We speak with journalist Mehdi Hasan, founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo, about the incoming U.S. administration and President-elect Donald Trump’s picks for key roles, including lawyer Kash Patel to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trump reportedly considered Patel for FBI deputy director during his first term but dropped the idea after pushback from within his own administration. Hasan describes Patel as a “toady” whose threats against political opponents and journalists should be disqualifying, but that he aligns with Trump’s goals of further politicizing the FBI. “He wants to use it as an instrument of vengeance.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi, let’s talk about Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to head the FBI. This is Kash Patel speaking to Steve Bannon in his War Room podcast.

KASH PATEL: We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But, yeah, we’re putting you all on notice. And, Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we’re dictators, because we’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is Kash Patel speaking on the Shawn Ryan Show in September.

KASH PATEL: The FBI’s footprint has gotten so frickin’ big, and the biggest problem the FBI has had has come out of its intel shops. I’d break that component out of it. I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state. And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops. Go be cops. Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers and violent offenders. What do you need 7,000 people there for? Same thing with DOJ. What are all these people doing here? Looking for their next government promotion. Looking for their next fancy government title. Looking for their parachute out of government. So, while you’re bringing in the right people, you also have to shrink government.

AMY GOODMAN: So, again, that’s Kash Patel. When President Trump wanted to make him deputy director of the FBI in his first administration, the attorney general, Bob [sic] Barr said, “Over my” — Bill Barr said, “Over my dead body.” Mehdi Hasan?

MEHDI HASAN: Yes, he did. Bill Barr, of all people, said the guy was completely unqualified, it was detached from reality to try and put him in the FBI. And he said, “Over my dead body.” Gina Haspel, who was director of the CIA in December 2020 during Trump’s lame duck, when Trump tried to appoint Kash Patel to deputy director of the CIA, she threatened to resign, and Mike Pence had to get involved and block that. So this is not some kind of liberal whining about Kash Patel. Prominent conservatives at the time said, “No way. This guy is completely unqualified.”

And you played that clip from the War Room, from the Steve Bannon show. I think that’s from December 2023. He put us on notice. He says in that clip, “We’re putting you on notice.” Well, we’re on notice. In fact, I’ve been warning about Kash Patel since 2022, when I predicted — when I was at MSNBC, and I predicted that Trump would make him FBI director, and he would go after the media. He’s making it very clear. He wants to prosecute journalists. In another time and era, Amy, those words would be chilling. Those words would disqualify him from the running. But, of course, Republican senators mostly will fall in line. We’ll see if the — you know, the Murkowskis and the Susan Collinses and Mitch McConnell, whether they’ll push back in the way they did on Matt Gaetz. He’s a deeply dangerous nominee. I would argue that clip you played from the Bannon War Room show makes him perhaps the most dangerous nominee so far, because he’s open about the fact that he wants to use the power of the state to crush Donald Trump’s opponents. He’s a sycophant. He’s a bag carrier. He literally wrote a children’s book about King Donald Trump. That’s how sycophantic he is.

And I would say to some of the progressives maybe watching your show this morning, Amy Goodman, who say, “Well, you know what? The FBI does need reform. We on the left don’t like the FBI. We think Kash Patel should go break it up,” well, look, you can not like the FBI, for good reason, but the only reason Kash Patel and the Republicans don’t like the FBI is because the FBI investigated Donald Trump over ties to Russia and because the FBI went to Mar-a-Lago and searched his home for stolen classified documents which he was keeping against the law in his home. So, they don’t actually care about reform or bureaucracy or deep state; they care about neutering all institutions that can stand up to Donald Trump and MAGA.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go more deeply into what he said in Bannon’s War Room, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens.” If you could explain more who you think he’s talking about, about Joe Biden rigging presidential elections, “We’re going to come after you,” Mehdi?

MEHDI HASAN: So, Patel is at the core of pretty much every major MAGA conspiracy theory about the deep state, about the election, if you go through the list. I mean, he came to prominence — he was a very junior, as I say, unqualified person. He was working on the House Intelligence Committee with Devin Nunes, the right-wing California congressman. And he came to prominence in going after Robert Mueller, going after the Russian investigation, coming up with this memo that — some of the stuff in this famous Nunes memo turned out to be true, some of it, the inspector general said, “No, not true.” That’s how he caught Trump’s attention. That’s how he ended up in the White House. That’s how he ended up on the National Security Council.

By the way, one of the many people saying he shouldn’t be given this job is John Bolton, his former boss — not exactly a kind of lily-livered liberal — John Bolton saying he should be rejected by the Senate 100 to 0.

But he’s at the core of every conspiracy theory, Amy, whether it’s about, you know, Donald Trump didn’t lose the election, whether it’s January 6th. He testified in a Colorado courtroom over January 6th and the election. The judge said he wasn’t a credible witness. He’s even had the endorsement, I think you mentioned in the intro, of QAnon. In one of the books he wrote, he actually handwrote a QAnon mantra into the book, and they just posted it on social media. By the way, the FBI regards QAnon as a domestic terror threat. Think about the irony, Amy, of putting a person in charge of the FBI who’s actually fine with this group that the FBI thinks is a domestic terror threat. So, he is at the core of all these conspiracies.

When he says he’s going after people — you asked me who he’s talking about — of course he’s talking about the Bidens and Clintons of this world, but actually it’s much more dangerous than that. It’s much broader than that. It’s anyone who they think — who they think is an opponent. I mean, let’s just be very — this is what authoritarianism looks like. I know it’s become fashionable since the election, even on parts of the left, to say, “Well, it was all exaggerated to say that Trump is a fascist threat to the Constitution or authoritarian threat to the media.” No, it’s not exaggerated. These people are saying it out loud, and Trump is appointing them or trying to appoint them to the most senior positions in the United States government and national security apparatus.

AMY GOODMAN: And let’s talk about who he would be replacing, Christopher Wray, whose term doesn’t end for several years, who was appointed by Donald Trump, and why an FBI director has a 10-year term, which goes back to, what, post-Watergate, when a president, Nixon, is trying to deploy his FBI director exactly in the way Kash Patel threatens to do.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, so, of course —

AMY GOODMAN: So that they would span several terms.

MEHDI HASAN: Well, we know that J. Edgar Hoover was the man who abused more FBI power than any director in the history of the FBI. I think he was in charge — for what? Four decades? Five decades? Astonishing amount of time. No president dared to remove him. And the 10-year terms comes in after that, of course. By the way, I would credit my former MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown, who said appointing Kash Patel to the FBI director’s job would be like appointing a cross between J. Edgar Hoover and Alex Jones, which I think sums up pretty well who Patel is.

But, look, on the 10-year term, what’s interesting, Amy, is, of course, Donald Trump is the great precedent breaker, the great norm buster. When I hear Democrats talking about norms, Trump has already trashed all of them. In Trump one, in Trump term one, he got rid of James Comey, who, of course, he was angry at, even though James Comey, arguably, helped him win the 2016 election. But he got rid of Comey and put in Wray. And that itself was quite unprecedented, only the second time, I believe, an FBI director had been fired and replaced in the middle of their term. He appointed Wray. Then he got upset with Wray. Now he wants to replace Wray.

I would also make a side point to some of the progressives watching at home. Why is it that the FBI director is always a Republican, even under Democratic presidencies? It’s always a Republican. And Democratic presidents always keep on the Republican who the previous Republican appointed, which I just find so ironic.

But now he wants to get rid of Wray, put in Patel, which tells you, again, everything that he wants from the FBI. He wanted to use it as an instrument of vengeance, of score settling, of silencing dissent. He wants to use it to basically intimidate people. And that’s why he’s getting rid of Wray, not because he disagrees with Wray’s politics. Christopher Wray is a Republican who Trump appointed. But in this Trump term, he’s made it very clear what he wants the FBI to be doing.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about another of Trump’s picks. The New Yorker magazine’s Jane Mayer has an explosive piece in the magazine. Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, was forced out of leadership roles at two veterans organizations for misusing funds, sexually harassing women, being repeatedly drunk on the job. According to a whistleblower report, Hegseth once had to be restrained from joining strippers on the stage at a strip club. In another incident, he drunkenly chanted “Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” at a bar in 2015. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports Hegseth’s own mother accused him of a mistreating women. In 2018, Penelope Hegseth wrote him an email that read in part, quote, “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” unquote. The email was sent a year after a woman accused Hegseth of raping her at a California hotel. This is Trump’s pick to head the Defense Department. Your final comments on this, Mehdi Hasan?

MEHDI HASAN: So, Amy, if you had asked me this a few weeks ago, I would have said, “Hegseth is the worst pick of all. You can’t get worse than Hegseth.” And then we got Tulsi Gabbard, and I said, “You can’t get worse than Gabbard.” And then we got RFK Jr., and I said, “You can’t get worse than RFK Jr.” Now we’ve got Kash Patel, and I’m telling you, “You can’t get worse than Kash Patel.” Donald Trump says “hold my beer” every time and keeps producing these nominees.

And look, while we’re focused on Patel, we’ve got more reporting on Hegseth. I mean, it’s astonishing. It’s almost beyond belief. If you were writing a TV show about the Trump years, if it was a Netflix show called The Trump Years, you would say these storylines are just too unrealistic. If you were sitting in the writers’ room, and you said, “You know what? Let’s have a scene where it turns out that Hegseth, the great Christian nationalist, tried to get on stage with strippers. Let’s have his mother write him a letter saying, 'I disown you because of all, you know, your misogyny,'” you would say, “Oh, come on. That’s a little unrealistic. Those are kind of beyond-parody characters.” No, it’s real life. This is the Trump administration. These are the people he’s appointing.

And I think it’s interesting, by the way, the Islamophobia is very worrying on Hegseth’s part, because there was this strain of thinking, even on some parts of the left, that, well, Trump won’t be as militaristic and belligerent as the Democrats. Not true. He’s putting in a guy at Defense Department who has crusader tattoos on his body, who said outrageous things about killing Muslims, supported the Iraq War. He’s going to be in charge of the Pentagon? You know, there’s no way this is going to be a, quote-unquote, antiwar presidency, if Hegseth is at the Pentagon and Marco Rubio is at the State Department. By the way, can you imagine, Amy, if Biden or Obama had a nominee who had been accused of screaming drunkenly “Kill Jews! Kill all Jews!”? It would be the end of the world. But, of course, with Muslims, no one cares, so this will be a minor story in the résumé of Peter Hegseth.

One last point, very quickly, is Hegseth’s mother is attacking him. Elon Musk’s daughter is attacking him. Bill Barr is attacking Kash Patel. Donald Trump was called Adolf Hitler by JD Vance. When people say, “Oh, liberals are deranged about Trump people,” it’s always other Republicans who are actually leading the charge and reminding us how awful these people are.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, it’s other Republicans who would have to approve these —

MEHDI HASAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — appointees, these nominations, unless —

MEHDI HASAN: Many of them will.

AMY GOODMAN: — this is done in a recess appointment. Twenty seconds, Mehdi.

MEHDI HASAN: Many of them will, Amy. They all roll over. They’re intimidated by Trump. A lot of them are scared to go against Trump. And it comes down to, basically, you know, the four who stopped Gaetz: Mitch McConnell, Murkowski, Collins and the new Utah replacement for Mitt Romney whose name I forget. But those four Republicans are basically the ones everyone’s going to look at and say, “Are you going to stand up for the Constitution? Are you going to stand against this unqualified nominee, Kash Patel; this dangerous nominee, Peter Hegseth; RFK Jr., who kids could die because of?” Let’s see.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, I want to thank you for being with us, editor-in-chief of the new media website Zeteo.

Despite committing to tackling mass incarceration during his presidential campaign, President Joe Biden has rarely used the presidential pardon to commute sentences during his time in office. As his term draws to a close and amid outrage over the pardon of his son Hunter, advocates are pressuring Biden — who has pardoned thousands who had been convicted of federal drug charges but were not incarcerated at the time of their pardons — to grant clemency to thousands more who are still in prison over cannabis offenses. The president has a chance to atone for his past support of “tough on crime” measures, says the Last Prisoner Project’s Jason Ortiz. He says Biden has an opportunity of “correcting the injustices that were done over the past 20 or 30 years” and should “extend the same grace and compassion” he showed his son Hunter “to all the folks that he helped put in prison to begin with.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

President Biden is continuing to face criticism over his decision to issue a sweeping pardon to his son Hunter Biden. But the president’s decision has also brought renewed attention to the power of the presidential pardon. Biden is now facing renewed pressure to commute the sentences of death row prisoners and to pardon or grant clemency to political prisoners like Indigenous leader Leonard Peltier, imprisoned in Florida, and the whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. The group Last Prisoner Project is calling on Biden to use his clemency power to free those still incarcerated in federal prison for cannabis crimes.

We’re joined now by Jason Ortiz, director of Strategic Initiatives at the Last Prisoner Project.

This is very interesting, Jason. I think they say that Hunter Biden has been clean for something like just over five years. His father has openly talked about his son, formerly an addict. And as he faces bipartisan criticism, talk about what you think this is an opening for.

JASON ORTIZ: Sure. So, this is definitely an opening for folks to talk about exactly how expansive we can use the pardon power of the president to make sure that we’re correcting the injustices that were done over the past 20 or 30 years when it comes to cannabis crimes. President Biden himself was actually one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill that created a lot of the outrageous sentences that we’re now dealing with today.

And so, we’re seeing that there are over 3,000 federal cannabis prisoners currently incarcerated on cannabis charges, and these are all folks that also have families and have parents and have loved ones. And we have examples, like folks like Jonathan Wall, who is somebody that was a Maryland resident. He was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for his first offense. And so, while I can understand why the president wants to have compassion for his own son, where we’re really getting frustrated is that he’s refusing to extend that compassion to all the parents that are currently watching their kids waste away in prison. Mitzi Wall, who works with the organization Freedom Grow, is the mother of Jonathan Wall. She was joining me this past week when we had the congressional press conference, when we were joined by folks like James Clyburn, Congressman James Clyburn, asking for freedom and clemency for folks like Jonathan Wall. And so, that’s one example of 3,000 folks that are currently in prison.

Some of the charges are far more egregious. Folks like Edwin Rubis was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison in the '90s. And so, he's someone that hasn’t had a Christmas or holidays with his family. He has a son that’s 27 years old. He has currently served 27 years of that federal sentence. He hasn’t had a single Christmas with his son because of charges that were orchestrated and architected by President Biden, then as senator, in the crime bill. We have folks that are serving life sentences. Ismael Lira, for a trafficking charge, is currently sentenced on a life sentence for the same activity that is now legal across the country in 25 —

AMY GOODMAN: Which is what?

JASON ORTIZ: — different states, including — trafficking. And so, that would be the distribution of cannabis. And so, there is a specific differentiation between what President Biden’s previous pardons were intended to do, which was only covering things like simple possession, where right now we have folks that are serving decades for trafficking, which is exactly what the hundreds of legal cannabis businesses across the country are currently doing on a regular basis, including right in Washington, D.C. And so, we’re now seeing people sitting in prison for decades for the same activity that is currently generating tax revenue for cities and states across the country. We’re paying for schools and building bridges with cannabis activity dollars, but still letting folks waste away in prison. And so, while I can definitely understand why a father would want to have compassion for his son and avoid prison time for his son, we’re really asking him to extend that same compassion to all the folks that he helped put in prison to begin with.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: [Jason], you mentioned the previous pardons for simple cannabis possession, but that hasn’t led to the release of many of those incarcerated individuals. Can you talk about that?

JASON ORTIZ: Yeah, absolutely. So, those pardons were for simple possession, for folks that were currently charged on a federal possession charge. And, now, it is very rare for someone to actually serve prison time for a simple possession charge at the federal level. That generally happens to folks — somebody maybe got caught; they were smoking at a national park or some other sort of federal property where they were unaware of it. But there are nobody in prison for simple possession in the federal prison system whatsoever. So, despite his pardoning of 6,000 charges, zero people were released.

However, the charges that we’re looking to actually have folks released for, things like cultivation of cannabis, sales of cannabis, those are the charges that folks are currently in prison for. And we want him to expand his use of the pardon to cover all cannabis crimes that are now legal in the majority of the country.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and, Jason, apologies, but, Jason, during your press conference last week, you spoke of, quote, “the heartbreaking number of Latino fathers incarcerated for life or near-life sentences.” How do these cases reflect systemic inequalities in federal sentencing?

JASON ORTIZ: So, we’ve seen for the past 50 years or so that the war on drugs has been racially motivated, specifically targeting young Black and Brown men, and many of those are Latinos, here in the city of New York. There was millions of arrests across the country. We’ve seen countless young fathers that have been ripped from their families, simply because they were trying to make money to help feed their families.

And so, I was somebody who was arrested in high school at the age of 16. I was lucky enough not to get incarcerated, but only because my parents were able to help me through this ridiculous legal process of keeping a 16-year-old out of prison.

And so, we’re seeing across the country that while these laws are changing, the retroactive relief and the restorative justice for the folks that were impacted has not followed suit with all of the cannabis profits that we’re seeing developed across the country. And we know without a doubt that the war on drugs was and is still racially motivated, specifically targeting Blacks and Latinos. And so, we’ve yet to actually wrestle with that real racist history of the war on drugs. We’re simply trying to just move on without addressing the past.

And I think the president has an incredible opportunity now to really address the issues that have been developed over the last few years by taking real expansive action, using his clemency power to commute the sentences of the folks that are currently in prison. And roughly half of the folks that are on our list of constituents are Latino. And you can see very clearly just by looking down the list of names who is in there and who is getting out in the future. And Latinos are definitely overrepresented in the prison population generally, but especially in the federal system for cannabis crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you look at the clemency statistics by president, Biden is at almost the lowest, outside of George H.W. Bush. Biden, Trump, Obama, W., Clinton, H.W. and Reagan — he’s number two, among the lowest. Are you speaking directly, are your groups speaking directly with the Biden clemency office? How far are these demands going? You’re talking about thousands of people.

JASON ORTIZ: Yeah. So, we have met with White House officials multiple times, and we’ve explained exactly the folks that we believe are the top candidates for clemency. And while they have been receptive, they have not told us that they’re going to take any particular action to help these folks out at all.

And so, what we are really doing is hoping that they will take action sooner rather than later. It is true that most of the time most presidents use their clemency powers at the very end of their presidency. However, President Biden has clearly shown that he’s not going to wait for everyone to wait until the end of his presidency. He was willing to do it a little bit earlier for his son. And so, we’re asking him to extend the same grace and compassion to all the folks that are currently incarcerated and release them immediately, let them join their families for the holidays, let them see their families grow up, and bring joy and happiness back into their lives.

These are folks that have served a tremendous amount of time already. This is not folks that we’re saying did not commit the crime and should be, you know, released without any sort of punishment. Folks like Edwin Rubis have already served 27 years of their life in federal prison for a cannabis charge.

And so, while he could wait, we are asking him not to wait, to do this immediately, to show the people that his presidency is going to be one where he will be remembered as addressing the issues that he created and coming to this from a place of compassion, and not continuing the process and continuing the damage done by punitive drug policies.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jason Ortiz, we thank you so much for being with us, director of strategic initiatives at the Last Prisoner Project.

Next week, our guest Chase Strangio will make history as the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court. Strangio will argue on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project that Tennessee’s state ban on gender-affirming hormone therapies for transgender children is a form of sex discrimination. “Our hope is that the cultural anxiety about trans people … is not going to sway the justices from applying straightforward constitutional principles,” says Strangio about the case. We also discuss recent cultural backlash against trans rights as part of an “approach to gender that is regressive and dangerous.” The Democratic Party has been unwilling to provide a robust defense to conservative attacks on trans identity, says Strangio, ceding ground to the further loss of the community’s civil rights and protections. Yet even as trans people are “demonized” and blamed for structural problems in the U.S., he adds, “We have always resisted. We have always taken care of each other. No matter what happens, that is what we’ll do.”democracynow.org

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

When incoming Republican President Donald Trump returns to office, he’s vowed to target the LGBTQIA community. Our next guest will be a key figure in challenging this.

Next week, Chase Strangio will make history as the first openly transgender lawyer to make oral arguments before the Supreme Court as the justices consider Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming hormone therapies for transgender minors. The case argues the ban is a form of sex discrimination.

Last week, the Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson announced a policy banning transgender people from using some Capitol restrooms that correspond to their gender. This came after Republican Congressmember Nancy Mace introduced a resolution to ban transgender women from using women’s restrooms at the Capitol, then posted about it more than 300 times, in just a matter of a few days, on social media. This follows the election of Delaware Democrat Sarah McBride as the first openly transgender congressmember. McBride dismissed the Capitol bathroom bans as a distraction during a recent interview on CBS.

REP.-ELECT SARAH McBRIDE: Some members of the small Republican conference majority decided to get headlines and to manufacture a crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Chase Strangio joins us now, co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. In a week, again, he becomes the first openly transgender lawyer to argue a case before the Supreme Court, looking at Tennessee.

Welcome to Democracy Now! There’s a lot to discuss here. Why don’t we begin with this case, in which you’re going to make history?

CHASE STRANGIO: Well, good to see you, Amy. Thank you for having me.

We are before the Supreme Court at this moment when transgender people are under so much scrutiny. And this comes on the tail of 24 states banning evidence-based medicine for transgender adolescents. And that is why we are before the Supreme Court now. One of those states is Tennessee. Tennessee has categorically banned medical treatment for adolescents only, when that treatment is prescribed in a manner that Tennessee considers inconsistent with a person’s sex.

So, what we’re arguing before the Supreme Court is that, look, this is a simple example of sex discrimination. Our clients — so, if you take, for example, a transgender adolescent boy, he cannot receive testosterone to live consistent with his male identity, because he was assigned female at birth. Had he been assigned male at birth, he could receive that same medication for that same purpose. That is sex discrimination. And Tennessee has to justify it, which the district court concluded that Tennessee just simply did not. The courts across the country that have actually looked at the evidence have repeatedly found that the claims about the harms of this treatment just do not hold up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny. But, of course, we lost in the appellate court. We’re now before the Supreme Court making the case that this is just a plain and simple example of sex discrimination, and the fact that it’s sex discrimination against trans people doesn’t make it any less unconstitutional.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Chase, this comes in a period when the Republican Party used anti-trans ads throughout the presidential campaign. I’m wondering your reaction to the impact of those ads around the country.

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, it is astonishing to think about $250 million that have been spent focused on a group that represents less than 1% of the population. I think it comes out to, you know, almost $100 to $200 per trans person in the United States.

And obviously, there are sort of two fundamental things that happen as a result of those ads. The first is just the impact on trans people ourselves. We are living in a climate in which we are being demonized, in which we are being blamed for structural failures of this country. Talk about scapegoating, if you’re blaming trans people for everything from, you know, changes in education to school shootings to changing gender norms across the board. So, that’s one aspect of this.

And then, the other is that this rhetoric — and, I will say, the post-election legitimizing of it by Democrats — is what creates the policy realities that we’re living under, the policy realities where you have 550 anti-trans bills introduced in a single year, resulting in the stripping away of healthcare that people rely on, resulting in Representative Mace targeting transgender people’s ability to access restrooms in federal buildings. This is a cascading reality of material harm for our community on top of the rhetorical and cultural harms that it is bestowing upon us.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a clip from one of Trump’s presidential campaign TV ads for those who didn’t see it, this particular one with transphobic messaging that aired, I think it was, over 15,000 times.

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: Surgery.

MARA KEISLING: For prisoners.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: For prisoners. Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access.

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Hell no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that.

DJ ENVY: And Kamala supports transgender sex changes in jail with our money.

NARRATOR: Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports. Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.

DONALD TRUMP: I’m Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message.

AMY GOODMAN: “Kamala is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.” And yesterday, Kamala Harris spoke, and a bunch of the senior members of her staff spoke out on Pod Save America, and a lot of the discussion in that conversation was about how they dealt with these ads. I’m very interested, Chase, as you say, that you are faulting the Democrats in how they’re dealing with this, that they are normalizing this. Explain.

CHASE STRANGIO: Well, so, it’s not even that they’re normalizing it. What they’re saying is that the Harris campaign did too much to support trans people, which is a hard pill to swallow, since they did nothing. You know, Kamala Harris did not respond to the ads. She did not make any affirmative statements in support of trans people throughout the —

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, that’s very interesting, because apparently they floated the ad first, the Republicans, to see if there would be a response. When there was dead silence, they just went for it.

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, so they went for it. And then, in the aftermath of the election, you have this postmortem in which you have Democrats — you know, pundits, as well as politicians — speaking out and saying, “Well, part of why the Harris campaign lost is because they were too supportive of trans people.” But what did they do? Nothing. And so, the obvious, you know, takeaway from that is, well, they should have just joined in the attacks. They should have said, “Yes, it is. Of course we should exclude trans girls from sports. Of course we should deny people in government custody of medical treatment.”

These are constitutional norms that they are sensationalizing because — and playing into people’s misunderstanding about trans people and our bodies. And they played on that misinformation, and they played on that fear, in a campaign that was both about trans people and also about gender more broadly. And what trans people represented in that was the instability of gender roles that were causing so much anxiety. I mean, that’s why you saw Vice President-elect Vance talking about the role of postmenopausal women is to care for children. Childless cat ladies, you know, should — or whatever else he said about that to demonize people who aren’t playing the proper gender roles. It wasn’t just about trans people. Trans people were a very specific focus, but this was a broader commentary on an approach to gender that is regressive and dangerous for everyone.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Chase, in your arguments on the Tennessee case before the Supreme Court, what are you — especially given the large conservative majority on this court, what will you be looking for in terms of the kinds of questions that the justices will ask or what hope you might have of swaying some of the conservative justices?

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, so, you know, at the end of the day, this really is a simple argument about a law that tells us 10 times over on its face that it’s about sex. It says you can’t do something if it’s inconsistent with your sex. And Tennessee comes in and says, “Well, that’s not really about sex.” But that sounds a lot like the arguments that the employers raised in the case of Bostock, where the question was: Is it because of sex to fire someone for being transgender? And that was a conservative-majority court that said 6 to 3 that that is because of sex, that if you are firing someone because they are transgender, that means you are firing someone assigned male at birth because they identify as a woman, and you are not firing someone assigned female at birth because they identify as a woman. The same is true here. We’re making that same argument. We think it is as clear in this context as it was in Bostock. And our hope is that the cultural anxiety about trans people, the demonization of our healthcare, is not going to sway the justices from applying straightforward constitutional principles that have been applied for 50 years.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re arguing this case — this is unusual, isn’t it? — alongside the Biden administration.

CHASE STRANGIO: So, it is not totally unusual. You often have a situation where private parties will bring a case, and the United States will intervene, or the United States can weigh in at the Supreme Court as amicus.

What is a little bit unusual here is that you really have us as coequal parties in this case. We are splitting the time, with the solicitor general going first, and I will go after her, and making this argument, both of us, that this is a law that violates the Equal Protection Clause and that the court, if it is going to faithfully apply its precedents that say that when a government discriminates based upon sex, that it is the government’s burden. It’s Tennessee’s burden to show that the statute that they’ve passed is constitutional, and they have failed to do that. So we are in it together up until January 20th.

AMY GOODMAN: And then what happens? I mean, is there any possibility that this wouldn’t happen by January 20th and then the Trump administration would not be there next to you?

CHASE STRANGIO: So, that’s absolutely right. We fully expect the Trump administration to switch positions. That is not unusual also. There will be other cases in which the administration switches positions. This case was originally brought by the transgender adolescents and their parents, who we represent, against the Tennessee officials who are charged with enforcing this law that bans their healthcare. The parties will still be there. There’s no reason why the court would in any way be stripped of jurisdiction. So, we move forward past January 20th; it’s up to the Supreme Court, of course, what happens next.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to what’s happened in these last few days in Congress, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson speaking to reporters last week after South Carolina Congressmember Nancy Mace introduced this resolution to ban transgender women from using women’s restrooms at the Capitol, after the election of Delaware Congressmember Sarah McBride, the first openly trans congressmember. This is what he said.

REPORTER 1: Can you address the issue of the new bathroom?

REPORTER 2: Can you talk about the policy that you just issued?

SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: Yeah, I’m not sure what more there is to say.

REPORTER 1: Is it enforceable?

SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: Yeah, like all House policies, it’s enforceable. But we have single-sex facilities for a reason. And women deserve women’s-only spaces. And we’re not anti-anyone. We’re pro-women. And I think it’s an important policy for us to continue. It’s always been the — I guess, an unwritten policy, but now it’s in writing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, it’s an unwritten policy, but now it’s in writing. This is the House speaker, Republican Johnson. And I wanted to ask you about Nancy Mace, this campaign she is on. But it is new. Last year, in 2023, Congressmember Mace, during an interview with CBS News, proclaimed she was, quote, “pro-transgender rights and pro-LGBTQ.” Now she’s putting up little paper signs that say “biological” above the signs that say “women’s room.”

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, so, I think one thing to keep in mind is that the cultural discourse and the popular culture norms shift what happens in law and policy. If you look at the tenor of the conversations in this country, it’s shifted so far against trans people that now we have proposed bans on transgender people using restrooms in all public buildings. A few years ago, let’s say in 2019, the question of trans people in restrooms had really died out. It was something where the proponents of those bans admitted that all of their claims were fabricated, that there was no evidence that there was any harm or violence by allowing trans people to use restrooms that align with who they are, which of course they do, we do, all the time. And this idea that there is some unwritten rule in which people are surveilled out of restrooms is just simply not true. It is not enforceable, as we know. But this escalation is a product of the ways in which our public discourse has shifted so dramatically around gender and around trans people.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you nervous about next week? You are making history, Chase.

CHASE STRANGIO: You know, of course I’m nervous. I’m nervous because I am always nervous to do right by my community. The stakes are so high, where this argument is happening in the period of time after the election, before the inauguration, a time when trans people are feeling so vulnerable, a time when, you know, I hear every single day from parents who are asking me if they have to leave the United States. And so, that is what I’m carrying with me. You know, I’m nervous for December 4th. I’m nervous for 2025. We don’t know what we’re up against.

But I guess the two things I’ll say are that, one, this case is a fight to put a limit on what government officials can do to target trans people across the board, and we are going to fight with everything that we have. And then, the other thing I’ll say, specifically to the trans community, to the people who love trans people, is we have always resisted. We have always taken care of each other. No matter what happens, that is what we’ll do.

AMY GOODMAN: Chase Strangio, on December 4th, he becomes the first openly transgender attorney to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Chase is co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. We thank you so much for being with us. We hope to talk to you after you make your arguments.

Donald Trump has tapped a new loyalist to head the Department of Justice, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who served on his defense team during his first impeachment trial and now works at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. Bondi previously dropped a probe into Trump University in 2013 after Trump’s family foundation donated $25,000 to her campaign. This comes after Trump’s first pick, former Florida Congressmember Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration Thursday amid a firestorm over allegations of sex trafficking involving a 17-year-old girl. “In Pam Bondi, Donald Trump has just the person he really wants: someone who will be a lapdog when it comes to wrongdoing by those people he likes and wants to insulate and protect, and a vicious attack dog for anybody Donald Trump wants to seek revenge against,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for decades.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, this is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We’re broadcasting from Baku, Azerbaijan.

But we end today’s show looking at Donald Trump’s new pick to head the Department of Justice, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Trump made the announcement hours after Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration as attorney general amidst a firestorm over allegations of sex trafficking involving a 17-year-old girl he had sex with.

Pam Bondi served as Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019. She served on Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment trial, now works at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. As a lobbyist, her clients have included Amazon, GM, Uber and the nation of Qatar. The news outlet Lever reports Bondi’s brother, Brad Bondi, has represented Elon musk and Tesla against federal securities fraud charges.

We’re joined from Rochester, New York, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, co-founder of DCReport, author of three books on Donald Trump, including The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. In that book, he details how Bondi dropped a probe into Trump University in 2013 after Trump’s family foundation donated $25,000 to her campaign.

David, talk about her nomination and the significance of the Trump University case.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, in Pam Bondi, Donald Trump has just the person he really wants: someone who will be a lapdog when it comes to wrongdoing by those people he likes and wants to insulate and protect, and a vicious attack dog for anybody Donald Trump wants to seek revenge against.

And she demonstrated her loyalty to him 11 years ago, when she accepted, through an arm of her campaign, affiliate of her campaign for attorney general of Florida, a $25,000 contribution from Trump University [sic], a nonprofit, a charity. Charities in America are not allowed to give to political campaigns. Her campaign defended that they were going to keep that money. At the same time, there were complaints going from people in Florida that they had been ripped off by Trump University, Donald Trump’s fraudulent education scheme. And she killed that investigation. So, the fact that Pam Bondi is corrupt and perfectly loyal to Trump has been thoroughly established.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what has taken place. I mean, she would be the head of the Department of Justice — what exactly that means? And again, her nomination follows the nomination of a fellow Floridian — right? — Matt Gaetz, who increasing information was coming out on about this investigative report from the House. If you want to comment on that, and then more on who Pam Bondi is, how close she is to Trump, how, I guess you could say, bonded she is to Trump? And what would it mean to be the attorney general?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, Matt Gaetz, who practiced law long enough to have a cup of coffee, was a totally unfit candidate. And I believe Donald Trump put him forward as a test of loyalty and obedience by United State senators who are Republicans. He asked them to arrange what’s called a recess appointment, which would have allowed Matt Gaetz to serve as attorney general for two years without the advice and consent of the Senate, which is required under the American Constitution. What he was really doing was finding out: Will the U.S. senators bow down to him and ignore their constitutional duties and further his efforts to become our dictator, something you know I have warned about for nine years?

Now, in Bondi, he has someone who represented him on the floor of the House during his first impeachment. And I think to call her fumbling and not very good would be perfectly reasonable, arguably not competent. But that doesn’t matter to Donald. What matters to Donald is total loyalty.

If you want to create a dictatorship in the United States, there are two things Donald has to do to fulfill his statement that he’s going to be dictator, though he claims for one day. You have to control the enforcement of the laws. And there are more than 100,000 people at the Justice Department. The FBI is under the attorney general, for example. And then, secondly, you have to fire those general officers, admirals and generals, who will not do your bidding and ignore their oath of office, and replace them with craven junior officers who will do your bidding, politicizing the American military. Those are the two key levers to creating a Trump dictatorship.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, can you talk about her other positions and her position as chair of the equivalent of the Heritage Foundation, the America First group, that has taken many positions like hers against same-sex marriage, against the Affordable Care Act, etc., David Cay Johnston?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, Pam Bondi has been a lobbyist — she properly registered, unlike some people around Trump — representing Qatar and other foreign interests, as well as some domestic companies, including — I don’t remember the exact names, sorry. But she has clearly identified herself with those people who want to take away freedom from Americans.

The Republican Party used this say that it stood for freedom, for individual freedom. It’s very clear that it now stands for authoritarian control. And the organization that she affiliated herself with is part of that. You will behave the way we want you to do in the Trump administration, or we will find ways to punish you; we will find ways to take away money, to shut down your nonprofit organization on a whim, a mere accusation with no proof. And remember that under the U.S. Supreme Court’s immunity decision, anything Donald Trump does in his official capacity is beyond review by anyone anywhere. They have — the Supreme Court majority has effectively set up a dictatorship for Trump. The question is: Does he have the competence to execute it? No. Does he have people around him who are competent to execute it? Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us, David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, co-founder of DCReport, author of three books on Trump, including The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family.

I want to say thank you so much to our local crew here in Baku, Azerbaijan: Dave Pentlow, Julian Jones, David Iacolucci, Tobin Shackleford, Callum Skipworth, Rufana Kamilova.

A very happy birthday to Alexa Nyemchek! Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Hana Elias, Sonyi Lopez. Our executive director is Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Jon Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, Denis Moynihan, David Prude, Dennis McCormick.

To see all of our coverage from COP29, go to democracynow.org and all the social media platforms. We’re right there. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Concerns are mounting over Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, Fox News host and military veteran Pete Hegseth. Hegseth is a vocal opponent of the military’s multiculturalism and decision to allow women to serve in combat, promises to purge the military of generals disloyal to Trump and sports tattoos connected with neo-Nazi and white nationalist movements. “Here’s a man who wrote a book declaring his intention to wage, not metaphorical, but actual war within the United States,” says Jeff Sharlet, an expert on the rise of far-right extremism in the United States. Sharlet explains how Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, Trump’s choice for U.S. ambassador to Israel, have Christian nationalist and Christian Zionist views that ultimately work to whip up animosity toward domestic enemies of the far right.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman in Denver, Colorado, broadcasting from PBS12 right here in Five Points Media Center, also home to our colleagues at Free Speech TV, a wonderful media center, joined by Democracy Now!’s Nermeen Shaikh in New York.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Concerns are mounting over Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, Fox News host and military veteran Pete Hegseth. CBS News reports that Hegseth was one of 12 National Guard members who were removed as guards for President Biden’s 2021 inauguration over possible extremist ties. Hegseth has tattoos associated with the white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements, including what’s known as a Jerusalem cross, a symbol used by Christian nationalists.

Meanwhile, officials in Monterey, California, have confirmed police investigated Hegseth as part of an alleged sexual assault that occurred in 2017 at a hotel where Hegseth addressed the California Federation of Republican Women.

AMY GOODMAN: Pete Hegseth has also been a vocal opponent of the Pentagon’s embrace of multiculturalism and the Pentagon’s decision to allow women to serve in combat. Hegseth, who once served at Guantánamo, made headlines in 2019 for pushing Trump to pardon U.S. soldiers accused of war crimes, including one convicted of murder.

We’re joined now by Jeff Sharlet, journalist and author, professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. His book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Professor Sharlet’s new piece for Religion Dispatches is headlined “Meet Pete Hegseth, the Man Who Will Lead the Entire US Military — A Man Deemed an 'Extremist' by the US Military.”

Well, let’s start right there, Jeff Sharlet. Explain what you mean. Who called him an extremist, and what are Pete Hegseth’s views?

JEFF SHARLET: The number one person who called Pete Segseth an extremist is Pete Hegseth. It’s page one of his new book, The War on Warriors. It’s the way he leads out his interviews, this idea that he was too extreme for today’s “woke” military, dominated, as he puts it, his words, by trans, lesbian, Black females. And so, he tells a story of being pushed out of the military. We can’t actually confirm that. No one can confirm that. I think what’s more important about it is that he wants that story out there. He wants it known that he is too far to the right for the Armed Forces.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Jeff Sharlet, could you explain? What do you think led Trump to name him?

JEFF SHARLET: So, Pete Hegseth, one, he’s from Central Casting. He’s got the chiseled jaw. He’s got the biceps that he flexes on his Instagram showing off his tattoos that are from the white supremacist world.

But he really came to Trump’s attention through his advocacy for three military personnel charged or convicted of war crimes, and most famously Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who was — his own men said that he stabbed to death a teenage prisoner who was receiving medical care, shot deliberately a young girl. And Hegseth used his platform to say — to sort of amplify Trump’s idea — we’ve heard that Trump says the “one rough hour” that violence is needed. And Trump liked it.

But more than that, Hegseth promises in his book the first war he’s going to wage is against the U.S. military — that’s whom he describes as the domestic enemy, the enemy within — to purge the generals who are disloyal to Trump and replace them [inaudible] who will do absolutely the commander’s will. And I’m not paraphrasing. What’s startling to me about this pick and the reaction to it is we speak of it as concerns. Here’s a man who wrote a book declaring his intention to wage, not metaphorical, but actual war within the United States. That’s what he says. He says this is not a political project anymore. This is a civil war.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Is anything known at all about his foreign policy positions? What does he think about the position of the U.S. military around the world?

JEFF SHARLET: That’s actually kind of — that’s another part of what makes him appealing to Trump, is, on the one hand, he writes, in traditional fascist style, that war is absolutely necessary for what he calls normal men to realize their masculinity. On the other hand, like Trump, he presents this kind of isolationist posture. It’s not that he doesn’t want Israel to wage total war; he doesn’t care as much about it. So, then he says, “OK, so, where is this war? The war is within, and we will depend on the so-called normal men in Israel.”

He is, however — and this is important — he’s a Christian nationalist. He believes absolutely in the idea of the ingathering of Israel as a stage toward the Book of Revelation in the Bible. So, he sees Israel’s war on the Palestinians as biblical prophecy and one that must be supported for the sake of Christendom.

AMY GOODMAN: And we want to continue on that strain and also talk about Governor Huckabee, also a proud Christian nationalist, who President Trump has nominated to be the ambassador to Israel. But I wanted to stick with something you said for one moment and that you wrote about, Jeff Sharlet, in your piece. You laughed about, you know, his biceps. But it’s what’s on his biceps, those tattoos. “On his chest he’s had inked a 'Jerusalem cross' — a symbol of the crusaders’ holy war against Muslims and Jews — and on the flip side of his bicep there’s this, featured on his Instagram: 'Deus Vult,' God wills it, is more crusader kitsch — and popular with White supremacists.” Talk more about this. And then we’ll play what he has to say to, for example, to Netanyahu.

JEFF SHARLET: So, Hegseth talks a lot about his tattoos. They’re important to him. He began getting them around 2016. The very first one was a cross with a sword running down the middle, which he said was a tribute to one of his favorite biblical verses, Matthew 10:34. This is taken by those who want not a peaceful Christianity, but a war religion. It’s where Christ says, “I come to bring not peace, but the sword.”

He then starts adding this, as I say, crusader kitsch, because it’s important. The Jerusalem cross, it was — is always a political symbol. It’s not a symbol of spiritual struggle, just like “Deus Vult.” But this imagery comes into popular culture not through deep study of history, but through a 2005 Ridley Scott movie, The Kingdom of Heaven. Much like the right at one point was emulating Braveheart, now they’re emulating this movie, this idea of this crusader knight who wages holy war against Muslims, against Jews.

In Hegseth’s book, he talks at great length about the story of Gideon from the Book of Judges. And what’s interesting to him about Gideon is that Gideon’s first step was to purge the enemies within. That was the first battle. And then he emphasizes another part. Gideon goes to war. And we sort of know this. These are sort of Bible stories. But the part that he really likes is that after they won the battle, Gideon orders his men to hunt down every one of the other force and, in Hegseth’s words, “eliminate them all.”

That’s the idea of this sleeve of tattoos, which mixes American nationalism, an AR-15 folded into an American flag, 1775, the year the Army was founded, but also part of sort of the mythos of J6, a group that he has had very positive things to say about.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, we’d like to turn now to ask about President-elect Trump’s selection of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as the next U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is a leading U.S. Christian Zionist who’s openly advocated for Israel’s annexation of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 2008, Huckabee declared, quote, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” This is Huckabee speaking in 2017, when he was visiting an illegal Israeli settlement.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Israel would only be acting on the property it already owns. I think Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria. There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities. They’re neighborhoods. They’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Jeff Sharlet, that’s Huckabee speaking in 2017. So, if you could comment on what he said and also why Trump has selected him?

JEFF SHARLET: I mean, Huckabee is a sort of a key element of the Trump coalition. He brings in evangelicals, and particularly kind of the older, more traditional evangelicals. He’s a Southern Baptist. And he’s also been involved with Israel for a long time. As he says, since 1973, he leads pilgrimages of Christians.

It’s important to understand that in all his advocacy for Israel, this comes from no particular care for the Jewish people, but, as he puts it, he says, “It’s because I’ve read the end of the book,” and by which he means the Book of Revelation. And again, like Hegseth, he sees Israel as playing a role in a battle not so much between Israelis and Palestinians, but as between Christendom versus the real enemy.

There’s an episode of his show in which he talks about who’s really behind Hamas. And I tuned in, thinking, you know, he was probably going to talk the various ideas and so on. And instead, he sounded like the old Saturday Night Live character: “Satan.” Hamas is, he argues, demon-filled — again, not a metaphor for him.

So this is the man who is sort of representing the United States in Israel now, who is as fully fundamentalist as even the furthest-right element of the Israeli government right now, and sees this as a holy war — and again, kind of like Hegseth — in which any step is justified. You are fighting for God, and that’s the end of the story for him.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Sharlet, you have written this book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. You certainly have extensively followed white nationalists, white supremacists. Where do Christian nationalists and Christian Zionists fit into this picture? I mean, he calls himself a Christian Zionist. You heard Huckabee — and by the way, he was the governor of Arkansas. His daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is now the governor of Arkansas, and she was the spokesperson for the first President Trump White House. But where does he fit? Where do Christian Zionists fit into this whole story? And how do Jewish Zionists relate to them? And how does Israel, people like Netanyahu — how do they rely on Christian Zionists?

JEFF SHARLET: Huckabee likes to brag about his special relationship with Netanyahu. And Israel has — or, right-wing Israel governments have said, “Look, Christian Zionists are useful to us, so we’re going to support them.” In fact, the right-wing Israeli governments have said Christian Zionists are actually our better American allies than American Jews.

But Christian Zionism has in some ways been folded into Christian nationalism. Every Christian Zionist is a Christian nationalist, but not every Christian nationalist is a Christian Zionist. Christian nationalism is the larger view — and it tells us something more about what Huckabee is doing. When you go through his archive, so often when he’s talking about Israel, what he’s really talking about is, from his point of view, a struggle for power on the battleground that really matters, which is the United States. And so, for instance, he talks more — when he wants to talk about Hamas, he often talks about Harvard. He talks about elites, these sort of — again, this idea of the enemy within. What happens in Israel is theologically important to him, but it’s more useful politically in the United States. And that’s where it brings us back around to Christian nationalism, this idea of a kind of — not so much a pious nation as a holy war nation, and the war is within.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Sharlet, we want to thank you so much for being with us, journalist and author, professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. We’ll link to your piece, “Meet Pete Hegseth, the Man Who Will Lead the Entire US Military — A Man Deemed an 'Extremist' by the US Military.”

Immigrant rights lawyers are preparing to fight back against Donald Trump’s plans to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history once he takes office again in January. The president-elect has already named some leading anti-immigration figures for his incoming administration who will lead the plan, including former ICE head Tom Homan and his longtime aide Stephen Miller. Trump’s picks were central in family separations, the Muslim ban, attacks on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and other anti-immigrant policies during the first Trump administration. Trump is also reportedly planning to greatly expand immigrant detention in private for-profit prisons, and during the campaign he spoke of invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to speed up deportations. “We have been preparing nearly a year for this,” says attorney Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, who argued some of the most high-profile immigration cases during the first Trump administration. He stresses that while groups like the ACLU will challenge the Trump administration in the courts, “it needs to be a national effort” to prevent abuses. “We are not opposed to basic immigration reform, but this cannot be a situation where we’re just going after immigrants left and right.”democracynow.org

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

Immigrant rights lawyers are preparing to battle with Donald Trump as he vows to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history once he takes office in January. This week, Trump named several key figures who will oversee his plan.

Stephen Miller has been tapped to serve as White House deputy chief of staff for policy. During the first Trump administration, Miller helped orchestrate the Muslim ban, pushed for the separation of immigrant families and backed the termination of DACA — that’s the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that’s granted protection to certain undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children.

Trump has also picked Thomas Homan to serve as his so-called border czar. Homan served as acting director of ICE — that’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement — during Trump’s first term and has also been described as one of the intellectual authors of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy that separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump has also nominated South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to serve as the next secretary of homeland security.

NBC News is reporting the incoming Trump administration is already talking to private prison companies about drastically expanding immigrant detention centers, including building some near major U.S. cities.

Days before last week’s election, Trump spoke about invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

DONALD TRUMP: And on day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals in American history. We’re going to get them out. We have to. … I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. You know, 1798, that’s when they ran the country a little tougher than we run it today.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Donald Trump speaking a day before the election. This is Stephen Miller speaking in February at the CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he outlined how mass deportations could be carried out.

STEPHEN MILLER: Seal the border, no illegals in, everyone here goes out. That’s very straightforward. In terms of the policy steps to accomplish this, as President Trump showed in his first term, it’s a series of interlocking domestic and foreign policies to accomplish this goal. In no particular order, just to rattle off a few facts, you have your safe third agreements. You have “Remain in Mexico,” finish the wall. You have robust prosecutions of illegal aliens. You do interior repatriation flights to Mexico, not back to the north of Mexico. It’s very important. You reimplement Title 42. You have several muscular 212(f)s. That’s the travel ban authority. We did a few of those in the Trump administration. You would bring those back and add new ones on top of that. You would establish large-scale staging grounds for removal flights. So you grab illegal immigrants, and then you move them to the staging grounds, and that’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home. You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Stephen Miller.

We’re joined right now by Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, argued some of the most high-profile immigration cases during the first Trump administration, including the one to stop Trump’s family separation policy.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Lee.

LEE GELERNT: Thanks for having me again.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. OK, so, you hear Stephen Miller laying it out, and it’s the first appointments that Trump has made. How are you beginning to deal with this? What do you see is being laid out here?

LEE GELERNT: Yeah, so, we have been preparing nearly a year for this. I think the first time around, we were caught off guard. We moved very quickly. But this time I think we were prepared for it more. And so, since the winter, we have had multiple, multiple attorneys at the nationals of the ACLU preparing for all these policies that are being threatened. And the military is being threatened to be used. We’re preparing for that, the mass deportations, potential for more family separation, border policies that would restrict asylum seekers. So, we’re preparing for all, but we’re clear-eyed that it’s not going to be easy.

And the one thing I would stress is that it can’t be done solely through the courts. We will be in the courts, but it needs to be a national effort, similar to what happened with family separation, where the public said, “Wait. Enough is enough. That’s a red line, taking little babies away,” went out to the streets peacefully to protest, let it be known, “Yes, we want immigration reform, but not something like this. We don’t want the military walking through the streets.” People need to make that clear. We need some kind of balanced approach. We are not opposed to basic immigration reform, but this cannot be a situation where we’re just going after immigrants left and right.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what Miller is threatening, and, of course —

LEE GELERNT: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — most importantly, what Trump is threatening.

LEE GELERNT: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: They are building detention centers. They are saying they’re going to prepare them between New York and Philadelphia, outside Denver and Chicago. How does this work?

LEE GELERNT: Well, we’ll see how they try and do it. I mean, we don’t know yet. I mean, I’m not sure the logistics are there, but we’re concerned about it, and we are not going to underestimate how egregious the policies may be.

The first thing we’re preparing for is what President Trump has said about the Alien Enemies Act, the law from 1798. He’s saying he can use the military to start deporting people. We think that’s absolutely wrong. It would be illegal. The law is very clear that you need an invasion from a foreign government. This is not an invasion from a foreign government, immigrants coming to seek safety or a better life. So, if he tries to use the military under the Alien Enemies Act, we would be prepared for it. We’re prepared for if he tries to use the National Guard. But if it’s just going to be straight enforcement, egregious enforcement, I mean, we’re going to have to do what we can do, try to get individual lawyers for people.

But I think people also need to recognize that from a policy standpoint, we need immigrants here for a variety of reasons, including for the economy. And so I hope that businesses will push back and say, “We need these workers.”

The other thing that’s going to happen is if he starts deporting everyone like he’s claiming, we’re going to be seeing more family separation. There’s U.S. citizen children who have undocumented parents. They’re going to be left alone, or they’re going to have to move to a country that they’ve never stepped foot in.

But to your question of how it’s going to work logistically, we don’t know, but we’re not underestimating how much resources they’re going to put into it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go to Homan. During a recent interview on 60 Minutes, Trump’s pick to be the so-called border czar, Tom Homan, said the mass deportation campaign could also target U.S.-born children, you know, born to undocumented parents. He was interviewed by Cecilia Vega.

CECILIA VEGA: We have seen one estimate that says it would cost $88 billion to deport a million people a year.

THOMAS HOMAN: I don’t know if that’s accurate or not.

CECILIA VEGA: Is that what American taxpayers should expect?

THOMAS HOMAN: What price do you put on national security? Is it worth it?

CECILIA VEGA: Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?

THOMAS HOMAN: Of course there is. Families can be deported together.

AMY GOODMAN: “Of course there is.” Take those U.S. babies and deport them with their parents. Lee, you have directly dealt with all sorts of cases like this. What is he talking about?

LEE GELERNT: Yeah, so, I suspect he’s not claiming that they can actually deport the U.S. citizen. That would be flatly illegal, and obviously we would challenge it.

AMY GOODMAN: He said, “Of course.”

LEE GELERNT: Right, but I think what he’s saying — I mean, I don’t know. You’re right. It’s ambiguous. But what he may be saying is we’re going to deport the parents, and then, of course, the children are going to have to go with them. That’s not necessarily true. That means, I think, there’s going to be family separation, because children are going to stay behind with a relative, and so they’re never going to see their parents again potentially, or they’re going to have to move their children to a country that they have no connection to. If he is actually, as maybe that clip is suggesting, thinking he can deport U.S. citizen children, I’ve never heard that. That is flatly illegal, and we would challenge it.

But even if that’s not what he’s talking about, even if he’s just forcing this choice on parents — either bring my child with me to this country or leave them behind — that’s, you know, as egregious as it gets. Every president has had the authority to deport parents with U.S. citizen children, but they’ve all used their discretion not to. So, we don’t separate families unless we’re talking about hardened criminals or national security threats. So we’re really talking about a sea change in American immigration law that I think is ultimately going to be something history looks back on and says, “What have we done?”

AMY GOODMAN: Homan started working under Obama. He then became the interim ICE director under Trump. Five thousand kids, a number you know well, what, 5,500 kids —

LEE GELERNT: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: — separated from their parents. Still a thousand kids are separated from their parents?

LEE GELERNT: So, the amazing thing is that we don’t have all the records. We’re still looking for families. But we estimate that there may be a thousand children, little children, still separated from their parents, that it’s been now six, seven years they haven’t seen their parents. Many of them were separated when they were just babies or toddlers, will not even really remember their parents.

And the other thing I want to stress is that people think, “Well, if they’re reunited, you know, the 4,000 the ACLU has been able to reunite, they’re fine now.” They are suffering so much trauma. I mean, I’m talking to families. A 3-year-old boy who got reunited, he’s standing by the window, looking to see if men are going to come and take him away again; a little boy saying, “Mommy, I don’t want to go to bed, because that’s when they took me away.” So the trauma is unbelievable even for the families who are separated.

You know, this is, I think, the worst thing I have seen in 30 years, the family separation. President Trump is not ruling it out again, and Thomas Homan is trying to whitewash how bad it was, saying that it wasn’t really that bad. It was as bad as anything you can imagine. And now they’re talking about doubling down on separating families.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Trump was forced to reverse his executive order separating children. As you said, that didn’t just come from lawyers like you going to court; it came from millions of people in the streets.

LEE GELERNT: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: It was universal condemnation. You have the Bush-appointed judge calling the separations one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country. Now, under Obama, he engaged in the largest number of deportations in U.S. history.

LEE GELERNT: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Then we move into Trump. At this point, since Trump has made very clear what he’s about to do, what can President Biden do preemptively? I mean, a number of people have argued in law journals about pardoning undocumented immigrants preemptively.

LEE GELERNT: Yeah, I think there’s some things he can do. I’m not sure that he has the power to really stop all this in these next two months, and I don’t know whether the administration will do it. We are certainly talking to them about things they can do to make sure that, for example, our settlement, giving rights to these families who were separated, is secure, and some other things. I don’t know that he’s going to be able to pardon all these people.

I think we need to do what we can in these next two months, but really start gearing up for a Trump administration where I think it’s going to be, you know, worse than anything we’ve seen. We’re talking about really horrible anti-immigrant sentiment. And I think that’s one of the things we really need to reverse here, is how bad the anti-immigrant sentiment has gotten. You know, in my 30 years, I have never seen it this bad.

The one thing that I’m hopeful for is that the American public says, “Well, look, we wanted immigration reform, but you’re now starting to cross the line past what we wanted,” the same thing that happened in the first administration, where people said, “Wait. We wanted immigration reform, but we don’t want you taking little babies away.” I think if the public sees the military in the streets or these huge deportation camps or family separation again, I’m hopeful that they will come out and say, “Wait. That’s not what we wanted.”

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end with that famous audio track of the children in 2018 that ProPublica obtained, kids who were being held at a Customs and Border Protection facility after being separated from their families, the kids believed to be between the ages of 4 and 10. They can be heard screaming “Mami” and “Papi.” This is an excerpt. It’s incredibly disturbing.

We’re not hearing it right now. We’re going to try to bring it up. Well, I think most people maybe who are tuned into this — unfortunately, we can’t play it at the moment, hearing the crying and the mocking by the guards of this — of the agony. And the reason I also brought it up is ProPublica brought it out —

LEE GELERNT: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — a nonprofit news organization. And I wanted to get your comment on a different story, but it is the news from Capitol Hill that the House yesterday voted down a bill that would have allowed incoming President Trump to target nonprofit organizations as political enemies. The bill did get a majority of the vote, but it failed to win the two-thirds majority needed for approval. Can you talk about the significance of this? The ACLU was involved in —

LEE GELERNT: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — really explaining its dangers.

LEE GELERNT: Yeah, I mean, we were involved with a coalition of groups that’s vehemently opposed to giving that kind of unilateral power to the executive branch to start going after nonprofits. I think it’s a very dangerous situation when you’re starting to give the Treasury Department the ability unilaterally, without any real due process, to start going after nonprofits they disagree with. The bill could come back, so we’re not going to rest. But you’re right, it did get a majority, and so that’s very scary.

AMY GOODMAN: Lee Gelernt, I want to thank you for being with us, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, arguing some of the most high-profile immigration cases during the first Trump administration, including one to stop Trump’s family separation policy.

President-elect Donald Trump reportedly plans to appoint his former senior adviser Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy. Miller will play a key role along with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who will reportedly be the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Miller is the architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, an avowed white nationalist and a man who is spurred by his “animus to the notion of the United States as a multicultural and multiethnic democracy,” says author Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Guerrero says the Trump administration’s “obsessive deportation” attempt to “radically reengineer the racial demographics of the United States” will “backfire” on the U.S. economy and destroy “the United States’ global reputation as a safe haven for the persecuted.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: President-elect Donald Trump is quickly assembling a team to carry out his plan to launch the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history. Trump has reportedly tapped far-right immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller to be White House deputy chief of staff for policy and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to be secretary of homeland security. During the first Trump administration, Miller helped orchestrate the Muslim ban, pushed for the separation of immigrant families and backed the termination of DACA — that’s the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Trump has also picked Thomas Homan to serve as his so-called border czar. Homan served as acting director of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, during the first Trump administration. Homan has deep ties to the far right. Two years ago, he attended a white supremacist conference hosted by Nick Fuentes. Homan has said Trump’s mass deportation campaign could also target U.S.-born children who were born to undocumented parents. He was recently interviewed by Cecilia Vega on 60 Minutes.

CECILIA VEGA: We have seen one estimate that says it would cost $88 billion to deport a million people a year.

THOMAS HOMAN: I don’t know if that’s accurate or not.

CECILIA VEGA: Is that what American taxpayers should expect?

THOMAS HOMAN: What price do you put on national security? Is it worth it?

CECILIA VEGA: Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?

THOMAS HOMAN: Of course there is. Families can be deported together.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s talking about deporting U.S. children. And this is Stephen Miller speaking back in February at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, outlining what Trump’s deportation plan would look like.

STEPHEN MILLER: Seal the border, no illegals in, everyone here goes out. That’s very straightforward. In terms of the policy steps to accomplish this, as President Trump showed in his first term, it’s a series of interlocking domestic and foreign policies to accomplish this goal. In no particular order, just to rattle off a few facts, you have your safe third agreements. You have “Remain in Mexico,” finish the wall. You have robust prosecutions of illegal aliens. You do interior repatriation flights to Mexico, not back to the north of Mexico. It’s very important. You reimplement Title 42. You have several muscular 212(f)s. That’s the travel ban authority. We did a few of those in the Trump administration. You would bring those back and add new ones on top of that. You would establish large-scale staging grounds for removal flights. So you grab illegal immigrants, and then you move them to the staging grounds, and that’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home. You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Stephen Miller speaking in February. He’s now White House deputy chief of staff for policy for Trump.

We’re joined now by Jean Guerrero, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Her books include Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.

Jean, welcome back to Democracy Now! We just spoke to you a week ago on election night. Much has changed. Tell us about this latest appointment of Stephen Miller, and then we’ll go on to Homan and President Trump’s promise before the election and after that one of his first acts in office will be the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history.

JEAN GUERRERO: Yes, Amy. Great to be here.

This is not a surprising choice at all. Stephen Miller, as I report in my book, is one of Trump’s most trusted advisers, who has been with him since early on in his 2016 campaign. And he represents, essentially, the ideological force behind Trump’s anti-immigrant policies. He was not only the architect of Trump’s family separation policy, but he was also the main proponent of a number of policies that focused on restricting legal immigration into this country — for example, slashing refugee admissions to record lows, strangling the asylum system in the United States, and a policy denying green cards to people who were deemed likely to seek public assistance in the future.

This is somebody who, as I report in my book, has expressed contempt for multiculturalism since he was a teenager attending high school in Santa Monica, where he would antagonize his Latino classmates, his immigrant classmates, yelling at them to speak English and to go back to their countries, according to his friends who I spoke with. He’d go to school board meetings to denounce Cinco de Mayo celebrations, multicultural celebrations at the school. And for many years, Stephen Miller has pursued what amounts to a homogenous United States.

The logical conclusion of these policies is to radically reengineer the racial demographics of the United States, so not only with mass deportations, but policies that will 100% target not only undocumented people in this country, but also legal immigrants, naturalized U.S. citizens and the U.S. citizen children of undocumented people.

And as you mentioned earlier, he has been deeply influenced by white supremacist texts and websites, which I document in my book. And at the end of the day, this is not about animosity toward criminals or animosity toward people who have broken the law. It is about animus toward the notion of the United States as a multicultural and multiethnic democracy.

And the last thing I’ll say about Stephen Miller is that while Trump has very clearly expressed vindictiveness towards his critics, towards people who go against him, towards people who disobey him, Stephen Miller has for decades exhibited this same level of vindictiveness towards immigrants. And that is important to note because it is going to inform his policies moving forward.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jean Guerrero, I’d like you to, if you could, expound on this idea that the Trump administration is not simply targeting the undocumented for expulsion from the country, but they also want to radically redesign legal immigration. Obviously, during the first Trump administration, refugee admissions reached an all-time low. The president himself has often talked about revoking birthright citizenship. Could you talk about what they’re hoping to do in terms of legal immigration?

JEAN GUERRERO: Yeah. So, I’ll start with refugee resettlement, because, as I report in my book, Stephen Miller has repeatedly stated to colleagues that he would like refugee admissions to ultimately be zero. So I think there’s a real risk that we will see further attacks on refugee resettlement and that it will be completely dismantled in a second Trump term. During the first administration, they caused permanent damage to refugee resettlement because they forced resettlement agencies to shut down infrastructure that had taken years and sometimes decades to build. So these are permanent, long-term or long-term harms that are caused to the refugee resettlement process. And they’re also, I should note, decisions that end up impacting homeland security, because the Department of Defense has long used refugee resettlement to be able to recruit translators, informants, and to help homeland security in that way.

But, ultimately, it’s about destroying the United States’s global reputation as a safe haven for the persecuted. And I think we’re going to continue to see moves in that direction and an expansion of the Muslim ban, which was also one of the main policies that Stephen Miller put forth, which speaks to the influence of his longtime mentor David Horowitz, who I delve into in my book. He has said inflammatory statements about Muslims and has said things such as, quote, “There is no Palestine.” So, when they say that they are going to ban refugees from Gaza, I do believe that that is something that they’re going to do. I think we need to believe them, and we need to prepare. And there are preparations happening as far as attorneys and the ACLU setting the stage to fight back.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you also about this notion among the — Trump and his MAGA followers that undocumented or illegal immigration from Mexico is a threat to national security. I’m wondering — we’re going to play a clip from a speech from one of the real — the founders of modern neoliberalism, the economist Milton Friedman. Back in 1978, he gave a speech about the importance of Mexican immigration to the United States. I’m wondering if you could comment on it after we play this clip.

MILTON FRIEDMAN: Mexican immigration over the border is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But it’s only good so long as it’s illegal. That’s an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal, and it’s no good. Why? Because as long as it’s illegal, the people who come in do not qualify for welfare. They don’t qualify for Social Security. They don’t qualify for all the other myriads of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket into our right pocket. And so, as long as they don’t qualify, they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with workers of a kind they cannot get. They’re hard workers. They’re good workers. And they are clearly better off.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was economist Milton Friedman back in 1978 talking about the importance of Mexican immigration — specifically, he said, illegal Mexican immigration — to the American economy. I’m wondering your thoughts.

JEAN GUERRERO: Well, I think it speaks to the Republican Party’s desire to maintain a second-class citizen population in this country, because they can exploit them. But these are individuals who have been contributing to our economy since the beginning of the United States. They’re individuals who build our highways and our homes, who harvest our crops, who take care of the elderly in hospitals. They’re contributing to the United States in endless ways.

And, in fact, the people that Trump wants to deport are the very people who have mitigated the rise of inflation in this country and whose deportations will absolutely increase the price of groceries. So, it’s going to backfire on the Trump administration and on the U.S. economy.

But the people who are most going to suffer are the 22 million mixed-status families in this country who have at least one undocumented person in the household, U.S. citizen children, and who are going to be traumatically separated and subjected to these cruel policies, which if you listen to Tom Homan talk on — there was a recent podcast, a Breitbart podcast, that he appeared on in which they were actually ridiculing, laughing at the notion of these mixed-status families being traumatized and crying as a result of these policies. It’s about — fundamentally, about cruelty towards these individuals and not acknowledging the very real benefits to this country that they offer.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Jean Guerrero, about Tom Homan, who you’re just mentioning, who Trump has now chosen to be the so-called border czar, who served as acting director of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, during the first Trump administration. He actually was first appointed by President Obama. But Homan spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee as many in the crowd held up signs that read “Mass deportation now.”

THOMAS HOMAN: As a guy who spent 34 years deporting illegal aliens, I’ve got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released in our country in violation of federal law: You better start packing now. You’re damn right. Because you’re going home.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Tom Homan. Tell us more about who he is. I mean, if you look at him over the last four years after Trump, he appears on increasingly right-wing podcasts, antisemitic, Pro-nazi podcasts. They’re just remarkable. But he is defiant, even in the 60 Minutes piece that we played before, in saying the way to keep families together is to deport them all, those who are legal and those who are undocumented.

JEAN GUERRERO: Yes. So, Homan is the intellectual father of the family separation policy and one of the contributors to Project 2025. He has said no one is off the table. So, his appointment really shows that Trump’s immigration policy is moving forward, and his mass deportations, which are a big part of that, are not solely or even principally going to be focused on criminals. They’re going to be focused on undocumented families, on women and children who have homes here, who have jobs here.

And I think one of the most important things that I want to underscore here is that during the first Trump administration, when Homan was at the head of ICE, what they did was they shifted the focus from serious human trafficking and terrorism investigations to the obsessive deportation of women and children who are in the United States without authorization. There’s two main components to ICE. There’s the ERO division, the Enforcement and Removal Operations division, which is focused on rounding up families, and then there’s the Homeland Security Investigations unit, which is focused on serious threats to homeland security. And as I report in my book, HSI, the serious homeland security division, was sidelined for ERO, so for these roundups of immigrant families, who pose no threat to this country and who, in fact, are the backbone of the United States economy and are our neighbors and are, in many cases, you know, our family members, our friends.

And so, ultimately, I think what this shows is that when you look at who these people are, these guys are bullies. That is ultimately what they are. They like to beat up on vulnerable people. And that is what Trump’s immigration policy going forth is going to be, now that we know that Stephen Miller is going to be in charge of — he’s deputy chief of staff of policy, and now that we know that Thomas Homan is also going to be playing this fundamental role.

AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, we want to thank you for being with us, New York Times contributing opinion writer, author of the book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

American Coup: Wilmington 1898 premieres tonight on PBS and investigates the only successful insurrection conducted against a U.S. government, when self-described white supremacist residents stoked fears of “Negro Rule” and carried out a deadly massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina. Their aim was to destroy Black political and economic power and overthrow the city’s democratically elected, Reconstruction-era multiracial government, paving the way for the implementation of Jim Crow law just two years later. We feature excerpts from the documentary and speak to co-director Yoruba Richen, who explains how the insurrection was planned and carried out, and how the filmmakers worked to track down the descendants of both perpetrators and victims, whose voices are featured in the film.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

A new film is premiering tonight on PBS on the largely erased history of a coup to overthrow the elected government of the Black-majority North Carolina city of Wilmington three decades after the Civil War. This is the trailer for American Coup: Wilmington 1898.

PEYTON HOGE: [dramatized] We have taken a city as thoroughly, as completely, as if captured in battle.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: It was the only armed overthrow of an elected government.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: We really don’t know how many people were murdered that day.

KIERAN HAILE: Whole families have broken up and scattered. The homes, representing their savings, are deserted.

UNIDENTIFIED: I’ve always felt like this story was always meant to be told.

ALEX MANLY: [dramatized] In North Carolina, the Negro holds the balance of power.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: There was really no other major city in the South like Wilmington.

CAROL ANDERSON: You have the Black leadership with college degrees.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: And there was a professional class there.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: Doctors and teachers and lawyers.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: White vendors were having to compete with Black vendors for customers. And Black men were able to hold public office at multiple levels of government. Wilmington is essentially a promised land for African Americans.

CAROL ANDERSON: It was a different vision of what American democracy could be, that it could actually be multiracial and work.

ALFRED MOORE WADDELL: [dramatized] Men, do your duty. This city, county and state shall be rid of Negro domination once and forever.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: The Confederacy was trying to take power back.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: And white supremacy is going to be the rallying cry.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: So, leaders of the conspiracy turned to actually taking over the city government at gunpoint.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: A definition of a coup d’état is an armed overthrew of a legally elected government, which is what happened on this day in Wilmington.

CAROL ANDERSON: This was a coup based on the devaluation of African American citizenship. You think about the loss of wealth, the stealing of their generational legacies. What Wilmington tells us is how fragile American democracy is.

AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for American Coup: Wilmington 1898. We’re going to speak to the director, but first this clip lays out how Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina in 1898. Black people held many positions in government alongside white people.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: The removal of troops from the South ushered in the end of Reconstruction, and white supremacists are once again able to regain power.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: Democrats and Republicans of 1898 are not the Democrats and Republicans of the 21st century.

CAROL ANDERSON: Remember, what we had coming out of the Civil War was that Lincoln was a Republican, and the Republican Party was founded on an anti-slavery platform.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: That meant that most African American voters were going to vote for the Republican candidates.

CAROL ANDERSON: The Democrats were the Klan members. The Democrats were the slaveowners, the enslavers. They were deeply committed to the denying citizenship rights to African Americans.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: The Democratic Party holds the state in the 1870s throughout the 1880s. It’s really not until the 1890s that you begin to see the Democrats again lose their power. There’s a depression that takes place in 1893. White farmers are suffering.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: These white farmers felt that the Democratic Party was beholden to the banks and the railroads and the moneyed interests.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: And they bolt from the Democrats and join the Populists, which is a third party.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: Neither the Republican Party nor the Populist Party had the voting power to unseat Democratic Party candidates if they were running in a tripart election.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: So they form an alliance, white Populists and Black and white Republicans. This became known as fusion.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: We see a political alliance between African Americans and working-class white people.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: The Populists were as racist as any of the members of the Democratic Party, but their economic interests were so strong that they were able to set that aside.

CAROL ANDERSON: It’s not some kumbaya moment. We’ve got to be really clear about that. It was a pragmatic moment.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: So, both in 1894 and in 1896, this fusionist coalition of Black and white men are able to sweep the North Carolina General Assembly.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: North Carolina elects a fusion governor, Daniel Russell. They send George White to Congress. And they start to pull back all the things that the Democrats did to reduce democracy. So, for example, the positions that were once appointed in Wilmington are now turned into elected positions, which allows Black people to run for office.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: It created, really, a situation in Wilmington that was unique. You had Black men in positions of authority and power.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: So we see Black and white men on the Board of Aldermen. We see Black and white men serving in various municipal offices.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: Ten of the 26 policemen were Black men, the city treasurer, the city jailer, the city coroner. John C. Dancy was the custom collector at the port, which is a federally appointed position. He made $4,000 a year, which was $1,000 more than the governor made.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: The mayor of Wilmington is also a fusion candidate. It’s not the majority of Black, it’s the majority fusion that makes the difference.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: So, with Wilmington by 1898, African Americans had still held on to a lot of the rights and privileges and the institutions and the power they had enjoyed.

CAROL ANDERSON: It was a land of possibility, a land of hope, a different vision of what American democracy could be, that it could actually be multiracial and work.

AMY GOODMAN: That last voice, Carol Anderson, Emory professor. And this is another clip from American Coup: Wilmington 1898 that describes an editorial in Wilmington’s Black newspaper, The Daily Record, before the coup.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: Rebecca Felton, she was the wife of a congressman in Georgia. She gave a speech to the agricultural society condemning white men for, in her mind, not doing enough to stop the Black beast rapists and this supposed rape epidemic in Georgia. There was no rape epidemic, but she created one. White supremacist newspapers in Wilmington realized they could make something of this, so they reprinted her speech in August of 1898. And as soon as Alex Manly saw that, he sat down and wrote an editorial in response to Mrs. Felton.

KIERAN HAILE: “Mrs. Felton from Georgia makes a speech before the agricultural society at Tybee, Georgia, in which she advocates lynching as an extreme measure.”

ALEX MANLY: [dramatized] Experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men that are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman’s infatuation or the man’s boldness bring attention to them, and the man is lynched for rape.

Every negro lynched is called a big burly black brute. When in fact, many of those who have thus been dealt with, have had white men for their fathers, and were not only not black and burly, but were sufficiently attractive for the white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them.

KIERAN HAILE: “Tell your men that it is no worse for a Black man to be intimate with a white woman than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman. Don’t think ever that your women will remain pure while you are debauching ours.” Alex Manly editorial, Daily Record, August 18th, 1898.

CAROL ANDERSON: This was blasphemous. You know, to say that a white woman could actually desire a Black man? What?

DAVID ZUCCHINO: The other point he made was that for generations, white men had been raping Black women with impunity, and that had been going on forever, and nobody talks about that.

CAROL ANDERSON: Alexander Manly’s rebuttal to Rebecca Felton was absolutely courageous. He didn’t say it behind closed doors while he’s talking with his friends. He did it in an editorial published in The Daily Record that has white advertisers. I mean, so he’s really putting himself out there. You had some members of the Black community who were like, “Oh, Manly? Manly doesn’t speak for us.”

CRYSTAL SANDERS: There were many who perhaps, even if they believed it was true, thought that it was, you know, too inflammatory to be printed. We also see prominent Black men in Wilmington urge Manly to recant the editorial, to apologize, in an effort to avoid conflict. He refuses. He sees himself as someone who has done nothing wrong. He has spoken a truth that he believes has gone unspoken for too long.

AMY GOODMAN: American Coup: Wilmington 1898 premieres tonight on PBS and will also stream online. We’re joined by the co-director, Yoruba Richen, award-winning filmmaker.

Yoruba, welcome back to Democracy Now!

YORUBA RICHEN: Thank you, Amy. Thanks for having me.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Yoruba, I wanted to start off by asking you — the Manly editorial became the basis for the first attack of the white supremacists, when they burned down his newspaper. Can you talk about — and again, they were spurred on by the editor and publisher of the white-owned News & Observer. Talk about the role of that publisher, as well.

YORUBA RICHEN: Absolutely. So, the editorial that we just saw was used as the spark to, you know, go into action. But this coup had been planned meticulously in the months leading up to it. It was planned by a group called the Secret Nine, otherwise known as the Chamber — you know, very prominent members of the Chamber of Commerce. And they were self-styled, self-called white supremacists. And it was led by Josephus Daniels, who was the editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh. And the newspaper had published continually this idea, this racist idea, of Black men raping white women and of bad government that Negroes were in charge of, and that if we continued — you know, if they continued to let this happen, white women would be debased and continue to be raped, an epidemic of rape.

And that’s what you saw, you know, the Rebecca Felton newspaper — her speech reprinted in the newspaper, and Manly responding and saying, “No, that’s not true,” and debunking that. And it was that editorial that was — that they said, you know, “Look what happens when Negroes are in rule. Look at the things that they can say. We’ve got to get rid of them. We’ve got to get rid of this newspaper.” And that was the spur for the attack. But it had been planned many months before the actual events happened.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in making the film, you not only went into the archival records, but you made a decision to locate and interview both white and Black descendants of families that were involved in the events at the time. Could you talk about that?

YORUBA RICHEN: Absolutely. My co-director and I, that was one of the first things that we knew we wanted to include in the film. We found out that a group of Black descendants and, really, one white descendant had been meeting for about a year before we started the production, through an organization called Coming to the Table, which is a national organization that deals — that brings Blacks and whites together dealing with racial issues. And they had been meeting. And we were able to meet them through that organization, attend those meetings and start to create a relationship with some of the descendants who you see in the film. And then we did work to find more descendants, particularly more white descendants, because they were harder to locate or to invite to come and be a part of the film. And we’re very grateful for their participation.

AMY GOODMAN: And one of the white descendants was the descendant of the newspaper editor, right?

YORUBA RICHEN: Absolutely, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And he and the other descendants took down his statue.

YORUBA RICHEN: Yes, yes. So, The News & Observer, up until the 1960s, was the paper that we saw in 1890s. And then there was a change. And the family recently took down the statue, I think in about 2020. And, you know, Frank was a part of it. He is in the film admitting to what his ancestor did and the harm that it produced not only to North Carolina but to the nation.

AMY GOODMAN: And what happened, actually? What did all of this lead up to? How many people died?

YORUBA RICHEN: So, you know, we’ll never know the numbers, the exact numbers. They weren’t — you know, they weren’t taking it down. But it’s said that it was maybe 200 to 300, but it was probably more than that, you can imagine. Black people were run into — ran into the swamps. One of the — Alfred Waddell, one of the leaders, said, “We’ll choke Cape Fear with their bodies.”

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

YORUBA RICHEN: And then it returned to — and, sorry, then it became a majority-white city. And two years later, Jim Crow was instituted, and there was not another Black person elected from the state of North Carolina ’til 1992.

AMY GOODMAN: Wow. It is an amazing film, and I encourage people to watch it. It premieres tonight on PBS and also live-streamed. Yoruba Richen is co-director of American Coup: Wilmington 1898. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. This is Democracy Now!

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

“Why is it that the issues that most of the public agrees with — healthcare, living wages, voting rights, democracy — why is it that those issues weren’t more up front?” We speak to Bishop William Barber about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s failed election campaigns, Donald Trump’s election as president and the urgent need to unite the poor and working class. Barber is the national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and a co-author of the book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. He urges the Democratic Party to recenter economic security and poverty alleviation in its platform and draws on historical setbacks for U.S. progressive policies to encourage voters to “get back up” and “continue to fight.”democracynow.org

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Donald Trump and his allies celebrated his election victory with calls to implement the far-right policy plan to overhaul the federal government, known as Project 2025, as Republicans also took the Senate and will probably take the House.

Meanwhile, at the White House, President Biden Thursday said he had called President-elect Trump to congratulate him and promised a peaceful transition of power.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The struggle for the soul of America, since our very founding, has always been an ongoing debate and still vital today. I know for some people it’s a time for victory, to state the obvious. For others, it’s a time of loss. Campaigns are contests of competing visions. The country chooses one or the other. We accept the choice the country made. I’ve said many times, you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.

Something I hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, is see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans, bring down the temperature. I also hope we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent. And it can be trusted, win or lose.

AMY GOODMAN: President Biden spoke in the Rose Garden a day after Vice President Kamala Harris conceded her loss in a speech at her alma mater Howard University.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin our look at where Democrats went wrong with Bishop William Barber, national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, which sought to increase voting among low-income residents, an often ignored but massive bloc. He’s a senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach and founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, co-author of the new book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy.

Bishop Barber, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about what you think happened in this election. Respond to Trump’s presidency and where you think the Democrats went wrong.

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, thank you, Amy, for getting up this morning and continuing to say “Democracy Now!”

You know, we’ve got a lot of questions that we must wrestle with deeply. We can’t be flippant or knee-jerk in this moment. We have to deal with the fact that America has often chosen wrong and had to pay for it later. We have to look at the fact that this week 71 million, 72 million people chose to return Donald Trump to the White House despite his vitriol, his anger, his regressiveness, his outright racism and lean toward fascism. And we may not know exactly what he’s going to do, and it may take him doing it to the point that even his followers are hurting so bad that they admit, they ask the question, “What did we do?”

But Nikole Hannah-Jones said something the other day, and I shared it with my co-chair Liz Theoharis, and she reminded us that 60 years after America’s first attempt at Reconstruction in the 1920s, right after the election of 18— excuse me, of 1865, 1866, in that area, the majority of Americans went back and embraced white supremacy. And if we think about where we are, we’re 60 years now after the ’60s, after the white Southern strategy.

And what did we see the other day? We’ve got to ask a deep question. We saw most Americans, many Americans did not vote. Trump got 2 million, almost 3 million votes less than he did in 2020. Harris received almost 13 million, 14 million votes less than her and Biden received in 2020. They got 81 million votes. A lot of people just didn’t vote.

And what’s the reason? We know that in 2020, when Harris and — Biden and Harris focused on living wages and voting rights out front, that they got 56% of the votes of those that make less than $50,000 a year in a family of four. But this year, the exit polls show that it was even, 49-49. Trump came up, Democrats went down. And the question becomes: Why? Did we adequately focus on the 30 million poor, low-wage, infrequent voters that held the key to the largest swing vote in the country? We reached out to more than 12 million of those persons.

We’ve got some serious questions to wrestle with. Did white women, for instance, who are against taking abortion rights, then — but also voted for Trump and chose Trump? They’re with Harris on the abortion issue but not for presidency. Where did Hispanic men turn out? We have a lot of wrestling to do. Why is it that the issues that the most of the public agrees with — healthcare, living wages, voting rights, democracy — why is it that those issues weren’t more up front? And why is it that persons would choose to vote against — for someone who’s diametrically against the very things that the percentage of the people say that they are for? We have some serious issues.

What we don’t now have the option to do is to give up. You know, I do think there were some failures also in the media. You know, we didn’t have — I didn’t see one debate where there was a focus on poverty and low wage, even though 800 people are dying a day from poverty, even though you have a million — over 32 million people making less than a living wage. We haven’t raised the minimum wage since 2009. Not one major debate. You didn’t hear about it in the Congress. Why didn’t the Democrats, for instance, bring up living wage in the Senate before the election and force a vote on it, to expose where the Republican Party actually stood on this critical issue? Because everywhere that raising the minimum wage and paid family leaves and things that matter was on the ballot, they won. They won, in Missouri, in Alaska, in places like that. We have some serious questions to ask.

But we also — lastly, Amy, I have to also say something. Somebody said Trump has a mandate. Nobody has a mandate to overturn the Constitution. Nobody has a mandate to engage something like Project 2025 to try to take us backwards and undo progress. Nobody has a mandate to say we’re not going to address people who are literally dying from the ravages of poverty. Nobody has a mandate to say we’re going to take away people’s healthcare.

We have to get up every morning from now until and still, with every nonviolent tool in our disposal, and challenge any form of regression, regardless of who is in office. And I thought about this. When Plessy v. Ferguson came down in 1896, the activists that chose against “separate but equal” fought 58 years, 58 years until they overturned it. They got up, and they continued to battle. And so, when we get up this morning, we’ve got to go back to the same kind of strength the people had when they woke up in 1877 and there was an election to turn back America; or when 1896 happened, Plessy v. Ferguson; or 1914, when a white supremacist entered the White House, played Birth of a Nation in his Oval Office; in 1955, when they woke up, and Emmett Till was killed; in 1963, when four girls were killed in Birmingham church; 1963, when a president was assassinated; 1968, when Martin King was assassinated. People had to own their tears, own their pain, own their frustration, but then still get back up and declare that we will still fight for this democracy, and we’ll not just go away and slink away into the dark.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to go to independent Senator Bernie Sanders tweeting, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Well, the DNC Chair Jaime Harrison called Sanders’s statement “straight up BS.” He said, “Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time.”

And then there was also the comment of David Brooks, who is the well-known columnist in the paper. And I wanted to go to that column. He wrote in a piece headlined “Voters to Elites” — this is The New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks — “Do You See Me Now?” — he said, “I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me,” David Brooks wrote, “feel uncomfortable.”

So, if you can —

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — respond to that and give us the facts on the number of people we’re talking about in this country? And, of course, it’s not just about numbers. It’s about what people are dealing with, millions of people all over this country, and they could vote.

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Right. And, Amy, what we’ve got to do is get out of our feelings. It’s a total different thing to say our policies were such and such and such, and we helped people, and whether or not that was articulated and whether or not people got it. For instance, we know that, yes, we need tax credits, child tax credit, and we support that. And yes, we need healthcare, money for housing, new housing. We’re clear about that. We support that. But to say, “Wait a minute. We have to take a look at where we were and what’s going on. Is it a messaging? What is it?” Because what we know is in every — around this country, raising, for instance, the minimum wage, that would affect 32 million people who live every day for less than a living wage. For instance, yes, we need to deal with price gouging, but people also need money to buy goods, buy gas, buy whatever. And we have not raised the minimum wage, Democrats or Republican. We’ve sat on this issue now for 15 years. We’re talking about 140 million poor and low-wage people. We’re talking about 43% of our country that’s poor and/or low-wealth. We’re talking about adult population, people who make less — who are $500 away from economic ruin. We’re talking about 800 people that die per day. This is not hyperbole. And we have to be able to talk about this.

And to talk about it is not to say that a candidate was wrong. It is to evaluate what is going on and what is going to be our position. And why, for instance, why, for instance, that we did not make a determined effort right up front that every time we opened our mouths, we said, “Listen, if you elect Democrats, from the presidency to the Congress, in the first 50 days, first hundred days, we’re going to raise the minimum wage to at least $15 or a little bit more”? We have the data. Three Nobel Peace Prize economists won the Nobel Peace proving that raising the minimum wage would not hurt jobs, would not force more taxes and would not make prices rise. At some point, we have to take this very seriously.

And, you know, I know people — everybody’s in their emotions, and should be. Now, that’s not the only issue, though. And I would agree with Jaime in this. That’s not the only issue. There’s a lot of issues. We’ve got to — that’s why we have to drill down on this. What factor did race play? What factor did sexuality play and gender play? But we have to take serious that the fundamental issues — even in Mississippi, 66% of Republicans now say that they want healthcare, that they support the Affordable Care Act, or what we used to call Obamacare. We have to take seriously, when we look at these other states — when living wages was on the ballot, it won. You know, do need to then make sure that across the country we have these things on the ballot? But what we can’t do is walk away from them.

So, we have to do introspection. We have to look at why there was less voting. We have to look at why, when — and I remember in 2020 when Biden and Harris — when they were running. Every time they talked, they said, “If you elect us, we’re going to do living wages and healthcare and voting rights.” Fifty-six percent of those who make less than $50,000 a year supported that ticket. Also, we have to own the fact that some of this is not Biden or Harris or anybody’s fault. It started when the Democrats brought up for a vote to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and eight Democrats joined every Republican and blocked it, blocked it in the United States Senate, after it passed the House. We can’t have Democrats running rogue when they have power and voting against something at that time would have impacted 55 million people. And it would still be at 55 million if Biden had not and Harris had not increased the minimum wage for federal workers. But you run rogue when you have power, and then when you come back to the people for election, you say, “We are with you.” People are hurting out here. People are dying out here. And until we can face poverty and low wages in this country, we’re talking about 66 million white people. We’re talking about 26 million Black people, 60% of Black people, 30% of white people, 68% of Latino, 68% of Indigenous people. We cannot walk away from this issue.

And lastly, we cannot allow people to suggest that if you focus on this issue, that it’s a far-left issue. It’s an American issue. It’s a moral issue. It is a — the level of poverty and low wages in this country is a violation of our claim of our Constitution to establish justice and promote the general welfare. It is disgusting and damnable that we’ve not had a full-on dealing with this issue in the media, in the halls of Congress and in our election. Not one presidential candidate was asked at any of the two debates that were held, “Where would you — do you stand on the issue of poverty and low wages? And what are your plans to address it? And how will you lead this country?” For issues that affect nearly 50% of the population. We’ve got to face this issue.

And that’s why one of the things I’m saying, Amy, you know, Venice Williams said something in a poem that all of us ought to read. It said — she said this:

“You are awakening to the
same country you fell asleep to.
The very same country.

Pull yourself together.

Some of my Ancestors dealt with
at least 400 years
under worse conditions.”

She said:

“Continue to do the good work.
Continue to build bridges and not walls.
Continue to lead with compassion.
Continue to demand
the liberation of all.”

I would add to that, continue and seriously fight for living wages and healthcare and the end to genocide around the world and the end to the battle of war in Gaza. Continue, continue the fight for women’s rights. Continue to fight for children. Continue to fight to expand voting rights.

How much of this low vote was because of voter suppression? Why is it in a state like North Carolina, for instance, all of the Democrats at the top of the ticket won, and yet the presidency did not win? We have to deal with some serious questions. We can’t get in our emotions. We’ve got to ask serious questions because we have serious pain out here, that people are hurting, and millions of them didn’t vote either way. They just didn’t vote. I want people to hear that. The vote totals went down. They didn’t go up. They went down. And we have to take this very seriously.

Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of immigrants a centerpiece of his plans for a second term, vowing to forcibly remove as many as 20 million people from the country. Historian Ana Raquel Minian, who studies the history of immigration, says earlier mass deportation programs in the 1930s and '50s led to widespread abuse, tearing many families apart through violent means that also resulted in the expulsion of many U.S. citizens. “These deportations that Trump is claiming that he will do will have mass implications to our civil rights, to our communities and to our economy, and of course to the people who are being deported themselves,” says Minian. She also says that while Trump's extremist rhetoric encourages hate and violence against vulnerable communities, in terms of policy there is great continuity with the Biden administration, which kept many of the same policies in place.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show looking at Donald Trump’s threat to deport as many as 20 million immigrants living in the United States. It’s a threat he repeated on an almost daily basis on the campaign trail, including at the Republican National Convention.

DONALD TRUMP: That’s why, to keep our families safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country, even larger than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower from many years ago. You know, he was a moderate, but he believed very strongly in borders. He had the largest deportation operation we’ve ever had.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by a historian who’s closely studied past mass deportation programs in the United States. Ana Raquel Minian is an associate professor of history at Stanford University and the author of In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States Their recent piece for Dissent magazine is titled “Trump’s Deportation Model.”

So, Professor Minian, if you can start off by talking about Trump’s victory, what that model is, and, you know, his famous motto, “Make America great again”? Go back in history and talk about the mass deportations of people in the United States.

ANA RAQUEL MINIAN: Thank you.

In many ways, we think that Trump is a new model, a person who completely goes against the grain of American history in terms of deportations, in terms of his treatment of immigrants. But as he noted himself, that is absolutely not true.

What he was referring to when he spoke about Eisenhower was an operation that occurred in 1954 titled Operation Wetback. And this was a massive deportation campaign. The tactics were military tactics. They brought tanks. They brought Border Patrol people all throughout the border, airplanes. People were grabbed from their houses and taken to the border, stopped outside of their jobs and taken to the border. Their families didn’t know where they had been. It was a very cruel operation. In the year 1954, the year of Operation Wetback, over 1 million people were deported. And this is the model that Trump says that he is going to expand.

And it comes at huge costs to America, to its communities and to the people themselves. In the United States, when Operation Wetback happened, communities were destroyed. People were left without central members, without churchgoers, without breadwinners. Families came to [inaudible]. Families who relied on some of the folks who were deported had to either rely on welfare or find jobs immediately. Children were left without parents. Many jobs, many employers needed workers who were deported. It was bad for the U.S. economy. It was also bad for American civil rights. Many Mexican Americans, people who were born in the United States, could be walking through the streets and considered to be Mexican just because they, quote-unquote, “looked Mexican,” and their civil rights were not protected. Their constitutional rights were not protected.

The deportation of American citizens is something that we have seen over and over again. For example, in the 1930s, there was also a massive deportation campaign against Mexicans. It occurred, of course, during the Great Depression. We estimate that from 350,000 to a million people were deported and that over 60% of those were American citizens. These deportations that Trump is claiming that he will do will have mass implications to our civil rights, to our communities and to our economy, and of course to the people who are being deported themselves.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could explain? If you could put that in the context of more recent history? In other words, how does Trump’s proposal — or, in fact, what is actual policies that he implemented in the four years he was in power, from 2016 — on immigration, how do they compare with what the Biden administration did and what Kamala Harris said herself, since it was also central to her, immigration border security was also central to her campaign?

ANA RAQUEL MINIAN: Absolutely. In many ways, the Biden administration also led an extremely anti-immigrant movement. His administration first continued the “return to Mexico” policy, continued Title 42. What did these policies do? These policies meant that either asylum seekers could not even apply for asylum in the United States, even though asylum is something that we abide to because of our own national law and because of international agreements, and it said that — and the “Remain in Mexico” policy said that if we were to accept asylum seekers to apply for asylum, they had to wait while their cases were adjudicated in northern Mexico. While people waited in northern Mexico for either Title 42 to go away or for the “Remain in Mexico” policy to be allowed in, people lived in terrible encampments where they were regularly raped, tortured, mugged. It was absolutely brutal, the conditions there. In fact, I once interviewed a woman who had fostered a child during Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, the policy that Trump implemented that separated children from their parents while in detention. And this woman, who had fostered one of these little kids who was separated from his father while crossing the border because of the Trump administration, said, “Right now the Biden administration’s 'Remain in Mexico' policy is basically a zero-tolerance policy in reverse.” Why? The conditions in northern Mexico were so brutal that some parents made the heart-wrenching decision of sending their children across the border, because unaccompanied minors were the only ones who could get into the United States while their parents had to wait in northern Mexico. Even recently, the Biden campaign has dramatically reduced the number of asylum seekers who can come into the country. These policies have been devastating to asylum seekers and migrants.

But there is, I believe, a big difference between what Trump did and what Biden did, even if not so much numerically. The rhetoric that Trump implemented, the anti-immigrant discourse, calling Mexicans “animals,” all Central Americans as belonging to MS-13, calling people rapists, that is not something that we heard so much from the Biden administration or from Kamala Harris’s campaign. And that rhetoric matters. That rhetoric leads to violence in Latino communities, and eventually it also pushes people, administrations, to move further and further toward anti-immigrant policies. Additionally, Trump’s family separation policy was explicitly created for purposes of deterrence. What does this mean? Trump implemented the zero-tolerance policy to cause harm to asylum seekers in order to warn other asylum seekers not to try to come into the United States. The very purpose of this policy was to cause harm. This is different from the policies that Biden has implemented and that Kamala Harris promised to implement, as well, even though they, too, would have created massive harm.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could say, given all of that, especially what you said the distinctions are between Kamala and Biden and Trump — you know, so many exit polls have found, across the board, there was an increase in the number of votes for Trump, and obviously Latinx community is a massive and highly diverse community, but among this community, however defined, there was also an increase in the number of people who voted for Trump. How do you understand that?

ANA RAQUEL MINIAN: I do want to emphasize your first point, which is: Why are we even thinking of a Latinx community when we think of votes? We know, for example, that Cubans have regularly voted Republican, that Mexicans have switched back and forth. So, I have been a little disturbed by this concept of a Latinx community and the blame that has been put on this community for the election of Trump nowadays.

But there is a history that we must understand. For example, if we look at the Mexican American community, right now the biggest Latinx community is of Mexicans. And Mexicans have changed — Mexican Americans have changed their views around migration many times. Up until the 1970s, most Mexican Americans viewed immigrants as a huge problem. Why? When immigrants arrived in the United States, they were cast as bringing disease, bringing crime — just like nowadays. And so, Mexican Americans had an option. One of these options was to say, “Look, we are not them. We don’t want them here. If they don’t come, we won’t be stereotyped as criminals. We won’t be stereotyped as bringing in disease. Stop them from coming.” So this was a very common speech and rhetoric of the Mexican American community up until the 1970s. This type of rhetoric began to change —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

ANA RAQUEL MINIAN: — because of the civil rights movement — because of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when Mexican Americans said, “Actually, these people are our brethren. We are still being discriminated. Instead of stopping their discrimination — instead of fighting for them not to come, let us say they should not be discriminated, either.”

AMY GOODMAN: Ana Raquel Minian, we have to leave it there, and we thank you so much for being with us, associate professor of history at Stanford University, author of In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

In a major piece for Mother Jones magazine on “Why Ballot Measures Are Democracy’s Last Line of Defense,” voting rights correspondent Ari Berman discusses abortion ballot measures in 10 states, important downballot races in Wisconsin and elsewhere, and the movement to abolish or reform the Electoral College.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Ari, you also wrote a piece for Mother Jones headlined “Why Ballot Measures Are Democracy’s Last Line of Defense.” So, for example, you have actually 11 ballot measures in 10 states around abortion. Some people are talking about a scenario where this is the year of the women — women do tend to vote more than men — and that across the political spectrum, even those who are concerned about abortion are deeply concerned. I mean, we saw it in The Des Moines Register poll that just came out. They just put into place a six-week abortion ban. You have women who were dying who want to have children. Something happens with the pregnancy, and doctors are afraid to touch them, and they die. That this will drive women out in droves, especially around these ballot measures, where, then, in their states, they will then vote for the top of the ticket. If you can talk about ballot measures?

ARI BERMAN: The reason why I called ballot measures “democracy’s last line of defense” is that direct democracy is really the only way in certain places to protect key rights from hyper gerrymandered legislatures and right-wing courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. So, in many states, if you want to protect abortion rights, the only way to do so is through direct democracy, is through ballot initiatives. And that’s why abortion rights initiatives are on the ballot in 10 states, including some really important swing states like Arizona. People are really motivated about this. Lots of states have passed six-week abortion bans that are incredibly unpopular with the public, including in places like Iowa. I think this is going to be a major sleeper issue in the election, the number of people that turn out for these ballot initiatives on issues like abortion.

It’s also broader than just abortion rights in terms of what’s on the ballot. There are 150 ballot measures this cycle that voters are considering. There are things like banning partisan gerrymandering in Ohio. There are things like raising the minimum wage, protecting marriage equality. A lot of stuff is happening on the bottom of the ballot that isn’t getting as much attention but is critically, critically important, and people are getting out. And I think what Democrats are trying to do is they’re trying to link what’s happening at the bottom of the ballot to the top and say that if you want to protect abortion rights in a place like Arizona, you also have to vote for candidates that are going to protect abortion rights, like Kamala Harris compared to Donald Trump.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ari, I wanted to ask you about the issue of the Electoral College. You’ve been pretty vocal in your writings about the need to abolish it. Could you talk about why and what the prospects are for having actual elections that depend on the actual votes of all the people rather than on the Electoral College system?

ARI BERMAN: So, the Electoral College is undemocratic, it’s antiquated, and it’s racist. It dates all the way back to slavery. It was put in to restrain democratic participation and to protect elite white power. And it creates a situation where you can lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College, where seven swing states representing 15% of the population decide the presidency, to the detriment of 85% of Americans. It depresses voter turnout in states that aren’t these prized swing states. So it depresses turnout in the 43 other states that aren’t going to decide the presidency.

And there is now a movement to abolish it, called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. One way to do it is through a constitutional amendment. That’s very hard. But through this National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, states that reach 270 electoral votes, they could then pledge to appoint the winner of their state to the winner of the popular vote nationwide. And right now those states have 209 electoral votes. They’re short of 270. But that’s what happens — that’s why what happens at the state legislative level is so important, because if Democrats can pick up places like Arizona, like Wisconsin, like Pennsylvania, they can then move to join this interstate compact to then abolish the Electoral College.

So, I think you’re going to see renewed momentum to try to abolish the Electoral College if there is a popular vote-Electoral College split this time, which there very well could be. But even if there isn’t, I think we have to ask ourselves: Why do we have this ticking time bomb every four years, where someone could win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College? And why do we have a system that prioritizes a handful of swing states to the detriment of the rest of America?

AMY GOODMAN: Ari Berman, we want to thank you for being with us, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine. We’ll into your pieces, “How Election Deniers Took Over Georgia’s Election System,” as well as the one on ballot measures. He is the author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It.

And, Ari, we will see you tonight in our New York City studio as part of our four-hour election special from 8 p.m. to midnight Eastern time. We’ll also be airing an expanded two-hour election show on Wednesday morning from 8:00 to 10:00 Eastern time.

Next up, we look at a new Latino USA investigation into “The Misinformation Web,” targeting Latinx voters in battleground states and beyond. Back in 20 seconds.

As Donald Trump and Kamala Harris campaign in Pennsylvania on the last day before the presidential election, false claims of voter fraud are spreading. “The truth is, none of these lies have been about election integrity. It’s always been about power,” says Neil Makhija, chair of the board of elections in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania — the battleground state that “could decide the election” — in a video essay featured by The New York Times. Makhija joins Democracy Now! to discuss his work expanding access to the vote and debunking the myth of mass voter fraud.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: “You’re Being Lied To About Voter Fraud. Here’s the Truth.” That’s the headline of a New York Times guest essay by Neil Makhija, the chair of the board of elections in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, who will help oversee elections in Montgomery County in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are campaigning today. As Trump continues to stir up false claims of voter fraud and similar rumors are flooding social media ahead of Election Day, we begin the show with a video Makhija published with his essay called “Our Elections Are Secure. The Right to Vote Is Not.” The video is illustrated by Molly Crabapple and produced with Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt.

NEIL MAKHIJA: Picture this: an America where your voice matters equally, as much as anyone else’s, where your voice carries the same weight, no matter who you are, where you’re from or what you have. That’s the promise of democracy: one person, one vote. Sounds simple, right? But it’s revolutionary. And right now that promise is in danger.

It started in earnest in 2020, when falsehoods spread about our elections became part of a calculated effort to undermine our collective voice. Since then, election deniers have been telling Americans that millions of votes are being cast illegally, by dead people, by people coming in from outside the border, by people stuffing drop boxes with illegal ballots. Election deniers brought these claims to court and lost in over 60 cases before judges of both parties. Yet the lies persist and have exploded into violence.

We saw this play out in the events of January 6th, when people who believed in the lies tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. It also hit closer to home. Just a few weeks after that, someone claiming the election was stolen fired gunshots into a campaign headquarters right here in Montgomery County, across the street from my office.

My name is Neil Makhija. Here in the battleground of Pennsylvania, I’ve been part of a new generation of election officials who are trying to combat the attacks on our democracy. I was born the son of immigrants and grew up in a small coal and steel town. I saw firsthand that while my family was different, we held shared values of hard work and opportunity in common with all of our neighbors. I also saw how easily our communities could be divided over differences.

By 2020, I was teaching election law in Philadelphia. I had to explain to my students why some folks were trying to throw out millions of legally cast votes in Pennsylvania. I knew I couldn’t just teach about this stuff anymore. I had to do something. So I ran for office, and in 2023, I won. Now, as a Montgomery County commissioner, I oversee the elections for 865,000 people. I became the first Asian American to hold this position in all of Pennsylvania’s history. My fellow commissioner, Jamila Winder, is the first Black woman. We are living proof of what democracy can look like.

When I took office as chair of the board of elections, I found that the lies about our elections have become worse than ever. Every public meeting is now full of conspiracy theories. But here’s what I’ve learned: Our elections are secure. You are more likely to get struck by lightning than to find voter fraud. Here’s why.

We have layers of protection to ensure that no one can vote more than once. And starting when a person registers to vote, we make sure that they’re eligible citizens over 18 by Election Day. Whether you vote in person or by mail, there are full paper trails every step of the way. Mail-in ballot envelopes are stamped with unique bar codes. They can be safely returned through secure drop boxes, which are monitored 24/7. Our county voter services and sheriffs manage highly secure daily pickups of the ballots. And every single ballot is scanned and kept safe and secure. After each election, we conduct multiple public audits to detect any irregularities. If we do detect an issue, or if it’s just a very close election, the law requires a full recount.

Pulling off widespread voter fraud with 10,000 different locally run elections across the country would be like trying to rob every bank in America at the same time. It’s just not happening. In my county alone, on Election Day, we have 2,700 poll workers across 430 precincts. These are your friends and neighbors, of all parties, working together to help everyone vote. Witnessing the incredible care that goes into ensuring everyone has a chance to vote, most county officials will appropriately certify an election.

If our elections are this secure, the truth is, none of these lies have been about election integrity. It’s always been about power. American democracy started with just 6% of people being eligible to vote. It took generations upon generations of activists subjecting themselves to violent opposition to expand voting rights to women, to people of color and young people, to a majority of our country. These rights were hard won.

There are some who are afraid of democracy in an ever-evolving, inclusive America. They’re part of a shrinking minority that wants to entrench itself in power and enact policies that set us back to a time when we had no rights. Instead of celebrating record voter participation in recent years, anti-democracy politicians have run for office specifically to introduce laws making it harder for us to vote. They continue to lie about the security of our process, and even go as far as to deny the certification of free and fair elections. Inevitably, this leads to violence. This isn’t just an attack on voting. It’s part of an attack on the American ideal that we all deserve a voice.

To protect democracy, we can’t just play defense. We need to go on offense to expand voting rights and access. We can make early voting easier, provide language assistance, support community voting centers. We can even bring mobile polling places to senior centers or college campuses where voters don’t drive. We need a movement in every corner of the country to celebrate our hard-won right to vote.

It’s time to step up and support those who will hold sacred our democratic process, who will reject violence and accept the outcome of elections, no matter the result. The vast majority of us agree on this, because, in the end, this is bigger than a policy debate. America is on the cusp of something unprecedented, a truly multiracial, inclusive democracy where we respect our differences and our rights, where our highest courts and halls of power truly seek to represent the best interests of everyone. That’s never existed before, not here, not anywhere. That America is within our grasp at this moment, but it could slip away. This is the dream we’ve been chasing since 1776. It’s now up to us to make it real.

AMY GOODMAN: Neil Makhija, chair of the election board in Montgomery, Pennsylvania, reading his guest essay, “Our Elections Are Secure. The Right to Vote Is Not,” the video picked up by The New York Times. It was illustrated by Molly Crabapple and produced with Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt. When we come back, we’ll speak with Commissioner Makhija, as well as former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission, Larry Noble. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “The Witching Hour” by Quincy Jones. The musical icon has died at the age of 91. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are both headed to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, today on the final day of campaigning before Tuesday’s election. Harris is scheduled to hold three other events in Pennsylvania: in Scranton, in Allentown and Philadelphia. Trump is also heading to Raleigh, North Carolina; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Grand Rapids, Michigan, tonight.

More than 78 million voters have already cast their ballots in the 2024 election. For months, pollsters have predicted the presidential race will come down to seven states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. But over the weekend, the most prominent pollster in Iowa, Ann Selzer, released the Des Moines Register poll which showed Harris has taken a shocking three-point lead in Iowa, which Trump easily won in 2016 and 2020. The poll showed women voters have shifted heavily toward Harris in Iowa, where a six-week abortion ban took effect in July.

For more, we go to the battleground state of Pennsylvania. We’re joined by Neil Makhija, who serves as Montgomery County commissioner and chair of the board of elections in the county, the most populous suburb of Philadelphia. Also with us in Potomac, Maryland, is Larry Noble, the former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission, now adjunct professor at American University Washington College of Law.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Neil Makhija, that was a fascinating video essay you did of your life and the elections in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. It seems, especially as this Des Moines Register poll has come out, which predicted Trump’s victory in Iowa in 2016 and 2020, but now, clearly, it has so shocked even the Trump campaign, he has doubled down on allegations of fraud around the country, and particularly focusing on Pennsylvania, where he and Kamala Harris will be today. Talk more about why you think the elections are safer than they’ve ever been, yet the allegations of fraud are greater than ever.

NEIL MAKHIJA: So, thank you so much for having me on for this topic.

And, you know, when I took office earlier this year, I had thought that we would have seen some of the disinformation die down after 2020, given that the former president took these claims to court in 60 cases, as the video describes, and lost, because there was never any evidence of widespread fraud. But unfortunately, as we’ve seen with other misinformation online, the more they repeat it, the more people believe it. And so, he’s got friends like Elon Musk that are perpetuating the idea that there are millions of votes being cast illegally, whether it’s from noncitizens or from individuals they don’t even describe, they can’t prove, they can’t show. They’re perpetuating this idea that our system is not secure.

And what I’ve done and tried to do throughout my tenure this year is make sure that in our communities, and more broadly, we’re giving people the facts, step by step, on all the safeguards that exist here in Pennsylvania and across the country. And as you say, they are more secure than ever, because our system has been challenged and questioned to such a degree that we’ve reviewed every step of the process and done everything we can to make sure that the process has integrity. And when you have it being run by 2,800 poll workers, as we do here in Montgomery County, you have people from all political parties, friends and neighbors, simply helping each other vote and exercise their fundamental rights. So, when Trump casts doubt on that, he’s really casting doubt on ordinary people.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain why Pennsylvania is so crucial to the election of president of the United States, Neil.

NEIL MAKHIJA: Well, all eyes are on Pennsylvania. And the candidates are here today, the day before the election, because we have 19 electoral votes, and this is a state that, from all indications, is the closest race in the country. It could decide — it could decide the election.

It’s a big, diverse state. I grew up in a coal and steel town in a rural part of the state where a lot has changed and, unfortunately, has been more receptive to the message of Donald Trump. But there’s both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, as well as, most importantly, the suburbs, including where I am in Montgomery County, that have shifted in the other direction, that are likely places where Kamala Harris is going to make gains. And yet the state remains divided quite evenly. I think the Selzer poll is interesting. I think some of the polling could be off, because they could be hurting and afraid to show that someone is breaking into an advantage.

But what we’re seeing right now in Montgomery County is that people are voting at historic rates. And what we don’t know is: Are there crossover votes happening? We know more Republicans are voting by mail than in 2020, and fewer Democrats. A lot of that is by nature of us getting past the pandemic and people feeling OK walking into their polling place. But we’ve had about 160,000 people vote already, and we expect several — three to four times that in person. So, we’re looking for historic turnout here in the suburbs.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how the motor election vans work?

NEIL MAKHIJA: Yes. So, look, when I took office, we wanted to do everything possible to make it easier for people to vote. And one of those things was expanding satellite locations, where you can request a mail-in ballot and submit it on the spot. And we decided to create a mobile satellite office, basically, a voter van. It’s kind of like an ice cream truck where you can submit your ballot. You can register to vote, request it and submit it all on the spot.

And the idea there was to change the story. Right now people are fearful. They are concerned about the integrity of the election. But in the process of getting out there and educating people, I’m trying to let them know that exercising our right to vote is something to be celebrated. And so, we show up in Montgomery County with our voter van. It’s the first of its kind in Pennsylvania. We go to senior centers and college campuses, and we simply make it easy for people to vote on the spot.

And, of course, the Republicans and their lawyers sued me immediately when we set this up. But thankfully, it continues to roll. We stopped on college campus at Bryn Mawr College here in Montgomery County. I remember being asked by someone on the right, “Why did you stop at a women’s college?” I said, “Well, because women have the right to vote.” So, we have to remind some folks on the right that, in fact, helping people vote is simply helping us live up to the promise of our democratic ideals.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Elon Musk, who promised to give away $1 million a day to voters who sign up with his America PAC. He’s been sued by the Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner for calling it an illegal — he calls it an illegal lottery scheme. Can you talk about the effect of this?

NEIL MAKHIJA: So, I think one of the ironies about those who are perpetuating the lie that there is widespread fraud are often the people who are committing the fraud, and first and foremost Donald Trump in his attempt, as we all know, in Georgia to find 11,000-some votes and to pressure election officials to do so. But now Elon Musk, who’s being told by the Department of Justice that his scheme may violate the law and that they’re investigating him, and he’s also been sued by the district attorney of Philadelphia for operating an illegal lottery.

And fundamentally, it’s very clear that they will say and do anything. And it’s concerning, because if they lose, it’s going to really be a question of what their supporters do after the fact. And that’s the biggest concern for me right now, is if we know on election night, if, say, the Selzer poll is accurate and Kamala Harris does very well, are any of their supporters going to believe the results, going to trust the results, despite the integrity of the process?

With just days to go before the November 5 presidential election, fears are growing that Republicans intend to interfere with the official results in order to install Donald Trump as president. At Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally, Trump said he had a “little secret” with House Speaker Mike Johnson that would have a “big impact” on the outcome, though neither he nor Johnson elaborated on what that entailed. Elie Mystal, the justice correspondent for The Nation, says the secret is almost certainly a plan to force a contingent election, whereby no candidate wins a majority of the Electoral College and the president is instead chosen by the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a slim majority. Mystal notes that even if Democrats challenge such an outcome, the case would still end up before a Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority that is likely to side with Trump.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show with The Nation's justice correspondent Elie Mystal, whose new piece, out this week, is headlined “That ’Little Secret' Between Trump and Johnson? Here’s What It Could Mean.” It refers to a comment Trump made at his racist Madison Square Garden rally in New York last Sunday about how House Speaker Mike Johnson could help install Trump as a president through a “contingent election,” in which the House, not the Electoral College, determines the president.

DONALD TRUMP: You know, with me, we’ve got to get the congressmen elected, and we’ve got to get the senators elected, because we can take the Senate pretty easily. And I think with our little secret, we’re going to do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a secret. We’ll tell you what it is when the race is over.

AMY GOODMAN: “He and I have a secret. We’ll tell you what it is when the race is over.” And clearly, President Trump is concerned. Pieces in The Washington Post, Politico, Politico headlined “Trump lagging in early vote with seniors in Pennsylvania, a red flag for GOP.”

For more, we go to Elie Mystal. He is author of Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution.

Elie, welcome back to Democracy Now! OK, what is this “little secret”?

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, so, it’s really the 12th Amendment. One of the reasons you have to ask yourself: Why is Donald Trump and this group of MAGA people stomping around the country calling Puerto Ricans garbage and generally acting like they don’t need to get any more votes to win the presidency? And the reason why they think that they don’t need any more votes is — comes from the 12th Amendment. The 12th Amendment is where you get to these contingent election scenarios. What the 12th Amendment says is that the winner of the presidency is determined by whoever has a majority of the electoral votes among the electors appointed, right? And that’s the key phrase. If you do not get to a majority among the electors appointed, then you kick it to the House, and that’s where you have the contingent election, where, importantly, the House votes based on its own state delegation. So, basically, every state gets one vote. Currently, there are 26 delegations that are Republican, 24 Democrat, so Trump would win in that contingent election of the House.

But that’s not the secret. The secret is that if you decrease the number of electors appointed — right? — the math is simple that the majority of electoral votes that you need also goes down. So, in a very simple case where we think it is — you need 270 electoral votes to win, if there are 538 total electors. But if you take that number down to, say, 528 electors, well, then, all of a sudden, you only need 264 electoral votes to win, right? And you can do that, you can decrease the number of electors appointed, if you prevent, delay, obfuscate the ability of any particular state to certify its elections and send electors to Congress by the statutorily required deadline of December 11th.

And so, Amy, I think that’s where this whole game is going to be played by Trump and Johnson. They’re going to try to prevent states from submitting — states that Harris wins from submitting valid slates of electors by the December 11th deadline. And then, once we get to that deadline, Mike Johnson, as speaker of the House, and Republicans in control of the House, will simply call the process over and say any electors not appointed by the statutory deadline of December 11th simply don’t count. And that is a way for Trump to steal an election that he loses.

AMY GOODMAN: And for people who are watching this globally, Elie, for people who don’t understand the Electoral College — and there are movements to change it, like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, designed to ensure that the candidate who received the most votes nationwide is elected president, would come into effect only when it could guarantee that outcome. What this system is that we have, that they’re finagling with right now?

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah. So, for people who are not from America, who are, like, trying to figure out what’s going on, I believe the scientific term for the Electoral College is “stupid.” Right? The Electoral College is anti-democratic and dumb. If you’re living in some other country and you have been told that America is the greatest democracy on Earth, you have been sold a lie. We are not the greatest democracy on Earth. We are not even a true democracy, because of the Electoral College, right? The Electoral College, which has always been a part of our history of our nation, it’s always been part of the structure of the government, is fundamentally an anti-democratic system for the single elected official, the single representative that is supposed to be elected by all the people in the United States, right? Everybody else, it’s based on their county, their town, their state. The president of the United States is the one official that’s supposed to be elected by everybody, but he’s actually elected by — he or she, one day hopefully soon, is elected by nobody, because of the Electoral College. It is a ridiculous system.

It’s an anachronistic system, basically, like so much else in the Constitution, made to — it’s another one of those poison pills the enslavers put into the original Constitution in hope that it would make it very difficult for slavery to ever be outlawed in this nation. And while we overcame slavery, its fundamental structure of allowing for minoritarian white rule is still in place, and we still see the effects. And that’s what we’re looking at in this election.

You got to remember, Donald Trump is most likely — you know, regardless of what happens on Tuesday in the Electoral College, Donald Trump is almost certainly going to lose the popular vote for the third time. For the third time in a row, this man will have a minority of the popular vote, yet still could be president, either by winning the Electoral College outright or by gaming the system as I’ve outlined in my piece in The Nation.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us more about what you wrote about deadlines, that what this means is that Republicans just have to delay long enough to pass those deadlines. They don’t have to win; they just have to stall. And we’re seeing more and more across this country these complicated local election laws that have to do with counting. You know, we’re doing an election special at night, an election special the next morning, when we very possibly might not know what the election results are, even the next morning.

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, delay, delay, delay is the name of the game for the Republicans. Statutorily speaking, electors have to be submitted to Congress by December 11th. Statutorily speaking, those electors have to vote and then submit their votes on who the president should be by December 25th, Christmas Day, because we are that kind of stupid, right? January 3rd is when the new House takes office. That’s a constitutional deadline, so no shenanigans are applicable there. And January 6th, as the violent MAGA people know, is the date when the House certifies the results of the Electoral College vote. But that day is largely ceremonial. Even Mike Pence understands that date is largely ceremonial. The real action is on December — is between December 11th, when the electors are appointed, and December 25th, when they’re supposed to be done voting.

Now, those deadlines are statutory. That means they can be changed. And if you roll the tape back to 2020, when Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House and the Democrats control the House, one would imagine that if states had gotten cute with their delaying submitting their slates of electors, Nancy Pelosi would have just extended the deadline. But this is why Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is critical to Trump’s secret plan to steal the election, because if Mike Johnson is in charge, which he absolutely will be — even if Democrats win the House, Mike Johnson is in charge on December 11th. If he’s in charge then, he could not move the deadline, essentially, and declare the process over.

Now, let’s say Democrats win the House, right? Let’s say January 3rd, Democrats come in, Hakeem Jeffries is the new speaker of the House. Could the Democrats undo what Mike Johnson has done on December 11th and December 25th? Maybe. But as my colleague John Nichols just reminded us all, Democrats probably ain’t going to control the Senate on January 3rd. So, you generally need a bicameral proposition to move deadlines like that. You’re probably not going to have the Senate, even if the Democrats win the House.

But more importantly — and, you know, people who know my beat will not be surprised about what I’m about to say — but if you set the deadline on December 25th, and on December 25th you say, “OK, Trump is the president now, because we didn’t count the electors from Wisconsin and we didn’t count the electors from Pennsylvania” — let’s say that happens, right? Well, now Hakeem Jeffries comes in, we change the rules, whatever. That’s called a lawsuit, right? And that ends up in front of the Republican-controlled Supreme Court, which we have already seen go to great lengths to protect Donald Trump, to protect his candidacy and to protect his ability to become president again. So, even if Jeffries and the Democrats win the House and take over on January 3rd, by then you’re putting it all into — like, all roads lead to the Supreme Court. And the Republicans, MAGA Republicans, and their wives, control the Supreme Court. So, as I say in my piece, I mean, everybody likes to say, like, “We’re close to a constitutional crisis.” Nah, we in a constitutional crisis now, bro. And what happens after that, it’s anyone’s guess.

AMY GOODMAN: Elie, you have an interesting piece in The Nation, “Black Men Will Vote for Harris—White Men Are the Problem.” I mean, I think a lot of the emphasis came when President Barack Obama started to appeal to Black men. You say, “Why is the media talking so much about the fraction of Black men who might go MAGA when more than 60 percent of white men will vote for Trump?”

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, I think the focus on Black men has been a complete media red herring. Right? People have been worried about it. I saw a poll recently or post recently saying, like, “It looks like Trump’s support with Black men could be evaporating.” Evaporating? It was never there. All right? Trump is going to get the same Black men to vote for him who voted for him last time, who voted for him in 2016, who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, who voted for John McCain in 2008. He’s going to get 10 to 15% of the Black male vote, because there are 10 to 15% of Black males are Republicans, and they like Republican things, like shooting Liz Cheney apparently. That’s a Republican thing that apparently a lot of Black men — that 15% of Black men like. But that’s it. And that’s always it. And it’s never more than that, right?

Conversely, we live in a country —

AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds.

ELIE MYSTAL: Conversely, we live in a country where somewhere around 60% of white men will vote for the adjudicated rapist Donald Trump. And that is our problem in this country, not the 10 to 12 to 15% of Black men who are going to vote Republican.

We speak with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and authoritarianism, who argues that Trump’s use of the hallmarks of “fascism and violence,” including dehumanizing rhetoric, profane and crude discriminatory language and threats to the “enemy within,” echoes the rise of midcentury fascist rulers like Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Vice President Kamala Harris makes her closing arguments to voters tonight at the Ellipse near the White House, where Donald Trump gave his speech on January 6, 2021, just before his supporters rioted at the Capitol. Trump made his closing arguments Sunday at Madison Square Garden. As he did so, local democratic socialists protested nearby at Bryant Park.

For more on Trump’s closing arguments and the rise of the authoritarian right, we’re joined by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, expert on fascism and authoritarianism. She’s the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present and a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. She also publishes the newsletter Lucid on threats to democracy.

Professor, welcome back to Democracy Now! In the lead-up to this final week of the election, if you can talk about the comments of President Trump, everything from arresting his enemies to the enemy within, and what this echoes for you?

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah. So, you know, fascism started almost a hundred years ago in both Italy and Germany with a core of combatants from World War I who brought the war home and turned their wrath and their force and their violence on liberals, on leftists, on progressive priests, on anybody who did not — was not in their leader cults. And so, when Donald Trump talks about America being an occupied country that he’s going to liberate, this is the language also of Francisco Franco. This is the language of fascism and violence.

And, you know, when we think about all the dehumanizing rhetoric and the explicit references to Hitler’s Germany, you know, Trump doesn’t want people comparing him to Hitler, even sued CNN for $475 million, claiming they were comparing him to Hitler, but he himself has — his campaign has explicitly made these parallels, even releasing a campaign ad that talked about him creating a, quote, “unified reich” and, of course, calling people “vermin.”

And I want to say something about the use of profanity and the crudeness of all of these remarks at the Madison Square Garden rally, which of course was the site of the American Nazi rally, because we think about authoritarianism as imposing controls on people and silencing people, and it certainly does that. But it also is designed, from fascism forward, to make people become their worst selves, to give them permission to be as violent and unrestrained as possible. And so, deregulation, just as, you know, Project 2025 wants to deregulate environmental protections and food safety things, following what happened during the Trump presidency, there’s also a deregulation of inhibitions, of morals, and so that you will be not — less bothered when the violence starts. You will turn the other cheek, or you will participate in it. And this kind of profanity, you know, at women, the misogyny, anti-Black statements, calling Latinos garbage, it’s not only a tradition of dehumanization that starts with fascism and goes through authoritarian movements up to our day, it’s also designed to make people feel, the foot soldiers of MAGA, that there are no restraints, there are no controls, and everything will be accepted as long as it is in the service of targeting the enemy within.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to two clips of Donald Trump, and these have become quite familiar. He called for the National Guard or U.S. military to be deployed on U.S. soil to target what he called radical left lunatics. Trump made the call, at least this particular one — he said it repeatedly — during an interview on Fox News.

DONALD TRUMP: I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the — and it should be very easily handled by — if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is Donald Trump speaking in Aurora, Colorado, earlier this month.

DONALD TRUMP: It’s the enemy from within, all the scum that we have to deal with, that hate our country. That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, we know what John Kelly said, his former, longest-lasting chief of staff, the general, who called him the “definition of a fascist.” Your response, Professor Ben-Ghiat?

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: So, you know, retired military officers, especially generals, don’t speak out unless they feel there’s a real need to do so. And the fact we’re seeing General Kelly, General Milley, former Defense Secretary Esper speak out and use the “F” word, calling Trump a fascist, means that they are highly concerned about a possible misuse of the military, because, again, this goes back. When Trump talks about scum and perhaps needing to use the military against them, this echoes Francisco Franco and the whole discourse of the subhuman, which was integral to fascism.

But there’s also a geopolitical dimension that’s very important, because if you’re Putin or Xi or North Korea and you have your expansionist aspirations, the power and professionalism of the U.S. military is a huge problem. The global reach of the U.S. military is a huge problem. So, here comes Donald Trump, who’s the latest partner of Putin — there’s been Gerhard Schröder, Silvio Berlusconi, now we have Trump — who wants to give the U.S. military a new role, concentrating them on domestic repression, withdrawing from NATO, calling troops back from abroad. And so, we have to think about who benefits geopolitically from this rerouting of the military. I’m not saying the military would go along with this, but this is what Trump is saying by — when he declares repeatedly, and as does JD Vance, that the bigger problem — you know, Russia and China are not the biggest problem; it’s the enemy within. So, this refocusing of military and armed force on American people benefits Putin, benefits Xi, benefits any autocrat who has expansionist ambitions.

We speak with V, the playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, about “How We Do Freedom: Rising Against Fascism,” a daylong educational event to be held at New York City’s Judson Memorial Church on Saturday. V is the founder of the global activist movements V-Day and One Billion Rising that is organizing the event. “The rise of fascism, from India to Italy, from Afghanistan to U.S., [is] the most pressing concern everywhere,” says V, who ties the crisis to growing loneliness and isolation. “One of the antidotes to fascism we know is community, is solidarity, is coming together, is talking, is being part of something that is bigger than yourself.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

A daylong event scheduled at Judson Memorial Church here in New York City Saturday is called “How We Do Freedom: Rising Against Fascism.” Speakers, poets, artists, activists will be crowding into the church, billed as a discussion on the way fascism impacts everything from, quote, “women’s bodies to anti-Blackness [and] the suppression of LGBTQ+ and the disabled, to the banning of books, erasing history and immigration bans, union busting, increasing violence and expansion of the police state, and the destruction of the Earth,” unquote. The event is organized by V-Day, One Billion Rising and Judson Memorial Church.

We’re joined right now in the studio by V, the playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, founder of V-Day and One Billion Rising, global activist movements to end violence against all women, gender-expansive people and the Earth.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. This is an event that spans the globe. People will be talking about fascism from India to the United States.

V: Exactly. Thank you so much for having me this morning.

When we had our gathering of our global counsel of One Billion Rising in Rome in June, which we do every year — we kind of determine what’s going to be the issue of the year and what are the most pressing issues women are facing. And it was unanimous, within a half an hour, that the rise of fascism, from India to Italy, from Afghanistan to U.S., was the most pressing concern everywhere.

And I think this day, which I’m very excited about, we have a range of the most brilliant philosophers, thinkers, activists, artists, all who are going to be responding, telling stories, presenting theories, artistic responses to those theories, and, hopefully, inviting everybody into a deep exploration of what is fascism here, everywhere, and how we build a movement that can resist it.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a clip that you have highlighted, Dalton Clodfelter, host of The Right Dissident program. He was speaking in 2022.

DALTON CLODFELTER: People say, “Well, I’m sort of like — you know, I’m like the 1920 feminists. You know, I believe women should have the right to vote,” etc., etc. No, that was evil, too. That was terrible. Our country started really going down the pooper once women got the right to vote. That’s evident. … And the facts of the matter are, women are dumber than men. Women should be subservient to men. Women have no place in male activities. Women have no place in partaking in the workforce. Women have no place in participating in politics. Women have no place outside of the home. The home is a virtuous place for women. Women should be happy when they are in the home. Women should be grateful when a man puts a roof over her head.

AMY GOODMAN: That is Dalton Clodfelter, host of The Right Dissident. How alone is he? Or what movement is he a part of?

V: Well, it’s hard to tell the numbers, but he’s certainly represented by JD Vance, who is running for vice president. We’re seeing a very strong push from the right wing to make sure that — let’s just look at abortion rights and the fact — what we’ve seen over the last year. I read this statistic recently that 64,000 babies were born last year to raped women who could not get abortions. That’s in America, right? We’re seeing the pushback of women back into the, quote, “family,” back into the home, the idea that women should now have the vote removed.

And I think we’re seeing this actually across the world, this repression of women. I mean, one of the women at our gathering and who will be — we’ll hear from during the event on Saturday, the oppression of women in Afghanistan is the extreme, most extreme form of oppression. It’s kind of the end of women, period. You can’t go out. You can’t speak. You can’t laugh. You can’t have jobs. You can’t — you can’t do anything, essentially, but have babies and be quiet, right? And I think there is a Talibanic movement in this country that would like to see women in the very same place.

And I think part of what we know is that when women’s rights are threatened in such a perilous way, it’s representative of all of our rights being, you know, oppressed in a similar kind of way. So, I think the day is really looking at — like, one panel, for example, is looking at the body — right? — the oppression of transgendered women’s bodies, the oppression of disabled women’s bodies, the oppression of, obviously, pregnant women’s bodies and our right to determine whether we have babies or we don’t have babies. But it’s also across the board, whether it’s the scapegoating of migrants and immigrants, as we’ve seen with this mad, mad — I don’t even want to repeat it, it’s so ludicrous, but the lies that are being told, the plans for expulsions of millions of people in vicious and violent ways.

I think what we all have to do now is really come together to think deeply about what are these rising fascistic impulses, that have been here all along in this country. They’re certainly not new to Black or Indigenous people, who have lived forever in that kind of precarity. But they are spreading, and they are deepening. And with Project ’25, the kind of outline of this policy bible, which is literally spelling it out, you know, beat by beat, we need to be prepared with our own Project ’25 as a counterproposal.

AMY GOODMAN: V, I wanted to ask about your piece in The Guardian titled “The forces of loneliness can cause political instability.” Explain.

V: Well, I think one of the things Hannah Arendt always talked about is that loneliness is often a precondition for fascism. It feeds off of it. And because people are lonely and they want to attach themselves to things, then they want to kind of find a cult or a way of belonging. And I think, you know, in 2023, the surgeon general came out and said that the greatest mental health crisis facing America was loneliness. And if we look at the combination of neoliberal capitalism and the pandemic, and now this ongoing, everyday malevolence coming from — mendacity coming from the right wing, I think it’s pushed people into a powerful state of isolation, loneliness, where they’re facing ongoing anxiety, dread, a feeling of not being wanted, a feeling of having to prove themselves and their right to be here. And it’s created mad isolation and mad disconnection.

And I think one of the antidotes to fascism we know is community, is solidarity, is coming together, is talking, is being part of something that is bigger than yourself, where you are protected, where each of us stands for each other’s rights. And I think, you know, one of the things I try to say in the piece about loneliness is that it’s up to us now to create a movement that is so powerful and so strong and so welcoming and so inclusive and so interdependent that that loneliness vanishes and we become strong in our numbers.

AMY GOODMAN: And one of the things about this event is not only the critique of fascism, but developing the strategies on dealing with it. And what do you think are among the most important global strategies, in this last 30 seconds we have?

V: Well, I think one is to recognize that it’s a global problem and to see this as something that’s happening, the rise of strongmen everywhere — right? — the expulsion of immigrants and scaping, the hatred of women and the destruction of our rights, and LGBTQ, the erasing of history, the religious nationalism. And I think one of the greatest strategies, I think, is educating ourselves, knowing what it is. I often bring up the word, and people don’t know what fascism is. So, part of this day is: What is it? And once we know what it is, then we begin to know how to deal with it and how to create an alternative to it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, V, playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, founder of V-Day and One Billion Rising. The event at the Judson Memorial Church in the Village on Saturday, “How We Do Freedom: Rising Against Fascism.”

That does it for our show. We have job openings. You can check them out at democracynow.org. Democracy Now! is produced by a remarkable team: Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Hana Elias. Our executive director, Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Jon Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.

The U.S. military ran a secret anti-vaccination campaign at the height of the pandemic in the Philippines and other nations to sow doubt about COVID vaccines made by China, according to a new investigation by Reuters. The clandestine Pentagon campaign, which began in 2020 under Donald Trump and continued into mid-2021 after Joe Biden took office, relied on fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to target local populations in Southeast Asia and beyond. The campaign also aimed to discredit masks and test kits made in China. “Within the Pentagon, within Washington, there was this fear that they were going to lose the Philippines” to Chinese influence, says Joel Schectman, one of the reporters who broke the story. Schectman says that while it’s impossible to measure the impact of the propaganda effort, it came at a time when the Chinese-made Sinovac shot was the only one available in the Philippines, making distrust of the vaccine “incredibly harmful.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

A new investigation by Reuters has revealed the U.S. military ran a secret anti-vaccination campaign at the height of the pandemic in the Philippines and other nations in an effort to sow doubt about COVID vaccines made by China. The clandestine Pentagon campaign began in 2020 under Donald Trump and continued into mid-2021 after President Biden took office. The Pentagon set up numerous fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to target audiences in the Philippines, Central Asia and the Middle East. The campaign also aimed to discredit masks and test kits made in China.

According to Reuters, the secret operation was launched to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines and other countries. One senior military officer involved in the campaign told Reuters, “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud,” they said.

For more, we’re joined by the reporter who broke the story. Joel Schectman is an award-winning investigative journalist who’s written for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal on national security, intelligence and cyber espionage. His recent Reuters piece is headlined “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic,” joining us now from Washington, D,C.

Joel, thanks so much for being with us. Lay out your major findings. I mean, this is just explosive, what you have discovered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMY GOODMAN: I mean —

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMY GOODMAN: Your piece concludes by noting that General Dynamics IT, which worked on the anti-vax campaign, just won a contract worth almost $500 million, half a billion dollars, to, quote, “continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.” Explain.

JOEL SCHECTMAN: Yeah. So, General Dynamics — there’s a lot of different, like, aspects of these psychological operations — right? — because it’s not just online. But for the online part of it, General Dynamics was responsible for the largest Pentagon contract that was involved in this kind of anti-vaccine, kind of COVID propaganda. They were the ones that were kind of running the accounts. Them or their subcontractors, I should say, were running the accounts, running the propaganda during that period.

And they actually got into a lot of hot water, not so much just because of, like, you know, the kind of moral elements of this, or the ethical elements that we’re discussing, but more because they really got caught, right? Like, the accounts were discovered by the social media companies. Like, the tradecraft they used to disguise themselves was very poor. And so they got into a lot of trouble. And people in that world were, like, kind of shocked on that basis for why they would get, like, another contract so soon after to do the same thing, you know, when they were discovered kind of repeatedly and called out repeatedly just like a year ago or two years ago.

So, going forward, my understanding is that they’re going to continue to be the prime or like the main contractor behind these kind of clandestine online kind of propaganda operations, these online —

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about setting up—

JOEL SCHECTMAN: — psyops, as they call them.

AMY GOODMAN: Right, psyops, psychological operations. You’re talking about setting up fake sites.

JOEL SCHECTMAN: Fake websites, fake accounts, you know, fake social media accounts, like Twitter, sock puppets, if you will, to kind of amplify these propaganda lines in countries that the U.S. is in competition with.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Joel Schectman, award-winning investigative reporter who has written for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal on national security, intelligence and cyber espionage. We’ll link to your Reuters piece — now you’re going to The Wall Street Journal, but to your Reuters piece, “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic.”

In a historic verdict, a New York jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts in his criminal hush money and election interference trial. Trump is now the first former president to be convicted of a felony and faces up to four years in prison. “All this is unprecedented in the history of American republicanism,” says U.S. historian Manisha Sinha. “A man like Trump could very much upend this over-200-year historical experiment in representative government.” Trump can still be president as a convicted felon and is poised to become the Republican nominee for the nation’s highest office in July. “One of the most dangerous things about Trump is that he’s not a one-man show,” says Sinha. “He’s the presumptive nominee of a political party in a two-party system. That in itself poses an immense danger to American democracy.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Former President Donald Trump will be sentenced July 11th, four days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, after a New York jury found him guilty Thursday on all 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up payments made to Stormy Daniels in order to protect his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump has vowed to appeal, also faces three more criminal cases.

For more, we’re joined by professor Manisha Sinha, historian of U.S. politics, slavery, abolition, the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction, professor at the University of Connecticut and author of several books, including The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.

READ: Trump and progressives reach an important agreement

Professor, you last joined us on the day after the January 6th insurrection. Welcome back to Democracy Now! First, respond to this historic moment in U.S. history, not just U.S. politics, the first former president to become a felon.

MANISHA SINHA: Thank you for having me, Amy.

Yes, it is extremely unprecedented, because we have never had a case in United States history when a former president has been not only impeached twice, but also is now a convicted felon. Of course, there have been instances of corruption amongst presidents and vice presidents, but mostly they have resigned, before they could be convicted, and they have been pardoned. What’s unusual about Trump’s case is the extent of the criminality, the various cases against him, and now this unanimous jury decision convicting him for falsifying business records, but also, most importantly, for trying to corrupt the 2016 elections.

All this is unprecedented in the history of American republicanism. As so much that concerns Trump, he wears this as a badge of honor. He seems unrepentant even in the face of all these convictions. So, yes, I think we are, in fact, at a crossroads in the history of American republicanism. And a man like Trump could very much upend this over-200-year historical experiment in representative government.

AMY GOODMAN: So, it’s not clear what will happen July 11th, except that he will be sentenced by Judge Merchan. He could sentence him to up to four years in prison. It’s highly unlikely he would do that. He could sentence him to house arrest. He could be out on probation. But if you can talk about the political significance of right before the Republican convention, what this means? You have a president now, a presidential candidate, who represents a lot of firsts in U.S. history: the first former president to be indicted, criminally tried, convicted, impeached twice. Talk about his legacy and what this means as the Republican front-runner.

MANISHA SINHA: Yes. I think one of the most dangerous things about Trump is that he’s not a one-man show. He is the presumptive nominee of a political party in a two-party system. That in itself poses an immense danger, I think, to American democracy.

He’s also now a convicted felon, as you mentioned. It’s a Class E felony. He may not go to prison, but he is in the same category as those people who do carjackings or those who are accused of aggravated domestic assault. Now, this is a category of criminality that he is a part of.

And I cannot help but think that any right-thinking American citizen, even a moderate Republican, would have to think about that. I don’t think that this conviction, as many have argued, will actually increase his support. Those — a minority that supported him will always support him, because there have been so many acts of criminality and wrongdoing that have preceded this. I do think, though, that this will make an enormous difference to moderates, independents, will make them think twice — do they want to actually vote for a felon? — especially a party that pretends to stand for law and order.

AMY GOODMAN: So, we spoke to you the day after the January 6th insurrection in 2021, Professor Sinha. In fact, you were among the historians included in one of the biggest briefs in Trump v. Colorado. Your work was also quoted. Can you talk about this case in the context of your new book, which focuses on the Reconstruction era and when the 14th Amendment was ratified? And explain it all.

MANISHA SINHA: Yes. You know, I, as a historian, really do feel that our present is shaped by the past. We are not exactly repeating history, but we live with those legacies. And in my book, when I look at this period, Reconstruction, that immediately followed the Civil War, I talk a lot about how ex-Confederates, insurrectionists, got away, literally, with murder, right? They launched a program of domestic terrorism. They have committed treason against the government of the United States. And very soon, because of an amnesty law, they’re back in power. They may have lost the war, but they win the peace.

And that represents what I call a nadir in American democracy. I don’t think many American citizens may be even aware that we have lost our democracy for decades, certainly in the South, where it was open season on freed people, and you had a regime of racial terror, segregation and disfranchisement for Black men, and later on Black women. And I don’t think we can today go down a path where we similarly have a completely emasculated democracy. We live with the legacies of that period, as I mentioned to you.

The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is a Reconstruction-era amendment, is a sleeping giant. It does prevent someone who has participated in or aided and abetted an insurrection from ever running for federal office, someone who has sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. And the only way that person can do that is to be pardoned by Congress by a two-thirds vote.

Now, it was very disappointing to me that the Supreme Court, in the Trump v. Colorado case, decided — including the liberal judges — that Trump in fact is not liable under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. In fact, he is. It’s a very clear disqualification. Now, Congress could take away the disqualification for him. The idea that this would create a patchwork system, where different states would then take Biden off the ballot, actually does not work, because Biden has not led an insurrection against the government of the United States or proven false to his oath of office. This would be actually a national disqualification, even though the case stemmed from Colorado. So, our Supreme Court did not have, I think, the moral courage or judicial courage to do this. They thought only expediently about the political fallout from their decision.

Instead, 12 ordinary American citizens defended our democracy. And this is exactly what Abraham Lincoln said on the eve of the Civil War, that the fate of our democracy actually lies in the hands not of the rich and powerful, but in the hands of ordinary American citizens. And if you look at the jurors, a lot of them didn’t seem to me particularly anti-Trump. In fact, I thought maybe there’s going to be a hung jury, even though the prosecution had an airtight case. So, for this decision to come down sort of renews my faith in democracy, that if ordinary people, ordinary citizens, get the chance to really deliberate on Trump’s many crimes and misdemeanors, then perhaps we will get a right decision.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end by asking you about a related story in the Supreme Court. Of course, President Trump appointed three of the nine Supreme Court justices. And I wanted to ask you about this latest controversy around Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who told Congress he will not recuse himself from cases involving Donald Trump and the January 6th Capitol insurrection, after photos emerged of two flags associated with election deniers flying in front of Alito’s homes in Virginia and New Jersey. He said his wife did it. One of those, an upside-down American flag. So there are many who are demanding that he recuse himself from these cases. He says no. Your response, Professor Sinha?

MANISHA SINHA: Yes. You know, the Supreme Court, in U.S. history, has not distinguished itself as a defender of democracy. Think of Dred Scott. Think of Plessy v. Ferguson. The Warren Court, during the civil rights era, emerges as an exception.

We’ve had partisan judges before, but we have not had corrupt judges. We have not had judges sympathetic to insurrection against the government of the United States, whether it was Alito and his wife, whether it is Thomas or his wife. These two judges are clearly involved in planned insurrection against the government of the United States, or at least displaying their sympathy for it very openly by flying an upside-down American flag, which is a sign of disrespect, and the “Appeal to the Heavens” flag. The idea of simply, you know, passing the buck on —

AMY GOODMAN: The “Appeal to Heavens” flag is that pine tree flag.

MANISHA SINHA: Exactly. The passing the buck onto his wife seems really ironic for somebody like Alito, who has taken away women’s fundamental right to decide for themselves how and what they do with their bodies. He has taken away reproductive freedom from a majority of women, and now he tells us that he bowed to the decision of his wife to display flags that were sympathetic to the January 6th insurrectionists.

You mentioned that you had interviewed me immediately the day after. And even though I am a historian who has studied American history and knows that there have been instances of grave danger to democracy in U.S. history, I was shocked. And you could see the shock in my face.

To have a justice of the Supreme Court, who is supposed to uphold the highest laws of the country, be an active participant in this sort of behavior is just astounding. And the shamelessness of it is similarly astounding, that he would — after being sort of outed by the press, that he would refuse to recuse himself. Frankly, I think both Thomas and Alito are completely compromised, besides being very corrupt. They should either resign or, at the very least, recuse themselves.

And I think it’s about time for the Democrats to take a more aggressive position on this. At this point, we are not talking about some slight convention that has been upturned. This is a real threat to American rights and freedom. And we need to — you know, Biden likes to compare himself to FDR. Well, then, think about packing the court. Think about judicial reform. We need to act against this. We cannot just let Alito decide for himself, because he’s clearly incapable of making the right decision.

AMY GOODMAN: Manisha Sinha, we want to thank you for being with us, historian of U.S. politics, slavery, abolition, the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction, professor at the University of Connecticut.

NOW READ: It’s obscene: Inside the Medicare Advantage sham

Democratic Arizona state Senator Eva Burch made headlines last week after speaking on the floor of the state Senate about her plans to obtain an abortion after receiving news that her pregnancy was nonviable. Arizona has banned all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. “I felt like it was really important for me to bring people along, so that people could really see what this looks like,” says Burch, a former nurse practitioner who worked at a women’s health clinic before running for office, about why she decided to publicly tell her story. “I wanted to pull people into the conversation so we can be more honest about what abortion care looks like” and “hopefully move the needle in the right direction,” she adds.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

As we continue on the issue of reproductive rights, we’re joined by Democratic Arizona state Senator Eva Burch. Last week, she made headlines when she gave a speech on the floor of the Arizona state Senate where she shared her plans to get an abortion after receiving news that her pregnancy was nonviable. State Senator Burch spoke about her struggles with fertility and miscarriage she had over a decade ago.

SEN. EVA BURCH: Two years ago, while I was campaigning for this Senate seat, I became pregnant with what we later determined was a nonviable pregnancy. It was a pregnancy that we had been trying for, and we were heartbroken over it. But now I wish I could tell you otherwise, but after numerous ultrasounds and blood draws, we have determined that my pregnancy is once again not progressing and is not viable. And once again, I have scheduled an appointment to terminate my pregnancy. I don’t think people should have to justify their abortions, but I’m choosing to talk about why I made this decision, because I want us to be able to have meaningful conversations about the reality of how the work that we do in this body impacts people in the real world.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Arizona state Senator Eva Burch, a former nurse practitioner who worked at a women’s health clinic and has been widely critical of abortion restrictions in Arizona, where abortions are banned after 15 weeks of pregnancy, no exceptions for rape or incest. State Senator Eva Burch is joining us now from Phoenix.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! And let me start by saying you publicly announced plans last week to have an abortion. I can’t believe we’re talking about this globally. Did you have the procedure? And what was it like to have to make this public to everyone? And as you did this, Republicans walked out of the state Senate.

SEN. EVA BURCH: Good morning. Thank you for having me on the show today.

You know, I felt like it was really important for me to bring people along so that people could really see what this looks like. I’m at this critical intersection in the abortion conversation, because I’ve been healthcare provider, I’ve been a patient seeking abortion care, and now, as a lawmaker, I knew that my perspective was unique. And I wanted to share that. I wanted to pull people into the conversation so that we could be more honest about what abortion care looks like in Arizona — but this is happening all over the country — and who the abortion patient is, and really try to break through some of the stigma and some of the misunderstanding about abortion care, and hopefully move the needle in the right direction.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Senator, could you talk about how your profession as a health provider and a nurse practitioner has influenced your approach, the conversations perhaps you’ve had with other women in similar situations?

SEN. EVA BURCH: Certainly. I worked in the reproductive healthcare space for some time. I don’t work in abortion care, because that’s not something that’s available to me as a nurse practitioner, but I have had patients who were pregnant who had questions, patients who were concerned about whether or not Arizona is a hospitable environment for someone who is pregnant, patients who are unsure about whether or not continuing their pregnancy is the right decision for them. And we have to counsel them with the understanding that our laws here are in flux, that abortion care is not guaranteed in Arizona by any means, not only for patients who are just uncertain about whether or not they want to continue their pregnancy, but for patients who might be experiencing complications in their pregnancy or pregnancy loss the way that I was.

AMY GOODMAN: You spoke —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you —

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Can you talk about the reaction, since you made your announcement, from other members of the Senate, as well as protesters, how you and your family have coped with that?

SEN. EVA BURCH: Yes, I have had an overwhelmingly positive response. It has really been moving for me. I’ve had people sending me letters to the Legislature. I have had emails and messages and direct messages on social media to the tune of thousands. What I’m mostly receiving are people telling me their own stories or just thanking me for giving them a seat at the table. I think that people really don’t want to bring people along with them with their abortion experiences. This is highly personal, and it’s a little bit taboo, and often it’s a sensitive subject. People don’t want to talk about it, but they want to be heard. And I think people are just really grateful for this opportunity to pull people in and to have a voice, to have a seat at the table.

Now, as far as the reaction within the Legislature, I haven’t had any of my Republican colleagues reach out to me to talk about this, not in the way that maybe I would have hoped for, but I wasn’t overly optimistic about that. It wasn’t so much about trying to convince my colleagues as much as it was about trying to bring light to what’s happening in Arizona so that our constituents can make decisions for themselves and hopefully get engaged in the political process and help us to elect pro-choice candidates up and down the ticket. That’s really what we need in Arizona and in this country to make real change.

AMY GOODMAN: In one of the articles, many about you, state Senator Burch, they said you said that “I was told I could choose adoption, I was told I could choose parenting, which were two things that I couldn’t choose. It was cruel to suggest that that was an option for me, when it’s not.” If you could explain that, then also what it was like to have these Republicans walk out on you, one of them, a female state legislator, walking in, thinking you were done with your speech, then walking out for the second time?

SEN. EVA BURCH: Yes. So, I think that a lot of people don’t really understand the ways that laws can be sort of weaponized against patients, not to necessarily ban abortion, but to make abortion inaccessible or a difficult experience, to create a hostile environment in the abortion clinic, to create confusion in the patient and provider relationship. And we have a lot of that in Arizona. There is this mandatory counseling, where they have to talk about adoption and parenting as alternatives to abortion, which, of course, is not always relevant to patients, which is why it should be medical providers who are determining the appropriate counseling for their patients. They also have to talk about the probable physical and anatomical properties of the fetus at the time that your abortion will take place, which, again, certainly in my case, but in general, is inappropriate and unnecessary. And my pregnancy was not progressing. My embryo was dying and not subject to the probabilities of a normal healthy pregnancy, so that information was also just factually inaccurate for me. But that’s what the providers are required to do because of out-of-touch legislators, who don’t have any medical professional experience, who are writing the laws and dictating what doctors have to say to patients in that environment.

As far as my Republican colleagues filtering in and out and not really listening to what I had to say, I have a couple of thoughts on that. One of them is just that I think that these laws are intended to do what they did. So I don’t think that they are surprised by it or concerned about it. I think that, really, it just reinforces that what they’re doing with these laws is having the intended impacts. So I don’t think that there’s necessarily any need for my Republican colleagues to hear what I have to say, because they’re not going to make any changes or do things any differently because of that. I will also say that I have good relationships with a number of my Republican colleagues. We disagree on a lot of things. It’s really the leadership in the Arizona Senate that is so skewed far to the right. They are extremists. And they really have sort of set themselves up for failure in that way. But I didn’t experience anything that I wasn’t expecting in the chamber that day.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds. If you could respond to the mifepristone oral arguments in the Supreme Court?

SEN. EVA BURCH: Yes. I mean, I can’t believe we’re even talking about it, to be honest with you. I mean, mifepristone has — what is it? — 26 years of safety data and is extremely safe and effective medication. I think that we cannot be setting this precedent where we are allowing religious or extremist organizations to be able to go to highly partisan, Trump-appointed judges and bring a case all the way up to the Supreme Court. I just really hope that they do the right thing. It’s unimaginable that this is where we are with the mifepristone case. We use this medication so much more safely than so many medications that you can buy over the counter. It’s an outrageous conversation that we’re having with this. But I am hoping that the right decision will be made, but it just goes to show how serious the consequences are when we have someone like Trump who is designing a highest court in the land for the people of this country. And we have to be so conscious of that and to work so hard to make sure that we are making better decisions in November.

AMY GOODMAN: Eva Burch, Democratic Arizona state senator, nurse practitioner, announced in her speech on the state Senate floor that she planned to get an abortion last week, to call attention to the restrictions she and others now face.

In Mississippi, six former sheriff’s deputies have been sentenced to between 10 and 40 years in prison for raiding a home and torturing, shooting and sexually abusing two Black men, Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, in January 2023. The six former deputies, all of whom are white, called themselves the “Goon Squad” and have been linked to at least four violent attacks on Black men since 2019. Two of the men attacked and tortured by the group subsequently died. To discuss the case and the verdict, we’re joined by Eddie Parker and attorneys Malik Shabazz and Trent Walker. “Never have we seen this many police officers sentenced to this kind of time in one week,” says Shabazz, who calls the verdict “historic.” Jenkins, Parker and Shabazz are currently suing the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department over its track record of civil rights violations and racist targeting of Black residents.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show in Mississippi, where six former law enforcement officers have been sentenced to between 10 and 40 years in prison each for raiding a home and torturing two Black men. The officers, all of whom are white, belonged to a group that described itself as the “Goon Squad.”

In January of 2023, the six officers burst into a home, then beat, handcuffed, waterboarded and tasered Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker. The officers also sexually abused them with an object while shouting racial slurs. One of the officers put a gun in Jenkins’s mouth for a mock execution and pulled the trigger. The bullet lacerated his tongue, broke his jaw, exited through his neck. The officers then planted drugs at the scene in an attempt to cover up their act.

The attack occurred in the majority-white Rankin County, which is about 20 miles away from majority-Black Jackson, Mississippi. Some of the officers were also sentenced for their role in a separate assault just two weeks earlier, when another member of the Goon Squad repeatedly tased a man and put his genitals in his mouth. While the charges focused on these two cases, The New York Times and Mississippi Today have revealed that deputies in the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department have for decades barged into homes, handcuffed people, tortured them for information or confessions.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a statement Thursday saying, quote, “The depravity of the crimes committed by these defendants cannot be overstated, and they will now spend between 10 and 40 years in prison for their heinous attack on citizens they had sworn to protect,” AG Merrick Garland said.

We go now to Jackson, Mississippi, where we’re joined by Eddie Parker, as well as his attorney Malik Shabazz, who is with Black Lawyers for Justice.

Malik Shabazz, let’s begin with you. Can you talk about the courtroom scene and the sentencing of these sheriff’s deputies and police officers for what they did?

MALIK SHABAZZ: Good morning to the Democracy Now! audience and Ms. Goodman.

The scene inside of this courtroom in the United States district court for the sentencing of the Goon Squad was absolutely incredible. And you wouldn’t believe it if it was a movie. I mean, to see the big, bad, intimidating, murderous Goon Squad, to see all of them there, to see all of them in court, crying tears out of their eyes and begging the judge, begging Eddie and Michael, in this packed room, was absolutely incredible. But it was well deserved, because so many other families and victims have had to shed those tears and go to jail for a long time behind their crimes and lies. I mean, Amy, it was absolutely incredible. And never have we seen this many police officers sentenced to this kind of time in one week. And it was awesome.

AMY GOODMAN: Malik Shabazz, talk about how this self-described Goon Squad operated.

MALIK SHABAZZ: OK. Well, they operate worse than criminals. I mean, they handcuff people, like they did to Eddie. When they handcuff, they don’t use warrants. They beat, they tase, they take their private parts out of their pants on another victim. They used dildos on Eddie and Michael, at least attempted to use them on Eddie and Michael. They waterboard, like U.S. troops did in Iraq. They put guns to heads, guns in mouths. They shoot in mouths. I mean, they are — everything you have ever heard that police may do, they did. They throw down guns. They carry throw-down guns. They plant guns. They steal videotapes.

And this is why they have received the longest and strongest sentences for any police brutality case in the history of the United States of America, and even the world. This week, the 132 years given to the Goon Squad defendants represent the longest criminal sentences ever given out, collectively and individually, to police officers in the history of the United States of America. And they deserve every day and hour of it.

AMY GOODMAN: Eddie Terrell Parker, your feelings in the courtroom, after having been so seriously brutalized and tortured, to see these officers put away for years?

EDDIE TERRELL PARKER: It was a moment in history. I mean, it was satisfying. I enjoyed every second of sitting and watching it all, you know, come to reality.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Michael Jenkins’ mother, Mary Jenkins, who earlier in the week spoke outside the federal courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi.

MARY JENKINS: When I first found out that my son was shot, and that he was shot in the mouth, I was almost certain that he was dead. I called Rankin County, and at first they wouldn’t let me speak with anyone. They said they were in a meeting. And when I finally spoke with someone, I asked him if my son was alive. And he said, “As far as I know.” I said, “When can I see him?” He said, “When we let you see him.” This is a crying mother on the phone trying to inquire about her son. He said, “Michael is our property.” That’s what that deputy told me on the phone. My son’s shot in the mouth, and he’s telling me that Michael is their property.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Mary Jenkins, Michael Corey Jenkins’ mother. Malik Shabazz, will Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker also civilly sue for — not only personally these men, but, clearly, one of the things that their lawyers argued, the lawyers for the sheriff’s deputies and the officers, is that there was this permissive atmosphere that allowed them to operate in this way. Will they be suing the state or the city?

MALIK SHABAZZ: No, we are suing Rankin County and its Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Bryan Bailey, who was supposed to be running a department that supervised and monitored its officers. Unfortunately, during the sentencing hearings, it came out that Brett McAlpin, who is the chief investigative officer, which is similar to internal affairs — the criminals ran the department in Rankin. And that’s why they are facing a very large civil judgment and civil trial in this case. This is a pattern and practice of the Rankin County Police Department to routinely ignore constitutional rights violations.

I want to say one thing, and then I want you to hear from Mississippi attorney Trent Walker. He’s with me. He’s from Rankin. But Eddie Terrell Parker gave the most powerful victim’s testimony in these six days — I mean, these three days of sentencing these six defendants. He was very powerful. Mr. Mel Jenkins, Michael Jenkins’ father, was very influential in these hearings. But I would like you to hear a further answer on your question from Mississippi attorney Trent Walker, who is from Rankin County. Here he is.

TRENT WALKER: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Hi, Trent Walker.

TRENT WALKER: Hello.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can — go ahead. If you can talk about the significance of what’s happened? And does this open up hundreds of cases, going back decades?

TRENT WALKER: It should open up hundreds of cases, going back decades, anything that these six have touched, in point of fact, given the testimony that they themselves gave. And they used terms like there was a “culture of violence.” More than one of them said that, and that violence and brutality was expected for you to work on the night shift, which they did not refer to as the night shift. They talked about it as the “Goon Squad shift.” And so, yes, anything that they touched should go back, be reexamined, and really, just as a matter of course, overturn, because when you find that they’re willing to plant evidence and falsify reports — you know, they had Michael Jenkins charged with aggravated assault on a police officer and with possession of drugs. Michael could have been sentenced to up to 38 years in prison. And as a criminal law practitioner in Rankin County, I can tell you, he would not have been slapped on the wrist, and he would have served many years in prison for those charges that they falsified and put on him.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to U.S. Attorney Darren LaMarca speaking last year, announcing the federal charges against the former officers for the attack.

DARREN LAMARCA: These defendants committed heinous acts of violence against handcuffed victims when they terrorized under color of law. As reflected in the informations unsealed today, these men sexually abused their victims, repeatedly tased them, tortured them, all under the authority of the badge, which they disgraced. … But not only did they brazenly commit these acts, but after inflicting serious bodily injury by firing a shot through one of the victims’ mouths, they left him lying in a pool of blood, gathered on the porch of the house to discuss how to cover it up. What indifference. What disregard for life.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I’m wondering if either Trent Walker or Malik Shabazz can talk about the state charges, also federal charges, what this means. We’re talking about officers sentenced not only for the attack that we’re describing today on Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker, but for two weeks before, when they barged into someone’s home. I think this was Dedmon. And how has he been described? The judge said he committed the most “shocking, brutal and cruel acts imaginable.” Attorney Shabazz, you’ve described Dedmon as “oppressive” and “sick.” Talk about these acts that you know about that they did, that they were sentenced for in addition to the case of Michael and Eddie.

MALIK SHABAZZ: Well, about a month before, they had targeted a person named [Alan] Schmidt. And [Alan] Schmidt allegedly had offended Dedmon because he had allegedly stolen something from one of Dedmon’s friends. So, the Goon Squad gangsters, they had his tag, and they had the tag tracers, and they had an order out. They had an order out that if they found him driving anywhere, without any probable cause to stop him, that they were going to stop him and deal with him.

They found him one night. They called Dedmon, who came, off duty, on duty. And then Dedmon, who was on this night shift — now, I want to remind you that according to the sentencing hearings, you could not work the night shift in Rankin County Sheriff’s Department without being a part of the Goon Squad. And overall, you could not rise or be promoted into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department without participating in violence and being violent at night with the Goon Squad. And every one of the defendants said that they were doing OK in their careers until they were inducted into this gang called the Goon Squad. OK?

So, Dedmon himself — it’s so much sickness here. But any officer who you see that will whip out his private parts and attempt to put it in the mouth of a defendant —

TRENT WALKER: On the side of the interstate.

MALIK SHABAZZ: — on the side of the road, take his gun out, shoot it by the side of his head to make him believe he’s going to be killed, pull his pants down while handcuffed — this came out in court — pulled the man’s pants down while handcuffed, grabbed his genitals, told him how — the size of his genitals, then dry humped him. I say that it came out in court that Dedmon dry humped the man after they took him to a private house in another jurisdiction. I mean, you wouldn’t believe it if you saw it in a movie, but I’m imagining it will be that one day. But, you know, in Mississippi —

AMY GOODMAN: Well —

MALIK SHABAZZ: I must give — I’ve got to say this. We have a Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, that is headed by a Black woman, and Kristen Clarke takes her job seriously. And her Southern Division attorneys have pursued and made history in this area. And Judge Thomas Lee — they thought that Judge Thomas Lee down here in Mississippi would not do justice. And, oh, how he has set a standard and put police officers on notice all over America that if you do the crime, you’re going to do the time, just like anybody else.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I just want to say, Eddie Terrell Parker, you and Michael Corey Jenkins, amazingly brave in coming forward and describing what happened to you, which seems to have broken open all of these investigations right now. I want to thank civil rights attorney Malik Shabazz and Trent Walker with Black Lawyers for Justice and Eddie Parker, who was tortured by the Goon Squad. Thank you so much, joining us from Jackson, Mississippi.

And that does it for our show. Very happy belated birthday to Tami Woronoff. I’m Amy Goodman. Our website is democracynow.org. Thanks so much for joining us.

On the 59th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, two former security guards are speaking out for the first time about how they were falsely arrested by the New York Police Department as part of a conspiracy to remove his protection before he was killed. We hear from Khaleel Sayyed, 81, who says he was detained on trumped-up charges just days before Malcolm X was fatally shot, and we speak with Ben Crump and Flint Taylor, two civil rights attorneys who are working with the family. They are calling on New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer, to support the release of key evidence in the case. We are “trying to peel back the layers to finally, after 59 years, get some measure of justice for Malcolm X’s family,” says Crump. Taylor also places the assassination in the context of police and the FBI targeting Black civil rights leaders through COINTELPRO, such as Fred Hampton, which he helped expose in a landmark case in Chicago.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: It was 59 years ago this week that civil rights leader Malcolm X was assassinated, February 21st, 1965, as he stood at the podium before a crowd here in New York in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. His wife, Betty Shabazz, pregnant with twins, and his four daughters were in the ballroom looking on. As Malcolm began speaking, a man shouted, accusing another of picking his pocket, creating a disturbance. A smoke bomb was thrown. Amidst the confusion, three gunmen at the front of the hall opened fire. Malcolm was hit 17 times in the ensuing hail of bullets. He died on the stage as chaos erupted.

On Wednesday night, at what is now the Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz Center in Washington Heights, Malcolm’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz recalled that horrifying day.

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: My parents’ young lives were filled with joys, and they were filled with challenges. And one week before my father’s assassination, our family home was targeted. A firebomb was thrown into the nursery where my sisters and I slept as babies. History records that we escaped unharmed. Yet, a mere seven days later, my family witnessed the unimaginable. Our father was gunned down as he prepared to speak right here in that location. My pregnant mother placed her body over my three sisters and me to protect us from gunfire and to shield us from the terror before our eyes.

AMY GOODMAN: Malcolm X’s daughter Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, speaking last night at the former Audubon Ballroom, now the Malcolm and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center, during a commemoration marking the 59th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. Malcolm X often began his speeches, including the one that was cut short by that hail of bullets, by addressing everyone in the room. This a speech he gave in 1964 at the Audubon Ballroom.

MALCOLM X: As-salamu alaykum. Mr. Moderator, our distinguished guests, brothers and sisters, our friends and our enemies, everybody who’s here.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, 59 years after Malcolm X’s assassination this week, two former members of his security team have come forward for the first time to reveal details of their entrapment and imprisonment by New York police just days before he was killed. Yesterday, one of the two men and family members of Malcolm X appeared at a press conference. This is 81-year-old Khaleel Sultarn Sayyed.

KHALEEL SULTARN SAYYED: From its creation in 1964 to 1965, I attended public events organized by the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the OAAU, founded by el-Hajj Malik Shabazz, Malcolm X. It was widely known by my acquaintances that I had deep fondness for Malcolm X, as I spoke frequently with respect for Malcolm X, and I always made an effort to attend his speeches.

In or about January 1965, I attended public events — I’m sorry. On or about January 1965, I was introduced to Raymond A. Wood. I only interacted with Wood on approximately two occasions. Robert Collier, a new acquaintance, told me that he wanted to introduce me to his friend, who had some ideas. This friend was Raymond Wood. When Collier introduced me to Wood, I had only known Collier for two or three months. Collier would invite — also invited Walter Bowe to attend. Since Wood was undercover, I had no idea he worked for law enforcement. I later found out Wood was an undercover police agent — or, I’m sorry, Wood was an undercover police officer from the New York City Police Department in the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations.

The idea Wood introduced was a conspiracy to destroy national monuments, specifically the Statue of Liberty. Those at the meeting laughed, so I assumed Wood was not serious about this idea. I said very little at the meeting. In the weeks leading up to my wrongful arrest and incarceration, I never heard the idea again.

I was asked by a close follower of Malcolm X to serve as security at Malcolm X’s home after it was firebombed on February 14th, 1965. I was offered this opportunity because it was widely known that I respected Malcolm X and was interested in the OAAU. It was a small group of individuals who were asked to serve as security for Malcolm X’s home, only two or three individuals per shift. I would always have made myself available to serve as security for Malcolm X, as I had — I would always have made myself available to serve as Malcolm X’s security, had I not been wrongfully arrested. It was widely known that Malcolm X’s life was frequently in danger and under constant threat.

On or about February 16, 1965, five days before Malcolm X’s assassination, I was detained and arrested by the New York City Police Department related to the Wood’s conspiracy. I was shocked to hear the New York Police Department accusing me of conspiracy to destroy the Statue of Liberty. I lost 18 months of my young life for a crime I did not commit. I was only 22 years old at the time of my arrest. I spent four years as a student at Howard University working toward a degree in electrical engineering. I was helping my father during — I was helping my father in his store during a gap year in my studies, when I was arrested. As a result my detention, I never graduated from Howard University.

I believe I was detained in this conspiracy by the NYPD, BOSSI and FBI in order to ensure Malcolm X’s planned assassination would be successful. Had I not been arrested, I would have attended his speech and could have served as part of his security detail.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was 81-year-old Khaleel Sultarn Sayyed, speaking Wednesday alongside our next two guests, who are fighting for justice for Malcolm X’s family to expose the depth of the government’s involvement in the assassination of the civil rights icon, both the NYPD and the FBI. We’re joined now by Ben Crump, civil rights attorney, and Flint Taylor, lawyer and co-founder of the People’s Law Office in Chicago.

We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! Ben Crump, let’s begin with you. Can you put that testimony in context? I was there last year for the 58th anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination, when you also held a news conference revealing new information. Talk about this year and the significance of what these two men had to say.

BENJAMIN CRUMP: Thank you so much, Amy.

It is quite significant when you consider last year Mustafa Hassan, who was shown in photographs in The New York Times was present in the Audubon theater the day Malcolm X was assassinated — in fact, he was the one who was seen grabbing one of the assailants as he tries to escape after shooting Malcolm X. And his testimony was very riveting, because he said there was no presence of uniformed New York police officers, and they came up after all the chaos after Malcolm had been shot, and the first thing he heard them say, “Is he with us? Is he one of us?” as if even NYPD knew there were undercover police officers in the Audubon theater that day, and they didn’t know what they had done in the theater that day.

And now this year, we have two additional witnesses, who have never before spoken, come and offer new evidence. These were members of Malcolm X’s security team: Walter Bowe, who is now 93 years old, who was a charter member of the OAAU with Malcolm X, as well as Khaleel Sayyed, who we just heard from. And both of these individuals were framed by Ray Wood, who, unbeknownst to them, was an undercover police officer working with BOSSI and the FBI. And he —

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what BOSSI is.

BENJAMIN CRUMP: It’s the Bureau of Special Services, that was specifically targeted to infiltrate Black organizations. They infiltrated the Black Panthers, CORE, as well as Malcolm X’s organization and the Nation of Islam there in the city of New York. They were an arm, if you would have, like a little brother to the FBI there in New York. And so, what they were doing, we believe, was carrying out the deeds at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover at the very top.

And these young men, just as other individuals have been wrongfully convicted to cover up for the conspiracy to assassinate Malcolm X, they were arrested five days before Malcolm X was assassinated. They believe that their arrests had everything to do with Ray Wood and BOSSI and the FBI trying to be complicit, if you would, in Malcolm X’s assassination. And so, that’s why attorney Flint Taylor and I and Ray Hamlin and our legal team are trying to peel back the layers to finally, after 59 years, get some measure of justice for Malcolm X’s family.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Ben Crump, could you explain what was the pretext for their arrests? Can you talk about the destroy the Statue of Liberty conspiracy?

BENJAMIN CRUMP: Absolutely. So, this wasn’t the only time we saw the workings of Raymond Wood, this undercover New York police officer. He also used this to have the members of the Panther 21. Afeni Shakur, Tupac Shakur’s mother, was a member of the Panther 21. And they were all arrested under this pretense that they were endeavoring to bomb United States monuments — namely, the Statue of Liberty. Well, that’s the same exact thing that they said about Khaleel Sayyed and Walter Bowe, Malcolm X’s security members. They said that they were out to bomb the Statue of Liberty. I mean, you would think that they could come up with something new. But all of these Black self-determination organizations, they would infiltrate them and try to say, “Oh, they were conspiring to bomb the Statue of Liberty, so we have to arrest them.” And so, that’s exactly what they did to Panther 21, and it’s exactly what they did to Malcolm X’s security detail. They came up with a bogus theory and had them convicted of crimes that was orchestrated by undercover police officers.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Ben Crump, can you talk about the man who was in the Audubon Ballroom with a long gun under his trench coat, the one who was set free?

BENJAMIN CRUMP: Certainly. As attorney Flint Taylor from the People’s Law Office in Chicago, who has joined our legal team to get justice for Malcolm X’s family, articulated, Bradley, this individual, who we know from the files that have been revealed, had a shotgun and was one of the killers of Malcolm X, yet he was not arrested. He was able to leave the Audubon Ballroom free. And they arrested two innocent people, we believe, to cover up for those individuals who they knew were responsible for Malcolm X’s death.

And this Bradley fellow was then, four years later, arrested for a bank robbery, he and his accomplice. His accomplice was in prison for 25 years, but yet Bradley was allowed to escape — walk away out the jail scot-free. And so, you know that they have something connected with this Bradley character, if he continues to commit major crimes, federal crimes, and yet the government lets him walk scot-free, as if he has something that they are connected, to say that he will have no culpability for his dastardly deeds.

And that’s why we want these files. We want these files to see what connections, to see who were those undercover agents that were in the Audubon Ballroom the day Malcolm X was assassinated. And the reality is this here. It’s 59 years later. Who are they trying to protect? What person’s life will be put in danger 59 years later? They continue to offer us excuse after excuse after excuse every time we get FOIAs for the information. They even went so far as to tell us that one of the reasons they can’t give us the information that we request on the surveillance of Malcolm X and the documentation that they have on Malcolm X is because Malcolm X is potentially still alive.

AMY GOODMAN: Is potentially still alive? Let’s bring Flint Taylor in right now. You stood there in the Audubon Ballroom, the site where Malcolm X was gunned down 59 years ago this week, yesterday with the family of Malcolm X, with Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, with Ben Crump. But you’re actually based in Chicago. And if you can talk about why it is possible, almost 60 years later, all of these documents do not become public, and the experience you have back in Chicago trying to get information on another leader, the Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, when they were gunned down in 1969?

FLINT TAYLOR: Good morning. Thank you for having me on.

Yes, it was a very powerful experience standing there, for the first time for me, in that ballroom. And as you may know, I stood in the blood of Fred Hampton the morning that he was assassinated 55 years ago. And, of course, that had a similarly powerful effect on me and the people in the People’s Law Office at that time. And that started us on a 13-year battle to find out the truth and to change the narrative of what happened to Fred Hampton, the young, 21-year-old, very articulate, very powerful, very charismatic leader, young Black Panther leader.

And, of course, at first, they talked about it as a shootout. And as we got into the litigation and as the community raised the case in the public eye over years, we were able to fight to get evidence that was covered up, by the FBI predominantly, that there was this COINTELPRO program, Counterintelligence Program, a super-secret program that was targeting the Black Panthers, attempting to destroy the Black Panthers at that time — it came from Hoover in Washington — and that it also claimed as part of its program dealing with what they call messiahs, who would bring together and lead the Black liberation movement. And they cited to Malcolm X as one of those messiahs.

So, there’s evidence that is starting to come out about Malcolm X. That piece existed back then. But what’s coming out now, as attorney Crump has mentioned, is this file on William Bradley, an FBI file, and a statement straight from Hoover that said there were nine informants, FBI informants, in the ballroom, and that at all costs they should not let those informants be known, and at all costs not let it be known what they might have been doing, and whether they were working, of course, for COINTELPRO, because we know that what the FBI was doing was trying to foment the split between the Nation of Islam and Malcolm and his organization. So, you put this evidence together, and you demand more evidence about Bradley, about those informants, about BOSSI’s role. And BOSSI seems to be kind of a junior FBI COINTELPRO program in New York. I shouldn’t say “seems to be,” but was. And so, that’s where we stand.

And that’s one of the reasons that attorney Crump asked me and my office to come in, because we fought this case, similar case, an assassination case, that had in it the FBI covered up the Chicago police informants. Of course, the main informant in our case in Chicago was William O’Neal, who set up the assassination of Fred Hampton. So those same questions come up here. And after Cyrus Vance revealed the tip of the iceberg with regard to the FBI files that had been suppressed and the BOSSI files that had been destroyed, that’s when attorney Crump and, of course, the family and now the People’s Law Office have become involved.

And we feel that it’s not only a civil case for justice, but that it’s a human rights case. And it’s not only a case that has significance in New York, not only significance nationally, but it has international significance. And I think attorney Crump and I are both calling on the mayor of the city of New York and the federal government for transparency, for giving us these files and for, in fact, all these years later, making reparations. And that’s what it is. It’s reparations, not unlike the reparations that we fought for and obtained in Chicago for the survivors of police torture. It’s reparations to the family. It’s reparations to the community of New York and nationally, in terms of justice and in terms of compensation.

AMY GOODMAN: Ben Crump, let’s end with you. Flint just mentioned the mayor of New York, right? Eric Adams is a former police officer. Have you spoken with him? Is he joining the call for the documents, both in BOSSI and the New York Police Department and the FBI, to be opened, more than a half a century after Malcolm X’s assassination?

BENJAMIN CRUMP: At this time, we are unaware if he will join us in that call for transparency. I know that in past conversations, Ilyasah and myself have felt assured that New York Police Department would — I’m sorry, the city leadership in New York would do the right thing here and help Malcolm X’s family finally get justice. Now, with attorney Flint Taylor and I and our legal team, we have put the ball squarely in their court to be able to tell us if they’re going to be on the right side of history 59 years later. Will they give up their records?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ben Crump, we’re going to leave it there. We’re going to ask you to stay for a few minutes so we can ask about the Houston police shooting of Eboni Pouncy, an amazing story, with video just revealed, and we’ll post it at democracynow.org. Ben Crump, civil rights attorney. Flint Taylor, co-founder of People’s Law Office of Chicago. To see all our coverage of the Malcolm X assassination, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks for joining us.

The shooting in Kansas City on Wednesday came on the sixth anniversary of the Parkland, Florida, school massacre that left 17 dead and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. To mark the anniversary, gun control advocates have launched a project called “The Shotline,” which calls lawmakers with AI-generated audio messages that feature the voices of gun violence victims, pushing them to pass stricter gun control laws and prevent future tragedies. One of the victims featured is Parkland student Joaquin Oliver, who was just 17 years old when he was killed. We speak to Joaquin’s father, Manuel Oliver, a gun reform activist who worked on the “Shotline” project. He describes the project as the “result of more than six years being ignored” while “begging these politicians to pass laws,” and reacts to the news of the Super Bowl parade shooting in Kansas City.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

The mass shooting in Kansas City came on the sixth anniversary of the Parkland, Florida, school massacre, when a 19-year-old gunman shot dead 17 people, injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. To mark the anniversary, gun control advocates traveled to Washington to play for lawmakers a series of AI-generated audio messages featuring the voices of students killed in Parkland and other gun violence victims. This is an AI-generated message from Joaquin Oliver, who was shot dead in Parkland at the age of 17.

AI-GENERATED VOICE OF JOAQUIN OLIVER: Hello. I am Joaquin Oliver. Six years ago, I was a senior at Parkland. Many students and teachers were murdered on Valentine’s Day that year by a person using an AR-15. But you don’t care. You never did. It’s been six years, and you’ve done nothing — not a thing — to stop all the shootings that have continued to happen since. The thing is, I died that day in Parkland. My body was destroyed by a weapon of war. I’m back today because my parents used AI to recreate my voice to call you. Other victims like me will be calling, too, again and again, to demand action. How many calls will it take for you to care? How many dead voices will you hear before you finally listen? Every day your inaction creates more voices. If you fail to act now, we’ll find someone who will.

AMY GOODMAN: The AI-generated audio appears on a new website called “The Shotline,” which aims to flood the congressional hotline with the AI-resurrected voices of murdered kids. On Wednesday, Joaquin Oliver’s parents, Manny and Patricia, were set to appear on CNN to talk about their new project, when news broke about the shooting in Kansas City.

BRIANNA KEILAR: We had an entirely different interview that we were going to do here, just to talk about some of the work that you guys are doing on Capitol Hill trying to bring about awareness and change. And you see this happening as you were here visiting Washington. What is on your mind as you’re watching this?

MANUEL OLIVER: I’m not surprised at all. It’s like, literally, “We interrupt this interview because we have another mass shooting going on.” Then you might be interrupting that one because it was going to be another one. So it never stops.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Manuel Oliver, the father of Joaquin, one of 17 people killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Manny is the co-founder of the gun reform group Change the Ref. His new project is “The Shotline.” He’s joining us today from Lansing, Michigan, where he’s set to perform his one-person show called Guac.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Manny, once again, as we do so many times, offering you our condolences not only on the death of your son six years ago, Guac, but on the gun violence deaths of so many in this country. So, they interrupted your Shotline presentation on CNN to bring you yet another mass shooting that you had to respond to. Can you take it from there? And talk about the project you were in D.C. to present.

MANUEL OLIVER: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me here.

Absolutely, that’s exactly what happened. We’ve reached a point where we’re going to fight about dates. Like, I thought February 14th will be the day that we honor the victims from Parkland, but I can tell you now that next year a lot of people will be honoring what happened in Kansas City. And that’s the best way for America to forget about a shooting, a mass shooting. Having a new one will make everybody ignore the other one. That’s sad, but it’s true. And shame on us on that.

We were in D.C. launching The Shotline. And The Shotline is basically the result of more than six years being ignored. My voice has been out there, Patricia’s voice and thousands and millions of voices have been, knocking doors and trying to convince, begging these politicians to pass laws and to prioritize life over guns. And that did not work, or hasn’t worked enough. So we’re bringing the voices of the ones that we lost, of our loved ones. And with the technology that we have today, we can do that. So now we have an army of dead people, people that was killed and murdered by the blessing of our system on the gun manufacturers, asking for change. So far, believe it or not, we have close to 40,000 calls made, and we just started a couple of days ago. So, when you tell me, “Call your representative. If you want to see change, call your representative,” that is exactly what we’re doing. But I don’t want to call him. I want Joaquin to call my representative, and see if that way we can find some change.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you called it “Shotline” because?

MANUEL OLIVER: Well, for obvious reasons. Because people has been shot. In Joaquin’s case, he got shot four times with an AR-15 inside his school. But you see other things. Like, if you find this uncomfortable, which is something that we heard already, well, I think that you don’t know what uncomfortable means. I can tell you about feeling uncomfortable. When they let you know that your son, your loved one, was shot and you won’t be able to see him anymore, you won’t be able to watch the Super Bowl with him, for example, anymore, forever, that’s being uncomfortable. So, this is something that involves all of us. I think we should all support this. And amazingly — and this was kind of predictable — we have already more than 40 submissions from families that want their loved one’s voice to be part of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Manny, you’re in Lansing to perform a one-person show called Guac. As we wrap up, tell us about this, and from Lansing to New York.

MANUEL OLIVER: This is an amazing project, part of a very bad situation and terrible, painful, traveling around the country. But we’re here. We have the one-man show. And it’s a story about Joaquin. You have to remember that Joaquin was here for 17 wonderful years. So I don’t want people to remember — that would be unfair — to remember Joaquin as the kid that died on February 14. This is not honoring Joaquin at all. So, this is a roller coaster of emotions. People laugh. People cry. And people engage with what we’re doing. Today we’re part of an event. It’s the Latinx Film Festival here. And the show will be on Saturday, the 17th. And I’m so happy. It’s probably my favorite project, because I can talk about my son, no interruptions, theater treatment, you know? Turn your phones off and just listen how beautiful and amazing my son still is.

AMY GOODMAN: Manuel Oliver, we want to thank you so much for being with us, co-founder of the gun reform group Change the Ref and the new project, The Shotline. He’s father of Joaquin, Guac, one of 17 people killed six years ago, in 2018, in Parkland, Florida.

We speak with world-renowned climate scientist Michael Mann, who was just awarded more than $1 million in a defamation lawsuit against two right-wing critics who smeared his work connecting fossil fuels to rising global temperatures. He joins us to discuss the importance of resisting climate denialism through free scientific inquiry and expression. “We all pay the price when scientists don’t feel empowered to speak out about the implications of their science,” says Mann. Mann says he hopes his legal win will protect others who have been silenced by the threat of defamation so that “scientists will feel more comfortable in leaving the laboratory and speaking to the public and policymakers.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to the climate crisis. Dozens were arrested Monday outside President Biden’s campaign headquarters in Delaware as members of Sunrise Movement called on him to declare a climate emergency. Some held signs that read “Fund climate, not genocide.”

This comes as world-renowned climate scientist Michael Mann has been awarded more than a million dollars in a defamation lawsuit settled last week. Mann initially filed the case in 2012 against two right-wing critics. Rand Simberg, then with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote that, quote, “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data,” unquote. Of course, Sandusky is the convicted child molester and former football coach at Penn State University, where Mann was a professor at the time. Mark Steyn, a contributor to National Review, cited Simberg and called Mann’s research, quote, “fraudulent.” Dr. Mann said he hopes the unanimous verdict in his defamation case against the two makes it clear that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech.

He’s joining us now from Philadelphia, where he’s the presidential distinguished professor of Earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Mann, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you explain what just happened and this major victory being awarded, a million dollars, by a Washington, D.C., jury, after suing these two right-wing climate deniers?

MICHAEL MANN: Yeah. Thanks, Amy. It’s good to be with you.

You know, as you quoted me before, this is a line in the sand. It’s one thing to disagree with the findings of scientists. You know, people have the right to do that. It’s one thing to criticize scientists. And within the scientific community, good-faith criticism, skepticism is a good thing. But what’s not allowed, what you can’t do, is make false allegations about scientists in an effort, of course, to promote an agenda, an agenda in this case of climate change denialism. And this is something that we’ve encountered for decades, efforts by the fossil fuel industry and their hired guns to attack and attempt to discredit scientists, to prevent meaningful action on climate. And so, this is a line in the sand.

And I think it goes beyond climate science. I think it also applies to other areas, public health science. Today we see bad-faith attacks on public health scientists like Anthony Fauci, my good friend Peter Hotez. That is not protected speech. You can’t engage in false and defamatory attacks on scientists. And so, I like to think that this will create some space now, that scientists will feel more comfortable in leaving the laboratory and speaking to the public and policymakers about their science and about the implications of their science, knowing that there are some basic protections.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you: In your conversations with fellow scientists, what is the mood or the sense of how these attacks are affecting their ability to do their work?

MICHAEL MANN: Well, you know, especially young scientists, what I fear is young scientists see these very visible attacks, these denunciations of their fellow scientists in the public sphere, and that sort of chills the public discourse. It makes them basically afraid to speak out and to speak up. And so, I do think that these attacks have had a chilling effect. And that was their intended impact. Of course, the climate change disinformation machine has used vilification as a way to intimidate scientists, to — again, to sort of — you know, to create fear that they’ll be attacked if they speak out about the implications of their science. That’s been going on for far too long. It’s now infected our entire body politic, where today misinformation and disinformation runs rampant. And when it comes to the great challenges we face, whether it be climate change or the public health threat of pandemics like COVID-19, it is absolutely essential that scientists feel free to speak to the public and to policymakers about these mounting threats. And I hope, once again, that this decision will create a little bit more space now for my fellow scientists to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: And do you see your case setting precedent for political leaders who attack climate science — to attack climate science? And how badly were you injured? I mean, this horror of comparing you to this known molester who destroyed so many young men’s lives at Penn State.

MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, well, you know, I was certainly — there was an emotional toll that it took on me, for certain. You know, it didn’t prevent me from speaking out about the climate crisis. I have embraced that opportunity. My recent book, Our Fragile Moment, is my latest attempt to communicate the threat of climate change to the public and to policymakers. I’ve been able to do that. But at the same time, it’s taken an emotional toll and, once again, has sort of created this chilling effect, where other scientists, seeing me attacked in this way, have probably backed off and have shied away from the spotlight. And we all pay the price when scientists don’t feel empowered to speak out about the implications of their science.

As the 2024 election heats up, the Poor People’s Campaign has launched a 40-week effort aimed at mobilizing the voting power of some 15 million poor and low-wage voters across the United States ahead of the November election. The campaign’s first major coordinated actions are set to occur outside 30 statehouses on March 2, just days before Super Tuesday. “Statehouses are where the political insurrections are taking place,” says Bishop William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. The “enormous undertaking” is in response to “an enormous economic and moral problem” of inequality in the United States, he notes, and poor and low-wage workers have the voting power to affect the 2024 elections in every single state in the country. We also speak with economist Michael Zweig, who is a member of the New York State Coordinating Committee of the Poor People’s Campaign. His new book on inequality is Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

As the 2024 election heats up, the Poor People’s Campaign announced this month it plans to catalyze the voting power of poor and low-wage workers across the United States. As part of a 40-week operation, thousands of volunteers are working to mobilize 15 million voters, with the first major coordinated actions taking place outside 30 statehouses on March 2nd, three days before Super Tuesday. The voting bloc, described as “the sleeping giant,” could potentially determine the outcome of the elections. Activists say nearly half of U.S. voters are living in poverty or low-wage households.

This is Alabama activist Linda Burns, a former Amazon worker, speaking at a news conference with the Poor People’s Campaign last week.

LINDA BURNS: A hundred eighty dollars a week. One hundred eighty dollars a week. … Amazon let me go because I was helping to organize the union. We didn’t get the union in Alabama. But I’m going to do everything in my power. I’m going to stand in solidarity.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now in Durham, North Carolina, by Bishop William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. Here in New York, we’re joined by Michael Zweig, founding director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life, professor emeritus of economics at State University of New York, Stony Brook, where he received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. His new book is called Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism. Bishop Barber wrote the book’s introduction.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Bishop Barber, this is an enormous undertaking. As the talking heads in the corporate media networks talk about the strength of the economy and how it’s only getting better, talk about what you’re seeing on the ground and how people are organizing.

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, Amy and Michael, we have to have an enormous undertaking, because we have an enormous economic and moral problem. In 2019, before COVID, we had 140 million poor and low-wage, low-wealth brothers and sisters in this country, 43% of the adult population, going into COVID. Coming out of COVID, we now have 135 million. It went down some to about 112 million, then it went back up. It went down because of investments that were made during COVID, but they were not continued. And poverty right now is the fourth-leading cause of death. Over 800 people are dying every day from poverty and low wages. On the ground, people are hurting, people who make less than $15 an hour. We have not had a pay raise, Amy, since 2009. There are 52 million people who make less than a living wage of $15 an hour. We had 58 senators during COVID to vote no on raising the wages of essential workers. We’ve had — even during COVID, we still have 87 million people who are uninsured or underinsured.

And so, we know now there is not a state in this country where, if 30%, 20 to 30%, of poor and low-wage workers who are eligible to vote, that have been infrequent, would vote, that they could not change the outcome of the election. In some states, Amy, you have a situation where you have almost a million poor and low-wage voters who did not vote in the last two elections, and the election was only won, at large, by 10,000 votes or 40,000 votes or 100,000 votes. Poor and low-wage people are saying, “We must move this power.”

So, on March the 2nd, we’re having a launching. It’s not just a march. It’s a launching of a 42-week campaign to mobilize 15 million poor and low-wage voters. We’re going to raise up people in every state that will be trained in every form of voter mobilization, from technology to the old way of just getting and walking on the turf and knocking on doors, to touch these voters, because right now the democracy could literally be changed and saved by the power of poor and low-wage workers. But it’s not just holding onto democracy. We are saying, “What kind of democracy do you want?” We want one with living wages. We want one that ends poverty as the fourth-leading cause of death. We want full funding of public education. We want women’s rights. We want to stop deregulation of guns. We are uniting around those things.

And why statehouses, Amy? Because statehouses are where the political insurrections are taking place. Everything that we have on our flyer for March 2nd, you can either stop or start in a statehouse. We’re challenging both sides of the aisle. And then, on June 15th, we’re coming to challenge the Congress, to launch the summer initiative of this massive mobilization on June 15th. But we must have a massive movement, because we have a massive moral and economic problem.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Michael Zweig into this conversation. You’re on the New York State Coordinating Committee of the Poor People’s Campaign, and you’ve written this book, Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism. Can you talk about the fact that, well, Columbia University found only 46% of voters with household incomes less than twice the federal poverty rate cast a vote in 2016, as compared to 68% turnout rate for voters who had a household income more than twice the poverty line? This leads politicians to ignore whole swaths of people. And what you think then needs to be done, and how the Poor People’s Campaign is addressing this, Michael?

MICHAEL ZWEIG: Well, my book — thank you, Amy, for having me here today. And, Bishop Barber, good to be with you.

The task, I think, is to understand, first of all, why it is that we have these outrages that cause poverty and that cause the women of this country to lose their agency and lose their right to healthcare, that threaten the environment — all these issues that are brought together and that have a special effect on poor and low-wage workers. These are not just things that just happen or fall out of the sky. They come from the functioning of a capitalist system, in particular, the capitalist system in the United States, sort of capitalism with U.S. characteristics. I think that we need to, as we build our movements, build them with an understanding of what it is that we’re dealing with and what we have to confront in order to address the inequalities, in order to address the injustices that the Poor People’s Campaign is organized to do, is bring together what Bishop Barber has often called a fusion movement, that isn’t just one piece of the puzzle, but all of those things brought together.

And I think that this book, Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism, is a resource to try to get that understanding and to bring it forward, so that we can all be marching together, no matter what our particular movement and particular concern is, that we all echo each other, we all come together in one mighty force. And that is both a political question of mobilization, but it’s also an intellectual question, a question of analysis and political education. And what this book is trying to do is to be a resource for all of that organizing and mobilizing that’s going on.

AMY GOODMAN: We just heard a low-wage worker, an Amazon worker, talking about why it’s so important to organize, Michael Zweig. In what ways can the labor movement leverage collective bargaining and advocacy efforts against corporate entities like Amazon? Also talk about the significance of the United Auto Workers and what they did in their strike, that led to so much advancement.

MICHAEL ZWEIG: The UAW strike, the autoworkers’ strike, under the leadership of Shawn Fain, was really a watershed moment, I think, in the current labor scene and the current political climate in the country. And I say that because it was, for the first time, a strike that attacked all three major U.S. automakers simultaneously, and it struck each one selectively. And it did that in a way which also brought a public message that the corporate leadership is getting 40% wage increases, 50% wage increases, they’re making millions of dollars a year, and the autoworkers are not getting any piece of that. And so, the task there was to bring forward those demands in a context that made sense to the American people, and, of course, to the autoworkers themselves.

And I think that what was also important is that Shawn Fain addressed the question as a class question. He talked about his workers as working-class people. When President Biden went to the Warren, Michigan, picket line, he talked about the workers are in the middle class, and the union makes the middle class. No, the union makes working people have a better life, and they’re still working-class people. And Shawn Fain understands that and also understands, in the history of the UAW and other parts of the labor movement, that the labor movement, the unions have an obligation to talk about the whole structure of society, to go to the root and go to the core of why it is that they have to fight every day for a better wage and for better working conditions, why it’s unacceptable to have workers paid so low that they have to get food stamps, that they have to get public assistance in order to make ends meet, and the corporations can go ahead and make billions and billions of dollars.

What Shawn Fain and what the rest of the labor movement is coming, I think, to understand is that it’s important to take on the whole range of questions that affect working people, not just at the workplace, but also in their communities. So that means hunger issues. That means issues of women’s equality. That means racial justice. That means the environment. All those questions are questions for working people to address, and to address in conjunction with those other movements that are outside the labor movement, per se, just as those other movements need to pay attention to and take strength from what the labor movement is doing. And that kind of fusion movement, which the Poor People’s Campaign is about, is what I’m trying to get across also in this book.

AMY GOODMAN: Bishop Barber —

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Amy? Amy?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: May I? Yeah, we also, though, have to stop using the language “working-class.” Poor. Poor. See part of our own struggle inside of the movement — and I say to Michael and to others — we can’t back up on the language — “poor” — because it’s not used. The poor. The poor working class. Because we don’t use that language, and we fall back into a trap of capitalism by saying “working.” We’re saying poor and low-wage workers. We’re saying workers that every day hustle hard and still live poor and low-wage.

You know, one-third of all poor folk live in the South. One of the movements that actually helped to get to UAW was when we challenged Smithfield in the South, in North Carolina, and won, brought poor, low-wage Black, white, Latinos together in a small, small — to Tar Heel, North Carolina. Nobody ever heard about it. And they said we couldn’t win. We have to go to these states, because what we say, for instance, in the South, we say those are red states, but we don’t know what color those states are, because we’ve not really mobilized. One-third of all poor people live in the South. There’s not a state in the South where if you mobilized 25% of poor and low-wage workers, that it would not change the outcome. In Florida, the percentage is under 3% of those infrequent voters. In North Carolina, it’s under 19%. In Georgia, it’s under 7%. In all over the South and all over the country — in Wisconsin, it’s less than 1%. So, we, even in our language — and we have to say “poor and low-wage workers.” There is not a state in this country we call battleground states, where the margin of victory was within 3% for the presidential election, that poor and low-wage workers don’t make up 40% of the electorate. There is not a state in this country where poor and low-wage workers don’t make up over 30% of the electorate.

This is not just about the system, but it is also about poor and low-wage people grabbing their power and understanding the power that we have not used. Remember, it was Dr. King in 1965, at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery March, who said the greatest fear of a racist aristocracy in this country would be for the masses of Negroes and the masses of poor white working folk to come together and form a voting bloc that could fundamentally deal with the economic architecture of this country. You know, I’ve just released a book called White Poverty, and it’s looking through the lies and the mythology pushed down by the Southern strategy to literally divide poor and low-wage Black and white people as a way of continuing to exacerbate the divisions of race and class. This is a power move for poor and low-wage folks, poor and low-wage folk, religious leaders and allies.

And lastly, one of the things Shawn did with UAW is he made it a moral issue. He lifted it up and said, “This is not just — it’s a class issue. It’s an issue about working folk. But it’s a moral issue.” And when he framed it that way, it actually helped more people to grab on what he was saying.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a historic case Thursday to determine if Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is eligible to remain on the ballot for the 2024 election. The justices are reviewing a decision by Colorado’s high court that found Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution makes Trump ineligible to run for office because he engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021. The Nation's justice correspondent Elie Mystal responds to the first day of proceedings, saying he was disappointed to hear both liberal and conservative justices casting doubt on the Constitution's application in this case to avoid the political ramifications of keeping Trump from office. “They decided to lock hands and ignore that because it would be too messy for the country to apply the law to Donald Trump,” says Mystal, who also explains Trump’s far-fetched plan to claim immunity from prosecution until after the presidential election, the scandal surrounding Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis during Trump’s prosecution in Georgia, and writer E. Jean Carroll’s successful defamation suit against the former president.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh, joined by Amy Goodman.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a historic case Thursday to determine if Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is eligible to stay on the ballot for the 2024 election. The justices are reviewing a decision by Colorado’s high court that found Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution makes Trump ineligible to run for office because he engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021. A ruling would come within weeks.

Before a packed courtroom, both liberal and conservative judges expressed skepticism over Colorado’s case. This is liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor [sic].

JUSTICE ELENA KAGAN: I think that the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States. In other words, you know, this question of whether a former president is disqualified, for insurrection, to be president again is — you know, just say it — it sounds awfully national to me. So whatever means there are to enforce it would suggest that they have to be federal, national means.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Meanwhile, liberal justice Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared to agree with Trump’s lawyer Jonathan Mitchell’s argument that the 14th Amendment’s disqualification provision does not apply to all insurrectionists, but only to people who swore to support the Constitution as an “officer of the United States,” which does not include the president.

JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: The first argument is we have a list of offices —

JONATHAN MITCHELL: Yes.

JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: — that a person is barred from holding, right?

JONATHAN MITCHELL: Yes.

JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: Under your theory or under the language of — and we see it begins with senator, representative, elector of —

JONATHAN MITCHELL: Elector.

JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: — president and vice president, and all other civil or military officers — offices —

JONATHAN MITCHELL: Offices under the United States.

JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: Offices under the United States.

JONATHAN MITCHELL: How it’s phrased.

JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: But the word “president” or “vice president” does not appear specifically —

JONATHAN MITCHELL: That’s right.

JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: — in that list. So, I guess I’m trying to understand: Are you giving up that argument?

JONATHAN MITCHELL: No.

JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: And if so, why?

JONATHAN MITCHELL: No, we’re not giving it up at all. You’re right: The president and the vice president are not specifically listed. But the Anderson litigants claim that they are encompassed within the meaning of the phrase “office under the United States.” And that’s —

JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: And do you agree that the framers would have put such a high and significant and important office, sort of smuggled it in through that catchall phrase?

JONATHAN MITCHELL: No, we don’t agree at all. That’s why we’re still making the argument.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That’s Trump’s lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, questioned Thursday by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. And this is conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh challenging Colorado’s attorney, Jason Murray.

JUSTICE BRETT KAVANAUGH: Last question: In trying to figure out what Section 3 means, and kind of to the extent it’s elusive language or vague language, what about the idea that we should think about democracy, think about the right of the people to elect candidates of their choice, of letting the people decide? Because your position has the effect of disenfranchising voters to a significant degree.

JASON MURRAY: This case illustrates the danger of refusing to apply Section 3 as written, because the reason we’re here is that President Trump tried to disenfranchise 80 million Americans who voted against him, and the Constitution doesn’t require that he be given another chance.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: For more on this and other cases Trump is facing, we’re joined by Elie Mystal, The Nation's justice correspondent. His new piece is headlined “The Supreme Court Is Not Going to Save Us from Donald Trump.” He's the author of Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Elie. If you could just begin by responding to yesterday’s oral arguments.

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, it was a disaster. Apparently, the Constitution does not matter, if it makes Republicans sad. The idea — and it’s so important that you guys, I think, earlier highlighted the Bolsonaro story, right? Because look at what Brazil is doing when their former president threatened their government, right? They took my man’s passport away, right? That’s not what we do here, apparently. We don’t defend ourselves, apparently.

And yesterday’s Supreme Court argument involved nine justices, three appointed by Republican presidents, but — sorry, six appointed by Republican presidents, but three appointed by Democratic presidents, kind of locking arms and deciding to ignore the Constitution, ignore the plain text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which clearly states that insurrectionists cannot run for office. They decided to lock hands and ignore that because it would be too messy for the country to apply the law to Donald Trump. That’s what happened yesterday. And it was very disappointing to listen to.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s fascinating, Elie, when you look at who Jason Murray is — right? — the lawyer for Colorado that is trying to keep Trump from the ballot as an insurrectionist. He both clerked for Elena Kagan, a liberal justice, and for Neil Gorsuch — right? — the justice from Colorado.

ELIE MYSTAL: Mm-hmm, and both Gorsuch and Kagan lit him up yesterday. Kagan was extremely concerned — the first sound that you played wasn’t Sotomayor; it was actually Kagan. And as you played, Kagan was extremely concerned with the ability of Colorado to, kind of on its own, exclude Trump from the ballot, and the knock-on effect that would have in all the different states.

The best way that I can explain the liberal position or why the liberals took the position that they did is that I would say Kagan, Jackson, Sotomayor, to some extent, they were more concerned with a red state, a Republican legislature or Republican governor kicking somebody like Joe Biden off the presidential ballot for bad-faith reasons, that they were willing to stop Colorado from kicking Trump off the ballot for good-faith reasons. And while I get that calculus as a realpolitik method, it is a problem when your legal decisions, when your legal rulings are based on what you think the bad-faith guys will do with it, right? Like, that’s a problem if the law gets reduced to, like, “Oh my god! What will Ron DeSantis do?” Like, that’s not a good way to run a country. But that is the way that we saw the liberals want to play it yesterday.

And I think the other point, Amy, that’s worth mentioning — you brought up who the lawyer for the Colorado side was. Let’s not forget who the lawyer for the Trump side was, right? Let’s not forget who Jonathan Mitchell is. He is the former Texas solicitor general who is most famous for inventing Texas’s SB 8, the bounty hunter law that allows people to pursue abortion providers in Texas, that effectively overruled Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. That’s the guy the Trump campaign dragged out to make their argument that he should stay on the ballot. And that’s the guy that apparently all nine justices found a way to agree with yesterday.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I also wanted to ask you about the line of questioning of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and the whole issue of what it means to be an officer in the 14th Amendment. And also, talk about the history of this case, why Colorado invoked it, going back to the Civil War, what it means for an insurrectionist to run for office.

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, I mean, this is the double-edged sword of Justice Jackson, right? She is fantastic, you know, amazingly smart. And she is a textualist, right? She is an originalist — a liberal version of those words. But she is the person who kind of goes toe to toe with Neil Gorsuch whenever they want to talk about the original public meaning of this or that, right? She is the one who goes right into the Oxford English Dictionary to fight Gorsuch about the definition of what “is” is, right? That’s who she is. And that’s great, most of the time, right?

But yesterday, those same — that intellectual consistency led her to what I think is a quite tortured place, where she was parsing the word “office” versus “offices,” “officer” versus “offices,” to try to find some way to not include President Trump. And problem with that is that it’s ridiculous, right? It is just ridiculous as a matter of common sense to think that the people who said that “You can’t be a senator if you raised a rebellion against the government, and you can’t be a congressperson if you raised a rebellion against the government, but president, yeah, sure, that’s fine. We don’t have a problem with it.” Like, that’s a ridiculous argument. But that’s how — that’s what she talked herself into.

And again, I think she talked herself into that, I think the liberals generally talked themselves into that, because they don’t like the political reality of what the law says. They don’t like the idea of kicking Trump off the ballot. They don’t like what that means kind of as a precedential value around the country. And so they twisted themselves into a pretzel to pretend that the law says something that it doesn’t.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Elie, I want to ask you about the long-awaited ruling this week on Trump’s claim to be immune from criminal prosecution, which you write about in your piece headlined “The D.C. Circuit Just Shredded Trump’s Immunity Claims.” “The court’s decision should put to rest the question of whether a former president is immune to prosecution. The question is whether the Supreme Court will allow that,” you wrote. So, lay out how this three-judge panel unanimously rejected Trump’s argument, and what could happen next.

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, speaking of stupid arguments, the argument that the president of the United States, once he is no longer clothed in power, is free to commit any crime he would like, without fear of prosecution, the idea that if a president of the United States commits crimes while he is in office, he is somehow immune from ever being prosecuted for those crimes, even when he is out of office, that is ridiculous. Nobody reasonable believes that. And the D.C. Circuit panel, the three-judge panel, two judges appointed by Democrats, one by a Republican, unanimously ruled that Trump was wrong on every single level of his argument. It was a total — like, what I called it was a “bench slap.” They destroyed that argument, as well they should. It’s a ridiculous argument.

But does that end the issue? No. Because, remember, folks, Trump is not trying to win with this ridiculous immunity argument. He is trying to delay with this ridiculous immunity argument. He was due to be put on trial by Judge Tanya Chutkan and prosecutor Jack Smith on March 4th. Then he started making this immunity argument. Well, then Judge Chutkan ruled that that immunity argument was wrong, because, again, it is obviously wrong. But now he got to appeal, right? So, that appeal took a month — right? — took a month for the D.C. Circuit to write it. We are now — we’ve moved — Chutkan has already moved back her March 4th trial date, right?

So, what happens next? Well, he’s going to take the D.C. ruling and appeal it to the Supreme Court. Now, again, when he gets to the Supreme Court, if the Supreme Court takes it, he will lose again, because his argument is ridiculous. And I think even after what I heard yesterday, I do not think there are five justices up there who will say that the president is immune from — that a former president is immune from prosecution. That’s just not true, right? So I don’t think they’re going to do it.

But the question is whether or not they grant the case at all and whether or not they allow him to continue to delay the start of his trial while he makes this ridiculous argument. The court doesn’t have to take the case. And if the Supreme Court does want to take the case, it doesn’t have to grant a stay. It doesn’t have to stop Judge Tanya Chutkan from moving forward with her trial. But if there are four or five conservatives willing to allow Trump to delay, willing to allow him to essentially hack the legal process to try to keep himself out of jail long enough to run for president again, then Trump will potentially be able to delay his trial into the summer, through the conventions, maybe even past the next election — which is his whole game, because the idea that he’s actually going to win on this particular argument is never in the cards for him, and he knows it, and anybody rational knows it, as well.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, this week, Donald Trump renewed his request for the judge in his Georgia election interference case to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and dismiss the indictment, saying her, quote, “egregious misconduct demands” it. Willis has acknowledged she had a romantic relationship with the prosecutor she hired on the case, Nathan Wade. You have a piece for The Nation headlined “The Fani Willis Scandal Is Bad — But It Doesn’t Change Her Case Against Trump.” Explain what you mean, Elie.

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, I don’t think Fani Willis should have done what she did, what she allegedly did, what she has admitted to even in some ways. I don’t think that’s a good look. I don’t think she should have done that, right? I think that borders on unethical. But it has nothing to do with her ability to prosecute this case and the charges that she has brought against the 19 co-conspirators who tried to defraud the people of Georgia of their votes, right? It has nothing to — like, her personal, I think, foibles have nothing to do with the prosecution of that case, where, let us not forget, three people have already pleaded guilty to the charges that she brought stop.

So, we have to understand Fani Willis as a person who has professional responsibilities and a personal life. And her personal life, I think that was a mess. But her professional responsibilities are not in any way implicated by this particular scandal. There are different kinds of ethical, moral quandaries and scandals that potentially would implicate a prosecutor’s ability to move forward with a case. This ain’t one of them. This is just a bad look, right? So the idea that you can go from this personal issue and overplay it to the point where “Now you have to dismiss the whole case, and she is racist” and — it’s ridiculous. And I don’t think a judge will go for it. But it’s a bad look. I wish she hadn’t done it.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Elie Mystal, we haven’t talked to you for a while, since the E. Jean Carroll case, which really is significant, a jury voting more than $83 million for Trump defaming E. Jean Carroll, after another civil trial found him guilty of sexually assaulting her, the judge saying, in common parlance, it was rape. But when the — just before the jury found him liable for $83 million, Trump walked out of the closing arguments. Can you just summarize that case for us and where it’s headed? Will he be paying this $83 million?

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, Trump is a bit of a baby, and he threw a tantrum when he had to pay up the money for running his mouth. Like, let’s not forget. There was an initial trial. He was found liable for defaming her. He was ordered to pay her $5 million. And then he kept defaming her, and then he kept running his mouth about her, right? And so that’s why he had the second trial, and now it’s an $83 million payment.

And I’ll tell you one thing, Amy: He has shut up about her now. He’s made a lot of tweets, a lot of all-caps anger tweets — haven’t heard her name out of his mouth since the verdict. And that’s the point. We, perhaps, finally found the price point that it takes to make Donald Trump shut up, and it’s $83 million. I hope we all remember that figure. I hope other judges put $83 million fines on him to keep his mouth shut, because, apparently, that’s what it takes.

Will he have to pay it? You know, eventually. I’m not an economist. I don’t understand the GDP of Trump Org and how exactly that works. He has to post a bond. I don’t know if he has the money. I don’t know if he’s going to fleece his, you know, MAGA supporters to send them their Social Security checks so he can pay off his legal fees. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to work, but I do know that the point was that he needed to shut up about her, and he has.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, you know, we haven’t talked to you since your debut on SNL, or was that Keenan Thompson? Let’s take a look.

BARRY GIBB: [played by Jimmy Fallon] Elie, you write for The Nation. Do you think the media is overstating the negative sentiment of the election to get views and clicks?

ELIE MYSTAL: [played by Keenan Thompson] Well, that’s an interesting question.

BARRY GIBB: Oh, is it? You say it’s interesting. You find it interesting.

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, I do.

BARRY GIBB: Yeah? Well, I find you interesting, OK? You look like if Don King ate another Don King. I will unhinge my jaw and bite your head off like a goldfish cracker!

AMY GOODMAN: So, you made it, Elie! You made it! How are you feeling today?

ELIE MYSTAL: I’m obviously a huge fan of Barry Gibb. I feel like he was done wrong by Jimmy Fallon. Look, it was a nice moment for me. And what I’ve taken from that is that whatever the heck I’m doing, it seems to be working, so I should keep working and keep writing and keep trying to explain how our Justice Department and how our Supreme Court is deciding the rules that the rest of us have to live under.

AMY GOODMAN: So, next time we’re going to look at the Supreme Court, do we have to have Keenan Thompson on?

ELIE MYSTAL: Oh, I hope so. If one thing could happen, if that — if I become, in any small way, a way for SNL to cover the Supreme Court a little bit more and to bring some knowledge to bear on its viewers, that, you know, usually aren’t listening to me, about how the court actually operates and what it does in secret, then I will take every Don King joke they can throw at me, if that’s the upshot.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Elie Mystal, The Nation's justice correspondent, thank you so much for joining us. We'll link to all your pieces. Elie Mystal is also the author of Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution.

The Federal Aviation Administration is grounding more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s after an Alaska Airlines panel blew out late Friday near Portland, Oregon, leaving a gaping hole. The plane was able to land safely and no passengers were seriously injured. Earlier on Friday, we spoke with legendary consumer advocate Ralph Nader about “Boeing’s criminal design of the Boeing 737 MAX,” and how his grandniece was killed in a 2019 airplane crash over Ethiopia.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, I was just thinking, Ralph, that when I went to the big opening for the book, that amazing meal that so many people came out to have, that’s when I met your grandniece. That’s when I met Samya Stumo, who was 24 years old and died in that Ethiopian flight, that plane that was made by Boeing. Samya’s middle name is Rose, named for your mother. If you can talk about the latest on that? I mean, you may remember, of course, that day she was there, and then we went over to the tort museum, not like apple tortes, but your famous museum in Winsted, Connecticut, and I got to spend time with her. Talk about Samya and the case.

RALPH NADER: Well, Samya was extraordinary. She was an emerging leader in global health in her early twenties. She had peer-review articles at international conferences. She had a vivaciousness and a charisma that was built on content and a relentless focus on delivering healthcare all the way to the people, breaking through bureaucracies and distortions of health aid. And it was a huge loss at the time when she went down with 146 other people right outside Addis Ababa in Ethiopia due to Boeing’s criminal design of the Boeing 737 MAX. I said at the time that a lot of people’s lives would not be saved, because Samya Rose Stumo was not going to be allowed to fulfill her great promise.

The families have all filed lawsuits. They’ve organized. They’ve got legislation through Congress to improve airline regulation by the FAA. They wanted a stronger bill, but it was miraculous that they got what they did. They had a lot of news conferences, as you know. You had them on Democracy Now! And the lawsuits are bogged down. And that’s a big story all by itself, that the judge is very inimical to having open trials with Boeing. He’s pushing the families into mediation, with more than a little arm twisting. And the plaintiff lawyers, you know, they want their fee. And the defense lawyers want to immunize the top executives of Boeing, who have thus far escaped the arm of the law for what they did and did not. And that’s a big story. And I hope the media gets on it, because it’s a gross distortion of the promise of the law of torts. Justice delayed is justice denied. And people should have a right to have an open trial in court with a trial by jury, which they’re not receiving. They’re forcing these settlements under gag order secrecy. And this judge has not allowed one single trial in four years. His name is Judge Alonso. He’s a Democratic appointee in Chicago Federal District Court.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ralph, I want to thank you so much for spending this time with us. Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, the granduncle of Samya Stumo, corporate critic, four-time former presidential candidate. His new book is titled The Rebellious CEO: 12 Leaders Who Did It Right, also the founder of the Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper, named by Time and _Life_magazines one of the most — one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century. He turns 90 on February 27th.

Watch the segment below or at this link:

Henry Kissinger is dead at the age of 100. The former U.S. statesman served as national security adviser and secretary of state at the height of the Cold War and wielded influence over U.S. foreign policy for decades afterward. His actions led to massacres, coups and and even genocide, leaving a bloody legacy in Latin America, Southeast Asia and beyond. Once out of office, Kissinger continued until his death to advise U.S. presidents and other top officials who celebrate him as a visionary diplomat. Yale historian Greg Grandin says those glowing obituaries only reveal “the moral bankruptcy of the political establishment” that ignores how Kissinger’s actions may have led to the deaths of at least 3 million people across the globe. Grandin is author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100. To many in the Washington establishment, Kissinger will likely be remembered as one of the most influential diplomats in U.S. history. But around the world, including in Chile, East Timor, Bangladesh and Cambodia, Henry Kissinger is remembered as a war criminal whose actions led to massacres, coups and even genocide.

Kissinger, who was born in Germany, served as U.S. secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford from 1973 to 1977. He also served as national security adviser from 1969 to 1975. He’s the only U.S. official to ever simultaneously hold both posts. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 with his North Vietnam counterpart Le Duc Tho.

During his time in office, Henry Kissinger oversaw a massive expansion of the war in Vietnam and the secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia, where as many 150,000 civilians were killed in the U.S. strikes, as Kissinger told the military, quote, “Anything that flies or anything that moves.”

In South Asia, Kissinger backed the Pakistani military genocidal war against East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh.

In Latin America, declassified documents show how Kissinger secretly intervened across the continent, from Bolivia to Uruguay to Chile and Argentina. In Chile, Kissinger urged President Nixon to take a, quote, “harder line” against Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. On September 11th, 1973, Allende was overthrown by the U.S.-backed General Augusto Pinochet. Kissinger once said, quote, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

AMY GOODMAN: In 1975, Henry Kissinger and President Gerald Ford met with the Indonesian dictator General Suharto to give him the go-ahead to invade East Timor, which Indonesia did on December 7th, 1975. The Indonesian military killed a third of the Timorese population — one of the worst genocides of the late 20th century.

Kissinger also drew up plans to attack Cuba in the mid-’70s after Fidel Castro sent Cuban troops to Angola to fight forces linked to apartheid South Africa.

At home, Kissinger urged President Nixon to go after Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan Ellsberg, who Kissinger called “the most dangerous man in America.”

The historian Greg Grandin once estimated Kissinger’s actions may have led to the deaths of 3 million, maybe 4 million people. While human rights activists have long called for Kissinger to be tried for war crimes, he remained a celebrated figure in Washington and beyond, serving as an adviser to both Republican and Democratic administrations.

We turn now to Greg Grandin. He’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of history at Yale University. His books include Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. His new piece for The Nation is “A People’s Obituary of Henry Kissinger.” He also wrote the introduction to the new book, just out, Only the Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger.

Greg, welcome back to Democracy Now! So, give us this people’s history of Henry Kissinger, as we see in the mainstream media he’s hailed as the man who opened communication with China, led to a détente with Russia. What is your version of events?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, I think you summed up very well the version of events, the number of war crimes that he was involved in. You know, Kissinger’s life is fascinating, because it spans a very consequential bridge in United States history, from the collapse of the postwar consensus, you know, that happened with Vietnam, and Kissinger is instrumental in kind of recobbling, recreating a national security state that can deal with dissent, that can deal with polarization, that actually thrived on polarization and secrecy and learning to manipulate the public in order to advance a very aggressive foreign policy.

I mean, we can go into the details, but I do want to say that his death has been as instructive as his life. I mean, if you look at the obituaries and notes of condolences, they just — I mean, they just reveal, I think, a moral bankruptcy of the political establishment, certainly in the transatlantic world, in the larger NATO sphere, just an unwillingness or incapacity to comprehend the crisis that we’re in and Kissinger’s role in that crisis. They’re celebratory. They’re inane. They’re vacuous. They’re really quite remarkable. And if you think of — just think back over the last year, the celebrations, the feting of his 100th anniversary — 100th, you know, birthday, his living to 100 years. I think it’s a cultural marker of just how much — how bankrupt the political class in this country is. So his death is almost as instructive as his life.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, we had you on, Greg, when he turned 100, when Kissinger turned 100.

GREG GRANDIN: Right.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In that interview, you said that the best way to think about Kissinger isn’t necessarily as a war criminal. Could you explain why?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, because that is the way — I mean, Christopher Hitchens popularized thinking about him as a war criminal, and that has a way of elevating Kissinger, in some ways, as somehow an extraordinary evil. And it’s a fine line, because he did play an outsized role in a staggering number of atrocities and bringing and dealing misery and death across the globe to millions of people. But there’s a lot of war criminals. I mean, you know, this country is stocked with war criminals. There’s no shortage of war criminals.

And thinking about him as a war criminal kind of dumbs us down. It doesn’t allow us to think with Kissinger’s — use Kissinger’s life to think with, to think about how the United States — for example, Kissinger started off as a Rockefeller Republican, you know, a liberal Republican, an adviser to Nelson Rockefeller who thought Nixon was far out of the mainstream and a dangerous sociopath, I think, as he put it. And yet, when Nixon won — and he actually helped him win by scuttling a peace deal with North Vietnam — he made his peace with Nixon, and then went on, you know, into public office. And he thought Reagan was too extreme, and yet he made his peace with Reagan. Then he thought the neocons were too extreme, and he made his peace with the neocons. Then he even made his peace with Donald Trump. He called Donald — he celebrated Donald Trump almost as a kind of embodiment of his theory of a great statesman and being able to craft reality as they want to through their will. So, you see Kissinger — as the country moves right, you see Kissinger moving with it. So, just that trajectory is very useful to think with.

If you also think about his secret bombing of Cambodia and then trace out that bombing, it’s like a bright light, you know, a trace of red, running from Cambodia to the current endless “war on terror,” what was considered illegal. I mean, Kissinger bombed Cambodia in secret because it was illegal to bomb another country that you weren’t at war with in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s his old colleagues at Harvard, who were all Cold Warriors, none of them peace liberals, who marched down to Washington. They didn’t even know about the bombing. They went to protest the invasion of Cambodia. And now, you know, it is just considered a fact of international law that the United States has the right to bomb countries that — third-party countries that we’re not at war with that give safe haven to terrorists. It’s just considered — it’s just considered commonplace. So you could see this evolution and drift towards endless war through Kissinger’s life.

You can also — Kissinger’s life is also useful to think about how, you know, as a public official, first national security adviser and then secretary of state to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger created much of the chaos that would later necessitate and require a transition to what we call neoliberalism. But then, out of office, as the head of Kissinger Associates, Kissinger helped to broker that transition to neoliberalism, the privatization of much of the world, of Latin America, of Eastern Europe, of Russia. So you see that, you know, that transition from a public politician or public policymaker and then going on to making untold wealth as a private citizen in this transition.

So, you know, there’s many ways in which Kissinger’s life kind of maps the trajectory of the United States. You know, they celebrated him at the New York Public Library as if he was the American century incarnate. And in many ways, he was. You know, he really — his career really does map nicely onto the trajectory of the United States and the evolution of the national security state and its foreign policy and — you know, and the broken world that we’re all trying to live in, as your last two segments —

AMY GOODMAN: Greg, I —

GREG GRANDIN: — showed so —

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Henry Kissinger in his own words. He’s speaking in 2016, when he defended the secret bombing of Cambodia.

HENRY KISSINGER: Nixon ordered an attack on the base areas within five miles of the Vietnamese border, that were essentially unpopulated. So, when the phrase “carpet bombing” is used, it is, I think, in the size of the attacks, probably much less than what the Obama administration has done in similar base areas in Pakistan, which I think is justified. And therefore, I believe that what was done in Cambodia was justified.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Henry Kissinger in 2016. He was speaking at the LBJ Library. The late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once said, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.” If you can just respond to that? And for a —

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah. Well, that quote contains more moral and intellectual acuity and intelligence than the entire political establishment, both liberal and — both Democrat and Republican. It’s morally correct. It’s intellectually correct. And, you know, it’s more accurate than most diplomatic historians, who trade on making Kissinger more ethic — morally complicated than he was.

In terms of Kissinger’s quote himself about Cambodia, there he’s playing a little bit of a game. So he’s lying. I mean, he carpet-bombed Cambodia. The United States massively bombed Cambodia and brought to power within the Khmer Rouge the most extreme clique, led by Pol Pot. You know, when you massively bomb a country and you destroy a whole opposition, you tend to bring to power the extremists. And that’s exactly why Kissinger is responsible, to a large degree, for the genocide that happened later on under Pol Pot. The bombing brought to power Pol Pot within the Khmer Rouge, which previously was a larger, broader coalition.

But Kissinger isn’t wrong when he links it to Obama’s bombing of Pakistan. That was the point I was trying to make earlier. You know, Kissinger just had to do it illegally back — covertly back then, because it was illegal. It was against international law to bomb third countries, you know, in order to advance your war aims in another country. But now it’s accepted as commonplace. And it is true, he’s not wrong, when he cites Obama’s drone program and what Obama — and, you know, the continuation of the logic in the “war on terror” that started under George W. Bush. He’s not wrong about that. And that’s the line that — that’s one of the lines that you can trace from Vietnam and Cambodia and South Asia to today’s catastrophe that we’re living in.

Former President Donald Trump lashed out from the witness stand at the judge and prosecutor in his New York civil fraud case Monday. He could be forced to dissolve much of his real estate empire and bar his family from doing business in New York. “The scene was pretty incredible to witness,” says Lauren Aratani, reporter for the Guardian US who is covering the trial. The court is now determining how much the Trumps must pay in damages as the case enters the penalty phase.This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Donald Trump took the witness stand Monday in a civil fraud case brought by the state of New York against the former president, his sons and his businesses. Trump was repeatedly admonished by Judge Arthur Engoron for testimony that veered off topic, lashed out against the court and New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom Trump called a “political hack.” James is seeking $250 million after accusing Trump, his oldest two sons, the Trump Organization and company executives of inflating the value of assets. The judge has already ruled Trump liable for fraud. The trial determines how much the Trumps will pay in damages.

For more, we’re joined by Lauren Aratani, reporter for the Guardian US who has been attending the trial, her most recent piece headlined “Speeches and grandstanding: Trump scores few if any legal points in court.”

So, you were there, Lauren. If you can describe the scene, but also contrast his hurling epithets, getting angry, his face getting red, with the documentary evidence that’s been presented in this trial?

LAUREN ARATANI: Yeah, the scene was pretty incredible to witness. I mean, not only is there the typical media circus that surrounds Donald Trump, but then you also have it in a very, you know, what’s supposed to be a civilized courtroom. It’s very quiet. There are no cameras or recordings allowed. So, really, it’s just a prosecutor asking Donald Trump, the witness on the stand, these questions.

So, what we saw a lot yesterday was Trump would often kind of get into these rants, as I mentioned in my piece, and really kind of was reminiscent of what he was like at his rallies, where he would really go off, a bit off topic, on election interference or crime in New York City, kind of, you know, saying that New York Attorney General Letitia James, who’s been attending the trial every day — you know, kind of making the case that she’s wasting her time, saying that the case is unfair.

And, of course, what the prosecutors have been doing with Trump and his adult sons last week is showing these documents where essentially the Trump family signed bank agreements, you know, term agreements with these banks who gave them loans, saying that their financial statements were fair and accurate. So, you have a lot of these documents, emails, these things that are being pulled up in front of Trump, and, you know, he’s basically saying that he kind of relied a lot on this idea of a “worthless clause,” which is basically that the banks knew not to take, I guess, the Trump Organization for its words when it came to these financial statements. And, of course, the judge, in his pretrial judgment, had written that the worthless clause argument is, in itself, worthless. So, we saw a lot of that yesterday, a lot of Trump basically, you know, doing what he does, except the only person that really matters in this courtroom is the judge, and he even seemed to kind of express a lot of frustration toward him.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Lauren, at the beginning of the trial, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, testified that Trump had directed him to manipulate financial statements. How does Cohen’s testimony fit into the broader context of the trial? And was Trump questioned about that testimony?

LAUREN ARATANI: Yeah, so, Trump wasn’t questioned directly on Michael Cohen’s testimony. But what Trump was asked — so, basically, Michael Cohen testified that he, along with two of Trump’s top finance executives — there is Allen Weisselberg, who used to be chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, and Jeff McConney, who was the Trump Organization controller. Basically, he would say that, you know, Trump would direct the three of them to essentially increase his net worth on the financial statements. Cohen, you know, basically wasn’t necessarily that specific on the assets that he was asked to increase on the financial statement, but there was briefly a document that was pulled up that he had confirmed that Trump, in handwritten notes, had basically instructed them to increase their assets. But Trump wasn’t questioned directly on Cohen’s testimony, that was a few weeks ago.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, but what do you think is the big takeaway? Trump testified now. He’s expected to testify again when the defense presents their case. His daughter Ivanka is going to be testifying. Talk about the significance, overall, and if you were surprised by anything, Lauren.

LAUREN ARATANI: Right. Like, I think, you know, what we’ve been seeing a lot lately is — I wrote a piece a few weeks ago that was basically talking about how what we’ve been seeing is this a trial within a trial. We have the trial that’s in the courtroom. You know, there’s no jury. It’s just the judge basically deciding whether Donald Trump will be paying a $250 million fine.

But then there’s also the trial that he sees as more important, which is in the court of public opinion. And we definitely saw that yesterday. We’re seeing that last week with Trump’s sons, when they were saying that they don’t recall, that they, you know, in angry times they also were very much kind of going on —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

LAUREN ARATANI: — their own little angry kind of rants. And so, yeah, a lot of what we’re seeing is just politics in the courtroom.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to do Part 2 and post it online at democracynow.org, Lauren Aratani, reporter for the Guardian US.

Raz Segal, an Israeli expert in modern genocide, calls Israel’s assault on Gaza a textbook case of “intent to commit genocide” and its rationalization of its violence a “shameful use” of the lessons of the Holocaust. Israeli state exceptionalism and comparisons of its Palestinians victims to “Nazis” are used to “justify, rationalize, deny, distort, disavow mass violence against Palestinians,” says Segal.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

“A Textbook Case of Genocide: Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?” That’s the headline of a new piece in Jewish Currents by our next guest, Raz Segal. He’s an Israeli historian, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, where he’s also an endowed professor in the study of modern genocide. Raz Segal joins us now from Philadelphia.

Professor Segal, welcome to Democracy Now! Lay out your case.

RAZ SEGAL: Thank you for having me.

I think that, indeed, what we’re seeing now in Gaza is a case of genocide. We have to understand that the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide from 1948 requires that we see special intent for genocide to happen. And to quote the convention, intent to destroy a group is defined as racial, ethnic, religious or national as such that is collectively, not just individuals. And this intent, as we just heard, is on full display by Israeli politicians and army officers since 7th of October. We heard Israel’s president. It’s well-known what the Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on 9th of October declaring a complete siege on Gaza, cutting off water, food, fuel, stating that “We’re fighting human animals,” and we will react “accordingly.” He also said that “We will eliminate everything.” We know that Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari, for example, acknowledged wanton destruction and said explicitly, “The emphasis on damage and not on accuracy.” So we’re seeing the special intent on full display. And really, I have to say, if this is not special intent to commit genocide, I really don’t know what is.

So, when we look at the actions taken, the dropping of thousands and thousands of bombs in a couple of days, including phosphorus bombs, as we heard, on one of the most densely populated areas around the world, together with these proclamations of intent, this indeed constitutes genocidal killing, which is the first act, according to the convention, of genocide. And Israel, I must say, is also perpetrating act number two and three — that is, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and creating condition designed to bring about the destruction of the group by cutting off water, food, supply of energy, bombing hospitals, ordering the fast evictions of hospitals, which the World Health Organization has declared to be, quote, “a death sentence.” So, we’re seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent. This is indeed a textbook case of genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the displacement? Israel is saying that the entire northern Gaza — now hundreds of thousands of people have complied — must move south. The northern part of Gaza is the most populated, with Gaza City.

RAZ SEGAL: Yeah, definitely. I mean, as is well known, this is an impossible order. It’s impossible for specific groups of people — people in hospitals, people defined as disabled, elderly people — many Palestinians who refuse to leave their homes because of their histories and their memories of the Nakba. This is an impossible order. It’s yet another indication of the intent to destroy, the intent to commit genocide.

It’s also worthwhile to emphasize Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a new term that he coined, “complete siege.” It seems like a completely new term that really takes what was already a 17-year siege on Gaza, the longest in modern history, which was already a clear violation of international humanitarian law — it takes this siege and now turns it into a complete siege, which really signals the turn to this kind of genocidal destruction that we’re seeing, including with this eviction order.

It’s also worthwhile to try to explain, I think, why Israel is so explicit in its declaration. We’ve heard Israel’s president talk about evil. We’ve also heard about Biden’s use of the word “evil.” EU leaders describe the Hamas attack as “evil.” And it has to be said, the Hamas attack were clear war crimes, the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, a horrendous war crime that rightfully shocked many Israelis and many, many people around the world. But “evil” is not a term to describe them. “Evil” is a term to decontextualize. “Evil” is a term to demonize and to really enhance the widespread fantasies of Israelis today that they’re fighting Nazis. Actually, former Prime Minister Bennett, Naftali Bennett, said that directly in an interview yesterday: “We are fighting Nazis.” We see this and many, many other indications in Israeli society and politics today. And if we’re fighting Nazis, then everything is permissible.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Segal —

RAZ SEGAL: No law —

AMY GOODMAN: I actually wanted to go to the former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who’s currently in the Israeli army. This is from a few days ago, where he exploded at the Sky News anchor Kamali Melbourne during an interview Thursday, when Melbourne pressed him on Israel’s attacks on Palestinian civilians. This is a part of what he said.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: What about those Palestinians in hospital who are on life support and babies in incubators, whose life support and incubator will have to be turned off because the Israelis have cut the power to Gaza?

NAFTALI BENNETT: Are you seriously keep on asking me about Palestinian civilians? What’s — what’s wrong with you? Have you not seen what happened? We’re fighting Nazis. We don’t target them. Now, the world can come and bring them anything they want, if you want to bring them electricity. I’m not going to feed electricity or water to my enemies. If anyone else wants, that’s fine. We’re not responsible for them.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: But this is the point —

NAFTALI BENNETT: But you keep on —

KAMALI MELBOURNE: This is the point —

NAFTALI BENNETT: You — I want to tell you —

KAMALI MELBOURNE: No, no, Mr. Bennett, this is the point.

NAFTALI BENNETT: No. No, listen.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: Listen.

NAFTALI BENNETT: You listen to me right now.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: No, you’re raising your voice. And we’re trying —

NAFTALI BENNETT: I’ve heard you enough.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: No, no, I understand. We’re trying to have a conversation here.

NAFTALI BENNETT: I’ve heard a lot of you.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: Listen, this is my program.

NAFTALI BENNETT: No, you’re not having a —

KAMALI MELBOURNE: This is my show.

NAFTALI BENNETT: And that’s exactly —

KAMALI MELBOURNE: And I am asking the questions. You’re raising your voice.

NAFTALI BENNETT: But it’s my country.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: And I’ve asked you. And we’ve already —

NAFTALI BENNETT: And when people — when people —

KAMALI MELBOURNE: We’ve already — stop, please.

NAFTALI BENNETT: When people —

KAMALI MELBOURNE: And let me finish. We’ve already distinguished —

NAFTALI BENNETT: Shame on you, Mister.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: — between Hamas —

NAFTALI BENNETT: I want to tell you, you — shame on you.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: You’re trying to speak over me.

NAFTALI BENNETT: Because we are not —

KAMALI MELBOURNE: No, no.

NAFTALI BENNETT: Shame on you.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: It’s nothing about shame.

NAFTALI BENNETT: I am the — I was the prime minister.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: We’re trying to have a conversation —

NAFTALI BENNETT: There is absolutely shame.

KAMALI MELBOURNE: — about a very serious situation here.

NAFTALI BENNETT: Because when you just jump —

KAMALI MELBOURNE: And you are refusing to address it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is the former Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, exploding at the Sky News anchor Kamali Melbourne. Professor Segal, you’re an Israeli historian. This is what you’re talking about, when he uses the Nazi analogy and also when he says, “Are you seriously talking about Palestinian civilians?” Your response?

RAZ SEGAL: That’s exactly what we’re — it’s very important to understand this context, the idea of fighting Nazis, the idea of using Holocaust memory in this way. There is a broad context, a long history, of course, of this shameful use of Holocaust memory, which Israeli politicians have used to justify, rationalize, deny, distort, disavow mass violence against Palestinians. And it has allowed also a view to develop that sees Israel as somehow exceptional, providing it impunity. The truth, however, is that all perpetrators of genocide actually see their victims as dangerous, as vicious, as inhuman, right? That’s how the Nazis saw the Jews. And that’s how today Israelis see Palestinians.

And that’s why the lessons of the Holocaust, actually, which were never meant to provide cover and rationalize state violence and genocide, but, rather, protect groups, especially stateless and defenseless groups, groups under military occupation and siege, from violent states — the lessons of the Holocaust are now very, very urgent. We need to center the voices of those facing state violence and genocide, and we need to move to prevention as fast as possible. In order to do that, we need to recognize what’s going on around us, what’s unfolding in front of our eyes, which is really a textbook case of genocide, with the rhetoric, with the actions, with everything involved.

AMY GOODMAN: Raz Segal is associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide. He is an Israeli historian. His new article for Jewish Currents, we’ll link to, “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” The subtitle, “Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?” Back in 30 seconds.