking a lot in and around accountability as well. There's a real challenge on what accountability we have as an organization, providing care as a trusted brand there to support people, and then also holding big technology accountable as far as educating people on how to use these fancy devices that, you know, have the most sensitive information that they have available.

So when our team comes together thinking about what we should build and design, I mean, First and foremost, we [01:57:00] work very closely with our information securities team, our general counsel and legal advisors and folks are brought into that process right away in the beginning so that we are thinking bigger than just the moment.

We're trying to be more thoughtful about what the idea is going to look like in execution and iteration over time. You know, there's so much conversation around weaponizing of data these days, and there's a lack of trust. And so. Positioning ourself as a trusted resource is been really important to our social media and communications team, just because there's just a, you know, it's next level out there right now.

Yeah, it's a wild west. Yes, it is a wild west right now. Totally is. We've become so dependent on big technology. We really need to find a way to use this data for good. I think there's a lot of noise in and around the [01:58:00] exploitation of data, but there's some real societal shifts that that need to be observed.

And I think part of the challenge with that is what information is being collected, where it's being stored, who's monitoring it, how is it being exchanged in between and across organizations? And I just would really like to have more conversations about that.

NJ Rep. Mikkie Sherril On Abortion Nationwide, And Campus Protests In Her District - Brian Lehrer_ A Daily Podcast - Air Date 5-1-24

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Let's start with the judge shopping bill. Can you explain what that's about?

REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: Yes, so, you know, what we've seen in some of the anti-abortion tactics is judge shopping, meaning that there are certain divisions within our, uh, judicial system that have only one judge.

So for example, if you come, uh, if you bring a case to court in New Jersey, um, you don't know which judge you are going to get to hear your case. You could have a judge appointed by Biden or Obama. You could have a judge appointed by Trump or [01:59:00] Bush. You don't know. There are multiple judges that might be picked to hear your case by the assigning judge.

However, in some of these divisions, especially, you know, in some more remote areas, there is only one judge. So that you know, if you take your case to that court, you have One person that will hear it. And so that can, uh, ensure the outcome you want in certain cases. And certainly we saw that with the Mifa Prestone case.

So what my bill does is say you have to have more than one judge if you are going to bring a case that will impact the st the rights of people nationwide. So in that type of case with say, a nationwide ban on something or impacting a nationwide law. that you have to bring your case, uh, to a division or a department that has more than one judge.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: Don't all sides in all cases judge shop if they can? And if so, how can a bill prevent it [02:00:00] in ways that would kind of advance what you're, uh, Erin Clayton, MAGA, QAnon,

REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: Deon Clark, Transcriptionist Quartet, enshittification, MAGA, QAnon, Deon and go to some of the most conservative judges in the nation to determine the outcome.

We want a more fair process. And certainly, they may draw a very conservative judge, but I think we want somebody to put forward a case where they are trying to make a very fair case and can't sort of game the system or determine the outcome based on where they bring that case.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So, The bill would explicitly do that, how, and do you think you have enough support in the Republican House of Representatives to get that bill to the President's desk?[02:01:00]

Work to the Senate.

REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: So the bill would specifically say that if you are trying to, um, bring a case that would impact people nationwide, you have to bring it into a district or division that has more than one judge, um, so that you can't sort of predetermine exactly the judge, uh, that is going to hear it.

Um, and, uh, you know, it's hard to say, we've had, uh, trouble in this Congress, I think, gaining enough support to get, um, Very non controversial things done. It's been very hard. So in this Congress, trying to find that group of support will be difficult, but I think we've seen movement in the Senate. Schumer introduced a similar bill, um, and I think that he's seen some bipartisan support there.

So hopefully we can build on that in the House, because really this is, this is something that, um, You know, when we're talking about rights, uh, that we want to protect in our [02:02:00] courts, um, you know, the very things that protect us against, um, some very conservative justices could protect people against some very liberal justices, so, or judges.

So I think this is an area where we could find, um, wide bipartisan support, and just trying to create a more fair justice system.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, A DAILY PODCAST: So the MIFA Pristone case was an inspiration for this bill. I see you're also concerned about another Supreme Court case on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.

What's that?

REP. MIKKIE SHERRIL: So the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, um, called EMTALA often, Is a case heard, being heard before the court or just was heard before the court and we expect an upcoming decision, um, that is a case where Idaho had a trigger law, meaning that once Roe was overturned, that law would immediately go into effect, um, and it was one of the most draconian laws [02:03:00] regarding abortion care across the nation.

So, you could basically, um, You only get, as far as health care for women, abortion in the case of if you were seeing the death of a mother, um, so what EMTALA says in, and how that has been interpreted is to provide what, what is called stabilizing care, but what that really means is, look, if you are in a medical situation, if you are suffering, um, a medical problem with your pregnancy, abortion may be the way that.

The, um, the way that the medical center can treat you. And in cases such as placenta previa, um, hemorrhaging, other areas, it's really an important part of reproductive health care. We're seeing in too many cases that when doctors wait until the actual life of the mother is at stake, not just the health of the mother, they're making decisions that will put the mother at risk of [02:04:00] never being able to conceive again.

Transcriptionist Quartet, enshittification, MAGA, QAnon, Transcriptionist Quartet, enshittification, to conduct an abortion if it would save the reproductive organs of a mother and the answer was really very unclear because I think the answer is no under that law and so health care providers are not protected in that case and in Idaho you can be put in jail.

Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation, Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone Part 2 - CounterSpin - Air Date 4-5-24

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: Well, if you talk to staunch anti-abortion people, the conversation is, is very rarely about science or about medicine, you know? Um, but then some of them and their media, Folks will throw around terms that sort of suggest that they're being science y, you know, they'll talk about viability or heartbeat, or they'll say it's about [02:05:00] concern about the safety of drugs.

And I just wonder, as a scientist who actually is immersed in this stuff, what do you make of the reporting on the medical reality of abortion? And would more knowledge help inform the broader conversation or is it just two kind of different conversations? What do you think?

RACHEL K. JONES: Right, I definitely think it's two different conversations.

Like I said, we have decades of scientific medical research establishing that medication abortion is safe, effective, and widely accepted. People who don't support abortion choose to ignore the science and the safety and dig for their own factoids and, and supposed scientific facts to support their arguments.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: It's so strange how the media debate always seems to start again and again at point zero, you know, as though there were no facts in the matter or, or no experience. And as though women aren't And, uh, we're looking for [02:06:00] experts on their own experience, you know? Um, well, finally, we see things like the Women's Health Protection Act, you know, federalizing the right to abortion.

I know the law is not necessarily your purview, but, you know, In terms of responding to these court moves and these state level moves, do you think that federal action is the way to go?

RACHEL K. JONES: Certainly, that is one solution, right? The Women's Health Protection Act would enshrine the right to abortion federally.

But we also need, and especially in the current environment, I don't want to say Women's Health Protection Act is pie in the sky, but given everything that's going on right now, we also need federal and state policy makers to step up to restore, protect, and expand access to abortion. A lot of these restrictions are imposed.

I mean, quite frankly, you know, the right to abortion was removed because of Roe, and that allows states to impose pretty much any restriction that they want to. We're seeing from all [02:07:00] these, uh, different laws that are being implemented, and so it really is a lot of times at the state level, and certainly in the current environment, the state level is what we might need to focus

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: on.

And then anything you would like to see more of or less of from journalism in this regard? Thank you very much.

RACHEL K. JONES: You know, on medication abortion, it seems like the media is actually doing a decent job of covering the issue, of acknowledging, again, the decades of research showing that medication abortion is safe, effective, and commonly used.

I guess the only issue we might have is one that you see anytime that abortion is the subject of media stories, and that is a lot of times reporters think, well, if they have to Take a fair and balanced approach. That means that they have to talk to the people who oppose abortion. And again, when this is about science and facts and research, then you don't need to talk to people who don't believe in it, don't believe in sound science, or who are going to ignore the science.

Again, decades of, of solid [02:08:00] medical research.

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

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Even if you know about hipaa. You probably have at least a few misconceptions about it, according to director Fontes Rainer.

I think there's a lot of misinformation about HIPAA in the first instance, whether it's to doctors and hospitals or patients. And I have been told from people, right, you know, oh, well, HIPAA protects me for X, or HIPAA protects my data on my phone, or HIPAA protects me when I do X, or I'm going to get my records because of HIPAA.

And some of that is true and some of that isn't true. We all do everything on our phones now, and I think a lot of people have a very unrealistic expectation of privacy and expectation of protection when they think it's just, oh, it's my medical information, so it's protected, right?

Not right, unfortunately.

AMY MERRILL: There should be a business associate agreement in place so that data is protected, but oftentimes there isn't. So oftentimes you may be using some app on your phone that is not a HIPAA covered entity, it's not a business associate agreement, you're just using it, and so you are making yourself exposed.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: HIPAA makes many [02:09:00] concrete requirements about how healthcare providers have to treat medical records. The same is true of all sorts of private companies in the healthcare space. That's the function of these business associate agreements that the director just mentioned. But, HIPAA makes no provisions for technology companies.

AMY MERRILL: So one of the first things my office did last summer was we put out, literally, here's how to take this into your own hands even when HIPAA doesn't apply, right? Like basic things, right? Turning off, tracking things, tracking off geolocation, making sure you're not storing protected health information on your phone, on your tablet, on your devices in the first instance.

Don't store it into the Google Cloud. Don't store it into the Apple Cloud. Don't Because these things can be searchable, identifiable, and sometimes they're not protected.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: So this is the problem, and it's twofold. HIPAA goes so far, but falls short of protecting many sources of healthcare data for the 21st century American.

And in a landscape without the protections of Roe v. Wade, it also [02:10:00] became clear that HIPAA had huge gaps in it when it comes to reproductive healthcare. And when you take those two issues together, then you're at the intersection of data privacy and abortion rights.

SUE DUNLAP: I'm gonna turn again to a story here.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Again, here's Sue Dunlap of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles.

SUE DUNLAP: We recently had a patient here in Los Angeles who had started in Georgia, then went to South Carolina, got sent back to Georgia, then went. to Florida, then from Florida, flew to Los Angeles, all because there were various abortion limitations and bans.

The very first thing when one of our doctors came into my office to sort of explain what had happened, he said, she came with a stack of papers that made no sense. Would having had one seamless electronic health record have made her experience better? In a perfect world, [02:11:00] yes. Sure. But I can also tell you that what was contained in those papers was also informed by fears or fears.

around the limitations in each state. So what a doctor in California might expect versus what a doctor or a practitioner in a state where abortion is becoming criminalized might be able to offer are also very, very different. So, Again, I'm stuck in this in between where I can tell you what we aspire to and want isn't here today.

What should we do now? I think we have to live in both. I don't think it's a, this is the solution, health records. I think that's naive. Our patients live in a different world and that's exacerbated by dramatic differences across geography, which frankly are only going to become more intense. It just starts to create a dynamic that [02:12:00] is not going to work and isn't compatible with the beautiful vision of shared electronic health records, which is that.

Patients can travel, and they can get the best care possible. And so an electronic health record starts to become the path to transfer those disparities.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: Sue reminds me that in real life, tech doesn't live in a vacuum. In a world where your own data can be weaponized against you like this, what might seem like a simple, obvious solution to a technologist, like electronic health records, becomes a huge social issue, an emblem of the loss of autonomy and surveillance.

And not just surveillance. For many Americans seeking reproductive care, simply visiting the doctor generates a dystopian digital scarlet letter. It could lead to your being fined or jailed, or to an awful self destructive cycle where in order to avoid getting arrested, you avoid seeing a doctor. Post [02:13:00] Dobbs America is a place where people have to choose.

Should I risk prosecution? Or should I risk getting sicker? And for pregnant people, the choice is even starker. States with restrictive abortion laws have made it so your data can very literally be the difference between life and death. That's post Dobbs America. But Melanie Fontes Rainer is trying to steer us out of this nightmare.

And she's trying to do that by fixing HIPAA.

AMY MERRILL: So, in this space that we live in now in post op, a lot of reproductive health care providers, reproductive health care clinics, OBGYN facilities, they are very aware of that. Trying to misuse data, trying to track women, going on fishing expeditions, none of this is new.

Those kinds of providers are very familiar with the landscape and they know the law. Oftentimes before you have surgery, what do they do? They give you a blood test [02:14:00] to make sure you're not pregnant. And now you have a medical record, whether or not it's related to your reproductive health care, that now affirmatively states whether or not you're pregnant, that someone wants to have, that someone could track you.

And so those are the instances I worry about because your medical record through your electronic health record can be everywhere, right? I've had people tell me, you know, uh, we had a patient, she went to California for an abortion. When she went back home, just stayed at. The provider said, I see you had an abortion in California, right, and now they may hand over those records.

And so, you know, that's why we have proposed a rule to actually take it a step further. We have a proposed rule that will actually prohibit those disclosures in the first instance.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: It's called the HIPAA Privacy Rule to Support Reproductive Healthcare Privacy. Yeah, that's right, privacy's in there twice.

And back when I spoke with Director Fontes Raynor, it was just a proposal. But on April 26th, it became official.

NEWS CLIP: Thank you for joining [02:15:00] us, uh, to discuss today's major announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: The new rule protects patients and providers. Because it basically says, if reproductive healthcare was given or received in a state where that care was legal,

AMY MERRILL: That information about that healthcare cannot be used or disclosed by that healthcare provider or health plan for an investigation to impose liability on the individual or the provider.

NEWS CLIP: There is one thing Dobbs did not take away, and that is the right of Americans to their privacy.

RAFFI KRIKORIAN - HOST, TECHNICALLY OPTIMISTIC: That's HHS Secretary Javier Becerra. He's speaking at a press conference announcing the new rule, with Director Fontes Rayner at his side.

NEWS CLIP: We took action the moment the Dobbs decision became public. We're not stopping.

AMY MERRILL: The idea, right, that me as an individual, as a human being, that I can't travel somewhere to where the healthcare is lawful to receive lawful healthcare on my dime, [02:16:00] that that's not legal and that my state thinks they own me, that is bananas.

Credits

The additional section of the show included clips from Lectures in History, Technically Optimistic, The Weeds, The Thom Hartmann Program, The Brian Lehrer Show and CounterSpin. Further details are in the show notes.

Membership is how you get instant access to our impressively good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads, and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community where you can also continue the discussion.

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

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#1633 Fights for Fair Pay, Journalism vs Sensationalism, Billionaire Bailouts, and Addiction Capitalism: Sports are a Microcosm of the Ills of Society (Transcript)

Posted by · June 04, 2024 2:30 AM

Air Date 6/4/2024

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. Seemingly, the late Pope John Paul II said that, "Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important", referring to European football, of course. And arguably that could be extrapolated out to all of the other sports that people also invest much of their lives into following. But it's not just for the importance that people put on sports that it becomes a good topic for a political podcast; it's because the problems that arise within the systems of sports, are the same problems we all face everywhere, which makes them a good lens through which to understand the mechanisms of broader society: the fight for fair pay, both journalism and addictive games functioning under capitalism and unfair benefits for billionaires, all resonate far beyond the bounds of the

players, owners and fans of sparks clubs. Sources providing our top takes today, include the University of Iowa, the PBS [00:01:00] NewsHour, Brett Coleman, LeBatardShow, MSNBC Reports, Robert Reich, and The Current. Then, in the additional deeper dive half of the show, there'll be more on the new world of pay for play for college athletes, the folly of taxpayer funded stadiums, sports journalism and capitalism, and the impact of addictive sports gambling.

Pay for Play: Should College Athletes be Considered University Employees? Part 1 - University of Iowa - Air Date 3-28-24

DAN MATHESON: I want to set the stage for the tectonic shift that is facing college athletics right now. It didn't happen overnight, and the path that has led to this moment provides much needed context for a full discussion of the issues that we're going to have tonight.

I want to begin by going back to 1984. In that year, the NCAA lost the antitrust lawsuit known as the Board of Regents case. In that case, the Supreme Court found that the NCAA's restrictions on the number of football games that could be televised each week were illegal [00:02:00] restraints on trade and commerce under antitrust law.

But there was a silver lining for the NCAA in that defeat: the Supreme Court acknowledged in its decision that some restraints on trade and commerce are necessary for college football to exist and wrote, quote, "The NCAA seeks to market a particular brand of football, college football. The identification of this product with an academic tradition differentiates college football from, and makes it more popular than, professional sports to which it might otherwise be comparable, such as minor league baseball. In order to preserve the character and quality of the product, athletes must not be paid, must be required to attend class and the like." End quote.

"Athletes must not be paid." That dictum by the Supreme Court in 1984 became a foundation upon which the [00:03:00] NCAA based its legal strategy and its justification for amateurism for decades to come. But the protection the NCAA relied on from that Supreme Court decision would eventually come to an end, which I will talk about in a moment.

20 years after that Board of Regents decision, legal challenges to the NCAA's amateurs and rules began like a snowball at the top of a mountain that grew as it tumbled downhill, and today the NCAA is at the bottom of that mountain, looking up at an avalanche coming at it.

I want to briefly walk you through a few of those important legal challenges to amateurism that have taken place over the past 20 years and set up the issues that we're considering tonight.

First, in 2004, we have Jeremy Bloom. Jeremy Bloom was a unique [00:04:00] two-sport athlete who played college football [for] Colorado, but also was an Olympic-level skier, and he sued the NCAA because the NCAA denied his request to sign name, image, and likeness deals as a skier outside of his college sport. This was long before our current NIL environment that we've become so accustomed to. The NCAA won that lawsuit, and succeeded in holding off what was a very high-profile challenge to its authority. But in doing so, it sparked a national debate over the fairness of its amateurism rules.

Five years later, in 2009, the next legal challenge took Jeremy Bloom's fight one step further. That was a class action antitrust lawsuit known as the O'Bannon case. In that case, college athletes challenged the NCAA's amateurism rules that restricted them from profiting from [00:05:00] their name, image, and likeness in video games. This was the lawsuit that brought down the very popular EA college sports games that probably many of you students here played while you were younger. The O'Bannon case was an antitrust case, just like the Board of Regents case. So in deciding the O'Bannon case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was influenced by the Supreme Court's statement in the Board of Regents that athletes must not be paid. In the O'Bannon case, the court ruled that offering student athletes, quote, "Cash sums untethered to educational expenses is not minor. It is a quantum leap. At that point, the NCAA will have surrendered its amateurism principles entirely and transitioned from its particular brand of football to minor league status." End quote.

That decision by the Ninth Circuit to protect NCAA [00:06:00] amateurism rules against payments unrelated to educational expenses further emboldened the NCAA and further enraged a growing number of amateurism skeptics.

Right around the same time as the decision in the O'Bannon case, another case challenging amateurism rules was decided in a different legal venue by the National Labor Relations Board. In 2014, The Northwestern University football student athletes sought recognition as a labor union by the NLRB. In that case, an NLRB regional director found the football players to be employees of Northwestern. But on appeal, the full NLRB in Washington, DC chose not to exercise jurisdiction over the case, because doing so, it said, would create instability in labor relations in college football. [00:07:00] So the players couldn't form a union, but the NLRB clarified it was not deciding whether the regional director was right or wrong in finding them to be employees, which helped further stoke the flames of the debate.

So in about a 10 year period, starting in 2004, you had the Bloom case, The O'Bannon case and the Northwestern case. And while the O'Bannon and Northwestern cases were going on, another class action antitrust lawsuit known as the Alston case was filed against the NCAA and that one would end up going to the Supreme Court.

The Alston case went a step further than the O'Bannon case in that the plaintiffs challenged any NCAA restrictions on college athlete compensation, not just NIL restrictions in video games.

But by the time that case was litigated up to the Supreme Court, it was trimmed [00:08:00] back to a more limited focus on whether the NCAA was violating antitrust law by placing restrictions on educational benefits to student athletes. On that more limited question of educational benefits, the Supreme Court unanimously found the NCAA restrictions to be in violation of antitrust laws. And--this is significant--the Supreme Court rejected the NCAA's reliance on the Board of Regents decision and its "athletes must not be paid" comment as being some sort of safe harbor to protect the NCAA against amateurism challenges.

The Supreme Court noted in Alston how dramatically the economics of college football and college sports in general had changed in almost 40 years since the Board of Regents case, and emphasized that it would be unwise to rely on what was a stray comment [00:09:00] by the Supreme Court about student athlete compensation rules in Board of Regents, when those rules weren't even an issue in that case.

Taking things one step further in the Alston case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion that signaled to future plaintiffs that at least one member of the Supreme Court would entertain a more expansive takedown of the NCAA's amateurism rules. Justice Kavanaugh delivered a searing indictment of amateurism that concluded with the following passage. Quote: "Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not [00:10:00] above the law." End quote.

What the historic $2.8 billion settlement to pay NCAA players means for college sports - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 5-24-24

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: So I think it's safe to say the days of the amateur student athlete, college athlete, those days are over. Help us understand how significant this moment is.

PAT FORDE: Yes, this is the death of amateurism, which has basically been on the books forever in college athletics.

So it is a significant milestone. The castle walls of amateurism had been eroding for years, most specifically starting three years ago, when name, image, and likeness payments were first approved, but this is a major acceleration from that.

This provides, as you noted, back damages to four years' worth of college athletes who are no longer in their sports, and then also a framework to pay for a decade going forward. So this is a lot of money being transferred from the traditional coffers of the athletic administration, coaches, athletic directors, facility usage into — directly into the [00:11:00] hands of the players and it being done by the schools themselves.

That's the real change here.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: How soon could we see these payments start going out to student athletes?

PAT FORDE: I think it's going to be about 14 months from now, 15 months, setting into the 2025-'26 academic year. That's kind of what the target is right now.

There's still a million loose ends to this, so there's a lot of work to be done on the details, but that's the target date for when you will start seeing major sums of money going directly from institutions to the athletes.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Yes.

How are schools thinking about compensating athletes in those sports that generate a lot of revenue versus those that don't, so, say, the star football player, the star basketball player versus the star pole vaulter?

PAT FORDE: Well, how this actually is going to be divided up is going to be one of the great sources of curiosity and ultimately controversy, I would imagine.

As it stands now, it seems like the [00:12:00] preponderance of thought is to make this an institution-by-institution decision. This will not be like a nationally mandated pay scale. There will not probably be conferences dictating how much is going to go to which athletes or which sports. It'll be up to each school to decide whether they can afford a full $21, $22 million a year in revenue for the athletes or if they want to pay something less than that, and then that is divided up.

Obviously, the football players, the men's basketball player and probably increasingly women's basketball players will get the majority of this, but then, even within the team, what sort of parameters are put on in terms of performance or recruiting star power or experience as far as who gets what? That's all that's good going to be have to be sussed out at the institution level.

And it's going to be quite, I think, a process to get to those deliberations.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Yes.

To the point about women's sports, how does Title IX [00:13:00] factor into the financial calculus here?

PAT FORDE: Well, that's going to be another fascinating element of this, because, obviously, Title IX has really changed the game in terms of allowing females equal opportunity or near-equal opportunity to play their sports in college to the men.

But is equal opportunity the same as equal compensation? So far, in the NIL era, it hasn't been, that most NIL dollars have gone to men's football — or men's basketball and football players. So does this ruling have an effect on that and say, no women have to be compensated in a similar manner in terms of the actual outlay of money or just maybe the number of female athletes has to be somewhat commensurate or proportional to the men?

And then you decide what the money is. But that's going to be, I think a great major flash point of this, and I think we're going to be hearing a lot about that in the next year-plus.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Yes, and one flash point is, how do these colleges and universities go about paying these student athletes without really [00:14:00] classifying them as employees? How are they weighing that question?

PAT FORDE: That's an attempt to thread the needle here by the NCAA and by college athletics. Once again, they have been playing the thread needle game for time immemorial of these people probably are employees in a business setting, but they don't want to be classified as such and they don't want to have to face antitrust legislation along those grounds.

So what they are hoping is for the significant movement here to get the attention and the motivation of Congress to help come up with some antitrust exemption for college athletics to protect it from further lawsuits and to have a system where athletes are sharing in revenue, where they are being compensated, but they are not necessarily considered employees of the university.

GEOFF BENNETT - HOST, PBS NEWSHOUR: Hmm.

And lastly, Pat, this doesn't replace the NIL, the name, image and likeness opportunities for those student athletes that are able to take advantage of them?

PAT FORDE: It doesn't. No, NIL [00:15:00] is still going to be an ongoing fact of life. It'll be fascinating to see how much money is still in an NIL sort of pool versus what's now going into a strict, straight university reimbursement pool and if donors are necessarily less inclined to give NIL money now through a collective or otherwise, because they're already seeing athletes getting paid by the school itself.

But NIL will still be part of the dynamic and there will be schools that want to spend more than the $21, $22 million cap. And so they will turn to boosters or collectives and say, hey, can you help us out with this star quarterback over here? We'd like to give him some more money.

So the NIL era is changing, but it's not going away.

Pay for Play: Should College Athletes be Considered University Employees? Part 2 - University of Iowa - Air Date 3-28-24

ALICIA JESSOP: If you follow my journey in sports, I've had the privilege of writing for some of the greatest publications in the world. And when I started in journalism, you can go back to the very end of ruling sports, I said, I believe that there [00:16:00] are good stories about sports in this world. I am tired of hearing the negative stories, particularly about the NCAA. I knew there were good stories out there and I set out to tell them.

But very quickly I realized that were there were some problems and I had a front row seat to Identifying them and addressing them. So now i'm going to go on script.

It's easy to paint the NCAA as the big bad wolf, and admittedly it's something that I have done. But doing so loses sight of how we got to where we are today.

Since the filing of O'Bannon, the focus on college sport has shifted from the field of play to the court of law. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on legal fees, only for massive blows to be dealt at every level of the American court system to the NCAA system of governance. In fact, in two legal challenges the association faces today, the House and Hubbard cases, it risks the possibility of having to pay damages greater than $5.1 billion. Repeated defeat calls [00:17:00] for a scapegoat, and in the world of college sports, the easy scapegoat to blame is the head governing body for college sport.

The story, though, of how we got where we are today, where examining whether college athletes are employees is something we're all spending our time doing, doesn't begin with O'Bannon, as we've examined here already. Nor does it start with NIL in 2021. I agree with Josh, and if I could redo this, I would go back to 1906.

I start 73 years ago, though, with the 1951 NCAA convention. And as I tell this story, I'm going to let you decide where blame lies. Is it with the head governing body? Is it with the universities? Is it with the media companies? Is it good old American greed? Or perhaps, can we stop laying blame and recognize that there is enough at the table for all to adequately be fed?

24 years before that fateful 1951 convention, a 21-year-old who lived the first 14 years of his life [00:18:00] without electricity unveiled an invention that would change the world. In a lab on San Francisco's Green Street, Philo T. Farnsworth wired to his fundraiser, quote, "The damn thing works," when after years of thinking, his contraption transmitted the first electronic television image.

It would be an understatement to say that television changed the American way of life. In 2023, 97 percent of the 125 million households in this nation owned a television. The average American spends three hours a day watching that device. Binge watching has become a common aspect of today's existence. But Farnsworth's invention hadn't proliferated American society in 1951. In fact, at that time, 96 percent of American households owned a radio, where only 12 percent owned a TV. As we are experiencing today with artificial intelligence, the potential reach and impact of new technology can spur fear in a populace awaiting its full rollout. [00:19:00] So it's not surprising that the three-person committee charged by the NCAA with figuring out what to do with what was called the, quote, "television problem," perceived that television posed the possibility of shaking up the status quo. If fans could watch games on TV, would they attend in person? If they didn't attend in person, what would happen to athletic department revenue? The committee determined, quote, "that the television problem is truly a national one and requires collective"--that's the key word there--"collective action by the colleges."

This is where the plot thickens. As the main character of our story, the NCAA's attempt to solve a " problem" ended in actually creating a bigger one, one that would embed the organization in decades worth of legal battles that it continues fighting today. To get the television problem under control, the association launched an association-wide TV plan that limited football teams exposure to two games per season. When one school, [00:20:00] Penn--and I'm not talking Penn State, I'm talking about the Ivy League school, which had televised all of its home games in the decade prior--pushed back, the association threatened to kick it out, and every team that had it scheduled for games that season canceled those games. So, needless to say, Penn acquiesced and hopped back on the system.

In 1981, modifications were instituted into the plan wherein the NCAA negotiated an overarching four year, nearly $132 million deal with ABC and CBS. Each of the networks would carry 14 games per season. However, while they could negotiate directly with the schools the right to carry their games, there were limitations around what games could be covered. Schools could only be shown no more than six times in a two-year window, four of which nationally. And they would be paid out of that $132 million pot with the NCAA specifying ideas, but not requirements, for how the money could be allocated. [00:21:00]

Since the turn of the 20th century--so this is the 1890s coming into the 1900s--marketplace competition has been a distinguishing aspect of the American economy. On July 2nd, 1890, Congress enacted the Sherman Antitrust Act. We are living today in a period of wide division in our American Congress, but this was a piece of federal legislation that everyone was on board with. One congressperson voted against it and it passed unanimously in the Senate. This law was enacted to combat the rise of trust that thwarted competition in this nation, like the Standard Oil Trust.

And so it was in the spirit of competition that in 1981, the NCAA's then-unchallenged television plan received its first real shake up. I don't consider Penn's attempt a real shake up because they backed down too quick. That summer, a group of schools organized as something called the College Football Association, hereafter the CFA, and they went [00:22:00] to ABC and CBS's competitor, NBC, and negotiated their own TV agreement. Pretty smart. Needless to say, the NCAA did not appreciate this because it would give these schools, quote, "an unfair competitive advantage to have more of their games broadcast on television and subsequently the ability to generate even greater revenues."

Unlike Penn though, two of the CFA schools, Oklahoma and Georgia, lawyered up. They sought a preliminary injunction preventing the association from disciplining them or interfering with their contract. Three years later, the case reached the United States Supreme Court. The seven to two decision by the court in Board of Regents versus NCAA deemed that the NCAA's television plan violated the Sherman Act, as it amounted to a restraint on trade and price fixing.

This decision singlehandedly reshaped the landscape of intercollegiate athletics forever. That's because it opened up the marketplace for college sports tv rights. And the market quickly [00:23:00] responded. Where once 82 schools fought for a piece of a $132 million dollar deal, now schools and conferences could individually land lucrative deals, expanding their exposure and coffers. Notre Dame was the first to the market. I always love asking people who say that they're Notre Dame fans if they went there. Nine times out of ten, they didn't go there. And when you unpack why they're a Notre Dame fan, it's because they grew up watching the games on NBC. They were first to market, striking a five-year, $30 million deal.

And then the Southeastern Conference was the next to follow with its first conference deal, inking a five-year, $100 million agreement with CBS that continued until last year.

Considering the athletic success of these programs across the last four decades, what opportunity was born from this initial financial advantage? Today, the valuation of the broadcast agreements for just the four biggest NCAA D One conferences, the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, and Southeastern conferences, along with the association's deals for men's [00:24:00] March Madness, the NCAA's other 40 championships, and then the separately-organized college football playoff, top $36.4 billion. So we're not talking about mid major conference TV deals. We're not talking about D2 or D3. $36.4 billion. That's a far cry from the $132 million allocated in 1981, which adjusted for inflation would be worth about $450 million today.

This influx of broadcast revenue into the college sport ecosystem has brought increased spending. In 2022, football bowls subdivision head football coaches saw a 15.3 percent rise in their average annual salaries. This is coming out of COVID. Ask the average American worker what raise they saw in 2022. USA Today data shows that public Power 5 conference schools will pay their head football coaches an average annual salary of [00:25:00] $6.2 million. These schools also pay their head men's basketball coaches average annual salaries of $3.35 million. In fiscal year 21 to 22, D1 FBS program spent $1.86 billion on college coaches' salaries, and another $2.04 billion on facilities and equipment. That same year, $1.19 billion was spent on athletic scholarships. I wish I had a whiteboard to write the number.

So we're spending more on coaches salaries and facilities than we're spending on the entirety of college athletes.

We are living in an age where there is infinite money to pay an in-demand coach and install lazy rivers and put-put courses in athletic facilities, but mention paying college athletes and suddenly the well dries up.

Sports Media has changed forever. - Brett Kollmann - Air Date 7-15-23

BRETT KOLLMANN - HOST, BRETT KOLLMANN: We are now firmly in an era where individual personal brands In sports media are king, and they [00:26:00] supersede pretty much everything else, including the corporate brands of the networks that employ those people. If you look at everything that's happened at ESPN over the last month or so, signing Pat McAfee to a mega deal, which he left an even bigger deal with FanDuel to take that deal with ESPN, and you overlay that with the unfortunate layoffs that happened at the same time, and it can feel weird, seeing the dichotomy of a whole bunch of talent get let go while at the same time they sign one talent for a lot of money. And I understand where those mixed feelings come from and why there's a lot of confusion about the state of sports media.

And as somebody who used to work in sports TV for a long time, I was in the trenches as a PA at NFL Network, cutting highlights, being in the control room for NFL Red Zone, doing graphics on Red Zone for years, working on virtually every single show that existed at that network at some point in time. And also at the same time doing local sports media at Time Warner Sportsnet, which was later [00:27:00] Spectrum Sportsnet, doing Lakers coverage, Dodgers coverage, Galaxy, Conca Cap, all that kind of stuff. Even going back to my time in high school, I started doing field cam work when I was 16. I started doing technical directing and directing when I was 17. So I spent a lot of my life in sports TV. And then I left all of that to YouTube for also almost a decade at this point. So I've been on both sides of the fence here. I have watched this transition happen, literally even to myself. So I feel like I'm in a unique position to comment on the state of sports media, and maybe give a little bit of context of what's actually happening at ESPN, or at least what I think is happening at ESPN.

First things first, I do want to express as much empathy as I possibly can for everybody that did, unfortunately, recently get let go at ESPN. It was --I think it was twenty total on-air talent got let go. A lot of them, yes, were in very expensive [00:28:00] contracts. They were making great money. And I don't think that matters. And my buddy, Brandon Perna, made a great point when he did his video about this topic that for a lot of the folks that were on-air talent at ESPN that were not former professional athletes themselves, being on air at ESPN is literally their dream job. That is the pinnacle of the profession. That is what you work for is to be an on air talent at ESPN. And they had that. And unfortunately they got let go. And so these are people that literally in many cases lost their dream job. And regardless of the dollar amount of their contract, I think that it just sucks, right? Nobody wants to go through that. And so I empathize with that because it's a very hard thing to have everything you wanted and then have it slip through your fingers. So I want to express empathy first and foremost for those people.

But I also want to explain the network perspective on why those layoffs were probably necessary from Disney's perspective. I do not believe that [00:29:00] Disney would have made those cuts unless they absolutely had to. Because typically, at least in this business, if a contract is not generating the revenue that they need in order to pay for that contract, they're just going to let it expire.

But these were outright layoffs. They were ending these contracts early. And I don't think they would have done that if Disney+ was not losing literally one and a half billion dollars a year. Disney+ has been a disaster for them financially for a lot of reasons, and there's a whole bunch of videos on YouTube that dive into why Disney+ has failed. But that has had an impact on the entire company as a whole.

And so in order to make ESPN profitable, there's really only two paths they can take. The first path is obviously, hiring talent that they think is going to bring in enough eyeballs to generate ad dollars so they can be profitable. And the second path is cutting expenses, which means cutting talent that they do not believe is bringing in enough [00:30:00] eyeballs to generate enough ad dollars to pay for those salaries.

And I do want to make a point here that these are two separate paths and two separate decisions. They're not necessarily linked together. There's not some salary cap that Disney has to adhere to where, oh, we have to cut all these contracts so that we can bring in Pat McAfee. It's really more like we're bringing in Pat McAfee because we need somebody that can generate eyeballs and get money injected into this company again, through advertising. And at the same time, unfortunately we need to get rid of contracts that we do not believe are bringing in revenue. Hence the layoffs.

All these people that got laid off, I don't think that they would have got laid off if Disney felt that they were a plus on the balance sheet, as callous as that sounds. They need to make money. They need to be profitable. Because Disney+ is just an anchor on the entire Disney business, globally. Disney+ is dragging everything down. So ESPN has to make money. [00:31:00] And I think that those are the two paths that they're taking simultaneously.

Now, for everyone else that is still at ESPN or FS1, or NBC, or print media, or any other outlet, anybody that's in sports media--and I know a lot of them are probably going to watch this because I know many of them all across these different outlets, so I'm sure a lot of them are going to see this video at some point--if you're watching this and you're in the industry, I want you to be aware of where sports media is right now from a consumer perspective.

Let's talk about what actually works in modern sports media and why a lot of legacy outlets are now having to play catch up with new media like YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and all the hundreds of creators. that are slowly but surely ripping eyeballs away from those networks.

With the rise of all these different social media platforms, sports fans now have more options than ever for where they consume their sports content. Yes, they [00:32:00] could turn on a debate show in the morning while they're getting ready for work, which let's be honest, that format now is basically just background noise while people make their coffee and toast a bagel. But if they don't like the debate format, they don't have to watch that anymore. They're not locked in to network television. They can get a million different things from a million different sources. If they still want live sports content in the morning, that's a little bit more lighthearted and not so combative, they could throw in Pat McAfee. If they want something that's edited or prerecorded that just lives on YouTube, they can watch Tom Grossi's 30 in 30 series every morning. They can throw on Brandon Perna. They can watch The Pivot. They can watch FlemLo. If they want fantasy content specifically, like on-demand fantasy content because they're getting ready for their drafts, they can watch the Underdog Fantasy Channel, they can watch BDGE. If they want Madden content to get ready for the Madden release coming up, they can watch Bengal.

There's so many options now. They don't have to watch First Take if they don't want to watch First Take. [00:33:00] This is not the 90s anymore. The audience is no longer captive. And I feel like it's taken a lot of legacy media outlets, in particular TV networks, it's taken them way too long to catch on to that fact.

For the first time ever, ESPN has to truly convince sports fans to watch their content over the hundreds of other content creators now that are making stuff for free. They never had to do that before, and they've had to change their entire content strategy as a result. And again, they're doing it a lot later than they should have. But I at least do want to give them credit for finally catching up.

And everything that they've done over the last three weeks, by the way, in my opinion, is part of that new content strategy. ESPN is now taking a step back and they're not focusing so much on having the network brand be at the forefront. And instead they're letting individual talent brands take the spotlight.

Dan Le Batard Tells Stephen A. Smith He Hates What He and Skip Bayless Did to Sports Media - LeBatardShow - Air Date 12-28-23

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: I hate what you two have done to sports [00:34:00] television.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: You could say that all you want to. I would say, who the hell are you to sit up there and say, me and him? What about you? What the hell were you, living under a rock, teaching at Miami U? You were part of it too? You ain't innocent?

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: I'm talking about all the imitators that you have birthed, all of the imitators that are all over the place thinking, without the journalism credentials, that the point of all this is to turn it into an argument on television.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Well, I would take umbrage at what you're saying in this regard, Dan. Those people who don't have a journalism background, who don't exercise journalistic ethics and beyond, how are we responsible for that, when our background is based on that?

Skip Bayless was a journalist for decades. I was a journalist for decades. We came, we come on television and [00:35:00] those ethics are applicable. The fact of the matter is, is that when I take a position, it's the same kind of position I would take right in the column. The difference is instead of writing 800 words and being limited to that space. I get to talk for a few minutes on each subject.

When was it, when did it happen that I ignored the fact that I was a journalist for the Winston Salem Journal, The Greensboro News and Record, The New York Daily News, and then The Philadelphia Inquirer, before I went to CNN/SI and then Fox Sports, and then ESPN? When was it, when did it occur in my career that I ignored the journalistic tenets that came with the job?

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Oh, it's not ignoring them, it's that they shrink in the face of the need for the argument as entertainment. It's that Kellerman offers too much nuance, so we have to make it, in the form of entertainment, we have to... it's not that it's ignored, it's that the journalism becomes less important. It's the argument, it's the sparks, it's the debate [00:36:00] that needs to be carried.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Yeah, but where you're missing the boat, and I'm actually surprised that you're missing it, Dan, is that it's not about us. It's about the money. The fact of the matter is, is that somewhere along the lines, social media came into play. And even with YouTube, you have the ability to monetize your product. People look at whatever it takes to monetize those products, you know, their product, and they prioritize that, and that dictates what they do. If you are on social media, and guess what? You don't have to go to college and you don't have to take 18 credit semester hours like I did each semester. And you don't have to get a bachelor's degree. And all you got to do is go on YouTube, talk smack, find a way to build subscribers and viewers per episode and monetize [00:37:00] your brand, and you get to bypass all of that stuff. And there's an industry that's been put in place that allows you to do that. And you've elected to do that just to get paid. How the hell is that Skip Bayless and Stephen A's fault? Or Dan Le Batard for that matter. Or anybody else. They created those platforms. It's allowed to be monetized. People see that that has the potential to pay you more than a $75,000-$90,000 salary working in newspapers. Everybody don't have space for you to do talk radio, or a television show. So you figured out a way to do this, rather than punch a clock, work a nine to five in corporate America, at whatever job you're doing. And that's basically been more beneficial monetarily to you. How is that Skip Bayless, Dan Le Batard, Stephen A, Wilbon, Kornheiser, or anybody else?

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Well, I don't think entirely, right?, that this category that [00:38:00] I'm talking about is something that I fit in just because you and I have had a long relationship. I don't think we've ever had an argument on or off the air. Like, the argument is not something that I pursue. I'm not saying it's not good for television. I'm not saying that. I just know that the show that you did with Skip Bayless was one kind of show. And then the one you did with Max was a different kind of show, at least in part. And you've said publicly that you didn't like how Max wasn't interested, as interested in the argument, in the sparks, as you were.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: What I'm saying to you is this: if people want to watch Dan Le Batard and they've come to know Dan Le Batard, they have an expectation of what they're getting when they click on the Dan Le Batard. And if you want to stay in business, you have to give the audience to some degree what they expect. Long before First Take was ever number one, [00:39:00] PTI was. PTI with Mike Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser had been number one for 20 years. First Take has been number one in the mornings for 11. Nine years before we ever came along, nine, 10 years before we ever came along, they were doing it.

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: So, I should blame them. I should blame.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: No, no. No, no. What I'm saying is no one said it about them. No one said it about Around the Horn, which was there years before we arrived. No one said it about Jim Rome or what he's doing, and you know how great Jim Rome has been. The list goes on and on. Mike and the Mad Dog.

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Oh, but...

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Mad Dog's screaming, Mad Dog been screaming since 1987.

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: Oh, but you mutated it though. It's fair to say that you turned up the volume on all of it, that there are more flames around what you guys are doing.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: You're gonna sit up there with a straight face, Dan Le Batard and say, I turned up the volume on Mad Dog Russo.

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: No.

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Are you, have you lost your mind

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: On the argument...

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Are you crazy?

DAN LE BATARD - HOST, LE BATARD SHOW: On Wilbon and Kornheiser, you guys turned up the volume, uh, you guys...

STEPHEN A. SMITH: Okay. Okay. What [00:40:00] I'm saying is, is that I just named you a plethora of shows that existed before we ever came along. That's what I'm saying. We didn't create it. We saw what was there and we maximized it to the best of our ability. Just like you do. You'll go into what you don't like or whatever and I respect that. You know that. But what I'm trying to say is that you ain't no innocent birdie in all of this.

You've attacked many people over the years. Now, you might have had a platform where you're joined with dudes and y'all are not a debate show, so you're not debating somebody, but you've gotten into debates on your own show with people. You've gotten into arguments on your own show with people. I don't know if that former executive for the Florida Marlins will ever be in business again after the way you excoriated him because you were upset at the assets that he traded away.

You have been holding people accountable for decades. And because you don't have [00:41:00] somebody to volley back off, you know, volley off back and forth with, oh, you innocent? You're not. You're a part of it, too, and I'm saying it's not a bad thing. It's a great thing, because your intellect, your perspectives, and everything in between are very fresh, they're informed, they're not ignorant, they're not devoid of facts, the fact of the matter is, you bring a fresh perspective, and there's a lot of people out there that want to be Dan Le Batard.

So why are you tripping? You're right here with the rest of us!

Report Finds That Sports Owners Use Their Teams To Avoid Millions In Taxes- MSNBC Reports - Air Date 7-14-21

STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: We're learning more about the money behind the scenes, off the court, after a bombshell report from ProPublica detailed how mega rich sports team owners use their teams to avoid paying taxes.

Take Steve Ballmer, for example. He's the billionaire owner of the LA Clippers. According to this report, he only paid 12 percent in federal income tax in 2018. That is a lower rate than players like [00:42:00] LeBron James, who plays at the Staples Center, and more shockingly, a lower rate than the typical food worker at the Staples Center. But here's the real scandal. Don't be mad at Ballmer. Look to your lawmakers. All of this is totally legal.

Let's dig deeper and bring in one of the reporters who broke this story, ProPublica investigative reporter Robert Federucci. Robert, our tax code allows sports team owners to take deductions on team assets, like their cars, that depreciate in value. Uh, you don't get to deduct your car. Walk me through how this works.

ROBERT FATURECHI: Yeah. So, I mean, the original idea, right, is if you have a widget factory, you purchase a widget-making business, over time, the assets that make up that business—so, the widget conveyor belt, the widget maker—are going to break down and you're going to have to replace them. They lose their value. [00:43:00] So, for sports teams though, the assets are media deals and player contracts and franchise rights. These are assets that sort of automatically regenerate. And not only do they not lose value, they typically rise in value. But nonetheless, owners are able to write them off and they're able to write off almost the entire purchase price of the team.

STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: They rise in value a lot. So, how much money is the government losing by allowing these write offs to exist? Why on earth are they letting all this happen?

ROBERT FATURECHI: Sure. So, take Steve Ballmer, for example. We found that during a recent five year span, he reported $700 million in losses from the Clippers. What that means is that he was able to pay about $140 million less in taxes. That number is inevitably only going to grow and probably grow [00:44:00] dramatically. What this tax treatment does for owners, essentially, it allows them, if they're profitable, it allows them to tell the IRS they're actually losing money, and if they happen to actually be losing money, they can tell the IRS they're losing vastly more money, and that money, you know, those losses cancel out profits from other ventures, and they don't have to pay taxes on them.

STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: Okay, this is completely insane because we're sitting here looking at an infrastructure deal and how we're going to pay for it and talking about taxing rich Americans, families whose household makes 400 grand or more. Four hundred grand, these team owners blow their nose with 400 grand and they are not paying taxes. Legally. Are there any lawmakers pushing to close these loopholes? And if so, how do we do it?

ROBERT FATURECHI: Sure. So, I mean, one type of response we got from owners was, Look, if you take away this amortization benefit, the entire American [00:45:00] economy is going to break down. But in reality, not too long ago, sports teams were not able to take these kinds of write offs. The IRS would insist that the assets that they were writing off actually had, you know, real lifespans and were actually losing value. It wasn't until 2004 that Congress completely threw their hands up and allowed all types of assets to be written off in this way. So, you know, it didn't always work this way. And, you know, like you said, it's in the hands of Congress and the president to change it.

STEPHANIE RUHLE - HOST, MSNBC REPORTS: Okay, you heard it here first. The entire American economy will not collapse if this is changed. People who defend this say that owners do have to repay the taxes,, if and when they sell the team, but that's like getting a massive interest free loan from the government. And this is how super rich people operate—I'm just going to borrow and borrow and borrow—when regular people out there would never be able to get a loan like that from the [00:46:00] government.

ROBERT FATURECHI: Sure. And not just that. I mean, a lot of owners will die while holding their team. And if that happens and you pass your stake onto an heir, the heir never has to repay those taxes that you save. That's just a loss for the American government.

The Sports Stadium Scam - Robert Reich - Air Date 2-10-23

Robert Reich: Billionaires have found one more way to funnel our tax dollars into their bank accounts, and if we don't play ball, they'll take our favorite teams away. Ever notice how there never seems to be enough money to build public infrastructure like mass transit lines and better schools? And yet, when a multi-billion dollar sports team demands a new stadium, our local governments are happy to oblige.

A good example of this billionaire boondoggle is the host of the 2023 Super Bowl State Farm Stadium. That's where the Arizona Cardinals have played since 2006. It was built after billionaire team owner Michael Bidwell and his family spent years hinting that they would [00:47:00] move the Cards out of Arizona if the team didn't get a new stadium. Their blitz eventually worked, with Arizona taxpayers and the city of Glendale paying over two thirds of the $455 million construction tab. State Farm Stadium is not unique. It's part of a well established playbook. Here's how stadiums stick the public with the bill.

Step number one— "Billionaire buys a sports team." Just about every NFL franchise owner has a net worth of over a billion dollars—except for the Green Bay Packers, who are publicly-owned by half a million "Cheeseheads." The same goes for many franchise owners in other sports. Their fortunes don't just help them buy teams, but also gives them clout, which they cash in when they want to get a great deal on new digs for their team.

Step number two— "Billionaire pressures local government." Since 1990, franchises in [00:48:00] major North American sports leagues have intercepted upwards of $30 billion worth of taxpayer funds from state and local governments to build stadiums. And the funding itself is just the beginning of these sweetheart deals.

Sports teams often get big property tax breaks and reimbursements on operating expenses, like utilities and security on game days. Most deals also let the owners keep the revenue from naming rights, luxury box seats, and concessions—like the Atlanta Braves' $150 hamburger! Even worse, these deals often put taxpayers on the hook for stadium maintenance and repairs.

We taxpayers are essentially paying for the homes of our favorite sports teams, but we don't really own those homes. We don't get to rent them out. And we still have to buy expensive tickets to visit them. Whenever these billionaire owners try to sell us on a shiny new stadium, they claim it will spur economic growth, from which [00:49:00] we all benefit, but numerous studies have shown that this is false.

As a University of Chicago economist aptly put it, if you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark. But what makes sports teams special is they're one of the few realms of collective identity we have left.

Billionaires prey on the love that millions of fans have for their favorite teams. This brings us to the final step in the playbook— "Threaten to move the team." Obscenely rich owners threaten to, or actually do, rip teams out of their communities if they don't get the subsidies they demand. Just look at the Seattle Supersonics.

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz owned the NBA franchise, but failed to secure public funding to build a new stadium. So the coffee magnate sold the team to another wealthy businessman who moved it to Oklahoma. Now [00:50:00] that'll leave a bitter taste in your mouth. The most egregious part of how the system currently works is that every dollar we spend building stadiums is a dollar we aren't using for mass transit, hospitals, housing, or schools.

We're underfunding public necessities in order to funnel money to billionaires for something they could feasibly afford. So instead of spending billions on extravagant stadiums, we should be investing taxpayer money in things that improve the lives of everyone. Not just the bottom lines of profitable sports teams and their owners.

Because when it comes to stadium deals, the only winners are billionaires.

The gambling problem in sports - The Current - Air Date 4-3-24

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: Walk us through the basics of this—who is Jontay Porter and what is he accused of?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: So Jontay Porter is one of the backup centers for the Toronto Raptors. He's on a G League contract, which is a two way deal where he plays sometimes for the Toronto Raptors, sometimes for their minor league team in Mississauga, [00:51:00] Ontario—the Raptors 905—and what he is accused of doing is purposely exiting games early to have an effect on proposition bets. And I'm going to define proposition bets for you, Matt. Yes, please. For your listeners, because it's important. It's important to this discussion. A proposition bet, commonly known as a "prop bet," is a kind of bet that isn't on the outcome—the result of the game.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: It's not about the win or the loss.

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: It's not about the win or the loss. It's about a player's performance. Famously during the Super Bowl, people will bet on what color Gatorade is going to be poured over the winning coach. That's a prop bet. It has no bearing on the outcome of the game in Jontay Porter's case they will have put together parlays for online book makers where it's how many points will he have in the game? How many rebounds, how many assists? Jontay Porter, in two games left early, meaning that anyone who bet the under [00:52:00] on him to get a certain number of points, a certain number of rebounds, a certain number of assists—if they picked the under, they won lots of money.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: I was reading about this, and they were saying that in some cases, some of these bets were five figures.

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Yes.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: They were placed on him. He left one of those games just four minutes in, saying that he had an eye injury that was re-aggravated or something like that, and there's a lot of money that's at stake here.

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Yes. And the money is an important thing. So if you place a bet online on a player prop bet, like the kind of bet we're discussing, most bookies only allow you to place a bet of a $1,000 to $2,000—it depends on the bookie. These are bets of $10,000, $20,000—which is why they got flagged as suspicious because it was so much and, with all due respect to Jontay Porter—

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: He's a fringe player.

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: He's a fringe player. And frankly, he was only getting the opportunity to play because starting Raptor Center, Jakob Poeltl is injured—he has a torn ligament in his [00:53:00] hand. So, Jontay Porter was getting more playing time that he wasn't able to take advantage of because he was leaving the games early.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: Who— I mean, I'd said that some of the suspicion here is that perhaps he was involved in this, aside from being on the court, that he may have had other involvement.

Who is being suspected of placing these bets?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: That's part that's not really disclosed yet. It's the MBA that's investigating this case and they haven't given a lot of information. When I reached out to them and other investigating bodies about this investigation—if it's even happening—the reply is, "We're looking into it."

They offered no other details, including who placed those bets. It's just that ESPN report that says several different parties were placing bets of $10-20,000 on Jontay Porter leaving games early.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: Is the suspicion that he could have placed bets on himself?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Allegedly, I mean it if he's not placing them himself Then the suspicion would be that he is working in party [00:54:00] with people who knew that he would leave the game early.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: And why would he do such a thing? Is this just about cash money? Like, do you make lot of money in these bets?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: In these situations that would be the case. Yeah

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: We heard his brother there. Have the Raptors said anything about this? Has Jontay Porter said anything about this?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Jontay Porter has not been made available and although, Raptors head coach Darko Rijakovic has made comments and, the team officially has no comment and, we asked players about it, they don't know anything.

Darko Rayakovic was asked specifically, "Did you think it was weird when Jontay pulled himself out of the game twice?" He said, well, of course I trust my players. Like, if my player tells me he's sick, I'm going to listen. Cause why wouldn't you, right?

And the other players on the team also said we don't know anything. This is upsetting, but we know, they all said, we know as much as you do. Like they learned as we did as news broke.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: We introduced this by saying that there were a couple of different things unfolding. [00:55:00] One is this issue of Jontay Porter and the NBA. The other one is the baseball superstar caught up in a different gambling scandal. Just briefly walk me through that. What do we know about what may have happened there?

RICHARD DEITSCH: Yeah, so there's some conflicting reporting when it comes to Shohei Ohtani—who, if you want to think about it in a modern context is your modern equivalent of Babe Ruth— and what Shohei Ohtani is saying is that his longtime interpreter, but "intrepreter" is really probably not even a fair description, it's his longtime very, very close compatriot and friend— had a gambling problem. And ultimately, because, allegedly, the friend had access to Shohei's funding, was able to pay off significant debts— close to five million dollars—using Shohei Ohtani's money to pay off these debts. Where it gets a little interesting and suspicious, if that's the right word, is that the story [00:56:00] had changed.

Initially, the story, which the interpreter told to ESPN in a 90 minute interview, was that Shohei Otani had paid off this problematic gamblers' debts because he cared about his friend and wanted to help him out. The framework of all this is that we're not necessarily dealing with bets that you make in legal gambling entities in the United States.

This was done through an illegal bookmaker. So Major League Baseball, just like the NBA, has said they're investigating this. Looks like the U. S. Attorneys are investigating the bookmaker in California, and we'll see what happens. The cynic would say that the investigation may be a little bit like Casablanca because I'm not sure how much baseball would like Shohei Ohtani to be under the microscope.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: People have been betting on sports since sports have been played, probably. [00:57:00] How different is this now? How big is the sports betting industry right now, Richard?

RICHARD DEITSCH: It's massive. People who live in Ontario obviously can get a little sense of it because it's very, very hard to watch any program on SportsNet or TSN, depending on the medium, without being inundated with gambling ads.

Just think of the population in the United States compared to Canada—it's 10x. So that's how much more you'd be inundated in the United States. I think, at this current juncture, there's 38 states where sports gambling is legal in the United States. There's still some big ones out there that are expected to become legal. So, you really can't, essentially—if you are a sports fan, I would say even a casual sports fan in the United States, you really cannot escape the sports gambling element. It's essentially everywhere. And I would also say, just to be fair, as people who work in the media, there's almost no sports entity that, that has some kind of [00:58:00] content or media play that doesn't have some kind of affiliation with a gambling network.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: John, you were nodding along as Richard was saying that. I mean, ESPN has a sports betting analysis segment, HockeyNet in Canada, other sports as well. How entwined now is this with pro sports?

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: There's official sponsors who are bettors.

After the Jontay Porter news broke, we spoke to veteran forward Garrett Temple, who in addition to being one of the veterans in the Toronto Raptors locker room, he's also a vice president of the National Basketball Players Association—their union—and we asked him about it and he said, yeah, it's kind of awkward we're not allowed to bet on basketball. And that's the NBA rule. They can't bet on the NBA, or the WNBA, or the G League, or any associated basketball product. But we have official sponsors, like DraftKings and FanDuel. You see it in the arenas. The Toronto Blue Jays have it.

MATT GALLOWAY - HOST, THE CURRENT: These are these legalized entities here.

JOHN CHIDLEY-HILL: Yeah, these are legalized entities in Ontario, and they are in business, literally "in business," with [00:59:00] Major League Sports.

Note from the Editor on the value of sports to building community

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with the University of Iowa in two parts, discussing the new pay-for-play rules. Same with the PBS NewsHour. Brett Kollmann looked at the changing landscape of sports journalism. LeBatardShow hosted a debate about the economic drive towards sensationalism. MSNBC Reports discussed sports owners using their team to avoid taxes. Robert Reich explained the scam of publicly-funded stadiums and The Current looked at the problems of sports gambling. And that's just the top takes; there's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section.

But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process. To support our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support--there's a link in the show notes; through our [01:00:00] Patreon page if you prefer; or from right inside the Apple Podcast app.

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

Now, before we continue onto the Deeper Dives after the show, I have just a few thoughts.

I occasionally find it sort of amusing to repeat the fact that I paid quite a lot of attention to sports up until 1997 or so. I was pretty deep into it, mostly watching baseball, football, and hockey. Then at the wise old age of 13 or so, I took stock of my sports-watching time commitments and realized I was basically wasting my finite time here on earth watching sports. So I stopped, cold turkey, and never went back.

And then it took another 25 years or so for me to soften my stance on the wastefulness and unimportance of watching professional sports.

Now I see it as a worthwhile lens through which to [01:01:00] observe society, even if I don't follow teams closely or watch the games myself. And I also have a better impression of those who watch sports, particularly as an excuse to come together, spend time with friends and family, share special moments, make memories, that kind of thing.

In fact, just today, I realized that when I was quite young, most of my sports watching would have been done with my older brother. But by the time I was 13, he'd moved out of the house. So when I decided that watching sports was a waste of time, what I really may have been feeling was that watching sports alone was a waste of time. And I pretty much still agree with that.

But in terms of using sports as a window into the nature of culture and society, sports documentaries are actually a great place to start. I've definitely watched more sports documentaries in the last two years than I've watched sports games in the past decade. And I found them very insightful often [01:02:00] or revelatory, depending on what you're trying to get out of it sometimes.

With all that said, it's still the fact that producer Deon here at the show is a sports fan, that I am reminded to take time now and again to focus on the intersection of sports and politics. It's Deon who reminds me that sports are important because they're a microcosm of the rest of society.

For instance, as maybe a parallel to the influence of money in politics and how that distorts what politicians do and what they vote for and what laws were able to pass, and how we get a distorted perception of ourselves as to what our country believes in. I think like, gun safety laws that we cannot get passed. And we think, well, I guess the country doesn't believe in it. But no, that's the influence of money.

So think of that compared to the sports system being overly consumed by capitalism and gambling. It will distort the game out of recognition. It will be hard to say whether [01:03:00] what we're looking at is a reflection of reality at all. Or if it ended up with a simulated version of sports to watch where the influence of the betting system throws everything off. And if that is the case, then what are we all even doing here, right? Deon made this point to me, to which I responded, speaking of the concern over reality just being a simulation, aren't we having that same problem with the entire universe as a whole? He said, Sports really is a microcosm. Sort of makes you think.

DEEPER DIVE A: PAY FOR PLAY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue with deeper dives on four topics. Next up, "Pay for play." Deeper Dive Section B: "Stadiums, Our Great Folly" and—by the way—I know it's a deep cut, but one of the rarely used secondary definitions of the word "folly" is, "A costly ornamental building with no practical purpose built in a large garden or park," which doesn't exactly describe stadiums, but [01:04:00] comes a lot closer than it should.

So I just want to make sure that you enjoyed that double meaning wordplay along with me. Anyway, that's section B. Deeper Dive Section C: "Sports Journalism" and Section D: "Sports Gambling."

Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger: What NCAA Suit Settlement Means for Paying Players - The Rich Eisen Show - Air Date 5-23-24

KIRK MORRISON - HOST, THE RICH EISEN SHOW: These antitrust lawsuits that are being, that are going on right now, I'm seeing conferences or agreeing to the payout, but where's the money go? Is it going to the players or going back to the institutions? What, what does this pay out from these antitrust lawsuits that have been going on? I'm trying to keep up Ross and I'm like, how does it, what does this involve the players or no?

ROSS DELLENGER: Yeah, it definitely involves the players and it is complicated. You know, the, the settlement and it should be finalized by the end of the week, by, by Friday, uh, I will, I'll show you a portion of it should be finalized at least the NCAA in the power five conferences, which are the six defendants. in the case, they will have authorized the settlement by Friday.

It's got a long way before it's actually finalized. But the settlement right now, according to documents of [01:05:00] sources who are knowledgeable about it, will include kind of three parts. So The first part is the back damages to athletes owed NIL payments before NIL was implemented. There are four years before NIL, four years before athletes could earn compensation from their NIL.

Those athletes around 12, 15, 000 of them is the estimate will get, will be distributed, um, 2. 8 billion. That's the, that's the back damage and settlement to those athletes. So that's the first. Part of the settlement. The second part of the settlement is kind of the forward thinking part where, um, schools will be permitted, not required, but permitted to share revenue with athletes.

Um, we don't know exactly the specific amount, but it will probably be around 20 to 21, 22 million dollars. a year per school can can share with [01:06:00] athletes. It's kind of like there's a salary cap that will be put on that of around 2122 million. But that will fluctuate as the settlement, which is 10 years in length, goes on.

So that's the second part. And the third part, it's kind of a re Structured NCAA, um, where power conferences will have more control. Uh, we'll be able to create their own rules and probably enforce them. There'll be probably be a new enforcement arm. There'll be some changes to some other kind of granular things, scholarship limits, roster, things like that.

KIRK MORRISON - HOST, THE RICH EISEN SHOW: So we know that the money's going to be coming in Ross, is that what you're saying with all of these expansion of. Conferences. I saw that yesterday, though, that the college football playoff will now expand, um, its viewership opportunities, not just from ESPN, but now TNT will now hold, um, a first round matchup, I believe to first round matchups in the first couple of years, and then they'll have quarterfinals and we'll see where that [01:07:00] goes along.

But it just shows you now that college football has expanded viewership opportunities. That's more money. And now this money can now go into the pockets of the student athletes. But if I'm a volleyball player or water polo or soccer, am I entitled to what the football revenue brings in from these TV contracts?

Or is this going to be something that the NCAA is still trying to figure out how to disperse these collective television contracts coming into each university?

ROSS DELLENGER: That is, that is a key issue is how you distribute, you know, if you hit the cap, if a school hits the cap around 20, say this around number 20 million, because of the federal title nine law, which requires higher education in education institutions to share, to offer equal opportunity to men and women.

Do you have to split? down the middle. That 20 million is 10 million go to football and men's basketball, say, and then 10 million [01:08:00] go get spread out to women athletes. A lot of These women's sports, obviously, um, in the grand scheme of things, right? Um, call schools, millions of dollars. They, they lose, they lose money.

Most of this money, as you mentioned is coming from, is generated from TV contracts in ticket sales around, around football, uh, in, in a little bit of men's basketball. So how do you do that? Do you, do you follow. The title nine law, are you required to follow the title nine law and do you split the payments or is there a way around this where you can give more of the, the money to the players who sport generated, which would be football and men's basketball.

It is a key question in all of this. Uh, and so is these booster collectives. Do they continue outside of the university offering athletes money? And does that money Count toward the cap. I don't think it will. Um, so there's a way to potentially for schools to circumvent the cap by going outside with their [01:09:00] booster collective.

And there's a way toe potentially circumvent title nine by either by either not doing it or going outside as well. So a lot of questions still on the disbursement of the money to athletes.

“Amateurism Is Dead” - ESPN’s Jay Bilas on the Future of NCAA Sports - The Rich Eisen Show - Air Date 5-29-24

RICH EISEN - HOST, THE RICH EISEN SHOW: With the court cases and a settlement, it appears, between the NCAA and, um, I guess the Jeffrey Kessler led class, um, of players. I imagine, um, I might be botching it, but what is happening here and what's your prediction as to what happens next, if you don't mind?

JAY BILAS: Well, a lot's going to depend on what Judge Claudia Wilkin does, uh, the, the federal court judge out in California.

So she has to approve this settlement. The settlement's basically in two parts. One of them backward looking damages, uh, for the harm that was caused by players due to the antitrust violations of the NCAA. And that's in the neighborhood of 2. 8 billion payable over 10 years. The [01:10:00] other is revenue sharing.

That's the forward looking piece of this. And my understanding after reading what I've read is that players are going to be eligible to receive up to 22 percent of revenues going forward. That's a cap. And my question for the court when the settlement is presented is what other cap is there? Whom else is subject to a wage cap other than players?

Because coaches are gonna be able to be paid as much as a school wants to pay 'em. Uh, and I don't, I don't think players should be capped, absent some sort of collective bargaining agreement where the players agree to it. To me it's not enough. And what what's clear to me is the NCAA through this settlement is gonna try to take this to Congress and say, here's a framework that we've agreed to with, uh, with the, the plaintiff's lawyers and the plaintiffs in the class.

We want you to put this into law so that they can cap [01:11:00] all this at 22 percent and that and that doesn't even mean that they have to pay anything to players if they don't want to. I think the market will dictate they have to, but a 22 percent cap with the way revenues have exploded are continuing to go up in college sports to me doesn't sit well with me.

We'll see if it sits well with the, uh, with the players and what their objections. Uh, to this settlement and objections going forward. But one thing we know for sure, rich amateurism is dead. I think it was dead a long time ago, but they pulled the plug. Now they're going to be the players are going to be paid directly by their universities now, which was a long time coming.

And that hopefully will mean contracts for the players and they can put buyouts in them. So the schools feel like they have some more protections. But amateurism is now dead. It's, it's purely professional sports. And the only thing that differs from the NBA or the NFL is, uh, is they, the players have to be enrolled in school.

That's it.

Pay for Play: Should College Athletes be Considered University Employees? Part 3 - University of Iowa - Air Date 3-28-24

ALICIA JESSOP: I'm a big believer in the power of education. I'm a first generation college student. My father, who experienced [01:12:00] homelessness as a child, preached to me that education was my way out. I bought the sermon. I've been privileged with an incredible life and career thanks to my undergraduate and legal educations.

I also understand the value of a college scholarship. My father spent 40 years working on a factory line in the Coors Brewing Company. He and my mother provided me with a great life and home, but they didn't have the cash to finance my legal education. I was 38 years old when the 100, 000 I borrowed to pay for that education was finally paid off.

I say that to make apparent that I don't tread lightly when I say that most revenue producing college sport athletes are employees. Let me be clear. I do not believe that every college athlete is an employee. Rather, I believe that the two regional NLRB offices in the Northwestern and Dartmouth cases and the head NLRB in the Northwestern case got it right when they said that the right to control test is the correct test to apply to assess whether a college athlete is an [01:13:00] employee.

The right to control test looks at the level of control an employer exerts over how a worker does their job. By evaluating a set of factors, the greater the level of control exerted across those factors, the more likely it is that a worker is an employee who can access the benefits of the National Labor Relations Act.

I'm not gonna go through the factors, because that would be kind of boring. Not to say it's gonna be boring if someone else does it, but I'm going to give you some examples of control that I've seen in my experience as a journalist, as a lawyer, as a professor. Here's where I've seen control. It's not seeing the men's basketball players in my class at the university of Miami for close to a month during the school year, when they went on to win the NIT.

It's not because they were ditching those young men were always in class. They weren't in my class that month because the university kept them out on a business trip and kept them in New [01:14:00] York or the Northeast instead of bringing them home to go to school. It's a college football player falling asleep in the front row of my class because the television network scheduled a midweek game in a different state and he didn't get home until 4 a.

m. It's the quarterback in my class staying afterward to ask me if I know what the symptoms of a concussion are. When I tell him, no, I'm a lawyer, not a doctor, and ask why he's asking, he says, did you see what happened to me? No, I say, He says, my molar got knocked out in the game and coach told me to stop being a P word and go back and play.

Think about your molar getting knocked out. The amount of force that has to come across your head for a molar to fall out, and then not to be held out for one play seems a little problematic to me. It's the student I met who I mentioned earlier who had the reading skills of probably a 6th grader, but made it into two top 50 universities because he had NFL level talent.

I love it. [01:15:00] It's a student not being able to pick a science major because it conflicts with their practice schedule It's me spending my free time helping young men who played college sports around this nation find jobs after their playing career ends Because as one who competed at the university my missouri told me Nobody ever told him what he was capable of other than football.

And the football program demanded so much of their time that they didn't gain internship experience or meaningful networks during their college experience.

Coming back to where I started, I don't think the head governing body for college sports wanted to be where we are today. Where very valid arguments exist for the employee status of college athletes. Some may say that their television plan was an attempt to hold monopoly power, but I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I think they wanted to preserve the amateur nature of college sports and keep greed out of the game. But the Supreme Court's decision in 84 open Pandora's box and the reality of [01:16:00] college sports today is that is it is a 25 billion annual generating enterprise whose power and control is largely held by media companies and the conferences benefiting grandly from those media deals.

These media companies call all the shots. They schedule the games. They drive the bargaining power at the negotiation table to the point where West Coast schools leave historic conferences to join East Coast schools, increasing both the travel footprint and missed class time for their college athletes and the revenues that said schools generate.

D1 revenue producing college athletics is not an extracurricular. It is big business. We see this in that the expenditure for college coaches salaries and facilities often topples those of their professional counterparts. We know it's a big business because schools that say they don't have money to pay college athletes are spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists, hundreds of millions of dollars on legal fees [01:17:00] and possibly billions of dollars in legal damages to preserve the status quo.

As I mentioned at the outset, repeated, repeated defeat in the court of law calls for a scapegoat. Who got us to where we are today? I'll leave that for you to consider. But as sport tells us, repeated loss also calls for a new game plan. And if the NCAA wants to put an end to the litany of legal challenges it faces, it needs to turn course.

Turning course requires more than accepting that college athletes can benefit from the right of publicity that is afforded to every American. College athletes didn't gain some new right. Their right was finally restored to them through NIL. It requires coming into compliance with the law in full. And such necessitates understanding when and how the right of control test indicates that some Namely division one revenue producing sport college athletes are employees of their respective universities I know what some of you are thinking right now Here's some questions that [01:18:00] might be rolling through your head But where is the money going to come from to pay these athletes too?

Is this the end of women's and olympic sports? You What are the unintended consequences of this legal status? I've already talked a lot, so I'm not going to address those in full, but I'm happy to more. But I'll give you a few thoughts on each. I tell my students to question everything, so I hope that you'll do the same.

Don't buy that there is no money in the system. Likely this will require the reallocation of funds. Top college coaches will see pay reductions. Strength trainers will no longer earn $1 million per year. The stadium and facility spending boom will slow. Beyond that, a review of Power 5 Conference Schools 990 Forums, one of my current favorite activities, shows that there's cash in the coffers.

We were told that NIL would mean the death of women's and Olympic sports. That threat has not become reality. Instead, we are living in a time where thanks to an [01:19:00] incredible athlete from your own university, women's college basketball is seeing unprecedented success. We see from the viewership and ticket sales numbers for women's college basketball this season that opening up a market can produce greater demand for a product.

Olympic athletes now have longer windows also to financially benefit from their incredible gifts. What though of the unintended consequences? First we must recognize that the potential horror stories thrown around by those against recognizing the employee status of d1 Revenue producing sport college athletes are already true.

These things are already happening on college campuses People warn that if college athletes are recognized as employees, they would be quote fired for poor for poor poor performance Tell me what is different between that scenario and a coach, maybe one of the greatest coaches in college football history, routinely gray shirting college athletes to build winning teams.

[01:20:00] People today sport, people today say sport is the wild, wild West. My maternal grandfather was a cowboy and I'm not sure he would agree with that analogy, but the system is currently being shaken by the slow breakdown of the cartel with new additions like NIL and the transfer portal. The NCAA continues unsuccessfully and to the tune of millions of dollars in lobbying fees trying to persuade congress to grant it Antitrust immunity and deem college athletes to not be employees The likelihood of congress passing such bills is as good as caitlyn clark not being the number one overall wmba draft pick.

DEEPER DIVE B: STADIUMS, OUR GREAT FOLLY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering deeper dive section B: stadiums are great folly.

Why Are Taxpayers Paying For Stadiums? - Long Story Short - The Daily Show - Air Date 10-27-23

DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Right now, we're in a sports stadium building boom, and just about every one of them is funded by taxpayers. So how are billionaire team owners able to get these sweetheart deals? Easy. When asking for taxpayer subsidies, Teams come to a community like a dude asking for an open marriage. [01:21:00] Nah, girl, it's not just good for me, it's good for you, too!

Now, they say these stadiums will spread economic growth throughout the community.

These owners also claim these stadiums will increase property values. Which is one of the biggest lies in the world. What kind of psycho is like, Yeah, I want 50, 000 drunk idiots pissing on my stoop every night. No way, bro. If any drunk idiot's gonna piss on my stoop, it's gonna be me. Next, they promise to donate money to the community or build affordable housing.

And if none of that works, uh, they threaten to move the team. And it usually works, because even though using taxpayer money in stadiums is usually unpopular, losing a team could end a politician's career. Like, for example, if Mayor Eric Adams lost to the Knicks, he would be deported. All the way back to his real home in New Jersey.

But the truth is, a lot of the time, those owners are bluffing, and we know that because they admit it. [01:22:00]

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: David Samson, the former president of the Marlins, largely credited with being a Pulling off the worst stadium deal for Miami Dade taxpayers. It's actually a pretty easy playbook. I get a lot of credit for doing the Marlins Park deal, but it really wasn't very difficult because Miami did not want to lose its baseball team and all we had to say is that we're ready to leave Miami if we don't get a deal done.

Let me ask you, were the Marlins going to leave Miami, David? Truly. Absolutely not.

DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: See? These guys are full of shit. They were never going to leave Miami, because no one ever leaves Miami. Like, even people who are just visiting don't leave Miami. Now the cousin who went to a bachelor party six months ago, he's still in a club partying with BBLs. So, the teams get their free subsidies, and now that they have their brand new stadium that boosts their value.

But don't worry. Because in return, the city gets hundreds of millions of dollars worth of jack shit.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Economists who study stadium subsidies say little or none of the money makes it back to taxpayers. One [01:23:00] economist estimated that the contribution of a professional baseball team is similar to that of a mid sized department store.

As a University of Chicago economist aptly put it, if you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark.

DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: Wait, that's an option? Yo, I wish they'd drop a giant bag of money in my neighborhood. Like, rest in peace to the person it lands on, but it'd be a payday for the rest of us. So the economic boost they promised doesn't pan out. And I know that personally, because I saw that in the Bronx. In exchange for that 20 acres of parkland, the Yankees promised to donate 40 million to affected areas.

But the media community has not seen a dime from the team. And more immediately, And more importantly, we haven't seen a World Series in like 20 years, though. Like, if you want to screw my community out of 40 million, fine. That's business. But me [01:24:00] not getting a ring, that's personal.

I mean, at the very least, these teams could toss out some more shirts during games. Like, how do you have 25, 000 fans in an arena and only toss out ten T shirts? And they're all size XL? Do mediums cost more? And also, could we please get a T shirt cannon that can hit the 300s? What the f? Up top in the row!

Up top! And the thing that really gets me heated These stadiums aren't even that old. Stadiums for the Braves and the Rangers last like 20 years before they built new ones. You can't be replacing a stadium that Leonardo DiCaprio would still hit.

I'm not gonna be in Titanic 2. Sorry. But you know what the worst part is? How much this sucks for the fans. Because suddenly the team they've been rooting for their whole lives starts extorting them for a fortune. And all they can do about it is to go to the stadium, And cuts out the owner, which is what they did in Oakland.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Check this out. [01:25:00] A's fans packing the Oakland Coliseum for the first time in what seems like forever to send a blunt message to the Athletics top brass. A season best crowd of nearly 28, 000 A's fans came out to the Coliseum for what was deemed a reverse boycott, which encouraged owner John Fisher to sell the team so it can remain in Oakland.

instead of moving to Las Vegas. Tonight, you should call us cheers. South Shore sucks! South Shore sucks! Fisher, get the hell out of here. 30, 000 people are going to show up tonight to show John Fisher that he sucks. That's how you do it. Listen, I'm an East Coast boy, but Oakland, paying

DESUS NICE - HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: 20 to cuss out a man you've never met is big New York energy. Respect.

Nick Wright won’t be a Chiefs fan if they move to Kansas - What's Wright? With Nick Wright - Air Date 3-31-22

NICK WRIGHT - HOST, WHAT'S WRIGHT: The public funding of stadiums is one of the [01:26:00] most It's something that I promise you, history will not look upon fondly when people are like, oh, what was one of the reasons American infrastructure and public schooling all seem to fail?

And they're going to be like, well, there's money issues, a lot of things. And then they're going to be like, oh, well, that's funny because all these municipalities sure seem to find a billion dollars when they needed it to build a stadium that's going to be used a dozen times a year. With that said. There are certain cities in America that I think you can justify the public kicking in some dollars to the team and Buffalo might be one of them.

So here's, here's my general point. Take your top 15 cities in the country. All of them should come together, have a meeting of the mayors or the governors of the states, however you need to do it, and make a pact and all a nice little collusion against the leads. Guys. [01:27:00] None of us are ever paying a dime.

You know why? Because pro sports leagues want to be in New York. They want to be in LA. They want to be in Dallas. They want to be in Houston. They want to be in Miami. They want to be in DC. They want to be in San Francisco. Their threats to leave are hollow threats. We never need to pay a dollar. If we're a major American city for a team, the leagues want to be here.

The owners have the money. Let them pay. Now, a city such as Buffalo, you can make the argument that the difference between Buffalo and Schenectady is one thing, that they have pro sports, they have the Sabres and the Bills. And that I, you know, I've said for a long time growing up from Kansas City, what's the difference between Kansas City and Des Moines?

Well, aside from the history of Kansas City and the amazing barbecue and the jazz, all that, the real contemporary difference was. Kansas City had the Chiefs and the Royals and Des Moines didn't. So I [01:28:00] do understand why a small city might feel incentivized to make sure their team doesn't move. So I get why the bills are doing it right.

The Buffalo's doing it. It's the state of New York that's doing it. And I know these two headlines aren't exactly, uh, aligned, but around the same time, I found out the state of New York's going to kick in about 800 million for the Bill's stadium. I read in the New York times. Our new governor say there's about an 850 million New York state public school shortfall.

You got to piss me off to be totally honest. But I, if you're Buffalo, if you're green Bay, if you're a small city that is kind of just happy to have a team, I get why you might want to make sure the team never leaves. But big cities should never pay a dollar to these leagues. They get tricked by them.

They're never leaving. Pro sports leagues are never leaving New York. Or LA or the cities I mentioned, they want to be there, so don't [01:29:00] get tricked into it. Speaking of the Chiefs, looks like we're gonna talk about them for a moment.

DAMONZA BYRD: Speaking of stadiums. Yeah. Is it possible that the chiefs end up leaving Arrowhead?

NICK WRIGHT - HOST, WHAT'S WRIGHT: Okay, so listen, Arrowhead Stadium is loud and it's a fine stadium. It's not state of the art, but it's fine. It also is in the, it's in the middle of nowhere. It is 30 minutes from downtown Kansas City. The closest restaurant to Arrowhead or Kaufman is a Taco Bell. The closest hotel is a Drury Inn. Arrowhead's not ideal. It's not an ideal location. The reason the idea of the chiefs leaving is touches a tendon for me is there was a rumor. They might cross state lines into Kansas. The Kansas city chiefs, Our Kansas city, Missouri's team. And there is a big difference between being from Missouri and being from Kansas.

The audience may not care. The Kansas city and we'll get it. If people, if you're from [01:30:00] out, you're like, oh, I'm from Kansas City, and they're like, oh, you're from Kansas? No . I'm from Missouri. And the idea of the chiefs crossing the state line will, I'm not saying I won't be a fan.

This is what I'm going to say. This is what I will say. If the chiefs move to Kansas, my fandom ends when Patrick Mulholland. That's it. I'm just telling you when Patrick Mulholland retires, I'm out. If they move to Kansas.

Former A's Bruce Maxwell calls out Oakland A's owner John Fisher for Vegas move - Edge of Sports - Air Date 5-3-24

DAVE ZIRIN - HOST, EDGE OF SPORTS: I want to talk to you about the Oakland A's, their move to Sacramento, and then their subsequent move that's coming up in 2028 to Las Vegas.

You're the person I wanted to ask this. What, what, what was your impression when you played for the A's of Oakland? as a baseball town.

BRUCE MAXWELL: It was incredible. The environment. I'm a very, I'm a big history buff when it comes to baseball. Um, my dad's favorite team was the Oakland A's and my dad's from Indiana.

Um, it's just with that team, [01:31:00] it's history. You know, it's, it's one of the oldest organizations in baseball. The players that have come through there, the winning the environment, what they've done for the city of Oakland itself. It's really given the community. a staple in a, in a, in a sports team. And that's something that you cannot allow to leave.

You cannot allow that to, to move to another area because now you're turning Oakland into almost like a wasteland when it comes to sports. I know they, they lost the warriors, the Raiders moved this and the other, but I feel like. The Oakland A's have been more of a pillar of the community than either one of those teams.

So it's upsetting and it's, it's honestly, it's bothersome to see that being allowed to happen. It's like taking the Cubs out of Chicago.

It's like taking the Dodgers out of LA. Um, it can't happen. It can't happen. [01:32:00] So it's devastating to, to see, uh, their moves and the fact that it's just allowing, they're allowing it to happen, uh, because of greed and because of, uh, the lack of.

Uh, the lack of stature when it comes to the city of Oakland.

DAVE ZIRIN - HOST, EDGE OF SPORTS: Yeah, what does this say about John Fisher, the owner of the team? He inherited all the money from Gap Clothing. That's where his 3. 3 billion come from. That's his net worth. What does it say about John Fisher that he's so willing to remove the team from Oakland when he clearly has the financial means to keep them there as long as he wants to?

BRUCE MAXWELL: It just says that he's selfish. And it's about as clear as I can be with that, um, it's the fact that the fans in the city of Oakland have seen him gouge our prospects and our players over the years. And then the Oakland A's fans have still been loyal and stayed loyal while watching their very players be all stars and important [01:33:00] players for their teams.

Um, the fact that he has the financial means to move the team, but not the financial means to upgrade the stadium, to upgrade the locker rooms, the field itself, to put more money into the contracts of players, to keep fans coming in wanting to support the Oakland A's. The fans took a stand and, and I would too, in that situation, especially again, for such an historical team, these people in Oakland, man, they grow up and teach their kids the love of the Oakland A's.

Even to this day, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a culture up there. It's not just another team. And I think with John Fisher, he doesn't care at the end of the day. He doesn't care about the workers who've been working there for 40 years. He doesn't care about the kids and the grandparents and the great grandparents that have been coming to Oakland A's games that have had season tickets for 40 [01:34:00] years.

He doesn't care about that. He wants new and shiny things, but he could easily have made those shiny things. In Oakland, he just didn't want to be there and for him to be able to move the team without a batter of an eye. It's disappointing and it's upsetting for the people of Oakland, but also for a lot of us that I can't speak for everybody else, but it saddens me.

I played seven years with those that organization. And the whole time it was history. You have Ricky Henderson, Dave Stewart, Vita blue, all these guys coming into spring training, working with these, working with the kids. So in phase, right? All of that is because of the Oakland ace. It's not because, Oh, they're just big leaguers.

No, they, they spend a good chunk of their careers playing for this team, winning for this team. And it's part of their lives. So to see it be uprooted to a very, a new place for whatever the reason may be. It's, it's, [01:35:00] it's bothering me.

DAVE ZIRIN - HOST, EDGE OF SPORTS: You know, I'm really glad you mentioned the stadium workers, because as awful as it is to move the team, there have been some articles about how generations of people have worked for that team and Fisher's disregard for them is just another mark against him to me as somebody who cares about the sport.

I mean, clearly he does not.

BRUCE MAXWELL: He doesn't. And I went back, um, this off season. Um, I was, I was coaching with kids, uh, with a couple of my former teammates in Palo Alto. And when we, when I got there, I went to an A's game within about a week to go see my coaches and things. Uh, cause I, when I was there, the coaches are the same minus Bob Melvin, but they're the same.

And, um, I walked up in the players area and same security guards. They gave me a big old hug. They were like, great to see you. It's been forever. Mind you, I haven't been in the big leagues since 2018 and God, I don't remember their names, but a hundred percent. [01:36:00] They remember me and the people that men, men, the parking lot, the people that, that check you before you go into the locker room, uh, the people on the field, the grounds crew, I spent most of my time talking to all those people because Those are the people that make the difference in our days every day.

And so for him to be able to uproot that team and put all of those people out of a job, just willingly, it's, it's upsetting. And it's cruel at the end of the day, it's cruel.

DEEPER DIVE C: SPORTS JOURNALISM

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached a deeper dive section C: sports journalism.

Pat McAfee Gets Torn Apart by Famed Sports Writer - TYT Sports - Air Date 10-26-23

PAT MACAFEE: Andrew Marshawn is a rat.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: There's no doubt Pat McAfee's tenure with ESPN has been entertaining, yet simultaneously troubling. Famous sports writer Greg Doyle has a bone to pick with the sleeveless ex punter because of instances such as this.

AARON RODGERS: I'm 48 hours in, and I consulted with a now good friend of mine, Joe Rogan.

I'm thankful for [01:37:00] people like Joe stepping up and using their voice. And this If, if, like we learned, if science is Dr. Fauci, you're damn right I'm defiant.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: And this.

AARON RODGERS: Mr. Pfizer said he didn't think he'd be in a vax war with me. Didn't a back floor? Me? This ain't a war homie. This is just conversation. But if you want to have some sort of, uh, dual debate, have me on the podcast, I'm gonna take my man RFK, junior.

Okay. . Okay. As an independent. Hell yeah. Right? And he can have, you know, Tony Fauci or some other crat and we can have a conversation about this.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Okay. And this. Where he ripped Travis Kelsey Doyle, a longtime media member, sees through it and is called out Rogers McAfee and ESPN in his column.

AARON RODGERS: You know, I think there's some sentiment that there's some sort of moral victory out there that we hung with the, you know, with the Champs and.

And that, uh, you know, our defense played well, and, and, you know, [01:38:00] uh, Pat didn't have a crazy game, and, uh, you know, Mr. Fizer, we kind of shut him down a little bit, he didn't have, you know, his, like, crazy impact game. Obviously, he had, you know, some yards and stuff, but I felt like, for the most part, you know, we played really tough on defense, especially the last three quarters.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Because he can't stand seeing this. Here's what he wrote. Every Tuesday, Rogers emerges from his rat hole and looks around smugly, enjoying the smell of his own breath, and says something really, really stupid about vaccines. And because we live in this cult of fame, liking and believing and even electing people only because they're rich or famous, people believe Rogers so he's out there, every Tuesday, saying something that makes us less safe.

It's because As Awful Announcing put it, Rogers went from the thinking man's quarterback to an anti vax buffoon allotted time on McAfee's show to ramble about life saving medications with zero pushback whatsoever even if the information he was offering was at best misguided and at worst harmful, penned Sean Keeley.

[01:39:00] Doyle has worked in the Indianapolis market for decades at this point. Even doing radio shows with a former Colts player named Sean Keeley. Pat McAfee. They have somewhat of a history, one can say. Which makes his article even more of a must read. He'd write McAfee is allowing and enabling Rogers to spew misinformation.

He'd bring up McAfee being found to pay the quarterback more than a million dollars to appear on his show, and third, according to Doyle, McAfee doesn't believe Rogers for a minute. Doyle, it becomes quite evident, lays the blame on at McAfee's feet for all of this. Rogers was a four time MVP with the Packers, but his anti vax gibberish makes him a harmful member of the human race.

McAfee lets it happen, Doyle wrote. Rogers has done McAfee's career a huge service by appearing on his show. Pat was going to take off regardless because he's that good, but Rogers appearance put booster fuel into [01:40:00] the rocket ship. And not just that. Not to be misremembered, this was first taken on by a long time NFL media member.

Pat McAfee is getting a massive pass for allowing Aaron Rodgers to spread disinformation and lies that could lead to people dying. He tweeted, McAfee would reply, You're not picking and choosing what to report from my show in an attempt to mislead people, are you? That'd be a style of misinformation, right?

You were probably saving the world at the time, but how come you didn't cover this with a video of Charles Barkley?

AARON RODGERS: I've been taking monoclonal antibodies. Ivermectin, zinc, vitamin C and D, HCQ. And I feel pretty incredible.

PAT MACAFEE: Okay. So you said a lot there.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Doyle then ends his piece with this. Unlike Rogers and people of his ilk, people who think they're the smartest guy in the room.

McAfee is the smartest guy in the room. He also was born with a second serving of empathy. He's a good man with a good heart. Pat McAfee. He understands [01:41:00] vaccines are the only reason the war is over. The only reason the good guys won the biggest and most important questions Doyle poses. In his piece are these.

Why is ESPN allowing this? And why is Pat McAfee a willing accomplice?

Are Athletes a Threat to Sports Journalism? - Karen Hunter Show - Air Date 5-28-24

RODERICK MORROW: Do you find any difference in this, uh, approach that the players have where they're like considering themselves the new media, uh, As compared to, you know, the classic traditional media. Um, are you finding that there's a, a, a real separation or difference between their approach and, and, and the approach that at the networks?

CHRIS BROUSSARD: Oh yeah. Like, like Rob Parker really gets upset about it. Now he has a, uh, journalism, uh, masters from Columbia. Um, he teaches sports writing at USC. So he's really into it and he gets upset because On their podcast, the athletes generally don't push back on one another. So if you're doing a podcast and one [01:42:00] player says, yeah, I think Paul George is better than LeBron.

Now, in a lot of cases, I'm just throwing that out, but in a lot of cases, it might be, Oh, wow. Okay, cool. Whereas the natural pushback is hold up. What are you talking about? You know? And so Rob is constantly complaining about, you don't get the full story. You don't get the pushback. From the athletes. But I say that's true, but what I do like is that you get to see the athletes in their own space and their natural, like as writers, what I was trying to do when I interviewed an athlete, I always was trying to get them to be comfortable.

And to not give cliche quotes and just, okay, I'm speaking to the media. Let me have my guard up. I wanted them to just be their normal selves and then convey that to the audience or the readers. And you get that in the podcast, like with Kevin Garnett's with Paul [01:43:00] Pierce or what, you know, they're just being their natural selves.

They cussing, they talking like they would in the locker room. They're not worried about, you know, coming off a certain way for the media, but that tells you that shows you what they're really like. So I think there's a real value in that. So I like what they're doing. It is a little different from what we do, but.

You know, there's space for all of us. Do you feel that

RODERICK MORROW: animosity too? Cause like, I feel like the new media thing is also a little bit of animosity towards the old media where it's like, y'all ain't doing it right. We're, we're going to show you how to do it. And I'm, and I'm not gonna lie. I miss a little bit of the conflict because I do like the pushback.

I do think the media has a job to fact check and, uh, and, and to be there in the space to say, Hey, that thing you just said, you need to explain that a little bit more out. So I kind of missed that a little bit.

CHRIS BROUSSARD: Well, no, that's why I said you could listen to both because they're not journalists. They're in the media space now, but they're not journalists.

They're not doing [01:44:00] investigative reporting. They're not probing. They're just talking, which is cool. There's a space for that, but you still have to go to the real journalist if you want to get some pushback and another side of the story. And something like that. But, um, the, the thing is to athletes, they don't like being criticized, which is normal.

I mean, wait, who likes being criticized? I'm told Rob will jump on. I'm like, don't nobody like being criticized, you know, they used to say. Y'all didn't play in the NBA, you don't know what you talking about, you know, and try to play the the player card on you. But if you notice, they don't like being, uh, criticized by Charles Barkley, right?

Phil O'Neill, Kendrick ver you. They just don't like criticism, period. It is not whether you played or not. And so that's where I think maybe the animosity can come from, but you know what's happening. They're criticizing. [01:45:00] Yes. They're criticizing other players too. Cause what we do, what I do on television and the radio and what they're doing on their podcast, it's like you in the barbershop.

Debating who's better between Michael and LeBron. We're just doing it on national television or radio. And so we have to answer for it. I might see LeBron at a game or see, you know, somebody, and you have to answer for it, whereas when you in the barber shop on your couch, you can spout all this stuff. And never see a player and not have to answer for it.

So.

RODERICK MORROW: I am, I am kind of looking forward to our first podcast fight, you know, like we're like Draymond green seas, Pat Bev. And like, we just, the gloves come off. Like, we think it's a basketball fight, but we find out, Oh no, it's cause of episode seven, you got to go back and

CHRIS BROUSSARD: listen. Well, that's, that does make it interesting for the guys that still play, that have to.

Podcasts and our [01:46:00] players, current players. Cause you really have to answer for the stuff you say.

Can You Afford to Watch the NFL This Year? - That's Good Sports - Air Date 5-17-24

BRANDON PERNA - HOST, THAT'S GOOD SPORTS: Welcome to That's Good Sports, I am Brandon Perna, and if you want, you can sign up for That's Good Sports Minus. What's That's Good Sports Minus? It's nothing. You sign up, you give me your money, and then you EAT IT! You shut up, and you give me your money for nothing! That's why it's called Minus! I hope you do have a war chest of extra Funds, if you wanna watch every NFL game this season.

Start cutting costs, okay, for unnecessary things in your life. Baby food, heart medicine, car insurance, to make room for your NFL viewing expenses. The NFL will now have games on YouTube TV. For the Sunday ticket, Amazon Prime, Peacock, ESPN and now two Christmas games on Netflix. I know a lot of people are complaining, but if you remember, What Jesus said, who's birthday is literally on Christmas, What a coincidence.

But he said, [01:47:00] With man, this is impossible, but with God, capitalism will save us all. That is how you get saved. By me, Jesus of Prophets. What, if Harrison Butker can use Jesus to push some weird bullshit narratives, So can I, so can I. That's America. How we will consume NFL and sports games in general is changing.

And the almighty dollar still rules this evolution of screens. Personally, I already have Netflix. I've been paying for that shit since it was DVDs. So I really don't care that games will air on that streaming service. I have all of the damn streaming services, plus cable. I hate that I have to pay for it all, but it's kind of my job, so I justify it.

That said, I want to break down what this means for us viewers, how much it's going to cost us, and if it's a good or bad thing for us in the long run. And the answer might surprise you. No, it won't.

Let's go back 11 years to the exact moment it all changed. [01:48:00] DirecTV was king with its exclusive rights for NFL Sunday Ticket. If you wanted access to watch every game of your favorite team out of market, DirecTV was the only way to do it. I know, I had it when I lived in Sin City, Los Angeles. Yes, technically it's the City of Angels, but after what I witnessed on Hollywood Boulevard, it will always be Sin City in my heart.

We watch NFL football on our phones now, right? And we don't even think about how that wasn't a possibility 12 years ago. DirecTV changed that with the Manning Bros.

AD: So now's your chance to have football on your phone and football in your pants.

BRANDON PERNA - HOST, THAT'S GOOD SPORTS: Now I did a video review of that commercial in the early days of this struggling YouTube channel Which predates the NFL YouTube channel, by the way, the NFL didn't create a channel until 2014 So you had to rely on idiots like me to get a chance to see highlights from your team's games. Now highlights are thrown in your face [01:49:00] Face, anytime you open up your phone, they're no longer a treasure worth hiding, but a readily available foundation of life that is simply consumed like breathing air.

Now, I say all that to emphasize that getting access to the NFL on your mobile device was a huge shift in the NFL's approach to making their product more available. Part of me believes that's what they are doing right now by making games available on services like Netflix. You can also argue that it makes its reach more limited because not everyone has Netflix.

If I were you, I'd blame Tom Brady who broke the Netflix football cherry via his roast. Would you like a massage? Which. He has said, as a parent, he now regrets doing because it greatly affected his children. As a fellow father, I agree. And if any of you are out there, and you're in a, a rare, and I mean rare, more rare than winning the lottery type situation where Netflix asks you if they can host a roast in [01:50:00] your honor, that as a parent, you should say no.

Do not, do not do a net, If you're a parent. Unless, of course, you are Harrison Butker, then definitely do it right now. I find it hilarious that one of the most prepared quarterbacks in NFL history didn't do his homework yet. On what a roast is. It's also wild to me that Tom made sure to protect Robert Craft from the massage jokes, but failed to see how his recent divorce and having a teammate that killed himself in prison, who was in prison for murder, might be, uh, the things that the comedians go hard on and ultimately offend and affect his family.

Anyway, why is this shift to streaming services happening? Duh, it's it's money right? It's money. Netflix is reportedly spending close to 150 million per game for the two christmas games and this is actually a three year deal with a couple more games coming in 2025 and 2026. Now last season an average of [01:51:00] 29. 2 million people watched the nfl games on tv. That's why Netflix is willing to pay. In addition to that, Netflix is hoping to see the big subscriber boost like Amazon saw two years ago when it took over Thursday Night Football. I forget the numbers, but they were insane. Johnny, throw them on the screen.

And also what Peacock saw when it had its exclusive playoff game this year. While we all might publicly complain about this on Twitter, it turns out that a bunch of people who signed up for Peacock, uh, just for that game, um, Didn't cancel. Peacock saw 2. 8 million people sign up and subscribe and 71 percent of those news subscribers kept paying for Peacock I don't know if those subscription numbers will translate to Netflix Or how many people stayed signed up after those seven weeks because I was too lazy to look it up.

Netflix has two regular season games that look nice on paper right now, but the must watch aspect of those Christmas games is far less compelling. Plus, I think [01:52:00] in general, Netflix has a much larger piece of the streaming service subscriptions already compared to Peacock, so I don't know if they get the big boost.

But that's what they're banking on. Now, a benefit that doesn't really get mentioned too often in all of this discussion is that Thursday Night Football on Amazon is actually a better viewing experience than it was when the NFL Network hosted all of those games. On Amazon, you have multiple broadcast options plus Prime Vision, and for hardcore fans like me, that shit's cool.

I'm not sure if a platform like Netflix can up the ante with the presentation for just two games a year, and for a company that has, uh, little to no revenue. Live production experience, the Brady Roast was good, went off without a hitch, but according to my wife Jess, their Love is Blind reunion live show was a disaster.

If they fuck up NFL games,

Netflix will look more like Quibi or PlayStation Vue after Chief Steelers and Ravens fans get done with them. They're just starting to enjoy some success again. For Netflix, it's willing [01:53:00] To drop a giant chunk of change on NFL games, because they're proven to work. For them, it's a lot less risky than spending that kind of money on a series that flops.

Tanks. Space forces, if you will. Like the NFL, Netflix was king of streaming for a very long time, but as that market became widely more competitive, they have to make some power moves. Netflix is betting on a massive influx of new subs, but for those two games. And while it's not a playoff game, Christmas is a smart play as that's when we're all in a pretty good mood and we don't have issues spending a little more money.

What's 20 bucks when I just dropped a thousand on my dumb kids who do not entertain me like football and only bring me the same misery my football equally provides? I will gladly give this for entertainment. Here's the loophole the NFL discovered, okay? They have more games than they know what to do with.

Thursday night football survived waves and waves of criticism about player safety [01:54:00] because a stand alone primetime game in the middle of the week blew up. does numbers. The NFL realized it can still satisfy all of its TV agreements because it has 14 to 16 games every single week. Plus, the game on Peacock still had fucking commercials even behind the paywall.

They can handpick one or two of their games on any week and then sell that to Netflix. And not disturb their billion dollar TV deals with Fox, NBC, CBS, and ESPN. I also think the COVID year, where they had to reschedule games, showed the league how much maneuverability they had to move games around, like chess pieces.

Which is why we have games on pretty much everything. Every day of the week at different points this year. Then you had Christmas fall on a Sunday in 2022 and a Monday in 2023 and boom, holy fuck, the NFL destroyed the holiday once formally monopolized by the NBA.

DEEPER DIVE D: SPORTS GAMBLING

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now deeper dive [01:55:00] section D: sports gambling.

Is the sports betting industry a huge mistake? - Good Work - Air Date 2-9-24

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: In 2013, the American Psychological Association officially classified gambling as an addiction. Meanwhile, since its 2018 legalization, sports betting has generated a gangbusters amount of economic activity in the US $220 billion. In just the first five years it was legal. There are now over 16 million average monthly users of the most popular sports betting apps.

And next year, online sports betting revenue is expected to approach 12 billion dollars. But to understand this growth trajectory, we gotta talk about something called Daily Fantasy Sports. Daily Fantasy is an online version of Fantasy Sports. And according to my wife, a terrible reason to have my phone out during our kid's baptism.

Fantasy is when you pick a bunch of real players, assemble a fake team out of them, and keep trying. But around 2010, a new turbocharged version of fantasy came onto the scene, where you could set new lineups as often as every day, play in apps on your phone, and crucially, put money down on the results.

KENNETH VOGEL: So you [01:56:00] had two competitors that really arose to the top of the market here, DraftKings and FanDuel.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Kenneth Vogel is a New York Times investigative reporter who was part of a team that wrote a series of major stories about the betting industry's rise in America.

KENNETH VOGEL: And they made a business out of fantasy sports and allowed players to win. Wager, not wager, but put money on the performance of their teams.

They would push back against the use of the term wager there.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Even though gambling on sports was still broadly illegal, Congress had previously determined that fantasy sports were actually a game of skill, not luck, meaning that putting money on the results wasn't gambling. Which reminds me, a lot of an argument my high school friend Chaz used to make about the pullout method.

The gray area in which these fantasy companies operated was pretty controversial. Even at the time. A lot of state attorney generals and even some sportsbook CEOs publicly said that they considered Daily Fantasy to be gambling. But the industry saw it differently.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: So you don't view what you do here at Daily Fantasy?

Uh, FanDuel is [01:57:00] gambling. No. That's a word that isn't used very much around here, I take it.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Still, FanDuel and DraftKings clearly understood that they were operating in murky waters, and made a huge lobbying push to defend themselves. And they were pretty successful. By 2017, 19 states had passed laws explicitly legalizing daily fantasy sports.

But this effort wasn't just about creating a legal framework for daily fantasy. The industry's big kahuna was still out there, swimming around in the deep waters. Just waiting to be caught. I'm talking about full on sports betting.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Breaking news to the Supreme Court this morning, striking down the federal ban on sports betting.

Now it leaves it up to the states.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: When that happened, the industry was ready to get lobbying, thanks to their powerful network of relationships in state capitals that they built during their daily fantasy push.

KENNETH VOGEL: There was a lot of like, whining and dining. That was, that was my colleague, Eric Lipton, and a photographer who went out to, um, This is a party that, uh, was sponsored by the industry or by lobbyists who were representing the industry.

The lawmakers [01:58:00] were smoking cigars and drinking expensive scotch that was provided by the lobbyists and sort of schmoozing with them as the debate was unfolding a few blocks away in the Capitol.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: The industry's main arguments for legal sports betting, both then and now, are to fight black market gambling.

JASON ROBINS: There's this big illegal market, and there's no consumer protections, no tax revenue being generated. Why don't we just bring that in house?

MATT KING: A lot of states are understanding that it's really just common sense legislation to allow mobile sports betting. Uh, it raises tax revenues and it puts an illegal market out of business.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: And look, I know it's easy to go around bashing these corporate CEOs. Especially when they got this mid as hell Zoom background. What, is this a map of the lands you plan to conquer? Why do you have a Bla black and white photo of the industrial revolution behind ya. Come on, Matt. It could be worse. You've got some work to do, buddy.

But my point, which I'm making very clearly and without getting sidetracked, my point is that the gambling black market is a problem, and regulating it would generate [01:59:00] tax revenue.

TIMOTHY FONG: One of our biggest concerns, we have so much of the unregulated sports betting market, right? So these are the websites, uh, that are based in who knows where.

They take all electronic betting. You know, financing, so they're, they're not subjected to the regulations of the state. But trying to shut them down is impossible because you don't even know where they exist.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Now, it's impossible to know the exact size of the black market at this time, but some estimates had Americans illegally betting as much as 150 billion per year.

But the industry's second point was that if states did vote to legalize, It would instantly create tax revenue.

KENNETH VOGEL: One of the things that the industry, sports betting industry had going for it, you know, after 2018 was, uh, you know, it's, um, sort of a perverse way to think about it, but it was the pandemic. I mean, the pandemic put a real dent in state budgets.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: So the black market, the promise of tax revenue, state budgets, absolutely decimated by the pandemic. It was the perfect storm for sports betting companies to capitalize on and capitalize. It was

OLIVER BARNES: [02:00:00] There's a huge investor appetite around it. The companies are turning over massive amounts of money.

Everyone's very excited.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Oliver Barnes is a reporter for the Financial Times who's been covering the gambling industry both in the U. S. and the U. K.

OLIVER BARNES: Lawmakers are also quite excited, right? Because you're sitting in a state that's yet to, um, legalize sports betting. You have a whole load of tax revenues you can just switch on there overnight.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: But in reality, many states who have voted to legalize have seen less tax revenue than expected.

KENNETH VOGEL: The industry, the sports betting companies and the gambling trade groups push for lower tax rates.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: While lobbying for legalization in states like Kansas, the industry argued that the best way for states to maximize their tax revenue would actually be to tax betting companies less because it would create an easier market for the companies to operate in.

Okay, whatever you say, Mr. Businessman. Alright.

But in 14 jurisdictions that legalized and followed the industry's tax advice, revenues in 2022 were nearly 150 million less than predicted. And in [02:01:00] addition to negotiating lower tax rates, the industry also convinced many states to classify huge chunks of their advertising spend as tax write offs.

KENNETH VOGEL: When we talk about deductions for advertising and marketing, what we're really talking about is the promotional bets.

And so, what that is, is you see an ad and it says, get your first 100 of like, free bets, or like, we'll match your first 100, or what have you, and this is like an incentive that the gambling companies are using to bring in new customers. And what they did was they convinced lawmakers in most states to allow them to deduct the cost of these promotional bets.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: In 2022 alone, the industry gave out almost 1 billion in these promo bets, costing states more than 120 million in potential taxes. States are losing money on promotional bets. I'm losing money on promotional bets. You and I aren't so different after all, Kansas. Maybe this could work out between us. And though tax revenue generated by the industry post legalization has been underwhelming, you might say the opposite [02:02:00] about its approach to marketing.

AD: Spreads to cover, overs to hit, and chances to live bet from the first sound to the final whistle. Download BetMGM. You know what to do.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: The industry spent about 300 million on TV ads in 2023, and an estimated 1. 8 billion in local markets. This marketing push even made it to college campuses. One deal between Michigan State and Caesars Sportsbook let Caesars Caesarize part of its campus. Another between Colorado Boulder and Pointsbet gave the school 30 every time one of their students signed up for the app and placed a bet.

Granted, there was a lot of backlash to these deals. The lead gambling industry trade group now prohibits marketing on college campuses. And since then, Michigan State, Colorado, and other schools have canceled their partnerships. But what's so bad about these ads anyway? Getting caesarized sounds fun!

RICHARD DAYNARD: It's a public health issue.

Is that this is an addictive product.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Oh, I get it. Too fun. Richard Daynard is the lawyer who designed the litigation strategy against the tobacco industry, resulting in Big Tobaccy [02:03:00] coughing up over 200 billion dollars and changing the way they market cigarettes. We lied and told him we were 60 Minutes and he agreed to tell us about his next target, the sports betting industry.

RICHARD DAYNARD: There's the denial of, you know, of dangers. Presenting this thing as simply a harmless way to have fun. March 10th of last year of 2023. That was the day that sports betting was unleashed in Massachusetts. It was just massive marketing. You know, there'd be trash containers. It'd be on the side of buses, uh, as well as on, uh, you know, television.

Just about anything you turned on would have an ad for, you know, one of the companies.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Unfortunately, it's been a while since I've turned anything on, professor. Daynard's Public Health Advocacy Institute recently backed a lawsuit in Massachusetts against DraftKings, and its focus is on one of those fun tax write off promotional ads.

According to the lawsuit, DraftKings knowingly and unfairly designed a 1, [02:04:00] 000 sign up bonus. The 1, 000 comes in the form of additional bets, which customers could only get if they first deposited 5, 000. Risk 25, 000 within 90 days, and bet on events with worse odds than 3 to 1, which doesn't sound like I'm gonna get 1, 000.

RICHARD DAYNARD: The idea is for you to continue to bet, which is the way you develop and heighten an addiction, which is you keep at it, you keep doing it. We hope to, you know, encourage that. You know, other litigation, this is hardly the only deceptive ad running in the United States.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: And there is some backlash building.

TIMOTHY FONG: We don't see cannabis ads on TV, do we? We don't see a lot of tobacco ads on TV anymore. And all that has an impact on what people think and feel about that product, right? When you look at the gambling ads right now, they're all 120 percent positive.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Regulators in Ohio. Doled out almost a million dollars in fines last year to betting companies for advertising that customers could make free bets.

Massachusetts and other states have moved to legally ban advertising on college campuses. And all the way up [02:05:00] there in Maine, lawmakers proposed banning cartoon characters, celebrities, athletes, and entertainers from being able to appear in ads. Which might sound extreme to us here in America, but is actually very simple.

Similar to the way that lots of other countries regulate gambling advertising.

OLIVER BARNES: In the UK there's like a whistle to whistle ban on football matches. You can't advertise like during a football match. In terms of like TV commercials. Because of the advertising environment where you're bombarded with ads, it's very difficult to kind of escape that habit of like recurrent gambling.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: The UK has also banned gambling logos on the front of Premier League jerseys and other regulators wanna move even further. In Australia, gambling ads are banned during games between 5:00 AM and eight. And Belgium and the Netherlands have fully banned gambling advertising on TV, radio, newspapers, and in public spaces.

And these regulations are all a reaction to the way that gambling has proliferated in these countries post legalization. The UK Gambling Commission earlier this year said that as many as 2. 5 percent of their adult population could be problem gambling. Meanwhile in Australia, citizens lose more [02:06:00] gambling per capita than in any other country.

And some worry that if this continues If the U. S. isn't careful, we might not learn from these more mature markets.

The NBA’s Sports Gambling Issue Is Worse Than You Think - Hoop Reports - Air Date 4-27-24

HOST, HOOP REPORTS: On December 19th, 2023, four games were scheduled, setting the stage for an unbelievable turn of events.

I'm not usually one to gamble, and I've never placed an online bet in my life, but let me tell you, this was one of the most incredible sports bets I've ever seen. It was a four leg parlay, meaning four specific outcomes had to align for the bettor to claim the prize money. Here were the conditions.

Brandon Ingram needed to score the first basket in the Grizzlies vs. Pelicans game, Zach Collins in the Spurs vs. Bucs game, Steph Curry in the Celtics vs. Warriors game, and finally Jeremy Grant in the Sun vs. Blazers game. Each of these events was necessary for the bet to succeed. The odds were staggeringly set at 4, 428 to 1.

Translating to a mere 0. 02 percent chance of success. Yet on this day, one daring individual defied these odds, turning a modest bet [02:07:00] of 2 and 50 cents into an astonishing 11, 000 after researching other astonishing online sports gambling wins. Including two unbelievable six leg parlays on three point shots that turn 25 into over 100, 000, I gained insights into the world of online betting, specifically about prop bets and parlay bets.

Now, some of you might already be familiar with these terms, but for those who don't engage in betting, like myself, this was quite enlightening. Essentially, a prop bet is a wager on a specific occurrence within a game, rather than on the game's final result. For instance, instead of betting on the Warriors to win, one might bet on Steph Curry to score 50 points, Draymond Green to get ejected, or Klay Thompson to miss all his three point attempts.

You get the idea. A parlay bet, however, involves combining several of these prop bets. Each event included in the parlay must occur for the bet to pay out. This is precisely what led to Jontay Porter getting caught. He placed a bet that was so [02:08:00] obvious it triggered an alert from gambling sites. Actually, he made two significant errors.

The first mistake involved the prop bet set for him on January 26th, which were five and a half points, four and a half rebounds, which were One and a half assists and 0. 53 pointers made. If you're wondering why these aren't whole numbers, like five points or four rebounds, it's to prevent something known as a push.

A push occurs when the final result of a bet matches the set number exactly, meaning the bet neither wins nor loses and all wagers are returned. Well, just 4 minutes into the game, Jontay had already racked up 3 rebounds and 1 assist. This meant there were just 2 more rebounds or 1 more assist that would cause anyone who bet on him, including himself, to lose the bet.

As a result, he abruptly left the game, citing a re aggravation of an eye injury.

On the following day, during their daily report, DraftKings announced that the under on porter had been the most profitable bet for props that night. Then [02:09:00] on March 20th, in a game against the Sacramento Kings, a similar incident occurred. His over under bets for the night were set at seven and a half points and five and a half rebounds.

And just about three minutes into the game, Porter exited citing an illness and did not return.

This meant anyone who had bet on his unders immediately won the prop bet. While initially Porter's season statistics might make you question the logic of placing those types of bets. The truth is, due to injuries to Scotty Barnes and Chris Boucher, Porter's playing time had surged to about 20 minutes per game.

So, in the 4 games preceding this, he averaged 7 points and roughly 5 rebounds. But, anyway Once again, DraftKings reported that this outcome was the top moneymaker for the night across all NBA bets. What made these cases even more suspicious was the fact that the average NBA player prop bet usually falls between 1, 000 and 2, 000, but the bets placed on Jontay Porter were significantly higher, ranging from 10, 000 to 20, 000.[02:10:00]

In fact, during the March 20th game, one bettor placed a staggering 80, 000 on a parlay bet. This bet was that if Porter scored 7 points or fewer and grabbed 5 rebounds or fewer, the bettor would win 1. 1 million.

However, the sports betting operators flagged this as suspicious and froze the wager. This action triggered the investigation which NBA Commissioner Adam Silver Issuing a permanent ban on Porter. What's somewhat ironic about this situation is that Adam silver himself played a significant role in bringing sports gambling into the mainstream in the United States.

Back in 2014, when he wrote a piece for the New York times advocating for the legalization of sports betting, using the phrase out of the underground and into the sunlight to express his stance. He also emphasized in his writing. Any new approach must ensure the integrity of the game. However, the inherent challenge lies in the fact that sports betting, and maintaining the integrity of the game, simply cannot coexist.[02:11:00]

Over time, human nature's insatiable greed for money will inevitably take a hold and begin to exert its influence over games. This has been evident in numerous scandals throughout sports history. The 1919 Black Sox scandal, where eight players were accused of throwing the World Series for money. The 1980s Boston College basketball point shaving scandal where players manipulated scores for betting gains.

The 2000 Spanish Paralympics basketball scandal involving athletes faking disabilities for medals and sponsorships. The 2000 Hansi Kronje cricket match fixing scandal where a captain accepted bribes to influence match outcomes. The 2007 Tim Donaghy NBA betting scandal where a referee rigged games he officiated.

The 2011 Turkish football match fixing scandal implicating over 30 games. These are just a few examples of the widespread betting scandals that have plagued professional sports globally. They span various sports and nations, but share a common motive, manipulating game outcomes for financial gain. Apart from the [02:12:00] Jontay Porter incident, the true extent of betting related issues in NBA games remains largely unknown until they surface publicly.

However, given the substantial financial stakes involved, there's a valid argument to suggest that such occurrences may be more widespread than commonly perceived, implicating both players and referees. In fact, some retired NBA players assert that there's actually a significant number of referees involved in gambling activities nowadays.

RASHAD MCCANTS: Do you think it's another ref that's in the NBA right now that's like him? A club of them. I think it's a club of them. We clearly see the discrepancies in certain games where the swing for Vegas hits the numbers, right? These are elements that bookies know about, gamblers know about. Hey man, this is a game we need Luka out.

He gets two technicals before halftime.

HOST, HOOP REPORTS: One counter argument to this notion is that the NBA players and referees already earn substantial salaries. So, why would they risk their careers for additional money? [02:13:00] However, as highlighted earlier, the potential financial gains from betting can far exceed their regular earnings.

For instance, the individual who placed the 80, 000 parlay bet on Jontay Porter stood to make over 1, 000, 000, more than double Porter's salary. However, in the case of Tim Donaghy, despite having a successful career with a comfortable salary of 300, 000 per year as an NBA referee, he still succumbed to the temptation of making extra money through illicit means.

These days, when you think about prop betting and parlay bets, you realize there's a ton of ways to cheat the system. Like even though I've never placed an online bet and likely won't just spending a few minutes brainstorming gave me some ideas on how referees can manipulate outcomes without getting caught.

For instance, imagine placing a parlay bet on a player getting exactly 5 fouls, but his team still winning by 10 points. As a referee, or a team of referees, orchestrating such an outcome might not be too difficult without anyone noticing, but the [02:14:00] potential payout could be huge. And that was a quick example I came up with in 5 minutes, without any professional refereeing or betting experience.

Just think about what experienced individuals could do in this scenario. That example should give you a quick glimpse into the extent of betting that occurs in sports. To be fair, the NBA claims to closely monitor all activities, and even has an internal team consisting of lawyers and full time data scientists dedicated to investigating any irregular bets or line movement.

However, the reality is that Pandora's box of sports gambling has already been opened, and the methods of gamblers will only become more sophisticated over time. Consider this, if the NBA couldn't effectively stop James Harden from exploiting the rules to draw fouls for a significant portion of the 2010s, how can they hope to regulate an industry where transactions amount to 50 to 80 billion dollars every year?

CREDITS

The deep dive sections of the show included clips from The Rich Eisen Show, University of Iowa, The Daily Show, What's Wright? With Nick Wright, Edge of Sports, TYT Sports, the Karen Hunter Show, That's Good Sports, Good Work, and Hoop Reports. Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get [02:16:00] instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion.

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#1632 SiliCON Valley: The False Promises, Enshittification Economics, and Misguided Adventures of the Twits of Tech (Transcripts)

Posted by · May 29, 2024 2:30 AM

Air Date 5/28/2024