 Joining us is the founder and treasurer of the Blue America PAC, which raises money for progressive candidates around the country. He also writes the Down with Tyranny blog, Howie Klein. Howie, Trump fatigue. There's no time for Trump fatigue because these are the angriest people in the world. They are violent. They are not getting what they want because Trump is not keeping any promises. They can't admit they're wrong for voting for Trump, so they resort to violence. They are going to lash out at the other side and we're seeing evidence of this already. Well, we saw evidence in the run-up to Trump being installed. Tell me about Kim Weaver. She dropped out of her campaign for Iowa's fourth congressional district. She said that she had financials insecurity, but there were other reasons. Why did she drop out? She dropped out basically because she was getting death threats. So she's running against Steve King and I think some of the listeners know that Steve King is one of the most right-wing, racist members of Congress. He's an overt, what they call white nationalist, a normal people called fascist. He represents the largest part of Iowa, which is basically a rural area. There are almost no real cities there. It's just a lot of very small towns and miles and counties full of farms. It's a pretty backward area and it's the reddest part of the state. He's represented that forever. Kim ran against him last time and she didn't get any support at all from the Democratic Party, from the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, but she decided to run again. Blue America endorsed her. We've been raising money for her. She's raised a lot of money, about a quarter of a million dollars. She was ready to go up against him and she's been getting death threats. And that's what mostly the media knows, but there's a little bit more to it than that. I wrote a post about it last night and people can find it on my blog at downwardtyourney.com. And what it says is that Republican officials have targeted the agency that she works for and she was told specifically they were doing that because she works there. So they've cut the budget of the agency and she's freaked out because some of her fellow workers are going to be fired now. So she's very, very upset about that and she decided it's just not worth it between the death threats. And it's not just an email in this case. Someone put something up on her lawn and she just felt it was getting a little bit too close for comfort. Trump, as you just were saying, has encouraged violence among his supporters and they're taking it very literally. And when he said, if you get into trouble and he said this at one of his rallies, I'll pay the legal bills. And these kind of knit-width, half-width, opioid-addicted imbeciles hear this stuff and they take it very seriously. And of course Trump isn't going to pay their legal bills at all or do anything to help them, but they don't know that. And there was going to violence. So people might say, well, you know, Steve King, for example, said this isn't true. He said she's making it up. She wasn't really threatened. She's just afraid of him. He said he wants her to run because she's a weak candidate. So he said this stuff publicly. But interestingly enough, just in the last couple of days, so literally this all happened in the last, let's say three days, Kim Weaver drops out in Iowa, then we have a guy who's running a liberal Democrat who's running for mayor of Binghamton, New York, upstate New York, and he started getting threats. He went on the radio, talked about his campaigns when he answered Republican incumbent, and he starts getting death threats. And then they started coming to his wife and to his children as well. They're getting emails of death threats. And, you know, what's an email, you know? He sort of, it was Waterwolf adducts back. He didn't care that much. He was a little concerned about his wife getting them, of course, and his kids. But that's how it goes. Then it's about eight o'clock at night, and he went to pick up his three-year-old daughter at a babysitter, and he's coming back in the house, and there's a strange pickup truck parked across the street from his house. And suddenly the guy starts screaming, you know, horrible words that we don't want to say on the radio, although liberal and then excellent of deleted, and throws a can at him, a can which, as it turned out, was full of soda, so a full can, and that could do a lot of damage. And he went to shield his daughter, of course, and then the can hit him, and then he decided to drop out. So he dropped out of his race as well, and he's the only Democrat in that race, which means the right-wing Republican who is the current mayor will become mayor again with no opposition. So, bad enough, we have those two things. And then down in Louisiana, in, you know, a really, really right-wing district in Louisiana where Hillary got, you know, 20-something percent only. So you can imagine what that district is like. They elected a, you know, down there, they have the jungle primary, just like we do in California, where everybody runs in the primary together, and although in California we tend to have two Democrats who win and then they face off in the general election, in Louisiana it's the opposite. They'll have two Republicans who win, and they'll face off in the general election. And in this guy's election there was a mainstream conservative, Scott Angeli, who's very well-known statewide. He's a famous Republican, and he's not a moderate in any way, but he's kind of a mainstream conservative. He's held statewide office, he's very famous, and who is he running against? He's running against a guy named Captain Clay Higgins. Captain Clay Higgins, who's a professional vigilante. That's what this guy is. He's not paid by law enforcement. He's a vigilante, and a nut, and well-known as a fascist. So he's a mainstream conservative running against a fascist, and the fascist wins. So this guy, Clay Higgins, is now a member of Congress. So on Sunday he decided that he's going to take it on himself to write a Facebook post urging his followers to hunt down suspects. He used the word suspects. People they suspect of being Muslim terrorists. And when you read it, you know you might like miss out on the terrorist part. So if you suspect someone that might be a Muslim, he says kill them. He doesn't say go to the police, report them. He says kill them. That's what he said. That's a congressman. So today I'm waiting to hear maybe another Republican congressman saying that that doesn't say anything about our party and that we disown him and we disavow what he's saying. Nothing. Nobody says a word. Maybe Paul Ryan should say something to him. The whip of the Republican party is a guy named Steve Scalise who's supposed to be somewhat sane, although I've never seen any of that. Is he from Louisiana? Is he from Louisiana? Does he say anything? No, nothing. None of them say a thing. Are they afraid of these people? I think that they are sympathetic with these people. Maybe they're afraid of some of them. I don't know. They certainly are cowardly, that's for sure. And you know, when you called a little while ago, I was on the phone with Alan Grayson. And one of the things that we were talking about was Walter Jones. Walter Jones is a Republican from North Carolina. And Walter Jones just came out saying that Congress should not fund the war in Afghanistan. And if Trump tries to put more troops in there, they should flap him down and not let him do it and not give him the money to do it. No more troops, no more war in Afghanistan. And the reason that Grayson and I were talking about that is because he is a truly courageous guy. I mean, the Republicans hate him. They run candidates against him. Ryan has made sure to pull this guy off his committee and not let him rise in the ranks of he should be the chairman of the committee he's on now because it's based on seniority and they don't let him do that. They don't let him even be the second in command. And they do everything to target him. They gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to some right-wing nut who was running against him in the Republican primary last time. He beat the guy, you know, the guy only got 20 percent. But that's what they do. That's how they try to stifle independent thought. So when you say, are they afraid of these people? These Republicans are afraid of their own shadows. They have reason to be as well. I mean, they generally are cowardly lot and, you know, they act together and they think that they're all safe if they stick together. It's out of the Putin playbook. You know, he surrounds himself with paramilitary organizations. Bikers and Trump surrounds himself with bikers because they can't rely on the police to do their dirty work. It's from, you know, who's playbook from 75 years ago. The people who are violent, let's call them the brown shirts who support Trump, who are doing these violent things to this guy running for mayor. Did you say Binghamton? Binghamton, New York, which where Harper is, the University of New York. There is no difference between the people who threaten these candidates like Kim Weaver and George Zimmerman. If you want to understand the mind of a right-wing Trump supporter who wants to clock a liberal, think of George Zimmerman. They don't believe in anything other than violence. They believe that they were put on this world, put on this earth to remove what they consider weak or nefarious. Is that a fair statement? There's no ideology behind these people, right? Well, there is some ideology. The violent people. The violent people is true. They get off easily from left to right without a problem, though. So what you're saying is absolutely true, but while they're doing it, they have some kind of ideologically underpinning the next day they could be converted to something else. I'm sure they don't think they have strong ideological feelings. They're just a bunch of violent thugs. So there's a guy named David Woodward. He's a political consultant. He's helped people like Lindsey Graham, Trey Gowdy. I think Trey Gowdy becomes head of the House Oversight Committee to replace Chafetz and Jeff Dunn. And Woodward told McClatchy earlier this week, the McClatchy News Service, that they are literally going to fight the media, that they're going to run against the media in the midterms. They can no longer run against Washington, D.C. Now they're going to run against the mainstream media. And you have people like Ben's at mainstream media. Yeah. And you have people in the media like Laura Ingram who praised Gianforte, the new congressman from Montana for beating up the reporter from The Guardian. It's getting more violent. And it's going to get a lot worse. Gianforte was rewarded for his behavior by bringing in $100,000 that day from donations, some of which were very specifically made by people saying congratulations for punching out that liberal jerk in much worse ways of saying it. Yes, the Trump kind of people, that's their mentality. They like that. They think, you know, what was Limbaugh said? He was virile or masculine or something. Right. Donald Trump right now is so unpopular. More Americans, according to a new poll, favor impeaching Trump over Trump himself. There are more people who want to put him on trial than approve of him. But below Trump is the media. The media is even less popular than Donald Trump. This is so, in a way, it's a race to the bottom, but he's winning. No. I don't think so. I think that people see Trump as a real existential threat to our country now. And I don't think some might think of the media that way. But I think that everyone likes to use the media as a punching bag. And there are times that I'm screaming at the TV or I'm angry at Rachel Maddow. But it's very different from how you might feel about Trump. And there's a daily tracking poll that Gallup puts out. And the one that came out today has him at the lowest number he has ever been at, which was 36 points something. I don't remember what the point was. 36.4, I think. And that is lower than Nixon's rating that they found during the Watergate hearings when he was about to be impeached. Trump is already at that level. And thinking, I mean the momentum is all downward. It's not like it goes up and down and up and down. It's going down. They're not going to get rid of him unless they lose the house. Right? Right. When they lose the house in 2018, presumably the Democrats will shut Nancy Pelosi up and no more off the table bullshit from her. Sorry for my French. All right. And they will start the impeachment process. Now they won't be able to find him guilty because the Senate is going to either be, you know, barely in the hands of the Democrats. I don't think it will be. It will be a Republican Senate. And they have to, they have to, they need 60 votes in the Senate to be able to find him guilty. But he will be impeached. Be impeached. And then the Democrats will, you know, in the House will impeach him and then the Senate will find him not guilty. On the local level in the state governments, we're finding hope for the Democrats. Montana and Kansas, the Democrats did not do well in special congressional elections. Well, they, they, no, they did do well. They didn't win, but they, they, their, their numbers were way higher than they had been previously. So yes, they did well, not well enough. We're seeing, however, an increase in state and local elections for Democrats in primarily red districts, correct? We are. You know, what we're seeing is across the board a, a rise in pro-democratic votes between five and 10%. So if you need to make up 20%, it's not going to do you any good, like in Kansas and Montana. If you only need to, to, to come up by 10% and the vote turns to the Democrats by 10%, you win. And that's what happens. That's what's been happening in, in New Hampshire, for example, a couple of weeks ago. They won the Democrat there, won a seat that had never in history gone to a Democrat. It's been a Republican seat since it existed. And it's now, it was won by a Democrat. That was a seat, of course, a Trump one. There is, there was a seat in, in, on Long Island, where it's, it's, it's in Peter, Peter King has a big chunk of the South Shore of Long Island from Nassau County into Suffolk. And the, the reddest part of his district is this particular assembly district. So, so his district is, is, is a purple district. But with this one part of the district is the reddest part by far without this part of his congressional district, he's got, he's in a blue seat and he wouldn't have to stand a chance. This particular part had an assembly race and the Democrat won. And it was shocked everyone. No one expected it. It was, and it was a Bernie delegate who ran and, and she won. And, you know, that should send a message to Peter King that he's in trouble because if he can't win in that part of his district, he might not even run again. You're in a boat. It's sinking. You grab your life raft. There's one life vest left. You grab your life vest. There's only one left. Peter King and Steve King are in the boat with you. You have to give the vest to one of them. You're going to give it to Steve King over Peter King, I would assume, right? Well, it depends if there's a shock in the water or not. Steve King is worse than Peter King, right? Yes. But not by a lot. Both terrible. Yeah. Hillary Clinton is speaking and I don't think she's doing herself any favors. I don't think she should be complaining about the Russians and the DNC. I think it's a little, I don't know. Yeah, David, the private citizen, she could do whatever the hell she wants. I don't care what she does. I don't care what she says. And she has the right to speak and say and give her opinion. I don't think that she represents in any way the Democratic Party. I think some Democrats are not happy that she's speaking out like this and saying silly things and or bringing attention to herself. And I think they wish she'd shut up and go away. I don't really feel that way. I'm not a big fan of hers, but she has the right to speak. Okay, let me ask you a question about her because the Hillary supporters say that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was the chairman of the DNC, the Bernie supporters say that Debbie Wasserman Schultz conspired with Hillary to make Bernie weak so that Hillary can get the nomination. The defenders of Hillary say that the chairman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has no power. That the DNC is a shell organization. It's just a container for somebody to seize power within and then take it over. But it's really the individual politician who gets the nomination, who runs the DNC. So that if Bernie had won, then he would be the DNC, Hillary won, so she became the DNC. That's the argument. Right, so that argument is true except what about before there's a nominee? That's where Debbie Wasserman Schultz was doing her damage to Bernie was before Hillary was the winner. Once Hillary won, then there wasn't a problem anymore. But before Hillary won or got the nomination, that's when Debbie Wasserman Schultz was doing damage to Bernie in every way she could. Did Hillary undercut that argument, the pro-Clinton argument, by complaining about the computer software that the DNC had when she got the nomination? She says, I inherited this mess that the DNC was... No, she did not undercut the argument because she did inherit a mess. The reason she inherited a mess was because Debbie Wasserman Schultz, aside from being the most corrupt DNC chairman ever, wasn't in it for anything except herself. So all she was trying to do was build up a gigantic personal mailing list of donors. So she didn't care about the DNC, she wasn't doing a very good job at it. She was just getting her own list together, stealing from the DNC. But on the other hand, she would be doing things... For example, there are many, many things she did to harm Bernie, including bad scheduling of debates, fewer debates than should have happened, debates scheduled on odd times when people wouldn't be able to tune in for one reason or another. And then, at one point, she shut down his access to his own lists, which the DNC has the capability of doing. I was going to say, they don't have the right to do it, but they have the capability of doing it. She did it. She cut him off from his own list so he couldn't do any kind of fundraising from the people who were his supporters. So she did a lot of things to harm him, some small, some big, and always persistent. She never did anything to help him. She always did things to harm him. That's Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Before we get to Dr. Keyanga Yamunata Taylor, she's an assistant professor of African American Studies at Princeton. She spoke at commencement address. I didn't hear the speech, but you write about it on Down with Tyranny. I write about it and I have an embedded copy of the speech itself. So you or anyone else who would like to listen to it can go to my blog and there's a YouTube of it. It's fantastic. It is so inspirational and so powerful. And this is an amazing woman. I'm going to guess that since we were talking about threats, that you're bringing this up because she was also threatened to the point where she had to cancel previously scheduled engagements. She speaks. She's an inspiring speaker. She was scheduled to give a speech in San Diego and she was scheduled to give a speech in Seattle. And she's now canceled both of them. She said it's too dangerous for her and her family and she's not going to do it. So why did that happen? That's because of Fox News. They took one very incendiary part of the speech, played it on Fox News where she's saying some negative things about Trump. Basically he's a bigot and a misogynist. She's not cursing him. She's not saying cut his head off or anything like that. Does anyone think he's not a bigot or does anyone think he's not a misogynist? I mean he certainly is. And Fox played it and riled up their audience and she was deluged with death threats. Now she's an African-American woman. So you can well imagine what those threats were like. She says that almost every single threat had either the N-word or the C-word or both of those words. And this is an incredible, incredible woman who was invited by the students at Hampshire College to come there and speak. The students themselves get to pick who their commencement speaker is going to be and they picked her. Her speech is really incredible and very, very much worth listening to. And like I said, I have it embedded on my blog. Or you can find it on YouTube and she's just a pretty amazing woman. People should go to Down with Tyranny to read your blog because what you wrote about her will enhance the viewing pleasure you also embedded a YouTube video to see the speech. A great speech was delivered last week by Michelangelo, the mayor of New Orleans, about a ceremony taking down three statues of Confederate leaders. Did you happen by any chance to read that speech? No. I didn't read the whole speech but I've heard a lot about it. So I know it was a very, very inspiring speech as well and people said that it was just, you know, it put him on a whole other plane of hero of the resistance. I think that speech, well it's unfair to talk to you about it because you haven't read it but I think that speech will go down in history as one of the great speeches about. Not alone. A lot of people are saying that now. I need to get my hands on that and either watch it or read it. Is he a good guy? He's part of a machine, that family. I don't know. I've never talked to him. He's from like a political family. His father was a big time Louisiana politician. His sister was a horrible right wing Democrat, one of the worst of the worst. Yeah, she was the U.S. Senator, Mary Landrow, as bad as they come. She's now a lobbyist and she's a real bad lobbyist. So can you tar him with that? I don't know. But I know when I hear that name, it gets me thinking, be careful. We're almost out of time. Trump, climate change, it looks like global warming, climate change might have succeeded in doing what the Democrats can't do in terms of gerrymandering. Tell me about Carlos Kerbello. He's a Republican from Florida. And according to Down with Tyranny... I don't know if it's up yet, but I wrote a post about this and I think it is up. It is up. Yeah, so Carlos Kerbello is in a Miami district where that Hillary won by almost 20 points. So this is not a close district. This is a district where he's really in danger of losing. And in Miami, climate change is not a theory. They've got pumps running 24-7 pumping water out of their streets. I mean, if they stop pumping the water out of Miami streets, bye-bye Miami. So Carlos Kerbello is very, very, very well aware. He came right out and said, you know, Trump is incorrect and pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord was a big mistake. And he denounced him in no uncertain terms. The only Republicans that are doing that at this point are Republicans in districts like his that went heavily for Hillary and where they feel that they're jeopardized by association with Trump and certainly in the case of any kind of educated audience who is aware of the reality of climate change that's exacerbated in a very, very big way. So when you talk to, you know, some audience, some bunch of Trump supporters in some backward area where everyone in the county, and there literally exists, there are 25 counties that went heavily for Trump, many of them in Appalachia, so whether we're talking about Tennessee or Kentucky or West Virginia, parts of western Pennsylvania, where the death rate is so high from opioid addiction that that's the Trump heartland. That's these counties, I mean, it just sounds like I'm being an insane person, but I've done the research on this and I've written about it. If you just look at which were the counties that voted for Trump overwhelmingly? I'm talking about like 70%, 80%. These counties, there's also the counties that have the worst opioid addiction in the country. There's no way, I mean, of the 50 counties that have the worst opioid addiction, 49 of the 50 were Trump super counties. One of them wasn't and the one that wasn't was on an Indian reservation. It's the only one that wasn't. Very quickly, Joe Biden, too old to run for president, but he's created a super PAC, an exploration committee to run for president or it could be to support people who he likes. Joe Biden, remember, has, you know, now people think of him as Uncle Joe and he was, you know, he's Obama and he, you know, people like him. But Joe Biden had a very, he had a very, very, very long senate career and that very, very, very long senate career was very, very bad. In terms of, you know, he was fine when it came to women's choice and gay rights and, you know, these social issues, he was fine. He was just a typical good decent democrat. When it came to things that had to do with corporate finance and Wall Street and that kind of thing, bad guy. He was, you know, when you hear about these bad bankruptcy bills, he was the one that would be writing them. He was, he's really, you know, not one of my favorite democrats. Let's put it like that. You know, there's good, there's bad. There's a lot of bad with him and I certainly, he's gotten better in the last few years, but I wouldn't trust him to be president. I would much more like to support someone like Elizabeth Warren or even Bernie Sanders. Is 70 still the threshold? It was the threshold when Ronald Reagan was elected president. They said you can't go past 70. Bernie is what, 74? Hillary's 70? Biden is 74? I'm rounding these numbers off. So next week, who turns 71? Who turns 71? Yeah, next week. Who does? Senor Trump Pansy. Oh, so could Hillary run again? Could Bernie run again? Bernie said she's not going to run again. She's not going to run again. I think if she, the Democrat, I think the Democratic Party, they're slow to learn, but I think they've learned that she's the wrong candidate. And last question before you go. Walter Jones. He's a Republican. We were just talking about... I know, I have a question. I have a question before you go. Carlos Kerbello, Republican. Why do they stay? What prevents them from throwing their hands up and just walking to the other side of the aisle? Interesting question. So Kerbello has one chance to keep his seat, in my opinion, well, two chances. The more likely chance, actually, is that the Democrat, the DCCC will screw up and they'll pick some terrible candidate, which they may do. In fact, they are talking about picking someone who would be defeated in that district. That district is about, it's close to 70% Hispanic, and they're thinking of running a guy named Patrick Murphy, who was a congressman from another part of Florida, nowhere near there. So they're thinking about running him and he would lose. So if the DCCC does something foolish like that, which they usually do, he could win. Other than that, the only shot he would have to win would be to say, okay, I'm a Democrat now, and switch parties. Howie... Walter Jones, by the way, before we go, he was elected in 1994. In 1992, he ran for Congress for the first time as a Democrat. He was a Democrat. His father was a congressman who was a Democrat. Howie Klein is the founder and treasurer of the Blue America PAC, which raises money for progressive candidates. Read him every day. Over it down with tyranny. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Talk to you soon.