On Jan. 19, 2025, a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel went into effect—and, for an all-too-brief moment, the slaughter in Gaza halted. TRNN was on the ground in Gaza speaking with displaced Palestinians about their reactions to the ceasefire, the incalculable losses and horrors they had experienced during the previous 15 months, and their hopes for the future once they returned to the ruins of their homes. “I haven’t seen my family for 430 days,” journalist Mustafa Zarzour says. “I’ve been literally waiting for the moment to see my family—since the beginning of the war.”
Since the filming of this report, Israel broke the ceasefire agreement and re-launched its assault on Gaza, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stating that Israel had “resumed combat in full force.” Netanyahu further stated Israel’s intent this week to conquer and control the Gaza Strip, adding that Gaza’s remaining Palestinian population “will be moved.” According to the UN, 90% of Gaza’s remaining population have been forced from their homes, and no aid has been allowed into the Gaza Strip since March 2, 2025—the longest period of aid blockage since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
Producer: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt Videographer: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi Video Editor: Leo Erhardt
Transcript
Khalil Khater:
Honestly, I felt happy but not so much. You feel like your heart is split. I mean, it’s true people are returning to their homes, but I don’t have a home. And still, it’s bittersweet. I lost my brother and his children. It felt like he died again when they announced the ceasefire.
Mother of the Martyr Mohammed Wadi:
A huge joy that can’t be described—I was overjoyed. The first thing I thought was: I will find my son and bury him. I want to go to Gaza City, find my house and bury my son and look for reminders of him—pictures, or some mementos of him. Anything really, that has his scent. God is greater. God is greater. God is greater. There is no God but Allah.
Mustafa Zarzour – journalist:
Frankly, there are mixed feelings. Between joy and the fact that we have forgotten the meaning of joy. Because we’ve spent 470 days witnessing bloodshed, air strikes, explosions, displacement. But today, something has returned to us—something like joy. Despite all the blood and all the loss—we have all lost—I lost my brother. This joy is because despite all that happened we are still steadfast.
Mohammed Rayan – Head of Admissions, Shuhada Al Aqsa Hospital:
Frankly, our pain is vast and our wounds are big, there’s not really a lot of room for joy, honestly. What we will do is visit the graves of our martyrs and pay our respects to them. Our feelings swing between happiness and despair, pain and loss, hope, and the immense suffering that our people will continue to endure in the coming days. The loss—because there is no home in the Gaza Strip that has not suffered loss.
Khalil Khater:
I love your uncle and your cousins, sweetheart. OK, I’ll stop crying—for you. We’ll go to Gaza, God willing, and see your grandpa. You can play with your cousins, because you miss them a lot, right?
Chantings:
God is greater. God is greater.
Mother of the Martyr Mohammed Wadi:
I lost my brother, my son, and my brother’s children. I lost two brothers who were taken prisoner. My family had already lost 18 martyrs. My mother, the embrace of my loving mother. My siblings in the North, I’ve missed them so much.
Khalil Khater:
What did the war take? First it took my health. I’m really exhausted. It took the most important people from me. It took them. That’s what it took from me. I lost my work—I was a kindergarten teacher. I lost my home, where I used to feel safe, where I raised my children. Life in a tent is really, really hard. And I lost my brother, of course I can’t get him back, only memories remain. God rest his soul. God rest his soul. Praise be to God in every circumstance.
Rayef Mustafa Al Adadla:
I shall search for my second martyred son, who hasn’t been buried. Then we will return to our homes and fill them. We will rebuild them to say: we rebuild our nation, no matter what the occupation destroys.
Khalil Khater:
I don’t want to return to our old neighborhood because that’s it—we were kicked out of our home. There’s no place for us there. Our neighborhood was near the border, there are a lot of houses that were destroyed, and the building we were in was bombed many times. The tower block next to us was also bombed repeatedly.
Rayef Mustafa Al Adadla:
My house is destroyed, but I will return to it. Despite all the circumstances, I will set up a tent on its ruins or beside it. I will stay on my land, beside my house. We won’t go far. We won’t abandon Gaza, and we won’t emigrate, because we are steadfast—like the mountains. We will stay beside it in the same area, God willing.
Mustafa Zarzour – journalist:
Our house was struck six times. It’s just rubble now, but we will organize this rubble and build again, God willing. What will I find? I’ll find rubble. Blood mixed with rubble. I’ll find ashes. I’ll find… body parts. I won’t find any people, but I’ll return, rebuild it, and live there. We will thank God and continue with our lives. We will move forward, get married, have children—all of us will do this, God willing.
Mother of the Martyr Mohammed Wadi:
My house was destroyed early in the war, on day four. I think I’ll find it bulldozed. I hope I will find some photos of my son. Some of his belongings, to remind us of him. All will be well, God willing. We’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time.
Khalil Khater:
We’ve been waiting for a ceasefire for a long time. I didn’t sleep all night. I waited until 08:30 to hear them announce a ceasefire.
Mother of the Martyr Mohammed Wadi:
One and a half years. From the beginning of the war, I kept saying: “Tomorrow it will be over, tomorrow it will be over.” Hopefully—thank God—today, it’s over. God willing.
Mustafa Zarzour – journalist:
I haven’t seen my family for 430 days. I’ve been literally waiting for the moment to see my family—since the beginning of the war. From day one, I’ve been praying for it to end. We go, we come back again. We’ve been waiting to return for 470 days. Today, the feelings… I literally don’t know how to describe them. Beyond description. Peace means the oppressor and occupier leave all of Palestine—not just Gaza, and not just a ceasefire. Because this is a war of extermination. A war of extermination—where they committed every kind of war crime. It’s not two states. There is only one Palestine. They are the brutal occupier. So our peace is when the occupation leaves.
Mother of the Martyr Mohammed Wadi:
Peace and safety mean no massacres, no bodies, no mass extermination. No martyrs, no jets, no drones, no tanks.
Mustafa Zarzour – journalist:
God rest his soul—my older brother, who was my father’s successor, died. I want to see his kids. His kids are now my responsibility. So the first thing I want to do is see my brother’s children.
Khalil Khater:
When I truly believe that the war is over, I will go and throw myself into my mother’s arms. I don’t know… I’m sure that Gaza City will have changed. All its landmarks will have changed.
As news of Operation Sindoor broke on May 7, a 21-second video featuring several men and hijab-clad women running helter-skelter amid some debris was widely shared on social media claiming that the footage shows the aftermath of Indian air strikes.
A fortnight after a terrorist attack in Pahalgam had killed 26 people, Indian Armed Forces in the early hours of May 7 hit nine sites containing terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and PoK from where attacks against India had been planned and directed. The Union ministry of defence described the action as “focused, measured and non-escalatory in nature”, with no Pakistani military facilities having been targeted.
An X-user, Janardan Mishra (@janardanspeaks), shared the video clip with a caption, which can be roughly translated as, “He who has entered your house and dug your grave is Modiji, sitting on the throne in Delhi.” The caption is suggestive of the condition of the people seen in the video to be from Pakistan. (Archive)
घर में घुसकर मारा है कब्र तुम्हारी खोदी है
दिल्ली की गद्दी पर बैठा बाप तुम्हारा मोदी है। pic.twitter.com/zas1Usfn1v
X user Deepak Sharma (@SonOfBharat7), who amplifies misinformation and propaganda on a regular basis, also shared the video praising Indian Army for their display of valour. In the tweet, Sharma quipped that India first suspended water supply to Pakistan and then “set it on fire.” He further claimed that Pakistanis was now praying to Allah to save them — especially from Prime Minister Modi.
वाह्ह्हह्ह्ह्ह.. अनामिका जी
सिंदूर को बारूद बनाकर आतंकों की खान में,,
रोक के पानी आग लगा दी पापी पाकिस्तान में..
On Facebook, a user named Ayesha SDhar shared the same video and claimed that it showed the condition of Pakistan’s Bahawalpur in the morning after the air strike. (Archive)
According to the profile bio, Nour is from Gaza, and the video footage featured the destruction caused by Israeli strikes in Gaza.
To ascertain this further, we performed another keyword search and came across an Al Jazeera news report dated April 4 with the headline, “More than 30 people killed by Israel as Gaza supplies run out”. The report contained a video from the same location with people running in all direction in utter confusion.
To sum up, the video in question depicts an unknown location Gaza following an Israeli strike on April 4. The video has no connection with India, Pakistan, or Operation Sindoor. The social media claims surrounding the clip are false.
World-renowned political cartoonist Dwayne Booth, more commonly known as Mr. Fish, has found himself in the crosshairs of the new McCarthyist assault on free expression and higher education. While employed as a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, Booth became a target of Zionist and pro-Israel critics, and his work became a flashpoint of controversy in the months leading up to his firing in March. Facing charges that certain cartoons contained anti-Semitic tropes, J. Larry Jameson, interim president of the University of Pennsylvania, denounced Booth’s illustrations as “reprehensible.”
In a statement about his firing, Booth writes: “The reality – and something that, unfortunately, is not unique to Penn – is that colleges and universities nationwide have been way too complicit with the largely Republican-led efforts to target students and faculty members engaged in any and all speech rendered in support of trans/black/immigrant, and women’s rights, free speech, the independent press, academic freedom, and medical research – speech that also voices bold criticism of right-wing nationalism, genocide, apartheid, fascism, and specifically the Israeli assault on Palestine.”
In this special edition of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc sits down with Booth in the TRNN studio in Baltimore to discuss the events that led to his firing, the purpose and effects of political art, and how to respond to the repressive crackdown on art and dissent as genocide is unfolding and fascism is rising.
Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s great to have you all with us.
A wave of authoritarian oppression has gripped colleges and universities. Life on campus looks in some ways similar but in other ways very intensely different than it did when I was a young man in the 1960s. International students like Mahmoud, Khalil are being abducted on the street and disappeared by ICE agents in broad daylight, and hundreds of student visas have been abruptly revoked. Faculty and graduate students are being fired, expelled, and doxxed online. From Columbia University to Harvard, Northwestern to Cornell, the Trump administration is holding billions of dollars of federal grants and contracts hostage in order to bend universities to Trump’s will and to squash our constitutional protected rights to free speech and free assembly.
Now, while the administration has justified these unprecedented attacks as necessary to root out so-called woke scours like diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and trans athletes playing college sports, the primary justification they’ve cited is combating antisemitism on campuses, which the administration has recategorized to mean virtually any criticism, opposition to Israel, its political ideolog, Zionism, and Israel’s US-backed obliteration of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Now, our guest today is Dwayne Booth, more commonly known as Mr. Fish, has found himself in the crosshairs of this top-down political battle to reshape higher education in our country. Booth is a world-renowned political cartoonist based in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in venues like Harvard’s Magazine, The Nation, The Village Voice, The Atlantic. Until recently, he was a lecturer at the Annenberg School [for] Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. And just days after the Trump administration announced it was freezing $175 million in federal funds depend, Booth was fired.
Booth’s work has become a flashpoint of controversy in the months leading up to his firing, facing charges that certain cartoons he made contained antisemitic tropes. J. Larry Jameson, interim president of the University of Pennsylvania, denounced Booth’s illustrations as reprehensible.
In a statement about his firing posted on his Patreon page on March 20, Booth wrote this: “The reality and something that, unfortunately, is not unique to Penn is that colleges and universities nationwide have been way too complicit with largely Republican-led efforts to target students and faculty members engaged in any and all speech rendered in support of trans, Black, immigrants, and women’s rights, free speech, the independent press, academic freedom, and medical research, speech that also voices bold criticism of right-wing nationalism, genocide, apartheid, fascism, and specifically the Israeli assault on Palestine.
Today we’re going straight to the heart of the matter, and we’re speaking with Mr. Fish himself right here in The Real News Studio. Welcome. Good to have you with us.
Dwayne Booth:
Great to be here.
Marc Steiner:
So I gotta ask you this question first. Just get it out of the way. So where did the fish come from?
Dwayne Booth:
Oh my gosh. Well, that’s a long tale. I attempted to name my mother, had gotten my stepfather a new bird for Father’s Day. And this was right after I dropped out of college and was living in the back of my parents’ house and fulfilling the dream of every parent to have their son return. I’m not getting a job, I’m going to draw cartoons, and my real name is Dwayne Booth, and I wasn’t going to start. I started to draw cartoons just as a side, and I couldn’t sign it “Booth” because George Booth was the main cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine, and I couldn’t just write “Dwayne” because it was too Cher or Madonna, I wasn’t going to go for just this straight first name.
So I attempted to name this new bird that came into the house. My mother asked for names and I said, Mr. Fish is the best name for a pet bird, and she rejected it. So I said, I’ll use it. And I signed all my cartoons “Mr. Fish”, and I immediately got published. And one of the editors, in fact, who published me immediately had pretended to follow me for 30 years. Mr. Fish, I can’t believe Mr. Fish finally sent us. Oh, it was locked in. I had to be Mr. Fish.
Marc Steiner:
I love it. I love it. So the work you’ve been doing, first of all, it’s amazing that a person without artistic training creates these incredible, complicated, intricate cartoons. Clearly it’s just innate inside of you.
You have this piece you did, I dunno why this one keeps sticking in my head, but the “Guernica” piece, which takes on the Trump administration and puts their figures in the place of the original work, to talk about that for a minute, how you came to create that, and why you use “Guernica”?
Dwayne Booth:
Well, it’s called “Eternal Damn Nation”. And one of the things that we should be responsible and how we communicate our dismay to other people. Now, what we attempt to do as artists is figure out the quickest path to make your point. So we tend to utilize various iconic images or things from history that will get the viewer to a certain emotional state and then piggyback the modern version on top of it, and also challenge the whole notion that these kinds of injustices have been happening over and over and over again. Because the Picasso piece is about fascism. Guess what? Guess what’s happening now? So you want to use those things to say that this might refer to a historical truism from the past, but it has application now, and it speaks to people, as you said, it resonated. Why did it resonate? Because it seems like a blunt version of truth that we have to contend with.
Marc Steiner:
So when you draw your pieces, before we go to Israel Palestine, I want to talk about Trump for a moment. Trump has been a target of your cartoons from the beginning. And the way he’s portrayed eating feces — Can I say the other word? Eating shit and just having shit all over him, a big fat slob and a beast of a fascist. Talk about your own image of this man, why you portray him this way. What do you think he represents here at this moment?
Dwayne Booth:
Well, it’s interesting because, in many ways, what I try to do with the images, the cartoons that you’re referring to, is, yes, I try to make it as obscene as I possibly can because the reality is also obscene. So I always want to challenge somebody who might look at something like that and say, oh my gosh, I don’t want to look at it. It’s important to look at these things.
The reality is, yes, I create these metaphors, eating shit and being a very lethal buffoon and clown. Those, to me, are the metaphors for something that is actually more dangerous. He’s being enabled by a power structure and being legitimized by these power brokers that surround him to enact real misery in America and the rest of the world, so you don’t want to treat somebody respectfully who is doing that. You want to say, this is shit. This is bullshit. This is an obscenity that we have to not shy away from and face it.
And if it is that ugly, if the metaphor is that ugly, again, challenge me to say that I should be respecting this person in a different way, should be pulling my punches. No, no. We should be going full-throated dissent against this kind of person and this kind of movement because it is an obscenity and we have to do something about it.
Marc Steiner:
The way you portray what’s happening in this country at this moment in many of your cartoons, in many of your works, Trump next door with Hitler, Trump as a figure with his middle finger to the air, all of that, when you do these things. How do you think about transient that into political action?
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that’s one of the tricks with satire, and I think that satire, I don’t think people know how to read satire anymore. What stands —
Marc Steiner:
It’s a lost art.
Dwayne Booth:
It’s a lost art. People think that Saturday Night Live is satire, and it’s not. It’s comedy, it’s burlesque is what it is.
Marc Steiner:
It’s burlesque.
Dwayne Booth:
It’s burlesque, it’s parody —
Marc Steiner:
It’s burlesque.
Dwayne Booth:
And what it does is it allows people to address politics in a way that ends with laughter and ridicule, which is the physiological reaction. And when you laugh at something, you’re telling your body, in a way, that it’s going to be okay. We can now congregate around our disdain and minimize the monstrosity by turning Trump into a clown or a buffoon. Only then we can say we’ve done our work. Look at how ridiculous he is. Now we can rely on other people, then, to do something about it.
Satire is supposed to, from my understanding through history, is supposed to have some humor in it. A lot of the humor is just speaking the blatant truth about something, and it’s supposed to reveal social injustices and political villainy in such a way that when you’re finished with it, you’re still upset and you do want to do something about it. Again, if we have to start worrying about how we are communicating our disdain about something that is deserving of disdain, Lenny Bruce quote, something that always has moved me and is the reason I do what I do. When he said, “Take away the right to say fuck, and you take away the right to say fuck the government.”
Marc Steiner:
Yes, I saw that in one of your pieces.
Dwayne Booth:
We need that tool. So when I am addressing something that I find upsetting, I lead with my heart because it is a visceral reaction. It’s very, very upsetting. I pour that into the artwork that I’m rendering, and then I share with other people because people are suffering. I know what suffering feels like. So the emotional component is really, really important to me.
And if you notice, looking at the cartooning that I do about Trump, is those are very involved, most often, fine art pieces. They’re not the whimsy of a cartoon because it’s more serious than that. I want to communicate through the craft that I bring to the piece that I’m willing to spend. Some of those things take me days to complete.
Marc Steiner:
I’m sure.
Dwayne Booth:
This is so important to me, and you’re going to see my dedication to, A, giving a shit and wanting to do something about it. If I can keep you in front of that piece of art longer than if it was just a zippy cartoon, it might seep into your understanding, your soul, and your enthusiasm to also join some sort of movement to change things.
Marc Steiner:
What popped in my head when I first started looking into the piece was the use of humor and satire in attacking fascism, attacking the growth of fascism. Maybe think of Charlie Chaplin.
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah, The Great Dictator
Marc Steiner:
That was so effective. But the buffoonery that he characterized Hitler with is the same with Trump. It is frightening and close.
Dwayne Booth:
It is. And I would say, again, one thing I just want to be clear about is that there can be elements of parody and burlesque in there, because what that does is that that invites the viewer into the conversation. It says that this is not so dangerous that you should cower. This person is a fool — A fool who is capable of great catastrophic actions, but he’s an idiot. He’s an idiot. You’re allowed to be smarter than an idiot, and you’re allowed to lose patience with an idiot.
So the second question. So, OK, if you can inspire somebody to be upset and recognize that they are somewhere in this strategy coming from an authoritarian of I will devour you at some point, and maybe this is where… I don’t know if you want to get into the college experience necessarily right now, but that was one of the things that’s interesting about being a professor for. I taught there for 11 years, and it’s always been in my mind. I love teaching, but I was hired as a professional because I was a professional cartoonist. I’m actually a college dropout, and so I bring the practice of what I do into the classroom.
One of the things that was very interesting is, as the world blows up, colleges and universities are institutions of privilege. There’s no way around it. There’s students, yes, that might be there with a great deal of financial aid or some part of a program that gets them in, but by and large, these are communities of privilege. So it was very interesting to see when the society was falling apart, when there was an obvious threat before it was exactly demonstrated about academic freedom and so forth, the strategy from many colleagues that I spoke to was, all right, if we hold our breaths and maybe get to the midterms, we’ll be okay. If we can hold our breaths and just keep our heads down for four years, maybe things will be better. And my reaction was just, do you realize that that’s a privileged position? There’s people who are really suffering. If that is what your strategy is moving forward, then we are doomed because there’s no reason to be brave and stick your neck out.
Marc Steiner:
A number of the things running through my head as you were just describing this, before we go back to your cartoons, which I want to get right back to, which is I was part of the student movement into the 1960s. We took over places, we fought police, we got arrested and expelled from schools. I was thrown out of University of Maryland after three semesters and got drafted. Don’t have to go into that story now, but that happened. So I’m saying there’ve always been places of radical disruption and anger and fighting for justice.
How do you see that different now? I mean, look, in terms of the work you do and what happened to you at Annenberg, tossing you out.
Dwayne Booth:
Well, that’s a two-part question, and we can get to the second part of that in a second. But when it comes to that question of what has happened to college campuses, essentially, is look around. The commodification of everything has reduced the call for speaking your mind, for free speech. Because if you’re going to be indoctrinated into thinking that the commodification of everything is what’s calling you to a successful life, then colleges and universities become indoctrination centers for job placement, way more than even… When I was in college, it was different. You were there to explore, to figure out who you were, what you wanted to do, literally, with the rest of your life. It wasn’t about like, OK, this is how you play the game and keep your mouth shut if you want to succeed. That is the new paradigm that is now framing the kinds of conversations and the pressures inside the classroom to “succeed”.
But my thing with my classes, I would always tell my class a version of the very first day is, what you’re going to learn in this class is not going to help you get a job [Steiner laughs]. What it’s going to do, if I’m successful, and I hope I will be, is it will allow you the potentiality to keep a white-knuckled grip on your soul. Because the stuff we’re looking at is how did the arts community communicate what the humanitarian approach to life should be? That’s not a moneymaking scenario. In fact, there’s examples all through history where you’re penalized for that kind of thinking.
But what is revealed to students is that this is a glimpse into what makes a meaningful life. It’s not surrendering to bureaucracy and hierarchy. It’s about pushing back against that.
Marc Steiner:
Right. And the most important thing in an institution can do — And I don’t want to dive too deep into this now — But is make you question and make you probe and uncover. If you’re not doing that, then you’re not teaching, and you’re not learning.
Dwayne Booth:
Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. And that’s where we are now. Just even asking the question has become a huge problem. Even when everything started to happen with Gaza and with Israel, we had some conversations in class, without even getting, I wasn’t even trying to start conversations about which side are you going to be on? This is why you should be on this side and abhor the other side. It wasn’t even questions like that. The conversations we ended up having was the terror on the campus to even broach the subject.
My classes where we spoke very frankly about, I can’t even say the word “Israel”, I can’t say it. And it was also among the faculty. And I don’t know if you’ve spoken to other faculty members at other universities, and this shouldn’t be shocking, but at some point, a year ago, we were told, and we all agreed unanimously, not to use school email. They’re listening. We were going to communicate with WhatsApp or try to have personal conversations off campus because we do not trust the administration not to surrender all of our personal correspondence with these congressional committees attempting to blow up universities.
And they did that with me. There was some communication about Congress wants all of your communication with colleagues and students.
Marc Steiner:
That literally happened.
Dwayne Booth:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
They wanted all your communication?
Dwayne Booth:
Yes. And I wasn’t alone. This is what’s going on on college campuses. So A, it’s a really interesting thing to ask because I don’t own the correspondence I have on the servers at school. I don’t. So it’s not even up to me. I can say no, but they’re still going to do it. So that kind of question, what that does is say, you are under our boot. We want to make sure that you understand that you are under our boot and that you’re going to cooperate.
So what was my answer to that? My answer was, fuck you. Because this is coming after a semester where a couple of times I had to teach remotely because not only there were death threats on me, but being the professor in front of this class, there were death threats on my students. So knowing that and really being angry at the main administration and the interim president Jameson for surrendering to this kind of McCarthyism. Again, that’s an easy equation to make, but it’s accurate. It’s a hundred percent accurate.
Marc Steiner:
I’m really curious. Let’s stay with this for a moment before we leap into some other areas here, that when did you become first aware that they were coming after you? And B, how did they do it? What did they literally do to push you out?
Dwayne Booth:
Me being pushed out, it’s an interesting question to ask because Annenberg actually protected me. Jameson wanted me out when The Washington Free Beacon article came out in February of last year.
Marc Steiner:
The one that accused you of being an antisemite?
Dwayne Booth:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
Right.
Dwayne Booth:
So again, what do we do with that? We clean house. We don’t look at the truth of the matter. We don’t look at the specifics. We don’t push back, we surrender. That’s the stance of the administration. So he wanted me fired, but the Dean of Annenberg was just like, no. So they protected me. It’s the School for Communication. It has a history of…
Marc Steiner:
It’s a school where you’re trained journalists and other people to tell the truth and tell the stories and dig deep and put it out there.
Dwayne Booth:
And to say no when you need to say no.
Marc Steiner:
Yes.
Dwayne Booth:
Right. So that happened. So they protected me. I was there because Annenburg protected me. It didn’t stop the administration, as you said at the beginning of the segment, Jameson then makes a public statement that basically says I’m an antisemite and that I’m reprehensible.
So that went on for all of last year, not so much the beginning of this semester because everybody was very focused on what the election was going to reveal.
So I was given the opportunity to develop a new class for this coming fall. So I took off the semester, was paid to develop this new course for, actually, about the alternative press and the underground comics movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
Marc Steiner:
I remember it well [laughs].
Dwayne Booth:
Very good. And so that’s considered the golden age for opinion journalism, which is lacking now. So I’m like, this is a great opportunity to, again, expose what our responsibility is as a free and open society. Let’s really talk about it. I even was going to start a newspaper as part of the class that students were going to contribute to. It was going to be a very big to-do.
Trump won. The newspaper was the first thing to be canceled. We don’t want to invite too much attention from this new regime on the campus. Again, it’s this cowardice that has real ramifications, as you were saying. These funds, as soon as there’s money involved, the strategy for moving forward becomes an economic decision and not one that has to do with people and their lives.
So me being let go, I was part of a number of adjuncts and lecturers who were also let go. So it’s not an easy connection to say that I was specifically targeted as somebody who should be fired. But that said, you could feel some relief. And as a matter of fact, being let go and then being, again, the attacks from the right-wing press increased, and all of a sudden we’re like, finally UPenn has gotten rid of the antisemite. And then we’re back in this old ridiculous argument.
And luckily, I’m not alone. I’m not so much in the spotlight because many people are stepping forward and, again, trying to promote the right kind of conversation about this.
Marc Steiner:
One of the things, a bunch of things that went through my head as you were talking, I was thinking about the course you wanted to teach on alternative press. I you ever get to teach that course again, I have tons of files for you to have, to go through.
Dwayne Booth:
[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was writing the textbook.
Marc Steiner:
Textbook. Oh, were you? OK.
Dwayne Booth:
I’m going to France, actually, and I’m going to interview Robert Crumb. I’m staying over his house. Oh, that’s great.
Marc Steiner:
Oh, that’s great. He must be really old now.
Dwayne Booth:
Yes. I’m really looking forward to it.
Marc Steiner:
[Laughs] I was there at the very [beginning]. I helped found Liberation News Service.
Dwayne Booth:
Oh, see.
Marc Steiner:
And I was at Washington Free Press back in the ’60s.
Dwayne Booth:
See? So you know. I curated an exhibit on the alternative press for the University of Connecticut a couple years ago. Hugely popular. They have an archive that is dizzying. It might be the biggest in the country. And so when I was curating and putting together that exhibit, I would go in and I would be, all day, I wouldn’t even eat, and I would pore through these newspapers and magazines at the time. And I would leave, and I would actually have this real sense of woe because looking at what that kind of journalism was attempting and accomplishing made me feel like we have lost.
Marc Steiner:
Every city and community had an underground paper across the country, and Liberation newspapers were there to service all those papers and bring them together. The power of the media in that era was very different and very strong.
Dwayne Booth:
Well, the work that I do as a cartoonist and somebody who uses visuals to communicate this stuff, that was all through these newspapers, all through this movement. The idea being is the arts community is there — Well, let’s do it this way. The job of journalism, one could say, is that it provides us with the first draft of history, which we’ve heard.
Marc Steiner:
Exactly.
Dwayne Booth:
So the idea as a journalist, what you’re supposed to be asking yourself is what is the real story here? And I’m going to approach it and try to be objective about it, but what is the real story here? The job of an artist in the arts community is to ask the very same question. What is this story really about? What does this feel like? But rather than searching for the objective version of that, it’s about looking for the subjective. This is how I feel about it. And that invites people in to share their own stories. Because really we’re just stories. We’re really just stories.
Marc Steiner:
Storytellers.
Dwayne Booth:
Exactly. So if you can have a form of journalism that not only draws on straight journalism but also can bring in Allen Ginsburg to write a poem that will then explore what does it mean to be a human being? Why are we vulnerable and why do we deserve protection? Until you have that inside of a conversation, why argue in favor of protecting, say, the people of Gaza?
Marc Steiner:
Let’s talk a bit about that. Now, look, this is what got you fired [laughs].
Dwayne Booth:
Well, I don’t… Well, again.
Marc Steiner:
It’s part of what got you fired.
Dwayne Booth:
It created a lot of heat for me last year, we can say.
Marc Steiner:
It is a very difficult question on many levels, being accused of being an antisemite or a self-hating Jew. If you criticize Israel, whether you use the word genocide or slaughter, whatever word you use has infected the entire country at this moment. Campuses, newspapers, everywhere, magazines. And in itself, it seems to me, also creates antisemitism. It makes it bubble up. Because it’s always there, it’s just below the surface. It doesn’t take much to unleash it. So I think we’re in this very dangerous moment.
Dwayne Booth:
We are. But I would say that, with that broad description, if people only approach the question with that broad of an approach, I think we’re in trouble.
Marc Steiner:
What do you mean by that?
Dwayne Booth:
I think the question of attempting to criticize Israel and then being called an antisemite is conflating politics with religion, nationalism with religion. Because really, again, look at it. Just look at all of the conversations that people have been having. To criticize the state of Israel is criticizing the state of Israel. It has really nothing to do with criticizing Judaism at all. Now, if somebody is Jewish and supporting Israel, OK, they’ve made that connection for themselves. So therefore, you can’t have an argument that says, you’re hurting my Jewishness, my Jewish identity by attacking a nation state, because they’re two different things. And if you’re protecting the virtue of a nation state, that is nationalism.
Marc Steiner:
It is. I don’t want to digress on this too deeply, but I think that when you are part of a minority that has been persecuted — My grandfather fought the czars, people in the streets of Warsaw, in the pogroms. My dad fought the Nazis. When you know that they just hate you because of who you are, which is the excuse they used to create Israel out of Palestine, which makes it a very complex matter. It was FDR who would not let Jews here and said, you have to go. You want to get out of those camps? You’re going there.
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah. There is that. Yep.
Marc Steiner:
So what I’m saying to all that, I’m saying it’s a very complicated matter.
Dwayne Booth:
And so the argument, though, and I totally agree with you. So what is important for that, the fact that it is a complicated matter, then you need to create space for the conversation to happen, and you have to create the space to be large enough to accommodate all of the emotion, the emotional component that is part of this, because that’s also very, very real. And then the less emotional stuff, like what is the intellectual argument piece of this? So yes, it is all completely knotted up, but the solution is to recognize how complicated it is and then create the space for people then to untangle it.
Because again, that’s why I said about the broad approach. The broad approach is not going to help us. The broad approach is going to actually disenfranchise people from wanting to enter into the conversation. Because you don’t want to say, and as you can see it happening over and over again, anybody who says, I’m against Israel, what Israel is doing, immediately they’re called, they’re shut down by people who don’t want to have that conversation, as being antisemitic. And nobody wants to feel like they could be called an antisemitic, especially if they are not one. Remember, people who are antisemitic, they tend to be proud of the fact that they are antisemitic.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, I know. But there are a lot of antisemites out there, a lot of racists who don’t admit that they’re antisemitic or racist.
Dwayne Booth:
Again, and the question, they don’t admit it. So again, so that’s where you need that kind of conversation to turn the light on in that darkness and give them the opportunity to either defend their antisemitism, have their antisemitism revealed so that they can then self-assess who they are. Because a lot of prejudices people have, they don’t know that they have them, and they have not been challenged.
So much of what we think and feel is reflexive thinking and feeling. You can’t burn that flag. I’m an American, it’s hurting my heart. Let’s look at the issue. What is trying to be communicated by the burning of the flag? It’s not shitting on your grandfather for fighting in the Second World War. But again, if somebody is going to have all that knotted up into this emotional cluster, it’s up to us as sane human beings who are seeking understanding and also empathy with each other to be able to enter in those things assuming, until it’s disproven, that we actually have the potential for empathy and understanding among each other. But you need to create the space and the conversation for that to happen.
Marc Steiner:
What was the specific work that had them attack you as an antisemite at Annenberg? What did they pull out?
Dwayne Booth:
They pulled out some cartoons that I had. It was interesting because they pulled out mostly illustrations that I had done for Chris Hedges. I’ve been Chris Hedges’s illustrator for a very long time.
Marc Steiner:
He used to work out of this building [laughs].
Dwayne Booth:
Yes, exactly. And so what they did was they pulled out these illustrations completely out of context from the article that I was illustrating, had them as standalone pieces, which again, if you’re doing cartoons or you’re doing any illustrations, what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to be provocative and communicate with a very short form. If it’s something as fiery as this issue, then you need, potentially, more information to know what my intent is as an artist. Those were connected to Chris Hedges’s articles that had them make absolute sense. So those were shown without the context of Chris Hedges’s articles.
They showed a couple cartoons that also were just standalone cartoons that had been published and posted for four months without anything except great adulation from readers, because I also work for Scheer Post, which is Robert Scheer’s publication. And I’ve known Bob for decades. And if you don’t know who Bob is, you should know who Bob is. He was the editor of Ramparts and has a very long history of attempting independent journalism.
Marc Steiner:
I can’t believe he’s still rolling.
Dwayne Booth:
He is. He’s 89.
Marc Steiner:
I know [laughs].
Dwayne Booth:
It’s amazing. And so he was running my cartoons. He lost more than half of his family in the Holocaust. He knows what antisemitism looks like. And so these cartoons that were pulled, again, I had nothing but people understanding what I was trying to say. But taken, again, out of context, shown to an audience that is looking for any excuse to call somebody an antisemite, which is the Washington Free Beacon, who has called everybody an antisemite: Obama, Bernie Sanders, just everybody. And framing the parameters of that slander, presenting it to their audience who blew up, again, then started writing me: I want to rape your wife and murder your children. I know where you live. All of those sorts of things all of a sudden come out. So that happened.
And so again, there I am — And I’ve had hate mail. I’ve had death threats before. I’ve never been part of an institution where the strategy for moving forward is being part of a community was… All right. I was told to just not say anything at first. We’ll see if we can weather this. And then when the Jameson statement came out, I wrote to my dean and I said, I have to say something now. I can’t sit back and just let these people frame the argument because it’s not accurate.
Marc Steiner:
Right, right.
Dwayne Booth:
Then I started to talk to the press, and again, started to say, we need to understand that there is intent and context for all of these things, and I cannot allow the truncation of communication to happen to the degree where people are silenced and then people are encouraged to self-censor.
Marc Steiner:
So I’ll ask you a question. I’ve been wrestling with this question I wanted to ask you about one of your cartoons. It’s the cartoon where Netanyahu [inaudible] are drinking blood.
Dwayne Booth:
It’s not Netanyahu. I know which… Is it with the dove?
Marc Steiner:
Yeah.
Dwayne Booth:
OK. Yeah. Netanyahu is not in there.
Marc Steiner:
That’s right, I’m sorry. So the first thing that popped in my head when I saw that picture was the blood libel against the Jews by the Christians that took place. My father told me stories about when he was a kid how Christian kids across from Patterson, the other side of the park, would chase him. You killed, you drank Jesus’s blood, you killed Jesus, the major fights that they had. So talk a bit about that. That’s not the reaction you want us to have.
Dwayne Booth:
No, no, no, no. Absolutely not. It is interesting because I think that’s probably the leading one that people — And now when all this started up, again, they don’t even show it, they just describe it, and they describe it so inaccurately [Steiner laughs] that it just makes me crazy.
Marc Steiner:
You’re not shocked, are you [both laugh]?
Dwayne Booth:
No, no. But in the cartoon, it’s actually, it’s power brokers. These guys look like they’re power brokers from the 1950s. I like to draw that style of… And if you want to look at these guys, they look completely not Jewish. I pulled them from, like I said, they’re basically clip art from the 1950s. So they’re power brokers at a cocktail party. It’s playing off of the New Yorker style of the cocktail party with the upper class.
So they’re upper crust power brokers. Behind them is a hybrid flag that is half the American flag and half the Israeli flag. And they are drinking blood from glasses that says “Gaza”. And there is a peace dove that is walking into the room and somebody says, who invited that lousy antisemite.
As a cartoonist, understand that when it comes to, as I said earlier, trying to figure out how to make the point as quickly as you can and as eye catching as you can. If you look through the history of the genre, drinking blood is what monsters do. They do it all of the time in their criticism of people who are powerful and who are called monsters. I, frankly, when I was drawing it, I [wasn’t] like, well, this might be misinterpreted as blood libel. I didn’t know what blood libel was.
Marc Steiner:
I’m sure you didn’t.
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah. And again, and it was posted for a long time and nobody’s said anything about it. But then when it was called that, it became a very interesting conversation because it was like, oh, OK. So now I can see how that would flood the interpretation of the cartoon. And again, this is what happens in regular conversation. And particularly if you’re communicating as somebody who uses the visuals as your form of communication, there’s a thousand ways to interpret a visual.
Marc Steiner:
There are.
Dwayne Booth:
There are. And as the artist, you have to understand that you’re going to do the best that you can and hope that the majority of people are going to get what you’re trying to do. Which brings us, again, back to that second question or that point that I was making earlier, which is let’s have the conversation afterwards. If you understand that my intent was playing off of not a Jewish trope but a trope of criticizing power — Which, actually, out of curiosity, I went through the internet and I all of a sudden started to assemble, through time, using people are drinking blood constantly who are evil. So it’s used and so forth.
And so the challenge with something like that was to then try to communicate that that was not my intent. I know a communications, a free speech expert, in fact. She and I had a really interesting conversation about it because she is such a radical, she’s been more radical than I am. She wanted me to know that it was blood libel, and she wanted to hear me say, yes, I knew it was blood libel, but I’m going to use that to force the conversation and reclaim what that blood libel was supposed to be as, A, this ridiculous thing that actually is being applied as a truism in this circumstance.
But all of a sudden it became this academic conversation and I was just like, whoa, I don’t need it to be that, because you don’t want to upset everybody and confuse what your communication is, obviously. So I said, it wasn’t that. She goes, you sure [Steiner laughs]? Are you sure you weren’t trying to do that? I’m like, no, I wasn’t trying to do that. So that’s what that one was.
Marc Steiner:
So I’m glad we talked about this because I think that… I’m not going to dwell on this cartoon, but when I first showed this to some of my friends —
Dwayne Booth:
You’re not alone [crosstalk]. I get it. I totally get it.
Marc Steiner:
As I was preparing for our conversation, that was their first reaction as well.
Dwayne Booth:
Right. Right.
Marc Steiner:
Because your cartoons, they’re really powerful, and they get under an issue, and it glares in front of your eyes like a bright light. And they’re very to hard look at sometimes, whether it’s Trump eating shit, literally [both laugh], and the other images you give us. It’s like you can’t allow us to look away. You want us to ingest them.
Dwayne Booth:
I want you to ingest them and then have an honest reaction. And then, again, it doesn’t have to be in a conversation with me, have a conversation with somebody else. Because that cartoon that you were talking about, it started a bunch of debates.
Marc Steiner:
The Trump one?
Dwayne Booth:
No, no, no.
Marc Steiner:
Oh, the blood libel.
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah, yeah — Don’t call it the blood libel one. See what I mean, man [both laugh]? So it started, what I would say is necessary debate to really get to the bottom of issues. Again, that’s really what we should be doing. We should be encouraging more and more difficult conversations. Because we’re not, and look at where we are. People are uncomfortable to even go into the streets. You don’t have to shout. You don’t have to carry a sign. People are being conditioned to be uncomfortable with making a statement in the name of humanity, even though humanity is suffering in real time in front of us. Look at Gaza. For me, there’s no way to frame the argument that can justify that. There’s just no way. There’s too many bodies, there’s too many dead people. There’s too much evidence that the human suffering that is happening over there right now in front of the world needs not to be happening.
Marc Steiner:
It needs not to be happening. [I’ll] tell [you] what just popped through my head as you were saying that, a couple things. One was the Vietnam War where millions of Vietnamese were slaughtered, North, South, all over. And we didn’t call that a genocide. We called that a slaughter. And then I was thinking as you were speaking about… I speak at synagogues sometimes about why we as Jews have to oppose what Israel’s doing to Gaza.
Dwayne Booth:
And I’ve gone to synagogues and seen those talks. That’s also what I’m [crosstalk] —
Marc Steiner:
They’re very difficult talks to have people just…
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah.
Marc Steiner:
Because it’s an emotional issue as much as it’s a —
Dwayne Booth:
Exactly.
Marc Steiner:
— Logical and political issue. And so, when I look at your work, again, it engenders conversation. It makes you think it’s not just his little typical political cartoon. It’s like you sink yourself into your cartoons like an actor sinks himself into a part. That’s what I felt looking at your work.
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s funny because just hearing you say that, it’s true that quite often I forget about my cartoons soon after I do them because I’m already onto the next one. And I’ve done searches for things and found my cartoons that I’ve forgotten. I have no memory of doing them [Steiner laughs]. Some of them I don’t even get, and I literally have to call my older brother and say, what was I trying to say with this? He’s very good at remembering what I was trying to say and can decipher my cartoons for me.
But yeah, it is a form of meditation. If you look at the work that I do, again, if you’re going to stick with a piece of art for hours, you have to be able to sustain your focus on it. So I meditate while I’m doing it and see if it feels true to my emotional reaction to what’s going on, then I post it.
Marc Steiner:
So lemme ask you this question. So think of one of your most recent cartoons, I dunno which one, I’ll let you think of it since I don’t know what your most recent cartoon is, and it’s about Gaza and Israel and this moment. Describe it and what you went through to create it.
Dwayne Booth:
One of the most recent ones that I did was, as the death toll continued to climb, and I think it was right after Trump started to talk about how beautiful he’s going to make Gaza once we take over. The normalizing of that, and even the attempts to make it a sexy strategy, hit me so hard that my approach to that was, OK, well what would that look like? What would the attempt to normalize that amount of human suffering, what would that look like?
Well, it sounds like a travel poster that is going to invite people to the new Gaza. So I decided to do a travel poster riffing off of an old Italian vintage come to Italy poster, just like a Vespa. Let’s get a Vespa in there and a sexy couple. Now, I don’t want to render something that has Gaza completely Trumpified already. We’ve seen what that looks like. Let’s, OK, satire. But let’s talk about, let’s visualize what that would look like right now moving towards that. So I have this young couple on a Vespa coming down a giant mountain of skulls, heading to the beach. And out in the beach there’s some Israeli warships. And it’s rendered, at a glance, to be very gleeful, but then you start to notice the details of it and the attempt to normalize, again, an ocean of skulls, [and] nobody’s recognizing the fact that these are a slaughtered population. So that’s what I thought.
And so, again, sometimes what you want to do is you want to say, alright, this is an ugly truth that’s being promoted as something that is beautiful, I’m going to show you what that looks like as something that’s been beautified. And the reaction, of course, is just like, oh my God, this hits harder than if I showed the gore, in the same way that if you go back to Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”, right? He published that anonymously. And he also, it’s very interesting because it’s about what do we do with the poor, bedraggled Irish people? We make them refuse for the needs of the British. We will cook the children, kill some of the grownups, make belts, make wallets, all of these things to feed the gentry of the British.
What’s very interesting about that is he sustained the irony of that all the way through. You don’t have the sense, he did not turn it into parody or burlesque or wild craziness. He presented it as a solution to the problem. Now, if you look at that, it actually makes business sense. It would actually solve the problem — Minus all the horror of killing babies and killing a bunch of people. It makes good business sense.
Now, if you look at that and you see that as a parallel to what is justified by big business and corporations now, it happens every single day. It’s been completely normalized. Look what’s going on with the environment. Look at the Rust Belt across this country. All of that stuff is rendered in service of profit and economics the same way that “Modest Proposal” was, and people have been conditioned to see it as normal and ignore the human suffering.
Marc Steiner:
I’m curious. The first one is, where’s that latest cartoon published?
Dwayne Booth:
I actually gave it to Hedges for one of his columns, and then I posted it and people wanted prints. I’ve sold prints of it. And it was also in the paper that comes out of Washington that Ralph Nader does… Gosh, what’s it called? The Capitol…
Marc Steiner:
I should know this
Dwayne Booth:
Myself. I should know this too, because I’ve been doing cartoons for them for a few years now.
Marc Steiner:
Capitol Hill Citizen.
Dwayne Booth:
That’s it. See, I missed the word “hill”. Thank God.
Marc Steiner:
Capitol Hill Citizen.
Dwayne Booth:
Which is a great newspaper. And it gives me the opportunity to see my stuff on physical paper again, which looks gorgeous to me. I’d rather —
Marc Steiner:
Now that you’ve described the cartoon, I saw it this morning as I was getting ready for this conversation. I didn’t know whether it was the latest one you’ve done.
Now that you were facing what we face here, both in Gaza and with Trump and these neofascists in charge of the country, your brain must be full of how you portray this. I just want you to talk a bit about, both creatively and substantively, how you approach this moment when we are literally facing down a neofascist power taking over our country and about to destroy our democracy. People think that’s hyperbole, you’re being crazy. But we’re not.
Dwayne Booth:
No, it’s happening.
Marc Steiner:
And if you, as I was, a civil rights worker in the South, you saw what it was like to live under tyranny, under an authoritarian dictatorship if you were not white. I can feel the entire country tumbling in at this moment. So tell me how you think about that and how you approach it with your work.
Dwayne Booth:
It’s an interesting time because, in many ways, my work is quadrupled. Partly because it’s just what I’ve always done, but the other part is I don’t see this profession stepping up to the challenge at all. I don’t see any single-panel cartoonists who are hitting the Israel Gaza issue nearly as hard as I am.
Marc Steiner:
No, they’re not.
Dwayne Booth:
No. And I see a lot also, of the attacks on Trump. And again, it always strikes me as, how would the Democratic Party render a cartoon? That’s what I see out there. And it’s too soft. It is just way too soft. So as I increase my output, I feel the light getting brighter and brighter on me, which makes me feel more and more unsafe inside this society because yes, they’re targeting people who are not citizens, but what’s next? We all know the poem.
But at the same time, I feel like it’s a responsibility that I have, and I’m sure that you probably have this same sense of responsibility. Speaking up, talking out loud, even though it’s on my nervous system, it is grinding me down in a way that is new.
But that said, my numbers of people who are coming to me are increasing. I’m actually starting a substack so I can have my own conversations with people and so forth, because we have got to increase this megaphone. We just have to.
In fact, one thing that was interesting is just this last October I was invited to speak at a cartooning conference in Montreal. And the whole reason to have me up there and to talk about it was was from the perspective of the people, the organizers, I was the only American cartoonist who was cartooning about Gaza.
Marc Steiner:
Really?
Dwayne Booth:
Yeah. And I’d had conversations, remember, that there’s some cartoonists who are doing some things that, again, are just a little bit too polite. Because if we’re looking at this thing and we do think that this is a genocide, you can’t pull your punches. And so, in fact, when this stuff had happened with me initially with the Washington Free Beacon, I reached out.
There’s another colleague I have who’s a cartoonist, whose name is Andy Singer, and he and I have been in communication over the years, and he’s somewhat fearless on this issue. He and I were talking, and we came up with this idea, let’s publish a book that has cartoonists who, over the last many decades, have had a problem criticizing Israel for fear of being called anti-Semitic.
We sent it out to our colleagues and other international cartoonists and so forth. We found two, Matt Wuerker and Ted Rall, who were willing to participate in this project. I had a number of conversations with others who just contacted me privately and said, I can’t do it because I’ll lose my job. I can’t do it because I’ll be targeted and I’m too afraid. I can’t get close to this subject, my editor won’t let me do it, so I can’t do it. International cartoonists, different idea, a whole different approach, sending me stuff. I can tell my story. I’ve been jailed. I’ve been beaten up for this kind of work. And so it became a very interesting thing.
Again, the United States is, by and large, it’s an extremely privileged society. And yet, when it comes to issues like this, it demonstrates the most cowardice because we’ve been made to be way too sensitive about our own discomfort to advance the cause of humanity and justice, love, all of those things because we’ve seen that there is a penalty for doing that, and we do not want to give up certain creature comforts. We don’t want to be called something that we are not, and we need to be uncomfortable. In many ways we have to break soft rules. We have to chain ourself to fences and then make it an inconvenience to be pulled from those fences.
Marc Steiner:
This has been a fascinating conversation. I appreciate you being here today and for all the work that you do. And I think that we’re at this moment where the reason that many of us who are part of Jewish Voices for Peace and other organizations is to say those voices are critical in saying this is wrong and has to end now. And I appreciate the power of the work you do. It’s just amazing. And we encourage everybody, we’ll be linking to your work so people can see it and consume it. And I hope we have a conversation together in the future.
Dwayne Booth:
Thanks. I agree. Thanks a lot, Marc.
Marc Steiner:
Good to have you sliding through Baltimore.
Dwayne Booth:
Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, let me thank Dwayne Booth, also known as Mr. Fish, for joining us today here for this powerful and honest conversation. We will link to his work when we post this episode. You want to check that out.
And thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, audio editor Alina Nehlich for working on her magic, Rosette Sewali for producing The Marc Steiner Show, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.
So please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has openly vowed to pour $100 million into campaigns to defeat progressive representatives like Cori Bush who have spoken out against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. As Chris McGreal writes in The Guardian, “after it played a leading role in unseating New York congressman Jamaal Bowman, another progressive Democrat who criticised the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza… AIPAC pumped $8.5m into the race in Missouri’s first congressional district to support [Wesley] Bell through its campaign funding arm, the United Democracy Project (UDP), after Bush angered some pro-Israel groups as one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel.” After Bush was unseated in August, she vowed to keep fighting for justice, and she put AIPAC on notice: “AIPAC,” she told supporters, “I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”
At the 2025 National Membership Meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sits down with the former Congresswoman and key member of “The Squad” to discuss her re-election loss, the undue influence of organizations like AIPAC on our democracy, and Bush’s plan for fighting back.
Studio Production: Kayla Rivara, Rosette Sewali Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
We’re here at the Jewish Voice for Peace National Membership Meeting held in downtown Baltimore, and I am honored to be sitting here with Congresswoman Cori Bush, who just gave an incredible speech at the closing plenary.
Congresswoman, thank you so much for joining me. I know we only have a limited time here, and I wanted to just sort of ask, first and foremost, for our viewers out there who saw your re-election campaign be awarded by $8.5 million from AIPAC, amidst other things, what would you say to folks out there who just see the results of that election and think, oh, well, she lost fair in square. What’s really going on underneath that?
Cori Bush:
Well, thank you for the question. First of all, there was no fair. There was no square. There was deceit, manipulation, lies, misinformation, racism, bigotry, hatred, vitriol, and it was all okay. There was nothing that was off limits as long as AIPAC got the result that they wanted. They didn’t care about how it ripped apart our community, how all of the years of organizing, so much of it was just disrupted and some of those bonds that people created, it just completely shattered. They didn’t care about that. They don’t care about that. They don’t care that I’m the same person that some of those folks marched with out on the streets of Ferguson during the uprising in 2014 and 2015.
They don’t care that I am the one who protested the ending of the eviction moratorium in 2021 as a freshman out on the steps of the US Capitol to make sure that 11 million people weren’t about to be evicted from their homes when the government could have done something about it. They didn’t care about that. They wanted to discredit me because in discrediting someone that the people trust, then it pulls power not only from that person that they trust, but it pulls power from the people. So there over $8 million that they put in, plus those that they were working with, it roughly ended up being around $15 million, between 15 to $20 million, which is the numbers that we’ve seen. And I just want to make this point. To use racism against me, to distort my face on mailers to make me look like an animal, to use lies about my family or me. The thing is this, if you’re doing the right thing and you’re doing it for the right reason, why can’t you just use truth?
I have no problem with people running against each other. We’re able to do that. That’s how I won my race. I ran against someone I thought was ineffective. I felt like I could do more. I spoke about what I would do and how I felt I could do it. I spoke about my past and who I wanted to be as a member of Congress. The people believed it because the people saw me as that person, and I won around $1.4 million. It took me that much money to unseat a 20-year incumbent whose parent, whose father was in the seat for 32 years. So 52 years worth of a machine. I spent around $1.4 million to unseat. I won that race with over 4,700 votes. AIPAC and the groups that they were working with, they spent around 15 million. The person only won by less than 7,000 votes.
So it took basically 15 million … I mean, 15 times the amount of money to unseat me that it took me to unseat someone who had a 52-year family legacy. So that was the depth of the deceit that they had to use. And I’ll say this, never once did they say anything about Israel or Palestine. Never once did they use that in ads. Now in front of people, they would call me anti-Semitic. People would say, well, what did she do? Oh, well, [inaudible 00:04:41]. I have anything to show you. But what they would use in the ads was, oh, she’s mean to Joe Biden. She wants kids to drink contaminated water from lead pipes. Those were the things that they used against me. And because it flooded the media, our local media so heavily because of the amount of money, because you will see four or five ads from my opponent and then only one ad from me, the people started to believe and they were wondering, well, why does he have so much money? Well, why does it?
So that’s what it looked like, and that’s how they were able to deceive the community to make them think, oh, well, then maybe something is going on that we don’t understand. And then they also made people feel like, well, I’m confused, so maybe I’ll just stay home.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I want to ask another follow-up question on that because of course, you and other members of the squad are representative of a grassroots hope coming from a lot of the folks that we talk to and interview on a weekly basis. This is a hope over the past 10 years that there was still a possibility of making progressive change through electoral politics.
What would you say to folks right now who are feeling despondent and after seeing AIPAC still amidst all of that unseat, you unseat Jamal Bowman, the richest man in the world buying his way into our government right now? what would you say to folks who feel like we don’t have enough to take on their money?
Cori Bush:
Well, that’s what they want us to believe. They want us to fall into this place of just feeling overwhelmed, just believing the chaos. They want us to stop fighting. They want us to think that … Well, they want us to just live in this place of fatigue. That’s why they keep ramming this train our way. But we can’t allow that to happen because what they understand is it’s actually the people who have the power. That’s why they have to do so much and push so hard and spend so much money because they understand is that it’s really us who has the power. We just have to acknowledge it and understand it and figure out how to properly use our power to fight against this. And so yes, I was unseated Jamal Bowman was unseated, and I know that we know that they’re coming from more in 2026 and beyond.
But the thing is, the movement is never one person or never a few people. Yes, we were working for more progressive change, and that’s an issue right now. But the other part of that is we need our actual elected officials who claim to be progressive, to actually be that. We need them or stop saying that you are, because then you’re making people feel this way because they’re looking like, oh, these are our people, but what’s going on? Why aren’t they pushing? Why aren’t they fighting for this change? So we need people to be your authentic self in this moment because the people are falling away from the Democratic Party because they feel the hypocrisy. People are saying, I don’t understand why you’re not fighting hard enough. You said this man is a fascist. He’s a racist, he’s a white supremacist. He’s authoritarian, he’s a dictator. He’s all of these things. But you’re not meeting the moment. You’re not meeting the threat with the proper opposition to it.
But when they also see that some of these same folks who are supposed to be our “leaders” take money from groups like AIPAC who are primarily funded by Republicans who also endorse insurrectionist members of Congress or people who supported insurrectionists, at least we feel, then the people are like, well, why should I believe and trust in you? Also, if you are cool with allowing a genocide to happen on our watch in our lifetime with our tax dollars, if you are okay with that, then what is your red line? Because apparently, death and destruction of thousands of people, it’s not. So who are you? Is this the party of human rights and civil rights? Is this the party of equality and equity and peace? Is this that party? It is absolutely not if there is no no real opposition to what we’re seeing right now.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And just a final question. When you lost your reelection and you gave this rousing kind of speech that you sort of brought back into your speech today, you told AIPAC, “I’m coming to tear down your kingdom.” I wanted to ask, just in closing here with the last minute, I’ve got you. What does that mean? What does that look like? And for folks out there watching who want to see that, who want this undue money and influence out of our politics, what is it going to take to tear down that kingdom?
Cori Bush:
So one thing I won’t do is give all the secrets away. So I can’t give all of the … but what I will say is part of it is this, part of it is being here with the people. So Jewish Voice for Peace has 100% been a supporter of mine. And this didn’t just start after October 7th. We’ve been working with folks with JVP for years. This is not anything new, and we’ll continue to do that work. But the fact that they continue to organize … other groups are organizing and calling out the name “AIPAC.” There are experts working on why there is this loophole that allows for AIPAC to do some of the lobbying they do. There is a lot happening behind the scenes, and I’m going to continue to do that work. But the stuff that is more forward-facing, I’m going to continue to organize.
I’m going to continue to make sure that people know. The PAC United Democracy Project is … We need people to understand the connection between them and AIPAC. So that’s where the money is going to flow from. It’s going to flow from UDP. We need people to know DMFI and know some of these other names, but we also need people to know that in your local community, there are PACs being formed that are basically a smaller AIPAC. And their whole purpose is to try to make people to be kind of ambiguous. And so you won’t know that this is who they are. It is just like, oh, it’s this group that has all of this money that’s coming against this elected official that’s speaking out against the genocide. But they have all of this money, and so it’s like maybe they’re good. We want people to know. So educating people around the country as well.
I’m not going to stop fighting because AIPAC came for me. The thing is this: AIPAC didn’t make me, so AIPAC can’t break me. AIPAC didn’t position me so they can deposition me. The thing is, I got there because the people put me there, but I was there for a purpose and a mission. So that’s the other part. So I knew while I was there in Congress that I was on a timer. I knew that I was only there for a purpose, for a mission. I knew that there was this urgency on the inside of me. One thing that I would say to people all the time is I felt this weeping. I just only inside of me, I just always felt like crying. It never stopped 24 hours a day. And it’s the thing that kept me moving fast. Like, okay, I got to do this. I got to do that.
People in Congress will say, “She’s championed all of these different areas. Why is she doing so much?” That was why I didn’t know that I would only be there four years, but I needed to get the work done, and I needed to be true to what I said, who I said I would be. But also, I needed to be what I needed. That’s what I had to be what I needed when I was unhoused, when I was hungry, when I was abused, and all of the things. I needed that. I needed what my grandmother needed when she taught me that you never look a white woman in her face because of what she went through the experience in Mississippi growing up and my ancestors before her through chattel slavery. I needed to be what they needed. And I’ll never stop doing that because the thing is, it’s not about me, it’s what is who God created me to be. And that’s just everything for me. And so I’m not afraid.
A notorious federal prison in Dublin, CA, was closed in 2024 after years of complaints of rampant and systematic sexual abuse, medical neglect, and human rights violations. Now, the Trump administration is pushing to reopen the facility as an ICE detention center, but an interfaith coalition of community members and human rights advocates are fighting to keep the facility closed.
Edited by: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:
The Dublin City Council and Representative DeSaulnier, as well as Representative Zoe Loughran, we would like everyone to join them in opposing the opening of FCI Dublin as an ICE detention center.
Speaker 2:
On April 16th, faith leaders and activists gathered outside of a federal correctional institute, Dublin, a site of horrific abuse, neglect, and state-sanctioned violence, calling for the facility’s permanent closure and to reject a plan to use it as an immigration detention center. That’s from a statement released by Interfaith Movement and Human Integrity and the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice. The statement further details that countless people incarcerated at FCI Dublin survived being sexually abused by the Bureau of Prison staff and faced inhumane conditions, retaliation and medical neglect, and that now ICE appears to be moving forward with converting FCI Dublin from a BOP facility to an ICE facility, despite congressional opposition, its abusive history and dangerously dilapidated infrastructure.
Speaker 3:
Led an amazing campaign to organize to shut that prison down. We want to honor their dreams that this harm not be continued and perpetuated on other people and other communities. So this is why we’re preventing, here to prevent ICE from reopening Dublin as a detention facility.
Speaker 2:
Immigrants incarcerated at Dublin who are not citizens were specifically targeted by BOP staff who threatened to turn them over to immigration and customs enforcement, or made false promises that in exchange for sex, they could help them stay in the United States. In 2023, the Real News spoke with organizer Erin Neff of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners about the lawsuit filed on behalf of incarcerated women who were experiencing abuse at the prison.
Erin Neff:
In the case of Dublin, just to give it an historical context, 30 years ago there was a horrific incident of abuse upon many people, and there was a big case and a big settlement, and it is heartbreaking to see that 30 years later, the same thing is happening. And what it exposes is a culture of turning a blind eye to this abuse. There’s cooperation, there’s cover-up. It’s very difficult to report, let alone confidentially report. So in recent times, what you’re seeing are people being abused who are undocumented. So first of all, they’re being targeted because the staff knows that they are people who are going to be deported. So there’s an exposure there. They are threatened that if they say anything, they’ll be deported. So these people are people who’ve been here maybe their entire lives, all of their families here, they’re being retaliated against by putting in isolation. They are getting strip searched. It goes on and on. They’re being deprived of medical care, of mental health care.
Speaker 2:
At the recent vigil, outside the gates of FCI Dublin, Reverend Victoria Rue read a statement by Anna, a survivor of FCI Dublin.
Rev. Victoria Rue:
Like so many other immigrant women, I was sexually abused by an officer at FCI Dublin. After I was finally free from the hell of FCI Dublin, I was taken to another hell, an ICE detention center. The conditions at the detention center were terrible. I saw so much suffering. After months and months, I finally won my freedom. I am finally home with my children and trying to heal from the U.S. Government, from what the U.S. Government did to me. When I saw on the news that they wanted to reopen FCI Dublin for immigration detention, my heart fell. That prison is toxic and full of the pain of so many people. I pray that it is demolished, given back to the birds that live on the land there.
Speaker 2:
There was also testimony from Ulises Pena-Lopez, who is currently incarcerated in ICE detention. According to the Santa Clara rapid response team, early on February 21st, as Ulises was getting ready to leave his home, ICE agents showed up and forcibly arrested him, disregarding his rights and his health. Despite Ulises invoking his right to remain silent, to speak with a lawyer and to not exit his vehicle with without seeing a warrant, ICE officers responded with violence, smashing his car window with a baton and dragging him out of his vehicle. Without receiving proper medical care, Ulises was released into ICE custody and is currently being held at the Golden State Annex Detention Center in McFarland, California.
Ulises Pena-Lopez:
It fills me with strength, encouragement, joy, knowing that we are not alone. That you are standing in front of us, that you are our voice and I know and I feel that you’ll never leave us. God bless all of you. Physically, I feel like half of my body is numb, my foot, my right hand. I’m losing vision in my right eye and my face without mobility. Psychologically, I feel like I’m having pauses. They detected my medical and psychological condition as serious and they’re giving me treatment. I can’t sleep. When I call someone or whatever I need, I’m scared. I tremble. I start to sweat. My heart races because of everything they did to me; because of the way we’re not supposed to possess medication in here. If you want two painkillers, you have to submit a request. If you have to put in the request, it usually takes two or three days to be approved.
Speaker 2:
This comes from the statement of Ulises’s campaign and his supporters. They are calling and sending emails to Congress members Ro Khanna and Alex Padilla to demand ICE to release Ulises from the Golden State Annex ICE Detention Center in McFarland and provide access to medical care, treatment and medications.
Ulises Pena-Lopez:
I want to tell you that despite what ICE did to me, when they beat me in front of my wife, in front of my daughter, and they took me to an alley, they continued to beat me. They performed CPR on me to revive me. After they called the ambulance, they still had the audacity to send the ambulance bills to my wife, not once but twice, saying that she is responsible and has to pay for these bills for what they did to me.
Speaker 2:
The list of demands issued by the organizations Interfaith Movement and Human Integrity and California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice includes: honor and uplift survivors of FCI Dublin; demolish and permanently close the FCI Dublin; reject all forms of ICE detention in Dublin and the ongoing terror and criminalization of immigrant communities; return and transform the land to meet community needs and reaffirm that places of worship and religious observance should remain sensitive locations free from the reach of immigration enforcement.
Speaker 7:
Just to close, we know that if Dublin is reopened as an ICE detention center, if people are once again caged in those empty buildings across the street, abuse and neglect will continue. As Dublin survivors have said so many times, the horrors that happened at Dublin are not unique. Abuse is baked into our prison system. Everywhere there are cages, there is violence. In BOP, in ICE in the Santa Rita jail across the street. What is unique about FCI Dublin is that survivors of this violence came together and they organized and they spoke out and they made themselves heard. Dublin survivors shut for years to shut that prison down and they won and it must stay closed forever.
A 9-second-long video showing a few young boys crouching in a field while a loud bang goes off resulting in smoke has gone viral on social media. In the clip, after the loud noise is heard, one person collapses to the ground and a few moments later, laughter can be heard.
Referring to the loud noise in the clip as a gunshot, social media users sharing this video have linked it to the April 22 attack in Kashmir, in which 26 civilians were killed by terrorists. They claim that the laughter in the background is proof that when tourists were being shot dead, Kashmiri by-standers cheered on the reprehensible act.
On April 30, X user Janardan Mishra (@janardanmis) posted the viral video, with a caption in Hindi which roughly translates to: “Tourists were being shot dead and local Kashmiri ‘pigs’ stood there laughing… After this video, if any leftist motherf***** trumpets the ideals of Kashmiriyat, please take off your shoes and beat them up.”
At the time this article was written, the post had been shared more than 3,000 times. (Archive)
The same day, X account @ProfSudhaanshu also shared the video with a similar claim. The post has now been taken down but the last time Alt News checked when it was live, it had raked up over 120,000 views. Here’s an archived version of the now-deleted post.
To verify the truth behind the viral video, we broke it down into several key frames. We then ran a reverse-image search on one of these, which led us to a YouTube video from April 3, 2025, which is 19 days before the Pahalgam terror attack.
This clip in this YouTube short is exactly the same as the video that was recently viral and associated with the Pahalgam terror attack. We also found a Facebook reel uploaded on April 3 that features the same video.
It’s possible that the video was from earlier, but we were unable to find when exactly it happened. We know for sure that the viral clip was available on the internet since April 3, 2025, at least.
We have reached out to the Facebook account that shared this video on April 3 to understand what was happening in the clip. The story will be updated if and when they respond.
To conclude, a video, which has been on the internet since April 3, 2025, was falsely linked to the April 22 Pahalgam attack with hateful remarks against Kashmiris.
In Baltimore, Maryland, thousands took to the streets on May 1—from students to seniors, teachers to transit workers—united by a shared demand for hope, justice, and a future not shaped by billionaire greed. Marchers opposed the Trump administration’s policies targeting public programs, labor rights, and immigrant communities—and expressed solidarity with Gaza.
Pre/Post-Production: Jaisal Noor
Transcript
The transcript for this video is in progress and will be made available as soon as possible.
The first of a multipart documentary series, InterRebellium 01. The Estallido Social is a story told through the eyes of anarchist and anticolonial participants of the 2019 uprising in the territories occupied by the state of Chile.
The Estallido Social (or Social Explosion) was a popular uprising in the territories occupied by the Chilean state, sparked on October 18, 2019 by a fare hike of 30 pesos. What began with a student-led campaign of transit fare evasions quickly spread into a nationwide uprising that shook society to its very foundations.
This uprising was born out of the long history of revolt in so-called Chile. Unfortunately, as participant Yza reminds us, long histories of revolt are often due to long histories of repression. Repression in these lands goes back before the formation of the Chilean state, to the Spanish invasion and conquest. But the modern era begins with the 1973 coup that installed Augusto Pinochet as dictator. Years of neoliberal reforms produced a disillusioned and disorganized working class. InterRebellium traces the roots of the 2019 uprising to the student movements of the 2000s and feminist movements of the mid 2010s, as well as through Indigenous resistance throughout the history of colonial domination. The movement also took cues and tactics from revolts happening concurrently in Hong Kong and Ecuador.
For months, thousands of people fought pitched street battles with the cops and military, organized networks of support for the front line militants, created horizontally organized neighborhood assemblies, participated in general strikes and conducted acts of arson and sabotage against symbols of power and multinational corporations.
The Estallido was ultimately contained through a combination of brutal state repression, promises of reform and a new constitution, and an aesthetic face-lift on the old symbols of power with the election of the young Gabriel Boric of the new-left. As the riots subsided and many people became willing to work within the channels of state bureaucracy, Boric and the new left were free to build coalition with the same forces that were in power before the Estallido, leaving many of the worst perpetrators of state repression in their same roles. A handful of political prisoners from the Estallido remain behind bars to this day (April 2025)
InterRebellium will cover the global wave of revolts from 2018-2020. The title is from Latin for “between uprisings.” We believe it is important to take this time between waves relate our experiences on a worldwide scale, to study the last one so that we are better prepared for the next one.
Host Faramarz Farbod talks with Dr. Maura Finkelstein, writer, ethnographer, anthropologist, and author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai (DUP 2019). Dr. Finkelstein was falsely accused of antisemitism and fired last May (2024) from her teaching position at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. We talk about the state of academic freedom, classrooms as ethnographic spaces, decanonization, being Jewish and anti-Zionist in the US, Zionism, Israel, misuses of antisemitism, Islamophobia, empire, and the present moment in history.
This video dives into a groundbreaking investigation by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, exposing how fabricated stories about October 7 were used to justify mass violence — and how the Western media played along.
On April 12, 2015, lifelong Baltimore resident Freddie Gray was arrested, hogtied and thrown into the back of a police van by six officers. When Gray was pulled from the van less than an hour later, he was in a coma. A week later, he passed away from severe injuries to his cervical spinal cord. The incident, and the revelations thereafter, set Baltimore and the entire country ablaze. Details of the case alleged officers had taken Gray for a “rough ride,” a police brutality practice where individuals are intentionally left unrestrained in police vehicles during dangerous driving maneuvers. After a coroner ruled Gray’s death a homicide, the six officers involved in his arrest were charged with crimes ranging from false imprisonment to manslaughter. But the damage was done, not only to Gray, but to his community, which had endured decades of deprivations and abuse by Baltimore police. The resulting Baltimore Uprising shook the city and the nation to its core, fueling a fresh wave of Black Lives Matter protests building on the murders of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Eric Garner.
In a special 10-year anniversary documentary, TRNN reporters Stephen Janis and Taya Graham asked Baltimore organizers, activists, teachers, and residents for their reflections on Freddie Gray’s death, the subsequent uprising, and where the city is now. What did they feel when they first received news of Freddie Gray’s death? Did they have any hope the police would be held accountable, and has Baltimore City and its police department changed for the better as a result of the uprising? The following conversation is a thoughtful meditation on the long term impact of police brutality, the limitations of legislating cultural change, the power of community organizing, and the determination to still love and heal this city.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
[CROWD CHANTING]:
While they’re smiling, we are dying. While they’re smiling, we are dying. While they’re smiling, we are dying. While they’re smiling, we are dying. While they’re smiling, we are dying. While they’re smiling, we are dying. While they’re smiling, we are dying. While they’re smiling, we are dying.
Taya Graham:
In 2015, 25-year-old Baltimore resident, Freddie Gray, locked eyes with a police officer. He was chased, arrested, hogtied, and thrown into the back of a van. He died a week later from severe spinal cord injuries. Baltimore City rose up to protest his death, the result of decades of aggressive over-policing. 10 years later, the real news spoke to activists and community leaders about what they remembered, how it affected them, and the impact on the community, and finally, their thoughts on the future of our city. This is what they said.
[VIDEO CLIP] Taya Graham:
Thank you. Thank you so much. Really appreciate that. Welcome to a special live edition-
Taya Graham:
Just before the uprising began, I was actually hosting a town hall with Michelle Alexander, who’s the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
[VIDEO CLIP] Michelle Alexander:
We maintain this attitude that we ought to be punishing those kids and teaching them a lesson by putting them in literal cages.
Taya Graham:
And activists and organizers from all throughout the city had joined us. Members of the ACLU, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. All types of community members were there, and we were actually there initially to discuss the school-to-prison pipeline, but one of the people spoke up and spoke about the video of Freddie Gray that had just been released to the public.
[VIDEO CLIP] Adam Johnson:
I know here in Baltimore, in particular, we’ve been dealing with the issue of police brutality for quite some time. And Freddie Gray recently, his spine was severed and he died, I think two days ago.
Dayvon Love:
I actually got a text from a cousin of the Tyrone West family, and I still have it, a text message that has the picture, the famous picture that we’ve all seen of Freddie Gray in hospital while he was still alive, but on life support and says, “This is Freddie Gray. This just happened and we think this is going to cause a big uproar.”
Tawanda Jones:
When I seen Freddie Gray getting dragged into that van, it was like opening up my brother’s casket all over again.
[VIDEO CLIP] Eddie Conway:
Tyrone West’s family held their 200th-week protest and demonstration, trying to demand justice for Tyrone West, who was beaten to death by a dozen police in the city and still has not received any justice.
Tawanda Jones:
Hearing him screaming and moan, it just took me to, with my brother moaning and groaning and screaming and hollering, he was getting beat down in the same streets in Baltimore, not in the same streets, but in the same city, and nobody being held accountable. It broke my heart and that’s when I met Freddie Gray’s mom, Ms. Gloria, and I was just telling her pretty much to hold on, just keep fighting, and I was being prayerful that he was going to survive his attack.
D. Watkins:
I never forget, I was over Bocek’s, Bocek Park in East Baltimore and I got a homeboy that’s like he is one of those guys that he wanted to be affiliated. Rest in peace. He’s dead. This particular day, he was outside. He was riding around the city with my homeboy daz because they was filming a video and they was on a basketball court, and he just started blacking out. He was going crazy. He was going back and forth, and I’m like, “What’s wrong?” And he was like, “The police did such and such,” to my man, and he was going through it. So, that’s how I first heard about the story.
Michael Wilkins:
That morning, that morning, I actually had a hearing for a parole violation down in classification on Biddle Street, I think it is in Baltimore. And when they call you in for parole hearing for a violation, if they’re calling you into the actual jail itself, it means you’re not coming up.
Doug Colbert:
I was supervising law students who were representing people in criminal court, and we had many cases just like Freddie Gray, where the police would react to a black person who was not showing the proper respect and decorum, and they would then chase them down and eventually apprehend them and search them. And of course, those searches would not have been constitutional legal. So, my students won most of those cases.
Michael Wilkins:
So, I’m at home, and I’m like, “I don’t want to go to jail today.” Who wants to go to jail? So, I’m like, “I don’t want to go to jail,” and I’m praying. And then the riots break out, shuts the whole city down.
[VIDEO CLIP] Jaisal Noor:
In Baltimore on Saturday, April 15th, about 1500 people took part in the largest demonstrations to date against the killing of 25-year-old West Baltimore resident, Freddie Gray in police custody.
D. Watkins:
When people see things on video, it brings a different type of anger than just us talking about it. That’s the first thing. The second thing is poor leadership in a police department. We never really tracked down the source of who made the decision to shut the bus lines down, but some people said it came from the state, and then some people said it came from the police department. I don’t know. But whoever made that decision is a very, very bad decision.
Doug Colbert:
Oh, I think what happened in terms of the video was so unusual. It’s when you see something and then you have live witnesses who can tell the story that made a huge difference, and the reaction was immediate and predictable.
Michael Wilkins:
It made me feel as it relates to the city that once you push any population enough, once you keep them under your thumb enough, once you continually to kick them and prod them and laugh at them and mock them, it gets unbearable after a while.
Taya Graham:
For years, our community had yelled out and screamed out, people are experiencing misconduct, people are experiencing brutality. We had endured 10 years of zero-tolerance policing, where corners were cleared. People were taken off blocks for loitering or expectorating, spitting in public or simply not even having your ID on you to prove that you lived in the neighborhood. I actually endured that on multiple occasions in my own neighborhood, I would have to produce ID and be questioned on who I was, where I was going, and did I belong there.
[CROWD CHANTING]:
No justice, no peace, no racist, police.
Doug Colbert:
Freddie Gray was well-known in his community, and there were a lot of Freddie Grays who had suffered the same consequences. So, when people were actually there, they were able to tell the story firsthand.
Michael Wilkins:
Freddie Gray, unarmed. Freddie Gray dying in the custody of police. And then the first thing the police do is try to soften the situation and then they try to devalue Mr. Gray by victimizing him, putting the blame on the victim, saying that it was his fault that he died. All that together with everything else going on, it was a powder cake and it grew up.
[CROWD CHANTING]:
Justice for Fred. Justice for Fred. Justice for Fred. Justice for Fred.
Michael Wilkins:
You have to understand the atmosphere surrounding Freddie Gray’s murder, the uprising, which grew from, you have to understand the climate.
Jill P. Carter:
I think zero tolerance had a lot to do with it. It’s not me just thinking that the entire Department of Justice thought so because it’s all throughout the report that led to the consent decree.
[VIDEO CLIP] Vanita Gupta:
EPD engages in a pattern or practice of making unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests.
Jill P. Carter:
So, it absolutely did. How does it not? How do you have 100,000 people in a city of 600,000 people? Many of them are not even eligible for arrest because they’re either super old or super young. So, you take out, out of the 600, you got what, 300 or 400 that are actually maybe arrest eligible or likely, and then you got a hundred thousand people arrested each year, each year.
Michael Wilkins:
Nothing is in a bottle, you know what I mean? Nothing is isolated, you know what I mean? It’s like a silo with wheat flurries going through it. All it takes is a spark for that silo to ignite. It’s like being at a gas pump and the fumes in the air and you light a cigarette, the pump might blow. So, the fumes, in this case, the wheat flurries in this case of the silo of Baltimore was the policing, was the attitude of the police.
Jill P. Carter:
I think that the ongoing confusion that people have, as well, when those arrests were coming, wasn’t that what was needed? Well, no, because those were also years that we had astronomical homicide numbers and astronomical violent crime numbers and astronomical shootings that didn’t lead to homicides.
Dayvon Love:
Whenever I talk about the Baltimore case, I just, I point viewers or people talking to two figures. One figure is spending on parks and rec, and the other is spending on policing, starting in 1980. I think in 1980, parks and rec spending was like $35, $45 million parks and rec spending in 2015 was $35, $45 million. Policing was maybe, I think 140 million, policing by 2015 was three times, that was approximately 430, 440 million. Now, it’s above, I think, it’s maybe 500, 550 if not more. And then you look at where that spending goes, that spending goes into a martial approach to policing.
Some of the factors that I think led to the uprising is that law enforcement is a very insular industry, and the way that the system of white supremacy operates in this society is that there’s a fundamental disregard for the humanity of people of African descent. And that manifests itself in the notion that the community having oversight of law enforcement and light respectable “political establishment society” is seen as ridiculous.
Taya Graham:
The fuel, the gasoline was all the crimes that had gone unpunished. And when I’m speaking of these crimes, I’m talking about police crimes, Baltimore City police crimes against our community.
Dayvon Love:
Because I remember talking to a reporter at the time for whom I mentioned this concept of community oversight of law enforcement and young white women whose response was almost like she found it a little bit of a stretch.
D. Watkins:
If I walk out here right now and you put a gun on me and rob me, the last thing on my mind is going to be, “Call the police.” I’m never going to think that unless I had something that was insured and I was like, “Oh, I can get that bread back.” Then I might be like, “All right, back, call the police.” But other than that, if I can’t get my stuff back or figure it out, then that person was meant to have whatever they took and that’s just theirs. That’s just what it is.
Dayvon Love:
But I’m mentioning that because when you think about all the structural forces that in terms of socioeconomic denigration, lack of access to resources, disempowerment of community, when you have all those factors, the community doesn’t have the levers that it needs to be able to push back against police abuse.
Lester Spence:
Yeah. So at that point, what happens is when an event happens that people didn’t predict, and remember, I didn’t predict, I do this, but I didn’t really predict it. So when something happens that people can’t predict something explosive like this, it disrupts everything. It disrupts alliances. It disrupts institutions. It disrupts the solutions that people routinely believe should be applied to political problems.
Jill P. Carter:
I was infuriated. So the arrest and ultimate death of Freddie Gray literally happened days after the conclusion of the 2015 legislative session. And that was a session where for the second time in a row, 2014 and 2015, I had proposed a multitude of different pieces of legislation that would do things to create police reform.
Dayvon Love:
So police, in many respects could run rough shot as a result of that, the community not having those mechanisms of accountability because they’re fundamentally politically disempowered given the society that we live in.
Jill P. Carter:
One of the ones that I thought was really important was we’ve ultimately passed something similar now, but whistleblower protection so that officers would be free to report on other misconduct within their institutions and other officers and even their leadership without fear of repercussion. This happened a number of times and there were a lot of different mothers testifying. And why was that painful? Because my colleagues within the legislature just didn’t seem to care.
Michael Wilkins:
I don’t think that people really realize that nobody on the corner wants to be on the corner. Whoever’s doing bad, selling drugs, shooting people, robbing people, nobody wants to do that. That’s the reality of it. And if anybody comes and says, “Look, we’re going to help you find a job, that’s all that they want.” You think some man wants to go home to his girlfriend and two kids after spending all day on a corner, hustling drugs?
Doug Colbert:
And what then happened is that three nights a week, they did drug suites or gun suites or whatever arrest, whoever was on the street on a Sunday, Tuesday, or Thursday, if those were the three nights would be arrested.
Jill P. Carter:
Those were the years, the O’Malley years where everybody wasn’t safe outside of their home. You are sitting on your steps on your porch, you’re in your backyard, you’re on your street, you’re on your corner, just being present and being black could often result in an arrest without charges. So out of those 100,000 or so arrests every year, at least 1/3 were without charges, meaning we had no reason to legitimately arrest you.
Michael Wilkins:
Is directly proportionate to these men having jobs now. And we’re talking about a very impoverished area. People in trouble with the law already. And from personal knowledge, I can tell you how difficult it is to have a criminal record, a felony record, and not being able to find a job. I mean, there’s a lot of despair involved in that. There’s a lot of give up in that. I mean, you talk about taking a knee, try going to an interview, getting hired, and then a week later getting fired because your background record comes back. People get tired of that. So the easier path, is just to go on the corner. I can make 75, $100 a day hanging on the corner for 8 hours, and that’s enough that they’ll get me by until tomorrow.
Doug Colbert:
And I remember having a conversation with the mayor because we happened to both belong to the downtown athletic club. Baltimore is a very small town, and I’m going, “Martin, these arrests are not legit.” He says, “We got five guns off the street, that’s five less people that are going to be in danger.” I said, “But the other 95 people should never have been arrested in the first place.” He said, “Well, they shouldn’t have been out in the street.” I said, “Martin, they have fines that they didn’t pay.”
Lester Spence:
I think when Martin O’Malley was mayor, I think over a three-year period, he made more arrests than Baltimore had black citizens. So each of those arrests ends up leaving a mark. Leaves a mark on the individual, leaves a mark on that individual’s family. And as much as those arrests are concentrated in certain types of neighborhood, it leaves marks on those neighborhoods.
Taya Graham:
So the protests had been going on for days, and Marilyn Mosby calls a press conference. So at the time, everyone was a little bit nervous. No one was sure what was going to be said, but we knew it was going to be important.
Michael Wilkins:
And you have a brand new city-state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, who nobody thought would win, who was an extreme outsider fighting against the system just being a black woman and running for city-state’s attorney. And she wanted to show that she was different.
Taya Graham:
So she calls a press conference in front of the War Memorial, and it seemed like the entire world was there. There were reporters from across the country, and even international reporters were there to listen to what SAO Marilyn Mosby had to say.
Marilyn Mosby:
First and foremost, I need to express publicly my deepest sympathies for the family of the loved ones of Mr. Freddie Gray. I had the opportunity to meet with Mr. Gray’s family to discuss some of the details of the case and the procedural steps going forward. I assured his family that no one is above the law and that I would pursue justice on their behalf to the thousands of city residents, community organizers, faith leaders, and political leaders that chose to march peacefully throughout Baltimore, I commend your courage to stand for justice. The findings of our comprehensive, thorough and independent investigation coupled with the medical examiner’s determination that Mr. Gray’s death was a homicide which we received today, has led us to believe that we have probable cause to file criminal charges. The statement of probable cause is as follows.
Lester Spence:
So Marilyn Moseley was one of the beneficial… It’s complicated, but her election was one of the beneficial consequences of organizing. She had far less money, if any, than her person she was running against, and she ran on the platform of holding police accountable.
Taya Graham:
City state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby walks out to the memorial and she drops a bomb that she’s charging all six officers. As much as it was what people in the community wanted, I think we were all shocked that was actually really happening.
Speaker 21:
This morning at seven o’clock, I said, on one of the national networks that I would trust, whatever Marilyn Mosby did. I didn’t know that a decision would be coming down today. And the other thing that I said was this, that I believe with all my heart that she would take the facts, once she did all the research she needed to do, size it up with the law and make the right decision. And I said this morning before I knew any of this, that whatever her decision would be because of her integrity and the fact that I believe in her, that I would accept that decision.
Tawanda Jones:
I was so shocked that Marilyn Mosby stood up because I never saw a state prosecutor stand up and say, “You know what? You all hold your peace while I get accountability, gave the greatest speech that I have ever heard.”
[VIDEO CLIP] Marilyn Mosby:
To the youth of this city, I will seek justice on your behalf. This is a moment. This is your moment. Let’s ensure that we have peaceful and productive rallies that will develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come.
Tawanda Jones:
And I’m like, “Oh my God.” I’m at work. I’m in tears. I didn’t know, because I’m thinking in my mind, “Nobody’s going to be charged. They didn’t charge nobody in my brother case.” But when she came out with those words, I’m like, “Oh my God,” and that speech was profound. I’m like, yes,
D. Watkins:
I know it didn’t make her a lot of friends, but at the same time, it made her a hero to a lot of people. So a lot of people, they still talk about that, but on one side, and then a lot of people on the other side can’t stand her for that.
Michael Wilkins:
She wanted to show that her constituency matter to her. That she was going to stand up for them and with them, because she is part of them and she charged them. She charged those officers like they should be charged.
Doug Colbert:
What prosecutor state’s attorney Mosby did, which she really has never gotten the full credit for, is that she handled that case so differently from the way that most criminal prosecutions against police officers would take place. So in the first instance, she did not allow the police to investigate police officers because the outcome of that situation, not just here in Baltimore but throughout the country, was that there would never be charges filed.
Taya Graham:
But as soon as she announced those charges, the pushback from law enforcement began even before the trial. There were, let’s say, advocates on behalf of the law enforcement industrial complex in Baltimore city that were going on CNN, lawyers who were calling her juvie league and saying that she was rushing to judgment. There was an entire media blitz to discredit Mosby from the very beginning of her actually announcing those charges, let alone the trial itself.
Doug Colbert:
Steve, I think what people forget is how close the prosecution came to convicting Officer Porter, who was the first to go on trial. As I recall, the jury went out late Monday afternoon, probably around four o’clock if I recall, and they deliberated very little on Monday. They had a full day on Tuesday. On Wednesday, they sent a note to the judge in the afternoon saying that they had not reached a verdict, and the judge had Thursday, there was a holiday weekend coming up, as I remember. The judge easily could have allowed them to deliberate some part of Thursday at least to see if they could have resolved their difference. Surprisingly, the judge did not do so, and that’s when the mistrial took place. But I think that outcome really scared the bejesus out of the police union because they saw how close a jury of 12 people came to convicting the first officer.
Taya Graham:
I sat in that courtroom, and I can tell you, even though there had been a lot of chatter about how Judge Williams was going to be a fair judge, he was an honest judge and a forthright judge. When I was sitting in that courtroom, I couldn’t help but feel like the fix was in.
Dayvon Love:
So I think the officers that participated in arresting Freddie Gray that ultimately led to his death, them being clear, is, I think, a little complicated. There is a natural relationship between the prosecutor and law enforcement. So in some ways there’s an inherent structural mismatch between the notion of a prosecutor holding police accountable, and having the tools that when a prosecutor decides to do that, having the tools to do that, because you need law enforcement in order to do the investigations, in order to hold them accountable.
D. Watkins:
And I tell people, I don’t claim to be an expert on anything, but it is hard to be a revolutionary, identify as a revolutionary, and work as a prosecutor. If you want to be loved by the masses, you got to go be a public defender.
[VIDEO CLIP] Marilyn Mosby:
There were individual police officers that were witnesses to the case, yet were part of the investigative team, interrogations that were conducted without asking the most poignant questions, lead detectives that were completely uncooperative and started a counter investigation to disprove the state’s case by not executing search warrants pertaining to text messages among the police officers involved in the case.
Dayvon Love:
So in terms of them being cleared, for me, it is a result of the structural mismatch between the fact that law enforcement in many respects, as a matter of policy, had developed a structure where they’re the only ones that could investigate. And so with just the culture of the blue wall of silence, it makes it nearly impossible
Michael Wilkins:
When those cops, when those six policemen were exonerated, I don’t want to sound cliche, but it was just deflation. It was an air balloon with the oxygen being turned off. But at the same time, I’m old enough and I’m wise enough to realize that police is a very powerful beast with a very powerful ying and a very long reach. And they stay together, they stick together. There’s not too many juries and judges around that’s going to facilitate willfully their incarceration.
Dayvon Love:
And there are ways that both her deciding to indict those officers and prosecute marked her in ways that was detrimental to her and her family. But it was a net positive to have a person in that seat who took the positions that she ended up having to take. It was a net positive. I think it helped us on police accountability, juvenile justice. Her being there really helped in some of the policy work that we’ve done on a lot of relevant issues. And I think the targeting of her in many ways was not just about her, the individual. It was about her policy platform and pushing back against it.
Taya Graham:
So after the Uprising, the Baltimore City government makes a really extraordinary choice, and that choice was to give a billionaire a $600 million tax break to build out Port Covington.
[VIDEO CLIP] Stephanie Rawlings-Blake:
So my office began working with Sagamore Development months ago to make sure that all of the people of Baltimore benefited from Port Covington.
Lester Spence:
And as much as that’s all occurring within a dynamic in which Baltimore is being hollowed out in social service provision, and they’re giving tax breaks to a combination of high income earners and then to either corporate actors like Under Armour or even like my employer, like Hopkins, who doesn’t pay taxes, it ends up creating this hollowed out city in which I think the word that comparative politics or IR scholars would use to describe Baltimore if it were a nation, I think the term is Garrison State. It’s a state in which most of its governing resources are put into policing.
Taya Graham:
This tax break of $600 million going to a billionaire is going to allow him to build out Port Covington, also now known as the Baltimore Peninsula. Now, this area is isolated from the rest of Baltimore City, so the amenities, the luxury apartments, the Under Armour headquarters, none of this is actually going to benefit city residents.
Lester Spence:
The degree to which there were some actors who were able to benefit far more than others, and that in some ways, even though the priorities shifted, they didn’t shift, they shifted, right? So they shift a little bit, but not enough where giving a $600 million basically tax write off to a major development actor wasn’t deemed to be abnormal. It was still business as usual.
Tawanda Jones:
Again, it’s just a capitalist system that perpetuates off of poor people and use our paying for its game, just like they built a Freddie Gray community center. What is the Freddie Gray community center? How is it helping black and brown folks, or needy folks? What is it doing? Do anybody know what is it doing?
Jill P. Carter:
Where you spend your money is indicative of your priorities and your moral code, your moral compass. So if you’re spending your resources or expending resources to help billionaires while you have neighborhoods of people starving, that shows you the priorities. And that’s indicative of the leadership of the city that’s always been in place. I’m born and raised in Baltimore, and I wasn’t always astute about decisions of leadership and how they affected everyone, but when you look at the entire history of the city, we’ve always had leadership and an establishment that feeds the rich and starves the poor.
D. Watkins:
Freddie Gray got robbed by one of those settlement companies. You’re supposed to get a lead check for like a half a million dollars, and they come through with like 15, 20 cash, it was something criminal like that. So it’s like you’re being preyed upon by the people at the corner store, you’re getting preyed upon by the payday loan people, you’re getting preyed upon by some of the ripoff preachers. So many different people are just picking at you, and you got to exist in that reality. And then you got a world of people speaking on your behalf, and they don’t fuck with you either, in a real way.
Tawanda Jones:
It’s the haves and the have-nots. They take care of what they want to take care and neglect what they want to neglect. And the saddest part, they get more money in the city than they do anywhere else. And then they take our money and run with it, and take care of what they want to take care of, and leave people in food deserts, leave them. It is the same exact way. And in fact, it’s getting worse.
Taya Graham:
It was a hastily called press conference at City Hall. Mayor Catherine Pugh, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Police Commissioner Kevin Davis announced they had reached an agreement over how to reform the Baltimore City Police Department.
[VIDEO CLIP] Catherine Pugh:
I want to say that the agreement recognizes that the city’s Baltimore Police Department has begun some critical reform, however, there is much more to be done.
Taya Graham:
A process that started last year with the release of a damning report that revealed the Baltimore City Police engaged in unconstitutional and racist policing. But the devil was in the details. Among them, a civilian oversight taskforce charged with assessing and recommending changes to the city’s civilian review process, requirements that suspects are seatbelted when transported, and that cameras are installed in all vans. It also included additional training and emphasis on de-escalation tactics.
Doug Colbert:
The federal consent decree is the best thing that has happened in legal circles since Freddie Gray’s killing. And I say that because once you have a federal judge monitoring police behavior and police conduct, and Judge Bredar, another unsung hero has been doing so for the last, what, eight years, and he doesn’t just bring people in to pat them on the back. He’s always demanding, “What are you doing to control that practice?”
Dayvon Love:
So what I’m about to say is not super popular. So initially when the consent decree was conceived, I wasn’t super excited about it. And I think sometimes people say “consent decree”, but aren’t even entirely clear structurally what it is. It is in essence an agreement between the federal government and local jurisdiction that we would sue you, but we won’t unless you meet these certain standards and obligations in order to withdraw any potential legal action. So that is in essence structurally what a consent decree is. And so the consent decree doesn’t impact policy as much as it impacts the internal practices of the institution of the police department.
Jill P. Carter:
Right on the heels of the consent decree, there’s an entire unconstitutional lockdown because an officer is possibly shot and killed in one of the neighborhoods.
[VIDEO CLIP] Jill P. Carter:
The idea of making people understand that we understand that we’re valuable, I think that the message of what they did because of the detective’s homicide or potential homicide versus the lack of that kind of action with the other 60 or so people that were killed in West Baltimore this year.
[VIDEO CLIP] Speaker:
The second day when this was locked down, this board should have went to the media and said, “You’re in violation.”
Jill P. Carter:
Now every day, there are people that are not officers that are shot and killed, and we don’t have lockdowns of entire neighborhoods. That shows you that the priorities were no different even after the consent decree.
D. Watkins:
These questions are really complex, and it’s hard to give a straight answer, and I’m going to tell you why. If I’m living as an outlaw, I don’t give a fuck about a consent decree. I’m an outlaw, I’m not thinking about that shit. I’m not even watching… I love Debra Wynn, I’m not watching them talk about the dissent decree. You know what I’m saying? So it’s not even a part of my reality. So there’s nobody who’s like, “Yo, I’m going to be a bigger criminal because the police officers are nice now.”
Doug Colbert:
At that time, the police were still being extremely aggressive. The Gun Trace Task Force had been in effect and operating for probably six years. And so on the street, people knew about the hitters. I mean, they would just jump out of their car and they would go after whoever they wanted. And there was no regulation, there was no supervision.
Michael Wilkins:
For years, very passive, and it was part of that, them not working for the city and working for Marilyn Mosby, they would just not do it. And I believe that it was a complete call of duty for them not to perform their duties and tasks. I really strongly believe that.
Taya Graham:
I recently went to Gilmore Homes in order to speak to residents, and I have to be quite straight with you that it doesn’t look that much different than it did in 2015 when I was reporting from Gilmore Homes. Even as I was standing on the playground, there was a woman there picking up broken glass so the children wouldn’t be injured. As I looked across the street from the playground, I saw that the row houses that were connected, one of them was burned out in the middle. I mean, imagine having your home connected to a completely burned out and abandoned home.
Dayvon Love:
So I think what has happened in the 10 years since the death of Freddie Gray and the Baltimore uprising, it’s mixed. I think that one of the biggest outcomes of the uprising was that I think there was recognition of the demand for more black community control of institutions and more investment in black folks’ capacity collectively to have control of major institutions.
Doug Colbert:
We have to be investing in our schools, we have to be investing in our kids. It’s not that complex. And it doesn’t mean we’re going to succeed for everyone. And if we succeeded for half of the people, that would be enormous, because that would set an example for the other half. Right now, once you get a criminal record, once you get a criminal conviction, your chances of getting a good job have decreased considerably. In wealthy neighborhoods, we often will give enormous tax benefits, and that makes it, I guess, the profit-
And that makes it, I guess, the profit margin higher. But we’re talking about a city which has a very high poverty rate and a very high low income rate. And we’re just neglecting so many people.
Michael Wilkins:
No, it hasn’t changed and it won’t change. It won’t ever change. That’s the hood, that’s the ghetto. That’s where lower income Black folks are relegated to. That’s their designation. That’s their station. That’s where they’re from. That’s the way it will always be. Gilmor Homes, that whole West Baltimore area is huge. So to change the whole area, you have to change that huge amount of real estate and space. And what are you going to do? What developer is going to walk in there and step on those? And then what do you do with the people when you try to redevelop it? So no, it’s not going to change. It hasn’t changed. Nothing’s changed. Poverty is poverty. Poverty is necessary, some people believe, and Gilmor Homes faces the brunt of that belief.
Jill P. Carter:
It’s possible that 10 years ago, if you had asked me if I thought that was possible or if I had some optimism about what might happen, I probably would’ve said yes. But 10 years later, having watched what has occurred since then, no, I’m not surprised at all. There’s no real interest in… There’s a belief that the people that have been ignored, neglected, deprived, criminalized, demonized, are always going to be that way and it’s just okay. We got to always have some group of people that we can just prey on. Do you know what I mean? Do I think anyone in leadership is that crass or that insensitive? No, but it’s a subconscious kind of thinking.
Dayvon Love:
The decline in homicides and non-fatal shootings the last few years in Baltimore City I think is one of the most important things to discuss and I think it has national implications.
Doug Colbert:
In some ways, we certainly have improved. I always like to start with the positive, especially in these times when sometimes it’s difficult to find positive, but our murder rate has decreased almost in half. I mean, whoever expected it would ever go under 200. And that reflects maybe a different approach to policing. I don’t get as many complaints or reports from citizens. I’m not saying they don’t happen, but I used to get regular calls, “We need your help. We need you to look at this.”
Dayvon Love:
So let’s just start with just the facts of where we are. Baltimore City Police Department for the past several years has said that it has a shortage of officers. So they’re having trouble recruiting officers, retaining officers, and therefore they will claim numbers between maybe 500 to almost sometimes, let’s say, a thousand short in terms of police officers in Baltimore City. What has happened simultaneously are precipitous declines and homicides and non-fatal shootings. So the argument that we have a police shortage, but homicides and non-fatal shootings go down that the case that makes is that law enforcement is not central to addressing public safety. The historic investments, and this is where the current mayor, Brandon Scott, should get a lot of credit. One of the first mayors to make the level of historic investments and community-based violence prevention. And what that means pretty simply is investing in people who are formerly involved in street activity, clergy that are really engaged and on the ground level, and a variety of other practitioners from the community and historic investments in their work to mediate conflicts, to prevent conflicts.
Jill P. Carter:
I do give credit to some of the violence intervention efforts that have sprung up since Freddie Gray and definitely since George Floyd. I don’t just give credit to the grassroots and neighborhood-based organizations actually to some of the political leaderships credit, they’ve funded and resource some of these organizations in ways they never had before. That is helpful, 100% helpful. But I also believe that I don’t understand why nobody ever looks at the decrease in population as well. You’re always going to have lower numbers if you have less, fewer people. What I would like to see it change, I would like the same way that it protects white folks. I would like for it protect brown and Black folks too, the same way it gives white privilege, we need Black privilege. That’s what I would like.
Michael Wilkins:
I think 10 years post Freddie Gray uprising, I think it has changed the city in the sense that the residents feel a certain compatriotism, they feel tied to each other. They feel as though they’re a collective, that they can move as one, that they can achieve goals, that if they stick together, if they hang together, if they are together, then they can move forward.
D. Watkins:
Invest in the residents, not just with money, but with ideas and that main idea being that this city is yours. It’s yours. You should love it and you should nurture it and you should take care of it because you can own a piece of it too. This is your city. It’s not a place where you rent. It’s not a place where you’re visiting. It’s not a place where you’re here until something tragic happens to you, this is yours.
Taya Graham:
Looking back 10 years after the uprising, I have a hope I didn’t before. And that’s because I have seen community organizers and activists and just community members actually feel like if they raise their voices, they can be heard. And I have seen incredible work from our community organizers going to the Maryland legislature asking for reform, crafting legislation.
Doug Colbert:
The criminal justice system always can be improved, always, but there are signs at least that lawyers are fighting for their clients. I always want them to fight harder for their clients. So we have a place to start. And if we can just keep adding to that and adding more resources to all of those different areas, I think we’re going to have a bright future.
Dayvon Love:
I think for me to overcome the narrative so that people aren’t freaked out by Black folks that are self-determined and that taking that posture doesn’t mean I dislike white people, but it is clear that there is no form of freedom where me being self-determined should be a threat to the space if folks are serious about liberation.
Jill P. Carter:
I’m always going to have hope because I’m always going to want to see people do better. I’m always going to want to see political leadership be better for all the people. But at this moment, I could honestly say I’ve been disappointed for the most part in what I’ve seen. But there’s always hope. Let me tell you, every generation there’s something that happens, some events that kind of galvanizes people around. And so I’m sure that there will be things in the future who’ll do the same thing.
D. Watkins:
Obviously we know a lot of people didn’t care when it happened and they don’t care now. A lot of people started off on their little activist journey and then they realized they weren’t going to get no bread, so they went and did something else. But there’s a whole lot of people who remember that, who remember those curfews, who remember seeing those tanks, who remember what happened, and they started moving differently as a result. And I think that’s important too. I’ve known some people that have passed and didn’t really have an opportunity to mobilize a city like that. I think his life mattered and I think his life put a whole lot of people on the journey towards being better people.
Ecuador’s president and Trump ally Daniel Noboa has declared victory in the recent election, claiming 56% of the vote in Sunday’s presidential election, according to the country’s National Electoral Council. But analysts say Noboa’s campaign was riddled with illegalities, and that he waged a dirty fake news war against challenger Luisa González the likes of which the country has never seen—and González has challenged the legitimacy of the final vote tally. Reporting from the streets of Quito, journalist Michael Fox breaks down the political tumult in Ecuador and the implications of Noboa’s victory for Ecuadorians, for Latin America, and the new international right.
Videography / Production / Narration: Michael Fox
Transcript
Michael Fox, narrator: Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, has been reelected. He’s 37 years old. The son of a banana tycoon. And a Trump ally. He was one of only three Latin American presidents to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, alongside Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele—all international figureheads of the “new right”.
Noboa’s campaign focused on one thing: Security. See, gangs and narco-groups have sent violence spiraling out of control in recent years.
Decio Machado, political analyst: If things continue this way this year, Ecuador won’t be the second most violent country in Latin America, it will be the first.
Michael Fox, narrator: Noboa has promised to take it to the gangs. He’s building high-security prisons, like El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and like Bukele has done to execute his war on the gangs and extrajudicial imprisonment of 2% of his country’s population, the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Daniel Noboa has also decreed states of emergency to claim exceptional powers, suspending constitutional rights in the name of the war on drugs.
He’s even invited the United States to help.
Daniel Noboa, Ecuador’s President[speech]: We are going to end delinquency. We are going to end criminality. We are going to do away with these miserable politicians that have kept us behind.
Michael Fox, narrator: Iron fist. Tough on crime. This is Noboa’s bread and butter. And his people love it.
According to the National Electoral Council, Noboa won Sunday’s election with 56% of the vote. His supporters danced in the streets.
Noboasupporter: I’m so happy. We’ve won again.
Michael Fox, narrator: But analysts say Noboa’s campaign was riddled with illegalities, and that he waged a dirty fake news war against challenger Luisa González the likes of which the country has never seen.
And on election night… González refused to recognize the results.
Luisa González, presidential candidate[speech]: I denounce, before the people, before the media and the world that Ecuador is living under a dictatorship. This is the biggest fraud in the history of Ecuador!
Michael Fox, narrator: Luisa González is a former national assembly member, a lawyer, and the leader of the Citizen’s Revolution. That’s the leftist political party created by former president Rafael Correa in the mid 2000s. He oversaw a tremendous increase in spending for education, healthcare, and social programs. They helped to lift almost two million people out of poverty.
Luisa ran on this legacy, with a campaign focused on both battling crime, and also tackling unemployment and poverty. Almost 30 percent of Ecuadorians live under the poverty line. González called for unity and promised to reinvest in Ecuador. Social programs. Education.
Her supporters were excited for a return to the good days of the past.
Marlene Yacchirema, Luisa González supporter: There was a lot of security. We lived in peace for 10 years, which we had not experienced for many years. And today, it’s gotten so much worse.
Michael Fox, narrator: Polls showed her leading ahead of the vote. Even the exit polls showed a virtual tie. That is, in part why, when the results started to roll in showing a more than 10-point lead for Noboa, Luisa González’s team believed there must be something wrong.
In a historic agreement, González was endorsed by the country’s most powerful Indigenous political party. In the first round of voting in February, Pachakutik had come in third with 5% of the vote . Nevertheless, on Sunday night, González received roughly the same number of votes she had in the first round.
Luisa González is now calling for a recount. It is still unclear if the electoral council will permit it and how everything will unfold. But beyond the fraud allegations, this entire election was rife with abuse, violations, and a dirty campaign carried out by president Daniel Noboa.
Decio Machado, political analyst: We have witnessed the shadiest electoral campaign since the return of democracy in Ecuador, from the year 1979 onward. And I say shady because it’s been the campaign with the dirtiest war, with the worst fake news campaign, with the most lies, and violations of the constitution.
Lee Brown, political analyst & election observer: I came here about five days before the election, and even in those few days before the vote itself took place, it was very obvious that the election wasn’t taking place in what you and I would call free and fair conditions. So most extraordinarily, the day before the election, there was a state of emergency. And this was called in, in particular, in all the areas where Luisa’s vote was strongest in the first round, but also in the capital city. Obviously that creates a climate of fear. People couldn’t move freely. So this is the sort of context the election was taking place even before that. That was on the day before the election.
I saw in my own eyes and, you know, people were telling me clear, clear abuses of power that were taking place. One clear example is the failure for there to be a separation between the government itself and the election campaign. One of those examples is just the state spending literally hundreds of millions of pounds in grants other things in the run up to the election, effectively buying votes. So that’s caused a lot of concern for people.
Michael Fox, narrator: Above all else, this high-stakes election was defined by a rabid fake news campaign against candidate Luisa González, which clearly influenced voters.
Alejandra Costa, doctor & Noboa supporter: I don’t want socialism from other countries to be implemented here in Ecuador. I want to continue to live in freedom. And I want my nephews to have this future as well. We want a free country.
Decio Machado, political analyst: There’s been a huge fake news campaign. It’s targeted Luisa supporters and has tried to insinuate links of candidate Luisa González with drug gangs, with links to drug trafficking, with the Tren de Aragua, with Mexican cartels. There’s been a whole strategy of poisoning the Ecuadorian electorate with information through social media, WhatsApp groups, etc., and it’s been very powerful on the part of the ruling party’s candidacy and on the part of Daniel Noboa’s candidacy. It’s all clearly part of the dirtiest campaign we’ve ever seen in Ecuador.
Michael Fox, narrator: Noboa’s fake news campaign wasn’t just negative against Luisa González, it was also positive in favor of himself.
Lee Brown, political analyst & election observer: The most incredible fake news that I’ve seen is that the government is resolving the question of security, because with your own eyes you can see that with all the data points, you cannot see them.
Michael Fox, narrator: This is an interesting reality. Despite Noboa’s discourse, his state of exceptions, and his increasing the military and police on the streets… the violence, homicides, and theft in the country have actually gotten worse.
Decio Machado, political analyst: Between January, February, and March, according to the official figures, the levels of violence have risen 70% compared with the numbers from the same period last year.
Lee Brown, political analyst & election observer: The propaganda campaign means people are really, really getting this unified message that only they can resolve this issue of security, and, on the flip side, that if you bring back the progressive movement Luisa González and representatives of the citizens Revolution, that if you were to do that then the drug the narco traffickers would take over the country.
Michael Fox, narrator: These types of lies and fake news campaigns we have seen before. From Donald Trump. From Bolsonaro, in Brazil. From Bukele, in El Salvador. They are a dirty, but highly effective tactic of the far right across the region. Their push to spread false narratives and weaponize misinformation across media platforms has been key to securing sufficient popular support and consolidating power.
Analysts expect Daniel Noboa to double down in his new term. A willing ally of Donald Trump and the United States, Noboa even traveled to the US two weeks before the election for a photo-op at Mar-A-Lago with the US president. Noboa has invited the United States to help fight his war on drugs.
Francesca Emanuele, Center for Economic and Policy Research: He is trying to get to that position of being part of the Latin American far right. And actually his policies are from the far right. He has militarized the whole country in the name of fighting crime. He is committing human rights abuses, forced disappearances with impunity, and he’s offering the US to have military bases.
So he’s definitely working to be the far right of the Americas and the far right of the world. And that’s really scary. That’s really scary for the population here in Ecuador. And I think that in the next four years, the situation is going to be worse.
Michael Fox, narrator: But there will be resistance. Social explosions are common in Ecuador when people’s rights are being trampled, or their communities disrespected, or their native lands threatened.
Nation-wide protests shut down the country in 2019 and again in 2022 against neoliberal government reforms and the rising cost of gas and basic products.
If Luisa González and the Indigenous movement continue united, it is only a matter of time, before a new wave of protests ignites. As we have seen time and time again, in Ecuador, if rights are not respected and won at the ballot box, they will be fought for and reclaimed on the streets.
On April 5, 100,000 gathered at the Washington Monument to tell the Trump administration in no uncertain terms that the DOGE attacks on federal workers at Veterans Affairs, Social Security, the Consumer Finance Bureau, USAID, and more were harming not only Americans but our relationships worldwide. Congressmen Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Al Green (D-TX), and John Garamandi (D-CA) shared with TRNN reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis their determination to fight, the need for a groundswell of public support and Congressman Green’s plan to end President Trump’s term early by filing articles of impeachment.
Videography / Production: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis
Transcript
A transcript will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa, host of Rattling the Bars, spent 48 years in prison before his release in 2019. At the invitation of the UMD College Park Young Democratic Socialists of America, Mansa delivered a lecture on his life behind bars and the political struggles of prisoners.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa:
I hope that at the end of this conversation that we have, that y’all will be more enlightened about what direction y’all want to go in in terms of changing social conditions as they exist now. As she said, my government name is Charles Hopkins. I go by the name of Mansa Musa. Prior to getting out in December the 5th, 2019, I did 48 years in prison. Prior to going to prison, I was a heroin addict, a petty criminal, and that’s what got me in prison.
I went in early, I went in ’72, and during the seventies was a tumultuous time in this country. You had Kent State, you had Attica, you had Puerto Rican nationalists taking over the hospital in Bronx, you had the rise of the Black Panther Party in terms of becoming one of the most formidable fighting formations in this country. So you had a lot going on in society, but more important, the number one thing you had going on in society during that time that cost every sector in society was the war in Vietnam. Everywhere you looked, you had protests about the war in Vietnam. And you’re talking about every day somewhere in this country, 75,000, 10,000, 15,000.
People was coming out protesting the war in Vietnam and the establishment’s response was to suppress the movement, to suppress the war in Vietnam. Anybody who was anti-war, their attitude was suppressive. And what got people in an uproar about it was when the media started showing them bringing back United States citizens bodies, and the coffins they was bringing back, they was bringing them back in numbers. So society started looking and said, “Well, this is not a good thing because a lot of people dying.”
And in my neighborhood, I lived in projects in Southeast, my brother in ’68, back then they had, the way they had the draft was, it was like the lottery. Literally that’s what it was. They had balls that rolled up and your number came up, A1, A1. In my neighborhood in the projects in Southeast, my brother graduated in ’68, and in 68, the whole entire, everybody that graduated from high school, the men, was gone to Vietnam. So this shaped the attitude of the country. But more importantly, a lot of people that were coming back from the war in Vietnam was radicalized. And because they experienced a lot of segregation, a lot of classes in the military, a lot of them came back and joined the Black Panther Party.
During that period, the Black Panther Party was, according to Hoover, the number one threat in the country. So the response to them being the number one threat in the country was to eradicate them. Assassination. They killed Fred Hampton, assassinated Fred Hampton, little Bobby Hutton, they assassinated him. And they locked up a lot of Panthers. That’s how I became a Panther because they locked up a Panther named Eddie Conway, Marshal Eddie Conway. And they set him up and locked him up. And I got some information over there, y’all can pick it up when y’all leave.
When he came, so when you got the encouragement of Panthers coming into the prison system, prisoners are becoming politicized. Petty criminals like myself are becoming politicized because now we’re looking at the conditions that we’re living under and we’re looking at them from a political perspective, like why the medical was bad, why the food is garbage, why are we in overcrowded cells? Why is this cell designed for a dog? You got two people in it.
So these things started like resonating with people, but the Panthers started educating people about understanding, raising their consciousness about this is why these things are going on and this is what your response would be. So that got me into a space where I started reading more, because that was one of the things that we did. We did a lot of reading. You had to read one hour a day and exercise. But more importantly, you organized the population around changing their attitude about the conditions. Because up until that point, everything in prison was a kind of predatory.
Then when you had the Attica Rebellion, that created a chain reaction through the country, with the most celebrity political prisoner in prison that got politicized in prison was George Jackson. George Jackson was a prisoner in San Quentin. He spent most of his time in what now they call solitary confinement. They call it the Adjustment Center. Back then in San Quentin. Him and three or two other political prisoners was locked up in [inaudible 00:05:06] killing a correctional officer. After the San Quentin police had killed… [inaudible 00:05:14] police had killed some prisoners in the courtyard who were wrecking. And it was a dispute between white prisoners and Black prisoners. The only prisoners that got killed was Black prisoners. So that created a chain reaction in the prison system.
Fast forward, so this became my incursion into the political apparatus in prison. While in prison, and some of the things I did in prison, my whole thinking back then when I was in prison was I didn’t want to die in prison. I had life and I didn’t want to die in prison. So I would probably go down in the World Book of Guinness for the most failed attempted escapes ever. And if I would sit back here and go back over some of the things I did, it would be kind of comical. But in my mind, I did not want to die. I could have died, I could walk, literally come out on the other side of the fence and fall out and be dead, as long as I didn’t die in prison. It was just a thing about being [inaudible 00:06:19].
And in 2001, a case came out in the Maryland system called Merle Unger, Unger v. State. They said anyone locked up between 1970 and 1980 was entitled to a new trial. So I was entitled to a new trial because of the way they was giving the jury instructions. So at that time, everybody was getting ready to come out. Eddie Conway was on his way out. So everybody’s coming out. Now we’re able, we did a lot of organizing in prison. We had organized political education classes, we had organized forums where we had a thing where they say, “Just say your own words.” We brought political leaders in, radicals in to talk about, had books that they had a political discussion in a forum much like this. And it changed the whole prison population thinking about the way they thought about themselves and the way they thought about themselves in relation to society. So all of us coming out now.
And when I got out, I got out December the 5th of 2019. I got out, I had, they gave me $50 and let me out in Baltimore City. I’m from Washington D.C. They let me out in Baltimore City and I’m standing there with $50. I don’t know nothing. I don’t know how to use a cellphone, I don’t know how to get on the bus, I don’t know how to get from one corner to… I know the area because the area is the prison where the prison was at, where I lived at all my life. So I know the street name. I know this is Green Mount, I know this is Madison, I know the street, I know these streets, but I never seen, that’s like me knowing somewhere I read something about something in Paris. I know the name of the street, but put me there and I wouldn’t know what to do.
So this is the situation I found myself in and I didn’t know what, my family knew I was coming out, but I didn’t know whether they knew this particular time. And so I got $50. I see somebody coming with a cellphone and I’m like, “Look, I got, can I use?” He said, “No, I’m going to get on the bus.” So it was an elderly woman coming off. I said, “Look, miss, I was locked up 48 years. I got $50. You can get 25 of them. I just need you to call this number and tell my people.” And I heard somebody calling from the side, was my family.
Now I’m out. While I’m out, I’m out December the 5th of 2019. It was a major event that came right in that period, COVID. So now I’m like, I’m out in society, but really I’m back in prison because the whole country was locked down. So for most people it was a discomfort. For me, I was like, “Oh, this is all right. I can walk.” You know, I’m like basically walking, like I’m walking in, I’m coming back in. I’m not, you know, there’s not a whole lot going on, so you know. And I’m working out and people dealing with each other from afar. You see the same people, everybody like, “I see you, you have a group.” And we started having like a distant social relationship like, “Hey, how y’all doing? How you doing?” And keep it moving right?
After I got out and when COVID peaked out, I was doing some organizing in Gilmor projects in Baltimore, and backstory on that, we had took a house in Gilmor Projects, which is exactly what it is, Gilmor and their projects. Real notorious. So we took a house, we found out it was city property, we took it, renovated it and made it community property, and we started doing stuff for the kids. Because Eddie, Eddie Conway’s attitude, he’s like, “Kids don’t have no light in their face. It’s real dark.” So we started doing Easter egg hunts, showing movies on the wall, you know, doing all kinds of activities, gardening to get the kids to be kids.
And we took it and when we took it, we say, “We taking this house.” We put the city on and we had a press conference, “Yeah, we took this house, we doing this for the community. Y’all got a problem with that, y’all come down here and tell the community that they can’t have this house.” So the city pretty much like, “Ah, whatever, we ain’t going down there and messing with them people.” So we did, we gave out coats. So this is our organizing.
See, our organizing method was you meet people with their needs, you meet people’s needs. So it’s not only about giving out food and giving clothing, it’s about having a political education environment where you can teach people how to, you know, you got the analogy of Jesus saying like teach people how to fish. Right? Okay, I already know how to fish, now tell me how to survive. Tell me how to store, tell me how to build, tell me how to build out. So this is the things that we was doing and we would put ourselves in a position, we would network with legal organizations. The people had issues with their rent and we know it was a slum lord environment. And we would educate people about this is how you get your rights recognized.
So Eddie, and I’m going to talk about Eddie often, right? Because that was my mentor. Ultimately, he got lung cancer and passed away December, February the 13th a couple of years ago. He passed away the day before my birthday. My birthday was February the 14th. And I was like, when his wife called me and said, “Eddie is getting ready, you know, transition. They in Vegas, can you come out here?” And I’m like, I can’t come out there. But the only thing I’m saying is like, man, whatever you do, don’t die on my birthday. I’m like, because I ain’t going to be able to take it. I ain’t going to have no birthday no more. It’s already sad for me to have to deal with it the day before, but I just didn’t want that memory of him.
But long story short, this individual was responsible for changing the mindset of a lot of prisoners and getting us to think outside the box more or less, right? Our political education, this was one of the things that the Black Panther Party emphasized. So you see, we call it Panther porn. This is Panther porn for us. Panther porn for us is when you see the guns and you know the Berettas and the mugging, that’s Panther porn. What we identified with is the free breakfast program where we fed our kids. We tried to promote the hospital, we tried to promote where we was taking and giving sickle cell anemia tests to our people because we knew they wasn’t doing that. You know, we used to give them free breakfast program. We was getting our food, we had clothes, we was transporting prisoners, families to prisons in California. All out of the way prisons. We was holding political education classes in community and networking with people around their needs and making sure they understood exactly what was going on with them.
One of the questions I seen that was on the question is the difference between abolition as it relates to prison and the police. And we know we had this call for divest, and I’m going be perfectly honest with you. I don’t want to live in a society that there ain’t no law and order. That’s just not me. I don’t want to live in a society where we don’t feel safe. So it’s not an issue of whether or not police should be in the community. It’s an issue of what’s their relationship? They got on their car serve and protect. Okay, if you’re responsible for serving and protecting me, then my interest should be first and foremost and I shouldn’t be targeted. I shouldn’t be like back in the sixties, everybody that had long hair that was white, they was hippies and you was treated a certain way because in their mind you was anti-sociable or anti-establishment. That’s what made you a hippie. It didn’t make you a hippie because you didn’t… Your identity was based on, I don’t really have a lot of interest in the establishment.
But they looked at it as a threat. People had afros, they looked at it as a threat. So when we look at it’s not about abolishing the police, it’s about the police respecting the community and the community having more control over. So if you represent me in my community, then you need to be in my community, understand what’s going on in my community and serving my community according to serve and protect.
Abolition on the other hand is we’re about completely abolishing the prison system. What would that look like? And we was having this conversation, what do that look like? You going to open the doors up and let everybody out? I’ve been in prison 48 years. There’s some people that I’ve been around in prison, if I see him on the street the day after tomorrow, I might go call the police on them because I know that’s how their thinking is. But at the same token, if a civil society, we have an obligation to help people. And that’s what we should be doing.
You know, people have been traumatized and trauma becoming vogue now. You know everybody like oh, trauma experience. So trauma becoming vogue, but people have been traumatized and have not been treated for their trauma. So they dial down on it and that become the norm. So we need to be in a society where we’re healing people. And that’s what I would say when it comes to the abolition. Yeah, we should abolish prison as they exist now, they’re cruel, they’re inhumane. We’ve got the guards in Rikers Island talking about protesting and walkout, wildcat strike because they saying that the elimination of solitary confinement is a threat to them. How is it a threat to you that you put me in a cell for three years on end, bringing my mail to me and say that if you eliminate this right here, me as a worker, it’s going to be threatened by that non-existence. How’s that? That don’t even make sense.
But this is the attitude that you have when it comes to the prison industrial complex. The prison industrial complex is very profitable. The prison industrial complex became like an industry in and of itself. Every aspect of it has been privatized. The telephone’s been privatized, the medical’s been privatized, the clothing been privatized. So you’ve got a private entity saying, “I’ll make all the clothes for the prisons.” You got another private entity saying, “I’ll take, I want the telephone contract for all the prisons.” You got another company saying, “I want to be responsible for making the beds, the metal and all that.”
Which leads me to Maryland Correction Enterprise. Maryland Correction Enterprise is one of the entities that does this. There’s a private corporation that has preferential bidding rights on anything that’s being done in Maryland. I’m not going to say these chairs, but I’m going to say any of them tags that’s on your car, that’s Maryland Enterprise. I press tags. So I know that to be a fact. A lot of the desks in your classroom come from Maryland Correction Enterprise.
So what they’re giving us, they gave us 90 cent a day and you get a bonus. Now, you get the bonus based on how much you produce. So everybody like, so now you’re trying to get… Okay, I’m trying to get like $90 a month. I’m just starting. So somebody that’s been there for a while might be getting $2 a day and some. We pressing tags like till your elbows was on fire because you’re trying to make as much money as you possibly can. You’re trying to produce as many tags as you possibly can to make money.
Well, they’re getting billions, they’re getting millions of dollars from the labor. So I just recently did an interview with a state senator about that because he had put a bill in and I was asking him about it. And then I asked him, I said, “Okay, prisoners going to want to work.” The incentive for prisoners to work is in the Maryland prison system, you get five days off your sentence when you come through the door. Then if you get a job, then some jobs give you 10 days off, so that’s 10 days less that you do in a month. Everybody trying to get in them kind of jobs where you getting less days. So it’s not a matter I don’t want to work and it’s not a matter I like the work that I’m doing. I’m just, the incentive for me to work is really the reduction in my time in prison.
So I asked the state senator, I said, “Listen,” I said, “Would it be better if, okay, everybody going to want to work, wouldn’t it be better if you pass and try to get a bill passed that say that everybody get minimum wage, that they’d be able to pay their social security, they’d be able to pay taxes and they’d be able to acquire some money. Wouldn’t that be the better approach? Because prisoners going to work.” So I realized when I was having this conversation with them. In Kansas, that’s exactly what they’re doing in Kansas prison. They got guys that’s in Kansas prison saved up to $75,000. They got long-term, they’re not going anywhere, but they’ve been able to have an impact on their family and have a sense of responsibility.
So another question that came up was, that I was thinking about is what would be y’all response? What would I say to y’all in terms of what I think that y’all should be looking at? And I’m not here to lecture you, but this is for when we look at colleges and as they relate to the struggle, the majority of people that resisted in the seventies, sixties, they came out of school, they came out of college. You had Angela Davis, you had Huey Newton, Bobby Seales, they came out, they was in college, the Kent State, this was a college., they got rid of Angela Davis because she was teaching on campus, because of her politics.
So college has always been a place where you have a propensity to like being organized or start questioning things and start developing ideas about looking at what’s going on in society today in the country and around the world. We’re in a time right now where, I don’t know how many of y’all read George Orwell 1984, but we’re in like a George Orwellian type of society. And free speech, yeah, it’s only if you talk about a subject matter that is not contrary to capitalism. And then you got the right to free speech, but then you don’t have the right to be heard. So then you got who got control of the media.
So right now getting our voice out or taking a position and you take a position, oh you being anti, so therefore I’m going to take your grant or I’m going to take your scholarship. I only got like one more semester to graduate. Hey so what? And I’m going to blackball you or better still, I’m going to snowball you and put you in an environment where you ain’t going to be able to get a job at McDonald’s. Why? Because I’m trying to control your thinking and make sure that you don’t be organizing in a manner that’s going to be against anything that we’re doing.
We’re getting a lot of information coming out and a lot of people is like hysterical. “Oh my god, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” No, this is what you do, you organize. We don’t have the luxury of saying what somebody else is doing going to dictate me not doing nothing. We should be in the mindset that regardless of what you’re doing, I have a right. This is what they say to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I have a right if I want to be transgender, I have a right. I have a right to that. Your morality is not going to determine what I do with myself.
We were just getting ready to do a thing on transgender prisoners. They didn’t have their biology changed. Your biology changed. According to law. You went to court and got an operation. They took you out of a female prison and put you in a male prison because they say that biology aside, you was born a male, not what you are now. And rounded them up and took them to a male prison. Who does this? Who had the right to tell you that you come from another country to come here for a better life? Oh by the way, everybody in Congress, ancestors came here for a better life. So I know they should have no issue with that because they wouldn’t be where they are right now if the Statue of Liberty would say hell no. So we passed that.
But everybody, I ain’t talking about the people that they brought here, the people that was here before them, the indigenous people who said, “Hey, everybody get the hell out. Because this is our…” No. What you want to say that you create this false narrative that people of color from another country is creating all the crime in this country, therefore we’re going to round you all up. Kind of sound like something they did with the Japanese when they put them in internment camps, right? When they say like, these are people that was fighting for this country. These are United States citizens that were fighting in this country. They rounded them up, put them in internment camps because you’re Japanese and we fighting Japan. So your loyalty can’t be with us. Your loyalty got to be with them, or we just don’t care one way or the other.
It sounds like kind of like that. But the point I’m making is we don’t have the luxury to sit back and allow the hysteria that’s going on in this country around some fools to make us say, I’m not going to do nothing, or get into a position where I’m just, I don’t know what to do, I’m giving up. No. Resistance is possible. It starts with education, it starts with political education. It starts with understanding the history. Lenin said that imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. We’ve seen imperialism, we’ve seen that imperialism taking shape. So a lot of this is based on the capitalist drive for greed. It’s about greed. A lot of this.
When you talk about taking a country and say, “Oh, we’re going to take the Gaza and turn it into Disneyland.” And what you going to do with the people? “Hey we already bombed them into oblivion so they’d be glad to work, they’d be glad to put on Donald Duck suits and Mickey Mouse hats and get some money.” That’s your reality. Their reality is, “I just want to live a human life.” That’s my reality. My reality, I just want to live human. I don’t have no problem with nobody. I just want to be human and treated like a human.
But when you say something like that, “Oh, you anti.” You ain’t got the right to say nothing like that. And if you say it on campus and you try to get them to take a position on campus, their masters who they invest with, corporate America going to tell them, say no. And Congress going to say, “Oh any money we gave you, we’re taking it back.” So the money, monetary is more important than people’s lives. That’s our reality.
So as we move forward, my message to y’all is don’t settle for mediocrity, don’t settle for nothing less. Whatever you’re thinking that you think should be done, do it. If you think that, but more importantly in doing it, make sure that it’s having impact. When you’re dealing with, like I said, we took that place. We knew that neighborhood, the drug dealers in the neighborhood, this is what they used to say to us when we come through there and say, “Hey, it ain’t a good time to be down here today.” And they give us a warning like, “Y’all can’t come down here today.”
And we was good with that because they knew that it was their children that we was creating a safe environment about. They couldn’t get out of the grips of their insanity and we weren’t trying to get them out of it. Our focus was on the community and people. And we feel that if we educate the people enough, if we educate the mothers, the girlfriends, the wives enough to say like, “Y’all deserve to be safe.” The people that’s not making y’all safe is your boyfriend, your father and them. Y’all need to talk to them and tell them that y’all are making our lives unsafe. All we’re doing is educating you that you have a right.
All we’re doing is coming down there and telling you that we’re doing something with your children. We’re taking your children out of the neighborhood on trips that they’ve never been before. We’re making them feel like they have some value. We’re making them feel like, “Yeah you can get a hug today and there won’t be nothing unusual about it.” This is what we was doing and it had an impact. What they wind up doing with that neighborhood is they did with all of Baltimore, that’s a major, they started tearing down places, boarding up places. So you might be on the block or you might be in the projects and you might live in this house. The next four houses is boarded up, another house, the next two houses boarded up. How can you have a sense of community with all that blight?
Then the trash bins that’s for the area become public trash, and then people just ride by, see a trash bin, throw trash in the area. How can you live in that kind of blight? So when somebody come and say, “I’m going to give you a voucher to move somewhere that you ain’t going to be able to afford in a year,” you’re going to take it on the strength that like you ain’t factored in, I ain’t going to be able to afford it. You say, “I just want to get out of here.” And when they get you out of there, next thing you know they come in and demolish it and they got condominiums and townhouses and it’s affordable housing for somebody that’s making 90, 100,000 dollars a year. But it’s definitely ain’t affordable housing for somebody that’s making less than minimum wage. So that’s my point. And I’m opening the floor for any comments or questions.
Student:
I was going to ask what can everyday citizens, meaning not politicians do to help prisoners?
Mansa Musa:
Okay, and that’s a good question because one of the things that we had, we had a lot of people from the community come into the institution. But what you can do is educate yourself on some of the issues that’s affecting them. Like right now in Maryland they got what they call the Second Chance Act and they trying to get this bill passed to say that after you did 20 years then you can petition the court for a reduction in sentence. It’s not guaranteed you’re going to get it, but it opens the door for a person to have hope, because after you… when you get first locked up, they give you a designated amount of time to file a petition for modification. After that, it’s over with,. The only thing available to you then is parole. If you don’t make parole then you in there forever and ever and ever.
So this is a bill that’s being sponsored by people whose family members are locked up and been locked up for a long time. And it’s a good bill because what it do, it create hope. And when you have hope in an environment, it changes the way people think. So when you have a hopeless environment, and case in point the then Governor Glenn Denning came in front of the Jessup Correction Institution in Jessup because a guy was out on work release, had killed his girlfriend and he had life. So he sent all the lifers back, took them all out of camp and put them all back in prison and then stood out in front of the institution to say, “From now on life mean life, let me tell you that ain’t nobody, any of you got a life sentence, you going to die in prison.”
When he left that prison, the violence went up like that. I mean stabbings, murders and everything because there was no hope. Because now people saying, “I’m going to be here for the rest of my life so I got to dominate this environment.” When the Unger case came out, bills was passed about juvenile life, they got bills passed. They’re saying if you have drug problem you can get drug treatment and the [inaudible 00:33:05] and people started going. It was whole. So to your question, monitor some of these things and look at some of the websites of the institutions, see what kind of programs they offer. They might need some volunteers to come in help with teaching classes. They might need some volunteers to come in to help with some of the activities they doing that’s helping support prisoners. Thank you.
Student:
First of all, thank you for coming out and really appreciate it. It’s great to hear you speak. I had a question, you kind of briefly alluded to it already, but how would you compare the political conditions, especially like during Black Power in the sixties and seventies and eighties, and like the repression that everyone faced, like especially from COINTELPRO and FBI and the police to today, and like what students and people on the street are facing right now?
Mansa Musa:
I think that back then the difference was technology, the internet, where we get our information from and the AI, that’s becoming vastly like the thing now. I think the difference is like back then, and Huey Newton made this analysis, what he called intercommunalism. He talked about that at some point in time technology will become so advanced that we ain’t going to have no more borders, and which we don’t when it comes to information, right?
So the difference is that the fascists are more advanced and pluralism is more insidious. Back then, because you had a lot of repression around class, so Black people was being subjected. So you had the war in Vietnam, we had so much going on that it was easy for people to come and find a commonality. Said, “Hey, we live in this squalor here in Little Puerto Rico and New York. We live in this squalor down here in Brooklyn and so and so. We’re living in…” What’s our common thread? Our common thread is that we’re being treated inhuman. So it was easy to come together around organizing around social conditions.
Now because of so much misinformation and so much control, that it’s hard to really get a read on what is real and what’s not real. You had the president say that when they gave everybody an ultimatum to give their report by the end, like a report card or something at the end of the week and they didn’t do it. He said, so when they put the mic in front of his mouth he said, “Oh, the reason why they didn’t do it is because the people that didn’t submit it don’t work there anyway.” So somebody getting a check in their name, in other words fraud was the reason why you got a 100 workers and only 10 people work there so the other 90 don’t exist anyway, so where that money going? That money going to somebody else’s pocket.
But that was the narrative he painted. But when he painted the narrative, the media is so dim with it that they like, it’s almost like you asking them a question and it’s like, no you’re dumb, no you’re dumb, no you’re dumb, no you’re dumb. And I got a Pulitzer and I’m going back and forth a whole stop. I’m not even going to ask you no more questions. So that’s what we’ve been relegated to. So that’s the difference, but in terms of our response, I’m going to give you an example. When they killed, when them little kids got killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, the children said they going to do something about it. They asked their parents, they went on social media, they started finding everybody had the same attitude. Next thing you know they had 40,000 kids that say they going to Washington.
So now I’m telling my mother, “I’m going to Washington, whether you going with me or not.” So the parents say, “Oh we’re going to chaperone you.” That’s how quick they organize. So that’s the difference. Our ability to organize is a lot fast, it’s a lot quicker now. So we can organize a lot quicker if we come to a consensus on what we’re trying to get done. And our response can be a response of like hysteria. We got to be focused. You know, we got to really sit back and say, they’re going to do what they’re doing. You know? They’re going to do what they’re doing. So if I’m doing around workers, I got every federal worker, I’m getting with every federal worker, I’m organized. I’m not going to sit back and say, “Oh well look…” No. Organized.
You know you got a right, organize, get together, organize, bump Congress, bump, bump, filing lawsuits, bump them doing whatever they’re doing. They the problem. Get organized and say, “Okay we’re going to organize, we’re going to mobilize. We got midterms coming up, we getting in your ass. In the next presidential election, you don’t have to worry about the count, we ain’t going to give one vote. That’s going to be your vote.” That’s what you do, organize. Well don’t, we get caught up in this thing like with Trump, I don’t have no problem with him. He is what he is. My problem is making sure that I tell people and organize people and help people get some type of sense of security.
So we should be food building co-ops, food co-ops. Because $99 for a dozen eggs? No, we should be building a food co-op. We should be doing things where we really looking to each other to start a network. And on campus, we should be looking at how are we going to take and organize ourselves into a block where once we decide an issue then all we’re going to be forced to deal with that issue and try to make a difference.
See some fights is not a fight worth taking because all it’s going to do is cause a loss. So you got to be strategic in your fight. We put a 10-point platform program together for the reason of identifying the social conditions that existed in society as it related for oppressed people. We chose to police the police because that was the number one issue that was affecting people. But our main thing was feeding our children, medical, housing, and education. Those were the main things we did. So we took over education institutions. That was our main thing. Our main thing wasn’t walking around with shotguns and guns. Those was things that we did to protect the community, but our main focus was programs that directly related to serving people’s needs.
Student:
Thank you. Thank you.
Mansa Musa:
You’re welcome.
Student:
Hi, I do have a question. First of all, I want to say great job, amazing conversation and the topics are so important. So I guess my question to you is how do… you mentioned this, like how do college students on campus build morale and boost momentum? Because I know it can kind of be a little iffy and hard to do so, especially if you have that backside fear of like this could cost me my entire like college education and the future I was wishing to build for myself?
Mansa Musa:
Right, and see and that’s not something that shouldn’t be taken into account. I invested in this, you know, and I invested in for a reason. I spent money. This money, my parents put in. They ain’t going to be sitting back like, “What? You did what? All that money going down the drain? Nah, that ain’t happening.” But the reality is this here, you mobilize around educating yourself, raising your consciousness and understanding historical conditions like Kent State, what college students did back then. Vietnam War and groups like this, young Democrats, socialists of America come to create political education classes, bring in speakers much like myself.
We pass around literature of books, videos, and look at those things and develop a space for y’all coming together to talk and discuss, how that’s going to come a direction. And look at issues off the campus. Look at issues like if it’s around in this area right here, how many homeless people exist? How much property do the campus, do the school own? All right, I ain’t telling you, I ain’t going to say like don’t mess with them over in the Middle East because that’s wrong. No, I’m going to say, “Oh, damn, you know what, y’all got all this land and property and within this radius you got like homeless people sleeping on the ground. We asking that you take some of this property and turn it into homeless shelter, and in the name of Ms. Snyder or give it a name of somebody. We asking, now now we’re moving in the area, we’re asking that you take this money and feed some people.
Now in this area, now we’re talking about that. We’re taking that you dig in this area and you help people that can’t, don’t have medical insurance but need certain things that you can get done, like dental. We’re asking that you take this money and putting it… This is things that free dental health. So you can take and say, “We providing free medical assistance at this level. We tested people for sickle cell, we tested people for HIV.”
When Huey and them decided to do the Black Panther Party, they looked at Malcolm and they picked up where Malcolm left off at. That’s how they got in the space that they got. They just took the social conditions said that these are areas you need to focus on, because you got what they call objective and subjective conditions. Objective conditions is what you see every day. The subjective conditions is what we do, how we organize, how we develop ourselves, what we’re doing. Because that’s going to determine how effective we going to be when we go out. So if we can’t come to no consensus on direction then we ain’t going to be effective when we go out. Because somebody going to be saying do this and somebody going to be saying do that, but that ain’t going to be the problem. Problem going to be I don’t like what you doing. So now you my enemy.
Student:
Thank you.
Student:
So I think one of the questions was actually about Maryland Correctional Enterprise. So we could talk about that. Yeah. In response to student concerns about Maryland Correctional Enterprises, President Pines said students concerns is that inmates are underpaid. That’s out of our control and we have to abide by state law. But the other side of the story is that the inmates actually want the employment because it gives them skills. How do we combat this messaging?
Mansa Musa:
All right, so the basic thing, and somebody asked earlier, what can you do? It’s legislation because the argument is why can’t you give them minimum wage? So when we tried to unionize back in the seventies and it’s a celebrity case, North Carolina versus somebody, we tried to unionize, they said no. And the reason why they said no because then you talking about the whole prison in the United States of America, [inaudible 00:44:30] you got 2.9 million people there in prison or better. So you’re saying we in the union, we got the largest union in the country.
So the issue is legislation and advocating for them prisoners to get minimum wage, a livable wage, no matter how much time you got. That allowed for MCE, we’re not opposed to them making money, we’re opposed to them profiting off of us and we’re not getting the benefit of it. So the issue is if I left out of prison and I had my quarter paid into social security, I had my quarters three times over. Now I’m forced to work. I got to work at least three more years or more before I get my quarter. Because when I left the street, I ain’t worked like maybe three years on it all.
But if a person got their quarter while they in, they get minimum wage or they allowed to save money, they can make a contribution to their family. A lot of guys got locked up, they got children, they could do something for their children. They got their mother, their families travel long distances to see them. They could pay for that transportation. The phone calls, they could pay for the phone calls. So they’d be able to take a burden off their family.
It don’t cost MCE nothing. They got preferential treatment and contract for all state institutions. Any institution that’s in state under the state of Maryland, they can do them. Whatever they make, clothes, the chemicals, signs, signs you see up and down there. They do all that. Tags, all the furniture. All the furniture you see in the state cabinet, all that. They do all that. So yeah, they could do that. That’s the alternative is for the legislator to pass a bill that says that prisoners can get minimum wage from any industry, any prison industry. If you hired in the prison industry, then you should be given minimum wage. And they got meat cutting, they do the meats, they do the furniture, they do the laundry for like different hospitals, and they do them tags. Them tags, I’m telling you, that was like… I really realized how people felt on the plantation doing them tags. That was like some… Yeah. That was labor.
Student:
This isn’t on the responses but this is like one of the questions that we’ve thought about. In your previous podcast episode, you interviewed the state senator and he mentioned the 13th Amendment and the connection between prison labor and slavery. So what do you think are some of the connections between the prison abolition movement and like the historical movement for the abolition of slavery?
Mansa Musa:
Right now, you know the 13th Amendment says that slavery is illegal except for involuntary servitude if you’re duly convicted of a crime. So if you’re duly convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave. And the difference between that and the abolition movement back in the historical was the justification. The justification for it now is you’ve been convicted of a crime. Back then, I just kidnapped and brought you here and made you work. So the disconnect was this is a human, you taking people and turning them into chattel slaves. Versus, oh the reason why I can work you from sun up to sundown, you committed a crime. But the reality is you put that in there so that you could have free labor.
All that is a Jim Crow law, Black code. It’s the same. It’s the same in and of itself. It’s not no different. You work me in the system. In some states they don’t even pay you at all. South Carolina, they don’t even pay you. But they work you. In Louisiana, they still walk, they got police, they got the guards on horses with shotguns and they out there in the fields. In some places in North Carolina and Alabama, Alabama they work you in some of the most inhumane conditions like freezers, women and men, put you to work you in a meat plant in the freezer and don’t give you the proper gear to be warm enough to do the work.
And then if you complain, because they use coercion, say “Okay, you don’t want to work? We’ll take the job from you, transfer you to a prison where now you’re going to have to fight your way out. You going to literally have to go in there, get a knife and defend yourself. So this is your choice. Go ahead, work in this inhumane conditions or say no and go somewhere and be sent back to a maximum security prison where you have to fight your way out.” So now it’s no different. Only difference is it’s been legislated, it’s been legalized under the 13th Amendment.
And abolition, in response to abolition, so we’ve been trying to change the 13th Amendment. We had an attempt in California where they put a bill out to try to get it reversed, and the state went against it. The state was opposed to it. Because why would I want to stop having free labor? The firefighters in California, they do the same work that the firefighters right beside them, they do the same work, the same identical work. They fighting fire, their lives are in danger. They’re getting like 90 cent a day, maybe $90 a month. They don’t have no 401k, they don’t have no retirement plan, and they’re being treated like everybody else, go out there and fight the fire.
So yeah, in terms of abolition, the abolition movement is to try to change the narrative and get the 13th Amendment taken off, out of state constitutions because a lot of states, they adopted it. They adopted it in their own state constitution, a version of the 13th Amendment that says that except if you’ve been duly convicted for a crime, you can be treated as a slave. If you’ve been convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave. That’s basically the bottom line of it. Thank you.
Student:
So like, I saw two questions kind of talking about state repression and like attempts to divide solidarity movements. So how do you kind of feel like state repression has changed over the decades and how can we kind of respond to those situations?
Mansa Musa:
The thing with state repression now is it’s a little bit more insidious. It’s not as overt like it was back in the sixties when they crossed the Edmund Bridge and they beat them, put dogs on them, or like they just took a move in Philadelphia, they burned the house down, burned the whole block down. There’s one house right here we got a problem with, oh hey, you had no business living in that neighborhood. We burned the whole neighborhood down, dropped a bomb on it. Or like they went to in California and they shot the headquarters of the Black Panther Party up. Or they ran down and killed Fred Hampton, drugged him and then came in there and shot him. His wife was in the bed with him. They put like 90 holes in him and not one on her. So you already knew you had the diagram where he sleep at, you knew he was drugged because the agent provocateur spiked his milk. So he was drugged, he was knocked out. And you came in there and killed him and said, “Oh, he fired out the window.”
So the difference is now because of the media and the propaganda, you have a different slant on things, and the fear of corporate America in terms of perpetuating this fear. So you change the narrative. You can’t say certain things. You can’t. If you say certain things about certain people or certain countries, you’re going to be Blackballed, labeled. And the pressure going to come in the form of okay, you don’t care. Okay, I’m going to attack your family. I’m going to find somewhere in the scenario where I can get you to back up. If that don’t work, then I’m going to round your ass up and send you to Guantanamo Bay. I can make up something. We got the illegal combatants. You got people that’s been in Guantanamo Bay since the Gulf War and has not been sent nowhere, had not been, no due process, no where are my accusers. Oh you’ve been labeled illegal combatant, state sponsored terrorism.
So they got so many different things they can say to make it where as though it seems to be an issue of you resisting and your right to protest and demonstration. It becomes you’re a threat to society or you’re a threat to the government. And this is how we’re saying it. We’re saying that, oh you was on the internet with somebody that’s been branded a terrorist. And that become enough to get them to say, “All right, lock them up.”
So now the difference is when they had COINTELPRO, COINTELPRO they was doing all these things and setting people up and killing them. But we knew what was going on and we made people aware of it. Now all this misinformation, it’s hard to get a read on what’s going on. So the response got to be, again, we got to organize ourselves, develop our own information source and all the misinformation, be prepared to identify it and put it in perspective. This is misinformation. And start educating people on understanding that be mindful where you’re getting your information from. We’re addicted to social media. We’re addicted to being like, how many likes I get today? Hey, they don’t like me. Oh my God, I’m having a fit. No, I don’t care if you don’t like me because if they lock you up and send you to another country, you ain’t want to be liked by nobody. I don’t know.
In terms of supporting countries and movements that’s fighting for their liberation in the Congo, in the hemisphere, South America, then yeah, we support a person’s right to self-determination. For us, our position right now should be to educate ourselves, politically educate ourselves to understanding social, economic, political conditions and the relationship they have between us and people. Because people going to resist. People going to be hungry, they’re going to go to stores and take whatever the hell they want to take because they don’t have nothing to eat. That’s just the reality. They ain’t got nothing to do with, I have a propensity to steal. No, I don’t have the ability to pay to feed my children.
Versus somebody that had ability. Food is high. And then medical, they talking about the Medicaid and all that. So if they take that and poor people rely on that, how you going to get the medical treatment that you need? How you going to get the medicine that you need? So these are the areas that, this is when you’re talking about organizing people, you got to look at what they’re doing, what the repression is, how they trying to repress people and organize around the counter to that. What’s the counter to this? What’s the counter to the medical? Do y’all have medical students here? What are their attitudes towards providing services for people?
What’s the problem with mental health? Do y’all have mental health people here that’s in that field? Social workers in that field? Then your responsibility is come and get them to say, “Listen, we need you to go in the community to organize, to help us organize this. Show us how to organize this for the community to get them to be more proactive.” Okay, what’s your purpose of your education? The purpose of my education, I want to get a degree and make some money. Okay, and what? The federal government? What’s your chances of getting a job in the federal government?
They find people that’s on probation, person that got 20 years in one job, get a better job and they put them on probation. They say, “Oh you fired because you’re on probation.” No, I just took a better job. But the arbitrariness of this thinking is that I’m putting fear and I’m turning people into snitches because I’m making you, in order to keep what you got, you got to tell on somebody as opposed to us saying, take the institution of higher learning and look at the different departments and see how you can go into new departments and get them to become more proactive in doing some things in the community.
And that’s the whole thing about the higher learning. Look at these other disciplines and start asking yourself, how can I get them to start doing some things in the community to help raise people’s consciousness? How can we come together to do a plan, a program around how we can invest in the community? How can we get a plan to start dealing with getting trauma to be recognized as a national mental health and get the government to do what they supposed to do in terms of providing services for people that’s been traumatized. And stop, oh, oh yeah, you traumatized but you shouldn’t have did what you did. But you’re saying that trauma, I’m in trauma, that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Yeah, but we don’t recognize that because you did it. All we recognize as a problem, we’re not recognizing as it relate to you. Double talk.
Student:
I had a question about the role of electoralism, because one part of the Black Panther Party’s historical activism that’s somewhat forgotten is elections and campaigns like Bobby Seale ran for mayor of Oakland. A lot of the modern American left is starting to be more wary of the use of elections because we’ve seen people who maybe are supposed to represent our values get elected, and then do things against what their constituents want, things like that. But I was wondering if you had any thoughts about if there’s still a role for elections to, you know, be agitational and grow the organization, or you know, how we can make sure that we’re still, you know, being agitational against the establishment.
Mansa Musa:
And you know, Tip O’Neill said, “All politics are local.” And Tip O’Neill was the speaker of the House, the Democrat party back in caveman days. But my position, and to reflect on what you said about Bobby Seale, when the party took that position of running Bobby Seale for mayor, we knew that he wasn’t going to get elected. But the objective was, this was the ability to mobilize people around, educating them around what this government, what the city government is supposed to do, what your government is supposed to do. So now we are on the campaign trail saying, “No, the budget is the people’s budget. The money is the people’s money. The budget got to be like this. If I’m elected, I’m going to do this,” and make him respond to it.
But then at the same token we looked at, when we started doing that, I was telling [inaudible 01:01:59], we started looking at local elections. Our institution of elected. Ericka Huggins, who was a member of the Black Panther Party, she ran for the position to be the director of the Juvenile Services. And when she got in that position, she changed the whole narrative of how they treated the kids. So that was one way we got in there and changed policy.
What we recognize though, that in terms of electoral system, there’s no such thing as two parties. It’s one party, the capitalist party. That’s it, that’s all. They knew that this is reality, this is the reality we confronted with. If you know Biden ain’t going to be able to cut the mustard for two years, just hypothetical, you know he ain’t going to cut the mustard for two years. Why you didn’t in two years at the end there say, “Listen, the Democrat Party that’s responsible for putting all the money up, let’s start getting a candidate now. We’re going to have open primaries, whoever come out there.”
No, you put Kamala Harris, the top cop in this position and expected, one, they’re going to put a woman in there. Hillary Clinton was more qualified and more fascist than all of them put together. And they ain’t put her in there more qualified. She’s secretary of state, senator, her husband, Obama, Biden, Trump, Bush one, two, and three. More qualified than all of them. They definitely wasn’t putting her in there. And then they’re going to turn around and put Kamala Harris in there. That wasn’t happening.
So what you did, so it ain’t made no difference. Trump, they got somebody come on. I don’t know if it’s AI generated or not where he’s saying that he stole the election. That yeah, Elon Musk knew how to work the computers, so that’s why I won Pennsylvania. All right. What we did on that? Ain’t nobody in their right mind think they won’t let this woman get in there. And this is a two-party system and then y’all at the 11th hour, y’all got to… So now you’re putting the pressure on everybody donate, donate. And her position was, “Look what you want to do? What you want to do? So I’m going to do something but my thing is, I’m telling y’all don’t, I’m here. This your alternate. Vote for me, don’t vote for him.”
Why? “Because y’all going to… Look at him.” Yeah. It wasn’t like what I’m offering y’all, what am I offering y’all? How am I changing? Food was still high, gas was high. People’s everyday needs. And he, look, he did a whole bunch of crazy fire too but he played, he ran on that. Oh, he ran on that record. Oh look, y’all can’t put gas in y’all cars? Y’all can’t put food on your table? Oh man, y’all ain’t safe? Yeah, we wasn’t safe when you was in there, we didn’t have food on our table when you was in there. But you saying, “Look. Oh yeah, but look. Forget what I did. Look what they’re doing to y’all now.” Yeah. Come on.
So in turn, in response to I look at the electoral politics like this here, certain municipalities that you can make impact policy, that you can organize people and put people in there that’s going to be responsible to that. Yeah. But when you look at Congress and they beholding to corporations, they beholding to them. You ain’t going to find a Ron Dellums. You ain’t going to find a Clayton Powell. You ain’t going to find these people like this here, Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer. You ain’t going to find these people that’s like, I’m here, I’m here as a representative of the people.
Ron Dellums and he was a member of this right here. Ron Dellums was the first one that had congressional hearings about what they were doing to the Black Panther Party. This was when he was in the office and Hoover was in power. And so everybody was scared of Hoover, but Ron Dellums wasn’t scared of him. So when you look at the electoral politics, we got to take the position of Malcolm too. Malcolm said that we’re going to register as independents, we’re going to put our agenda together. You sign onto our agenda. If you don’t represent what you say you’re going to represent, then we’re going to be calling you. The same way we got you in, the same way we’re going to get you out. And make them sign on to that.
All right. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I got some stuff over here on Eddie Conway. I got my card over there. We can take a picture of the QR code, Rattling The Bars, real news. Appreciate this, appreciate this opportunity. My call to action for y’all is, you know, just go out, sit back, get together, start brainstorming, look at some of these institutions. How can I get… That’s where you go at, go to these bodies of work, psychology, go to these bodies of work. What are you doing? What’s your position on trauma? Oh, this is my position on trauma. All right, will you be willing to do a trauma workshop in a Black community, in a neighborhood where they traumatized? Would you be willing to help set that up?
Then go out there and find a community where they’re traumatized. Get somebody to say, “Look, hey, we want to come down here and educate y’all on trauma, but more importantly, we want to get the other part of this institution that we have that’s doing wellness to get them to create a wellness program for y’all to do it and make the institution pay for it.” Yeah, you ain’t got to tell them don’t invest in somebody. Say, “Look, invest in this.”
A video has been circulated in Chinese-language social media posts that claim it shows a city in Myanmar after it was hit by a powerful earthquake in late March.
But the claim is false. According to an AI analysis tool and expert, the video is not footage of the real scene but instead AI-generated.
“The tragic situation after the earthquake in Myanmar! People can’t help but ask, why Myanmar?” the caption of the video reads in part.
The 10-second video shows the aerial view that captures a devastated street below. Massive potholes scar the road’s surface, while buildings on either side stand in ruins, their structural materials scattered across the ground. At the far end of the street, smoke billows from an active fire.
Some Chinese social media users claimed that this video shows a city in Myanmar after it was hit by a powerful earthquake in late March.(Weibo and X)
A powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck near Mandalay, Myanmar, on March 28, causing widespread destruction. The disaster resulted in more than 3,500 fatalities and thousands of injuries.
The earthquake also affected neighboring countries, with significant tremors felt in Thailand and China.
Rescue and relief efforts have been severely hampered by ongoing heavy rains and the country’s ongoing civil conflict, complicating access to affected regions and the delivery of aid.
But the claim about the video showing a damaged Burmese city is false.
A closer look at the video shows it was credited to a TikTok user “@the.360.report”.
A search on the user’s account found that the user often published AI-generated videos.
A test using an AI-generated content detection tool from Hive found that the video was more than 95% likely to be AI-generated.
Results from the detection tool Hive show a more than 90% probability that the video was AI-generated.(Hive AI)
Taiwanese cybersecurity expert Paul Liu told AFCL that the video contains several clear inconsistencies, which indicates that it was AI-generated.
Liu said the spread of flames across the sky and the concentration and uniformity of the smoke appear unnatural, while pedestrians on the street remain motionless throughout the video.
He added that there is a large pile of debris on the right side of the ground, which does not match the level of visible damage to the nearby buildings – an inconsistency commonly seen in AI-generated content.
Additionally, Liu pointed out that the spacing between the characters on the red signboard on the left-side building is uneven, another frequent issue found in generative content.
US support for Myanmar
The claim about the video is among several pieces of misinformation that emerged online following the earthquake.
A few days after the earthquake, a claim began circulating on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, alleging that the United States had provided no support to Myanmar, while China and Russia promptly dispatched rescue teams, medical personnel, and relief supplies.
A claim began circulating on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, alleging that the United States had provided no support to Myanmar, while China and Russia promptly dispatched rescue teams, medical personnel, and relief supplies.(Weibo and X)
But this claim is also false.
U.S. President Donal Trump said on March 28 that the U.S. was going to help with the response to the earthquake in Myanmar.
Separately, U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce, said on the same day that its foreign aid department, USAID, maintained a team of disaster experts with the capacity to respond if disaster strikes, and these expert teams provided immediate assistance, including food and safe drinking water needed to save lives in the aftermath of a disaster.
The U.S. Embassy in Myanmar also announced on March 30 that the U.S. will provide up to US$2 million through Myanmar-based humanitarian assistance organizations to support earthquake-affected communities.
“A USAID emergency response team is deploying to Myanmar to identify the people’s most pressing needs, including emergency shelter, food, medical needs, and access to water,” it said.
Apart from this claim, a couple of photos emerged in social media posts with users claiming that they were taken after the earthquake in March.
A couple of photos emerged in social media posts with users claiming that they were taken after the earthquake in March.(X and Facebook)
But a photo of a damaged road, which has been widely circulated in Burmese-language social media posts, was in fact taken 2011 in New Zealand.
A photo of a dog “helping” rescue efforts, which has been trending among Thai-speaking social media users, is a stock image created by Czech photographer Jaroslav Noska and has nothing to do with the latest earthquake.
Edited by Taejun Kang.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Zhuang Jing for Asia Fact Check Lab.
As Israel resumes its genocide in Gaza with the full support of the Trump administration, the movement in solidarity with Palestine has returned to Washington, DC, in a mass mobilization on April 5. The Real News reports from the ground in the nation’s capital.
Videography / Production: Jaisal Noor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Jaisal Noor:
On April 5th, thousands joined anti-Trump protests across the US, including multiple rallies in Washington, DC.
Roua:
I am here to demand an end to the genocide. I am here to demand an arms embargo, and I am here to demand an end to the deportations and repression against the Palestine movement.
Jaisal Noor:
The Hands-Off 2025 protests criticized the Trump administration’s assault on basic democratic rights, while a large pro-Palestine rally demanded an end to US-backed violence and Gaza and growing repression.
Miriam:
I think it’s really important for everyone to come out and protest what’s happening with the Trump administration. These cuts to public benefits, to public housing, it’s really, really destructive to working-class people everywhere. It’s also important, as we’re showing here today, that Gaza be at the front of this.
Jaisal Noor:
Critics claim, these protests are anti-Semitic and support Hamas. We got a response from participants.
Miriam:
No. This is a narrative that is being parroted by all of these politicians, pulled forward by what is ultimately a right-wing white supremacist administration. And what it’s trying to do is demonize any kind of political dissent right now. It’s trying to paint the movement for Palestine as something that it’s not. What we’re really out here for is an end to genocide. An end to the war machine that has been murdering tens of thousands of people for the last year and a half.
Jaisal Noor:
Recent Gallup polls show a historic low in US public support for Israel, yet only 15 US senators supported Bernie Sanders’ recent bill to block 8.8 billion in arms sales to the close US ally.
Eugene Puryear:
I think what we’re hoping to achieve with protests like this is like the abolitionists years ago with the longterm campaigns of petitioning and other forms of pressuring the government, and their own forms of demonstrations and others is to help build a stronger moral conscious movement in this country in solidarity with the Palestinian people and to end this genocide. And we know this country is so undemocratic, it’s so gerrymandered, it’s so difficult to get the voices of the people, even when they’re in the majority, represented inside of Congress. And so we’re here to crystallize our position, to show people they’re not alone, to encourage them to stand up in their own localities, to keep building a movement that cannot be denied.
Jaisal Noor:
Protesters also highlighted the Trump administration’s crackdown on student activists, including revoking 300 student visas and detaining Mahmoud Khalil under a controversial Cold War-era law that permits deporting non-citizens deemed a threat to US foreign policy.
Roua:
The repression against the Palestine movement speaks to the power of the Palestine movement. You have the president of the country with one of the strongest militaries in the entire world, and at the forefront of his agenda is revoking the visas of anti-genocide student protesters. That is how effective our movement, the Palestine movement, has been in exposing Israel’s crimes. And that is how strong we are. And I think that gives me hope. That gives me the power and the inspiration to know that what we are doing is working and what we are doing must continue to be done.
Jaisal Noor:
For The Real News, this is Jaisal Noor in Washington, DC.
Host Faramarz Farbod interviews Robert Jensen, professor, journalist, activist, and author of many books, most recently It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics. They talk about how to think freely, speak responsibly, and live authentically in an uncertain world and end with a discussion of contemporary controversies like white supremacy, ecological sustainability, and trans ideology.
On March 31, also known as Cesar Chavez Day, unions and workers from across California converged on Delano, home of the historic Delano Grape Strike that began the struggle of the United Farm Workers. The Real News reports from the ground, speaking with union and community leaders who say workers are coming together across sectors to oppose Trump’s attacks on immigrants and the federal workforce.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mel Buer:
On March 31st, 2025, thousands of workers from all over the state of California met in Delano, California to celebrate the life and legacy of Cesar Chavez, and stand in solidarity with immigrant workers across the United States. One in every three workers in the state of California are immigrants. And raids by ICE and border patrol agencies on immigrant communities have intensified in the months following Donald Trump’s inauguration in mid-January. In California, all across the state, immigrant workers have been detained and deported. Some of the most harrowing experiences have been in Kern County, in California’s Central Valley, where ICE raids have terrorized the immigrant community and left workers uncertain about their future in the country. In a show of solidarity, union workers from all over the state traveled to Delano to remind the country and each other that these attacks on immigrant workers won’t go unchallenged.
David Huerta:
Today’s also, not only a recognition of that, but also really standing united against the attacks against working people and the most particularly, immigrant workers, right? And so I think we stand today in the sense of saying that we stand shoulder to shoulder with one another, all workers for every worker. Doesn’t matter your status, doesn’t matter what language you speak, doesn’t matter. We have to stand united as working people at this moment in time, as we see this president continuous attacks against working people, and most particularly, against the immigrant community.
Mel Buer:
The Real News joined a caravan from Los Angeles to Delano, organized by the Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West. Dozens of workers from all over Los Angeles met early in the morning, shared breakfast together, and then made the two and a half hour journey to Delano to march. When asked about the importance of organized labor coming together in support of each other, SEIU President David Huerta had this to say.
David Huerta:
This is the moment in time that as every fight, working people have to stand united. Whether you’re a farm worker, a janitor, a hotel worker, a state worker, a nurse, all of us have to stand together because really with this administration, their attack right now is against federal employees. But that attack against federal employees is just a precursor to what he’s trying to do to the rest of the labor movement, and that’s dismantling. And we cannot allow that to happen because the labor movement is the last line of defense for working people in this country.
Mel Buer:
After arriving in Delano, workers gathered for opening speeches in Memorial Park before beginning the three-mile march to Forty Acres, owned by the United Farm Workers. Members of CWA, the Teamsters, UAW, SEIU, UNITE HERE, and other unions were represented in a massive show of solidarity with immigrant workers in California and the U.S.
Speaker 3:
So I think when we think about what Trump is doing on immigration, it’s an attack on the working class. And not just immigrant workers, the entire working class. When one group of workers is so afraid of getting deported that they’re not willing to talk about wage theft or unsafe working conditions, obviously, that’s bad for them, but that’s also bad for every other worker in that industry. So we’re looking at construction, agriculture, home care, kitchens, janitors, right? If you’re an American worker in those jobs, when undocumented workers who are essential to those industries are in those same battles, they’re afraid to speak out, that’s bad for everyone. So I think it’s literally true that an attack on any worker pushes wages and working conditions down for every worker. And so it’s so important that labor defend immigrant workers. If for no other reason then, we cannot have a labor movement in this country if the immigrant working class, which is such a large and literally essential portion of that working class, is afraid for their very life.
Mel Buer:
For members of the Chavez family, the continuation of their father’s legacy and activism as founder and leader of the United Farm Workers in modern day movements has been a high point of the Cesar Chavez Day in California and beyond.
Paul Chavez:
It’s heartwarming to see that his legacy continues to inspire whole new generations of workers and activists. My dad had commented that it would’ve been a terrible waste of a lot of hard work and sacrifice if his work ended with his life. And the fact that we’re here with people from all walks of life that have come from the many places, and a lot of times from places far away, would put a smile on the face because I think he would say that his work continues even after his passing.
Speaker 5:
And this is a great opportunity for us to do that as a community, as people, especially, people who know the struggles of the people who actually have this country moving forward, those immigrants that at times are abused or do not have the recognition that they should as people that they are. May this moment for all of us be an empowering moment so that we might remember our commitment as Christians to uphold the dignity of those who are voiceless. May we be an inspiration to others to do the same in every aspect of their lives.
Mel Buer:
Reporting from California for The Real News Network, I’m Mel Buer.
TThe world is on the brink of a new “gold rush.” Except this time, countries are rushing to control the minerals required for solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. And instead of continuing to dig tunnels or pits, some scientists are looking to a promising — but challenging — source of minerals that has tormented researchers for decades: seawater.
The ocean holds far more than just water and salt. Pretty much every naturally occurring element on the periodic table can be found in seawater, from gold and silver to lithium, cobalt, and nickel.
The problem? For most of history, these metals have been out of reach, because they exist at levels so low that it’s kind of hard to even wrap your head around.
Source: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Grist
Imagine an olympic-sized swimming pool full of seawater. If you were to separate all the elements, you’d be left with about half a kilogram of lithium, 1.2 grams of nickel, 3 milligrams of cobalt, and similarly small amounts of other sought-after metals. While that might not seem like a lot, the world’s oceans contain about 534 trillion olympic-sized pools’ worth of water. So, while there might not be much, say, cobalt in that hypothetical pool of seawater, there’s a lot of cobalt in the actual seas. In fact, the ocean contains 46 times more cobalt than all of the world’s land reserves combined.
“When you multiply it by this vast volume of seawater on planet Earth — that’s a huge gold mine,” said Scott Edmundson, a research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Lab. “There’s a gold mine, literally right at our shoreline.”
For nearly a century, scientists have been trying to tap into the ocean’s mineral stores — perhaps none more infamous than the German chemist Fritz Haber. Haber started his career as an idealistic young scientist, determined to use chemistry to save the world from famine. At the turn of the 20th century, he invented a method to pull the key ingredient for fertilizer out of thin air — a technique that allowed farmers to grow enough food to save an estimated 3.5 billion lives from starvation. But when World War I broke out, Haber’s story took a dark turn. He retooled his fertilizer factories to make chemical weapons for the Germans instead.
German chemist Fritz Haber developed an innovative technique to pull the key ingredient for fertilizer out of thin air. Later, he infamously turned his attentions toward developing chemical weapons for Germany during World War I. After the war, Haber (third from left) experimented with pulling gold from seawater. Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin
After Germany lost the war, the country was in shambles, riddled with war debt. And Haber — now shunned by the scientific community — decided to turn his efforts toward saving his country’s economy. Haber knew that the oceans were filled with gold. And he hatched a plan to extract it. “The legend is that he had this chemistry lab on a transatlantic ocean liner going back and forth and doing seawater chemistry experiments,” Edmundson said. “And it worked — technically.”
Haber’s invention was able to put gold out of seawater. The problem was that it was super inefficient: It turned out that gold was 1,000 times less abundant than he’d expected. Meaning the gold he extracted wasn’t valuable even enough to cover the costs of operating his machinery.
While Haber’s seawater mining plan failed spectacularly, for many scientists, the dream of extracting minerals from the ocean lived on. For example, over the following decades, researchers in countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan all looked into ways to harvest uranium from seawater. But none of those efforts led to widespread success.
And yet today, there’s a renewed interest in seawater, not for gold or uranium, but for the minerals needed for today’s energy transition. A team of scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Lab in Sequim, Washington, have a new plan to extract minerals from the sea, this time, using a billion-year-old living technology: seaweed.
A team of scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Lab in Sequim, Washington, are extracting minerals from the sea using seaweed. Grist
Seaweed is a type of algae — a huge class of photosynthetic organisms that primarily grow in the water. They range from microscopic phytoplankton all the way to giant kelp, which can grow a whopping 2 feet per day. And they all grow by absorbing light from the sun and sucking nutrients and minerals and dissolved CO2 directly out of the ocean.
Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Lab had already been studying algae for decades as a potential way to make renewable biofuel. They’d grow different kinds of algae in the lab, and then they’d refine it, extracting out all the organic matter for fuel. Without that organic matter, they were left with a powder made of all the stuff that the algae had pulled out of the seawater — including minerals. Initially, that powder was seen as a waste product. But as demand for renewable energy started to take off, the lab realized that its “waste product” was full of the same minerals required for this renewable boom.
“That’s where we started looking at, ‘oh, there’s a lot of minerals here that we really are undervaluing,’” Edmundson said.
Scott Edmundson and his colleagues at the lab dove in, trying to figure out if they really could get usable minerals from this algae waste product. The first step was finding the right type of algae. They scoured Washington’s coasts, searching for the species that concentrated the most critical minerals. This led them to a fast-growing native seaweed called ulva.
“Ulva is one of my favorite seaweeds,” Edmundson said. “It’s definitely a rockstar of the seaweed world.”
Researchers at the lab built a system to pump seawater into their onshore lab. This allowed them to fine tune the temperature, lighting, and currents to create the perfect conditions for ulva to suck up minerals. The seaweed is so good at filtering out minerals that mineral levels can be up to a million of times higher than the original seawater.
“The seaweeds have this remarkable capacity to bring it up orders of magnitude,” Edmundson said. “So you’re getting into the realm of, now we can do something with it.”
Research scientist Scott Edmundson holds two small jars full of bio-ore collected from dried seaweed. Grist
Once the seaweed has been harvested and dried, researchers use a machine that heats and pressurizes it, turning all the organic matter into a liquid that they can use for things like biofuels. This process leaves behind that mineral-rich powder, which they call bio-ore.
On a recent visit to the lab, Edmundson showed me a small container of bio-ore, which resembled a colorless powder. “All the organics in the seaweed have been removed, and we’re just left with the minerals,” Edmundson said, holding the jar. He then picked up another jar filled with a clay-red colored powder. “Each seaweed has this different mineral composition,” he said. “This one you can see is much, much redder. So this one has much higher iron content.”
At this point, the bio-ore is concentrated enough for a mining processor to turn it into pure minerals for batteries or solar panels.
Beyond seaweed, scientists are looking at other ways to extract minerals from the ocean. Maha Haji, an assistant professor at Cornell’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is working on a plan to hang big mineral filters off of decommissioned oil rigs. A few years ago, she looked into what would happen if all the retiring oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico were instead converted into seawater mineral extractors.
“With a little bit more research and development on the materials side, you could maybe extract over a quarter of the cobalt demand in the United States,” Haji said. “That’s a sizable amount of cobalt.”
While large-scale seawater mining is still a ways off, both scientists feel this technology has the potential to completely reshape mining as we know it. For most of history, precious minerals have been clustered in a handful of resource-rich hotspots. In those hotspots, people would do whatever it took to control those resources: They’d fight wars, destroy surrounding ecosystems, or violate human rights.
Seawater mining could change that. For starters, 77 percent of countries have access to a coastline. “It opens up a whole new world where pretty much any country with a coastline could harvest minerals for their own use,” Haji said. “It almost democratizes mining and mineral harvesting.”
For Edmundson, he sees seaweed as a way to turn mining into an environmentally positive activity, since the seaweed can filter out pollutants and combat ocean acidification.
“If you can make that work, and you can do it in a way that’s environmentally responsible, that has such high potential for providing the minerals we need in a sustainable kind of egalitarian way,” Edmundson said. “If you have access to the ocean, you have access to the minerals.”
Prominent Chinese influencer Liu Zhenya, also known as “Yaya,” left Taiwan Tuesday evening on orders from the Taiwanese government after she got in trouble for social media posts that appeared to support China’s use of force to take over Taiwan.
Initially, Liu resisted leaving and held a press conference to protest the decision, claiming the Taiwan government was abusing its power. She was criticized by protesters who gathered at the scene and shouted anti-China slogans.
But Liu left Taiwan on Tuesday evening, March 25, just before the deadline set by the Taipei government two weeks earlier.
Beijing considers Taiwan a breakaway province that needs to be “reunified” with China, by force if necessary.
The video that got Liu in trouble was from May 2024. At that time, she posted a video on her Douyin social media account about China’s “Joint Sword 2024A” military exercises around Taiwan.
In the video, she called the Chinese military drills “the most intimidating and aggressive exercises ever,” and expressed support for defending national sovereignty. “Maybe tomorrow morning, the island will be filled with five-star red flags,” she said. “Just thinking about it makes me happy.”
This video was later reposted on the official Facebook account of Taiwan.cn, a media outlet under the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing.
On March 12, Taiwan’s National Immigration Agency, or NIA, determined that her actions violated regulations on residency for mainland Chinese nationals and revoked her residency permit on the grounds of “endangering national security and social stability.”
It also imposed a five-year ban on reapplying for the permit and said she must leave the island by March 25.
Heckled at press conference
On Tuesday, Liu held a press conference to criticize the NIA’s decision to revoke her residency, calling it an abuse of power. Liu defended her comments, insisting that she had never advocated for military unification.
“I support peaceful unification. My discussion of military unification was based on an analysis of the current situation,” she said. “Talking about military unification is different from advocating for it.”
Liu also appealed to the Taiwan government not to separate her from her children, who live in Taiwan with her Taiwanese husband.
Throughout the press conference, protesters repeatedly shouted, “Welcome Yaya back to China,” along with other chants like “Yaya, go back to China!” and “June 4,” a reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre that Beijing has attempted to cover up.
Ba Jiong, a Taiwanese influencer who had originally reported on Liu’s actions, claimed Liu’s refusal to leave voluntarily was an attempt to stage a dramatic exit, with Taiwanese immigration officers escorting her onto the plane.
Ba Jiong said this would allow Liu to create propaganda for Chinese state media.
“Yaya wants to take a symbolic gesture back to China,” he said. “We’ll help fulfill her wish by holding signs like ‘June 4’ and images of Xi Jinping and the former Foreign Minister Qin Gang who went silent, making sure she has no material to use for her propaganda.”
Taiwan’s Premier Cho Jung-tai said that freedom of speech must have limits. “Freedom of speech has boundaries, and the boundary is the survival of the state,” he said. “One cannot defame the country and still expect it to protect you.”
In a separate interview, Interior Minister Liu Shih-fang pointed out that Liu was not just an ordinary mother. “She is waging a legal, public opinion, and psychological battle, and she has also received support from many pro-China Taiwanese and influencers.”
Liu confirmed that NIA had made a decision regarding Liu, urging her to leave voluntarily. “If she does not depart by the deadline, we will take compulsory measures, and this decision has not changed,” she said.
Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Chunmei Huang for RFA Mandarin.
Maryland’s Second Look Act has passed the State House, and now awaits a vote in the Senate. The bill would allow prisoners to request judicial review of their sentences after serving 20 years of prison time. Advocates say Maryland’s prison system is in desperate need of reform; parole is nearly impossible for longterm inmates, and clear racial disparities in arrest and incarceration are immediately evident—72% of Maryland’s prisoners are Black, despite a state population that is only 30% Black. Meanwhile, opponents of the Second Look Act charge that the bill would endanger state residents and harm the victims of violent crimes. Rattling the Bars digs deeper, speaking with activists, legislators, and formerly incarcerated people on the real stakes and consequences of the Second Look Act.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Jheanelle K. Wilkins (Maryland State Delegate, District 20):
Colleagues, I rise in support of this legislation, the Maryland Second Look Act, but it may not be for the exact reason that you would think. For me, this legislation is about justice. Was justice served in this sentence? We know that in Maryland, Black residents are 30% of the population, but 72% of our prisons. Our own Maryland data tells us that Black and Latino residents are sentenced to longer sentences than any other group or any other community. I’m not proud of that. Was justice served? For us to have a piece of legislation before us that allows us the opportunity to take another look at those sentences for people who were 18 to 25 years old when convicted, for us to have the opportunity to ask the question, if justice was served in that sentence, why would we not take that opportunity colleagues? If you believe in fairness, if you believe in making sure that our justice system works for all, then colleagues, you will proudly vote yes for this bill.
Mansa Musa:
Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. According to press releases published by the Maryland Second Look Coalition and the ACLU, “The Maryland House of Delegates passed The Second Look Act on March the 17th, recognizing the urgent need for reform in a state with some of the nation’s most pronounced citizen disparities.” The Second Look Act, House Bill 853, passed a final vote in the House. The vote was 89 yeas and 49 nays. Now, the bill will move over to the Senate, where it has until April 7 to pass. Delegate Linda Foley, representing the 15th District, who voted yes on the bill, sent a statement to The Real News Network providing some critical context. “The Maryland Second Look Act follows many other states, including California, Oklahoma, Colorado and New York, to allow a judicial review of sentences. The Second Look Act allows the individual who was convicted between the ages of 18 and 25 years old to request a review of their sentence by the court after serving 20 years in prison.”
Delegate Foley goes on to cover the details of what this bill achieves. She states, “It’s important to note the critical safety measures in the Maryland Second Look Act. The bill does not guarantee release of any individual. It allows an individual who was convicted between the ages of 18 and 25 years old to request a review of their sentence by the court only after serving 20 years in prison. A judge must evaluate individuals based on strict criteria, including the nature of their original crime, threat to the public, conduct while incarcerated, statements from the witnesses, et cetera. The court may only reduce a sentence if it finds an individual is not a danger to the public and that a reduction of their sentence is in the interest of justice.”
Recently, I spoke with two members of the Maryland Second Look Coalition, William Mitchell, a formerly incarcerated community activist, and Alexandra Bailey, a two-time survivor of sexual violence, about the organizing they are doing around the bill, and why it’s important to support The Second Look Act.
William Mitchell:
The Second Look Coalition is a group of people who come from all different backgrounds, some being returning citizens, some being people in the political realm, some being professors, and we all support what we call The Second Look Act. The Second Look Act is essentially, when an inmate has served 20 years day for day, the judge would have the authority to possibly review that inmate’s sentence, to see if the sentence is still warranted after the person has done tons of things to change their life.
Alexandra Bailey:
The Second Look is a mechanism that is being considered all across the country, and the reason it’s being considered all across the country is because America, for a long time, has led the world in incarceration, and part of the reason that we’ve led the world in incarceration is because we have a hammer and we think everything is a nail. We’ve addressed everything from poverty, trauma, veterans’ PTSD, domestic violence survivors’ responses, young children who are led astray by giving them lengthy prison terms, and we know that this doesn’t keep us safer. This has been statistically proven. If you’re a survivor of violent crime as I am, I think the one thing that all of us would agree on is that we want no more victims. We want a safer society. We want people to be okay so that everyone can be and stay okay.
The first criminal offense that I ever lived through happened when I was a minor. It was a sexual offense, and the person who perpetrated that against me is serving a life without the possibility of parole sentence. I was plagued with the pain of this for many years, for a lot of my childhood and early adulthood, and as I came to my faith and came to forgiveness, what I wanted was to understand why this had happened. I reached out to the person who harmed me, and what I learned is that he had also been harmed. He also had been sexually victimized as a young person, really had nowhere to turn in order to gain support, and lived out the natural consequences of pain, PTSD, lack of health and support, mental health support, and I ended up caught in that cycle of violence.
What I say is, we need to get way upstream on the cycle of violence. Everyone, from those who are remorseful inside to those who are advocates for survivors, as I am, we have the same goal, and the only way that we’re actually going to address that is by taking our resources away from a public safety concept that we know doesn’t work, which is mass incarceration, and transferring it where it should have been, when the person who harmed me suffered his victimization. If that help had been there, if he had been able to go to a crisis center, receive the mental health support that he need, have the education and access that would have allowed him to divert his life and recover from his own trauma, I more than likely would not have been traumatized.
As a survivor, I’m here promoting Second Look because actually, if you take a look around at who our peer recovery specialists are, who our violence interrupters are, our credible messengers, the people who are out getting in the way of other people’s victimization, it is our returning citizens who have kept the peace not just in prison, but are now keeping the peace outside, and based on my own faith, I believe that people who are remorseful deserve a chance at forgiveness. We all deserve a second chance. Also, from a practical standpoint, if my goal is that nobody suffers from what I suffered from, then the people who are best suited to help me, unfortunately in many instances, are currently behind bars.
Mansa Musa:
Brian Stevenson says, we’re not our worst mistake. All right, William, let’s unpack the Second Look, because earlier, we talked about how this allows for a person, the bill that’s being proposed, and you can go over the bill that’s being proposed, after a person has served 20 years, they’re allowed to petition the court for a modification, or to review their sentence, and take certain factors into account. Why can’t they do it anytime? I know under Maryland’s system, don’t you have the right to modification sentence? Don’t you have a right to a three-judge panel? Explain that for the benefit of our audience that doesn’t know the criminal justice system, and understand that.
William Mitchell:
Our Maryland rules, specifically it’s Maryland rule 4-345, subsection E, what it does is, it allows for a judge to have the authority to review a sentence, but that reviewing power is only from five years from the imposition of the sentence. Meaning, if you have a lengthy sentence, no judge is really going to consider, within five years, if you have a lengthy sentence for maybe a serious crime, if you’ve changed your life. Most people’s thoughts on it are, if you’ve committed a heinous crime or something that’s bad in public view, you need to sit for a long time, which may be true. Some people transition, grow and mature at different stages and different ages. My crime, I was 23, so I really wasn’t developed. I had a very immature mindset, though an adult technically, by legal standards, I was still very immature. The law right now, as it sits, say you get 50 years for an attempted murder. You’re 20 years old, it occurred when you were on drugs, maybe you were gang affiliated, family structure was broken.
And then what happens is, you sit in prison, and right now, as the law stands, you could go into prison, take every program, become a peer specialist, work to transform everybody that comes through that door, and unless you are collaterally attacking the legality of your sentence, there is no legal means for somebody to have a judge look at their case for compassionate reasons, or to see if the very system, because the Maryland Department of Correction, their job is to correct criminalistic behavior, but right now you have a department that is supposed to be correcting it, and if they do, there is no legal avenue for you to bring it to the judicial branch and say, “Hey, DOC has done her job. This behavior has been corrected. Now, what’s the next step?”
The system was set up many years ago to punish, to correct behavior, and then in that correction or rehabilitation, to allow the person to assimilate back into the community as a productive member. That has been taken away over the years because one law is added on top of another law, which moots out the point of the first law, and before you know it, you can’t get out. For me, I had a 70-year sentence. That means I would have to serve half of the sentence, 35 years, before I could go for parole. Meaning, I committed a crime, intoxicated at 23, coming out of a broken background, and I would have had to have been 53 to show the parole board the first opportunity to say, “Hey, I’m worth a second chance.” Most people age out of criminalistic behavior, number one, and number two, if you commit in your 20s, by the time you’re 30 something, you don’t even think like that.
I always bring this point to anybody’s mind, whether an opponent or an advocate, nobody can say that they are the same person they were 20 years ago. I would like to meet somebody if they can stay the same from 20 years ago, because just life in general will mature you or change you. Right now, there’s just no way to bring it before the judge or a judicial body, to get any relief. Even if you change your life, right now, you’re pretty much stuck in prison until, if you have parole, you might get the opportunity to possibly get relief.
Mansa Musa:
Alexandra, talk about what you look for in this particular narrative, because as William just outlined, we do a lot of time, we don’t have the opportunity to get relief. We do good works while we’re incarcerated, and we have no way of having that good work brought to the attention of someone that can make a decision. Talk about that.
Alexandra Bailey:
Well, Second Look is just that, it’s just a look. It is not a guarantee of relief. It is not a get out of jail free card. It is literally a mechanism whereby, after two decades of incarceration, where the criminological curve shows us that most people have aged out of crime, that you can petition a judge to show your rehabilitation, and the survivor of your offense or their representatives get to be part of that process. Some of the most miraculous moments that I’ve ever seen are those moments of forgiveness. There’s this false story that goes around, that what prosecutors are doing is giving permanent relief to victims. I’m going to give them, in William’s case, 50 years before anybody can even say hi, and that’s going to heal you. That’s going to make you feel better.
Mansa Musa:
That’s what you mean by permanent relief?
Alexandra Bailey:
That’s what they would say. It’s permanent relief. We are making sure that this person stays safe permanently. Now, there are some people who do not rehabilitate, but in my experience, they’re very much in the minority. The people who do rehabilitate, like I said, they’re the ones raising other people in the prison, getting them out of criminal behavior, and all we’re asking is that the courts be able to take a look. When the survivor steps into that room, and I’ve witnessed this, and actually receive the accountability, the apology, the help that they need from the system, that is where the healing comes in. It’s rarely through punishment. You know that this is true because I watch survivors who have not moved on a single day from the day that this happened to them, and if you’re reliving that trauma day by day, what that tells me is that you haven’t received the mental health counseling, support, grief support that you needed. Why don’t we focus on that and rehabilitation, as opposed to permanent punishment?
To what William was saying, the criminological curve tells us that people age out of crime. Crimes are more often than not committed by young people who very frequently are misguided, and that is certainly true for Maryland, with a particular emphasis on the Black and Brown community. There was actually a national study that was done of survivors, which I was actually interviewed for, 60% of us who have survived specifically violent crimes are for more rehabilitation and second chances than we are for permanent punishment. Permanent punishment doesn’t get us to what it is that we need, which is a safer society, a more healed society, a society that when things are going wrong for folks, there is a place for them to turn. Our lack of empathy and kindness is not serving us.
Mansa Musa:
Also, I had the opportunity to talk to Kareem Hasan. Me and Kareem Hasan were locked up together in the Maryland penitentiary. He’s talking about some of the things that he’s doing now that he has gotten a second chance. I’m outside of 954 Forrest Maryland Penitentiary. I’m here with Kareem Hasan, who’s a social activist now, both us served time in the Maryland Penitentiary. When did you go into the Maryland pen?
Kareem Hasan:
1976, at 17 years old.
Mansa Musa:
All right, so you went in at 17, I went in at 19. When you went in the pen, talk about what the pen environment was like when you went in there.
Kareem Hasan:
Well, when I went in the penitentiary, like you asked me, the first day I went in there, I walked down the steps and it was just confusion. I was like, “Where am I at now?” People were running everywhere, all you hear is voices and everything. It was like you were in the jungle.
Mansa Musa:
Now, what type of programs did they have to offer when you went in there?
Kareem Hasan:
Well, when I went in there, they had a couple of programs, but I wasn’t too interested in the programs because I was still young and wild, running wild. I wasn’t even thinking about educating myself. All I was thinking about was protecting myself, because of all the stories I heard about the penitentiary.
Mansa Musa:
Right. All right. Now, how much time did you do?
Kareem Hasan:
I did 37 years.
Mansa Musa:
Okay, you did 37. I did 48 years. When I went in the penitentiary, they had no programs, like you say, and everything we were concerned with was protecting ourselves. When did you get out?
Kareem Hasan:
I got out in 2013, on the first wave of the Unger issue.
Mansa Musa:
The Unger issue is the case of Merle Unger versus the state of Maryland, that dealt with the way the jury instruction was given at that time, it was unconstitutional. I got out under Unger. When Unger first came out, what did that do for you in terms of your psyche?
Kareem Hasan:
Oh man, that really pumped me up.
Mansa Musa:
Why?
Kareem Hasan:
Because I saw daylight.
Mansa Musa:
And before that?
Kareem Hasan:
Before then, man, I was gone. I was crazy. I wasn’t even looking to get out, because I had a life sentence.
Mansa Musa:
Right. Didn’t you have parole?
Kareem Hasan:
Yes, I went up for parole three times.
Mansa Musa:
And what happened?
Kareem Hasan:
First time, they gave me a four-year re-hear, and then the second time, they gave me a two-year re-hear with the recommendation for pre-release and work release.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Kareem Hasan:
Then they come out with life means life.
Mansa Musa:
Glendening was the Governor for the state of Maryland at that time.
Kareem Hasan:
Yeah, he just snatched everything from me, snatched all hope and everything from me.
Mansa Musa:
Hope, that’s where I want to be at, right there. When Unger came out, Unger created Hope.
Kareem Hasan:
Unger created hope for a lot of guys, because when it first came out, I think it was Stevenson.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Kareem Hasan:
I had it in my first public conviction in 1981.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Kareem Hasan:
But they said it was a harmless error.
Mansa Musa:
Right, right.
Kareem Hasan:
And then, Adams came out, and then, everybody kept going to the library, and everybody was running back and forth. Everybody was standing in those books, because they saw that daylight, they seen that hope.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Kareem Hasan:
And then, when Merle was fortunate enough to carry it all the way up the ladder to the courts, the Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, they made it retroactive.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Kareem Hasan:
All that time we were locked up, it wasn’t a harmless error. They knew it, but they just kept us locked up.
Mansa Musa:
And you know what? On the hope thing, you’re supporting the Maryland Second Chance Act. You’ve been going down to Annapolis, supporting the Maryland Second Chance Act. Why are you supporting the Maryland Second Chance Act?
Kareem Hasan:
Look at me. I’m a second chance, and everything I do, I always refer back to myself. I’m looking at these young kids out here in the street, and when I talk to them, they relate to me. I need more brothers out here to help with these kids out here, because y’all see how Baltimore City is now. These young kids are off the chain, and they need somebody that’s going to give them some guidance, but they’re going to listen to a certain type of individuals.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Kareem Hasan:
They’re not going to listen to somebody that went to school, somebody that’s a politician or something like that. They’re looking for somebody that’s been through what they’ve been through and understands where they at, because that’s all they talk about.
Mansa Musa:
When you went into Maryland Penitentiary back in the 70s, you said ’77?
Kareem Hasan:
’76.
Mansa Musa:
You had no hope?
Kareem Hasan:
Oh, no. I had a fresh life sentence.
Mansa Musa:
Right. When Unger came out, then we had legislation passed to take the parole out the hands of the governor, that created hope. Then we had the Juvenile Life Bill, that created hope. Your case, had you not went out on Unger, you’d have went out on Juvenile Life, because they were saying that juveniles didn’t have the form, the [inaudible 00:22:12] to do the crime. Well, let’s talk about the Maryland Second Chance Act. Based on what we’ve been seeing and the support we’re getting, what do you think the chances of it passing this year?
Kareem Hasan:
I think the chances are good, especially the examples that we set. We let them know that certain type of individuals, you can let out. Now, there’s some people in there I wouldn’t let out, but the ones we’re talking about will help society, will be more positive for the society, especially for Baltimore City, and we need that.
Mansa Musa:
Yeah.
Kareem Hasan:
The Second Chance Act is something that I support 100%.
Mansa Musa:
What are some of the things you’re now doing in the community?
Kareem Hasan:
Well, I have an organization called CRY, Creating Responsible Youth.
Mansa Musa:
What is that?
Kareem Hasan:
It’s a youth counseling and life skills training program, where we get kids, we come to an 11-week counseling course. After they graduate from the counseling course, we send them to life-scale training courses such as HVAC, CDLs, diesel training, and things of that nature. The program is pretty good, and I’m trying to get up off the ground more, but I need some finances.
Mansa Musa:
How long have you had this idea, and how long has it in existence thus far?
Kareem Hasan:
Well, when I first got the idea, I was in the Maryland House of Corrections, because we had a youth organization called Project Choice.
Mansa Musa:
That’s right.
Kareem Hasan:
I had a young guy come in, and the counselor told me, he said, “Hi son, can you talk to him?” He can’t relate to any of us.” I took the kid on a one-on-one, and the kid said, “He’s trying to tell me about my life, but he’s from the county. He never lived like me. My mother and father are on drugs. I’ve got to support my brother and sister. I’m the one that’s got to go out there and bring them something to eat, because my mother and father take all that money and spend it on drugs.”
Mansa Musa:
Yeah.
Kareem Hasan:
The kid said, “He doesn’t understand my lifestyle, so how is he going to tell me about my lifestyle?” And then he looked at me and said, “Now see, where you come from, I can understand you. We can talk.”
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Kareem Hasan:
“Because I know you understand where I’m coming from.”
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Kareem Hasan:
“Because you’ve been there.”
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Kareem Hasan:
He got to talking about his mother and father, and he started crying. When he started crying, I was telling him about when my father passed, when I was on lockup, and I was in my cell crying.
Mansa Musa:
Right, right.
Kareem Hasan:
And then, later on that night, I was in bed, and it just hit me. I said, “Cry, create a responsible youth.” That’s how I came up with that name, and just like those boys in the penitentiary, they’re crying out, just like in the Maryland state penal system, the ones that’s positive and they change their life, they’re crying out for help, and we’re here to help. We’re here to create responsible youth.
Mansa Musa:
Last, you will hear from Bobby Pittman, who was in the Maryland Prison system and is now out, a community organizer and leading a bully intervention program. This is what he’s doing with his second chance, in the interest of justice.
Robert Pittman:
Bobby Pittman, I’m from Baltimore. I’m a Baltimorian, and I actually went to prison when I was 17 years old. I was sentenced to a life plus 15 year, consecutive 15 year sentence at 17 years old, for felony murder.
Mansa Musa:
How much time you serve?
Robert Pittman:
I served 24 years on that.
Mansa Musa:
Okay, come on.
Robert Pittman:
The crazy thing, it’s been a year and a few days, it’s probably been 370 days I’ve been free.
Mansa Musa:
Yeah. Come on. Welcome home.
Robert Pittman:
Thank you. Since I’ve been out here, it’s been amazing. The things that I learned while I was inside of prison, actually, it carried over, with me out here. Within the last year, I helped 50 people get jobs with a connection with the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development. Shout-out to Nigel jobs on deck Jackson.
Mansa Musa:
Okay, Mr. Jackson.
Robert Pittman:
We’ve got individuals, like a couple of mothers, single mothers into schooling.
Mansa Musa:
Okay.
Robert Pittman:
With full scholarships. Got 10 people into schools, people that never believed that they’d have an opportunity to get their education. We got about 10 people in school. And then, I did all that through my peer recovery knowledge, my lived experience, and understanding where these individuals come from, and assessing these individuals, seeing some things that they might need or whatever.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Robert Pittman:
You know that you can get that. You can do that.
Mansa Musa:
What made you stop, once you got to a point where you said you needed to change, what made you get to a point where you started looking and thinking that you can get out? What inspired you about that?
Robert Pittman:
This is crazy. I actually fell off. I was on lockup one time, and I heard all this screaming and yelling. I’m like, “What is this screaming and yelling for?” It was 2012.
Mansa Musa:
Yeah.
Robert Pittman:
They’re like “The law passed.”
I’m like, “What law?”
They said, “The Unger, the Unger’s passed.” People on lockup are screaming and all this stuff. I can hear, on the compound, individuals screaming and celebrating, and things like this. The crazy thing, they were screaming and yelling about a chance.
Mansa Musa:
Come on, yeah.
Robert Pittman:
You know what I mean? It wasn’t even a guarantee.
Mansa Musa:
I got a chance.
Robert Pittman:
All they know is, I’ve got a chance, because I’ve done exhausted all of my daggone remedies.
Mansa Musa:
Yeah.
Robert Pittman:
But I’ve got a chance right now.
Mansa Musa:
Come on.
Robert Pittman:
To have my case looked at again.
Mansa Musa:
Yeah.
Robert Pittman:
That’s when it started.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Robert Pittman:
That’s when it started. The Ungers went out, it wound up being 200 and something.
Mansa Musa:
People started seeing people going home.
Robert Pittman:
People I’ve been looking up to, now they’ve taken my mentor. My mentor is gone. I was happy for them, but now, it made me like I had to step up more, because I had to prepare for my chance. I see it now, Maryland. They said that they had a meaningful opportunity for release through the parole system.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Robert Pittman:
But there wasn’t one person that got paroled since 1995.
Mansa Musa:
That’s right.
Robert Pittman:
It was a fight. It took about six years, but it gave us hope. We’re just waiting.
Mansa Musa:
Oh, yeah.
Robert Pittman:
We’re sitting there like, “Man.” Six years later, 2018, that’s when it was an agreement with the ACLU and Maryland courts that we’re going to restructure the parole system.
Mansa Musa:
Right, for juvenile lifers.
Robert Pittman:
For juvenile lifers, and on that, they created a whole new set of criteria that an individual on parole, or going up for parole had to meet. If they meet these things, the parole commission has the opportunity to release them. I started going through that. I went through it, went through the whole process in 2018, went up for parole and all that, was denied at my first parole hearing, of course. I saw people going home.
Mansa Musa:
Yeah, through the system.
Robert Pittman:
I’m sitting there like, “Oh man, I saw somebody go home from parole. This is real.” The first couple I saw, I’m like, “Oh, this is real, now. I see how real this is.”
Mansa Musa:
Right. Talk about what you’re doing now.
Robert Pittman:
Now, I do peer recovery work. I’ve got a nonprofit, Bully Intervention Teams. What we do with Bully Intervention Teams, it’s not your average bully intervention. We look at all forms of injustice as bullying.
Mansa Musa:
Right, you’re talking about bullies.
Robert Pittman:
Yeah, all forms of injustice is bullying. One of the things that I see, I was seeing bullying when I went down to Annapolis this week. They’re bullying individuals through misinformation. This organization will try to make sure these individuals that receive this misinformation will receive proper information, because they’re being bullied through ignorance. It just was horrible. What we do on the weekend, Saturdays, individuals that were incarcerated, a lot of people look at them, “They’re doing good,” but they don’t know the stress of that, because you know what you’re representing. You’ve got to be a certain type of way, because you’re trying to be an example for these individuals. You’re trying to pioneer for these individuals that come out.
Mansa Musa:
Yeah, you don’t hae the luxury make a mistake.
Robert Pittman:
We have our session, our peer-run session, where we can just relieve ourselves, because it’s a lot of pressure.
Mansa Musa:
Oh no, that’s there. You’ve got a wellness space.
Robert Pittman:
We need it.
Mansa Musa:
You’ve got to have it, because like you say, our reality is this here. We don’t have the luxury of making a mistake, and everything that we’ve been afforded, and every opportunity that we have, we don’t look at it as an opportunity for us. We look at it as an opportunity to show society that we’re different. Therefore, the person that I’m talking about, who I’m representing on their behalf, I’m saying that I’m different, but this person I’m asking you to give the same consideration that y’all gave me is also different.
We want to be in a position where we can have a voice on altering how people are serving time. One, we want to be able to say, if you give more programs, if you give more hope, you’ll meet your purpose of people changing and coming back out in society. But more importantly, we want to be able to tell the person, like you said, rest assured that you’ve got advocates out there.
The ACLU of Maryland and advocates urged the Senate to pass The Second Look Act, House Bill 853. For those that are interested, the hearing for The Second Look Act, House Bill 853, in front of the Senate Judiciary Proceeding Committee will be held Tuesday, March the 25th, 2025, 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM, in the East Miller Building, room two. For more information, visit Maryrlandsecondlook.com, or ACLUMaryland.org.
There you have it, the real news and Rattling the Bars. We ask that you comment on this episode. Tell us, do you think a person deserves a second chance, and if giving a person a second chance is, in fact, in the interest of justice.
The Economist is an influential weekly magazine that was founded way back in 1843. But its age hasn’t lent it much ability at all to analyze China’s economy, making embarrassingly bad predictions about this country over the last few decades that show us crystal clear: if you want to understand China and its economy, DO NOT read The Economist.
The magazine has got it wrong on so many major subjects, most recently being China’s huge successes in the AI sector.
Just yesterday they were forced to admit that success, with an article calling China’s AI boom “astonishing,” but just a few years ago they told readers not to hold their breath about the country’s chances in AI.
And their predictions over the decades that China was about to collapse even put serial self-loathing China-hater Gordon Chang to shame, and they were once hilariously even against China’s high speed rail!
Today we’ll take a closer look at some of The Economist’s embarrassing bad China takes.
This is Reports on China, I’m Andy Boreham in Shanghai. Let’s get reporting!
March Madness is back. In a special episode of Edge of Sports, Dave Zirin takes a retrospective look at past interviews with Washington Post journalist Danny Funt on sports gambling, and with professor Diane Williams on the NCAA’s checkered past regarding women’s basketball.
Studio Production: David Hebden Post-Production: Taylor Hebden, David Hebden Audio Post-Production: David Hebden Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Dave Zirin:
Welcome to Edge of Sports only on the Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin. In this special March Madness edition, we are proudly airing two interviews that could not be more timely as college basketball and the road to the final four take center stage. The first is on the explosion of app-based sports gambling in the United States and the second on the hidden history of NCAA women’s basketball. So let’s start with gambling. You may not realize this, but more people bet on the NCAA basketball tournament than even the Super Bowl. We’re talking $3.1 billion and that’s just the legal betting. The Final four may not be the Super Bowl in terms of ratings, but it is the profiteering Super Bowl for FanDuel, DraftKings and all of those gambling apps that have not only colonized the commercial time during games but are also integrated into the sports commentary itself.
Who is Charles Barkley betting on in the tournament he’s supposed to cover? He’s about to tell you. What they don’t tell you is that these wildly popular apps have led to a crisis of gambling addiction, particularly a youth gambling addiction. Thousands of young people are calling hotlines for addicts feeling like they have lost control of their impulses and their bank accounts. They’re learning a hard lesson from which the young used to be insulated. The lesson that the reason those casinos look so nice is because the house always wins. This proliferation of addicts has become a mental health crisis so deep that Congress is even taking a look to see if more regulation is needed, but rest assured that oversight will be resisted. The facts are that this addiction economy has become the financial lifeblood of sports, and we need a deep dive to understand what this is all about, whether we are sports fans or not, and there is no better person to guide us into the underbelly of this world. Then reporter Danny Funt. This is Danny Funt’s beat sports gambling. He covers it for the Washington Post and he has a book coming out that breaks it all down. So he knows this world and this interview could not be more relevant. I started by asking him how big legal betting is for the economy of sports and where the trend lines are pointing to. Let’s go to it now, Danny Funt.
Danny Funt:
Yeah, I’d say it’s transforming every aspect of the business of sports, the fan experience, certainly the laws that affect sports and those aspects. Yeah, it’s a game changer. 38 states and DC have legalized sports betting several more expected to in the near future and from teams to commissioners to certainly the ncaa. Everyone is trying to cash in on that legalization, making some suspect choices in the process. And yeah, I mean they’re sort of facing the consequences as we’ve seen in some pretty shocking headlines recently, but it’s only going to continue. I still think we’re in the early innings of this sports betting experiment in the us.
Dave Zirin:
So you’re saying that the recent headlines, you’re talking about some of the betting scandals involving athletes as well as some of the statements of coaches and players who talk about being heckled or even being threatened because of fans not making their gambling quotas. Is that what you’re referring to?
Danny Funt:
Yeah, exactly. It was kind of funny. March Madness is one of the biggest betting periods of the year, certainly a time when the sports books want to get positive coverage and attract as many new customers as they can, and yet there was just an onslaught of grim news from the sho Otani betting scandal, an NBA bench player who got caught up it looks like with some basically a version of point shaving involving his prop bets to the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers saying he gets menacing voicemails from people when the Cavs cost betters money, the list goes on. It was a rough month for betting advocates.
Dave Zirin:
Yes. So is a reckoning inevitable if these stories keep continuing of players finding themselves with spare time, their phones disposable income and wanting to make bets? I mean, it’s such a perfect stew for more scandal and what would a reckoning look like and is it just too much money for the leagues to even want to have a reckoning for the effects of gambling?
Danny Funt:
That’s such a pressing question. I don’t know exactly. I think I’m skeptical that leagues would actually, that have recently legalized betting would go so far as to outlaw it. I think they might reign in the sorts of things you can bet on. One of the things that leads to all sorts of suspicious betting is that obviously you can bet on much, much more than just who’s going to win nowadays. You can bet on basically every facet of the game down to how a certain play is going to play out. So I think things like that could face stiffer regulations, the ways you can bet on college sports already are being reigned in. But yeah, I think the leagues have placed their bet, lawmakers have placed their bet and they’re kind of having to live with it, and I don’t know what level of addiction or what level of corruption would have to go down for them really to pull back in a meaningful way, but they’re being tested recently.
Dave Zirin:
You mentioned addiction, gambling addiction. What are we seeing on that front in the United States especially? Obviously since the legalization,
Danny Funt:
Pre legalization, the number that was floated was that roughly 1% of the population is susceptible to gambling addiction post legalization. Now that basically every smartphone is a casino, those rates could be as high as 4% I’m told, which is really a staggering number. You think about it like in a full NFL stadium, maybe 3000 people could be suffering from gambling addiction. It’s kind of incomprehensible. I think beyond that, it’s important to recognize there’s a clinically diagnosed gambling addiction that needs a medical intervention, but then there’s all sorts of problem behavior. Just like with drinking alcoholism is one thing, but people might drink more than they ought to along that spectrum, and the same thing is proven true with gambling, and it’s so important to note with that, that it’s not just can I gamble or can I not gamble? It’s the ways you can gamble and some of the most profitable types of betting, some of the most popular types of betting are some of the most addictive, and that’s certainly driving addiction rates across the country.
Dave Zirin:
I’m speaking just anecdotally, but my son who’s in high school has come home and told me about kids placing bets with other kids because they got their parents FanDuel accounts and my son said, dad, we’re creating a new generation of bookies out of our high schools. Is that just my son’s massive public school experience or are we seeing indicators about youth gambling addictions?
Danny Funt:
No, I don’t think that’s one-off. How old’s your son, by the way? I’m curious.
Dave Zirin:
Actually, he’s 15. He turns 16 tomorrow.
Danny Funt:
Yeah, that’s a classic time of life to start playing around with this. No, I think sort of an irony of legalization is it’s shown a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs, Hey, bookmaking is a winning business. Maybe I should get involved in that. I was just talking, I live near Colorado State University. I was just talking with a student there who said the legal betting age is 21 by 19, as soon as he got to college, he was betting through offshore sports books that are unregulated and through some campus bookies who just like your son’s classmates got inspired by all the betting around them and said, Hey, this is an easy way to make a buck. No, I think the argument for legalization was we’ve got this robust black market, let’s bring it into the sunlight just as the same way that happened with cannabis and regulate it, tax it, implement some consumer protections.
In reality, yes, some of that has happened, but it’s also caused the black market to surge for a number of reasons with adults and certainly with young people. Young people, I don’t know exactly what age definitely are more susceptible to compulsive bedding, which is obviously dicey because they probably have a lot less disposable income, but it’s a reason why advertising that targets college students. You can understand why they’re attractive new customers, but that’s some of the most controversial types of marketing and some of the partnerships that Sportsbook struck up in recent years literally with universities in some of those cases got shut down pretty quickly just because that seemed like a line too far. Even for gambling advocates.
Dave Zirin:
Do the legal gambling concerns, the fanduels, et cetera, do they give a damn about these issues of addiction? You see they do the 1-800-GAMBLER at the end of their ads, or is this just window dressing the equivalent of a cigarette company saying, oh, by the way, you can get lung cancer?
Danny Funt:
Yeah, so true. I mean, I think whether they give or damn or not meaningful change can’t come from sportsbook self-policing. Just a week ago I talked to a guy who was one of the top officials at one of those kind of second tier sports books, and he was saying the incentives just aren’t there to crack down internally on problem gambling. Those are literally your best customers. Those are your whales who you’re showering with promotions and egging on with these kind of concierge services to keep those people betting. So their rationale as well, they’re our best customers. If we boot them, they’re just going to go to our competitors. We’re going to lose market share. They’re going to find a way to keep betting. So it’s not really in our best interest to do anything meaningful about that, which is why this person and a number of people across the industry are saying regulators need to impose much, much stiffer fines when sports books are caught recruiting or egging on problem betters, and there’s also ways beyond that, just really simple fixes short of banning gambling that would make a difference.
Like one of the tenants of responsible betting is don’t chase your losses. Chasing your losses is like pre-game. I bet on the Denver nuggets to win, they’re down at the first quarter, I place another bet they’re losing at halftime even more. I place a third bet. You can kind of trick yourself into thinking, well, the odds have gotten better, so if they make a miraculous comeback, I’ll make a fortune. Obviously, more often than not, that doesn’t play out classic way to bet over your head. So if a tenant of responsible betting is don’t chase your losses, perhaps sports books could just not take those bets past the point. If I keep depositing money in my account during a game and upping my bets, they could just cut you off and say, you need a cool down period. Things like that seem to me like a lot more practical incremental changes that definitely would make a difference.
Dave Zirin:
Let’s talk about the European experience with legalized sportsbook betting its effect on soccer. Does that have anything to teach us about how bad this could get or where this could go?
Danny Funt:
Yeah, I think absolutely the UK betting market is about a decade ahead of the US as far as legalizing online betting. If you just walk around London, the betting shops are all over town. It’s kind of those people over there are kind of numbed to that culture, but as far as seeing where they are as foreshadowing where the US could be, there’s definitely been kind of an awakening that, not that they’re going to ban petting anytime soon, but the public health consequences that come with it. I wrote it down anticipating that question. There was a study last year that found that what they called gambling related harms cost the UK 2.3 billion annually. So that’s a case where sure, they maybe get tax revenue. Sure, it might create jobs, but the harms are clearly outweighing the gains, at least according to this study. And you’ve got similar studies in the US showing that the economic price of the economic activity goes down in states that have vibrant legal betting markets, even if they’re bringing in a certain amount of gambling tax revenue. Again, the scales are imbalanced Beyond that gambling addiction. There is just a fact of life and it’s ubiquitous if you go to a soccer match just like it’s becoming at all sorts of American sports. So yeah, a lot of warning signs of where the US market could be headed.
Dave Zirin:
Now, I haven’t been surprised to see the explosion of sports gambling. I haven’t been surprised to see the rise in addiction rates. I’ll tell you what has surprised me is seeing how this has been embraced by members of the sports media. What are the implications of seeing so many established grade A trusted members of the sports media embracing this, giving odds during games and becoming spokespeople for sports betting? That has surprised me. What are the implications of that in your mind?
Danny Funt:
I think it’s definitely normalized sports betting and made it seem acceptable to the mainstream. You could argue in a lot of different things whether media is just a reflection like a mirror of society or whether it’s influencing society. I think there’s no doubt that there’s certainly been an influence in making sports betting just ubiquitous and intertwined with the fan experience. One of the first articles I wrote on this topic was for the Columbia Journalism Review. Looking at that question, what caught my interest actually was the ethical question of whether sports reporters should be betting on games. It seemed like a ripe opportunity for gambling’s version of insider trading, and I think some of that is definitely taking place, but just as far as media companies embracing gambling, there’s a lot of factors that made this the perfect time for sports betting to explode in the us.
Definitely one of them is how so many sports outlets are imperiled and facing brutal financial times. I know you looked at Sports Illustrated recently in one of your recent episodes, they tried to latch onto this bandwagon licensing their name to a sports book in Colorado here and a few other states that clearly didn’t write the ship, but yeah, from the biggest personalities in sports to the biggest names in sports, E-S-P-N-I think is a huge example. Recently licensing their name to a sportsbook, and now you go on ESPN’s website, you turn on a game, you’re indicted with appeals to bet on ESPN bet. I actually just spoke with a very knowledgeable bet who worked as an odds maker as well. He was saying similar to you that his 8-year-old son was seeing so many ESPN bet ads. This guy felt obligated to teach his son like the basics of probabilities, why betting is a losing venture for customers. It’s kind of surreal to think that a parent would feel a responsibility to coach their 8-year-old on that as they might responsible drinking or the dangers of smoking, but that’s just the world we live in.
Dave Zirin:
So if you were in charge of the sports world, how would you handle all of this? Is the wine simply out of the bottle and it’s just about managing the crisis? Is it possible to still ban this and get it out of sports? Where are we right now? And if you did have that kind of power, what could be done?
Danny Funt:
As I said earlier, I’m skeptical just practically speaking that any states are going to outlaw sports betting that have legalized it anytime soon. I think definitely when states kind of go online and are a little late to the party like Ohio and Massachusetts in the last year or so in North Carolina in recent months, they’re imposing much strict stricter regulations than some of the early states, just seeing bad examples of things that could easily have been avoided. So risk-free promotions were a reason why millions of people, I think took up sports betting thinking, oh, this is literally free money. I can’t lose. You certainly could lose your money. You could also get hooked on gambling from a false sense of how easy it could be. Those have been kind of stamped out. I think more promotions are basically fraudulent still and deceptive, and those could be police more aggressively.
I think a fairly straightforward fix that if I was this sports betting czar I would see too is in a lot of states, I think the regulatory apparatus just doesn’t cut it. Sometimes the state lottery is in charge of overseeing sports betting. Now obviously the lottery is in the business of raising money for the states. What sort of incentive do they have to crack down on sportsbook operators that are bringing in betting revenue? Even more questionable, I’d say, is when the lottery is in charge of running the sportsbook. In that case, you’ve got someone who’s functioning as an operator and a regulator. It’s no surprise that there are plenty of examples of them not self-policing very effectively. So I think state by state, if you had a truly independent commission that was charged with overseeing sports books, it would be a little bit of a fair fight. So often when customers say, Hey, this is deceptive. Hey, I’ve been screwed over by a sportsbook. The deck is stacked so much in favor of the operators of these companies, those sorts of complaints, even when I think they’ve been wronged, pretty egregiously, just go nowhere. So I think if you had a really aggressive independent regulator state by state, that would make a big difference, and there’s very few examples of that currently.
Dave Zirin:
I want to paint a picture for you and I want you to tell me if I’m being a Cassandra
Or if this is in the land of the possible, a chicken little, if you will, is there a future where sports gambling becomes so hegemonic to the fan experience that people start keeping their kids away, they don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate. The audience for sports thins, the profit margins do not. People start thinking the fix might be in, so they start drifting away, and at the end of the day, gambling, which has been so profitable as a revenue stream actually hollows out sports as we know it. Is that in the land of the possible, like an actual darn near destruction of this incredibly vast athletic industrial complex
Danny Funt:
Man, that really got my wheels turning. I hadn’t thought of that. And yeah, it seems feasible. The leagues are certainly betting against it. You brought up the integrity of the game, like do we think matches are fixed? There was always some of that, but it’s just gone through the roofs post legalization. Even players like Rudy Gobert on the Minnesota Timber Wolves made this money just at a referee recently and got a hundred thousand dollars fine for it. The obvious insinuation is he’s saying the ref is on the take. Maybe he’s looking out for a bet by swallowing his whistle or something. The confidence in the integrity of the games has definitely taken a hit, and yet the leagues aren’t spooked enough by that to really do anything about it. So that’s something that I’m really interested in as far as people saying, let me keep my kids away from sports. I just find American sports are so deeply rooted. I don’t know. I mean, maybe parents don’t take their kids to the race tracks because they don’t want them to start betting on horses. That might be a precedent worth looking at. But as far as football, basketball, golf, baseball, major sports that are the first things we talk about when we meet people, I don’t know. That feels a little out there, but I’ll definitely keep an eye on it.
Dave Zirin:
Hey, horse racing and boxing, were once two of the most popular sports in the United States. So just because something is doesn’t mean it will always be. I can’t let you go without mentioning that you’re doing a book and I was hoping you could tell us something about the book. What about sports gambling? Are you set to explore? What’s your thesis? What are you going for with this book?
Danny Funt:
Thank you for asking. I would say what I’m going for is I want to rewind a bit because I feel like just as a sports fan myself, as someone who follows politics pretty closely, it felt like the Supreme Court opened the door for states to start legalizing, and then seemingly overnight it was just, okay, New Jersey, Delaware. Soon after that, New York, Illinois we’re up to 38 states counting Nevada that have legalized, as I said, more are going to do. So you don’t hear a robust public debate about that. It seems like, okay, this is a moneymaking opportunity for states. We used to be adamantly against it, but now other states are doing it, so we got to get on board. The leagues used to speak about sports betting literally as an evil that was poisonous to sports. Now they’re sports bettings biggest backers, again, seemingly overnight.
So with the book, I definitely want to force us to have a serious conversation about these pros and cons, whether, as we’ve talked about today, the harms outweigh the positives. I also want to pull back the curtain a bit on what goes on inside of sports books. We see ads for FanDuel and draft gigs and Caesars pretty much everywhere. I don’t think a lot of us know exactly how those companies operate, how they think, they think about betters, what their motivations are, and I’m going to definitely get inside of those companies and give a closeup look at how they approach this game and try to anticipate where this is all going. As we’ve talked about, looking at Europe, even just looking at states that are a couple of years ahead of some of the others and the second guessing they’re having about what they’ve signed up for. So it’s a bit retrospective. It’s a bit of making sense of this chaotic world we’re living in and looking forward and seeing, as I said, we’re in the early innings. Is this going to be something that the powers that be are going to wish they hadn’t signed up for?
Dave Zirin:
Wow, that was the truth about the gambling industrial complex. Thank you, Danny. Fun. But now in this special March Madness edition of Edge of Sports, we turned to women’s hoops. Last year, the women’s college basketball Final Four for the first time, drew higher ratings than the men’s, significantly higher. In fact, this was historic, yet much of the way it was explained, centered around the then Iowa Senior Guard, the record breaking Kaitlyn Clark, whose Hawkeye’s team lost in the finals to South Carolina. Others countered this saying that the growth of the game is deeper than one player. A recent New York Times article opined that the NCAA had long set the table for this level of interest to take off, but both of these theories are woefully inadequate. Such a superficial analysis ignores the way that the NCAA suppressed women’s hoops for years. It also overlooks the Hidden history, the very foundation of Women’s College of Basketball that dates back decades to a league called The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, the A IAW, the A IAW is a remarkable story all its own, and was the collegiate hoops home for legends like Lynette Woodard, Nancy Lieberman, and the Queen of the Court, Lucia Harris.
It’s also a history that the NCAA does its best to obfuscate because in this saga, they’re not the good guys. Well, we are about to revive one of my favorite interviews that we’ve done on the show. We are speaking to former roller derby great and current McDaniel College professor Diane Williams, who is the source of knowledge about the history of the A IAW. You want to learn where modern women’s college basketball really comes from. We got you on Edge of sports.
Speaker 3:
So I’ve been a fan of the Iowa Women’s team since I was a grad student there. Got to know a little bit about the coaching stuff, got been watching those teams for the last 10 plus years, and Caitlin Clark is an individual who is incredible, obviously ridiculously talented. I’m thrilled. She went to Iowa. She was an Iowa kid, and she really is an interesting figure in that she’s really taking seriously the idea of being a role model and the idea of being a star. I think in an interesting way, she’s balancing those pretty well and thinking about both her own success, her team’s success, and the broader picture of women’s basketball, of women’s sports, and of just celebrating the potential that is there, and she’s showing us some of that potential in her play and in the way she’s navigating all the different pressures and excitement of this moment.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, I think she’s really interesting too. I’ve felt like there’ve been times where the media has tried to play her against other players, particularly Angel Reese, Kelsey Plum, who we’re going to talk about a little bit more, and she doesn’t take that bait. I feel like she’s really sort of mature and intentional about being a white superstar, and that’s certainly unique for somebody that age.
Speaker 3:
It’s also such a reminder to me of all those top players on those teams have played together. They know each other, they go way back. And I think sometimes that’s one of those things that when media wants to jump in and divide, we forget that there’s relationships already existing there, and depending on how the players want to relate to each other, Caitlyn Clark seems to be dedicated to the lifting up and supporting across the board, and let’s go. Let’s all get better together. I mean, and relishing the competitiveness and the She’ll trash talk. She’s dedicated to her team. She’s going to defend what she thinks is right, and she always has, and she wants everybody else to too, right? Yeah.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. Now, when she hit that 30 footer to set the NCAA women’s scoring record breaking Kelsey Plums, mark, the announcers were really big on saying that Caitlyn Clark has now scored the most points in college women’s history. Now, that’s not quite correct, is it?
Diane Williams:
No, it is not. So before the NCAA offered women’s intercollegiate sport period, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics, the A IAW, they had for 10 years been hosting Women’s Intercollegiate Sport. It was led by women. It was the entire athletic governance organization was founded by women who were physical educators and who were really dedicated to creating a different kind of sport culture and one that was for women, and it was educationally rooted. It had, the organization was focused on student athletes rights, their wellbeing, sport being a part of their educational experience, something that the NCAA sort of has a different take on a little bit more of a commercial view on that side. And so the scoring record, actually, Kelsey Plums record was from the NCAA years, which started in 82, but there’s 10 years of history before that that were also, there was another important record that Caitlyn Clark broke a few games later.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, speak about that. Who was the A IAW all time scoring leader?
Diane Williams:
Yeah, so there’s two. The big college scoring leader was Lynette Woodard from Kansas, and she set that record right at the end of the a I W’s time, even leading intercollegiate athletics for women. And actually, if you watched the game when Clark broke that record, Lynette Woodard was there. She was at Carver Hawkey Arena in Iowa City. They interviewed her before the game. They gave her a standing ovation, and both her and Clark have talked about the significance of both of them being there, and the idea that partly Woodard said, Clark is helping to bring attention to this history that has been really ignored. Some would argue buried that there’s so many women in intercollegiate basketball we don’t even know about. We don’t know their stories, we don’t know their glories, and yet this history is just, it was 10 years before the NCAA offered sport, and it was big.
Dave Zirin:
So you used the word buried. Why do you think this history is so buried and because that certainly speaks to an intentionality, to use that word again about the A IAW and honestly, I love sports history. Without your work, I never would’ve known about the A IAW. Why is this history obscured?
Diane Williams:
Well, so I don’t know if I can necessarily say why I don’t know the intentions, but I can tell you a little bit of the story. Right? When the a IW started, the NCAA didn’t have interest in facilitating women’s sports, and the folks, the women who went on to lead the organization said that, great, we’re going to go do it ourselves then. And they created a nationwide governing organization that was, at its peak, it was 970 plus members, colleges and universities across the country hosting 19 different sports, which is more than the NCAA has ever offered for women or men in three different divisions. So in 10 years, they grew from nothing to huge, and were really proving that there was, I mean, a lot of appetite for women’s intercollegiate athletics, which was feeding down to high school and youth, right? There’s this whole revolution happening, and they were leading it when Title IX was finally, so Title IX was passed in 72.
It took a number of years for it to be interpreted, and it wasn’t intended to be applied to sports. It was an educationally focused bill about academic programs funding. But immediately, particularly on the women’s side, they realized, oh, this could help us get some money, and we sorely need money. We have the resources. Were laughably small for what they were trying to build. And so during the seventies, title IX is being interpreted. The Congress is figuring out how do we even apply this to sport? What does it look like to have gender equity in sport? Sports are really different than who gets led into a dentist program or dental training program. And so ultimately, in 79, some standards come out of how we’re going to actually account for gender equity in sport. They’re both clear and kind of convoluted in different ways, but it became clear that it was actually going to be enforced.
Well, that was the idea. And really, I think the NCAA got nervous that while the NCAA as a governing organization and the A IAW, they weren’t subject to Title ix, but all of their member institutions were. And so if they were not in line with the law, it could be a problem. And so the NCAA had been sort of working with the A IWA little bit on parallel tracks in the early part of the seventies. They had verged away from that by the later part of the seventies. And by the time that this all happened, not only was the NCAA and men’s sport organizing against Title IX being applied to athletics against football being included, they were trying to get it exempted. There’s all kinds of things happening. But the NCAA was working actively against Title ix, including athletics, but it decided to switch course and start offering women’s championships without discussion with the A IW, without even recognition that there was already a massive infrastructure in place that was hosting women’s championships and the A IW.
There was some movements to try and work together. Maybe we can come together and find the best of both worlds, right? A highly competitive, financially sustainable model pulling from the NCAA side, but that valued the student athlete experience more and the wellbeing of the student athletes that quickly got dismissed by the ncaa, and instead, they chose to offer competing championships the same weekends as the A IW championships. In some cases, they financially incentivized schools to join their championships. They had the money and resources to say, we can pay for your travel, pay for your food, pay for your lodging. If you come to our championships. The A IW was just starting to generate some cash, just had some media contracts, couldn’t compete. And within a year, the A IW had ended ceased operations. And so the NCAA won in some ways, and there was a pretty big loss of an emphasis on student wellbeing for women’s sport and women having women role models in leadership positions in sport.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. Ruthless by the ncaa. Talk about intentionality.
Diane Williams:
Yeah.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. Before we stay on that, the time in which the A IAW came to be feels very much in the middle of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Were there direct connections between the broader struggle and the emergence of this organization?
Diane Williams:
So ideologically, yes. In that it was a movement to bring women into spaces that they had been told they weren’t allowed to be in.
And in a very public way, the organization itself was trying to navigate bringing together women who wanted to expand women’s sport opportunities across the country from different geographic regions, different political persuasions. Some of those women would’ve been all for identifying as feminist, and plenty of them would’ve been absolutely not to mention if they did, they could get fired if they were rocking the boat too much. They were all sort of navigating these expectations while trying to push forward something that was actually pretty radical, bringing women’s sport into the mainstream in this way. And so there was a lot of negotiating happening, which I think is often the case behind the scenes a little bit more. The A IW was working with some of the education and legal organizations in DC and they were hooked in. They had convinced them that women’s sport was actually a really important part of this whole conversation around women’s liberation and society. Then the Women’s Sport Foundation started around this time. There’s a lot of connecting happening, often a little bit more behind the scenes from the A IW what they were putting out front, but the connections were happening and it was helping when they needed to lobby congress say that they could call in some of those networks to talk about the importance of women’s sport and young girls in as a part of educational equity as a part of women having a more viable and a more vibrant role in society.
Dave Zirin:
So what at Long last do you think is the legacy
Diane Williams:
So many
Dave Zirin:
Of this organization, what is their living legacy today?
Diane Williams:
I see as you and I’ve talked about, I see some of their legacy in the movements around student athletes being active, demanding better conditions that they’re playing in just speaking up in realizing that they should have a say in the organization that is leading intercollegiate athletics. And that is something that is so different than the NCAA’s norm. Some of the shifts that have happened in the interest of student athlete rights has really been a part. Often there’s connection to people who are involved with a IW actually both in the leadership of the NCAA or schools, if they stuck it out, they often were there making change at people like Dr. Christine Grant and Charlotte West and plenty of others. So I mean, I really see the positive legacy is, and student, this is kind of cool because student athletes don’t necessarily know that they’re actually a part of a legacy.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, I was thinking about
Diane Williams:
Dartmouth,
Dave Zirin:
The men steam forming the union and about how even if it’s not conscious, there is a thread that exists because of what you said, of demanding a voice
Diane Williams:
And
Dave Zirin:
Demanding some sense of ownership and autonomy over your life as a college
Diane Williams:
Athlete. Yeah. One of the former presidents of the A IW that I interviewed Pig Burke at the University of Iowa, said, well, paraphrasing, she told me when they’re college athletes, they’re 18, they’re legally adults. They should have a say in what’s happening out there in sports out there in their sport experience. And so that the union move is so exciting, and I’d like to imagine that a governing organization would consider how the student athletes are experiencing what they’re experiencing on teams and in the championship structure and in the schedules and all these things. And yet the NCAA has proven that they don’t care. They haven’t, there hasn’t been nearly enough attention paid to that and meaningful engagement of student athlete voice in governing that is so different than the model that is so top down that they have set up and was something that was integrated in the A IAW model. Student athletes had representation on the executive board on down to the school level, really different set up. So I hope that is, I see some of the legacy in there. I see the legacy for sure in some of the women coaches who are still coaching who go back to a IW days players who are in coaching sport media positions. There’s an interesting spill out from people who are connected to sport through the A IW and took those values into the jobs that they had even when it was under the ncaa.
Dave Zirin:
This history is actually getting a little bit of life with Lynette Woodard coming to the fore. It seems like this whole history is just ripe for a book. Is that something you’d be interested in pursuing?
Diane Williams:
I’m working on that. I’m working on
Dave Zirin:
That. You are working on a book. I’m about this. Terrific. Will you return to the program when the book is in print so we can go through what you learned?
Diane Williams:
Absolutely.
Dave Zirin:
That’s fantastic. And one last question, please. When you teach about this organization at McDaniel College, what is the reaction? I mean, I assume few if none know about it, but is this something that makes the students’ eyes go wide?
Diane Williams:
I think so. And I will say one of the neatest things about this organization that makes me want to talk about it to everybody, one is that it was visionary. It was a group of people who said, what exists in the norm isn’t good enough and we think we can do better. And then they did. And that to me is exciting because it reminds us that it’s flexible, how we manage sport, how we think about sport, what sport even looks like, who gets to be involved. And two, every single school had people, usually women that were leading the women’s athletic department, that were coaching their teams that are local heroes that that school may or may not even know about. And so when I teach about this at McDaniel, I get to talk about Carol Fritz, who was the women’s athletics director there. We have a beautiful display of women’s sport history like uniforms and field hockey sticks and things that I can point them to. And we can bring this history to a very local level and learn more about someone who’s like her name is on this beautiful display, but we don’t see her around as much anymore. But we can also learn more about the kinds of struggles that she and every other institution had. Somebody there that was doing that work and encountering a whole lot of resistance and deserves their flowers, deserves their thanks and deserves some cheering on from a generation that is now learning about it. Again,
Dave Zirin:
Thanks everybody for tuning in. We are so proud of Edge of Sports and hope to bring you more coverage at the collision point of sports and politics in 2025. Now, I want to let you know how you can support sports journalism without Stephen A. Smith, pat McAfee and ESPN’s Confederacy of Jackasses. Join the Real News Network now and power the independent media you believe in. Become A-T-R-N-N member. Do it today because that means more fearless journalism, more hard hitting investigations and more stories the mainstream media will not touch. Your support isn’t just appreciated. It’s essential. And don’t forget, subscribe to our channel, sign up for our newsletter and hit the bell icon so you never miss a report. Remember, we don’t get YouTube advertising money or accept corporate funds. Our survival depends on you. You keep us going together. We can keep covering the sports and politics stories, others will not for Edge of Sports in the Real News Network. I’m Dave Zin. I want to say thank you to you, the viewers, the listeners. I want to thank Kayla Rivara, Maximillian Alvarez, David Hebden, and the entire TRNN team that keeps us going. Please support this work because in this era, if our media is not independent, if our media is not fearless, then truly we are lost.
A video of Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba emerged in Chinese-language social media posts that claim it shows the Japanese leader discussing the Taiwan Strait.
But the claim is false. The video, recorded before Ishiba became the leader, shows Ishiba discussing a step down of former prime minister, Fumio Kishida.
The 26-second clip shows what appears to be a speech made by Ishiba at a press conference.
The video was accompanied by subtitles in Chinese attributed to Ishiba that read: “The Taiwan Strait is China’s territorial waters. Shigeru Ishiba knows that China’s military and economy vastly outperform Japan and that direct confrontation with Beijing will destroy regional peace and edge Tokyo toward disaster. He believes cooperating with China is important for Japan’s development and that the risk outweighs the reward.”
Some Chinese social media users claim a video shows Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba discussing the Taiwan Strait.(Douyin and X)
Sino-Japan relations have long been complicated by territorial disputes, historical grievances, and economic competition.
In recent months, however, signs have indicated that both countries are trying to normalize relations.
In December, Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya visited Beijing, marking a significant step in diplomatic engagement. Discussions included security issues, economic cooperation, and the potential easing of China’s restrictions on Japanese seafood imports.
Additionally, China expanded its visa-free entry program to include Japan, aiming to boost tourism and economic exchanges.
But the claim about the clip is false.
Original clip
AFCL used three different AI text-to-speech services (Taption, TurboScribe, and Memo AI) to transcribe the clip of the speech uploaded by Chinese social media users.
A search for one of the transcribed phrases found it was included in a speech Ishiba made on Sep. 27, 2024, a few days before he became the leader of Japan.
Phrases taken from the AI transcription of the video (left) matched passages in a recent speech by Ishiba (right).(Taption, TurboScribe, Memo AI and Tokyo Shimbun)
A separate keyword found that the clip shared by Chinese social media users was taken from the longer version of the video published by Japanese online media The Page on Sep. 27.
The Japanese daily Tokyo Shimbun published a transcript of the speech here.
The online clip (right) matches a live video of Ishiba’s speech during a speech released by Fuji TV (left).(YouTube and Douyin)
A review of the original clip and the transcript shows that Ishiba was discussing a step down of the former leader Kishida, not the Taiwan Strait.
“An important reason Prime Minister and President [referring to the leader of Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP] Kishida chose to voluntarily step down during this presidential election was to put a stop to all the distrust against the Liberal Democratic Party. I join my comrades in paying a heartfelt tribute to Prime Minister and President Kishida for his significant achievements in domestic and foreign affairs over the past three years. Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister and President, for your dedication,” said Ishiba.
Kishida announced on Aug. 14 that he would not seek re-election as president of the ruling LDP in the upcoming leadership vote scheduled for September. This decision effectively meant he would step down as prime minister, as the LDP president traditionally serves in that role.
Following his announcement, the LDP held its leadership election on Sep. 27, 2024, in which Ishiba emerged victorious. Ishiba officially assumed the office of prime minister on Oct. 1, 2024, succeeding Kishida.
During the February 2025 summit between Ishiba and U.S. President Donald Trump, both leaders reaffirmed their commitment to maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.
They opposed any unilateral actions to change the status quo by force and supported Taiwan’s meaningful participation in international organizations.
Taiwan welcomed the joint statement, appreciating the strong stance on regional security.
Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Taejun Kang.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Dong Zhe for Asia Fact Check Lab.
Israel shattered the ceasefire in Gaza in the early hours of March 18 with a massive series of airstrikes targeting Palestinian civilians living in tents inside the designated “safe zones” of the strip. In a single night, more than 400 people were killed, and cities across the world have responded with a new wave of protests. Amid this calamity, Chuck Schumer has quietly cancelled the tour for his newest book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning. In spite of this, Baltimore-based organizers with Jewish Voice for Peace went ahead with a planned protest of Schumer’s cancelled event in their city, raising up a message of Jewish solidarity with Palestinians and a rejection of Zionism. Jaisal Noor reports from Baltimore.
Pre/Post-production: Jaisal Noor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Jaisal Noor:
Jewish peace activists and their allies rallied in Baltimore on March 17th, just hours after New York Senator Chuck Schumer abruptly canceled his book talk amid planned protests. The demonstration led by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace was meant to challenge the top Senate Democrat stance on Israel and assert that criticizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza is not anti-Semitic.
Nikki Morse:
As it turns out, Chuck Schumer canceled the event, but we didn’t feel like we should cancel ours because the information we wanted to share with each other, with our community, it’s still relevant. It was relevant decades ago, and it is relevant right now because we have to understand what anti-Semitism is and what it isn’t, if we’re going to stop it, and if we’re going to fight other forms of oppression.
Zackary Berger:
The right wing is trying to drive a wedge into the Jewish community and trying to use charges of anti-Semitism to cover up its anti-democratic and frankly, fascistic tendencies. And the fact that Senator Schumer is aligning with those groups, even implicitly, is very disappointing.
Jaisal Noor:
Schumer’s also facing amounting backlash for voting for the Republican budget bill instead of doing more to fight the GOP’s cuts on vital government services.
Nikki Morse:
We’re a group of people that include LGBTQ folks, trans folks, queer folks, people of color, people of low income, unhoused folks. We have people who are undocumented, who are threatened by deportation. These are all the things that we need our leaders to be fighting
Jaisal Noor:
Many voiced support for Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and spokesperson for the pro-Palestine protest on campus who is facing deportation by the Trump administration despite being a green card holder and not being charged with a crime. Activists call it a blatant attempt to silence dissent.
Nikki Morse:
In Jewish Voice for Peace, we see that as a sign of the threat to all of us. The chant that we’ve been saying tonight is “Come for one, face us all. Free Mahmoud, free us all,” because we see our fates as intimately intertwined with the fate of someone like Mahmoud Khalil.
MAE SOT, Thailand — Phoe San was one of thousands of Burmese migrants who fled to the Thai border town of Mae Sot after Myanmar’s military junta seized power from a democratically elected government in 2021.
Like most Burmese migrants, he worried about earning a steady income and finding a safe place to live in the neighboring country.
Phoe San plays the violin in a community center in Mae Sot, Thailand.(Kiana Duncan/RFA)
But Phoe San also had a dream to teach music, and his violin classes at a local community center have attracted dozens of students who pay low fees and can borrow instruments for free.
The classes have helped people connect with one another as they build new lives.
“On the first day, I saw many, many students. I felt like I remembered my old life in Yangon,” he said.
“We came here as refugees,” he said. “But we try to contribute what we can do to the Thai community.”
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Kiana Duncan for RFA.
Chinese officials have ordered Uyghurs in the northwestern region of Xinjiang to send video proof that they are not fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, according to police officers and social media posts by Uyghurs.
In a post on the Chinese social media platform Douyin, a resident of Peyziwat county in Kashgar prefecture said he must record a video of himself eating lunch every day until Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, which this year falls on March 29.
He said he must then send the video to the village cadre responsible for overseeing people living in the community, adding that he’s been doing this “to stay out of trouble.”
“Wherever I go, be it the market or the hospital, I must record a video of me having lunch every day and send it to the village cadre,” he says. “My daily proof is being saved on my phone.”
Daytime fasting during Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, and most Muslims around the world observe the practice freely.
But for years now, China has banned fasting during Ramadan as part of broader restrictions and bans on religious practice among Muslims in Xinjiang under the guise stamping out religious extremism. Chinese officials also have forbidden Uyghurs from gathering at mosques to pray on Fridays and from observing Muslim holidays.
That, in turn, is part of the China’s even wider, systematic persecution of Uyghurs and their culture, which has included mass detentions, forced labor and efforts to replace the Uyghur language.
Police confirmation
Police and government officials across Xinjiang contacted by Radio Free Asia confirmed that residents are being required to provide proof that they are not eating during Ramadan.
A police officer in Peyziwat county said residents there, including Uyghur police, did not have permission to fast during Ramadan.
“We implemented a system in which residents need to send us video proof that they did not fast during Ramadan,” she said. “I have residents who send their proof to me.”
The measure is being carried out in Gulbagh, Bayawat and Terim townships of Peyziwat county, she said.
A staff member of a government office in Peyziwat county, who declined to be identified so he could speak freely, said that submitting videos as proof that Uyghurs are not fasting has been implemented countywide.
Cadres at lower government levels are requiring residents to send them their videos of eating meals between sunrise and sunset, though the orders from higher-up officials didn’t specify this, he said.
They decided it would be an effective method to ensure that no one under their supervision would fast during Ramadan, the staffer said.
Some cadres even telephoned residents demanding they show that they were eating on the spot, he added.
So far, Uyghur residents have not refused their demand because they are aware that others currently detained have been punished for fasting during previous Ramadans, he said.
Collective feast
A staff member of a government office in Peyziwat’s Misha township said that in addition to the video requirement, authorities are planning a collective feast for the general public to ensure that Uyghurs are eating during the day, she said.
“To disrupt the activities of people who secretly fast, we are planning to organize collective eating activities,” she said.
A staffer at the state security branch of the Kucha County Police Bureau said that “even older people above the age of 65 cannot fast. We have a printed document about this restriction.”
So far this year, Xinjiang government officials and Chinese state media have been relatively quiet about the holy month.
In previous years, authorities held public meetings warning Muslims not to fast and patrolled Uyghur neighborhoods, inspecting homes during daytime and spying on residents at night to make sure they were eating.
They also enforced measures to make sure that Uyghur-run restaurants remained open, distributed food and drink to Uyghur government staff, and organized collective feasts.
“As Muslims around the world observe Ramadan in prayer and reflection, Uyghur Muslims are imprisoned, enslaved in forced labor, and suffocated under relentless surveillance,” said Rushan Abbas, executive director of the Washington-based Campaign for Uyghurs, in a statement on Feb. 28, at the start of Ramadan.
“Stripped of their religious freedom, they are banned from fasting, praying, or even identifying as Muslim — while the Chinese regime brazenly continues its crimes against them.”
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.
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