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Category: economy

  • Trump taps Big Tech critic Brendan Carr to lead communications agency

    Republican has accused major tech platforms of operating a 'censorship cartel'.

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • The Many Contradictions of a Trump Victory

    As Donald Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term, the reasons people voted him into office are becoming more clear. 

    For Micki Witthoeft, it’s cause for celebration. Her daughter, Ashli Babitt, was shot and killed by a police officer after storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Today, Witthoeft is confident Trump will stand by his word and pardon everyone involved. 

    “He said his administration’s going to be one on ‘promises made and promises kept,’ ” she said. “I felt like he was talking right to me.”

    But it’s not the same sentiment for all voters. This week on Reveal, we look at the many contradictions behind Trump’s victory, with stories from hosts Hanna Rosin and Lauren Ober of the new podcast from The Atlantic, We Live Here Now; Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy; and Reveal producer Najib Aminy. We delve into January 6ers seeking pardons, “messy middle” voters who split their ballots, and members of the Uncommitted movement who wouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris despite being opposed to Trump. 

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • “Let’s unite!”: Poisoned residents of America’s sacrifice zones are banding together

    Sacrifice zones are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself, from toxic industrial pollution to the deadly, intensifying effects of man-made climate change. In a more just and less cruel society, the very concept of a “sacrifice zone” wouldn’t exist. And yet, in America, after decades of deregulation and public disinvestment, more working-class communities are becoming sacrifice zones, and more of us are being set up for sacrifice at the altars of corporate greed and government abandonment.

    America’s sacrifice zones are no longer extreme outliers; they are, in fact, a harrowing model of the future that lies in store for most of us if the corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires destroying our communities aren’t stopped. And residents of different sacrifice zones across the country, fellow workers on the frontlines of all this reckless and preventable destruction, are connecting with each other, learning from one another, and working together to fight back. In this Working People liveshow, recorded on Oct. 19 at Red Emma’s worker cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore, we speak with a special panel of residents from four different sacrifice zones in the US about how the situations they’re facing in their own communities and their struggles for justice and accountability are connected.

    Panelists include: Hilary Flint, communications director of Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community and a former resident of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, a few miles from the site of the Feb 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio; Melanie Meade, a community organizer, educator, and life-long resident of Clairton, Pennsylvania, the site of US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, which was named the most toxic air polluter in Allegheny County in a 2021 report by PennEnvironment; Elise Keaton Wade, a real estate attorney by trade, longtime environmental justice activist, and a native of Southern West Virginia; Angela “Angie” Shaneyfelt, a resident of Curtis Bay in South Baltimore, who lives just blocks away from an open air coal terminal owned and operated by rail giant CSX Transportation, which has been polluting her community for generations.

    Special thanks to Dr. Nicole Fabricant and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust for organizing this live show.

    Additional links/info below…

    Permanent links below…

    Featured Music…
    Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

    Studio Production: Max Alvarez
    Post-Production: Jules Taylor

    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Hilary Flint:

    Hi everyone. My name is Hilary Flint. My pronouns are she her. I am from Enon Valley, Pennsylvania that is a town of less than 300 people that borders East Palestinian, Ohio. I have a background of chronic health issues and I’m a young adult cancer survivor, and I’d always been very conscious of the environment and very conscious of health issues, but it wasn’t until the East Palestine trained derailment and chemical disaster did I start organizing full-time in this work. So I’m director of Communications and community Engagement at Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community. And we really work around fracking and the Shell Plastics plant in Beaver County and also around the East Palestine trained real as well. And then I also work with Clean Air Action Fund. It’s a C four. And the reason I do that is so I can put on a different hat and do things like lobby and help write bills that would prevent these types of things from happening.

    And then I also just started working for Center for Oil and Gas organizing around the issue of LNG, which is kind of the next big thing that we need to be working on. But a lot of the work I do is through a lens of disability justice, solidarity building and trying to change the way nonprofits work. So getting more mutual aid, getting money directly to grassroots instead of big green except food and water watch, they can have all the money. So yeah, just figuring out a different way to do the work because I’ve seen that the system currently just does not work.

    Melanie Meade:

    Hi everyone. My name is Melanie Meade. I’m from Clairton, PA, and I came into this work in 2013 when I was burying my father, when six months later I buried my mother. And from the span of 2011 to 2020, I buried all of my immediate family. I live next to one of the largest plants, USX coing plants in Clairton pa, and I’m so thankful to have sisters like Hilary and everyone on the panel to stand in solidarity with.

    Elise Keaton Wade:

    Hello, my name is Elise Keaton Wade. I am from Southern West Virginia. I am a real estate attorney by trade, but I got started in my activism 25 years ago on Payford Mountain with Larry Gibson, looking at mountains being blown up for tiny seams of coal through the process of mountaintop removal, strip mining. And that is how I came to my environmentalism. It’s how I became a lawyer trying to find out why it was legal to blow the tops off mountains to get coal. Turns out it’s legal because we made a law allowing it. So it’s a policy issue, right? So I lived in Colorado for a little while. I was licensed to practice out there, and I came back to West Virginia in 2011, reconnected with Larry Gibson in 2012. He passed away shortly thereafter, but I was involved with the organization where I met Dr. Fabricant. And so she and I, 13 years ago sat on Payford Mountain and dreamed of a regional coordination of efforts. And here we are today with multiple states in this room, and we’ve spent two days together talking about how we’re all interconnected. So I’m honored and pleased, and I’m so grateful for each of you being here.

    Angela Shaneyfelt:

    And I’m Angela Shaneyfelt and I am a community member of Curtis Bay here in Baltimore. And I got started in this in December 30th, 2021 when the CSX Coal terminal had their explosion. And the reason why I am here is just when you look into your child’s eyes and they’re mentally checked out and you don’t know why. So that’s why I am here.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    All right, welcome everyone to this special live show of working people, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within in these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and I cannot overstate how much of an honor it is to be sitting here with all of you here in this room here at this table. As those of you listening just heard, we have a really special installment of our ongoing series sacrificed where we have been talking with working class folks, living, working and fighting for justice in different, so-called Sacrifice Zones around the US and even beyond. And we are sitting here in the great red Emma’s cooperative bookstore and cafe and organizing space here in Baltimore. Shout out to Red Emmas, thank you for hosting us.

    And I also wanted to shout out and thank the great Dr. Nicole Fabrican for bringing us altogether, everyone at the South Baltimore Community Land Trust for bringing us together. And thank you for all the incredible work that y’all do, and thank you all for being here. And yeah, as listeners of this show, no, I didn’t expect to be doing this kind of work. I’ve been doing this show for years, mainly talking to working people about their lives, jobs, dreams and struggles, but within the context of their workaday lives and labor shop floor struggles. And that’s why I was interviewing railroad workers a few years ago, nonstop, all of whom were telling me that there was a crisis on the freight rail system. I talked to engineers, I talked to dispatchers, I talked to the folks who maintain the track, right? And all of them were saying some version of the same thing, which is that corporate greed has destroyed this vital element of our supply chain, and it is putting all of us workers, residents, and our planet at Hazard, and they were screaming for someone to listen to them, and they were demanding of those companies and of their government and of the public that we support them.

    And instead, as we all know, a little over two years ago, Joe Biden and both parties in Congress worked together to block railroad workers from going on strike, forced a contract down their throats and basically told them to shut up and go away. Two months later, east Palestine happened, a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed in Hilary’s backyard, and then three days later, the Norfolk Southern pressured local authorities to make the disastrous and unnecessary decision to vent and burn five cars worth of toxic vinyl chloride, spewing a massive black death plume into the air that we all remember seeing Hilary and her neighbors lived it, and they are still living in it. I mean, I think one thing that we want to emphasize here and that’s going to come out in the stories of our incredible panelists is that maybe you heard about the issues that they’re dealing with in the past, and then it faded from the headlines.

    That does not mean the issue has gone away. In fact, quite the opposite is true in most cases. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been wins and struggle, and we want to make space to talk about that as well. But I really want to emphasize first and foremost that when communities are sacrificed for the sake of corporate profits or government negligence or what have you, I mean, these are people’s lives. These are communities that are destroyed and then forgotten. And as a journalist investigating and talking to folks living in these areas, what I’m realizing is we’re going to run out of places to forget. And so it breaks my heart going from East Palestine to South Baltimore to communities around the country talking to folks who feel so forgotten yet who are dealing so many of the same problems caused by the same villains. And so really, we’re here to talk about what we as fellow workers, as neighbors can do to band together to put a stop to this, to get justice and to build a world in which this kind of thing is not only unthinkable, but it sure as hell isn’t as normalized as it is today.

    And so with all that upfront, I want to shut up and really just have you all listen more to the incredible women I’m sitting next to. I want us in the first half of this to just sort of talk a bit more for listeners and folks here about your story, about where you come from, about the kind of issues that you all are dealing with in your own respective communities. Because each has its own specificities. Every community is different. And then in the second half, I want us to talk about the significance of all of us being here together, of what y’all have seen in Baltimore, what discussions you’re getting into and what we can do to fight these corporate villains, wall Street monsters and corporate politicians who are destroying the planet upon which we all depend. So with all that upfront, Angie, I wanted to turn it back over to you since you are home based here in Baltimore. Tell us a bit more about yourself and about the struggle going on in Curtis Bay for folks who maybe haven’t heard about it yet.

    Angela Shaneyfelt:

    I grew up not in Curtis Bay or Brooklyn, I grew up just a little bit south of there in Anne Arundel County in Pasadena, a suburb of Baltimore City. And honestly, when I was younger, I said I would never live in the city, ever. And here I am 16 years later in the city that I said I would never live in. When I first moved to Curtis Bay, I never even thought about the coal other than it’s getting in my house. And I opened my windows the first year I lived there. And then after that first year, I was like, what is this black dust in my house and where is it coming from? And so we figured out that it was from the coal pile that’s two blocks, three blocks, city blocks down from where I live, just wafting into my house any way it could get in.

    And so that’s when I just didn’t for 15 now years that I’ve not opened my windows at all. And then never, still didn’t pay attention to it honestly. And then December 30th happened, 2021, and literally I felt the sonic didn’t know what it was, did the mental checks looking around, and my kids were in the living room with me. My husband was on his way to Dunking Donuts. I had Covid, my daughter had covid, so we couldn’t go outside. He was going for coffee and we felt the pressure from the boom, didn’t hear anything yet. And I’m just looking around, what is it? My kids are looking at me for direction they didn’t know. And then we heard it and it shook our house. There’s neighbors that had windows blown out from this explosion. And then I looked at my daughter and she, one doesn’t, even before this, never really dealt well with loud noises or balloons.

    And I’m looking at her and she literally wasn’t there. And my kids were around seven or eight at the time, so I had to tap on her chin three times to get her to come back to normal. And in that couple minutes time, I had to do the checks. The electricity’s still on. My windows are intact, and I live in Baltimore, so there’s nobody shooting outside my house. So we’re okay, but I don’t know what happened. And so then after the explosion, initial explosion happened, I go outside what we do here in Baltimore, go outside and talk to neighbors.

    We didn’t get any alerts at all from any government agency, but word on the street what we go by a lot of times in South Baltimore because kind of the forgotten part of Baltimore City word on the street was there’s no threat to the community. But if you go outside and we found this out hours later from news and whatever, if you go outside, wear a mask, now it’s 2021 and we’re in the middle of a pandemic, of course we’re going to wear a mask, but why are you telling me to wear a mask if I go outside if there’s no threat to the community, like one plus one equals two in my world and that doesn’t add up. So with C, I lost my sense of smell and taste, and I had a mask on anyway, I was coming back inside because it was don’t go outside.

    I had the worst suer and rotten egg smell that I’ve ever smelled in my life without a sense of smell and a mask on. So I don’t know, I can only imagine what a normal person at that point would’ve been smelling in our neighborhood. And so then my husband comes back and I literally was shuffling him inside because go inside, don’t be outside. And he had no clue. He was driving up the hill when the initial blast happened to the point where he felt like the car tires were lifting up off the ground and he stopped when he made the turn off of the street right next to ours and to check the tires to make sure there was still air in the tires. And that’s just one explosion. There’s been a history of explosions from CSX and they initially didn’t know it wasn’t us.

    We’ve heard different things like it’s not our coal that is in our neighborhood, that is in your neighborhood. It comes from across the water in Ock, but your coal doesn’t leave the terminal. We’re breathing in somebody else’s coal. They tried to say it wasn’t coal. Well, what is it? Black dust. And now the community with the help of some scientists from John Hopkins have done the research, which we shouldn’t have to do. Honestly, we shouldn’t have to do that. The MDE and EPA should be doing their job. That’s their job, not our job to protect us as a community and as a city.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    And just to clarify for folks listening, y’all heard the episodes that we’ve done in the past with Angie and her neighbors in South Baltimore, and what we’re talking about here is the massive open air like coal terminal that is owned and operated by CSX rail, multi-billion dollar rail company that these uncovered coal cars have been coming in and out of that terminal for decades over a century. So we’re talking about the explosion that happened at the cult pier that Angie was referring to, but as you’ll hear later on in the conversation, and as y’all remember from our past episodes based on South Baltimore, this is sadly only one of many polluters poisoning Angie and her community.

    Elise Keaton Wade:

    So my name is Elise Keaton again, Elise Keaton Wade. It’s tough when you get married later in life, confuses things and complicates things. I said in my introduction that I got started with my environmental activism in college because I had to go away to college to learn about the environmental degradation happening in my backyard. And imagine my surprise at 19 years old when I’m sitting in an Appalachian studies course in Virginia Tech and I hear the words mountaintop removal for the very first time in my life, and I’m like, what are we talking about? And that visceral reaction to something so wrong, and that journey over the last 25 years has landed me in places where really tragic things are happening. For example, I graduated law school the year that Katrina happened. I was in the evacuation from Houston, from Rita where more people died in the evacuation from Rita than died in Katrina.

    And that’s a little known fact, right? The entire city of Houston tried to leave within 36 hours and we sat for 28 hours going nowhere. But my policy mind was always at work in those instances, what is the policy that got us here? What is happening? Why am I staring at a bridge? And I was naive. I don’t know who said it earlier about being a naive high school student, but I thought it was a great statement that I’m a student. Of course I’m naive. I don’t know what’s going on right in my naivete, I thought this hurricane was going to be something that’s shone the light on all of these policy issues. This hurricane was going to show that we weren’t able to evacuate in a big way very quickly from some mass event. What if it wasn’t a hurricane? What if it wasn’t explosion or a chemical plant or some trained derailment with deadly chemicals going into the air?

    We are ill-equipped across the board to deal with those types of things. That was in 2005, right? What the hell have we been doing? What have we been doing? Where is our plan? Right? So now, okay, it’s 2014. No, it’s not today. You’re glad I drank the espresso, I’m telling you. So it’s 2024 and in West Virginia right now what we’re dealing with is poisoned water in Indian Creek in Wyoming County because the coal companies are going back into the coal mines for the methane, the coal bed methane that’s down there. And one way they’re trying to figure out how to get it out of there is to flush it out with water.

    Well, they’ve found out pretty quickly, that’s a terrible idea, but they continued to do it and continued to pollute. It’s been about a year and a half, maybe close to two years that this community has been aware of this, and they’re just now acknowledging that they have an issue. And yesterday they withdrew their permits to continue this practice. It was because hashtag Appalachian living on TikTok, my girlfriend Lindsay Riser who’s out there beating the drum every day, calling out the hypocrisy, telling people, why are you not talking about the industry that’s poisoning us? At the same time, we have a solid candidate coming out of that district. This is my Senate district, my state Senate District nine. She is a 35 year member of Teachers union. She started teaching right out of high school. She is from our community. She’s been a teacher for decades. She is pro West Virginia. She got involved in politics because one of her children is transgender, and she had to sit in our legislature and listen to them abuse transgender individuals with their legislation. It triggered her into action. The UMWA United Mine Workers Association, the union that we wear our bandanas to remember and to support supported her candidacy in the primary. They’re supporting her Republican opponent in the general.

    Now out of respect for her, I’m going to wait until after the election to address this issue, but this issue will be addressed because of East Palestine. East Palestine is the reason that I am involved again in these issues. When Nikki brought me to East Palestine and I heard what really happened and the fact that very few news outlets were actually telling us the real news about what was happening up there, I realize it’s never going to stop. They are never going to stop doing this to us. The only people who have ever shown up for our communities are the people within our communities. And unless we’re there making other people show up, they don’t come. They’re not trying to help us and find out what’s going on. It is up to us every single time I’ve been around long enough to know Katrina, Rita, name your disaster, right?

    It’s not changing and it’s unacceptable. It is disastrous and unnecessary to quote our host. And so when you find yourself in these systems and these situations where you are somewhat powerless as an individual, right? I can stand up and scream all night long and it’s not going to get anything done, but I can work in regional coordination and support the people who are in these different areas because those trains roll through my community. The coal in your bay came from my mountains in West Virginia that we have stood on as activists. They’re blowing mountains apart. Those mountains filter clean water. That’s a very shortsighted plan, don’t you think? So everything that happens in Appalachia, in West Virginia, in East Palestine, in Baltimore, this is all coordinated together and us talking to each other and having in these gatherings and committing to supporting each other regionally is their biggest fear because we’re recognizing our power and we’re using it. So I don’t know, that’s exactly the question you asked, but it felt good while I was saying it, so I’m going to stick with it. All right. Alright, with

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Nah, sister, preach. Everything you guys say is incredible and important. I only picked the mic back up just to note and make a very grim footnote for listeners, because we just published another installment of this series where I spoke to two folks on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina providing mutual aid and trying to repair their destroyed community, their destroyed region, and something that Byron Ballard, who’s there working at a church and doing great work, said that really stuck with me. If you’re trying to see the connections here, not only through manmade climate change and all the ways that that is making these massive hurricanes bigger, more destructive and going and destroying parts of Western North Carolina for Pete’s sake, but what she said, because we’ve seen those pictures of towns that have been wiped off the map, mudslides that have taken towns off the map that have killed families. She said mountaintop removal made those mudslides a lot worse. So just really wanted to drive that home. If you think that these are distinct issues that aren’t going to come back and combine in monstrous ways they already are. Melanie, please hop in.

    Melanie Meade:

    Thank you Max. In Clariton. In 2005, I was successfully working at American University in Bowie State. I was part-time adjunct professor in Spanish. I was so proud to have my job. I went home to a Clairton reunion we have during Labor Day and I woke up the next morning in the hospital being diagnosed with what is called nocturnal epilepsy. That emergency doctor did not tell me what it came from and no other doctor could find it whenever they did scans of my brain. But then in 2013, when I came home to bury my father, I met a gentleman named Dave Smith and he was working for Clean Air Council and he had taught me about the campaign leaders of 10 and he said, Melanie, get 10 friends and tell them to each get one friend and let’s start talking about our shared issues. In 2018, fires burned the size of three football fields for 17 days before the mayor and Health Department informed us little black boys because they’re typically outside and want to be outside and play outside. We’re five times more affected according to a doctor’s report. Then we came to find out months later that everyone’s health was harmed who live within 10 miles of the USX Claritin K works.

    And we didn’t get the right help, nor did we know what kind of help we needed. So there were people who came in to say they were helping, but we never really found out the truth. And it disturbed me to find out that those fires burned again in 2019 total of over 100 days, and it wasn’t on the news anymore. Hilary and I are very close, so we’re not in competition, but I felt like USX was in control of the media. There was a stop and desist with USXK works to talk about the trains, and those trains come through clariton as well. I can hear them all through the night and day.

    That’s where I realized we have to remain connected. We have to tell our stories, we have to have real news. We have to have real journalists that report the truth according to what we have experienced because it can’t be done any other way. And I’m just really encouraged to have you all to look, to call on and come together like this because this is helpful and it’s healing to know that our work is meaningful and it will result in something. So I just continue to thank you for real news. I continue to thank Curtis Bay for sharing your stories. I continue to thank Hilary. I continue to thank Elise, Dr. Fabricant, all of you who are here because you are the wind beneath my wings, not having my parents or siblings. It can be a lonely place, but you fill those voids for me and I’m so very grateful for you all and I’m so very grateful that we can say let’s blow stuff up.

    Hilary Flint:

    I just want to start off by something I feel like is not spoken about enough is that East Palestine did get a lot of media coverage, especially in the beginning, right? We were on all the news stations and it was this big plume, but I genuinely think it’s not because USX is not allowing media to do things. I think it’s because we’re a predominantly white community, and I’m going to be super frank about that. Myself and two other community members were able to meet President Biden within a year of the trained derailment. And I have to see black leaders in Louisiana and in Texas who have been doing this fight for 40 plus years, 50 years, and they do not get proximity to the White House. They get nowhere near it. So I just want to start with that because I think we talk about East Palestine a lot and it’s like, yeah, we got the media coverage because it was a white community and it was not only that, it’s a very conservative area.

    So it was a flashier news story than, oh, we’ve been poisoning people for 40 years. It was different. And that’s what was different about it is that we were a white, small rural community. And I try to do the work that now we can bring people with us because one thing about your whiteness is I can’t get rid of it, but what I can do is utilize it to then make sure that now the White House is contacting other communities because it’s disgusting to me that you feel this guilt that day that myself and other community members met with President Biden, I had the most extreme guilt because it was like we did this in a year and through that year I was connecting with communities all over the United States that went through environmental disasters. And I had to think like, oh, you expect, oh wow, that’s so cool.

    You did that in one year. And so part of it, you do have that little bit of pride and you’re like, yeah, that’s awesome. And then you’re like, but why could I do that? Watching these other women, and by the way, it’s usually women, it’s usually female activists. I’m watching them and I heard Melanie speak one day and I was like, that is a fierce woman. And if Melanie Mead isn’t getting the help that she needs, then there is something wrong with the system. And that’s what this solidarity building is. It’s so important. But I did want to talk about the day of the derailment and how people think it is the derailment. That’s the problem. I refer to this as the East Palestinian trained derailment and chemical disaster because the derailment is just a piece of the puzzle. And yes, there was all these chemicals and there was fires, but it really wasn’t until a couple of days later when they burned the vinyl chloride that my community was affected.

    So we know this as the East Palestine trained around it, but it’s directly on the border where this happened. Pennsylvania is right there, and other communities outside of East Palestine were affected and will be affected down the line, but it would not be as bad as it will be that vinyl chloride changed the game. So that’s the mushroom cloud that everyone saw. And I remember that day very distinctly because I was convinced I was glued to the news thinking they’re going to evacuate us. Of course they are. East Palestine at that point had been under evacuation. It was a one by two mile radius, but where I lived, you could see the smoke. So I’m thinking they’re going to have to evacuate us. And so then I’m watching the TV and I see, oh, my little brother’s school, they’re sending the kids home and our school is way further away from East Palestine than our physical home.

    So I’m thinking, oh, okay, they’re sending the kids home so then we can evacuate as families. He gets home and we’re waiting and we’re waiting and we’re seeing, I’m watching the press conference on the news. They’re saying, alright, at three 30 we’re going to blow this up. And the call that we were looking for never came. We were never going to be evacuated. It was just a one by two mile radius. Now we’re over a year out and there is proof that this plume traveled to 16 different states. So imagine a one by two mile radius. Us, my family chose to self evacuate. We did it very last minute. I had my go-bag prepped. My Italian grandma was like, I’m not leaving my house. So last minute we got Mimi. We got Mimi in the car. She was the last one. But as we were driving away and we had no idea where we were going by the way, it was just like, you just have to get away.

    And I look in the rear view mirror and that’s when they blew it up. So it felt like I was a storm chaser running away from a tornado or something. That’s what it felt like. And you see it. And at that moment, my dog just started barking like crazy, just barking like crazy. And I think they have a more sensitive smell and things like that. And we just kept driving and I’m like, where are we going by the way? So I don’t know. I had family in another town. So we went and I was sat in my cousin’s driveway for hours. She wasn’t home. And then I was like, well, I guess we’re going to have to get a hotel. Because once we saw what it looked like, some of my neighbors that had stayed behind at the farm next door to me and took pictures, I was shocked.

    People were alive. It was black. The whole area was just black smoke. I couldn’t imagine that was safe to go home to. So we did end up getting a hotel. It was the last hotel book. We are small communities. Guess what? We don’t have a lot of hotel rooms available and the National Guard there. And we were checking in kind of at the same time. And so I had asked this man in full uniform, I said, we weren’t supposed to be evacuated, but we did anyway. What would you have done in that situation? And he said, ma’am, if it was up to me, I wouldn’t even be here right now. So this is someone in full uniform who came to respond to the crisis, who understood how dangerous it was. And at that point we were like 15 miles away and he didn’t even want to be there.

    And the next day they say everything’s fine, everyone can go home. And I remember I had a business trip that I had to go back, pack my bag, and then go to the airport. The minute we opened the door of our home, I knew everything had changed. It was a smell that I had never sm smelled before. I couldn’t even find the correct words to describe it except sweet bleach. It was a chemical smell, but it also smelled sugary. And within a few minutes we had health symptoms. I mean, it did not take long. So I have some preexisting health conditions. I have chronic illness, and one of the diseases that I have is called rainy odds. And in rayons it causes blood vessel constriction. So you turn purple. Now, I’ve always had rayons since I was little. My hands would turn purple, but I’d never had it go beyond that.

    And all of a sudden I look down, my feet are purple, everything is turning purple. And it wasn’t until later I find out that their vinyl chloride is one of the known triggers of that particular disease. And when we’re told it’s safe to go home, my question is, who is it safe for? It’s not safe for everyone. It’s not safe for people with asthma. It’s not safe with for people with preexisting conditions, but that is what we operate off of. It’s a blanket statement of, oh, it’s safe. That’s not true. It wasn’t safe for me. And then I had to get on a plane and leave my family and say, oh, I had to go to work. And so I was on this work trip and just, I smelled, there was a smell that lingered. So I get off the plane, I was flying to California and my boss and I are meeting at the airport and I go to hug him and he goes, Ooh, why do you smell like that?

    It came with me to California. And that smell traveled with me for a full year. I had to leave all my clothes behind. I had to leave mattresses. You couldn’t take anything that was a soft surface because this chemical smell lived in it. And no matter how many times you washed it, it didn’t matter. And it got to the point where it became embarrassing because you had a smell. My partner also has chronic illness, and the smell would make him sick just from me being in his home. And it got to the point where when I would go over, I would have to get completely naked at the door, get in a shower, shut my clothes in a basement. I would have to shower, I would’ve to put on different clothes that I had to buy to keep there. And it was so I didn’t feel like a human.

    And I remember at one point I was crying. I was so upset, I was so tired. And I was like, I can’t believe I have to go through this whole ritual, this decontamination ritual. And I just remember him saying, it’s not you, honey, it’s the chemicals. I’m like, I don’t know that. That makes me feel that much better, right? Yeah. He would get nosebleeds just from being around my suitcase. And so about six months in, I ended up, I worked two jobs until I could afford to move. Because when they tell you to just move, it actually doesn’t work like that, especially if you were exposed to a chemical. So now all of your belongings, you can’t take them with you. And so when I did move, I finally got a place, I was on an air mattress. Me and my grandma were sharing an air mattress on the ground.

    There was no furniture. I just got a couch. And I’ve been there for over a year at this point, because you are rebuilding, you were starting over again. And so I’ve had to work from the crack of dawn until it’s dark out. And that’s what I had to do to move. And that’s a privilege, right? Not everyone even has that privilege. That’s pretty shocking. I can do that as a disabled person. But I look at people with families. My family is a small, well, small business owner, but we own a lot of acreage. And my parents want to move. But when you have 10,000 acres and you have a business based on tourism, and guess what? You can’t sell it. So where are you going to go? And you can’t pull equity out of your house. So they’re stuck. I could just up and move.

    I didn’t have the business. I didn’t have this and that. So now my grandma and I, we lived in the home. My great-grandmother built on the land that my family originally lived on. My parents built a house in the backyard. I had moved back home because I had cancer. And I was a young adult and I couldn’t financially recover unless I did that. My plan was I live back with my grandma and then I build a house in the backyard. Cause we have 40 acres, we have our own little commune. That can’t happen now. There’s no way we used to lease farm land. And how can we ethically do that? How can we ethically, if you have farmers who want to farm that land, is that ethical? Is it ethical to sell your home? So right now, we just have our home sitting there because we don’t feel comfortable selling it.

    And I had someone who was a lawyer be like, oh, actually you can, it’s okay. And I said, I’m not actually asking about the law here. I’m talking about ethics. Can I sell this home so that some little kid someday gets angiosarcoma, which is the cancer that vinyl chloride is tied to? So in the beginning, I was kind of the person behind the scenes organizing, I don’t really like to do stuff like this. I’m the person who likes to prep people for these things. And about six months in, I realized I was going to have to do this and step up. And so we had a grassroots group that we started just like a volunteer. We weren’t a nonprofit, we weren’t anything. And people always said like, oh, why didn’t you become a nonprofit right away? And I said, oh, because we didn’t want the rules.

    So we did have some civil disobedience in the beginning. That’s how I met Robin and David. They went to the Ohio State Capitol with us. And we didn’t storm the capitol, but we had people go sit in a session and stand up and say, remember he is Palestine. My kid’s nose is bleeding. And let me tell you, once you go back to your community after you do something like that, things don’t go well. Small, rural conservative communities aren’t really into that kind of thing. But it was effective. And the reason we went when we did was one thing we thought that could help us was a major disaster declaration because we didn’t even get a state of emergency. It opened up this problem that because there was a company who was the reason this happened, the liability was with that company and it wasn’t a natural disaster.

    So there was just so many things behind the scenes that they couldn’t figure out how to classify the disaster essentially to give us the government services we needed. But we thought a major disaster declaration would help. In the beginning had started a petition. We had over 20,000 signatures. And then it was the next day it was, if the governor didn’t ask President Biden for that, then you could never get it. And so we went because we knew we had to put pressure on Ohio’s governor to win Pennsylvania’s governor. I found out couldn’t even call that disaster declaration because it physically didn’t happen. So where an accident happens is really important apparently. So we went and we put the pressure on, and guess what? The next day DeWine did ask for the disaster declaration. So it worked to the whole community hated us after that. And I mean, still to this day, Facebook groups terrify me like what they’re saying about us, but it’s what we had to do.

    And that’s what I’ve realized. Some of these decisions I have to make in this work is like, I have to do this and I’m not going to be liked after, and I have to do this in a way that I can stay in the work too. So maybe sometimes that means not organizing as close to home. I learned that federal policy actually can help us a lot more than talking to my representatives when they tell you, oh, talk to your representatives, talk to your counsel. That is true in some cases, but in this case, that wasn’t true. So a lot of my work has been about going to the very top and figuring out what we can get from the government. And unfortunately, it doesn’t happen quick. It does not happen quick. And so by the time we are going to get the things we’re fighting for, people are going to be sick.

    There’s already people sick. There’s people with rare forms of breast cancer. There’s young girls getting their period super early. There’s respiratory issues. I was hospitalized multiple times. My sibling was life-flighted multiple times. My three-year-old sister has obstructive sleep apnea, which only happened after the derailment. So the system was horrible. And that’s kind of what I’m trying to change. And we found out when we did get to meet at the White House, something I had asked later, I said to them, what got us here? What was the difference maker? And they actually said, we noticed you were working with other communities and other industries. And they talked about the fact that we were working with labor, we were working with unions, and then they found out that we’ve been working with the Gulf South and we were working in West Virginia. And that scared them. It should.

    And that got us in the door. And that’s why I think what we’re doing here is more important than anything we could do because this is what scares them. People coming together and realizing it’s not left versus right. It’s not Republican versus liberal. It is us versus them. And we are the people. We’re the everyday people. It’s us versus the billionaires in the systems and that’s scaring them. So we have to keep doing this in other communities because this is what gets the attention. Sometimes it’s not the rallies or the op-eds, sometimes it’s them simply understanding your network. So anytime I go to another community, I was in Louisiana at a public meeting and someone from industry said, oh, who are you and why are you here? And I said, oh, we all work together. And they were like, oh no. So letting industry know like, oh yeah, I know Elise in West Virginia. I know Nikki in Baltimore, and that’s really scary to them.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s go back around the table before we open it up to q and a. And I want to acknowledge that as y’all had laid out, and as Hilary, you were talking through some of the gains that you made by not going away. And I know that that has happened in your respective communities. Y’all are true heroes, love warriors for justice because you refuse to go away. And in that way, you were also an inspiration to all of us. So I want to acknowledge the fact that here in South Baltimore, y’all got together high school students, folks from Johns Hopkins doing community science to provide the proof that CSX without which CSX could keep on saying, no, that black shit in your home is not us, must be something else. So that’s a victory. But yet they’re still denying culpability. Their operational permits still up for renewal in coal country, right?

    It’s like, oh, well, we stopped mining coal, now we’re fracking the shit out of everything and still poisoning the water that way. So I say this by way of asking if in our final turnaround the table, if y’all could say a little bit about what the communities have been doing and achieving through struggle, but also what this week has shown us in regards to as valiant and essential as those local efforts are to take on these international corporations. We need solidarity that’s operating at the level that they are and what we can do working together, building on what Hilary kind of got us started on. So yeah, could you say a little bit about what y’all and your communities have achieved and have been working towards, but also where you’re seeing that that’s not enough and that we need to band together to take this fight to the higher level higher.

    Elise Keaton Wade:

    So I want to start this. Can you hear me okay? I want to start this because their fights are more current in time than mine, and I want to kind of build on what Hilary said and then hand it to them to talk about their current struggles. But now you understand why Palestine at Palestine set me back on fire right now. You understand that I got there and realized that everything I’d seen wasn’t true. They were misleading the rest of the world about what happened there. And it wasn’t until I sat in the room and heard these people talk about why the people with no marks on their skin or their hair falling out were the ones who got to go into the White House, how they divided the community. And I stood next to my friend Dustin White who is here tonight with me.

    He was at that meeting and the entire time they were talking about how that community and how the officials responded in that disaster. We were looking at each other across the room. That’s exactly what they did in 2014 at the Elk River Chemical disaster in West Virginia. The leak spill, whatever, nearly verbatim responses. And then the split, you have a coalition of people and we cobbled ourselves together. And now they’re going to pick and choose who they bring into the room so that when you leave that room, there’s division within your community. They did exactly the same thing to us. And I sat there with my jaw on the floor and they’re going to keep doing it to every community. There’s their standard playbook. So yes, what scares them is that we talk to each other now that we stand in solidarity with each other, that I go and raise hell with the union in West Virginia for our railroad brothers and sisters in East Palestine who stood for two months and screamed about the safety issues on this railroad, screamed to the people in this country about what was happening and what was going to happen if they didn’t shut it down and address it.

    And we told ’em to sit down and shut up because our economy needed those trains to roll. Now, if you’ve been with me for the past couple of days, I’ve been on a bit of a diatribe about the failed economic theory of capitalism. Happy to go into that more on another podcast Max. But this is a great example.

    This is a great example of why it doesn’t work, because if it worked in theory, they would’ve taken as long as they needed to clean up that mess because it would’ve been what was safe and best for the community and for making sure that the altruistic idea of what happened happened. That’s not what happened in West Virginia. If they cared about the community and the long-term effects, they would’ve addressed the issues that caused that chemical spill, which are mountaintop removal and contamination of local water sources from coal mining and chemical production. If they care, they don’t care. The only people who have ever shown up for us are us. The only people who have ever shown up for us are us. And then we have to support each other. Don’t let them divide us. Don’t let them go back and forth. So I want to step back and just say that the fact that it has become more egregious, they are pushing that boundary, right?

    They are pushing it constantly and they will continue. Every community in this country has a train rail through it. This could be Hinton, this could be any town that has a railway through it. And what are they going to do? They’re going to destroy your lives with their contamination and they’re going to point fingers at each other and they’re going to point fingers at you and tell you it’s really not as bad as you say it is, because how do you know it wasn’t the nail polish you were wearing that caused the toxicity in your body?

    Yeah, that’s what they told me. Do you wear nail polish? Do you color your hair? Well, how do you know you didn’t poison yourself? Do you smoke cigarettes? Do you drink soda West Virginia? Maybe you’re the problem. I want to say one thing about the myth of the inbred hillbilly, because this is one of my favorite things to talk about in broad groups, and I think it goes back a long time in our history, and I know everybody’s heard about the inbred hillbilly. If you haven’t heard about the inbred hillbilly, raise your hand. This is so diffused throughout our culture, right? Well, I went into the world carrying the identity of the hillbilly that had to do better. I had to prove that we’re not all inbred, that some of us aren’t. So I let them tell me who I was. I accepted their identity of who they told me I, I carried it with me into the world espousing it.

    I came back to West Virginia because I love my state. I wanted to come back and do the good things that I’d learned out there that nobody taught me here, come back here and do those good works. And when I got back here with a little bit of perspective and context and some world experience, I realize that may be the biggest hoax of the 20th century. Because what happens when you live next to unregulated pollutants? You have high instances of birth defects, cancers deadly diseases. You die young, you die sick. You have offspring that are compromised and sick and young. And 150 years ago, all of these toxins were going unchecked into the community. And what better way to marginalize that community than they say, well, don’t look at that ugliness. They inbred and they changed the narrative and they framed a region for decades. The myth of the inbred hillbilly is still carried forward.

    So it is on purpose. It is deliberate. If they can tell you who you are and what you’ve done to f your life up, then they’re not responsible. So don’t let them gaslight you. Stand firm and speak your truth to power because you’re right at the end of the day. You’re right. And what did Larry Gibson teach us? Teach us while we stood on Payford Mountain? If you’re telling the truth, what are you afraid of? Speak your truth to power and stand firm. And you’ve got brothers and sisters in West Virginia standing with you and you’ve got brothers and sisters in Pennsylvania standing with you. You’ve got brothers and sisters in Curtis Bay standing with you. So thank you for standing up East Palestine, we are with you in this. Thank you.

    Angela Shaneyfelt:

    Thank all of you. And I’m so, so glad that we’re sitting all here in this room together tonight because Curtis Bay, we’re at a point right now. We’re pushing. We’re getting the attention that East Palestine got. And I mean, I said it two years ago at a rally. Let’s take this to Annapolis and to dc. We’re so close to DC that we can’t stop fighting the fight. And it’s not for us. It’s for my kids who are in middle school right now. And my daughter joined us today for as long as she could hang, and she got up on the steps and she said her, she was awesome. And we have the higher cancer rates in Curtis Bay, like asthma rates. I never had asthma growing up. And I found out I had asthma in 2020 in the hospital for surgery. And they’re like, this is your breathing treatment. And I’m like, breathing treatment for what? Nobody ever told me I had asthma.

    And we have been fighting. We’ve been going to city council. And at one point they didn’t listen, but then we kept fighting and we kept calling the news. And Max, thank you for starting the whole podcast thing and just getting the word out. I’ve gone through times. I mean, the fight is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. And I’ve had my own thoughts. What am I doing this for? I doing it. And I just, I’m so grateful right now that I’m sitting in this room with you guys because we’ve gotten to a point where what is our next step? And I’ve even said it along the way. There’s this lull of large numbers, and I see it happening right now. I didn’t know any of you guys before today. So I knew Nikki for a few years and I never would’ve ever imagined before 2021 that I would ever be sitting in circles that I’m sitting in now. And now I’m 16 years ago, I wanted to be out of Curtis Bay as fast as possible no matter what. And then kids happen. And Curtis Bay is where I can afford to live in all honesty. And in two years, I’m like ready to, the plan is to buy a house. Is it going to be in Curtis Bay? A hundred percent, no. But I’m invested now. So even if I move out, I’m still coming back to keep the fight going and keep the story going, to make the change because that’s what I need to do.

    Melanie Meade:

    My father taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Thomas Vme. He passed in 2013. And the reason he stayed in Clariton is because the family land that we had called Randolph Hollow was taken over for mill housing and he felt like it was worth it to sacrifice his life and his health so that our history could not be forgotten. And so when I hear Hilary stand in solidarity, and the new friend I have in Curtis Bay stand in solidarity, Elise and Dr. Nikki standing in solidarity with me, I know that I’m on the right path. I know that I have not forgotten my history, who I am and what I’m capable of. And I think each and every one of you are fierce in your own way. And it is so wonderful that we have this opportunity because we need it. We need to check in with ourselves, check in with others, because we are the ones showing up for ourselves, as Elisa said. And I need each and every one of you for the long haul. So thank you again, and let’s keep doing the work.

    Hilary Flint:

    To go off of what Melanie said, it’s stuff like this that keeps me in the work. So that’s a question I ask myself a lot, and I see other activists and I think, what do they need to stay in the work? What do I need to stay in the work? And every once in a while it’s going to a community and getting inspired by their wins. I noticed how closely the communities here, the EJ conversation is happening with housing injustice and you’re talking about racial justice, and we don’t see a lot of that in our corner of Appalachia. That type of solidarity building doesn’t happen. And so I get to leave and be really inspired by that. I have been working with a group of folks from the Gulf South, and we’re talking about creating an area where climate refugees can live. So I’m looking at the passive housing and I’m thinking, oh, interesting. And I bet a funder would fund something like that. So I get to think about those different ways of doing the work. And we just don’t celebrate joy very much in Appalachia, unfortunately.

    And to see the positivity and the solutions, I got to see solutions to problems instead of just problems where we are just stuck in the doom and gloom. So for me, coming to this, this is what keeps me in the work. It keeps me going, but then as most people know, I’m a homebody. So I’ll go home and you won’t see me for three weeks now because this social battery, but we all have, that’s such an important lesson. As an activist, what are your boundaries? What keeps you in the work? What are you comfortable in and what are not? What type of hate are you willing to put up with? What’s going to cross the line for you? It can get really bad. I always say being an activist is choosing to be a target, and not only to industry, but sometimes community, sometimes politicians.

    So again, it’s like what’s going to keep me in the work creating solutions to some of those problems? So something we’ve been trying to do is, again, bring mutual aid into the work. Because what we found out is in East Palestine and Beaver County, they go, oh, well there’s not property damage and there’s not this and there’s not that. So no one’s coming to help you because you don’t fit in a box. And mutual aid is the answer to that, right? It’s community care. It’s, we’re not looking for a box to check off on a grant. You tell me you need a mattress, we get you a mattress. And so how do we make sure that that’s present in the nonprofit industry? So we are fighting really hard to get mutual aid funds set up at small grassroots nonprofits that are just meant for answering community need, peer support.

    So something that we’re working on is building up mental health resources within the movement. And what does it look to make sure other nonprofits are trauma informed, because what I saw was a lot of groups coming in and taking advantage of people, and I was expected to tell my story of my battle with cancer, and then I turned purple and I wasn’t getting paid for any of that. So something that I’ve been doing is I call people out and I say, you can build paying community members into a grant. And so we do it with everything. We build that money into a grant. And I did a video project where I made sure we paid everyone and paid them well. And this one funder said, that’s revolutionary. We don’t do that. And I said, paying people for their work is revolutionary. I said, and we are the progressive industry.

    No, we’re not. So thinking about what does care look like in every aspect, because we are not going to stay in this fight. And as we’ve seen it as a long fight, if we don’t think about those things and we’re just, I’m an action oriented person, I’m like, I got to keep going. I got to keep going. And so that gets tiring. And it’s like sometimes I need Melanie to be like, Hilary, have you checked in with yourself today? Are you doing your self care? And we don’t always get that in our own community because when you’re fighting so closely together, people want to do the work differently. And there’s just so much division going on. The minute I decided that I was going to meet the president and then continue a relationship with politicians, it was, she’s been bought off.

    We can’t trust her anymore. And I had to be okay with that and say, that’s fine. I’m going to work silently. I’m going to get done what I know is going to work because I have been with all of these people now for a year. I know what the needs are and I don’t need to be liked anymore, but I do need to be liked by someone. So that’s where activists come in. They remind me, okay, Hilary, you’re loved and respected in some just not your own home right now. So, okay. So it builds that friendship. And when I get to come and be with Melanie, or even I work very closely with Robin at home, and just to have people that keep filling you up, even if it’s just a couple people in the community, a couple people in different neighborhoods, or when you go through a really heavy situation and no one in your community can relate to it, I can say, Hey Melanie, have you ever experienced this?

    What does it mean? Can you just be my friend right now and talk me through it? No one else gets it in the community. So again, there’s nothing more important than the solidarity building that we’re doing right now. It’s what scares them. I heard it from the highest up mouth that I could find in the United States. This is what scares them. So the more we do it, the more we win. Especially when it comes to public hearings, public comment periods, vinyl chloride, the chemical that ruined my home on October 23rd, you have until October 23rd to submit a public comment about what you think about that chemical, should it be banned. They’ve known since the 1970s that it was a carcinogen. It was the reason the EPA started something called tosca. Yet it has yet to be banned by tosca. This is the first year it’s up to be banned.

    Just letting each other know, Hey, I have a public comment period. I would really appreciate it. Because then guess what? They look and they go, oh crap. They got all these public comments from Pennsylvania. They’ve hit every state. Now we’re going to have to do something no longer. Oh no, we poisoned this one community. We poisoned this one community. And they talk to this other poison community, and they talk to this house that has these people that have been dealing with racism. And then they talk to these people that are dealing with transgender rights and they go, oh, so reminding each other, we have some group chats that’ll be like, Hey guys, public comment period here. Submit. And just finding ways to engage with each other outside of this stuff is really important. Mutual aid fundraisers, some people I meet will have a chat where we’re just like, oh, here’s a GoFundMe.

    Everyone send $5. And it doesn’t ruin my day to send someone $5 at this point. So it’s like, it’s so simple. But if you keep building out these networks and someone has a crisis, and I know people all over the United States, we can get a lot of money. I think we got $3,000 and not even 24 hours. And that’s just like us being random people. It wasn’t a part of our work. It’s just like you can get it because your network is big and your relationships are the work. And if people trust you, they’re going to donate to that. They trust you. So this is how we win

    Melanie Meade:

    In all aspects. Relationships are the work is powerful. And hills is,

    Hilary Flint:

    It wasn’t me, my colleague Andrew Wooer said it the first time, and I’ll never forget it because I don’t like emotional labor. I am someone who I don’t feel often. I just want to do. I want to solve problems. I want to keep going. And so I was getting so upset that people would be crying and I didn’t know what to do. I’m like, I don’t know what this means. I’m like Googling. I’m like, why would someone cry about this? So I was getting so frustrated and it was going to take me out of the work. It was because I was so bogged down and people would want to have two hour long conversations to tell me about their feelings. And I’m like, I am not the one I truly wish I was, but I’m not. So then you have to find your person who’s the one who does

    Melanie Meade:

    The feeling.

    And I think what I learned here in Curtis Bay is education is important and valuable, especially for our youth in Clariton right now in 2024, we do not have climate change or environmental justice spoken of, nor will they allow me to go in and volunteer to talk to the youth. Our newest superintendent, who is an African-American woman, would not allow us to prepare a lawyer clinic because there are three remaining class action lawsuits for the 2018 and 2019 Christmas fires. So our youth are disengaged. Our little league football team practices directly across the street from the industry. And the coaches say to me, who are sickly, this is not harming us. It hasn’t harmed us. We did it when we were little. And that is what must stop aligning with Hilary, aligning with Elise, Dr. Nikki and Curtis Bay gives me voices to now take back to those coaches to say, look, here it is a problem and let’s stop it.

    Let’s unite. Let’s stop allowing them to divide. Because our youth in Clariton are winning football games for 40 years and dying at the age of 20, overdosing on Fentanyl or other drugs less than 30 years. And we don’t have the time. We’re 50 years behind in the conversation. So we need to pick it up. And I’m able to pick it up because I have Hills, tiktoks and Curtis Bay and you Max real-time news. So that if you don’t understand, take a moment to listen here, check in and let’s continue this work. We are not defeated because we are together. Give it up for our incredible panel.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • ‘Let this election galvanize and radicalize us’: Abby Martin, Francesca Fiorentini, and Kat Abughazaleh respond to Trump’s win

    While Democrats are looking for scapegoats to blame for their losses on election day, Donald Trump is busy making cabinet and administration appointments. When it comes to US policy on issues ranging from the climate crisis to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, from public health policy to reproductive rights and labor rights and civil rights, from trade wars to mass deportations, one thing is clear: a lot is about to change. But between Trump’s own contradictory statements and a corporate, independent, and social media ecosystem overflowing with conjecture, misinformation, propaganda, and partisan hackery, it is difficult to know what exactly is coming, how we should be preparing for it, and how we can fight it.

    So what are we facing, really? How do we get ready for the fight ahead? What tools do we need to parse fact from fiction in this critical moment, when talk is everywhere but truth is in short supply? What lessons from the last Trump administration can we use to effectively navigate the very different political terrain we’re on and media ecosystem we’re in today? In this livestream, we dug into these questions (and answered yours!) with independent media makers Abby Martin of Empire Files, Francesca Fiorentini of “The Bitchuation Room” podcast, and Kat Abughazaleh of Mother Jones.

    Studio: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley
    Production: Maximillian Alvarez

    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Donald Trump is headed back to the White House in two months, and with the news this week that the GOP has won a majority in the House of Representatives, the fully MAGAfied Republican Party will effectively control all three branches of government: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.

    The election was just over a week ago, and since then, Democrats have been busy pointing fingers at each other and looking for scapegoats to blame for their losses. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is busy making cabinet appointments and administration appointments. Trump is already sending shockwaves with jaw dropping picks, tapping Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general, for instance; Thomas Holman, an Obama-era appointee to ICE, who was one of the architects of Trump’s zero tolerance policy for border czar; Florida Senator and foreign policy hawk Marco Rubio has been tapped as secretary of state. And the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, are going to head up a new Department of Government Efficiency.

    Listen, when it comes to US policy on issues ranging from climate change to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, from public health and social security to reproductive rights and labor rights and civil rights, from trade wars and tax codes to mass deportations, one thing is clear: a lot is about to change.

    But between Trump’s own babbling contradictory statements and a corporate, independent, and social media ecosystem that is just overflowing with conjecture, doomerism, misinformation, propaganda, and partisan hackery, it can be really difficult to know just what exactly is coming down the pike, how we should be preparing for it, and how we can fight it.

    So what are we facing really? How do we get ready for what’s coming? What tools do we need to parse fact from fiction in this critical moment when talk is everywhere but truth is in short supply? There’s a lot of sound and fury out there, and it’s only going to get louder and more confusing as we rumble onward into the dark unknown of the next four years.

    And we need to get our heads and hearts right for the fight ahead. We need to have a clear-eyed understanding of the political terrain that we’re actually on and the media ecosystem that we’re operating in, both of which are decidedly different today compared to what they were in 2016 when Trump was first elected.

    And that is exactly why I could not be more excited for today’s livestream, where we’re going to talk to three brilliant independent media makers who have so much to teach us about how to fight and win on that terrain. I’m truly honored to have joining us on the stream today the one and only Abby Martin, independent journalist host of the Empire Files, a vital interview and documentary series which everyone should go watch. She’s the director of the 2019 documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom and the new documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy.

    We’ve got the one and only Francesca Fiorentini, correspondent, comedian, host of the Bituation Room podcast, the former host and head writer of the web series News Broke on AJ Plus, and host of the special Red, White, and Who on MSNBC.

    And we’ve got the one and only Kat Abu, video creator and TikTok Powerhouse who started her media career at Media Matters for America monitoring dangerous narratives on Fox News, and who now produces video explainers for Mother Jones, Zeteo, and her personal accounts, which have gained tens of millions of views over multiple platforms.

    Abby, Francesca, Kat, thank you so much for joining us on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it.

    Kat Abu:

    Thanks for having us.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Yeah, woo! There’s a lot of questions I don’t know if we can answer.

    Kat Abu:

    I think the three of us can solve everything. That sounds right.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Yeah, sure, sure. Give us some time.

    Kat Abu:

    An hour.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    [Laughs] Listen, man, I got a lot of confidence in this brilliant group, so we’re not going to be able to figure everything out, but we’re going to be able to figure some shit out. And we have so much to learn from the three of you, and I’m so grateful to all of you for being on this stream with us together.

    And I did want to just give a note to the audience real quick here at the top that we are going to have an audience Q&A section later in the hour. I can’t promise that we’ll be able to get to everyone, but if you’ve got questions for our guests, please put them in the live chat and we’ll get to as many of them as we can at the back end of the hour here.

    So let’s get rolling. We got a lot to dig into here. Abby, I want to come to you first, but this question’s going to be for everyone. So we’ll roll into Francesca and Kat after Abby. So I want to toss you guys this opening question here. Like I said in the intro, the past week has just been a dizzying avalanche of bad news amplified by a constant doom dump of panicked reactions to that news.

    So I want to ask, how are you reacting to and processing all of this, and what’s your message to folks out there watching about the reality that we are actually facing with a second Trump administration? And are there specific cabinet appointments or policy changes or political battles that you are especially focused on right now?

    Abby Martin:

    Thanks so much for having me, Max. It’s great to be on this panel. I’m a little less shocked than I was in 2016, let’s say. I think I was resigned to the inevitability of a Trump presidency for about two years, ever since I found out Biden was sticking it in and not giving up his seat. I think we all got tricked for the last a hundred days when Kamala was anointed that we actually thought that it wasn’t maybe an inevitability, that Kamala did have a chance at winning. So ultimately, I’m just pissed off that the Democrats failed so abysmally and paved the road for this to happen, because it really does all fall on their shoulders.

    But I think that when we take a step backward and look at the playing field and Democrats and Republicans and the ruling class here, Wall Street executives and a lot of billionaires and millionaires did resign to that ultimate Trump presidency far long ago, Max, and they already said, Larry Fink from BlackRock, the CEO already said nothing will fundamentally change because at the end of the day, it’s about capital accumulation whether or not you’re a Democrat or Republican. Yes, they may differ on religious zealotry and how much that has infiltrated politics, but ultimately they would much rather have a Trump, have someone who is fascist. Because we already know that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter for them. Their pocketbooks will still be lined and the capital will still be gained. They would ultimately much rather have Trump than someone like a Bernie Sanders.

    Now, that’s not to discount the fears, the very real trepidation, obviously, from minorities, from trans people, from leftists. Trump ran on a very openly fascist platform where he said he was going to deport pro-Hamas sympathizers while there’s this upswell of pro-Palestine protests against the country.Oobviously the environment is going to be completely gutted. Every last vestige of regulation and protection are going to be thrown out the window.

    So it’s a very dystopian time that we’re entering into, the fact that Trump has been able to dial into this not only conservative hegemony when you’re looking at mainstream media, because even though the conservatives paint it as the liberal media dominates everything, we know the power, scope, and reach of conservative media, and then he folded in all of the alternative media as well. And so that was a very smart strategy for him. We’re in for a very tough road ahead.

    And somehow the Democrats failed to such an extreme degree that they even gave Trump an opening to seize on again this populist rhetoric and anti-war rhetoric. So amidst the Gaza genocide subsidizing this on behalf of the Democrats, Trump was able to seize and capture a huge swath of the populists who are rejecting status quoism and antiestablishmentism somehow, even though we’ve already had this man as president for four years and he gave nothing but whatever the ruling class wanted. But here we are again, facing down a second Trump presidency, and it’s going to be a long fight ahead and long road ahead.

    Two cabinet appointees that I’m especially concerned about, obviously Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, little Marco couldn’t have been a worst pick. When you’re looking at foreign policy, especially Latin America, this guy’s a maniac warhawk who wants to just destroy Cuba and Venezuela, he wants to destroy Iran. I mean, all of these people are China hawks. So even though they might have good rhetoric time, and again on someone like Ukraine, they all want the ultimate prize, which is war with China. And then God damn, this guy Pete, he, Pete Hegseth, sorry, his name is a doozy Secretary of Defense, this Fox News guy. I mean, this guy still supports the Iraq war in 2016. He’s still promoting the Iraq war and defending torture. So it’s a slew of the worst of the worst. Mike Huckabee, the list goes on. It’s just a nightmare.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    You mean the guy with the white nationalist tattoos who’s going to be Secretary of Defense? Yeah, not worried about that at all. Jesus fucking Christ. All right, Francesca, let’s keep the good times rolling with you. How are you processing and responding to this moment? And are there specific kind of appointments, policy changes or political battles where your eyes are especially focused right now?

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    I just want to give it up to Abby. That was an amazing roundup and she hit somehow all of the questions, and I super agree with it. And everything she said is just on the money and especially the last part. I just want to pick up on the idea that Trump could endear himself to a very real cry for an end to the weaponizing sending weapons to Israel and end to this genocide, giving some, I mean, complete window dressing. I’ll be the candidate of peace. Oh yes, I’m going to embrace this one Muslim American group in Michigan and all of that. And then turns around and it points all these neocons who are, I mean, I think we’re going to be probably going to war with Iran, I think within a year, if not sooner. It’s incredible the amount of obviously misdirection switch around that he did.

    But guess what? That’s all you had to do. All you had to do was speak to the very real pain and anger at the status quo, at the status quo of again, genocide. And look, I mean, it’s not necessarily what got him the election, but it sure as hell captivated, captured a moment and he took advantage of it. And so a certain part of the electorate did vote for Trump. Despite everything will be worse in Gaza if you ask me. And yes, there will be a wider war. So I just want to name that the Democrat’s unwillingness to even offer window dressing as to change. It is not that Kamala didn’t say the exact same thing that Biden did, but just a little bit of a hint. Here’s what I would do different. This is how we were going to change on that. That’s important to understand just how unwilling they were to even on a surface level try to appeal to what most people were saying, not just Democrats.

    And then the other thing that Abby said, look, I wish I had her foresight that two years ago I saw this coming because what’s happening to me? The scene in Memento where he starts to figure out that he’s lost his memory and he’s piecing it all together. That’s what I’m doing with the Biden administration, where you’re like, oh, shit. Not raising the minimum wage. We got fucked relying on the Senate, parliamentarian, giving Joe Manchin everything he wanted, and he still tanked your build back better Bill all the ways, and then him running again. It’s like we should have seen this coming. And even though, yes, it’s eight years since 2016, not a lot has changed, not a lot has changed. And our fight against MAGA and Trumpism and the Republicans writ large should not change. And so it is about, you hear, I’m sorry, but when I hear that they got a trifecta, it actually makes me laugh.

    It makes me smile because there’s a little bit of me that’s like, good for them, good for them. You know what I mean? They got a vision. It’s fascism. They took over every single court. They got what they wanted. Why? Because they had a plan. So what’s the plan? That’s what we need. What is actually the plan for Democrats to win? And again, I’m in this moment, clearly I’m mad, and I don’t know if in four years there will be a plan that actually will gain, not just gain these voters back, but I think more importantly gain voters who didn’t go out to the polls or didn’t vote for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump who feel disaffected, who are legitimately disenfranchised in various ways. And so for me, look, there’s too much awfulness to stare directly at. It’s like, don’t look at it all like Trump did at the eclipse. You got to take your own corner, your own peace and fight on that level, whether it’s locally, whether it’s in a community organization, whether it’s you getting involved in something, whether it’s a movie night, documentary month, everyone. I love a good doc. So I’m just like, however you can feel productive, generative and helpful. And hopeful rather than trying to, if you take it all on, I mean you’ll never get out of bed.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Yeah, the notification fatigue is very real, right? I mean, this is one thing hopefully that we learned from the last Trump administration is that immobilizing people in constant fear with an endless barrage of bad news is part of the strategy by which we become demobilized and easier to defeat. And like Francesca said, you got to give it up to these fascists. They are, at least we can say good planners. So there’s something to learn there. Kat, I want to bring you in here. Same sort of questions. How are you processing this and what are you focusing on right now?

    Kat Abu:

    When he won, I thought I expected it, or I at least knew it was a possibility, but I really thought I’d wake up and be ready to go to Mexico. My mom straight up told me, she was like, I will help you move to Mexico. We’re from Texas. So we spent a lot of time down there. She was like, I will be there. I will help you move. I will take the cat. And honestly, I woke up and I was just so energized, ridiculously energized, particularly because of what Francesca said, we need a plan. And I am someone who was as a job. I am immersed in right wing media constantly, which means a, I know Trump’s entire cabinet right now, Pete Hegseth, oh my God, don’t even get me started. But also I think it’s time. You talked about people pointing fingers when you’re pointing fingers to blame, to find someone to say, this wasn’t me, or it was your fault.

    That’s not productive. But what’s really productive is being able to say, fuck y’all who didn’t listen, who didn’t listen. When I and 20 other people were sleeping outside of the DNC when we tried to play ball just to get a Palestinian American on stage, when I had a super PAC reach out to me and ask me to run an entire pro-Palestine voter initiative over the last month of the election in Michigan and Wisconsin, and my only condition was speaking to Kamala Harris on camera for 10 minutes talking to one Palestinian person, and instead she did a tour with Liz Cheney. So we know what went wrong. And the way that we fix this is we get these people out, they don’t listen, and the only way they will is if we threaten their power. There were so many districts where Democrats didn’t even run a candidate.

    There were so many districts when the incumbent who had been there for 3, 5, 10 terms didn’t have anyone try to challenge them in the primary because that’s the big issue with the Democratic party, is that it fears dissent. And I think that’s healthy to have dissenters, dissenting supporters in your party. That means that there is freedom of speech. That means that you’re getting different ideas. That means if you are being corrupt, people will call you out. And so what we need to do, like Francesca also said on the local level, but also the state level, the national level is get people in communities to run for every possible office. And anyone who’s watching here and had that inkling in the back of your head and you were like, maybe I could do that. No, that’s insane. You can, especially at the local and state level, you can absolutely do that.

    Even if you don’t win challenging, that will make them fucking sweat. They are terrified of losing power. But as far as what’s going to happen for the next four years, we don’t know. I find a little bit of solace in the fact that there are so many incompetent buffoons being appointed that they will definitely wreck stuff. But it takes a little bit of competence like a Dick Cheney type maniacal plotting to be able to accomplish everything they want to do. And appointing both Elon Musk and Vivek Ramas Swami to one role for efficiency. Yeah, that’s not going to happen. They’re going to hate each other. And just these egos on the right, especially in these far up positions are just too big to balance with one another. But things will get bad and we don’t know. The best time to challenge authoritarianism is at the start and at the end of that regime. And we are at the start. It’s up to us, especially during the midterms, which are going to come up way faster than you think. Two years is not that long to try to disrupt this while we can. Yeah. Sorry, I’m so pissed off.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    No, let the rage flow baby. That’s why we got all three of you here. We need to channel that shit because if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention. And I want to, in this sort of second section, I really want to focus in on the work that y’all do in the media and what we can learn from that work. But just a sort of quick, rapid fire run around the table one more time. I want to kind of pick up where, pick up what Kat was putting down there. We should also emphasize that there are weaknesses, critical weaknesses in the MAGA movement in the Trump administration, in the way Trump operates. And I wanted to ask if y’all just kind of had any of those at the top of your mind that you wanted to remind viewers of things where all hope is not lost, all territory is not gone, the struggle needs to continue, but I think Kat hit upon a really important one.

    What we do know from the first Trump administration is that it was a clown car of clowns coming in, clowns going out. People were in the administration for a week before they ran afoul of Trump and got the boot. I’m fully expecting Elon Musk to outwear his welcome with Trump in the next 10 minutes or something may go wrong there with these two massive egos clashing against each other. So there are pressure points within the MAGA movement in Trump’s administration that we can put pressure on. But I wanted to start with Abby and go back around if there are other sort of weaknesses or areas of struggle that you want to remind folks are still there. We can’t give up on everything here.

    Abby Martin:

    Well, it does seem to be curiously of a vehicle for Christian evangelicals, which obviously the first tenure was certainly that. I mean delivering the overturning of Roe v Wade and the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem, that certainly was just giving the Christian evangelicals exactly what they wanted. This one is a little bit more, it seems like stage managed Trump is a total buffoon. He’s like Grandpa Simpson yelling at the clouds. I mean, I don’t know if anyone, I’m sure Kat, you were watching very diligently, the insanity that he was putting out there at some of his rallies. I mean, even his victory speech seemed so lackluster. He didn’t even know what the hell to say. It was like, how is this your victories speech, aren’t you? We

    Kat Abu:

    Are going to get some really crazy reaction made soon.

    Abby Martin:

    He’s so horrible and he’s lost all of his mojo. He is not the same Trump that ran in 2016, but he is still a narcissist and megalomaniac, and that is to his detriment. So like you said, max, I mean the clashing of egos, the upset that’s certainly going to come with a lot of these appointments and a lot of things are going to come to a head and he is belligerent. He’s a bull in a China shop, and that’s ultimately why the ruling class doesn’t want him as someone as opposed to someone who’s more manageable or someone who’s not as uncouth and belligerent to the rest of the world. But yeah, I think it’s going to be a big opening to just show how incoherent he is and how he doesn’t even have anything cogent to present at all. So there’s a lot of space to ram the truth through. It’s just a matter of how are we going to expose that when the entire media sphere is just locked down by right wing billionaires?

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    And I’ll just pick up on that and say, I mean, I think it’s a good question. I think things like subjecting ourselves to Pi Morgan panels, Abby is also, it’s for me, it’s like fun sometimes, but I only do it if I can have a little bit of fun and sort of mock the entire thing. It’s ripe for mockery. I’m a comic, so I thrive on this kind of stuff. That being said, I am so less interested in how we rake up the MAGA billionaires versus how we actually have the best defense, which is a good offense, and how we actually drive more fissure in the democratic side and the liberal side, how we use this moment. A lot of liberals are being radicalized by this moment, and I think it is specifically the left’s job to allow liberals into our fold to let them be radicalized, help them learn, dig deeper, watch some empire files documentaries, watch some news, broke videos get woke for lack of a better term because there are also people, as much as we’re so hyper-focused on who voted for maga, nah man, I’m focused on the people who are disillusioned and rightly so with the Democratic party as it exists, and they are trying to dig deeper, they’re trying to get involved.

    They realize this is not going to be won by them just getting a sticker and falling out of a coconut tree or whatever it is. So there’s that. I agree that the Trump administration on its own will eat itself alive, but we have to remember that even in effective fascism does still hurt people and separate people. Maine people does give rise to vigilantism and hate crimes. We’re going to see a lot of that. And we already have seen that. I think that child separation happened under Trump’s first term. I think we can expect that and worse. So for me, here’s why I can’t care about the right and their billionaires is because this whole year, this whole year, ever since Biden started campaigning, what have we been doing? Look at how silly they are. Look at how crazy they are. Look at how dumb, look at how weird, look at how corrupt look at them drinking horse dewormer and shitting their pants on the regs.

    Look at all of this stuff. How undemocratic, how stupid, none of it breaks through. None of it matters if you yourself are not offering real concrete solutions. If you’re doing a piss poor job at selling any concrete solutions or a piss poor job at selling the solutions that you actually did do some of the good things that Biden might’ve done, then I can’t help you. And so me pointing out Orange Man bad, I just brought this segment onto my show, it’s now going to just be an Orange Man bad segment. We talk about all the Trump shit and then we talk about some real stuff. What are we doing? How can we fight back? What are people doing organizing with their unions and their workplaces? That to me is where our energy needs to be.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Preach this. Kat, you want to hop back in here?

    Kat Abu:

    Yeah, I mean, both of y’all are absolutely right. I mean, Abby hit on the head with talking about their oversized egos and Francesca talking about offering another solution besides I think like George HW Bush. Every president who has won since Carter has been a populace whether on the right or left. And the good thing about progressive policies is if you don’t market them like a moron, pretty much every normal person likes them. People hate Obamacare, but they love the a CA. It’s the same thing. And so I think that’s when you’re bringing these people into the fold, that’s an important thing to remember. Instead of immediately attacking progressives or say that’s a pipe dream, why don’t we try to strive to do better? But I think the biggest thing that I think gives me comfort and I think to look out for in the next four years is what happened today, the onion buying Infowars, they are losing their collective minds over this.

    And it’s because they desperately want to be a part of normal person culture, deeply entrenched culture. Not sure if I’ve done, I’ve watched it for the last three years, the Patriot Awards at Fox. It’s their equivalent of the Academy Awards. And there are like four awards. It’s one year. It was most valuable Patriot, Patriot of the Year, most patriotic, badass. And that was Pete Hef, by the way and the Back of the Blue Award. That’s not a real award show. No one watched that except me. They want to have comics that are lauded and everyone thinks they’re hilarious, and instead you’ve got gut filled. And sure there are a lot of radicalizing podcasts and stuff that are capturing the attention of especially young men, young white men. But as far as our identity of what’s cool, what’s fun, who you want to be around in real life and not online, they simply can’t capture that.

    They can only do it through a screen or through angry taglines they say on TV that your uncle might believe, but he’ll make sure not to say his true thoughts at Thanksgiving until a couple glasses of wine. And that’s devastating. Then they’ll never get that. And I think exploiting that on top of all of this other action we can take on top of bringing people into the fold on top of running candidates, on top of just resisting complete doom and despair kind of rocks, they’re terrified of that and it makes them so mad that they can’t capture the lightning in a bottle of being a person.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Oh boy,

    Kat Abu:

    That’s so

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    True.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I think that’s all, I mean all three of you beautifully and powerfully put and important things to remember, and I could genuinely talk to you guys for hours and hours, but I know we have a limited time with you, and I want to make sure that in this next round we kind of zero in on the work that you’re doing as media makers, as journalists, as analysts, as powerful voices in this ecosystem. So let’s talk about the media side of things and then to everyone watching, I want to remind you that we are going to have a q and a section at the end of this hour where we want to hear your questions for our guests. So please, if you haven’t already, put your questions in the live chat. So as we’ve already addressed here, corporate media, big tech and this growing network of new media influencers have all played major roles in the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement, and they’re going to continue to shape our political reality as we head into a second Trump administration from Elon Musk buying Twitter and turning it into a cesspit of Trump. Again to influencers like Joe Rogan endorsing Trump the day before the election. The arena of digital media and online politics has shifted over the past eight years. As Francesca said, a lot has stayed the same, but changes have happened. And Abby, you actually went on Rogan’s show again back in the summer, and I want to play that clip for our audience. Let’s roll that appearance from Abby’s on Rogan

    Abby Martin:

    A couple years ago. Yeah, back in 2021.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    This is the 20 21 1.

    Abby Martin:

    Yeah.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Okay, pause. Let’s roll that.

    Speaker 5:

    When you see the Iron Dome and you’re seeing these rockets being fired out of Palestine and they’re all getting detonated in the air, and then you realize like, oh, this is a kind of crazy situation. One side has this insane technology and the other side is kind of in an open air of prison camp in a way. You can’t go anywhere. You’re kind of stuck.

    Abby Martin:

    25% of American Jews now after the latest onslaught in Gaza believe Israel’s an apartheid state. And that shows you how dramatically the narrative has completely flipped on its head because for the last 20 years, Israel’s been losing control of dictating the narrative. I mean, that was really what they relied on for so long that we’re acting in self-defense, that we’re surrounded by people who hate us and hypothetically will commit genocide against us to basically defend the fact that they are committing defacto genocide in Gaza. That is the erasure of Gaza resident. It’s the erasure of a culture. It’s not just the extermination. That’s according to the,

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    The very fact that Abby fricking Martin was speaking the truth about the occupation and Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians on the most popular podcast in the world is a testament to what you were saying in that very clip, Abby. So what does that say about the media environment that we’re in today and what have you learned navigating that environment that you think folks out there may not be seeing or understanding? And how do we sort of square clips like that? The influence that shows Rogans have their openness to voices like yours and also the Trump endorsement?

    Abby Martin:

    My God, there’s so many levels there. I mean, first we need to look at Joe Rogan’s audience, and I think it’s a huge mistake for liberals to write it off just like they have written off Trump supporters as racist, misogynists, and just a MAGA cult entirely. Look, Joe Rogan’s audience is eclectic diverse. I’ve had thousands of people come up to me over the course of the last eight or nine years ever since I was going on his show, telling me that they learned about Palestine for the first time that they became radicalized, that they became a communist based on what I said on his show. So I think it’s a huge mistake for, again, it’s just writing off any semblance of alternative spaces and turning them into conservative pockets. And we saw exactly what happened with Bernie when he went on the Joe Rogan podcast and Joe Rogan endorsed him, and the entire liberal media sphere was up in arms.

    Everyone was like, recant the endorsement, denounced it. How dare you go on his show and how dare you take this endorsement from him? I mean, it was a huge mistake. And I think that when we’re looking at someone like Kamala Harris, it was a huge mistake for her not to go on Joe Rogan’s platform. Would Joe Rogan have ultimately endorsed Trump by their way? I don’t know, probably. But I think, look, when we’re looking at these huge spaces with tens of millions of people who are captive audiences and we just silo ourselves off and we don’t engage with them, it’s to our own detriment. You look at the liberal media, the corporate media of liberal spaces and liberal dominant narratives, they were painting that the economy was actually fine, the stock market was good. They don’t ever talk about poor working class people. They talk about the middle class, the middle class.

    So they’re erasing tens of millions of people. 40% of Americans are insecure economically. So yeah, when you’re looking at what was a big driving factor of this election, people’s material conditions and being gaslit and lied to from, so-called Legacy Media, or the term that conservatives have really kind of hijacked to paint what they claim is corporate media hegemony on the liberal side. We know that that’s not the case, but it’s easy to paint it that way when the corporate media by and large is defending the status quo and promoting what we’ve been seeing, the genocide, right? I mean, so it’s crazy and it feels schizophrenic, and I think people are completely detaching themselves from that space. We’re no longer in the position where we’re begging these outlets to cover our struggles fairly or to stop being so biased and one-sided when it comes to US foreign policy. We have to create our own avenues and engage with each other and uplift our voices to build this consensus that we know exists

    With a large swath of Americans. Unfortunately, to the point of all of you and all of our work, I mean, it is so dominated by conservatives, and it’s so unfortunate because people are so detached from what they’re being told, the media pundits, and they’re basically being funneled into the alt-right pipeline because it’s so overly dominant. And now you see Elon Musk Musk, who’s a total joke. I mean, he bought basically Twitter to just be relevant because the Babylon Bee, I mean, they want to be funny. They want to be culturally significant and relevant, and we’ve seen what he’s done with it. I mean, he bought it under the pretense that it would be somehow because the government was too involved and he’s just become an arm an appendage of the Trump administration. So it’s getting quite scary. It’s getting quite scary. But when look at two networks that allowed someone like me to have voices that were anti-capitalist and anti empire tell AOR in Russia today, and when you have a voice on networks like that, among the only spaces that we’re allowing people like me to talk, the national security state becomes involved and ends up suppressing voices like that.

    And it just erases leftists like Chris Hedges and Lee Camp and then just silos us off into oblivion. So we’re all scrambling and competing with our own brands and Patreons and podcasts to try to just make a modicum of space that the right wing has just engineered and really dialed in. And I think it’s an incredibly effective strategy, and you cannot under state or discount the effect that Joe Rogan had the effect that folding in RFK Jr and Tulsi and all of these kind of alternative media figures into this umbrella. It’s a big tent, and they pulled everyone into it, and it’s the opposite of what the liberals have done to the left.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Man. Mic drop shit. So like Francesca, I want to just build on that and come to you because you are quite the influencer yourself, and you’ve got a lot of experience as Abby does, as Kat does, moving between the independent media sphere and the up echelons of corporate or legacy media from M-S-N-B-C and Nat Geo to Fox, right? You’re like a bull shark. You can swim in saltwater and freshwater, right? And perhaps most famously, I don’t know, maybe because he just masochistically loves getting dunked on Piers Morgan has frequently had you on as a guest on his show, PI Morgan Uncensored. So let’s play the next clip of Francesca blasting Morgan on his show for being a hypocrite and a division profiteer

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    During a Wednesday episode of Pi Morgan Uncensored. Oh, this is me. Pi Morgan found himself agreeing with a fellow guest named Kat Tim, who had recently wrote a book about why we are so divided in this country and why we need to come together left and and really just talk about the issues and not make everything so polarized. And I for Jessica Fiorentini happened to also be on that panel. And I took issue not with Kat, Tim or her book, which I actually thought was incredibly interesting and yes, much needed because so many of the issues that face this country really do cut across party lines. But I took issue with Pi Morgan who was gushing over Kat and gushing over the book and saying that he agrees that we are way too divided as a nation, and we really need to just listen to each other when this is a man whose bread and butter is made by people screaming at one another, arguing with each other, and he gets rich in the meantime. And here’s what I had to say about that. Take a look.

    Piers Morgan:

    I completely agree. I’m a bit like that. I don’t park myself into either the right or left camp. Go

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    On. You’re so dishonest, dude. You’re so dishonest though, because all you do on this show is play off social media algorithms to get people to fight. You lead with it in the cold open and you get the click, click clicks. And if you don’t hit a mill, you never ask that person back. You literally play the game. The cat is decrying, but pierce, stop pretending like you think there’s something wrong and we can’t watch

    Piers Morgan:

    Francesca. There’s

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    One central. Your whole algorithm

    Piers Morgan:

    Is

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Based based on it. Your whole model is based on

    Piers Morgan:

    It. Francesca, it’s a lovely statement that will get you lots of clicks from your followers, and that’s why you’ve just delivered your little monologue. However, it’s based on I’m here, wait, I’m here on this panel free. You don’t normally get a million views for me, but I still invite you back. So that can’t be true. I do it as an act to charity. I like you.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    I check the sets. I crush, I crush Pierce.

    Piers Morgan:

    I like having you on because you’re so annoying.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Same

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Queen shit. So Francesca, we

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Stand.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    We stand. So what has your experience in these different sides of the media ecosystem taught you about where the power is in that ecosystem? Who and what are we fighting against in this media arena and how do we win? Or at least how do we not lose in that arena?

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    We’re fighting liberals. We’re always fighting liberals. I’m sorry. The reason I do peers is because it’s fun. But look at the commenters. They hate me. They think I’m crazy. They think I’m an insane person who supports trans rights, all that. And I just go on there again, as he called out for fun to show those clips to just dunk on him and move on my merry way. I don’t really, sometimes I get real. Sometimes I talk about the billionaire class versus the rest of us, the number of venture capitalists that the Trump administration has supporting it, the David Sachs, the David Horowitz, all these people, the Peter Thiels and whatnot. But for me, it’s about liberal mainstream media. And I think I want to pick up on some things that Abby said as well. I actually think that war and empire have a lot to do with why so many, especially young people don’t have faith in mainstream news.

    And it’s because of the Iraq war, people like us who came up during the war on terror and completely that mainstream news was nowhere to be found. They were in lockstep with the generals and beating the drums of war. And we got a couple mea culpas here and there, but really nothing. And then since then, the media sphere has proliferated with alternative news, many of it, amazing, a lot of it also disinformation. And then Donald Trump comes in and calls everything fake news and it all, everyone’s sort of discombobulated. But the fact that the media, mainstream news has still not been able to adequately discuss the war machine, the war profiteering, the military industrial complex is just like, I mean, obviously in part because they accept money from these weapons contractors and in some cases are owned by them, but that will forever be the stain that they cannot wipe out and they’re clawing their way back from.

    And so for me, it’s twofold in terms of how to get the Rogan, the Rogans of the world, and how to get big. And I agree with Abby. You’ve got to find these openings. Look, I disagree with him platforming a lot of white nationalists and spewing a lot of misinformation about trans people. I have people who are talking to me, I don’t know, but these kids are getting these sex changes, and you’re just like, I know you’re listening to Rogan all the time, man. That’s what’s happening. However, who are the people who he will let on the show? And they happen to be, and usually always are people who are anti-establishment. And that I think is the bigger rather than left, right? It’s distrust with big pharma, which can lead to awful things like the RFK, anti-vax movement, in my opinion. But it can also lead to great things like the Medicare for All movement or people who want pharmaceuticals, the drug prices to come down.

    It can lead to meal mouth. Things like Medicare gets to negotiate on insulin in two years as per Joe Biden. So it’s like not capturing that anti-establishment, not vibe. Movement is how the mainstream news loses every single time to say nothing of the fact that for me, in my career, it’s like I had a special in 2019, right? M-S-N-B-C, they run it in the dead. You guys will love this the last week of December. So it’s the week between Christmas and New Year. Nobody home, nobody watching all the Be hosts were in that. It was very funny. And what happened in 2020, the pandemic Donald and the election cable news did not need deep dive journalism, an hour long report looking into the successes and failures of Obamacare. And that’s on them. And every four years they come around going, why is the electorate so misinformed? You cannot break your own 24 hour news media cycle and actually give a journalist, a real journalist an hour, give them an hour a week to explain something to the many, many millions of people that watch the program. But they can’t do that because they don’t need to. And again, it could be unsafe for their bottom line to say nothing of it would have to be a little bit of an investment. But anyway, one day I’ll be Stanley Tucci traveling Italy and eating my ass off. But until then, situation room is where I’ll be.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    We have the same dream. I just want to be the Mexican version of it. So Kat, I want to bring you back in here because you are doing something that so many of us want to figure out how to do, but can’t. And you’re playing a really critical role in the short form video space on platforms like YouTube, TikTok X and more. And you’re also doing something that none of us would ever want to subject ourselves or our worst enemies to. You are watching, studying and analyzing ungodly amounts of Fox News. So let’s play the next clip from one of Kat’s recent explainer videos.

    Kat Abu:

    And finally, Fox News is definitely excited about running the country again through Trump’s TV habits. In fact, they’re already proposing administration officials.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I expect

    Speaker 5:

    Him to appoint someone really strong at the FCC like Hannity.

    Kat Abu:

    RFK is going to make us healthy again.

    Speaker 7:

    President Trump knows if he needs help securing that border. I’m standing by if he needs help running a deportation operation. I’m standing by. But no former offer has been made.

    Kat Abu:

    Oh, by the way, that last guy who is a Fox News contributor and project 2025 author has already been named as Trump’s Borders are cool stuff.

    Speaker 7:

    I’m standing by

    Kat Abu:

    These people feel like they’re invincible. And with Trump at the helm, they kind of are. But there is one advantage to Fox News. It’s public, which means we know it’s being pumped into Trump’s brain every morning, afternoon, and night. And a tip hand, that is exactly how we can document and call out these authoritarian goals for you, which Mother Jones has been doing well before this and will continue to do so well after. Damn, you cut off my cat. You didn’t show everyone the clip of my cat. Cat wanted high off her ass.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I wanted to save something. So that folks, I was going to say go watch the rest of that video for a special treat at the end. But yeah, it is. Spoiler alert, it is Cat’s cat. And it is adorable.

    Kat Abu:

    She’s so cute. She’s wearing a little watermelon hat.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Oh my God, I love it. So I want to ask Kat, if you could expand on first the points that you were making in that video. As an expert in this area, how do you see right Wing media, Fox News, especially shaping the politics of Trump, his base and the GOP today, and what does that mean for our fight? And then I also, if I can, I want to ask if you could talk a little bit about your process for how you’re navigating this media environment and what your process is for making and using media to kind of combat the corrupting influence of Rightwing Media.

    Kat Abu:

    Yeah, I mean, I’ve talked about this before, but I think the interesting thing about Fox News and my old boss at Media Matters, Andrew Lawrence also, we just say this on repeat, is Roger Ailes created Fox News to support the GOP, but now the GOP exists to support Fox News. And this was really obvious during the Trump administration and when Tucker was on. That’s honestly, personally, the point that I am most annoyed with, just from a petty perspective, is now Fox Fox host are like, oh, we have more power. Again, I want them to have a bad day every day. But now, GOP, senators and Congressmen, when Tucker was on, they used to compete with each other for a five minute slot where they would only get to speak about a minute of the time. And now it’s that again, Trump has a place to call in every morning and rant for 10, 20, 30 minutes at a time.

    Hannity, his favorite fanboy is out there with a direct line to the president. I mean, when Trump lost in 2020, Hannity literally was tearing up on air at the thought that he wouldn’t be able to call the White House day or night. And as far as right-Wing Media as a whole, I think the big thing is there are all these forms of alternative media. Fox is the, they love to talk about mainstream media. You’re the most popular cable news channel in the country. You are the mainstream media, but that’s not how they see it. But it is the only, it’s the biggest establishment version of conservative media. And so even though a lot of its viewers, it gets a ton of viewers, but that’s because most of them are super old and they’re just sitting in a chair getting scared all day every day, watching from Fox and Friends till Gutfeld, and they’ll die off soon enough.

    But the influence isn’t really who is watching at that point. It’s twofold. One, it shows what far right narratives are finally okay to say in the mainstream, Tucker used to do this. He was the one that would normalize them. The great replacement theory. The first time he said that on Fox, it was in 2021. And me and my colleagues at Media Matters are watching it, and it was like Red Alert, like all hands on deck. He said, replacement, this is insane. But now you can hear it all the time, not just in Fox, but in the GOP. And then additionally, it’s a place for the GOP to rally around. Once again, they are supporting Fox, not vice versa. Fox is dictating their policy. And if you want to know what’s happening or what’s going to happen in the next day, week, month, year of the Trump administration, watch Fox watch what Jesse Waters is saying. Watch what Sean Hannity is saying. Watch what Laura Ingram is saying, and then the next morning, see what’s being repeated on Fox and Friends, or you don’t have to do that. You can just watch my stuff because I do it for you.

    Thank

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    You for your service.

    Kat Abu:

    Of course, of course. I mean, I do miss getting paid a full ass salary with benefits for it, but what’s that? I don’t know anymore. I’m just hoping I don’t get hit by a car. That’s a good plan.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    God

    Kat Abu:

    Too real.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    But Kat, I want to pick up something that you said, which is they’re the most mainstream as outlet, but then they say that they’re

    Kat Abu:

    Hitting on the anti-establishment thing.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    They’re hitting on the anti-establishment thing. Exactly. It’s like the brand is good for anti-establishment, but you never hear M-S-N-B-C, so their own discredit, they could easily be like, you’re not going to hear this anywhere else, but we’re telling you, you don’t even hear a whiff of that when actually sometimes, not all the time. Sometimes they do do good show. I mean, it was, he’s

    Kat Abu:

    Getting people to tell Biden to step down. I mean, the shit I have gotten since October 7th, 2023, I have gotten so much more anti Palestinian, anti-Arab racism than I did growing up as a kid in Texas. But the shit that Democrats were saying to me, or supposed liberals were saying to me when I just said, Hey, Joe Biden didn’t allow primary, and this debate performance is clear that he should step down some of the most vile shit I have ever had in my dms and replies, and I monitor Nazis for a living.

    Abby Martin:

    Well, I mean, it’s so emblematic when you look at something like Bill Clinton, the fact that they had to hoist up Bill Clinton who was flying the Lolita Express more than Trump, and instead of putting front and center, Trump was friends with the most notorious pedophile in the country. Holy shit. Isn’t that crazy? They didn’t say one thing because they thought Bill Clinton was too important of an asset to go talk down to Palestinians in Michigan. I mean, you can’t even unpack, say the brain damage going on. A lot

    Kat Abu:

    Of people under 22 don’t know who Bill. They would not recognize him on the street who care, honestly, with the way that he looks now, I probably wouldn’t either. He literally looks like the suds episode of SpongeBob. But as far as

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    He looks like an Eli Val cartoon. You guys know what he is? Oh my God. He literally, look, he’s turning into an Eli Val cartoon.

    Kat Abu:

    It’s so bad

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Navigating

    Kat Abu:

    This.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    It’s like a literal visual metaphor of the debate. The Democratic Party. It’s Democratic party it. It’s like, Hey, let’s bust out a decrepit slick Willie and send them to Michigan. That’ll win. Voters over is like he Biden Pelosi, all these people are falling apart as is their ideology. They just won’t let their fingers off the wheel of power until someone like Trump and the Republicans take it from them.

    Kat Abu:

    No, and that was so clear at the DNCI was one of the 200 creators that was at the DNC, and they were super accommodating at first. They were like, let us know who you want to talk to. And I had a very detailed proposal of all the surrogates I’d want to talk to, and I was like, I think I’m the only Palestinian creator here with the way that I look for better. It’s shitty that wearing a hijab and having dark hair and dark eyes, even though this is obviously fake, makes people listen to you less. But I was like, if you want a Palestinian to talk to, that’ll make some dude in Iowa not shoot up a Walmart. I’m here. I am here. And they not only after a day of delusion on my part, I was like, oh, it’s clear. I am here as a token, but also so was everyone else.

    They brought in all of these creators, and there were some that were like, oh, yay, democracy going to the hotties for Harris party and sitting on the JD Vance couch or whatever. But a lot of people, there are great people who do great work and we’re just trying to do their jobs. And then when the Democrats were like, you need to do this, this, and this, they were like, no. And the Democrats were like, wait, what? Even though they marketed this whole thing as the creator convention, as the creator election, and it’s because they fundamentally misunderstand what that is and what actually appeals, especially to young people. It’s icky.

    Abby Martin:

    Did

    Kat Abu:

    You get kicked out

    Abby Martin:

    That wasn in crisis?

    Kat Abu:

    No, I didn’t get kicked out, but I spent the night outside with the uncommitted movement, and you had to go to get your credentials. And I was like, well, I can’t do the credentials. You don’t get them after 11:00 AM. And I was like, well, I can’t really leave. And the only good decision they made was not sticking the cops on us or escorting people out for not having their credentials the second day. You had to get them every single day. But no, I did not get kicked out. I know his son was escorted out, but I think that that would’ve been too dicey. They’re like, oh, well, we don’t want to, you guys can stay out here, but we don’t want to put you

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    In cuffs or escort. Plus, the headline of Palestinian content creator gets kicked out is not one they want. And necessarily, sorry, I interrupted, but

    Kat Abu:

    No, no, no, that’s exactly, it’s what I was trying to say.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    And there was some eyebrow raising shenanigans, to say the least, at the DNC. That was actually where I first met Kat in person was at the uncommitted. I’m there with my camera. I turned, I’m like, oh, that’s Kata boot. So I’m there. And then when I tried to go back in, suddenly the entrance to the United Center is blocked off for the next hour. So

    Kat Abu:

    Oh, yeah, they blocked off the front entrance, right? So no one could go out that

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Way. So when the uncommitted sit-ins started, a lot of folks went out. And then curiously, we found that same entrance, which had been opened the whole day was suddenly, you can’t go through here anymore. So it felt like a trap. Anyone who’s going to go out and look at the uncommitted thing, go stay out there. You’re not getting back in, but

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    I see. Right,

    Kat Abu:

    Right, right, right. Yeah. And also, sorry, this is sort of unrelated. I’d just like to say I went to go see Charlie XCX at the United Center a month, two months ago. There is weird United Center trauma, and Max, if you go back, you’re going to heal it too.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Whenever I go back, it’ll be too soon. That’s for sure.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Because I thought this was also kind of the biggest latest breaking story before the election was the Epstein stuff and the Michael Wolf tapes revealing that Epstein was his source, and actually Epstein had regular contact with Donald Trump during his first term before he was obviously raided by the FBI and arrested and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, Trump’s FBI. But Abby’s so right on that this would’ve been the story that across the board, many people are interested in terms of, yes, the biggest sex trafficker, one of the, not only that, but also like a billionaire and everything, and all the connections that he had. And so you can imagine this alternate universe, which might not have affected anything, but where Kamala Harris goes to the Joe Rogan podcast, sits down and gets to talk about these Epstein tapes and all this information, and they get to just sort of smoke a bull and think about, did Donald Trump have Epstein killed? And you know what I’m saying that

    Abby Martin:

    No, imagine. Instead you have Don Jr. Talking about who’s on the P Did he tape? It’s like, dude, what about your fucking dad, bro? Right, exactly. Exactly. He’s talking about it is so fun to envision an alternate reality that would be so cool. It’s like imagine what would’ve happened.

    Kat Abu:

    The Democrats are so good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Exactly. Just, oh my God,

    Abby Martin:

    I so obvious. It’s like capitalism’s in crisis and we’re seeing this

    Kat Abu:

    Planet,

    Abby Martin:

    It throw built under the bus, not just in the us and people are voting out incumbents as a rejection of whatever their material conditions are. And I absolutely, even though a lot of people are downplaying the Gaza genocide in the Ukraine war as factors in this election, I do not think that you can uncouple the economic conditions and hardships of Americans with the periphery and backdrop of funneling tens of billions of dollars to our foreign policy. I mean to subsidize a genocide. I don’t think that that can be uncoupled for the average person to say, Hey, that doesn’t make sense. Why can’t I pay for bread or eggs at the grocery store? But we have unlimited money to kill babies. So I think that it’s a huge problem, right? And when you have the Democratic party saying Nothing will fundamentally change while the writing is on the wall. I mean, any of us could have predicted what was coming if we just kind of laid it bare and they did not care enough to stop it.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I think that’s a really powerful point. To cap off the hour here, I want to a, not take liberties with anyone’s time and say that we did ask if you guys could be on until five if you do need to go. Totally understand. It’s been an absolute honor having this conversation with the three of you, I hope can have you back. For those of you who can stay, I wanted to just see if we could do a little overtime here to get to some of the audience questions. Y’all have touched on some of them already, but I wanted to throw up one here about the merit to the argument that the Democrats can be pushed left. I guess it really comes down to what path forward is there in the existing Democratic party. We know that that is not the end all, be all of the political struggle, but in so far as the Democratic Party is part of that struggle, I guess, what would you say to folks about how we should be approaching that strategically and how far we can actually push this party that seems hell bent on going to the right to left?

    Abby Martin:

    I want to touch upon that just because I do have to go. I think Kamala’s whole performance and Biden’s whole performance. I mean, we can’t forget that Biden won on a progressive platform, right? Everyone was coat tailing the Bernie Sanders movement because of how enormously popular his brand of progressive populous politics were. And so Biden over the course of his presidency, unfortunately abandoned a lot of that. And then Kamala Harris, nothing will fundamentally change, ran one of the most conservative platforms, abandoned Medicare for all, ban fracking, federal jobs guarantee. I mean, all of those things just made no sense. Why would anyone who’s remotely leaning conservative vote for Diet Coke when you can vote for the real thing? I think at this point, look, I was really energized about Bernie just because of the tens of millions of people that were in the streets mobilizing because I felt it was a revolutionary moment to catalyze the masses.

    I never believed in electoral politics on a federal level, especially, I’m not saying to discount city council races and local districts, obviously referendums and city council and all those things. Absolutely we need to be investing our energy into seizing power locally. However, investing in two to four years and putting all of your political energy and enthusiasm into federal electoral politics, I think is a dead end. And I think if that’s not apparent now, it sure as hell should be let this election galvanize and radicalize us outside of electoral because the Democrats have perfectly elucidated that they will not lean left. They would rather have fascism than Bernie Sanders populism, right? That’s just social democracy. They would rather have Trump than an FDR platform. So they are going so far, right, because they have no other choice.

    They have to maintain their capital and power no matter what’s at stake and what’s in the future. So it’s up to us, the tens of millions of people who have been radicalized by the Gaza Genocide, who radicalized by Bernie Sanders, who see the climate change catastrophe on the horizon. It is up to us to build the movement we know is the only thing that has ever pushed politics, left the social movements in the street, the masses that shut down business as usual. That is the only possibility that we have moving forward because the time is urgent. We don’t have the time to wait for a super majority pie in the sky. Oh, maybe. And if one of these freaks on the Supreme Court croaks, no, we don’t have time to wait and waste the time is now. We need to act accordingly and get involved locally with the struggle and with the activism because that’s how we’re going to move mountains.

    Kat Abu:

    Hell yeah.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Hell yeah, sister. Well, I know Abby said she has to go. I just wanted to first just, I don’t know, just have a Jesus moment that was incredible in fire and also just really, really stress to everyone watching. You need to subscribe to the Empire Files YouTube channel. You need to support Abby’s work, her current documentary, her past documentaries, share them with everybody, watch everything that she does. You can see for yourself why her voice is so vital. Abby, thank you so, so much for joining us today. It’s been

    Abby Martin:

    A long you guys rock. It was such an honor. I hope to do this way more frequently. She do this like a monthly thing or something. Let’s do it. So good to meet you all girls panel baby.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Hell yeah. Solidarity says

    Abby Martin:

    Bye guys. Bye bye.

    Kat Abu:

    Abby,

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Francesca and Kat, if you guys got more, I would hate to follow that act too, but I guess if you have anything else to say,

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    I forgot what the question was, but

    Kat Abu:

    Yeah, I was entranced.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    I mean, look, I really appreciate Abby’s perspective and her analysis is just spot on and always has been. I am not ready to say that electoral is not going to work. I think that we cannot just take our ball and go home because it didn’t go the way we wanted. I think we have to be players in this and I don’t think that being players means you’re not in the streets. And I don’t think being players means it is the only way. And I think I’m very much sort of let a hundred flowers bloom in, I guess in a MAOIs sense. I don’t know in a nonviolent MAOIs sense, but I do think that we need inside outside strategies. I am not someone who you’re going to hear bashing the squad for not doing enough. I think that there are many, many hurdles and layers to actually getting things over the finish line in Congress.

    And I think a lot of us have sometimes maybe too simplistic of a view simply because we feel like we elected somebody. They didn’t do the change we wanted. So we’re kind of just like we’re fed up. But I do think that even though biden’s, I mean good God, I’m sure he would like a mulligan on the last year and a half of his presidency. But I do think what Abby said about Joe Biden’s election in and of itself was thanks to the progressive movement, so was Barack Obama’s thanks to a progressive anti-war movement, the absolutely capitalized on not eight years of the war on terror people sick and tired of it. We elected Barack Hussein Obama, the first black president. Are you kidding me? I was under no illusion that he would be really for the working class or actually very progressive, but it was such a radical sea change that I do think we have to be poised for.

    What is the electorate willing to do when it comes to reacting to what we know will be a failed fascistic government coming from Donald Trump? So the pendulum swings, but let’s, let’s swing it farther and let’s make sure it stays there and let’s break this goddamn grandfather clock of a duopoly. So I am inside out. I’m of both minds. I just feel like you find the place and the space that you feel most effective and we stop putting so much credence into the electoral process, meaning especially on a national level. I just feel like by the time you get to the presidential election, it really is which flavor of warmonger. And yes, I really would like the diet warmonger honestly, because I feel like Kamala Harris and the Democrats were much more pushable. And I know people disagree with me on that, but I think we see that.

    Look at the Zionists, Trump’s disappointing a bunch of bidens. It’s like they’re nothing but Biden’s and Biden was arguably one of the more Zionist people in his cabinet. So anyway, that’s where I stand on that. I feel like we on the left tend to say, here’s my line, this is what I believe, and if you don’t believe this, then you can go sit over there. So let’s have the same grace and understanding that sometimes we’re like, gee, how did Trump get all these voters? Let’s be kind to one another as well as we forge a path forward and figure out what to do.

    Kat Abu:

    Can I just jump in here real quick please.

    One of the things that I just want to stress to everyone in the world all the time and not just even in the political sense is in general, there are very few consequences for your actions that will genuinely affect you. Whether it’s standing up for a server who someone is yelling at, whether it’s doing that thing that you always wanted to do or whether it’s running for office, speaking up at your town hall, meeting at your local city council meeting, whether it’s trying to mount change in any way. If you feel any inkling to do it, you should do it. I think that we’ve coming back to the anti-establishment stuff, we’ve come to this idea that you have to have all of these ins to get anywhere and that these people in power have some type of extra read, some secret read on the electorate that we don’t have or some secret factor that the rest of us don’t have, but they are just people.

    They are just as fallible and dumb and weak as all of us, maybe more so, more so more. And anyone that gets into power will probably take on a little bit of that too. And that includes you, me, all of us. That’s just the human condition. But if enough of us actually acted on what we want to do, especially in an age where you can reach so many more people through alternative media, through the TikTok algorithm, through person to person connection that a lot of people are really missing. I’m hosting a women’s club at my apartment this weekend because I read it in a book and I was like, you know what? Why don’t I just do

    Abby Martin:

    That? And

    Kat Abu:

    Maybe in a different time I would’ve been like, well, probably no one would be interested or whatever. But instead I reached out to some friends and they were like, yes, that sounds like so much fun. So everyone’s bringing a friend. We’re learning how to embroider together and it’s just action. Action is what spurs us forward. And it doesn’t have to be running for office. It doesn’t have to be taking to the streets, just this is going to be a really weird four years at the very least and probably pretty dark. And if you don’t act on what you know is right and what you want yourself or others to do, nothing is going to get done.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Max is the least I’ve ever heard you speak maybe ever.

    Kat Abu:

    I’d also like to apologize for any, I’m not actually DM Abby after this. My wifi is laggy. I’m on my building wifi, so if I interrupt, I’m so sorry.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    You’re

    Kat Abu:

    Great. No, you’re fine.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Y’all have been incredible. I’m sitting here in awe. I’m learning, man. I mean, yeah, I could spout a lot myself, but I mean, y’all have so much insight that we need to hear and I don’t have all the damn answers I need to learn from y’all, just like I hope our audience is learning. And in a way, y’all were already sort of picking up on another audience question that I want to just keep this ball rolling. One of the questions was about how we fight the hate, the vitriol, the trolling, the misinformation on social media that is emboldening people in the MAGA movement. And so I wanted to pose that to y’all as well, but I kind of wanted to pick up on where Kat was talking just now that the answer to that question does not solely exist on your online tactics for engaging people through a screen. I can’t stress enough how important the old meme of go touch grass, go talk to your neighbors.

    It really matters. I mean, one of the things that I’ve noticed watching my own grandfather dive from Alzheimer’s over eight years since Trump was first elected to now his social world, his physical mobility, everything in his world has shrunk. And that got hyper accelerated with Covid where his social world went to going out to the golf course, meeting friends to those friends dying to his mobility being limited to now being locked to one living room, and the entire connection to the outside world is mediated through the TV in his living room that plays two channels, Fox and OAN. And so I bring that up because I know this man, I love this man. I mean, he is one of the many Trump supporters in my family who I know is not just like the diehard racist and fascist that we like to paint Trump supporters as being, but what I really want to emphasize for people that they can learn from folks like my grandfather and folks in your family, is that people don’t just go gung-ho into fascist politics saying like, yeah, let’s deport all the brown people. That comes way later because people’s politics flow downstream from their perception of the reality they believe they’re living in.

    When you are being bombarded with these images of what the world looks like outside your window as your connection, your real connection to that world gets smaller and smaller and is all mediated through screens. That’s how you end up with so many Fox News viewers saying, you live in Baltimore. Do you even walk down the street? I won’t ever go to New York City or to Chicago or these places are bedlam. It’s like, that’s nuts. But that’s the reality. They believe they’re living in and Trump’s fascist politics feels like a natural response to this dark world that’s being presented to them. And so going out and countering that misinformation with reality, with real human connection seems to me to be one of the most, if not the most potent antidote to that fearmongering.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    And the same thing with the media just in terms of why do we only sit in diners when it’s an election? You should sit in diners all the time, you know what I mean? You should really talk to people all the time. And this whole wheel, the mainstream news is allowed for the demonization of immigrants as much as they want to clutch their pearls over Donald Trump’s wall or mass deportations. We all watched in 2016 how Donald Trump’s single-handedly moved the Overton window and Jake Tapper helped him just refix over to the right a little bit. Jake Tapper, the whole GOP primary was just, what do you think of Donald Trump’s wall? What do you think of Donald Trump’s wall? What about the wall? How about the wall? It’s like, no, no, no. How about a serious answer to the question of immigration in this country?

    How about a serious plan? What do you think about the wall? They helped every single step of the way, and they’re going to continue to help when it comes to mass deportations. How many Haitian migrants have they actually platformed on mainstream news? How many times have they talked to, have they gone to, let’s say, Portland and seen the way that decriminalization programs are working in the community? We always make fun of when Jesse Waters or some Fox News hosts will go and be like, isn’t it crazy here? And it’s funny, but who do you actually see doing it from the other side or doing it from a side that doesn’t have an agenda? Just being real with it. It’s like you got to listen. It’s like long form investigative stuff, reveal real news network. Even some Bourdain did that. It’s like people are like, wow, Bourdain is really amazing.

    You know how he talks to people. You know what I mean? So that’s the other thing is how are we humanizing all of these groups, including ourselves every single day? And there’s just a consensus to not do that because fear really does sell. And so I think I’m more terrified to see what nonprofits, what different organizing left, not left, but liberal entities, which news outlets, who’s going to decide, I don’t want to resist anymore. I’m just going to join. It’s too much for me to resist this fascism. Let’s just join them because that’s easier. I need access and I need money that terrifies me. It is really

    Kat Abu:

    Scary. I have to hop off after this, but I think two things on that is one of the big problems at these big companies, like at M-S-N-B-C and CNN and the New York Times and all these big media companies is they have a lot of really good reporters who the leadership straight up will silence their work. It will be written, it will be edited, it will be ready to publish, and then it will just be on the chopping block and no reason will be given. And then oftentimes they’re assigned to a different beat. That is such a problem in our media right now. But also, I think, I grew up conservative in Texas, and I think a lot of people underestimate the power of conservative propaganda. Like you were talking about how people see cities. I have lived full time in New York, DC and Chicago over the last two years.

    I had two major life changes. So I had to move from DC to New York, New York, to dc, DC to Chicago. Haven’t been stabbed once in any of them, but the way that conservatism was portrayed to me, and granted I wasn’t, my parents were more like the Reagan conservatives, but still, there was so much misinformation that I had to break was like, we’re the responsible party. We are being responsible. If you think our cities, even though you haven’t stepped foot in one in 15 years are being taken over by maniacs, you’re like, well, I’m being the responsible one because for some reason, my brain is now rewired to make me think that certain people love crime. That’s a position that anyone has,

    But it’s a lot harder, especially older people, to get someone to admit that they’re wrong. No one likes doing that. And I know when I had to realize when I was 16 and we moved to Tucson, for whatever reason, I moved to Tucson halfway through high school. Dallas is where I grew up, was super segregated by income and by race. I had never really been around a poor person before. So many of my friends, Tucson is a very low income city, and so many of my friends at my school couldn’t afford basic things. I had never really experienced that before of someone on a daily basis, someone who I had a real relationship with, and it totally radicalized me. But I had to go through and see all of these things that I thought were truth were wrong, and that feels like shit. You feel like a moron.

    You’re like, what is my moral compass? It’s not fun. And I look at people like my mom who grew, my grandmother, her mother was a major GOP operative in Texas, so she was right in the middle of it. She grew up with this as a major part of it. And she has reevaluated so many of her views, and I think it takes a lot of bravery and grit. It’s hard to do that. And if you’re looking back when you’re like 40, 50, 60, and you’re like, did I spend this much of my life being wrong, lacking empathy, where I could have given it villainizing people who didn’t deserve it? And so that’s, it’s

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Never too late though. I

    Kat Abu:

    Mean, it’s never too late.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    It’s amazing to hear when older people might make this transition. It’s like, yay, it is.

    Kat Abu:

    But I think that there’s a lot of people on the left who either grew up in a family that wasn’t really political or was liberal like Obama voters or whatever, and they really underestimate the power of propaganda that gets you there in the first place. And then also how hard it is to change that because you’re trying to break an entire structure of thinking and also have someone admit, I was wrong. Everyone I love was wrong, and I might’ve had some really shitty opinions about ideas. People, places, things, other nouns, and it’s

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Just people, racist is, and calling folks racist or sexist, it isn’t a winning strategy. Even if some of them

    Kat Abu:

    Are, if you say something or sexist to me, I will say that. But if it’s just like a guy,

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    It doesn’t work, but it’s being able, I mean, it’s the looking past the racism and sexism, like I said, like this four years ago before the election, then you cannot shame Trump. Trump voters. You cannot shame Trump. You cannot shame the Trump administration. Shame doesn’t work for us. Making fun of them is for us. Now, we need it to stay sane because we have to tap in and be like, is this real? Are you real? And I think we’re all doing that, and this is the real news network. So there you go. But that’s for us. It’s not necessarily going to move the broad electorate. That’s just for us to be like, yeah, that was fucking crazy, right? Yeah, that was fucking crazy. Okay, we can laugh at that. Yeah. Yeah, we can fucking laugh at that. Yeah. For us,

    Kat Abu:

    I mean, I think I tell people all the time, say, question me if you watch my stuff and you’re like, that doesn’t sound right, question me. Am fallible. Everyone is I could be wrong, or just make sure you have an extra source or two on that. This is not the time to just think anyone is perfect, that anyone can say anything, and it’s the absolute truth. And when it comes to conservatives and on the right, where was my train of thought going on this, I had a point that I was really fired up about, but I don’t know

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    If it comes back to, I will just say that one of the reasons that I’ve always gravitated towards your work, Kat, is that I myself as folks in the Real News, no, I grew up deeply conservative as well in Southern California. And for me, the reality breaking thing that got me to start that long process of unlearning all the dumb shit that I believed and acted on was the recession, right? Was this sort of massive market crash. Our family lost everything 12 years ago. I was working in warehouses and factories wondering why the hell I believed in this system that just bailed out all the banks while families mine lost everything. And I was working with ex-cons undocumented folks, trying to make my own paychecks so I could buy dinner like that week. So that forces you to confront a lot of those realities. But as you both said, so well, and as you both and Abby embody so well, we need grit and grace to navigate that and to help others navigate it. And it can be done. We’re living proof of it, but we can testify as people who have made that transition that, like Francesca said, like shaming and berating, even though it may feel morally righteous and good is not going to fucking work. If your goal is to bring folks out of that darkness into the light, finding their way back to love and common humanity and working class struggle,

    You need grit. Grit and grace.

    Kat Abu:

    My point came back to me, and it’s exactly what you’re saying. I clown on conservatives all the time because it’s fun, but I try to only punch up people on Fox who are getting millions of dollars to miss inform you. And even when I talk, I did a video about Rob Schneider’s comedy special, which was abysmal from a comedic perspective. I got to see this. It was a lot of fun. It’s on you, but he,

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Wait, Francesca, can you please have Kat on your show to talk about

    Kat Abu:

    That? Oh, yeah, yeah. We need to break it down to sex. Please Rob Schneider’s comedy special on Fox Nation. But I did admit he had a really funny 10 minute bit where he did a Trump impression, but it wasn’t political. He was just talking about his experience with Trump as a person. It could have been about any celebrity. And it was funny. So I admitted it painting anything in a broad stroke. I did a whole thing on Trump Charlottesville comments explaining why he said that Nazis are very fine people, and by doing that, I went through literally minute by minute every single thing he said, I didn’t cut anything out. So anytime a conservative was like, you’re misquoting. I say, watch the whole thing, and you will not believe how many people on the right have come back to me being like either, damn, I still don’t agree with you, but you were right. You didn’t cut anything out or like, oh, wow, I really didn’t understand the full context, and I watched this whole 35 minute video and now I do. And so just doing that instead of straight these people villainize themselves,

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Sure,

    Kat Abu:

    If you just give a little bit of grace, no one is right all the time. No one is wrong all the time. We need a baseline for humanity. There is a baseline that if you straight up just see me as a womb on legs, probably, you have to address that on your own. This is not us to handhold you through, but there are a lot of other people who just, they just don’t know anything else. And you can’t blame someone for ignorance if you don’t tell them where to find the knowledge.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    That’s so true. That’s very real.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I think that is a beautiful, powerful point to end on. I apologize to everyone in the live chat if we didn’t get to your questions, but I think you’ll agree.

    Kat Abu:

    Shout out to the two people’s questions we answered. We hope you’re

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Satisfied. Shout out to the big two. I mean, you guys did address a lot of the questions that were asked, even if we didn’t directly pose them, but I think everyone watching will agree this was a feast for the mind and heart, and I think I’m feeling better prepared to head into this darkness, and I’m feeling at least a little more emboldened, emboldened knowing that we’ve got great folks like you, folks like the people watching, folks like the folks at The Real News in the back room right now, making this all happen. Thank you, sisters.

    Francesca Fiorentini:

    Thanks for having us.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    We’ve got each other and we can make it. And to everyone watching, I wanted to just ask you to please go support, subscribe to every channel that Kat, Francesca and Abby are on. We need their voices now more than ever. And if you don’t want independent media to go away, you got to support it. So please go support it, share it, send it to folks that you know who you think will want to watch it, anything you can do to help them out. We need that work. We need your support here at The Real News. The overall message is, is that we need you guys to keep going, so please go subscribe to their channels, follow them on any platform that you’re on, and if you can, please donate to the incredible work that they’re doing. Kat, Francesca, and Abby who had to depart 20 minutes ago, it has been a true honor being on this stream with you. Thank you so much, and solidarity from Baltimore.

    Kat Abu:

    Likewise. Thank you. Everyone. Go outside.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Go outside and touch grass for the Real News Network. This is Maximilian Alvarez signing off. Please donate using the button on the side of this video. Share this live stream with your friends, family members, coworkers. Please go to the real news.com/donate and support our work today. It really makes a difference. But more importantly, and most of all, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

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  • Trump’s army of social vigilantes are coming for payback

    This story was co-published with In These Times on Nov. 12, 2024.

    It was a little after 1 a.m. when I left The Real News Network studio in downtown Baltimore.

    Nervous optimism gave way to worry, worry gave way to disbelief, disbelief gave way to anger, anger gave way to fear—and then grief.

    Our team spent the whole night there, anxiously watching the election results roll in. With each update — Republicans win a majority in the Senate, Trump wins North Carolina, then Georgia, then Pennsylvania — reality began setting in, hardening like concrete. Nervous optimism gave way to worry, worry gave way to disbelief, disbelief gave way to anger, anger gave way to fear — and then grief.

    The race was still too close to call at the time, and as I got into my car, running through the remaining-but-rapidly-shrinking paths to victory that were still, for the time being, open to Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats, my phone dinged with a social media notification: “@maximillian.alvarez saved this post to laugh at you hahahaha hope you’re crying tonight. 2024 trump LFGGGG.”

    The post this person was responding to was 32 weeks old—he’d been waiting a long time to get that dig in.

    The post this person was responding to was 32 weeks old — he’d been waiting a long time to get that dig in. Doing so clearly meant something to him, and former President Donald Trump’s triumphal return to power gave him the flashing green light he’d been hoping for.

    A familiar feeling bubbled up as I read that message and as I’ve read through other notifications, posts and comments on TRNN’s YouTube channel the past few days, one I remember feeling constantly during Trump’s first term. The exhausted, on-edge feeling that comes from having to confront the worst parts of people on a regular basis, the parts that Trump gives his supporters bacchanalian permission to indulge and find strength in. The ugliness, the orgiastic meanness, the cackling vitriol for social norms, the dark glee found in flouting them and in trolling and bullying people; the lust for retribution and soft targets.

    Credit: BET

    It’s all rushing back. It feels like it did eight years ago, but worse. First as farce, now as tragedy.

    From 2015 to 2020, during the first stage of Trump’s political rise and the MAGA-morphosis of the Republican Party, an ungodly amount of ink was spilled and breath wasted by out-of-touch pundits fumbling to explain the Trump phenomenon and failing to understand the people who supported it. 

    Yes, racism has always played a giant role, misogyny too. Yes, white working class people (and working people in general) have been feeling the brutal squeeze and daily pangs of ​“economic anxiety.” And yes, a lot of folks out there are ignorant, misinformed rubes who have been duped by one of the biggest con men in history. But one of the most important qualities of Trumpism that the pundit class never fully grasped is the sense of social power Trump instills in people — and how valuable that is to them.

    Most of us have had some exposure to the nastiness of people trying to exercise that power online, and you’ll be seeing more of it again flaming up in social media comments, video live chats, direct messages, etc. Although, this is not the same media ecosystem we had in 2015-16. The Twitter and Facebook of that time are long gone, the power and visibility dynamics on these multiplying and changing platforms have rearranged dramatically since then, the ​“public sphere” is way more fractured, and our shared digital spaces (and physical spaces) are decreasing. So maybe you won’t see as much of the online projections of Trumpian bile from trolling strangers as before, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t currently heating back up to full boil as we speak, and you won’t be able to escape it entirely. None of us will. 

    Supporters react as Fox News projects Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump is elected president during an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center on November 06, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    But that sense of vindictive empowerment extends well beyond the online world. You know what it looks like. It was on full display in Madison Square Garden two weeks ago, it was written on the faces of delegates cheerfully waving ​“Mass Deportation Now” signs at the Republican National Convention.

    Credit: POLITICO

    You can feel it simmering in the ether when you read lines like this, published last week inThe New York Times: ​“A wave of racist text messages summoning Black people to report for slavery showed up on phones across the United States, prompting the scrutiny of the F.B.I.” You could see it in the sinister smirk of Covington Catholic High School students surrounding Nathan Phillips, an Indigenous man, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in January of 2019. You could watch it transform regular-seeming people into monsters who shout things at families in restaurants like ​“Trump’s going to fuck you. … You fuckers need to leave … fucking Asian piece of shit.” You could hear it on the playgrounds, as Lucia Islas, president of the Comité Latino de Baltimore, recently reminded me: ​“Even in the schools … the American or other kids — they were making fun of the [Latino] kids like, ​‘Oh, the immigration is going to come for your family.’”

    Credit: Guardian News

    Here’s the thing: Leftists, progressives, community and labor organizers, social justice advocates, faith community leaders — we have all seen how beautiful of a thing it can be when regular people channel, build and exercise their power to effect change. And we all know how necessary that will be to fight back against what’s coming. But power is not a moral quantity on its own. It is a force to be harnessed — to achieve good and morally righteous ends, or dark and destructive ones. Right now, we are much, much closer to the latter scenario.

    When it comes to controlling the levers of economic and political power, Trump cedes none of that ground. Quite the opposite: he seizes and consolidates real power like a CEO or a mad king, and he wields that power to serve himself and the interests of his fellow capitalist oligarchs. 

    But Trump has always understood that you have to give people a semblance of power too, and he has. (Since former President Barack Obama infamously dissolved his organized base of citizen-footsoldiers after his 2008 electoral victory, Democrats have stupidly and self-servingly demobilized their rank-and-file, hoping to replace that grassroots energy and readiness to make change with a vacuous faith that the ​“adults in the room” would take care of it; Trump, on the other hand, gives his base something to do. He invites them to feel like protagonists in the story, not just spectators).

    Credit: CBS

    Trump gives people a tangible feeling of power to turn the tide of the ​“culture wars,” which is, in part, why MAGA-pilled people and MAGA pundits, politicians, podcasters and posters have spent years trying to turn virtually everything into a ​“woke” vs ​“anti-woke” culture war issue. In doing so, they’ve effectively taken issues of non-concern, as well as issues that could channel people’s genuine concerns towards a larger, systemic critique of capitalist economics and politics, and woven those issues into a vast cultural conspiracy. This has the dual effect of moving people farther away from identifying the capitalist pillage of our society — led by the very billionaires, profiteers and grifters Trump’s policies actually serve—as the real problem, while, at the same time, moving people closer to feeling like they are fighting for and winning something.

    Credit: NBC

    For MAGA, ​“the personal is political,” too, but for very different reasons than it is for Left-minded people who have invoked that phrase in the past. Personal grievances are elevated to the level of political struggles against a perceived evil that lives in other people who are ruining America — not in the political or economic systems hollowing our country out from the inside and cooking our planet — and interpersonal interactions become the always-available terrain upon which Trump supporters can feel deputized to ​“take the fight” to … someone.

    When working people live in a society that has made them feel like they have so little decision-making and decision-affecting power — as workers, as political constituents, as consumers, as debtors and renters — and when the conditions that make people feel empowered to pursue and attain a good life continue to deteriorate, the desire and demand for any other kind of power increases dramatically. Trump and the MAGA movement encourage people to reclaim that lost sense of power by finding ways to exert power over people they know (neighbors, family members, coworkers, acquaintances they’re still connected to on social media) and people they don’t know, online and in public.

    Trump and the MAGA movement encourage people to reclaim that lost sense of power by finding ways to exert power over people they know (neighbors, family members, coworkers, acquaintances they’re still connected to on social media) and people they don’t know, online and in public.

    As a president, Trump’s oligarchy-serving style of gangster capitalist rule (now with a much stronger Christian nationalist identity) has only accelerated the deterioration of conditions that makes people feel this way — exacerbating the systematic squeezing and disempowering of working-class people and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the rich few — but he has always simultaneously met his base’s demand to feel powerful. 

    It is a false, ugly, illusory kind of power, but it is power nonetheless. It is nothing compared to the power of, say, organizing and striking with your coworkers to get your boss to bend to your collective will, but it’s much easier to exert, opportunities to exercise it are in much greater supply, and it is much more immediately rewarding than any of the alternatives presented by liberals or the Left. Punching a person in the face is more instantly gratifying than scolding a faceless system. 

    The visible discomfort one can prompt in others just by wearing the red MAGA hat in public. The despicable rage and terror cowardly men can generate by saying shit like ​“Your body, my choice.” The ​“liberal tears” one can suck out of strangers by trolling them online. The change in corporate course one can contribute to by boycotting ​“woke” companies. The pain and fear and panic one can extract from one’s perceived enemies in vulnerable, dehumanized and marginalized communities (immigrants, trans people, ​“radical Left lunatics,” etc). 

    These are all tangible forms of social power that anyone in the MAGA movement can exercise anywhere to feel like they’re worth a damn and part of making change. And doing so bears localized but real results; it is a way for people who live in a world in which they have so little real power to experience firsthand the immediate, perversely intoxicating power of assaulting someone, affecting the feelings and actions of the people around you, disrupting their comfort, destroying their sense of safety, even violating their bodies.

    Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Santander Arena on November 04, 2024 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    Trump makes that possible for a lot of people, and it means something to them. What’s worse, it is a renewable resource, an infinite well of dark energy to draw from, because there will always be more people to attack, more scapegoats to throw on the pyre, as conditions fail to improve for the non-rich. And the twisted, naive hope of the disciples of MAGA is that their loyalty will always secure their spot on the side of the attackers, even if it won’t, and that they will be the beneficiaries of the promised prosperity supposedly waiting for them on the other side.

    The desire for some kind of power, and the dark joy that comes from the Trumpian permissibility to exercise power over other people, is a mobilizing force. It does not cater to ​“the better angels of our nature,” but to the worst, cruelest and most antisocial parts of us. 

    And the hard, terrifying truth from Election Day is that this force is strong enough to defeat a bankrupt Democratic Party, and it is certainly strong enough to crush and confound what exists of the Left in this country if we don’t take the threat seriously and mount a correspondingly serious, strategic and steadfast response.

    We are entering an extremely dark period in our history. It won’t be the same as 2015-2020. The MAGA-morphosis is now complete — this is Trump’s GOP, and there is no room or tolerance for dissenters within the ranks. And that party, along with its bevy of billionaire backers and Christian nationalist networks of support, may end up controlling all three branches of government when all is said and done. It won’t be the same, and we can’t be either.

    And the hard, terrifying truth from Election Day is that this force is strong enough to defeat a bankrupt Democratic Party, and it is certainly strong enough to derail and further confound what exists of “the Left” in this country.

    But we can and must draw on the hard-won lessons we learned throughout the first Trump administration. One of the most crucial lessons, I think, is that fascism doesn’t just come from executive orders alone; the fascist creep comes from below, when a critical mass of people come to desire fascist solutions over the existing political alternatives, and when they feel empowered to play a role in bringing those ​“solutions” to fruition. For my entire life, establishment Democrats and Republicans have worked in their own shared and distinctly stupid ways to diminish people’s faith in the existing political options. ​“The Left” has not managed to provide a credible and viable political alternative, and that has enabled Trump to fill the void, channeling the naturally resulting malaise and unrest into fascistic desire.

    A lot of people out there are ghoulishly delighted that the results of the election have given them that green light to shamelessly return to their worst selves. You are going to run into them more and more, and so will I. They may even make a point to seek you out. They have been waiting for this moment, all while their need for retribution has festered and the targets of that retribution have become more specific.

    The most essential lessons I learned about how to confront this during the first Trump administration didn’t come from any pundit or media organization. They came from explicitly antifascist political and coalitional organizing.

    1. Don’t let your enemy dictate the terms of your fear. Just because there are more people in the world telling you to fear them right now doesn’t mean you should fear everyone — many are as scared as you are, they feel just as distrustful of strangers in this moment, but most don’t want to see hate win either.
    2. Working people, together, organized, are our own best protection against bullies and fascist violence.
    3. A lot of regular folks out there who have succumbed to the MAGA soul rot can still be brought back, especially if they are compelled to struggle together with other working people, face to face, outside of their small social circles, and if that struggle provides them with real-world alternatives to addressing their problems, not just conceptual or moral arguments for why the path they’ve chosen is bad. That can counter these forces at the heart of Trump’s dark appeal — I’ve seen it. But we won’t be able to reach everyone, some are way too far gone. The bloodlust has consumed them. We risk the safety of all and any chance of political success by failing to recognize the difference and protect ourselves.
    4. Out of darkness, when all seems lost and emergency is our reality, when we are forced to struggle together for survival, we find the ties that truly bind us, and the artificial walls that divide us start to come down. And once we learn to keep building and fighting from that starting point, moving upward and outward from there, a portal to a better world opens up.

    Until and unless people stop fighting, hope for that world is never lost. 

    If you ask me if there is hope now, my answer is the same as it always was: that depends on us and what we all do next.

    Views expressed are those of the writer. As a 501©3 nonprofit, In These Times does not support or oppose any candidate for public office.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Bitcoin nears $90,000 as investors eye crypto-friendly Trump administration

    The world's most popular cryptocurrency has gained more than 30 percent since the US presidential election.

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • Chris Matthews Garbles It All for You

     

    Election Focus 2024MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews, once one of the most prominent pundits on cable TV, used his post-election appearance on Morning Joe (Mediaite, 11/6/24) to demonstrate just how unhelpful political commentary can be.

    Asked by host Willie Geist for his “morning after assessment of what happened,” Matthews fumed:

    Immigration has been a terrible decision for Democrats. I don’t know who they think they were playing to when they let millions of people come cruising through the border at their own will. Because of their own decisions, they came right running to that border, and they didn’t do a thing about it.

    And a lot of people are very angry about that. Working people, especially, feel betrayed. They feel that their country has been given away, and they don’t like it.

    And I don’t know who liked it. The Hispanics apparently didn’t like it. They want the law enforced. And so I’m not sure they were playing to anything that was smart here, in terms of an open border. And that’s what it is, an open border. And I think it’s a bad decision. I hope they learn from it.

    You could not hope for a more distorted picture of Biden administration immigration policy from Fox News or OAN. “They didn’t do a thing about it”? President Joe Biden deported, turned back or expelled more than 4 million immigrants and refugees through February 2024—more than President Donald Trump excluded during his entire first term (Migration Policy Institute, 6/27/24).

    Human Rights Watch (1/5/23) criticized Biden for continuing many of Trump’s brutal anti-asylum policies; the ACLU (6/12/24) called those restrictions unconstitutional. How can you have any kind of rational debate about what the nation’s approach to immigration should be when the supposedly liberal 24-hour news network is pretending such measures amount to an “open border”?

    ‘Democrats don’t know how people think’

    NBC Exit Poll: Most Important Issue

    In one brief segment, MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews (Morning Joe, 11/6/24) was able to mangle the most important issues of 42% of the electorate.

    “It’s all about immigration and the economy,” Matthews told Geist. Well, he got the economics just as wrong:

    I think you can talk all you want about the rates of inflation going down. What people do is they remember what the price of something was, whether it’s gas or anything, or cream cheese, or anything else, and they’ll say, “I remember when it was $2, and now it’s $7.” But they remember it in the last five years. That’s how people think. Democrats don’t know how people think anymore. They think about their country and they think about the cost of things.

    The suggestion here is that success in fighting inflation would not be bringing the rate of price increases down, but returning prices to what they were before the inflationary period. That’s called deflation, a phenomenon generally viewed as disastrous that policy makers make strenuous efforts to prevent.

    A decade ago, the Wall Street Journal (10/16/14) described “the specter of deflation” as “a worry that top policy makers thought they had beaten back”:

    A general fall in consumer prices emerged as a big concern after the 2008 financial crisis because it summoned memories of deep and lingering downturns like the Great Depression and two decades of lost growth in Japan. The world’s central banks in recent years have used a variety of easy-money policies to fight its debilitating effects.

    Paul Krugman (New York Times, 8/2/10) noted that

    in a deflationary economy, wages as well as prices often have to fall—and…in general economies don’t manage to have falling wages unless they also have mass unemployment, so that workers are desperate enough to accept those wage declines.

    It’s natural for ordinary consumers to think that if prices going up is bad, prices going down must be good. For someone like Matthews to think that, when he’s been covering national politics for more than three decades, is incompetence.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to MSNBC at MSNBCTVinfo@nbcuni.com.

    Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Gaza, voter turnout, abortion rights, and more: Surveying the post-election damage

    What happened in the 2024 elections, and what happens now? Donald J. Trump is headed back to the White House, Republicans will control the Senate, and it’s possible they will control all three branches of government when the dust settles. Democrats’ “blue wall” crumbled in the face of the MAGA-led “red wave,” but that picture gets more complicated when we survey the results of other key races and ballot measures across the country. So, what really happened on Tuesday? What do the results tell us about the political landscape and the balance of power in the US? How did Democrats lose so soundly, how did Republicans pull off such sizable wins? And what implications do the elections have for the future of civil rights, immigration, protest and social movements, public policy, the climate, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and America’s place on the world stage?

    In this post-election livestream, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Marc Steiner, host of The Marc Steiner Show, are joined by a range of guests to help break down the wins, losses, and strategies for moving forward from the 2024 elections. Guests include: scholar-activist and artist Eman Abdelhadi; Rick Perlstein, columnist at The American Prospect and author of numerous books like “Nixonland,” “Reaganland,” and “Before the Storm”; Laura Flanders, host of “Laura Flanders & Friends” on PBS; John Nichols, National Affairs Correspondent at The Nation; Bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project; and TRNN reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, who have been on the ground in Wisconsin all week.

    Studio: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley
    Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara, Jocelyn Dombroski

    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Welcome, everyone, to our postelection breakdown livestream here on The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and we are so grateful to have you all with us.

    Marc Steiner:

    And I’m Marc Steiner here, host of The Marc Steiner Show on The Real News. I’m also happy to be here.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Donald J. Trump is headed back to the White House for a second term. Republicans will control the Senate, and it’s possible they will control all three branches of government when the dust settles: the executive, legislature, and the judiciary. Republicans currently have the lead in the battle to control the House of Representatives, with 207 seats compared to Democrats 194 seats. But enough races remain competitive and uncalled as of this recording that the future of the House is still uncertain.

    In the presidential race, however, Democrats’ blue wall crumbled in the face of the MAGA-led red wave. Trump not only won the key swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, but he also flipped Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. All of those states, with the exception of North Carolina, went for Joe Biden in 2020. And Trump currently has commanding leads in Nevada and Arizona.

    In these last harried months before Election Day, Democrats made a cynical, dangerous, and fateful calculation. They bet that a winning coalition of today’s never-Trump Republicans, i.e. yesterday’s neocons, undecided “moderates”, and all manner of people terrified into submission to vote against Trump would counteract the precious working-class youth, Arab and Muslim American, progressive and other voters that they have hemorrhaged by recklessly continuing to fund and support Israel’s genocidal regime, by presenting Harris’s platform as a lockstep continuation of the Biden administration, and by failing to articulate a strong, populist vision that spoke to working people’s deeply felt lack of economic security. And they were wrong, catastrophically wrong.

    So what happened on Tuesday, and what happens now? What do the results tell us about the political landscape and the balance of power in the United States? How did Democrats lose so soundly? How did Republicans pull off such sizable wins?

    That picture does admittedly get more complicated when we survey the results of other key races and ballot measures across the country, and we are going to talk about that today as well.

    But what implications do the elections have for the future of civil rights, immigration, abortion rights, protest and social movements, public policy, the climate, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and America’s place on the world stage? On today’s livestream, we’re going to dig into all of this. And this will not be the only livestream we have to address these issues.

    But we’ve got lots of incredible guests with powerful voices and vital perspectives coming on over the next two hours to help us unpack your biggest questions about the elections. We’ve got scholar activists and artists and Amman Abdelhadi; we’ve got Rick Pearlstein, columnist at the American Prospect and author of numerous books like Nixonland, Reagan Land, and Before the Storm; we’ve got the great Laura Flanders, host of Laura Flanders and Friends on PBS; John Nichols, national affairs correspondent at the Nation; Bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project; and Real News reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, who have been on the ground in Wisconsin all week.

    And we’re going to bring on our first guest, Amman Delhi in a minute, but by way of getting us there, Marc, I want to turn to you at the top here and just get your thoughts on where we are right now and how we got here.

    Marc Steiner:

    We’re in a very scary place, and I think I have to lay some of what happened here at the doorsteps of the Democratic Party, who placed a very narrow campaign, thinking they could go to the right to win, which was absurd. And we see what’s happened.

    I think that it’s interesting to me how the Democrats have lost their ability to find their roots. By that I mean their roots were in labor unions and organizing and the Civil Rights Movement and organizing. They’ve lost the organizing roots. They weren’t out there at the grassroots. They weren’t pulling people in. They weren’t doing a media campaign that talked about not just the dangers ahead if Trump wins, but talk about what the vision was for a different kind of America. They didn’t do any of that, and I think they put the nails in their own coffin.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    They tried to articulate in a vision and it was not a compelling one. I think that’s also a clear takeaway. It just wasn’t hitting. And we’re going to talk about why, over the course of this livestream and over the course of our continuing coverage and your coverage all the way up to the election and beyond has been incredible, so thank you for all that work, brother.

    And thank you all once again for joining us. We know you’ve got a lot of questions, we’re going to try to get to as many of them as we can, but please do send us in your questions and we will try to address them in more segments, more livestreams with more guests in the coming days and weeks.

    Right now I want to bring on our first incredible guest, Eman Abdelhadi, scholar, activist, and artist who has been doing incredible coverage for outlets like In These Times in the runup to this week’s elections. Aman, thank you so much for joining us on the Real News Network today. I really, really appreciate it.

    Eman Abdelhadi:

    Thanks for having me, Max.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Well, we need your powerful voice, sister, now more than ever. And you know as well as we do that right now, a lot of people in a lot of high places are going to be looking for people to blame this week’s results on, and one of the utmost obvious and softest targets that they’re already going after is the Gaza Solidarity Movement. Anyone and everyone who expressed genuine concerns over Harris’s continued support of Israel’s genocidal Zionist regime.

    So taking those narratives out of our heads for a second and asking you to help us unpack this, what role do you see, from your perspective, what role has Israel and Harris’s support for the Zionist genocide seemed to play in this election writ large? And then, what is a second Trump presidency going to mean for Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and all of that moving forward?

    Eman Abdelhadi:

    I think we have to think about the voter who has been watching children under the rubble every day for the last year, for over a year now, watching a genocide unfold on their phones every single day. And knowing that this system, that this ruling elite has been completely committed to this genocide, has gaslit us about it over and over.

    Then this moment of asking this voter to put all of that aside and show up to the polls and vote for the people who have not just enacted this genocide but have patronized the people protesting it, have criminalized the people protesting it, and are offering very little else, are not saying, okay, put aside the genocide because we have this great amazing vision for you on this other ground. They’re not doing that either. And so I think a lot of those voters stayed home. Kamala lost 10 million votes from previous elections.

    I think that there’s this way that we ask the left to put on their big boy pants and, as a recent article said, to basically be these hyper-rational, focus on strategy voters, whereas we make a lot of room and leeway for other voters’ proclivities. There’s a sense that you are just going to be able to put aside Gaza. I think a lot of people didn’t, and they weren’t being offered anything meaningful — And, in fact, they were being told that they shouldn’t care at all.

    Now, will Trump be worse on Gaza? It’s actually hard to tell. His rhetoric is certainly a lot worse. His foreign policy was really hard to pin down, I think, in his last presidency. He’s certainly no friend of Arabs. He’s no friend of Muslims. He’s no friend of the Palestinian people. His rhetoric has been terrible.

    But I think that people need to understand that, in terms of US support for Israel, there has been no red line and there have no been no checks on the Israeli government. So it’s hard to imagine a worse case. It’s hard to imagine things getting worse in terms of the Middle East, which is what we’ve been threatened with this whole time, this whole campaign — Oh, it’s going to get worse, it’s going to get worse. And I think what voters have been saying is, what is worse than a genocide and an open tap of weapons and support that no amount of brutality has stopped?

    So I don’t know what’s going to happen with Iran. We do know that Trump tends to be an isolationist. I think he’s less committed to the vision of the world with US leadership that Clinton and Bush era politicians seem to be arguing for. I don’t know what that’s going to mean on the ground. I think it’s going to be a question of what becomes lucrative for him.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    And what about, I guess this is a question that’s on a lot of our minds. It’s a question that makes me think of the fact that the last time we were together in person was there in Chicago, covering Gaza solidarity protests around the DNC in August.

    Right now, I think the knee-jerk reaction from a lot of folks is we gotta hit the streets. We gotta hit the streets even harder. We gotta protest even louder. And I’m not saying that we don’t need to do that, but I am saying that the first story I reported on in Trump’s first term was when his administration was cheering on the mass arrest and the attempts to charge mass amounts of protesters, journalists, legal observers at the inauguration protests with felony riot charges. So we are entering a new terrain when it comes to grassroots action, protest actions, and otherwise.

    So as you see it, as someone who’s covered these protest movements all year, where do you see us heading in terms of the terrain of struggle, particularly as it pertains to protests moving forward in the Trump administration?

    Eman Abdelhadi:

    We always knew that whoever was going to be in the White House, headed to the White House in January, was going to be an enemy. And the question is which enemy do we have? And right now we have an enemy that, it has no qualms about calling the military, has no qualms about criminalizing protests.

    Now, a lot of us have been facing off against the police and these repressive tactics under the previous administration. So I think we need to think about our tactics not from a place of fear and from a place of, well, what are they going to do, necessarily, in response, but more where are we as a movement? We need to think about where our movement is in terms of its potential, in terms of its energy. And I think that street mobilizations and street actions have been really important for growing our base, but we’ve also hit up against the limits of them a little bit.

    And so I think that what I’m seeing on the ground is a lot of people turning towards organizing and power building as opposed to mobilizing just street actions. Thinking about your workplace, your school, your neighborhood, thinking about your local politicians and your local political scene and whatever other institutions are within your sphere of influence, and thinking about how do I hold these institutions accountable to their relationship with the state of Israel to their complicity in the genocide?

    For me, it feels clear that the American public is going to have to divest from Israel before we force the ruling class to do it. And we are going to have to do that through all of this bottom-up work and grassroots organizing.

    So I think we should still be on the streets. I think we have to protect the right to be on the streets, but I also think that we have been expanding into other tactics as well.

    Marc Steiner:

    I watched this whole thing unfold and the Democrats just blew it. Kamala Harris and her team did not come up with an alternative to what’s been happening. I don’t expect the Democrats to go, oh, we’re pro-Palestine and goodbye Israel. I don’t expect that at all. But what I did expect and what they should have done at the very least is to say, we are going to end the violence right now. We’re going to do something to build peace in the Middle East, to build a peace platform. And it may have saved them votes, but B, it just set it apart.

    Because you can’t… It was just really disappointing to watch this unfold. And I think that I’ve been in this struggle around the Palestinian Israeli struggle since 1968, and we’ve been fighting against this occupation for that long, and organizing and coming up with strategy is what has to happen now. The Democrats have seen what they’ve blown, and I’ve talked to a couple of people in the Democratic Party over the last two days, and people really have to push to change the way they approach the subject, period. It’s just obscene. And that’s a huge reason why they lost.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Well, and to turn that into a question for Eman, I mean, again, I don’t want to ask you to speak for whole swaths of voting constituencies here, but again, having watched what we watch, having heard what Marc just said, I mean, what would a better alternative vision have been or needs to be moving forward to get the faith back from so many folks? Not just Arab and Muslim Americans, but working class voters, youth voters, folks around the country who feel like even in the face of a threat like Donald Trump, that the prospect of things getting better is just so hopeless that they stay home or they don’t put their faith in any of the options on offer. What does an alternative to that even look like?

    Eman Abdelhadi:

    I think a left wing candidate… Listen, I don’t think our full liberatory potential as human beings is ever going to be on the ballot in the current system as it is. We’re never going to have liberation on the ballot. But I think that, even within the current system, if you had offered people a left-wing, truly progressive alternative with actual policies.

    At the DNC, she said, we’re going to build the most lethal fighting force on earth. She said this to her voters who largely are anti-war, anti weaponry. And there are these ways that they could have even lied. What’s so wild about having watched this campaign, it’s like, you could have lied and said you were going to do more than you did and then ended up doing what every Democrat has done, which has moved to the right when you’re in office.

    But they couldn’t even offer that platform. And I think that speaks to the intense disjuncture between this party and the people who are supposed to be its base that somewhere there’s this consultant class of Democrats who truly believes that if you send Bill Clinton to Michigan to speak to Arab communities about how terrible Gazans basically deserve to die, that was a good election strategy on the eve of the election.

    So I think there’s so many ways that they could have done things differently. And within our lifetimes we’ve seen that. We’ve seen the energy around the Bernie campaign. Bernie is not as far left as I would like him to be, but I even knocked on doors for him. We saw the energy that could happen if you had an actual progressive candidate on the ballot.

    And here in this election, we saw that she lost states that voted for left-wing policies. In my own home state in Missouri, voters voted overwhelmingly for Trump, and they also voted for a minimum wage hike.

    They’re trying to spin this right now as America moving to the right ideologically because they voted for Trump. And I don’t think that that’s what we’re seeing here. I think what we’re seeing is that there’s a referendum on Democrats’ economic vision, on their vision of the world as a world that’s led by US hegemony, and they’re losing that referendum, that people have voted against it.

    And those two things, the domestic side and the international side, are two parts of the same coin. We need a candidate who says, I care more about Americans lives here. I’m going to actually invest in working class people here, and I’m going to do that more. And it’s more important than protecting the interests of corporations or weapons manufacturers or Israel. And well, we haven’t seen that. And I think if we had seen that there was a moment where Kamala could have pivoted to that and she did it and she lost as a result.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    And also worth noting that not only did Missouri vote to raise the state minimum wage, but it was also one of the seven states that voted to enshrine abortion rights in its state charter. I mean, along with Arizona, Colorado, New York, Maryland, here in our home state, Montana, Nevada. I mean, as I said at the top, the picture does get more complicated than just sort of the red Trumpian wave when you look at all the way up and down the ballot. And I want us to continue to unpack that over the course of this live stream. But it does sort of raise an important question here, Aman, that I wanted to pose to you because I know we only have you for a few more minutes here. But as we said, the pundit class, the consultant class, like Democrats at the top of the party, they, they’re going to do what they always do and they’re going to look for a way to blame voters for the outcome that voters kept telling ’em they were going to get if they didn’t change course.

    But they don’t really seem to have a case to make here the way that they tried and succeeded in doing in a lot of ways after 2016 because now granted, in terms of the national total voter results, there are still a lot of results in populous states like California that are going to be counted. So we’re expecting that the total voter turnout will be closer to what it was in 2020, but it still appears to be less than what it was in 2020. And there also appear to be key dropoffs in democratic support. But those dropoffs do not correspond to the amount of people who voted for say, Jill Stein or Cornell West. So it doesn’t even feel like Democrats and sort of like their supportive pundits in the media can even say all those people who voted third party are the difference that could have swung this to Harris. It feels like something else is going on here. I just wanted to get your thoughts there with the caveat that more is going to become clear in the coming days and weeks. Exit polls need to be taken with a huge pinch of salt, but based on the results that we have, what do you actually think are the takeaways that people should have rather than trying to just blame this all on uncommitted folks or people who voted third party?

    Eman Abdelhadi:

    I think the takeaway is that the Democratic party has abandoned working class Americans, and it’s abandoned any pretense that it was the sort of more peace anti-war party. And as a result, its base has abandoned it. And I think there’s this way that if you don’t offer something exciting and something interesting in a world, in a country that is increasingly disillusioned with the whole system is increasingly disillusioned with voting, you’re just not going to win. And so I think that’s the key takeaway. But I think broadly as a leftist, as someone who, like I said, doesn’t believe liberation is ever going to fully be on the ballot, but that the ballot is worth engaging and that it’s not something to throw away and that it is important and that we should participate as leftists, we should be seizing any ground that we can. And I think we have to think broadly about the world we need to build and what the hurdles are to getting there and how to push for that. It became clear to me around the DNC that the sort of electoral possibilities of ending the genocide and Luda had been reached that we were not going to push her any further, and that it was time to focus our energy back to local organizing. So I think for each of us, there has to be this question of what do I need to do to protect the people around me and to advance the causes that I care about in this moment of incredible weakness for the left

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Brother? Mark, any final questions you have for Aman?

    Marc Steiner:

    Yeah, I am very curious, from all the work you’ve done and what we face now in the Middle East and building a coalition that makes some changes here in America, how do you see that unfolding? How do you see that happening? We talked a bit about organizing and more, but because it infuriates me watching these Democrats not be able to make the leap to say, end the war in the Israel Gaza, stop it because we are the only country on the planet that has the power to stop it. So I’m curious, what do you think the next moves are to push that and to push that as an idea for Mass Americans to take hold of and to change the Democrats if you can?

    Eman Abdelhadi:

    Yeah, I mean, I think that we need to make commitment to this war extremely costly. I think we do that by leveraging our power through things like unions. I think we need to basically create both social and economic costs to continuing to support this war. I mean, we sort of did do that in terms of the vote. I mean, I think Kaza was a part of why she didn’t win, but I think also this is a long-term battle where we need to basically build power, whether that’s through street mobilizations, that disrupt business as usual or through moving labor has been solidly on the side of Palestine, but there needs to be more work in that arena. I think the broader problem is that we are left after decades of neoliberal in a version of this country that makes it incredibly hard to leverage any people power.

    The fact that we have so few unions that we have and we’re stuck in these kind of ideological debates without a lot of actually points of leverage. So I think a lot of the work that’s been happening on the sort of cultural realm of realm has been really important. But what we’ve seen is that hasn’t translated into policy. So yeah, it’s hard to say beyond. And I think organizing locally, so here in Illinois for example, we are organizing around a divestment campaign for Illinois bonds. So I think there needs to be a sort of systematic attack on all of these links that bolster the Israeli government and it’s sort of murderous campaigns. I wish I had a silver bullet. I wish

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    You all had it right?

    Oh no. None of us have a silver bullet, but I mean we only have a couple minutes left with Aman, and then we’re going to welcome on our next guest, Rick Pearlstein and Laura Flanders. And so by way of asking you this kind of final question, Aman, mark and I were talking about this leading into Tuesday about what the message was going to be if Harris won because I think for the left or whatever that means today, or for people who have principled commitments that you could define as more left-leaning or progressive, there was going to be a very sobering reality on the other side of a Harris win, which is that the progressive wing of the Democratic party is at its institutionally most powerless point, and it takes two election cycles to wash the Bernie Sanders stain out. And Harris would’ve gone into her administration feeling next to no compulsion whatsoever to even cater to that Bernie side, that progressive side of the Democratic party that Biden felt compelled to cater to in 2020.

    There was going to be a real soul searching question of what is the left, where is the left, and what do people who believe in that vision of the world, where are we and what do we do moving forward into a Harrison administration? Now we got Trump. So in a lot of ways, the equation’s the same institutionally. We ain’t got no power in that administration. We have less and less in all three branches of government. So that is both a terrifying prospect and a critical one because for all the reasons that we can justifiably say people want an alternative so that we’re not in this same situation in four years, that needs to start now, that needs to start yesterday. And a lot of people are feeling maybe too scared and too anxious to even begin thinking in those terms. So I wanted to give you the sort of final word here. If you could speak to people who are in that position, people who desperately want an alternative but are currently fearful of what a next Trump administration’s going to be, don’t know where to start, don’t know what our goal needs to be beyond just defense of ourselves, our communities, and our livelihoods. What would your message be to those folks right now?

    Eman Abdelhadi:

    I would say start with the local level. I would say we need to build a bench of progressives that can move through these. I mean, in 2018 after there was a blue wave of folks that were elected all over really on all levels of government who were progressive and on the progressive end of the party and all of that kind of dissipated, they got eaten up into the, either they sort of got co-opted into mainstream democratic party politics or they sort of got marginalized. But I think that it’s important to think about these moments as of potential mobilization. And so I think on the electoral level, we need to build a bench of progressives who can sort of move through local elections and eventually kind of make their way up. And we need to keep them accountable through the movement, not by constantly immediately canceling them all the time, but constantly holding them back, accountability to their base. And then I think people need to organize. I mean, the reality is I didn’t feel I had very much power in the previous administration either, and no one that I organized with felt like we had power vis-a-vis last administration. And so I think we need to build coalitions and organize again in our spheres of influence, whether that’s our workplaces or our schools or our districts, and build these coalitions that can either be used electorally or more importantly for broader movement wins.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    So that is the great Aman Abdelhadi. You should read anything and everything Aman has ever written. Follower on social media, scholar, activists, artists. Aman, thank you so much for joining us on The Real News. Thank you for everything that you’ve done and we’re sending all our love and solidarity to you from here in Baltimore.

    Eman Abdelhadi:

    Mentioned that I’m sending it right back, max. Thanks so much.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Thank you, sister. Thank you. So we’re going to bring on our next guest in a moment. We’ve had them on before. In fact, we had them on together to help us break down the Trump conviction news that feels like it happened 10 years ago, but it was only a few months ago. And we said rightly then. And we were addressing this to all the folks out there who were taking a premature victory lap and hoping that the legal system of checks and balances would sort of just take the Trump problem off the country’s plate back in the spring. Our message was very clear. That’s not going to happen. What in the Trump era would make you think that he’s just going to go away or that the system is going to treat them with the same callousness that it does working people like us? And here we are months later in a much different world.

    And so we’re very excited to have our guests, Rick Pearlstein and the great Laura Flanders joining us today at this critical and dark moment to help us make sense of this. Laura, of course, is the host of Laura Flanders and Friends, which you can catch every week on PBS. She is a journalist legend, a hero of mine as is Brother Rick Pearlstein, the most brilliant mind analyzing the American right that the American left has ever produced. Laura, Rick, thank you both so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. We really appreciate it.

    Laura Flanders:

    Alright, it’s great to be with you. Glad to be here Max. Good to see you, Rick.

    Rick Perlstein:

    Yeah, it’s a comforting place to be and a very uncomfortable time.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    That’s good to see you both. Well Mark, let’s open it up with you.

    Marc Steiner:

    Yeah, I like hear both of your analysis about what just happened here, how the Democrats blew this and the growing power of the right. I’ve been covering the growing power of the right in this country for some time now here for Real News. And what we’re seeing now is they almost have a trifecta politically in Washington dc. It could be extremely dangerous from everything from civil rights to labor rights to the future of our country and our democracy, everything’s at stake. I’m curious, how did we get here? How do you think at this moment we came to this point?

    Rick Perlstein:

    Can I start Laura,

    Laura Flanders:

    The historian? Rick, go for it.

    Rick Perlstein:

    Yeah, I mean I’m going to lean away from any preliminary judgment at this point that the Harris campaign necessarily blew it. I mean, maybe they did, right? But I’m just going to give a little example of my day-to-Day life. My car got towed and at the impound lot in the middle of a neighborhood in Chicago, the Mexican American clearly working class clerk, we got into a conversation about the election and he said he was for Trump, and he said he heard that every undocumented immigrant was getting a $9,000 check. I just got the latest issue of the Economist, and the cover is the American economy is the envy of the world.

    Speaker 6:

    Now,

    Rick Perlstein:

    Of course, we still have a profoundly unequal economy. There’s lots of vultures, for example, in the housing market who are just stripping people clean. But if you look back also at say in the Biden administration, the fact that we had a party where young black men were called super predators, and now they’re nominating public defenders to the bench, or the fact that Kamala Harris chose as her running mate, basically a Scandinavian social Democrat who when the federal government took away the Biden administration, let’s be frank, took away the Covid stimulus checks for families. He just brought ’em back. So I don’t think it’s as easy as just saying the administration and the campaign rejected the left, and that’s why they lost. I mean, here I am in Chicago and we elected the Bernie Coalition and they just screwed up everything and the mayor as a 15% approval rating, I’m going to really place the blame on the fact that people only know what the candidates are saying or doing through mediation.

    And that medium is the media, right? I just got a text from a friend of mine who works at a major metropolitan newspaper, basically in a blue state, a blue city in a red state, and he said, journalism deserve what it has coming to it. Discussion in the newsroom. This is a newspaper newsroom about Project 25. So very clear, no one’s seriously grappled with anything before today. Just one more example, inflation, right? I mean, there’s this huge debate over inflation, right? Did anyone in the media ever say that the president really has no control over inflation? Right? So I mean, to me, the reason the word fascism is useful is because it’s only possible in this kind of deranged information environment in which it’s just very hard for people to just grasp reality. I mean, here we have this guy, I, Elon Musk, and I was looking at Axios today, and Axios report was, well, maybe Elon Musk isn’t so dumb after all, maybe he’d made an amazing investment by buying Twitter and by saying that, they’re saying this is a guy who basically was turned over the keys to something that’s going to be like state media, a state propaganda raus.

    He’s going to be the nation’s gables and one of these newsletters of the elite capitalist masters of the universe in Washington. All they can say about this is great business move. So yeah, I wish it was as easy as saying, Kamala screwed up. I kind of dug what she was doing. I think that it’s a calamity and a disaster that she wasn’t able to say anything about Gaza that was productive in any way, shape or form. But quite frankly, mass occurring brown people is not a big problem for a lot of Americans, as we’ve seen from them choosing Donald Trump. So I think the biggest crisis moving forward has to be dealing with this media that just does not know how to represent the truth to citizens in a way that allows them to act like citizens.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Laura, let’s toss it to you.

    Laura Flanders:

    Well, so many things there. I mean, I want to come back to the media. Of course. Huge, huge issue. I will give just a few quick takes on the Harris campaign for sure. I don’t think there’s anything she could have done that necessarily would’ve turned a totally different result, maybe incrementally different. But I do think it is really hard to run on and also against the economic record of the administration that you’ve been part of for the last four years. I also think it is really hard to run against autocracy and war and for human rights and be part of an administration that is flooding weapons to a foreign autocrat committing. I think it’s super hard to run a bottom up. People powered We are democracy in Action democratic campaign that nonetheless relies on big dollar donors by private interests. That’s our system that is fundamentally instills a level of hypocrisy and servitude into our political process.

    Finally, I think it is really hard to run as the nation’s first woman of color president in a continent as big as ours with 330 million people and do it in 106 days. So those are my hot takes on the Harris aspect of the story. The other aspect of the story though that I think Rick is getting at so well is it’s not about one party or one campaign or let alone one politician. There have been structural phenomena playing out here over decades that finally came to roost this election. Did the media ignore important aspects of what was actually happening under the Biden administration? Absolutely. I mean, when Nicholas Lehman writes in the New Yorker, in the issue that comes out the week before the election, Biden Nos is working, why is nobody noticing? You’re like, well, because the media, so-called most of our most influential media speakers are those cable network pundits who never leave the studio.

    So while Nicholas Lehman, bless him, goes out there and actually talks to working class people at the factory, making the school buses, making green school buses with union labor in a neighborhood that needed employment, employing people that were historically disadvantaged, all thanks to millions of dollars coming in from the Biden administration, it’s too little too late. And where was the reporting all this time about how this policy was actually playing out? I’m with Rick. I was never a huge Biden fan during the financial crisis. We remember the role that he played benefiting privileging banking over others. But heck in this administration, Biden nos showed the markers of the influence of the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren wing of the party. It really did. And there was a lot to actually run on and talk about. Not happy talk about how inflation is nothing and everybody’s lives are great and the market’s great, therefore you should feel better than you do.

    But actual real life stuff about what’s happening on the ground, that’s about as positive as you’re going to get from me about a democratic administration. But I do think there were things to report on there that simply got missed, and Harris could have run on some of that, but she was so intimidated, I think by the frames that the media had put on this election, which was that everybody was upset about the economy. What do we mean by the economy anyway? Who’s out there talking about what that means? We have many economies in this country, people getting by in all sorts of different ways and people being helped by government programs in all sorts of different ways. We could have talked about a lot of it. So I think there’s the problem of the media, what they actually do today. There’s the problem of how much advertising money they absorb.

    What if they just said, tomorrow we’re not running these ads, but instead they accept the cable companies, which are for-profit corporations, part of international global corporate capital, accept millions of dollars of advertising money to run ads that are lies. And we know that they were lies that worked lies around trans people, men in sports, not true. That’s not the issue. And lies of every other possible kind, and this comes back to our bigger fundamental problem we have. Well, two, they both have to do with capitalism. One of them has to do with you cannot have a democracy. I mean, Bernie’s, right? We shouldn’t have billionaires. You can’t have a democracy when you have billionaires allowed to pump as much money as they want to into our elections. It just doesn’t work. Secondly, we have had an extractive economy that has extracted culture and value and understanding and care and attention as much as it has extracted precious minerals from underneath the ground of our communities around this country, and concentrated all those resources and attention and information and caring in a few hands in a few places.

    So we do have a lot of this country that has been ignored for way too long in terms of the culture, what they see reflected back to them through their media, the kinds of people they see, talking back to them about the nature of the world. And I think that that is a longstanding problem that has been going on for years when people feel ignored, alienated, scared, alone, remote, disinvested in, not cared about. It is really easy for one to create a sense of community of the aggrieved and a community of the aggrieved that are led to believe through endless messaging that it’s not the wealthy and the extractors that are the problem. It’s the scrappy immigrants who are coming to take their jobs. And that’s what happened this time and we’ve, it’s not magic, it’s not rocket science, it’s not breaking news that that’s been going on, but that is, I believe at the heart of what happened today and leaves us with an enormous job of how do we reinvest attention, caring, consideration, not to mention resources into communities that don’t make it into our news.

    Marc Steiner:

    A couple of things here that popped up as both of you were talking. One has to do, we don’t have to belabor this, but the Democrats had a billion dollars to spend. They could have told the story, hired organizers really pushed a different agenda, exposed the things you were just talking about, Laura, all across the media. They could have done that and had people on the ground organizing. They didn’t do it. They did not organize this. And I guess having spent years as an organizer and running campaigns, give me a billion dollars, I’ll help you change it. That really drove me nuts. But the other thing is, let’s talk about what’s going to happen now.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Well, let me hop in there real quick. I want us to end in the sort of what happens now question. But I guess by way of getting there, I want to comment on the economy and a question about the media. That’s cool, right? Because again, agree with what you guys are saying, taking it all in, appreciate your perspectives that as always, and I want to just also offer kind of a perspective here as folks watching this know, yeah, the Real News Network is a nonprofit newsroom. We’re not competing with CNN or stuff like that, but we’re small, mighty, we care and we try and we talk to working people around the country week in, week out. I interviewed tons of them on my show working people all the time. And what I can also want to add to the conversation here is that in those conversations, you will hear how the people’s perception of the economy and people’s lived experience, it produces a sort of mixed bag.

    When we’re talking about the economy, it is not as simple as saying Omics is working. Why aren’t people talking about it depends on what people were talking about. I interviewed railroad workers last week on my show saying, Hey, Biden and Congress broke your guys’ strike. How are people feeling right now? How are they going to vote? The answer was, people are feeling demoralized. Our strike was broken under Biden’s administration and the rail companies got everything that they want. Then two months after we were forced to accept a contract, the derailment in East Palestine happened. They’ve been left behind. Railroad workers feel just as demoralized as they did three years ago before the country started to care about ’em again. They barely got any sick days. They got a little pay bump, but they’re still being run into the ground. So in terms of omics working for them, it’s not right in terms of public school teachers and counties all across the country, especially in places like Minnesota where I’ve interviewed folks, they can’t hire educators because the pay is so low and they can’t retain folks, nurses, healthcare workers, education workers are constantly telling us that they are being burnt out because they’re having more work piled onto fewer workers at pay that is not keeping pace with the cost of living.

    If you add into that young people who are dealing with a massive debt burden from getting the education we were told to get when we were young, those student loan repayments started up a few months ago. Housing costs still are skyrocketing. Omics is not working for a lot of folks there, and they’re feeling it. Now. Again, Trump’s not going to address that, but it paints a really complicated picture. As Laura said, there are many complic economies.

    Laura Flanders:

    Well, it’s complicated picture though, max, that I mean, if you had been, I bet if you had been running head for office, you would’ve said, listen, it’s not working for everybody. We want to do more, do it better. I mean, if you were a Democrat, you would’ve run on, we’ve been at least doing this and we could be doing more instead of we agree it’s been a big problem, which is what she basically ran on. So instead of saying, we need more of this and this is what’s been happening and this is what still needs to be done, she ran away from the whole story, which I think was a big mistake.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I mean, I think also people have a very distorted picture, which brings us back to the media about what the scene is for working class people and organize labor in this country. Folks still think we’re in the midst of this great organizing wave when the organizing wave that emerged out of Covid is still running through the mud of an underfunded NLRB in a viciously anti-union corporate class that has managed to stall so many of those unionization

    Rick Perlstein:

    Efforts.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    So again, complicated picture point, very well taken. This brings us back to the question of the media, because I wrote this piece last week in these times in the Real News, a deeply personal piece trying to address this question because I went back home and visited my grandfather who’s dying of Alzheimer’s, who’s obsessively watching Trump and Fox News and OAN, and I sat there in his living room watching the screen that he watches that connects him to the world outside of his window. And the world looked very different than the one that I see watching the world in my social circles through the media that I consume, the reporting that I do. And that is a huge unspoken crisis that we are experiencing in the digital age right now where you could be seeing and imagining a very different country than the person who sits next to you on the bus, depending on what channels you watch, what apps you use, what podcasts you listen to.

    So there’s been a fracturing of not only the mass public that maybe television commanded a large audience of 30, 40 years ago, but that has sort of translated into a very fractured sense of the country that we’re actually living in. And so Mike, I wanted to ask Rick, the media is one of the core pillars of the Infernal Triangle that you’re writing about so much at the American Prospect. Can you talk a bit about that sort of reality warping and reality and casing sort of effect of the fractured media ecosystem we’re living in now? And Laura is someone who has been working in media and journalism, you’re on still public tv. How do we fight that?

    Rick Perlstein:

    Right? I mean, imagine if your work and your reporters in Wisconsin or East Palestine, if that was happening on the scale of the resources of a New York Times or a Washington Post or a CNN instead of your hard scrabble crew, literally probably literally a thousand fold resources, we would’ve a different country because the politicians would receive different signals because they’re very solicitous of what the media says about them and what’s going out there. And we take something like crime and crime committed by migrants. Every educated person knows that immigrants commit violent crimes at a level far lower than native foreign people. So logically speaking, if you want a less crime ridden country, you’re let in more immigrants, not less, and the lie that immigrants are invading, I mean, which is just like fascist rhetoric. I mean, the idea that a poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free are the people who are the threat to the country.

    It is like something out of Nazi Germany or Prof and the Soviet Union I spent a couple of weeks ago, I was in New York and I went to Ellis Island, so I really saw Ellis Island. I don’t know if some of you guys who are older might remember that Ellis Island was rehabbed and kind of reopened after a long closure in the 1980s during the Reagan era. At the same time, they restored the Statue of Liberty. There were all these scaffolding around it, and it was really a time when the civic religion just had a basic grasp and basic beliefs that immigrants were a good thing. And one of the things I found so fascinating was they had all these oral histories in which people told their stories what it was like going through Ellis Island. And one guy was like, there was a law that you had to have $25, so we would just kind of pass the same $25 down the line.

    And the immigrant inspectors looked the other way. They knew we didn’t have $25. And the fact that this was upheld in the museum is a story that we were supposed to celebrate showing the gumption and hustle of immigrants instead of the story now, which is told also by unfortunately Kamala Harris, did she ever say once that we want more immigrants, the immigrants are good. She said, we are a nation of immigrants, which is a very mild thing. Instead, the story about immigrants passing that $25 down the line would be, wow, these immigrants are cheating us. And that’s somehow become this kind of bipartisan thing, and it is backed by this lie that’s also passed on in the media because the Republicans say it. And if the Republicans say it, we have to report it without fact checking because fact checking would be bias that America is suffering a epidemic of violent crime. So yeah, I mean, I think really it’s very fundamental. And then you get to the issue of social media and their algorithms that basically valorize people basically lying in order to create fights, which creates more engagement. I think that the revolution now flows through the media, right? I mean, if we had an honest media that provided a reasonable picture onto the world, everything would change. Everything would change.

    Laura Flanders:

    I mean, Rick, you mentioned Bels, and I wrote a piece for The Guardian earlier this year that referred to Musk as today’s Bels. And I didn’t just mean because of the role he is playing in communication, but structurally, I mean people perhaps don’t remember Bels, the communications director for the Hitler administration, as it were, the Hitler regime. He didn’t just do propaganda. He distributed cheap radio sets to Germans all across the country so that they well boosted the economy of the people that owned the manufacturers, but also gave people a free new medium that they could engage with and get their news from that they were excited about. It was very similar to Twitter or X. And I think that that idea of distributing not just content, but also form the pipes as well as what runs through the pipes, owning your own media platforms.

    I mean, the Trump team have several of them now. Trump has his own, which is increasing in value after the election, and Twitter Musk has x. I think that we, and always Max, when I talk about the failings of the media, I am not talking about you or me or the whole media, independent media ecosystem that has provided us our community over all these many decades. And it’s exciting to know that there are new generations of independent media makers and movement media makers and a new alliance that I know that you’re part of the Movement Media Alliance that’s thinking about how can we independents move more closely together, work more closely together, help one another survive better. I assume my days on public television are numbered because I think public television is to be zeroed out of the budget, at least according to Project 2025,

    Not than anybody at public television covered that part of Project 2025, but hey, I read that chapter with Care and Concern. I think they mentioned it on page like two. But I do think that this media piece also, another thing that I’ve thought about a lot is we have monopoly media, and when I talk about extraction, the extraction takes resources from a place, attention, people care, all of that and concentrates it somewhere else. And if you think of what’s happened in our media, national networks have taken over where there used to be local media and that local media that reflected back to you perhaps what was happening in your town, the little league scores and the stores and what’s happening in the church and the food pantries and anything would reflect back to you, your actual reality. In most parts of this country, there is no such thing. And I think that is another phenomenon, that it’s not just the addition of propaganda mechanisms, but the subtraction of the other media that made people feel that they lived in a community with other folks.

    Marc Steiner:

    I’d like to ask a quick question in time. We have here,

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    We’ve got a few minutes for our next segment, so take us out.

    Marc Steiner:

    Okay. So when you have people like Elon Musk, JD Vance in positions of huge power, these are both very bright and shrewd men in, and you have Project 2025, which they’re going to implement. We touched on it just briefly, it was brought up, but it seems to me one of the biggest issues we’re going to face is people like that running the government and implementing Project 2025. I’m curious, what’s your analysis of that is, what do you think? Is it going to take us and what’s the struggle against it? Rick, you want to jump in First?

    Rick Perlstein:

    Project 2025, I mean, one thing that is very important to understand about Project 2025 is how just thoroughly comprehensive it is. I tried to read through the whole thing and it gets to the most molecular granular levels of these agencies. You’ve never even heard of

    Marc Steiner:

    It. Does I read it?

    Rick Perlstein:

    Yeah. So is the contrast to kind of power building on the left is we don’t have that kind of granularity about where the levers of power live. It’s like we say the right things, we have the right ideals. But one reason I personally preferred Elizabeth Warren over Bernie Sanders is she knew those millions of federal agencies and who worked there. And just to kick a quick example, one of my friends running for office running for governor said he supported Elizabeth Warren because he told a story about how when he was running for governor, he said he was trying to create this certain financial reform, and in order to do it, he had to pass this law. And Elizabeth Warren said, no, you don’t have to pass this law that’s already a federal law. You just need it enforced by this person and this place and dah, dah, dah, dah. So I think that kind of granularity, that kind of seriousness about power, that kind of really unglamorous stuff is what Project 2025 accomplishes that there isn’t much, much of a parallel to on the left.

    Laura Flanders:

    Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I think that we talk about the writers being anti-government, but Project 2025 showed just how good they were at thinking about the role of government and what government can do.

    Marc Steiner:

    The

    Laura Flanders:

    Other aspect, of course, of that whole initiative is not just the policies on paper, but the people that were recruited to line up to be appointed into these offices in a way that enabled there to be a lot of scrutiny of those candidates long before any transition team comes into play. So unlike the last Trump administration, they won’t be the same kind of lag in populating government. And I would just echo Rick, while they populate with loyalists, we need to look closely at local government and see where we can also shore up positions of influence at the local level. Because heck, we have got to look at any possible place in our entire government system where we can fortify resistance, fortify mechanisms that would act as at least a slowdown on this administration’s plans

    Rick Perlstein:

    Based decisions. Where were we are that are going to have an effect on this resistance. And I wrote a column, Google it, what will you do? And it’s about the faces, the kind of questions all of us will individually face under an authoritarian government, whether we’re in a government job or we’re lawyers or we’re working class people, we might have to stand in the gap.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Well, we’re going to go to Wisconsin in a minute, but while we still have Rick Pearlstein and Laura Flanders on with us, I want to kind of ask you guys in a second to sort of just help center our viewers and listeners right now. Where does the fight go from here? And what is your message to folks right now who are feeling scared, anxious, uncertain about why they need to be part of that fight? But I wanted to also just really underline the point about the importance of independent truth telling, principled, transparent, honest media. And if you support us here at The Real News, first of all, thank you. Secondly, please go support Laura Flanders and Friends if you don’t already. It is vital. The entire team there is great. They do incredible work week in, week out. And as you’ve seen here over the past 30 minutes, we desperately need Laura’s voice heard by as many folks as we can.

    Same goes for Rick. So if you are watching this, you support the Real news, please go support our friends at Lo Flanders and Friends. Please support the American Prospect where Rick’s invaluable column is published. Every week. So I wanted to put in a plug there for both of our guests and their incredible work, and I wanted to throw it back to you guys to kind of have the final word here again. What would you say to folks out there watching and listening about where the fight goes from here, why they need to be part of it, and yeah, how we steal ourselves for what’s to come?

    Rick Perlstein:

    I don’t know.

    Laura Flanders:

    Well, I had a question for Rick if we had more time, and I guess we don’t, but I’ve been thinking how does this moment compare to the worst of the Nixon years and is there any courage or any comfort to be had in the idea that we have seen bad times before? I’ll tell you,

    Rick Perlstein:

    Yeah. Nixon had a lot of this in mind for his second term, and that was all scotched by and Watergate in a lot of ways was the political elite and institutions in this country having the courage to stand up to, to someone who really had authoritarian designs in mind. So I’ll just say that we need all of us, whether we’re democratic office holders or radical grassroots activists, to figure out some way to find every possible lever of accountability and make it hard, make it hard. And that can just mean putting your body in front of us, in front of an immigrant who’s going to be deported, just make it harder.

    Laura Flanders:

    Immigrants, just very briefly, max, I will say, and first off, thanks for the pitch. If you absorb any independent media out there, fund it, send a contribution, whatever it is, support whatever avenue of information that you value, send them some money. Secondly, I had a show, we recorded a show yesterday that will be aired tomorrow at five and all frontline activists, and one of them is Lene Yosef, who works with the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the only Haitian-American organization working with migrants on the border. And this is an organization she personally with her organization brought a citizens lawsuit against Trump and Vance over what they had done in Springfield, Ohio. And she knows for sure she’s on any kind of enemies list that the administration’s going to have. She said, I’m Haitian, I’m indomitable. Don’t think for a minute that we are going to pause in our action.

    And while I was there, white lady saying, oh my God, worst night ever. She’s like, eh, we’ve seen many worst nights. And the other guests that we had on the show too, who have spent years fighting segregation in North Carolina or genocide on the reservations, they all looked at me like, get over yourself, get down to work, get busy. I think art culture, we’re going to need to really exercise our imagination and every possible tool of connection and place of connection that we have that into which we can invite the next generation and every other kind of wise that will help us build a better day and connect us to one another. So save the places that you care about and invite new people into them.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Absolutely. Hell yeah. So that is the great Laura Flanders host of Laura Flanders and friends on PBS and the great Rick Pearlstein author of numerous books, including Nixonland and Reagan Land. And you can catch Rick’s column, the Infernal Triangle at the American Prospect, Rick. Laura, thank you both so much for joining us at this critical moment. We need your voices now more than ever, and we appreciate you joining us and sharing them with our audience today. Take care of yourselves, and we’re sending love and solidarity to you guys from Baltimore. Good to see you both.

    Eman Abdelhadi:

    Great work. Yep,

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Right back at you. Si. Thank you guys. So we have another hour to go here. We really appreciate y’all sticking with us and we really want to hear your questions, your comments, your responses to what’s being said here. As I said, at the top of this live stream, this will not be the only chance that we have to address the questions that are on your mind. We want to take the questions that you’re asking us now in the live chat, in the comments of this video and respond to them in future live streams and segments. So we are going to stick with you, we’re going to stick with this. We’re in this for the long haul, and we’re going to keep doing what we can to get you the information and perspective that you need to act. And today, in the second half of this live stream, we’re going to kick off the hour by going to one of the key battleground states that all eyes were on heading into Tuesday.

    It was a key pillar in the so-called Blue Wall in the Midwest, including Wisconsin, Michigan, and both of which went for Trump. And we actually had our intrepid reporters, my incredible colleagues, Mark’s incredible colleagues, Steven, Janice and Taya Graham on the ground in Milwaukee this week where they also were reporting from during the RNC earlier in the summer. And they’ve had a hell of a week. And we want to sort of get an on the ground update from them on what they’ve been seeing, hearing, feeling there on the ground in Wisconsin as folks went to the polls. And as the results started coming in, we are hoping to also be joined by John Nichols, national affairs correspondent at the Nation to help us also get some perspective on what Wisconsin can tell us about the larger political realignment taking place in this country. But for now, I want to bring in my amazing colleague, Steve and Janice and Te Graham. Guys, thank you so much for first of all, the incredible work that you’ve been doing. The entire team here is so proud of you and so grateful.

    Speaker 6:

    Thank you

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    For your hustle and for everything that you’ve done to execute our mission. So I wanted to start there. I know you guys are tired, you’ve had a hell of a week. So why don’t we start there? A, how you doing and B, can you just sort of give us a sense of what this has all looked like from your vantage point reporting there on the ground in Wisconsin from Monday to now?

    Stephen Janis:

    Yep. It’s interesting because Tay and I always say when we reported on the ground for presidential elections since 2016 for the Real News, and there’s always moments that we have where we encounter someone or something that kind of gives us a cue. And I would say that this particular, we were on the ground out going to polls like we always do, and we went to Centennial, what was it, cental? Centennial Hall? Yeah, Centennial Hall. It

    Taya Graham:

    Was for awards 180 3, 180 4 and 180 5.

    Stephen Janis:

    But basically it serves Marquette and University of Milwaukee. And we interviewed several people and there were a couple of things that came to mind. First of all, there was a young woman who we thought was that you presume would be talking about reproductive rights or whatever, who said, and she’s like, I voted for Trump. And Tye and I both looked at each other and we’re like, wow, that does not bode well that we’re in downtown Milwaukee. And then another young man who was a student as well voted for Trump. But what was interesting about it relating back to our previous guest, was the information ecosystem from which they made this decision seemed so murky. And so really not within the realm of how policy actually works. And it harken back from me to what we had talked about right after the debate, Kamala Harris, where she soundly defeated Donald Trump.

    And we asked the question, would it matter? And I was just reading articles today in the New York Times about a Republican strategist who was stunned that after that horrible debate performance by Donald Trump, that Kamala Harris didn’t rise up much of the polls. And these students kind of exemplify that because they’re getting their information from places I think that don’t really have a concrete rendering of the vagaries of policy. And in this case, I think te you want to talk a little bit about with the young man, talk about the young man that was really interesting, you challenged

    Taya Graham:

    Him

    Stephen Janis:

    And just talk about that.

    Taya Graham:

    So I don’t think people realize how much the culture war that has been promulgated by the Republican party has been incredibly effective. So this young man we spoke to was actually from California. He’s an Asian American, and he essentially said, and in not so many words that he didn’t want his media to be woke. And what he cited was JRR Tolkiens, second thank you Rings of power and on Amazon Prime. And he cited that he did not want, I guess present deism put into his fantasy. And I said to him, quite pointedly, I said, so you didn’t like the Black Lady dwarf is what you’re saying? And he smiled and he looked down and he said, well, that and the L-G-B-T-Q ideology that I found in the art as well. And I did challenge him a little bit. I said, well, isn’t Art supposed to reflect the zeitgeist of the age? Isn’t that the point of any form of art, whether it’s a book being adapted that it’s supposed to reflect the culture of the time? And he said, no, I just want to escape when I watch whatever creative form that he’s interested in. So I was somewhat surprised by that. So essentially he’s saying, I’m rejecting woke ideology, and that is why I’m voting for Trump.

    Stephen Janis:

    The thing is, what you saw in some of the voters was the Democrats have a very sort of professional rollout talking points and somewhat, I think seemingly in this media ecosystem, an inauthentic approach as opposed to Trump who kind of permeates and gets through that morass of social media because he seems to them, and I’m saying to them to be a more authentic alternative. I mean, that’s the only thing I can figure because their grasp for the policy aspects of both the Democratic administration and what really is going to happen. I mean, this young woman was like, well, Trump improved abortion rights because he sent it to the states.

    Taya Graham:

    Exactly.

    Speaker 6:

    She

    Stephen Janis:

    Said that to us and maintain, and I kind of looking at each other, a

    Taya Graham:

    Little puzzled, little puzzled,

    Stephen Janis:

    And I mean you can talk a little bit more of that, but I think that just to emphasize that this is a social media tumble world they’re in and the Democrats are coming forward with a very professional campaign, but maybe that doesn’t work.

    Marc Steiner:

    Right.

    Taya Graham:

    The one thing that I can tell for certain from all the different people that we spoke to at the polls is that the Democrats did not do their job communicating to the public effectively. And for people can discuss for the next four years how Trump was so effective, whether it’s that he’s the perfect man for the social media ecosystem that we have, that he’s able to push through in a way that as Steven said, sort of granular policy analysis simply doesn’t

    Die. It simply dies on the vine. But these young people, I would say, and I don’t mean to say this, to be rude to the Trump voters in any way, we went to the Republican National Convention and also the people at the polls, when I spoke to delegates at the Republican National Convention, they could not cite specific policies. It was based on their feelings about Donald Trump as a leader. And that is exactly what that young woman said. She could not name a single policy from his previous administration that she liked, but she just felt that he felt stronger as a candidate. And so it’s an emotional connection and for whatever reason, Democrats have not been effective at making that sort of connection with the public.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really critical point. The emotional economy of vibes is playing a huge role in shaping voter attitudes and perceptions of the reality that they’re living in. I want to return to that point for sure in a minute, but I’m excited to welcome on our other guests for this segment, the great John Nichols, who is national affairs correspondent of the nation, has been writing on and analyzing Wisconsin and its place in the political terrain for many years. We’ve had him on Mark’s show. He is a brilliant, brilliant mind and we’re so grateful to have him on to help us unpack this. John, are you there with us?

    John Nichols:

    I think I am. I can see folks.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Beautiful. Thank you. Good to see you. Good to see you, man.

    John Nichols:

    It’s a pleasure,

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    John. How are you? Good to see you. Thank you. Good

    John Nichols:

    To see you my friend.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Thank you so much for joining us, man. We know you don’t have much time. We know you’re working your butt off right now, so while

    John Nichols:

    We amazing, we’re still trying to figure this one out. Okay.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Yeah. So while we’ve got you, I mean, I want to give our audience access to your rich perspective here. We need it right now, and there is a lot to be unpacked about the current results in Wisconsin that I want to ask you to try to of help our viewers and listeners understand what they’re seeing and where it came from, but to also offer us some larger historical perspective here. I mean, I was watching on M-S-N-B-C, they were showing the map from 2008 to 2024. It’s basically mirror images of each other in terms of, especially in the rural counties across Wisconsin that have now just deep red when they were blue not so long ago. And this of course is taking place in a longer political trajectory in a state that in many ways is the heart of modern progressivism. So I wanted to ask if you could, a, help us just unpack what we are seeing now in Wisconsin, what is happening in Wisconsin and what that tells us about the national scene right now and how the heck we got here. What can Wisconsin tell us about how we got here?

    John Nichols:

    Well, that’s a great way to frame the question frankly, because Wisconsin, of course, we begin with the fact that it’s the ultimate battleground state, more of a battleground state than any other in the country. Now, in the last seven presidential elections, the last seven presidential elections, five of them have been decided by under 35,000 votes, four of ’em by under 25,000 votes. So you can’t find another state in the country that has that pattern of deep divide. This is a state that has a democratic senator and a Republican senator. It’s a state that had a Republican governor, now it has a democratic governor. You know what I mean? It is kind of constant Out of this election. We just had a result that made our state legislature, our state senate, almost exactly tied. And so in that context, obviously small movements in one direction or another mean a lot, and you are basically right to focus on rural, and that’s a place where progressivism was in Wisconsin at its strongest.

    At one time, it was a combination of Milwaukee socialists and rural populist farmers. It was very effective coalition, and interestingly enough, it helped the Milwaukee Socialists faded and so did some of the progressive tradition, but still, you had a state that voted democratic in 19 88, 19 92, 19 96, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012, right, this hope had. And then Trump comes along and he cracks into that. He doesn’t win by much in 2016, and he didn’t win by much this time, 20, 30,000 votes is what you’re talking about. That still makes Wisconsin, and when all is said and done, Wisconsin will end up being closer than most of the battleground states. Here’s the fascinating thing about Wisconsin though Tammy Baldwin, US city, US Senator, who’s clearly to the left of Kamala Harris on a number of issues, she won. She pulled it off. And just as Trump won Wisconsin, it looks like we had roughly 30,000 votes.

    Baldwin won by roughly 30,000 votes. So there’s a space there, but I think you have to be careful to assume that there were Trump people voting for Baldwin. There was a drop off. There’s I think a portion of Trump voters who just vote for Trump and don’t even vote for the rest of the Republican ticket. That’s something to take into the mix. But there were some folks who actually did cast a Trump Baldwin vote. It seems bizarre to us in many ways because that doesn’t compute. Tammy Baldwin an out lesbian who supports Medicare, has supported Medicare for all, who has been very progressive, not always and not as good as I might want on some issues, but pretty solid record winning in a state where Trump’s winning. How does that happen? What’s going on there? Why do you have this? Well, the answer, and we saw a little bit in Michigan with Slotkin winning the Senate seat narrowly over there, the answer is that Tammy Baldwins did something that the National Democratic Ticket didn’t do, and that is she wedded her campaign to trade unionism to the working class, to the labor movement.

    And this morning, just not long before I joined you today, I was at an event where she formally declared victory. She didn’t do it at a hotel downtown, hotel like Canada, like Democrats always do or almost always do. She didn’t do it in a office, some office someplace, or even frankly at her alma mater or the University of Wisconsin campus. She did it at a union hall on the edge of town, and the place was packed with union members wearing their shirts, steam fitters, electricians, teamsters, all sorts of other folks. And when she walked in the room, there was this epic cheering. And that’s frankly what Democrats need to have. They need to have union members cheering them on. They need to have an excitement about their candidates. Just as, I guess as an example, the Christian Wright gets very excited when a Republican walks in the room.

    And one of the things that Baldwin did in Wisconsin last, I’ll say this because I want to hear more of your questions of course, but one of the things that Baldwin did in Wisconsin was a wholly different set of ads. You wouldn’t have recognized them as compared to the Democratic party in a lot of other places. Her ads, one set of her ads featured teamsters who were sitting one after another, sitting in a chair talking about when they lost their pensions and when they were in very dire straits, the plan closed, the pensions taken away, and each teamster after another talked about an aspect of the story. It’s a very short ad, but they’re saying, when we lost our pension, we thought we were going to lose everything. And a couple sitting there saying, we thought we’re going to lose our house. These are real working class people talking about a profound issue. And then toward the end of it, one of ’em says, and so we called Tammy Baldwin and she went to work for us. And then, I’m paraphrasing here, but the close of it was, if you’re in trouble, if you’re having a hard time as a worker, you need Tammy Baldwin on your side. I mean, that is a kind of classic outreach to working class multiracial, multi-ethnic voting class. And she had other ads with people working in shipyards, people working on farms, and so she ran a campaign that reached out to the working class and it paid off. She won. Other good Democrats didn’t. That’s something to pay attention to.

    Marc Steiner:

    I extrapolate that a bit more when I think about Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s always been, people look at it as a progressive state, but it’s always been a deeply divided state as well. Politically. George Wallace did well there, Joe McCarthy bloomed out there. And so I wonder what you just said about Tammy Baldwin. What does that say strategically to you about what progressive leaders in this country have to do to build a majority and to take the fight to the working class and bring people together? I mean, what is the Wisconsin lesson?

    John Nichols:

    Well, the Wisconsin lesson is a pretty simple one for about 150 years. Wisconsin hasn’t liked elites, hasn’t liked people in New York or Washington or LA or other places that tend to tell ’em what’s going on, and there’s a reason for that. Wisconsin was historically a farm state, and the farm products that they produced had to be shipped by train. The railroads charged extreme rates, and that was very damaging to people. And so they developed this sensibility that which we do not control is probably going to harm us. And it’s one of the reasons why historically Wisconsin was a more anti-war state. Wisconsin tend to think wars came from Washington, Wisconsin was a state that was historically very strong union state, very strong and a lot of different issues, and also very anti-corporate in a lot of ways and very anti-monopoly, et cetera, et cetera. Our politics has become so muddled in recent decades that I think most people don’t necessarily see that Democratic party as an anti-corporate, anti-monopoly party. So if you’re going to get those votes, you have to remind people of that, or there’s a real chance that they’re going to vote for somebody else who sounds like they’re attacking elites. That’s how you ended up with a Robert and Lafa, the great progressive winning and son Robert and Lafa Jr. Winning a Senate seat, which ultimately went to Joe McCarthy. Now, you and I don’t get very excited about Joe McCarthy. We don’t like where Joe McCarthy was coming from, but in his time, he was seen by somebody who was attacking a certain set of elites.

    And that’s sort of the thing to understand that even came in through Russ Feingold more recently as a US Senator from Wisconsin losing his seat to Ron Johnson. All of this kind of a muddled politics. You have to cut your way through it. And what Baldwin did was her way through it, she said, Hey, by the way, I am the candidate of unions and of working class people. I don’t just tell you that in a speech or something. I don’t put ’em on my ads. I’m going to actually use them talking to the people of this state. It didn’t mean that she deemphasized issues other issues, her strong support of abortion rights. She’s arguably the leading supporter of abortion rights in the Senate. Didn’t mean that she played down her stances on a host of issues, but she turned up volume on these working class issues and it paid off.

    I think you saw a little bit in Michigan with Slotkin in her Senate race as well, but you didn’t see it in the presidential race. And I think that’s a subtlety of this thing. Kamala Harris had extremely strong union support and unions went to the mat for really worked hard all over the country, even when the Teamsters didn’t endorse her, Teamsters Regional and local councils jumped in to backer and gave her a tremendous amount of support. And so they did a lot of internal work. In fact, fascinatingly enough, the exit polling shows that one of the few demographics that didn’t decline for the Democrats in this cycle was union members. So the unions did great work with their members. The problem is that the Harris campaign, which did many things right? I’m not here to just purely complain about the Harris campaign, but they did not put that broader emphasis on working class issues at central to their campaign.

    And so as a result in the non-union working class, they experienced a lot of loss. And again, that multiracial multi-ethnic challenge that they faced. And I guess here’s the simple thing I would offer, yes, for Wisconsin lesson itself, so maybe to some extent upper Midwest, and that is this, people need to clearly know where you’re at and you need to remind ’em. You can’t assume people remember it from past elections or things like that. Our friends here, were just talking about the social media landscape and all these other ways that we get our information. Now, it’s bifurcated. It’s not the same daily newspaper or local radio station. It’s all sorts of sources. And in that Caity, you lose sight sometimes of core messages. What struck me is that Kamala Harris, who again, I thought did many things right, but why didn’t she, in every single speech say, we are going to raise the minimum wage to a living wage? Why wasn’t that part of every speech? Why wasn’t it part of every speech to say that Donald Trump renegotiated NAFTA and made it worse, actually undermined the auto parts industry in all sorts of industries and call it Trump’s nafta. Why not say that? Why appear everywhere with Liz Cheney, but almost never with Bernie Sanders and only rarely with Sean Fain?

    I mean the equation, it’s so easy to this out, and it always frustrates me that the Democratic Party has such a struggle to get to it at the national level. Again, some people like Baldwin and soccer and figuring it out, but why not? When you’re in that situation, why not take the step, deliver the message, appear with the people that are going to be useful to you politically? This isn’t just moral politics. I think being pro-union is a morally good stance. This is also practical politics, and the fascinating thing about it is that I looked at the data, all those places that Kamala Harris went with Liz Cheney, all that outreach to conservatives, the percentage of conservatives voting for Kamala Harris in 2024 was down from the percentage that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. They didn’t get anybody over. Nothing happened there in the suburban areas that they went to where they actually had these sit downs with Liz Cheney. They didn’t move numbers. Things didn’t get better for them there. And so it was wasted energy that could have been spent going to not just physically, but messaging wise to working class people of all races and in all communities.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Yeah, man, that’s making my blood boil, man. That’s a powerful analysis though. No, really helpful and vital information. And I do have a follow-up question if we got time. We only got Brother John Nichols for a few more minutes. I did want to give my colleague Steven, Janice te Graham, the chance, if you guys are still with us since you guys have been reporting there in Milwaukee. If you guys had a question for John based on what you’ve been seeing there on the ground, I did want to prioritize that, but no pressure if you don’t.

    Taya Graham:

    Well, first off, I just want to say I’m so glad that he mentioned Senator Tammy Baldwin. We were actually at a Harris Waltz rally. What was the name of that event center? Was that, was that the State Fairgrounds

    Stephen Janis:

    Expo? State Expo?

    Taya Graham:

    It was at the state Expo,

    Stephen Janis:

    Yep.

    Taya Graham:

    And we were there and there was so much excitement when she came onto the stage. I mean, people love her here, and I feel like I wish I could be a fly on the wall as the Democratic Party is doing the autopsy right now. Because I think there’s a lesson, and perhaps you can confirm this for me, that they did not learn either from watching Senator Baldwin or from seeing how much Senator Sanders was actually able to generate enthusiasm, which is when the Democrats, as they normally do when they start doing a national campaign, they start moving towards the middle thinking that they’re going to bring people over instead of perhaps taking a different alternative of leaning into being authentic and just leaning left, just going completely into progressive policies, completely embracing unions and instead of worrying about being characterized as leftists or Marxists or what have you, just so you know what, we’re going to be progressive, we’re going to stop trying to play the middle because I think they didn’t learn anything from Senator Sanders campaign or Senator.

    John Nichols:

    Yeah, I think it’s a brilliant question and you’re spot on. Bernie Sanders came to Madison about eight days before the election, Monday the week out, and they had about a couple hours basically to organize the event. It was in one of the main theaters on State Street in downtown Madison, big, big cavernous theater. It was packed. I walked over to where the event was, there was a line out the door around the block because Bernie Sanders was coming. He had a OC with them as well. They got up there, delivered a peer progressive message, and people were on their feet excited, engaged, and they talked a lot about these issues that we’re talking about. But there’s a deeper thing in your question that I think is really vital and that is leaning into a progressive stance. I think Democrats often think that makes ’em look weak or something

    That somehow, oh, you’re off in this place, or whatever. It’s the exact opposite. It’s Sanders has proven, when you come out as a genuine progressive and you’re proud of it and you speak about it strongly, people come to you, and I think that’s even people who aren’t ideologically necessarily with you, but they’re like, wow, that’s somebody who really means it. And I can give you an example on an issue that we haven’t talked about, but I think it’s vital here, or at least relevant, and that’s Gaza Joe Biden’s stance on Gaza is that he would like what’s happening there to stop. He officially says, oh, we want the killing to stop. We want the horrors to end. He says that as the president of the United States of America, one of the most powerful countries in the world and a very close ally of Israel, and does that project strength, no, I think it projects weakness.

    I think it says on this fundamental issue that tens of millions of Americans care about, you’re not willing to step up, you’re, you’re not going to use the power of your office to take a stand. And I think the same thing happened to Harris on that, such a muddled position on Gaza. So little messaging that I think could have reached a ton of people. And then you look around the country, you say, well, it’s a drop off in votes, obviously, among many Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, but also on campuses, right? Where students were so passionately concerned about these issues. And I guess what I would tell you is that on a host of issues, having a strong position makes people who don’t even necessarily agree with you say, wow, that person believes in things. I know that they get to Congress, they get to position power, they’re going to fight for me.

    And that is an intangible. In fact, you two were talking about just a second ago where you were talking about these kind of personality things and kind of all the media influences and things like that. Well, in that cacophony, if you’re a strong voice, it has meaning, right? It gets heard. And again, I think that takes us back to what we’re talking about with Baldwin a little bit on these working class, on these union issues. She jumped right in. She stood there strongly and said, this is who I am. She’s running against a very wealthy guy from California, as you know, from watching the state so well, it was perfect. It’s a perfect juxtaposition. And so what I would say for the Democratic Party as regards, our very good question there that led us into this whole discussion is the Democratic Party, I think needs to have a radical rethink, a deep, deep rethink about this because this campaign should not have ended this way at the presidential level, and frankly, even at the congressional level, it just shouldn’t have ended.

    Where it did something about that doesn’t suggest strength on Trump’s part. In my view, it suggests weakness on the Democratic party’s part. If that is the case, then the most important thing I would say about this rethink is please don’t say you want to rebuild the Democratic Party. Because the fact of the matter is, we have had this cycle on and off for decades now where the party wins and you say, oh, it’s perfect, and then it loses, and you say, well, we’ve got to rebuild stuff. But you keep going back to some of the models of the past. Politics has evolved. The Republican party is a very different party than the one they ran against in the past. And the messaging, the outreach to the Republican party now in many cases, aimed at working class voters at very frustrated, angry folks who have in many cases reasons to be angry at the system, if that’s what you’re up against, don’t rebuild, build something new,

    Speaker 6:

    Build

    John Nichols:

    A political party that is multiracial, multi-ethnic that respects people where they’re coming from, but also respects the fact that they’re struggling economically that in this capitalist system, it just doesn’t work very well for them. And speak to that in a way that is of the moment and looking to the future, talk about these issues we’re talking about. But finally, and perhaps most importantly, talk about the issues that are never discussed. Do you want to know what builds anxiety in America? There’s a lot of stuff. Inflation builds anxiety, right? No question of that. The inability to buy a house, all sorts of economic issues for women, the threat to their bodily autonomy, right? They assault on abortion rights for L-G-B-T-Q, people who were literally targeted in advertising throughout this campaign all over this country. All of that builds anxiety. You know what else builds anxiety, ai, artificial intelligence, the rise of machine learning. People’s lives are being radically transformed on a daily basis. How we communicate, how we work, how we study. I mean, you talk to a university professor, they’ll tell you everything is different in the classroom because everybody’s using chat, GBT and all this stuff like that.

    That was never brought up in this campaign, a democratic party that brought up how technology is changing our lives. It is a very future oriented party, but also one that understands the anxiety of working class people in this country. So again, a new democratic, if we’ve got to be stuck with a two party system, let’s have a new democratic party that actually takes in all the stuff that you are talking about that you are, that all these people are talking about and gets us to a point where ideally, ideally the counter to a cruel and angry, and I think in many cases, awful Republican message, right? One that is very dark and it has nothing to do with the history of the Republican party or anything like that, but then it’s one that’s really aimed at dividing people, aimed at, aimed at really building out that anxiety. The counter to that is a party that’s capable of looking at the future, explaining it, and offering a better route forward.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Very well put, John. Yeah, I mean, I wish I could keep this segment with everyone here going for another half hour, but I know brother John Nichols has a deadline to meet.

    John Nichols:

    I’m actually writing about some of the things we’re talking about.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Well, let me help out. That’s good. We can’t wait to read it. Everyone who’s watching this needs to go and read it. Steven and Te, I’m going to ask you guys if you can hang on for just a little bit, and brother John, I will say thank you and goodbye here. If you’re able to hold on for 30 seconds, cool. If not, we thank you so much. But I just wanted to add there because I’m worried that folks are taking, once again, the wrong sort of lessons from the political map here, especially as it pertains to the rural and urban divide in places like Wisconsin.

    John Nichols:

    Let me give you 30 seconds on that.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Please, please. What are the anxieties in rural Wisconsin? We were reporting there on the CAFOs, on climate affecting their crops. I guess for folks who are just thinking that people in rural America, they’re all driven by racism and uneducation and whatnot, what are the anxieties that folks there’re feeling to?

    John Nichols:

    Well, I come from a town I was born in, had 970 people when I was born, and so I grew up in the most rural places, and that was actually one of the biggest communities members of my family had ever lived in. They route back to places with 300 people and 200 and farms. And so that’s where I come from. And one of the things that I always start with is telling people that rural America is multiracial, multiethnic, and far more diverse than I think our national media even begins to understand. If you look at the main streets in rural towns, they’re being revitalized particularly by Latino immigrants, but also by Asian American immigrants. I mean, there are real amazing things happening. There are now small towns in Wisconsin that are majority immigrant families, right? Because people have come, they have revitalized those towns, they’ve rebuilt those towns.

    It’s an amazing thing. Now, it doesn’t mean that rural areas aren’t predominantly white in many states, but I always remind people that roughly a quarter of black Americans live in rural counties, mostly in the south, but a substantial population that the boom areas for obviously the Latino population, but also for Asian American population is rural areas because they’re moving there, they’re working there, they’re creating things. And so if we understand it as that, first off, we have to recognize rural America isn’t what our media tells us it is. It’s much more, it has a lot of diversity, a lot of distinction within it. The other thing that I always emphasize to people is this, that those blue and red maps are useless. It’s they’re a nightmare because they don’t tell you the actual percentages in those counties. Many of those counties that you look at that are red on the map are 45% blue, right?

    They’ve got fights within a real battles. And what in Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin would not have been reelected if it wasn’t for rural Democrats. She got a great vote out of Madison, a very liberal town, great vote out of Milwaukee, a multiracial, multi-ethnic town. I mean, she got great votes in these places, but she also held her own in the rural areas. She was endorsed for reelection by the Farm Bureau. I mean, that’s wild. But it was there because she’s been good on farm issues. What that means, what that translates to is that for the Democratic Party, which has been such a mess on so many issues for so long, is that they need to get better on rural. They need to talk to these folks. There are rural Democrats out there doing the work. They’re opening their headquarters, they’re knocking on doors. I can take you to the places and show you people that are putting so much effort and energy into this, but they do need messaging from the national level. And one of the things I would tell you is that the Democratic party will do dramatically better in rural areas if democratic nominees for president simply include three lines in their speeches. Not another rural post office will close if we are elected, not another rural school will close if we are elected and not another rural hospital will close if we are elected.

    Speaker 6:

    You

    John Nichols:

    Go out and say just those three lines in a speech and you stick to it, you watch some of those numbers shift. The reason Trump and Republicans do well in rural areas is often because people don’t think there’s a big difference between the two parties, and then they default to the anger of the division, right? But if you gave ’em a real alternative, I think we open up a whole new avenue for politics that does not deny the reality of ugly politics and people who do vote on the basis of race and typically toward folks or something that happens. I know that’s there not denying that, but what I’m saying is one of the counters to that is an outreach that actually says to rural people, we see you. We hear you. We want to respond to your actual problems, not to try and make you hate somebody else or not to try and make you see somebody else as a problem. There’s space there. There’s so much space there. And even though we’re staying longer than usual, I love talking about these rural politics issues because it’s frankly one of the spaces where both parties have so much to learn because both parties tend to treat rural folks as an afterthought that they just throw slogans, good slogans are bad at rather than actually going out and talking to the people. So I really thank you for giving me a chance to say that.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Thank you so much. John Nichols, the great John Nichols national Affairs correspondent at the Nation. We can’t wait to read your piece. We depend on your work. So please, yeah, keep doing it, brother, and let’s have you back on very soon.

    John Nichols:

    I appreciate it. And hey, I really appreciate what you folks do, and I love the reporting that you folks have been doing in Wisconsin. Some people come here and they just come for a minute and they pop in on the tarmac of the airport. You’ve got some reporters that have embedded themselves, and that’s a really big, big deal. It makes the reporting so much better. So thank you for treating Wisconsin and America seriously.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Great to see you, John.

    John Nichols:

    Thank you.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Well, speaking of those incredible reporters, Steven, Janice and Te Graham, do we still got you guys over there in Milwaukee? We may have lost Steven and Te here can hear us. No, they’re still here. You never hear Steven. Of course they’re there. They’re always there. Steven and TE are always there. That’s what you get with these incredible folks on the police accountability report and elsewhere. I wanted to a bring you back in, ask if you guys had any kind of additional thoughts after what John just said about Wisconsin, but also we are going to be wrapping up this live stream by bringing on our final guest the great Bill Gallego. So the Mexico Solidarity Project Bill’s been on Mark’s show recently. We’ve been working with him on some really great historical segments. Bill is also has years of experience in racial justice, Latino justice organizing, immigrant justice organizing, climate justice organizing.

    And so one of the things we wanted to talk to Bill about is helping to unpack the sort of narratives that are emerging about changing voter trends, specifically in Latino populations, Latino men, like being one of the current groups that are being talked about the most is having swung more for Trump. But this is also an area of reporting that you guys have been really committed to and have done great work in recent months where Taya has been out there going and talking to black and brown Republicans about how they are thinking about the election and voting for Trump. So I wanted to include that as a way to sort of bring Bill in here and continue the conversation that we’re having. So I’m going to toss it to you guys here. And yeah, we’ll have Bill Gallegos on the other side to hop in as well.

    Taya Graham:

    Well, I would be happy to speak on the black conservatives that I spoke with. I spoke to Tia Best, who is National Engagement Director for Moms of Liberty. I spoke to, I think dozens, literally dozens of black Republicans at the Republican National Convention the last time we were here in Wisconsin. That was so kind to hear Mr. Nichols give our work such a compliment. That was a huge boost. But back to the black conservatives, something I thought was interesting is that they said black people are naturally socially conservative. So this shift to the Republican party should be expected. But I’d like to say that the loss of black male voters was not that huge. I think depending on what states you’re looking at, 74% up to 80% of black men voted for Harris in any other ethnic group that would be considered a landslide. There was a slight peel off of black male voters and male Latino voters towards Trump. But in general, black voters held for Harris and held for the Democratic Party, whereas the Democratic Party was hemorrhaging votes from youth and actually so many different minority coalitions that in theory should be under the tent of the Democrats. But the one talking point I kept hearing from black conservatives is that we’re socially conservative. Black folks are church folks. It’s natural that the Democratic party is moving away from us. We didn’t move away from them, and that is what I’ve received from black conservatives.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    So I want to bring in Brother Bill Gallegos here as well, because this is an issue that we’ve been talking about with him and that he’s been talking about and trying to get folks to pay attention to in the many months leading up to this election. Right. So Bill, do we have Bill Gallego? So the Mexico Solidarity Project with

    Bill Gallegos:

    Us, I am here and I’m glad to be here, and I’m really glad to be here with the folks in Wisconsin from John with you all, and I really appreciate it. I got to say my take is probably somewhat different than what we’ve been hearing so far. I think race was at the center of this campaign, and the only really significant increase in the electoral voting patterns was from white folks, and they overwhelmingly went for Trump, and his campaign didn’t start a year ago. This has been his consistent message since he started, but especially since he lost the election in 2020. There’s been a consistent message that centered race using immigrants as the focal point for it. But I think it was clearly aimed at dealing with this feeling that white privilege is at risk, the particular role of white people in controlling society. And we know it’s the 1%, but I think for a lot of white folks, this idea, Trump pretty much said, I will protect white suburban women from these immigrants coming into your neighborhoods and ruining not only the physical threat destroying your property values.

    So I think I am very concerned that this will get lost in the postmortem that we’re doing on the elections. I know I just saw something from Bernie where he said, the problem is is that we focused on identity politics instead of class politics as if you focus on the attack on black and brown voting rights. That’s not a class issue. That’s a huge class issue. And the working class is not just white folks. It is a multiracial working class majority women, and some of the most dynamic sectors are those in the black, brown, Filipino communities. So I really feel like we should be very critical of how the Democrats ran this campaign. I’m particularly critical of for years and years and years and years, they have been told, do not take Latinos for granted. Forget the Cubans. I mean, they’re, I don’t care what you do.

    They’re going to go with the Republicans, and we know the historical roots of that. But for the Central American community, the Dominican community, the Puerto Rican community and the Chicano community, that is not the case and has been solidly democratic even in the last elections at 20 and 20, 22, 70 to 75% of Latinos voting that most political parties in the world would kill for those numbers, they shifted this time, and we should look at that. But I think we really, really need to understand just given the history of this country as a racial capitalism, how deeply embedded that is not just in the politics, but in the psyche, the political psyche of this country. And if we run from it, I think it was what somebody said is that Kamala tried to run and hide on immigration. That was the exact wrong thing to do. All that did was give a much more open space to the racist messaging that was consistent from the Republican party and has been consistent for years starting with the Tea Party. When the Tea Party came out, it wasn’t just against Obamacare. That was that one of the first organized organizations outside of one of those anti-immigration rights groups that start talking about anchor babies

    And making that a part of their campaign and putting it into the Republican program. So I think we have to really take on this issue, not identity politics versus class politics. We had to see the connection here. And for example, when John is talking about the rural areas, farmers, well, nobody’s caught more hell than black and brown farmers. They’re barely holding onto the land that they’ve got all those years when the Department of Agriculture was giving loans to white farmers so they could hold onto their land and not giving it to black farmers, not giving it to Chicano farmers. And then when the Biden administration tried to set in some reparation money, that’s effectively what it was for black farmers. The Republicans killed it. So yeah, I want to talk about rural areas. I mean, my family were farmers in New Mexico and Colorado and the folks are trying to hold on desperately trying to hold onto that land there as well as black farmers in the South.

    So yes, we have to help our white farming brothers and sisters understand why they have to be the hardest fighters for black folks to get the money that they’re entitled to continue their farming and make it generational for Chicano farmers to hold onto their land that Monsantos trying to grab up there in Northern New Mexico. So I come at it a little bit differently I think, than we’ve been hearing, and I think we have to be careful about this thing that advancing class dynamics somehow doesn’t include issues like voting rights and gerrymandering and women’s reproductive rights. Those are class issues. Those aren’t elite issues. Those are class issues. The women that are going to be dying from these back alley abortions, not going to be rich white women.

    Marc Steiner:

    That’s right.

    Bill Gallegos:

    It’s going to be poor working class white women, and it’s going to be mostly women of color. So I think as we’re all sorting this out, and it’s too early to make any hard and fast conclusions, but we do know there are some things that we do know that the Republican party has become a party of apartheid of white minority rule. They pretty much say it, and Christian nationalism, and that’s rooted in mainly the white evangelical, evangelical churches. So I’m not discounting the impact of Latino evangelical churches. I think they did have an impact in this election, but I think we need to really get ahold of that. The second thing is I think we really need to understand that we’re not talking about a qualitative shift in political conditions now, I mean a quantitative shift, there’s a qualitative shift in political conditions when they’re talking about replacing 40 or 50,000 federal workers in all federal departments.

    That’s huge. That is a vastly different attitude than we’re talking about. If there was a democratic administration and we have to be ready talking about a labor movement and a working class movement ready to defend those workers, because we can’t just roll over and say, well, Trump’s going to bring in all these folks that project 2025 talked about. So we have to be ready to defend those workers in the interior department, the Food and Drug Administration, the EPA. We had to be ready to do that. And we know that the right wing has been wanting to target the labor movement. They feel the most vulnerable sector is the public sector. So when they talk about eliminating the Department of Education, that’s only a piece of the puzzle. What they really want to do is just destroy the power of teachers unions. They saw the strikes in Arkansas and Oklahoma and California and every other damn place, and they want to crush that.

    And they make it very clear. It’s very clear that’s a big part of their agenda. So when we talk about class issues, I think that’s a key part of it. But we also need to understand that we are facing now a qualitatively different set of conditions when Trump talks about an ethnic cleansing campaign. Yet that’s different than even the deporter in Chief Obama or some of the shit that Biden has done. This is something qualitatively different, a massive ethnic cleansing campaign that even if we take the lower estimate of 15 million undocumented immigrants and we make a low estimate of maybe two or three of their family members will be impacted, that’s 40 million people directly impacted. That will have an impact on small business infrastructure and these poor black and brown communities on unions where the most dynamic sector of the union movement has been among immigrants and Latino women especially.

    It will have an impact on social organizations. It will have an impact. I mean, the impact would just be enormous. And Trump understands this, which is why he is saying it will be a military campaign. This is not just sending in the border patrol with a few trucks and vans. They’re talking about it. The only way you could do it, and we have to understand that the connection internationally is where they’re talking about setting up a series of concentration camps along the border because the overwhelming majority of these people will be Mexicano. What kind of pressure are they going to put on this new left wing government in Mexico on the shine bomb administration to take these millions and millions of working people. So we had to be ready to stand with our brothers and sisters in Mexico who will want to support their government in standing up to the United States.

    And it’s not just a political question because the United States has enormous political leverage over Mexico’s economy, enormous. When they make threats about we’re just going to wreck your economy, we have to take that seriously. But this is going to now become this question of immigration and this ethnic cleansing. It’s already an international question. Are they really going to ship a hundred thousand people back to Haiti? Are we going to sit and watch and let that happen? Where’s the labor movement? Yes, Sean Fein, I agree with you in 2028, we should all go out on strike. But now, right now, the labor movement needs to come out and stand for its immigrant, right? Brothers and sister workers. We have to say that not a single ice agent will ever get into our schools. We have to create sanctuary cities everywhere that we can. So I think we need to just in terms of the media, I’m worried about you all. I mean, I know they want to go after public television and public radio, that’s for sure. I think that’s scaries me. But they hate the Pacific Radio Network. You can’t be sure about that. They hate the Real News Network. Y’all are vulnerable unless we build a strong and broad resistance movement. The few voices that we had, I mean I know they got my address, max, I’m guessing they got yours.

    They know where to find us. We haven’t been hiding, and this is going to become very vulnerable. I’m worried. I know I work a lot in the climate justice movement. Most of these grassroots organizations are funded by foundations. These foundations are going to be under enormous pressure. There’s going to be congressional hearings. Are you giving your money to be under pressure to just start funding services and not organizing? So there’s so many that now including Greg Palaces, talk about the complete elimination of the Voting Rights Act, all of the other things that, the civil rights protections that we’ve had, the restoration of Jim Crow, this is real. This is real. It’s in Project 2025, but it’s also been very consistent in the messaging of the MAGA rights since they’ve taken over the Republican party and they got to the Latinos. I heard Maria Noosa talking about Spanish language, social media.

    The Republicans had 10 messages to every one that the Democrats put out on Spanish language, social media, and those are young Latino men who were already some ready. I ain’t going to vote for a woman, a black woman. Are you kidding me? To deal with in our community? So I think we just as we’re kind of brushing the smoke away and trying to pick through the ashes to see what happened, how did this disaster come about? We understanding we need to understand. This didn’t just happen since Biden dropped out and Harris came in. There’s real strong roots to this campaign.

    A lot of factors, a lot of white workers are concerned anybody about the economy. It’s black and brown women who got the worst of it, or ever before all this stuff was going on and did not run to the Republican party, did not run to the Republican party because there’s a level of political sophistication and understanding. I don’t think anybody has any illusions that the are going to bring out a totally liberatory society, but understanding that at least there’s some leverage there. And now I have to believe Miley when he says Trump’s a fascist and he believes it earlier. That’s talking about we really have to, I agree with that, but stand now that the Palestinian movement that we’ve had the last four years is going to be considerably more risk under a Trump administration.

    Marc Steiner:

    We all will.

    Bill Gallegos:

    They will try to drown it in blood. And they’ve already said that their immigration policy includes deporting anyone who’s been part of the pro-Palestinian movement, who’s an international student. So this is the reality that we face now. It shouldn’t panic us. What it should say is we have to build a broad based resistance movement, which is going to include some really folks that we ordinarily ain’t going to work with, but we have to build a broad based resistance movement both at the local level. I totally agree with that. We have to root it locally, but it has to be broad. And I’m not even getting into the whole climate thing here where Trump’s pretty much about ready to toast the planet and he says it. And the first communities that are going to feel the impact of his policies are poor, black and brown communities that are already choking like no other community on the toxicity and pollution that comes out of us capitalism. There’s a lot of areas you can say just a little

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    More about that Bill have, sorry. I want to underscore the fact that you have deep roots in climate justice movement. You know what you’re talking about on climate for everyone watching this is not just like, oh, the climate’s going to get worse. I want you to listen to Bill in terms of what the implications are for our shared planet right now.

    Bill Gallegos:

    Well, I’ll just start by saying this, that under the Biden administration, the environmental justice community one policies that we have never had with anyone, not even Obama. So for example, justice 40, which is a federal policy that a minimum of 40% of all federal environmental spending will go to frontline communities. Frontline communities are those that get the worst 40%. This is a larger allocation of federal resources than the war on poverty. It’s a hundred and some billion dollars, 190 some billion dollars that could potentially get to frontline communities. It’s been slow rolling out because the federal bureaucracy is very complicated. There’s every federal department gets a certain amount of money and they all have their own rules and regulations, but there are organizations that are trying to help frontline communities access these funds for cleanup, clean energy development, job development, all of those things, mitigation.

    So certain percentage of that is for affordable housing. So this was a huge victory that we’ve never had. It’s going to be gone. They’re saying that anything that has to do with equity will be gone. So those resources probably won’t survive a Trump administration. The Biden administration also adopt some very positive policies related to certain carcinogen, toxics and other forms of pollution that affect respiratory problems. Not everything we wanted. And they did open up a lot of drilling, and I’m not going to paint a picture that this was, we’re not talking about Iron Daddy Roy making policy for the Biden administration, but there was a lot that we won. I don’t want to just say it was because of the goodness of Biden’s heart, but because this movement has been organizing for years and we had support from a lot of the big green groups, the Sierra Club, the NRDC, earth Justice supported the Climate Justice movement in making these demands.

    So this was pretty significant victory for our movement that is now at risk. And I don’t see how we hold onto the things that we’ve won. And Trump is pretty much saying it. He’s going to put polluters in charge of the EPA, if not close it down the Department of the Interior. We’re not going to have Deb Halland in there. We’re going to have somebody who wants to just open all public land to corporate development. So we’ve got our fight cut out for us as a climate justice movement. What I think we need is we need unity within that movement because it’s been fragmented and we need unity with a broad sector of our sisters and brothers in these national green groups as well as with labor. We’ve always gotten played labor versus the environment, but now’s the time when we’ve got to come together.

    And we’ve always said that it’s not one or the other that clean jobs should be union jobs. We don’t want it to be a sweatshop and that there’s already this one of the fastest areas of job growth in the energy sector. So we need to make certain that that happens so that as we phase out of fossil fuel and that whole dependency on that fossil fuel economy, there’s a real just transition. But all of these things are now going to become qualitatively more difficult because of the fact that the Republicans probably got Congress, the Senate, and the White House and a Supreme Court that’s going to give many damn thing that they want. So we have a challenge, but hey, in the lifetime of some of us, I’ve seen Jim Crow go down. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen women win reproductive justice. I’ve seen our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers win the right to the marriage.

    I’ve seen foreign workers with the right to a union. So I’m always optimistic. But I have to say that I wouldn’t compare this to the Nixon administration. This is something qualitatively different here. We didn’t have Nixon administration, the John Birch Society was considered fringe. Now they run the party. Those kinds of racist and reactionary forces run and control one of the big ruling class parties of this country. And I saw the list that Standing for Democracy had. There’s something like 30 billionaires that had been funding this project, funding this kind of MAGA project 2025 thing. So there’s huge sections of the ruling class that are behind this.

    Speaker 6:

    So

    Bill Gallegos:

    I’m sorry a little bit from our randt here, but I guess what I really want to make certain is we don’t lose sight of the importance of the fight against racism and misogyny in this and not pitted against class politics. Those are class politics and they’re so central to any kind of change that we want to make, whether it’s in the environment or public health or education or just in the area of democracy of protecting and expanding voting rights. It’s always at the center because that’s the country we have the history starting with the dispossession of genocide of native peoples, the enslavement of Africans, the theft of half of Mexico’s territories. That’s the history that has shaped the country we have now and really contributed a lot to the electoral results we have now. And if we run from it, we lose. If we take it on, we have a chance to win.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Ain’t got to apologize for that ramp, brother, because I feel like that is absolutely the truth that folks need to hear right now, the sobering truth, but a truth that is not without hope. And Mark, I want to kind of toss it to you in a second to sort of offer your closing thoughts in that realm as someone who like Bill has seen American history change in significant ways that my generation only learned about in books, but you’ve seen it happen and we have also seen major change in our lives. I remember when gay marriage became legal, I mean as one just minor, not minor, but one example. It’s not minor,

    Marc Steiner:

    Right? Right.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Yeah. So I do want to give you the closing kind of word in a second about where we go from here and your closing messages for our audience. But I did just kind want to pick up on something that Bill said about the importance of race and understanding the dynamics here and how it shapes our vision of the world that we think that we’re living in, right? Because if you do the thought experiment here where you have aliens from Mars sort of airdrop in and look at what they’re seeing, what they’re going to see in this election is a monster’s ball of billionaire oligarchs surrounding another billionaire oligarchy serving politician from Musk like the richest man in the world, literally campaigning with Trump, taking over X, using it as a propaganda platform to the billionaires that own the Washington Post and the LA Times, putting their thumbs on the scale and not letting their papers like endorse a candidate to the crypto bros and the financial Wall Street interests that array to defeat senators like Sherrod Brown that are excited to get Lena Kahn out of the government by all objective accounts.

    This is a billionaire’s takeover of what remains of our fledgling democracy. But so many people don’t see it that way because conditions that we’ve been discussing for the past two hours have allowed and enabled people to instead identify people who look like me, people who look like Bill as the enemy, people who don’t perform gender the same way that you do or identify the same way that you do as somehow the enemy, right? I mean, they have managed to convince working people that their fellow workers to their left and their right because of their race, because of their immigration status, because of how they identify, are somehow more responsible for our woes than the fucking billionaires up there who are destroying our planet, destroying our democracy, and are going to do a whole lot more damage in the coming four years. That is an incredible feat that the oligarchy has pulled off and they have done it through ages throughout history. This is the eternal struggle of working people to realize who their true oppressors really are and to be able to cut through the noise and haze that makes us feel as if somehow our fellow workers who are different from us are responsible for our woes. And I say that

    Bill Gallegos:

    I want

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    To that not just as a reporter, not just as a historian, but I say that as a person who is deeply worried right now that people in my own family are going to be deported. I want you people watching this to understand I’m not just a fucking face on a screen, I’m a human being just like you are, just like your neighbors are. And we are terrified for very justifiable reasons and we need to not succumb to that terror. We need to feel it but not become it. But I need people out there to understand that the terror is real and that it is going to change the terrain of struggle for all of us, and that we are going to need you to stand with us and we are going to need to stand together to face whatever we are facing. Bill, I’m sorry to cut you off. Please hop in there

    Bill Gallegos:

    And Mark. No, absolutely. You’re right. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t carry around proof of citizenship with me and I’m widow, but they hear Gallegos, it’s dirty Mexican and I live in a community in southeast Los Angeles. It’s a black and brown working class community. Almost every house on this block is going to be at risk. Yeah, this is for real. And it brings me to one part of my rant that I didn’t get to drop in here, which is how the left and progressive woman in this country has consistently overlooked the Chicano Latino community as an important social force for change. There continues to be mostly black and brown framework, and that’s only because black folks, the black liberation struggle has insisted on being taken seriously. But it is another one of those things where I’ve been looking at a lot of these webinars that happen to talk about the elections and so on.

    Almost never do I see a Latino or Latina voice here in those conversations. There’s a big one that’s happening later this afternoon. There’s a huge network, national network that’s developing as a resistance network, which I think is really important. But when I looked at the five or six speakers that they have, they’re not a single one comes out of the Chicano or Latino, not the Puerto Rican community, not the Dominican community, not the Mexican American community. I mean, I know there’s only 37 billion of us, but I could help them find some, but, but I think this is a strategic problem. Do we want to win or not? Are we serious about building the kind of multiracial movement that really has a chance to impact our lives in the immediate and also for the transformative agenda that we have? So this is kind of a consistent issue that I raise.

    I’m on the editorial board of the Nation magazine. I raise it to them all the damn time. I raise it in other arenas where, hey, we’re here if, and the unfortunate thing is that the left within those movements, both within the Puerto Rican liberation struggle and the Chicana liberation struggle is very small. It’s weak. It’s, I think, stupidly fragmented when it doesn’t need to be. But that’s a problem because that leaves the political field opened to more mainstream forces, more less progressive forces. I mean, after all that happened with what the MAGA Wright and Trump said about the Puerto Ricans, they’re going to reelect this Puerto Rican pro-Trump governor. What’s going on there? Well, I don’t blame the Puerto Rican people. I’m blaming us. Where are we? Where’s the attention that we’re giving to that movement? And especially the democratic. They’ve got all these resources, but I’m also talking about the labor movement and the women’s movement. All these different movements need to direct their attention to an area where they have not had it. And that means not just with words, but with resources, with organizing. And don’t just come out every four years and ask for our vote.

    The Democratic party now is reaping what it has, sowed it, reaped it in this last election. I mean, I was shocked by even if I think the results are a little, their initial, clearly there was too many Chicanos and Puerto Ricans and other Latinos that were voting for Trump and the right against their own interests, maybe under some illusion that well, we’ll finally get admitted into the club like the Italian immigrants did and the Polish immigrants did. Since the 1840s, we haven’t been admitted into the club. I don’t think it’s going to happen. Now, Puerto Rico’s been a colony for how many years. They haven’t been admitted into that particular immigrant club. I don’t think it’s going to happen now, but I think there’s people who are desperate to believe that and that’s affected them. So yeah, we got a lot of work cut out for us. But what I’m really, really want to emphasize is for our folks on the left in progressive movements, don’t ignore us, you guys, real news. You’re one of the few programs that ran something on the Chicano Moratorium. We hear a lot about Kent State and we should about the murder that happened when Nixon invaded Laos and Cambodia and the people that were shot there, but the Chicano moratorium against the Vietnam War, three people were shot there. Why isn’t that an annual

    Commemoration? And not just in our community, but in the broader progressive, anti-war and peace community, why is that not taken seriously as an important historical event that has meaning for us? I guess I feel like I can raise this because I feel like I’m among friends in comrades when I’m raising this to comrades on progressive moments. And on the left, I feel like I can be honest and frank with you because you say that you’re for complete equity and equality and self determination and liberation and all of those things. So I’m going to take you at your word and say, stop doing what you’re doing and start broadening your attention and enrich the movement that we’re trying to build.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I think that is a powerful point to end on from our amazing guest, bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project. He mentioned an episode of Mark’s show, the Mark Steiner show, where we had Brother Bill and other guests on to talk about the history of the Chicano moratorium. You should go listen to that episode. We released it back in August. So if you want to keep the conversation going after this live stream, go listen to that. But for now, we are a little over time. I have had such a great time. It’s been very helpful for me to unpack the events of this week over the past two hours on this live stream. We are going to do more of these. We want to respond to more of your questions. We want to bring more guests on. So I wanted to ask folks before I toss it to Brother Mark Steiner here to close us out with his final thoughts.

    Please subscribe to this channel if you’re not already become a member of this channel. If you’re not already, if you want additional perks and access to us and more engagement with us and our journalists, please write into the real news and let us know the topics you want to cover, the folks you want us to have on. And please, please, please support the work that we do here. Go to the real news.com/donate. Click the donate button over here on YouTube to donate to the Real News now because we can’t keep doing this work without you, and we know we are heading into hostile waters here and we’re going to need that support to hang on for as long as we can and to keep fighting for you. So our future depends on you and our collective future depends on what we all do next. And so with that, I want to sign off and thank you for joining us. And I want to toss things over to Marksteiner to give us his closing thoughts and we’ll see you back here on the next live stream. Thank

    Marc Steiner:

    You all so much for watching. I’ll make it short and sweet because we’re a little bit over time, but this, we are in a very important moment here, a critical moment. And I just want to go back for two seconds to think about the things that Bill just pointed out. People like John Nichols pointed out and others on this broadcast is that if the Democrats had taken the ideas as you heard some of the people say on this program and turned them into a media organizing campaign, we’d have a different outcome of this election. If we fought for the truth and showed the truth to the world, to our country, it would’ve had a very different result than what we see today. I think that’s a really important point for us to realize. And now the thing is we have to do that ourselves and we have to organize and we have to make a broader coalition of all the media organizations on the left that’s being worked on.

    We’ve got to bring people together to say no, there’s a different way. And we have to do it because we’re not just facing a Republican party, we’re facing a neofascist rise. These are very dangerous people who are now in charge of the United States government. They’re going to destroy the government Department of Education and more read Project 2025 on understand what they’re about to do us. And we have to stand up together to fight to stop it. We cannot allow it to happen. This is our country. It’s all of us. It’s the greatest heterogeneous nation in the history of the planet. We can stop them. We have to stop them. And that’s part of our work right here at The Real News. And I want to thank you all for joining us.

    Bill Gallegos:

    Thank you all. Really appreciate it.

    Marc Steiner:

    Thank

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    You guys. Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to the Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Inflation versus wages: Trump’s stunning comeback explained in two charts

    The rise in prices under the Biden administration proved fatal for Kamala Harris's election hopes.

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • Trump’s re-election plunges global economy into uncertainty

    Global GDP could take a hit, and emerging economies would suffer if Trump imposes big tariffs. Will he follow through?

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • Nintendo says Switch games will be playable on next console

    Japanese gaming giant is expected to launch follow-up to its wildly popular console next year.

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • Asia’s export-driven economies brace for upheaval under Trump

    Former US president's proposals for sweeping tariffs threaten to hobble exports that drive the region's growth.

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • ‘Join a union’: Boeing workers ratify contract with over 43% wage hike

    Common Dreams Logo

    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Nov. 5, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    After seven weeks on strike, Boeing workers voted Monday to ratify a new contract that includes a 43.65% wage increase over four years—a significant improvement over the 25% increase that the aerospace giant offered in September.

    Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Districts 751 and W24 approved the contract in a 59%-41% vote around two weeks after rejecting a tentative deal that called for a 35% pay increase over a four-year period.

    The contract approved by workers also includes a $12,000 ratification bonus, improvements to retirement and healthcare benefits, and improved overtime rules.

    “Strikes work,” labor journalist Kim Kelly wrote in response to the contract vote.

    Jon Holden and Brandon Bryant, respectively the presidents of IAM District 751 and W24, said in a joint statement that “working people know what it’s like when a company overreaches and takes away more than is fair.”

    “Through this strike and the resulting victory, frontline workers at Boeing have done their part to begin rebalancing the scales in favor of the middle class—and in doing so, we hope to inspire other workers in our industry and beyond to continue standing up for justice at work,” said Holden and Bryant. “Through this victory and the strike that made it possible, IAM members have taken a stand for respect and fair wages in the workplace.”

    “Livable wages and benefits that can support a family are essential—not optional—and this strike underscored that reality,” they added. “This contract will have a positive and generational impact on the lives of workers at Boeing and their families. We hope these gains inspire other workers to organize and join a union. Frontline Boeing workers have used their voices, their collective power, and their solidarity to do what is right, to stand up for what is fair—and to win.”

    IAM’s international president, Brian Bryant, called the contract “a new standard in the aerospace industry—one that sends a clear statement that aerospace jobs must be middle-class careers in which workers can thrive.”

    “Workers in the aerospace industry, led by the IAM—the most powerful aerospace union in the world—will not settle for anything less than the respect and family-sustaining wages and benefits they need and deserve,” said Bryant. “This agreement reflects the positive results of workers sticking together, participating in workplace democracy, and demonstrating solidarity with each other and with the community during a necessary and effective strike.”

    Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and an outspoken supporter of the Boeing strike, congratulated IAM members on Monday “for winning a hard-fought victory.”

    “I also congratulate Machinists President Jon Holden as well as Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg for working to reach a deal that ensures Boeing will continue to build quality planes that contribute to our country’s security and mobility while valuing and respecting the fact that there is no Boeing without the IAM,” Jayapal said in a statement.

    As did the union leadership in their remarks, Jayapal specifically thanked Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su of the Biden administration for helping secure the deal, citing “skilled leadership” that brought “both parties to the table and to an agreement.”

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Boeing workers vote to end seven-week strike

    International Association of Machinists votes to approve latest contract offer after rejecting two previous proposals.

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • Heading into the electoral storm

    This is it, friends. No turning back. The elections are finally here, and we are preparing for every possible outcome. You should, too. 

    Listen, our political system has given us all the reasons in the world to cynically scoff when pundits or canvassers, or anxious friends and family members, tell us this could be “the most consequential election in our lifetime,” but it’s possible that everyone is right here to some degree. Two things can be true at the same time: Our corporate-captured, duopolistic “democracy” is worthy of all the righteous scorn it has trained us to feel, and things can still get a lot worse. 

    That’s what immigrant residents and immigrant-justice organizers in Baltimore explained to me and Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernández of Belly of the Beast in this collaborative report we published last week. “My community is so afraid, saying that if Donald Trump wins, they’re going to leave the country,” Lucia Islas, president of Comité Latino de Baltimore, told us. “They are afraid. They don’t want to be here. Even professionals—they say, ‘If he wins, I’m leaving…’”

    Lucia Islas, president of the Comité Latino de Baltimore, explains the issues facing Baltimore’s immigrant community and why she’ll be voting for Kamala Harris. Still image taken from TRNN’s collaborative report with Belly of the Beast, “Back in the crosshairs of GOP hate, many migrants plan to vote defensively”

    That’s what three veteran railroaders explained to me when I spoke to them on Working People about how workers in the rail industry are approaching the election after President Joe Biden and both parties in Congress infamously blocked them from striking two years ago. “I don’t think what Biden did to us in 2022 is even a thought at this stage of the game, because of the threat from Donald Trump,” Hugh Sawyer, a locomotive engineer in Atlanta, told me. “Forget about our pathetic problems in the rail industry… We’re talking about the theoretical dismantling of this country if Donald Trump gets elected.” 

    BNSF engines and workers arrive to give a tunnel motor locomotive with Rio Grande heritage donated from the Union Pacific Railroad it’s last ride to it’s new home at the Colorado Railroad Museum after nearly 8 years of storage at MillerCoors on Aug. 22, 2018 in Golden, Colorado. Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images

    Two months after Biden and Congress broke the rail strike and forced workers to accept a contract that did not address the serious issues putting them, our supply chain, and our communities at hazard, railroaders’ worst nightmare came true in East Palestine, Ohio. From the moment a Norfolk Southern ‘bomb train’ derailed in East Palestine on Feb. 3, 2023, traumatized and chemically exposed residents became another political football to be kicked around by Republicans, Democrats, and the media. 

    Like in 2020, the majority of voters in this part of Ohio and Pennsylvania will likely vote for Donald Trump in 2024, though plenty have given up on the whole system. In this on-the-ground documentary report, we went to East Palestine to speak with residents face to face, deep in the heart of so-called “Trump Country,” and what we found is a stark reminder that partisan politics haven’t helped this poisoned community, and that working-class people have way more in common than corporate media and corporate politicians want us to believe. 

    TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez (left) sits next to Chris Albright (right) in front of Albright’s home in East Palestine, OH. Still image from TRNN documentary report Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan Politics Haven’t Helped East Palestine, OH / Mike Balonek.

    I hope, more than anything, that people take that message to heart this week. “Don’t listen to all the mainstream media,” Chris Albright, a resident of East Palestine, said to me when we were sitting on his doorstep. “Go talk to your neighbors. Go talk to your friends. Go talk to people in your community. You’ll find out that the differences that [mainstream media] is pushing down our throats, and the political parties are pushing down our throats… to divide us are not true.”

    What we are about to find out is if people in this country are ready and willing to allow themselves to be further divided and further convinced that their fellow workers and neighbors are the enemy. Trump and right-wing media have masterfully exploited people’s real pains and anxieties, captured their attentions, and shaped their worldviews to this end. As I wrote in this deeply personal piece, “the only thing more frightening than the view of the world as seen through the Trumpian lens is the prospect of a society ruled and supported by enough people who believe it’s all true and that the obvious and necessary solution is just around the corner.”

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Who are the real Trump supporters? The answers might surprise you

    The outcome of tomorrow’s election is anyone’s guess. While the candidates are familiar, this election is very different from previous showdowns with Trump in 2016 and 2020. While old guard Republicans like Dick Cheney are throwing their weight behind Harris, the MAGA movement is persevering—and even courting support from unexpected places. Stephen Janis and Taya Graham look back on past conversations with Trump supporters from this election cycle.

    Watch the full stories:

    Are Black men really flocking to Trump? We asked these Black conservatives.

    Republicans plan for 40 years of MAGA

    RNC delegates explain their views—and stumble through fact checks

    Black, conservative, and unapologetic: A deep dive with the Black women fighting to get Trump reelected

    Behind enemy lines: ‘Blacks for Trump’ and Pennsylvania progressives play for undecided voters

    Production: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis
    Post-Production: Stephen Janis
    Written by: Stephen Janis

    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Taya Graham:

    Hello. This is Taya Graham for the Real News Network and Stephen and I are going to be on the ground in Wisconsin to cover what some are saying is the most consequential election in recent history. We’re going to be in Milwaukee, talking to voters, going to poll sites, and doing our best to keep you up to date on the vote count. But we thought we should show you some of our earlier coverage and go back to where we began in Milwaukee at the Republican National Convention. There we interviewed dozens of people from all across the country and what we learned surprised us, namely the promise that if Trump wins, there won’t be just four, but 40 more years of magic.

    Speaker 2:

    Hello, Milwaukee. Are you ready for four more years of Donald Trump?

    Crowd:

    Yes.

    Speaker 2:

    We’re setting a course for the next 40 years.

    Taya Graham:

    We actually heard a speaker say that we could be looking at decades of MAGA. What people may not understand is we are looking at the future of our country right now. Do not underestimate the passion, respect, and the inspiration people feel when they see Donald Trump as their leader. And now that he has survived this assassination attempt, it has taken on almost a religious fervor.

    Speaker 2:

    A fellow came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but an American lion got back up on his feet and he won.

    Speaker 4:

    Fight the party tooth and nail to get every Democrat unelected, marginalize the party, wash them away.

    Taya Graham:

    What about the poor folks who voted for the Democrats?

    Speaker 4:

    Well, it’s a different party. This is not John F. Kennedy’s Democrat party anymore. The Democratic party is now, it’s a godless depraved Marxist party.

    Taya Graham:

    We also spoke to a group of voters that pundits say are still in play, namely Black men. So we spoke to several Republican Black men who had an awful lot to say.

    Hello. This is Taya Graham for the Real News Network, and I’m here in Milwaukee Wisconsin at the Republican National Convention. And I had a question. Polls are saying that Black men are going to be voting more and more for former President Donald Trump, and I wanted to know why. So I came to the Black Republican Mayor’s Association event to ask the source why they are voting for Donald Trump and why they think more Black men will be doing the same.

    Michael Austin:

    Michael Austin Kansas Republican delegation.

    Taya Graham:

    Why are you representing the Republican Party?

    Michael Austin:

    I’m a guy that really likes to focus on facts and of course, just is it easier to live your life, buy a house, run a business, and it’s clear that President Trump has done an amazing job for the African-American community, of course, for me and my family as well. And so I have no qualms about supporting him again this time.

    Steven Mullens:

    My name is Steven Mullins and I am part of the Connecticut delegation to the Republican National Convention.

    Taya Graham:

    I want to know what brought you to the Republican Party? What policies inspired you?

    Steven Mullens:

    I have been active with the Republican Party since I was a child. I was politically inspired by President Reagan as an elementary school student, and I’ve stuck with it. I believe in the conservative values that the Republican Party offers. Socially, fiscally, I think it is the way to go.

    Taya Graham:

    I also conducted an intriguing interview with two powerful Black women in the Republican movement, namely Tia Best, a national engagement director for Moms of Liberty and Janaya Thomas, the Black media engagement director for Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign. And what they had to say might surprise you.

    Well, it’s interesting that you said that you voted for President Obama because he’s Black, because obviously we have Vice President Harris in the race who’s Black and a woman. People are very excited about this. They feel that this is historic. So it’s interesting. So let’s say 10 years ago, you would’ve voted for Vice President Harris?

    Tia Best:

    Of course, because I’ll put it like this. Well, we’ll say Black, but everyone has their own definition of what is Black. You’re biracial. My son is biracial. My son is actually really African American. He’s half African and he’s actually African American and Caribbean. It’s just we understand how America is, how they have that one drop rule. Doesn’t matter if your dad is white or your mom is white or whoever’s Black. They have a one drop rule.

    Taya Graham:

    And I have to ask, how did you become the Black media engagement director for the entire Trump Re-election Campaign? What factors influenced your decision to take the role? And I have to say, especially in the light of what people view as President Trump’s controversial stances on issues affecting the Black community.

    Janiyah Thomas:

    I think overall, I’ve been doing this for a while. I originally was the Black Media coordinator at the RNC. That was my first job. So I’ve been working with Black press and I love doing it because sometimes I feel like getting good stories, working with Black-owned media, I feel more rewarded, not as easy to do that all the time, versus working with New York Times.

    They’ll do anything and write about anything. So it feels more rewarding to work with Black-owned media and also a lot of, as you know, Black people rely on Black media to give them factual information, especially when we’re in election year. So that has everything to do with part of the reason I took it, because it’s something I thought was really cool and I feel really passionate about working with Black media and I love Donald Trump also. But I think it’s important to have somebody that’s able to speak to those issues, speak to that community, and also someone that’s able to develop relationships with that community as well.

    Taya Graham:

    We were also on the ground when the Trump Tour bus hit my hometown, Baltimore City. Attendance might’ve been low, but confidence was high. What exactly are we seeing here? “I’m not with her.” The Black voters for Trump. What is this fuss?

    Speaker 8:

    Yeah, so President Trump and of course VCF, they’re all in town today. Just visiting areas like here, Morgan State University, just letting these students know that there is an option. You don’t have to vote for the leaning left, comma, you don’t have to vote for this administration again, you can vote for change, which would be President Trump in a situation.

    Speaker 11:

    Challenge them on the, “He’s a racist.” What does that mean? Tell me, what do you mean “He’s a misogynist?” What does that have to do about good policies, effective policies that work for our country?

    Taya Graham:

    Finally, to find out just how close this election might be, we went to Lancaster, Pennsylvania where we spoke to voters and activists to find out exactly what might happen in the Keystone state that could decide this election.

    At a community center, Lancaster Stands Up is organizing in the critical swing state that most agree could decide the presidential election. The non-partisan group focuses on issues supporting candidates that back their policies. That means affordable housing, a living wage, and reproductive freedom.

    Speaker 12:

    So we’re a non-partisan organization. So our goal is really to just support candidates both locally and on the national level that represent our values. So our members vote on local candidates, and then once we endorse them, we like to offer support through things like canvassing, phone banking, hosting meet and greets, things like that.

    Speaker 13:

    We definitely do skew more towards a Democrat than Republican. We tend to have a lot of problems with Republicans on labor rights and how they don’t really support workers. So we are running like IE phones for Harris and Walz because originally we weren’t going to do anything when Biden was going to be this presidential candidate. But now that it’s Harris, we feel like she’s someone that we’ll be able to organize with and potentially work with in D.C.

    Taya Graham:

    But just down the road in Lititz, a divided town shows changing minds won’t be easy.

    Speaker 12:

    It’s a very polarizing time right now.

    Taya Graham:

    Passions were so high that one resident we spoke to says he avoids talking about politics altogether.

    Speaker 12:

    If you want to stay friendly with people, you don’t talk about politics. That’s the bottom line. Nobody’s getting convinced, and that includes my family. I don’t agree with my kids.

    Taya Graham:

    Nevertheless, the people who did want to talk on the record about their choices were adamant.

    May I ask you your voting for?

    Speaker 13:

    Kamala Harris.

    Speaker 14:

    And I just don’t like his politics and do not like what he would like to see, which is the United States to become a dictatorship.

    Taya Graham:

    Phyllis, can you tell me if you’ve decided that you’re going to vote?

    Phyllis:

    Yes, I have decided. Trump.

    Taya Graham:

    Can you share with me what policies have inspired you to… If there’s anything in particular that really stands out to you as why you’re voting for him, I assume for the second time.

    Phyllis:

    Just overall, because I don’t like who’s running against him.

    Taya Graham:

    Is it the policies or the person you don’t like?

    Phyllis:

    Policies and the person.

    Taya Graham:

    So as you can see, we take being on the ground and speaking directly to the voters very seriously. So we’re going to be giving you live updates from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You’ll see them on YouTube, you’ll see them on Facebook, even on X. And make sure to keep on checking with the Real News website for constant updates. I’m really looking forward to covering this election for you and giving you voter data as soon as I get it. This is Taya Graham and Stephen Janis reporting for the Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH (DOCUMENTARY) 

    From the moment a Norfolk Southern ‘bomb train’ derailed in East Palestine, OH, on February 3, 2023, traumatized and chemically exposed residents became another political football to be kicked around by Republicans, Democrats, and the media. Nearly two years since the avoidable catastrophe that changed their lives forever, residents in and around East Palestine and their families have been left to live in a toxic “sacrifice zone.” Like in 2020, the majority of voters in this part of Ohio and Pennsylvania will likely vote for Donald Trump in 2024, though plenty have given up on the whole system. In this on-the-ground documentary report, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Steve Mellon from the Pittsburgh Union Progress go to East Palestine to speak with residents face to face, deep in the heart of so-called “Trump Country,” and what they find is a stark reminder that working-class communities have way more in common than corporate media and corporate politicians want us to believe.

    Filmed and directed by: Mike Balonek
    Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Mike Balonek, Steve Mellon
    Post-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Mike Balonek, Jocelyn Dombroski, David Hebden, Kayla Rivara

    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Speaker 1:

    Tonight, a town meeting in East Palestine, Ohio where worried residents are getting a chance to express their concerns after a freight train, derailment caused evacuations in a fiery toxic mess.

    Krystal Ball:

    Joy Behar knew exactly who to blame for this toxic catastrophe sparked by years of political corruption and corporate greed. The residents of the town themselves. Why? No, because they were part of the deplorable group who voted for Donald Trump. Take a listen.

    Joy Behar:

    I don’t know why they would ever vote for him because of somebody, who by the way, he placed someone with deep ties to the chemical industry in charge of the EPA’s Chemical Safety Office. That’s who you voted for in that district.

    Speaker 4:

    [inaudible 00:00:39] talk about the political finger pointing because you hear Buttigieg critical of former President Trump for going, and many would say, “Hey, Buttigieg, we’d like to see you in East Palestine, Ohio right now addressing this.”

    Chris Albright:

    It was a catastrophe that happened, that changed our lives and we’re never going to get back to normal. Since the derailment happened, I was a gas pipeline worker. I developed congestive heart failure, which ended up spiraling into severe heart failure. I’ve been unable to work since April of last year, unable to provide for my family. I’ve lost my health benefits, in that time. I can’t afford my medications [inaudible 00:01:19] out because of this, because of something that could have been and should have been prevented by the railroad, by Norfolk Southern.

    Laurie Harmon:

    I live about three blocks from the train derailment as diagnosed with systemic contact dermatitis due to chemical exposure. I have now lesions in my spine. I have cysts on my kidneys. I am losing everything. I’m losing my home. I lost my relationship. I’m a foster parent, I lost my kids. This is more than one person can take.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    It’s just like really, really sad and infuriating because from the moment that the Norfolk Southern train derailed here in East Palestine on February 3rd, 2023, the people of this town were turned into just another political football to be kicked around by Democrats and Republicans in the media. The conversation was all about, who’s more to blame for this? Democrats or Republicans? Who’s going to get to town first? Trump or Biden? Senators like Sherrod Brown and JD Vance, Democrats, Republicans made a lot of political hay about this situation and saying they were going to fix it.

    These people are still going through hell and now we’re here in 2024 talking about an election season. We’re talking about places like this as Trump country. We’re talking about people, regular people like you and me who live in places like this, as if they’re not people. So if we have to talk about the elections and we do because elections are still important, the outcome of elections still shape the ground upon which we live, work, and organize. So we got to talk about them, but if we have to talk about elections, let’s talk about them from the bottom up, not from the top down.

    Steve Mellon:

    I was talking to East Palestine resident, Ashley McCollum on the phone the other day about politics and about the differences in the political differences that exist in the world today and that everything is boiled down to who are you going to vote for in the presidential election? She said, “Steve, if you came upon a car wreck and the car was on fire and you rushed up to help people, would you ask them who they voted for?” “Like, of course not. You’d pull them out” what’s different between this situation and that situation?

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    This is Steve Mellon. Steve’s a journalist and a photographer, and over the past year, he’s done more consistent, thorough, on-the-ground reporting on the East Palestine disaster than practically anyone in the country. Steve has also been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that whole time, and he’s been doing all that reporting without pay for the Pittsburgh Union Progress. The alternative newspaper that workers have been producing on their own while they’ve been on strike for the last two years.

    Steve Mellon:

    We went out on strike in October 18th, 2022, and for the first couple months we had difficulty learning how to strike. We had to figure out how to take care of each other’s needs, figure out different actions, how to coordinate with other organizations, supportive organizations and unions. We were still figuring out how to publish a strike paper. Bob was editing, he was figuring things out, and then this derailment happens 30 miles from my house.

    And there was this yearning to go cover it, but quite honestly, we saw the cloud. We saw that mushroom cloud for the burn-off, and I thought, holy shit, this is happening to people who are living in this community. I mean, I know communities like this. Covering a story like this, in my experience, in doing this for 40 years, if you want to cover this story accurately, you have to build relationships with people.

    And I’ve been able to do that with that on strike simply because if we think this is important enough and I need to come up here once a week and sit and talk to people for three hours at their kitchen table about what they’re dealing with and not go home and write a story because the story’s not done yet, we can do that.

    If the Post-Gazette or any other news organization that’s paying me, they’re going to want a story they can’t afford to have somebody out working on a story that’s not going to have an immediate payoff and fill that space and generate audience and revenue for the publication. I lament the demise of those local media organizations because I do think they’re incredibly valuable just on a daily basis. But when something like this happens, when a catastrophic event occurs in the community, I think a local newspaper is like one of the places people can go to feel bound to each other. We’re all dealing with this together.

    Laurie Harmon:

    Hi everybody. Thank you for being here. I live about three blocks from the train derailment. We were evacuated, came back on about the 10th when they said it was all clear. On the 12th, I had a doctor’s appointment already scheduled. I started getting rashes. So May 1st … No, this is about the time where they started digging up the pits, cleaning up. I started getting second, third, and fourth degree chemical burns. I have the burns over 80% of my body. They burrow deep down in, it’s horrible.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    On March 23rd, dozens of people from around East Palestine and around the country gathered in the East Palestine Country Club for a conference that was called by the newly formed Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers Coalition. Attendees included residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area, but also residents of other so-called sacrifice zones.

    People living near other rail lines, railroad workers, labor union representatives, environmental justice organizations, journalists, socialists, Trump voters, and so many more. The coalition discussed how to pressure the Biden-Harris administration to issue a disaster declaration for East Palestine and secure immediate government-funded healthcare for residents whose ailments and medical bills continue to pile up.

    Christina Siceloff:

    So I’ve had pressure in my ears, itchy skin, migraines, headaches, brain fog, dizziness, confusion, tiredness, low-grade fever, congestion, runny nose, burning in my nose, eyes and throat, strange smells, strange tastes, polyps in my nose, pain around my eyes, itchy eyes, extra mucus, sore and blistered throat hoarseness, a feeling in my esophagus and lungs, throat, nose, and abdomen like someone was burning me with acid and lighting me on fire from the inside.

    Coughing, sore lungs, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea sometimes at the same time. Body aches, excessive thirst, loss of appetite at times, stomach pain, abnormal menstruation, cramping and tingling in my feet, twitches, tremors, anxiety and panic attacks. These are most of the symptoms I can recall. I’ve had these since the train derailment and the event and burn that happened last year.

    Since then, I’ve been diagnosed with an ear infection, an upper respiratory infection, exposure to toxins that were non-occupational and even had one doctor tell me they didn’t know what to do for us yet, including for my four-year-old son. I’ve had blood tests and urine tests only to be told everything was fine. In January, I was diagnosed with PTSD. One of the most recent doctor visits was to have a screening done for cancer that came back as benign, but they wanted to continue monitoring every three months, but the insurance won’t pay for that.

    Daren Gamble:

    Obviously, steps like this are very important to get this ball rolling, to bring awareness not only to us, but the other thousands of communities in the country that are being poisoned. It’s just so eye-opening. So I lived here my whole life. Before this happened, there was no such thing as environmentalists to me. I mean, that all happened somewhere else. These things happen somewhere else.

    Chris Albright:

    One of the biggest takeaways about this is what happened here can happen to anybody out there. They have done nothing, nothing to fix the safety issues, the maintenance problems, anything like that. This can happen at anybody’s place, anywhere in this country right now because they won’t do anything about it until they hear from us. Once they hear from us and we start letting them know that we’re done, we’re not taking this anymore. We got to stand up. We got to unite. We got to get together and we got to make this right.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I’m the socialist weirdo that Fox News keeps telling you is the enemy, right? You’re the white working class, Trump country guy, that MSNBC keeps telling me is the enemy and your neighbors are the enemy, but we’re here sitting on your porch. I don’t know what that says about how we should vote in the election, but what do you think that says about the disconnect between the way we talk about this country as if we’re all just so divided by party? What do you think people can learn from why we’re here right now?

    Chris Albright:

    Well, a couple things I’d say about that is number one is, don’t listen to all the mainstream media and all. Go talk to your neighbors. Go talk to your friends. Go talk to people in your community. You’ll find out that the differences that MSM is pushing down our throats and the political parties are pushing down our throats and then trying to get us to believe, to divide us, are not true. That we’re not defined and we’re not separated by those things that they’re telling us that we shouldn’t be. You just said you’re on the left side. I’m on the right side. So what? So what? It doesn’t matter. I think what it comes down to above all and anything else, is be a good person. Be a good human.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    What was most powerful about the gathering in East Palestine was seeing this diverse working class coalition of capitalism’s forgotten victims standing together in solidarity. There were no blue state people or red state people. There were just people fighting off different tentacles of the same corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires.

    Jami Wallace:

    This isn’t just a fight for East Palestine. This is a fight for all of the laborers across the country. We built this country with our blood, sweat, and tears. Our ancestors built this country, and now our country is in the hands of these corporations that have created a country that I don’t want to live in. We let this country get so far gone, we are the only ones that are going to be able to take this country back and we need national action.

    Christina Siceloff:

    The government should not be let off the hook either. They had the funding to do more research on the chemicals before they even put them on the tracks. They had the power to not lift the evacuation, and some of us were never even told to leave or to stay inside. There should have been more done to protect people, and even to this day, they have done next to nothing to make changes or even monitor the changes that were made.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I first met Chris Albright and his wife Jess when Professor John Hanson and his law students brought us all out to Harvard in September of 2023 to do a live interview about the East Palestine derailment and the never ending nightmare that residents have been living through ever since.

    Steve Mellon and I went to East Palestine to sit down with Chris and to talk frankly about how different our conversations about politics and the elections look when we actually have them face to face. And when we talk as fellow workers and human beings first, not as Democrats or Republicans or anything else.

    What do you want folks to know out there who are only looking at you as a Trump voter in Ohio?

    Chris Albright:

    Well, I’m not just a Trump voter in Ohio. When it comes to the core of everything is the fact that we want safety. We want healthcare. We want safe railways. We want to be able to get over a lot of stuff that our country is telling us because you’re on this side of the fence or that side of the fence, you have to be this person or that person, and that’s not right. We want the basic human rights that anybody else wants.

    And I don’t care whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, Independent, it doesn’t matter to me. We have to be able to come together and work on everything that we need as a country, as people to get past this. And yes, I’m a Republican, I’m a Conservative. I have my views, I have my thoughts. You’re not, you have your views and your thoughts. But we can sit here and then talk like this because it doesn’t matter.

    Hilary Flint:

    What we’ve learned is talking to our elected officials doesn’t get … I sat down with the President of the United States last month. It didn’t get me anywhere. It’s another promise for another day, for another meeting, for another … No. Now the way that we show them is that we come with more people. And every meeting gets more people and more power, and that’s how we move the needle. It’s not a conversation with an elected official. It’s an elected official seeing you bring the power to them.

    George Waksmunski:

    We need a movement, a rank-of-file, militant movement. Aggressive struggle also, it’s going to join a coalition and fight back.

    Chris Silvera:

    But if we want to change things, then we have to create that change. It ain’t going to be the Democrats and it ain’t going to be the Republicans. Don’t worry about some third guy running for president. You have to start at the town council, at the city council, at the school board. When they see that change coming up the hill, that they will understand that you have changed and that’s going to make the society change. So we need to start to demand from these railroads, from people that’s in Washington, pass the Safety … What do you call it?

    Speaker 1:

    Rail Safety Act.

    Chris Silvera:

    Pass the Rail Safety Act. Is it the best thing? No, but it’s better than what you got right now. So you got to move step-by-step in one direction, right? So everybody here got to make that commitment. Call your senator, call your congressperson, call one of them crooked people down in Washington DC and say, pass this because they’re still subject to the vote at the end of the day, right?

    Speaker 1:

    Right.

    Chris Silvera:

    Still subject to one person, one vote. We have to stand out.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Yes, Norfolk Southern has agreed to pay a $600 million class action settlement with residents and businesses in and around East Palestine. With payouts varying depending on one’s proximity to the crash site, their household size and other factors. But the company is not admitting liability or wrongdoing, and that settlement frankly doesn’t begin to cover all that Norfolk Southern has stolen from this community. And residents who desperately need the money, still worry about the health costs they will continue to accrue from the chemicals they and their families have been exposed to.

    And yes, like in 2020, the majority of voters in Columbiana County are still going to vote for Trump in 2024, though plenty have given up on the whole system. After experiencing such a devastating tragedy and after being lied to by government agencies and abandoned by elected officials in both parties, the mere fact that Trump visited East Palestine a full year before President Biden did was frankly enough to convince many residents of who supposedly cares more about them.

    But what I saw and felt in East Palestine was what I’ve seen in other sacrifice zones around the country, working people who need help after more than 40 years of corporate dominance, deregulation, disinvestment, and the systematic devaluing of labor and life itself. People who yearn for something better than empty promises and partisan gimmicks, but who feel like nothing better is ever really on offer.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I mean, the common wisdom is that our country is more politically divided now than ever before. I mean, granted, you got to put an asterisk next to that because, keep in mind, this is a country that fought a civil war against itself. But the point stands that it feels like we have nothing in common, nothing to talk about, nothing to struggle together over.

    Chris Albright:

    Max, me and you have talked how many times before I even knew that you were on the left side. I’m not, but it doesn’t matter. You’re great human being. Steve, you’re a great human being. I don’t care what side of the fence you’re on. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re a Democrat, a Republican, a Conservative, a Leftist, I don’t care. Be a good person. If you’re a good person, that stuff doesn’t matter.

    Steve Mellon:

    I think it’s proof that what divides us is a very surface level item, and we can all probably disagree here on who we should vote for, who we personally are going to vote for, but that’s not how defined any of you two, because we have not had that conversation. We have gathered in East Palestine, what draws us all here are issues that affect us all. They affect you personally now, Chris, on a very visceral and real level.

    They could happen to me. It could happen to you Max. And that’s what’s drawn us together is the understanding that we’re all vulnerable. We all lack power as individuals, but if we coalesce around issues, around the things that are important to us, the safety of your family, the safety of your community, how we should treat each other as human beings, not as Trump voters or Biden voters, but as human beings who want the same things out of life. We want a healthy family, we want a life that we feel proud of. We want to be able to live lives that give something to the community that we can feel proud of.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I mean, these are just real nuts and bolts things that it feels like it had to get to a point where we’ve lost so much of that, that what binds us is more apparent now than ever. But I do genuinely feel that whatever path forward we have, it’s got to start there.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • China’s small manufacturers anguish over Trump’s tariff plans

    Republican candidate's plans to slap tariffs of 60 percent or more on imports has businesses in China worried.

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • How will railroad workers vote after Biden and Congress blocked their strike?

    Two years ago, the US was on the cusp of seeing its first national rail strike in decades. Then, President Joe Biden, at the urging of the rail companies and with the help of both parties in Congress, preemptively blocked railroad workers from striking in December of 2022. Workers were forced to accept a contract that did not address the vast majority of issues that have been putting them, our communities, and our supply chain at hazard. How has this all shaped railroad workers’ attitudes and approaches to the upcoming elections? In this urgent panel discussion, we pose this question directly to three veteran railroaders, and we have an honest discussion about how working people should act strategically within and outside the electoral system to advance their interests. 

    Panelists include: Hugh Sawyer, a veteran locomotive engineer with 36 years of experience, a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Division 316, and a founding member and acting treasurer of Railroad Workers United; Mark Burrows, a retired locomotive engineer with 37 of experience, who has served as co-chair and organizer for Railroad Workers United, where he still edits RWU’s quarterly newsletter “The Highball”; Ron Kaminkow, a recently retired former brakeman, conductor, and engineer who worked for many years in freight rail before working 20 years as a passenger engineer at Amtrak, a founding member of RWU and delegate in the Northern Nevada Central Labor Council. 

    Additional links/info below…

    Permanent links below…

    Featured Music…

    • Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

    Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
    Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

    TRANSCRIPT

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A corrected version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Hugh Sawyer: 

    My name is Hugh Sawyer. I’m a working locomotive engineer in Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m completing my 36th year. I’ve been a locomotive engineer practically my whole career and I’m a proud member of the Teamsters as I belong to Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineer and Trainman Division three 16 in Atlanta, and I’m also a founding member of Railroad Workers United and the current treasurer of that organization, which we’re organization of rank and file rail members from all the crafts that are just working together to make a better, hopefully better work environment and better contracts in the future for the rail members that are left in the industry.

    Mark Burrows: 

    My name is Mark Burrows. I’m a retired locomotive engineer. I started railroading in 1974 at the Chicago Northwestern, 12 years there and then 25 years at the Canadian Pacific from 91 to the end of 2015. In my latter years I was a delegate for the UTU now, the Smart Transportation Division for our 2011 and 2014 conventions. I’ve been a long time member of Railroad Workers United since 2011 and am currently the editor of our quarterly newsletter, the Highball.

    Ron Kaminkow:

    My name is Ron Kaminkow, recently retired from the railroad as of last year. I hired out with Conrail in Chicago in 96, taken over by Norfolk Southern in 99, worked for the NS in 2004. I left the Norfolk Southern, came to Amtrak, which is the railroad I just retired from. I’ve worked on the railroad in nine different states, run trains over basically every rail carrier major class one carrier, having been an Amtrak engineer out of Chicago in particular, and Milwaukee, we run on all these different railroads. Founding member of Railroad workers, United served as the General secretary for many years also as the organizer and now serving in the capacity of a trustee for that organization. Still a member of Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen honorary member Division 51, and I am still the delegate to our local Northern Nevada Central Labor Council.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Alright. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends, and your family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you got recommendations for working folks that you’d like us to talk to or stories you’d like us to investigate and please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

    My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got a critical episode for y’all today. We are just days away from the US elections and America stands on the precipice of a dark and uncertain future. Polls are showing that the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is incredibly close and we may not know which candidate legitimately won for days, if not weeks after November 5th, but what we do know because it’s already happening is that there will be a tug of war over the legitimacy of the results. And I want to just give a note on that really quick because as researchers at Trusting News, a research and training project that helps journalists demonstrate credibility and earn trust, writes, 

    “The United States doesn’t have a nationwide body that collects and releases election results. Instead, journalists gather data from local and state agencies that report election results publicly.

    The Associated Press gathers this data and makes it available to the public and to other newsrooms to count the votes and then declare winners. They’ve been doing this in presidential elections since 1848. Elections in the US are highly decentralized and complex. While uncontested or landslide races may be called right after polls close, competitive races may take days or even weeks to call, and while some states like Florida count most of the ballots on election day, other states like California can take weeks.”

    So just take note of that and make sure that your family and your friends know how to interpret what is going to play out in front of us next week. Be critical, be watchful, be patient, and don’t let yourself become a tool of cynical actors who are trying to manipulate you and above all else, just go vote. Listen, we’ve talked for years on this show about how and why our political system sucks.

    I mean, we know that you’re not going to find any naive defenses of that system here, but every conversation that we’ve had with workers has also shown in one way or another that the results of national, state and local elections still shape the ground upon which we all live, work, and organize. History has shown us, for instance, that if you’ve got a hostile underfunded national Labor relations board run by bosses and corporate hacks, that’s going to drastically change the entire landscape of rank and file organizing around the country facing an even more daunting path to victory and are getting a first contract. Many new union drives would be stifled and many existing unions may find themselves not going on strike, not expanding to organize new members, but instead defensively fighting for their right to exist. Ballot measures like the infamous Prop 22 in California, which passed in 2020 and which we covered here on this show.

    These things can legally cement a permanent underclass of workers who make less than minimum wage and have virtually no rights as employees. So take elections seriously, even if politicians and their elite donor class don’t take you seriously. And that’s really what we’re here to talk about today. As you guys know, two years ago when the potential for a national rail strike was building, we conducted many, many interviews on this podcast and over at the Rail News Network with railroad workers from across the industry. We talked to engineers, conductors, dispatchers, track workers and more. And through those interviews, we help educate the public on the long brewing crisis in the country’s supply chain, a crisis driven by the insatiable greed of massively profitable rail companies and their Wall Street shareholders, a crisis that is affecting all of us as consumers who depend on the rails way more than we realize, and a crisis that has been most acutely felt by workers who have been run into the ground and trackside communities like East Palestine, Ohio.

    As you guys also know at the request of President Joe Biden, with the urging of the rail companies themselves and with the help of both parties in Congress, the government preemptively blocked railroad workers from striking in December of 2022 and forced workers to accept a contract that did not address the vast majority of issues that have been putting them our communities and our supply chain at Hazard. Then two months later in February of 2023, the Norfolk Southern train derailment and toxic chemical disaster happened in East Palestine. Now, a lot of folks have been asking us how this has all shaped railroad workers’ attitudes and approaches to the elections, and plenty of folks have even cited the blocking of the rail strike as a key factor in their decision regarding who to vote for or whether to even vote at all. So as we always do here, rather than try to hypothesize or ventriloquize what we think workers might say, we’re going to go straight to the source and talk to workers themselves.

    As you guys heard at the top of this episode, we’ve got an incredible panel of veteran railroaders here to help us navigate this. So let’s dive in…

    Brothers Hugh, Mark, and Ron, it is so great to see you all and so great to be chatting with you all today. Thank you so, so much for making time for this. I really appreciate it and I’m really excited to talk to you guys about this today because as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of folks really want to know and really need to know what you think and what is being talked about on the rails, right? And we came together ourselves two, three years ago out of our reporting on the struggle of workers on the railroads that led us to connect with Railroad Workers United and so many great folks from across the different crafts, the different unions.

    We’ve had Ron and Mark on different recordings on the Real News and working people. Brother Hugh, it’s so great to have you on the show and to introduce you to our listeners. And I want to kind of just quickly start there because since our listeners became over time, so familiar with Railroad Workers United and some of you guys, I mean, I think it’s at least worth starting on a positive note that since our intense recording interviews panels live streams during the last contract fight and potential railroad strike, brother Ron Kako has finally retired since then. And so, Brother Ron, folks just want to know, are you enjoying your well-deserved retirement?

    Ron Kaminkow:

    Yeah, very much. I’m catching up on many, many years of deferred personal life, all sorts of hobbies and interests, but also remain active in the labor movement. Definitely hope to remain active in Railroad Workers United for many years to come. So yeah, it’s a good thing. I highly recommend it.

    Maximillian Alvarez :

    Well congratulations from all of us here at Working People to you, brother Ron. Congratulations on making it to retirement, man. You deserve it. I hope that you’re enjoying every single second of it, and I know our listeners are sending nothing but love and solidarity to you and to Mark and brother Hugh. You’re going to be there soon, baby. Don’t worry. We we’re pulling for you too sooner or later, sooner or later, man. And let’s kind of go back to that moment right when we all started connecting back in 2022. I mean, because as I mentioned in the introduction for this brief moment, during that contract fight as we were moving stage by stage through the Railway Labor Act provisions that were getting us closer to a potential national rail striker rail lockout, we were learning through interviews with rank and file railroad workers, just how big of a catastrophe has been brewing on the rails for many years and how damaging this has been to railroad workers themselves, to communities that have railroads running through them or terminals stationed near them, not just places like East Palestinian, Ohio, but places like South Baltimore here that lived next to the CSX terminal that we’ve also reported on.

    So it was in the process of those conversations that we learned so much of what you and your fellow railroaders had to teach us about the kinds of conditions you’ve been working under for many, many years. And it felt like for a brief moment in 2022 and into 2023, a lot of folks around the country finally woke up to a lot of the realities that workers like yourselves were describing to us on this podcast. And then as we know, which we’ll get to in a minute, the potential rail strike was blocked by the Biden administration and both parties in Congress, the East Palestine derailment and poisoning of an entire region happened in just a couple months later, people were paying more attention to the number of derailments happening around the country. And then as is the case with anything, whether it’s a war in Ukraine or East Palestine itself, like the news fades from the headlines, people move on, the attention wanes. And so I wanted us to start back at that moment and we’re heading into a new contract bargaining period in 2025. So I want to give our listeners an update before we dig into the upcoming election. Just give us an update on how things have changed or not changed for railroad workers and for the rail industry since the potential strike was blocked two years ago.

    Hugh Sawyer:

    Well, I’ll jump in on that and just say that I worked for Norfolk Southern. So we had, as you’ve already mentioned, the East Palestine disaster. And there’s been a hedge fund group and COR that’s come in and tried to take over the board of directors, and I think they’ve been successful by the way, and creating a situation in which they were able to oust the CEO Alan Shaw. And so we have a new CEO and I’m sure that we’re going to see further action to get their people onto the board of directors. And the goal, of course is to strip the railroad of its assets. I noticed in the third quarter results, they mentioned our 3.1 billion gross profit and what have they try to make the numbers look good, but if you read the fine print down there, there was close to half in land sales and what have you.

    So we’re selling off our assets and what have you, and this is not bode well for the long-term health of the railroad. And we also, in my opinion, I got to stress that this is my opinion, it’s not the opinion of Norfolk Southern. Of course, we defer maintenance on locomotives, we defer maintenance on rail. Maintenance is still going on out there, but not at the level that it used to. And I think we’re just kind of trying to strip out the good of the railroad and leave the husk there for the taxpayers ultimately to pick up, which I should point out, the railroad Workers United is involved in trying to push to the public public rail ownership, that concept that we own the highways, we own the waterways, federal government regulates those things and runs them and maybe they should run the railroad, the infrastructure of it and just let anybody lease space it, so to speak, and that way they can maintain the safe level of maintenance and what have you that I feel like we’re kind of stripping away over time.

    So with regards to the contract, when the Biden administration stepped in, they went through the steps and they had a public presidential emergency board. Keep in mind those are recommendations. President Biden could have sat there and thrown all those recommendations out or adjusted them to the degree that he wanted to present to Congress and he didn’t. And his attitude, oh, we’re going to put a bunch of other union people out of work. And I mean, he said that and he just felt like he had to shove this down our throat. Now we got a fairly good pay raise, but that really just got us from years where we had been going backwards. That got us up to some point that we needed to work from, but we got none of the working condition issues that we wanted. Now ultimately, we got some sick days, but I got to tell you, for your rank and file workers, yeah, we would like to have sick days like the rest of the country, but that was hardly the top priority for us and getting some kind of a lifestyle a reasonable, we’re on call 24 7 and for me, I’ve sat here for the last two years.

    I used to be on a car job that at least had a specific time that I went to work. I was on a schedule, I had scheduled off days, all that’s gone now I’m back on a pool job where I was 20 years ago. And we just keep going backwards. We keep cutting off and they’ve cut a lot of yard jobs and what have you. Their goal is to have a great big happy extra board where you’re on call 24 7, 365 days a year. And despite any propaganda coming from Norfolk Southern, I just don’t think they really care about our lifestyle. They care about theirs, but they don’t want to give us a reasonable off time. I would like to, I would think with 36 years of seniority, I’d be on a high paying pool job with a good schedule and what have you. That’s where I would’ve been if this was 20 years ago,

    Mark Burrows :

    I’ll just jump in and add on to Hugh’s point about the whole railway labor process when the government decided to directly intervene, and not only could Biden have made a proposal, but Congress itself could have crafted and if there was one shred of sympathy for the just demands of rail workers, which contractually was mainly about the quality of life issues, everybody spinning on extra boards and working on their rest and fatigued and no life and potentially getting fired to take off for your daughter’s wedding or your kid’s T-ball game or whatever. And draconian attendance policies.

    A, it’s worth noting that the main, while fatigue is certainly in and of itself a safety issue, a major safety issue, but all the other safety issues which we regularly, the long and heavy trains, the deferred maintenance, many of the factors that contributed to the East Palestine disaster, those were not even on the table and being discussed and they’re not now in the current round, but it was mainly about the quality of life issues. And so if there had been a shred of sympathy, Congress had the latitude, like Hugh said, the Presidential Emergency Board, they put out recommendations and that’s it. They could have crafted an agreement that could have been addressed the most egregious working conditions, some of the basic just demands of the workers as it is, the tentative agreement at the time was based upon the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations and they hid behind the time factor to just say, oh, we don’t have time to discuss any details. We’re just going to go with this. So it didn’t have to turn out that way. Now there have been, and a lot of the scheduling issues were left in a TBD category to be determined and negotiated later, and that’s common. And then that seldom works out in workers’ favor. On some railroads, on some properties, there have been some minor like smoothing the roughest edges, whereas many workers didn’t have any days off just spinning on the 24 hour call extra board going to work on two hours notice there are some property agreements.

    It seems like the average seems to be like an 11 and four, so you work 11 straight, you’re on call, 11 straight days, then maybe you get four days off, but those are not even four real days off. That’s at Canadian Pacific. When they sold an agreement to get two days off, it wasn’t two days off, it was 48 hours. The average person who works a 40 hour week their weekend when they get off from Friday afternoon at four o’clock in the afternoon and go back to work at Monday morning, that’s like 64 hours if my math is correct. So a real conventional weekend is like 64 hours. So selling this 48 hours as a weekend is bullshit. And so any of these 11 and four, it’s the same thing’s, not really four days off, it’s four times 24 at best, and the first day is spent recovering from working like a dog and then you got less than three days to salvage what’s left. So smoothing off some of the roughest edges, but for the most part it’s still extremely rough and intolerable. I would say.

    Ron Kaminkow:

    I would just jump in and agree, I’m out of the industry now, but I keep my ear to the rail. For example, Norfolk Southern, the new quote leadership just came out with a report and nothing has changed. And the idea that things were going to change when the railroad was under the microscope due to the contract fight due to East Palestine, due to all the hard work of RW and our media committee just beating the bushes and promoting all that’s wrong with the rail industry, rail industry kind of got a black eye and they started to make nice. And so just an example, rail industry said, oh yeah, I guess the close call reporting thing that they have in the airlines we’re under the microscope, so we’ll agree to do it. And then as soon as they’re out of the spotlight, they all just rele on that and go, no, no, no, this close call reporting thing got problems.

    It’s not going to work with the way we run the railroad and we find it unsafe and all this kind of thing. And so it’s just one example. Same thing, Norfolk Southern after East Palestine, we’re going to make nice with the shippers, we’re going to make nice with our workers and the report, if you all want to read it, it’s quite lengthy, but what Norfolk Southern is now saying is, yeah, we’re going to strip the company down. We’re going to save a lot of money by cutting out the fat, which means doubling up, pushing on the workforce, requiring more work, less employees and the usual PSR stuff. And so for a while there, precision scheduled railroading was getting a black eye, but time goes by and they sort of concede a little here and there, but the new leadership at Norfolk Southern is simply reasserting.

    Yeah, we’re going to have real PSR like Ancora was demanding and go for the jugular. We’re going for a below a 0.6 operating ratio now. And all of us on the railroad knows what that means. That means job cuts, that means shop consolidations, that means job eliminations, more pressure on workers to get the job done, do more with less, this kind of thing. That’s what the code word is. And so to take up where Hughes Sawyer mentioned Railroad Workers United is in favor of public ownership of the railroad because we just don’t see anything really changing. There’s a few tweaks here and a few tweaks there. Amtrak is suing Norfolk Southern and I believe Union Pacific for failure to run the trains on time. So there’s a little bit of fluff, there’ll be a few concessions made, maybe a few court cases won a few sick days granted here and there, but at its essence, nothing has really changed Max, I think. And if you asked any railroader today, are you happier today than you were back two years ago when that contract fight was on? I would hazard a guess that most are about the same level if not less happy than they were two years ago.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I mean, that’s really sad and sobering to hear, but I think really important for people out there to hear, especially if they’re thinking that we won something and that things have changed. Maybe they’ve bought the sort of PR machine trying to spin that contract as a huge gain. And don’t get me wrong, our listeners were rooting for railroad workers to get that pay bump all the way. But through our interviews with y’all, they understood as you guys helped us understand that the problem is so, so much bigger than a pay raise or a couple sick days. The sickness runs very, very deep. And for anyone continuing to follow it, I would highly recommend that folks follow journalists like Josh Funk who in March was already giving an update for AP. That, to make Ron’s point, is more of the same. I’m just going to read one sentence here.

    This is from March, 2024, quote, “BNSF laid off more than 360 mechanical employees this week, just days after Warren Buffet told shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate that owns the railroad, that he was disappointed in BNFs profits.” So again, more of the same, more cuts deeper to the bone, piling more work onto fewer workers, automating what they want to automate, making the trains longer and heavier to the hazard of workers themselves and the communities whose backyards these trains are bombing through. I definitely want us to do a deeper follow up on this after the election because as we said, regardless of the outcome of this election, right, I mean the new contract bargaining period is coming in 2025. And so I want our listeners and viewers to be fully up to speed on that and to know what they should be looking for and how they can show support.

    But I want to kind of build on this discussion and take us into the heart of darkness as it were. Like we all know that, that we are days away from what may very well end up being the most consequential election in our lifetimes. We hear that every year feels like it may be true this time. And as always, I want to be clear that as a 5 0 1 C3, the real news is not in the business of telling anybody how to vote. We are here to give y’all the information and perspective that you need to act and to make an informed decision for yourself. But as we discussed earlier today, like the railroad workers, as y’all were saying, infamously had your potential strike blocked under the Biden Harris administration in 2022. But I would remind listeners that that was also with full bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, some dissented symbolically, but importantly, but by and large, this was a bipartisan effort, but it happened under the Biden Harris administration.

    And as we discussed in our reporting from that period, the industry, the rail industry itself was further deregulated under the Trump administration. And so we know that railroad workers specifically and union workers in general are not a monolith. And I do not want to ask any of you guys to try to speak for the whole of rail labor or your union or even the company you work for, right? Again, just help us put our ears to the rail here, and what insight can you give us right now into how all of this is shaping your and your fellow railroaders attitudes and approach to the current election. A lot of people on the left, and even people within the world of labor have cited specifically the crushing of the rail strike as a reason not to vote for Harris. But we want to know what do railroaders themselves have to say? How are you guys navigating this moment and what are you hearing your fellow workers talking through as they are navigating this moment as we head into November 5th?

    Ron Kaminkow:

    Well, max, I’d say obviously it’s a mixed bag. It’s not a monolith, whether you’re on the railroad or at UPS or whether you’re a teacher or what have you, a myriad of different political opinions. But first of all, I think it’s important that railroad workers and all us citizens understand that in Biden breaking that strike, he didn’t do it alone. He asked Congress and Congress willingly, both Democrats and Republicans provided the legislation to break the strike. So that’s the first thing. Secondly, we haven’t had a national rail strike in 30 years. The vote in 1992 to break the strike, I believe was 400 to five. And so right off the bat, you know that it was complete bipartisanship, both Democrats and Republicans. So I have a little list here that I think it’s worth everybody, whether you’re a Democrat, republican or what your political persuasion is.

    The great railroad strike of 1877, which was the first general strike in this country, one of the greatest labor uprisings to that point, that strike was largely broken by a Republican Rutherford b Hayes, but it didn’t take long. In 1894, just 17 years later, the great Pullman strike where Eugene Debbs was sent to jail and so forth, and the American Railway Union was destroyed. That was the great Democrat friend of labor, Grover Cleveland, who was president for that one. And then the shaman strike in 1922 that lasted for months. That involved a half a million shaman who maintained diesel or steam locomotives and so forth. Warren Harding Republican businessman intervened in that strike. And then back to 1946, the miners, steelworkers and railroaders all went on strike. The great friend of labor, Harry Truman, Democrat, threatened to draft every railroad worker into the military as a way of breaking that strike.

    Pretty creative, innovative way to break a strike. And then we had 1985 National Strike Reagan, and then 1991, the CSX that developed into a national railroad strike Bush the first. And so now here we are 30 years later or with Biden in effect, breaking that strike. And it’s important for people to understand this just because this bipartisanship of Democrats and Republicans over the course of 150 years, they are doing their job, they’re doing their bidding, whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat, their job is to protect the interests of capital. And railroads have historically been some of the most powerful capitalists in our country. And when they say dance, the government does so and so I think what I’m trying to point out here is I’m not excusing the Biden administration at all for its actions. In fact, he shot himself in the foot. He had the opportunity to very easily state that if there’s a national rail strike, the fault lays squarely at the doorstep of the Class one carriers who won’t even provide a single day of sick time for these hardworking railroaders, 85% who at that time did not have sick time.

    And he could have emerged as a hero. And I think that the National Carriers Conference Committee would’ve simply collapsed and agreed, but no Biden, not only was it offensive, it was just downright stupid politics basically. But hey, he owns it and he has to live with it. But I think it’s important that railroad workers understand. And like I say, everybody understands this has been a bipartisan effort of 150 years of breaking our strikes. And so railroad workers are not happy as a general role with Republicans or Democrats. I was at the founding of US Labor Party back in Cleveland. I think it was 1995 or six. One of the rail unions actually said, enough is enough. We’re tired of seeing our strikes broken. And so the brotherhood and maintenance away employees was present at the founding conventional Labor Party. And it’s just an example of railroad worker frustration that we do not have a party that represents our interests. And I’ll just leave it at that.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Can I follow up on just one quick point there? And I think so appreciative, Ron, that you gave us that deeper historical perspective because Lord knows we need it right now when we’re in this sort of hyper digitalized, fast-paced news cycle where we all have the long-term memories of goldfish, that’s a dangerous place to be. We need to remember history to know how to forge our way ahead into the future. But you said something that I know will really perk our listeners’ ears up, right about the political stupidity of Biden, like asking Congress to break the strike in 22 and how he could have played it differently, which he did when the International Longshoremen Association went on strike just a couple of weeks ago. And so I have to ask the question that’s on my mind I know is on listeners’ minds, and I am not pitting unions against each other. I’m just saying explicitly in a case where Biden handled two consequential strikes very differently, were you guys watching that and thinking, how would your contract potentially have ended up differently if he had approached the rail, strike that way, the way that he vocalized support for the ILA?

    Ron Kaminkow:

    Yeah, I don’t want to hog the show, but I got to answer this. It’s fascinating. And I think a couple things. Biden I think learned a lesson, especially when Sean Fein told him directly, publicly, stay the hell out of our bargaining. Do not mess with us. Unfortunately, in the rail industry, we did not have a union leadership. First of all, we didn’t have a railroad workers union. We had 13 divided largely impotent little sections, but craft by craft that couldn’t speak collectively. That all took separate votes on separate contracts. And so there was no voice of unity to tell Biden to bug out. And hey, between us, I’m convinced that since the rail union leadership did not speak out publicly, not a single one of ’em made a statement that Biden and Congress should stay the hell out of this strike. We did hear that from Sean Fe in the auto workers.

    We did hear this from ILA, had we actually had some real leadership that could have spoke with a unified voice, that could have been militant and told the US government, stay the hell out of our strike. We got this. Let us settle this. They may not have been so quick to intervene and order us back to work. So one could easily postulate that Biden was taking his cues from the rail union leadership. I mean, I hate to say it, but we did not hear a squeak from not a single rail union leader asking the government to stay out. So anyway,

    Mark Burrows:

    I’d like to chime in and then definitely want to hear what Hugh has to say, but while we’re on the subject, I want to back up. First of all, as far as railroad workers’ reaction to Biden saying, oh, I respect the collective bargaining process and I’m not going to invoke Taft Tarley, or whatever the vibe I’ve gotten from talking to workers as well as just online posts. Obviously there’s a lot of cynicism. Many rail workers see right through that. That’s kind of like those who are paying attention. That’s an obvious no brainer. Ron mentioned this, I believe it was 83, there was a BLE strike in 83 that lasted actually three days. We actually had that feeling of being out there and they weren’t trying to run without us. They were taking their beating like men, if I can say that without being out sounding sexist.

    And then Reagan intervened after three days and imposed the presidential Emergency Board recommendations. And I don’t have the exact totals, but I remember distinctly that it was basically like a nine to one ratio. I think the Senate vote was more than 90 to 10, and the house vote was something like 4 55 to 30 or something like that, but I mean easily a nine to one ratio. And so then the next year, the 84 elections, so now the UTU news comes out with its recommendations for their preferred candidates, and most of them are Democrats, some of them are Republicans, but they have the check mark incumbent. And the vast majority of their recommendations were for incumbent senators and representatives who had voted to break this strike back in 83 in the same way they did in so no repercussions. Like Ron was saying, no repercussions, no calling out. This is just like smart TD President Ferguson right before Biden when he was employing his membership to ratify the contract or Biden or the government will. He just said, well, we’ve reached the end of the process, so this is it. We’ve done all we could. And I would argue, no, you haven’t done all you could without challenging, challenging their right, challenging the moral and ethical legitimacy to do this. There’s a whole history of how the Railway Labor Act came into being in the first place was for this very reason to curb railroad militancy.

    And then also, I think it was 2011, the BLE was about to go on strike. I was working the afternoon shift and we were ready to get off our engines at the stroke of midnight. And then Obama, great friend of labor, he issued a presidential back to work order. Now, the only reason that didn’t turn into a big government intervention was because then the BLE just kind of implored its membership to here. You might as well ratify this or they’ll ram it down your throat. And they always hold this threat, ratify this. It’s not the best contract, whether it’s a tentative agreement or ratify before government intervention, I suggest you ratify it because it could always be worse, which is true, just as the government could make a more favorable contract to the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations, the government can always make it worse. So that threat has merit to it.

    And then of course they wield it like a 20 pound sledgehammer. And so after Obama did the last minute, I think he invoked a cooling off period. It had gotten to the point where the last cooling off period was over. And so he invoked one more and then the membership ratified it. But so that was another example of if not direct government intervention, what I always call the gun to the head threat of government intervention. And now both the operating craft unions are just shamelessly encouraging their membership to support Harris thousand as if 2022 didn’t even happen in the same way that the union leadership did back in 84 as if busting the strike back then. So yeah, the history, I think Einstein said continuing to do the same thing while hoping expecting different results is the definition of insanity. So there you have it. Take it away.

    Hugh Sawyer:

    Okay, and let’s see. I don’t know where to start, but right now we’re in an election that I don’t even think what Biden did to us in 2022 is even a thought hardly at this stage of the game because the threat from is my opinion, Donald Trump and the 2025 project and what have you, forget about our pathetic problems in the rail industry. I mean, we’re talking about theoretical dismantling of this country if Donald Trump gets elected. So I think we’re beyond that. Having said that, I feel like a lot of my fellow workers down here in the south rail workers think this is the WWF or something. It’s some kind of entertainment industry. And so a lot of them and down here we’re like sheep. We run around in herds and what have you, and depending on where you live, I now live way out in the country where I grew up in the city.

    They all convinced each other that they’re going to vote for Donald Trump and they’re voting against their own interests, but they’ve convinced themselves that he’s the man and they don’t want that horrible person Kamala Harris up there who’s black and female, let’s be honest. And I’m living in the south. So I want to go back and say something about the rail industry. Ron went through the history of strikes and how they’re broken. What everybody needs to understand is how important we are to the economy when we go on strike, the economy comes to a halt. I mean, stock market is affected on day one. I don’t know if this is still true, but they used to tell us in New York City, 24 hours after the rail industry shuts down, that you’ve got food shortages and what have you. So this is why I think Democrat or Republicans are so anxious to prevent a strike and prevent that economic blow. My thing about Joe Biden and breaking our strike, you could have imposed a lot of what we asked for and the way of work related rules and so on and off time and that sort of thing. He could have imposed a good agreement for the workers and chose not to.

    But in fairness, he’s surrounded by people around him. I just think he was told, Hey, we give him a 25% pay increase that solves all the problems. And he went with it, but he was desperate not to have an economic slowdown. By the way, I’m going to go back to public rail ownership. The amount of freight that we’re moving in this country has been going down for years as a percentage of the freight. That’s ridiculous. These railroads are not operating in a patriotic mode in a, Hey, we’re the basic part of the economy that we keep the whole capitalistic system going. And without that thought process in there, this country, and by the way, a lot of the inflation I think is brought on by the cost of the logistics network. A lot of which those costs increases are due to the railroad just jacking up their prices and performing less for that money.

    And so people need to look at things from a bigger scale than just the rail workers. And really, you could pay all of us a million dollars a year. What few railroad workers are left? And it would still be a pimple on the amount of profits railroads are making. But the greed is, I mean really you’re talking about you want to go to a 50% operating ratio, would you give me a break? And we were making money hands over fist, and it was at 80% what have you. So at some point, that’s why the American public needs to take back the ownership. We gave the railroads, the rails, the land, everything. And in exchange for a common carry, they would carry the goods for everybody. Rural America, the cities, everybody. They have violated their part of that agreement since almost day one, and it’s time to hold them responsible and we need to go in a different direction for the health of the American economy.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, man. And I want us to sort of end this conversation, right, with a kind of, let’s get real, let’s talk strategy here. Let’s talk about how working people of conscience who are trying to do the right thing for themselves, their families, their communities, their country, people who are trying to navigate this, what words can we have to offer them about how to navigate this election and whatever’s coming after it. But I want to just by way of getting there, just ask two clarifying questions here because again, these are questions that I’m seeing come up a lot online in the news. People ask me directly, and it feels like based on what you guys were saying, there are two key points here that I just wanted to ask for a little clarity on. So in one sense, would you say it’s fair that, by and large, the majority of railroad workers are not the majority of railroad who are thinking of voting for Trump or planning to vote for Trump, that they’re not primarily motivated by a feeling of betrayal from the Biden-Harris administration that’s driving them to Trump?

    So that’s kind of just one clarifying question I wanted to pose to you guys. And then the other which, Hugh, it was kind of coming out in what you’re saying, is do you think a lot of folks on the rails are thinking of their votes as a rail worker? What is going to be good for me and my union and the industry? It sounds like what you guys are saying is that in terms of the folks who are planning to vote for Trump, they’re not thinking with that side of their brain. They’re thinking more in this WWE kind of terms that you were saying Hughes. So I wanted to ask if you guys could just comment on both of those before we kind of make the final turn here.

    Hugh Sawyer:

    Well, I’ll jump in and just say, I don’t think the screwing that we got in 2022, and that’s what it was, has any factor today. Everybody’s caught up in the news cycle that everybody’s caught up in on what’s going on today. And they definitely are not looking at it from a union, does this really benefit me as a rail worker and what have you, this may down in the south? I don’t think they’re thinking that at all. And we’re right back to the demoralized place we were two years ago before people got excited and said, wow, we’re going to go on strike and we’re going to really achieve something, and now they’re just back to their hang dog, make another day, and that sort of thing. So that’s my feeling that what happened back two years ago is not a factor today in how people are voting. And I don’t think they’re voting in their own interest. I can’t imagine any worker voting for Donald Trump in that bunch. I mean, really, we’re going to add another 8.2 trillion in debt, which was added under our glorious leader Donald Trump, when he gave that big tax cut to the rich. I mean, when will let anybody get it and somebody’s got to pay taxes in this country, it’d be amusing to me if everybody paid taxes, including the rich. So I don’t know.

    A lot of union people are going to vote against their best interests, but I am hopeful that we’re going to eke it out as we did four years ago. It’s a lesser of two evils, and we can do more to change the Democrat party, I think than we’ll ever be able to with the Republicans who are led by people who are out to great Nazi Germany. In my opinion,

    Mark Burrows:

    My observations are,

    Ron Kaminkow

    Yeah, I’ll second that emotion.

    Mark Burrows:

    Go ahead. Go ahead.

    Ron Kaminkow:

    Well, I was going to say it is the lesser of two evils. This is the game that I personally feel that we’ve been playing my whole adult life when it comes to election time. I rarely have a candidate on the ballot that I’m excited about because I don’t see them as really representing the interest of working people. They’re always beating around the bush, even when they sound pro-union like Biden. Then he does something like goes along with the corporations and breaks a strike. It’s the same old, it’s been happening ever since Jimmy Carter first election that I was party to 44 years ago or what have you. So we got our back against the wall, and we’re looking at a regime potentially that could assume power in January that has shown itself to be somewhat fascist in nature. The Hugh alluded to that 2025 project of the Heritage Foundation that Trump has now said he doesn’t know anything about, but of course he does.

    And all of his big time supporters are very excited about implementing such a thing. But railroad workers, like many workers aren’t necessarily in tune with what their interests are. And politics is complicated. And so yeah, we had this horrible guy, Ron Bori, who was head of the FRA, and he was all for single person crews, and he was all for granting waivers to the industry and getting rid of long-term safety regulations during covid on trumped up reasons. Grant given by the carriers, RO Batory lifelong, CEO of rail corporations was ready to give the industry everything it wanted. He was a Trump appointee. He could come back and if not him, someone just as bad if not worse. But people don’t necessarily connect these kind of dots, max, it’s really a shame. Elaine Chow, head of the Department of Transportation comes out of a big billionaire shipping magnet family.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of Pete Buttigieg, but God damnit. I mean, at least the guy isn’t from some billionaire shipping company who’s obviously going to side with the interest of big shippers. And so same with Pori, CEO, Amit Bose, he is what he is at the FRA, but he’s a hell of a lot better than having a CEO. These are the people we bargain with. These are the people who have implemented precision scheduled railroading. These are the people who want to eliminate crews, eliminate jobs, combine shop facilities, get rid of all of us if they had their way and gave us precision scheduled railroading. We don’t want those people heading up these agencies. And of course, when you have a billionaire president who’s very favorably disposed to all of his wealthy friends, this is exactly what we’re going to get. I don’t think Emett Bowes is great. I don’t think Pete Buttigieg is great at head of the DOT, and I could go on and on. But at times we have to look at the situation and just go, if you’re going to play the game, choose the one that’s going to hurt you the least. And right now that happens to be the Harris ticket.

    Mark Burrows:

    I just want to chime in, in my observations and discussions and posts, there is an element, some rails do have an andi-Biden hatred, and I saw one discussion Trump’s talking to Trump. Trump and Musk want to fire all workers who strike, and then, oh, well, at least he wouldn’t do what Biden did or whatever. So what’s going on there is what’s going on all over the country where workers are forced to make this choice. I mean, I go back to the first election I really paid attention to, like Ron was talking about 44 years ago with Reagan against Carter. And that’s when I came of age politically, and that’s when I became convinced of the need for an independent political party based on it. I organized militant trade union movement. And so I’ve been advocating for that for 44 years. But these last three election cycles has been Trump versus a lame Democrat Clinton, who in my opinion, if they had not stolen the nomination from Sanders, there’s a very good chance that Sanders could have beat Trump because so many of these workers who had voted for Obama and then got disillusioned about that, they voted for Trump.

    Sanders, I believe, could have won some of those voters. So then four years later, Trump and Biden, now Trump and Harris, just a female version of Biden. And so people held their nose to vote for Clinton, and people held their nose to vote for Biden. And now people, some are going to hold their nose to vote for Harris, and some are so repulsed by them that they don’t even care about Trump. And then some will sit it out and who knows where we land. But we cannot allow ourselves to continue this cycle of, I mean, this is lesser equalism on steroids, maxed out circuits, overblowing. I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that the more of us that are convinced of the need for an independent political party, how we get there, what form it takes, we have to figure it out.

    But the more of us that are convinced of that, we can start collectively having that discussion. And then if our union leaders don’t support that and help push it along, then we have to find, develop leaders from our own ranks to help make that happen. But this, I’m not an expert on the history of Nazi Germany and fascism, but the basic common thread is Hitler wasn’t taken seriously until, and the social Democrats were too impotent to mount any challenge. And I don’t want to be, fascism is around the corner, but there’s a common thread, okay, that’s the direction they want to go. And the Democrats have proven themselves incapable of mounting any resistance, and we could end up with Trump, and who knows where that will take us. But whoever ends up, we need to organize and resist, organize, resist, and ultimately come together and form an independent political party, use our numerical majority and our economic power and figure it out. Because we can run this show a whole lot. I’ll leave it there

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Workers can run this shit way better than the billionaire class. Of that I am certain. And I appreciate as always your guys’ incredible insight and passion, and I just really hope that folks out there are taking everything that you say to heart. And I just, yeah, on a personal level, just really appreciate the kind of sober but principled kind of analysis that I always get from you guys because folks need that regardless of what sort of political tradition you’ve come out of where in the country you are right now, right? We’ve got to look at this situation soberly and not as Hugh was saying, sort of get caught up in that kind of herd mentality or the kind of online rage fueled sort of manufactured consent. I mean, if you feel yourself getting unmoored from that and you feel yourself being led where the media wants you to follow and where these politicians want you to go, take a step back, center yourself, listen to your fellow workers, talk to the people around you, have these kinds of conversations now before it’s too late.

    And in that vein, guys, I want to just sort of build on the great points that y’all were making and sort of look forward here. As we said, we’re going to have y’all back on, have more brothers and sisters from the rails on to talk about the contract fight coming up and where we can as a working class, kind of learn from our past mistakes, learn from 2022, so that we’re forging ahead into the future, having learned those lessons and being better prepared for what’s coming. I know our listeners feel that. I know you guys at RWU are always planning, organizing, mobilizing in that direction, and we’re going to talk about that in a future episode. But we’re recording this on October 30th, and this is going to come out just days ahead of the election itself, which is taking place less than a week from now.

    And as you guys have laid out in brutal detail, our political system sucks. And the system wide change that we need as working people is not going to come from elections alone. We know that we need to understand that, but the results of elections still shape the ground upon which we live and work and organize. And so when it comes to addressing the ongoing crisis on the railroads, the crisis of democracy that we’re in, the corporate destruction of the supply chain, and all the threats that poses to workers and to our communities, like what role do electoral politics have to play in that struggle? And what would you guys say to your fellow workers out there listening to this about how working class folks need to proceed strategically within and outside of the electoral system to advance our interests?

    Ron Kaminkow:

    Max, I think there’s a lot of examples from history, not just in this country, but in countries around the world where without a social movement to propel the political, the electoral struggle forward, you’re kind of pissing up a rope. I mean, everyone says FDR changed the country and this and that, or Lyndon Johnson facilitated the Civil rights movement. But had there not been a movement on the ground in both instances in the thirties and in the fifties and sixties, nothing would’ve changed. And so if you put all your eggs, the basket of electoral change, I think you’re doomed to failure. By the same token within the unions, if you elect reformers in my union, the brotherhood of locomotive engineers and trainmen, we actually do have one member, one vote. Very few unions in this country have that, and we deposed a long-term President Dennis Pierce, and replaced him with somebody else. It looks good on paper, but without a movement in our union that a caucus that’s organized to pressure the new president and to make sure that he moves in a direction that’s more accountable to the members and starts to take creative action and break from this bureaucratic srait jacket that we’re in.

    You are just tweedle dee and tweedle dumb. And I think the same thing holds. One of the most unfortunate things that I’ve experienced in my life is that most people, unfortunately, are looking for a savior. And whether that savior is Jesus Christ or Muhammad, or whether that savior is a partner or that savior is a politician or a union leader, or a rich, wealthy person like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, unfortunately people don’t understand that the only way change is really going to come is, and when I say we, I mean tens of millions of regular working class people take matters into our own hands. We’re not just going to go vote next week and everything’s going to be okay no matter what we believe and who we vote for. Everybody has to sort of grow up and take responsibility and understand that politics isn’t something you do every four years in a voting booth.

    Politics is something you do every day. You wake up and you say, what do I do today to further the cause of my class, of my neighborhood, of the people that I’m in this world with, that I identify with? And so you go to your union meeting and you go to the picket, you go to the rally, you raise hell. And I don’t think we’re ever going to get out of the quagmire that we’re in and less and until a critical mass of tens of millions of common regular, everyday working people inside and outside of unions start to basically say, we are going to take action. This is what happened in the 1930s. Workers spontaneously started taking over factories and this is how the modern labor movement was born. Modern labor movement didn’t come about by a bunch of bureaucrats spending a bunch of money and calling elections. Literally millions of workers occupied factories went on general strikes built a solidarity and a momentum that literally changed the body politic of this country. And that’s what we need to do I think going forward, no matter who wins this election that is on our agenda as working class people.

    Mark Burrows:

    I just want to add on my personal hero, and I know I’m not alone. Eugene Debs not only for his rail labor organizing, but his relentless fight to his dying day for social justice and for a better world of peace, justice inequality. And he fought and advocated tirelessly to build this kind of movement that Ron is talking about. And one of the things when he was trying to inspire people to build this kind of movement, he would say, don’t take my word for it. Go research it yourself. Go learn and study the facts yourself about how this system works, about how this all works and what’s really at play here. What’s really going on. And if you do that, then I’m confident that you’ll arrive at the same conclusions that I have. And so I mean 44 years ago I was just a hotheaded rebel without a clue. But I had mentors to start opening my eyes about what was possible.

    I had a lifetime of ideological brainwashing that I had to unlearn just like, well what about this? What about that? And back then I needed mentors and then books to learn and study to undo and unlearn what all the propaganda that, because these corporations that we talk about, they also control the mainstream mean media. They control the flow of information. Today we’re blessed with outlets like with yourself, the Real News Network and others, democracy Now and others, where people who are beginning to question can go and learn the truth. Your series on the Middle East under the Shadow, so much important information and education. And so Ron was talking about the responsibility. We have a responsibility educate ourselves because only then can we make informed decisions. If we’re just buying the boss’s propaganda, then this is what we’re left with Trump against Harris. So there is a responsibility to think for ourselves and then we can act in an informed manner in our best interest. I’ll just leave it there.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Sorry, Hugh, I muted you one more time. I apologize.

    Hugh Sawyer:

    I don’t blame you for muting me, but well, let’s just say at least something positive. We’re stuck with this two party system and we can talk all we want about a third party and what have you. And I certainly advocate that. But right now there’s no reason why we can’t take, I believe, a portion of the Democrat Party and move it over to our way of thinking. And we have to exist in the political system as it exists and we need to, instead of just talking about it, we need to start putting forth candidates in the system that exists.

    And I mean, you have some people like AOC and what have you. I mean there are people out there and I don’t necessarily agree with every, there’s nobody I agree with a hundred percent, but I appreciate people that are trying to lead us in a different direction and I have no problem throwing my support behind ’em. And the issue for me is finding more candidates that support our positions who are workers or have been workers themselves and let’s start putting them in the office. I fully admire the Republican party in that they have gone out for years now on a grassroots campaign to take over school boards and on up. And now they’re able to impose the Supreme Court justices on the whole country and what have you because they put their mind to it. So we’ve got the example in front of us that a group of people can make a change. I don’t think theirs was a change we wanted to make, but for the interest of people. But we can respond to that. And the Democrat party has not been doing a good job in responding to it. But I think we can force ’em to.

    So I just want to say that it’s not hopeless. We can affect change in this country.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Boeing workers to vote on 38% pay rise offer to end weeks-long strike

    Striking workers to vote Monday on contract that includes 38 percent pay rise and $12,000 ratification bonus.

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • Allying with Trump, Elon Musk is the latest billionaire to seek gov’t power

    Tesla and SpaceX CEO is eyeing a position as 'Secretary of Cost Cutting' if Republican prevails in November 5 election.

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • WaPo Says Not to Worry About Climate Disruption’s Disastrous Costs: Reassuring report based on long-debunked climate contrarian

     

    WaPo: The real reason billion-dollar disasters like Hurricane Helene are growing more common

    The Washington Post (10/24/24) claims that “the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.”

    As the country begins to vote in an election that will be hugely consequential for the climate crisis, the central task of news outlets’ climate beats should be informing potential voters of those consequences. Instead, the Washington Post‘s “Climate Lab” seems to be working hard to cast doubt on whether climate change is really causing weather disasters to be more expensive.

    In a lengthy piece (10/24/24) headlined “The Real Reason Billion-Dollar Disasters Like Hurricane Helene Are Growing More Common,” Post Climate Lab columnist Harry Stevens highlighted a NOAA chart depicting a notable increase in billion-dollar weather disasters hitting the US that he says is widely used by government reports and officials “to help make the case for climate policies.” But, in fact, Stevens tells readers:

    The truth lies elsewhere: Over time, migration to hazard-prone areas has increased, putting more people and property in harm’s way. Disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.

    The takeaway is clear: The (Democratic) government is lying to you about the supposedly devastating impacts of climate change.

    Distorting with cherry-picked data

    The problem is, it’s Stevens’ story that’s doing the misleading. It relies heavily on the work of one source, Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime climate contrarian beloved by climate denial right-wingers, who cherry-picks data to distort the truth.

    What’s worse, from a media critic’s perspective, is that it’s not even a new story; it’s been debunked multiple times over the years. Pielke—a political scientist, not a climate scientist, which Stevens never makes clear—has been promoting this tale since 1998, when he first published a journal article that purported to show that, as Stevens describes, “after adjusting damage to account for the growth in people and property, the trend [of increasing economic costs from weather disasters] disappears.”

    Science: Fixing the Planet?

    A review of Roger Pielke’s book The Climate Fix in the journal Science (11/26/10) accused him of writing “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.”

    When Pielke published the argument in his 2010 book, the journal Science (11/26/10) published a withering response, describing the chapter as “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.” It detailed the multiple methodological problems with Pielke’s argument:

    He makes “corrections” for some things (notably, more people putting themselves in harm’s way) but not others. Some adjustments, such as for hurricane losses for the early 20th century, in which the dollar value goes up several hundred–fold, are highly flawed. But he then uses this record to suggest that the resulting absence of trends in damage costs represents the lack of evidence of a climate component. His record fails to consider all tropical storms and instead focuses only on the rare land-falling ones, which cause highly variable damage depending on where they hit. He completely ignores the benefits from improvements in hurricane warning times, changes in building codes, and other factors that have been important in reducing losses. Nor does he give any consideration to our understanding of the physics of hurricanes and evidence for changes such as the 2005 season, which broke records in so many ways.

    Similarly, in discussing floods, Pielke fails to acknowledge that many governing bodies (especially local councils) and government agencies (such as the US Army Corps of Engineers) have tackled the mission of preventing floods by building infrastructure. Thus even though heavy rains have increased disproportionately in many places around the world (thereby increasing the risk of floods), the inundations may have been avoided. In developing countries, however, such flooding has been realized, as seen for instance this year in Pakistan, China and India. Other tenuous claims abound, and Pielke cherry-picks points to fit his arguments.

    That year, climate expert Joe Romm (Climate Progress, 2/28/10) called Pielke “the single most disputed and debunked person in the entire realm of people who publish regularly on disasters and climate change.”

    Debunked a decade ago

    538: MIT Climate Scientist Responds on Disaster Costs And Climate Change

    In response to Pielke, climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (538, 3/31/14) pointed out that it’s not necessarily appropriate to normalize damages by gross domestic product (GDP) if the intent is to detect an underlying climate trend,” since “GDP increase does not translate in any obvious way to damage increase,” as “wealthier countries can better afford to build stronger structures and to protect assets.”

    Pielke peddled the story in 538 (3/19/14) four years later—and lost his briefly held job as a contributor for it, after the scientific community spoke out against it in droves, as not being supported by the evidence.

    The backlash led 538 to give MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (3/31/14) a column to rebut Pielke, in which she explained that while it’s of course true that “changing demographics” have impacted the economic costs of weather disasters, Pielke’s data didn’t support his assertion “that climate change has played no role in the observed increase in damages.” She pointed to the same kinds of methodological flaws that Science did, noting that her own research with Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn projected that through the year 2100, “global hurricane damage will about double owing to demographic trends, and double again because of climate change.”

    That all happened ten years ago. So why is Pielke’s same old ax-grinding getting a platform at the Washington Post shortly before Election Day?

    Stevens does tell readers—quite far down in the article—that Pielke has “clashed with other scientists, journalists and government officials” over his research—though Stevens doesn’t give any details about those clashes, or about Pielke’s reputation among climate scientists more generally.

    Stevens also briefly notes that Pielke was recently hired by the American Enterprise Institute, which Stevens characterizes as “center-right,” but more helpfully might have characterized as “taking millions from ExxonMobil since 1998.” But in the same paragraph, Stevens also takes pains to point out that Pielke says he’s planning to vote for Harris, as if to burnish Pielke’s climate-believer bonafides.

    Pielke agrees with Pielke

    Roger Pielke (Breakthrough Institute)

    Roger Pielke “agrees with studies that agree with Pielke” (Environmental Hazards, 10/12/20).

    Stevens tells Post readers that the science is firmly on Pielke’s side:

    Similar studies have failed to find global warming’s fingerprint in economic damage from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and crop losses. Of 53 peer-reviewed studies that assess economic damage from weather events, 52 could not attribute damage trends to global warming, according to Pielke’s 2020 review of the literature, the most recent and comprehensive.

    You’ll notice Stevens just used Pielke’s own review to bolster Pielke’s argument. But the journal that published that review (Environmental Hazards, 8/5/20) immediately followed up with the publication of a critique (10/12/20) from researchers who came to the opposite conclusion in their study on US hurricanes. They explained that there are “fundamental shortcomings in this literature,” which comes from a disaster research “field that is currently dominated by a small group of authors” who mostly use the same methodology—adjusting historical economic losses based strictly on “growth in wealth and population”—that Pielke does.

    The authors, who wrote a study that actually accounted for this problem and did find that economic losses from hurricanes increased over time after accounting for increases in wealth and population, point out that Pielke dismissed their study and two others that didn’t agree with his own results essentially because they didn’t come to the same conclusions. As the authors of the critique write drily: “Pielke agrees with studies that agree with Pielke.”

    A phony ‘consensus’

    Stevens includes in his article an obligatory line that experts say

    disputing whether global warming’s influence can be found in the disaster data is not the same as questioning whether climate change is real or whether society should switch from fossil fuels.

    He also adds that

    ​​many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.

    Note that he frames it as only “many,” and suggests they are only using (faulty, simplistic) logic, not science. But of course, climate change is intensifying extreme weather, as even Stevens has reported as fact recently (in the link he provides in that passage). In contrast, Stevens writes that

    the consensus among disaster researchers is that the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.

    But in fact, as mentioned above, there’s not consensus even among disaster researchers (who are primarily economists). And the “many scientists” who disagree with Pielke aren’t the scientists the Post chooses to focus on. While Stevens quotes a number of different experts, including some who disagree with Pielke, they are not given anywhere near the space—or credence—Pielke and his arguments are. (Pielke’s name appears 15 times across the article and its captions.)

    When he does get around to quoting some of the scientists, like MIT’s Emanuel, whose research shows that extreme weather events are intensifying, Stevens presents the conflicting conclusions as a back-and-forth of claims and counterclaims, giving the last word in that debate to a disaster researcher whose goal is to refocus blame for disasters on political decisions—like supporting building in vulnerable locations—rather than climate change.

    Changes in our built environment, and governments’ impact on those changes, are certainly an important subject when it comes to accounting for and preventing billion-dollar disasters—which virtually no one disputes. (Indeed, the four government reports Stevens links to in his second paragraph as supposedly misusing the NOAA data explicitly name some variation of “increased building and population growth” as a contributing factor to growing costs.) It’s simply not an either/or question, as the Post‘s teaser framed it: “Many blame global warming. Others say disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.” So it’s bizarre and frankly dangerous that ten years after climate scientists debunked Pielke’s claim that there’s no evidence climate change is increasing extreme weather costs, Stevens would take, as the “urgent” question of the moment, “Is global warming to blame” for the growing billion-dollar disaster tally?

    By giving the impression that the whole thing is basically a government scam to justify climate policies, Stevens’ direct implication is that even if climate change is indisputable, it doesn’t really matter. And it feeds into climate deniers’ claims that the climate change-believing government is lying about climate change and its impacts, at a time when a large number of those deniers are seeking office.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

    Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • As Trump and Harris Tout Their Economic Records, What Do the Numbers Say?

    There’s an old saying that goes, “If you put 10 economists in a room, you’ll get 11 opinions.” The data, meanwhile, shows that if you ask U.S. voters how they feel about the economy, their opinions will largely fall along party lines: Democrats with a Democratic president are more likely to say the economy is good, and vice versa. Voters also rank the economy as their most important issue when…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • EU hikes tariffs on Chinese EVs, prompting rebuke from Beijing

    China's Commerce Ministry promises to take 'all necessary measures' to protect the interests of Chinese firms.

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • US tech stocks send Nasdaq to hit record high, as Alphabet beats forecasts

    Tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index rises 0.8 percent as investors bet on strong earnings from Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.

    This post was originally published on Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera.

  • White Men Get Short End of Stick—in NYT Chart, if Not in Reality

    It’s supremely unhelpful of the New York Times (Upshot, 10/26/24) to compare income of white men without college degrees to white, Black, Latine and Asian-American women with college degrees:

    The Times provided no similar graphic making the more natural comparison between white men without college degrees and Black, Latine or Asian-American men without college degrees. Why not?

    Someone who did make that comparison is University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen, who has a blog called Family Inequality (10/27/24). Maybe you won’t be surprised to find that not only are white men without college degrees not uniquely disadvantaged, they’re actually better paid than any other demographic without a college degree.  White men with college degrees, meanwhile, are at the top of the income scale, along with Asian-American men with college degrees.

    Family Inequality: Relative Income of US Workers

    As Cohen writes, the way the New York Times presented the data “is basically the story of rising returns to education, turned into a story of race/gender grievance.” That fits in with the Times‘ long history (e.g., FAIR.org, 12/16/16, 3/30/18 , 11/1/19, 11/7/19) of trying to explain to liberals why they should learn to love white resentment.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.