 This is the Humanist Report with Mike Figueredo. The Humanist Report podcast is funded by viewers like you through Patreon and PayPal. To support the show, visit patreon.com forward slash humanistreport or become a member at humanistreport.com. Now enjoy the show. Welcome to the Humanist Report podcast. My name is Mike Figueredo and this is episode 279 of the program. Today is Friday, February 26th and before we get started, I wanna take some time to thank all of our latest sponsors of the program. And of course, I'm referring to our Patreon, PayPal and YouTube members, all of which either signed up for the very first time to support us this week or increase the monthly pledge that they were already giving us. And that includes Adele Arland, Ava Darkness, Claude Ellis, David Dell, Humanist Badger, Jason Deck, Liz's Creations, Null Unit, Patrick Nemeck, Shannon J Brooks and Sleeper Johns. So thank you so much to all of these kind souls. If you'd also like to support the independent progressive media revolution and support the show, you can do so by going to humanistreport.com slash support, patreon.com slash humanistreport or by clicking join underneath any one of our YouTube videos. This week on the program, we'll discuss Joe Biden's betrayal on a key immigration promise as well as his unwillingness to fight when it comes to the $15 an hour minimum wage. Additionally, we'll discuss how his nomination of near attendant may be in jeopardy. Also Newsmax TV decided to attack Joe Biden's dog. Yeah. Also, Fox News freaked out about insignificant news related to the Muppets. I wish I were kidding. And Ben Shapiro was triggered by a cartoon network PSA where they teach children to not be racist. Also, Megan McCain goes on a bizarre rant about Dr. Fauci and the COVID vaccine. And finally, we will close the week by talking to 2022 congressional candidate Isaiah James about his rematch with Congresswoman Yvette Clark in New York's ninth congressional district. So that's what we've got on the agenda for you. Let's waste no time and get right to it. I hope you all enjoy the program. So prior to Joe Biden's inauguration, he was talking a big game when it comes to immigration. Not only did he promise comprehensive and sweeping immigration reform, he also promised to stop all deportations for the first 100 days of his administration. Now fast forward to him being in power and things are already starting to change. It's been what, like a little over a month of him being president and he's already backtracking on his promises. So it started almost immediately when he signed an executive order to do what he promised to do, stop all deportations. The problem is that a judge blocked that order to stop deportations because of something that Trump's administration put in place at the last minute. They basically said that any changes that you make, you have to notify the state. So Texas actually sounded the alarm and they got this stopped, right? So any and all deportations that were scheduled to go into effect before Biden came into power, they went on as planned. The issue is that Biden legally can still just stop, stop those deportations by rescheduling them, scheduling them for months later so that way in the event you are successful in this legal war, well, those deportations will stop. He didn't do that. Immigration activists called on him to take action and he didn't take action. As a result, hundreds of people were deported and now he has just done a complete 180 and I don't know how else to describe this other than saying this is a gigantic brazen betrayal contrary to what people want you to believe. People in media who are trying to do Appalachia for Joe Biden here. So as Colin Kahnbacher of Long Crime explains, breaking President Biden just issued new ICE guidance, wholly abandoning his pledge to halt deportations. ACLU says this is a disappointing step backward from the Biden administration's earlier commitments to fully break from the harmful deportation policies of Trump and Obama. The seven page guidance can generally be characterized as a return to form these immigration enforcement under the Obama administration. Some of the new provisions are likely to be of extreme concern to immigrants, immigrant communities and immigrant rights activists and advocates. Most headlines about this have not taken stock of the full nature of this interim guidance. Mainstream media largely appears to be taking ICE at their word that the new enforcement priorities, really just the old enforcement priorities are targeted toward criminals, but that's not true. As the removal priority sections above which work in tandem show new undocumented immigrants are subject to immediate deportation. That's a huge departure from what Biden promised and has nothing to do with public safety or criminal law. Being undocumented is a civil offense. Now Colin lays all of this out more comprehensively in an article for Long Crime, but I think that the tweets are sufficient because they concisely explain the situation, but I do wanna read the statement that the ACLU put out in response to this news because I think that they really, they put it best. They write, the memo is a disappointing step backward from the Biden administration's earlier commitments to fully break from the harmful deportation policies of both the Trump and Obama presidencies. While the Biden administration rightly acknowledges that immigrants are our family members, our coworkers and our neighbors, for now it has chosen to continue giving ICE officers significant discretion to conduct operations that harm our communities and tear families apart. The interim enforcement priorities detailed today import the injustices of the criminal legal system and will lead to continued disproportionate deportations of black and brown immigrants. The priorities use sweeping and overboard presumptions of threat that have for decades resulted in biased profiling and harmful immigration consequences for black and brown people, including Muslims. The priorities presume that all recent border crossers are threats in total contravention of President Biden's commitment to ensuring that people seeking asylum are treated with dignity. We expected better from the Biden administration and believe that the next 90 days will continue to reaffirm the need to force ICE to downscale its operations, including by ending ICE programs that tap state and local law enforcement for immigration enforcement, such as the 287G program and the use of ICE detainers. And we will demand accountability for the unjust arrests and deportations that ICE officers and their local partners will inflict on immigrant communities until DHS further reforms. At a time when black immigrants are being deported, including to the lethal situation in Haiti, the Biden administration must not hesitate to put real limits on ICE as it works to undo the chaos and cruelty of both the Trump and Obama administrations. The Biden administration must fully break from the racist and unfair policies of the past. So this is something that is deeply disturbing, but it's not surprising. I didn't necessarily expect a change in the status quo when Biden, all throughout his 2020 campaign, didn't really seem to care much about immigrants. Like when he was confronted by an immigration activist about the Obama era policies, do you remember what he told that person? He said, you should vote for Trump. That's what he said to an immigrant activist who confronted him about his policies. So I'm not surprised that he's not doing anything different. Like I was pleasantly surprised to see that he did sign that executive order to halt deportations, but when further action was needed, I mean, of course, the old Biden that we all know and hate was back. He chose to not take action. And so this is why we have to get a lot more radical in the way that we talk about immigration and it should be non-negotiable that ICE be abolished. This is a rogue agency and Biden at this point is not even doing the bare minimum to try to rein them in. He is absolutely culpable here. And by issuing this new guidance, this is a direct betrayal. You can't call it anything but that. This is a betrayal. And by calling ICE a rogue agency, I don't wanna make it seem as if like Biden is a good faith actor here. He's not. He has the power as the president of the United States to stop all deportations during a pandemic. And you might not be able to permanently stop them, but at a minimum, reschedule them. So that way, we can sort things out. Do immigration reform perhaps? But he's not doing that. And this is a really, really quick betrayal. This is the second betrayal that we've already seen with him being in power for less than a month. He lied about the $2,000 survival checks and then he said, okay, it's gonna be $1,400 survival checks. And we were supposed to get this immediately and now we're looking at March to get these checks. And now after promising to halt deportations to change the status quo, to right the wrongs of the Obama and Trump eras, now we're seeing the same deportation policies that are harmful put into practice by Biden. It is deeply disgusting, albeit, exactly what we should have expected from Biden. He doesn't deserve a honeymoon. He never did. And this is why people like me were saying, immediately when he is sworn in, you hold his feet to the fire because it's not like there's any confusion about who Joe Biden is. He has a lengthy decades plus long record and he has governed as a conservative. So don't give him the benefit of the doubt. Immediately apply pressure to him because if we don't keep constant pressure on Joe Biden, he is going to do a lot of damage. And we're already seeing this. The media was never going to hold him accountable, but grassroots activists, they can hold him accountable. And so if we don't make a stink about this, then he's not going to feel any pressure to do the right thing. So I hope that members of the squad and Bernie Sanders and progressives in positions of power, progressive organizations actually sound the alarm about this because this is downright morally reprehensible. So even in the rare instance where I agree with Joe Biden on the policy substance, he still manages to be a disappointment because if he takes a position that I agree with, then the next question is, will he be willing to fight for said policy? And the answer is, hmm, hopefully, but usually no. And we've seen this time and again with Joe Biden. I mean, back in 2009 during healthcare reform negotiations, they publicly supported a public option, but then didn't even put it on the table. I mean, to walk away from a policy that wasn't even sufficient to begin with. I mean, of course, you're going to lose if you play that game because you're not playing politics in a savvy way. And we're seeing this again with the minimum wage. So he wants to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Now in 2021, that's not necessarily sufficient, but still, if he does this, that will raise the wages of millions of American workers. And I'll take what I can get right now. The problem, however, is if this isn't done using budget reconciliation, since Democrats have a razor thin majority in the Senate, it's not gonna happen. So you have to make sure that you put this as part of the package deal. So what he's trying to do or what he was trying to do is include this in the $1.9 trillion COVID relief package. However, you have some individuals in the Democratic Party, such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, saying, I don't want to support this if it includes a $15 an hour minimum wage. Now, rather than fighting people in your own party using your bully pulpit to pressure them, he's choosing to back down. He's already signaling to people behind closed doors that this is probably going to be a defeat for him. So as Politico reports, when Joe Biden met with a group of mayors and governors last week, he bluntly told them to get ready for a legislative defeat. His proposed minimum wage hike was unlikely to happen, he said, at least in the near term. I really want this in there, but it just doesn't look like we can do it because of reconciliation. Biden told the group, according to a person in the room, I'm not going to give up, but right now we have to prepare for this, not making it. The comments, which were confirmed by two other people familiar with the conversation were the furthest Biden has gone in conceding the coming axing of the $15 an hour minimum wage provision from his first major legislative package. And they suggest that the president is more inclined to not manage the fallout of it not being included than to pursue long shot, political capital consuming efforts to fight for its insertion. Sitting in the Oval Office with Republican and Democratic elected officials last Friday to advocate for his $1.9 trillion COVID relief package, he didn't hide his skepticism. Doesn't look like we can do it, he said of the minimum wage hike. For weeks now, the White House has been trying to manage expectations on the feasibility of advancing a $15 an hour minimum wage provision through a broader rescue package. Biden first suggested it might not make it into the final COVID relief bill in an interview with CBS prior to the Super Bowl, noting his belief that the Senate parliamentarian would determine if it did not jibe with budgetary rules that allow a bill to pass with just 51 votes in the Senate. His comments drew pushback from fellow Democrats who have argued that raising the minimum wage isn't just necessary for an economically battered country but as sound politics as well. They have urged the White House to find avenues for making it reconciliation compliant to push party members skeptical of a major minimum wage hike to get on board and to consider the procedural nuclear option of having the party with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie breaking vote overrule the parliamentarian. So of course, this is a really bad time. And look, to put it bluntly, if it's not in the COVID relief package, if it's not attached to something else, it's not gonna pass. Because if you are going to put it in this predicament where it needs 60 votes to pass, you're not gonna get it. You could barely get 51 votes for it to pass. So if you don't pass it with something else as part of a broader package, then it's not gonna pass, simple as that. And I get that, you know, he is getting cold feet because the longer that he keeps it in, well, the longer he's holding up COVID relief. But this is kind of his own doing. Like you could have passed a standalone survival check of $2,000, which you promised if people in Georgia voted for Rafael Warnock and John Asif. You didn't do that. So you're including that with a COVID relief package, which is okay, I guess, but now it's taking a long time to pass and you could have just gotten survival checks and then you pass the broader economic relief package and then you put the minimum wage provision in that. So that way it doesn't seem like you're dragging your feet with the survival checks and you actually push the minimum wage increase through. But if you don't get this through, using reconciliation, it's not gonna happen. So either you make it happen or you crack some skulls. You're the president of the United States. You are the most powerful government official in the country. Why is it that you, of all people Joe Biden, are walking on eggshells for someone like Joe Manchin or Kirsten Sinema? Make them, make them support your agenda. I just, I don't get why this is so hard. Joe Biden lacks the spy needed to get anything done, which is why, you know, I can't not anticipate a bloodbath in 2022 because if you don't at least deliver a little bit of material benefits to the American people, you're going to get wiped the fuck out because the coalition that you put together that got you in the White House will not return if they don't feel as if there's a benefit to you being in power. So this is just, it's bad politics. And another part of the issue, not to like cleanse Joe Biden's hands of all of this, but the media also isn't helping the media rather than actually like trying to educate the masses and inform people about the necessity of giving people a wage increase during the pandemic. The way that they're framing this entire debate is as if, you know, if Joe Biden is successful at passing the minimum wage using reconciliation, is that actually a bad thing? Like look at the way that Casey Hunt of MSNBC framed this question to Congressman Ro Khanna. Congressman Khanna, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for starting your day off so early with us. Let's start there with what we just heard from now president Biden about this package. He of course ran on the idea of unity trying to get bipartisan support. They're now essentially saying that's not necessarily what unity means and that this is very popular broadly with the country. What do you think you're actually gonna be able to get done in this bill? Do you think the minimum wage provision is gonna stay in it? And do you think that handling it this way with reconciliation right out of the gate potentially is gonna make it harder to work with Republicans on other issues in the future? Casey, I'm pleased that president Biden has been so strong on delivering for relief for working class and middle class Americans, on delivering, on tackling the pandemic. That is what he campaigned on. He said he was going to do this with the recovery. He said we were gonna get monthly checks. He said we were gonna tackle child poverty. He said that we were gonna give Americans a raise. And so I appreciate his approach. I do think reconciliation is the right way to do it. The house minimum is gonna pass the $15 minimum wage. And I hope that it will pass in the Senate as well. This was explicitly what president Biden ran on. I mean, this is why we are in the predicament that we are in. The concern shouldn't be whether or not using budget reconciliation to raise the minimum wage will be divisive and turn Republicans off to wanting to work with Biden's administration. The concern should be why is it that in the richest country in the world, we have to use budget reconciliation to assure that the minimum wage is going to be increased? Like why is it this difficult? Why are people in the United States government who make almost $200,000 a year refusing to give the peasants a raise of just a couple of dollars? Like this is why the situation in the country is so fucked up. We have a Democratic Party who is unwilling to fight and they cave immediately when they start to fight. And second of all, we have a media that doesn't actually care about educating the masses. They care more about like the partisan angle of it. Not about, hey, isn't it kind of fucked up that Democrats have to use budget reconciliation to pass this crucial policy? But well, maybe that's a little bit mean and maybe they should try to bring more Republicans in. Like it's so frustrating to see this. Look, I'll put it very bluntly. Pass this or you're gonna lose your reelection campaign and Democrats will lose in 2022. The minimum wage increase is a key promise. And if Democrats do not deliver here, you are going to assure your defeat in 2022 and 2024. So get it together, find a spine and fucking fight. Don't give up, fight Joe Biden. So this story has me really feeling confused and I don't know how to process it, but overall I'm glad. So Joe Manchin for once in his life has done something that I don't entirely disagree with. He has chosen to come out against the confirmation of near-attending as director of the OMB. Now it is for the wrong reasons. He thinks that she's too mean to Republicans, a little bit too divisive. And sure, her tweets are absolutely without question divisive. She goes after everyone, the left. She's blocked me on Twitter. And she also goes against or goes after Republicans. I don't care that she goes after Republicans. Really near-attending is the embodiment of every single thing that is wrong with Washington DC. She's too close with special interests. As president of CAP, she took millions and millions of dollars from big tech companies, large multinational corporations. She literally advocated to steal Libya's oil, which is a war crime by the way. She wanted cuts to social security. She physically assaulted someone, a journalist. And on top of that, she outed a sexual harassment victim who was working at CAP. There's a plethora of reasons why she shouldn't be confirmed. Her being too mean to Republicans, that's the least of my concerns, albeit the fact that Joe Manchin is on the right side here. Great. I wish that it were progressives in the Senate who were actually standing up to near-attending. You know, maybe Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, even Elizabeth Warren. But nonetheless, we got Joe Manchin. So a broken clock is right twice a day. So we learned last week that Joe Manchin would not be supporting near-attending's confirmation. And at that time, the question was, now, since this basically throws her confirmation into jeopardy, since Joe Biden would need at least one Republican, which is really unlikely, is he going to withdraw the nomination? And at that time, he said, no, as of the 19th anyways. I think we're gonna find the vote to get her confirmed. So you're not gonna pull her nomination? No. Okay. So at the time, I understand that makes sense because this is only a minor setback. You just need one Republican to cross the aisle. And perhaps Mitt Romney or Susan Collins would do just that. Except now, the Republicans who, in theory, were the most likely to cross the aisle and support near-attending's confirmation have come out and said, no, we are not going to support near-attending's confirmation. So as Brett Samuels and Morgan Shalfon of The Hill Report sent a confirmation of near-attending to lead the Office of Management and Budget appeared increasingly improbable on Monday after three key Republicans said they would oppose her. GOP Senator Susan Collins, Mitt Romney and Rob Portman joined Senator Joe Manchin in opposing Tandon, seemingly leaving her at least one vote short for a confirmation. If Tandon falls, it would be the first time a Biden cabinet nominee was blocked from confirmation. Given the Manchin defection, President Biden would need one Republican in the narrowly Democratic-controlled Senate to vote in favor of Tandon's confirmation. But on Monday, three of the most likely possible choices said they would not back her, citing inflammatory tweets. While the White House has publicly backed Tandon, officials are already considering backup plans. So as of the 19th, he was saying I have no plans to withdraw my nomination, but now we're getting reports that they see that the writing is on the wall and her confirmation is now in jeopardy. To that I say, good job, Joe Manchin and Mitt Romney. It feels almost sinful to have those words leave my lips. Nonetheless, if you do something that ultimately is better for America that the left wants, I don't care who you are. I care about results, not who gets me those results. So if Joe Manchin is gonna end up by accident on the right side of this issue, along with Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, that's fantastic. Now, I still have to say, even though I'm happy and I wanna celebrate the fact that it looks like near Tandon is going to go down, although we don't necessarily know for sure yet, I'm not gonna lie, my soul is a little bit crushed because this should have been something that every semi-leftist in the country was in agreement on, that near Tandon obviously is not someone who is qualified for any position. She should not be confirmed for any government position for all of the reasons that I listed and that's not even like all of them. There's many reasons as to why near Tandon is not qualified, is terrible. And will I be satisfied with the individual who Biden names to replace her? Almost certainly no. But what we do know about near Tandon is more than enough to deduce that she is not someone who's going to be looking out for the people, but yet, leftists can't get it through their heads that this is not your friend. Bernie Sanders should have immediately stated his opposition to near Tandon, but yet, as CNN's Manu Raju reports, he won't actually say whether or not he'll confirm her, but he is supposedly speaking with her by now, I'm sure that that meeting already took place, but this shouldn't be like a question, like we shouldn't be wondering, will Bernie Sanders be against near Tandon? It should just go without saying. I mean, he's the individual who I think brilliantly and eloquently laid out all of the conflicts of interest that are there. Why would you confirm someone who is so entrenched in corporate America? I mean, this is the corruption that the left is supposed to be against, so why is this so difficult? Why are there so many people on the left who are afraid to go against Joe Biden and near Tandon? Like, these are corporate Democrats. Corporate Democrats are bad, and when we find the worst of the worst, who are auditioning for a position just because they wanna advance their own careers and don't actually care about the people in this country, then we fight them. Now, even the executive director at Justice Democrats on CNN advocated for the confirmation of near Tandon and attacked Joe Manchin when he's right for the first time, perhaps in his entire life. Yeah, and I mean, there's public record of those tweets, but the reality is I think that Joe Manchin is the one being divisive right now. We are in the middle of a public pandemic. Joe Biden was just elected by a huge mandate by the American people. We have to deliver as Democrats, and we need people in positions of power who are ready and prepared to go big in this moment and not leave anyone behind. The mentality has got to be the Democratic Party especially, but any elected official that we have to move quickly to save as many lives as possible. And I would also point out that he had no problem voting to confirm other appointments of clearly partisan members when it was the previous Republican administration. There should be no, I think opposition to some folks that are being proposed by the Biden administration who have clearly are ready to do the work and are ready to get the job done and they feel are the best prepared to do it. What was that? I'm sorry, but Nira Tandon is not someone who is quote ready and prepared to go big in this moment and not leave anybody behind. You do know who Nira Tandon is. I'm almost hoping that the executive director of Justice Democrats, one of the most prominent left-wing organizations is just woefully misinformed because if that's actually like your beliefs about Nira Tandon, one of the most corrupt elites in DC, then we have to like reevaluate our positions. We have to reevaluate what we're doing. I mean, really? And I hate, it is driving me nuts, how people justify their bad political beliefs by saying, oh, well, we have to do X because this is a pandemic and the situation is really serious right now. No, you're just using that as an excuse to give someone who's very unqualified for that position a pass. And on Twitter, Cenk Nira tweeted out, I'm not a fan of Nira Tandon. In fact, she did some of her mean tweets about me, but unlike Republicans, I don't think we should cancel her because she once hurt someone's feelings. The hypocrisy of GOP crying over cancel culture and then trying to cancel her over her tweets is amazing except this isn't about mean tweets. This is about the substance, like the mean tweets and the divisiveness that is one of many reasons why she shouldn't be confirmed. Mean tweets, like, sure, you could say she's divisive, she attacks the left and she's too much of an instigator, but still it's the corruption that we care about. Cenk has been one of the loudest advocates to get money out of politics. So why would you be in favor of someone like Nira Tandon? Now he does make the case later on that, well, if it's not Nira Tandon, then it's gonna be someone way worse because Joe Biden is terrible. But that's not an excuse. Like we shouldn't just say, oh, well, you know what? This person is terrible, but odds are, there's gonna be someone even worse for that position. I mean, we have to fight, that's all part of the process. Like none of this is easy. It's always going to be difficult. That doesn't mean that we roll over and die. And I hate this because people on the left are becoming just accepting of whatever Joe Biden wants to do because sure, he is better than Donald Trump. He's done a number of good things. He's handling the pandemic competently. But when it comes to actually making a difference in people's lives, you're not going to make a difference. We're not going to see an impact if he keeps nominating corrupt ghouls who just get into positions of power and further enrich themselves. Do we honestly believe that Nira Tandon, who has accepted millions of dollars from big tech companies and large multinational corporations is actually going to do anything to improve the lives of the American people? Sure, if she fails, which that seems likely, Biden's new nominee could very well be someone equally as if not more conservative than Nira Tandon. But the thing is that Nira Tandon, like anything that she says that is ostensibly progressive, that's all facade. She ran the center for American progress. So her entire political theater revolves around her convincing people that she's a progressive, but in actuality, she's not. You have to look at the evidence. When there was momentum for Medicare for All, what was she advocating for? A means-tested private insurance-based alternative, the thwart momentum for Medicare for All. Someone who's okay with Americans dying because they don't have health insurance, that's no progressive, that's no progressive. Someone who literally advocated stealing the oil from a sovereign nation, committing a war crime, that's no progressive. And so what I just wanna see is fight, like I wanna see the left actually fight. I wanna see Bernie Sanders unequivocally condemn Nira Tandon. And without question, say no. I'm gonna be working with the OMB director. I want someone who I can trust. We cannot trust Nira Tandon. Her record over the years has been nothing but destructive and divisive. So no, try again, Joe Biden, do better. I mean, if we never use our leverage, if we never actually push back against the Democratic Party establishment in a meaningful way, when we actually have leverage, when Nira Tandon needs every single vote, then we're never gonna be effective. People are going to lose faith in progressives and we can't have that happen. There's a number of progressives or leftists online who are already just like disregarding Nina Turner, who hasn't even been elected yet. Like they're already saying, well, she's just gonna be as ineffectual as members of the squad. So I'm not even gonna try to get her elected, just let the corporate Democrat win. That may not be their words, but that's effectively their argument. So people like that don't give them ammunition, actually fight and prove that people in Congress are there for a reason to fight. So Bernie, get it together, fight. Elizabeth Warren, where are you at? Ed Marquis, Jeff Merkley, like what are we doing? People in organizations who are influential, Alexandra Rojas, Cenk Yuger, fight. Don't roll over, fight. That's what I wanna see. Continue to fight and agitate and push back against the Democratic Party establishment. Who is not our friends? They're not our allies. They are our enemies. And if we don't treat them as such, then we're going to be steamrolled again. And if we get steamrolled, that means that Republicans will be empowered because Democrats, they don't have the answers. The left does. So we have to behave that way and fight them when they do wrong and fight folks like near attendant. But thankfully, it seems as if she is going to go down. So that's really good news. But let's learn from this and actually stop letting bad people take advantage of us and further advance their own careers for narcissistic reasons. Let's actually push back for once. So I don't know how I missed this, but Newsmax actually thought it was a good idea to air a segment where they attack Joe Biden's dog. Literally, like they viciously attack and criticize the appearance of Joe Biden's dog. I wish I were kidding, but unfortunately this is a thing that happened and it is one of the most outrageous things I've ever seen from a supposed news outlet. Did you see the dog? Let's see, I want to show you something I noticed. Doesn't he look a little rough? I love dogs, but this dog needs a bath and a comb and all kinds of love and care. I've never seen a dog in the White House like this. I remember Buddy, I remember Millie, I remember lots of dogs, but not a dog who seems, I don't know. I don't know how much love and care he is getting. Let's bring in the historians. I'm having fun with this obviously, but I do want to talk about some stuff. Craig Shirley, Reagan biographer, presidential historian, Greg, welcome back in Doug Weed, presidential historian, former advisor to George H.W. Bush. That's the White House where I remember Millie. Millie had like a staff and they really took care of her, very beautiful dog. This dog looks like from, I'm sorry, from the junkyard. And I love that dog, but he looks like he's not been well cared for. No, not at all. Thank you for having us. No, he looks very dirty and disheveled and very unlike a presidential dog like Millie or Victory or something else in the past in the White House. Isn't it conservatives who say that the lefties are always looking for politics and everything and that everything is political to you? How can this not be you overly politicizing something? You're attacking a dog, an innocent dog, because it looks like a junkyard dog and it's dirty and disheveled and very unlike a presidential dog. Hey fuckface, the dog is 12 years old, 12 years old. That's like what, 84 in dog years? And you're criticizing a dog? Listen, I don't care if they criticized Joe Biden. I don't care if they criticized Joe Biden's wife or his children. Hell, even if they criticized his grandchildren, that would be like a little bit too far. But where you cross the line is when you criticize animals. That is so fucked up, so beyond the pale for me as a dog lover. And how dare you call yourself a dog lover? Go fuck yourself, you don't love dogs. You're criticizing a fucking dog that is so innocent. He's a good boy, he just wants scratches on his head. And you're gonna say that he's a junkyard dog? Don't you have anything better to talk about? Like they're assuming that it's fine, this is all fair game because if Donald Trump adopted a dog, then the left would criticize this dog. So we can criticize Joe Biden's dog. Except no, anyone who would criticize a dog that Donald Trump chose to adopt is a scumbag. It's a dog. Like, I don't get this. Like how shitty of a person do you have to be? Like take a look at this video that they released. This is the dog you're criticizing. I mean, how is that not relatable? Like you have the younger dog who's super hyper and energetic and the older dog is just so tired of it. Like this is the dog that you're criticizing. So I mean, this is just, this is what partisan brain fucking worms, I don't even know what to call this, looks like. Like when you hate Joe Biden so much that you're literally attacking his dog, like you can disagree with Joe Biden's policies. I have my disagreement with Joe Biden's policies, albeit for different reasons, but nonetheless, I have a lot of disagreements with Joe Biden. But why would your hatred of Joe Biden be so, so far reaching that it even applies to his dog who's completely innocent? Like get a life. Like what a fucking loser to attack a dog and say that his 12-year-old dog looks like a fucking junkyard dog because it's unpresidential. Go fuck yourself. What a loser. Presumably because they have nothing better to talk about. Fox News is harping away on the damage that cancel culture causes to America and they are choosing to prop up the Muppets as the latest victim of cancel culture. Not because the mob saw an old Muppets episode and vocalized outrage, but because Disney themselves releases a little disclaimer before older episodes of the Muppets. So as Quartz reports, Disney added all five seasons of the Muppet show to its streaming service Disney Plus on February 19th, the show which first aired in 1976 and featured characters like Kermit the Frog interacting with celebrity guests did on occasion include some content a modern audience might find questionable. In one episode, for example, Johnny Cash performed a song in front of a Confederate flag and so before select episodes, Disney inserted a brief disclaimer warning viewers of that content. It says this program includes negative depictions and or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact. Learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together. Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe. So that should be end of story, right? They released older episodes on Disney Plus. They acknowledged that some of this is questionable. I think that's a great way to put it. But of course that wasn't the end of the story because Fox News decided to talk about how this is the example that we need to prop up to prove how bad cancel culture is. It's almost as if the individuals who scream about the outrage mob are actually the outrage mob themselves. Curious. So media matters put together this little compilation, if you will, of Fox News freaking out about the Muppets and they juxtapose it with other news outlets, CNN and MSNBC covering real news. Dr. Fauci, 500,000 Americans, families grieving all across the country, did this have to be? Rim Milestone that the US looks like it's going to reach 500,000 deaths. We saw predictions of a death toll around 250,000. We thought it was massive. We thought it was extreme. Now we're hitting 500,000. Staggering loss this morning. We are approaching 500,000 Americans dead from coronavirus. You know, just kind of wondering like when is it going to end, you know, the Muppets? I don't remember the Muppets ever being offensive, but here we are again, cancel culture. Not even the Muppets are safe from the woke crowd. Disney slapping a warning label on the Muppet show for being offensive. The Muppets have become the latest target. What's the issue with this piggy? Senator, we'd like you to weigh in on an entertainment story. Disney Plus has labeled, I think, 18 episodes of the Muppets. You think we'll have a Muppets commission to look at this? Well, the Muppets are now deemed offensive. The Muppets are now offensive. We're going to dig into that. The Muppets now making that same exact list. Hard to believe this. Even, even the Muppets. The Muppets. All right, so apparently the Muppets are offensive. The Muppet show. Imagine having a United States Senator on and you ask him about the Muppets. I mean, you have one of the most powerful people in the United States and you're choosing to dedicate time to ask him about the Muppets and this disclaimer that Disney Plus is putting before old episodes of the Muppets. I just, the juxtaposition there, it really shows how foolish they look. And it's not like CNN and MSNBC are quality news outlets. These are corporate media outlets. I mean, MSNBC effectively is state media because they do propaganda at the behest of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party establishment. But out of all corporate media, this clip really demonstrates that Fox News is way worse than CNN and MSNBC. Like when we say corporate media, of course, we say we meaning leftists or we're referring to rather CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Newsmax and whatnot. But there is a distinction. Fox News is so ridiculous in comparison to like even CNN and MSNBC that they look like clowns. Imagine dedicating that much time to talk about how the mob is canceling the Muppets. That's not an issue. Out of everything that's happening in the country right now, to dedicate even a minute to this nonsense as a supposedly serious news network should show everyone that you are fucking clowns. Nobody is actually outraged about this. Have you seen anyone on your Facebook feed or your Twitter complaining about the Muppets? No, but because Disney themselves decided to unilaterally on their own accord put this disclaimer, that's evidence that the mob and cancel culture has canceled the Muppets. Like discourse on cancel culture, I think has reached its logical conclusion. Like you can't go further here, it's done. Like folks like this ruined it. Whatever conversation that was substantive regarding cancel culture before that we were all having, like this is what it has devolved down to. Where if you just acknowledge that some things in the past are not politically correct or socially acceptable today, that is proof that the outraged mob is destroying everything and ruining even the Muppets. I just, I don't know how anyone takes them seriously. I don't know how anyone takes them seriously. If you're truly concerned about cancel culture, there is a plethora of other examples that you can use to illustrate your points. You could talk about BDS, how there is a concerted effort by lawmakers to actually shut down and silence people who support the BDS movement. We can talk about that. You can talk about how this war between Trump and Biden to extradite Julian Assange is a threat to the First Amendment when it comes to press freedom because if we actually prosecute publications for publishing leaks and classified information, that is going to discourage other outlets from publishing the same thing and therefore holding the government accountable. That's a bad thing. You could talk about that. There's a number of things that you can talk about, but instead you choose to talk about the dumbest of all fucking examples, the Muppets, the Muppets. Jesus Christ, like, I just, if this doesn't tell you that Fox News is a joke, then nothing else will between them and Newsmax literally critiquing the appearance of Joe Biden's dog, calling him a junkyard dog who looks disheveled and unpresidential, right wing media needs to do some soul searching because it is completely fucking lost. That is evident. They're not talking about like small government and, you know, tax breaks for the rich anymore. They're talking about the dumbest things imaginable to where they've effectively become parodies of themselves. So obviously children's cartoons, they're meant to entertain kids, but oftentimes they are meant to be informative and educational. So if you watched Sesame Street as a kid, as all of us did probably, then you'd learn the alphabet. You'd learn how to spell. If you watched Dora the Explorer, you'd learn some Spanish words. If you watched the Care Bears as I did, you'd learn that sharing is caring. Like it's not necessarily unusual that cartoons try to instill values into children. It's not like they are going out of their way to indoctrinate children into these controversial things like Satanism or Marxism. Like that's not what cartoons do. Like the message is, if they are talking about values are usually pretty anodyne. However, they cross the line according to Ben Shapiro when they start teaching children how to not be racist because a new show on a cartoon network or maybe it was a PSA released by cartoon network. Either way, it told kids that racism is bad and Ben Shapiro took issue with that. Hey, and then you've got Cartoon Network now pushing anti-racism. Okay, so you've got Robin DeAngelo and not just teaching Coca-Cola but mainstreamed into Cartoon Network. Now it's one thing to get mad at the Muppets from 1987 for telling a joke that you now consider culturally insensitive 30 years later. It's another thing to get mad at Cartoon Network when Cartoon Network is literally just putting out PSAs mirroring, or children, mirroring Robin DeAngelo's talking points on racism and indoctrinating kids into a overtly racist garbage. Here's the Cartoon Network pushing what is obviously racism. Well, I'm not an alien but it definitely matters to me that I'm black. Yeah, it makes a difference that I'm white. I know the two of us get treated very differently. My experience with anti-black racism is really specific. Other people of color experience other forms of racism too but you won't see any of that if you don't see color. Can we get a rewrite where we appreciate each other without erasing what makes each of us different? Okay, but it's gonna add a couple hours to the shoot. I can make yours open. You are rolling just now, weren't you? Can't we just slap some graphics on this and call it a day? Hmm, see color be anti-racist. Shut up racist children. See color be anti-racist. So yes, we are all supposed to see each other as people of different colors whose experiences are completely non-understandable. I can't understand your experience in any way. And because I can't understand your experience, this is the Robin DeAngelo stuff, I have to listen and believe. I can never try to assess whether your opinion on a matter is non-factually or evidentially based. Instead I have to listen and believe because you see I see color. So I'm an anti-racist, which means I have to listen and believe whatever you say and presumably accept all of your policy recommendations as well in order to destroy the systems of power. This is being taught to children that current to network, to children. Yeah, you wonder why people feel like they're under assault because they're under assault. Who's under assault, Ben? Why don't you finish the thought? Tell us who's under assault. Are white people under assault? Like who are you talking about? Explain yourself. I mean, I don't know what to say about this other than if you think that it's bad that a cartoon is teaching your children not to be racist, then I can't not deduce that you must think that racism is good. I mean, what else am I supposed to take away from this? Like the message there is pretty benign. It's not really telling your children to become S.J.W.'s. Like it's saying acknowledge that there are differences between human beings. Don't pretend as if those differences aren't there and be anti-racist. Is that really that controversial? Would you really be offended if your children learned this? And for whatever reason, like he tries to tie Robin DiAngelo to this. She is the author of White Fragility. And it's a book that is controversial because even though what she says about race from a social standpoint is sound, her entire analysis is devoid of class analysis. But Ben Shapiro doesn't care about race or class. So the criticisms that are usually attributed to Robin DiAngelo, they're not applicable here. So I don't get why he's against this. Like I don't know, like maybe it's the case that Robin DiAngelo actually like scripted this cartoon. Who knows? But this is a very watered down message that just basically tells your kids, hey, don't be racist. Is that really that controversial? And the way that he frames this is as if like this is some new phenomenon. This is the next thing that the woke mob is doing. They're trying to indoctrinate your children, but this isn't new. I mean, Ben Shapiro, he can't be more than a couple of years older than me. So I'm assuming he grew up with all of the same television shows and cartoons that I watched. So were you outraged back in the 1990s when Boy Meets World aired an episode about anti-Semitism and racism? Was that offensive to you? Were you angry when Family Matters aired a show about how Laura Winslow was getting harassed by racists and was called derogatory slurs? Like was that offensive to you? This isn't some new thing. I don't understand why he takes so much issue with this. Now I don't wanna straw man him. I wanna try to steal man him. So I'm going to assume that he doesn't think this cartoon is bad because he believes that we should be teaching our kids to be racist. What he says here is if I accept that I'm anti-racist, I also have to believe I can never try to assess whether your opinion on a matter is nonfactually or evidentiary based and he says that if you're anti-racist you have to quote accept all of your policy positions as well. So this is why he's against it because he took that away from the cartoon. You see if I watch the cartoon that is intended for children under the age of 10 I'm assuming, what I take away from that is don't be racist. But what he takes away from that is, well you know if you're not racist then everything that a black person says we're supposed to take as gospel. I don't think it's that complicated. I think it's just saying don't be racist. Acknowledge that there are races and don't be racist. Be an anti-racist. Like it's intended for children. But he's saying actually what they really want is for your children to white knight for black people to the extent that all of their individual beliefs that they have. Well if they conflict with something that a black person says then you should just like accept what the black person says. But that's not what the cartoon is saying. Like to say this is so bizarre. Like he can't believe this. He can't believe that that's what the cartoon is saying. And the individuals who constructed this PSA or whatever it was do you honestly think that they're trying to promote to children that you have to accept everything that people of color say as like gospel? Of course as individuals we're allowed to have different ideologies and different beliefs. And be intellectually curious about different things. It's just saying not to be racist. That's it. But of course since Ben Shapiro is the antithesis of an SJW which means he's so much of an anti-SJW that you kind of go full circle and you become an SJW yourself where you become outraged about everything yourself. Like he has to see negativity in this. He has to see this and think man, this is just the vocal F trying to brainwash my children because how dare anyone tell my kids that being racist is bad. Okay, you're kind of telling on yourself here because I don't know how anyone would take issue with this message. It's a very basic message that shouldn't in theory be controversial. Shut up racist children. But of course he's taking issue with it because don't you dare fucking tell his kids that they can't be racist. If they wanna be racist, that's fine. Maybe the cartoon should be teaching children that if they want to be racist that's fine and some people are racist, some people aren't. Is that like more appropriate? I just, I don't get the controversy here. Like I'm failing to see why this is an issue according to his own standards that he stated there if we are steel mining him, I don't get it. It's for kids. The simple message is don't be racist and that's it. I mean, out of all the issues in the world, all of the things going on in the country, he chooses to talk about this. What a fucking clown. So boy do I have an interesting clip for you. So the hosts on the view were talking about an interview that Dr. Anthony Fauci did with CNN's Dana Bash and in this interview, the particular clip that they were talking about, he was asked whether or not he believes we're still going to be seeing Americans wearing masks into 2022. Now of course, he couldn't answer that question. I don't think that you can make that prediction at the beginning of 2021 when we're only now rolling out the vaccine. I think that if they could tell us that that would be likely they would. But I mean, he basically didn't give us a definitive answer. Megan McCain did not like what he had to say. She then went on some bizarre anti-Dr. Anthony Fauci rant and then she ended up revealing how entitled she is as a person. Take a look. Really quickly, I just wanted to show a clip of Dana Bash talking to Dr. Fauci this weekend. My parents have already gotten their second dose. They're fully vaccinated. Does that mean it's okay for them to spend time with their grandchildren who obviously have not been vaccinated? What's your recommendation? You know, I'm not gonna make a recommendation now except to say that these are things that we really do. I mean, literally every day, Dana, we look at that, we look at the data, we look at what's evolving about how many people are getting vaccinated and there will be recommendations coming out. I don't wanna be making a recommendation now on public TV. I wanna sit down with the team, take a look at that. So I was very frustrated when I saw this clip. I first and foremost wanna say that I respect the great tragedy and all the pain that has come of our handling of the coronavirus and there are 500,000 Americans that don't have family members and it's horrific and very sad and the grief that our country is going through should not be downplayed. That being said, we are, next week it will be a year since we left studio and I have been very responsible in many different ways as so many Americans have been and the fact that Dr. Fauci is going on CNN he can't tell me that if I get the vaccine, if I'll be able to have dinner with my family or dinner with, I mean, I don't have any grandparents left but older people, if I can go to dinner at friends' houses who are older, it's terribly inconsistent messaging and it continues to be inconsistent messaging. In Israel and Tel Aviv, one of the messages that they have, I saw a sign that said, get a shot, take a shot. Meaning if I get the vaccine then I can go out and I can have shots with my friends. Is the science in Israel different than the science here in the United States of America because Israel has over half of their country vaccinated already and seemed to be doing pretty well. The idea that I can get vaccinated and I won't be able to see friends and nothing in life changes and that we're gonna have to wear masks forever, I don't understand the downplaying of getting the vaccine because right now we should be wanting as many Americans as possible to get a vaccine. The fact that I, Megan McCain, co-host of The View, I don't know when or how I will be able to get a vaccine because the rollout for my age range and my health is so nebulous. I have no idea when and how I can get it. I wanna get it. If you call me at three o'clock in the morning, I will go any place at any time to get it. I wanna be responsible and obviously wait my term but this rollout has been a disaster and I understand obviously President Trump can take much of the blame but now we're in the Biden administration. I for one would like something to look forward to and to hope for because if getting the vaccine means that just nothing changes and we have to wait another few years until everyone gets it, there's already a lot of people not getting it. We're already having a messaging problem getting people to take this vaccine. So I'm over Dr. Fauci. I think we need to have more people giving more opinions and I honestly, quite frankly, I think the Biden administration should remove him and put someone else in place that maybe does understand science or can talk to other countries about how we can be more like these places that are doing this successfully. That was very interesting to me. On one hand, I get the frustration. I feel what she feels. I get it. We all want the vaccine. We all want to return to normal. But to me, it sounds like she just wants someone to replace Dr. Anthony Fauci who is going to tell her what she wants to hear. But I mean, science doesn't work that way. His job is not to make us feel better. His job is to give us the science, the data, the evidence that he has. And sometimes that isn't necessarily going to be pleasant information. Sometimes he's going to be a little bit more conservative than other scientists, but I'd rather him be real and realistic than just like make me feel good. Like I want the truth. I can handle it. I'm an adult. So I mean, look, I do get the frustration and real quick, I'm just gonna stop and I'm gonna reach out to her and I'm gonna tweet to her that I understand her frustration but she needs to not be so narcissistic. So I'm coming from a place of understanding and I'm blocked, nevermind. Looks like I can't reach out to her. I figured by now she would have unblocked me and she'd be over our previous beef. I don't even remember why I got blocked in the first place, but nonetheless, I get where she's coming from, okay? And let me just say that I am pleasantly surprised that Megan McCain of all people, a Republican isn't actually trying to spread misinformation about the vaccine. She's saying I want to take the vaccine and presumably she's going to be encouraging the viewers to take the vaccine as well. Like to have a better stance as a Republican than Joe Rogan even. I have to give you credit words too. I applaud you for that, Megan. And maybe she has a point. I think it's a fair criticism that perhaps Dr. Anthony Fauci may be underselling the vaccine. This is what David Pakman talks about as well. I think that's fine. That's a fair criticism to make. However, the issue is you can't say things like this. The fact that I, Megan McCain, co-host of The View, I don't know when or how I will be able to get the vaccine, you can't say things like that. Do you not understand the way that that comes across the people? I mean, what are you thinking? Oh my God. Like I do want to be kind to her and give her credit in this instance because she is saying, like she qualifies what she says here by saying, look, I don't want to jump the line. I want people who need it the most to get it. But I mean, you can't say things like that. You can't say the fact that I, Megan McCain, someone who's really important and rich, daughter of John McCain, if someone as important like me can't get the vaccine, the rollout must be terrible. And I'm trying to steelman her, but I don't think she truly realizes how narcissistic she sounds right here. It sounds like you're an entitled rich brat and you're mad that you can't have something soon enough. We all want the vaccine. We all want the vaccine. But right now, we can't get it. So we have to accept that. We can't like throw a tantrum on national television and say, look, I'm really fucking important. So if I can't get the vaccine, then public officials must be failing. Yes, Joe Biden perhaps could be doing more to get the vaccine out. But he's pretty competent in comparison with Donald Trump, wouldn't you say? I mean, he said we'll get 100 million doses out. And it looks like we're on track to surpass that and 100 million doses specifically within the first 100 days. So I mean, sure, there's always room for improvement. But the way that you said that, Megan, makes you sound really bad. And you're basically highlighting an issue with elites in this country. They think that they're better than everyone else. And it's already an issue that members of Congress jumped the line. Every single member of Congress got access to the vaccine, including Republicans who were downplaying the severity of COVID-19. In Florida, the governor Ron DeSantis rolled out these pop-up vaccine sites in rich areas so that way elites can get vaccinated before other people who may need it more. And so what you're saying in the midst of this rant is that basically my life matters more than everyone else. Now, again, she doesn't explicitly say this, but that's the implication, that's the subtext. Because the fact that I, Megan McCain, co-host of the prestigious television show The View, which has millions of viewers, if I can't get the vaccine, then man, they must be fucking up. Maybe Dr. Anthony Fauci should be replaced. Like really? How do you go from point A to point B? I, a very entitled rich person, can't get it. Therefore, Anthony Fauci should be replaced because he's not telling me what I wanna hear. She honestly said that Dr. Anthony Fauci doesn't understand the science and she wants to replace him with someone who does. Do you honestly think that he doesn't understand the science? Because Israel is saying one thing and he's saying something that isn't necessarily in line with what they're saying. Look, we don't have information. A new study from Claylett Research in Israel did prove that the vaccine is in fact very effective, but we still don't know whether or not if you are fully vaccinated, you can transmit the virus to other folks. Preliminary data shows that you can't, but we still don't know. And on top of that, in Israel, they're not the best example because there is vaccine apartheid going on right now where they're not giving the vaccine even to first responders in Palestine. Although they did recently, they rolled out 5,000 shots, but I mean, they're not the best example. But I mean like, I just, the things that she says here, it just, it proves what a spoiled brat she is. Like she thinks that she's better than everyone else. And again, I'm pleased that she is publicly stating, I'm gonna get the vaccine. I think it's really important. You know, if you call me at 3 a.m. in the morning, I will go anywhere to get it. I want to wait my turn, but this rollout has been a disaster. Like that's fine. Like you can make all of these criticisms. But when you start saying things like the fact that I, Megan McCain, coast on the view, can't get it, that is where you really, like you take the mask off of this disgusting system where elites, their lives are valued more than the peasants. And so I hope that she reflects, like what she's saying is fine up until that point. Like you can't just like, you can't do that. Like basically she's carining Dr. Anthony Fauci right now. And because she can't get the vaccine, she wants to speak to his manager because he's not telling her what she wants to hear him. She wants to speak to his manager, but it doesn't work this way. Like it doesn't work that way. Like I would rather him be realistic than tell me what I want to hear. Is there a very high likelihood that if we all get vaccinated, if enough people get vaccinated, things will go back to normal? Yes, obviously, but we can't say that right now. There's so many new variants. It's basically a race between the spread of the variants and vaccinating enough people. So there's so many factors to consider that I think that if Dr. Anthony Fauci actually did make a prediction, that would be somewhat reckless. And it would further deteriorate the trust in public health officials because we need him to be realistic with this timeline and say, look, I don't know. Because look, if he says, I'll just put it this way. If he says by July, things are gonna be back to normal and things aren't back to normal by July, people are going to lose confidence in him. So you don't just tell people what they want to hear and you have to accept that. As someone like with a very large platform who reaches millions of people, I am appreciative of the fact that Megan McCain wants the vaccine and is encouraging others to take the vaccine. The bar is really low, so I'll celebrate that fact. But you can't say things like this. You can't say, I'm Megan McCain, give me the vaccine. If I can't get it, that shows how bad the system is because I can't get it, someone really important. You can't say shit like that or you can. But I mean, you're further proving to us why elites are terrible people and why we shouldn't have elites, why we shouldn't have a ruling class. Since Dave Rubin is no longer a libtard cuck, he is espousing the same exact talking points as you'd expect any right-winger to espouse. So of course, he is right in line with their idiocy when it comes to COVID-19 and he's not just promoting this idea that the pandemic isn't as serious as the scientists or the libs say it is, but actually we should do no lockdowns, ease all restrictions, allow people to dine indoors at full capacity and not wear masks. And the way that he proves that it's not that bad is by sharing his experience dining indoors in Florida, I think, where he was in this restaurant with lots of old people and this bizarre encounter with an old lady that he had supposedly proves that the pandemic isn't as serious as the experts are saying it is. I don't know why he chose to share this experience. Nonetheless, I guess, enjoy. You know, we're sitting in this restaurant and my sister's got two young kids and they're just great and we're having a ball. And this elderly couple, Florida, it's a lot of old people. And despite all the old people, by the way, the second oldest populace in the United States, their mortality numbers are way down even though they kept everything open. Although mainstream media doesn't seem to want to talk about that. Anyway, there's a lot of old people in Florida, there's a lot of old people having dinner. This very elderly couple, I would say these two were probably between 85 and 90. They come up to the table and they're telling, oh, the kids are so great, that's so great, you're on vacation, where are you from, blah, blah, blah. And the woman points to my nephew and she's standing right behind me. She starts pointing to my nephew and said, oh, you're so cute. And as she's saying it, I turn around and she stuck her finger right in my mouth. And like, this is an old woman, she couldn't move very quick and I was kind of, and she like literally like all over saliva dripping all over her finger. You know, there wasn't much taste to it. She was very old. There wasn't like a lot of juice or anything on the finger. Anyway, I just thought it was hilarious that I end up not only do I go to a restaurant in Florida, I had the Parmesan crusted sea bass, quite delicious by the way, although I ate mostly grouper throughout the week, but not only did I go to a restaurant, I survived, but then an elderly woman actually stuck her finger in my mouth. And guess what? Everybody's okay. As far as I know, she's okay. I didn't trade numbers with her, but I think she's okay. What the fuck was that? What the fuck was that? Checkmate liberals, the pandemic isn't that serious. He just disproved COVID-19 guys. I don't know where to begin. I have a lot of questions to ask though. Why was this encounter so long? Like it wasn't just like a, oh, jabbed you in the mouth there. Like she was like hooking your mouth and she like, she like, you deep-throated her finger. I don't get it. Like how long did this last? Like, was her finger in your mouth for like five seconds? 10 seconds? All right, all right, all over saliva. And all over saliva. I don't believe that this happened. Or if it did happen, perhaps he's embellishing. I don't know why you would want to embellish a story like this. Like, look, if I'm at a restaurant and for whatever reason I turn around and an old lady inserts her finger down my throat, I'm not gonna share that story with anyone. Let alone with my audience of millions of viewers because that's weird, it's cringe-worthy, it's embarrassing. That's something that you keep to yourself. But he's using this to prove a point about how the pandemic isn't actually that serious because this lady who he didn't contact since is fine after she stuck her finger in his dirty mouth. And apparently it's also further proof that the pandemic isn't as serious as everyone claims because there was a lot of old people at this restaurant dining indoors. Okay, well they're irresponsible and if you're old and you're dining indoors and nobody's wearing masks because I mean, how can you eat with a mask? Then you're just fucking stupid. That doesn't disprove the seriousness of the pandemic. That proves how irresponsible these old people are to endanger their own lives just for the convenience of eating indoors when you could easily get takeout or do drive-thru or have something delivered to your home. Like, I don't get how this is supposed to disprove the seriousness of COVID-19. We just surpassed 500,000 deaths. And this dipshit is saying, well, it's not that serious because I deep-throated an old lady's finger. What? Well, it goes through your head to think that this is gonna be persuasive. What made him think, you know what? I have to share this story because this is gonna prove once and for all to these goddamn liberals that this pandemic isn't that serious. So watch me explain how there's this 15 second encounter where this old lady hooked my mouth with her finger and she like stuck her finger in the back of my throat. I just, what do we do? Like, where do we go from here? How do we move on from this? This is so weird. I have to watch the clip one more time. And she stuck her finger like right in my mouth. And like, this is an old woman, she couldn't move very quick and I was kind of, and she like literally like all over saliva, dripping all over her finger. There are so many questions, so many questions that I wanna ask to Dave Rubin. He blocked me on Twitter, so unfortunately I can't ask him these questions, but yeah, this is a good place to end the show. Permanently, perhaps. If this doesn't demonstrate the stupidity of American politics, nothing else does. It doesn't prove that COVID-19 isn't as severe as he wants it to, but it does definitely illustrate how stupid American politics, particularly the right in America, has gotten over the years. So I don't believe any Republican has gone on board with the $15 an hour minimum wage increase that the Democratic Party has proposed. They don't care about the working class. This is the party that is constantly trying to do everything in their power to break up unions. So why would they do anything that's even marginally pro-worker? Having said that though, to try to appear reasonable, Mitt Romney as well as Tom Cotton have teamed up to offer a counter proposal to the peasants. They'll still get crumbs, but maybe a little bit less crumbs than the Democratic Party is proposing. So NBC News's Sahil Kapoor reports Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton rolled out plan to raise the federal minimum wage to $10 per hour incrementally over five years tied to mandatory e-verify for employers and stricter penalties for hiring people here illegally. Oh well, I mean, are they not merciful? Are they not reasonable? They don't wanna raise the wage to $15 an hour, which isn't enough in 2021, but they still at least admit maybe workers should make a little bit more. What's interesting to me is that Tom Cotton is on board with this proposal. The minimum wage in Arkansas is $11 an hour. So he's not even on board with what his own state has as the minimum wage. Like they have to be trolling, like this has to be a joke. But for more details on this, we got a Jake Johnson of Common Dreams who explains, formally titled the Higher Wages for American Workers Act, the Republican legislation would gradually phase in a $10 federal minimum wage over the next four years and thereafter index it to inflation every two years. The minimum wage in Arkansas, Cotton's home state is already $11 an hour. Romney and Cotton's bill would also require employers to use e-verify, a Department of Homeland Security system to ensure that companies don't hire undocumented workers and heighten penalties on businesses that continue to do so, measures that Romney's office said are designed to prevent undocumented people from benefiting from the minimum wage increase. This one makes my blood boil, tweeted Dorian Warren, president of Advocacy Group Community Change. Romney and Cotton are offering a paltry minimum wage increase in exchange for throwing immigrants under the bus. They think US-born workers will fall for this, they won't. So not only are they lowering the federal minimum wage by $5 in comparison to what the Democrats are proposing, they're trying to sneak in this xenophobic nonsense to suggest that, well, you know, it's these immigrants who are taking American jobs when in actuality, that doesn't bear out in reality. I mean, it's just how out of touch they are that can never be overstated. Let's examine the net worth of these two goals for a moment. Tom Cotton is worth an estimated $5 million. Mitt Romney, however, is worth an estimated $150 to $250 million. He is a multimillionaire. This is an individual who owned a mansion that had an elevator for his car. All right, can you imagine having an elevator in your home? Well, he had one in his home for his car. This multimillionaire ghoul thinks that you deserve only $10 an hour. You don't deserve $15 an hour, which isn't enough in 2021, but you don't even deserve that. You don't deserve to make a living wage in 2021. You deserve $10 an hour. It's almost insulting. And the worst part is that he proposed this with Tom Cotton to basically suggest the folks that they're reasonable. They agree that the minimum wage should be increased, except you're basically giving people who are seeking the fight for 15 or seeking a wage increase the middle finger. The fight for 15 is like the bare minimum that workers should expect. The bare minimum, not a penny less, but the fact that you proposed $5 less, an increase of less than $3 than it is currently is insulting. It's just downright insulting, especially considering your wealth and privilege that you have. You live in a fucking mansion, but yet you think that the peasants only deserve $10 an hour. I mean, this is further evidence that there needs to be a wealth tax and that we shouldn't have 100 millionaires. Like, what a joke. We have people in this country who are struggling to feed themselves and people who have car elevators and their mansions are saying you don't deserve more than $10 an hour peasants suffer. I mean, what a fucking joke. How about this, Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton counterproposal? Go fuck yourselves. How about that? I've got a really quick clip to show you of Tucker Carlson that really demonstrates just how disingenuous he is, where he is willing to just brazenly lie to his audience, the millions of people that tune into his program every single night. Take a look. So it's worth finding out where the public is getting all this false information, this disinformation, as we'll call it. So we checked. We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which in the end we learned is not even a website. If it's out there, we could not find it. Then we checked Marjorie Taylor Greene's Twitter feed because we have heard she traffics in disinformation seen and told us, but nothing there. Really? You mean to tell me that your entire team, which I'm assuming is dozens if not hundreds of people consisting of spinsters, ideologs and researchers, all of them came together to look into the subject and they concluded that there was zero evidence that QAnon exists and that there's not even a QAnon website. Who believes this? Who believes this? I don't know if this is him trying to gaslight his audience or him trying to downplay the significance of QAnon or the existence of QAnon altogether because maybe he bears some responsibility for propping up Donald Trump or maybe he bears responsibility indirectly by not denouncing QAnon either way. Like, he's playing dumb. This is a lie and he's lying because QAnon actually has multiple websites. Multiple websites. I'm not going to name them because I don't want them to get clicks but Max Burns really, I think, made a great point about this. Before he resigned in disgrace, Tucker Carlson's top writer was an active member of popular QAnon message boards like 4chan and 8chan. Tucker should have just called him. QAnon literally has a website or a large chunk of one. The QAnon research board over on 8chan is far and away the largest and most active part of the website. So, I actually forgot about this. Tucker's top writer, he was very heavily involved in these websites where QAnon originated or at least was popularized. Either way, like, nobody believes that Tucker Carlson is telling the truth here but he knows that his audience of mostly older conservative people are going to believe him because they trust him. I just, I don't know what to say about this. Like, what a liar. For those of you who thought that Tucker Carlson was good or could be good sometimes, like, what does this say about his character? What does this say about his concern for the truth if he's literally willing to lie in such a blatant manner? So there's nothing else to say about this. I think that the clip speaks for itself. Tucker Carlson is a liar but of course this is not the first time that he's lied and it's not going to be the last time that he's lied because he is a propagandist and this is what propagandists do. So by now, I'm sure that you have seen this story from The Washington Post that is making the rounds on social media titled First Migrant Facility for Children Opens Under Biden. Now, I think that it is really important that leftists know the details of this story because as leftists, myself included, criticize Joe Biden for doing what Donald Trump did effectively. Liberals are saying, you know what? Leftists are just disingenuously smearing Joe Biden because they don't have the details. They're not willing to dive into the nuance. And what I wanna do in this video is just that. I wanna dive into the details. I wanna be nuanced because regardless of the propaganda that we're seeing at the behest of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party establishment, there's not really a way to defend this. Either way you cut it, like however you look at this or try to spin it, this is bad. And if Donald Trump did this, I think that liberals would be outraged but because it's Joe Biden, liberals and some leftists, but mostly liberals are saying, you know, it's not what it looks like. I promise it's not what it looks like but in actuality, this is an issue. So we're gonna read a lot of this article. This is probably gonna be a pretty long video but I think that this video at this topic in general deserves a lot of time. But first, I want to show you an exchange between Jen Psaki and Peter Ducey who asks her what I think is a pretty fair question with regard to this and let's watch what she has to say. Under Trump, there have been horrifying scenes at the border of kids being kept in cages and Kamala Harris said basically babies in cages is a human rights abuse being committed by the United States government. So how is this any different than that? We very much feel that way. And these are facilities, let me be clear here. One, there's a pandemic going on. I'm sure you're not suggesting that we have children right next to each other in ways that are not COVID safe, are you? I'm suggesting that Kamala Harris said that this facility, putting people in this facility was a human rights abuse committed by the United States government and Jill Biden said under Trump, there have been horrifying scenes at the border of kids being kept in cages. Now it's not under Trump, it's under Biden. This is not kids being kept in cages. This is kids, this is a facility that was opened that's going to follow the same standards as other HHS facilities. It is not a replication, certainly not. That is never our intention of replicating the immigration policies of the past administration. But we are in a circumstance where we are not going to expel unaccompanied minors at the border. That would be inhumane. That is not what we are going to do here as an administration. We need to find places that are safe under COVID protocols for kids to be where they can have access to education, health and mental services, consistent with their best interests. Our goal is for them to then be transferred to families or sponsors. So this is our effort to ensure that kids are treated or not in close proximity and that we're abiding by the health and safety standards that the government has been set out. So there's a lot going on there. First of all, is his question fair? Yes, although Ross's story framed this as a gotcha question, when in actuality, I don't think that this is a gotcha question. Is this a conservative who wants to get the Democratic Party? Sure, but I think that the question that he posed to the White House press secretary, Jan Socky, is pretty reasonable. Now, there's a lot of things to consider here. First of all, is this different than Donald Trump technically? Yes, because Donald Trump had the family separation policy that he instituted and the goal of this policy was the cruelty. That was the goal. So if you separate children from their parents at the border that would act as a deterrent to stop other immigrants from trying to come into the country. And deterrents isn't necessarily something that came up just with Donald Trump. During the Obama administration, the Obama era, they instituted this program called ASEP, Alien Transfer Exit Program, where they would deport someone who came to this country illegally and drop them off at some random place in their home country, which is an issue because oftentimes they're not going to be in stable locations. They could be without housing and they may not know anyone. They could literally be in danger. So it's a really cruel way to send a message to people saying, hey, you're not welcome in our country. So there is the difference there that you want to point out. And I think that David Dole did a phenomenal job at really distinguishing between Donald Trump and Joe Biden's program differences here. Having said that though, she speaks to the need to find somewhere to house these migrants because we have an influx of unaccompanied minors coming here. Now during the Trump years, particularly in May of 2020 as one example, which is cited a lot, there were a lot of migrant teens, adolescents, unaccompanied minors that showed up and they were turned away. Trump's administration didn't even give them the chance to make their case. So I don't want people to think that turning them away would be preferable. That's not the case. We should be welcoming them because remember, it is our policies, the policies of the US government that destabilized Latin America that led to an influx in immigration. So we should be trying to right the wrongs of our policy failures. So I don't think that turning migrant children away is the correct strategy. I also think that yes, they should be following COVID protocols. I don't want to see these facilities at over capacity. The issue overall however, is that when you step back and you look at all of these things, the facts of the matter, yes, there's a pandemic going on. Yes, we don't want to turn these teens away. And on top of that, we want to make sure that the teens in this instance are cared for and that they're not just going to be released into the wild in the United States if you will and they'll just become homeless teenagers. Of course we want them to be cared for but under the umbrella of all of this, it's all happening in the context of incarceration. And what people are drawing attention to is the fact that even if we are not turning away these teens, even if we're trying to follow proper pandemic protocols, they are still being detained. They still cannot leave. And so the broader question here is, why are we responding to unaccompanied minors by effectively jailing them, putting kids in cages? Because that is quite literally what is happening. Now, if you read this article from the Washington Post, you might take away a little bit more of a charitable picture of what's happening because the spokesperson for HHS, Mark Webber, he basically says, look, this isn't as bad as people are making it out to be sure. Technically, there are kids in not cages, but facilities. We don't want to say cages. We said cages during the Trump era, but it's not that bad. So we're going to read what he says. We're going to read the article that gives us the details here. And then we're going to juxtapose what we learned in this article, with this article from Mustafa Bayoumi of the Guardian, who actually puts everything into perspective, because while it might sound at face value, reasonable for Joe Biden to do this, in actuality, it's not reasonable. And I also want to get to what AOC says about this as well. So this is going to be long. I'm going to read quite a bit of this, but I do think it's important that we be thorough here. So this is by Sylvia Fosterfrau. He writes, dozens of migrant teens boarded Vans Monday for the trip down a dusty road to a former man camp for oil field workers here. The first migrant child facility opened under the Biden administration. The emergency facility, a vestige of the Trump administration that was open for only a month in summer of 2019 is being reactivated to hold up to 700 children ages 13 to 17. Now this particular facility, this was meant to detain immigrants that came here illegally and we're effectively using a jail to house children or jail children. Like I'm not necessarily worried about the framing here, but we need to understand the context of what's happening and where these children are being held. Government officials say the camp is needed because facilities for migrant children have had to cut capacity by nearly half because of the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border has been inching up. With January reporting the highest total, more than 5,700 apprehensions for that month in recent years. So understand there is a problem and we need to figure out how to humanely deal with this issue. There has to be a humane solution rather than just putting them in jails. Of course, it is more cruel to turn them away which could endanger their lives. So I'm not saying that Biden should do what Trump did but what I am saying is that perhaps we should rethink the entire system to where we just instinctively put children in cages, in jails. Now we're gonna skip a little bit here. So during the campaign, Biden pledged to undo former president Donald Trump's hardline immigration policies. In his first month in office, Biden signed several executive orders reversing many of those policies. Last week he and the House Democrats introduced a plan that would provide a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. The administration also reversed one of Trump's expulsion practices by accepting unaccompanied children into the country, a change that also is contributing to an increase of minors in government facilities official set. Now also to give Biden credit where it's due, he also undid the really, really disgusting remain in Mexico policy to where if someone is seeking asylum, we don't admit them into the country while they wait to make their case. We force them to remain in Mexico. And that doesn't really make sense. If they're seeking asylum here, then why shouldn't we hear them out here where we can keep them safe and make sure that they're not going to be in danger, that they won't fall victim to anything that could endanger their lives, which is why they left in the first place. So it's good that he did that. Additionally, he also signed an executive order that halts most deportations for 100 days. And I say most because he did permit deportations of individuals who committed crimes to be deported until a judge in Texas decided to block that order. Now, while the case was being litigated, Joe Biden could have postponed all of the deportations that were scheduled to take place, but he didn't do that. And his lack of action led to deportations continuing as they were scheduled to do so. And as you've seen in a video I posted just recently, now he's basically abandoned that pledge entirely. There's an article in Law and Crime by Colin Kahnbacher who explains this in great detail. So let's get to what Biden's administration is saying. This is the spin, if you will. So Mark Webber, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees services for migrant children said the Biden administration is moving away from the law enforcement focused approach of the Trump administration in one in which child welfare is more centric. At the 66 acre site groups of beige trailers encircle a giant white dining tent, a soccer field and a basketball court. There is a bright blue hospital tent with white bunk beds inside. A legal services trailer has the Spanish word bienvenidos or welcome on a banner on its roof. There are trailers for classrooms, a barber shop, a hair salon. The facility has its own ambulances and fire trucks as well as its own water supply. So understand the juxtaposition here that they want us to think about. When we envisioned child separation under Donald Trump, we oftentimes learned that there were really crowded spaces that immigrants were forced into. They weren't allowed phone calls, they weren't allowed to shower and whatnot. So what they're saying here is these are actually really nice facilities. Children can play, they can play basketball. They have classrooms and whatnot here. And so what they're trying to do very deliberately here is not get you to think of these detention facilities if you will as jails, rather as more accommodating towards children, we're not trying to be overly cruel and that may very well be the case. But I mean, would you say that the legal system in the United States, the jail system in the United States is any less cruel because oftentimes they have basketball courts and allow for recreational outdoor activities? Well, of course not. This is a tactic to kind of like deflect and not get you to think about the fact that we are basically jailing these children. Now, the operation is based on a federal emergency management system, Weber said. The trailers are labeled with names such as Alpha, Charlie and Echo. Staff members wear matching black and white t-shirts displaying their roles, disaster case manager, incident report, emergency management. The most colorful trailer is an entryway where flowers, butterflies and handmade posters still hang on its walls from Carrizo's first opening in 2019. HHS has 13,200 beds for children having exploded in growth in the past four years, adding more than 80 facilities for a total of about 200. Weber said putting children in permanent shelters is preferable to the influx shelters like Carrizo. But nearly half of those beds are unusable during the pandemic. So, you know, on one hand, the question is, well, why aren't these kids being put into foster care immediately? Why are they staying here for approximately 30 days? And if it is the case that the foster care system is overwhelmed right now because there is an influx of unaccompanied minors crossing the border, then of course we have to figure out what do we do? And there really is no easy answer to this. But I think that the main thing that the left is focusing on here and trying to argue is that we don't treat them like prisoners when they come here. Of course, reopening a jail that Trump's administration held immigrants in who he treated as criminals isn't the answer. Of course, there's gotta be a better way, right? So, Weber said the facilities received a bad rap under the Trump administration because many people associated them with the detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE. But the children always received good care and that never wavered between administrations, he said. Now this right here is where he kind of puts his foot in his mouth because to say that the children received good care, you can say, okay, once we ripped the children away from the parents during the Trump era, we cared for them well, but that's still child abuse. Taking a child away from its parent that is traumatizing. It leads to long-term psychological damage. That's child abuse. So, to even say that the children receive good care, doubt, doubt to say the least. The majority of child migrant facilities are subject to state licensing requirements. Temporary influx centers like Carrizo are not. However, Weber said Carrizo would meet or exceed Texas licensing standards if applicable. The influx facilities also cost more about $775 a day per child compared with $290 a day for permanent centers. So Weber said the influx shelters keep children from ending up in border patrol stations which have holding cells that were not designed for children. During the 2019 immigration surge, many migrants were stuck in overcrowded cells for prolonged periods that exceeded legal limits. So basically he's trying to propose an alternative to you. If we don't put them here in this jail cell, then they're gonna end up in the really bad jail cells, which are meant for the adult immigrants. And we don't want that, right? So basically, I think that that's about all that we need from this. I wanted to give you the picture that they're trying to paint for the rest of us in order to downplay what's happening here, downplay the fact that a Trump-era migrant jail has been reopened for children. And you can accept that there are complexities here. The influx of unaccompanied minors. Again, I wanna emphasize that does pose a logistical issue, especially during a pandemic. I'm not saying that we should turn them away. But let me show you, by reading this article from The Guardian, why what we're seeing here, the picture that the Biden administration, Mark Weber is presenting to us, is nothing more than propaganda. So he argues this week, the Biden administration did the unthinkable. It reopened a Trump-era detention site for migrant children. The detention center, a reconverted camp for oil field workers in Caruso Springs, Texas, is expected to hold 700 children between the ages of 13 and 17, and dozens of kids have already arrived there. So there's gonna be a little bit of overlap between this article and the other article because it quotes the other article. So forgive me for the redundancy, but I think it is important that we be thorough here. So we get a clear picture of what's happening. This is an awful development, reminding me of some of the worst abuses of the Trump years. And while we obviously don't know how this ominous development will play out in the long run, what we do know is this, unaccompanied migrant children deserve compassion, not detention. And that is the main takeaway. Like it or not, by putting them in this facility, we're still treating them as if they are criminals. We may be treating them more kindly than we treat adult criminals, but nonetheless, they're still being treated as criminals. And the approach that we're calling for is compassion and not just compassion in an entirely new approach where we overthrow the previous fascistic regime that was in place, abolish ICE, which is a fascist organization, regardless of liberals wanna admit that or not. And anyone who supports the existence of ICE is complicit in supporting fascism in the United States. But to continue here, but rather than seeking out new and better solutions, which is what we're calling for, the Biden administration is instead trying to sell us an image of a kinder, gentler imprisonment. That's the issue. That's the issue with the Washington Post article. How else are we to understand the words of Mark Weber, spokesperson for health and human services, the agency that oversees the welfare of unaccompanied migrant children? Weber told the Washington Post that the Biden administration is moving away from the law enforcement focused approach of the Trump administration to one in which child welfare is more centric, that may play well as a soundbite. But how well for a centric is it to place children in jail in the first place? And if you don't think it's a jail, you should know that the unaccompanied teens sent to the Carrizo Springs Shelter will not be allowed to leave the facility as reported by the news website, borderreport.com. That is a really great point. If it's not a jail, can they leave? Again, we don't want these children to come to the United States and be homeless, right? But do they have the autonomy to leave if they came to the United States and they have a loved one to stay with? The answer is no, they do not. That's really important, that's key here. It gets worse. The camps operation will be based on a federal emergency management system where trailers are labeled with names such as Alpha, Charlie and Echo names, which are commonly used in military detention practices. Camp Echo, for example, is a notorious site in Guantanamo Bay. Yeah. And while staff members will thankfully not be sporting military gear, the government spokesman makes a point to tell us that they will wear matching black and white t-shirts displaying their roles, disaster case manager, incident support, emergency management, and that the most colorful trailer is at the entryway where flowers, butterflies and handmade posters still hang on its walls from Carrizo's first opening in 2019. Give me a break. The problem with this sort of language is that it hides the brute reality of detention and covers it up with the rosy rhetoric of summer camp. The post story describes the center as a 66 acre site where groups of beige trailers encircle a giant white dining tent, a soccer field and a basketball court. There is a bright blue hospital tent with white bunk beds inside. A legal services trailer has the Spanish word bien venidos or welcome on a banner on its roof. There are trailers for classrooms, a barber shop, a hair salon, who I wonder is really comforted by a welcome banner on a roof, the jailers or the jailed. Think I'm being ungenerous that the Biden administration is merely trying to articulate to the public how its detention scheme will be more salubrious than Trump's? Well, if that's the case, then health concerns, especially during a pandemic would be paramount. We've been told by the government that these children will arrive at Carrizo Springs after a period of quarantine and will all be tested for COVID before entry. Yet when borderreport.com asked HHS whether everyone entering the facility and not just these teens will be tested for the virus, they did not receive a direct answer. It doesn't stop there. Despite the language coming from the administration, these children are facing a terrible and possibly illegal situation. In 1997, a class action lawsuit settlement established standards for the detention and release of unaccompanied minors taken into custody by the authorities. According to the Florida Settlement Agreement, the federal government must transfer these unaccompanied children to a non-secure and licensed facility within days of being in custody In an emergency, the government can keep the children for up to 30 days while seeking to reunite them with family members or place them with a sponsor. Meanwhile, the Carrizo Springs site is a secure site. The kids can't leave. It's unlicensed by the state of Texas. It's operated by a government contractor for the office of refugee resettlement and is expected to hold children for 30 days as reported by the Washington Post, which is obviously longer than the 20 days dictated by the Florida's agreement. The detention is also very expensive, coming in at a cost of $775 a day per child compared with $290 a day for permanent centers. All of these extremely disturbing facts surrounding this detention should elicit massive amounts of outrage in all of us. But the Biden administration seeks to deflect the criticism by assuring us their version of childhood detention is thoughtful and humane. Even while opening a facility where kids are delivered in unmarked vans to an internment camp that is geographically remote and difficult to access. Does it feel like we're being sold a bill of goods? It sure does to me. Yes, it's not as malevolent as the family separation policies of Trump, but if our way of judging political conduct now is whether something is simply better or worse than Trump was, then we've elevated Trump's actions into our new standard of behavior. And when we do that, we've lost any genuine sense of judgment in the first place. There's no question that with rising numbers of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border during COVID, the Biden administration has a difficult road ahead but expanding a long discredited system that detains children and cannot be the answer. No matter how good the government wants to make it sound, every government spins their message, but if we fall unthinkingly for the spin, the fault isn't with them, it's with us. And he's making a really valid criticism, but he's also being charitable and acknowledging that this is an issue. It's a tough issue. I don't necessarily know that we have the right answers here. Who knows how to deal with unaccompanied minors if we haven't already changed the system itself, but certainly we have to change the system, not focus on detention, but most importantly, I think it's pretty reasonable to expect our government to not treat children as criminals. And that's what's happening here. This is a jail. That's what this is. These are cages that we are keeping children in. If we don't call it what it is, we're not being intellectually honest with ourselves. Now AOC also called out the Biden administration. She says, this is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay, no matter the administration or the party. And she's saying this in direct response to the propaganda article released by the Washington Post. She adds, our immigration system is built on a carceral framework. It's no accident that challenging how we approach both these issues are considered controversial stances. They require reimagining our relationship to each other and challenging common assumptions we take for granted. It's only two months into this administration and our fraught unjust immigration system will not transform in that time. That's why bold reimagination is so important. DHS shouldn't exist. Agencies should be reorganized. ICE gotta go, ban for profit detention, create climate refugee status and more. And in terms of answering the question, what do we do? Because that really is the question. So liberals will say in response to the left being outraged about this, they'll say, well, what do you propose we do? Well, AOC shared this answer. There is legislation that has been proposed by AOC, Jayapal, Escobar, which would right the wrongs of our cruel immigration system. And this is really long, so I can't read it. But the goal is to establish a just humane system. So that way we don't treat immigrants as if they're inherently criminals. And we especially do not treat child immigrants, unaccompanied minors as if they're criminals. Because regardless of how we wanna frame the situation, regardless of how the Biden administration spins it, we are treating these children as criminals. We are caging children. That has not changed. And you can try to change the way that you conceptualize detention and immigration in order to give Biden a pass here. But if you do that, I would argue you're not being truthful with yourself. You're not fighting past the cognitive dissonance. You're not actually being principled. So at the end of the day, this is the answer. And in the short term, there is no easy questions here in terms of how we deal with unaccompanied minors, we of course admit them into the country. However, how we deal with them, it does matter. Being outraged at the fact that we are treating them like criminals, that does matter. And getting this rosy picture of the way that they're being treated here, that doesn't change things. Of course, one immigrant activist said that she kind of feels a little bit better about this because this is basically the Cadillac of the Cadillac of detention facilities. Let me see if I could find the quote here because I think it really, it speaks to the way that as individuals, we try to convince ourselves that something that's bad isn't actually that bad. So this is from Rosie Aburabrara. I consoled myself with the fact that it was considered the Cadillac of migrant child centers, but I don't have any hope that Biden is going to make it better. And that's just it. This person was really horrified when this detention facility, when this cage concentration camp was reopened and she tried to console herself by saying this is the Cadillac of migrant children centers. And perhaps psychologically that helps to comfort us, but at the end of the day, we're lying to ourselves if we say that this is different than the Trump era because it's not, if we're still treating children as criminals, that is no different. There are substantive differences in approaches to immigration. And that Biden at this point in time doesn't seem to be reinstituting the deterrent as an approach to immigration, as Trump and Obama was yet. But the good news is Biden still has time to turn this around and if he does actually pass immigration reform, perhaps we can change our approach. But I know for damn sure that nothing's going to change if we keep giving Democrats a pass for the same things that we criticize Republicans for. So what I call on liberals to do is be consistent and understand where leftists are coming from here and condemning this, which is kids in cages, regardless of how you wanna spin it. And it's morally reprehensible. Hello everyone. I am back with a congressional candidate who you may know from last year. He's running again in 2022. It's a rematch against Yvette Clark. I am of course talking about Isaiah James running in New York's ninth congressional district. Isaiah, welcome back. Thank you so much for having me. We're finally on the air after all the technical difficulties. I feel like every single interview I do, there's like at least three technical difficulties and five attempts. One day we're gonna have a really solid setup where there's no issues. I swear. You might actually have an actual studio, like a building somewhere. Yes. So that way, you know, whether you have an entire staff and then they can handle those problems. With like people who know what they're doing and not me where I'm just like clicking, if you're- All I know how to do is refresh, if you like start over, that's all I have to turn it off, that's all I want. My technical capacity, like it's limited to like blowing on the NAS cartridges and putting it back in. Like that's as much as I know how to fix anything related to technology. But either way, it's working and I'm so glad to have you back on. So I've gotta ask you, you're running for Congress again. You haven't even really had time to recover since your first run, I'm assuming, because you've just been like constantly like on the run, under go. What made you wanna run again? What made me wanna run again is because nothing changed from my last run. You know, my last run ended June of 2020 when we didn't win. And honestly, I took a step back from not, well, the campaign was over. I took a step back from social media. I didn't really post anything. I just watched to see if the member of Congress, Deepak Clark, who I ran against was gonna actually do something or say something or change the way she was, you know, thinking that our campaign, if we didn't win, at least we pushed her further to the left. At least we moved the Overton window in conversation. And the same corporate interests are running her and everybody else in the corporate democratic party. So I mean, it's like, wait a minute, nobody's gonna, she didn't change. Nothing changed at all, nothing. And things have only gotten worse. I mean, when I ran, I was running during the beginning of the pandemic. I started my run in the pandemic last February, last March. And now we're here, we are a year later and things are demonstrably worse and she hasn't changed. So I think that even more so now our message resonates because people are starting to see, wait a minute, the nation's billionaires added like 1.5 trillion to their wealth and we can't even get a $2,000 check from our own government. So that's what made me wanna run again. Yeah, I feel like this pandemic, not that we needed more proof that the system is broken, but it really, like if you had doubts before, I mean, now it's shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that like if the richest people in this country get even richer during a pandemic when in theory, everyone should be suffering, I mean, that system is indefensible. And to not have people in government actually want to fight or at least they say they wanna fight but they don't actually take meaningful action. I think it warrants, you know, a rematch. And I will say that a rematch, I feel like it's always a good idea because you don't always win on the first try. This was the case for Ro Khanna for Corey Bush. Corey Bush had like a 20 point swing, I think the second time she ran. Oh yes, Corey Bush and I were both endorsed by Brand New Congress. Me, Corey Bush, Jamal Bowman, ALC, all of us. We were on the same, we were on what they called the New York slate. So not Corey Bush obviously, but the other ones, we were all on the New York slate. So we all met each other. You know, I met Corey a few times, you know, I talked to Corey, called Jamal, and her first election, she lost like over 50,000 votes. But she saw that it wasn't about running to get, you know, celebrity or some name recognition, it's about running because you actually wanna make a difference in the people's lives, who you're running to represent. And the second time around, she got over the hurdle. And now the people of her district are more blessed because of it. Because they actually have a representative who actually cares, who's a nurse, who's an organizer, who's a BLM activist, who cares about the same things that I talk about because she's lived them. That's why when me and her talk, I call her my big sister. Cause she reminds me so much of my big sister. Literally, they're about the same age. And my sister has two kids just like her. So I mean, the fact that she went again shows that it's not about, it's not about winning on the first try. It's about fighting for what you believe in. And if you truly believe in these things, and if you have the capacity to run, then why wouldn't you run again? Yeah, absolutely. And it seems like the number one thing that really is make or break. It's money, of course, that's a huge factor, but name recognition is so incredibly important. Like I remember I talked to Corey Bush back in 2017, I think it was, when she was running for the very first time. And then I talked to her again when she just launched her second run. And she was talking about how it was like really difficult. It was a rough start. The day that I talked to her, she said, we brought in $15 the day before. But what she did little by little was reach out to people, improve her name recognition. And she really got a hold of her community and her district and that made all the difference. And sometimes it takes more time to build up your name recognition. Because I mean, you folks are, you're running for Congress and you're reaching out to thousands upon thousands not hundreds of thousands of people. Yeah, that's not an easy task, especially when you don't have the resources of the incumbent. So I think that like, if folks are really serious about running for Congress, this is a commitment to not just run once, but you're running like two, three times, because this is a lot of work to do it the way that you're doing it. Like if you took large contributions from like corporations, oh, you can get your name out there like that. It'd be easy if I did that. But this is the thing. So last cycle, I am so proud of my team. And even during the midst of a pandemic with absolutely no money and just a grassroots scrappy team, we spent, get this, we spent $13,000 and got over 10,000 votes. Which is, if you know anything about New York primaries, if you get 10,000 votes for a first time candidate with absolutely no name recognition, 10,000 of my neighbors said, they believe in our message and they want us to carry it forward to Washington. That was monumental. Now other people in the race spent 50 and $60 per vote. They had literally a million dollars, a million and a half. We didn't have anything. We were grassroots. We can't, our main tool was to get out there and talk to people. And everybody knows New York got hit the hardest first. We were the first ones hit. So March, April, May, all the months leading up until the election, we literally were sitting in ours. We couldn't knock on a door. We couldn't talk to anybody. And everybody was scared and rightfully so. And we still got over 10,000 votes. Now people know how to live within the confines of a pandemic. If you drive down the streets of New York, especially in my district, everybody's masked, everybody's social distance, but there are people out there now. So it will be that much easier coming with the name recognition this time and learning so much from the first campaign. It was like drinking through a fire hose upside down. I was learning so, so much from the first campaign. We have a really, really good shot to win this because there are enough young people and left this in any district to swing that district. It's just, they need to be motivated. They need to be given not something to vote against, but a reason to vote somebody to vote for. And that's what this campaign offers. It's not just, hey, vote for me because I'm the new young guy. It's vote for me because I'm in the same boat as you. And I want us to all row in the same direction. Yeah, and I honestly feel like a lot of grassroots candidates like yourself have the advantage going into 2022 because this is when a lot of liberals kind of tend to check out. Like a lot of folks who aren't necessarily hyper political, more privileged professional managerial class types, they tune into presidential elections and they kind of demobilize during the midterms. This is when the grassroots, I think can really remain activated and pounce, use this as a unique opportunity. And I wanted to get your take on this stimulus situation. Anyone who I've talked to who was relying on the $2,000 checks, have asked me, hey, do you know when the $2,000 checks are coming? And I always have to say, actually, now it's supposedly $1,400. I know, and in terms of when it's coming, I don't know, maybe March, if we're lucky. What's been the response? Because I've been so furious seeing folks trying to downplay what was literally a lie. Like we were told $2,000. And I think that folks who are democratic party loyalists in media, they're trying to make it seem as if, oh no, no, no, the left, they're being so unreasonable. We knew it, Joe Biden. And of course he meant 600 plus, you know, 1,400. What's been the take from people in your district? Because anyone who I've talked to who was counting on that check is pissed. So look at it like this. If you look behind me, you see all these sight words for first graders and kindergartners. My wife is a public school teacher here in New York City in Brooklyn. So she teaches first graders and kindergartners. She's been working from home since the pandemic. Our living room table, which I'm sitting at right now is also her classroom. So we're not people of large means. So we're still relying on those checks. To be honest with you, I still have not gotten a single check yet. I have not gotten a $1,400 check, have not gotten a $1,200, have not gotten a 600. I have not gotten a single dime from Uncle Sam yet. So that's number one. Number two, the fact that we're arguing over 1,400 versus 2,000 in the midst of a global pandemic, where we just crossed the 500,000 death threshold, that is the problem. That's the root of the problem. We should be talking about $2,000 checks for everyone until this thing is over. What is a $1,400 check going to do? What is a one-time $2,000 check going to do? It's not going to do anything. If Joe Biden wants to give me a $1,400 check right now, that literally, literally doesn't even pay my rent. One month in New York City living in a basement apartment, that doesn't even pay my rent. So every other bill I have that I can't go to work to pay is that doesn't even affect, that just doesn't even pay rent. So we need to look at the crux of the problem. It's not the fact that the checks haven't gone out, which is a problem. It's the fact that we have people who are trying to rob Peter to pay Paul because they don't want to come up off the money of these corporate dollars. Meanwhile, corporations are making out hand over fist. I just told you that billionaires added a trillion and a half dollars to their wealth. There are a couple billionaires in this country that have more wealth than the GDP of some nations. Billionaires in this country added 1.5 trillion to their wealth. Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, does not have a $1.5 trillion GDP. Those few people have more money than millions of people in Haiti. The three richest people in this country have more money than the bottom of 50% of people in this country. And that's the big problem that we don't even talk about. That's why I'm running for Congress is because I don't want to stand up at a lectern and talk about 1460 and 12 dollar checks. I want to talk about closing all these goddamn corporate loopholes, bringing that money from overseas that is hiding in the Cayman Islands and Apple and Microsoft and all these corporations have over there. So we wouldn't have to argue about $1,400 checks. There's $2.5 trillion sitting offshore that needs to be taxed right now from these American corporations. If it was brought back here, if our corporate tax rate was brought up from 22% where it's at now to the 35, 40, 50% where it needs to be, then there would be no problem talking about our coffers that we can't afford things. If we cut our military budget at $780 billion, goddamn dollars, we would have the billions of dollars needed to give people checks until this pandemic is over. So that's when I don't see things from the street level. I see things from the 10,000 foot level. That's why I'm running for Congress because I see all these problems and we need to step away from the forest so we can see the trees so we can get these big bold ideas into people's mindset. It's not about because they make you think the pie is so small that you have to fight for those scraps of $1,400. Other countries are paying people every single month until this thing is over and we have the biggest GDP in the world. If New Zealand and England and France and Germany and Japan and South Korea and Canada, they can do it. Why can't America do it? Why do we lead the world in gun homicides? We lead the world in obesity. We lead the world in locking people up and military spending. We never lead the world in social safety net things. We don't lead the world in feeding the homeless and clothing the poor and picking people out of poverty. How can we never lead the world in those things? Only the bad categories. That's what I have to think about that. We need to start thinking big grand ideas because this piecemeal stuff we're doing is not gonna work. It's obviously not working. We need to go, we need to swing for the fences and we can't hope anymore. We can't wish anymore. We can't trade anymore. We have to be audacious. We have to demand that our government do these damn things because the government is supposed to be buying for the people and right now it's buying for the powerful. Yeah, I'm glad that you said that because it really matters to put things in perspective. Like the mere fact that we're talking about like the price of the check when we're not already, when we haven't already been getting monthly checks, it really is absurd in the richest country on the planet. It's weird. Like to think about this, that we allow this and that we're kind of just accustomed to it and we expect it and we're not surprised by it that really speaks to the failure of our system as a whole. And like I'm glad that you're running on this message of demand better because when you have this much wealth in one country, the fact that more or less wealthy countries are putting us to shame. Like we should all be embarrassed. I know I am. You know, so I'm glad that folks like you are running for Congress and explaining to people how they're getting a bad deal in comparison with our neighbors like even north of the border. Like Canadians are getting monthly income throughout the duration of the pandemic. They have single payer healthcare. Whereas in America, people with COVID don't even know how they're gonna pay their medical bills. So it's outrageous. It really is. And to your point or to what you said about you haven't received your stimulus or your survival checks at all. I'm gonna ask you a question. Has your representative reached out to assist people in getting their checks? Like have you heard anything because this is what a representative is supposed to do to folks in their district. So what help has been offered to you by representative of that Clark? Absolutely none. You know, during the election, I'm when I ran against her, I'm still her constituent. I would get her mailers. I'm running against her. I would get her mailers in my mailbox. Every week or two, we got a new mailer from her. I haven't seen a single piece of mail from Congress when we leave that Clark talking about, hey, this is how you get through this pandemic. This is the number you can call. You have the money to send out the mailers during campaign time. Why aren't you sending out mailers now? I mean, I'm still your constituent. Even though I ran against you, you're still supposed to be working to help me and my family's life and everybody else's life in this district be better. Haven't heard a single word from her at all. She's talking about technology, this and making smart cities that and listen, all that's good. But we need to focus on what's happening right now. People are dying. We just crossed the 500,000 death threshold. I just had a conversation with my father who's 72 today and he lives down in Florida. I was like, when are you going to get the vaccine? He's like, I don't know. There's nobody talking to us. There's nobody telling us. And my dad has been in the house for over a year, 72. Can't go anywhere because he had bypass surgery, got a bad heart and all that stuff. He can't even leave his house. I just had a conversation with him this morning. He called me at 10 this morning and we were talking about stuff. And I was like, when are you going to get the vaccine? He has no idea. I don't have, my wife's a teacher in New York city. Months have gone by. She still hasn't gotten the vaccine and she has a compromised immune system. The reason why she's working from home. I have pre-existing conditions from my time in Iraq. Heard nothing about the vaccine. This is what we're talking about. We have 500,000 reasons for a single-payer healthcare system in this country right now. We just crossed that mark. That's 500,000 reasons. We got 40 million reasons for a single-payer healthcare system that people were without insurance. We have 335 million reasons for a single healthcare system because everybody in this country deserves it. That's what I'm saying. We haven't heard an imagine if my representative, Congresswoman Clark, the woman who I'm running against, got on the floor of Congress and said these things. She's a member of Congress. She can call a press conference with CNN, MSNBC, Fox ABC, CBS, everybody. Imagine if she used her voice to elevate the people in her district. She's silent. If you go to her government website, Clark.gov or whatever it is, you can see the last time she put out press releases on housing criminal justice healthcare was 2017. That was four years ago. There's never, her website had to not think about it. I can't, I don't have regular access to you because you work in Washington. So my way of reaching you would be either to go to your office or to go to your website to leave you a message. If I go to your website and you haven't said anything about the issues that are affecting me in four years during the midst of a housing crisis in the midst of a pandemic, I have to assume that you do not care because if these things aren't at the forefront of your mind they damn sure at the forefront of mind because I'm living them every day. One would have to assume you don't care. So she does not care. I'm left to conclude she does not give it there. Yeah, you know, it's sad that the folks who are running for Congress as insurgent candidates are doing more than their elected officials. Like we saw this all throughout the 2020 election. You were doing more, Adam Christensen in Florida, Donna Imum in Texas. Like I saw all of these candidates trying to distribute information to there would be constituents if they want about how to access PPP loans if they're a small business, if they haven't gotten their stimulus check, where to go, how to reach out, how to make sure you get that. It's just honestly, it's really frustrating that the party who in theory is supposed to be the party of the working class, which is the joke, but I mean the party who in theory should be the party of the working class. They're not looking out for their constituents and they're talking about these weird things like futurizing like, you know, the country and whatnot. And you know, I just, I don't understand how, well I guess I do understand, I just am shocked that they don't even try to pretend like they care. Like they don't care about the optics. We know that they're out of touch because they're elites and you know, they're in DC, they're in that bubble and the longer you stay in DC the more you probably get out of touch. But like you'd think that they at least think about the optics. They're, they just don't care at all. I do want to switch gears a little bit and I'm a little bit apprehensive to even ask this question because it's been incredibly divisive but I wanted to get your take on your strategy as a member of Congress. So there was a lot of controversy recently with members of the squad for refusing to support a floor vote on Medicare for all. And I just wanted to kind of get a sense of what your strategy would be in terms of democratic party leadership. Would you in your opinion be more outspoken and aggressive towards leadership in comparison with the squad? Like what's your take on all of this? It's basically relating to force-to-vote controversy. And for me, this comes down to a strategic disagreement. Like the squad, I wanted them to force a floor vote on Medicare for all, but they didn't. That just, you know, that's a disagreement. But a lot of folks are using the squad's failure here as evidence that they're just like sellouts. And even in my interview with Senator Nina Turner because she said, you know, we have to give the squad a chance and that they're not sellouts. Like she was then labeled a sellout. And so I don't, you don't have to comment on like the controversy and whatnot because it's just overly stupid and divisive. And I think it's mostly more online people. But in terms of like what you do in Congress, the democratic party establishment is going to try to crush you. They're going to try to marginalize you in Congress. What do you think your relationship will be? Like do you plan to be more antagonistic? Give us a sense of like how you'll respond to the democratic party establishment. How respond? You said they're gonna try to crush me. Listen here. I'm a 34 year old six foot eight black man who was the son of immigrants living in America. America has tried to crush me since I was born. I can walk out of the door that they didn't get shot by a trigger happy cop. So worrying about somebody trying to crush me doesn't scare me one single bit. I'm not going to Washington to make friends. I'm going to Washington to solve problems. I don't give a damn if I'm blessed enough to win. If I serve one term and help better the people's life in this district, then my mission is accomplished, mission accomplished. I am not going there to try to rub elbows with the rich or the elite or get name recognition or a book deal or goddamn podcast that is not who I am. That is not what I am going for. I am going there to fight. I just told you it's not time to capitulate. It's not time to beg or to hope or pray. We have to be audacious. We have to demand it. The times call for it. You know what? This middle of the road politics, this centrist politics gets us. It gets us separate but equal, which was never equal. Middle of the road politics gets us three fist claws that said I was half a person as a black man. Middle of the road clause gets us that loving be the genuine. You can't marry a black woman. If you can, you just gotta move out of states. All of these things are those middle of the road politics. I don't play that. I'm going there with a clear vision and a clear thought of mine to make people's lives in this district better. And in doing so, I will be making people's lives across this country better because central Brooklyn where I'm running is a melting pot. You can walk down the street and run into 50 different nations walking down Flatbush Avenue. That's how diverse this district is. So I know if I'm standing up for a person in Crown Heights or Flatbush or East Flatbush, I'm standing up for the person in Alabama. I'm standing up for the person in Tennessee in Georgia and PA. I'm standing up for that hard work in person. Now, if there's come time to force the vote, you damn right. We should have forced the vote. If I was there, I would have been that guy standing there telling you we need to force the vote. What are you going to say to me? What is the downside of fighting for people in my community? I don't get a committee assignment. I'm not going there for that. I don't get a committee assignment. You gotta bring in a certain amount of money and do all this stuff. Okay, good. Cool. You get that? If I get one, thank you, God bless. But if I don't get one, cool. I still have to represent the people who sent me here to Washington to fight for them. And that's what I plan to do. So I've been shot, I've been blown up, all that stuff when my time in Iraq and Afghanistan. What are they going to do to me? What are they going to do or say to me that I hadn't already been done or said to me in my life? Yeah, I love your answer there because I think that, and here's what I took away from the force the vote stuff. I don't agree with the fraud squad stuff, but what I do think is logical is that it's not enough to just have the right policy positions because we now have members in Congress who have the correct policy positions and that's why I love the squad. The problem, however, is that we do need people who are more blunt, who are willing to actually agitate in Congress and stand up to the Democratic Party leadership who are obstacles to progress. And you saying that is exactly what I wanna hear and it's what I think a lot of people wanna hear. We already know every single policy, you agree with us, but in terms of like how you fight, that really is important. So like for you to say I'm gonna go there not to make friends and if I have to make enemies, that's fine, I think that's really reassuring because now we're kind of trying to suss out like which people are running for Congress because they have the right ideas and have the right methods to fight to get them accomplished. And I love your answer there. I wanted to also talk to you about issues that don't get taken very seriously. So we just had the hearing on HR 40 which is the reparations bill. And I think Corey Bush is maybe the only member of Congress who's really talking directly about reparations. This is something that I feel like there's a couple of issues in the leftist circles even not just liberals, but that leftists are bad with that. I'd say it's trans issues and it's reparations. These are the two issues that I feel like people are too afraid to be bold when it comes to this issue. So as a member of Congress, how would you advance these issues in particular reparations which is now finally getting hearings which in and of itself, that's really like, that's amazing. But I think that Tim Black put it best in a video. Like he said, he felt like these hearings, like it was a joke, like it was just lip service. It was a pat on the head. I'm paraphrasing him of course and that it wasn't taken seriously. So how do we actually get members of Congress to take these issues seriously and not just say, you know, or signal support to play cake, you know, members of the trans community and the black community. Because I feel like these issues, even though we're starting to talk about it which is an improvement, like I wanna actually see real action. So what do you think we can do to advance these issues and also convince leftists who in theory should be the most vocal about reparations and trans rights, but don't seem to be. Like what is your take on all of this? It's kind of a loaded question, but. No, not really. I mean, listen, I, listen, and this is crazy that we're having this conversation. I talked to my dad this morning I told you and he was talking about his grandmother, my great-grandmother. And he told me when she was born in Jamaica and I was like, wait a minute. She was a slave. He was like, yes, she was, my great-grandmother died when she was like 97. So she was born in the 1800s because my dad was born in the 40s. And my great-grandmother was a slave. My mother left Pasagulla, Mississippi. Her and my grandmother on my mother's side were sharecroppers in rural Mississippi. She left with my grandmother in 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated. So the Jim Crow South that we see about in documentaries and hear about in movies. My mother was 10 years old when she left that. She was spit on as a little girl. She couldn't go to certain places in town. She couldn't go out after dark. She worked to segregated schools. So I don't need another hearing or another study. I can walk out of my front door and see the effects of whatever study you're gonna talk about in Congress. I don't need another hearing to know that black people in this country are suffering because for 400 years, we have been oppressed by our own government. The way we get more eyes to this is to have more people talking about it and credit to Cori Bush that she is a member of Congress talking about it because HR 40 is just some obscure bill that people like you and me have the luxury of knowing because we're in the realm of politics. But if you're not in the realm of politics, what the hell does HR 40 mean to you? When your member of Congress comes back and holds town halls on reparations, that's how we move the needle forward. When your member of Congress goes on TV and vociferously demands reparations for black people in this country, that's how we move the ball forward. When your member of Congress is putting forth bill after bill after bill after bill with reparations in it. That's how we move the needle forward. We elect more black people to Congress who aren't millionaires, who don't come from the corporate class, who don't come from the elite class. That's how we move reparations forward. My father, I just told you is Jamaican. My last name is James. James is a British last name. That is not an African last name. So my father's people were slaves. My mother and grandmother were sharecroppers. Their last name, my mother's maiden name is Brown. That is not an African name. That was her slave master's name. And James was my father's slave master's name. I am a product of that wickedness. I am the seventh generation of crimes committed. And if we truly want to ever have equality in this country, we need more people who look like me, who come from the lineage of those descended slaves to stand up and demand that America make right the wrongs of the last 400 years. We have a member of Congress who was a black woman in a district that's 50% African American, mostly Caribbean, and isn't saying a damn thing about reparations, which is almost criminal in my opinion. That's how we move the ball forward on those things. Yeah, I don't understand how there's not greater urgency because it's not just like black Americans don't have a lot of wealth in this country. What little wealth they have is diminishing. So I just, I don't understand how we can ever have an equitable society without being serious and having a conversation about this. And also, getting left-wing allies to acknowledge the importance of this issue, that it's not just the social justice issue, it's an economic issue, it's a legal issue. It's an issue that I feel like everyone who's on the left, who's progressive, who's radical, should be on board with no questions asked. Every black history month, right? Every black representative in Congress should have been beating the drums about reparations this month. You wanna talk about black history and our contribution to this country, to American history. Well, let's talk about making right the wrongs of the last 400 years. Let's talk about that. The White House that Joe Biden is now in, when it was burnt down by the British, it was rebuilt by black slaves in this country. They rebuilt the seat of power in this damn country. And nobody wants to talk about that. No one wants to talk about making right the wrongs, making generations whole. Generational wealth wasn't just kept from us. It was stolen from us. Our language, our heritage, our culture, our religion, our even our identity was taken from us. And then you leave us to fend for ourselves. You make everything we do a crime with the black codes, first of all, with Jim Crow slavery, with the war on drugs, with the crime bill, and you don't see the harm that you have caused. We talk every year about 9-11, how we should never forget it. We talk about the Holocaust and how we should never forget it. Black people have had a 400-year Holocaust in this country, and it seems like everybody has forgotten it, except those are people like me or you who have time to think about it. And we have never been made whole from this. Communities were destroyed by Joseph R. Biden. That's why I wrote in Bernie Sanders. He gave us the crime bill, which was Ronald Reagan's war on drugs and Nixon's war on drugs cranked up to 11. That's what made the mandatory minimums. That's what made the harshest sentence crack. That's what literally took fathers out of homes and destroyed families, destroyed the nuclear family that Republicans love to talk about, the black people don't have a nuclear family. Well, why is that? Because a generation of men, an entire generation were put in jail and left to rot like grapes on the vine and America needs to atone for her sins and we can do that with government if we have people in government who actually wanna do that. Yeah, and I feel like there's a real opportunity here to get movement because Cori Bush, she's one of a few actual supporters of reparations. Like you have folks like Kamala Harris, who were during the primary, she would say, I support reparations, but when you ask her about it, it's not reparations. And Elizabeth Warren was doing the same thing as well. But Cori Bush is actually saying, I want real reparations. I mean, a check. And so if you actually get members of Congress, such as yourself and Nina Turner form this block, then that really can make a difference. And it's not a lot of members of Congress, but just having that spark that could ignite the flame is really important. So yeah, I'm so glad that you said this because everything that you're saying here is important. Like you can't pretend as if like the individuals who built the system are, their hands are clean. Like that's part of the issue with, I think like mainstream media in this country is that like, we can criticize the system in so far as we don't touch Democrats. We can't talk about Joe Biden and the hand that he played in building the system of mass incarceration. We can't talk about that. And I like that folks like you, folks like Nina Turner, anyone who ran for Congress in 2020, basically that I've brought on the show or most of them anyways, they're willing to call that out directly because if you can't address the elephant in the room, then you're not gonna address the root cause of the issue. And so- I'm running against the Democrat who's a black woman. But listen, like my grandmother who's really departed always said, all skin folks ain't kin folks. And just because you look like me doesn't mean you have my best interests at heart. We have to, if we're going to criticize the right, which they duly deserve, we damn sure have to get our house in order on the left because we're never, that's why I say I call Democrats, you know, low calorie Republicans because they do the same thing. Look at Joe Manchin. Joe Manchin is not a Democrat. No. Joe Manchin is literally a Republican who's running under the D name because it's easier for him to win than where he lives. Cause it was a Democratic district. He's not a Democrat. Everybody knows that. And there's dozens of them in our party who take this money. Nancy Pelosi is literally a Bush Republican. If you put her back in time right now, she is a Bush Republican. That is exactly what she is. She would be considered a moderate Republican. That's what she is. I'm willing to say that because look what she focuses her attention on. Think about this. Nancy Pelosi or the house voted to decriminalize marijuana months before Joe Biden got sworn in, right? That bill should have been on Joe Biden's desk, day one. Kamala Harris said she wanna make right the wrongs of sending people to jail for marijuana. We have the house. We have the Senate. Imagine how many people would not be in jail right now had Joe Biden signed that bill. There'd be people who've been arrested since he was taken office for marijuana who are sitting in jail who gonna sit there for two years waiting for a damn court date who would not be in the system right now if he had signed that bill to legalize marijuana. That bill should have been on his desk, day one. Why wasn't it? Why wasn't a bill you knew he was coming into office? Why wasn't the coronavirus relief package built on his desk, day one? Why wasn't all these things that we talking about on his desk, day one? It's because I looked at a tweet today, Joe Biden said those checks would go out immediately if Democrats took the Senate. He said immediately. I don't know his definition of immediate, but mine is, you know, post-haste, too with, right away. And it's been months since Democrats taking the house, January and February and the Senate. I mean, so why haven't those checks gone out? People are hurting. So the things we talk about on the right how ass backwards they are, and they need to be criticized for allowing white supremacists to store in the Capitol, we damn sure have to get our house in order on the left because we're doing a disservice to the people we say we care about if we're taking the same money from the same corporate interests. Yeah. You know, to me it's puzzling, like the level of incompetence that we've seen from the Democratic Party, it's not like surprising, but it even like is against their own self-interest, like as rational actors who presumably want to win reelection, you think that they do the bare minimum at least to make sure that they assure they will be victorious in 2022, 2024. But like to promise checks and use the word very, very clearly, immediately and then not get them out the door, a backtrack on it. And also he just Joe Biden abandoned his pledge to halt deportations for 100 days. He initially signed the executive order to do just that. And then a judge blocked it. And now all of a sudden it's been a complete change of policy. He could have stopped the deportations that were already scheduled to go through and just postpone them until after the situation was dealt with in the courts. And now it's like all of these things, I just, I don't get it. Like there's corruption, right? But corruption isn't the only thing. Like there has to be some level of common sense to where if you do these things, if you literally spit in the, well, not literally, if you figuratively spit in the eyes of your constituents and people who you just told you were going to give them something very specific, $2,000, that's bad. Like you're going to lose the next election. So I just, I don't even get like figuring out what goes through the heads of like the, the normal average corporate Democrats. I can't like it's perplexing on so many levels. I don't live in that space. I live in a space of reality. And I'm telling you, bro, if I could take this laptop and walk around the corner from my apartment, there is literally three or four food distribution centers right around the corner. I can walk a hundred yards, 300 feet, and go to a food distribution center. There's cars lined up every single day. People are hurting and they're still hurting. Listen, the moratorium on rent ends May 1st. Those bills are due. And this isn't a cancellation of rent. This is a moratorium on rent. So those landlords are going to want all those back months of rent. The bills are coming due and people are hurting, people are already hurting. We stand to have another two million homeless people evicted from their houses on May 1st if we don't do something about what's going on right now. And the quickest way for Republicans to retake the House, the Senate, and the White House, is for Democrats to go back on everything they said. Donald Trump was such a bad person that Democrats won. But people still want more from their government. And we don't even, it's not even want more, it's we deserve more. You know, I looked at my wife's tax return. My wife's got her W-2 in the mail the other day. And I looked at how much they take out for state tax, federal tax, and in New York City, you pay local tax. Thousands of dollars every year. And here we are arguing about a $2,000 check, a one-time $2,000 check. I don't know, I already gave Uncle Sam thousands of dollars. Thousands of dollars has come from my family to Uncle Sam. And here we are arguing about you giving me a little bit of that money back. You have no problem taking my money when you want to, Uncle Sam. But when we need it, that's when we hem and when we haul. And when we, oh, wait a minute, we gotta find it in the budget. You don't ask me what my budget is every month, when, or every paycheck, when that Social Security, that FICA, that Medicare, all of it comes out. You never say, hey, what's your budget? Can you afford it this month? Are you gonna be strapped for cash? You never ask that. But when hardworking people and poor people and people who are in dire situations need it, now it's all we gotta wait and see and we gotta run the numbers. That's the wrong answer. That is the wrong answer in my opinion. Anybody's estimation, that is the wrong answer. And we deserve a government that thinks like everyday people. See, because when you have people in there who've been career politicians their whole lives, who have come from the corporate sector where it's about chopping up numbers and hemming and hawing and not caring about the actual lives of people, then this is what you get. But when you have people who are organizers and activists who live these things every day, whose wife is a public school teacher, how could I not care about public education? How could I not care about criminal justice as a large black man? How could I not care about veterans' issues as a disabled veteran? How could I not care about immigration? My father still is not a citizen to this day. How could I not care about women's issues when I have sisters and a beautiful wife and a mother? How could I not care about these things? And that's what it means to elect everyday people to office because all of us are everyday people unless you're part of the elite. So if you put me in office, I'm working for you. I'm not working for the rich people but I don't know it. Yeah, yeah, and that's beautifully put. I want people to get into that mindset of thinking, okay, I gave the government money that's gonna be taken out of every single paycheck before I even see it. There's nothing I can do about that. But what I can do is demand that they use my money to actually benefit me, my community, my country. Maybe spending more on bombs, tax breaks for the rich, socialism for elites. Maybe we shouldn't be using my money for that. If people really took this stance, then I think they get a better perspective on how they're getting such a bad deal. So- This is the framework that I'm working from that people, members of Congress, the corporate wing is not even thinking. This is why I say you have to think as an organizer, you have to think like an activist because I think about things completely different than my member of Congress does, I guarantee you. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I would like to pick their brains or be a fly on the wall in a psychiatrist's session with members of Congress. I feel like rich people are sociopaths, and I don't want to get into the psychoanalyzing them, but the way that they behave is so bizarre to me, like I want to study them. We're filming this interview on a day when Mitt Romney proposed a $10 an hour minimum wage. This is a man who literally had an elevator in his mansion for his cars. For his cars. For his cars. Yeah, I saw that. I just read that story before I hit him in Tom Cotton. I was like, this additionist and bank capital millionaire. Mitt Romney, who's worth a quarter billion dollars, is like, hey, you guys deserve $10 by 2025. I was like, bro, if you talk about not figuratively spitting or figuratively, that's literally spitting in my face. Bro, spitting in my face would do less harm than that would. Right? It's like insulting. I can wipe that off. If you don't give me a, you telling me I'm only worth $10 by 2025? Spitting in my face would do less harm to me. This coming from the man who's worth a quarter billion dollars. This is what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah. I just got to wonder, like, okay, after you've made that $100 million threshold, like you've bought your mansion, you've got a nice, like sweet car elevator in your mansion, you've got a yacht, you have, I'm sure, you know, multiple sports cars. What do you do then with all of that? Like, what do you do? Like, it's, you've accomplished everything. You've won it live. Like, you don't need that much money. It's just, these people are so out of touch. It drives me nuts. But I don't want to take up too much of your time. So I do want to ask you, from my viewers, what do you need from them? What do you need from us? How do we make you successful? Because obviously having you in Congress would be a game changer. So what do we do to make this happen? Well, first of all, before we end this, I want to say thank you for having me on. You were literally the first person in my last cycle to give me an interview. Oh, you're kidding. Yeah, first person to reach out and say, hey, let's do an interview. And I was like, oh, I was ecstatic because I was like, wow, somebody wants to interview me and hear me talk about my race. So thank you for that. And thank you for always continuing to reach out to have me on. What folks can do. Oh, thank you for running. No, they can do a multitude of things. I know everybody's hurting right now during the pandemic. We need donations. If you can't donate, by all means, trust me, that is not a problem. I understand, because I'm broke just like you. But we need, if you can spare $5 or $10 or $27, you can go to isaafrecongers.com and donate on the act bloop. If you can't afford $27, if you can make it a $3 reoccurring donation, that's $3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18. That's months of $3. That equals $27. That would help because every dollar is a door hanger we can put on somebody's door. They can follow me on social media on Twitter, on Instagram, because I share stuff every single day and getting the message out, six degrees of separation, you never know who will see the message and who will get behind us to support us. That's how we built our following from no people to 20,000 people. That's how we built our following from no volunteers to 200 volunteers, from no votes to 10,000 votes, is by everybody being that megaphone. So you can like, follow, share, retweet, all that stuff to help get the message out there. If you live in New York City, if you live in Brooklyn, you can sign up for the email list so you can come knock a door with me, so you can hand out some flyers with me, so you can talk to people and see that, just cause I'm wearing a sport coat, don't mean I'm elite, I'm just wearing this for the day's interview. I'm just a regular, everyday guy like you and you can help me move that message forward cause this is a grassroots campaign and it takes everybody to put that back to the wheel to get over the hump because my opponent last cycle raised a million and a half dollars. If we raised that much, we would have won but we didn't raise that much. So I'm asking for volunteers, I'm asking for people to help spread the message, I'm asking for donations. Those three things right there and we're starting early. You see our election is not till June of 2022 but we're starting early right now. So come June or come January of next year, we're sitting on $100,000 in our campaign account instead of $10,000 in our campaign account and then we have to gear up for the fight. Yeah, absolutely. So you can get involved. There'll be links down in the description box if you're listening via audio. Of course, tell us what the website is. It's Isaiah for Congress, I-S-I-A-H-F-O-R Congress.com. Same Twitter handle, same Instagram handle, same Facebook handle. Okay, perfect. We'll also have everything up on the screen for folks. I'm sure I'll have you on again. It's more than a year until the election so we'll touch bases again. I'm so glad that you're running again. Once you told me that you were running, I was ecstatic because this is one of those races where it's like, okay, you're gonna win. So you just gotta do it again one more time and you're gonna win this time because you have the right strategy. I hope I am not blessed to win because like I said, a lot of folks, and this is the thing, I let people in on the inside of politics. After I finished my race last time, I guess I impressed a lot of people. People reached out to me with podcast offers and TV show offers and all that stuff. And I kind of took it, I never ran to do that. I don't want a podcast. That's not what I ran for. I didn't run for cause to live. I ran to actually make a difference in people's lives. You know what I mean? So that's why I'm running again now because I mean, what we talked about here is just a small microcosm of all the issues that we didn't get the climate change. We didn't really get the justice reform, housing, health care, education. We didn't get any of that stuff. We spent an hour talking about two or three issues. So just imagine how much stuff needs to get done that people aren't talking about. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, that's such a great point. Well, thank you so much, Isaiah. Of course, we'll be in touch. We'll be following your campaign very closely. When you launch merch, let me know so I can rock an Isaiah James shirt on the show. We got some merch. We got some stuff coming this, oh man. Just wait, wait. T.C. The Post is in the T-shirts and stuff. It's gonna be, everybody just saw that movie, Judas and the Black Messiah. I am Bobby Seal. I'm UEP Newton. I'm those guys. I'm more than Malcolm X, man. So I'm not that aggressive progressive. I have no reason to be scared. So that's who I am and that's why I'm running. I love it. I love it. All right, well, you take care. Have a great day. We will continue to follow your campaign. Thank you so much. Well, that's everything. Thank you so much for tuning in if you've made it this far. As usual, I wanna thank everyone who supports the show. The Patreon, PayPal, YouTube memberships. You all are absolutely crucial to our existence. You help us not just to survive but thrive as well. And I absolutely value each and every single one of you. That is all that I have. So I will see you all next week. Yeah, I'm Mike Figueroa. This has been The Humanist Report. Have a great week, guys. You know, you know this, you know this thing, thing. You're getting nervous, man, man.