 This is the Humanist Report with Mike Figueredo. The Humanist Report podcast is funded by viewers like you through Patreon and PayPal. To support the show, visit patreon.com forward slash humanistreport or become a member at humanistreport.com. Now, enjoy the show. Welcome to the Humanist Report podcast. My name is Mike Figueredo. This is episode 237 of the program. Today is Friday, April 17th and before we get started, I want to take some time to thank all of our newest Patreon, PayPal, and YouTube members, all of which signed up for the very first time to support us this week or increased their monthly pledge. And that includes Abbot Kai Kieran, Alejandro Lopez Ortega, Andrew John Mendel, Andrew Murphy, BananaFish58, Bonnie Verhantz, Brendan Carpio, Brian P. Foster, Karlo Welch, Carlos Alvarez, Chacesta, Chrissy B. Talking, Christopher Pineda, David M. Young, David Sol, 007 Will, Destiny Minpens, David Cervisco, Donna H. Taylor, Ellora, Franca Horvat, Heather Barrasa, Heather Weir, Jean Headley, Jenny Woo, Joseph Pisano, Matthew Muir, Megan Tanner, MK Zamel, Nancy Hodgson, Nick Dabs, Pierre Bell, Plurality of One, Sharon Velaz, Tim Oliveira and Tom Potter. So thank you so much to all of these kind souls. If you'd also like to support the show and join the independent progressive media revolution, you can do so in a number of ways. You can go to humanistreport.com, support patreon.com slash humanistreport or click join underneath any one of our YouTube videos. We have got another jam packed episode for you all this week. We'll talk about Donald Trump and how he's becoming increasingly authoritarian as the COVID-19 pandemic goes on. And he keeps making this about himself with every single thing he does. And we'll look at some new projections regarding COVID-19 and how long social distancing may be necessary. Bernie Sanders officially endorses Joe Biden. Joe Biden then spits in the faces of Bernie Sanders supporters. And Biden bros go after Brianna Joy Gray immediately after he dropped out last week. We'll talk about that. And now that Bernie Sanders is out of the way, mainstream media is finally talking about the sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden by Tara Reid and AOC breaks her silence on the matter as well. Also, AOC finds Joe Biden's pathetic attempt to appeal to progressives insulting while Bernie Sanders thinks we should already commit to support him without getting anything in return, seemingly. Also, we'll talk about how Obama pulled all of the strings behind the scenes and convinced Bernie Sanders to drop out and will discuss the internal sabotage of Jeremy Corbyn by some Labour Party officials. Gun Girl goes full authoritarian and will close the show by talking to Professor Harvey J.K., who talks about his latest book, FDR on Democracy, the greatest speeches and writings of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That's what we've got on the agenda for today's episode. Hopefully you all will enjoy the program. Let's get right to it. We're in the middle of a global pandemic and we have a president who is holding daily news briefings for COVID-19, and this is exactly what we should expect from a leader, except instead of actually reassuring people that everything is going to be OK, he's basically going on television every single day and throwing temper tantrums and shitting himself. This is what we're dealing with. Now, I will admit that the strategy of holding these daily press briefings, it's not just what leaders should do, but politically speaking, this is beneficial to Donald Trump, theoretically, because Joe Biden has basically been invisible throughout this COVID-19 crisis. Hence why a lot of Democrats are kind of gravitating towards Andrew Cuomo, mistakenly so. But nonetheless, you know, that's what's happening right now because they're desperate for a leader. So for Donald Trump to just be visible in and of itself, I think there is some value in terms of helping him with his reelection chances, because if voters value anything in a leader, its strength, its leadership, and that's the bare minimum. But as we've seen with Donald Trump, he can't even do the bare minimum for too long before he starts having meltdowns, because he literally can't even bother to seem somewhat competent. He can't pretend long enough until he's off air. And Donald Trump has been doing so little to assure people that he has this under control that his overall approval rating has actually gone down throughout the course of these daily press briefings. And this comes after a majority of Americans supported his response initially. And let me remind you that Donald Trump's approval rating should have been at zero percent. The fact that a majority of Americans initially approved of his handling of COVID shows how much the media failed because he is the reason why this is so bad in the United States. He ignored repeated warnings time and again. So if we acted sooner, it's unquestionable. We would be better off. We wouldn't have been able to, you know, skirt this pandemic altogether. It was something that we were going to have to deal with, but it's not even arguable. He put us in a worse off predicament. So the fact that a majority of voters approved of his job was awful. It speaks to the failure of the media, but it's also embarrassing as an American, because I mean, come on. But I mean, the fact that he took a majority approval and tanked it, it speaks to how stupid this individual is. And part of it is that he cares so little about Americans that he can't even really hide the fact that he doesn't care at all if they die. And he was talking about reopening the country by Easter until smart people around him had to let him know that that would be a terrible decision. And as Mary Popinfuss of HuffPost reports, in his haste to jumpstart the economy, Trump posed a frightening scenario to Dr. Anthony Fauci during a task force meeting in the situation room. No COVID-19 countermeasures would be taken so that people would quickly become infected with some recovering to create a protective herd immunity. Sources told the newspaper, quote, why don't we let this wash over the country? Trump asked a question. Others told the post the president has raised repeatedly in the Oval Office. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, realized with surprise that Trump was serious, the post reported. Mr. President, Fauci responded, according to the post, many people would die. Now, the fact that this even had to be explained to the president of the United States is utterly absurd. Like he genuinely believed for a period of time, maybe he still believes this, that we actually could choose between killing off Americans and the economy, as if lots and lots of people dying in and of itself wasn't going to be bad for the economy if you just let this disease wash over America. So the fact that this had to be explained to him shows you what a fucking moron this person is. But thankfully, there are people in his ear for now, anyways, like Dr. Fauci, who are actually smart. And the reason why I say for now is because in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, Dr. Fauci admitted what was obvious to everyone. Of course, if we acted sooner, we would have been better off, which led to Donald Trump retweeting a chud who called on Dr. Fauci to be fired for daring to suggest that Daddy Trump could ever be wrong in any circumstance ever and make no mistake about it. What Trump is doing here is kind of firing off a warning shot to Dr. Fauci, fall in line, obey me, or you're gone. Now, Trump knows that politically this isn't going to help his case going into November, because Dr. Fauci is one of the most trusted entities in American government currently. So if Donald Trump were to fire him, this wouldn't bode well for his electoral chances. So Donald Trump is probably having an internal battle right now. On one hand, he wants complete and total obedience because he is an authoritarian, but on another hand, you know, he knows that he kind of has to play nicely with Dr. Fauci currently if he wants to reassure the American people that he's competent and he should be reelected. And it kind of seems like after today, he is siding with his inner authoritarian because there is a battle that's going on currently between governors and Donald Trump's administration. You see kind of a pact forming along the West Coast and some other states. And they're basically saying, we're going to be the ones who dictate when we reopen our state's backup. And Trump wants to reopen sooner rather than later because, of course, he's self-interested and he thinks that the economy tanking is something that is going to hurt him. So if we reopen the economy, just push everyone back out into the workplace, get them all sick sooner, it's better for him. So if state governors are going to, you know, defy him, then he's not just going to stand idly by. So it's kind of mask off and he's just going full authoritarian case in point. When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that's the way it's got to be. Your authority is total. It's total. It's total. And the governors know that. So if a governor said that, now you have a couple of bans of, excuse me, excuse me, you have a couple of bans of of Democrat governors, but they will agree to it. They will agree to it. But the authority of the president of the United States having to do with the subject we're talking about is total. The sitting United States president just said the president's authority is total. Wow. Now, I actually think that it's pretty smart for governors to go back and forth with Donald Trump here because they know that Donald Trump is unhinged and he's going to battle them. And whenever he battles them, this helps raise their profile. Like Gretchen Whitmer has benefited a lot from Donald Trump attacking her. And she's believed to be a potential VP pick for Joe Biden. So they know that battling Donald Trump is it helps them politically, at least in terms of throwing red meat to your own base of Democratic Party voters. So, you know, admittedly, this is a fuck you to Donald Trump when he says we're going to reopen for them to say, no, we're not. I think this is a kind of a good move for them. It shows strength. It shows leadership where we get none federally. At least we get it at the state level in some states. But here's the thing. If Donald Trump says we're going to reopen the country back up, whatever that means in whatever capacity he's thinking he has the authority to command them to do. What if they just say, no, like, what is he going to do? What are you going to do, Trump? Are you going to send them the military to force them to reopen the state? Like, what does that even look like? What authority does Donald Trump think he has here? You have federal recommendations, you know, from the CDC and whatnot. But at the end of the day, governors are the ones who get to dictate when states reopen and you have the West Coast, Washington, Oregon, California, aligning with some East Coast states. And they're saying, actually, we're going to choose when it's best for our states, each with our own unique internal battles with COVID-19 and fuck you. Now, somebody asked him a follow-up question about what, you know, what he meant by that and how it's obviously not true. And he just kind of had a temper tantrum and melted down. You said when someone is president of the United States, their authority is total. That is not true. Who? OK, you know, we're going to write up papers on this. It's not going to be necessary because the governors need us one way or the other, because ultimately it comes with a federal government. That being said, we're getting along very well with the governors. And I feel very certain that there won't be a problem. Yeah, please go ahead. Has any governor agreed that you have the authority to decide when their state? I haven't asked anybody because you know why? Because I don't have to. Go ahead, please. But who told you the president has the total authority? Enough, please. You mentioned the vice president. Now, if you notice, he's kind of backtracking a little bit. In that first video towards the end, he said, you know, the president has total authority when it comes to this issue. Not true. And here, you know, he says, he kind of softens it a little bit. You know, actually, these governors, they need the federal government when it comes to funding and supplies. So, yeah, that's what I meant. I didn't mean that I was going to be like this petulant authoritarian and force them to reopen their states, even if they think that that would be unsafe. Well, that's exactly what it meant. And because you know that you don't have the power short of some type of weird, like unconstitutional power grab. He has no choice but to back down because this is a battle that he can't win because he doesn't have the authority to command states to do that. They're saying, no, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? You can't do shit. You can't force governors to be complicit if you command them to reopen their states and kill people. But the mere fact that he would even suggest that the president has total authority and use that authoritarian language, that should worry everyone. That should tell you that Donald Trump doesn't actually care about checks and balances. He literally does not believe that there is any check on his authority, even if he is actually saying it's only with regard to this issue. It's an unlimited scope that I have total authority. I don't believe that he believes that. But even if he thought that in a limited scope, he had total authority. That's not something that you say as a leader, you say, you know, what I'm doing is I'm working with the experts and together we're formulating a response. We're formulating a plan to reopen the country. But he can't even do that because he can't help himself. Instinctively, he is an authoritarian to his core. He is not authoritarian. And each successive president has increased the power of the executive branch. George Bush did this a lot. We saw substantial increase in executive power under his administration. We saw another increase under Obama. And we're seeing it again with Donald Trump. And this is going to be a trend that continues until we finally get someone in power who's not self-interested, who limits the scope and Congress actually stands up and does its job. And the courts do its job. But as you can see, you know, what we have are institutions that just have completely caved to the executive. So there is really no check on authority. He doesn't have the constitutional ability to be able to have total authority over anything. But the fact that he thinks he does, that should worry everyone. So let me just say that we are so and I cannot emphasize this enough. Fucked. Well, I think that we all knew this was coming. It was inevitable since the beginning. Bernie Sanders has said that he intended on supporting whoever the Democratic Party's nominee was. If that wasn't him, then he, you know, enthusiastically back that individual. And here we are. Now, what does surprise me is how quickly he's endorsing Joe Biden. I don't think this is a smart decision, even if I knew he was going to endorse Joe Biden. If I were part of Bernie's team advising him, I would have instructed him to wait because I think that that would be a way for you to extract more concessions from Joe Biden. Nonetheless, Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden in a live stream that was pretty awkward. Take a look. So today I am asking all Americans, I'm asking every Democrat, I'm asking every independent, I'm asking a lot of Republicans to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy, which I endorse. To make certain that we defeat somebody who I believe, and I'm speaking just for myself now, is the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country. A president that you made this point, who downplayed this pandemic, who ignored the advice that some of his people were giving him, which has not, who has not used the Defense Production Act early on so that we could produce the masks, the gowns, the gloves, the ventilators that our medical personnel desperately need. Who today, because I understand that is threatening to fire Dr. Fauci, who has been an unbelievable, I mean, it is, who has been day after day the voice of science to the American people trying to explain how we go forward in this crisis. And he's threatening to fire him. So to me, for all of those reasons, and so many more, a president who doesn't apparently has never read the Constitution of the United States, who believes he's above the law, a president who lies all of the time, a president who has at least shown me that he is a racist and a sexist and a homophobe and a xenophobe and a religious bigot. I mean, for all of those reasons or more, we've got to make Trump a one-term president and we need you in the White House. So I will do all that I can to see that that happens, Joe. And I know that there is an enormous responsibility on your shoulders right now. And it's imperative that all of us work together to do what has to be done, not only in this moment, but beyond this moment in the future of this country. And in that regard, I have been very pleased that your staff and my staff have been working together over the last several weeks to coming up with a number of task forces. These are task forces that will look at some of the most important issues facing this country, the economy, how we create an economy that works for all, not just a few, education, how we create the best educational system in the world for all of our people, how we deal with climate change, which, as you indicated, is an existential threat to the planet, how we deal with criminal justice, because we don't want to continue having more people in jail than any other country on earth, how we deal with immigration reform and how we have a health care system that is so much better than what we have right now. Now, it's no great secret out there, Joe, that you and I have our differences and we're not going to paper them over. That's real. But I hope that these task forces will come together utilizing the best minds and people in your campaign and in my campaign to work out real solutions to these very, very important problems. So look forward to working with you and bringing some great people into those task forces. That was hard to watch. I'm not going to lie. That was hard to watch because he just dropped out like that pain is still there. The pain is real, and I'm not ready to see him do that. But here we are. And for those of you wondering, that was one of Bernie Sanders' most disliked videos. He rarely gets ratioed on his videos, but his supporters clearly aren't feeling it. And to his last point there, I'm sorry, but I'll pass on the technocratic task force. I don't know what that's going to accomplish other than placating progressives. Like we already know what needs to be done with regard to health care and criminal justice reform and education. I don't need a task force to come up with more solutions. We have the solutions. The question is, will we ever get someone in power who's actually going to carry out the solutions that we need? So I have no interest in the task force. And a lot of people are enthusiastically following Bernie Sanders lead and endorsing Joe Biden. But one of them is someone who I really respect. Brianna Joy Gray, who was his press spokesperson, she tweeted out with the utmost respect for Bernie Sanders, who is an incredible human being and a genuine inspiration. I don't endorse Joe Biden. I supported Bernie Sanders because he backed ideas like Medicare for All, cancelling all student debt and a wealth tax. Biden supports none of those. And that's exactly it. I will say that I really respect her for saying this because she knows that she's going to be attacked by Biden, bros, for saying this because it is heresy if you don't fall in line immediately and support Joe Biden enthusiastically like that boot. And she's not doing that. So kudos to her for actually having a brain of her own and not just doing exactly what the establishment commands of you. So let me explain why I think this is a bad idea on Bernie's part. I know he was going to endorse Joe Biden, but to endorse him this early when you've extracted precisely zero policy concessions from him is completely just it. It's strategically not savvy. I'll put I'll put it that way to be polite. I'm doing this. It it benefits you in no way at all. It benefits the movement in no way at all. If I were Bernie Sanders, I'm playing hardball. I'm holding out. I'm not making an endorsement until I get at least one firm policy concession from Joe, but from Joe Biden, along with the promise that he will appoint someone to his administration that is actually going to hold his feet to the fire with said policy concession. But Bernie Sanders got nothing and he endorsed him. I mean, over the weekend, Joe Biden has proposed Medicare at 60 and canceling some student debt, although when you look into it, it looks more like a more charitable loan repayment program. I mean, you got nothing and you endorsed him already. What's the point? Like, why? What's the point? You're getting nothing. Like, we know that when Amy Klobuchar and Pete would have just dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden immediately, there was something in it for them, whether that is a spot in his administration and endorsement from Obama or Biden for another office. You know, maybe Pete would judge wants to run for governor. I don't know. But I know damn well that they wouldn't have endorsed Joe Biden and dropped out to endorse him if they weren't going to get anything. So I don't understand why Bernie Sanders would do this so quickly because you're basically taking all of your leverage and you're throwing it away just like that. It makes no sense. Bernie Sanders isn't good at playing politics. That is what I learned over the course of these last couple of months. But at the same time, it's part of the reason why I love him so much, because I don't want someone to be so calculative. I don't want someone who's going to play politics and do things for purposes of political expediency. But at the same time, you know, on the same coin, but opposite side, I want him to try to do what he can for the movement. And admittedly, that does mean once in a while, you've got to play politics, right, be authentic when it comes to policies. But when it comes to fighting the establishment and this is a real fight, I emphasize the word fight, because that's what this is. This is intraparty warfare. You've got to play a little bit of politics, at least a little bit. And the fact that he chose to endorse Joe Biden while getting nothing. It's really frustrating, because back in 2016, Bernie Sanders didn't endorse Hillary Clinton until like June or July. And immediately she came out with one of his policies. Now, it was watered down, right? It was a free college. I don't remember specifically what it was. I think maybe it was means tested. And we all know that she didn't actually support it. She was just paying lip service and trying to placate progressives. But nonetheless, you know, he tried to get what he could. And on top of that, he had some say with the platform. But I mean, here you endorse Joe Biden. And when it comes to health care, he proposed Medicare at 60. Bernie, your supporters are very, very young. So how does it benefit you to immediately concede and endorse him when he isn't offering your supporters specifically anything? I mean, this is when we need to learn how to get a little bit more savvy as progressives and as leftists and to acknowledge that as leftists, we will basically be perpetually marginalized when it comes to the establishment. But what little power we have, we've got to understand that there is an effective and practical way to harness that power and just immediately conceding and endorsing Joe Biden like this. I just I don't think that's a good way to use the power that you have to get any change whatsoever. Now, a lot of stuff is happening behind the scenes, I'm sure. So I don't know the conversations that Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden had. But what I do know is that just looking at this as an outsider to me. It looks like Bernie Sanders just kind of rolled over and died. And I get it. He's fought for so long. He doesn't want to do it anymore. He's a nice guy. He's ready to move on with his life. But if, you know, actually fighting for real change and not just that, but helping to get Joe Biden to a point where he's actually more electable and there's maybe a little bit of enthusiasm among young people, you needed to keep pushing. But I mean, the entire media narrative was drop out, drop out, drop out, drop out. And once he dropped out, it was endorse Biden, endorse Biden, endorse Biden. He went on Stephen Colbert. And I think that that was the first thing he asked them. Or I don't know if it was the first thing, but it came up. So it's tiring. I get that it's exhausting to have them constantly hound you. But I mean, we believed in you to be the leader and I kind of feel let down here. I'm not going to lie. So, you know, it's not like I'm surprised this was inevitable, but it still sucks to see it. It hurts to see it. And Bernie Sanders. And this should be like it should serve as a reminder that if you are a lefty and you're getting involved, don't play politics until you need to, right? Don't play politics with voters. Play politics with the establishment. Bernie just never learned that. And because of it, I think we will get zero policy concessions. And I'm not like delusional enough to think that Joe Biden would even follow through with anything he proposed us. But I mean, you do what you can in the position with the cards that you're dealt. And I think Bernie Sanders played his hand poorly here. Last week after Bernie Sanders dropped out, Joe Biden tried to extend an olive branch to Bernie Sanders supporters via Twitter by telling all of us that he sees us, he hears us, and he knows that he's got to earn your vote. So in other words, he seemed, you know, like he knew at least that he had to try to unify the party that lasted about a week. And now here's what he's saying. He is offering anyone this amazing sticker. If you choose to send him your hard earned cash, it says, I'm a Democrat and proud of it. And as you can see, it crosses out socialist and plutocrat because, you know, socialism and plutocracy, these things go hand in hand. I guess that's what he's trying to communicate. I don't know. Listen, they know exactly what they're doing. They can't feign ignorance. His team knows what they're doing. This is a slap in the face to Bernie Sanders and all of his supporters. So that appeal to Bernie supporters lasted about a week and he's already telling you to go fuck yourself. This is my question. I genuinely am asking. I'm not trying to be pretentious or patronizing. I genuinely am asking a question to people who are vote blue, no matter who. At what point do we start pressuring Joe Biden and the Biden bros to try to make even just a little bit of an effort to win over the left? At what point do we start putting pressure on Biden? Because what I've seen from a lot of people on Twitter, Mehdi Hassan, others, is that if you are even considering not falling in line and supporting Joe Biden, you are a terrible, terrible human being and you must want Donald Trump to win. If you're going to stay home, you're a bad person. If you are going to vote third party, you're a terrible person. So my question to those people who believe that and I get the legitimate fear about Trump getting reelected, all of the left does. But my question is, at what point do you actually direct your focus to Joe Biden? Does he share any responsibility at all, even a little bit to try to win over the left? At what point does it become the Democratic Party's responsibility to win over the left? Because everything that I've seen so far has been that the left should fall in line and we didn't even get like 10 minutes as soon as Bernie Sanders dropped out immediately. We were told to fall in line and lick that fucking boot and like it. So at what point is that responsibility at all going to be shared with Joe Biden? Like, do they share 50 percent of the responsibility? Hell, do they share 30 percent, 10 percent? Do they have any responsibility to actually win over voters and earn those votes? Any responsibility whatsoever? I'm genuinely asking, I'm genuinely asking because time and again, the Democratic Party establishment has given voters the middle finger. They've told us to go fuck ourselves. They said that they don't need us time and again. And all of a sudden we share all of the responsibility. None of the credit if Joe Biden's elected, all of the blame if he loses, but also in terms of just putting in work, that's on us. It's not on Joe Biden. Do you understand why people are so disillusioned with politics? Because things like this go on, things like this happen frequently. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party establishment, they have all of the power. So why are you directing your rage to Bernie Sanders supporters, especially when we see things like this, like in a reasonable world? You would see Joe Biden being universally condemned by, you know, neoliberals, Democratic Party loyalists who should theoretically be outraged. That's something like this is happening. They should be saying, Joe, what are you doing? I support you, but this doesn't help us to win anyone over. But this just gets ignored and the conversation continues to be. How dare you even consider voting third party? Fuck out of here. I've got no time for those types of people who do things like that. And if you genuinely believe that there's like some responsibility that Joe Biden has to earn people's votes, great, I respect you more than the others. But this doesn't help foster unity and to point it out is even blasphemy. Because at this time in a post primary election year, we're not supposed to acknowledge anything that's wrong with Joe Biden. We can't acknowledge the fact that a very credible rape allegation just came up against him. We can't acknowledge the fact that his vote for the Iraq war killed hundreds of thousands of people. We're supposed to shut the fuck up and be quiet because Trump is worse. And if you think that Joe Biden needs to earn your vote, sorry, you're a bad person, you're privileged. Joe Biden doesn't have to do a goddamn thing to win you over. So lick that boot and love it while you're doing it, fucking peasants. Listen, I'll give advice to the vote blue no matter who people or who are just, I guess, making vote shaming their main job. Let me let me just tell you something. Trying to guilt, shame and bully people into supporting Joe Biden is going to be a less effective strategy than picking up that phone and making calls for Joe Biden. I promise you that because guess what? There's going to be a portion of Bernie Sanders base of support that just won't back Biden. That's a fact of reality and no amount of, you know, blaming and shaming is going to change that. But what you can change is the group of non-voters who maybe just haven't gotten a call from any Democrat in years. Maybe if you canvassed or phone banked, at least for now for Joe Biden, maybe you can re-register enough new voters to make up for the lack of Bernie supporters that are willing to switch over and support Joe Biden. That's just something that I think maybe you should do. But instead, that's not fun. That doesn't make you feel as if you have the moral high ground by telling everyone to, you know, vote for the lesser of two evils. You feel as if, you know, you're genuinely morally superior. OK, but don't pretend as if you actually care about Joe Biden beating Donald Trump if you're not actually making calls for him. Don't pretend that you actually care about Joe Biden beating Donald Trump if you haven't said a goddamn word about ranked choice voting because over these past what is it, five years, the left has been screaming about a ranked choice voting. Do you want to know what I did when I had a town hall of my representative? I asked her to co-sponsor HR 3057, which is the Fair Representation Act, which would move us nationally to ranked choice voting. She told me she would get back to me on this. You want to know what happened? She never got back to me. So after we try to make it so, you know, spoilage isn't an issue after we try to make the process fair. After we try to fight for our candidate, shaming us isn't going to convince anyone. What you need to do now is make the case for Joe Biden to people who are non-voters, because guess what? The real base who you should be going after are people who don't vote anymore. It's not Bernie Sanders base of support. It is the people who don't turn out, the people who did not come out and support Hillary Clinton in 2016, who just chose to stay home. Because I think that if a lot of people aren't going to vote for Joe Biden, we should still acknowledge that there is value in them supporting Democrats, you know, on down ticket races, like I can still support Jeff Merkley, my senator, who is a Democrat. So what you need to do is everything in your power to make the case for Joe Biden. And I promise you that shaming people who are not going to vote for Joe Biden because they just they can't, that's not going to help. So if you genuinely think Trump is the worst option, I agree with you, right? I think Trump is the worst option. Does that mean I'm going to fall in line and support Joe Biden? It does not. And you can try to convince me. I'll hear you out. I'm a reasonable person. But guess what? At the end of the day, that is a less valuable way to spend your time. Shut up. Make calls for Biden. Period. Otherwise, you know, don't be mad when he loses because he's doing things like this. He's spitting in the face of socialists. I am not a capitalist. I hate capitalism. So I mean, if you truly want to be serious about unifying the party, then you should be condemning this as loudly as you're condemning all of the burning your busters. But the fact that so many people aren't doing that, it just shows you that this isn't really about defeating Donald Trump to them. This is about getting the left to comply, to be obedient, because that's the thing about our system, our institutions. They have a way of like forcing people. It kind of comes down on you. So people feel like they will be rewarded for, you know, being ostensibly morally superior by vote shaming people who choose not to support Joe Biden, who has been incredibly accused of rape. I mean, if you genuinely feel that it's worthwhile to get out and support Joe Biden, then don't make that case to people who already have their minds made up. Like it's just a vice if you're not going to change anyone's minds, especially with the things that we've seen happen. And, you know, if you're going to continue to vote shame people who are burning your bust, then at least condemn this, at least be somewhat consistent and acknowledge that a share of the responsibility of defeating Donald Trump lies with Joe Biden. But we can't even get that from people, you know. So, um, all right, then, whatever it is, what it is, but we're not going to take you seriously if you continue to vote shame, but not call out things like this. Since Bernie Sanders dropped out of the 2020 Democratic Party primary race and Joe Biden now really has no competition. Well, now the mainstream media is conspicuously talking about Tower Reed's Me Too story. They're bringing up the rape allegation against Joe Biden. All of a sudden. Interesting how that works, right? They ignored it for weeks. And now that voters seemingly have nowhere else to go. They have nothing to lose. So now they're going to do their job. The Washington Post talked about this story. NBC News also talked about this story. And, you know, really all of these organizations, they followed the lead of the New York Times, who I believe was the first major outlet post-dem primary to break their silence. And it took them so long to report on this that they literally had to put on a separate article explaining why it took them 19 fucking days to talk about this. So they're definitely not politically motivated in any way, shape or form. Nothing suspicious to see here. Now, the most disgusting part about the New York Times' coverage of this is that they literally put out this now deleted tweet where they say no other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of our reporting, nor did any former Biden staff corroborate Reed's allegation. We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden beyond hugs, kisses and touching that some previously said made them uncomfortable. That's a big yikes from me. I'm going to read that last line to you again. We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden beyond hugs, kisses and touching that some previously said made them uncomfortable. I wonder if they're taking a side here. This is not objectivity. This is not real journalism. They're very clearly taking a side and it's embarrassing. This is mask off for corporate media. They refused to cover a story about sexual assault and Joe Biden until Bernie Sanders dropped out. Now they're all covering it simultaneously. That tells you a lot about the media landscape in American politics. It tells you that we don't actually have a media who's going to speak truth to power. They are stenographers to power. And if you weren't convinced of that before, this should convince you of it. Now, what's amazing to me about this article is that they go out of their way to make sure that, you know, quote, President Trump has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by more than a dozen women who have described a pattern of behavior that went far beyond the accusations against Mr. Biden. So just remember, folks, that even though you may be a little bit repelled by the reality that Joe Biden is now an alleged rapist, just remember that Donald Trump is also rapist and he is a worse rapist. He's done more rape. So Biden is the lesser of two rapists. That's where we're at. That's where we're at now, because I'm not a hack, because I actually am trying my best to be objective. I do want to share a portion of their article where they do do some digging, which I believe was previously called investigative journalism, something that's lacking nowadays, unless you're an indie media. But nonetheless, here's where they actually kind of vet the claims made by Tara Reid, something they should have done long ago. But nonetheless, this is what they say. On Thursday, Ms. Reid filed a report with Washington, D.C. Police saying she was the victim of a sexual assault in 1993. The public incident report provided to the Times by Ms. Reid and the police does not mention Mr. Biden by name, but she said the complaint was about him. Ms. Reid said she filed the report to give herself an additional degree of safety from potential threats. Filing a false police report may be punishable by a fine and imprisonment. Ms. Reid, who worked as a staff assistant helping manage the office interns, said she also filed a complaint with the Senate in 1993 about Mr. Biden. She said she did not have a copy of it and such paperwork has not been located. The Biden campaign said it did not have a complaint. The Times reviewed an official copy of her employment history from the Senate that she provided showing she was hired in December 1992 and paid by Mr. Biden's office until August of 1993. The seven other women who had complained about Mr. Biden told the Times this month that they did not have any new information about their experience to add. But several said they believed Ms. Reid's accounts. So this is basically what was expected from mainstream news outlets. You vet these claims, give us the details, give us the consistencies, the facts of the matter. If there's any inconsistencies and let us decide for ourselves. For me personally, I definitely believe Tara Reid because there's no evidence of the complaint. They can't find the record. No paper trail. And Biden is denying it, but she's saying it's true and she did work for him. And there is a history of inappropriate behavior with Joe Biden. It is not normal for him to touch girls and women on camera in the way that he does. I think that that is completely inappropriate beyond the pale over the line. So I believe Tara Reid. But the point is that we need the mainstream media to do their job and it shouldn't have taken 19 days. The New York Times should not have put out a report where they have to explain why it took them 19 days. Do you understand how troubling this is? This is deeply, deeply problematic. Because it tells people that they can't trust the media because the media is in cahoots with the Democratic Party. And if it's not the Democratic Party, then they may be in cahoots with the Republican Party, OAN, Fox News. So we have different competing media outlets who are just playing team politics, right? They will condemn something that is, I think, universally egregious rape, sexual assault, unless someone from their team is accused of it. Here's a new proposal. How about we just treat all sexual assault allegations identical? Pretend like the individual who's being accused isn't a Democrat or Republican. They're just a political. And we vet those claims accordingly. Why don't we just try doing that just for once? This story. If this doesn't kill what little trust you had in mainstream media, nothing else would. And guess what? MSNBC finally chose to talk about this story. They definitely weren't waiting for Bernie Sanders to drop out of the race, guys. Nothing suspicious here. There's no conspiracy. And I don't believe they actually collaborated and were in cahoots, and they're like, OK, well, we'll cover it at the same time once Bernie's out of the race. We just know that everyone who works at these outlets, these are establishment shills for lack of a better word. They do the bidding of the establishment. They wouldn't have a job in these outlets if they didn't always do what the establishment wanted. And sure, there's a couple of people who do good work. Jeff Stein at the Washington Post is one example. But, you know, I truly believe that they keep these types of people there just so they can maintain their credibility. We'll publish, you know, and not bed from a progressive time. And again, but most of our work, the aggregate, if you kind of step back and look at it all will be disproportionately favorable to the establishment, predominantly one party in the establishment. And that really is sickening. So I'm going to play this clip from MSMDC for you. And it's relatively long, but I'm playing the entire clip for or almost the entire clip for you because it demonstrates the inherent bias here. And what I believe is a prime example of political priming. Take a look. Tonight, we have new reporting about a claim of sexual assault against Joe Biden from when he served in the U.S. Senate in the 90s. And tonight, his campaign is strongly denying that claim, calling it untrue. NBC's Mike Memley and Ali Vitale join us live with their latest reporting. Mike, let me start with you and let's start from a broad lens as we then narrow in on the new reporting that you guys have been doing here. It's been quite a week for Joe Biden. I want to take a moment and, you know, digest that with Bernie Sanders deciding to step back a much different sort of landscape for him than the one Hillary Clinton faced in 2016. But he also has a number of challenges ahead of him, including this, you know, a president who's on TV day in and day out, as well as what you guys have been working on. This is this allegation. Can you walk us through kind of where the campaign stands right now, what their thinking is in terms of how this is all going to unfold in the coming months? Well, Casey, to say the obvious that this is not the kind of campaign that Joe Biden thought he'd be running at this stage. It is interesting to note that Joe Biden can now lay claim to being the apparent Democratic nominee at an earlier state than anybody since John Kerry in 2004. We'll remember that Barack Obama in 2008 and then Hillary Clinton in 2016. It took until June or even later in the case of Hillary Clinton for them to really have that moment where they were in the minds of Democrats widely seen as the nominee. But now, of course, Joe Biden is campaigning from his basement in Wilmington. I'm coming to you from my apartment here in Washington. This is all a very different setup. But the challengers are the same for Joe Biden at this point. One is he has to work very hard to unite the Democratic Party behind him. We've seen him attempt to do that, including this week, by embracing some policy proposals that were at least a nod towards the progressive wing and the party in this case. This week, he's dealing with a free a form of a free college tuition and releasing relieving student debt. He also has to choose a running mate, of course, and that's going to be something that we talk a lot more about in the coming weeks, as Biden is set to announce his formal vetting committee, the team that will help him go through that process or also not seeing money raised in the same way that it usually is. And so the Biden campaign has been working to try to get him out into different forums, different venues via the technology that we're all using at the same time. But clearly, there's a lot of learning process still underway in that regard. Ali Vitale, let me go to you on this story that you and Mike have been reporting out. I know you and NBC News spoke with Tara Reid on multiple occasions. What did you learn from her? And how is the Biden campaign handling this in this moment? Yeah, Casey, Tara Reid was a staff assistant in Joe Biden's office from December of 1992 until mid 1993. During that time, she says that she was sexually harassed and sexually assaulted by the then senator. And this is a story that has evolved, Casey. In April of 2019, Reid came forward, saying that she had been inappropriately touched by Biden at the time. She was one of several women who came forward with similar allegations. And you'll remember Biden, who he himself calls him, he calls himself a tactile politician. He said that he would be more mindful of personal space at the time. Then last month, Reid came forward with a sexual assault allegation. In a podcast interview, she said that she had been sexually assaulted by then senator Biden in a corridor of the Capitol Hill complex in the spring of 1993, when she brought him a gym bag. NBC News has spoken with Reid multiple times since she made those allegations. And we've also spoken with five people with whom Reid says she told varying degrees of detail about this story over time. Three of them on the record deny knowing or remembering those conversations with her, but two of her friends tell me that they remember her telling her telling them about these incidents. One at the time, another says that Reid told her in the mid 2000s. And look, Biden's campaign for their part is saying the alleged assault quote absolutely did not happen, reading a little bit more of a statement that we have from Kate Bedingfield. They say he firmly believes that women have a right to be heard and heard respectfully. Such claims should also be diligently reviewed by an independent press. What is clear about this claim, they say it is untrue. And Casey, the most recent action that Reid took is going and filing a police report here in DC with DC Metro police. She did that on Thursday night. She said that it was for an assault that happened sometime in the spring of 1993. But I would point out that those claims are obviously past the time that they can be prosecuted. The statute of limitations is up on that. And it also is illegal to falsify police reports. That's what we know at this point, Casey. So that entire video was five minutes long. It was over five minutes. But the portion that I played for you was five minutes long. And they didn't get to Tower Reid's allegations until the third minute almost of that clip. So after they basically explained to you how Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee, Bernie's out. And if you're a Democratic primary voter, you have nowhere else to go. Then after they reminded you of that, they told you about Tower Reid's allegations, nothing to see here, folks, totally not suspicious. They're totally not in the tank for one candidate over the others. If we don't come up with some sort of plan to decommodify media or at least have a really strong alternative that we build up over the years, then leftist policies and leftist candidates will be permanently doomed because the mainstream media is not on your side. And once in a while, they may placate you every now and again. They'll do a really great segment that I even commend. But at the end of the day, they aren't looking out for you at the end of the day. They're not doing their job, which is to act as a check on power, government authority. They have an agenda because when you live in a capitalist system, then the goal of a news organization is not to produce the news. It's not to make voters more educated before they make their decisions in elections. It is to increase profits, to appease shareholders. That is the goal here. It is to make money. And it just so happens that it's more lucrative for the New York Times and MSNBC to be completely in the tank with the Democratic Party because the same entities that advertise on MSNBC, the same ones that you see advertise on the Washington Post's page are the same corporations that donate to the Democratic Party. It's one big club and you ain't in it, as George Carlin would say. So this story is really, really despicable. It's morally reprehensible. And it's not like everyone is required to believe Tara Reid's story. I do. But the point is that voters are supposed to be given the details and they're supposed to be able to make that decision themselves, whether or not to believe her based on the evidence that is presented to them objectively by the media. But we did not get that. This was a botched story and we can't forget this. You have to remember that the media did this because whenever you listen to the mainstream media, you have to approach their stories with a very healthy degree of skepticism. Because again, they have ulterior motives. They have agendas and that agenda is oftentimes self-interested. It seems nefarious, but really this is all about money and protecting power and protecting the status quo. Absolutely disgusting. Shame on all of these outlets. They don't get any credit for covering this 19 days after it came out. They don't get any credit for covering this once Bernie Sanders dropped out because it's obvious that they waited until Bernie Sanders was gone. So voters wouldn't be repulsed by the details of this story and maybe vote for Bernie Sanders over Joe Biden. They know about that, right? They know that's what they wanted. It's it's very clear. I don't think it's unreasonable for me to say that. I think it's very obvious that that was their agenda all along and they got what they wanted. They got what they wanted. They got their, you know, favorite Democratic candidate. They dragged them across the finish line. Congratulations. Good job. They don't care about the country. And if you are a lefty, this is the number one thing to keep in mind. Media is it's not going to be used at your benefit to inform you. It will be used to bludgeon you. It's another force of power that we also have to resist. So for me, one of the most difficult parts about this Biden allegation, Tara reads me two story is the deafening silence that we see from Democrats, especially after we just had the Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford story dominate headlines for months. And it, you know, it feels like nobody in the Democratic Party stands for anything. You see a Biden's press spokesperson, Simone Sanders, deleting all of the Me Too tweets that she made about Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. Why? Because it makes her look like a hypocrite. You see actress Alyssa Milano and Me Too activist pretend as if it, you know, didn't happen. And when it's finally addressed, she accuses Bernie Sanders supporters of trying to weaponize this Me Too allegation against Joe Biden, which is the same thing that Republicans accuse Democrats of doing towards Brett Kavanaugh. So it just it feels really gross. And I have sexual assault survivors in my family. And to me, one of the biggest things that I learned from them is that there's this automatic setting in people where they just they feel inclined to protect the rapist at all costs. You can't speak up, can't vocalize your story because that's really inconvenient for other people associated with the rapist. And it's so sickening, like this story has taken a personal toll on people that I know. So, you know, to see Democrats after they were rightfully condemning Brett Kavanaugh, because I believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, you know, not say anything about Tara Reid. It's so disheartening. And one individual who the left has, I think, been rightfully calling out is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because she tweeted this out on October 5th of 2018. We're saying it loud and clear on November 6th. If you are an elected official that minimizes covers for or ignores sexual assault, then we will replace you by electing survivors to office. Hashtag me too. Hashtag cancel Kavanaugh. And people have been resharing this tweet and asking for AOC to speak out because it's really important that we remain consistent as members of the left if we want to be taken seriously, if we just want to be principled and I think moral. And I also was wondering when are we going to see progressive leaders speak out? They just need to acknowledge it and do the responsible thing and call for an investigation, ask for these claims to be thoroughly vetted. Just give us something that tells us that you genuinely believed everything you said about Brett Kavanaugh. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked about Tara Reid and she actually responded. So according to The Hills, Zach Burdick, representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday addressed a sexual assault allegation against former vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by a former Senate staffer saying it was legitimate to talk about. Ocasio-Cortez was asked about the allegation during an online forum hosted by The Wing, a women's network and community space by a questioner who said she was strongly opposed to President Trump's re-election but said she also really resents the fact that the other choice is someone who has a really long history of being creepy to women. Citing the allegation by former staffer Tara Reid, quote, I think it's legitimate to talk about these things. Ocasio-Cortez responded according to CBS News. And if we want, if we again want to have integrity, you can't say, you know, both believe women support all of this until it inconveniences you until it inconveniences us. I think a lot of us are just in this moment where it's like, how did we get here? You know, it almost felt like we started this cycle where we had kind of moved on from, you know, from all of this. And now it feels like we're kind of back in it, she added. And, you know, the most diverse field that we've ever seen that we're kind of replaying old movies in a way. So what I have to say to that is thank you for speaking out, AOC. That is really meaningful. And anyone who doesn't speak out, I don't know what they're waiting for because Bernie's out of the race. You're not going to be accused of weaponizing this against Joe Biden. Well, I shouldn't say that, actually, because there are some individuals in the center who think that any and all criticisms of Joe Biden is an automatic endorsement of Donald Trump by you. But these people are not seriously. This is about being consistent and holding people accountable. We should not be forced to choose between the lesser of two rapists. The fact that Joe Biden and Donald Trump is what was produced by our political system tells us that this system is wholly illegitimate. This system has to be overthrown because if we get to a point where this is what is the best that we can do, then this system is illegitimate. This system has no credibility. This system is not valuable to us. So I'm glad that you said that, you know, this is legitimate to talk about because even if you genuinely believe that Joe Biden is the lesser of two evils and I would agree with you, you can't pretend like this didn't happen. This is wrong to just ignore it. And, you know, maybe you genuinely don't believe Tara Reid. I personally do because I find. Joe Biden's conduct completely inappropriate and unacceptable towards women, young women and girls. But even if you don't believe Tara Reid. As a member of the Democratic Party, who just fought to have Christine Blasey Ford's charges against Brett Kavanaugh, heard claims against Brett Kavanaugh, heard you have a responsibility to hold Joe Biden to the same standard you held Brett Kavanaugh to. So to me, I'm glad that she spoke out because we need our leaders to speak up. We need our leaders, people who are representatives of the left to make it very clear that they are principled and they're not just about playing team politics. Listen, it's not surprising to see elected Democrats and people running to lead the Democratic Party like Bernie Sanders and AOC all commit to supporting other Democrats. That's not surprising in the slightest to me. It's something that we all expect. This is how party politics oftentimes works. Now, I think that, you know, if Bernie and AOC were to be a little bit more Machiavellian in the way that they play politics, a little bit more savvier, they could be more effective, you know, if they play hardball with the establishment every once and again. But that doesn't change the fact that I do expect them ultimately to fall in line at the end of the day. But Bernie Sanders, you know, he called his supporters irresponsible, but AOC chose to take a different approach. And I think that this approach ultimately is going to be the one that is more conducive to Democrats winning, because while she is ultimately tacitly saying or actually explicitly saying she's going to support Joe Biden, the Democratic Party's nominee, which I don't actually think she should say because the minute that you say you're going to support someone, then you lose all leverage. And he hasn't reached out to her, she says. So I think that's part of the reason why he hasn't, because he already knows that she's going to support him. But, you know, regardless, what she says about voting blue, no matter who, I think this is a more reasonable response. And people like Bernie Sanders, Joy Reid, Mehdi Hassan, not that they're all equal. You know, I don't think that, you know, Joy Reid is a good faith actor here. But their approach to this vote blue, no matter who, it's all wrong. And I think that if anything, it's counterproductive because they're driving people away. Like if you try to hit someone over the head, you're not going to get them to listen. Like people don't respond to that. So you've got to meet people at their level if you genuinely think that people should support Joe Biden. And I won't be exercising that strategy. But to see the way that a lot of people are face planting and trying to convince others to use that strategy, it goes to show you that they are more willing to talk at people than actually listen. So in an interview with the New York Times, I think AOC did a really adequate job of explaining what unity actually means. She said there's this talk about unity as this kind of vague kumbaya kind of term. Unity and unifying isn't a feeling, it's a process. And what I hope does not happen in this process is that everyone just tries to shoot along and brush real policies that mean the difference of life and death or affording your insulin and not affording your insulin. Just brush that under the rug as an aesthetic difference of style. There's also this idea that if we all just support the nominee, that voters will come along as well. I flagged very early two patterns that I saw among Biden's campaign, which is underperformance among Latinos and young people, both of which are very important demographics in November. And so I don't think this conversation about changes that need to be made is what about throwing the progressive wing of the party, a couple of bones. I think this is about how we can win. The whole process of coming together should be uncomfortable for everyone involved. That's how you know it's working. And if Biden is only doing things he's comfortable with, then that's not enough. And then she was asked, can you give me examples of areas that you want to see him get uncomfortable? She says they floated this olive branch to the progressive left of lowering the Medicare age to 60 and it's almost insulting. I think Hillary was looking at policies that lowered it to 50. So we're talking about a progressive concession that is 10 years worse than what the nominee had in 2016. Progressives aren't a monolith like every voting block is in a monolith. But I also know from a Latino perspective, I think we need a real plan to be better than what happened during his service with the Obama administration. In terms of deportations, in terms of apprehensions, I mean, even in terms of rhetoric, it was just a couple of months ago that he told an immigrant activist to vote for someone else. I want to see him get uncomfortable there. Putting dreamers on a path to citizenship is great, but that's a policy concession from 10 years ago. And I respect what she's saying here. I don't agree with everything that she said in this article and I'll link to the full thing if you want to read it. But she is coming at this in the right way. She is putting the burden, the lion's share of responsibility on Joe Biden, not on voters, not on Bernie Sanders supporters. And that's exactly what the left should be doing. I think that it's perfectly reasonable to advocate for Joe Biden for purposes of harm reduction, because, you know, I do believe that he is the lesser of two evils. I think that we are looking at a Supreme Court growing that conservative majority. If Trump is president, I think we're looking at the prospect of war with Iran, if Trump remains president. So I agree with them that Donald Trump is the greater evil. However, admitting that someone is the greater evil doesn't mean that we should sweep all of the issues brought up by the left under the rug. And that's what it feels like when Bernie Sanders says, it'd be really irresponsible if my supporters didn't back Biden. I mean, what are you expecting? Like, these wounds are still very fresh. He just endorsed Biden a day before he called his supporters irresponsible. People are still grappling with the reality that we lost the second election in a row. And the fact that Bernie's supporters aren't given any room to breathe and they're already being bombarded with, oh, you must want Donald Trump to win. This is so counterproductive. It's so counterproductive. And it's insulting, right? It's completely ignoring all of the concerns that the left brought up to begin with. People respond when you meet them at their level, OK? And if you are a voter in a swing state, these are the people who you have to win over. So you've got to acknowledge just off the bat, there's going to be a number of people who supported Bernie that will not back Biden. But most of these people are in safe states, not swing states. Stop yelling at them. Stop yelling at people because not everyone is going to vote blue, no matter who, because it, in my opinion, isn't as big of an issue. If I lived in a swing state, I would reconsider my position. But you have to approach swing voters in people in swing states and convince them that there's going to be some sort of payoff for them if they come out and vote for Joe Biden, if they actually wait in line for hours and overcome barriers to voting and, you know, make it past voter suppression and voter ID laws. Like you have to show them that there's a real material difference that will be made by supporting Joe Biden. And a lot of people rightfully don't believe that there will be a material difference to their lives. They believe they're still going to be in the same fucked predicament if it's Trump or Biden. And the responsibility is on Biden to make sure that he reaches out to them. It's not the other way around. Voters are the ones who he should be earning. We shouldn't be having the fucking fight for Joe Biden. He should be fighting for the voters. So what AOC is doing here is she's approaching this from a reasonable perspective. She is coming to reluctant Bernie Sanders supporters from a place of reasoning, because she's been here herself, right? I'm sure she didn't enjoy voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016. So she gets it. And, you know, when you just do nothing but berate people, I promise you, you're not going to win them over. OK. I've already conceded on the argument that I think that the harm reduction argument is it's valid. I won't be exercising that argument because I live in Oregon. But other people who don't live in safe blue or, you know, red states, deep red states. Those are the people, ultimately, who will make or break this election. And it's not even them. Like, I don't necessarily believe that Bernie Sanders supporters should be the overall main focus, contrary to popular belief. Because what we saw back in 2016 was that a third of Americans didn't come out to vote at all. And so until Democrats acknowledge that they have to bring out non-voters by offering them policies that will improve their material conditions. I mean, we're going to be in this predicament. Like, we can try to place blame on voters if you want to. I don't think that's a good strategy, but we know what it takes for Democrats to win. Turn out has to be high. And when you see enthusiasm for Joe Biden lower than the enthusiasm level for Hillary Clinton back in 2016. You can't blame anyone, but Joe Biden for that, who has ran a campaign that may be worse than Hillary Clinton's. I don't know. They're equal in my eyes. But at least Hillary Clinton, like, was articulate. At least she was competent. But with Joe Biden, he comes off as incompetent, and he's also not really offering any policy concessions. So it's just it makes for a disastrous situation. We were warning Democrats during the primary that Joe Biden was not the electable candidate in spite of how much they tried to shove that argument down our throats. We said that, you know, this is not going to bode well for them if they do the same strategy in 2020 that they used in 2016. And they just they don't care because I think they revealed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the establishment doesn't actually care about beating Donald Trump. Like Chris Matthews was openly speculating whether or not it'd be better for Democrats to let Trump win than have Bernie be the nominee. You remember Nevada? So, you know, I just, first of all, I think that this entire argument about unity is disingenuous considering we for weeks watched as the establishment and other rivals of Bernie Sanders said that they would try to get superdelegates to take the nomination away from Bernie Sanders if he won. So it already seems disingenuous just inherently because of all of that because of that bad blood because we know that they're just, you know, they're telling you something, they're holding you to a standard that they would have never held themselves to. So for AOC to approach it this way, I do think that this is going to be more successful. So if you genuinely believe that people should vote for Joe Biden, this is the approach that you should follow. Not shaming them and calling them irresponsible or saying that they're guilty of Donald Trump wins. That's not the correct approach. That is a tone deaf approach and it ignores and really, I think undermines all of the issues that the left has been talking about, especially if you're on the left. Like you have to let people know that you understand that they're hurting and that even though they're still going to be hurting with Joe Biden, that's on Joe Biden to convince them that they're going to be better off with him, not the other way around. Like this whole argument is just so inseparable and I'm already preemptively dreading the inevitable conversation we have in 2024 when Democrats tell us we have to support Michael Bloomberg, otherwise Tom Cotton is going to win. It's a never-ending cycle and it's exhausting. And until we actually rise up and take direct action and call for general strikes, I don't think anything is going to change because we have to show the establishment that we are not going to play their game but because they think that we will or they think that they can win without us, this is why we see ourselves in this situation every four years. And I don't know about you, but I'm really sick of it. For all of this talk of me and Bernie Bros online throughout the 2020 Democratic Party primary process, we never hear the other side of this story. We never hear how aggressive the supporters of other candidates are. And it's the same thing as it was back in 2016. There was a study that showed that Bernie Sanders supporters were actually some of the least hostile and Hillary Clinton supporters were the ones who were actually the most mean online. But you never heard that from the mainstream media. All you heard about were these sexist, racist, hostile Bernie Bros. Now, there is another study that came out that shows that there's absolutely no data that suggests that mean Bernie Bros are a thing. But nonetheless, this media narrative was so powerful that it got regular people to believe it because maybe they had an interaction or two with a Bernie Sanders supporter who was mean to them. Well, look, I've had many interactions with Andrew Yang supporters that were not great. That doesn't mean that all of the Yang Gang are bad and toxic. I've gotten to many arguments with people on Twitter over Tulsi Gabbard. That doesn't mean that all of Tulsi Gabbard supporters were mean and toxic. Like, you've got to understand that because Bernie Sanders supporters are calling out these pundits because they put out misinformation about Bernie or a particular policy, that doesn't mean that the most mean people represent the aggregate movement. People are hostile only ostensibly because you perceive that to be hostile, but to them, they're putting you in check because their lives are on the line with this election. Regardless, this narrative persisted and it just never went away. And Bernie was repeatedly called on by people like Elizabeth Warren to condemn this and Mike Bloomberg to condemn this. And nobody talked about the hostile Biden Bros. But now that Bernie Sanders has dropped out, they're really showing their true colors because as soon as Bernie dropped, one of the main targets of hostile Biden Bros, Breonna Joy Gray, she was ambushed. She wrote about this on Facebook saying, thinking about how Biden supporters immediately photoshopped these images of me as essential workers in an effort to demean me and what it says about how much they actually care about working class people. Anyway, keep fighting. You don't take your moral guidance from folks who treat working people as a punchline. And that really says a lot about PMC, the professional managerial class, which is disproportionately, I think, the median Democratic Party voter. Like they literally looked down on people with these types of jobs. They view a McDonald's worker as someone who is lower than them. They are a lesser human because they work at McDonald's. Like that is such a disgusting way of thinking. And as someone who comes from this world, a fast food and retail, I can tell you that every single day I went into work, there was never a day where, you know, there wasn't someone that made me feel like I was less than them. I was lower than the scum on their shoes, right? Because people are very entitled. Like I dealt with lots and lots of Karens. And, you know, it really, over time, it tends to degrade your self-worth. Like I think that you kind of build up a thicker skin. But there's always going to be people that remind you in these types of jobs that, you know, they're better than you. And so to see them tweet out, you know, Brianna Joy Gray as a McDonald's worker, as if a McDonald's worker is someone to laugh at and not someone who's doing a real job making an honest living, it truly shows that these people don't actually care about the working class. They're phonies. They're phonies. And let me just say to PMCs who believe that McDonald's workers or any fast food or retail workers are lower than them in any way, shape, or form, you're not better than them. You think you are, but you're not. You're a human being just like they are, okay? You eat, sleep, shit, just like them. You have desires. You feel happiness. You feel sadness. And they're the same way. They're not robots. They're to serve you and lick your fucking boat. These are human beings. So just the fact that there is this entitlement and this overall view for the working class, it's honestly sickening. But I want to share an article from The New York Post that I think is phenomenal because it kind of takes this story and puts it all in context about the hypocrisy here with regard to the Bernie Bro myth and how we're never going to talk about Biden Bros in the mainstream media. So Adam Schrader reports Biden Bros are attacking Bernie Sanders national press secretary on social media by posting altered images depicting her as an essential worker in the wake of Sanders suspending his campaign. Breonna Joy Gray bemoaned the images allegedly created by Joe Biden supporters which show Gray posing in uniforms for fast food and sanitation workers. Some of the same jobs that have been praised during the coronavirus pandemic. Gray's Facebook post comes hours after she tweeted that Bernie was too kind to go after Biden but it's coming. Either Dem leadership cares more about maintaining a corporate status quo than getting rid of Trump or they're planning to replace Joe adopting a pretty fast and loose relationship with representative democracy. Lose, lose. Gray continued. Dr. Jill Biden at a virtual coffee fundraising event Wednesday rejoiced that Sanders ended his campaign. Thank goodness we can finally get to work. Biden told donors during his campaign other presidential candidates from Biden to Mike Bloomberg routinely attacked Sanders fan base. After his offices were vandalized in Tennessee Bloomberg said the vandals language echoes language from Sanders campaign. After Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race she slammed Sanders supporters for doing really ugly stuff. So for all of the hypocrites who loudly condemned Bernie Bros. I'm looking at you Mike Bloomberg. I'm looking at you Elizabeth Warren. Where's your outrage now? Does this not offend you at all? I thought that you cared about the working class. I thought you cared about civility online. Why are you not condemning this? Like this is not the only example. I talked about the week beforehand. I think I talked about this. I certainly tweeted about this. How people online former Elizabeth Warren supporters now Biden supporters even celebrities like event Nicole Brown were tweeting out photoshopped images of Diamond and Silk with Nina Turner and Breanna Joy Gray's faces on it. Comparing them to literal MAGA chuds. And we've heard zero condemnation from the people who were the loudest about the Bernie Bros. Let me tell you this. People like Elizabeth Warren and Mike Bloomberg care about decorum and civility online as much as Dave Rubin actually cares about free speech. These people are phonies and the arguments that they made condemning Bernie Sanders supporters as hostile online. That was nothing more than a political narrative that they saw as convenient. That's it. And I mean look at how little they care about the needs of the working class. Dr. Jill Biden said that. Oh thank goodness Bernie dropped out. Now we can finally get to work. I mean the way that I see that is as her basically saying oh thank goodness the peasants lost you know fuck all their concerns. Now we could focus on the real issues. Wait we were talking about the real issues. Shouldn't you be thanking Bernie Sanders for elevating issues that haven't been touched in decades. Well of course not because these issues are really inconvenient for someone like Joe Biden. I mean you've got to get the message the entire Democratic Party establishment. I don't know what more they can do. They have vocalized their contempt for the left. Time and again throughout this process. And as they scream unity at the top of their lungs that is coded in a you know language that blames you if anything goes wrong in November which very well likely will. I mean I shouldn't say that because you know now that this global pandemic has changed a lot Biden maybe could pull out a victory but it just when you have less enthusiasm going into the selection than Hillary Clinton and Trump has that incumbency advantage it doesn't look good. It doesn't look good. So I understand that they hold you in contempt. They don't care about you and they're not willing to change it even if they lose they don't care. This is about class interests above all else. It's just a matter of working class people coming together and acknowledging their class interests and material needs. So you know Biden and Brose I've been dealing with them but people online are mean. So you know it's petty to complain about it but you know I'm going to call this out. It is exactly what I'm going to do because they wasted you know not a single second. Whenever there was a Bernie bro who was mean to them they spotlighted it. It was broadcasted on mainstream media. CNN did an investigative report about how you know standard supporters were bombarding Elizabeth Warren with snake emojis and people would have judged with rat emojis which is all true but that's not harassment. These are wealthy rich powerful people. If they can't put up with snake emojis then they were never going to be able to beat Donald Trump but you know it's just the hypocrisy which I think is something we can never let them off the hook for. Literally just one day after Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden for president he already was essentially placing blame for the possible loss in November. Not on Joe Biden but on his supporters who refused to fall in line and I find this incredibly just problematic morally reprehensible and quite frankly cowardly. It's unbecoming of a progressive leader to basically take the entire burden and drop it on the heads of your supporters and absolve Joe Biden of any responsibility whatsoever of actually winning them over. But let's get to what he said specifically here. Steve Peoples of AP reports Bernie Sanders said Tuesday that it would be irresponsible for his loyalists not to support Joe Biden warning that progressives who sit on their hands in the months ahead would simply enable Donald Trump's re-election. And lest there be any question the 78 year old Vermont senator confirmed that it's probably a very fair assumption that he would not run for president again he added with the laugh one can't predict the future. He seemed to distance himself from the campaign's former national press secretary Brianna Joy Gray when asked about her recent statement on social media refusing to endorse Joe Biden. She is my former press secretary not on the payroll. Sanders noted a spokesperson later clarified that all campaign staffers were no longer on the payroll as of Tuesday though they will get a severance check in May. Sanders said his supporters have a simple choice now that Biden has emerged as the presumptive nominee. Do we be as active as we can in electing Joe Biden and doing everything we can to move Joe and his campaign in a more progressive direction or do we choose to sit out and allow the most dangerous president in modern American history to get reelected? He continued I believe it's irresponsible for anybody to say well I disagree with Joe Biden I disagree with Joe Biden and therefore I'm not going to be involved. So first of all I find it absolutely indefensible that he would throw his former press secretary under a bus. This has been a problem with Bernie Sanders for quite some time he never defends the people who defend him like when Zephyr teach out pendant op-ed talking about Joe Biden's corruption he apologized to Joe Biden and denounced Zephyr teach out articles so he never stands by the people who go to bad for him and that's a problem and the core issue that I have with this is that Bernie Sanders isn't reading the room correctly if he were to say look I get where my supporters are coming from but you've got to suck it up and vote for Joe Biden for purposes of harm reduction I think that is a reasonable approach nobody is going to bemoan the fact that you're telling them to support the lesser of two evils even if they won't actually do that we can understand and justify your position but for you to suggest which I think is implied here that Joe Biden has zero responsibility it's not irresponsible at all for Joe Biden to win over Bernie Sanders supporters I just find that completely unacceptable so you know the way that he worded this and I'll give him a chance to kind of respond and correct the record here is that we have to go to Joe Biden he doesn't have to come to us and earn our votes we have to go to him we're obligated to go to him and at no point does Joe Biden ever have to do anything to actually win us over I mean maybe Bernie if you truly thought that Donald Trump was a threat maybe you should have ignored Obama when he pressured you to drop out maybe you should have stayed in a little bit longer to extract maybe just like I don't know one concession and maybe behind the scenes Bernie Sanders did that but I'm sorry proposing Medicare at 60 when we're asking specifically for Medicare for all and after Hillary Clinton proposed Medicare at 50 I mean how could you say this with a straight face how could you not suggest that it's irresponsible for Joe Biden to not be aggressively campaigning to get our votes how could you not say it is very deeply irresponsible of Joe Biden to ignore the issues the legitimate crises that people on the left are talking about it's irresponsible for Joe Biden not to endorse Medicare for all it's irresponsible for Joe Biden not to cancel all student debt it's irresponsible for Joe Biden to not end the wars how could you possibly think that the entire burden all of the responsibility lies on the shoulders of your supporters I don't think Bernie Sanders to his core believes that because if you do then you're not the person I thought you were Bernie but you've got to understand that this approach is deeply deeply ineffective AOC in an interview with the New York Times I think she actually had a very human reaction she said we can't just throw all of the issues that the left raised you know under the rug and pretend like they don't exist now that Biden is the nominee we can't do that so we need we need more from Joe Biden it's insulting that he proposed Medicare at 60 after Hillary offered us Medicare at 50 it's like after 2016 Democrats should have learned the importance of uniting the left and the center even after they preached about it but now it's like they're saying you know yeah I get that we lost without the left you know they are the ones that blame Bernie Sanders supporters and third party voters but what do they do in response they throw us less crumbs than they did in 2016 it's like a huge fuck you and then we have Bernie Sanders dog piling on us along with the corporate establishment I mean do you want to know what happened as soon as this article came out Joy Reid of MSNBC tweeted this out so now that he's won them over after they berated you for more than a year actually fuck it since you ran for president back in 2015 and 2016 now you know they're using you as you're attacking your own base don't do this Bernie don't do this you know that this is not effective trying to come from a place of understanding that is a good place to start if you truly want some of your supporters to flip now it's a fact of reality that a large portion of Bernie Sanders supporters are not going to vote for Joe Biden I'm not voting for Joe Biden I live in Oregon all of my state's electoral votes are going to go to Joe Biden regardless so to me it doesn't matter so I'm not going to vote for Joe Biden but if you want to get people to vote for Joe Biden in those key swing states you've got to acknowledge and understand they're real discussed acknowledge where they're coming from and I think Bernie knows this because he talks to people he's not insulated from the public like people like Joe Biden but for him to say this it's really not a good look and I'm sorry where are you Bernie on the rape allegation against Joe Biden how could you continue to be silent on this don't you have a responsibility to call on Joe Biden and tell him maybe he should address it maybe give us some signal that he actually cares about women's rights after the Democratic Party has been screeching about women's rights ever since you know um forever it's just it's like you know he is he's not understanding that people aren't going to support Joe Biden enthusiastically even if his supporters and I think most of them probably will end up backing Joe Biden they're not going to do it you know uh enthusiastically they're going to do it begrudgingly because they don't want Donald Trump to fill another Supreme Court seat they don't want Donald Trump to be in control for the next four years which elevates the prospect of war with the wrong so Bernie of all people should be understanding of where his movement is coming from but the fact that he's saying that they're responsible and it's not Joe Biden who's irresponsible for not trying more to win them over after he just spit in our eyes with his I'm not a socialist fundraiser scolding people isn't going to work it's insulting so um yeah I think that Bernie Sanders of all people should know this is not a good look and uh it pains me to say this but sorry Bernie most people aren't going to respond to you blaming them for the incompetence of the Democratic Party and Joe Biden and to an extent your own campaign because you know this is what happens like so many people go to bat for Bernie Sanders Brianna Joy Gray Zephyr Teachout all of his millions of supporters and not even a day after he endorses Biden this is the type of bullshit that we have to put up with like if he were saying this in September I could understand it more right because there's a real urgency if it seems like Joe Biden's going to lose you know he's kind of frantic and panicking but it's April you didn't drop out in 2016 until July maybe just give him a week Bernie can they get a week to process it I mean Elizabeth Warren hasn't even endorsed Joe Biden yet so maybe give your supporters a little bit of time for self-care just give him a fucking little bit of time to breathe to nobody's surprise former president Barack Obama has officially endorsed Joe Biden and along with this endorsement comes a really fascinating article from the New York Times which basically confirms all of our suspicions about what Obama was covertly doing he was basically acting to sabotage and undermine the progressive movement at every single step of the way during this primary process he did in fact pressure Bernie Sanders to drop out and he pulled a lot of strings to make sure that he could drag Joe Biden across the finish line so we're definitely talking about that article but before we do that I do want to play a clip from Obama's endorsement I found it incredibly patronizing and I'll admit that part of that is because I'm incredibly bitter right now not gonna lie but it's patronizing because he tries to pat progressives on the heads by saying look we do need to go further even further than my 2008 campaign and we need progressive policy proposals and as he says all of this you can't ignore the fact that he did everything to stop real progress from happening and on top of that you know he makes a really passionate plea for Joe Biden who also has been incredibly accused of rape so any goodwill that Obama cultivated over the years it should be all gone after you watch this but it's difficult because people will see this and they're reminded that he was once a president who spoke in complete sentences you know that's what Joy Reed tweeted out so it's so easy to you know get back into the swing of just trying to gravitate towards someone who's a leader but understand that what Obama is saying here all of it is fake it's inauthentic it's all disingenuous this is all just political theater everyone in DC is basically full of shit so I'll stop talking let you watch the endorsement and then when we come back we'll talk about that article choosing Joe to be my vice president was one of the best decisions I ever made and he became a close friend and I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now Bernie's an American original a man who has devoted his life to giving voice to working people's hopes dreams and frustrations he and I haven't always agreed on everything but we've always shared a conviction that we have to make America a fairer more just more equitable society we both know that nothing is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change and the ideas he's championed the energy and enthusiasm he inspired especially in young people will be critical in moving America in a direction of progress and hope because for the second time in 12 years we'll have the incredible task of rebuilding our economy and to meet the moment the Democratic Party will have to be bold you know I could not be prouder the incredible progress that we made together during my presidency but if I were running today I wouldn't run the same race or have the same platform as I did in 2008 the world is different there's too much unfinished business for us to just look backwards we have to look to the future Bernie understands that and Joe understands that it's one of the reasons that Joe already has what is the most progressive platform of any major party nominee in history we have to protect the gains we made with the Affordable Care Act but it's also time to go further we should make plans affordable for everyone provide everyone with a public option expand Medicare and finish the job so that health care isn't just a right but a reality for everybody we have to return the U.S. to the Paris Agreement and lead the world in reducing the pollution that causes climate change but science tells us we have to go much further that it's time for us to accelerate progress on bold new green initiatives that make our economy a clean energy innovator save us money and secure our children's future wow you know he's just he's so charismatic that I almost forgot that he's literally a war criminal who had a kill list an extra judicial kill list and he frequently like George W. Bush like Donald Trump violated international laws but he's so charismatic though yeah I think that watching this endorsement even though I knew it was coming it's still really grotesque because it feels like we're all sheep being herded to slaughter there's absolutely no commitment from the Democratic Party or leaders to actually enact progressive policies and as Obama talks about the real need to get progressive policies codified into law he did everything he could to stop that from happening behind the scenes so we're going to look at this New York Times article that lays out in great detail how he did this and how party leaders reacted to the success of the progressive movement at certain times during the race so as Glenn Thrush of the New York Times reports over the past year Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former President Barack Obama practiced a political distancing of sorts with Mr. Obama maintaining a posture of public neutrality in the Democratic primaries offering counsel to any candidate who called most did and Mr. Biden saying he wanted to win on his own but with calibrated stealth Mr. Obama has been considerably more engaged in the campaign's denouement than has been previously revealed even before he endorsed Mr. Biden on Tuesday for months Mr. Obama had kept in close contact with senior party officials in hopes of preventing a repeat of the protracted and nasty 2016 primary race then in the weeks after it became clear that Mr. Biden was the party's near certain nominee Mr. Obama telling a friend he needed to accelerate the end game had at least four long conversations with his former vice president's remaining rival Senator Bernie Sanders Mr. Obama's efforts to ease the senator out of the race played a significant role in Mr. Sanders decision to end his bid and endorse Mr. Biden according to people close to the Vermont independent party officials were more direct prodding Mr. Obama to be more active behind the scenes especially after Mr. Biden had begun his comeback by winning the South Carolina primary but the former president often communicating through Eric Schultz a political aide who has also served as a bridge to the Biden campaign insisted that his best use would be as a passive peacemaker he kept his powder dry and that gave him credibility which made all the difference said Tom Perez the Democratic National Committee Chairman who served as Labor Secretary under Mr. Obama so again this confirms what I was speculating about in a video I put out last week did Barack Obama given the evidence that we had at the time influence Bernie Sanders pressure him to get out of the race and this article lays it all out what Obama told Bernie whatever that was in these private conversations played a significant role in Bernie Sanders making his decision and to me I view this as incredible naivete on Bernie Sanders behalf because Bernie needs to acknowledge that given the choice between Joe Biden and himself who does he think Obama is going to side with do you honestly think that Obama had your best interest if you're going to drop out you have to do it in a way that positions you and the left to have some sort of leverage right we're not going to have power the left will remain powerless but you've got to put us in a better off position than where we were before but he dropped out and gave up all of his leverage and he did this because Obama asked him to or pressured him to whatever the case may be and that's really frustrating like I'm not going to pretend like the math was in Bernie Sanders favor because it wasn't but the problem is that if you know you're going to drop out if you read the writing that's on the wall and it doesn't look good for your campaign weaponize what you can to be better off like I don't know have Joe Biden endorse one of your signature policy positions even if we don't believe him it makes it seem at least like you tried but I mean we got nothing now there's a little bit more details about how the establishment really was trying to call on Obama to step in after Bernie Sanders won that landslide in Nevada which was basically the peak time when everyone who was still running were saying that if Bernie Sanders with a nominee they would influence super delegates to steal it from Bernie in order to give it to him even Joe Biden said that if nobody won a majority and Bernie only had a plurality he would contest the convention or still fight for the nomination I'm paraphrasing so you know all this talk of unity now and to fall in line just immediately like that this is not a respect that would have been paid to Bernie Sanders but this is what happened Obama had intended to engage publicly only after the convention now scheduled for August at the earliest in line with his fall barnstorming campaign on behalf of Miss Clinton in 2016 and congressional candidates in 2018 he resisted calls by some Democratic officials earlier this year to intervene on Mr. Biden's behalf in the wake of Mr. Sanders victory in the Nevada caucuses arguing that he did not want to thumb the scale for his friend nonetheless he was becoming more agitated by the state of the race as Mr. Sanders surged and Mr. Biden slumped by late February he was telling people in his orbit that he thought Mr. Biden's campaign had an alarming lack of infrastructure and shared his doubts about Mr. Biden's belief that he could win the nomination after losing Iowa and New Hampshire Mr. Obama did not directly encourage Mr. Sanders rivals to endorse Mr. Biden ahead of the decisive Super Tuesday primaries yeah right but he did tell Pete Buttigieg a moderate that he would never have more leverage than on the day he was quitting the race so in other words he did and the former South Bend mayor soon joined the avalanche of former candidates backing Mr. Biden Mr. Sanders who in 2016 accused the Democratic establishment of conspiring to support Mrs. Clinton took note of all these moves but he has made no such charges against Mr. Obama in fact one of his campaign advisors speaking on the condition of anonymity and the wake of last month's string of Sanders defeats said the senator was grateful for Mr. Obama's neutrality throughout the campaign that is pathetic Bernie in late March Mr. Obama reached out to Mr. Sanders the two men would talk at least three more times with the former president reassuring Mr. Sanders that he had already accomplished much of what he had set out to do moving the party and Mr. Biden substantially to the left according to two people with knowledge of their interactions what a joke Mr. Sanders for his part is intent on protecting his open line of communication with the former president so this is why I think a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters feel really frustrated right now when we say that Bernie Sanders needed to fight harder he didn't listen and you know now someone from his campaign is saying actually we really respect that Obama was neutral throughout the course of the campaign but I mean did you not read the reports that we all saw he was not neutral he was the Debbie Wasserman Schultz of 2020 the only difference is that instead of using institutional mechanisms to sabotage Bernie's campaign Obama used his own power and influence to sabotage Bernie Sanders campaign and I've got news for you in the event let's say South Carolina went differently and Amy Klobuchar had emerged victorious that probably would have been who Obama made everyone else coalesce around it wasn't necessarily about Joe Biden because we saw the reports about Obama kind of nudging Joe Biden to not run because he doesn't have to do this he doesn't want him to embarrass himself I did a video on this it was really interesting so it wasn't necessarily you know a pro-Biden move by Obama this was just an anti-Bernie move and I think that's really telling this isn't just Obama looking out for his friend this is him fighting to stop progress and that's what I want people to understand this isn't Obama-Biden friendship you know conflicts of interest this is about Obama doing everything that he possibly can to deny the left power the same left mind you that helped him get elected twice it's a slap in the face and Bernie Sanders now that he has nothing to lose he won't call it out and look Bernie Sanders he's principled he's committed so maybe he's going to wait until after this election cycle to speak up but he's got to communicate to us in some way that he understands the disservice that was done to the left not just by the establishment and Obama but also the media but Bernie Sanders is just a nice person who doesn't play politics and you know that's that's a good thing I like a politician that doesn't you know engage in politics because it's disingenuous but you've got to be a little bit more savvy than that and Bernie just he wasn't so what I want people to take away from this ultimately is that if you ever want a chance at getting power you have to do everything to discredit and delegitimize Barack Obama because so long as he is this holy figure within the democratic party he can use that influence that he has to fuck over the left for decades to come and that's a failure on our part we didn't educate enough people about the inconsistencies and failings and war crimes of Barack Obama we didn't tell people that Obama's neoliberalism and failures led to the rise of a right-wing demagogue being successful like Donald Trump like does anyone believe that if Obama actually followed through on his message of change that Donald Trump would have been elected of course not so Obama is someone who I think the left really needs to focus on educating people about he is not anyone's friend he is only a friend to centrists and the power establishment he acts as a gatekeeper and the biggest obstacle to progress and if you truly want the left to have power you've got to work really really hard to discredit Barack Obama and let people know that this is not a good person he might talk really nicely he may have charisma but this is a war criminal with the Nobel Peace Prize this is someone who proposed a public option and we didn't even get a public option he didn't even offer that up when he had a super majority and now he's telling you to support his former VP who is supporting a public option we're supposed to believe them like do you understand Hillary Clinton she is absolutely insufferable but she's a distraction Hillary Clinton doesn't have the legitimacy that Barack Obama has she doesn't have the sway that Barack Obama has so I think that one of the numerous failings of the left is that we haven't done an adequate job at educating people at how much of a failure Barack Obama was but going forward I'm going to make sure that people know about Obama's history people in my social circles and whatnot they all still really look to Obama as someone who is a good person when this is a terrible human being who must be discredited because he's not someone who's deserving of all of this power and recognition and worship people idolize him who are Democratic Party voters and I can understand why they do that given what we see in the White House now a complete buffoon whose brains are melting out of his ears but at the same time all of that nice talk and charisma and the beautiful platitudes that Obama uses this swoon us with that all is nothing more than a distraction for a very very insidious agenda that is going to prop up the status quo for decades to come unless we educate people about the failure of Obama and the threat that he still poses because he may be out of power but he still has power so this isn't surprising but I am glad that we have these details at least because having this information it kind of gives us a little bit of a roadmap in terms of what we should do going forward when we're talking about putting pressure on the establishment and Democratic Party apparatus but it's still disappointing last year leftists such as myself were hopeful that we'd one day live in a world where Bernie Sanders was president of the United States and Jeremy Corbyn was prime minister of the United Kingdom and you know this was something that I think everyone viewed as unlikely but certainly within the realm of possibility I mean both of these politicians were taking on the political establishments in their respective countries so anytime you choose to challenge power and power structures like that in such a direct way it's going to be difficult you're going to be disadvantaged and these institutions are absolutely powerful and they often will do everything in their power to crush you both directly and directly openly and covertly now it's no secret that Debbie Wasserman Schultz used the power of the DNC to secretly sabotage Bernie Sanders in 2016 and in 2020 Obama used his power and influence within the party to sabotage Bernie Sanders but one thing that's interesting is that this also occurred in the UK because some labor officials in 2017 when Jeremy Corbyn almost one acted to lose the election I'll repeat that they try to sabotage their own party just to hopefully get Jeremy Corbyn replaced now we know that they lost in 2019 Jeremy Corbyn is no longer the labor leader but they were acting against their own party's interest according to a dossier that was just obtained by the independent because they didn't like Jeremy Corbyn so what happened in the United States also happened in the UK now as John Stone of the independent reports labor party officials opposed to Jeremy Corbyn worked to lose the 2017 general election in the hope that a bad result would trigger a leadership contest to oust him a dossier drawn up by the party suggests a huge cache of leaked WhatsApp messages and emails show senior officials from the party's right wing who worked at its HQ became despondent as labor climbed in the polls during the election campaign despite their efforts the unreleased report which the independent has seen in full was drawn up in the last days of Mr Corbyn's leadership and concerns the conduct of certain officials including some who were investigating cases of anti-semitism in the party labor has confirmed the document is a genuine draft though it is not clear who it was commissioned or written by tactics by anti-corbyn staff evidence in the report include channeling resources to candidates associated with the right wing of the party refusing to share information with the leader's office and coming into the office and doing nothing for a few months during the election campaign the report says hostile staff created a chat so they could pretend to work while actually speaking to each other with one participant stating that tap tap tapping away will make us look very busy an election night chat log showed that 45 minutes after the exit poll revealed that labor had overturned the conservative majority one senior official said the result was the opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years describing themselves and their allies as silent and gray faced and in need of counseling some senior staff joked about hanging and burning Jeremy Corbyn and suggested that another staff member who cheered a speech by the party leader should be shot party staff around the unit were also documented regularly describing people including colleagues they regarded as not sufficiently opposed to the leadership as trots short for trotskyites or disciples of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky chat logs show that some colleagues who denounced trots themselves were interned themselves privately regarded as trots by other staffers for being seen as insufficiently critical so there is a lot of information here and we barely scratched the surface so if you want to read the full article I'll put the link in the description box but wow this is unsurprising but still really shocking when you see just how active they were in trying to sabotage Jeremy Corbyn I think it goes to show you that neoliberals they hate socialists more than they hate fascists that's true in the United States it's true in the UK they used Russian hysteria McCarthyism to criticize people calling them trots on top of that there are some who were saying you know what this is just an attempt at this dossier to absolve Jeremy Corbyn of you know claims of anti-semitism and make it seem as if he wasn't actually anti-semitic and there was just this vast conspiracy to overthrow him but here's the thing this is a confirmed conspiracy we're no longer talking conspiracy theory this was confirmed and you know another thing that wasn't talked about is how hostile the media was to Jeremy Corbyn the same is true for Bernie Sanders so I think that what this tells us is that here in the United States as we just you know lost and we're grappling with the defeat of Bernie Sanders for a second time in a row our friends overseas are dealing with the same exact thing although you can honestly make the case that Jeremy Corbyn was probably treated worse by the media than Bernie Sanders that's it's arguable but you certainly can make that case because the claims of anti-semitism were so strong that most people who were Jewish in the Labour Party they viewed Jeremy Corbyn as anti-semitic whereas with Bernie Sanders you couldn't really lob that claim against them because he's Jewish he lost family members in the Holocaust but certainly they tried to weaponize identity politics in other ways against Bernie Sanders there were claims of sexism constantly in 2016 and 2020 including by some allies like Elizabeth Warren you know there were claims of racism both tacit and overt and this is what happens when you challenge the establishment this is exactly what happens you know it's true for the United States it's true for the United Kingdom and it's true for other countries as well establishment politicians you know they have institutional advantages that they oftentimes use to crush the left it's no different here and it's no different anywhere else so when we talk about how Democrats probably would rather prefer to lose with Biden than win with Bernie I mean you saw Chris Matthews after Bernie won Nevada speculating whether or not it would be beneficial for Democrats to lose and have four more years of Trump rather than let Bernie win the same is true in the UK they preferred the Tories over Jeremy Corbyn and you know broadening their social democracy it is incredibly frustrating and I think that what this communicates to us is that as leftists everywhere we really have to broaden our perspective and not just think about you know the progressive movement and the left-wing socialist anti-capitalist movement as a United States phenomenon this should be a global movement like how powerful would it be if in countries in major cities and countries around the world including the United States the left took to the streets and demanded social and economic justice demanded to end interventions and imperialism I think that once we realize that the fights that we're all fighting in our own countries are connected to fellow lefties abroad the stronger and better off will all be around the globe so when it comes to COVID-19 I'm gonna hit you with some really bad news really really terrible news but we're going to end on a more positive note because I don't want you to come away from this video thinking that you know things are going to be like this forever will remain in quarantine forever things will get better but it's going to take some time so the first bit of bad news that I have to share is that the death toll for COVID-19 in the United States has surpassed 25,000 that is a number that's so large it is difficult to comprehend 25,000 Americans died because of COVID-19 to think about this to think about how many people are in pain right now because they lost a loved one or fear losing a loved one to think about the mass of scale of just suffering it's really overwhelming it's really really overwhelming and on top of that prolonged social distancing may be necessary if we want to survive COVID-19 how long you ask worst case scenario 2022 yeah so as Leah Asmolash and Maggie Fox of CNN Report the U.S. may have to endure social distancing measures such as stay-at-home orders and school closures until 2022 researchers projected on Tuesday that is unless a vaccine or better therapeutics becomes available or we increase our critical care capacity in other words 2022 is one scenario of many that's according to researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who published their findings in the journal Science on Tuesday those findings directly contradict research being touted by the White House that suggests the pandemic may stop this summer the Harvard team's projections also indicate that the virus would come roaring back fairly quickly once restrictions were lifted if intermittent distancing is the approach that's chosen it may be necessary to do it for several years which is obviously a very long time Dr. Mark Lipstick an author on the study and an epidemiology professor at the Harvard School of Public Health told reporters another important factor whether people become immune to the new coronavirus after they have been infected that's not yet known potential challenges include finding a reliable test to determine who has antibodies for the coronavirus establishing the level of immunity conferred by previous infection and how long it lasts and the capacity of overstretched health systems to carry out reliable widespread antibody tests in the general population there's also difficult social questions around immunity certificates which have been floated as a possibility in the UK would they create a kind of two-tier society where those who have them can return to a more normal life while others remain locked down the study researchers say they are unaware that such prolonged distancing even if intermittent would likely have profoundly negative economic social and educational consequences they hope their research will help identify likely trajectories of the epidemic under alternative approaches identify complementary ways to fight it and to spur further thinking about the ways to get the pandemic under control though coronavirus cases in the US have been soaring social distancing appears to be effective now keep in mind that this study doesn't say we will definitely have to maintain social distancing until 2022 this is just a projection based on one model kind of a worst-case scenario situation but it's a possibility and I think that psychologically it would be healthy for us to prepare ourselves for the worst-case scenario but hope for the best now the societal implications of this are just so broad it's difficult to try to think through how this is going to affect society and culture how it may give way to new forms of discrimination and prejudice I mean this really is going to change the world forever now the good thing is that this doesn't necessarily mean that it'll change the world for the worst it may change the world for the better maybe people actually demand Medicare for all because they see how important it is during a pandemic maybe people you know value interpersonal relationships more you know maybe we take more precautions so this doesn't happen again but this could also have negative ramifications this could lead to another crackdown on civil liberties as 9-11 did I mean what happened after 9-11 we got the patriot act we got the Iraq war the Afghanistan war and those wars they have no end in sight so this could go very poorly but also it could go in a more positive direction that's all to be determined but I want you to know that the situation isn't entirely grim because the lead scientist at the National Institute of Health her name is Kizmikia Corbett she had a really really encouraging message about the timeline for a possible vaccine and what she says here kind of gave me confidence that 2022 is a less likely scenario this is what she had to say in an interview with with Anderson Cooper on CNN so we're developing a vaccine for COVID-19 it is based on several of our previous projects where we were investigating vaccines for MERS and SARS coronaviruses which are very closely related to the virus that causes COVID-19 so this vaccine incorporates the spike protein which is the protein that is on the surface of the virus and that protein is the reason essentially why the virus is able to attach to a cell and then get into a cell and cause an infection so from our perspective if we can incorporate that protein into our vaccine and essentially allow the body to create a response to that protein that may block an infection later we've created a successful vaccine the really interesting part about this is that we have a collaboration with Moderna which is a company that uses messenger RNA which is essentially just genetic material and we're using their platform to deliver our vaccine spike that's fascinating Sanjay I know you've got some questions as well yeah doctor thank you for being here and thank you for your work people don't always realize that vaccines can take a long time to make I mean there's vaccines that have taken years and years to make I think with SARS it took 20 months if I remember correctly just under two years to get into phase one trials I think you may have just talked about this but why it's happening a lot faster now I think right correct me if I'm wrong on that and how is it happening so much faster you know there are several layers to our rapid response which is what we call it most of it is based on the work that we've done previously so towards the goal of being prepared for a pandemic and ready and to aim and shoot so to speak we've researched coronavirus vaccine development for the last seven years particularly under my direction the team has researched this coronavirus development for five years and so coming into the onset of this pandemic we had an idea about what we wanted to do as far as the design of the vaccine we already had our collaboration set in stone with Madonna as we've been testing several other vaccine candidates what we call pre-clinically or non-clinically and so a lot of our work that we've done previously has essentially driven us into what we call a rapid response and so I mean you probably are aware that we were able to go from getting the sequence online from the Chinese government at the same time as the rest of the world and essentially pushing for vaccine to get into a human trial in six to six days and when you go what is the process pardon my ignorance on this you have a human trial that's a phase one trial is that right yes so vaccine development is a very long process and as Dr Gupta pointed out it is something that generally takes years and years to develop here in this first phase we are testing the safety of the vaccine that is just a simple question is the vaccine safe to use in people and then there's a step-wise introduction of the vaccine for other endpoints like does the vaccine work does it create an immune response does it protect people from infection and those are second and third phase studies that are to happen somewhat simultaneously but after getting data that is allows us to move forward of that process so overall our goal in the beginning was to go from sequence through to general population at best in eight people and is looking like we're on track for that so hearing her speak it gave me hope because they're working quickly and there's a lot of pressure on them to act quick and get us back to normal as soon as possible because nobody wants to stay in this predicament for a long time nobody does governments don't want to individuals don't want to because look the economy is going to suffer but we have to make sure that we take the proper precautions so we protect human beings and this doesn't come back we can't be irresponsible and end social distancing and self-quarantine too soon because then we're just going to have to do it again so it's important that we have a really strong efforts first so we don't have a relapse now odds are there will be a relapse in the fall if we return to some sense of normalcy if not you know fully normal but you know what she says here it made me feel hopeful trials in 60 days workers may get a vaccine as early as this fall and everyone could be vaccinated around the world by spring of 2021 assuming the virus is still a pandemic by then so I think that's a more realistic timeline I'm not going to automatically assume that the worst case scenario is the most likely scenario because there's a lot of different models that have variations in their predictions so we don't necessarily know but I think it's important that we pace ourselves right the world will adapt to this virus if we will have to remain in quarantine until 2022 like businesses will adapt you'll see you know the market gravitates towards takeout options for food you'll see more delivery options probably become available if we're to trust the market gods you know but I mean there's a lot of local movie theaters around me who are selling you know candy packages with popcorn and soda and whatnot so they're trying to adapt they're trying to survive and I think we're going to see more of that but in terms of whether or not this will be over by summer it's not like that's out of the question but in my view it really doesn't seem likely unless we're talking late summer but I think that we have to take this little by little right we can't like we can't depress ourselves thinking that this is never going to end because this will end and I know it's difficult because we're in this moment currently that it feels like it's never going to be over it feels like there's no light at the end of the tunnel but just know that this will pass this will pass we don't know how long but it will pass you know and this doesn't necessarily mean that we'll be the same after it passes a lot of people lost loved ones a lot of people are traumatized a lot of people feel really even worse off they're in a far far worse economic situation so you know my hope if I can be a little bit optimistic if you'll indulge me is that people going forward will wake up will take away some good out of this and actually grow and not regress as we did after 9 11 will actually have people demanding Medicare for all a universal basic income where we get a check monthly right and it stacks on top of our existing social safety net programs because it's times like this where people should really think think more about you know their fellow Americans not to sound corny but think about collectivism think about how you know when some of us fall we all fall when our you know the people at the bottom of the economic totem pole suffer everyone suffers so we all have a vested interest in making sure that all of us as many of us as possible come away from this as strong as possible and I'll leave you with that hang in there President Donald Trump announced that he will be halting funding to the World Health Organization which is probably not the best idea to say the least because we're all in the middle of a pandemic in case you haven't heard now the reason why this is such a stupid move is because this organization oversees international public health and there are some smaller developing countries that may not have the governmental capacity or resources to deal with this crisis alone so if we strip away funding from the World Health Organization and these states around the world get less help then that doesn't just impact those developing nations that impacts us because this is a contagious disease it's not just like well we're fine so you all can deal with this on your own if they get it we can still get it again so this is a move that's irrational because even though we're selfish this goes against our own self-interest and the reason why Donald Trump is now choosing to go to war with the World Health Organization seemingly is because he's accusing them of mismanaging the crisis and you know not providing us with information and he's basically accusing them for exactly what he's guilty of doing it seems like he's trying to scapegoat them and we all know that he botched this crisis he bungled it had he acted sooner and listened to the experts and the warnings that he got numerous warnings about the severity of COVID-19 we would be better off we would not have been able to escape this pandemic but we would have been better off that's undeniable so it seems like he is making this move because it's politically expedient he wants you to blame the World Health Organization for his failures now you can believe that the WHO has its own failures that's fine but you are not realistically going to absolve Donald Trump if you want to be taken seriously because he is largely to blame for the severity of the crisis here in the United States now on top of that at a time when Americans desperately need help they're losing their jobs people are applying for unemployment in record numbers this idiot decided that he would do something that is in his own self-interest that might delay the stimulus checks going out to people it's already bad enough that these one-time $1,200 checks from the IRS are just crumbs but in times of crisis even crumbs are better than nothing right so people need this immediately but because he's a narcissist because he wants to make sure that he's able to gain something from this politically he is ordering the IRS write his name on these checks now this is unprecedented because the IRS is an agency that's supposed to be non-partisan and apolitical so for him to do this not only is it unprecedented but it is incredibly selfish it is you know a Machiavellian political tactic but unfortunately it is one that I think will benefit him so for more on this we go to Daniel Villarreal of Newsweek who reports late Monday evening the U.S. Treasury Department ordered the internal revenue service to print President Donald Trump's name on the stimulus checks it is sending to millions of Americans nationwide reports the Washington Post the Treasury Department's order could cause the checks to be delayed by several days or longer a senior agency official told the publication the unprecedented decision will mark the first time in history that a president's name has ever appeared on an IRS disbursement usually president's names don't appear on checks issued by the Treasury Department in order to keep such payments non-partisan his name will appear on the memo line appearing left side of the stimulus check administration officials who spoke anonymously because they weren't authorized to publicly discuss the matter said that Trump had originally asked Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to allow him to formally sign the checks but the president isn't legally authorized to do so so this is genuinely embarrassing like this is a Michael Scott thing to do he is unwilling to allow Americans to have anything unless he can personally benefit from it politically he doesn't care about Americans he's willing to delay the stimulus checks that they desperately need now also he can take credit for it which will help him in November and he already asked advisors why we can't just let COVID-19 quote wash over Americans which would kill them so it's obvious because he was afraid that the suffering economy wouldn't bode well for his re-election chances so this is all about him it's always been about him that's why he chose to run for president and all of that populist rhetoric was nothing more than political theater Donald Trump is a reality television show star he's a showman he doesn't care about you he cares about himself and himself only and if you believe that he actually does care about you well then congratulations you've been duped by marketing and you are being taken advantage of you're like a sheep being led to the slaughter but the saddest part about this is that this is probably going to help Donald Trump substantially because most Americans who are voting they probably won't know that you know Donald Trump did this huge thing to delay the stimulus checks as an obvious partisan political ploy so they're going to see that the president gave them 1200 dollars because they're going to see his name on that check and they're going to likely return the favor by voting for him in hopes that he'll give them more money that they desperately need currently because even though you and I are you know glued to the news and we follow politics really closely the average American doesn't have time for that they don't have time for that and even if they're laid off and they have more time technically to pay attention to these types of news stories you know when you're unemployed it's not the funnest situation because you know you can easily fall victim to diseases of despair where you are depressed and you just kind of tune out the world around you so they may not know and they may you know um help Trump by thinking he gave them money and then they might vote for him Mary Ann Williams that I think put it best he didn't simply say he has absolute power now his name will be printed on every bailout check and there are tens of millions of Americans who are literally going to think he personally sent it to them don't kid yourself they'll want to vote for him in order to say thank you and she's exactly correct here it's shameless it's overtly political but this has the potential to be really effective this is an effective strategy deployed in a lot of developing and third world countries that are run by authoritarian governments you know political parties don't necessarily offer policy concessions to voters once they're in power but sometimes they'll do something as simple as delivering groceries to constituents and make sure that the party logo or emblem is on the bag of groceries or box of groceries groceries and this works this cultivates you know a sense of dependency on the party and it makes voters think and even non-voters people who don't vote in these authoritarian regimes it makes them think that they're government is legitimate and they should acknowledge the authority of government right it's a means of cultivating legitimacy it's a political ploy but it does work it does work so um I think it's incumbent on all of us to let people know that Donald Trump did not give them these checks personally but you're not going to get to everyone and this is probably going to help Donald Trump which is obviously why he's doing it but here's the thing this this tells you a lot about Donald Trump and why he actually doesn't care about people because if he actually wanted to help the American people and lift millions of people out of poverty he's in a position of power right now to where he can actually do that but what has he chosen to do give tax cuts to him and his rich friends elites ramp up the drone wars and now that he's offering you crumbs he wants to jump in front of the cameras and take all the credit for it when where has he been all of this time where has he been people are losing their health insurance because of him people are dying because they don't have health care he's doing nothing because of that and now he wants to take credit when it's convenient despicable this person is a narcissist of the highest order and he cares about nobody but himself and he is unwilling to take any action whatsoever to help the American people unless he knows that there's going to be some benefit politically for him disgusting Caitlyn Bennett otherwise known as gun girl is a gun toting flag waving Donald Trump supporting republican party edgelord who is mostly known for walking around her college campus with the gun and a graduation cap that says come and take it no thanks you are a psychopath and I will steer clear of you if I ever see you in real life now you know ever since she kind of rose to prominence by doing this thing that's definitely not a publicity stunt she has become a sort of political pundit and she is actually collaborated with some pretty prestigious right-wing news outlets such as infowars.com and she has a new gem that she wants to share with the world when it comes to policy proposals she thinks that women shouldn't be allowed to vote now I know what you're thinking Mike isn't she a woman that's right she's a woman who thinks that women shouldn't be allowed to vote this is her rationale she tweeted out honestly letting women vote in this country wasn't one of the best ideas females vote with emotion and overwhelmingly support democratic feel-good policies that take away our actual rights I'd rather lose my quote-unquote right to vote than lose my right to defend myself with a firearm now you know inevitably this tweet was met with backlash because it's extremely stupid and she responded saying lots of emotional responses to this tweet as always thanks for proving my point everyone why are all of these leftist snowflakes overreacting all she did was say that women shouldn't be allowed to vote you triggered this is so stupid this proves that chuds have no new policy ideas none this is the best that they can come up with taking away the rights of women to vote so regress further and you know the question is where do you draw the line do you draw the line at allowing women to vote do you include gay people or black people eventually like if you start at women why just end with women why not extend that to other parts of the population see why this is obviously dangerous not only is this a self-defeating argument and I'll tell you why in a moment it's immoral and undemocratic so why would you advocate for something you clearly haven't thought this through and you clearly haven't seen the inherent flaws in your argument especially the one that you use to justify taking away women's rights to vote because as a friend of the show professor Darwin of reeducation points out this is logically inconsistent if women are too emotional to vote why would you then trust them with guns and on that note why should I trust your opinion at all you are a disappoint anti-feminists are so cringe exactly if you say that we shouldn't allow women the right to vote because they're too emotional then by your own logic if we extend that to you in this predicament why should we trust you and your political judgment because maybe you're just being too emotional maybe you're just another hysterical woman who can't think straight I mean this is obviously completely idiotic and I think that this has got to be on the pale for the overwhelming majority of Republicans including MAGA chuds I'm sure that some of them will love this because the further you go to the right the better but I mean who in their right minds would endorse this if you are a woman and a Republican then this is against your own self-interest this is against the self-interest of all women obviously but I mean why would you want this for yourself isn't the fact that you are a Republican disproving your point because if there is a large portion of women who vote for Republicans even if you know they're not in the majority doesn't that disprove your point your theory that women are too emotional because some of them reached the correct conclusion according to you you did so I mean this is just this is idiotic and the fact that I'm even entertaining this is just I'm embarrassed for myself but I mean the thing is you just have to admit at some point that you are an authoritarian you believe in authoritarianism and you don't care about democracy I mean it was the right who cried for years about the authoritarian leftists on college campuses and look at them now literally advocating for outright authoritarianism to end democracy to protect her right to defend herself with a firearm I mean this is called creating a solution for a problem that doesn't exist even if we enact the legislation that curtail's gun rights to an extent so psychopaths maybe such as yourself shouldn't be allowed to have guns that doesn't mean that people will lose their right to defend themselves it's codified in the Constitution we're not going to take away guns you guys were saying Obama would take away guns for eight years and he never did so when is this going to happen when are government officials going to knock on your door and demand that you give up your weapons and you say this now of all times when Donald Trump is president I mean your team is winning do you think Donald Trump is going to take away your gun so like how stupid do you have to be to think that you should give up your right to vote because women are too stupid to make the right choice but you're in power Donald Trump is president so why are you freaking out I mean this is just it's hilarious but it really shows you how intellectually bankrupt and immoral quite frankly and authoritarian the right has become this is the modern megachud maybe she's not representative of all megachuds but this level of delusion and stupidity is rampant it's a common thing with all chuds they just they are reactionary they're emotional and you know I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to vote because they're emotional as she would advocate but they react to things that scare them right they react to immigrants they react to Muslims they react to the prospect of losing some gun rights and then they extrapolate and think it's going to lead to them losing all their gun rights like you're just a bunch of scaredy cats with big mouths that's what you are like you claim that it's the left who are the real pussies but you guys are the ones that are afraid of everything you think the government's going to take away your guns you're afraid of leftists who are supposedly violent I mean the right at this point in time is such a self parity that when we look back in history at this moment the modern right especially chuds are going to be so laughed at that it I can't wait to see that so I mean all right just own it just admit that you are an authoritarian and kind of crazy hello everyone I am here with Dr. Harvey J. K. He is a professor of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay and he's back to talk about his brand new book Just Out it's called FDR on Democracy the greatest speeches and writings of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and you know you were here professor after we got some bad news Jeremy Corbin had just lost labor lost and now we return again where Bernie Sanders has lost so it's unfortunate circumstances but I think that what you managed to really do which makes me feel better is you kind of put everything into historical context and it makes me feel better because it doesn't feel like real we are the trailblazers like we're kind of following in the footsteps of our ancestors and we're not doing anything new and there is some sort of comfort knowing that the things we're trying to do have been done before so welcome back to the show um do you want to tell us a little bit about your book well thank you Mike it's it's really good to see you I really enjoyed last time I'm sorry that I followed in the wake of bad news then and I follow in the way of bad news now but let's talk you know I think it was Isaac Deutsche the great sort of great Marxist historian and biographer of Trotsky who's you know talked about you know the pessimism and optimism and you know pessimism is like what is it glass half full no glass half empty and the and we should never fall into either one of those okay we always have we should try to see things and what T said is history enables us to go beyond that simple dichotomy so what history affords us is a sense of not only our predecessors and the precedents that they afforded us the achievements they afforded us it also enables us to situate ourselves in history so if you wouldn't mind just before I mentioned the the stuff that I'm here for you know the FDR stuff I do want to help people out okay from my vantage point first of all I'm 70 years old I still feel energetic fortunately but I want to put things in perspective especially for young people and this is this and FDR will come into this I assure you so I looked I thought about these failings you know the Corbin one and most especially these last couple of weeks last few weeks it's fairly devastating because at times I thought this was the one chance that I would have because if it doesn't work this time I'm not confident it's coming up that soon to actually see the creation of a social democratic America which by the way as I'll talk about was pretty much FDR's vision back in the 1930s even before then but here's the other thing I want everyone to see if they wouldn't mind going with me on this little journey into past is this so in the early part of the 20th century there emerged in this country a very significant socialist movement and that socialist movement had its roots in the late 19th century in agrarian populism and actually in and in progressivism and most especially in the labor movement okay and it was a diverse left at that time you know you had that anarchists and you had socialists and you had these agrarian populists and the progressives who we too often dismiss as middle-class folk but on the local level in various locales they made a dramatic difference whether it had to do with the creation of a state bank in North Dakota the pursuit in here in the Midwest of sewer socialism which by the way did not mean they were in the gutter what it meant is that they were that they were creating a better life for working people by actually putting sewer lines into working class neighborhoods by taking control of water supply companies by taking control of electric power companies so there were these there were those kinds of successes now those came about because of alliances between socialists and progressives and in many other areas of the country out in the countryside agrarian populists and socialists and so on okay but here's the other thing so okay they didn't create a populist nation they lost elections of you know in 1896 and similarly the socialists in 1912 came in I think it was well they got nearly a million votes under Eugene Debs and at other times they showed up well but they did not become a majority party other than by way of maybe certain city councils and governorships and sending people to Congress so here's the thing however if you look closely at what was going on and you think about the FDR presidency FDR himself and I'm going to come back to this later FDR himself is clearly rooted in early 20th century progressivism capital P the progressivism which we tend to associate with Robert La Follette here in Wisconsin Teddy Roosevelt out of New York and then who becomes president and runs as a progressive in 1912 and then Woodrow Wilson there were diverse kinds of progressives and Roosevelt the FDR Roosevelt is coming out of the progressive tradition but he's looking to go beyond that even as a young man you can if people pick up this book of speeches in my edited editions and introductions and all that they'll see that early on Roosevelt is reaching reaching for what we would think of as social democracy and by the 1930s he is significantly in pursuit I mean he's strongly in pursuit of what we would call social democracy even though he never uses the term now I'm going to come back to that but here's the key thing so in the 1930s he pursues what is a social democratic agenda that is he believes in the imperative of the federal government based on his experiences governor of New York taking charge of the relief efforts and as much as he can go beyond relief and turn it into a real real series of recovery initiatives what was often called the New Deal alphabet soup of agencies to mobilize Americans who are unemployed young people to go in young men in particular to go into the CCC Civil and Conservation Corps others into the works progress administration to create among farmers the rural electrification agency which were based on cooperatives and if you look closely at all of these initiatives in one sense they're basically just recruiting labor and enabling people to make some kind of income but it's also the case that if you think about this is a two step first of all in some of those initiatives there were highly democrat small d democratic initiatives not only in the sense of working people becoming involved but in the agricultural adjustment act and the National Industrial Recovery Act it actually empowered in the case of industry workers to organize unions and in the case of agriculture farmers to organize cooperatives and actually take part in major decision making regarding the agricultural economics of farming themselves directly and in fact the irony of this that some people dismiss the New Deal in terms of race but it's the case that black land owning farmers not sharecroppers land owning farmers in the south actually got to participate in those things and it's often said their first opportunity to vote was as farmers in these agricultural cooperatives and and similar kinds of initiatives now think about us today I mean I it's too easy to dismiss these efforts of 2015-16 and 2019-20 that Bernie has led these efforts for what he calls democratic socialism what I would more often and would have liked him to call social democracy and reaching back to FDR he has generated a movement there it's undeniable okay that you could you could feel the energy among young people a lot of labor unionists even in rural areas there was a sense that this was an opportunity to create social democracy and we can talk later if you want about whether or not this can become more than a two you know a two election campaign kind of thing but here's the thing what was once considered verboten forbidden to speak of in any fashion I'm not even talking about socialism I'm talking about social democracy is now in people's minds Medicare for all right now may not have won the day but it may well be the case that in order for I mean I don't know if he's willing to go there but it's quite possible the Democrats will by the summer have to go there if they're going to harness the energies that were generated or for that matter or I should say and for that matter the whole question of student debt right not just free public higher education but also the question of the unbearable and I say unbearable because it's unbearable for both the individuals who have the debt and unbearable for the nation to continue to create that kind of debt and worry about it and have a generation that has become like serfs to the banks that hold those debts okay so what I think is we're at this really interesting moment where there's lots of possibilities that Bernie has lost that Bernie may well have actually cut a deal with the Biden Obama camp it may be disappointing because we don't know what it's involved but it's also the case it's also the case not what Bernie does what we do that's the key thing and young people shouldn't turn their backs on the political moment and the political opportunities and I could tell you if it wasn't for the fact that FDR was deeply imbued with the earlier socialist and progressive ideas in his own way I doubt very much we would have faced the new deal sorry the great depression in the way that we did and he carried this with him and many Democrats themselves who might not have thought publicly in those terms had come to think like that and so FDR as he said to a friend in 1931 actually said in writing to a friend I think it's time for the for the country to go fairly radical for a generation and similarly we're we're in the makings of those kinds of moments I hope I hope people need however disappointed they are they need to vote I'm not telling them who to vote for just turn out and make sure those Democrats all the way down the ticket if you believe they're decent folks with good intentions and admirable aspirations you vote for them okay so now sorry I went I went on a little bit of a journey forgive me no this is this is fantastic um I think that what you said about the movement existing you know post Bernie 2020 post Bernie 2016 that really is important because even though we lost these elections and we don't have political power in the electoral sense I think that there's always going to be potential there so long as the movement lives on and I think that it will like I do genuinely feel optimistic that the movement will live on even if it's easy to be demoralized currently because you kind of you kind of have this specific vision and steps that you kind of see in your mind a forecast as to how the movement is going to harness power and actually influence change and now it's not going to happen in the sense that we elect Bernie and he passes these policies but that doesn't necessarily mean that the prospect for change has diminished it just means that it's going to take place in a different form yes and I'll add to that something I've been saying and I'm very I'm eager to say it here that young people should understand young people don't have this quite the historical perspective on a personal level that I'm trying to cultivate in them consider this 10 years ago shows like yours didn't exist okay now think about this so yeah I mean older folks are still watching cable news okay by the way I don't I'm older but I don't I gave up on it okay back in the 90s I felt a block watching Fox News because my I felt somebody had to do it to keep up with the bullshit that they were saying but so here's the thing okay here's the thing so I've been I was thinking how remarkable it is and I don't even like to call it alternative media because it's not I mean it's not alt-media it's this it's movement media is a good way of putting in fact I hadn't said that before I liked that I like that yeah okay so think about it now okay however you feel about any one of these shows think about this so let's suppose on a daily basis you wake you could wake up in the morning okay and if you've got the time especially now so many of us are stuck at home young and old you could turn on your computer your computer and you can catch segments of rising the Hill TV live thing with I mean you've got a conservative and a progressive on but crystal ball is definitely worth listening to and even sagar is offering a fairly critical perspective from the right it's worth worth watching during the midday hours you could turn on majority report with Sam Cedar and his co-host Michael Brooks and they've got you know two to three hours depending on on how how you subscribe of of content then later in the day later in the day you could go to the young Turks right and there again you've got conversation between Anna Kasparian who I pretty sure is a socialist or a social democrat and and Jake Jake Uger who is clearly a progressive okay and so you've got this kind of all day opportunity that if you need to catch up and hear a critical commentary you've got it more over then during during the week at your leisure right you can tune into the humanist report and everybody should of course I'm talking to the converted here you've got Michael Brooks show on Tuesday night and he seems to be multiplying you know he's like Tuesday night and this night he's doing great you've got Nomeki Konst who's launched a show on YouTube very active I mean and I'm always you know I could talk about left anchor with a couple of guys I just absolutely adore great guys millennial review I mean I'll stop there but you've got you guys are you and women are part of a of a movement you're not simply an alternative media you're you're you're the voice in many ways of the movement and all the more especially if we're not going to have the a senior figure like Bernie Sanders leading it's going to be your kinds of voices that there people are going to want to listen to and here there you go yet that's a lot of pressure but um I will say I will say that even though like one thing that I think was really clear was that indie media like movement media I love that term it isn't big enough yet to counter some of the narratives that were put out by the mainstream media but I do think that just the fact that there's this hunger that's there it's not going to just you know automatically go away like that once the election is over it's going to exist it existed before Bernie Sanders kind of harnessed this energy and I genuinely believe it will continue to exist so I want to talk about because when I think through history and everyone before us who fought for what we fought for and we're kind of continuing that fight it does make me feel more at ease knowing that we're kind of we're not starting anything new and we have a lot of you know history to work with to use as a guide because there have been many successes from progressives and socialists in the past so one thing that I kind of want to pick your brain about is as far as I know FDR never said that he's a social democrat but I think that it's very clear that's what he was one thing that is a conversation piece and I'm not necessarily sure where I fall here is Barney Sanders using the socialist label that may have harmed him you know certainly it excited a lot of people myself because I you know identify as a socialist but in your view and this is difficult to gauge I know do you think that him calling himself a socialist was an asset to him or do you think that if he maybe packaged his social democratic agenda in a different bow you know in a package with a different type of bow would that have helped in your view as FDR did yeah let's make one thing I mean let's start off with the fact that he'd already been known as a democratic socialist therefore he can only run so far from that label and moreover even if he called himself a social I'm prefacing by the way if he even even if he said my politics are social democratic they would have come at him as a socialist but by the way they're gonna come at don't laugh too hard they'll come at Biden as a socialist I totally agree I totally agree okay but so here's the thing but I do think Bernie should have spoken less of democratic socialism I think he was I mean people get upset with me when I say this I think he was wasting his time explaining it I think he I think he didn't he did it back in 2015 he should have stopped explaining it and what he should have done is segued to the term social democracy look historically they're interchangeable terms okay late as I was I think I was saying before at least to you late 19th century the anarchists call themselves social democrats the socialist part of the United States originally called itself the social democratic party here in Wisconsin even after Debs took command Eugene V. Debs the great labor leader after he came out of prison after the Pullman strike came out of prison basically and he he became a socialist even after he became the presidential candidate and did well as a candidate here in Wisconsin the socialist party was called social democrats so Bernie could have just grabbed hold of that and I think it would have it would have required less explanation okay all he would have had to say is I believe democracy should not be limited to voting okay or I believe that democracy should be extended into the marketplace and into the workplace but somebody should ask me to write his little lines for that's brilliant that honestly is so easy right I mean what it comes down to is there there was a historical sociologist named Th Marshall British guy and Marshall laid out this kind of you know is a faulty kind of historical picture but he talked about look there are civil rights going back to the idea of you know free speech worship and so on there are political rights the most fundamental one of which is voting but it involves a whole panoply of elements having to do with voting representation recall etc etc and then there are social and economic rights and that's what Bernie was going for the social and economic rights it was Bernie who harnessed the economic bill of rights idea from FDR his speech of the state of the union message of 1944 when Bernie talked about 21st century economic bill of rights so I do think I think that Bernie could have if people people are going to see us that's why we're we're taping Bernie could have literally worn the cloak of FDR okay and by the way there were those in the campaign who were trying to get him to do that all the more so I believe Rokana the congressman from California John Cusack my friend we've talked about this a lot and John I know is pushing for Bernie to literally become FDR if he could and there were others I don't know where David Sarota himself came down to that but I have a feeling he was one of those people but I could be wrong so there were there I think that could have been effective and by the way it would have been effective as well because in the debates Bernie then could have stood as the champion of the FDR legacy in the Democratic Party and when a question was given him by one of the moderators of whatever he could have said I think that's a bigger question and the question is are we the party of Franklin Roosevelt or are we not and he could have just laid out a few ideas of Roosevelt's and then if the likes of Klobuchar or Buttigieg or or what's his name Biden I was kidding but if they had come at him we can't afford Medicare for all he could have said that's what they told FDR about the new deal that's what you know in other words so they would have been attacking FDR and not him if you get my if you get my job that is really brilliant because as you're speaking there's so much there's so much clarity because that not only makes it more I think familiar to Americans who don't like this idea of Scandinavian socialism and and you know they don't they don't know what that entails it also kind of gives him cover from that you know annoying he's not a Democrat label which doesn't appeal to me but some Democrats are just they have to have a Democrat we've heard it and you know that that could have kind of given him cover in two ways and I also think about how this would have given him an opportunity if he really wore the cloak of FDR to kind of pitch himself in his campaign as extending that legacy because I know that as much as we give FDR credit this was someone who was you know he was a fallible human being he didn't pass everything he wanted to he did have some failings so can you talk through some of FDR's failings and how Bernie maybe could have messaged you know him as not just a continuation but really completing the vision of FDR yeah well let's start off with the three worst decisions FDR made or at least two were decisions and one was a failing so the first the worst the worst was the internment of Japanese Americans that the sort of the continental Japanese I think your family comes from Hawaii if I'm not mistaken right Hawaiian Japanese Americans were not interned okay it was mainland Japanese west coast Japanese in fact it was just west coast Japanese American and that was a terror that was one of the worst human civil rights abuses travesties in American history so no saint also he allowed and by the way he allowed California property and conservative interest to persuade him and military interest to persuade him to do that that was not intuitively his decision but then the other thing is this that the U.S. Army in World War II was segregated white and black Mexican Americans by the way were not in segregated units and there were 400,000 Mexican Americans who served in the military during World War II it was it was Japanese Americans and African Americans Japanese Americans were in a combat regiment which by the way was the most decorated combat regiment of the Second World War American combat regiment and African Americans were in separate units combat and supply units then were their white counterparts it would have been a remarkable thing if he had tried to overcome that if he had not allowed the military brass to convince him to segregate the military in that way now we can get into the argument what should he or shouldn't he blah blah blah the point is it's a tragedy that marks his administration and the other thing is that he couldn't overcome congressional opposition to opening the doors to greater numbers of Jewish refugees and Eleanor was pushing for it Roosevelt's chief of staff was Jewish Samuel Rosenman Robert Wagner the great senator from New York State who was actually called the pilot of the New Deal in the Senate he was pushing for the opening of the doors for greater numbers of refugees and he was German American German born and he couldn't persuade them to do it and there were any number of anti-Semites in the State Department so those are the three great tragedies or terrible decisions of his administration or failings but it's also the case that when he first entered the White House he knew it was very interesting he actually had the support of what we would today call the billionaires which people find surprising given the agenda that he had of expanding the powers of government in order to address the needs of American citizens but the rich guys and there were guys the rich guys had one one thing they were eager to see him do and that is they wanted him to end prohibition and what's important there is they didn't care less if people could they didn't care less if they could drink because they were already drinking they never had to worry about getting booze but they didn't want their taxes to go up any further and they figured if you enacted a new if you loosened or literally liberated Americans to drink you could tax every beer that a working guy drank and if you did that you literally liberate them from any kind of further tax burden now they got very upset when in fact very soon into the course of his 12 year presidency he began to push for higher and higher taxes on the wealthy and those guys organized the American Liberty League in 1934-35 and they spent millions trying to bring down his presidency I can tell you millions on advertising public relations film strips radio shows but they utterly failed because working people loved FDR and he and in 34 Democrats took even more seats in Congress and in 36 they literally romped over the Republicans so the American Liberty League was a failure there's no question about it so at first his first mistake was that he and he actually did allow certain freedoms to business to to break basically break the laws regarding you know trusts and cartels and and collusion we could call it today but it's also the case that he built into the very same law that sort of gave them those privileges the right to organize labor unions on the part of workers later it turned out the law needed to be revamped not only because it was declared unconstitutional but also because labor unions were literally being cheated by their employers the employers would set up company unions rather than have the workers organize their own so in 1935 FDR it's called the Second New Deal he signed into law the Social Security Act and he signed into law the National Labor Relations Act which wasn't just saying workers had the right to organize the federal government would back up their right to organize very powerful kind of move so okay so at the outset he may well have done a little too much business with the with the rich guys and business but he learned his lesson and he came to realize how much they hated him in fact in a famous speech in Madison Square Garden he said I welcome their hatred and the only president who's ever done that since well Truman did something like that actually but it was Bernie Sanders basically you know just billionaires I welcome your hatred it's a it's a good it's a positive sign okay now the other thing was that in 1937 after Roosevelt won the 36th election by a landslide he decided that the Supreme Court was his biggest obstacle to passing the laws that he believed working people needed to strengthen labor unions and so on and so forth so he actually proposed what people came to call packing the court which by the way was a subject we've been talking about quite a bit these last few years and what that meant was he had this thing where when a member of the Supreme Court reached the age of 70 I think that was the age there should be another person added to the Supreme Court to lighten the load for the old folks with the idea that you would add judges based on the ages of the judges or the justices already on the court and not only not only conservatives but quite a few Republicans but also quite a few Democrats were horrified at the idea but there were a lot who were not horrified who were willing to go to bat for him but he realized it was a mistake to talk about and he withdrew that that proposal eventually the other thing was and here's another mistake he made keep this in mind is that although he was prepared to go big okay create government initiatives empower labor all of that kind of stuff one of the things he still held on to this notion that you don't go too deep into debt so which is why he was willing to tax the rich and corporations as he was going to do so as a consequence I guess it was also in 37 when this when it seemed like they were winning the war against unemployment and the depression when social security taxes started to be collected that was pulling money out of the market you might say he was also willing to cut back on federal expenditures and they went into a recession again which really did weaken his administration to some extent so those are the kinds of things that that that he made a mistake but in terms of messaging he was brilliant so for example you know how I don't know if people realize he was the first radio president his fireside chats it was a broad he loved broadcasting his messages and but the other thing is he knew that the print media editors and publishers were conservatives honestly conservatives so the radio gave him it liberated him from depending on editors and publishers in the print media he could go around them and go directly unfiltered to the American people and the other thing is he was very guy was very very call it widely if you wish he knew that the journalists themselves were generally more liberal than their own editors so he would he held regularly press conferences off the record with the journalists and now we have available the the the texts of those the multi volume texts of those news conferences and the understanding was I will meet with you regularly and I'll let you know you have to I have to trust you and you have to trust me if there are things we don't want to get out you've got to hold on to that which I know seems a little devious but it was his way of getting around the editors and publishers so Bernie Bernie I think did a good job in terms of trying to reach people getting out there on the on the hustings as they say he discovered YouTube when he realized that the media was going to ignore him the tragedy with Bernie's messaging was what he was doing on YouTube he didn't take into the debates so on YouTube he would he would he would speak in a way that was more if you like light-hearted serious but light-hearted you could see smiles emerging on his face he more often might have said in a rally or maybe even on YouTube something about FDR but he never went into the debates bringing what I was talking about before to bear on that debate sorry I can't I'm sorry I'd go on forever but it's it's absolutely fascinating these are terribly you know what's that thing out of Dickens what was the novel about the French Revolutionary Years well you know these are the best of time these are the worst of times these are the best of times and let's hope that there's a prophetic side to that best of times yeah yeah absolutely I'm curious to know yeah go ahead sorry you know I wanted to ask you about what you think the catalyst is for change because the New Deal era this was changed like reform legislation after legislation there was so much that happened in such a short time and right now I think the left is really looking for what will ignite that spark specifically and I think it's probably a complicated answer but in terms of like what it was that really initiated if you're able to kind of figure out what that was was it FDR pushing it or was it the you know organized labor like was it top down or bottom up what do you think was the main catalyst because this is something that I struggle with I don't know what it is that really was conducive to change right well first of all as I think we when I talked about last time in January Americans during times of crisis somehow find it in themselves to transcend they transcend themselves to confront the mortal crisis the American Revolution the Civil War and here with FDR in the 1930s so a crisis it's a mortal crisis for the nation it's the worst economic and social catastrophe in American history an important thing and people will find this in these speeches when they look at them I really did try to craft the editing of these of these speeches so that it would really reveal that it would reveal itself in a way FDR knew he really seemed to have this confidence that he knew what Americans wanted now look there were unemployed leagues that were being organized in 19 during the middle of the great depression the early great depression communists organized some socialists organized others and radical slash progressives organized others but there were in every major city these unemployed leagues and they would take to the streets in their hundreds in some cases thousands trying to garner the attention of their fellow citizens and also political leaders to do something that's first second of all labor did not actually shrink in the face of the crisis increasingly keep in mind that labor did not have autonomous unions they mostly were company unions and labor movement during the 20s was a shrinking a shrinking movement but there was energy inside of the labor leadership and inside of workers they wanted action and they were willing to march to try to secure the right to organize and to hold on to their jobs now FDR was sensitive to this there was oh I left out the bonus marchers the veterans of World War one who were demanding their the bonus they were doing 1945 they should receive it in 32 so they marched on Washington and they occupied parts of the city so when FDR runs for office he has the advantage of his running against a failed Hoover administration but he's not oblivious to what Americans are communicating and wanting and this this intersects with his own political aspirations in the 1920s Eleanor even though FDR himself has suffered a polio and he'll never walk on his own again Eleanor is bringing back to the house European Jewish socialist women organizers from New York City who are educating FDR to working people's needs not just the needs of the men but the needs of the women as well so it's this grand intersection but now I'm going to throw in a good old Marxist term dialectic okay the dialectic is what the relationship was like this democratic dialectic of president slash you know president or leader and working people so FDR encourages them and empowers them he mobilizes them and he enables them to actually pursue the organization of labor in 1933 when they enacted the national industrial recovery act that I mentioned earlier labor leaders were calling it the Magna Carta of labor little did they realize they'd have to revisit it in 1935 but it's the case that for every agency that FDR created an alphabet soup agency you know CCC the WPA the PWA the REA I could go on and on labor itself working people themselves are organizing their own if you like alphabet soup the UAW United USW United Steelworkers United Rubber Workers the International Longshoremen out on the West Andes coasts and moreover young people who are not necessarily organizable in terms of work they're organizing in diverse kinds of movements everything from the YMCA to the young communists and young socialists and they come together and this is this is the kind of thing we ought to we'd like to see here they organize the American Youth Congress which had like four and a half million members given all these diverse organizations and they were a force and they were demanding they were demanding monies to be able to continue to get their education they were demanding some kind of guarantees of jobs they were doing exactly what you would imagine us doing today so Roosevelt didn't he didn't dismiss these people he would make every effort to bring them to the White House and they would push their causes and what he would say to them is I'm on your side now make me do it and what he meant by that is keep up the pressure so I can tell Congress you have got to act and and there's any number of occasions where it's actually I could even give you one but we don't really have the time some other time when we're talking remind me to tell you the story of a Philip Randolph and FDR but it's it's the case that FDR actually told his cabinet in 1935 when you go out to speak to organizations tell them to organize all the more and he gave a speech himself which included the words new laws in themselves do not bring the new millennium and what he meant by that is even once the law is passed you've got to be ready organized because they're going to be people are going to try to crush your movement and deny the the validity of the law and and that's exactly what happened the labor movement had to continue fighting all the way through the late 30s to secure the rights afforded by the laws that had been enacted in 35 and even in 38 the Fair Labor Standards Act so what was the catalyst the catalyst was of course the crisis that Americans remembered who they were because FDR was constantly speaking in historical terms reminding them of the revolution reminding them even of Abraham Lincoln I mean FDR was brilliant Lincoln was a Republican and yet FDR said to this leading Democratic Party intellectual who was a historian a historian of Jefferson he said to him I think we ought to make Abraham Lincoln one of our own since the Republicans don't seem to want to have anything to do with him so it's often said that if you look at FDR's political career or presidency in the 30s into the 40s in the 30s he's Thomas Jefferson at his at his best and in the 40s he's Lincoln at his best I mean it's it's it's actually entertaining he even brought into the White House as a as a as a what do you call speechwriter a guy named Robert Sherwood and Sherwood had surprised him play that's really it's nice to hear this because it feels like there's a blueprint that's already been established and we just kind of have to follow that blueprint and in some ways even though the situation does look bleak it feels like we have more tools than our predecessors had like we have the internet as you pointed out that's something that is incredible at organizing it makes it so much easier and gives voices to people who previously didn't have voices so if they can do it back then I think we can do it now so to me like what I think people should do is take the energy and the passion that they have and try to harness it join the DSA get involved local politics is incredibly important I think that you know that's something that we all overlook myself included and it's really important it can have a concrete impact on your life so this is all I find it incredibly fascinating before we go do you want to leave us with any lasting words and we'll have links in the description to the book okay this is something else that I discovered about FDR and I saw it in Bernie and I was tweeting a lot about it one thing FDR did what really made him great all the things I could tell you he was the history teacher in chief he had a progressive agenda that I would call social democratic he encouraged and responded he got pushed by the labor movement and by a housewives movement that I didn't mention and so on and so forth but this is the thing we need leaders who will not simply tell us they want to fight for us we need leaders who will encourage the fight in us that is perfect we will leave that there professor harvey jk thank you so much for coming back on anytime we are we just love to have you back thank you if anybody's at all interested in communicating with me I'm on twitter at h-a-r-v-e-y-j-k-a-y-e harvey jk perfect and can you tell us your website because you have let me make clear I think you've got a great show thank you I almost want to write another book quickly to get back on well I really appreciate that tell us your website because you have links to your other books as well that people will definitely be interested in I actually don't I don't want to say the name amazon but I you know it's a place where they're all shit excuse me but if they go on to twitter if they wanted to harvey jk and the pick there's a picture on the page of the four books but the link and the link you have a choice of links you can either go directly to the link of the that book and and for those of you who feel desperate you can go to the amazon link but bards of noble has them too the problem is that amazon's got this monopoly going and it's just so hard it's so hard to avoid you can go straight to the publishers to order it that way but for example you're in portland oregon let me tell you something how old books does not stock take hold of our history can you imagine they don't even they claim they can't even get it which i don't even i don't understand but they do have this book so if people are interested go online go to powells they can order this go to your independent books don't ask for it they can get it this book fdr okay on democracy all right perfect well thank you so much professor thank you mike well that's all that i have for you today hopefully you guys enjoy the show you know the topics i hope going forward we'll get a little bit more cherry but the news cycle just it won't it won't let up it's nothing but you know bad story after bad story but at a minimum at least we are all suffering together so um i've got nothing else for you all take care of yourselves stay safe i'm mike figurado this has been the humanist report love you all