 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 humanist report or become a member at humanistreport.com. Now enjoy the show. Welcome to the Humanist Report podcast. My name is Mike Figueredo and this is episode 285 of the program. Today is Friday, April 9th and before we get started, as usual, I want to take some time to thank all of the folks who make this show possible. All of our Patreon, PayPal and YouTube members, all of which either signed up for the very first time to support us this week or increased the monthly pledge that they were already giving us. And that includes the great Archie May, Jesse Lopez, Catherine Robinson and Sky Barks Chat. So thank you so much to all of these kind individuals. If you'd also like to support the show, you can do so by going to humanistreport.com slash support. Patreon.com slash humanist report or by clicking join underneath any one of our YouTube videos or you can join us on Twitch and become a subscriber to your one sub for 4.99 per month and support the show that way and get some extra perks on Twitch whenever I stream. Twitch.tv slash humanist report. So this week on the show, we've got another great episode for you. Mitch McConnell is whining about the late stage capitalist dystopia that he helped create. Joe Manchin continues to slap Joe Biden around. Paula Jean Swarajan calls out Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Arkansas governor vetoed a bill that bans gender-affirming care for trans youth. But the Republican-controlled legislature decided to override that veto. We'll talk about that. Tom Cotton, an authoritarian, calls for more authoritarianism. Shockingly, Joe Biden struggles to decide whether or not he should enact extremely popular common sense policies. Abby Martin is fighting against an attack on freedom of speech and I want all of us to know about her effort. We'll get an update on the Matt Gaetz scandal and I will talk about a new article in the American Prospect about how Prager U.S. now trying to brainwash even younger children. So that's what we've got on the agenda for today's episode. Let's waste no time and get straight to it. One way I think you can sufficiently gauge just how much trouble a politician is in is if even people like Marjorie Taylor Greene go out of their way to not just distance themselves from you but to actually delete any evidence that she ever met or knew you. That is the exact situation that Florida congressman Matt Gaetz is finding himself in now. And after learning about his scandal involving alleged sex trafficking and a possible extortion plot more details have been slowly but surely emerging. And to make matters worse, we're now finding out what actually triggered this investigation in the first place. As Sarah K. Burris of Raw Story explains, CBS News revealed Wednesday that representative Matt Gaetz took a trip to the Bahamas in late 2018 or early 2019 that triggered the sex trafficking investigation sources revealed. According to the report, Gaetz was on that trip with a marijuana entrepreneur and hand surgeon named Jason Parazolo, who allegedly paid for the travel expenses accommodations and female escorts. The Justice Department is investigating to determine if the escorts were illegally trafficked across state or international lines for sex with Gaetz or merely as escorts that do not provide anything other than companionship. Hmm, I wonder. Now we also learned that before Donald Trump left office, Gaetz reportedly had a private conversation with him and he asked for a preemptive blanket pardon, according to The New York Times. He said no. Since this story broke, Donald Trump has come out and publicly denounced the story alleging that it's fake news. And you know, since Donald Trump is usually a really truthful honest actor, I think we can take him at his word that this totally was never a conversation that occurred. Except it's totally probably true. And I don't believe it for a second. I think that Matt Gaetz is, uh, he's not letting on to how much trouble he knew that he was in. And really one thing that's telling about the situation is the fact that all of his usual allies aren't really speaking up on his defense. Usually when there's a Republican politician in trouble, the Republicans propaganda armed Fox News mobilizes and comes to his defense. But they haven't really said too much about this. I mean, they've covered it mostly in the first 24 hours when the story broke. But even Matt Gaetz is bestie at Fox News. Sean Hennedy has been nowhere to be found on this particular subject. And that really tells you a lot that, uh, his closest allies, they know that this ship is sinking and they want to get off before it takes them down with it. So as Eric Hannonoki and Matt Gertz of Media Matters Explains, Representative Matt Gaetz owes his political rise to Fox News. Politicians gain power in the modern GOP by grabbing and holding the attention of the base. And the easiest way to do that is through its most trusted media outlet. The Florida backbencher understands this structure and gained a national profile in his first two terms by fervently supporting Donald Trump and denouncing the former president's foes in near-constant appearances on the right-wing network. He also won the favor of Trump himself, who watches Fox regularly and appreciated the congressman's zeal. It seems, however, that Fox has now abandoned Gaetz at his moment of greatest need. Gaetz has been engulfed in scandal following the New York Times' March 30th report that he has been under federal investigation for alleged sex trafficking. The congressman has spent the last week denying that he had sex with a minor or paid women of legal age for sex, declining to comment on reports that he showed nude photos of women he claimed to have had sex with to other members on the House floor and drawing lackluster defenses from colleagues speaking on the record and descriptions of cartoonishly scandalous behavior anonymously. But Fox devoted a mere 45 minutes to the Gaetz saga through Tuesday and nearly three-quarters of that coverage came in the first 24 hours with the network providing sparse coverage of subsequent revelations. Perhaps the most notable absence from Gaetz's defense is primetime host Sean Hannity even as Gaetz responded to the allegations by spinning the sort of convoluted tale of deep state conspiracy and right-wing victimhood that seems tailor-made for Hannity's program the Fox star has seemingly left him for dead. Gaetz is a Hannity fixture. Since August of 2017 he made 127 appearances on the program roughly 41% of the 310 interviews he gave the network overall including a disastrous turn on Tucker Carlson tonight to respond to the initial Times report. According to Media Matter's database of weekday programming Gaetz is the 11th most frequent Hannity guest over that period and ranks second to Senator Lindsey Graham among guests who have not served as paid Fox contributors. Yet the Fox star has not mentioned the embattled congressman's travails not on his primetime TV show, not on his nationally syndicated radio show not on his website and not on Twitter. So obviously Sean Hannity's silence here is deafening. Imagine if we were in the middle of an election cycle and as someone who supported Bernie Sanders and defended him there was this gigantic scandal that popped up and I had nothing to say about it. That would be really, really conspicuous, right? My silence would be a little bit weird if you're a usual viewer. So the same thing is true here. When you have someone who is an ally to you who goes on your program all the time for you to be silent in a time like this that says a lot. Now perhaps Sean Hannity's silence has something to do with the fact that Matt Gaetz implicated Tucker Carlson and maybe Sean Hannity is a little bit too close to this. He doesn't want to fly any closer to the sun than he already has. I don't know. I'm very obviously just speculating but the fact that Sean Hannity of all people is not touching this. That says a lot. That tells you that Matt Gaetz he's going down. This is one of the many red flags. This is him, I think, realizing Sean Hannity realizing that the writing is on the wall and it's best not to get too involved in this. Don't defend him if you think it might come back to bite you in the ass and Republicans, they've always defended shitty people. How many Republicans defended Roy Moore who was an alleged pedophile? But in this instance, for whatever reason they are conspicuously silent for one of their best friends, Matt Gaetz. And that says a lot. That tells you everything you need to know that there's more than they're letting on and they know that this is a very, very serious scandal. But I mean, I think that we all know that Matt Gaetz should do the right thing. He should resign and I'm going to take some time to fire off a tweet at him telling him how I feel. I'm sorry but when even Marjorie Taylor Greene distances herself from you, you know you're in real trouble. So do the right thing and resign, Matt Gaetz. You absolute perverted cretin. Oh, misspelled cretin. I hope that Matt Gaetz gets the message. Anyways, this story is incredibly interesting and I am anxiously awaiting more and more details because this might be one of the biggest political scandals of the year. I am one of the folks who can attest to the fact that the reach of PragerU is absolutely vast. It is reaching all corners of the Internet to the extent that even I've seen my normie friends and family members share PragerU videos and if that wasn't bad enough, they're attempting to share these videos in schools. They launched a program to share their videos, their right wing disinformation videos to schools in order to brainwash children. But the situation is getting even a lot more alarming because now their target audience is much younger than they previously aimed for. Now this story in the American Prospect lays out the details. This is by Amelia Pollard and she writes, last week the Prospect reported that students across the country have been shown right wing content from non-profit educational video maker PragerU for years, even though it was supposedly intended for adults. Since last fall, however, the conservative organization massively fundraised for PragerU resource for educators and parents, PrEP, a new education program targeted directly at school age children. In the initiative's first batch of education-specific content released Monday, PragerU now has videos aimed at children as young as kindergarten age. The content includes online videos and other materials designed for ages 5 to 18. This material is meant to be shown in school or at home and although the videos aren't as overtly political as PragerU's typical 5-minute videos for adults, they are still suffused with right wing propaganda. PragerU's website advertises its content with a chirpy marketing message, fun shows, and crafting activities created for young children that teach American history along with traditional values like faith, family, and freedom. Using popular platforms like Instagram and Twitter, PragerU has long strived to get its content in front of young people, but now that target age has plummeted. For kindergarten through second grade, one of the new educational segments is a storytime that celebrates American values of freedom, individuality, hard work, equality under God, and more, starring the head of outreach for prep, Jill Simonian, and a mascot named Otto, modeled on the bulldog of the organization's founder, Dennis Prager. The first video features the book Paloma Wants to Be Lady Freedom by Rachel Campos Duffy, a regular Fox News contributor whose politics deeply aligned with PragerU's mission. Campbell Stuffy's husband, Sean Duffy, was a five-term Republican congressman from Wisconsin who is now also a Fox News contributor. Former high school students have complained online about being shown adult-oriented PragerU videos which are popular among some history and economics teachers. None of the students interviewed for last week's Prospect Story were comfortable confronting their teachers or school administrators, even though they recognized the conservative agenda behind the videos. But when it comes to younger children, the concern among some early education experts is that five-year-olds lack the critical thinking skills to enable them to recognize video content as political, let alone right-leaning. Now, Rachel Campos Duffy, who is the author of the book that they're promoting, this is someone who is a certified lunatic. She goes on Fox News all the time and she frequently complains about how leftists and coastal elites have too much cultural influence, and so she's made her mission very deliberately to push back on the cultural influence that she believes leftists have. So what she wants to do is embed these right-wing values in children at a young age, brainwash them quite literally in hopes that this is going to be something that sticks, that they remain conservatives and they don't become leftists or liberals when they go to college. And just the other day on Steve Hilton's program on Fox News, Dave Rubin was complaining about how colleges essentially manufacture leftists and liberals because they teach you how to hate America. But that's not actually true. What he's referring to is history classes. When you go to school, you get taught about American history. And yes, that includes American imperialism, genocides that our country has waged against other human beings. So he claims that if you teach them that, this is trying to teach college students how to hate America. So when Prager Yu says, well, we're just teaching students history, nothing wrong with that, seems pretty anodyne, right? No, actually, what they're teaching is revisionist history. They don't want to portray America in, you know, a negative light. So perhaps they downplay the elements of our past that are a little bit controversial, if you will, genocide, slavery, historical oppression of people of color, wars over oil. So this is quite literally indoctrination. This is what they want to do. This is what they claim liberals want to do. But this is literally what they're doing, and it has to be stopped. And really the only way I think that you can sufficiently push back against Prager Yu is by supporting their main adversary, the Gravel Institute. Subscribe to the Gravel Institute, and if you can, support them on Patreon because they've already had a phenomenal reach. They've been able to kind of compete with Prager Yu, even though they just got started. And I hope that Gravel Institute launches a similar program because at the rate we're going, Prager Yu, they could be unstoppable, which is really bad, because we want children and adults. We want them to get objective facts and data and statistics, not right-wing misinformation and revisionist history that is only going to perpetuate the issues that we have in America and make Americans dumber than we already are. So this absolutely has to be stopped. And I hope that more students, when they're shown these propaganda videos, they have the confidence to speak up. But I mean, if I were a high school student, I don't know that I would have the confidence to confront my history teacher about something like this. So it's dangerous. And the fact that they are trying to now indoctrinate kindergartners is really fucking just, it's gross. So this next story is so unbelievably outrageous that there is a high likelihood that my head might actually pop off of my shoulders and explode once it hits the ground. It's that ridiculous. I don't even know how to process this level of absurdity, but Mitch McConnell, the individual who helped create the late-stage capitalist society that we all currently live in, he's now questioning whether or not large multinational corporations have too much power in our political system. The guy who for decades has argued that there should be more money in politics who literally wrote a legal brief in favor of Citizens United when it was being argued in front of the Supreme Court is now mad because corporations have too much power in our political system. Unbelievable. So as Bergus Everett of Politico explains, in the wake of the cancellation of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in Georgia over new election laws there, McConnell flashed frustration that companies appear to be taking direction from Democratic complaints about the law. Our private sector must stop taking cues from the outrage industrial complex. Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signaling McConnell said in a lengthy statement on Monday. Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order. The cozy relationship between Republicans and business is no secret in Washington. The party's last major legislative achievement was a tax cut bill that focused on shaving down the corporate tax rate. But that relationship has shifted in the early weeks of the presidency of Joe Biden. So I find this hilarious. And when I say hilarious, I mean insufferable. Because he's pretending as if he doesn't know the way that large multinational corporations operate. And in the article, they quote him as saying that they're being woke and that the problem with them is that they're too woke. I think that someone who's a capitalist knows the way that corporations operate. These large corporations, they don't have a cohesive political ideology. Every action that they take is going to be a way that they increase their profits. So when they donate to politicians in both parties, it's not because they think that Democrats and Republicans have really stellar ideas and they want to support these politicians out of the goodness of their hearts. They donate to these politicians in both parties because they are doing that to foster goodwill with both parties. So that way when power changes, they still have people in power to advocate on their behalf. Opt for less regulations, opt for more tax cuts for them. So they don't have a political ideology, they're not woke. They might virtue signal and take a side when it comes to cultural issues, but them doing that is nothing more than marketing because they try to cultivate goodwill not just among lawmakers, but among the general public who they need to buy their products to survive. And to the extent that large corporations denouncing legislation produced by politicians that they donated to will be because it is a bad look. The optics are bad, it's a PR issue and they want to correct that. Now, AP reported that corporations gave $50 million to lawmakers in Georgia that supported the racist voter suppression legislation that was recently passed. And now these companies are facing pressure to stop supporting said politicians and even publicly denounce them because this is bad for business, right? Now, they're not just like Coca-Cola, Delta, they denounced Georgia's voter suppression law which in turn led to Trump calling on conservatives to boycott these companies. Now the whole reason why they're speaking up is not because ideologically they disagree with this, but it's a business decision, but to Trump's call to boycott companies like Coca-Cola, I've just got to ask how's that working out for you? Because in this photograph shared on Twitter by white supremacist Stephen Miller, it looks as if you're not necessarily participating in the culture that you are promoting. So how's that boycott working out Donald Trump? But here's the thing, we live in a democracy. So theoretically if we want to effect change we should be able to pick up the phone, pressure lawmakers organize. I mean, you can't really do too much in-person political activities during a pandemic. But in theory we should be able to just directly impact our lawmakers. But since we live in a late-stage capitalist society thanks to individuals like Mitch McConnell we can't just do that, it's not so simple. We actually have to use proxies to effect change. We have to put pressure on large corporations so that way they'll in turn put pressure on politicians because that's the only way that we will actually make a difference. And as Sasan put it, incredibly scary state of affairs when we need Coca-Cola to step in against restrictive legislation because people virtually have zero power to make politicians do anything through direct action. And that's the issue here. The issue is that we know nothing is going to get done nothing that we want will be accomplished unless corporate America says do it. Because when corporate America tells politicians to jump they ask how high. But when Americans ask politicians to do something they don't hear us. And if you look to a 2014 Princeton University study that Dr. Dylan's and Page produced, they found that special interests and business elites, they have a really significant impact on policy outcomes. But normal Americans have a statistically insignificant impact on policy outcomes. So this is why people are now putting pressure on Coca-Cola on Delta, companies based in Georgia. This is why we are trying to pressure the Israeli government to stop oppressing the Palestinian people by opting for boycott, divestment and sanctions because when capitalism reigns supreme around the world and in the United States really you have to hit them where it hurts. And that is in their wallets. So if they think that we're not going to buy their products if they don't speak out or if they're not woke enough, for example, then that will encourage these large multinational corporations to take action. And again, I just want to stress here that these corporations don't have a political ideology. Their ideology is to increase profits, increase shareholder value. That's the only thing that they care about. And that explains why you can have companies like Walmart, for example, put out pro-gay advertisements saying, oh, well we respect the LGBTQ community. We support LGBTQ pride. But on another hand donate thousands of dollars to anti-trans lawmakers in Arkansas, for example, who end up passing bills that ban gender-affirming care for trans youth. I mean not necessarily very woke if you're funding anti-gay and anti-trans politicians, but at the same time, you speak out in favor of pride. I mean to them it's all about the money. They don't actually care about gay pride. Nobody believes that when Xbox changes their logo to the pride flag that they're doing it because they genuinely care about gay people. It's virtue signaling because this is marketing to them. They're trying to say, hey, we support gay people and you probably know someone who's gay or you might be gay yourself. Buy an Xbox. Buy, you know, a Microsoft computer. That's why they do it. It's marketing. Now, someone who's a capitalist like Mitch McConnell, he knows this but he's lying to you. He's being disingenuous. He's trying to make it seem as if well look, this is just the woke mob and so he's trying to trigger the opposite backlash that these companies are expecting, right? Because they know that if they support politicians who keep passing anti-trans bills or voter suppression bills, then that might lead to blowback. But what Mitch McConnell is trying to do is trigger the opposite effect where it leads to conservative blowback, right? That's what Trump is trying to do as well. But ultimately in the grand scheme of things, what these corporations do will be dictated specifically and exclusively by what is going to make them the most money. If it became financially acceptable for them, it would increase money and value and be a good marketing tactic for them to sign on to a ban on interracial marriage, they would do it like that because they don't care about our political issues. They care about money. But Mitch McConnell, of all people, he never has the right to complain about the amount of power that corporations have. You are the one who created this dystopian hellscape that we're all currently living in. So unless your proposal is to reduce the amount of political power that large multinational corporations have, kindly shut your big fucking mouth Mitch McConnell because nobody believes you. Everyone sees right through what you're doing. It's not that you think they have too much power. It's that the corporate power that you gave to large multinational corporations doesn't always benefit your party. So at first it seemed as if all systems were go when it comes to Joe Biden's infrastructure plan because President Joe Manchin, I think it's appropriate that we can call him that, he said, you know what, I'll give it my stamp of approval, thumbs up, we can do the infrastructure plan. The issue, however, is that now President Manchin is getting cold feet because there's a provision in Joe Biden's plan that is kind of making President Manchin's donors a little bit anxious. So what provision does Joe Manchin want removed? Well, as Bloomberg reports, President Joe Biden's 2.25 trillion economic plan ran into trouble Monday with a key Senate Democrat, West Virginia's Joe Manchin who demanded changes to tax provisions in order to secure his crucial support. Manchin told a local news outlet he wouldn't support raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% as Biden proposed to pay for increased infrastructure and social welfare spending. Manchin said he would be in favor of closing tax loopholes that benefit the wealthy and could support an increase to the corporate tax rate to 25%, which he said is the global average. Quote, if I don't vote to get on it, it's not going anywhere Manchin said, it's more than just me. There are six or seven other Democrats that feel strongly about this. We have to be competitive and we are not going to throw caution to the wind. This whole thing has got to change, he said. Okay, so immediately there's two things that I want to point out. The first is how insufferable and smug Joe Manchin is. Whenever he has the chance, he's reminding everyone, look if this bill doesn't have my support it's effectively dead on rival. He loves it. He loves it. And in some ways, I'm actually envious of the way he's that effective. He knows how to wield power and I wish that other progressives in Congress and even Joe Biden would learn how to be this persuasive, this ruthless, because if you actually are really ruthless and you don't back down, then you get what you want. And so in a way like I admire it, but he doesn't care that he's playing with people's lives and that all of this that he's doing is hurting Americans. But it's all at the behest of his corporate donors. That's the only thing that he cares about. Now, the second thing that I want to point out about that article and you would all know this if you watched my fantastic interview with Steve Grumbine of Real Progressives is that taxes don't fund spending. So should Joe Biden raise the corporate tax rate? Yes, he absolutely should because these large multinational corporations are not paying nearly enough. Having said that, though, we don't need that to fund anything. The United States government has its own sovereign currency. They are the sole issuer of the dollar. So if they want to pay for something, they automatically have the money to pay for that period end of story. If you know about modern monetary theory, then you'll know why this is the case. So Joe Biden doesn't have to do that. But if he actually wants to appease someone like Joe Manchin, we all know exactly what he's going to do. He's going to water down his own legislation, which is why when I talked about Joe Biden's infrastructure plan, I argued that if he truly wants to get everything passed in this small 2.2 trillion dollar package over 10 years, then at least shoot for 10 trillion. And then by the time your bill gets watered down, you're at least still a little bit closer to your target. But I mean, he is going to believe that he has to raise taxes in order to pay for this. So if he does what Joe Manchin says or wants, rather there'll be less in here. And we all know what proposals will get taken out. The progressive proposals, the more progressive proposals. Now, what's interesting is that Joe Manchin is a total flip-flopper on this issue because as CNN reporter David Gellis explains in 2012 Manchin supported Obama's plan to drop the corporate tax rate from 35% to 28%. In 2011 Manchin now says Biden's plan to raise it to 28% is too high. Yeah. So first of all, I just have to speak to Joe Biden's weakness. You are the president of the United States. You are the most powerful politician in the world. And you have completely failed to use your bully pulpit to hold your caucus accountable. And yes, some of the burden lies with Chuck Schumer, right? He should be whipping his caucus, making sure that Joe Biden and the president has the votes needed to get his agenda accomplished. But I mean, if Chuck Schumer isn't effective, then you replace him or you use your bully pulpit yourself to fight these folks. But Joe Biden has proven that he's a pushover. And so whatever Joe Manchin wants Joe Manchin gets. And this really speaks to a broader issue. And I want to point to a tweet from Good Politics Guy who explains how this is basically the perfect demonstration of the ratchet effect. He says, Trump cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Biden's plan is to raise it back to only 28%. This is the ratchet effect, not Biden being a progressive. And the way that the ratchet effect works is Republicans draft right-wing policies and pass right-wing policies that Democrats ultimately refuse to undo. And little by little over time, Republicans have effectively shifted the Overton window further and further to the right. And the modest gains that Democrats make back in the opposite direction when they get power. They seem like victories when in actuality Republicans are still the winners because we're still operating based on what they want. They've shifted the entire spectrum to the right and if you, you know, move 10 points to the right, for example, and Democrats only move back two points. Who's the winner overall? It's Republicans. They're the ones getting what they want. And while we're talking about Good Politics Guy, I've got to plug his channel. Definitely subscribe to him. He's one of the best newcomers in indie media and it's really difficult to thrive as a political commentator in 2021. So any support that newcomers can get is going to help. So definitely subscribe to him. Love his content. He's doing a phenomenal job here. But yeah, I mean the story I think speaks for itself. If something is going to get passed, it has to have Joe Manchin's approval. Not necessarily because he's that important, but because out of all of the people in the Senate, this idiot somehow managed to find himself in this lucky position where he is right between Democrats and Republicans and is the last say on every single thing. So if Democrats want to pass something, they're more likely to get him than a Republican, a single Republican. So he's in this position to where he can make all these demands and people are too afraid to push back against it. But I think that if Democrats like Joe Biden actually wanted to achieve any of their agenda, you have to fight people like him. Even if it means you have to do some wheeling and dealing and say, look, I can include pork for West Virginia in this next package that I passed, so long as you support this progressive policy proposal or this moderate proposal even that would that would make a difference. But you know, the issue is that Joe Biden he's not just weak, he likes having someone like Joe Manchin there for plausible deniability because Joe Biden himself is actually a conservative Democrat. So if he has an excuse as to why his policies aren't getting passed, if it's Joe Manchin or the Senate parliamentarian he's going to use that because he doesn't actually disagree that much with the Republicans, at least when it comes to economic policies. So I mean, I'll leave that there, it's deeply frustrating that one of the dumbest members of the U.S. Senate Joe Manchin is in this position of immense power and influence. It's just frustrating and in spite of the Democrats narrow majority, I promise you it doesn't actually have to be this way, but that would require Democrats actually fighting and wanting to fight just in general, which I don't believe Joe Biden wants to fight. I think he's perfectly fine with Joe Manchin dictating the terms of his policies that his administration passes. Yeah. So I want to talk about an article recently published by Politico about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because she did something that really angered a lot of leftists and I think rightfully so. Now the more perplexing element about this story is that the thing that she did simultaneously pissed off both moderate Democrats and leftists, which is interesting. Having said that though I do think it's important that we address this. I'm not one who goes out of my way to criticize political allies, but I do really think there is a meaningful difference between constructive criticism and destructive criticism. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of folks online who go out of their way to make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez public enemy number one and they work backwards from the conclusion that AOC is bad and they try to find every single story and every little thing that she says to validate their belief that AOC is bad. They make it seem as if she's the main obstacle to all of our progress, but that's not actually the case. She's one member of Congress and I do believe that she hasn't really figured out how to effectively wield her power and she hasn't learned how to use the leverage that she has as is the case with other lawmakers. So in criticizing her, I don't want to contribute to the noise that's out there and I don't want to validate the opportunists who make money off of clicks and views just needlessly shitting on AOC nonstop, but I do think it is important that someone who is a good faith actor addresses this and explains to AOC if she manages to see this why the strategy isn't going to be conducive to success on the left. I don't think that she's a sellout. I don't think that she's ill-intentioned, but what she's doing very clearly isn't going to help her or the leftist movement. So to give you some background, basically every member of Congress is expected to pay dues into the DCCC which is the election arm of the Democratic Party. AOC doesn't pay her dues. She refuses to pay her dues because she believes that the DCCC is not fair to progressives. I mean they've previously blacklisted vendors who work with progressive primary challengers, so she's right to not pay dues. So she's circumvented this by trying to reallocate the money that she would otherwise pay to the DCCC which helps Democrats get elected to just giving directly to members of the Democratic Party. Now up until this point, she's been pretty selective about who she chooses to allocate election money to. She usually just specifically donates to progressives, but as of late she's actually broadened out who she's donating to and now she's donating to more moderate Democrats and she's not just donating to more conservative, right-leaning Democrats. She's donating to Democrats who very explicitly are hostile not just to her agenda, but to her specifically. So let's get to the article. As Politico reports, as the midterm campaign's first fundraising deadline approached this week, several vulnerable House Democrats got an unwelcome surprise in their accounts. $5,000 from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The New York Democrats sent the contributions to her colleagues to help keep the House majority ahead of a tough cycle without directly contributing to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee with which she's publicly clashed but Ocasio-Cortez's large S and an oversight of the campaign headquarters has instead raised awkward questions among her colleagues as some swing district Democrats fret over whether to return her money before the GOP can turn it into an attack ad. While some are grateful for the infusion of cash at least three Democrats have so far either declined the initial transfer or said they would return the money. Ocasio-Cortez is the representative's Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, Carolyn Bordeaux of Georgia and Alyssa Slotkin of Michigan according to multiple sources. Ocasio-Cortez is a prolific fundraiser with a campaign machine of her own that could be a major asset to Democrats as they attempt to hold onto their majority next fall. While she has given to some individual frontline Democrats in the past such as representatives Mike Levin and Katie Porter of California are now more selective. This year's crop of DCCC frontliners include 32 hand-picked Democrats who face some of the toughest elections in the country next November. The majority of them flipped GOP seats in 2018. Some, like Levin and Porter of California proudly identify with the left wing of the party and would face minimal political risk from an affiliation from the progressive icon. But Ocasio-Cortez's money poses a problem for Democrats such as representative Jared Golden of Maine and Slotkin moderate turf and have sought to distance themselves from the left wing of the caucus. Now, at the time that I record this video AOC has yet to comment on this article. I'd imagine that she'd say, look, this isn't necessarily about their policies. This is just about me trying to make sure I do my part to keep the Democratic majority as we head into the 2022 midterm elections. Also, she could say, look I know that they don't agree with me on most things, but this is me extending an olive wrench to them. Perhaps if I donate $5,000 to them, they might either support something that I'm pushing or maybe they just might stop criticizing me. Either way, what it seems like she's doing is she's trying to play 4D chess where she's trying to move up within the party's ranks by helping other Democrats get elected. That's exactly how you do move up in the Democratic party. The issue that I have with this however is that if you truly want to enact a transformative progressive agenda you can't just try to move up within the system itself once you're inside. As an insider you have to dismantle the existing structures, the existing establishment from within. Not play patty cake with corporate Democrats who absolutely want nothing to do with you and they hate her so much that they're rejecting the money, some of them are and they're publicly denouncing this donation but someone like Conor Lam like donating to this individual is unjustifiable because while he may be better than some Republicans he's pretty comparable to them and you're literally funding someone with money from progressives who is antagonistic towards your agenda. Conor Lam just attacked members of the squad he claimed that people like AOC put the Democratic party's majority at risk and when it comes to leftist policies like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All he lied about them and said that they're quote unworkable and extremely unpopular which is an outright fabrication I mean when it comes to Alyssa Slotkin she came out strongly against Medicare for All and she said I think for me the most important thing is that the American way of life is choice and competition I mean because that's certainly working out for us currently so the issue with this is that AOC is giving money to Democrats, she's helping elect Democrats that are going to in turn fight against the agenda that she's pushing and the worst part about this is that she's doing this with money that she's using from progressives. If progressives wanted their money to go to Conor Lam they would just donate to Conor Lam but since they don't want that to happen you can see why they're angry you can see why it feels as if they think they were betrayed because you're taking this money and you're justifying it giving it to Democrats justifying it by saying well I'm helping to enact a Democrat majority because if we lose the majority then everything's off the table but I mean it's even more difficult to justify that if with a Democratic majority currently you're not using the power that you have to push for more progressive legislation I mean it's not just AOC Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders they were touting Biden's COVID relief package as like one of the most progressive pieces of legislation in modern history. We passed the most significant piece of emergency legislation which among other things will cut childhood poverty in half. The American rescue plan is deemed to be the most progressive policy in decades but that's not a victory for the left it was a victory for centrist Democrats. You lost you tried to get a minimum wage of $15 an hour in that bill but that didn't happen so you can say that you know sure there's some good things in that legislation but to tout their victory as your own that's a little bit disingenuous like I want you to actually fight and sure you can you can critique the Biden administration AOC is phenomenal at doing that. You can you know speak to the issues within the system itself but if you don't actually go to war with the Democratic establishment and fight other Democrats then you're not going to be very effective. So to fund Democrats who are going to in turn fight against you and fight to you know dismantle all of the progress that we've made in building public support for Medicare for All I don't think that this is smart politics at all in fact I think it's terrible politics and someone who knows AOC very personally apologizing and tends to agree she says this is not what we supported when we started. Pretty sure AOC is batting for what the party wanted her to do not what will help to pass policies we need I'm highly disappointed with my colleague and I won't align myself with her anymore now I'm not going to go as far as I'm not going to say I won't align myself with her anymore because I think that if we want to get progressive policies enacted and have any chance whatsoever then we have to rely on progressives in Congress but the point that Paul Jean is making is that this move to try to play patty cake with members of the Democratic party establishment and even trying to help moderate Democrats get elected I get that you think this is going to help you win over Democrats but they're never going to like you so long as you truly support the agenda that goes against what their donors want and you see an issue here with AOC strategy is that it is reminiscent of Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign strategy and that she wasn't necessarily trying to go against the Democratic party establishment and Democratic party leadership she was trying to build support within the establishment which is something that I critiqued because if you actually want to make progress they are the obstacles that stand in your way so you have to actually treat them like the enemies that they are so what AOC is doing here I'd love to hear her try to justify this and explain why she's doing this again I can anticipate her saying well this isn't about me it's just about the Democratic majority but this isn't going to get them to like you and even if we secure a Democratic majority in 2022 you haven't fully justified using progressive money to fund conservatives especially considering that having a Democratic majority hasn't really paid off as far as the left is concerned sure Biden is handling COVID better we got the $1400 relief checks instead of the $2000 in terms of what the left is able to accomplish with the Democratic majority you guys haven't put up anything yet and you really need to put up more you actually have to go to war with the Democratic party establishment and if you don't want to do that then actually threaten to withhold support for certain bills Joe Manchin does it all the time moderate Democrats are already doing it in the house if Joe Biden doesn't adjust the tax policy in there so it's just it's really exciting and I think that what she's trying to do here it's just unjustifiable and again I hesitate to criticize AOC too hard because I don't want to join the course of people on the left who's just trying to tear her down because I think that that's counterproductive but I think that this is one of those times where what she's doing isn't just making the left less effective it's actually hurting the leftist cause and if she doesn't hear from good faith actors if she doesn't hear from leftists about why this is problematic and why this is something that a leftist politician should never do then she's going to be more inclined to just disregard all criticism because she's just going to think well it's just from my usual haters who are always shitting on me so I'm just going to ignore everyone and just try to do what I think is best but we need to hold them accountable we hold them accountable and get them to do what we want and they're not always going to listen to us but I think that we have to speak up and understand that this movement it goes both ways right we sent AOC to congress to dismantle the systems that oppress American people and working people from the inside and so if she thinks she has to try to move up the ranks within the party that's a misguided approach because you're not going to dismantle it from inside you're not going to dismantle the establishment from the inside if you're literally propping up the establishment yourself and just doing exactly what they want you to do and understand I get that these payments are in lieu to her giving the DCCC contributions which she should not pay her dues to the DCCC but you can't justify it by saying well the money would be going to conservative Democrats anyway if she just gave it to the DCCC or yeah but I mean Conor Lamb is bad but he's better than Republicans I don't think these are justifiable reasons to give money to people who are antithetical or who stand for everything that's antithetical to what you believe in so I think that this ain't it and the criticism that she's receiving in this instance is absolutely warranted and I hope that she listens and has a change of heart because her strategy of trying to butter up Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic establishment it hasn't paid off and unless it pays off really really soon I think it's time for her to re-evaluate her strategy in Congress because this isn't working if she wants to be effective you can't play nice with the establishment you actually have to fight and if she fights she has millions of leftists in her corner who will go to bat for her but doing it this way this ain't it chief last week on the program we talked about a bill that the Republican controlled legislature in Arkansas passed that would ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth something that would be absolutely detrimental to the well-being of young transgender people because this is a group that isn't just more susceptible to bullying and this would further make them a target but they're also highly statistically likely to attempt suicide or contemplate suicide much more so than their cisgender peers so all this would do was make their lives which are already difficult that much more hard and it seemed very likely that the governor of Arkansas would sign the since law given that he just recently signed a bill that would ban transgender high schoolers from participating in sports the unthinkable happened actually we got some unexpectedly good news Asa Hutchinson the governor of Arkansas who's a Republican actually decided to veto this legislation so as the ACLU reports the governor of Arkansas just vetoed HB 1570 an extreme ban on health care for trans youth this victory belongs to trans youth in Arkansas and the parents and doctors that have come together to speak up now upon vetoing this legislation he explained his reasoning and he says I was told this week that the nation is looking at Arkansas because I have on my desk another bill passed by the general assembly that is a product of the cultural war in America Mr. Hutchinson said and announcing his veto I don't shy away from the battle when it is necessary and defensible but the most recent action of the general assembly while well intended is off course it goes against the advice of medical experts and scientists having said that though I don't necessarily care what his reasoning is regardless the fact that he vetoed this is exactly what I was hoping would happen the bad news however is that that doesn't necessarily mean that this won't become law because there are other bills being considered currently in other legislatures controlled by Republicans Alabama may be the next date to pass something like this and even in Arkansas the battle isn't necessarily over just yet because as the New York Times explains the Arkansas state legislature could override Mr. Hutchinson's veto of the bill known as HB 1570 Republicans hold large majorities in both chambers and passed the bill last month with mostly party line votes 70 to 22 in the House and 28 to 7 in the Senate so if they want to they could easily override his veto and it seems as if that may very well be the case although the fight continues and I will say the video that I put out last week is still super relevant because I don't just talk about the legislation in Arkansas I explained specifically using the medical experts and scientific data that we have why these types of bills are absolutely detrimental to the well-being of trans people but if you look at the comments on any video as it pertains to trans youth all you see is ignorance denial of science denial of the existence of transgender people they say oh there's no such thing as a young transgender person absolute nonsense and your ignorance if you are part of that is fueling these types of legislative efforts trans youth exist and you can choose to ban gender-affirming care for them and make them suffer make them highly susceptible to self-harm and suicide or you can actually trust the science and medical experts and the community of doctors that treat trans youth who say this care it's medically necessary it's medically necessary and puberty blockers are 100% reversible so rather than trying to justify your bigotry with bad data and misinformation actually listen to transgender people get to know a trans person and it might actually change your mind you can actually learn something but you see in America what we usually do is we spend a lot of time demonizing one particular group of people and even though we know that historically we're going to be frowned upon for the way that we're treating this group we still do that anyway because ignorance and prejudice it's as American as apple pie we just learned that anti-gay prejudice is immoral because a lot of people slowly but surely got to know the people they found out that their siblings and friends are gay and so they realized okay they're not the boogie man and boogie women that we were told but rather than applying what we just learned to the trans issue people are choosing once again to not do that to be prejudice and as a result of people's unwillingness to learn and change and open their minds guess who's suffering for that transgender Americans and disproportionately trans youth who are the targets of these types of legislative efforts but I don't want to be too down because this is good news but I don't want to celebrate too much because this could be a short lived victory we just have to wait and see and continue to push back against these types of absolutely horrible, destructive pieces of legislation that we are going to continue to see around the country so I was finally able to actually deliver you with some good news for a change but unfortunately because we live in the United States of America and it is currently a dystopian hellscape any victory that we get I'm just going to assume from now on that it's short lived so I'm of course referring to this situation in the state of Arkansas where their GOP controlled legislature decided to pass the safe act which is a bill that bans gender affirming care for trans youth now this is a bill that is completely anti-science it goes against the experts the medical community and academy of pediatricians because gender affirming care provided to trans youth isn't just something that improves their lives from a social standpoint because they can actually live as the gender that they identify as but it's actually deemed medically necessary so for trusting the experts and the scientists then this bill is absolute rubbish and because there was so much backlash the republican governor actually decided to veto this bill but because republicans have so much power in the state of Arkansas they actually had the votes to easily override his veto and that's exactly what they decided to do so now it is the case that this bill is going to become law and it will be enacted this summer and gender affirming care for trans youth will literally be criminalized so as Andrew Demillo of AP reports the law makers on Tuesday made the state the first to ban gender confirming treatments and surgery for transgender youth enacting the prohibition over the governor's objections the republican controlled house and senate voted to override GOP governor Asa Hutchinson's veto of the measure which prohibits doctors from providing gender confirming hormone treatment puberty blockers or surgery to anyone under 18 years old or from referring them to other providers for the treatment opponents of the measure have vowed to sue to block the ban before it takes effect this summer Hutchinson vetoed the bill Monday following pleas from pediatricians social workers and the parents of transgender youth who said the measure would harm a community already at risk for depression and suicide the ban was opposed by several medical and child welfare groups including the American Academy of Pediatrics this legislation perpetuates the very things we know are harmful to trans youth Dr. Robert Garofalo division head of adolescent and young adult medicine at Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago told reporters on a press conference call held by the human rights campaign they're not just anti-trans they're anti-science, they're anti-public health the bill sponsored dismissed opposition from medical groups and compared the restriction to other limits the state places on minors such as prohibiting them from drinking yeah so that very obviously is a false equivalence by someone who is a bad faith actor an ignorant who's trying to justify his bill which is very inevitably going to increase the rate of self harm and suicide among trans youth and the blood is on his hands for this and what I would call this is child abuse they're trying to argue that if you allow children to transition socially and you give them puberty blockers that's child abuse but in actuality what they're doing this is child abuse it's comparable to the conversion therapy clinics that we use to send gay children to and in some states still allow this to take place it's banned in certain states but now we're seeing as a society collectively that we should allow children and allow individuals to just be who they want to be because it doesn't hurt anyone now what they're trying to do here is concern troll about trans youth they purport to care that young people you know they're too young to be making this decision nobody knows if they're truly transgender or non-binary at a young age so what this is going to allow is that they actually do allow them to get gender affirming care is they're going to transition when they're 16 and when they're 30, 35 they're going to regret that decision except that's not actually what happens that's ignorance studies long term studies of trans youth where the researchers will follow them when they're children all the way until their adults have found that the rate of regret is extremely extremely low and these studies show that there is a 0% rate of regret and here's the thing if you truly are concerned that trans people are transitioning too young first of all trans children cannot get bottom surgery you can't actually get that and second of all they're not doing this willy nilly it's not like parents are super hyper woke and they're forcing their kids to transition children at a young age as they develop you give them puberty blockers that further enables them to make a decision it allows them a little bit more time to decide who they are so if you're worried about regret then banning puberty blockers is something that you should be against because puberty blockers gives them more time to decide who they are and again I want you to understand that it's not like these kids are completely just choosing on a whim to be transgender because of social pressure and it's cool now these children are bullied they hate themselves statistically more likely than their cisgender peers to not only contemplate suicide but attempt suicide this is a public health crisis and what you just did in the state of arkansas made all of that more likely you exacerbated a problem that already existed you just made it 10 times worse it's just reprehensible and it's especially gross that they're doing this under the guise of protecting trans youth and they're calling it this safe act if you actually want to protect trans youth then perhaps listen to medical experts in the scientific community kids themselves aren't just choosing to have bottom and top surgery and take hormones that's not what's happening they are working in concert with their parents and doctors medical experts who have studied this for years to make a determination about what's best for them so to just outright criminalize gender affirming care this will do untold damage and the sad part is that we're not going to realize the amount of damage this causes until years down the road people like me are saying now this is going to lead to damage but they're not going to listen they're going to ignore this and same thing like you know um the conversion therapy clinics years down the line they'll look back at this and they'll say oh okay well maybe that is a bad thing maybe we made a mistake I mean again I'll make the same point that I made yesterday we just learned that treating gay people lesbians bisexual people as if they are these subhuman weirdos and they need to be ostracized like we just learned collectively as a society that that's bad and being prejudiced against gay people is bad not everyone got the memo but for the most part collectively it's no longer politically and socially acceptable to be homophobic I don't get why we can't just apply everything that we learned to the trans issue and non-binary issue why can't we take what we learned about lgb rights and apply that to trans rights like I just don't understand why every 10 years there has to be a new civil rights issue it's deeply deeply frustrating to me but because people are purposefully ignorant and they don't know anyone who's trans and they just perhaps are discriminatory against trans people and think that their identities are invalid well we have to have the same song and dance again rather than just fucking treating people with respect and giving them what they need it's just it's deeply disturbing and frustrating and I don't want to be one of the folks who's silent you know in the face of injustice I want to speak up and condemn this and I hope that you'll join me and I hope that you'll work to educate your peers because what we have in America it's not just you know a public health issue in the way that we treat trans people it's also an ignorance issue nobody in this country is going to really get the memo and really want to treat trans people as if they're human beings unless they know a trans person themselves unless they're actually informed and educated so I think it's incumbent on us as allies to the trans and non-binary communities in America to actually try to put in that work let people know that they're not the boogeyman they're just human beings who want to live their lives and like finding out you're gay you usually do so at a very young age the same is true for trans people I knew that I was gay probably when I was like five years old and the same is true for trans youth and by choosing to erase their identities erase their experience and just superimpose what you think is best for them under the guise of protecting them that's pretty fucking disgusting and I hope that this gets defeated this is absolutely just it's despicable I don't know what else to say about it it's gross Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton once again is fearmongering and this time he is concerned trolling about a spike in crime specifically he shared an article from CNN that states that the homicide rate in the United States has increased by 33% now the article itself doesn't necessarily state what causal factor is leading to an increase in homicide rates it speculates that it could be the pandemic or an increase in gun crimes but regardless Tom Cotton knows the solution to this problem he tweeted out we have a major under incarceration problem in America and it's only getting worse so the answer to this increase in crime is to just kill more people yes because that's worked out so well for us up until this point now before I actually get to the responses to Tom Cotton because he was ratioed into oblivion I just want to take some time to remind you that Tom Cotton is a fascist and an authoritarian when Donald Trump signed the first step act into law which is a criminal justice reform bill it doesn't nearly go far enough but it's a step in the right direction Tom Cotton actually criticized Donald Trump for signing that bill into law but it was too lenient so let's put things in a perspective Tom Cotton is to the right of a far right president when it comes to restorative justice and on top of that I'm sure that you'll all recall that just last year he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times where he called on then President Donald Trump to invoke the insurrection act to violently shut down Black Lives Matter protests so if Tom Cotton had his way we would be living in a fascist authoritarian police state that's what he wants time after time he's indicated that exactly what he wants to see so I think that we should take him at his word when he tells us who he is we should believe him he's a fascist he's an authoritarian now I do want to share some of the responses to this because it didn't take much effort for the internet to completely dismantle his arguments with vaccine logic so one person shared a comparison of prison population rates and obviously this shows that the United States jails far more people than the next biggest jailers combined now this person pointed out how looking specifically at Arkansas Tom Cotton's home state Arkansas has one of the highest rates of incarceration in America and actually has a higher incarceration rate per capita than many countries believe it or not so the issue is that we have an incarceration problem in America not that we have an under incarceration problem and just applying a one size fits all solution to crime I mean by now we should have learned our lesson right and I also don't have to tell you that in the event let's say hypothetically speaking there was this wave of hysteria over an increase in the crime rates because of fear mongers like Tom Cotton who would be the most affected by that we all know disproportionately black and brown people would be jailed at higher rates than white people it's already the case that black and brown Americans are more likely to be locked up than whites they received longer sentences than their white peers for the same crimes and they're also far more likely to be arrested for drug use even though they're as likely as their white peers to use drugs at the same rates and part of the reason why they get locked up at a higher rates than white people for the same crimes is because black and brown neighborhoods are policed more so than white neighborhoods in fact black and brown neighborhoods are overpoliced but the thing is that this isn't a flaw in our criminal justice system it's not some unintended consequence that we're only finding out about this is a feature of our criminal justice system our criminal justice system is explicitly white supremacist but here's the thing Tom Cotton may be a fascist he may be an authoritarian but he's aware of this he knows this and that's the point I think I think he wants more black and brown people to be arrested which is why many people pointed out the fact that him saying we need to jail more people is a racist dog whistle because he knows what's going to happen if he gets his way more black and brown people will be jailed now in spite of the occasional spikes in crime the overall trends tell you a completely different story so since the 1990s violent crime and property crime has actually decreased substantially now the homicide rate has also been historically low although the CNN article does say that it increased by 33% but if he read the article that he shared there's a number of reasons that they state this may be the case they can't find any one causal mechanism but one of the contributing factors that they lay out is gun violence now we all know that Tom Cotton doesn't actually want to do anything about gun violence he doesn't want any background checks he doesn't want any legislation whatsoever that might curtail gun ownership even for people who very clearly should not have guns so I don't think we really get a response about that additionally they also argue in this article that perhaps the pandemic exacerbated existing social issues and economic issues and that could have contributed to the spike although again this is all a speculation and the article also speculates that another reason why we may have seen an increase in crime is because police departments had to reallocate resources and personnel to the black lives matter protests last year and you know that took time away from them policing high crime areas and also since there's so many you know defund the police efforts police morale is low and on top of that if we're defunding police departments then obviously they can't do their job as effectively and that's leading to an increase in crime now that particular portion of this article is complete horseshit because in order to speculate about whether or not defund the police or black lives matter protests were responsible for an increase in crime they just cite police commissioners and police departments verbatim okay not the most persuasive hypothesis nonetheless the point of the article is that homicide rates are up and crime overall has increased but we don't necessarily know what the cause of this is and furthermore historically speaking in comparison to the 70s and the 80s crime is still low overall but what Tom Cotton is doing is trying to use this article as a justification to further crack down on Americans specifically black and brown Americans and I mean this is him stating fully and intentionally that he wants to live in a police state it's already the case that the United States of America is basically a police state when you look at how many people we jail in comparison with other developed nations I would be ashamed if I was a U.S. senator at these statistics I would be ashamed that my country a supposed democracy jails so many people and that we haven't immediately changed our criminal justice system as a result of this embarrassment as a result of historic racism in this country but he's proud of it and he thinks we should go further if that doesn't tell you everything that you need to know about Tom Cotton then I don't know what to say the man is a fascist and an authoritarian and he is exponentially worse than Donald Trump and we should never allow him to get anywhere near a higher position of power because if he had his way again America would be far worse than it is right now President Joe Biden is experiencing a current Lee he is struggling to decide whether or not he should unilaterally enact objectively good and common sense policies that are also extremely popular yeah so the first thing he's considering doing is canceling up to $50,000 of student debt which is a pleasant surprise that he's even considering this because previously he said he wouldn't cancel any more than 10,000 and he would only do that if it was passed through the legislature but seeing as how the filibuster is intact and he's going to listen to everything that the senate parliamentarian says I mean if he wants to accomplish anything and be even somewhat popular among young people then you've got to do something so he is considering student loan debt cancellation as Adam Minsky of Forbes reports the Biden administration on Thursday indicated that the president is actively considering whether to enact widespread student loan forgiveness of up to $50,000 but no decision has yet been made at a Politico playbook event on Thursday White House Chief of Staff Ron Claim indicated that Biden has asked newly appointed Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to put together a memo outlining potential legal authorities that would allow him to enact broad student loan debt cancellation of up to $50,000 separately last month President Biden also directed the Department of Justice to evaluate his authority to enact widespread student loan forgiveness now I will point out that this article was published on April 1st we're a little bit late to the party but we'll just keep that in mind if this is a joke this is a very very dirty joke but as to whether or not he should do this I don't know let me think should he do something that would alleviate an entire generation that's bogged down by debt largely due to policies that he enacted when he was a senator yeah I think that maybe he should definitely lean in the direction of canceling $50,000 what's the point of even contemplating just do it Donald Trump canceled student debt for veterans so I mean there's already the legal precedent do it now another thing that he is considering as CNBC reports the White House is considering whether to lift intellectual property protections on COVID-19 vaccine sources say which would allow other countries to replicate existing vaccines so if he were to do this it would only be temporary and what would be the benefits of him actually doing this well first of all it would drastically increase the speed to which other countries would be able to vaccinate their citizens because if you only have a select few number of companies manufacturing this vaccine it's going to take a little while right and we're in a race against the mutations and the variants you might want them to know how to manufacture this vaccine so that way there could be generics I mean is this really a time to let big pharma profit off of human health now if you're wondering what the downsides are we'll play that clip from CNBC because they explain the supposed downsides of Joe Biden's administration taking this action hey Brian I've learned that the White House is studying whether to temporarily suspend patent protections for vaccines and treatments developed to treat COVID-19 in response to specific requests from South Africa and India who have lodged a formal request at the World Trade Organization to get access to these medicines and so far the issue has been tabled on a global scale but now I've learned that it's risen to the highest levels within the Biden administration according to three sources familiar with the matter as recently as Monday of this week a meeting of deputy level policymakers convened to discuss the issue but I'm told by my sources that no decision was reached although privately House Speaker Nancy Pelosi many of the members of her caucus have supported this move behind the scenes that she has sent a private letter to the White House expressing her own support for pursuing such a move you can imagine there is fierce debate on either side of this discussion on one hand pharmaceutical companies say that this would compromise medical innovation in the future on the other hand you have many developing nations who say that they would like access to these medicines and they argue that wealthier nations are essentially hoarding these medicines that they've developed in the words of one source who's familiar with some of the support among progressive lawmakers here in the US they say we're not all safe until everyone is safe Brian we should note I just got a statement in from the office of the US trade representative who will have jurisdiction over this issue and who I believe will make the final decision and it says that they are using every avenue to coordinate with their global partners back to you okay so I kind of get the dilemma here on one hand we need the pandemic to go away and we need countries to be able to rapidly vaccinate their populations but on another hand these pharmaceutical companies who stand to make millions of dollars by being the exclusive manufacturers of the covid vaccines say that this will compromise medical innovation such a dilemma sounds like bullshit let's go with the first one let's compromise medical innovation let's go with option A and let's make sure that these countries are able to quickly vaccinate their citizens I mean are we talking about a secret sauce recipe from some restaurant no we're talking about a life-saving vaccine what's the dilemma Joe Biden why are you even contemplating this why do you even have to think about whether or not this is something that you should do of course this is something that you should do are you serious let me pose a hypothetical situation to you what would happen if you successfully vaccinate enough Americans where we reach herd immunity but other countries in Latin America in Africa don't actually vaccinate enough of their citizens the virus continues to spread there and a new mutation pops up that's actually resistant to the existing vaccines and then what happens all of a sudden all the effort to vaccinate Americans it's undone this is a pandemic we can't choose to let certain people on this planet get the vaccines while others don't get the vaccines if we actually want to end the pandemic for good so there's no dilemma I mean these are all things that Joe Biden can do that would be extremely extremely popular he'd get praise for it I'd certainly give him credit for it and on top of that these are just objectively good things why why the back and forth why the deliberation just fucking do it I mean this shouldn't be something that you take years agonizing over oh my god should I cancel $50,000 in student debt do I have the legal authority to do yes just do it I feel like Shaila Buff right now I mean just fucking do it this isn't an issue when it comes to lifting the intellectual property protections for the coronavirus vaccine obviously unless you're stupid I mean not doing that would be counterproductive so I don't understand this these would be all phenomenal things I would give Joe Biden credit for it many leftists would give him credit for this many human beings would give him credit for doing these objectively good popular things so just do it stop thinking stop contemplating and just do it right these things cannot be accomplished legislatively unless you are willing to fight and since you're not willing to fight if you want to get anything done and have any chance of keeping the house and keeping the white house in 2024 you've got to deliver at least something to the American people and you could start with the most popular easy to accomplish things so I'm not sure how many people are aware of this story I myself am a little bit late to the party on this particular subject but I wanted to talk about this on the program because I feel like this is one of the most important stories of our generation perhaps and I don't really think that that's hyperbolic because the outcome of this particular story the lawsuit that we're going to talk about here it has broader implications on the First Amendment on freedom of speech and I think that leftists have kind of dwelled a little bit too much on the cultural aspect when it comes to freedom of speech like we respond to political commentators like Steven Crowder getting demonetized and Donald Trump getting banned from twitter and sure those are related to freedom of speech I think tangentially but if you truly want to reach the crux of the issue in America it is a crackdown on political speech the criminalization or attempt to criminalize political speech that currently is not politically correct and I'm of course referring to criticism of Israel in particular BDS now Abby Martin she is the host of the Empire Files she's a journalist she's a documentarian honestly I admire her so much like out of all of the leftists she's at the top of my list in terms of who I admire just her work is so crucial but she has a lawsuit that is so important so she was invited to give a speech and that speech in order for her to give that speech it was required that she sign a pro-Israel loyalty pledge that also says that she will not boycott Israel now she refused the speech was subsequently canceled and now as a result she is suing so she recently put out a video where she spoke with her lawyer and got an update on the particular lawsuit here and I want to share some of the details here because this is so startling that every single person should be concentrating on this because what her lawyer says the justification used to crackdown on criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu's policies is honestly jaw dropping what her lawyer says here it sent chills down the back of my spine because it is extremely troubling in February of this year I was supposed to give a keynote speech at Georgia Southern University before the event I refused to sign a state mandated pledge to not boycott Israel in order to speak my invitation was rescinded and the conference canceled as a result I decided to sue the state of Georgia because signing an anti-BDS clause to work in the state is a direct violation of my constitutional rights to free speech and to participate in political boycotts similar laws exist in 28 states across the country you can watch the whole press conference with my lawyers with CARE and the partnership for civil justice fund on our YouTube channel which we'll link to below Joining me now is one of the main lawyers to give an update on the case Mara Verhaden-Hilliard of the partnership for civil justice fund so much for joining me Mara so I first wanted to get an update on my lawsuit filed with CARE and the PCJF back in February when we had that press conference the lawsuit was filed that day can you give us any updates on what has happened what they've done to respond legally since then since we filed the initial lawsuit we have filed an amended complaint in this case we've also been able to include some of the material that has come out since the initial filing that shows the communications going on behind the scenes in Georgia where they were taking action to stop you from being able to speak in service to the law that acts as a censor against those who support the BDS movement the defendants in this case have since moved to dismiss which is what we expected they filed a motion to dismiss we have filed an opposition to that and there has now been an amicus brief that's been filed in support of your case by J Street and by a Jewish human rights organization of rabbis in the United States who feel very strongly that the First Amendment cannot tolerate this kind of censorship and so they have joined in this effort because they don't believe that the BDS law is constitutional regardless of their own feelings about BDS just days after this lawsuit was filed and widely reported in the press Netanyahu tweeted this he said whoever boycotts us will be boycotted in recent years we've promoted laws in most US states which determine that strong action is to be taken against whoever tries to boycott Israel so here you have a foreign country essentially threatening economic consequences to dictate the constitutional rights of Americans then you had Georgia state officials essentially citing I mean actually citing Israel Netanyahu as part of their defense for these laws I mean this is a free speech case under the US constitution so why is it that you have a foreign leader you know making veiled threats for economic consequences and then you have actual state officials in Georgia citing foreign officials as their reason to undermine the US constitution here it's remarkable and fundamentally distressing that you have elected officials in the United States who actually are willing to sacrifice Americans first amendment rights cherished first amendment rights at the request of a foreign country and it's demanding basically that you and anyone else sign a loyalty oath to a foreign country in order to be able to contract with the state of Georgia and the situation is so extreme that in fact one of the state legislatures Deborah Silcox when they were seeking to amend the law and raise that limit to $100,000 to try and moot your case actually said in a committee meeting at the state legislature that she had been asked to take that step by the Israeli consulate and apparently even brought a member of the Israeli consulate to speak in that meeting. that the Georgia state government is citing the leader of a foreign country to justify their crackdown on political speech that they disagree with what stop for a second and imagine that Mississippi they created this law and they said you are not allowed to criticize the government of Russia you are not allowed to criticize their anti-LGBTQ plus policies or their authoritarianism you're not allowed to criticize them and the reason why we are going to pass this law is because Vladimir Putin himself said that you shouldn't criticize me imagine if that happened everyone on MSNBC CNN perhaps even Fox News would be speaking out against this but lawmakers in Georgia quite literally cited the minister of a foreign country as their justification as to why they are cracking down on the constitutional rights of American citizens that is horrifying absolutely chilling now her lawyer goes on to explain that the lawmakers in Georgia once they saw that Abbey Martin filed this lawsuit they tried to change the law and make it more palatable because they know that this wouldn't hold up to a legal challenge in fact just this year a law in Arkansas which is similar to the law in Georgia was just struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals and as Elliot Setzer of Lawfare explains the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit on February 12 ruled that in Arkansas law requiring state contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel violates the First Amendment in a 2-to-1 panel discussion Arkansas law was written so broadly that it would also apply to vendors that support or promote a boycott of Israel even if they did not engage in a boycott themselves and the court explained that supporting or promoting boycotts of Israel is constitutionally protected expressive activity the ruling reversed a January 2019 district court decision which had dismissed the case and remanded the case for further proceedings and that isn't the first time struck down in courts because they're blatantly unconstitutional which is why once Georgia saw that Abbey Martin filed this lawsuit then they tried to change it it's just honestly shocking that this is taking place and very few people are talking about it now what you'll see is that there's a correlation between an increase in popularity for BDS as a movement and these types of laws intended on criminalizing BDS now this is from Palestine Legal so you can see here there has been an explosion since 2014 of efforts to criminalize BDS it was struck down in four states as I stated but in 30 states currently there's some sort of anti BDS legislation that's currently still intact and again this very clearly violates the First Amendment and unlike other types of legislation that gets proposed in state legislatures across the country usually it comes in waves BDS legislation anti BDS legislation more specifically that tends to stick out of 219 bills proposed 49 of them have passed in state legislatures across the country so there is an all-out assault on freedom of speech but the battleground isn't Twitter or social media I think that's a different conversation that we should all be having about the power of big tech and I'm right there with you these big tech companies have too much control in our lives but the real battleground the issue of our time as it relates to freedom of speech is this story right here and Abby Martin is actually doing what no other leftist has done up until this point she's actually taking action to defend freedom of speech so I mean this story is incredibly important I will highly encourage you to familiarize yourself with the details of this case because it has broader implications on freedom of speech in the United States like the fact that US lawmakers are using what a foreign leader says to justify criminalizing freedom of speech against US citizens that should absolutely horrify every single person well we're finally getting some results about the Amazon union vote outcome and it's not over yet but it's not looking too good so far so as you can see here we have 463 yeses to 1,100 nos yeah this is very very disappointing so far as you can see they need at least 1,608 yes votes in order for the union to win the New York Times explains the first ballots counted in a closely watched bid to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama where heavily against the effort according to an unofficial tally of the results by the New York Times more than two thirds of the first 600 votes to be counted were against unionization the ballots are being counted in a random order in the National Labor Relations Board's office in Birmingham the union seeking to represent workers said late Wednesday that 3,215 ballots had been cast or about 55% of the roughly 5,800 workers who were eligible to vote hundreds of ballots are being contested mostly by Amazon according to the retail wholesale and department store union so it's not looking good so far and of course Amazon is contesting the ballots but they've done more in terms of trying to sabotage the effort aside from their public union busting efforts so as more perfect union reports more perfect union has obtained emails showing that Amazon privately pressured USPS to install an illegal ballot drop box during the union election in Bessemer, Alabama the emails directly contradict public statements by USPS about the box's origins the emails were obtained through a FOIA request by RWDSU many of the exchanges have been almost entirely redacted and any mentions of Amazon officials has been removed but here are some key findings that we have been able to glean from the FOIA request first we learn that beginning January 8th one month before the union vote begins Amazon repeatedly calls USPS's strategic account manager to say they want to install their own box USPS team deliberates Amazon's request and says a private box may not be utilized USPS then decides to install one for them Amazon HQ would like to be kept in the loop a USPS official informs the entire national and local team we don't know for sure but in a series of redacted emails it appears that for over the next week Amazon and USPS haggle over the acquisition of a box what kind of box can be installed and how quickly it can be done on February 3rd a USPS official sends an email stating that it is dedicating time and effort to physically altering a collection box that wouldn't meet Amazon's needs USPS says it is hollowing out a box that would allow for bulk mail ballot collection Amazon demands USPS install the box by February 7th one day before the union vote was to begin USPS says it is working with Amazon the box in a convenient location on the Bessemer campus as we documented with Grim Kim Amazon had the ballot drop box installed in violation of explicit guidance from the federal government the box is installed the evening of February 9th late at night under cover of darkness the mailbox was critical for Amazon's strategy because it wanted to pressure employees to bring ballots to work that they'd receive at home in the mail by doing this they could then pressure and monitor employees to submit no votes let's just say that if this vote were taking place in a foreign country Latin America the United States government would invade them for not being democratic enough the entire process itself has been completely flawed there's been zero transparency there's been fuck-rein shenanigans from Amazon and um if they win it's because you know there's this power imbalance and that's deeply frustrating again this is kind of a developing story I'm reading you the details that just were released but if this union were to succeed it would be a game-changer it could catalyze some sort of dominant effect where other Amazon warehouses across the country unionize and other companies perhaps unionize but this is why Amazon fought it tooth and nail they know this could open the floodgates and they don't want that to happen so it's you know a little bit disheartening we don't have all the votes yet they're being counted randomly but just off this preliminary results Amazon is looking poised to win and that's because they have done so much to manipulate this effort really disheartening you know there was a chance that labor could have at least a victory here when it comes to Amazon but doesn't appear that that's the case I hope that the situation changes but right now not looking too good in this effort in Bessemer, Alabama believe it or not there was a time when Howard Dean former presidential candidate turned DNC chair was actually fairly progressive but now he is cartoonishly evil and when he started to become evil is precisely when he became a lobbyist excuse me he's not technically a lobbyist because he doesn't actually have to register as a lobbyist somehow but what he does is very conspicuously similar to what lobbyists do so he's not necessarily technically lobbying for big pharma but he is advocating on behalf of big pharma and he's using his influence that he has within the Democratic party to pressure Joe Biden to do something that isn't just stupid but it's downright evil he's trying to get Joe Biden to oppose releasing the intellectual property rights of the COVID-19 vaccines so that way other countries can manufacture generic versions of the vaccines it's really the only chance that we have at vaccinating the entire human population before mutations and variations pop up so this isn't just one of those things where okay well you know what I don't have to care about other developing countries and whether or not their people are vaccinated because I have my vaccine that's not the way that this works because so long as the virus continues to spread that increases the likelihood that new variants could pop up that are resistant to the vaccine and again I've said this once I'll say it again if that happens we are all screwed it's back to square one and Howard Dean here is trying to influence Joe Biden to make that more likely so as Lee Fong of the Intercept reports Howard Dean the former progressive champion is calling on President Joe Biden to reject a special intellectual property waiver that would allow low cost generic coronavirus vaccines to be produced to meet the needs of low income countries currently a small number of companies hold the formulas for the COVID-19 vaccines limiting distribution to many parts of the world IP protections aren't the cause of vaccination delays Dean claimed in a column for Barron's last month every drug manufacturing facility on the planet that's capable of churning out COVID-19 shots is already doing so creating a new medicine is a costly proposition wrote Dean companies would never invest hundreds of millions in research and development if rivals could simply copy their drug formulas and create knockoffs deans claim that global vaccine manufacturing is already at capacity is patently false foreign firms have lined up to offer pharmaceutical plants to produce vaccines but have been forced to enter into lengthy negotiations under terms set by the intellectual property owners the waiver however would allow generic drug producers to begin copying the vaccine without delay many of the manufacturing plants prepared to mass produce low-cost vaccines are centered in India which has committed to supplying the poorest countries in the world but the waiver petition Dean wrote is unreasonable and disingenuous it's a ruse to benefit India's own industry at the expense of patients everywhere president Biden would be wise to reject it the strident opposition to the waiver which is supported by an international coalition of human rights organizations as well as a growing cohort of congressional democrats may surprise deans liberal supporters but while dean boasts a long history of support for single-payer health insurance coverage and government intervention into lowering domestic drug prices he has reversed his positions on virtually every major progressive health policy issue since moving to work in the world of corporate influence peddling dean is not a registered lobbyist though he works in the lobbying division of dentins a law and lobbying firm and his rhetoric in the column follows the firm's recent pattern of advocacy dentins touts its work on drug intellectual property issues noting on its website that it has represented Pfizer and other firms in the recent past despite publicly funded research and huge infusions of government cash for the development and delivery of vaccines drug makers have carefully guarded their monopoly on the intellectual property rights and signal to investors that they plan to soon hike prices the pharmaceutical industry including representatives of Pfizer, Moderna Johnson and Johnson have pushed the Biden administration to oppose the intellectual property waiver petition and go further to even impose sanctions on any country that moves to manufacture vaccines without their express permission so the reason why Howard Dean wants to deny developing countries the ability to very cheaply reproduce this the covid vaccines is because the clients that he represents it wouldn't be able to profit off of it and in his defense of his position he kind of inadvertently reveals why the motives here are so grotesque why capitalism is incompatible with human health or the flourishing of human health I should say so this is what he says here creating new medicine is a costly proposition companies would never invest if rivals could simply copy their drug formulas and create knockoffs isn't that the problem though Howard isn't that the issue do you see what anti capitalists have been saying now can you at least maybe try to sympathize with our position it shouldn't be about making money when it comes to public health medicine these things should not be commodified industries the covid vaccine should not be a commodified thing that's the issue making money off of public health when you introduce that profit motive that creates a perverse incentive to not actually want to make people well and prevent them from getting covid 19 but to profit off of it these companies didn't manufacture these vaccines out of the goodness of their hearts they saw an opportunity to make money and see we our tax dollars funded the development of these vaccines so obviously we should have a say it's just honestly the way that he defends this he claims that the arguments in favor of the waiver are disingenuous you're disingenuous and your disingenuity and your influence the level of influence that he has in the democratic party as a high ranking former official the implications are broad if he gets what he wants then how much longer will developing countries have to wait will you admit that you're wrong if we don't vaccinate people quick enough and that leads to the spread of new mutations that are resistant to the vaccines that exist will you ever admit that you're wrong will you ever admit that it was about the profit motive and not actually about public health of course you won't because Howard Dean is quite literally a corporate chill literally a chill but don't call him a lobbyist because that's a slur to him if you call him a lobbyist that's super offensive he's not lobbying he only works in the lobbying division of a company that represents Pfizer definitely not a lobbyist though don't call him that Howard Dean is absolute garbage he's a terrible human being this is bond villain level shit and I don't honestly even know how he sleeps at night I don't know how he justifies what he's doing here if I knew that I was doing something and influencing the president of the United States to not do something that is objectively good for the human species I don't know how I could live with myself I'd be so distraught I'd resign I'd quit I don't care how much money I was making to do something this disgusting morally reprehensible I just couldn't live with myself I couldn't lick myself in the mirror so I don't know how Howard Dean looks himself in the mirror I don't know how he's able to sleep at night but regardless if he can live with himself I don't care what he's doing is absolutely disgusting it's grotesque and in the event a new variant that's resistant to the vaccines emerges because not enough human beings in developing countries are vaccinated quick enough it's people like Howard Dean who we should thank the backlash to Georgia's voter suppression law has been swift and severe and even large multinational corporations are speaking out against the law not necessarily out of the goodness of their hearts but because public pressure part marketing there's a number of reasons but either way corporate America is getting involved and a lot of capitalists are finding out the hard way that their preferred economic system does have some pitfalls now if you are a socialist you know that democracy and capitalism are incompatible because capitalism is like a virus it seeps into every single corner of society and attempts to commodify every single aspect of human life eventually it grows and grows and spreads and it gets so big that it takes down the political system within which it exists it even makes democracy and elections this commodified money making venture and we're to the point now where you can't be electorally successful unless you can raise lots and lots of money you don't even have a say over policy outcomes unless you are an elite with a lot of money and capital and you know people who helped create this late stage capitalist dystopia that we live in like Mitch McConnell who literally signed legal briefs supporting Citizens United to increase the amount of corporate influence in our politics all of a sudden doesn't like that corporations are getting involved in politics and he decided to send a very strong message to them and he told them to stay out of politics although that lasted about a day because he immediately had to backtrack saying I didn't actually say that very artfully yesterday they're certainly entitled to be involved in politics they are my principal complaint is they didn't read the damn bill in other words somebody got a stern talking to by their corporate overlords and they told him you better change your opinion real quick otherwise if you want us to give you money in 2022 then uh we're not going to be there the gravy train is going to dry up so either come correct or find yourself some different corporate donors I'm loving all of this now there are two additional capitalists that I've got a spotlight because they're also very outraged at the fact that the system that they support or purport to support is operating exactly as it is intended to alright on top of the MLB moving out of the all-star game out of Atlanta dozens of Craven CEOs have jumped onto the left's trash Georgia bandwagon to me it's shameful but what if it became the new normal we just accepted JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon wants corporate America to get more involved in politics writing this today companies like ours have an extraordinary capability to help to not just with funding but with developing strong public policy oh really JPMorgan is going to run the country which could have a greater impact on society here to react is Dan Crenshaw Dan stand down as congressman from Texas Jamie Dimon is going to start making decisions isn't that a relief yeah look you know he should run for congress if he really wants to be in politics and that's my message to all these CEOs and I don't think what they I don't think they understand how damaging their entry into politics is for far too long already Americans are forced to you know watch a different late-night comedy show every time they watch a movie they have to deal with the fact that the actor they might be watching doesn't like them thinks that their ideas are stupid and now we have to look at products or banks or our airlines and think to ourselves well yeah I want to buy this product or purchase this ticket but these people hate me or they don't think my ideas are good or they lie about my ideas they lie about what we want to do for election integrity this is damaging our culture it's damaging our social fabric they're doing far more damage than they realize yeah we call that the free market bitch you are the ones capitalists are the ones who claim that the free market is this sort of sentient being that should be unaccountable and unregulated answer to no one whatsoever not even the government but now all of a sudden you're worried about the power that these corporations have over our government Brian Kilmeade asks is JP Morgan going to run the country Crenshaw then chimes in saying you should run for congress if he really wants to be in politics I don't think they understand how damaging their entry into politics is no no no I don't think you understand how damaging their entry into politics is because if you actually understood how damaging it was you would be supporting legislation that would get money out of politics rein in the power that large multinational corporations have and I love how they're only finding out about the amount of influence corporations have now when it comes to policy outcomes normal Americans have a statistically insignificant impact on what lawmakers produce however if you are an elite a business interest you actually have all the say in our political system so this isn't a new thing you just don't like that these corporations aren't doing what you want them to do because they know it is not socially acceptable to support voter suppression but when they do actually take a political stand on an issue it's a business decision they're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart they're condemning the voting law in Georgia because they're worried that there could be organized boycotts against them if they don't speak out against something that is very clearly an attempt to suppress the votes disproportionately of black voters in Georgia now Dan Crenshaw really if he's concerned about money and politics he should ask himself as a capitalist why do these large corporations have so much influence on our country in the first place on our government in the first place they fund politicians that in turn do the bidding of the corporations that help them get elected Dan Crenshaw is also guilty here so if you truly want to complain about corporate power in America you're meaningless as a lawmaker if you're not actually taking action now there's one more clip that I want to show you here so he very clearly is just going to complain about corporate power in politics not going to actually take meaningful steps to curtail the influence that they have but he's also going to say that this is really a specific kind of politics that we're seeing he's going to misrepresent a word that he obviously doesn't understand but I'll tell you what he's saying here is a little bit ironic and hypocritical United Airlines wants to get a little bit more woke they want to go out and say that 50% of their new hires from here on in are going to be women or people of color United Airlines is officially stating this they're planning to train 5,000 new pilots and a new pilot training program by 2030 of which at least half will be women and people of color what do you think about this idea I think just about every passenger that gets on a plane thinks to themselves I hope the pilot is qualified and can take off and land the plane safely look if they want a virtue signal that's fine what really pissed me off about United was the way they lied about the election integrity reforms that we're trying to make in places like Georgia and in Texas they lied about it they insinuated that these were voter suppression laws and of course that's not true clearly they didn't read it and again they're venturing into territory that they don't understand that they know nothing about and in an attempt to what this is what I call the phenomenon that's going on it's progressive fascism because what is fascism well it's the it's the regimentation of the economy of society and it's the forced suppression of your opposition that's what's happening right now the Democrats have successfully captivated the institutions you know pop culture Hollywood our education institutions and now our corporations into their own woke agenda this is fascism right and they use cancel culture as a tool to impose their fascism on us and so they're always using this anti this anti fascist labeling against the right but they're the ones who actually engage in the tactics and it's time we expose that that's really what's happening here and we should see it for what it is look if they if they want to if they want to hire based on quotas and virtue signal to us and imply that people didn't have these opportunities to begin with fine but don't lie about other policy okay that's what I really have a problem with how are conservatives being forcibly suppressed because the MLB is choosing to move to a different state how is that suppressing opposition and he says this is progressive fascism as if these corporations are progressive Dan Crenshaw is either dumb or disingenuous but what he said there is extremely stupid and you know I've got to ask Dan Crenshaw this because if we actually accept his argument if we assume that what he's saying here is true then he needs to admit he's a fascist because in response to conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson pointing out on Twitter that Dan Crenshaw suggested that criticism of Israel should not be protected under the First Amendment Dan Crenshaw responded by saying the question wasn't about criticism but the BDS movement i.e. economic warfare against Israel the US government can choose not to do business with BDS supporters so hang on a second according to Dan Crenshaw when the government chooses who it does business with based on the political ideology of the business in question that's perfectly justifiable and reasonable but when a private corporation chooses where it does business based explicitly on the policies of said state that's fascism ok we'll admit that you're a fascist admit you're a fascist you're advocating by your definition of fascism for fascism by saying that the US government can choose to not do business with supporters of BDS and understand that this is a capitalist who's making this case shouldn't you be the one who argues that private corporations can do whatever they want they could take their business wherever to whatever state that's the free market but you're claiming that this is forcible suppression of conservatives and you even go so far as to argue about how terrible it is in that first clip that you know you have to you have to watch these movies and you just know that these liberals in these films acting they think that your ideas are stupid how terrible this is definitely tantamount to forcible suppression and I love how he's just outraged that delta is misrepresenting the bill how could they call this a voter suppression bill I don't know did you read the bill Dan did you actually read the bill I don't know criminalizing giving food and water to people standing in line I'd call that voter suppression because we want to encourage them to stand line to vote do we not removing the amount of drop boxes that exist leading to longer lines I mean if lines are longer I'd call that voter suppression right I mean he knows what he's doing he's claiming that they're lying delta's lying but this is nothing more than projection and again delta doesn't give a flying fuck about voter suppression or black voters in Georgia they don't care they just want to make sure that they don't face backlash if they don't speak out and it's not that in a democracy the only way that citizens have a chance at having any say or influence over policies is if they can somehow pressure corporations to denounce what their lawmakers do if you actually if lawmakers like you Dan Crenshaw actually listen to the people perhaps they wouldn't be tweeting at Coca-Cola to take action in Georgia if you all just listened and did what the American people wanted and not what your corporate donors want I mean they wouldn't have to say but we have no say 60 to 70% of Americans depending on the polls support Medicare for all but yet because corporate shows like Dan Crenshaw take money from the private insurance industry well we don't get it we want to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour corporate America says no we don't get it so I guess what I want here is just consistency from conservatives you're just whining about corporations denouncing your party's racist policies but be consistent this is the free market you're not proposing anything to curtail the power of these corporations on our democracy so I can't help but think that maybe you should probably shut the fuck up here because if you're not proposing a solution if you're just whining then I don't know what to tell you you're a lawmaker if you don't like corporate power do something to rein them in but then that go against your capitalist economic philosophy so you're kind of backed into a corner here well folks that's all that I have for you today thank you so much for tuning in if you made it this far in the program as usual I don't think everyone that makes this show possible all of our patreon paypal and youtube members helping us not just to survive but they're as well you all are absolutely just so awesome and I also want to send a special shout out to all of our newest subscribers over at twitch.tv slash humanistreport in the first day after I streamed when I became an affiliate we got 18 tier one subs how cool is that I'm still learning how twitch works but I'm I'm just thoroughly enjoying the platform and the little community that we've built over there and I hope that you'll join it as well so anyways that's all that I've got for you today I will see you all next week my name is Mike Figueredo this has been the humanistreport take care everyone