Friday afternoon, the House narrowly passed a defense bill full of Republican culture war priorities. Hopeful efforts earlier in the week to rein in U.S. foreign policy fizzled out by week’s end, including an amendment to block the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine and other countries. On this week’s Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, and The Intercept’s Deputy Editor Nausicaa Renner to discuss how a bipartisan bill to prevent the Biden administration from sending cluster bombs to Ukraine went from gaining momentum to being undermined by another bill introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

Transcript coming soon.

The post Cluster Bomb Fight in the House appeared first on The Intercept.

Centrist and right-wing economists continue to advocate for laying off workers and engineering a recession to address inflation. But why not set price controls instead? This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by James K. Galbraith, a professor of government and business relations at the University of Texas at Austin. Galbraith has an extensive history of working in government, including as executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress and an economist for the House Banking Committee. Galbraith and Grim discuss the implementation of price controls by the U.S. government, how it brings down prices, how the Biden administration has used it and could use it more, and how Galbraith’s father — economist and politician John Kenneth Galbraith — was instrumental in setting price controls during World War II.

[Deconstructed intro theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to an on-the-road edition of Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

At the very end of 2021, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Isabella Weber published a short op-ed in The Guardian that surprised her, and everybody else, by going viral in a very bad way.

The leading lights in her field annihilated her for it. Paul Krugman called her “truly stupid,” and lesser-known figures called her much worse. Her crime had been to strike at the heart of free market economic orthodoxy. Weber suggested policymakers should learn from the past and do something directly about soaring prices, rather than trying roundabout solutions like slowing down the entire economy and engineering layoffs.

But the idea that the government could ever have any direct say in setting prices raises profound questions about the nature of the economy, and whether it falls properly within the sphere of democratic control, or whether it lives outside of it, like some other worldly force that we can only communicate within indirectly. Yet, that’s not how it really works.

So, when Weber raised the example of American policy in the 1940s — which was guided by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith — she had to be ridiculed, rather than treated seriously. During the Roosevelt administration, Galbraith was a top official at the Office of Price Administration, which was in charge of, yes, setting prices.

The idea Weber put forward was anything but radical. Here’s what she wrote in The Guardian: “Today, economists are divided into two camps on the inflation question: Team Transitory argues we ought to not worry about inflation, since it will soon go away. Team Stagflation urges for fiscal restraint and a raise in interest rates.

“But there is a third option,” she writes. “The government could target the specific prices that drive inflation instead of moving to austerity, which risks a recession. To use a metaphor,” she went on, “if your house is on fire, you would not want to wait until the fire eventually dies out. Neither do you wish to destroy the house by flooding it. A skillful firefighter extinguishes the fire where it is burning to prevent contagion and save the house. History teaches us that such a targeted approach is also possible for price increases.”

Now, it’s been quite a journey for Weber since that pile on. Much of what she argued has been proven to be correct and, two years later, she’s now a sought-after advisor by major industrial economies.

She was recently the subject of a profile by reporter Zach Carter in The New Yorker, and her critics, meanwhile, have been made to look foolish. Larry Summers, for instance, has consistently attacked the Biden administration for too much spending, which he says caused inflation, arguing that the Fed needed to heavily raise interest rates in order to get unemployment up to something like six percent.

Here’s one appearance he made on Bloomberg, where he called for millions of people to be thrown out of work. Now, since this is an audio-only podcast, you can’t see that he did this interview while literally on an island getaway, with the ocean as his backdrop.

Bloomberg Host: Doesn’t the Fed, Larry, have to push people out of jobs? I mean, right now, everyone is earning money, and able to pay up as much as they need to for goods and services. But, in order to bring inflation down, they’re going to need unemployment at four-and-a-half, five, five-and-a-half percent. I don’t know what NAIRU is right now, but maybe you have a view. Is that going to bring a political backlash?

Larry Summers: Matt, my guess is that things are much less good than the Fed has supposed. My estimate would be that the NAIRU is now near five percent. I don’t see how you can fail to think that the NAIRU has risen substantially when you look at how much there’s been an increase in vacancies at a given unemployment rate — what economists call “the beverage curve” — when you look at the big increases in quit rates that we’ve seen, when you look at wage behavior.

And I add all that up and I see a difficult situation where I think that, to start bringing down inflation, we’re going to need to get above the NAIRU; that’s probably somewhere in the five percent range. And I think we do have to achieve some meaningful amount of disinflation. So, I’ve said that I’d be surprised if we get to the two percent inflation target without an unemployment rate that approaches or exceeds six percent.

RG: There’s a tiny bit of jargon in this clip, but it should be understandable. When the Bloomberg host refers to NAIRU, he’s talking about the concept of the non-accelerated inflation rate of unemployment. That means that if unemployment is below what we think is the NAIRU, we will have inflation. The theory goes, if the true NAIRU is five percent, then we have to have at least five percent unemployment to avoid inflation.

The other jargon in there is the target of two percent inflation. That means that the Fed is trying to manage the inflation rate, so it hovers right at two percent — not below and not above — and the Larry Summers tool to get there is to try to guess what the NAIRU is and push unemployment above that level.

It just so happens that his guess was wildly too high of a number, but that’s OK for big corporations who benefit from higher unemployment, because they can then pay lower wages, hire more easily, and break unions. So, what he’s framing here as an academic dispute is, in reality, class war. The unemployment rate today is just 3.7 percent, yet inflation is falling fast. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Now, one economist who did defend Weber at the time was the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, economist James Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austin. I first met James back when he was advising House Democrats on how to respond to the great financial crisis in 2008. They didn’t take his advice, and we all paid the price.

Now, as some of you already know, during the pandemic, when they closed DC schools, we moved our family up to southern Vermont where public schools were still open in person. It was the best decision we could have made. And, coincidentally, it turned out that James was, by Vermont standards, one of our neighbors.

We came back up here for a visit recently, and recorded the episode on his porch at the home he grew up in, and where his dad wrote some of the most influential economic works of the mid-20^th century. Galbraith’s ideas became the target of the neoliberal counterrevolution launched by Milton Friedman, which is sadly, in many ways, still dominant today.

Here’s my interview with James Galbraith.

RG: How did your father wind up here? I mean, you told me this story once, but I’d love to hear that again.

James Galbraith: Well, this was 1947, and he was just returning, I guess, to Cambridge at that point — no, he was still in New York. They were looking for a summer place, came up to, to Newfane, were staying at the inn which, half of the building was also the jail. And as far as I know, he wandered up the hill on the basis of somebody’s recommendation, saw this house and property, and bought it, without having notified my mother that he was [doing that].

RG: As if he’d gone off to get eggs.

JG: Sort of, yes. And my mother came up and eventually looked at it. She noted in her diary that it was a Charles Adams landscape, because the meadows were very unlike what you see now. They were basically scrub, the forests were far from being mature, the farming had been abandoned, I don’t know, some decades previously. But they were not, the forests were not fully grown up.

And, over the front meadow, you could see the beavers had arrived relatively recently, and so the beaver swamps were full of dead trees.

RG: And when was this house first built?

JG: Parts of it were built in — the year we have is 1776, which I think is accurate. But then it was expanded, until the last part, which is the kitchen, was probably built in the 1920s.

RG: You had mentioned it ties into Revolutionary War history. Correct me if I’m wrong, it was something about the way that, when they cleared some of these forests for farmland, it produced a population boom, that then was hitting its stride right around the time that…

JG: Yes, it’s interesting. We’re on a hilltop here, and the original settlement was on the hilltop, so this is part of the original settlement. At the time, the forests were entirely cleared, and they were cleared from the hills down because the trees were thinner. The soil was very bad, but the trees were thinner; those two things went together. But it made it possible to clear out a patch and get a crop in, [in] a short period of time, the short season.

And as the settlements, which are all around here — you see stone fences, and old roads, and cellar holes that have long since been abandoned — but as the settlements became denser, they moved down the hills, and encountered thicker trees, but better soil. And the result of that was, effectively, increasing returns in agriculture, and that meant that the population expanded very rapidly.

So, that explains why you had a crowd of teenagers that were available in 1777 to go off.

RG: The Green Mountain Boys.

JG: The Green Mountain Boys, yeah.

RG: Well, thanks for inviting Deconstructed out here for this road show, it’s very much appreciated. And it couldn’t be a more appropriate place, because we want to talk about the history of economics, economic thought, particularly as it relates to your criticism of the way that economists had been looking at inflation during the pandemic and in its aftermath.

And they seem to have been, rather humiliatingly, been shown to be wrong in their approach.

JG: Not for the first time, but yes.

RG: Not for the first time. Pretty recently you had people like Larry Summers and Jason Furman saying, we’re going to need years and years and years of high unemployment in order to tame inflation. That did not prove to be the case. So, what did they get wrong from your perspective? What’s the most important thing that they missed?

JG: Well, I’m a contemporary of Larry Summers, and when we were coming through graduate school, the predominant view of inflation was essentially that created and published in 1960 by Larry’s uncle Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow. It was a relationship between inflation and unemployment. It basically said, the problem of inflation is a problem of excessively tight labor markets and excessive demand. And then, that view was modified in the 1970s to become even more rigid to the idea that the economy was an extremely unstable thing and, if the unemployment rate ever got a little bit too low, inflation would tend to take off and accelerate.

So, these views became deeply embedded amongst academic orthodox economists, and in the policy space as well. They tended to override the alternative tradition, which looks at specific effects on costs, and particularly the shocks, the effects of wars, the effects of energy shocks that tend to go through the price system. So you have these two competing views, but the one which was based on, let’s call it, macroeconomics, was the one that my generation of economists absorbed.

And that’s what I think was reflected in the way in which Larry Summers, Jason Furman, Ken Rogoff, and others, attacked this particular problem. So, they saw an increase in prices, which basically originated in 2021 and, preceding that, there had been a substantial transfer of funds from the government to the household sector. And they lined up these two things and said, OK, we now have a problem of accelerating and persistent inflation. And that just turned out to be a description of events based on a false premise.

What was actually happening was a series of, if you want to call them “shocks” to the price structure, in energy, in the supply chain, plus some things which are essentially statistical artifacts. And those things, although they take some time to work through the system, do work through the system, and they don’t produce a sustained inflationary process.

That doesn’t mean that the shocks can’t happen again; that’s possible. But it does mean that the analysis that this was being driven by the Covid income support programs, or by the infrastructure investment programs that were enacted early in the Biden administration, is not an accurate analysis.

RG: And so, if that’s not an accurate analysis, that raises some interesting questions about what is.

There’s a recent article by a mutual friend of ours, Zach Carter, in The New Yorker about the economist Isabella Weber and her efforts to get people to think about price and price controls. In the middle of all of this analysis — I guess it was 2021 or so — she suggested gently in public that maybe one solution ought to be, let’s think about controlling prices. If we don’t like what prices are doing, let’s control prices. And she was tarred and feathered, academically abused in ways that are just stunning to people, I think, who are outside the profession.

Paul Krugman, I think, has since apologized but, you know, practically wished death on her. Just an extraordinarily bizarre and over-the-top response. What was your reaction at that time, and what point is she making?

JG: Well, first of all, let me say a word about it: Isabella Weber is quite an extraordinary young economist. She’s German, originally. Her expertise, the field in which she made her breakthrough contribution is actually the policy debates in China in the 1980s, essentially. She did a great deal of field work, which is very unusual in economics, to develop a deep understanding of why China had succeeded by avoiding the mistakes that were made, for example, in the Russian Federation with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the other post-Soviet states.

Part of her analysis drew on the fact, first of all, that, in the long history of China, the stabilization of basic prices has been a major source of stability for the state, going back to classical imperial times, thousands of years. And further, in the modern period, and particularly in the early years after Mao, they maintained a system of price discipline, some of which was drawn by their study of the American experience in World War II, something which I also became familiar with in my time, working in China in the 1990s. This, in fact, was a period that Chinese policymakers or policy implementers were very familiar with.

RG: I just want to underline that. So, Chinese reformers, post-Mao, studied U.S. policy during World War II, as they were thinking about…

JG: I think they were familiar with it all the way through. One has to remember that many people who guided Chinese economic development, even in the revolutionary period, came back from the United States. This was something that they had paid especially close attention to.

So all of this suggests that, in a large, very important part of the world, let’s just say the approach to price stabilization was very different from what it was in the United States, and the results were not bad. One might argue, in fact, that the Chinese were too strict on prices, and there’s some interesting stories in Isabella’s book on this. But they, nevertheless, had deployed, let’s just say, strategic oversight over core prices as a continuing part of their policy.

So, it was not a stretch for Isabella to write in The Guardian that the experience of the United States in the Second World War was relevant to what we were going through. This was something she had a very professional, and thorough grasp, of that history, she had studied it very carefully. And so she was, in a sense, an authority, and that’s, again, very rare, because there are very few professional economists in the United States who know anything about this.

So, that, then, to her enormous surprise, generated this extremely vicious reaction. Certainly, Paul Krugman’s attack was really a blow, but there were also many others who joined in the great pile-on, and it showed that she had touched a very raw nerve.

What did I do? I stepped up to try and give her such assistance as I could, both publicly and privately. And, you know, she was able to withstand what was a brutal assault on an untenured professor who’s — she was up for promotion. She has since been promoted, so that issue has resolved. But, certainly, her career was, at least briefly, under a substantial threat.

RG: And her journey from being piled on to the top of the pile is a fascinating one, because she’s now in a position where she’s helping to make policy. But, before we get to that: nobody’s in a better position, really, to talk about that World War II experience than you. Your dad was the leader of implementing this policy.

So, what is it that Weber is looking back to, when she says that we ought to look at American policy in World War II?

JG: Well, at the start of the Second World War, there was an agency called the Office of Price Administration, originally “Price Administration and Civilian Supply,” which my father became the deputy director [of] prices. And that gave him authority, essentially, over every price and wage in the United States.

From May of 1942, this was under something called the General Maximum Price Regulation, and the basic way it worked was that there was a base of price set in March of ’42 and, to go above that price, you had to have the approval of the OPA, which then meant that people had to bring a case to the agency, which rapidly expanded to be about, I think, about 17,000 people. And then they quickly started moving to create schedules, so that they didn’t have to review every case on an ad hoc basis.

And that method for keeping prices under control was reasonably successful. It was replaced in May of 1943 with what was called the “hold-the-line order” that basically froze all prices until the end of the war, and that held up until price controls were abolished in 1946.

So, this was a period in which, given the extraordinary pressure that the wartime demand placed on the economy — total spending, GDP doubled, GNP doubled in the four years, and most of that increase was for things that could not be consumed because it’s military needs. So there was a lot of income that people had that they could not spend and, in order to prevent them from, or discourage them from, hoarding and buying commodities, they had to have confidence that prices were not going to rise, and that’s what OPA provided.

So, it worked in two ways. One was to physically restrain the increase of prices of core commodities, and the other was to give people confidence that, if they bought Series E bonds, Victory bonds at a two percent interest rate, that the purchasing power of those bonds would hold up, so that they would then have something, a financial asset that would serve them into the 1950s and 1960s.

And that was, between those two aspects of the policy, a very successful approach to the most dangerous kind of inflation, which is wartime inflation. [It] tends to be very demoralizing and very destabilizing, particularly if you have some national purpose that needs to be achieved, which is the case in a war.

[Deconstructed mid-show theme music.]

RG: At a recent talk, I think it was at the FDR Library?

JG: Yes, I gave a talk on this at the FDR Library.

RG: You mentioned there that another effect that it had — and maybe this wasn’t the intended effect, but it was, to me, a feature of it — that if you are a business owner or an investor and you’re looking to maximize your profits, one way you can do that is by driving up your price and just charging more for your product. If you’re prevented from doing that, then your two options are to increase your productivity and increase your volume, which then produces actual genuine economic activity and a benefit for the society, rather than simply marking up your prices and taking an extra profit margin.

And so, it feels like that has a lot of relevance today, because we’ve heard so much talk about greedflation and its role in driving up prices, but it’s not as if greedflation’s gone away. I would imagine the margins that these businesses are able to capture now, they’re going to try to seize those as long as they possibly can.

And so, what types of price controls are possible now, and can you move through the system, that have a similar function to what happened during the OPA? What parts of it couldn’t be replicated?

You mentioned in your talk that there were these civilian boards, like it was the most democratic kind of economy that you could imagine. That if a business owner wanted to raise their prices, they had to go to the local version of a town council, make their case, and then people would decide.

JG: Actually, the civilian boards, which were in effect from ’43 to ’46, were essentially to enforce the hold-the-line order. So, they were effectively to provide an oversight to prevent, they didn’t have authority, so far as I understand, to authorize price increases. They simply were there to supervise…

RG: To make sure that they weren’t going up.

JG: In the first year, the year my father was responsible, there was some leeway you could come to the OPA, so there’s a difference in these two periods.

But, to get back to your question, yes. This effect of price control on incentives-facing business was very well understood at OPA in the 1940s, no question about that. They had worked out…

RG: It’s fairly straightforward.

JG: It’s an artifact of what we call the “economics of imperfect competition.” Once you understand the way businesses actually function, this was both obvious and clear from the way in which businesses did react. They may have pressed, tried to press for price increases, but when they were denied, they knew that they could make money by increasing their volume on relatively small margins.

Now, the situation in the modern time and, particularly, in the last 30 years, when there has been essentially very little to no price pressure, is that most businesses and big distributors, they tend to behave pretty well with respect to prices. They like to have stable prices; they recognize that’s good customer relations. And, so long as they’re making a decent margin, they don’t, most of them do not, most of the time, constantly press to get the highest price. And they recognize that, if they do, they’re going to lose goodwill, and they may, if they have a competitor, they may lose market share. So, that’s the normal situation, most businesses behave that way most of the time.

But, when you get a shock to the system, and particularly a shock to costs — which is what happened in 2021, with the supply chain disruptions and with the energy price jumps — then things become uncertain for businesses. And, of course, they react to that, if they can, by raising margins. My margin is your cost, so that has effects through the system. And it becomes, then, a situation in which they, if you like, the basic psychology changes, and businesses say — and, you know, I’m not actually faulting them — they say, we really need to take the largest margin, because the other guy’s doing the same thing. And if we don’t, then we are going to be caught out, and we’re going to lose market valuation, we’re going to lose investors and profitability.

And so, what was a generally stable psychology becomes an unstable one.

RG: Which answers the question that people have of, well, greed is constant, so why would it be different now?

JG: Yeah, exactly. And that’s the one piece of this puzzle which has an element of persistence to it, and the one piece that the mainstream economists don’t want to talk about. But if you look into the sources of the recent inflation, you can see a very large share of it is, in fact, increased profit margins, and increased corporate profits.

So, a control mechanism which damps that behavior gets people back onto a more stable track, and that’s the virtue of that idea in the present circumstances.

RG: And what would that look like? I know Weber is now working with Germany and some other places. What does a control mechanism look like beyond the most obvious blunt measure of, you know, Kamala Harris telling us what the prices of milk are.

JG: And that’s, of course, a good question, for which I don’t have a comprehensive answer worked out. But you do look at, you might focus on profit margins, you might focus on core costs. What you want to do, though, is, essentially, try to move people back toward a base period and hold them there, making adjustments as you move along. It requires having an autonomous authority in the government which is not under the control of the lobbies and, therefore, not under control of, let’s say, members of Congress, who are controlled by lobbies.

RG: Like a federal reserve, but for prices?

JG: Well, yeah. Except, I think the Federal Reserve is, in fact, essentially a servant of a particular sector of the economy. This was the feature of the Office of Price Administration, was that it was strongly autonomous. It was run by people who were public servants to the core. My father certainly fit that category, but his boss Leon Henderson was, these were people who were not in the business of catering to lobbyists or self-enrichment.

RG: Now, I think when a lot of people think of price controls, the image that comes to their mind is of a farmer out in the Midwest somewhere, dumping a bunch of milk out, and complaining to the local news that milk prices are so low that it costs him more to just ship the milk. And so, he is just going to dump it, or they’re going to let the crops just go fallow, otherwise.

What’s the response to that kind of fear that people have?

JG: Well, that’s an image that, actually, I associate with the early years of the Great Depression, when agricultural prices fell so low that the orange growers of southern California were turning over their harvests, and dumping kerosene on them, and burning them. And, again, yes, you say, milk poured out on the ground.

The object of a successful program of price control is to keep people in business, to make sure that they can, in fact, sell their product, but that they sell it at a modest but sustainable margin. And so, you can, in fact, set up agricultural purchasing boards, which will ensure that there is a market for agricultural commodities, and avoid that problem.

Sure, anything can be maladministered, anything can be screwed up, but the point is that the situation that we have now has a certain instability to it, and a program of strategic intervention could be a useful way of reducing that instability.

RG: Can you talk a little bit about the way that price has come to be understood by the mainstream economics profession? And the idea that price could be under democratic control really was, as far as I understand it, the real battle that was fought in the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s, but has vanished as a battle? It is now just kind of assumed that that is off the board, that these are matters of physics, rather than matters of laws.

JG: No, it’s not an unreasonable interpretation of that course of economic thinking, to say that the experience of price control and of wage price guidepost — which continued up until, well, really up until the first days of Reagan’s administration in 1981, when the last vestige was abolished, the Council on Wage and Price Stability in the White House — that the idea that the price mechanism, freely adjusting prices, is the core of a well-functioning and efficient economy was, in a sense, aimed at demolishing those structures and removing them from the sphere of legitimate discussion, and were very successful in doing that.

But the reality is, first of all, that no modern economy, certainly, and I doubt that any economy, actually, even going back to classical times, any real-world economy has ever actually functioned that way. And the assumptions required, even in theory, to make a freely price-adjusting economy into an efficient system are assumptions which basically violate it. They’re completely unconnected to the world in which we actually live. They rest on the notion of so-called “perfect competition,” in which every business is a very small operation competing with many other identically situated very small businesses, to supply equally disorganized, vast numbers of independent households, and that’s not the way the world is organized. In fact, practically every major line of activity is organized through structures in which a relatively small number of major enterprises are involved.

The realization in the 20th century that you could, in fact, control prices, was based on the fact that there were large organizations that were already controlling them, so you simply shifted some of the authority to an institution that was serving public purpose, rather than relying on the good behavior of individual enterprises.

RG: And, despite what feels like the complete victory of the kind of Milton Friedman view of prices, it does actually feel like there are still assumptions embedded in us as people that price controls are important. And what I’m thinking of is Biden’s use of the strategic petroleum reserve. That that was, very directly, a White House effort to control prices.

JG: Absolutely, absolutely. And it was a successful effort. They were faced with a major spike in oil prices, which followed a major slump in oil prices. And what happened in the slump in 2020, among other things, was that the price of oil properties — for example, in the Permian Basin — fell to very low levels, which meant that they were a very good bargain for private equity and others to move in and take control.

Those entities, their behavioral pattern, their focus, is on shareholder return. They’re not out to maximize production, they’re out there to increase the return to their investors; you could read about this in the press in Texas, in the oil country.

When demand recovered, they had a plan for increasing production, but it was not to increase production to meet the demand, but something below that, and allow the price to rise dramatically, which is what it did. And the effect of that was that on the barrels that you were producing, you enjoyed a very healthy windfall. The White House, obviously aware of this process, stepped in, with releasing from the strategic reserve, and that then caused a peak and a decline in the price of oil.

The price of gasoline, which is what ends up in the Consumer Price Index, follows that process with a lag. That’s the price which, of course, is politically sensitive. That’s what people see at the pump.

RG: Are there other examples of that, that an administration could handle? Because it feels like an a-ha moment for a White House to say, oh wait, it is politically popular to control prices. We can control prices. We’re going to be punished. Because in a lot of the political debate you hear Republicans attacking Biden for the price of eggs, or the price of this, that, or the other thing. But you never hear them suggest what they’re going to do. Like, if they get into power.

JG: Well, there were a range of things in the supply chain that were affected by the pandemic, obviously. The delays in the buildup and congestion at Long Beach and Los Angeles for a certain period of time were a factor driving up shipping costs and delivery costs. And, again, the administration did have people working on that problem, which eventually gets smoothed out. So, yes. I think that over a spectrum of specific interventions, you can have an effect.

Another area was with the —which I think was simply resolved over time — was the shortage of semiconductors, as a result of the decision by semiconductor producers that forecast in the pandemic that people would be buying a lot more household appliances and fewer automobiles. And when they then didn’t produce the semiconductors for new cars, new car production got jammed up, and the effect of that was to drive up used car prices. Used car prices you can’t control. That’s an asset, which is, basically, anything the dealer can get you to pay, you will pay. So, they rose by 50 percent or so, and that shows up in the Consumer Price Index.

So, again, these are supply issues, which can, in fact, be addressed and resolved, and may take some time, but they’re not related to some notion that households had too much money to spend.

RG: The fact that Weber is now an in-demand policy advisor around the world, with countries asking her, “What can we do about prices? How can you help us, or show us that there’s some purchase there in government spaces?”

But I’m curious. In the economics field, is there any more openness to this way of thinking about the economy? Or is there going to have to be an entire new generation that comes around?

JG: I think it’s very hard to get serious openness on this question. There were some measures taken in Germany, and Isabella Weber was involved with the commission, and I think it was basically her idea for a price cap on natural gas for households that was implemented. But the reality is that, in order to do this, you have to have governments that are seriously capable of implementing that policy, and that means they have to be somewhat independent of the mainstream economists. And the economics profession has become so hidebound in its views on these matters, and so committed to a particular ideology, that one cannot be optimistic that sensible ideas will prevail anytime soon.

RG: And you also mentioned that there was one day where Keynes himself walked in for a meeting with your father. What do you know about that meeting? And, also, if your father and Keynes were around today, what would they be telling people to do?

JG: Well, my father went to Cambridge in 1937 for a year, but Keynes was not there. He had suffered a heart attack and did not come to campus, so they didn’t meet. In 1942, my father was in the position of being, as I said, Director for Prices at the OPA. This was in an office building which is now, I believe, the Ford House office building down on D Street, southwest.

In any event, one day he came back after lunch, and I think he came up a back staircase, and his secretary came in saying there was an Englishman waiting to see him. And he said, well, I’m busy, but the secretary said, well, he seemed to think you would want to see him. And she handed him a note on which he had written the name as she had heard it: K-E-E-N-S, “Keens.” So, yes, dad did want to see him, Keynes came in.

This was not on a macro issue. Keynes had been raising pigs at his farm in the south of England, at Tilton. And he had written a paper on what became known in economics as the corn hog cycle, the effect of prices of corn on the supply of hogs, “pigs and maize,” as Keynes called them. And he wanted to talk about this with my father. So, that was the subject of their meeting.

My father, in his memoirs, he said this was as though St. Peter had dropped in on the parish priest.

RG: Yeah. So, what do you think your father would say now, about how to think about prices in a global economy, to the extent that it is global?

JG: That’s an interesting question. My father’s perspective on price control was very much in the context of the national economy. That was what we had, the problem you faced in the 1940s, and the U.S. had full control over its core commodities and over its manufactured goods, and that’s not the case now.

Now, what then happened, and the reason why we didn’t have an inflation problem for 40 years after 1980, was effectively globalization, and there were two elements of that. One was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which lowered commodity prices, essentially, around the world. And the other was the rise of China, which gave us a very elastic supply of consumer goods.

And so, I think —just to put myself in my father’s shoes, or to maybe project what I would say —

RG: We’re in his house, so that seems fair.

JG: Exactly. You know, I think what he would say is that, if you want to have a situation in which the world economy is developing on a stable basis, first of all, you need to have peace. You cannot do this in a conflict environment because, in a conflict environment, you’re going to lose control of the flows of commodities, and you are not going to have an assured supply of manufactured goods. You have a global division of labor, everybody has to be working together, and that means you need to have some respect for the other guy. You need to understand that you are not the only player here, and we cannot impose our will on everybody else.

And that is, I think, a serious problem, which the United States has lost a degree of perspective, really, in the last 25 years, where we believed with the way — I mean, really, since the end of the Cold War, but especially since the 1990s — the belief that the world economy was our oyster, to be treated as such. Well, the fact is, as time goes on, that becomes less and less true. And you have to develop a way of living with other great powers.

RG: Jamie Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair and Professor of Public Affairs and Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

JG: Thank you very much.

[Deconstructed end-show theme music.]

RG: That was Jamie Galbraith, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is the Intercept’s editor-in-chief, and I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or review, it helps people find the show. Go ahead and rate any episode that you want, even if you rated one already.

If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or at Ryan.Grim@theintercept.com. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

The post Price Controls: An Inflation Solution That Doesn’t Screw Workers appeared first on The Intercept.

A top National Institutes of Health official told Covid scientists he uses his personal email to evade strictures of the Freedom of Information Act, according to records obtained by congressional investigators probing the origins of Covid-19. This week on Deconstructed, journalist Jimmy Tobias joins Ryan Grim to discuss the U.S. government’s response to the question of Covid’s origins, attempts by NIH officials to skirt transparency, and the ongoing battle to access intelligence investigations into the origin of the pandemic.

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim, and today we’re going to take another look at the ongoing controversy around the origin of Covid, focusing on two major new developments.

Now, if you feel lost in all the claims and the counterclaims flying around in what is becoming a highly-politicized and tribal debate, I’d recommend scrolling back in the feed to our May 6, 2022 episode on the lab leak, which I genuinely think is the best podcast summary of it you’re going to find. It’s an interview with three journalists who’ve been tracking the issue closely.

Today we’re going to be talking to a fourth, Jimmy Tobias, who has a new piece in The Intercept that adds valuable context to what we know about how the U.S. government responded to the question of Covid’s origin.

Jimmy, welcome to Deconstructed.

Jimmy Tobias: Thanks for having me.

RG: And so, of the two developments I referred to, one is his major new piece, which you can find over at The Intercept, and it’s not that long, and I encourage people to read it if they can.

The other is the release by the administration of a four-page declassified set of assessments related mostly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That declassification was a belated effort by the administration to comply with a law passed by Congress mandating the disclosure. It was a quite short and clear law so, rather than describe it, I’ll just read you the relevant part:

“Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Director of National Intelligence shall: declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of Covid–19, including; activities performed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology with or on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army, coronavirus research or other related activities performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the outbreak of Covid–19, and researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019, including for any such researcher: the researcher’s name; the researcher’s symptoms; the date of the onset of the researcher’s symptoms; the researcher’s role at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; whether the researcher was involved with or exposed to coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; whether the researcher visited a hospital while they were ill; and a description of any other actions taken by the researcher that may suggest they were experiencing a serious illness at the time; and submit to Congress an unclassified report that contains: all of the information described under paragraph and only such redactions as the Director determines necessary to protect sources and methods.”

So, Jimmy, that’s basically the law that was passed recently, which led to, like I said, a belated four-page report — I think it’s about a week overdue.

First of all, to help set the conversation up. Can you talk a little bit about this new declassified report, and why there’s so much interest in the health of these lab workers?

JT: Yeah. You know, for 90 days now if not more, people have been eagerly awaiting the release of this report in the hope that it might shed light on what happened in Wuhan. Whether, indeed, there were sick workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the initial days of the Covid-19 outbreak, and whether the Chinese military was involved at the lab. And I think, when it came out, the main standout thing for me is that there was no underlying documentation released with this report, as required by the law. I mean, this was a summary by ODNI, more or less, of the various views and the intelligence community about the origin of Covid. But there was no evidence, there was no underlying evidence, no documentation for the public to scrutinize.

And, because of that, the report received a very negative reaction from the law’s sponsor, Josh Hawley, and its co-sponsor, Mike Braun, both senators. They sent a scathing letter to ODNI over the weekend, calling the report paltry, noting its violation of the law, and demanding that the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, actually produce the underlying intelligence on Covid origins, which she failed to do.

And so, it’ll be really interesting to see whether ODNI responds to that. They basically — and I quote — said, “Try again.”

RG: Yeah. And this was a law that was passed by a Democratic-controlled Senate, it was signed by a Democratic president, and I just read the law. It says “any and all information.” If lawmakers or if the administration had issue with that, they had an opportunity to veto it, to vote against it. Instead, they voted it through. And, compared to the requirement for quote, “any and all information,” I’ll read quickly from the Intel report about the illnesses.

This is from the ODNI report. They say: “While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with Covid-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to Covid-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.”

And so, this comes after The Wall Street Journal confirmed reporting by Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger on Substack that named the three researchers who had allegedly fallen ill. What’s your sense of how much more the intelligence community knows, and why do you think we wound up with just this very vague, “OK, yes. The rumors that some people were sick were true, but some people had some things that were not consistent with Covid?”

JT: Yeah. Frankly, I don’t know how much the intelligence community knows. Obviously, the Department of Energy and the FBI have both assessed that they think it’s most likely that the virus came from a lab. Four other intelligence community agencies think it came up from nature, and the CIA and another agency haven’t made a determination, because there’s conflicting evidence.

I think, for me, as a reporter, it’s hard to take a report like this and know what to do with it without seeing any underlying documentation. Again, I mean, that’s really what I’m stressing. We need to be able to assess this for ourselves because, as a skeptic of the government, it’s just hard to take what they say at face value, without being able to assess it or analyze it for oneself.

I think that’s the real failure of this report, that there is no evidence to put out there. And, until we get that evidence, it’s really hard to assess the claims of this report, and to really determine whether those workers were sick, how sick they were, what their symptoms were, when and if they went to the hospital. It’s just, it’s really difficult to know.

And I’ll also note that the report was filled with circumspect language and hedging, and so it’s kind of like reading tea leaves, and that’s exactly what’s happened. People on the natural origin side of the debate have read it to support their claims, some people on the lab leak side of the debate have read it to support their claims. And so we need the evidence.

RG: And the other rather jarring line in that statute, for people not following this closely, might be the reference to the People’s Liberation Army. And I think when you start talking about bioweapons, and the Chinese military, and Covid, you start to lose people who think you’re often in conspiracy land, but there it is in the statute requesting information.

And I have this here, here’s what the declassified report said: “Although the WIV is independent of the People’s Liberation Army, the IC assesses that WIV personnel have worked with scientists associated with the PLA on public health related research, and collaborated on biosafety and biosecurity projects. Information available to the IC” — that’s Intelligence Community — “indicates that some of the research conducted by the PLA and the WIV included work with several viruses, including coronaviruses, but no known viruses that could plausibly be a progenitor of SARS-Covid-2.”

And the reason I wanted to quote from this report is that, in the public conversation over the past few days, it’s being bandied about, as you said, as evidence that the lab leak theory has now been thoroughly debunked. The LA Times ran a column asserting that it exposed the lab leak, as a, quote, “lie.” And I’m just not convinced that the people making those claims read this very short report. It certainly doesn’t provide any conclusive evidence that it originated in a lab, but the idea that it rules it out is just not true.

JT: No.

RG: Now, I’ll admit that I’ve had a hard time covering this issue, and not being driven mad by all the misinformation, and obfuscation, and all the accusations that if you’re curious about this question, you must be some crypto right-winger. So, what’s it been like for you? How do you sift through all the noise in your own reporting?

JT: Yeah. There’s no question this debate has been very bitter, very toxic. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever reported on, for sure. You know, for me, I try not to engage in the ad hominem stuff, try not to reply to the nasty comments; I know what my values are. And the main thing I’m trying to do is get documents from the government and present them to readers that can shed light on what happened around this question throughout the pandemic.

And so, really, I’ve tried just to stick to the documents. Get documents via FOIA and FOIA lawsuits, put them in context, and provide them to readers. I think when you use documents to write a story, people can’t say, “oh, that’s not true,” because the documents are right there in their face. And so, I think that strategy has served me relatively well.

It’s not like I’ve avoided heat from some of the more vitriolic participants in this debate, but it has made the reporting strong and defensible, and that’s what journalism is about, in my view.

RG: And that brings us to your latest story, which is based on a new ream of documents that you’ve gotten, and I’ll just read the top of it, and ask you to talk a little bit about how you obtained these documents and what you learned from them.

You write: “A top adviser to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health admitted that he used a personal email account in an apparent effort to evade the strictures of the Freedom of Information Act, according to records obtained by congressional investigators probing the origin of Covid-19. The official also expressed his intention to delete emails in order to avoid media scrutiny.”

And you’re talking here about David Morens, a high ranking NIH official deputy to Anthony Fauci, in a September 2021 email exchange with a number of the most vocal advocates of the nature theory of origins.

So, can you tell us a little bit about who Morens is, and why this is relevant?

JT: Yeah. Morens is a 25-year veteran of NIH who serves as a senior scientific advisor to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was a position that Anthony Fauci held for many years, until his retirement late last year. And these documents, as I say in the story, were obtained by congressional investigators on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. From what I understand, they were obtained from records in the possession of Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane University.

And yeah, I’m a reporter who uses FOIA as a tool a lot, and so, it was pretty shocking to see this very high-ranking government official basically saying that he uses a personal email account, I’ll quote: he says, “As you know” — in his email to these scientists — “I try to always communicate on Gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly.” And later, he says that his Gmail was hacked, so he had to use his government account. He says, “Don’t worry, just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in The New York Times.”

And when I talked to ethics and public transparency experts about this, they were very disturbed. They couldn’t believe that a government official would put something like this in writing.

RG: The first thing that occurs to you is, if somebody has a consciousness of what they’re doing here, that they are specifically avoiding their government email so that it does not later become public and turn up in The New York Times or The Intercept, you would think that they would not write that in a government email? 

JT: It wasn’t. This was an email sent on his Gmail account to this group.

RG: Oh, probably to Robert Garry. And so, then it got obtained through other eyes…

JT: Yes. Through the investigation. Yeah, exactly. So, I don’t think this person intended that for this to be made public, obviously

RG: It makes me feel a little better about Dr. Morens’ aptitude, although it’s still not a great thing to put in writing —

JT: No.

RG: — because anything you put in writing, no matter where you put it, might wind up in the pages of The New York Times.

Can you talk about who was on this email exchange? Because if this was just, he’s emailing with other soccer dads in the neighborhood, then it’s like, OK, fine. I understand why you don’t want your communications about the upcoming eight-year-old birthday party to turn up in The Intercept. But who was he talking to in these exchanges?

JT: Yeah. These were September 2021 email exchanges with Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, Robert Garry of Tulane, Edward Holmes, Kristian Andersen, and Angela Rasmussen. And these are all leading scientists who have been very vocal advocates in favor of the natural origin theory. Several of them were authors of the Proximal Origin paper, which The Intercept has covered at length.

RG: Can you explain what that is, real quickly, for people who haven’t [seen it]?

JT: Sure. The Proximal Origin paper was a paper published in March, 2020, that really threw cold water on the idea that the virus could have come from a lab. It basically said that — although it didn’t entirely rule out a lab leak — it said that it wasn’t plausible. And I’m paraphrasing.

And that paper kind of grew out of these confidential discussions that occurred in February, 2020, between this group of scientists; Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and others where, initially in these conversations, there was deep concern that the virus looked potentially engineered, looked like it may have come out of a lab, perhaps of experiments.

But then, the group pretty quickly changed its views, and came to determine — and said in the paper — that, actually, a lab leak is not plausible. And the paper was incredibly influential. It was viewed more than 5 million times online, covered in all sorts of news articles, Francis Collins wrote about it on the NIH website, Dr. Fauci mentioned it from the White House podium. It really kind of set the narrative, I’d say, in many regards, about the origin of Covid debate.

And these confidential discussions didn’t really come to light until years later via FOIA requests, including my own. And so, yeah, the paper has been the subject of a lot of controversy since then. And, in fact, the House Committee Investigating Covid Origins is holding a hearing on it on July 11th. 

RG: September, 2021, is a key moment as well. Can you put this conversation that’s going on between these scientists and Fauci’s in context of what was happening in fall of 2021, as regards this.

JT: Yeah. And perhaps you could weigh in on this, too, because you obviously were involved. This was when The Intercept published several articles, I believe, about the kinds of experiments that were going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, NIH funding related to those experiments.

And so, this email thread, in this email thread with Dr. Morens of NIH and these scientists, they’re bitterly complaining about The Intercept’s coverage, harshly criticizing the lab leak proponents, I guess you could call them. And also sort of laying out their own arguments in favor of national origin for the virus.

And so, this discussion in which Morens wrote this email about FOIA was part of a broader conversation about Covid origins, media coverage, and things like that. And so, to see all these folks, all in communication with each other about this, and then to see this top official saying that he’s using his personal email account in an apparent effort to evade FOIA, and that he’s also expressed his intention to delete emails, is certainly concerning, to say the least.

RG: Yeah. And it’s interesting to read through those emails, knowing what the backstory was. And for people who didn’t follow it, we had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for, basically, the grant documents that underlied EcoHealth Alliance’s work with Wuhan. Eventually sued — as you know, Jimmy, you basically can’t get anything nowadays through FOIA without suing — we sued, and eventually were able to get these documents. Sharon Lerner and Mara Hvistendahl did some great, great reporting on those.

Although, if you read through the chain, their fans are not in that, in those emails; a lot of criticism there. But, also, a lot of criticism of the many, many virologists who were quoted in those articles, and you see them talking about these virologists and saying: Boy, like, some of these, I really respect some of these virologists, and I’m really disappointed that they went on record to say that what we were doing in this research was either risky, or qualifies as gain-of-function research.

And then, as you read through the emails that you’ve reported on here more, you start to see — and I’m curious for your take on this, as you read through them — you start to see Peter Daszak increasingly make admissions to this other group of scientists, that I wonder if, from their perspective, started to become concerning.

At the beginning of the emails, they’re saying, there’s absolutely nothing to any of these claims that we did any gain-of-function research. And then, toward the end of the chain, you see him saying, well, OK, The Intercept is going to have some information that we did do some research that found a significant, one-log gain-of-function. But, we don’t believe that that qualifies because — and he has reasons for why he thinks it doesn’t qualify.

But, I wonder if, as you’re reading through that, you’re like, hmm, I wonder if there was some collar-tugging going on, even among these vocal advocates of the zoonosis theory.

JT: I don’t want to speculate on their thoughts. In general, in this debate, one of the ways I’ve sort of stayed out of trouble is to just try to put the documents out there…

RG: Yeah, good point.

JT: … and let people interpret them as they will. And so, I am very interested to see how people interpret these when we release them. But, you know, from my perspective – and, really, the focus of the article is on Morens and transparency issues — because, as a reporter who believes in FOIA, and believes that the public has a right to know what its government is doing, it’s very disturbing to see that kind of commentary from a top official.

And as with the confidential discussions around proximal origin, this is, again, another instance where the same group of scientists — or some of the same group of scientists — is in conversation with a top NIH official discussing this topic behind closed doors, more or less. And so, that’s a pattern that I find notable.

But yeah. I think I’m awaiting the public’s interpretation of the other contents of this email thread, which we didn’t really get into in this story. 

RG: And the level of vitriol, I think, is notable too. You have one quote from Dr. Morens. He says, “Do not rule out suing these assholes for slander.” And he says, “They need to be called out. Because I am in government I can only do this off the record, but I have done so again and again. Some of them are knowingly promoting false equivalences. If they interviewed a Holocaust survivor, they would say they have to give equal time and space to a Nazi murderer. They have no shame.” Un-quote.

It does not sound like somebody who is exploring with an open mind the origin of the pandemic. What was your reaction to some of that language?

JT: Yeah. I mean, when you see a government official encouraging others to sue their sort of, I guess you could call them “political opponents,” that raises red flags, to say the least. And likening, deploying, “the Nazi thing” in context of lab leakers is also — I mean, I think it speaks to the totally entrenched positions, and bitterness, and vitriol that has come to take over this debate for some reason.

But yeah. I think this does make the NIH look very good. And I think the subcommittee is sending a letter to Morens, and they’re going to ask for his documents from his email, from his phone, and they’re going to ask him for a transcribed interview. And I think we will eventually learn more about what’s going on here.

Did he delete emails that he claimed he was going to delete? Was this a regular pattern, where he used personal email to evade FOIA? Is this part of the agency culture at NIH? Those are questions that are in my mind.

RG: And, speaking of the NIH, the other interesting recent development was that the subcommittee that you’re talking about got confirmation that the agency has actually debarred Wuhan Institute of Virology from getting future U.S. funding. What do you make of that move by NIH, given the resistance to explore some of the questions around what happened there?

JT: My understanding is the subcommittee learned that NIH has referred the Wuhan Institute of Virology for debarment. So, I think there’s probably a process, still, [to play out].

RG: Which is different than debarment.

JT: Yeah. But, basically — and this is a fact I think people have lost sight of a little — back in January, the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services released a report that found that, since late 2021, the Wuhan Institute of Virology has not been responsive to NIH and EcoHealth Alliance requests to provide lab notebook entries and electronic files that could offer insight into the nature of the federally funded experiments performed at the lab.

So, just to consider that: the U.S. government gives money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct experiments, but when it then asked for documentation related to that, it gets stonewalled. And, yeah, I think that’s a pretty astounding fact that somehow isn’t highlighted in this debate much, lately. But, because of that, the Inspector General recommended that NIH consider referring the institute to the Department of Health and Human Services for debarment, which means it would be blocked from receiving funding in the future. And the agency seems to have done just that, according to the committee.

RG: Yeah, and it’s a frustrating situation, too, because we as journalists are looking for evidence that we can then follow to a conclusion. And the conclusion may not be what the lab leakers want, it may not be what the natural origin people want, but there does appear to be evidence that the U.S. government is trying to get from Wuhan, but is failing to do so.

What else, as you continue reporting on this, remains outstanding, that you’re hopeful could still become public?

JT: There’s records at the WIV. There’s the underlying documentation of the ODNI report. People have a million FOIA requests out. It took a year-plus of FOIA litigation to get the conversations that led to the Proximal Origin paper.

I personally, would really like to see what DOE has on this question, since they are a very highly regarded scientific agency with a lot of expertise. What do they have, what does the FBI have? Why does that lead them to believe that this was a lab leak? What did the other agency have that make them feel otherwise?  We need to see the evidence.

And it’s going to take — after seeing what ODNI released last week — it’s clear that it’s going to take further congressional action and/or a lot of FOIA lawsuits to get the kind of information that might shed light, one way or the other, but it’s something the public deserves to know, you know? We deserve to see what’s going on here, instead of just getting brief summaries and hedging from these federal agencies, 

RG: And there’s this hearing scheduled for July 11, with a lot of the people that are on this email chain. What’s your sense of what might be learned from that? And do you have any reporting on whether or not those scientists intend to appear?

JT: I don’t know yet, I think that’s an open question, whether they’re going to appear. It’s only the U.S.-based Proximal Origin authors who were asked to come, or who, at least, who will likely come.

My hope is that the hearing doesn’t explode into theatrics and the like. I mean, it would really be nice to hear from these scientists. You know, they’ve done a lot of media interviews, but rarely with people asking hard questions.

And so, I think it’d be really nice to hear them respond to some hard questions in an open forum. But I don’t know if they’ll accept. And if they don’t accept, I don’t know whether subpoenas will follow, but I will definitely be watching, and likely reporting on it.

RG: Well, Jimmy, terrific work, and thanks so much for joining me here. 

JT: Thanks for having me, Ryan. I really appreciate it.

RG: That was Jimmy Tobias, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed as a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is the Intercepts editor-in-chief. And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review, it helps people find the show. Go ahead and rate any episode that you want, even if you rated one already.

If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or at Ryan.Grim@theintercept.com.

Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

The post New NIH Emails Released: What Are Officials Trying to Hide About Covid’s Origins? appeared first on The Intercept.

This week, Russia accused Ukraine of striking a bridge that connects mainland Ukraine with the Crimean Peninsula. This is amid the emerging counteroffensive by Ukraine attempting to push back Russian troops. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Amed Khan, who has 20 years of experience funding and implementing humanitarian relief. Khan is currently based in Ukraine, where he has been seeing the war’s destruction firsthand. Grim and Khan discuss the recent developments in the war and Khan’s experiences working in Ukraine.

[Deconstructed intro theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

The war in Ukraine recently entered the much anticipated phase of the second counteroffensive by Kyiv. The last one was a startling success, gobbling up territory that had been seized during the Russian invasion, and giving the West hope that, against all odds, the Ukrainians might be able to drive Russian forces back.

The second counteroffensive has gone nowhere near as well, with The Kyiv Independent, a news outlet highly loyal to the Ukrainian government, reporting a pause and a reassessment of strategy. With Putin’s mobilization of hundreds of thousands of draftees and his overwhelming supply of artillery, Ukraine can’t handle a war of attrition.

Meanwhile, Putin recently unveiled what he said was a tentative peace agreement reached back in March, 2022, in which Russia agreed to retreat to the territory it held before February 23 of that year, which would give it control of significant parts of the Donbass, and also Crimea. In exchange, Ukraine would agree not to join NATO and to downsize its military, but would enter into security agreements with the U.S. and other E.U. countries.

Around that same time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was sounding hopeful about a peace deal. Here’s a report from March 16, 2022, on Democracy Now, which also references an exchange I had at the time with then-White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki.

Amy Goodman: So, I wanted to ask you about the state of negotiations to end this war. The Ukrainian President Zelenskyy suggested earlier today that Russian demands are becoming more realistic.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy [through interpreter]: Everyone should work, including our representatives, our delegation, for negotiations with the Russian Federation. It is difficult but important, as any war ends with an agreement. The meetings continue, and I am informed the positions during the negotiations already sound more realistic, but time is still needed for the decisions to be in the interests of Ukraine.

AG: Zelenskyy’s remarks came a day after he acknowledged he doesn’t expect Ukraine to join NATO anytime soon, which is very significant. And, during a news conference yesterday The Intercept’s Ryan Grim asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki what the U.S. is doing to advance peace negotiations, and whether the U.S. would lift its sanctions on Russia if it reached a peace deal with Ukraine. This is just a small part of what she said.

RG: Aside from the request for weapons, President Zelenskyy has also requested that the U.S. be more involved in negotiations toward a peaceful resolution to the war. What is the U.S. doing to push those negotiations forward?

Jen Psaki: Well, one of the steps we’ve taken, a significant one, is to be the largest provider of military, and humanitarian, and economic assistance in the world, to put them in a greater position of strength as they go into these negotiations. We also engage and talk with the Ukrainians on a daily basis, and the President and this national security team has rallied the world in being unified in their opposition to the actions of President Putin. So, those are the steps we’re taking.

We also engage, oftentimes before and after, any conversations that any of these global leaders are having with both Russians and Ukrainians, and encourage them to make sure they’re engaging with Ukrainians directly.

RG: Would Zelenskyy be empowered by the United States to reach an agreement with Russia, and have U.S. sanctions released as a result?

JP: Well, he’s the leader of Ukraine, so he is empowered to have a negotiation with Russia, and we’re here to support those efforts.

RG: That’s a yes?

JP: Again, I’m not going to get ahead of a negotiation, but we are here to support those efforts. We discuss and have conversations with his team on a daily basis.

RG: According to former U.S. diplomat Fiona Hill, writing in Foreign Affairs, a deal similar to the one Putin recently outlined was scuttled by the West, which insisted Ukraine fight on instead. Around this time, the horrific war crimes by Russian forces in Bucha were uncovered, changing the shape and tenor of the war, which I’ll talk about with my next guest, Amed Khan.

Now, today’s episode is not about the politics or the geopolitics of the war in Ukraine, and it’s not a dissection of military strategy or tactics, either. Instead, I wanted to talk to Amed about what life has been like on the ground there since the invasion, and since the failed peace talks.

Amed Khan is an unusual figure on the international scene. He was briefly in the diplomatic service during the Clinton Administration, but was frustrated there, and joined the world of humanitarian relief instead, spending several years in Rwanda, but he got frustrated by that bureaucracy, too.

Independently wealthy, he’s become something of a lone-wolf humanitarian relief organizer, visiting different global hotspots over the decades since the war broke out in Ukraine. He spent most of his time there.

As he talks about in our interview, his work has also gone beyond just food, water, and medical supplies, as he also supplied Ukrainian troops with the now-famous drone that a Russian soldier recently surrendered to on video. If you haven’t seen that story yet, check out The Wall Street Journal’s video report on it from earlier this month.

We recorded this conversation last week while he was on the ground there in Ukraine, about a thousand yards from the Russian frontline, amid the floodwaters from the recent destruction of the dam.

[Deconstructed intro theme music.]

Amed Khan, thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed.

Amed Khan: My pleasure. Great to be here with you, Ryan.

RG: And so, without giving too much away, can you talk a little bit about where you are and what you’re doing right now? Like, what time is it where you are, and what’s going on in the area where you are?

AK: It’s 9:00 p.m. on June 15. Is it Thursday? And I am a little bit downstream from the Nova Kakhovka Dam, which was partially destroyed last week, I suppose in the first week of June, right. And I’ve been actually working in this area for about eight or nine months since liberation of these villages. They’re on the west bank of the Dnieper River; the east bank of the river is still controlled by the Russians.

I’ve been supplying food, clothing, medicine, generators, because when the Russians withdrew, they cut the mobile network, they cut the power, and they cut the water. So, power, water, and communication are the three most urgent needs. Since the flood, obviously, the needs have multiplied. But, again, it’s the same big three: water, power, and communication. And then so much more — you know, so many houses are completely destroyed, so people are trying to clean out their houses. So, [we] are providing water pumps, power washers, wheelbarrows. You know, really, really basic stuff.

RG: And in one of the videos, or a couple of the videos that you sent me, you’re sloshing around, you’re seeing mud inside of houses.

AK [in video]: We’ve been working in this area for many months. And now you can see. [Sounds of walking through water.] This is the living room, this is what’s left. The chair, this is her life. Everything that was in this. The ground is mud.

RG: What’s the broader landscape look like there, in the wake of the dam destruction?

AK: It’s complete devastation. Let’s say, one of the villages’ pre-war population was, let’s say, about 2000, and today it’s about 200. Well, before the dam destruction it was about 200. And, since the dam destruction, it’s about 400. I met some people who were with their children in Germany and Poland, and they actually came back, because these are the houses that they were born in, that are actually nearly destroyed. So, the interiors, everything inside is destroyed, covered with mud. Many of them have water to the knees still.

And, you know, the houses continue to collapse, because they’re older structures. So, as the water sort of gets into the foundation or, in many cases, the water was above the roof, so houses continue to collapse.

So, people are just trying to figure out: Where do they go? And much of the population is on the older side, so these are the sort of people that do not, will not be evacuated. I mean, they just refuse, you know. Plenty of people have been evacuated, but many people just don’t, can’t leave their homes, that many of them were born in.

RG: And there’s a lot of speculation out there that Russia did this to the dam. If they did, what would be the advantage? As you’re seeing the carnage, what is the effect on the positions of both the Ukrainians and the Russians there? And what’s the effect on the population, and why would it benefit the Russians to do this?

AK: Well, I’ve given up. I’ve been here in Ukraine for most of the last 16 months since the invasion, so I’ve sort of given up on trying to figure out why they do certain things. They bombed the McDonald’s in Odessa two nights ago, June 13. I’ve personally visited hundreds of apartment buildings, hospitals, senior centers, nursery schools, shopping malls, you name it. Car dealers, gas stations, that have been objects of Russian missile attacks, rocket attacks. So, I’ve sort of given up trying to figure out why they do stuff.

In fact, we were in a boat in a flooded area on a street going between demolished houses. And I think I sent you this video, we came under a shelling.

AK: This was a road, now completely flooded. And you hear the shelling in the background. [Shelling sounds.]

AK: And I’m trying to figure out what exactly they’re shelling. It’s a completely destroyed village with a few old people living there, and no military or police or anyone else in sight. And so, I suppose, from a military perspective — and I’m not some expert on that stuff — but I suppose they could have done it to slow the counteroffensive, but many people speculate that they try to do it to defeat the Ukrainian spirit. But, you know, it’s been going on for 16 months and that hasn’t really worked, so you’d think they’d come up with an alternate plan.

But I, quite honestly, I have no idea when the devastation is just unbelievable. But it’s nothing that’s any different with what I’ve seen over the last 16 months. Some of this land will, I don’t know when it will recover. I’m in touch with some local scientists and they say it could be decades.

RG: To step back a little bit: How did you get involved in this kind of humanitarian work? What was your first foray into this?

AK: Well, I was a political appointee in the Clinton Administration working for the director of the United States Peace Corps in my early twenties, and Rwandan genocide was happening in this. And I just sort of didn’t really like Washington; no offense to anyone from Washington, but I wanted to get out there in the world.

And so, I got a job with the International Rescue Committee, and became an administrator in a series of refugee camps that were along the Rwandan/Burundi/Tanzania border, and lived there for almost two years. That was my first, and I suppose I’ve spent the majority of the last 25 years overseas doing this sort of stuff, one way or another.

RG: How would you compare the scenes that you’d encountered when you first got to Ukraine 16 months ago to what you’re seeing now? When it comes to both physical devastation, but also morale?

AK: The morale remains high, because the Ukrainian spirit is strong, and they just persevere through everything, and they’ll never give up and never be defeated, because this is something that’s been going on for three to 400 years, pretty continuously. It’s part of their DNA.

The physical destruction is something that I’ve never seen anywhere. I mean, I’ve worked in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Rwanda, like I said. And there is significant infrastructure in Ukraine, at a different level, and it’s been demolished, and continues to be demolished. And I suppose the initial destruction that happened around the cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv, which were the first places that I saw when I first arrived, shortly after the invasion.

Well, the Russians had almost encircled Kyiv, so if you drive to Kyiv now, if you approach from the West, you’ll see destroyed gas stations, supermarkets, schools. The Russians were very close, so the physical destruction — and, you know, thousands and thousands of houses and apartment buildings, but it pretty much continued. They will launch long-range rockets and missiles nightly, at cities far away from the front.

RG: What’s the reconstruction like? Is there any going on in the midst of the conflict, or is it on hold for some type of a ceasefire?

AK: Well, Bucha and Irpin, the suburbs of Kyiv that were the site of mass graves and significant war crimes, have managed to really clean up. People started fixing their houses and the apartments are in reconstruction, but, you know, some other places, the devastation is just so immense, and the shelling and rockets and missiles continue, so it kind of doesn’t really make sense.

So, if you take a city like Kharkiv where many schools are destroyed, [and] say, the gymnasium, the center, the main sports center, with the pool and the basketball court and all that, that’s all destroyed. So, I don’t know how they would start building that again, because the rocket attacks continue.

RG: So, are kids going to school? And what’s the economy like? Are people going to work amid the war? Obviously, it’s got to be different on the front lines, but how far back from the front lines do you feel like you’re really in the thick of a war? And how far do you have to go until you’re someplace where you know that there’s a war going on, but life is a little bit more normal?

AK: On the schools, it’s really difficult. Some schools in the western part of Ukraine operate, some schools in Kyiv operate. Many schools operate online. Many schools don’t open because they don’t have a bomb shelter, right, an underground bomb shelter. And you’d sort of think, it’s 2023, why would my school need an underground bomb shelter?

So it’s a really sad thing. I rebuilt a number of orphanages, and I’m always asking, is the school open yet? And they say, no, we can’t open, because we don’t have an underground bomb shelter. And it’s a relatively new school, right? And so, they wouldn’t have thought about building an underground bomb shelter. So, actually, the older schools are the ones that operate, because they have underground bomb shelters.

In terms of feeling the war, you sort of feel it everywhere, because the sirens are going off all day, everywhere. So, I suppose the area where you’d feel it least is the southwest, along the Hungarian and Romanian border, the Zakarpattia area, the mountainous area. In terms of city, probably Lviv is the one you would feel it least, but they have sirens three or four times a day, and a rocket or missile attack pretty regularly.

RG: Those are air raid sirens.

AK: Yeah, those are air raid sirens.

RG: Like, missile sirens?

AK: Correct.

RG: And so, how much time do you have? How does that work? You hear the siren, you have, you know, X minutes to get into a bomb shelter?

AK: Well, essentially that’s how it’s supposed to work. And, of course, we’re 16 months in, so some people don’t go running for the bomb shelter. But, essentially, you usually have, depending on what is being fired — and some crazy stuff is being fired, like Kalibr missiles and other sort of SEAD missiles — so you might have three or four minutes before. So, a typical thing, let’s say the McDonald’s that was hit two nights ago, the sirens were going off four minutes before the first missile hit. That’s a concrete example that happened on June 13.

RG: Did the workers and the people in the restaurant, did they heed those sirens?

AK: That one was at 2:30 in the morning, luckily, so it was[n’t] open, but three people did die, unfortunately. The apartment building on June 11,  in Kryvyi Rih, where 13 people died, that was, again, in the middle of the night, so they were asleep, right?

So, you hear the sirens, you sort of are sleeping, and then you kind of wake up and then you go back to sleep. I mean, I’ve personally had this experience, I don’t know, hundreds of times, where you’re like, let’s hope for the best. Roll back over. You know?

And other people have told incredible stories, where I’ve visited apartment buildings that have been hit in the middle of the night where, let’s say, the child made it to the shelter but the parents didn’t, because by the time they got the child awake and out, it was too late for them.

So, the answer to that question is limitless. How many minutes do you have, and how do you actually get out, and get downstairs, and get underground. I’ve seen every kind of scenario.

RG: And what about the farming economy? I mean, the area you’re in is pretty heavily agricultural. Was there any planting this season?

AK: Yeah. Yeah. The farmers continue, right. And Ukraine plays this massive role in the world, with wheat and soybeans and some other staples, right? It’s the watermelon, actually, the Kherson region is famous for watermelon, and they were planted. And there’s these little — they were still a couple months off from the harvest season — but the small watermelons were all destroyed. I think the number is: 95 percent of the watermelon harvest was destroyed for the year.

Much of the farmland in the east has been mined so, you know, the areas that were liberated, the farmers still can’t go out there. So, actually, farmers are kind of operating these demining machines alongside the professionals, to try and get their land to be arable again.

But in the west, they continue to continue to operate. You know, the land is planted, so the wheat is planted, the corn is planted, and they’ll harvest it and move it and, hopefully, that continues.

But the answer to your question about work: Yes, people go to work every morning, and they continue. And, yeah, obviously, the economy has been devastated, but people continue to wake up, go to the office in the west, let’s say and in the center, maybe Kyiv, Odessa, as much as they can. But, along the front line, life is totally at a standstill. And the front line is massive.

[Deconstructed mid-show theme music.]

RG: There’s been talk in the press about the U.S. potentially sending depleted uranium shells to work with the Abrams tanks that we’ve sent. Are people over there nervous at all about depleted uranium being in the breadbasket of the world? That, to me, seems like a tough combination. Or are they just so existentially focused on the war that they’ll think about resolving the depleted uranium problem later?

AK: Yeah. I think everybody just wants this war to end, right? And so, whatever it takes and whoever — the thing about Ukrainians is, there’s a national project here to get the Russians out and stop the war. No one wants the war to end tomorrow, they want it to end today. And people are deferential. Like, you know, if the experts feel that this is a solution to stop this war and get the Russians out, then I’m for it. That’s the sort of thing, because I think Bucha and Irpin really changed Ukrainian public opinion, and probably forever, you know? When it came out with the mass graves, and the murders of civilians, and old people, and children. And I was there, I was in Bucha on day two of liberation, so I saw the open mass graves and burned bodies on the streets. And I think that’s the sort of seminal experience for everybody.

Obviously, the war has continued, and the brutality has continued, but that understanding that Ukrainians, really, we can’t go on like this. And, I think that’s the immediate [understanding].

RG: That’s my understanding, too, that Bucha in particular really changed the course of the war. And you’ve had a lot of people who have, in a kind of conspiracy-type way, cast a lot of skepticism about what happened there. I’m sure you’ve seen some of that stuff circulating.

So, having been there on day two, can you describe — I don’t want you to get gruesome or anything — but can you describe a little bit of what you witnessed as you walked into the town?

AK: Yeah. It was actually overwhelming. I’ve been to mass graves. I was working in Bosnia, digging up old mass graves. And, again, Rwanda, also, Syria, also, Iraq, also. But this was something just on a different level, and not — I didn’t expect to see what I saw.

At the time, as you imagine, there were Russian snipers still in the woods, because they hadn’t completely withdrawn. They had sort of exited quickly, Bucha, so the security situation was very tense — multiple roadblocks. But, as we came closer and closer to entering Bucha, you would start to see charred dead bodies on the road.

And as we got to the church, where some of the mass graves were, in the back of the church, we started to meet locals who lived under the occupation for a month. And I went from house to house, to people’s houses, asking them what they experienced, and it was very clear what had happened.

And they told stories of this neighbor and that neighbor, and this 75-year-old man being murdered, and this eight-year-old girl being raped and murdered.

RG: Was there any pattern, was there any pattern about who became a victim and who didn’t?

AK: It looked like the sort of most innocent people were sort of victims. It was truly bizarre. Because when we went into house to house, I would ask, you know, who lived here? And they would tell him it was a 75-year-old grandmother and grandfather. They killed the grandfather. Why? And they said, I don’t know. Because, you know, this, again, was just day two, and it was really raw. And you’ve probably seen the images of all the burned tanks and cars, and the road was full of that. It was just pure brutality. When you went into houses, there were gunshots inside all the houses. And I said, what is that? And they said they would just get drunk.

And you’d see broken bottles of vodka and whatever anybody had in their house. And the barbecue was running in the backyard. And I said, so, basically they spent the day at war, and at night they’d come to the house and have a war with the house. Just start shooting around.

So, it was just some kind of, like, Hollywood movie about terrorists or crazy people. You know, just some post-apocalyptic-type thing. I just, I look at back at all the old pictures, I’m like, this is nuts.

RG: And, since then, is there any theory that’s developed about why that happened?

AK: Well, they’ve been doing the same stuff continuously, right? Like, not at that level, but they — I’ve heard the same stories from these villages where I am now. When they were occupied, they were occupied for nine months. November 8 was the day of liberation. There [was] story after story of, my friend was walking with a jug of water down along the river, and the sniper just shot. You never find out why this sniper fired at him and shot him, and he’s dead, you know?

So that’s, it’s, they’re — I don’t know. I think they’re just reckless. I mean, you know, we don’t want to be cliche about it, but when you study Russian Army tactics for the last 600 years, and there’s definitely a pattern of sexual violence, and other things that, I suppose, are not the norm for war.

RG: What is the thinking among people you meet about how this war is going to end? Because you hear from Zelenskyy, and you hear from other politicians in Ukraine that they want every Russian boot off of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea. And we hear that over in the United States, we’re like, how is that going to be possible? That can’t possibly be the way that this ends. There’s got to be some other way to end.

But where are the people that you talk to closer to? Are they in lockstep with that Zelenskyy position?

AK: Yeah. Yeah, that’s where they are. I guess it’s like, 85 percent. And, again, that number comes from Bucha and Irpin, and everything that’s happened since then. It’s just like, how are we ever going to live with them again? Because, if there is a truce, and there’s a ceasefire, and they’re just going to repower up and do it again.

In the West it’s very, very deep, because you can go to any small village and find a memorial to a kind of mini-genocide of Ukrainian villagers by the Russians in 1864 or 1823. And the older people can tell you stories about mini-pogroms all over the place.

And so, that’s been reinforced, and I think the constant attacks on civilian infrastructure has reinforced that. That they just, they want it to end, but they want it to end forever. They don’t want it to end and, ten years later, their children or grandchildren are having to go to war. They just don’t want that.

And that’s kind of looking into the future. They just come to work every day and try and figure out how they can help to be a part of this greater society on this mission to end this thing.

RG: At the same time, if you listen to American military officials here, they will say in unison, but that’s basically not possible. Like, the taking of Crimea, the taking back of every inch. So how do you square that? Like, how does this, how does that tension resolve itself, in your guess?

AK: I have no idea. I suppose that’s the job of the diplomats. I mean, I’m just a guy trying to help out. That’s why I quit the United States government and got out of that stuff, because I’m not made for that stuff, because I couldn’t sit in the same room with most of these kind of people. I don’t think I could even walk into the United Nations without, like, wanting to hang myself or something.

So, yeah. I really don’t know. I mean, obviously, the most important thing for them is to end the war, and to feel like justice has been served. And I don’t think that means vengeance.

I don’t know if you saw this story, but I was pretty involved with it. The Ukrainians retained their humanity. There was a Russian soldier that surrendered to a drone, and the Ukrainians pleaded with him to just surrender peacefully, and they wouldn’t fire on him. And it happened. And, every day, I’m just struck by how gentle and kind these people remain in the face of this sort of brutality.

So, I don’t know how the United States and the government, and the Ukrainian government will reconcile, as we go on. But I’m sympathetic to where they’re coming from.

RG: Yeah. And that, there’s a video of that that people can watch over at The Wall Street Journal. It’s pretty incredible to see him surrendering himself to this drone, and then walking across this minefield, basically. A no man’s land. And Russians start shelling him.

AK: Yeah. And he actually said, he signals that, if I try to surrender, they will shell me. And the Ukrainian military sent back that, look, please, please just do it, and you’ll be safe, and you’ll be in good hands, and everything will be okay. And he thought about it, and then came over.

And The Journal actually got access to him. I actually tipped off The Journal on that story.

RG: Yeah, that was quite a story. Send me the next one. How’d you hear about it?

AK: Well, actually, I supplied the surveillance drones to that brigade.

RG: Oh, well there you go.

AK: It was the 92nd brigade. So, I was on, live, actually, while it was happening.

RG: What was that like to watch that happening? Because, for people who haven’t seen it yet — and maybe people should pause it and go watch this — but like, he creates a language. The Russian soldier proposes hand signals to the drone. You know, if I do this twice, that’s a no, if I do this, that’s yes. And if the drone moves left to right, that’s a no, if it moves up or down, that’s a yes.

What was that like to watch in real time? Were you keeping up with him? Were you able to communicate with the people on the ground? Did they make those decisions independently, or were there people who were like — 

AK: Yeah, I was on with the people. I was on the ground in a different town, so I was being updated shortly after they were making the decisions, because I’m not, obviously, a part of the decision-making process. But it happened very quickly.

So, there’s a drone operator and there’s his colleague. And the colleague says to the drone operator, do not fire on this guy, I think he’s trying to tell us something. And then they figure out what he’s trying to say.

I think this is probably, this is another thing that’s amazing about the Ukrainians. They’re just like, sort of like what I wish Americans, we used to be, maybe? I don’t know, entrepreneurial and stuff. So they immediately get to their commander, right? I think there’s no bureaucracy. Like, it’s just, literally, the commander has to make this decision, the brigade commander. And he immediately says, please try and let him live. Like, we are not barbarians, right? We’re not going to go to the level of our opponent here. We need to help this guy live.

And it all happened in minutes. I was just, as always, struck about the retention of humanity. And, as it were, The Journal reporter happened to be in the area, and I said, my friends have a great story, and you might want to hear about it. And then they went on.

RG: Yeah. And the soldier turned out to be, basically, just a liquor store owner, it seemed like, who was drafted into the war.

AK: Yeah, I know. There are so many nutty stories, and I’ve sort of been in the right place — or I don’t know if you’d call it the right place or the wrong place at the wrong time — but I’ve been around some of these prisoner war stories. And the people are — you know, one guy, he was late on his alimony payments or his child support payments, and the Russians said to him, you can either go to Ukraine or we’re going to put you in jail.

I mean, I’m not sure if he was Wagner or if he was the actual army, but I just was struck by listening to this. I’m like, this guy, he led this irresponsible life, he couldn’t take care of himself, and so he comes over here to kill Ukrainian children. It’s crazy.

I mean, this is a war. War is just a terrible thing, it has to be avoided at all costs, there’s just nothing good about it.

RG: What does that do to the dynamic, where you have, on the one side, people who are defending their own territory. And then, they’re defending against people who are shooting at them and trying to kill them, and so it obviously is a very real live war. But, oftentimes, the people on the other side very much don’t want to be there, themselves. Like, it wasn’t their first choice, they were kind of mobilized and forced into it. How does that change the dynamic?

AK: Well, it’s very bizarre, it truly is. But, again, the issue is that they’re outnumbered and outgunned, right, from the Ukrainian side. And that’s what’s enabled the Ukrainians to go on, I think, because they’re there for better reasons, and they’re doing this for the right reasons of defending their homeland, right?

And so, I think that’s why, while the results — everybody wishes it happened faster. I mean, the Ukrainians are doing a little bit better. And the reality is that they’re outgunned by, I don’t know what kind of multiple, and outnumbered by what kind of multiple. In every battle they take significantly less casualties. I mean, every casualty is, really, a tragedy.

For example, in Bakhmut, I was just outside of Bachman the day before there was a semi-Ukrainian withdrawal, and I talked to one of the soldiers who had just come out, and he said it was beyond belief. There were literally hundreds of Russian soldiers just dead, and they’d been there for days. And they don’t take them with them, you know? They control that area. But they don’t actually just remove them, they just leave them on the ground. Just, wow, that’s really just not good.

RG: What about the nuclear power plant that’s near there? How nervous are you about that?

AK: I literally know nothing about this, about nuclear.  I don’t think it sounds good, though. But I suppose the U.N. chief is here today, the nuclear commission chief. So, hopefully, they can come up with something, because it’s obviously a ticking nuclear plant there. It’s very scary. It’s not in Ukrainian hands, and it’s just there.

RG: Last question. What do you think that you’ve been able to glean about the war in Ukraine that people in the U.S. are just missing?

AK: I don’t know. It’s hard to know, because most of the time I’ve been here, so I don’t really know what gets across and what doesn’t get across. But the sheer brutality, the human impact is mind-boggling, it’s overwhelming. And, like I said, I went as a humanitarian to most U.S. wars, mainly because I felt guilty as an American about what the U.S. was doing in all these countries. And I’ve seen a lot of terrible stuff. But I don’t know that the human aspect of any of this is, I don’t know if it’s even covered, because I think most of the coverage is probably about the war; like, the strategy, and who’s winning what, who moved, like, one kilometer ahead.

I mean, I try not to read too much, obviously I don’t see any video stuff, but, you know, there’s 40 million people who are traumatized, right? The trauma, the devastation. The children, children who’ve lost their parents, parents who’ve lost children, like, on the street, just walking in the park.

You know, I go to these destroyed apartment buildings. Today — Not today, when was I?  Yeah, it was June 11, [I] was Kryvyi Rih, an apartment building in Kryvyi Rih. So, I was there on the 12, and there’s grandmother outside, and she lost everything, and probably a relative. And with the stuff, and she’s hitting the pillow to get the smoke out of it, and I’m just thinking, wow.

I mean, this whole country, what they’re going through on a daily basis. And the sirens, and rocket attacks, missiles, explosions, you hear them, so no matter where you are, you’ll hear an explosion. Every major city has been hit by an explosion, let’s say, in the last ten days.

And that’s a continuing thing, right? It never ends. And so, I don’t know, you’d have to be very empathetic, I suppose, to just read that in the paper or watch it on TV and then fully understand what that means.

I’m involved with a number of orphanages and children, trying to help with prosthetics for children who [have] lost limbs. And I just think, like, the mother, what does she go through? She’s got to take the kid to the clinic every year to get a new prosthetic. The kid’s life is totally different. And just think of the story, over and over, and multiply it out.

I don’t know. I don’t even know how to even phrase any of this stuff. Like, it’s overwhelming tragedy and devastation. The physical stuff, it’s there and it’s terrible, but the human impact, it’s terrible.

RG: Yeah. I don’t think it could come across, I don’t think there is the language or the channel that’s open between that world and the one that I’m sitting in, here in the United States. It feels almost unbridgeable. The chasm is so great.

AK: Yeah. I think you’re right. Because when I’m home, I’m just looking around and people are sort of living their lives. Like, 48 hours ago, I was in this bombed out apartment building. I don’t know, I suppose you —

But, you know, where’s the responsibility? Where’s the accountability? As human beings, shouldn’t we all be concerned about this? Or should we all be concerned about the plight of our fellow human beings? But I guess not. I don’t know what’s the — I mean this goes to human nature, long philosophical conversations, I suppose. But it’s just, to me, sometimes it’s kind of an embarrassing time to be alive.

I’m just like, I don’t know how people aren’t just completely outraged. It’s nuts. It’s just, totally — like, this is in-our-lifetime stuff, you know? For anyone who was interested in history, read about it as a kid, or watched movies, and we’re like, oh my god, that’s disgusting. How people allow that to happen. And here we are.

And now, at this time, we have access to this stuff. So, sometimes people say, oh, you don’t really hear about it. And I’m like, well, you could if you wanted to, you could hear more than you hear, right? But it’s truly overwhelming.

RG: Well, thank you for taking some of your dwindling Starlink time to do what you can, to bridge it.

AK: Thanks. No, I appreciate your time, Ryan. I’m a big fan of your work, so keep up the good work.

[Deconstructed ending theme music.]

RG: Well, thanks so much. And be safe over there.

AK: Thanks. Appreciate it. Take care.

RG: That was Amed Khan, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, and I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of the Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to the intercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review, it helps people find the show. Go ahead and rate any episode that you want, even if you rated one already.

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Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

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Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., says he’s leaving his options open when asked about a presidential run. No Labels, a centrist political organization, is looking to run a split ticket between one Republican and one Democrat. Manchin is considered the likeliest candidate and has dropped increasing hints that he is considering it. This week on Deconstructed, Daniel Boguslaw, politics reporter at The Intercept, interviews Manchin’s former political operative and right-hand man, Scott Sears, about the senator’s career and political ambitions. Sears helped Manchin secure political wins across the state before switching parties and throwing it all in for Donald Trump.

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Daniel Boguslaw: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Daniel Boguslaw, sitting in for Ryan Grim this week. Two years ago, I began reporting on one of the most powerful politicians in American History, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.

Joe Manchin [on CNN]: We need pipelines. We need fossil fuel

JM [on Fox Business]: You have to have energy independence to be energy secure to be the superpower of the world. … Right now the administration has always been pushing further left than I can ever get. 

DB: When I started that project, I was still a freelancer. I was shocked at how much power Joe Manchin had amassed, as Democrats’ critical 51st vote in the Senate, and how little reporting there was about who this guy is, where he came from, and what sustained his political career in what is now a deep red state.

My reporting began with a months-long investigation into the private coal companies that made Manchin a fortune while simultaneously poisoning the air and water of West Virginia. During my reporting in West Virginia, from Morgantown in the north, down to Charleston and back to D.C., one man has provided invaluable insight into Manchin’s life story. I first met him at a Jimmy Buffet-styled restaurant, sandwiched between a golf course and a West Virginia freeway.

For years, Scott Sears served as one of Manchin’s top lieutenants, overseeing campaigns, fundraising, and helping to mastermind his political strategy across the state. After becoming disaffected with the West Virginia Democratic Party he once worked for, throwing all in for Trump, and having a falling out with Manchin over coal dealings, Sears picked up the phone when I called him two years ago. We’ve continued to talk since then.

[Phone rings.]

Scott Sears: Hello. 

DB: Scott, what’s going on? It’s Dan. 

SS: Hey, what’s up, buddy? 

DB: Not much. Just wanted to see if you’re ready to try to do this 2.0.

SS: 2.0. Let’s, let’s do it.

DB: Manchin did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. In this week’s Deconstructed, I talked to Scott to get the rundown on Joe Manchin’s rise, from carpet salesman to Senate kingmaker, and now potential presidential candidate.

Shannon Bream [Fox News]: The No Labels Political Group continues to fund and organize. They’re trying to get in all 50 states. They want to be on the ballot to run a third party ticket. [The] New York Times says that’s got Democrats very upset and worried it’s going to re-elect President Trump. And they say this, “At the top of the list of potential candidates is Senator Joe Manchin III, the conservative West Virginia Democrat who has been a headache to his party and can bleed support from President Biden in areas crucial to his reelection.”

DB: In June, Manchin was asked about a potential presidential run on Fox News.

SB: I always ask you, you have not ruled it off and have not taken it off the table, is a third-party run still in the realm of possibilities?

JM: Shannon, No Labels has been moving and pushing very hard the centrist middle, making common sense decisions. People that basically expect us to do our job and not put the political party ahead of the policy in our great country that’s what we’ve seen happening. And there’s more noise and more extremism coming from the far left and far right. 

DB: With Manchin refusing to say whether or not he’ll run for president in 2024, Scott agreed to go on the record for the first time. The years he spent working with Manchin in West Virginia — where Scott used to be a leader in the Democratic Party — gives him a deep familiarity with Manchin’s political maneuvering.

SS: Joe just basically knows how to work his way in with whomever.

DB: In our conversation, Scott details the perils a Manchin presidential bid could pose for Joe Biden’s reelection. Having worked on Manchin’s campaigns for political office for over a decade, Scott sees the senator’s recent moves — like a trip he took to West Virginia with Bill Gates — as signals that he’s gearing up for something much bigger.

SS: Bill Gates coming to West Virginia here a few months ago to talk about this battery plant — 

DB: Right. 

SS: — And being an investor in it, that’s a good example. And here you have pretty much the richest guy in the world worth $125 billion. Joe Manchin, when he sees those numbers, he will find a way because he was always taught — and we’ve always, we joked about this quite a bit — that Joe always lived off of other people’s money. I mean, that’s just Joe. He was taught that way from his dad to use other people’s money. 

So what Joe has done, basically — let’s use Bill Gates again as an example — is if he thought back then, which he did, that he was going to make this move — somehow, some way — to run for president as a third-party or whichever, he knew that he had to find money. So what’s the best thing to do on the national level, is go find the richest guy in the world and charm him.

When I saw this thing with Bill Gates and he jumps on the plane with gates, flies into West Virginia; that wasn’t all about this battery plant. This is all about Joe trying to figure out: How am I going to get into a bank account?

DB: I first met Scott after I began digging into Manchin’s companies. I was sorting through public records describing the amounts of waste coal that were moved throughout different parts of West Virginia. I looked into the Grant Town Power Plant where the waste coal that Manchin’s companies purchase and re-sells is burned.

I looked at the air quality in Morgantown and surrounding areas near the power plant to try to figure out the exact impact on residents of West Virginia. I looked into the coal ash storage where the remnants of that coal are put underground leaching into waterways and aquifers. And I also started calling around to try to find people who might have insight into how Manchin set up this network of coal companies, what initiated it all, and how he got his start.

Over the course of dozens of calls, I finally reached Scott by chance, and he put me in touch with all kinds of people throughout the state. Scott and Manchin’s relationship dates way back. Horizon Ventures, a company run by Scott’s father Stanley, owns the land on which the Grant Town Power Plant sits. That powerplant is the single largest consumer of coal delivered by Manchin’s company Enersystems. 

SB: I first met Joe, was when he probably started serving in the House of Delegates. Then moving on to state senator in West Virginia, probably around 1984, ’85. Just basically met him through my father. He knew my dad because he was in business for a long time in Fairmont, West Virginia. 

DB: Manchin’s political career began in the ’80s, when he was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates. He moved to the State Senate in 1986 where he served for a decade until running for Governor in 1996. In lining up supporters for his first gubernatorial bid, Manchin sought the support of businessmen in the state, including Scott’s dad.

SB: My dad and Joe, like I said, their relationship went back a lot further than mine, and especially with Joe’s father. My dad had a relationship and history with Joe’s dad, John Sr., and there was some falling out on that end because of some business deals. So my dad had no choice but not to support Joe in 1996. 

And I’ll never forget, it was a Sunday afternoon and it was shortly before the primary that year.  So Joe calls down the house on a Sunday. My mom answers the phone and, “Hey, Karen, what you doing? I bet you’re, it’s Sunday, you’re cooking pasta.” “Oh yeah, Joe cooking pasta. If you wanna come down, come grab a bite to eat.” He said, “OK.” He says, “Stanley there?” 

So, my dad gets on the phone, “Hey Joe, what’s up?” Said, “Hey Stan, what are you doing?” “Oh, nothing, Joe just sitting here.” “Do you mind if I come down and we talk about this race here for Governor in ’96? Because I know we have a little bit of difference and you’re not supporting me and I really need to get you on our side.” And, my dad said, “Hey, Joe, Karen’s cooking some pasta,” my mother, “and you’re more than welcome to come down and chat. But just so you know, I don’t want you to waste a trip, I still can’t support you.” [Laughs]. 

DB: Manchin ended up losing that 1996 Democratic primary for West Virginia governor.  

SS: Joe was devastated. I’ll never forget. I mean, he was so devastated that he lost that race that he had, he always had a Harley. Joe loves his Harleys. He jumps on his Harley by himself shortly after the primary election. And that year in May takes off and drives to Myrtle Beach. And just went to basically get away from everything. 

DB: Though the two families’ relationship was rocky, eventually Scott and Manchin later reconnected around state politics. While their fathers might have butt heads, their sons ended up forging a political alliance. 

SS: And I’ll never forget, talking to Larry shortly after that, maybe several months after that. 

DB: He’s talking about Larry Puccio. Puccio and Manchin knew each other from their days owning businesses together in a local mall: Manchin selling carpets and Puccio selling church organs. 

SS: Larry came from the same mold.

DB: They formed a friendship in that mall that would endure for the rest of their lives.

SS: We’re talking about the election and this and that. And Larry says, “Yeah, he said he’s done. He said he’ll never run, he’s never going to run for another office. He’s just finished with politics. He thought for sure he would win this race. It didn’t happen. And he’s just, he’s just devastated over it.”

So that was that in ’96. And then a few years go by, of course time heals and, and he rethinks his position and, and Larry jumps in and convinces Joe that, “Hey, you know what? There’s a good position right now that we can run for. Let’s run for secretary of state.” And this was in 1999, 2000. 

DB: Puccio, who also had a deep interest in politics, convinces Manchin to run for secretary of state.  

SS: So Larry, once he saw the opening with the secretary of state’s race, and he jumped on that as quick as he could.

DB: Puccio is now an extremely established lobbyist in Washington where he lobbies on behalf of energy interests. He says that he doesn’t talk to Manchin about his projects, although Manchin has told the press that Puccio is one of his unconditional friends and that he talks to all of his unconditional friends. Larry Puccio did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment at the time this episode was published

Because of their shared history, Scott agreed to work on Manchin’s campaign for secretary of state. Through his business dealings, Scott knew the power players in Northern West Virginia where he had grown up. He also excelled at finding new political allies in national politics. So when Manchin decided to run for secretary of state, he saw in Scott someone who could bolster his political odds better than anyone else. 

Whether it was at PTA meetings, Veterans Associations, or Democratic Party fundraisers, Scott was his man for getting the word out and bringing coalitions of interest groups together to turn out the vote.

Scott handled political operations in Northern West Virginia running the campaign in that region. Puccio was Manchin’s lieutenant in the southern portion of the state. With Scott and Puccio’s help, Manchin successfully won his race for secretary of state.

SS: And then Joe said, “Hey, I want you to come work for me in the secretary of state’s office. We’re gonna put a real neat program together that I think will make a big, big difference in voter registration in the state of West Virginia,” because voter registration was down so much.

And he said, “Would you want a full-time job?” I said, “Sure.”

DB: In the secretary of state’s office, Scott helped champion a strategy that would strengthen Manchin’s voter base.

SS: We created a program called the Share’s Program, S-H-A-R-E-S, that was the acronym for Saving History And Reaching Every Student.

And what we would do would go around to schools — every school in the state of West Virginia — high schools, and talk to principals, talk to superintendents of the counties and convince them that, hey, we’d like to get you guys involved with this program to make sure that we’re getting high school kids registered to vote because the voter registration was so low.

So we started that program and what that program did, is it not only gave us, what would you say, it didn’t [just] give us the permission just to go into the high schools, but it also made it easy for us that when we were in these counties, that you’re up there working with different counties that you were able to meet with the senior citizens, the Fraternal Order of Police any fraternities and different groups, and continue to build that base.

And that, and that’s all this was, was to build a base because knowing that Joe was going to run for governor in 2004. And at that time, the governor of West Virginia was Bob Wise. And Bob Wise got in, he had some problems. I can’t remember exactly what all happened, but it affected him real, really, really bad.

DB: Bob Wise’s problems centered on 500 emails obtained by the AP detailing the back and forth between the Governor and Mascia-Frye, the state’s Europe project manager. Wise would go on to admit that he had been unfaithful to his wife and family, and that he would not seek re-election as governor. That scandal created an opportunity for Manchin to run for his seat. 

SS: Plus, I don’t think the state of West Virginia was doing real well at that time. So that seat looked like that, OK, this is something that I think we can do. And the only person that Joe had to worry about that he had to run against was a guy by the name of Lloyd Jackson, because Lloyd Jackson was backed by education.

And you only had two teachers unions in West Virginia. You had the AFT and the WVEA. And the WVEA at the time, they had the largest membership. And if we could get the endorsement of WVEA, we’d have a good chance of winning that race.

DB: To have a fighting chance at the governorship, Manchin would need the help of a family member famous in West Virginia politics, his uncle A. James Manchin. So let’s back up a bit. 

A. James was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates when he was only 21. He became friends with the powerful West Virginia Governor Arch Moore, father to the current U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito. A. James used his seat in the House of Delegates to build political power in the state and forge relationships.

When JFK ran for president in 1960, it was A. James who took him all over the state, introducing him to political players and driving out the vote. He traveled up and down West Virginia meeting thousands of voters listening to their stories and speaking at large events and small gatherings. At a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, Kennedy told the audience: “No state in the country has suffered more from the neglect of the federal government than West Virginia.” Here’s JFK campaigning in West Virginia in 1960:

John F. Kennedy: Whether you vote for me or not, because of my competence to be president, I am sure that here, in this state of West Virginia, that no one believes that I’d be a candidate for the presidency if I didn’t think I could meet my oath of office.

DB: Fresh off a win in Wisconsin — his primary challenger Hubert Humphrey’s home state — Kennedy clinched West Virginia, which opened the door to winning the presidency. After Kennedy’s win, he appointed A. James the West Virginia state director of the farmers home association, giving him tremendous power to distribute funds all over West Virginia.

A. James Manchin: This is A. James Manchin, your secretary of state. With 36 years of experience in state government, 10 years of financial management and community development with the Farmers Home Administration, let us put West Virginia’s money to work in West Virginia.

DB: A. James went on to win a race for secretary of state and then state treasurer, but was impeached in 1989 for losing the state $279 million in bad investments.

Years later, in 2004, when Joe Manchin was launching his second run for governor, his uncle provided the same political muscle that had boosted JFK, until things took a tragic turn.

SS: Unfortunately, Joe’s uncle A. James Manchin had just passed away right in the middle of his primary. And he was so valuable because people still loved A. James because A. James was just like, he was like a Ted Kennedy.

He was, he was a great orator. And he was very colorful and people loved him. And unfortunately he passes away. And I’ll never forget, the day of the funeral, we’re at the funeral in Farmington. And that same day, the interview for Joe to meet with WVEA to get their endorsement, was that evening in Charleston.

DB: The same day that Manchin’s uncle A. James passes away — the man who helped Kennedy win the presidential election — is the night he’s going to meet with Tom Lange, the president of the West Virginia Teachers Union — a critical institution whose endorsement he needs to win the governorship.

SS: And of course, Joe’s just emotionally upset — lost his favorite uncle. He and I jump[ed] in a car from Farmington, right from where the church was and the celebration. 

DB: At this point, Manchin and Scott leave A. James’ funeral and head to Charleston, to meet Tom Lange. 

SS: We take off and we drive to Charleston. And of course, he’s just not feeling good.

And he’s like, “buddy, I don’t,” he said, “this is not good. This, I just, I don’t know if I can do this today.” I said, “well, I’ll just go in there and do your best.” 

So we get in front of the, we pull in front of the WVEA office and I say, “Hey, you go ahead and go in and then I’ll just hang out here and just call me when you’re done and I’ll pick you up.” And he comes out and gets in the car and I could see the look on his face.

And I’m like, “Well, how’d it go?” He’s all: “Buddy,” his exact words, he said, “I fucking blew that one.” He said, “I blew it. There’s no chance we’re going to get this endorsement.” So I take him and drop him off at his place down there and, and I called Tom and I’m like, “Hey, what are we gonna do?” He said, “It’s going to be tough.”

And Tom calls me back a little later and he says, “OK, we got it. They voted in favor to endorse him.” So he calls Joe, tells him what happened, and then Joe immediately calls me, he says, “What the hell did you do?” I’m like, well, I said, “Hey, don’t ask me. That’s Tom. You know Tom’s the guy who was the president of the WVEA.” So that right there was the jumpstart to basically moving on and pretty much with that endorsement and with the largest teachers union in West Virginia, that pretty much secured the nomination for the primary election for the governor’s race.

DB: Manchin’s run for Governor coincided with the 2004 presidential election. He, Scott, and Larry Puccio decided to take a play out of A. James’ playbook.

They linked up with Ted Kennedy to tour West Virginia and deepen their relationships with U.S. Senators and Democratic nominee for President John Kerry.

SS: West Virginia was in play during that race for John Kerry. John Kerry was running a tight race for president that year. So of course, West Virginia’s five electoral votes were in play.

So when they came down before the general of that year West Virginia was still in play. It was the last weekend of October before the November election. So me and Larry organized a bus tour in the Southern West Virginia because John Kerry needed Southern West Virginia and Joe needed Southern West Virginia as well. We wanted to secure that.

So we brought Ted Kennedy with us on that trip. Ted Kennedy and A. James are really, really good friends. So on that bus tour, that right there, probably with that group of people — especially when you’ve got Robert Bird, Jay Rockefeller, and Ted Kennedy with you — and you’re in southern West Virginia, the same town that JFK did his famous speech in West Virginia, was our last stop in, in Logan, West Virginia.

DB: Thanks to Manchin’s voter turnout efforts while serving as secretary of state, and the star-studded crew of celebrity politicians crisscrossing West Virginia with him, Manchin secured his seat as governor.

[Music transition.]

DB: After multiple terms as governor, investigations descended around Manchin in 2010. The federal government subpoenaed the Department of Transportation’s Division of Highways, investigating land seized through eminent domain, and also solicited campaign finance records from the secretary of state’s office dating back to Manchin’s 1996 gubernatorial bid. The investigation also sought records from the Department of Administration’s Aviation Division. 

Local papers also reported that Larry Puccio’s land assessment firm was being investigated by the IRS and the FBI for its role in the construction of a $150 million highway running straight through Manchin’s hometown.

Manchin had two connections to the family of the U.S. Attorney overseeing the probe. At the time of the probe, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia was Booth Goodwin. He was also the nephew of Manchin’s secretary of Culture and Arts, Kay Goodwin. Booth Goodwin was also the cousin of Carte Goodwin, Manchin’s former legal counsel and the man he would appoint as interim senator before filling the seat himself. 

When Carte declined to run in the special election four months later, ultimately only one person, a confidential FBI source, was charged with tax evasion and mail fraud.

Despite the investigation in 2010, that same year, Manchin would go on to win election to the Senate by over 50,000 votes, narrowly retaining Democratic control. Years later, Booth Goodwin would go on to run a Super PAC aiding in Manchin’s reelection.

None of the Goodwins responded to The Intercept’s request for comment by the time of publication.

[Break.]

DB: Just as Manchin was critical for maintaining Democrats’ control of the Senate when he was first elected in 2010, today, Manchin enjoys even greater power to make nearly any demand of the Biden administration he sees fit.

As I reported last summer, both Manchin and his wife – who chairs the Appalachian Regional Commission – have directed tens of millions of dollars to the conservation area surrounding their vacation condo. As Senator, Manchin has also used his tiebreaking vote to quash Biden’s nominees for critical agencies. He has pushed for fossil fuel expansion. And, most recently, was able to win approval for the Mountain Valley Pipeline – a massive natural gas project, which stands to greatly benefit Larry Puccio’s biggest client, the Appalachian Natural Gas Operators Coalition.

SS: What Joe is doing right now is he’s out there testing the waters. And just like what he’s doing, more so right now with Mountain Valley Pipeline, with a permitting process.

He thought that was a slam dunk, whenever he signed on with the Inflation Reduction Act with Biden, that he was guaranteed those permits. Well, we all know that, hey, Biden’s not gonna do anything with climate, especially involving gas or coal.

DB: But the IRA — the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s massive spending package — failed to deliver Manchin the permitting reform and Mountain Valley Pipeline he desperately sought. In May, after months of waiting, Manchin was finally able to secure a green light for the pipeline as part of the bipartisan debt ceiling bill.

Today, Manchin is in a perilous position. His approval rating in West Virginia is the lowest it’s ever been, and old allies in the state are looking for the exits, as Governor Jim Justice launches his bid for Manchin’s seat. 

Margaret Brennan [Face the Nation]: Jim Justice, your Governor, Republican — he’s coming for your job. He has declared, and I know you have said you are going to take your time till the end of the year to decide. But, doesn’t he have at least [a] six month advantage here? Don’t you need to tell people what your plans are?

Joe Manchin: Well, here’s the thing Margaret, you just said, “about my job.” My job is to do what I can to help the people of West Virginia and support this great country of ours and defend the constitution. 

DB: With few options left, Manchin has hinted that his next move could be to run for the only office higher than his own, President of the United States.

SS: Let’s start with Larry Puccio. You have Larry Puccio that jumped on board with Joe going back to day one. Like I, like I told you. OK, they both wrote each other’s coattails and Larry did a good job running campaigns and Chief of Staff and this and that.

And then of course Larry — he’s just looking for the most popular politician in the state of West Virginia. So, at that time, he jumps on Jim Justice, when Jim Justice decided to run for governor. So now here we are: Joe works his butt off to become the U.S. Senator that he is, and to be in the position that he’s in, and by making a couple bad decisions, like the Inflation Reduction Act and things like that, that have brought his poll numbers way, way down, and with Jim Justice jumping in this race, who Larry, is – still to this day – Jim Justice’s consultant as governor. So now it comes down to: Who has a better chance of winning? Can Jim Justice win, or can Joe win? Well, we all know right now that Joe cannot beat Jim Justice in West Virginia for the Senate seat in 2024.

So here you have Jim Justice, that’s gonna take Joe’s seat from him, because then that puts the Senate back at 50/50 at least. And Joe’s out there on an island right now all by himself not knowing where to go. He’s looking at this one or two different ways.

DB: Having served as Machin’s political operative for years, Scott says there’s only one move left for the senator to make, and that’s running for president in the 2024 election.

[Music transition.]

DB: As rumors swirl about Manchin’s presidential ambitions, the group with the most to gain from his bid is No Labels. The centrist political organization has helped support moderates in tough races and runs the Super PAC behind the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus, who concentrate their efforts on causing problems for both progressives and hardline conservatives.

Ahead of the 2024 election, No Labels has raised over $70 million in anticipation of running a split ticket with one Democrat and one Republican to “bring America back to the center.”

Joe Manchin and Republican Senator Susan Collins have both frequented No Labels events in recent months.

SS: So Joe’s looking at this whole thing saying: “OK, I can put myself in a position right now; I can go out and try to raise as much money as I can, probably never get to the number that I need to be competitive – “

A third-party candidate — Ross Perot ran and did a decent job and I think he ended up with 20 percent. We all know that that magic number as a third-party to win this race has to be between 30 and 35 percent, to even have a chance.

I don’t think, me personally, there’s any chance Joe can even come close to that. And he probably knows that as well. So he’s looking at this right now, the way I know Joe, is a couple different ways.

Number one: “I can go out and muddy the waters up a little bit. I can get a lot of attention on the media. I’ll travel all over the country, meet with some people, raise some money. That money will go into my campaign.”

Or, at the end of the day if he thinks he can carry five or 10 percent in the next election. And let’s just, let’s just call five percent. And if five percent is going to cost someone the election — it’s either gonna cost the Republican or the Democrat the election; as we all know, that five percent is a big number. So somewhere during midstream, what he does is he cuts a deal. The retail politician comes back out, he negotiates a deal, and he says, “Hey, I’ll get the heck outta this thing you guys. But I want to be secretary of state, secretary of energy, some cabinet position, where he can just jet set all over the country and all over the world, and finish out his political career have his income coming in, and still make the connections that he needs to, basically, what Joe has always done, is to prosper personally from it.

DB: Manchin hasn’t publicly confirmed a presidential run, and has dodged questions about running on a No Labels ticket.

Larry Kudlow [Fox Business]: So Joe you’re going to leave — the presidential door open, you’re going to leave it open for the moment? 

Joe Manchin: I haven’t closed anything, Larry, and I’ve kept everything open. I haven’t closed a thing. And I’m just leaving everything possible to help my country move in a moderate, centrist — making sure we’re making our decisions not from the extremes, Larry.  

SS: At the end of the day, and that’s why he keeps saying that, “I can’t make a decision until the end of the year.” Well, the only reason he’s saying that is because, once again, he’s out there seeing what kind of money is available for him to move forward with that decision.

So right now it’s just a little bit too early and those campaign contributions aren’t coming, probably aren’t coming in fast enough. And then his poll numbers aren’t moving at all in West Virginia. So he knows that’s pretty, pretty much a dead issue; he knows as of right now, he cannot beat Jim Justice.

So that’s all he’s doing right now. He’s just buying time to see which direction he’s going to go. So this is what his ambition is, and at this point of his political career, the clock is ticking. He’ll be 75 in August. This is his last big hurrah, so he’s gonna go out with a bang one way or the other.

DB: After getting everything he’s asked for, from funding for the nature preserve, where he vacations, to a massive natural gas pipeline, to a sweetheart deal appointing his wife to the Appalachian Regional Commission, Scott says Manchin’s final act won’t go as well as his decades-long stint in politics.

SS: Hey, we all know how the political cycle works. And we know that polling is the most important thing, and that’s what Larry’s job always was, was to look at polls. And we lived and died by polls. And polls are, that’s, if you’re dancing with the devil, you’re gonna find out real quick where you stand. And Joe danced with that devil one too many times, and that’s why he is in the position that he’s in right now in West Virginia with an approval rating hovering right around that 40 percent mark.

DB:  Whether Manchin decides to run for president, or double down in the private sector, I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for the latest developments. And so will Scott.

DB: Well Scott, thank you so much for laying out the psychology and political history of Joe Manchin and for coming on the show.

SS: Sounds good, my friend. I appreciate it. And we will look forward to see what unfolds here in the near future.

DB: Alright. Thanks, Scott. 

SS: OK, thank you.

[Deconstructed outro theme music.]

DB: Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn and our senior editor is Maryam Saleh. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor-in-chief.

And I’m Daniel Boguslaw, The Intercept’s Washington reporter. 

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week, and please go and leave us a rating or review, it helps people find the show.

If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcast@theintercept.com.

Thanks so much.

The post A Conversation With Joe Manchin’s Former Right Hand, Scott Sears appeared first on The Intercept.

Imran Khan became Pakistan’s prime minister through a most unusual route. As he explained in an interview on Sunday night, Khan was for decades the nation’s most famous cricketer, before transitioning into the world of philanthropy, building hospitals and supporting universities. From there, he moved into politics, founding a party — the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI — and sweeping into power in 2018. But he had a slim majority, and was ousted in a no-confidence vote by 2022. 

Since then, he and his party have been the target of a relentless crackdown by the nation’s military, which has ruled the country directly or indirectly for decades. 

Khan was arrested on May 9, 2023, by the military, and held for four days before the Supreme Court ruled his detention illegal. Protests erupted nationwide, some turning violent, and the military establishment responded by arresting most of Khan’s senior leadership and forcing them to resign from the party under pressure. Thousands of rank-and-file party workers have also been jailed. 

Khan, meanwhile, is holed up in his home in Lahore, sifting through some 150 charges of corruption and other offenses that have been leveled at him — charges he and his supporters dismiss as politically motivated. Yet Khan remains a popular political figure heading into elections that are scheduled for October.

He joined me last night to discuss his career, the political crisis facing Pakistan, and his diminishing hope for a negotiated resolution. What follows is a condensed version of our conversation; the transcript has been edited for clarity. You can hear the interview on my podcast Deconstructed. 

In the interview, Khan urged the United States to speak out in defense of the rule of law, democracy, and other Western values under threat in Pakistan. A State Department spokesperson, shown the comments, said that “our message has been clear and consistent on this. We support the peaceful upholding of constitutional and democratic principles, including respect for human rights. We do not support, whether it’s in Pakistan or anywhere else around the world, one political party over another. We support broader principles, including the rule of law and equal justice under the law.”

Khan, in the interview, also speculated that the U.S. had turned on him because of his skepticism of the global war on terror and due to a misperception that he had aligned Pakistan with the Taliban. “On the war on terror and the Taliban,” the State Department spokesperson said, “the United States and Pakistan have a shared interest in ensuring the Taliban live up to the commitments that they have made — that terrorist groups that may be active in Afghanistan are no longer able to threaten regional stability.”

Ryan Grim: Since you left office, you’ve been the target of an assassination attempt and a nationwide crackdown on your party, the PTI. Last month while sitting in a courtroom, you were hauled out and jailed by the military. For American viewers who haven’t been following this closely, can you tell us what happened that day and what led up to it?

Imran Khan: I had gone there to get bail, and before leaving my house, I had recorded a video message saying, “Look if you want to arrest me, just bring a warrant and then take me.” There was a huge problem the 12th of March. There was a 24-hour attack on my house … which was illegal because all I had to do was give a surety bond that I would appear in court, and they couldn’t arrest me. But they refused to take the bond, and they kept attacking my house, and it was an awful situation. A lot of people got injured; a lot of our workers got injured trying to stop them from abducting me.

So before leaving for Islamabad, I gave a statement, “Don’t do this again.” … I mean, it was a commando action. They beat up everyone who was in that registry office in the High Court. My [inaudible] were hit on the head, bleeding. I was then taken by all these commandos, really — they were there supposed to be Rangers, but they looked really scary. And then I was taken in jail.

“The entire senior leadership is in jail. The only way they can get out of jail is if they say that they’re leaving my party.”

The reaction was always going to be against the military. It was abduction, and later the Supreme Court ruled that it was unlawful. So there was this reaction in the streets. And as a result of that reaction, this crackdown has taken place where over 10,000 of my workers already in jail. Anyone to do with my party is picked up on a daily basis. And the rest of the party’s in hiding. The entire senior leadership is in jail. The only way they can get out of jail is if they say that they’re leaving my party.

RG: Now, The Intercept recently reported that the military has ordered news outlets across the country not to cover you at all. How effective has that ban been? Have you heard directly from the media about those orders? What’s the effect been on Pakistan public opinion?

IK: Well, the ban was [there] ever since I was ousted from power. And the then-army chief admitted afterward that it was him who thought I was dangerous for the country, and he engineered that conspiracy to get me out. So since then, most TV channels weren’t allowed to show me. And there were a couple of stations that would show me. And as a result, their ratings went very high. So about three, four months back, they went after those two channels, they shot one of them, they put the head of the channel in jail, the channel called BOL [News], the chief executive was put into jail. The channel then stopped showing me, and both the channels which were showing me, stopped showing me. No live coverage at all. This went to another level. Now my name is not allowed to be mentioned on television, on any electronic media or print media.

“My name is not allowed to be mentioned on television, on any electronic media or print media.”

RG: In the aftermath of your ouster, you suggested that the United States likely played some role in your removal or approved it. But you seem to have kind of downplayed that suggestion since then; why is that? And what do you think was the primary driver of your removal?

IK: On the 6th of March 2022, there was a meeting between the Pakistani ambassador and the U.S. Under Secretary of State Don Lu. In that meeting, the meeting was recorded, and a cipher was sent to the Foreign Office and me. In the cipher, it said that Donald Lu [was] telling the ambassador that Imran Khan had to be removed as prime minister in a vote of no confidence; otherwise, there will be consequences to Pakistan. The next day, 7th of March, was the vote of no confidence. So at the time, I thought it was really a U.S.-led conspiracy. Already, the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan was meeting those people who then defected from my party. So the U.S. Embassy was already meeting these people, the ones who jumped ship first. And then the moment the vote of no confidence came, then there were about 20 people who deserted my party, and the government fell.

At the time, I thought it was U.S.-led. Later on, I discovered that it was the army chief, who actually fed the U.S. — he had a lobbyist in the U.S. called [former Pakistan ambassador to the U.S.] Husain Haqqani, hired by my government without me knowing it, who was actually telling the U.S. that I, Imran Khan, was anti-American and actually, the army chief was pro-American. [Haqqani told The Intercept and other news outlets that Khan’s claim is false.] So later on, we discovered that it was actually engineered from here because I had a perfectly good relationship with the Trump administration. So I couldn’t work out what had gone wrong. But then we discovered that it was the army chief who actually engineered this feeling that I was anti-American, in the U.S.

RG: What do you think did go wrong? If you could go back to 2018 and give yourself a few pieces of advice just after your election, what would you tell yourself to do differently or nothing at all?

IK: I would have gone back to the public. If I had not got a big mandate, you cannot make reforms. And I would not have taken government because what subsequently turned out was, I just could not bring the powerful under the law — and the powerful mafias that control Pakistan for so many years. I did not have the strength. They would undermine me. They would weaken my party. They would approach my party members. So I was always trying to keep my government together, and so that was the biggest mistake. And then I became over-reliant on the army, on the army chief, because the army is the most organized institution in Pakistan. It’s entrenched. I mean, it’s ruled directly or indirectly for almost 70 years. So I became more reliant on them, on the army chief. And the army chief was not interested in rule of law. He was not [inaudible] the powerful making money and siphoning money out of the country. So I failed. So that’s what I would have done differently.

RG: You were criticized during your tenure as prime minister for cracking down on dissent and for suppression of free speech. As you look at what’s now happening to you, do you feel differently about the way that you approach dissent?

IK: Now talking about the media, you cannot compare what is going on right now. I mean, you just have to look back: Our government was criticized by the media more than any other government. We didn’t even have a honeymoon. And it’s because the powerful media also is in the hands of the powerful, the vested interests who did not want to change. So the moment I would go for change, they would attack me. So firstly, the media was completely free. I mean, what is happening now you can’t compare. They’re shutting down media houses. One of our best investigative journalists was hounded out of Pakistan and then assassinated in Kenya. Today, the second best investigative journalist: now disappeared for 17 days, no one knows where he is. And then some of the top anchors or journalists would disappear and be mistreated and then beaten up. This sort of thing has never happened in my time. And now, of course, there is total censorship, we are back to the days of military dictatorship. But [Pervez] Musharraf’s dictatorship doesn’t even compare to what’s going on right now.

RG: And is there anything concrete that you would urge the Biden administration or the United States to do to defend democracy now in Pakistan?

IK: What I do think that the Biden administration must speak out are what are the professed Western values: democracy, constitutionalism, rule of law. Custodial torture is banned everywhere, which is going on in Pakistan right now, as I speak. My people have been subjected to torture. Our senator was tortured. One of my staff, he was picked up and tortured. So speak out against custodial torture, but most of all, fundamental rights. … So that’s all we expect: The U.S. being the guardian of Western values, they should just speak out about what their professed values are. The same things when they talk about China and when they talk about Russia, what’s happening in Hong Kong. I mean, much worse is happening right now in Pakistan.

RG: How were you treated during your detention?

IK: I was [detained for] four days, I wasn’t mistreated. I was just completely shut off from what was going on. I didn’t even know what was happening. All the street protests and the few buildings — there was arson in these buildings — I knew nothing about it until I was produced in front of the Supreme Court. But I wasn’t mistreated. I mean, I was mistreated in the way I was picked up and then taken into custody in that time, but once I was there, no, there was no mistreatment.

RG: Were you interrogated? Were there any any threats, direct or veiled, made about your future role in Pakistani politics?

IK: You know, this country knows me for 50 years. I mean, for 20 years, I was a leading sportsman in this country. And cricket is the biggest sport, and I was captain for 10 years. So I was in the media for a long time. And then I went into philanthropy and built the biggest charitable institutions, which are cancer hospitals, and the university, so people know me for a long time. They know that I’m not going to back down. But what they’re doing is — they have clearly stated to me, the establishment, that whatever happens, “You’re not going to be allowed to get back into power.”

So what they’re doing now is, they are dismantling the party. But dismantling the biggest political party, the only federal party in Pakistan, is dismantling a democracy. And actually, that’s what’s going on. All the democratic institutions, the judiciary. I mean, the judiciary today is totally impotent in stopping this violation of fundamental rights. We went to the Supreme Court. According to the Constitution, the election in Punjab — the biggest province, which is 60 percent of Pakistan —was supposed to be held on the 14th of May. The government refused. So I mean, even the Supreme Court orders are not listened to. The judges give people bail, the police fix them up on some other cases. So this total violation of fundamental rights which is going on, I think this is — it’s all an attempt to weaken me and my party to the point that we will not be able to contest the elections. Because all the opinion polls show that we will win a massive majority in elections. Out of the 37 by-elections, my party has swept 30 of them, despite the establishment helping the government parties. So therefore, they know that in a free and fair election, we will just sweep. Hence, all these efforts are being made to completely dismantle my party and weaken it to the point that it will not be able to contest elections.

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RG: And this is a dark moment for your country, for your party, as you said, and for you yourself personally. But I’m curious: What are you looking forward to? In a best-case scenario, what’s the path out of this crisis?

IK: It’s like a crossroads. One road is leading back to the bad old days of military dictatorship. Because that means, you know, we will regress the whole movement for democracy, which gradually evolved over a period of time. Our media really struggled valiantly for their freedom, and we had one of the freest medias. And then our judiciary was always subservient to the executive. But in 2007, [it] started a movement called the “Lawyer’s Movement,” and for the first time the judiciary asserted its independence. So the whole pillars of democracy now are being rolled back. The whole evolution, the steady move toward a democratic country is now all at stake. So either we allow this to go where it is going, an emerging military dictatorship. The other is, you know, we all try and all the democratic forces get together and strive for getting back to rule of law, democracy, and free and fair elections.

RG: And as you confront this potential long term military dictatorship, how does it make you think back on your own support of the military and the coup of Pervez Musharraf, or having the military’s indirect support in your own election? Do you feel like there was a way to accomplish that without the military, or is Pakistan in a situation that reform is only possible through that institution?

IK: Well, you know, just to make a correction: Mine is the only party that was never manufactured by the military. People’s Party, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he served a dictator for eight years before he formed his party. The second party is [Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz]. The head of PMLN was actually nurtured by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship. I mean, he was a nonentity. So he was actually a product of his military dictatorship.

Mine is the only party for 22 years, from scratch I started, and actually broke through the two-party system. In the 2018 election, the army didn’t oppose me. But they didn’t help us in winning the election. The elections weren’t rigged, because it should be now obvious. Now despite the army, the establishment standing behind this government, we’ve swept 30 out of 37 by-elections. And all the opinion polls show that we are way ahead of everyone, almost 60 to 70 percent rating.

“Our thought process has evolved to the point now, where there’s a consensus in Pakistan that a bad democracy is better than a military dictatorship.”

And the other thing I want to say is, how is it different? When Ayub Khan, the first military dictator, took over, the majority of the population backed him, because at that time, we were very insecure and the army was the bastion of security. When Zia-ul-Haq deposed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the second military dictator, half the population supported him. Half the vote was for Bhutto, but half the vote went against him. When Gen. Musharraf wound up our democracy in 1999, he had 80 percent rating in Pakistan, because he came on an anti-corruption platform. But this is a unique time in Pakistan: Almost the entire country is standing now for democracy. There are no takers for military dictatorship anymore. So it’s a unique situation, because our thought process has evolved to the point now, where there’s a consensus in Pakistan that a bad democracy is better than a military dictatorship.

RG: It feels like the military may see this crisis and this conflict as existential for them. That given what you’ve said, that the country, the population, has now turned against them, if they lose power, they may be pushed off the stage entirely. And so cornered, that may explain some of the reaction that you’re seeing. So how do you navigate that situation: Where they currently have you literally and politically surrounded, but if you escape, they face an existential crisis?

IK: Well, you see, when I was in … power, I recognized that, you know, you can’t wish away the military. You have to work with them, because they’ve been entrenched for 70 years, directly or indirectly, they’ve ruled this country. So I worked with the army chief. And apart from the fact that he would not, he did not understand what rule of law meant, or didn’t want to understand — apart from that, we had a working relationship. When and why he decided to pull the rug under my feet, I still don’t know, at what point he decided that I was dangerous to the country. But in the last six months he conspired to get rid of me, why he decided to change horses, because he backed the current prime minister who was facing massive corruption cases. And so why he decided to do that? I think, my hunch is that he wanted an extension, and the current prime minister had promised him that. I guess that’s the reason. But really, he’s the best — he would know why. I don’t know why.

So my point is the way Pakistan has been run — a hybrid system — it just cannot be run like this anymore. We are now facing the worst economic crisis in our history. And my point is that — I’ve offered talks to the military, to the army chief. But so far, there is no response. My point is that the hybrid system cannot work any longer. Because if a prime minister has the public mandate and the responsibility to deliver, he must have the authority. He can’t have a situation where he has the responsibility, but the authority, most of the authority lies with the military establishment.

So a new equilibrium has to be made. You have to have some sort of an arrangement, where certain issues just have to be delivered in Pakistan. Pakistan cannot do without rule of law now, because we cannot get out of this economic mess unless we attract investment. But investment from abroad, that just does not come to a country where people do not have confidence in their justice system and the legal system and their contract enforcement. And therefore, Pakistanis go and invest in Dubai and in other countries, but they don’t invest in this country. We have 10 million Pakistanis [overseas]. If we could only get 5 percent of them investing in this country, we wouldn’t have any problems. But they do not have faith in our justice system. We are, out of the 140 countries in the rule of law index, Pakistan is 129. So with that a lack of rule of law, I’m afraid the country’s survival is at stake. So hence, a new equilibrium has to be made with the military establishment.

RG: Final question: I know you said that you believe that the driver of your ouster was clearly internal and not driven from the outside. But I’m also curious, given that the U.S. expressed its private approval for you to be pushed out of office through a no confidence vote. I’m wondering what it was that you think drove the United States to that position. Do you think it had something to do with your willingness to work with the Taliban, after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan? Do you think it has something to do with the war in Ukraine? Or what is your read of the geopolitics that would have led the United States to go from supportive to willing to see you thrown out?

IK: Well, for a start, you know, the war — the Trump administration acknowledged that I was the one who consistently kept saying there was not going to be a military solution in Afghanistan. It’s because I know Afghanistan. I know the history. And the province, the Pashtun province: Remember Afghanistan is 50 percent Pashtun, but the Pashtun population is twice as much in Pakistan. And my province where I first got into power is the Pashtun province bordering Afghanistan. So I kept saying there would not be any military solution. Trump administration acknowledged it. And they finally — when he decided to do the withdrawal, he understood there was not going to be a military solution. But I think this was taken wrong by the Biden administration; they somehow thought I was critical of the Americans, and I was sort of pro-Taliban. It’s total nonsense. It’s just simply that anyone who knows the history of Afghanistan just knows that they have a problem with outsiders. So the same happened with the British in the 19th century, the Soviets in the 20th century. Exactly the same was happening with the U.S. But it’s just that no one knew that. And so I think that was one reason.

Secondly, I was anti the war on terror in Pakistan. Because remember, Pakistan — Pakistan, first of all, in the ’80s, created the mujahideen, who were conducting a guerrilla warfare against the Soviets. So it was from Pakistani soil. And we told them that doing jihad — jihad means fighting foreign occupation — you’re heroes, we encouraged it.

Now come 10 years later, once the Soviets had left, the U.S. lands in Afghanistan. So I kept saying, look, let’s stay neutral. The same people who all the groups you have told and all along the border belt of Afghanistan, the Pashtuns, you’ve told that this was heroism to fight foreign occupation. How are you going to tell them that now that the Americans are there, it’s terrorism? So that’s what happened. The moment we joined the U.S. war on terror, they turned against us. 80,000 Pakistanis died in Afghanistan. No ally of U.S. has taken such heavy casualties as Pakistan did. And in the end, we couldn’t help the U.S. either, because we were trying to save ourselves. There were 40 different militant groups, at one point, working against the government. Islamabad was like under siege, there were suicide attacks everywhere. So all investment dried up in Pakistan, we had no investment coming in the country. Our economy tanked.

So I think my opposition to the war on terror also was perceived as being anti-American, which it’s not, it’s just being nationalistic about your own country. And with the Taliban, when the Taliban took over, frankly, whichever government is in Afghanistan, Pakistan has to have good relationship with them. We have a 2,500-kilometer border with them. We have 3 million Afghan refugees here. And when the [Ashraf] Ghani government, before that I went to Afghanistan, Kabul, to meet him. I invited him to Pakistan, we tried our best to have good relationship with them. So whoever is in power in Afghanistan, Pakistan has to have good relationship, because at one point, during the previous government, there were three different terrorist groups using Afghan territory to attack Pakistan — the ISIL, Pakistani Taliban, and the Baloch Liberation organization — three different groups were attacking us. So therefore, you need a government in Afghanistan, which would be helpful. So it was not pro-Taliban. It’s basically pro-Pakistan, as anyone who cares about his country would make those decisions.

RG: I know I said that was the last question, but I wanted to give the last word to you because every one of these interviews that you do now, with the posture of the military toward you, could be your last before an arrest or even worse. And so given that, is there any message broadly that you’d like to share, either with the United States or with the world?

IK: Well, you’re right. I mean, there’ve been not one but two assassination attempts on me. And a third one, which I preempted, luckily, and then there are 150 cases against me, although most of them are bogus cases. But now they’ve started military courts. And the military courts is just because the normal judiciary just gives me bail, because of the frivolous cases. Now, I think they will try me in a military court to jail me, so that I’m out of the way.

But the point is, it is not good for not just the region around Pakistan, not just for Pakistan. But I think, a country of 250 million people, it is very important that there’s stability here. Stability is only going to come through free and fair elections, because only a stable government with a public mandate then can start making the difficult decisions, reforms, structural changes, to actually get Pakistan back on the track.

Any weak government, which does not have the support of the people, is going to struggle. So the need for Pakistan to be stable is free and fair elections, democracy, rule of law, constitutionalism. That’s the road for Pakistan toward stability. And where we are headed right now is exactly the opposite. And what the world can do is — and the Western world — speak about the values that are preached by them, which is exactly what we are trying to do, which is democracy and rule of law and fundamental rights, human rights. So everything is being violated right now. And while I think no other country can fix a country from within — it’s only we [who] can fix the country from within — but they can speak out of the violations that are going on in this country, of what the West professes to be their values.

Update: June 5, 2023, 8:14 p.m. ET
The piece has been updated to add State Department comment received after publication.

The post Imran Khan: U.S. Was Manipulated by Pakistan Military Into Backing Overthrow appeared first on The Intercept.

Why is “fund the policE” a losing message for Democrats? That’s the question and type of messaging Deconstructed is exploring this week with Anat Shenker-Osorio, the founder of ASO Communications and host of the podcast “Words to Win By.” Grim and Shenker-Osorio discuss why certain messages do well and others fail, why reframing the debate is essential, and how to craft messages that resonate and win. They also revisit Grim’s recent conversation with political strategist Dmitri Mehlhorn and unpack why messaging that gravitates toward the right and center is not effective.

[Deconstructed intro theme music.]

Ryan Grim: So, a couple of weeks ago we had onto the program Dmitri Mehlhorn, who is a kind of tech executive and a Democratic operative who has become one of the more influential, but little known, figures in Democratic politics. And he has strong ideas about how Democrats ought to campaign and how they ought to message, and we got a lot of feedback from our interview with him which, if you haven’t listened to yet, you should go back and listen to that one first before you listen to this one.

And one of the people that he namechecked the most throughout that interview was Anat Shenker-Osorio, who’s going to join us today?

Anat, thank you for agreeing to come on. Appreciate it.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Thanks for having me.

RG: Were you surprised at all that he brought you up so many times throughout that conversation?

AS: Yeah. I think that I was surprised at the number of times. I also think I was surprised that he did so in such a complimentary way, despite the fact that we definitely have places where we don’t agree. So, yeah, I was appreciative of that. 

RG: I actually interviewed Dimitri about a year ago for an extended period of time, but the sound quality wasn’t very good, and so we put off doing it again. And just, one thing became another, and it took upwards of, I think, a little over a year for us to reschedule and get back on the horn.

But I went back and looked at the earlier interview – and we can play some of that throughout here – but I wanted to get your reaction, to start, to the way that he frames how he views politics. And then I want to go through the ways that he brought you up, and see if you can work through what some of those disagreements were.

Here he is talking about how he got into politics after Donald Trump won; he was kind of shocked into action. And he’s starting to think through what it was that broke in the Democratic Party. And so, he said:

Dmitri Mehlhorn: These massive disagreements come from framework differences, conceptual differences. And we’re like, okay, something broke here to allow Trump to become president, and what broke is not, we just didn’t get enough money to Guy Cecil, right? Like, something deeper broke. And what are the things that broke? And how can we – and we have a deadline here. If this guy gets a reelect, it’s a very, very big difference between the first term and the second term.

And, by the way, if he comes back, it’s even worse, but put that aside for a second. But like, you look at the history around the world of somebody like that taking power in a quasi-democratic way, and like, if they lose the first time, there’s a little bit of a breathing room where civil society can organize some resistance. And, you know, to some extent that happened already, but that was our focus.

RG: And so, then he talks about going into Virginia. And I – and correct me if I’m wrong – maybe you helped him with some of this? He talks about going into Virginia in 2017.

DM: One of the things we did is, we invested in all 100 Virginia House of Delegates in 2017. It’s a very easy baseline comparison, and Mark Herring ran in both races; he’s the attorney general. So, Mark Herring, 2013, Mark Herring, 2017, absolute numbers, margins. That gives you a baseline for every one of the hundred districts. And then you can test a bunch of interventions in a place where campaign finance laws are limitless, as long as you disclose.

RG: It’s so loose.

DM: Throwing money. And so, just see like, what works, what doesn’t. And the idea’s that seemed most promising, we tried to scale in the hundred closest 2018 battlegrounds. And by “we,” I mean his money, my money, but also a lot of friends, and kind of the network of venture capital in Silicon Valley, New York, etc.

RG: And so, how did you first get to know Dmitri Mehlhorn? And what was this iterative process that they went through to try to figure out what worked in these primaries? 

AS: Let me take the first part first. So, I became acquainted with Dmitri because I work frequently with a crew of folks at a really, really brilliant set of strategists and content creators that work under the Shingle frameshift. And, basically, what we do together is, we take an issue – could be electoral, could be a kind of standard progressive organizing issue – and we create a whole bunch of pithy 30-second digital ads, and then we test them through a randomized controlled trial. Dmitri has been really, really supportive of that project over the years, and that’s how I came to know him.

Our more specific interaction was around a project that I was helping lead in 2020 across battleground states in the Midwest, where we were taking these really high-performing ads that were using a framework that I helped co-create, alongside Ian Haney López, who famously wrote the book Dog Whistle Politics, and Heather McGhee, who at the time was running a thinktank called Demos. The name of that framework is the Race Class Narrative, it’s the basis for a lot of the messaging advice that I dispense out and the sort of campaign approach that I tend to take.

So, we had made a bunch of – we shorthand it RCN, Race Class Narrative – ads.

RG: Can you give people a shorthand of what the Race Class Narrative is? I think most listeners of this program probably are familiar with it by now but, for those who aren’t…

AS: So, the Race Class Narrative is essentially set up to – I would hope finally, although there is no finally, it seems, in politics, we seem to be having the exact same conversation over and over and over again. At least that’s what it feels, it’s very Sisyphean. But, to finally settle this perennial question that I think Dmitri asks as well, which can be summed up as, “Are we doing turnout? Are we doing persuasion?” Which is, in and of itself, ironically, racially coded speech for, “Are we going to put our eggs in the flipping-white-people basket, or are we going to put our eggs in the turning out and mobilizing our base?” Which is overrepresented, as you know, by people of color, by young people, by single women, by queer folks, etc.

And my take on this argument is, and has always been, that turnout is persuasion. If your words don’t spread, they don’t work. And if your base is not engaged and repeating your message, then it turns out the middle is never going to hear it, because it is a very, very noisy world.

So, what the Race Class Narrative does is, it refuses to fall either on the side of colorblind economic populism, which is some people’s solution. Basically, don’t talk about race, don’t talk about gender, don’t talk about so-called cultural issues. And it also doesn’t seed the class debate.

So, a Race Class Narrative message begins with a shared value that expressly names – or, if you’re looking at a visual ad, depicts – race. It then calls out the other side and their villain in a very specific way. It essentially exposes the dog whistle, talks about how they are deliberately dividing us, or deliberately shaming and blaming Black people, new immigrants, trans folks, take your pick; whoever they’ve got at the top of their punch list that day or that hour. And then it expressly calls for cross-racial solidarity.

I can give you an example of an RCN message.

RG: Yeah, that’d be great.

AS: So, do you want to pick a topic, or do you want me to?

RG: Let’s say, Republicans are pushing to add work requirements to food stamps in order to reach a debt ceiling deal. 

AS: What a far-fetched idea. Where could you possibly have taken that example from? Great.

RG: Ripped from the headlines.

AS: So, I will produce a message. It will need to be copyedited because, as you can verify, I’m making this up from scratch. So, it would sound like this: no matter what we look like or where we come from, most of us all know all too well what it’s like to see a loved one struggle to make ends meet.

Most of us believe that, in America, all of us should be able to put food on the table and be home in time to eat it. But, today, MAGA Republicans want to take food away from our families, forcing us to prove that we deserve the bread that we require. They hope that by getting us to point our finger in the wrong direction, we won’t notice that they’re handing kickbacks to their wealthy donors from the wealth that our work creates. By joining together and demanding that we pay our bills, we can ensure that all of us have what our loved ones need.

That, more or less, is the three-part structure. So, the opening value where we state and name, explicitly, race as the access of division in which they’re trafficking. That we all want this kind of shared thing. Second sentence: but the villains are doing their villainy, and that villainy isn’t just, they’re screwing us over in terms of money. It’s: they’re hoping that if we will blame people who are struggling to make ends meet, we’ll look the other way while they essentially fleece us all. That’s kind of the crux of it. That’s what I mean by narrating the dog whistle.

And then we seal the deal by making the call to action or demand that we’ve got …

RG: Right. And so, you were running a project around that in 2020? 

AS: Yeah. So, we had run a bunch of ads, and we had some early data, not just from in-channel testing, which is basically what we call anytime you’re doing a survey or a randomized control trial and the subjects that you are studying know that they’re being studied. Which is, by definition, an artificial environment that is necessary and helpful. But we had actually run a field experiment, so we were able to see how these ads were performing out in the world in terms of increasing early mail-in voting.

So, we had started that. We had a program going in 2020 in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and Dmitri saw that early data from the field experiment, got very excited about it, and very, very generously – and to his credit, I really want to say – very quickly, without a lot of the usual funder hemming and hawing and deliberation, resourced recreating that same program in Pennsylvania.

RG: He does seem like the kind of character that, if he believed in something, would just cut a check and be done with it. 

AS: Yeah. And that is refreshing.

I think that the rest of your question around my awareness of this kind of experimental thing, I don’t know the details of it, but it’s very much in alignment, I think, with the standard – and I don’t say this pejoratively – but the standard Silicon Valley ideate. You know, they have all of these catchphrases, like “fail fast to learn fast,” which does lend itself to this kind of quicker action, and this less deliberative kind of, “I will have deep thoughts for an entire year or longer about what might work. Oh, by the way, it’s already over, and nothing could work, because the election passed.”

RG: So, the first time that you came up in the conversation with Dmitri was around, defund the police. We can play that clip here:

DM: On crime, what are they going to say? And what they’re going to say is that there is a currently sitting member of the Democratic Party in the United States Congress who openly and expressly advocates for the end of funding to police forces. And there are quite a number of other Democrats who are in power now in administration positions and in Congress who don’t agree with that extreme position of, there should be no funding of the police. But, when asked if they believe in defund the police will give a complicated answer other than, “No, we should fund the police.”

Now, my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio, who’s another person that we have funded in the past, will tell you that if we say the words “fund the police,” that’s bad, because it’s increasing the salience of an issue. And if you run a poll, real time, and you ask people, “Hey, nothing else is going on in the world, it’s more than a year away from the next election, I’d like you to take a poll,” and you drop in the phrase, “fund the police,” out of nowhere, that will probably raise the salience of crime in that survey. And you will read the poll and you’ll say, “Ah, saying the words ‘fund the police,’ or attacking the defund the police movement from the center-left, attacking the left, those things actually reduce the poll results that you get in this survey a year and a half away from election day.”

RG: What would be your response? Is he accurately kind of capturing your take, that you shouldn’t say “fund the police?”

AS: He’s definitely capturing that part. I think that there’s a lot going on in that clip, so, can I kind of take it apart?

RG: Absolutely. Yeah.

AS: Okay. So, first, on the saliency point, one of the things that happens in research and, again, this is one of the perils of in-channel testing, and infield testing is much, much more expensive, and it requires doing those things after the fact, so you do have to test things. In survey and in RCT I do it as well, so I’m not saying I don’t, it’s just, you have to recognize what the limitations of it are.

If you have a survey, and you’re, basically, out of a clear blue sky, saying to people, “Hey, what do you think about defunding the police? Or, what do you think about funding the police?” You’re already introducing that idea to them in order to register their approval or disapproval of that idea, where they may or may not necessarily have that top of mind. To whit, I have been part of a consortium called The Research Collaborative, where we have been conducting qualitative research. So, not quant, but focus groups, two to four focus groups a week, every single week, since October of 2000. So, when you add all those people together, that is a pretty large number of people.

And we frequently ask them, is anyone from base voters of various races, ages, configurations, genders, etc., and then, also, swing voters, same thing. Different kinds of configurations, over all of these years and groups. When you ask them, “What is your beef with Democrats?” I can tell you that none of them – and I really do mean none – the first idea that comes into their own head is, they want to defund the police.

Their beef with Democrats, I mean, I would allow you to guess, I’m sure that you can guess. That they’re slow, that they’re bad on the economy, that they spend too much money, a whole litany of things. And, in fact, one of the fun exercises we often engage in is, we ask them, “If you had to liken Democrats to an animal, what animal would you pick?” We do the same thing for Republicans. And, generally speaking, the animals that they give us for the Democrats is a snail, a sloth, a turtle, some permutation of a thing that doesn’t do much, and does it slowly.

RG: Ouch.

AS: So, people don’t volunteer that answer about Democrats. Now, where does this feeling and idea — and here, I think that that Dmitri rightly made this point. The thing that people think about Democrats doesn’t come out of what Democrats say. I frequently say, that would be a wonderful world, and I’d be on vacation in it, but it’s not our world.

The thing that people think about Democrats is made out of all sorts of impressionistic things out in the world. A combination of the media, but also what is said about Democrats.

So, this saliency question, that is what that point is. It’s sort of difficult in a survey to actually capture, how do people feel about this thing because, in order to capture it, you have to introduce the thing. Does that make sense?

RG: Yes. I guess his argument is, the thing is out there. Like, it’s a big thing, Republicans are talking about it, so you don’t have a choice.

AS: Yes, of course. When the thing is out there, you’re going to have to have a response to it. And so, I want to say two different things.

The first is, if you want to win the debate, you have to set the terms of the debate. As long as you are responding to their terms of debate, you are already losing. And so, the trouble with a defund the police / fund the police kind of back and forth is that, regardless of which one of those you are tossing out there, by definition, you’re making people think about the police, right? I mean, that is most of what either of those phrases are made out of.

When we think about what is going on with people’s feelings around crime, or quote-unquote, “law and order,” or policing, yes, they are concerned about those things. Absolutely. But the reason that they’re concerned about those things, the actual underlying psychological motivation and feeling, is a desire for safety.

What people actually want in their life is to feel safe, and they have been taught – and we see it, it’s very evident, it would be silly to deny it – they have been taught to make a connection between safety and police. That exists and is real. But the hunger and the desire is not for police, it is for safety.

And so, there is a different way to approach this message. It is not a sort of A or b, defund or fund. It is understanding what voters actually want, and coming up with a message – which I’m happy to share with you – that actually talks about that and delivers it.

Because if you attempt to say, “no, I want to fund the police,” then basically what you’ve done is you’ve said to them, “Okay, the way to think about this safety issue, the way to think about this thing that you desire, is how much police is there going to be?” And regardless of what you support or espouse or say, they are always going to pick robocop over mall security, if you tell them the way to think about this election is who is going to be toughest, because that is the Republican brand strength.

You’ve basically said, we agree to have your debate. We’re going to play soccer, we’re going to pick the side of the field where we’re staring into the sun and try to make goals that way. It doesn’t work.

RG: Before we get to your better framing of how to respond, this feels like a very 2023 conversation that is not taking into account 2020. In other words, what do we do with the fact that there were real material conditions that were producing energy around the idea of defund the police? Like, the people who projected that really did want to talk about the police. They wanted to talk about police violence in a way that would finally land, and would finally send home the message that enough is enough, that this needs to stop.

And I think one thing that frustrated people about Dmitri’s approach to politics was that he very much wants to separate politics and political messaging from the real world. What would be a better way to respond to the very real concerns that people have that are producing messages that, by now, we may agree aren’t the most effective in swing districts?

AS: I’m so glad that you asked that, because part of the entire purpose of the Race Class Narrative, RCN, is to recognize – and this is something that I say frequently – that the job of a good message is not to say what’s popular, the job of a good message is to make popular what we need said, and that is the north star and the fixed point. Otherwise, what is the purpose of politics if it is not the kind of ritualized practice of trying to improve people’s lives? Which I’ve been naive enough to believe is, in fact, the purpose of politics. It’s certainly my purpose.

And so, I would agree with you, or with the listeners that you’re citing that brought this up, that we need to be able to talk about the things that are destroying people’s lives and, quite literally, killing them. And so, the way that we do that – and I will share the message in one second – is to also recognize that we need to be playing chess, not checkers.

And what I mean by that analogy is that, a defund the police message coming from activists is actually really critical and vital, because it provides us a left flank. It provides an opportunity for a democratic politician who is running for office to be able to say something that is also about accountability from the police, without literally saying “defund,” but still be understood.

So, the example that I would cite of that is, for example, in Minnesota, which is one of the states in which I work frequently. The rest of the states I work are more kind of classic-classic top-of-the-mind battlegrounds; Minnesota, a bit more purple, getting bluer every day. We ran a campaign in 2020, and then we used this messaging as well in the very, very difficult reelection campaign for Keith Ellison – who’s the Attorney General and, you know, a Black Muslim man – that said “fund our lives.”

Using the phrase “fund our lives,” because of the existence of the activist discourse on defund the police, that sort of rang to people. It’s kind of a call to defund the police messaging but, instead of making a negative demand, which is what defund the police is, we are making an affirmative demand. We’re talking about what it is we want to fund.

So, my first answer is that there’s a difference between designing messages for people who are running for office and the entire messaging terrain. And this is something that the right has understood a very long time ago. When Todd Akin famously talked about how it isn’t possible for a person to get pregnant from rape because if it’s a, quote, “legitimate” rape, the body has a way of shutting these things down. I don’t know if you remember that.

RG: Oh, yes.

AS: That egregious comment got him in trouble, for sure, but it also did what they always do, which is that they keep going to the right, keep going to the right, keep going to the right. So then, the other Republicans who quote “only oppose abortion in all cases, including rape or incest,” but at least will admit that rape is a thing that exists in the world, suddenly, they look progressive, because they just keep shifting things to the right.

Whereas we, on the left, are like, “Oh no, don’t say that. Oh no, don’t say that.” When a more strategic approach would be, “My esteemed dear friends here are understandably incredibly angry and upset around these horrible acts of violence by the people who have sworn an oath to protect and serve us. That’s why I’ve put forward this proposal for police accountability.” It lets you kind of bank-shot off of that, if that makes sense.

RG: Yes. And so, later on in his defund the police argument, he said this:

DM: In particular, defund the police as a national call and how that worked nationally, it’s hard to know how that played down in New York, etc. What I would say is that candidates that took an aggressive fund the police position in 2020 tended to win their races. Like Vicente Gonzalez, Abby Spanberger, etc.

Pretty much every one of those frontline members of Congress said, “I was getting hit at every town hall with defund the police. I was getting slammed with defund the police all over the place. I was only able to eke out a victory by aggressively articulating a fund the police position.” And that’s what they say. And it could be wrong. It doesn’t show up in Anat’s polls, but that’s what they say.

RG: Let’s say he is accurately articulating what those members of Congress believe — and I do think, whether they believe it or not, they do certainly say that a lot — what would you say back to them?

AS: First of all, I would say that we just saw in the ’22 cycle a whole lot of what I will shorthand as the “police love me” ads, right?

This is a kind of direct-to-camera sheriff or member of law enforcement who is speaking out on behalf of the candidate, and talking about how they support X-Y-Z candidate, because X-Y-Z candidate does indeed want to fund the police, and does indeed support them.

This ad was very popular. We saw many, many, many people do it. We saw Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin do it, we saw, of course, Tim Ryan in Ohio; we would expect that. We saw Mark Kelly in Arizona, we saw Stacey Abrams run it this time.

And what we see, when we actually look at how those ads test again in RCT, is that, compared with other ads that would say about taking our freedoms, which is the framework that we very much pushed and promoted. I.e., if you want to win the election, you’ve got to decide what the election’s going to be about, as much as you can, as often as you can.

Those “police love me” ads — that’s my shorthand for them — they didn’t do particularly well. And the reason for that is because they’re not that exciting to the base. It’s also not true that they’re completely anathema to the base, it’s a lie to think that they are. They’re anathema to activists, but the base is not quite where I would love them to be, and not quite where I think activists frequently think that they are. This is the hindrance of actually conducting public opinion research, right? You’re subjected to public opinion. It’s not always fun.

But they’re not motivating to the base. And, in fact, there is evidence that they are demobilizing. And, to swing voters, they just kind of feel, to use the technical terminology, like bullshit. And the reason that they feel like bullshit is because, how are you going to undo in one 30-second ad, even if you spend a lot of your TV money on it, the rest of what is being said about you? 

And, you know, clearly, Dmitri’s argument is, that’s why you’ve got to say “fund, fund, fund, fund, fund.” We don’t see it in the data. And the same holds for a giant study that was done by Justice Research Group through many, many, many iterations of testing lots of messages and huge samples. What they actually found, and I can actually read it to you if you want, is that the fund the police message did not perform the best. Partly because, like I said, it tips off swing voters’ bullshit meter, it just doesn’t feel credible. And it potentially has a demobilizing effect on the part of the base that is most likely to kind of drop off.

So, the message that did the best, and this was across demographics, specifically with battleground state voters. And I’m not saying that this message is exactly what I would say, but it goes: “Democrats say you should support candidate” – so, the name of the candidate – because, name of candidate, believes in investing in crime prevention and community police officers who will walk the beat, who will know the neighborhood and restore trust and safety. Let’s not abandon our streets or choose between safety and equal justice. Let’s come together to protect our communities, restore trust, and hold law enforcement accountable. We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police, it’s to fund the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.”

So, there is the fund the police sort of call out at the end. In subsequent retesting of that, it was found that that framework of police accountability works, even if you don’t use that line.

A second message that did the best with our low propensity – i.e., the voters that are our greatest flight risk – is the, we know what keeps us safe message, which is what I was alluding to before, sounds like this: “Democrats say you should support name of candidate because name of candidate knows what keeps us safe. It’s living in communities where we look out for our neighbors, where we have the great schools, necessary services, and affordable healthcare we need to get and stay well, overcome challenges, and care for our family Candidate believes that no matter our zip code, background, or color, we all deserve to live in a place where we are safe, and will deliver proven approaches to safety that the majority of us favor.”

So, basically a message that works, a landing spot, is this idea of, again, the shared value, that we know what keeps us safe, and a call out to what that requires, including having the people who are sworn to serve and protect us act in our interests, work to prevent crimes, and treat us all as equals. That is across, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of these experiments what we actually find to work, when you factor in both turnout and swing voters.

And a lot of these studies – and I don’t know the details of what Dmitri is citing — but there’s a tendency to overlook this mobilization question, which is justified by the fact that it’s really hard to measure mobilization. People lie about it, right? We ask them, does this make you want to vote? And they say, yes. It’s like, the, “I will pay you tomorrow” of public opinion research. People are always saying yes, and it’s not true.

But the fact that it’s hard to measure mobilization doesn’t justify that you don’t even look at it and don’t try. Because, otherwise, how are you dealing with the fact that a lot of our problems in a lot of states is our side just not turning out?

[Deconstructed mid-show theme music.]

RG: One of the other controversial things that he said during the interview was around Roe v. Wade, and he said it would be a mistake to run on codifying Roe v. Wade. And that came within his broader claim that you really shouldn’t run on anything, that you can’t inspire people to come out to vote by saying that you’re going to do good things, or pointing to the good things that you’ve done. That the only way to actually motivate people to come out is scaring them about bad things that are going to happen, or things that you have that are going to be taken away from you.

I would love to get out of politics if that is actually true. But, just a clear-eyed look at the data and the public opinion research, what’s your assessment of that claim?

AS: I mean, there are so many ways into that question. One rejoinder I would offer is that Martin Luther King didn’t get famous for saying, “I have a complaint,” nor “I have a multi-bulleted list of policy proposals,” right? He presented a dream in, arguably, some of the most harrowing, horrifying, terrible conditions.

We can look at example after example after example, and what we need to remember is that, in any election, there are actually three people running. There is your person, their person, and stay at home. And stay at home literally has the home team advantage, because, guess what? People are already at home.

So, our task and our job isn’t merely to get people to vote against their person, it’s to get them to vote in the first place. And it turns out, I think, if you know anything about US politics, that that’s a really challenging thing to do, and it’s a thing that is being made deliberately more challenging by these MAGA Republicans who are absolutely determined to pick their voters. Because they know that voters, broadly speaking, are getting less and less and less likely to pick them. Our side, staying at home is pretty much the anchor that weighs us down, and we can see that in election after election after election.

For example, in 2022, while pundits widely reported that, you know, it wasn’t turnout, it actually wasn’t turnout, that is just because they do not know how to look under the hood. In point of fact, in the 15 states that we won, turnout equaled 2018, which was historic. And the fact that it equaled 2018 is even more historic, because that was turnout in an incumbency. In the 35 states where we did not do that hot, turnout was as predicted, and our side stayed home.

And so, in point of fact, we see over and over and over again – we see it in ‘22, we see it in ‘18, we see it in ’20 – that, in order to win, we’ve got to mobilize our side. So, this question of, we can just say the other side are a bunch of bastards or whatever messaging you’re going to use, there’s a piece of that that I absolutely agree with, and that is that we do need a clear, coherent articulation of the villains. 

But what we have found in our research, and it’s the reason why we came to this Protect Our Freedoms framework in 2022, that we pushed out through ads, and through scripts, and through canvas, and texting and so on, and we got a fair number of candidates to actually adopt, in battleground states like Pennsylvania, to some extent Wisconsin, definitely Michigan, Arizona, etc. What we found is that drawing a contrast between an antagonist, which are MAGA Republicans that want to take away your freedoms, which is a phrase I use very deliberately; “take away” activates loss aversion. Freedoms is an incredibly important and central and resonant concept. It is a core value for Americans across demographics and ideologies.

And voters – notice I say voters as the protagonists of the story, not Democrats, so it is, antagonist, MAGA Republicans, protagonist, voters – voters who need to turn out to protect our freedoms. That was essentially the story that we found to be most effective.

But, in that, you do have to give people a reason to show up because, otherwise, they will simply just stay at home.

RG: Yeah, and his argument was that, instead of running on codifying Roe, you should actually run on a promise that you will make sure that children who are the victims of rape have access to abortion. Which, first of all, is practically difficult, because if all other abortion services are banned, you’re going to have abortion clinics across the state shut down. So, it would be legal in fact, but actually not available in practice. Like, there literally wouldn’t be anywhere to go and get a procedure.

But putting that aside, what was your reaction to the idea that you should pick something that crazy that the other side is against, and kind of drive that as the wedge? Rather than something broader like, we’re going to restore this right that was taken from you?

AS: Generally speaking, I like to tell people, don’t take your policy out in public, it’s unseemly. This is a more kind of generalized messaging lesson. The policy is not the message. So, I am not a big fan of messages that explicitly name any kind of policy, because what you want to talk about is not the name of the policy. You can do that in sort of boring back rooms, that’s totally fine. But, as far as what you’re actually selling to voters, you want to sell the brownie, not the recipe. Meaning, you want to sell what the policy is going to deliver.

So, the way that I would talk about it is, Democrats, or voters, need to turn out to: protect our freedoms; our freedom to decide whether and when we have children; freedom for our kids to learn the truth of our past; freedom to earn a good living and be able to retire in dignity. I’m giving you lots of different options. Freedom to be ourselves, love who we love, and create the families that we desire.

It’s talking about what the outcome is going to be. Going into policy details, first of all, people just absolutely glaze over. You would be astounded at the number of people who actually are still unaware of what Roe v. Wade, let alone Dobbs, actually is, even as they do know that something massive happened on abortion. 

Getting into the details of protecting the ability of a child to be able to have an abortion unleashes what people in the reproductive rights and justice community rightly call the “good abortion, bad abortion dynamic.” Where some abortions are just fine because it’s circumstances beyond your control, or it’s kind of these most horrific cases. And, aside from the practicality, which you very, very rightly lifted up and, in fact, we live in a country, even pre-Dobbs, where you have the purported right to an abortion but, in many, many places it’s inaccessible. And, thanks to the Hyde Amendment, you couldn’t pay for it anyway unless you have money from somewhere.

Basically, what you’re doing is, you’re falling into this slippery slope of conceding that abortion is actually a pretty terrible thing, but we need it in these super extreme cases, in order to avoid this much more terrible thing. I mean, I cannot tell you enough how much, again, we’re talking about two to four focus groups a week, every single week, for the last, you know, it feels like 7,000 years of my life, but in fact has only been since late 2020. I mean, we did focus groups before, but not in this kind of deliberate, all the time, over and over kind of way.

I cannot tell you the number of times that in a group of, for example, white swing men in the outskirts of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who have spent 45 minutes trashing Democrats and talking about how terrible and horrible they are, once we say the word “abortion,” a switch flips, and they say, “You know, at the end of the day, I’m not going to have anyone tell me and my wife what’s going to happen to our family and the decisions that we –” I mean, it really is like a lightning bolt, even for men.

Or another group that I remember really, really vividly in Texas, again, swing voters, trash talking Democrats, all the crap, all the crap, all the crap. And then suddenly saying, when we just introduced the topic of abortion, saying, “Money goes up, money goes down. I can learn to live in a budget. What I cannot learn to do is live without my freedoms.” Direct quote. Over and over again.

And so, what this abortion thing has done is it has made real, it has catalyzed the recognition that MAGA really is coming for your freedoms, and this is the first one that they’ve come for, and they’re coming for the rest. And it’s the creation of that loss aversion, and this sort of repugnancy to what feels corporeal – meaning in your body, your lived experience – that has mobilized, and activated, and turned people out in what should have been by historical precedent and punditry a red wave blood bath against us, and wasn’t.

RG: I noticed, though, the beginning of your answer, when you were talking about the messaging around the issue, you didn’t actually use the word abortion. “Choice of when to have children, nobody tells my family what to do.” I’m curious if that was deliberate, or am I picking up on something that wasn’t really there?

In other words, is there some consensus among messaging people that using the word abortion is not ideal? I would think, maybe, yes, it is. But then, on the other hand, you were saying that in the focus group when abortion came up, it flipped a switch for people.

So, if it is kind of a stigmatized word in messaging, why?

AS: So, there has been a historical feeling among mainstream Democrats that it’s not a good word to use. And, in fact, it sort of used to be widely referred to as, quote, “the A word.” “Don’t say the A word, the A word isn’t helpful.”

And even up until, I’m sure you remember, when the Dobbs decision came down, there were sort of two weeks of kind of weird, uncomfortable silence from the White House. Nancy Pelosi quite famously read a poem. It was sort of like WTF? Are you going to respond, are you going to react? And there really wasn’t a lot of response and reaction, and there really was this feeling.

And it was said over and over, and folks in the repro movement, they would tear their hair out — I would argue, rightly so – that people were like, “Oh, don’t campaign on abortion, don’t campaign on abortion. It’s not a winning issue, it’s not a winning issue.” And folks that had been at this, and are at this for decades, have been like, “You’re wrong, you’re wrong, it is a winning issue.” And, again, as I keep saying, if you want to win the debate, you have to set the terms of debate.

Lo and behold, now in this post Dobbsian World, most people are suddenly awakened to the fact that, oh, wow, it turns out that in an arena in which one of our biggest problems — and this is really the tragedy of watching this many focus groups. The idea of both sides is really, really thoroughly entrenched among voters. And this idea that, you know, yes, the Republicans are bad, and this action was bad and that action was bad, and so on. But that’s politics as usual, and politicians are bad, and they’re corrupt, and that’s just how it is.

The vilification of government project by the right has, I would say, been very successful, and it makes it much harder for people to sort of single out and say, “Oh no, but that’s like a new kind of bad,” right? That’s not just like, politicians-are-bad kind of bad. Dobbs and January 6th are two crystallized moments that really do that.

And so, to your question, which I did not forget, it’s not on my part a deliberate refusal to talk about abortion. We definitely talk about abortion – do not call it the A word, call it abortion. But the framework that I was employing, not when I was directly quoting focus group participants, which is, you know, them using their own words, right?

RG: Right.

AS: The freedoms framework is really important, and so, the reason why I use the phrase, “our freedom to decide whether and when we have kids,” is because that is a way to, if you’ll let me invent a word, “freedomize” the abortion question, so that we can link it to the book bans, so we can link it to the economic assaults, so that we can have a narrative that kind of everything fits into. 

RG: We talked on this podcast to a woman who was on the ground in Kansas working on that referendum, and listeners to this show will remember that she forecasted a landslide victory, and she was correct. And she talked about how resistance and skepticism of the vaccine mandates in Kansas was very successfully, actually, translated into messaging to defend abortion rights in that contest. Which I found surprising at the time, but it did seem to work, that there were a lot of people who didn’t like vaccine mandates, and then they came back to them with, well, if you don’t like that, if you believe in that freedom, then why shouldn’t a woman have the freedom to choose whatever healthcare decision she wants? And they’re like, “You know what? Fine. I guess I’m for abortion rights.”

Did you follow the Kansas fight? Do you have a sense on what enabled them to come from behind and win in a blowout there?

AS: Yeah. I did a very, very early conversation with the folks who ended up leading that campaign, and at that time I just talked to them about this freedom idea, because I’ve been on this freedom train for a very long time. Because we find it to be really, really effective, not just in, quote, “social issues,” but also in economic issues.

I think that they did an extraordinarily good job of – as we would say in Spanish, no tener pelos en la lengua – not biting their tongue, but rather making it really, really clear that what’s on the line, what’s at stake, and framing it around this concept of freedom. The anecdote or the information that you shared about connecting back to this kind of visceral idea that people had just had about feeling of intervention or forced coercion around something else that has to do with the body is really interesting. I wasn’t aware of that.

But the other framework on abortion – and this doesn’t apply in Kansas, but very, very much applied in Michigan – that we’ve seen be really effective, and this actually emerges out of work that I was fortunate enough to be able to do in Ireland, when we repealed the law against abortion there in 2018. And, to a certain degree, also informed by that same kind of victory in Argentina, which happened at the end of 2020, is a framework that I call, “someone you love.” And, basically, what it says is, someone you love may struggle with a pregnancy someday, someone you love may need an abortion. And what will they do then?

It’s basically taking the storytelling approach that is so central and vital, and has been the work of Black, women-led reproductive justice movements across this country. And taking that single-person-narrated story of abortion, and making it not just about past examples when, you know, the narrator has had this experience, or needed this health service, but also getting people to reflect on the idea of the future, and what it is going to mean when someone in their orbit – whether it be themselves personally or, you know, a sister, a coworker, a friend, a neighbor, whomever, which also applies to men – is going to need an abortion. And then what are they going to do?

And that someone-you-love approach is something that Gretchen Whitmer used a lot.

RG: Anything else that jumped out at you in the interview with Dmitri that I didn’t get to, that you wanted to hit?

AS: Yeah. What I want to say – and, in a way, this is partially a reaffirmation of some of what he said, with which I agree and, in some ways, perhaps, a difference that we share between us – is that, first of all, politics isn’t solitaire. And so, we need to recognize that people don’t just hear from us, they hear from the other side. And our message needs to act not just as a motivation, but also as a rebuttal to what the other side is saying.

And I think that he would probably agree with that, I just think that the approach of doing that by presenting ourselves as essentially the B-minus version of our opposition, right? They say they want to secure the borders, we say we want to secure the borders. They say they want to fund the police, we say we want to fund the police. That’s not actually a rejoinder. That’s not actually a, “Hey, you don’t want Pepsi, you want Coke.” It’s basically saying, “Hey, no, Pepsi is good, and we are also Pepsi.” That’s very confusing for people, it’s demobilizing for our base, and it doesn’t draw that contrast that we actually require with swing voters. And so, I just want to really hit that point hard.

The other point that I really want to hit hard is, it’s really challenging to break a signal through the noise. Getting a message out into the world, let alone getting it repeated so it can actually be heard, is one of the toughest things that we have. Even if we land on some kind of perfect message that we have focus-grouped, and RCT’d, and surveyed, and we are absolutely certain that this 100-word paragraph is the greatest 100 words that have ever been compiled together. If the base won’t repeat that, if they won’t wear the equivalent of the red MAGA hat, that means that the middle isn’t going to hear it.

Because, even if they see your one ad that is perfectly crafted that one time, they are also seeing eight billion other ads, and seeing flyers, and hearing other things. And so, if you don’t attend to what your base actually believes and is willing to repeat, you can’t persuade the middle. If your words don’t spread, they don’t work. That’s the underappreciated piece of this.

RG: Reed Hoffman doesn’t have enough money to get those paid ads in front of enough people for it to matter. You have to get people to do the work for you. And, to do the work, they’ve got to be a little bit motivated. Is that a good way of putting it?

AS: Yeah. I mean, all of the money in the world does not actually create saturation. And things that people see in a TV ad are far less convincing to them than social proof.

Social proof is what I sometimes call the middle school theory of messaging. It’s the fact that people believe the thing they think people like them believe. And so, for example, when it was socially sanctioned, and even sort of widely okay to think, you know, gay men should not be able to get married, right? This was not that long ago. Or lesbian women should not be able to get married. It’s anathema.

RG: Or marijuana should be illegal.

AS: Yeah, marijuana should be illegal. You know, there’s all sorts of social attitudes that have changed really, really rapidly that we’ve witnessed. And part of that change is this kind of broad idea — let’s take marriage equality — of pivoting away from, “this is a really contentious issue and people feel conflicted about it,” to essentially messaging from inevitability, and saying “love is love.” Instead of saying, you know, “This is our right, and we should have this right, and this is about being equal, and this is about –” The kind of taking your policy out in public. And, instead, claiming the moral high ground, and having a message that a person in line at the grocery store might actually repeat to someone else.

Unless you’re there, you’re not getting saturation. If you’re not getting repetition, saturation, you are not getting social proof, and you cannot move the needle. 

RG: Well, Anat, thank you so much for joining us. Really, really appreciate it. 

AS: Thank you.

[Deconstructed end-show theme music.]

RG: That was Anat Shenker-Osorio, and that’s our show. Anat is the host of the Words to Win By podcast and a Principal of ASO Communications, where she examines why certain messages falter where others deliver.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Fairman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, and I’m Ryan Grim, DC Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week, and please go and leave us a rating or review, it helps people find the show.

If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or at Ryan.Grim@theintercept.com.

Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

The post A Dmitri Rebuttal by Messaging Expert Anat Shenker-Osorio appeared first on The Intercept.

Ever since Congress created a federal debt limit, it has managed to raise it before U.S. borrowing reached the limit. For the first time, it looks as though that may not happen, and the government could conceivably default on its obligations. Today on Deconstructed, Jon Schwarz is joined by the economist Stephanie Kelton to talk about the history that brought us to this moment, why both political parties may take us over this ridiculous and dangerous brink together, and what it all means for now and the future.

[Deconstructed intro theme music.]

Jon Schwarz: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Jon Schwarz, a writer at the Intercept, and I’m substituting for Ryan Grim this week.

Today, we are going to be talking about the federal debt limit, and the bizarre, nonsensical, pointless catastrophe it is on the verge of causing. It seems like it can’t be that interesting, until you understand that, because of it, you may momentarily lose your job, and your parents may not get their Social Security payments, and your cousins won’t have enough money to buy food. So, that is actually pretty compelling.

And, speaking of Social Security, that’s what this makes me think of. The most important political experience of my life was when, as a youth, just by weird accident, I learned a ton about Social Security. Before that, I believed all the Social Security hype and propaganda about how it was going to collapse, and that nobody my age would ever see a check, and stuff like that, but then I learned that was all complete nonsense. There is no reason to worry about Social Security, it will be fine.

That’s why I was prepared for the Iraq War, because all the same people who’d been telling me about how Social Security was dying were now informing me about the terrible danger of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. 

George W. Bush: I take the fact that he develops weapons of mass destruction very seriously.

JS: And you may recall that did not pan out.

And so, that brings us to the debt limit. The basic fact of U.S. politics is that, just as with Social Security and the Iraq War, the people in charge constantly lie about everything, to the degree that reality is generally the exact opposite of what they say.

We’re going to be discussing this aspect of this, regarding the debt ceiling with Stephanie Kelton, who is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Stony Brook University. She was a senior economic adviser to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020, and she is the author of the fantastic book “The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy.”

I should say that I have a horrible cold, and so I’m not talking like Barry White on purpose. I just can’t get enough clear heterodox thinking about economics.

Professor Kelton, thanks very much for making the time to be here on Deconstructed. We know that there are a lot of people who want to talk to you about the debt ceiling this week, as we wonder whether the world economy is going to implode.

Stephanie Kelton: Thanks for having me.

JS: So, you know, most of the people listening to this are the kinds of oddballs and miscreants who know what the federal debt ceiling is. But for those who are listening who don’t know, can you explain it?

SK: Sure. The debt ceiling is basically a limit on the number of a very specific, kind of — call it a debt instrument — security that can be issued by the United States Treasury. We basically think of things like U.S. government bonds, short term T-bills, and the like. So, what we often hear of is U.S. treasuries.

And so, the debt limit says, at the moment, you can’t have more than 31.4 trillion, basically, of these things in existence. That’s the maximum that we’re prepared — Congress is saying — that we are prepared to allow the world to hold at this moment in time.

JS: Right. And, crucially, this is the face value of the bonds.

SK: Right.

JS: Which is something that we’ll come back to later, I suspect. Can you tell us the history of the debt limit?

SK: Yeah. So, this dates back to, essentially, 1917; really, [it] comes into its more modern form in 1931.

Back in the day, long before, let’s say, World War I, Congress was very specific, and it would give specific spending authority to the government on an individual basis. So, it would say, we’re going to spend money on the military, we’re going to spend money on the customs office, we’re going to spend money on X, Y, and Z.

And they would say how much they’re going to spend. And then, in each spending bill, they would also be very specific about the financing mechanism: We’re going to use this kind of borrowing, we’re going to issue this instrument for this spending, we’re going to rely on seigniorage for this other type of spending, we’re going to have customs duties pay for this type of spending.

And, basically, over time, the government grew, the operations became more complicated, especially in World War I. And so, Congress decided it was essentially too cumbersome to continue to do things the way that they had been doing it with this very specific nature. And, instead, they would just put a ceiling, and say to the Executive Branch, to Treasury, you have the discretion to figure out what kinds of instruments you want to issue. Ten-year treasuries, shorter term, T-bills, and so forth. You figure out how you want to arrange the financing, and we’ll just put a cap up very high, and then we’ll leave it to you, because we’re not going to micromanage the way that we have been. It’s just not feasible at this point.

And so, that’s where this idea of putting a limit on the borrowing authority. But, you know, it was really done to make it easier for the Executive Branch to carry out the spending that had been authorized by Congress. It wasn’t to slow things down, it wasn’t meant to obstruct, and it certainly was never meant to be a break on spending.

And, so that’s the irony, is that the debt ceiling in its origin was about making it easier for the treasury to facilitate the payments that had been authorized by Congress.

JS: Right. And you’ve used an analogy of people going to a restaurant and ordering dinner. You wouldn’t, when the bill arrives, just say, “Oh, by the way, we’re not going to pay that. We’ve decided that we have a limit on how much money we’re going to spend with our credit card.”

SK: That’s right. So, Congress appropriates, and Congress passes legislation that commit the government to making certain payments. There are programs like Social Security and Medicare, veterans’ benefits, you enter into contracts with defense contractors, and federal employees, and on and on and on. And so, Congress has already decided on the spending; that’s where the commitments come from. And so, the debt limit is this sort of secondary check, an opportunity for Congress to come back at a later moment and say, do we want to allow the Treasury Department to facilitate the payments that we are on the hook for in the usual way? Do we want to let them issue the bonds, and the T-bills, and so forth, the way they always do.

And, when they refuse to raise the debt limit, what I think [they’re] essentially doing is saying to the Treasury Department, “Well, we’ve told you to spend, but now we’re telling you we don’t want you to facilitate the spending the way you usually do, so figure out how you’re going to do it.” They’re not saying, “We’ve decided we don’t want you to pay the bill.”

So, in the restaurant example, they’re not saying: “We’re all going to get up and leave and stiff the restaurant. We’re going to eat the food, we’re going to drink the drinks, and then we’re all going to walk out without paying.” That’s really not what Congress is saying. I think what they’re saying is, we have to pay, because there is a legal commitment to spend that money, but we are telling you we don’t want you to do it the way you normally do. And that then puts the ball in Treasury’s court.

Now they have to figure out how they’re going to meet their legal obligation to spend the monies appropriated by Congress without doing it the way they normally do it.

JS: And so, in theory, I think a lot of people listening to this know that there are some options that the Biden administration, the executive branch and the Treasury Department would have. But, in practice, this has never ever happened, that Congress has failed to raise the debt limit.

And so, let’s just imagine a world in which they failed to raise the debt limit. The Treasury Department does not have the money to pay its bills, does not have the money to service its debt, does not have the money for all the things that you were talking about, like sending out Social Security payments. Like paying the soldiers, things like that.

So, what are, as I say, the theoretical options, if you were at the Treasury Department, that you would have at that point?

SK: Well, they actually have ways to sort of move — the money is, in a sense, fungible. And so, they will embark on this for a short period of time, efforts to embrace what Secretary Yellen — and before Secretary Yellen, Secretary Minuchin under Donald Trump — these extraordinary measures.

So they can sort of stretch things out, and everybody’s probably heard references to “the X-date,” which is, basically, what Secretary Yellen is saying. Well, we can practice these extraordinary measures for a period of time. And then, when the X date arrives, as you just said, there’s no more money that can be accessed. And, at that point, we can’t meet all of the commitments as we are supposed to under the law.

And, you know, people are talking about things like, well, there are actually ways to top up the government’s bank account. So, basically, when the government spends, it does so by drawing on what’s essentially a checking account, just like you and I have. This is called the Treasury General Account, and it’s the Treasury’s checking account at the Federal Reserve.

And so, what people are saying is, well, you’re not allowed to run an overdraft on that account. From day to day, you can’t run it into negative, day after day after day, so you’ve got to top up the account somehow. So, how do you get numbers into the account so that it doesn’t go below zero?

And so, one of the things people are saying is, well, you could mint this platinum coin. And we can talk about that, I don’t know if you want to get into it right now, but people have probably heard the trillion-dollar platinum coin idea. Some people have said the treasury can issue instruments that aren’t like the instruments that they currently issue to facilitate spending, which are the 30-year treasuries, or 10-years, or T-bills. They could issue something called a consol.

And you mentioned a little bit earlier that it’s about face value. Staying under the debt ceiling limit is about not allowing the total outstanding stock of these government instruments to exceed $31.4 trillion at the moment. So you issue something called a console, which has no face value, it’s just interest. And, since it has no face value, it doesn’t count against the debt ceiling, and that would be a way for the Treasury to sell something and bring in cash that it could then use to continue to meet payments by topping up that checking account.

Another idea is to issue something called premium bonds. A premium bond has a very small face value. So, as the maturing bonds, those that are already out there, they start maturing with higher face value, you are issuing bonds with very small face value and a very big interest rate. And so, you can stay under the debt limit that way.

Some people are saying, just invoke the 14th Amendment. Section Four of the Constitution, 14th amendment to the Constitution says, “The debt of the United States of America shall not be questioned.”

And so, you just basically ignore the debt ceiling limit, and you continue issuing the same kinds of instruments we issue today, and let the courts weigh in at a later date. So, all of these things are being talked about, and including some combination of these, like minting the platinum coin, issuing premium bonds or consols, and invoking the 14th. But there’s a sort of order in which I think it’s preferred to do these things.

JS: And what is that order? I should say that, I think for anybody who has understood the basics of how the government works – which is something that you have been trying to educate people about for, it seems, decades at this point — is that the government creates money. It doesn’t need to get money from anywhere; it creates the money. It doesn’t need to tax people to get the money, it just generates the money itself. And so, that’s the foundation of silliness, that we’re worried about where the U.S. government is going to get the money to pay its bills from.

And then, these entire mansions of silliness are built on top of that foundation, and all of these methods are silly. Even if they may become necessary, it’s ridiculous, because they’re built on this foundation of just being ridiculous to start with.

But, in any case, you mentioned these various methods. What is the order that people generally believe you would try these in?

SK: Well, it will differ, the answer will differ depending on who you ask. And even legal scholars, there are differences of opinion about which one to invoke first. And, for some people, some of them are not defensible; for other legal scholars, you could do all of them.

I think I’m very influenced by the arguments of a colleague, Rowan Gray, who is a law professor at Willamette. And Rowan says, and others do as well, that you’re running a risk if all you do is invoke the 14th Amendment, because you’re saying, I have no other options, I’m just going to ignore the debt ceiling limit, and continue to spend as I am required to do under the law.

And the problem is that you’re violating a statute. You are supposed to do both things under the law. You are supposed to spend the money that Congress has authorized and appropriated, you’re on the hook for the spending, and you’re supposed to spend it under the law. And you’re not supposed to issue the kinds of instruments that you normally would issue to facilitate that spending. That is a statute, so you’re not supposed to violate that.

Rowan argues you would only invoke the 14th as a standalone if you had no other options. And so, there are legal scholars out there — Rowan is one — who say, because you have other legal ways to top up the Treasury’s general account, including the coin, consols, premium bonds, because you have other ways to facilitate the spending without ignoring the debt ceiling limit, you should exhaust other options before invoking the 14th, so that you don’t run the risk of invoking the 14th, and then the courts get involved and say: “No, you can’t ignore the debt ceiling. You could only do that if there was no other option available to you.”

JS: Okay, so let’s go through these other options in a little more detail.

You mentioned minting the platinum coin, which, like, when I first heard about this it seemed so preposterous, that I could not imagine that the U.S. government would ever do it. But, in fact, it does seem to be lawful. What is the law here, and how did this happen?

SK: So, the platinum coin is an option, because of the 1997 Coinage Act, and former director of the U.S. Mint Philip Diehl had a very big hand in drafting the legislation that includes this provision that allows the Mint to issue proof-platinum coins of any denomination it chooses. It’s got to be platinum though, that’s the trick, it has to have platinum content. And, beyond that, the Coinage Act does not specify any limit on either the number or the denomination of the coins that can be created.

So, the Mint is already making coins. That’s where we get pennies, and nickels, and dimes, and quarters, and, you know, commemorative coins. You’ll remember those quarters that came out some number of years ago that had each state on it; that’s Philip Diehl. And he had this idea that he was going to find a way to issue coins that would be collector’s items, commemorative coins, things that other countries would want to invest in, bullion coins and so forth. And what it costs to mint the coin, or to manufacture, I should say, the coin. And then there’s the face value of the coin.

And so you’re reaping seigniorage, which is, essentially, revenue, from the difference between what it costs you to make or manufacture the money instrument and its face value. And so, what people will pay for it. So, we have this provision, because it’s in the Coinage Act, that would give the Mint the ability, and then through the Treasury Secretary, to instruct the Mint to strike a platinum coin. We could put any face value you want on it. You always hear “a trillion,” it could be a half a trillion, it could be, you know, two half-trillion dollar coins, it could be ten $1 trillion coins; as I said, there’s no limit on either the number or the denomination. It is at the discretion of the Treasury Secretary.

And so, you manufacture this coin, and you deposit it into the Treasury’s general account at its bank, its fiscal agent, the Federal Reserve. The Fed credits the account of the Treasury, and you carry on spending without breaching the debt ceiling limit, and without missing a single payment, so you make good on your commitment under the law to spend as instructed by Congress.

JS: Right. And, as they say, part of what was always preposterous to me when I was reading about this was something that you’ve mentioned; there are no limits to the denomination, there are no rules about anything. Like, who’s going to be on the coin? It could be George Washington, but he has three heads, you know? Like, it’s anything at all that people want it to be.

And so, just to explore the strange machinations of this a little further: like, what happens? They, like, walk the coin over to the Fed? How does that work?

SK: Well, so, just to be clear, there are limits. I mean, it does have to be a proof-platinum coin, so it has to have a bit of platinum in it, and you have to manufacture it in a specific way. Those are technical details, but the bigger point is that there aren’t limits on the denomination or the number of coins that you can make this way.

So, how does it get over there? I think Philip Diehl has explained this, and I don’t know that I recall exactly what he said would have to happen. But I think, you can imagine, it’s a pretty high-value coin, so probably, you’re not going to just put it in your pocket and walk from Treasury down to the Federal Reserve. I imagine there would be some security involved, and a lot of coordination ahead of time between the Treasury and the Fed.

But it would physically be transported from the Mint to the Federal Reserve, and you would have the account marked up. The balance in the treasury’s general account would just suddenly increase by a trillion dollars, let’s say.

JS: And so, an important issue here is, like, does the Fed have to accept this money and put it into the Treasury Department’s account?

SK: Well, again, it depends who you ask. If you ask the Secretary Treasury, Janet Yellen, she may say that she’s not certain that the Fed would accept the coin. In fact, that’s what she has argued. When she’s been asked about the coins, she says, “Well, I don’t know that they would take it. In fact, I think maybe they wouldn’t take it.”

That’s rather hard to believe. I mean, the Federal Reserve already credits the Treasury’s general account with seigniorage revenue. I mean, at the end of the day, the Fed is the government’s, the Treasury’s, fiscal agent. And I think acting in its capacity as fiscal agent to the Treasury, it would, in all likelihood, not refuse to credit the account.

And, you know, Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve Chair’s been asked this question, everybody’s getting asked about the coin, right? So, what would you do? Would you mint the coin? Would you accept the coin? They’ve answered all of these questions. And Chairman Powell, he doesn’t say, we would accept it, he doesn’t say, we would not accept it. What he does say is, “We are the fiscal agent.” And I think what he’s effectively saying when he uses that term is, you know — it would be like, when you go to your bank and you have a legal deposit, you can expect your bank to credit your account.

[Deconstructed mid-show theme music.]

JS: All right. So, these are some of the methods that could be used to deal with Congress not passing an increase in the debt limit. What are the reasons why it would be so important to find some way of dealing with a lack of an increase in the debt limit? Like, what would happen if the Treasury didn’t have any options?

SK: Well, in some respects, we don’t know how to answer the question, because we’ve not defaulted before. But I think we can say some pretty general things about the kind of financial chaos that it would set up if, suddenly, millions and millions of payments that were scheduled to be made by the federal government weren’t made.

You know, every dollar that’s spent by the government is received by someone, right? There’s someone on the receiving end. And people are counting on those dollars, whether they’re expecting them in order to be able to meet their own debt payments; credit card payment, rent, mortgage, buy food, fill a prescription. Just imagine what it would look like in a world where millions and millions and millions of payments that were supposed to go out didn’t go out.

Government is defaulting on obligations. The system is not set up to keep track of which government instruments were defaulted, which were not defaulted. What happens if you try to go back later on and say, “Oh, we’re going to not default in the sense that you never get paid. Eventually you’ll get your interest and principle because you’re a bond holder. We’ll figure it out later on.”

I think that people who are thinking about this for even ten seconds are saying, you know, we don’t actually have a system that’s set up to allow us to do that. And so, this cavalier attitude that some Republicans have taken about, “Well, it would be a technical default. It’s mostly just a pause on payments, and then they would restart, and the world wouldn’t really spiral downward, financial markets, global…”

U.S. treasuries are the most important financial instrument in the global financial system. They’re at the center of the financial world. And people who’ve given this any real thought at all, I think, have very quickly come to the conclusion that the dominoes would start falling. And, you know, there isn’t a point at which you say, oh, we can just sort of contain the damage.

I think I said in another interview once before, it’s not like, you know, you burn part of the house down and you say, well, we’re going to lose the spare bathroom and the guest bedroom, but the rest of the structure will be okay. It will just rip through the system in ways that touch virtually everyone.

And that’s the thing. I think people are imagining that, somehow, this is not really a big deal, and even if the government does end up defaulting, it’s not going to impact my life. This is something that somehow hits people I don’t know, hits investors. I’m sort of separate and distinct from all of the trauma that would unfold here.

And I just don’t see it that way at all. It would bleed through the financial system, and the payment system, and the lives of not just millions of Americans, but people all over the world.

JS: Yeah, I think that it certainly would have terrible effects that are predictable. It yanks tons of money out of the economy, and suddenly people can’t pay for all the things that they need to pay for every week, every month. My impression is also that the international financial system is so complex that literally no one can predict with any kind of certainty about what something like this would do, and that the system would begin to break and leak in all kinds of ways that, right now, are very difficult to foresee.

And, you know, my understanding is that a lot of financial institutions around the world, they have regulations that require them to hold debt that has a AAA rating. And that U.S. government debt is one of the first and foremost kinds of assets that places like that would hold. And so, what happens if the U.S. stops paying on debt like this, and the debt gets downgraded, it’s no longer AAA? And, all over the world, these places would have to get rid of the U.S. government debt and find something else.

So, who knows? Who knows what would happen? And you would find banks imploding in Singapore, where you couldn’t predict that before. But it would happen.

SK: Millions of job losses, very deep recession. I mean, these are the kinds of things that people, analysts, whose job it is to try to come to terms with what would the fallout actually look like. This is the kind of stuff that people like Mark Zandi at Moody’s Analytics, for example [do]. He will put numbers to this kind of stuff and tell you, we’ll go into a recession, and there would be millions of jobs lost as a consequence.

And so, yeah. It is kind of unimaginable. Which is, frankly, why I’ve been saying for a long time, I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

JS: Yes. And so, that is a key question that I was hoping that we could engage in some informed speculation about. You may have heard people using the analogy in the past, that Republicans would never actually force this to happen. Like, at the last moment, they would always come to some kind of agreement because, in some sense it, was like somebody holding a gun to their own head and saying, “Give me everything I want, or I’ll shoot.”

Because it would, first and foremost, it would be terrible for everyone. Lots and lots of people on earth, lots and lots of people in America, but it would damage the corporate and financial interests that they are often directly representing. And I think that was true in the past, that they would never truly contemplate something like this happening.

But my, as I say, speculation — but hopefully informed by something — is that things have changed. And, first of all, as you were just saying, they have persuaded themselves that shooting themselves in the head is not going to hurt that much. And, secondly, we are sort of conjoined twins, right? We’re connected to them. And they are capable, I think, of hurting themselves very deeply, but it’s going to hurt us a lot too.

SK: So, it’s interesting, because there are reports that Secretary Yellen did attempt to appeal to, let’s say, Wall Street, right? Big investment banks and so forth. And tried to get them to be more vocal, and sort of say, “We are really worried, and we want a clean increase in the debt ceiling limit. Don’t play games. No hostage taking. Just do what you did three times under the prior administration. Vote for a clean increase in the debt ceiling, and kind of bring Wall Street on side, and get them to help in that effort.”

And I think that didn’t happen, and one possible reason it didn’t happen is because the rhetoric has been, from the administration, that they are thinking about ways to prioritize payments so that, in the event of a default, you’re not defaulting on the obligations to pay interest and principle to bondholders. You may default on — or delay payment, which I think is a default — to seniors, to hospitals You know, you’re supposed to make reimbursements for Medicare, and so forth, and so on. Maybe you don’t meet those payment obligations on time, but you continue to pay the bondholders. And maybe that explains why there isn’t more anxiety and uproar from investors about where we are today, you know? Days away from this so-called X-date.

But the other thing you said, I think it’s worth saying, to say that Republicans would be forcing the default. I’ll go back to what I said earlier in the conversation, which is, Congress is instructing the executive branch to do two things. It is instructing the Executive Branch to spend, because it passed legislation, and the government is on the hook to spend money that’s appropriated by Congress. So, it’s got to do that. And, if it refuses to raise the debt ceiling limit, it is saying to the Executive Branch, don’t issue those instruments you would normally issue to facilitate the spending that you are legally obligated to undertake.

And so, I think that puts the ball in the court of the executive branch, and any default, then, is not so much Republicans pushing the country into default, because there are these other options available. You don’t have to default.

So, I think we really have to start thinking about it more as Congress saying to Treasury, effectively challenging the Treasury Department: “Find another way to do it.”

JS: Yeah, that’s right. And I think it is important for people to understand that the consequences that we’ve been talking about would be ones that, first, would be caused by Republicans not being willing to raise the debt limit without catastrophic cuts to government spending, but also, it would be the fault of the Biden administration.

And so, I would like to engage in some informed speculation, if we can do so, about what they’re thinking. Because I have to say, viewed from the outside, it is absolutely inexplicable. Ideally, we’d be able to go back in time 30 years and get the Democratic Party to stop constantly talking about the terrible danger that the federal debt poses to us and our children. Because, number one, that’s not true, and number two, they’ve sort of put themselves in the position where they’re the party of cutting spending, whereas the Republicans are always willing to spend as much money as they possibly can when they’re in power.

And so, we can’t go back in time 30 years, but how do you see their strategy, or what do you see their strategy as having been, and what should they do now, given that we’ve gotten to this place?

SK: Well, I don’t think they have a strategy. I think they were just very much hoping that, somehow, there would be a willingness on the part of Republicans to work in a bipartisan way, that he would get the same sort of treatment that Donald Trump got. Just give me the clean debt ceiling increase. If that was the calculus, that was certainly a very mistaken one. And I think a lot of people saw well in advance that that would be a big mistake, not to plan for contingencies where the debt ceiling was weaponized, where what was on offer was something so unacceptable to Democrats that they were going to be backed into a corner where they end up where we are today, which is this hostage taking situation.

Republicans definitely feel right now like they have the upper hand in this, and I think they do have the upper hand in this, because the White House is not signaling that there is any plan B, that there is an escape hatch, that they are prepared to explore some of these other options. They’re negotiating, where they started off saying, “We’re not going to negotiate an increase in the debt ceiling. We want a clean increase.” And Republicans said, “Well, you’re not going to get that. So, let’s start negotiating.”

And what you hear every day, multiple times a day, is House Speaker Kevin McCarthy going on television, and saying: How many days, keeping track, how many days, the White House refused to engage on this. And he’s out there saying: They waited until virtually the last minute to come to the table, and now here we are, we’ve put forward a plan. The House has passed a bill to lift the debt ceiling, and all we have to do are these series of very reasonable things. This is what McCarthy’s saying, right? “Very reasonable things.”

And I think they’re starting to sound persuasive to the American people. You’ll see polls out there that say —  You know, people don’t know the specifics, so they hear “deficit,” they hear Republicans have a plan to cut spending and get control of the government’s finances, and they’re prepared to avoid default and all of this. And the way that it gets presented through the media and so forth is that there’s this somewhat reasonable offer on the table, and that the administration, if it doesn’t like bits and pieces of it, should be negotiating. And that surely the two sides will come together and will end up with some kind of bipartisan agreement to lift the debt ceiling limit, and I suspect that that’s how this will play out.

Although, you know, I don’t discount the possibility that we’re so close now to this so-called X-date that there may not be enough time to actually get the legislation drafted. There are questions about what would happen in the Senate. So, I still think a default is something that’s possible, I just — I guess my instincts tell me that, when push comes to shove, something will be done.

If they need a bit more time, maybe they extend the debt ceiling, cleanly for a few weeks. Or I don’t know what ends up happening, but I do think it’s a huge problem, in terms of the way that the White House and Treasury have commented on the viability of different options for months now.

People will say, “Well, Democrats should have taken advantage of the option to raise the debt ceiling on their own, when they could have done so through reconciliation or something.” That was not ever in the cards. You had people like Senator Manchin who did not want to do that, [who] wants to be able to negotiate some spending cuts and deficit reduction in order to increase the debt ceiling limit.

So, I don’t think that was ever really in the cards for Democrats. And so, we are where we are.

JS: Yeah. And where we are is a place in which the Democratic Party’s story makes no sense whatsoever to any human being. People hear Biden, having said that getting rid of the debt limit — which is what, obviously, we should do — would be irresponsible. But, as you say, they didn’t raise it when they controlled power, either recently or further back in the past.

And, also, the Democrats cannot stop talking about how our debt is a dangerous problem, and we must do something to address it. And, also they won’t negotiate over the debt limit with the Republicans, except they will.

So, it is, I think, maddening, and it’s probably particularly maddening to you. Because, certainly, my understanding of how the world works, how federal spending works has been wrenched around — maybe not 180 degrees, but 170 degrees — by reading your book “The Deficit Myth,” and also just thinking about this, and realizing…

Well, why don’t you tell us about Modern Monetary Theory, and what its implications are for deficit spending in general, and the government’s control of public money.

SK: All right. Well, let’s get you the last 10% of the way there.

MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory, is a framework for analysis. It’s an economic framework — macroeconomic framework — through which you can understand how, let’s say, a sovereign currency works. We are not on a gold standard anymore. When people talk about, you know, “Well, where will you find the money to pay for this program or that program?” This is like, a crazy question, right? And yet you hear it all the time. “We have to find the money,” as if you’re out there digging, mining for gold or something in order to pay the bills.

We’re not on the gold standard. We have a fiat currency and we have floating exchange rates. We have a sovereign currency. The federal government, the United States of America is the issuer of our currency, the U.S. dollar. Issues the dollar, the sole legal authority to issue the currency.

The rest of us just use the currency. I can’t create manufactured dollars, right? I can try, but if I do, it’s called counterfeiting, it’s illegal. I’ll end up in an orange jumpsuit somewhere. Businesses can’t do it. State and local governments can’t do it.

So, think back to Covid, right? March of 2020, Covid hits the U.S. in earnest, and millions of people start losing their jobs. Governments, everybody panics. We say to almost all businesses, you can’t be open right now. Only essential things that need to be done, those go on. Everything else, we want to try to basically keep people at home, so don’t go to the nail salon, don’t go to the gym, don’t go to the theater, don’t go to a restaurant, right? All that stuff.

And people said, what in the world is going to happen? If you grind the wheels of commerce to a halt, you’re going to throw, the economy’s going to go into recession. Millions of people are going to lose their apartments, their homes. They won’t be able to buy food and medicine, and so forth.

So, the federal government says, don’t worry, right? They passed the CARES Act in March of 2020. $2.2 trillion right out the door. Money for the unemployed, that first round of stimulus checks. Payroll protection programs, you name it. There’s trillions of dollars going out the door, right?

How come they could do that? Why was the federal government able to come up with trillions of dollars when everybody else was crying poor? “I’m running out of money, I’m running out of money, I’m not going to be able to pay my vendors, I won’t be able to pay my landlord. I won’t be able to buy food.”

It’s because the federal government’s not like the rest of us, its budget doesn’t work like a household budget. And that’s what’s so maddening when you listen to Speaker McCarthy. Every single day talking about the federal government’s finances, as if they are akin to our own personal finances. He’s out there talking about how we’ve got a national credit card and we keep charging it up, and then every time we hit the limit on our credit card, we have a big fight over increasing the limit so that we can spend even more irresponsibly. And every household knows that you can’t do that. And he’s tapping into that idea that our government is just like we are.

And MMT is about helping people understand why that’s not the case. Why the monetary system that we have today, what I said is, you know, a sovereign currency, fiat money, floating exchange rate, not a gold standard — which is a fixed exchange rate system — gives the federal government the capacity to spend in ways the rest of us can’t. That Congress can literally write legislation like that CARES Act and commit to spending $2.2 trillion that it doesn’t quote-unquote “have,” right?

It didn’t go around and scoop up $2.2 trillion from taxpayers, and from investors around the world, and China, and everybody else, and then come back and say, “Okay, we’ve got the 2.2 trillion. Now we can tell the world we’re going to spend this money.” No. You write the legislation. If the votes are there, the money will be there. The money is created in the act of spending.

So, MMT is about trying to explain how the monetary system we have today actually works, and the mechanics of government finance, and why the government’s budget doesn’t function like a household budget.

JS: Right. And, as I say, it completely wrenched my perspective on these issues around. But once you have had your head successfully wrenched in this way, then it is just obviously true, it’s just a straightforward description of reality.

And I think you and other people have used the analogy of, like, asking people who run the scoreboard at a baseball game. Like, where are you going to get the points to put up on that board? And it’s just like, “Well, we have as many points as we need.”

SK: Jon, what we’re arguing about right now is, literally, the points in the Treasury’s general account. There is nothing in the account that you and I can grab hold of that we can touch or feel. It’s not physical money, we’re talking about digital entries. Just like when you watch a baseball game, or go to a football game, and the points appear on the scoreboard, nobody’s sitting in the crowd, [looking] up at the scoreboard, and says, “Wow, this team is on fire. They’re scoring a lot of points.” Like at a basketball game, right? And you say, “I wonder if the arena is going to be able to put up more points if the team continues to score. Where are the points coming from? What if they run out of points?”

Nobody has that thought, ever. You don’t look at the scoreboard and say: “Wow, the arena’s really in the hole here, because the teams have all the points, so the arena must be running out of points, or borrowing points from—” we don’t think like that. But, somehow, when it comes to the federal government, we hear these words – deficit and debt and so forth — and we think, wow, if the Treasury doesn’t have the points in its account, it won’t be able to continue to pay veteran’s benefits, and social security, and all the rest of it.

It’s just maddening, because we’re literally talking about an accounting system where, as long as we can just put some more numbers on a spreadsheet called the Treasury General account, then everything is good, and we can all go back to living our lives. But until we figure out how to do that, we have 24/7 drama around the debt ceiling, and default, and what will happen to financial markets, and if they tank, that’s people’s 401ks. And it’s your saving, and what does it mean for jobs? And will millions of people be thrown out of work because we couldn’t figure out how to put some digits on a ledger?

I mean, it’s just frankly insane that humans have evolved, as many millions of years as we have, and we’re so dumb that we cannot figure out something as simple as an accounting solution to an accounting problem. It’s just as ridiculous as it sounds.

JS: Yes, and I think that an indication of what a terrible idea the debt limit specifically is, is illustrated by the fact that, essentially no other country on earth has a system like this. My understanding is that Denmark has some kind of nominal debt limit in its law, but they’ve raised it so high that it’s essentially irrelevant, and that’s that. And then nobody else uses this particular dumb scheme.

SK: Exactly. So, go back to your earlier point, when you referenced President Biden being asked whether the U.S. should even have a debt limit, maybe we should abolish it. He was asked the question, “Would you be in favor of abolishing it?” And he laughed. He said, “no.” “No,” he said. “That would be irresponsible.”

We’re the only country – you just said it — we’re the only country in the world that has a debt limit that works like this and, somehow, doing what the entire rest of the world does would be irresponsible? Are you kidding me? And I will say, you know, it’s not just a moderate Democrat like President Biden. Bernie Sanders, Senator Sanders was asked whether he would be in favor of abolishing the debt ceiling. He said no, for the same reason.

JS: Amazing. And yet, as you’ve quoted, Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve — and, by no means, a fervent liberal, I think it’s fair to say — has said that the debt ceiling should be abolished. Ben Bernanke, also a former head of the Federal Reserve has said that.

SK: Janet Yellen.

JS: Our current Treasury Secretary and former head of the Fed herself.

SK: Yup.

JS: And so, in fact, it is the height of irresponsibility to continue to have it, it’s absolutely preposterous. And yet here we are.

SK: You know, I heard on television about a month ago or so, a Republican House member was being interviewed, CNBC, and I happened to be listening. And he was talking about the debt ceiling limit, and he said, these were his words, “It’s an anachronism, financially.” It’s an anachronism, financially. He understands. But he said, “The reason I like it,” and he said, “I like it. I like it because it periodically affords us the opportunity to do exactly what we’re doing right now. Which is to leverage it, to weaponize it, and to try to claw some money back out of programs we don’t like.”

And so, he was very candid. “It’s an opportunity for us, so I like it. It’s an anachronism, financially.” He knows we shouldn’t have it, don’t need it. It serves no useful purpose, in terms of economics, but he likes it for the political reasons.

JS: Yes. And we’ve taken up a lot of your time discussing this, but I would like to hold onto you for just a little longer, to say that, I see this in a specific historical context, which is that what we’re talking about here is, really, different philosophies about what the federal government should be doing. And they want to use the debt limit as an opportunity to kill off as much of the parts of federal government as they can that they don’t like.

And, you know, people have sort of forgotten all about this, it’s lost to living memory now. But, to me, this does kind of go back to the Great Depression in the 1930s, and what happened in the United States and elsewhere to deal with a worldwide economic collapse, and there were three choices that faced every country where their economies were absolutely dead. People were desperate, and it seemed to a lot of people that human beings simply couldn’t live with capitalism, at least in places with any kind of democracy.

And so, one option would be to keep capitalism, get rid of democracy, which was essentially what fascism was. And they could get rid of capitalism and try to keep democracy, but attempts at that were crushed pretty much everywhere. Or they could try to find some kind of compromise between capitalism and democracy. And that is what happened in the United States; so, the New Deal, at least as I see it.

The New Deal was triumphant for a long time in America. And I’m sure you know the famous letter from Dwight Eisenhower to his brother when he was president, when he told his brother that the federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken. And there is this tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things, but their number is negligible and they are stupid.

And people like this, who want to get rid of the new deal, they’re still around, they’re still stupid, but their numbers are not negligible anymore. And this is what they mean when Republicans like Steve Bannon, they talk about getting rid of the administrative state. They genuinely sincerely believe the New Deal was a terrible wrong turn in American history, and they want to turn things back in the other direction.

Do you see it like this? Am I missing something?

SK: No. I think that what’s basically a war on what remains of the New Deal and the great society has been an objective of many in the Republican Party for decades. It’s just a slow, steady grind, a whittling away of programs that are part of the social safety net. You know, Medicare, Social Security, obviously the two most important and, arguably, most successful government programs; you can add veterans benefits in there.

But these are wildly popular. Bipartisan, right? Republicans like these programs. Independents, Democrats, these aren’t programs that are easy to go after, which is why they’re referred to as the third rail, right? But they’re always in the bullseye. And, to the extent that we’re talking about trying to find some path to increasing the debt ceiling limit without making cuts to Social Security or Medicare, I guess that’s sort of a triumph in its own right.

But, of course, we’re looking at — the house proposal includes cuts to veterans, Medicaid, nutrition programs for women and infants. Rental assistance, low-income housing, head start programs. Not the military, though.

Those kinds of programs that I think you just described as the best of what we tried to build in terms of income security and so forth, coming out of World War II, and building on programs like that, it’s just been a slow, steady grind to whittle away at what remains of those ideals, championed by FDR and Lyndon Johnson.

JS: Yeah. And so, looked at from a certain perspective, the Republican Party’s behavior makes no sense. Like, why would you get yourself into a situation where so much damage could be caused to so many lives? But, for them, the prize really is enormous, and I think that people do not understand how peculiar and how radical the Republican Party has become.

Like, they genuinely do believe that the New Deal was a disaster, and that the best thing that they can do for America is get rid of it. But they can’t explain that very straightforwardly because, as you say, all of it is extremely popular.

SK: Yeah. I mean, what, are they just sort of shorthanded? “It’s all socialism.” If you have programs like this that serve millions of Americans, Social Security and Medicare and so forth, then you’re turning into a socialist society, right? And they just hide behind the cover of that word. And somehow voters, I don’t know. I don’t have the sense that there would necessarily be huge punishment at the ballot box for doing the kinds of things that Republicans sometimes talk about doing. I don’t know.

There are so many young people. You know, I teach. I used to ask my students, they’d come into the class, and teach economics, and I’d say, how many of you think that Social Security is going to be there for you when you reach the age of retirement? And, over the years, fewer and fewer hands would go up. And it always struck me that this is kind of like they’ve been primed for this along the way, for so many years, hearing about how these programs are unsustainable.

And, really, it’s not just Republicans. It’s both, it’s Democrats and Republicans reinforcing this idea that we can’t afford the kind of society that we want to live in, where we take care of people, where people can retire with dignity. Where, you know, if you lose your job, you have some income support. Where you can expect to have healthcare coverage and so forth. That all of these things are just unaffordable.

And we’ve heard both sides messaging that, you know, tough choices and all that kind of stuff. So, I think it makes the job of those who would like to whittle these programs down into nothing a lot easier, when the rest of us already expect them not to be there in the future.

JS: Yes. I would say that almost all political issues, including this, in the United States, are very much like the Iraq War. Where it was a program that was driven by a faction of the Republican Party, but lots and lots and lots of Democrats — including the current president of the United States, Joe Biden, including Hillary Clinton — were on board with it. And so, it was an obvious disaster from the beginning, if anybody who knew anything about the facts knew where it was headed. And we went there anyway.

And so, I think that we need to be very cognizant of the fact that that is possible. And, especially, now with the bill that the House has passed, if there’s any kind of compromise, this is probably going to require the votes of a lot of Democrats to get it through the House. Like, all the Republicans are not going to vote for it.

So, it’s going to be a bipartisan catastrophe. The Democrats will not be able to point to this and blame anyone because they did it, too.

SK: I think that’s probably the way this ends.

JS: Yes, I do too. And that’s extremely depressing.

Well, thank you for joining us on this depressing, distressing subject. And we would love to have you back at some point and talk to people more about the intricacies of Modern Monetary Theory, because it really does make you realize that we could have a much nicer world. We can’t have a utopia, probably, but life for everybody could be so much better if we just were able to get our minds around the concept of money.

SK: Yup. I’d be happy to come back, and thanks for having me this time.

JS: All right. That was Stephanie Kelton, and that is our show.

Please follow Stephanie Kelton on Twitter and elsewhere and, if you haven’t yet, read her book, “The Deficit Myth.” It can change your life like it changed mine.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is Jose Olivares, our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, and I’m Jon Schwarz, a senior writer at The Intercept.

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So, that’s Deconstructed’s quiet storm. We’ll see you next week.

The post Economist Stephanie Kelton on the Debt Limit, a Potential Catastrophe We’re Risking for No Reason appeared first on The Intercept.

On Sunday, as the first round of Turkish elections were underway, the government expelled a team of international election observers. The delegation, including members of Spain’s parliament, was invited by a leading Kurdish party to observe the elections. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Ismael Cortés, one of the election observers who was expelled. Cortés is a member of the left-wing Podemos party in Spain and a representative in Spain’s Congress of Deputies. Cortés tells how, as he visited voting sites in southern Turkey, he and his team were arrested by Turkish officials and later expelled from the country. He emphasizes that even though he and the team were mistreated by Turkish officials, it is nothing compared to the repression Kurdish people face.

[Deconstructed intro theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim, and today we’re checking back in on the first round of the Turkish elections, which saw Tayyip Erdo?an outperform polls and force a runoff, which will take place on May 28th.

I’m joined today by Ismael Cortés, who’s a member of the left-leaning Podemos Party in the Spanish Congress of Deputies who was on hand during the election in Eastern Turkey, the Kurdish region at the invitation of the opposition party, and things went about as poorly as you could possibly imagine for Cortés and his international team of elected officials and civil society representatives.

Now, we reached out to the Turkish government to get their response to what was a truly shocking move on their part, but we have yet to hear back. If we do we’ll, append their response.

Ismael was slightly delayed joining us today because he was finishing a debate on the floor of Congress. So, I have to ask, Ismael, what were you debating, and did you win? 

Ismael Cortés: Yes. We were debating the enlargement of the permission for parents after maternity.

RG: And how’s that going? Are they going to get it?

IC: Yes.

RG: Well, wonderful! Congratulations. It’s frustrating, sometimes, when we in America hear about the state of European politics, compared to what we’re able to get. Right now, the big debate in Washington is whether or not they’re going to attach stricter work requirements to welfare benefits — that’s what Republicans are demanding in exchange for not blowing up the global economy by pushing the US into default. So, real civilized debate that we have going on here.

But, over in Turkey, can you tell us about the city you were in, and how you came to be there? 

IC: Yeah. So, I was invited by the HDP party, which is part of the Yesiller Ve Sol Party, the Green left party in Turkey, and it is a Kurdish party. This is part of the Kurdistan, southeast of Turkey. And the intention was to observe the election, and to be together, and to visit different electoral colleges, just to make sure that everything was made according to democratic standards. 

RG: And so, the election was held on Sunday. What was the beginning of your day like, and when did it start to go badly? 

IC: So, I started at 8 a.m. I went together with them to advocate lawyers of the city. We visited 14 electoral colleges in different villages. Small villages, around 100, 700 inhabitants. And the whole day [went] quite well. It is true that we [had] to pass by two checkpoints that were controlled by the Turkish gendarmerie, which were acting, actually, as an army; heavily armed and controlling every movement between villages. So, everyone was checked into a list.

But the problem was at the end of the day, when more and more people of the Spanish delegation end up in the police station without any proper information.

RG: Right. So, how does that happen? How did the police just start rounding up members of this Spanish delegation on hand to observe the election?

IC: So, first it was even in the electoral colleges. They went to the electoral colleges as soon as they knew that international observers were in the electoral college, and they took them, with the excuse that they were violating the national electoral law, just because they put a tweet on Twitter.

And from there it started everything. We thought that that was a joke. So, they arrested some of the people, but then they were released. But, again, they were taken into the police station, then liberated. And, as soon as the day was passing, more and more people were in the police [station]. And, at the end, a group of police came to the hotel, interrupted the session because we were following the result of the election, and they took them all to the police station. 

RG: Did you go? Were you taken, also, to the police station? 

IC: I was also [taken to] the police station. I think I was the last one, at 12 a.m. It was already night, after the electoral result. So, they took us, and they put some of us in the police car and even to the police station, without any information, any accusation, or any allegation. 

RG: They just said, “Come with us.”

IC: They [said], “Come with us, we want to check your passport.” I said, “You can check my passport here, make a picture, and you can have a talk with the Spanish embassy that will verify all my data.” And they say, “No, it’s better if you come to the police, and we check your passport there.” Which is totally unusual and, I think, even illegal.

RG: And what did you hear from your colleagues who had been there for a while, before you got there?

IC: Yeah, some of them were even [there] very early in the morning, from 10 a.m. So, they were, from the beginning, just annoying my colleagues, making promises that they were [to be] liberated in 30 minutes, then in one hour, then two hours. And then they ended up being in the police station more than 24 hours.

RG: How long were you in the station?

IC: I was driven to the police station, as I said before, at 12 a.m., and then we were not really reevaluated. We were driven to the airport around 7 a.m. Police were with us in the airport until 3 p.m. of the next day. So, I think it was around 15 hours.

RG: Did you sleep at all? What was the delegation doing in the jail? 

IC: No, not at all. So I was together with other member of Parliament, I was one of those who was in charge of making the connections with the Spanish Embassy, and with the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs. So, I [had] to say loudly that they were, all the process, all along the way, helping, to the Spanish delegation, to the 10 people that were detained in the police station of Siirt.

RG: And I know it can be obnoxious when people say, “Hey, do you have any idea who I am.” But did you say to the police, “Listen, I’m a member of Congress, I’m an MP from Spain here to observe the election?” What was the response from police officials?

IC: Not really. I didn’t make that claim, myself, because I knew they would play with us. I thought that they already had all the information about us, so I didn’t want to allow them to make fun of me and my colleagues. But it was the Spanish ambassadors who said, “Did you know that, Iman, the people are two deputies, two members of parliament and one senator?” And [the] police, they were, all along, very [disrespectful].

RG: How did they treat people physically? Were you, was anybody mistreated? Or no? 

IC: It was not a violent, physically violent mistreatment, but it was more a kind of intimidation. An attitude of intimidation, making clear that they ruled the party beyond any democratic standards.

[Deconstructed mid-show theme music.]

RG: You said in your statement that some members of the Kurdish Party as well were swept up. Do you have any sense of what their fate was?

IC: What we know is, this is, for us, it’s an extraordinary experience. We went to Siirt, in the southeast of Turkey, Kurdistan, and we were treated as potential terrorists. This is the truth. But for people – and, especially, those members of the opposition who live there – this is a daily-basis experience, unluckily. But this is what happens with them. Usually they are put in the police station, or they have to suffer fake trials, and so on.

RG: And what was your sense of what the turnout was looking like and how the election was going? Because I know – and maybe you could give people some background, American listeners who don’t know the context – but, you know, the Kurdish opposition has often had kind of a delicate relationship with other elements of the Turkish opposition. And, this time, the full opposition came in coalition together in a way that they really hadn’t in the past. Sometimes the opposition coalition would reject the Kurdish elements, to serve whatever kind of bigotry there was on the part of some voters they thought they might be able to win over.

What was it from the Kurdish perspective that allowed the coalition to kind of come together this time?

IC: This is so true. I think, first of all, Erdo?an wanted to win in the first round, to show to the country and to the world that he’s the strong leader that has been ruling Turkey in the last 20 years. So, this is momentous, yeah? We can say that it is a kind of victory for the opposition, that they can take a second round.

Also, it is true that in the Kurdish region, but also in big cities, the opposition gained most of the seats of the Parliament. So, in terms of the legislative elections, it was also a good result. Now, we have to see what will happen on the 28th and, especially, what is the weight and the role that the extreme right will have in those elections, how they position and how they align with Erdo?an’s party.

But, answering your question, I think there is a sense that democracy in Turkey is first priority, and the coalition of the leftist parties with CHP, I think, is a very healthy one.

RG: Yeah, I saw the news recently that the candidate who finished third with 4 or 5 percent – you know, the reason that both candidates were kept under the 50 percent – he said he would endorse the opposition, but its condition for doing so was that the opposition must basically denounce its Kurdish element. Which is just, I assume, an offer he knows the opposition is not going to accept.

Do you think that that was expected from the Kurdish elements going into it?

IC: No, not really, not really. The issue is that this is a very extremist element of Turkish politics. He’s an extreme right candidate who — It’s an extreme nationalist Turkish party that is going to destroy the democratic movement. So, in a way, he was making fun of the opposition coalition.

RG: Right, right. What’s been the reaction back in Spain, now that you’ve landed and been released, and the news is out of your detention? Were your colleagues stunned or is Erdo?an – ?

IC: No, they do, they do, of course. And there is a preoccupation, not only from the side of the leftist parties or my colleagues, but also from the Socialist Party and all the democratic parties. I have to say that even the presidency of the Congress of Deputies, was following the fact that, two members of parliament and one senator were detained in a police station in Siirt, in Turkey. And, also, the Minister of Foreign Affairs was, all along, helping us, and I’ve been talking with him today.

So there is a big preoccupation of what is going on in [regards to] Erdo?an. And the fact that they detained a Spanish delegation and, among the Spanish delegation, members of the congress and the Senate, it [had] a huge impact in media and social media, but also in big newspapers here.

RG: And has the Spanish government pressed for any type of apology or accountability? Or is this the type of thing that you think Erdo?an will just blow off?

IC: What I can say is that, already, the Spanish government, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has made a request to the Turkish government to make explanation. It is like a formal inquiry. It’s a diplomatic way of asking for explanation. But, so far, we didn’t [receive] any. 

RG: Any final thoughts? How do you reflect on your night in this southeastern Turkish prison?

IC: To me, what is clear is that there is a context of repression and persecution in Turkey, especially in the region of Kurdistan, that we have experienced one day in. I can say, in an undemocratic way: what I think is that the Kurdish people, and especially those who want a political change, suffer much more violence, political violence and police violence, in [their] everyday life.

RG: Well, Ismael, thank you for joining us. And congratulations on the expanded maternity and paternity leave. I’m sure that will be much appreciated by parents in Spain. Thank you for joining me. 

IC: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me in your program.

[Deconstructed end-show theme music.]

RG: That was Ismael Cortés, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept.

Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s Editor in Chief, and I’m Ryan Grim, DC Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week, and please go and leave us a rating or a review, it helps people find the show.

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Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

The post Turkish Elections: Erdogan’s Government Arrested and Expelled International Election Observers appeared first on The Intercept.

On Sunday, Turkey’s presidential election could unseat Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim has a wide-ranging conversation with guests, covering Turkey’s election, the arrest of the former prime minister of Pakistan, and ongoing struggles in Palestine. Selim Koru, an analyst at the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey talks about the political climate in the country ahead of the election. Pakistani journalist Waqas Ahmed breaks down the arrest of Imran Khan, the cricket star turned politician. The Intercept’s Alice Speri discusses the one-year anniversary of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing and recent developments in the West Bank.

[Deconstructed intro theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

This Sunday, voters in Turkey will go to the polls, with the opposition optimistic they have a real chance of ousting Tayyip Erdo?an, who has dominated Turkish politics for two decades. We talked with Selim Koru about whether the polls that show Erdo?an losing will hold.

Now, in Pakistan, on Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that this week’s detention of former Prime Minister Imran Khan was illegal, ordering his immediate release. We interviewed Pakistani journalist Waqas Ahmed on Wednesday, ahead of that ruling, about his arrest. But, as you’ll hear in our conversation, Ahmed, who was actually scheduled to interview Khan just before he was arrested, already knew that the detention was illegal.

And, finally, Israel has launched airstrikes in Gaza again, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the killing of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Intercept reporter Alice Speri recently visited the region, and she joined us to talk about what she saw there.

Joining me first to discuss the elections set to take place this Sunday in Turkey is Selim Koru. He’s an analyst at the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey. 

Welcome to Deconstructed, Selim

Selim Koru: Thanks for having me. 

RG: Can you walk us through why it was that the earthquake in Turkey has been so damaging politically to Erdo?an? I could see a world in which people say, you know what, obviously he didn’t produce the earthquake, but what was it about the damage it caused and the aftermath that has put him in so much political trouble? 

SK: First of all, it was a massive earthquake. It was bigger than anything in recent memory, though comparable to the ‘99 earthquake. The thing is, though, that it doesn’t seem to have had a huge effect on his political chances in this Sunday’s election. So, in terms of the impact on the elections, it wasn’t huge, but I think it did shake confidence in Erdo?an’s ability to govern.

The Erdo?an government is known for its fast and loose construction. Before elections, for example, they also give building amnesties, where unregistered buildings are registered automatically without proper checks being conducted, so that sort of thing didn’t look good. People knew that he was very much in favor of this sort of fast and loose construction sector, and that really hurt him, I think, in the long term, especially. 

RG: Can you also talk a little bit about how the economy has kind of spun out of control in Turkey? I occasionally see Erdo?an’s approach described as unorthodox. What has he done economically? 

SK: It’s described as unorthodox specifically because he has decided that, contrary to recent Turkish history, he doesn’t need an independent central bank, right? Because Turkey’s economic policy was pretty mainstream liberal economics, right? You had to have an independent central bank, you had to have fiscal prudence, and that stuff was built on the AK Party’s first term.

When they won in 2002, they actually got this foundation of an IMF program that they maintained pretty well throughout those first couple of terms. And that gave them this basis of economic growth. More recently, so towards the end of the pandemic, he decided to basically fire his economics team, and conduct monetary policy on his own, effectively, is what he’s done, which caused rapid inflation. 

RG: So what did he do? He rapidly lowered interest rates to fight inflation and [that] only drove it further? What’s been the result out in the street?

SK: So, he argues that lowering interest rates is better for inflation always, right? And markets don’t like that. So, the result has been just rampant inflation throughout. For some sectors, that’s good. If you’re an exporter, for example, sometimes that can be good, right? A weak currency can help you. But it means that the country doesn’t have a well-defined strategy, right? That the president is not very transparent, let’s say, in conducting economic policy. Which, over the long term, people don’t like. 

RG: And I’ve seen reports of inflation running as high as 50 percent, maybe. Maybe higher. What’s that like to live through?

SK: Well, consumer inflation is significantly higher. There’s a group of economists who calculate inflation, approximating numbers, because the Statistical Institute of Turkey, TURKSTAT, used to be an excellent institution, but now nobody trusts their numbers anymore. So economists kind of try to calculate things on their own and, you know, sometimes they calculate 200 percent consumer inflation.

And it’s not just that. The housing market is in disarray, especially in the big cities — in Istanbul, Ankara, in Izmit — it’s really hard. Or also places like Mersin. It’s very hard to find apartment buildings that you can live in that are actually affordable. Also, food inflation is incredibly high.

RG: And so, as I’m thinking about this upcoming election, I’ve been also thinking about the Hungarian election, where the opposition to Victor Orbán felt confident that they had, at least, a shot. That people were frustrated with his leadership, and were going to be able to pull it together and give him a real challenge.

In the end, he waltzed to a landslide victory, and the opposition kind of felt that they really actually didn’t have a chance, and had been overestimating the possibility of challenging him. Because he controlled so thoroughly every lever of power, and controlled effectively every kind of media organization, institution in the country, and there was just no way for the opposition to break through.

You now have a united opposition in Turkey — correct me if I’m wrong — maybe the most united in decades, but they still face some of the same structural obstacles, in the sense that, you know, Erdo?an and his party are so dominant across the country.

And so, is there a possibility to break through it? And, if so, how are they going to manage to do it? 

SK: I think it’s an apt comparison, but the timeline’s a bit off. The thing is that, we in Turkey have had this kind of scenario before, where the opposition has tried to come together, but they found repeatedly that Erdo?an’s system was too powerful, that Erdo?an’s political career was still strong enough to resist a challenge.

But, at this point, people feel much more optimistic, because Erdo?an has kind of shot himself in the foot with his extremely unorthodox economic policies. And also that this regime is kind of aging, that the AK party elite, the sort of new elite in the country, is now sort of recognized as being very corrupt, and they’re not as motivated as they used to be.

All of those are, I think, strong factors, and reasons why the opposition has been able to unite and grow bigger than it has ever before. 

RG: And how are the Kurds playing into this election? 

SK: So, it used to be that for the centrist opposition, or the main opposition, to work with the Kurds was kind of painted as being taboo. And Erdo?an reinforced this taboo, even though he has worked with the Kurds before. He, especially after the coup, reinforced this taboo of working with the leftist Kurds, right? The HDP.

I think what K?l?çdaro?lu — Kemal K?l?çdaro?lu, the leader of the opposition — has now done, that’s perhaps one of the most significant things, is that he has been able to overcome that taboo. And he has built a coalition that spans from pan-Turkic nationalists to the Kurds, the leftist Kurds, right? That the entire spectrum of the opposition, if you will. And he has been able to hold that together fairly effectively. 

RG: Was there anything done differently? Or, what did he do differently to accomplish that?

SK: Various things over his tenure, of more than ten years, I’d say. If people know anything about Turkish politics in the outside world, it’s that there’s this sort of Kemalist strain that’s very secular and, you know, hostile to religion. And then there’s this Islamist strain that Erdo?an represents. What K?l?çdaro?lu has done is really softened that harsh secularism, and made it more sort of liberal and pluralistic. That allowed him to work with the center-right opposition, it allowed him to work with the pan-Turkic opposition. It also allowed him to work with the Kurds.

So he has sort of liberalized and made the main opposition party more pluralistic, I would say is the main thing he’s done. 

RG: And Erdo?an has, in some ways, kind of played up his confrontation with the U.S., or with some other Western leaders. What’s the sense inside Turkey of what the kind of western posture is toward either K?l?çdaro?lu or to Erdo?an? How is that affecting people’s postures toward those candidates?

SK: The West posture is actually a very big element in Erdo?an’s campaign. Because Erdo?an is telling his followers, his supporters, look, the West is with the opposition, the West are our enemy, so you should really support me if you want a strong leader that will face down the West, right?

He feels like the Kamalist strain within Turkey is sort of deferential to the West, and that he is competitive with the West. He doesn’t just want to confront them, he wants to compete with the West, and that’s very much at the core of his argument, I would say. Whereas K?l?çdaro?lu is saying, look, we want Western standards in this country, we want European standards. For that, we’d like to have good relations with the Europeans and the Americans.

RG: If Erdo?an loses, does that have any impact on the way that Turkey’s posture toward Ukraine and Russia has been? 

SK: If Erdo?an loses, I do think it would be a significant shift in foreign policy. But foreign policy is a big ship, obviously, and it would be gradual change. What would happen, I think, over time is that Turkey reengages with the European Union, and it adopts a more orthodox stance on things like Ukraine.

It wouldn’t, of course, be free to act like a central European country, like Poland, towards Russia, for example, right? Turkey is dependent on Russian gas, it has close business ties with the Russians. So it wouldn’t take a hawkish stance on Russia, but it would take much more of a conservative stance, I think.

RG: Well, Selim, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. 

SK: Thanks, Ryan, for having me. 

RG: That was Selim Koru, an analyst at the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey. 

[Deconstructed mid-show theme music.]

RG: Now we go to Pakistan to talk about the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Waqas Ahmed joins us now to discuss the latest developments. He’s a Pakistani journalist who has worked as an editor in multiple Pakistani newsrooms, including the Daily Pakistan and the Business Recorder. 

Waqas, Welcome to Deconstructed.

Waqas Ahmed: Thank you for having me, Ryan. 

RG: And so, Waqas, can you catch us up to speed? What happened to Imran Khan? 

WA: Imran Khan was illegally arrested yesterday. You can say he was abducted by paramilitary forces, not the police. There was no warrant. They broke into court premises where Imran Khan was having his hearing, and during that hearing, they took him, kidnapped him, put him in a Rangers van; Rangers is a paramilitary force that answers to the Pakistani military. They put him in a Ranger’s van and they took him away.

They took him to an unknown location, not a police station. It was said they took him to an ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] safe house. He has been there since, and this is where we are at. 

RG: And so, we’re recording this on Wednesday, so he was picked up on Tuesday.

WA: Yes.

RG: And so, in the 24 hours since then, has any word leaked out about how he’s been treated? 

WA: He did have a hearing on Wednesday, and he said that by the NAB authorities he was reached OK, but the police kept him awake all night. They mishandled him, they roughed him up a bit. And he was taken from one location to another in the middle of the night. He thinks that his life is in danger. He feels, he said that — the message he sent out through his lawyers — was that they might inject him with something that would cause slow poisoning. So these are the fears that he has communicated to the outside world. 

RG: And one of Khan’s top advisors was similarly detained recently, and talked of being tortured in detention. Do you know what I’m referring to? What happened in that case? 

WA: Yeah, there have been multiple, actually. First was Mr. Shahbaz Gill. He was taken away by the military intelligence guys, basically. He was kept in a safe house. According to his account, he was stripped. He was tortured. His private parts were abused. He said he faced sexual torture. When he came out, he had been traumatized for a while. He was not allowed to leave the country. He just recently came to the U.S., and he’s going to different cities telling about what he went through.

And there was another aid of Imran Khan, Mr. Azam Swati, he’s a 70-year-old man. He went through a similar abuse. The stories that he told, like when the military abducted him, took him to an unknown location, stripped him and tortured him, and then later showed private videos of him and his wife at a government guest house in Balochistan. He was privately filmed a few years ago, and they tried to blackmail him with those videos. And he came out with all of those things.

So there’s focused, concentrated efforts to crack down on Imran Khan and his supporters, and the playbook is the same. It keeps on repeating.

RG: What’s been the reaction around Pakistan since his detention?

WA: Pakistanis have been furious. This has happened for the first time in Pakistan, that the Pakistani crowds have marched towards the GHQ, which is the Pakistan Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi; this is where all the generals sit. And Pakistani people marched up to the GHQ, and they broke open the gates and they went inside. This has never happened in the history of Pakistan. Pakistan has been through three coups, Pakistan has been through martial law, but crowds have never entered GHQ.

Similarly, in Lahore, they went to the court’s commander’s house, which is the highest ranking general who sits in that city. They went to his house and they burnt his house down.

All of this is unprecedented. And, I would say, historic. 

RG: Where do you think it’s going from here? Are you seeing it mushroom, or are you starting to see it fade, as a result of a crackdown? 

WA: It depends on how the government deals with it. The Pakistani military today has tried to take control of the situation. Troops have moved towards Islamabad. And, in Lahore, they’ve encircled these military installations. If you now go in front of these military installations, there are soldiers standing over there, and some of them have orders to shoot, we’ve been told. And there have been multiple deaths, so people are now scared.

This, like I said, is unprecedented. People have never faced their own military like this, in the 70-year history of Pakistan. Even though Pakistan has been ruled by military, controlled by military, people have never come face to face with them. So, nobody knows how to deal with this situation.

People went out yesterday and, amazingly enough, it was the woman of PTI (Pakistan Tehreek Insaf) who were leading these processions. And all the videos we saw, these women leading the protest, these women facing these soldiers, and the soldiers not understanding how to deal with this situation, because Pakistan is a very patriarchal society. They’ve never dealt with situations like this. So all of this is very new, to Pakistani soldiers and Pakistani civilians alike. 

RG: For people who are new to this, how would you describe Imran Khan’s politics?

WA: Imran Khan’s politics, if we try to simplify it, is center to the right, more populist kind of politics. But it is also Pakistan’s middle class politics, which has its history and context.

Pakistan, for a long period of time, did not have a sizable middle class. In the ‘90s, and especially in the early 2000s, during the Musharraf era, Pakistan started to grow a sizable middle class. And this consisted of the educated people who were getting university education, lots of these young people, and Pakistan also saw a boom of young people at this time.

So, this demographic change of the Pakistani middle class realized that Pakistani politics is completely dominated by the Pakistani feudal elite or the Pakistani military, and they wanted to assert themselves also as a group in Pakistani politics. They did so by pinning their hopes on Imran Khan, who appeared on stage at that point. It could have been someone else, but it happened that it was Imran Khan, and the Pakistani middle class put their hopes up on Pakistani middle class.

And Imran Khan understood the Pakistani middle class, and Imran Khan understood they’re slightly conservative. They’re not completely liberal, as you might perceive from the Western lens. They’re against corruption. They’re against what has been happening in Pakistan for the 70 years: how the feudals and the military treat Pakistan. So he understood this, and Pakistani middle class latched onto him.

So, by 2013, he was getting mass following, and Imran Khan understood that. By 2018 he was in the position to form the government, finally. And we see this Pakistani middle class now, which is also the main constituent of Pakistani military, by the way. So, demographically, the Pakistani military officer core basically comes from the Pakistani middle class; urban middle class, usually.

These people are now pitched against each other for the first time in Pakistani history, as the Pakistani middle class as a group comes up. And the previous traditional power broker in Pakistani politics, the Pakistani military, and nobody knows how this will go.

RG: How do Imran Khan’s supporters think about his ouster? And what role do they believe that the U.S. played in pushing him out of power? And how is that influencing the political dynamic now?

WA: The U.S. role, initially, when it happened in, 2022, April, Imran Khan claimed that there was a big U.S. role in removal of his government. At least he expected the U..S to speak up against his removal. Because one thing was for certain: that Imran Khan’s government was removed by the help of the Pakistani military, and if the Pakistani military is going to remove him, that is an unconstitutional illegal act according to the Pakistani constitution, how Pakistani rules of business are. And, since this illegal act happened, nobody, especially Western partners, did not speak up against it.

A democratically elected prime minister was removed, and nobody said anything about that. And this is something, also, that the Pakistani people didn’t like. Pakistani people were furious that a democratically elected Prime Minister was removed.

At the time of his ouster, his ratings were low, he was not doing well, because Covid had ended and people did not have a good year for the economy. And, by the end of Covid, inflation was rising, so people were unhappy with him. And this is what, also, the military realized at that time.

But, as soon as he was ousted, nobody anticipated that people would be so angry at it, because Imran Khan, whatever his performance was, people did elect him. And he came through a mass movement. He came by breaking the monopoly of a two-party system, and that was a big deal in Pakistani history.

About Imran, about the American aspect, Imran Khan eventually toned down on that. Iran Khan eventually realized that it was not America that played a major role in his ouster, it was his own military. And this realization is like the process of four or five months when, after his ouster, initially he was talking a lot about American interference. Because he had one clue about that.

The clue he had about that was a cable that he claimed the Pakistani foreign office got from the Pakistani ambassador in the U.S. And the contents of that cable, according to Imran Khan, were that there was an undersecretary, a U.S. undersecretary who had talked to the ambassador about Imran Khan’s removal, and how there is going to be a vote of no confidence that the American government supports. This was the allegation.

Later, it turned out it was his own general, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who was the Army Chief at the time. And, Mr. Imran Khan then turned his gun on Mr. Bajwa.

RG: What do you mean, it was his own general?

WA: He was the Army Chief when Iran Khan was the Prime Minister and, technically, he worked, Imran Khan was his boss. And his general, it turned out, was doing a lot of things behind the scenes to ensure Mr. Imran Khan’s government collapses in April. 

RG: What I mean is, what was the role of the undersecretary, after he explored it more deeply?

WA: The cable is real. Many people in Pakistan have seen that cable, there are journalists who have seen that cable. And, also, the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. at that time, he has not denied that cable.  Allegedly there was a dinner meeting in which that undersecretary, Mr. Donald Lu, said that there is going to be a vote of no confidence against Mr. Imran Khan. And, if Imran Khan’s government is removed, there could be an American reset with Pakistan. And if it goes unsuccessful, there will be consequences for Pakistan.

These are the contents of the cable that many diplomats and journalists agree on.

RG: And so, why is it then that Imran Khan has moved away from pointing at that? Because he felt like the military had its own agency? 

WA: One, he feels that the military had its own agency. And, secondly, he feels that he should not fight America. And there is this tendency for him I’ve seen in the past few months to tone down on that.

Not just that. He has tried to reach out to U.S. senators and congressmen through overseas Pakistanis. Americans, basically, who live in America who have Pakistani roots. So, these people, who are, many of them are Republican and Democratic donors, they’ve reached out to their senators, they’ve reached out to their congressmen. Because of those efforts, we’ve seen Congressman Brad Sherman speaking up against human rights abuses in Pakistan.

So, it seems that Mr. Khan is trying to reach out to America and say, I’m not as bad as my army, made me out in front of you. Basically, he feels that Pakistani military has been badmouthing him in front of Americans and American diplomats, especially, and American congressmen and military people. And they’ve been presenting Imran Khan as a rightwing populist who is anti-American, who wants enmity against America, and who wants to go into the China camp.

Imran Khan has been trying recently after going out of power, after realizing that he has to build relationships with everyone. He’s been trying to mend these fences. He’s been trying to dispel this image of his. 

RG: I see. And waving around the charge that the U.S. was partially or primarily responsible for his ouster gets in the way of getting the U.S.’ help in getting him back into power, I would imagine.

WA: Yes.

RG: So what are the charges that they’re cooking up against him?

WA: There are 140 cases, actually. There are so many charges. There is one charge about a watch that he purchased that was gifted to him, and he purchased it at half the price and sold in the market. The recent case that they got him in, the thing that they arrested him on is about this university land that was gifted to his wife by a rich property dealer in Pakistan, Mr. Malik Riaz. And they say that he acquired that land for the university illegally.

But it doesn’t matter. There are going to be so many cases. Every step that he has taken in the past four or five years, they might be able to find some irregularity because, in Pakistan, systems are so weak and so loose, there are always irregularities in things. But, generally, the Pakistani people agree that Imran Khan is not a corrupt person. He’s spent his public life for 50 years in front of Pakistanis. He has built three cancer hospitals, he has collected funds for universities, and people have generally found him, to be honest, in his financial dealings at least.

So, these charges, they have been unable to stick these charges on him. They’ve been unable to convince the Pakistani public that Imran Khan is an evil guy. But they do have the process on their side. I won’t say even, like, justice, because the Pakistani Supreme Court has been pushing out these cases, rejecting many of these cases.

But still, today, on Wednesday, there was a case in Islamabad High Court about Imran Khan’s paternity from many years ago, at least, 15, 16 years ago. That was a case in a California court whether Imran Khan is the father of Ms. Tyrian White. And that case is now restarting in a Pakistani court in Islamabad High Court. But today there was a three-member court that sat. Two of these judges said that this is a frivolous case, and there’s no need to reopen this case again. But the Islamabad High Court Chief Justice immediately when realizing that two of the judges were against reopening the case, he broke the bench and said that he will reconstitute a new bench to hear the case again, because these judges were biased.

So, basically he’s been trapped in many cases at the same time. When he was out, till Tuesday, he used to go into a court hearing every other day with his broken leg. He got fired at in November in his assassination attempt, so he would go in his wheelchair sometimes. Sometimes he would go to court every day, a court hearing every day. And this has been going on for a while, and they will keep him occupied in this. And the only reason to keep him occupied in this is, basically, they don’t want him to participate in politics, they don’t want him to run elections. They want him to become unpopular. They’re afraid of this because they’ve seen over the past year how popular he has become.

He has become bigger than the military, and that is such a huge feat in Pakistan, for someone to become bigger than the military, because [the] military is a grand institution. It controls everything. It controls business empires. It controls your politics. It controls your scientific research, universities. In Pakistan, there are no institutions that are free from the military. Even if you find a civilian institution, there is going to be a leftwing general, major general sitting on top of it. And, in this situation, to become a brand bigger than the military is unacceptable to the military. If he wins the next elections, he might fire many of these generals who are doing all of this to him, who have allegedly tried to assassinate him, who have allegedly assassinated a journalist aligned to Mr. Imran Khan. And that’s unacceptable. 

RG: Well, Waqas Ahmed, thank you for the update, and we look forward to following your work.

WA: Thank you so much, Ryan. 

RG: And that was Waqas Ahmed, a Pakistani journalist who is starting a member-funded news site covering Pakistani politics and economy called The Brief.

Next, I’m joined by my colleague Alice Speri, who reports on U.S. foreign policy, abuses by military and security forces, and the repression of dissent there. She has a new story out this week marking the one-year anniversary of the Israeli government’s killing Palestinian American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh. 

Eleni Giokos (CNN): Is the IDF willing to apologize, ready to apologize? 

IDF Spokesperson: I think it’s an opportunity for me to say here that we are very sorry of the deaths of the late Shireen Abu Akleh.

RG: Alice, Welcome to Deconstructed. 

Alice Speri: Thank you for having me. 

RG: And so, you are just back from another reporting trip to Israel and the occupied territories, and you’re joining us on the week that — I don’t know if you’ve followed this, but, you know, it’s the 75th anniversary of the Nakba. But here in Washington Rashida Tlaib was hosting an event to commemorate the Nakba, which marks the day — you can get more into it — but marks the day, basically, the founding of the modern country of Israel.

Kevin McCarthy blocked her from having it, calling it anti-Semitic. Bernie Sanders invited her over to the Senate side and allowed her to hold the event there, because he’s the Chair of the Health Education Labor Committee, and said, you can use my space to mark this.

It’s also the one-year anniversary of the killing, by Israeli forces, of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

So, first of all, I’m curious, as somebody who’s been there so many times, how have you seen it change over the years?

AS: Yeah. This last trip was particularly difficult. I’ve been going back since 2006, that was my first trip to the West Bank and, you know, going pretty regularly every year or two. And, you know, there’s a lot of visible differences on the ground. Like, you can see that, primarily, the settlement enterprise, it’s really kind of sprawling. I mean, every time I go back, there are new neighborhoods built out of nowhere, there are new cities, there’s additional checkpoints, additional restrictions on movement for Palestinians.

But then, really what’s changed, I would say, over the last several years is, just kind of like the level of hopelessness that many Palestinians feel. Like, they are completely fed up with the occupation, many of them are very fed up with their own leadership. There’s just a sense that things are getting worse and worse. The violence in the West Bank and in Gaza is escalating; and, by violence, I mean really Israeli incursions into Palestinian cities.

I think oftentimes when I speak with Americans or people who haven’t been to the territories, there’s not a full understanding of what the landscape looks like. And, you know, the West Bank is occupied, territory is divided in different kinds of areas. The cities should be, in theory, under the control of the Palestinian Authority, but the Israeli military has increasingly been raiding cities, and really invading them. And that’s actually what Shireen Abu Akleh was reporting on last year when she was in Jenin, which is a city in the northern West Bank.

She was reporting on these increased incursions when she was killed in broad daylight. She was nowhere near fighting that had happened earlier that day. She was wearing a clearly visible press vest. And, even though Israeli authorities initially tried to really distort the narrative of what had happened: they said she was closer to fighting. We’ve, since then, had a number of independent investigations, and even a pretty detailed reconstruction of the dynamics of the event by Forensic Architecture, which really leave no doubt that she was visible and identifiable as a journalist. And she was reporting on these incursions that have been going on with increasing frequency since then.

Last year was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the second intifada in the early 2000s, and this year is already far worse than last year. So there’s a sense that things are just not getting any better at all. 

RG: In your recent piece for The Intercept, you talk about how the State Department says that their conclusion — or their assumption, at this point — is that Israeli forces unintentionally shot Shireen Abu Akleh. Having looked at the kind of forensic reconstruction of the killing, how on earth did they come to that conclusion? 

AS: It’s really interesting. I mean, that was a conclusion that the U.S. security coordination, which is this position that sort of responds to the State Department and DOD, and it’s the security liaison between Israel and the Palestinian Territories based in Israel. And he put out this statement in July, actually, over the July 4th weekend; there was a lot of controversy around that, because it was sort of buried on a holiday weekend. And, you know, this was after a number of independent investigations by the Associated Press, CNN, The Times — many other — Bellingcat, had sort of reconstructed already the dynamics of the incident.

And, at that point, the security coordinator said that he had reviewed the existing investigations, the Israeli investigations, which cleared the military of any wrongdoing, as they always do. And the Forensic Architecture reconstruction hadn’t been released yet, that came a few weeks later. And, following that — which you know, is online for everybody to see, it’s a pretty detailed, kind of horrifying reconstruction of the events — following that, there was a large pressure campaign, including, you know, several members of Congress repeatedly called on the State Department to do more about this. 

And so, the USSC — the security coordinator — re-embarked on a new investigation, and has been doing this work for the last several months, including interviewing people. He actually met with Forensic Architecture and with Al-Haq, which is a Palestinian human rights group. And I think, you know, just a side note there, I think it’s important to mention that, because Al-Haq is one of six Palestinian NGOs that the Israeli government declared terrorist organizations last year, in an effort to stifle their work. And these are organizations that have repeatedly brought filings to the International Criminal Court about Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians.

So, the security coordinator was supposed to deliver a classified briefing for members of the Senate that asked for it, and that hasn’t happened yet. He was expected to release a report on his investigation a few months ago. That also hasn’t happened yet. And, last week, Senator Van Hollen publicly said that he had heard that this report was now being circulated within the administration that wanted to make some modifications before they released it to Congress. Which, you know, of course, he pushed back against.

The State Department won’t really say anything more about it, but they did say in a briefing last week that, basically, the conclusions remained the same, which is the conclusion that this was unintentional. And I really have no way of knowing how they got to that conclusion. I mean, anybody that sees the video will certainly have major doubts about that. 

RG: Yeah, the Forensic Architecture — and I would encourage people to go find that, and you can find it on YouTube — the reconstruction shows what the vantage point was from where the Israeli position was. So it shows how visible the press would’ve been, and it also shows the shots that missed, missing only by a couple of inches and hitting a tree next to her. And it really makes it very, very difficult to imagine that this was just a random spraying of bullets that just happened to all land right at the spot that was necessary for her life to be taken.

So what is the assumption among her colleagues, and others who have looked into this more closely?

AS: I mean, I think anybody that was there, and also pretty much all the other independent reviews that have happened on it really show that there is a clear targeting of this group of journalists. Actually, the U.N. released a report before Forensic Architecture and, you know, the U.N. is usually pretty measured when it comes to these assessments. And they said the bullet was “well-aimed.” The fact that Shireen Abu Akleh was killed with a single bullet to the head. I mean, again, when you watch the video reconstruction, it’s clear how visible she was, and how identifiable as a journalist she was.

My understanding is that the security coordinator has been raising doubts about the intentionality element of it, but it’s hard to say how that conclusion was reached. It’s also worth noting that this was not an isolated incident. Like, Palestinian journalists are regularly targeted by Israeli forces.

In fact, this week, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a report that identified the killing of at least 20 journalists in Palestine — the majority of them Palestinians, a couple of them were foreign citizens. And it notes that many of them — I think the number was 13 — were clearly identifiable as press, or were driving in press vehicles, at the time they were targeted. So, really being a journalist in Palestine offers no additional protection. They are just as exposed to Israeli military violence as all Palestinian civilians. 

RG: I was struck by another section of your piece, where you wrote about this infamous recent kind of pogrom that went on in the West Bank, and a journalist was contemplating going to cover it. You know, most journalists, when those things are happening, grab the bag, run to get there to the scene as quickly as possible. This time she said, no; A, out of fear, and B, out of, I think she said, you know, “What’s the point?” 

Was that a new kind of emotion that you were encountering on this trip?

AS: This is definitely something I’ve been hearing from a lot of Palestinian journalists, many of whom were personal friends of Shireen Abu Akleh. And you know, to be fair, many of them continue to do the work. And even in the days after she was killed, Al Jazeera kept sending crews to Jenin, and people kept reporting on the story. In fact, Al Jazeera has been one of the most consistent organizations covering the story and investigations.

But what many of them told me is that it wasn’t just a sense of fear that kind of permeated their work — although that’s there too, of course — but the sense that, you know, really their lives are not worthy. The particular journalist you mentioned — who is a freelance Palestinian American journalist who has actually contributed to The Intercept before — what she was saying is like, really, there’s this sense that we don’t matter, that nobody’s even talking about Shireen Abu Akleh anymore.

She mentioned the White House Correspondents’ dinner last week, during which Biden talked about Austin Tice, the American journalist who’s been missing in Syria for years, and he talked about Evan Gershkovich, who’s detained in Russia. And he didn’t mention Shireen Abu Akleh’s name. There’s this sense that she doesn’t count. Even though Shireen Abu Akleh was not only a Palestinian journalist, a very well respected journalist, she was an American citizen too, which I think is another element of the story that we can kind of talk more about. 

But there’s this sense that this happened, the U.S. government has done what it usually does, which is like, you know, kind of minimal criticism, or initially only calling for Israel to investigate, eventually giving in and sort of starting their own investigation. But then there’s this idea that we move on.

And so, I think a lot of Palestinian journalists are just feeling really disheartened and kind of abandoned, even by some of their colleagues. I mean, some organizations have consistently called for justice for Shireen Abu Akleh, but a lot of media organizations have moved on and sort of, you know, forgotten.

RG: Right. And, since your previous trip, the Israeli government has taken an even further hard right turn, with the new government there. How does this new government talk about Shireen?

AS: I don’t know that I have specifics or things they said, but one thing I’ll say about the new government is that, if you talk to any Palestinians, many of them are, you know, horrified on one hand. On the other hand, they’re also almost glad that this government is as explicit as it is in its racism and in its hatred of Palestinians. You mentioned earlier this pogrom that took place near Nablus in Hawara in February, where, you know, you had Israeli ministers basically calling for the city to be burnt to the ground. I mean, this is something that’s just now so explicit and so evident that it’s impossible to deny.

And the policies on the ground have not really changed that much. The settlement enterprise is developing as it always has. The targeting of journalists, the targeting of civilians has been an issue for years. This government is no different in that sense, but they are just much more open in their rhetoric. And I think, in a way, it’s kind of like the mask is off. And so, Palestinians, many of them have told me that if their international community cannot respond to the open racism and supremacism of this government, then, really there’s no hope they ever will.

And it’s been interesting to see. I mean, the Biden administration has certainly been tested by this government. They’re still very measured and careful in their statements, but they’ve been making increasingly critical statements. And, you know, that’s not much, they can do a lot more, but they’re definitely being put in a position that’s challenging to them. 

RG: And more than two dozen people have been killed in recent days in Gaza. Can you bring us up to speed there? What’s going on in Gaza? 

AS: Yeah. The interesting thing with Gaza is that you could have easily missed it. There is so little coverage in most American media, certainly, about what’s happening. But, basically, Israel has launched a bombing campaign again on Gaza, targeting members, in this case, of Islamic Jihad, which is one of the groups operating from there. But, you know, as they often do when claiming they’re targeting these members, they tend to target very densely populated areas. I mean, let’s not forget that Gaza is the most densely populated area in the world, where 2 million Palestinians are confined in this very narrow space.

And so, they’re targeting all these buildings that are home to civilians, and children are killed every time. This time, the death toll is currently 27 people, I believe. But these kinds of rates have been happening with increasing frequency. I mean, it used to be once every couple years you’d have a big military campaign in Gaza, and now it feels like it’s every few months.

And it lasts a few days, usually. Egypt comes in and brokers some kind of ceasefire, and then everybody moves on, and then six months in it happens again. And it’s hard to even write about Gaza, actually, as a journalist, because I feel like people are always like, “I’ve heard of that before.” And they’re just like, it’s always hard to kind of like, really explain what’s going on. But it’s just this constant, relentless, sort of day-by-day violence that’s just like, the Palestinians there have kind of become so used to. And, at the same time, you never really become used to it.

I mean, one of the most horrifying stories this weekend was the one about a five-year-old child who died of a panic attack during the bombing. And this actually happened a few months ago in Bethlehem, where another child had a heart attack. A child at a heart attack because he was running away from the military.

So these are like, you know, you hear the numbers and you kind of like, forget what it’s like, but there are really horrifying stories for each of these people.

RG: And layered over this is the settlement project that you talked about. What do these settlements look like? Are these like, cul-de-sac American suburb-looking developments? What’s it like to see them? 

AS: There’s a variety of settlements. So, you know, they change quite a bit. You can go from like, high rise skyscraper-type buildings in parts of Jerusalem to these very suburban-looking neighborhoods that have been expanding into the West Bank. And, you know, usually they’re built atop a hill, so they kind of offer a vantage point, from a security perspective. Israel has kind of used the excuse of population growth to expand them, so many of them have additional neighborhoods that pop up, year by year, and take over the next hills. But also, I did a story earlier this year on this new sort of outpost.

So, one thing actually — sorry, let me mention this because I think people don’t know — but all settlements are illegal under international law. All construction by an occupying force in occupied territory is illegal under international law. In addition to settlements, which the Israeli government recognizes, there are also what they call outposts, which are just as illegal as the settlements, except they’re also illegal under Israeli law.

So you have the settlements that Israel has recognized, and then you have these outposts that are illegal under Israeli law, too, that have also been springing up everywhere around the West Bank. And Israel often will go back and retroactively legalize them.

So you’re seeing a lot of those. And a lot of these developments tend to be, basically, just land grabs. Like, you’ll have a few caravans and a few kind of makeshift structures built on a hill as a way to claim territory. And a new kind of outpost that’s been used quite a bit, particularly in the southern West Bank, is this agricultural outpost that I wrote about in my recent piece, where even just one or two settlers will go out with a few animals and kind of like stake a claim to a piece of land, and use the animals to kind of go into Palestinian farmers’ fields and destroy their crops, but also as a way to kind of claim that land. And so, that’s a very low cost, very easy to maintain type of settlement that really allows to take over more and more land, it doesn’t require a lot of people to do it.

It’s, in one case, one of the settlements I visited is just this one guy armed on a hilltop with his sheep. And, you know, very few Palestinians are willing to go up to their land to defend it.

So, yeah, we’re seeing a full variety of structures. But I want to say, last year, the settler population in the West Bank reached half a million people, which is massive. So, yeah. It’s certainly not stopping.

RG: Right. And becoming its own massive political constituency as well. 

AS: Yes, absolutely, and that’s a very important point. We actually have a couple members of the current government who are settlers, and very supportive of the settler enterprise. And there’s also divisions within Israeli society around this, and a lot of settlers, especially the most extremist ones, the ones that, you know, some of them, some settlements are basically suburbs, and people commute in and out of them. And there’s all these roads that are being constructed for settlers that allow them to easily get into Israel. And so, a lot of people commute from these settlements. Also because there’s an incentive to move there — like, housing is a lot cheaper — there’s all kinds of additional perks that are thrown in for people to move to settlements.

But then you also have very ideological settlers, that are the ones that tend to live in places like Hebron, right, which is a Palestinian city where, downtown, in the city, there are buildings that have been taken over by these very fundamentalist families. And those people, they’re not necessarily working as much. The army has to defend them. So I forget what the ratio of army to settlers is, but it’s become a burden on Israeli society as well, to essentially defend this enterprise. So there’s like, you know, not everybody in Israel is happy about this.

Something else I wrote about this year is this unit — this IDF unit — that was created a few years ago, initially as a place for orthodox men to serve, because Israel has a mandatory military draft, with some exemptions. Orthodox religious men are usually exempted for a number of reasons. So, this unit was set up as an opportunity for them to serve. It offers all kinds of religious accommodations. For instance, there are no women on their bases, and there are other exceptions. And so, it was used to incentivize this population to join the military, and really what ended up serving there are the most militant orthodox men.

And then, also, settlers were not necessarily particularly religious, but are really the ideologically driven one. And this has become one of the most violent units of the Israeli military, that’s been behind a number of abuses, including the death of another Palestinian American last year. And they were recently moved out of the West Bank into the Golan Heights, partially in response to all of the human rights abuses they’ve been accused of.

It’s a group that’s increasingly powerful, particularly with this Israeli administration. 

[Deconstructed end-of-show theme music.]

RG: Yeah, indeed. Alice, thank you so much for joining us.

AS: Thank you for having me. 

RG: Alright. And that was Alice Speri, reporter for The Intercept, and that’s our show. 

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, and I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week, and please go and leave us a rating or review, it helps people find the show.

If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcast@theintercept.com, or ryan.grim@theintercept.com.

Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

The post Around the World Update: Turkey, Pakistan, and Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Dmitri Mehlhorn, a tech executive who has emerged as one of the most powerful financiers in the Democratic Party and a strategist who often takes direct aim, with millions of dollars, at the party’s left flank. He was in the news this week for helping finance E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against Donald Trump. Mehlhorn and Grim discuss their competing views on political strategy, the best way to challenge Republicans, and the way forward for the party.

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Ryan Grim: I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome back to Deconstructed.

First, a big thank you to everybody who gave last week during our little pledge drive; very much appreciated. Today we’re going to be talking about the future of the Democratic Party and competing ideas about how it ought to pitch itself to the country, what it should stand for, and how it can best stand up to Trump and the MAGA movement around him.

Now, for that conversation, we’re going to be joined by Dmitri Mehlhorn, who is a tech executive and an advisor to LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, but is also his own man in democratic politics, and is one of those people in Washington that is influential enough that, when he gets talked about, it’s just by one name: Dmitri.

Dmitri Mehlhorn: [Laughs.]

RG: Dmitri thinks this, or Dmitri is funding that, and, very often what Dmitri is funding, is aimed at undermining the party’s left flank, in order to — in his belief — make the party a more viable challenger to Republicans. And so, I wanted to have Dmitri himself on, so we could hear straight from him what he thinks the party’s approach should be in 2024.

Dmitri, welcome to Deconstructed.

DM: Ryan, it’s a pleasure. And just to make sure that nobody misses this: My sainted mother, who is in her eighties, loves Ryan Grim. And if given the opportunity to choose who’s right, she will always choose Ryan Grim over her own son.

RG: Well, anybody with a mother that is that wonderful can’t be all bad, so I’m very glad to have you on. And I’ll be sure to send this out in my newsletter to her, so she’ll be getting a copy of it, no doubt.

DM: Excellent.

RG: And so, before we get into it, can you tell us a little bit about your background, and how you wound up at the center of democratic politics?

DM: [Laughs.] I’m not sure I’m at the center of it. My background: my parents met at U.C. Berkeley. My mom was a great-granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who had come to New York to flee the pogroms of late-1800s Russia and Ukraine. And she shows up in Los Angeles at UCLA., gets her graduate degree at UC Berkeley, and meets my father, who is a non-Jewish German war refugee who was bombed out of his home before he turned two, who eventually made his way out to California. And even though his aunts and uncles were members of the Nazi party, and thus had some culpability in slaughtering the other half of my family, when they met in Berkeley, they fell in love, and they had a child: me.

And because of that history and because of the way it was shared with me, I’ve been very alert my whole life to the potential threat of somebody like Trump. I believe his example is a very common phenomenon in human history. And so, when he came along in 2015, I became quite alarmed. At the time, I was an early-stage angel investor, investing in a variety of small technology and data startups. And I began working, to the extent that I could, to get others to share my fear about Mr. Trump. And when he actually won the election, I realized that I could not do anything else other than try to get him to not win another election. And when I say could not do anything else, I meant, literally, I’ve tried to concentrate on something else, I couldn’t concentrate, because I had so much fear about what a second Trump term would do.

So, I became active in that, and through social networks was reengaged with my former college classmate, who I’d known lightly over the years — Reid Hoffman — who shared my views of Mr. Trump, but had a great deal — a great deal — more money to fight. And so, he and I partnered up, and we have been active in anti-fascist politics ever since.

RG: I characterized your politics very briefly at the top of the show, but how would you, in your own words, describe the strategy that you are trying to get the Democratic Party to emulate?

DM: Ah, so, as a strategic — The only thing that I am focused on is making sure that Mr. Trump does not get another term of office. I believe that would be a catastrophic event. And if there’s anything else that gets in the way of that, I’m opposed to that other thing. So that’s the broad background. 

In terms of how I believe that Mr. Trump should be defeated, I believe that the extremism that he represents needs to be the center of the conversation. And the Democratic Party needs to organize and focus on the ways in which his vision differ[s] from what 90 percent of Americans want.

RG: And to you, is this a momentary strategy to deal with an immediate threat? Or would you see this as kind of the basis for a political party to organize itself around?

DM: The former. There are a lot of people who believe — and you see it a lot — that Trump is a symptom, and that if we over focus on him, we will ignore the underlying disease. We are strongly in disagreement with that perspective. He is the disease.

RG: And so, how do you think about the role of center-left parties in other developed countries? If you look at Europe and elsewhere, you’ve seen the kind of Clintonian type of center-left coalition basically collapse. You know, the bottom has fallen out of the center-left, and a lot of the center-right in a lot of places around the world. What makes you confident that the center-left here in the United States would be strong enough to stand up to a fascist movement?

DM: So, on its own, it’s not; the organizing principle should not be center-left, although that happens to be a fairly good characterization of my personal politics. But, by the way, it’s probably worthwhile — since politics is all personal — it’s probably worthwhile taking a step back. It is not merely that I am anti-fascist. I am currently professionally anti-fascist, but that is not the only thing I care about politically. I also am an extreme libertarian.

So, for example, on the issue of abortion, I believe that the government’s ability to tell you what to do, ends at your body. And so, if some government official has some point of view about what some cells are doing inside your body, there’s nothing they can do about it until those cells leave your body, at which point, maybe they have some rights. So, for example, substantively on that issue, I’m pretty strongly libertarian.

The thing that got me most upset about Mr. Trump was his assault on truth, but it was also his racism, and his assault on immigrants. Personally, in my point of view, I would probably be as quote-unquote “left” as many of your listeners on issues such as immigration, and criminal justice reform, and abortion rights. My view is also that none of that really matters if there’s a chance that someone like Trump can get a second term in office. Because, the difference is between, say, my more-strong view on that versus someone who’s maybe more moderate on that pales in comparison to the position that Mr. Trump would take.

So, when we’re talking about the center-left, the center-left is one of many, many groups that need to be united to prevent fascists from taking power.

RG: OK. So then, are you concerned that the kind of war the center-left has been waging — somewhat successfully, I would say, against the left flank of the party — is then going to undermine the ability of the coalition to come together at election time? Or are you concerned about what that does to turnout or enthusiasm? And if not, why not?

DM: Great questions. So, there’s so much about — When you use the analogy of a war, so much ends up getting — and I’m not saying it’s the wrong analogy — but there’s so much that ends up getting lumped into that. So, for example, you start asking, “Well, who started the war? Who’s fighting? On what grounds are they fighting?” And so, the thing that I believe is that everybody, from AOC to Liz Cheney, needs to be a part of the coalition to prevent Mr. Trump from taking office again. And so, if AOC is spending all of her time energy attacking Mr. Trump, then she’s on my team.

The reason we invested in groups like the Mainstream Democrats, who elevated Shontel Brown over Nina Turner, is we believe that Nina Turner was actually training her fire on somebody other than Mr. Trump; specifically, Mr. Biden, who was actually the center of our team. So, our decision to start investing in groups like Mainstream Democrats is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it came up after the exposure of working with these groups.

So, beginning in 2017 and 2018, when we were experimenting with different approaches to defeating the Trumpist movement, we actually put considerable investments behind fairly aggressive leftist groups. We supported open Socialists, for example, in the 2017 Virginia House of Delegates races, and some of them won. And in the 2018 midterm, we supported Richard Ojeda and Krystal Ball and the People’s House Project. We supported the Progressive Campaign Change Committee. We were major early backers of Indivisible. We put a lot of money into these groups that anchored what is now seen as the left because we didn’t know, and frankly didn’t care, so long as they were on the same side.

What we observed through the evidence of watching different races and monitoring them is that the more extreme leftist position did worse in the elections. You know, going hard-left cost us about one or two percentage points, which is decisive in a lot of these races, number one. And number two, people on the left were extremely enthusiastic about taking the fight in terms of salience and issues, in a way that we found to be helpful to Mr. Trump and hurtful to Trump’s enemies. So, that’s why we have moved the way that we have.

RG: What do you mean by “taking the fight?” Like, what were they doing? You mean, taking the fight to the Democratic Party establishment?

DM: So, first of all, a huge movement occurred in 2020 around George Floyd, right? Oh, actually, I’ll give you three examples and you can pick them apart. Defund the police, as a movement out of the George Floyd protests was one example. The term Latinx was a second example. And Medicare For All was a third example.

In our view, the evidence was very clear that these three things were politically toxic in a general election, and, the less said, the better. And there were significant parts of the Democratic Party that were urging those issues to be central, important, salient issues in the election, and the entirety of the Republican Party was enthusiastic about that as well. So, you have the left wing of the Democratic Party and the entirety of the Republican Party elevating these issues, because these are issues that will help Republicans defeat Democrats.

And so, we realized that, since no one in the Democratic coalition was willing to stand up to our own side and say, “Guys, this is not working,” we had to play that role.

RG: I think you would probably find broad agreement on the Latinx point, from kind of left to center at this point.

DM: OK.

RG: And I think — other than a handful of folks who brought the phrase “defund the police” into electoral politics — you’d probably find agreement across the democratic political spectrum on that, too. What would you say to the criticism that it was actually the party’s center that said “defund the police” a hundred times more than the party’s left flank? And I think that was particularly true in the 2022 New York elections, where you’d constantly have people like Sean Patrick Maloney or others attacking fellow Democrats for using the phrase “defund the police” back in 2020, long after that phrase itself had lost salience among activists.

DM: Yeah. So, I’m glad you’re asking the question that way. It’s the right way to ask the question, and it creates a complicated answer. The basic answer is that elections are decided by swing voters and what they hear. And what swing voters hear: paid media, what politicians pay to say, and what activists say, and what politicians themselves say has some impact on that, but it’s very light. Maybe one unit out of 20, somewhere between one unit out of 20 and one unit out of a hundred. So, something like 1 to 5 percent of what a swing voter hears comes actually from the activists.

The rest of it comes from this viral ecosystem, this earned media ecosystem, this free media ecosystem. Like, how does our national consciousness move? And it’s shaped by a lot of actors, good and bad, and you cannot fully predict it. However, you can draw patterns about things that are likely to be issues. And it is a fair assumption that the republican salient issues in ‘20 and ‘22 and ‘24, the top five issues that they will be trying to make top of mind for swing voters, one of them will be crime. One of the top five, maybe even one of the top three.

And on crime, what are they going to say? And what they’re going to say is that there is a currently sitting member of the Democratic Party in the United States Congress, who openly and expressly advocates for the end of funding to police forces. And there are quite a number of other Democrats who are in power now — in administration positions and in Congress — who don’t agree with that extreme position of, there should be no funding of the police, but when asked if they believe in defund the police, will give a complicated answer other than, “No, we should fund the police.”

Now, my friend, Anat Shenker-Osorio, who’s another person that we have funded in the past, will tell you that if we say the words “fund the police,” that’s bad, because it’s increasing the salience of an issue. And if you run a poll, real-time, and you ask people, “Hey, nothing else is going on in the world, it’s more than a year away from the next election. I’d like you to take a poll,” and you drop in the phrase “fund the police” out of nowhere that will probably raise the salience of crime in that survey. And you’ll read the poll and you’ll say, “Ah, saying the words ‘fund the police’ or attacking the defund the police movement from the center-left — attacking the left — those things actually reduce the poll results that you get in this survey, a year and a half away from election day.”

What we believe is that the three months leading up to Election Day, and Election Day, is a particularly salient moment where people think about things differently. And so, what you really need to know is, in the three months before an election, and especially on election day, would they ordinarily be thinking about crime, and will they be alert to the possibility that members of the Democratic Party wish to remove funding from the police? If you believe those things are inevitable, then once a significant critical mass of the Democratic Party starts saying “defund the police,” you actually have to inoculate yourself, and you have to make sure that you’re on record saying, “fund the police.”

And yes, there will be some short-term irritation around that — just like a vaccine will give you some symptoms — but, once you have those symptoms, when people are cued to understand that you wish to fund the police in normal context — and especially if they remember it, because it’s an unusual story, because it’s a man bites dog,  a Democrat going away from their own party — once you do that inoculation, you are less vulnerable than you would be if you just let that thing spread like wildfire.

And you may be right that, today, most Democratic Party activists agree that defund the police is not worth promoting. Both during 2020, and even throughout 2021, into December of 2021, when you made the argument that Democrats should not do that, you would still get a lot of pushback, with a lot of good arguments, but it was not a consensus then.

Does that sort of answer it, Ryan?

RG: Yeah. You think you hadn’t beaten it back enough yet, so it was still worth fighting, is what you’re trying to say.

DM: What I would say is, we still haven’t. Yeah, what I would say is that, in an ideal world, Joe Biden would’ve said the words “fund the police” more slowly, more loudly, more often. And had he done so, we would’ve done even better in ‘22 and ‘20. But the democratic left was — Immediately after he said those words in his State of the Union, for example, Anat Shenkar-Osorio — who’s widely respected, for good reason, as a messaging expert — sharply criticized him for having done so. And again, her basic argument was, if you pull people outside of an election context, that kind of language doesn’t help the way they talk about Democrats in the polls. And that’s just, in our view, a deeply flawed way of understanding how politics works.

RG: Well, it feels a little unfalsifiable, in the sense that the place where the strategy was tried the hardest was New York, where you had New York, Cuomo, ex-Cuomo Democrats really going after the left and DSA, and constantly saying that we’re not going to be as bad as these other bad Democrats are on crime. You know, we’re not going to defund the police, we’re going to fund the police.

And New York was the most underperforming state, it feels like, anywhere. And so, it feels unfalsifiable, in the sense that your argument seems to be, if we’d have just done it harder, you know, like, more “defund cowbell” would have gotten us there. And who knows? Like, I can’t say yes or no to that, but I can say that it was tried there, didn’t seem to work in New York.

DM: Yeah. You’re making a couple of points that are really important. The first point, which is really, really frustrating for Democrats, and it’s because Democrats, broadly speaking, are the party of facts and science, and so we want to measure everything. And so, one of the reasons why Democrats lose elections is because we try to only operate in areas that can be falsified. We only look for our keys where the light is. And each election is a sui generis thing, and there’s some things you can just know — like this many mail pieces is better than that many mail pieces — but big lane-changing stuff, each election is its own cycle, and you don’t know.

And in particular, defund the police as a national call, and how that worked nationally, it’s hard to know how that played down in New York, etc. What I would say is that candidates that took an aggressive fund the police position in 2020 tended to win their races, like Vicente Gonzalez, Abby Spanberger, etc. Pretty much every one of those frontline members of Congress said, “I was getting hit at every town hall with defund the police, I was getting slammed with defund the police all over the place. I was only able to eke out a victory by aggressively articulating a fund the police position.” And that’s what they say. And it could be wrong. It doesn’t show up in, you know, Anat’s polls, but that’s what they say.

It’s also like, if you’re looking at New York as an example — you know, that’s a multi-party primary with ranked choice voting — the fund the police answer won. I mean, Eric Adams is mayor.

RG: Well, that may be the case that he won there. There were some bizarre scandals that knocked out his opponent.

[Crosstalk.]

DM: A hundred percent. Yeah, New York state in general…

RG: And Brandon Johnson just won in Chicago. And Helen Gym might win in Philadelphia.

DM: Yeah. But Chicago is not a ranked choice voting state, is it?

RG: No, it is a runoff. Yeah.

DM: And it was a Democratic primary, right? Or no?

RG: Well, It’s top two.

DM: Oh, it’s just top two.

RG: Right.

DM: OK. So that’s fair enough. So that is an example where the fund the police versus the defund the police was tested. And yeah, the fund the police, in the Paul Vallas case, the fund the police position lost to Brandon Johnson. So you’re right about that.

RG: Let’s go back to the abortion politics that you mentioned.

DM: Yes.

RG: You and I were emailing about this, and I was surprised to hear your position on how to run on Dobbs and Roe. And so, rather than me articulating it for you, how do you think Democrats ought to approach politics of abortion in 2024?

DM: The same way that I think they should approach every salient issue, which is to point out that the Republican Party is absolutely controlled by a fringe that represents a position that is anathema to 90 percent of the country. The Republican Party cannot distance themselves from that position, they’re deeply interlinked with that position. And therefore, those people should not be given the power to put that position into law.

Specifically in the case of reproductive health, politically, I would say, in general, you can just map out the country who agrees with what. There’s about a third that’s broadly pro-life, there’s about a third that’s broadly pro-choice, there’s about a third that’s kind of in the uncomfortable European middle, of like, some but not others, and that’s kind of where we are as a country.

And while Roe was law, the Republicans could basically run to gather the pro-life votes, and they could also appeal to that uncomfortable center. And they could even appeal to the pro-choice folks, because the pro-choice folks would know that Roe was a backstop. And so, if the pro-choice folks happened to agree with Republicans on some other issue, like economics, they could swallow the abortion thing because it wasn’t real. That’s what happened until Dobbs.

Once Dobbs happens, you have the ability to make the debate. Like, what is the part of the debate that the Republican Party cannot disavow? And in the Wisconsin race, what the Wisconsin Democrats did, and what Governor Evers did, and Ben Wikler did, is they focused, they locked in on — I think his name was Michels? Was that the Republican nominee?

RG: Mm-hmm. Michels. Yeah.

DM: Yeah. They locked into the Republican nominee, they got a mic in his face right after he won the nomination, and they made sure that they understood his point of view about the Wisconsin snapback law, which did not have exceptions for that sort of thing. And so, once Michels was immediately on record suggesting that minors should be forced to carry their rapist pregnancy to term, all of the ads were about that.

Did you see the ad that won those awards in Wisconsin?

RG: This is the Ben Wikler ad?

DM: Well, I don’t know if it’s “the Ben Wikler ad,” because he obviously touches all of this Wisconsin stuff, but he was very active in making sure this ad happened, as did others, and we were active in making sure it got financial support. But the idea was, it was just a series of young girls, age 12, having fun, and then the voiceover changes and the atmospherics change when the discussion is, some of them will be raped, some of them will be impregnant, and Michels wants to force them to actually bear their rapists’ children.

Advertisement voice over: A 12-year old girl can’t legally drive a car. At 12, she can’t even vote. But if this little girl were tragically raped or a victim of incest and became pregnant, radical Tim Michels would force her to deliver the baby.

He said, it’s, “Not unreasonable for the state government to mandate rape victims to give birth.” Would it be unreasonable if he were forcing this on you? Let him know on election day.

DM: That is the winning play. Because the thing about the Republicans now, we have some trouble standing up to our left. You know, I fund Shontel Brown, and a bunch of the left is like, “Oh, how horrible.” But we are able to have debates between the center and the left. On the right, that’s not available. There is no one on the right that can disavow the pro-life extremists, which is why you get someone like Tudor Dixon in Michigan.

I met. Governor Whitmer for the first time in 2019, and we all thought she had a good chance of losing. She cruised, and part of it was that she was running against someone who said that forcing a 14-year-old to bear her rapist child was a gift from God, and she couldn’t disavow that. Abortion is a super salient issue. On average, one of these swing voters who might change their mind is going to be thinking about abortion as one of their top issues, and one of the two candidates is openly saying that they’re going to force this young girl to bear her rapist child.

That’s ballgame, and that’s what we should be replicating. As long as the Republicans are harboring that kind of insanity, we should make sure they pay for it.

RG: And to me, if you have an opponent who is saying something that is that insane, it only makes perfect sense to highlight the fact that they are saying that completely insane and extreme thing. I guess the question then is, what does that mean for what the Democrats are going to say that they’re going to do when they get into office?

Because what’s really struck me about the post-Dobbs moment is that you saw, almost for the first time, people surging into politics who had been disaffected in the past.That’s kind of like the Bernie fever dream of politics that he, you know, he ran his campaigns on the idea that, by exciting disaffected voters with an agenda that is populist and popular, and is going to take on the elites, that you’re going to bring people into politics that weren’t involved in politics before.

Now, that didn’t really pan out for him, so that kind of theory collapsed. He actually did better in caucuses and other states where turnout was lower. AOC, you know, upset Joe Crowley in a race where, like, 25,000 people, or something, came out and voted, so it ended up being something of the opposite. But then, when you had the case of Dobbs, and people felt that participating in politics could materially improve their lives, could defend a right that was taken away — Which, in some ways, is what Sanders was trying to get them to do. It’s to say, look, if you participate in politics, you will be able to materially improve your lives.

I think he was not able to convince anybody. He was not able to convince enough people that their participation would actually improve their lives. But people seem to get it on their own after Dobbs. You know, with Democrats kind of flat on their back, you had the White House, even with six weeks heads up that the Supreme Court was going to overturn Roe, was still caught flatfooted when they finally did it. Yet voters in Kansas kind of surged to the polls. You saw voter registration among young people, among women, even among men, increasing at substantial rates. You saw huge turnout in Kansas, and a blowout victory for abortion rights advocates, in a race that people thought they might win, or might lose, thought it was going to be very close. Instead, it’s a landslide.

And then, in every other state where there was a chance that people’s participation in politics would actually do something good when it came to abortion rights, you saw turnout surge, and you saw that position sweep, even if it was in Montana. You know, forget Kentucky, as you mentioned, Michigan.

In states where people didn’t feel like abortion rights were under threat — say, like, New York — you didn’t see the same surge in voter registration and voter turnout. So, should Democrats still say, we are going to codify Roe v. Wade, but they just should be quiet about it and focus on the extremism of Republicans? Because, if that’s your position, maybe I’m comfortable with that. But, do you think that Democrats running on codifying Roe is a bad idea?

DM: So, I think running on codifying Roe is a bad idea, and I think that the words you just said, when taken together, explain why.

Basically, you said Bernie believed that you could turn a bunch of people out by getting them to believe that being involved in politics could make their life better, and that didn’t really pan out for him. And you talked about other examples, and there are many, many others. And by the way, I was open to that idea, as I said. It turns out it’s not true. You cannot get people to vote by getting them to believe that voting and participating will materially improve their lives. It does not work, ever. Ever.

There are occasions when the right kind of candidate can catalyze a social movement that then leads to turnout — like a Barack Obama case or maybe a Bill Clinton case — but, fundamentally, these guys are centrists. What you can get people to get really excited about is: if you participate in politics, you might be able to prevent something really bad from happening to you.

So, imagine you’re the average voter, and you’re saying, OK, there are three things you can choose to believe about politics, and adjust your behavior accordingly. One, politics can do nothing for you. Two, politics can make your life better. Three, politics can make your life worse. People will believe the third. They normally default to the first, but they will believe the third. Within a rounding error, for electorally viable purposes, nobody believed the second, other than Bernie and his staffers and, you know, some other folks. It doesn’t work that way. I wish it did. It doesn’t.

The conversation about, for example, immediately after Dobbs, if I had been the Senate majority leader, I would have put a series of votes on the floor forcing the Republicans to confront their own extremes. The very first one would’ve been, “no minor should be forced by the state to carry her rapist pregnancy to term.” The second would be, “no adult should be penalized for helping a minor exercise their reproductive rights.” The third could be, “no woman of any age should be forced to carry her rapist’s. And just keep on going.”

And this puts the Republicans in a terrible position, because you would not— Even the one about banning, just saying, nationally, “no one in this country who’s been raped, who’s a minor, should be forced to carry her rapist pregnancy to term,” even that one would not get a hundred votes. There would be a good solid 10, 15 votes on the far, far right of the caucus who would vote for that. Maybe more. And then they would have to explain that, and that would be the news.

And the reason this is important, Ryan, is because politics does affect salience, and does affect news coverage. The specific issue of minors being impregnated, that happens in this country, in every state, all the time. Right now, every single state in this country has a woman, a girl, under 17, a minor, who is carrying a pregnancy that was put there by a rapist. Every state in this country. And the news doesn’t cover it, normally, because it’s background noise. It happens all the time, has happened for centuries, forever. The news will start covering it only if it becomes a salient issue, which it became after Dobbs. And once that becomes an issue, you have all of these Republican figures in media and politics explaining, “Oh, that didn’t really happen, that couldn’t happen.” And then, actually, yeah, it does happen. So, do you defend it or not?

And when the Democrats were considering whether to do this kind of work on the Senate floor to expose the extremism in the Republican Party, they chose not to, because Democrats were concerned that Republicans would simply use this to de-extremize themselves. They would stand up and, you know, Adam Laxalt might say, “Oh, I would vote for that Schumer bill,” and therefore, Cortez Masto would not be able to use Dobbs against him. That was the theory.

And what I think that misunderstands is, it just doesn’t understand the way that politics has turned in the last few years. It is impossible, in my view, for Adam Laxalt, or any Republican, to disavow their extremists, because the extremists have become the critical part of their coalition. They control the state and local party, they cannot be disavowed. And so, if you go extreme, it’s not that, suddenly, they’re going to use your symbolic vote as a way to position themselves as moderates. They’re going to be screwed, unless we decline to take the option, which we did.

So, instead, the bill that we put up for discussion was a bill that literally united every single Republican Senator in opposition — which was to codify Roe, with some other stuff — and they also got Joe Manchin. So, rather than a bill that would’ve been a 90 to 10 debacle that would have forced them to explain their extremists, it’s like, oh yeah, both sides, the Democrats have a bunch of extreme positions on abortion as well. It’s the worst possible choice.

So, to win elections, you don’t codify Roe, you codify not-extreme. You force the vote the way that the Kansas ballot initiative was, force the vote on the extreme Republican position, and Democrats will win — like in Kansas — by substantial margins, and you’ll have things like the Democratic Governor of Kansas winning reelection, because she made it about the Republican extremists.

RG: But you had Warnock and Fetterman, both proud champions of abortion rights, of saying that they would codify Roe — or even beyond codify Roe, actually — if they got into the Senate. So, why do you think that that didn’t hurt them? Or maybe my question is: Are you against them actually codifying Roe, if they take power and can eliminate the filibuster? Like, do you think that would be a political mistake, and that they’re better off being able to kind of beat up Republicans with the issue?

DM: Well, I want to really separate out two issues. One is, what should Democrats or anyone do in governance to make the country better and serve their constituents? Versus what is the way to win an election? Those are different things in my view.

If Democrats have a governing majority that allows them to do whatever they want on abortion, I still think you can get to codifying Roe, just get there in a series of steps. I guess I would put it this way, Ryan: when you’re thinking about the aggregate epistemology of the country, and where we are going as a country— There’s a new book out called “Gradual” that’s very good. There’s a book that came out not that long ago by David Graeber, who’s now passed, “The Dawn of Everything.” And what you see is that human societies move very much in opposition to each other, people separate themselves from each other. And in a time of great uncertainty like this where the boundaries are all over the map, the way that you legislate effectively is you start by saying, “OK, can we at least all agree on ‘X’ as a starting point?” You start that way.

And in the case of abortion, like, “OK, can we at least agree that minors should not be forced to carry their rapist pregnancy to term? Good? We’re all good with that. OK. How about this?” And you just keep going. And where you end up might look a little bit like Roe, might be better than Roe. Might be a little worse, might be better in some ways, worse in others, but that’s what you’re trying to go to.

RG: But, because Warnock and Fetterman won on as strong champions of abortion rights, the Senate now is controlled by a majority that is pro-codifying Roe. I guess I’m trying to figure out —

DM: Step one is: Make it clear that, under federal law, any minor who has been impregnated — and therefore, truistically [sic], definitionally, is a rape survivor — any minor who is pregnant as a result of that rape should be given all the healthcare she needs to end that pregnancy if she needs and wants to, needs or wants to. And no adult should be prevented from helping her, or punished in any way for helping her do that.

You could start there, that doesn’t preclude you from doing anything else. But why wouldn’t you start there? Why wouldn’t you just get the 90 votes, bank that, and then, how about, what’s the next thing? This kind of steady approach of marginalizing the extremes will likely get you to the same place, legislatively. But in terms of the governing majority, remember, under the current rules, you need 60 votes. This is not going to go in through reconciliation.

And you’re not going to get 60 votes to just codify Roe. You know, it’s just too complicated of a decision, it was too cumbersome and too mixed in its popularity. You’re not going to get there. So, why not get what you can, protect the people you can, protect all those girls, every single state, rather than going for it all, and risking it all?

And by the way, again, going for the first step of marginalizing and excluding the extremes, in my view, does not preclude then doing more. In fact, it makes it more likely.

RG: So, to you, does the victory by Fetterman, and the victory by Warnock, and Ossoff, previously, who ran on pretty progressive platforms — Now, they didn’t use the phrases “Medicare For All,” they didn’t use the phrase, “Green New Deal.” Fetterman had previously supported Medicare For All, never denounced Medicare For All, but, if you looked at his new campaign site for 2022, Medicare for All wasn’t on there. But the language was very similar.

But, up and down, these were not your 2012 or 2006 democratic Senate candidates — Blue Dogs, new Democrats — who were picking some Republican issues and picking some democratic issues, and portraying themselves as centrists. They were pretty unapologetic progressive candidates, and they won. Does that change how you think about what’s possible in a winning coalition? Because there could be some type of compromise there, between the left and the center-left, that if Warnock and Fetterman are going to be the party-type candidates in purple States, the left wouldn’t have a whole lot to complain about.

DM: All right, well, there’s a bunch bundled in there that’s worth talking about, and I’ll try to limit myself to the things that might be of greatest interest to you and your audience. First of all, issues themselves play a very, very small role in determining elections. If you are focused on winning an election, and you just want to win an election, for the purposes of math, you basically ignore the people who are going to vote anyway, on the Republican side and the Democratic side, and you focus yourself on the people who might vote either way.

These are the legendary swing voters. A more accurate way of describing them that’s more precise is that they’re partisan bystanders. So, negative partisanship is not so dominant in their thinking that it prevents them from switching between one major partner and the other. That’s about 10 percent of the electorate. And then there’s people who are marginal in their decision whether to vote or not. Whether it’s the sort of rural non-college whites who were brought out by Karl Rove’s 2004 anti-gay initiatives or college students who were brought out by enthusiasm for Barack Obama or whatever.

You know, those are the only issues. Those are the only groups that you care about winning elections. And frankly, if you care about Trump, you only care about those groups in swing states. Those groups don’t care about political issues or policy issues. The random marginal voter who’s making a decision about whether to vote for Mehmet Oz or John Fetterman — Like, if we were to take everybody whose votes were conditional, like people who voted who were thinking about maybe not doing, people who didn’t vote — who thought about it, but decided not to — and people who decided their votes at the last minute, I would venture to guess that zero of them made the decision because of what Fetterman said on his website about abortion.

It was much more identitarian, much more, “Do I basically trust this guy? Do I trust him enough to overcome my prior that all Democrats are evil? Do I trust…” you know, etc., etc. In the Fetterman case, we seriously considered putting a lot of support behind Conor Lamb because we thought he’d be a stronger candidate against Mehmet Oz.

RG: He was begging for it, publicly.

DM: Oh yeah.

RG: Begging for a super PAC intervention. Yeah.

DM: Oh yeah. And basically, we decided that Fetterman’s attributes outweighed his downsides, in our view. So, his attributes in this identitarian fight were that: He was tall, he had tattoos, he wore baggy shorts. He was a very physical candidate. If he hadn’t had that stroke, I think he would have crushed Oz, because his physicality really impressed people.

And if you looked at focus groups of swing voters in Pennsylvania and asked them about — including Republicans — and asked them about Fetterman versus Oz, Oz was from New Jersey, he was effete, he was college-educated, he was rich, he was Turkish. Fetterman was active, had tattoos, was relatable, was strong. That’s what they cared about. Now, if Fetterman had instead taken the abortion position that I’d recommended, rather than the more aggressive one that he’d taken, would that have cost him any votes? In my view, probably not. Because there was no way that that was going to be the central issue for those voters.

In a race where you’ve got Oz, and Shapiro, and all these other folks going on, in Pennsylvania, the gift to Democrats in Pennsylvania was that the Republicans nominated Doug Mastriano. And in Michigan, it was that they nominated Tudor Dixon. And those people — by virtue of their extremism on many issues, including abortion — made the debate about abortion where it needed to be.

RG: The risk, to me, about this kind of politics — I’m curious for your take on this — is that it then winds up electing a Democratic Party that doesn’t do anything. Because, I mean, that’s ultimately what I care about. Maybe I’m — well, I think polls show I clearly am in the minority — but what are we in this for, if we’re not in it to make the country a better place?

And so, if the issues don’t matter one way or the other, why not at least have a robust agenda that you plan to accomplish? And then go ahead and beat up your opponent for being an extremist nut job who wants forced birth for 12-year-olds, but then, when in power, actually do things that people like.

DM: So, a couple of things. There’s two broad things about this. Well, actually, let me start with the more important point for the purposes of this conversation, which is winning elections. If the debate is fundamentally about, Mastriano is crazy and Oz is a carpetbagger, then, yeah, it doesn’t really matter what your issues are. But If you add them up, it can be a lot, right?

So, maybe you get a little bit more progressive? It’s not enough to break through. But the further and further you go down the progressive route, the greater the risk is that you open yourself up to an attack that actually loses you the election.

So, for example, one of the groups that we pay close attention to is the group of folks on the democratic side who monitor the efficacy of television advertisements, right? And they monitor it in the way that I was dismissing earlier, which is that you insert the television ad into an otherwise banal set of online engagement, and then you test whether the ad effectively changed people’s views. So, you do an in-survey placement, you ask people at the beginning of the survey, you ask people at the end of the survey. In the best designed versions of this, you then follow those same people and ask them again a week later. And you do all that, and you try to say, like, OK, did this content move people? It’s not perfect, because the salience is so different from the election, but it’s one of the least bad things we have, so we do that.

Based on that, the Republicans did something in 2022 that previously Democrats did. So, Democrats in 2016 ran a bunch of ads that made Democrats feel good, made democratic donors feel good. These were ads about how Trump was a dangerous jerk. And in retrospect, it appears pretty likely that those ads elected Trump, because the electorate wanted a dangerous jerk. And so, if we had taken the hundreds of millions of dollars we’d spent on those ads, and spent them instead on a big national party on something entirely different, Hillary Clinton would be president. Like, those ads elected Trump. And we did it because we were appealing to our own donors and activists, rather than really paying good attention to what the voters potentially wanted.

The Republicans appeared to have done the same thing in 2022. They ran on crime and the border — and a little bit on Chris Rufo identitarian stuff — but they ran on crime and the border, and wokeness and whatever. Our analysis — and by “our,” I don’t mean just, you know, Team Dmitri, I mean the entire Democratic Party that has an operation assessing this stuff — showed that we were vulnerable on abortion. If the Republicans had spent more money explaining that they were not abortion extremists, then the post-Dobbs energy could have cost us a few of those seats. If Kari Lake had run those ads, she would be the governor, and we would be in a world of hurt because of it. But they didn’t, because they believed crime was better, and it wasn’t. But the more you go into places that it looks really likely that the place you are could actually lose you some votes, the bigger the risk is that you take.

Now, going to the second point that you made that I think is quite important is: why get involved in politics? You want to do things. I would just say to you — and this is the point of the David Graeber book, about “The Dawn of Everything” — being not another thing can help you be a thing, right? If you are not the extremists, that has implications for governance, right?

So, just taking this specific example, there are women all over the country — girls all over the country — who are dealing with a pregnancy caused by a rape. And if you can get into office, and forcefully and unambiguously give them rights, you have done a good thing for them. Even if your motivation was to stop the extremists, that’s good. And once you’ve done that — I mean, you know the whole girl effect thing that was at Nike — like, once you have enabled these girls to have a normal life rather than being saddled with that, all sorts of downstream positive effects happen.

A similar example, by the way, we’ve talked a lot about abortion, but like, guns, right? There’s a mainstream position on guns, there’s a Democratic position on guns, there’s a lot of positions on guns, but there is also a 90 percent position on guns, which is background checks. And you could imagine an entire campaign just around the first four words of the Second Amendment, a well-regulated militia means you don’t put powerful weapons in the hands of people with severe mental illness. The only way you find that out is background checks. It’s got 80-90 percent public support. That could be the issue, and if we pass that, it would be a good thing.

Now, are there other things that might be good, like, you know, an assault weapons ban or whatever? Sure, sure. But it is still an objectively good thing to have background checks.

So, your point, that you want to get into office to do good things, I would just make the gradualist plea that stopping really bad things is part of doing good things.

RG: I guess another way of making my point would be that we’re not talking about any of this in a vacuum. You know, Trump didn’t come from nowhere — although this gets back to your symptom-or-disease question — but if the country is coming apart at the seams, it feels like, at some point, you’re going to run out of duct tape trying to keep it together. And the tricks aren’t going to work anymore, and you’re going to become overwhelmed. Because the idea that Trump is the disease himself, to me, is undermined by the fact that you’ve got Trumps popping up everywhere you look around the world.

And so, to me, if the left and the center-left don’t come back with a forceful kind of recreation of a better world that stems the tide of this rising fascist energy, at some point they’re going to be over overwhelmed by it, no matter how kind of popular, and clever, and, you know, 80 percent you can make your issues that you’re running on.

DM: Yeah. It’s a good argument and a good question, Ryan, and I guess I would put it back to you this way: The history of humanity, as well as the history of the United States of America, is full of figures like Trump. Every human being, even you, even me, everyone on this podcast, every listener, every nation, every family, every tribe, we all have good and evil in us, all of us, because we’re human. And the particular kind of evil that Mr. Trump represents is a common kind of evil in human history. His governance style is, up until about three or 400 years ago, that was the norm. You know, total control of truth and what counts as truth. Absolute tribalism and misogynistic violence. Use of power to reward friends and hurt enemies; this is what Carl Sagan called “The Demon-Haunted World.” It existed up until the founding of America. And guess what? When America was founded, it continued.

If you look at the American South, between the Compromise of 1877 and the Civil Rights Movement, roughly half our country was governed the way that Trump would govern in a second term, which would be the use of violence to make sure that his side stayed in power for decades, right? This is all familiar.

The reason why I say that Trump is the disease is, until Trump came along, there were a lot of things that were outside of the Overton window of U.S. politics. Especially, you know, there’s been a particular moment in the last 50 or 60 years, since the visual evidence came out of the Holocaust in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and the visual evidence came out of the American South in the ‘50s and ‘60s about how abusive, the Bull Connor stuff. And there became a consensus for about five or six decades that certain things were a little bit beyond the pale.

And so, when you had people like Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, and Bob Dole, saying at their Republican nominating conventions, “If you are a racist, the exits are right there, we have no room for you in our party.” I mean, come on. Like, we have their tapes, we know they’re racist, we know what they were saying. We know this was not a thing that struck them as a deep moral imperative. There was a consensus, including in the Republican Party, that you had to disavow that kind of race-based fascism in order to win. And once Trump breaks that taboo, we’re now at year zero in a new era where that is back on the table. And once that’s on the table, once it is possible that you will have a rejuvenation of the kind of governance that happened, for example, in the American South for those many decades, the job is to eliminate that.

And your point about, versions of him are popping up all over? Yeah, cancer is metastatic, that’s why you’ve got to stop it. But the central fight — I mean, I actually think the central fight is the war in Europe and Putin’s invasion — but, like, the number two fight, in terms of where the world’s going, in terms of “the demon-haunted world” versus a rule of law world is, can we keep Trump out of the White House in ‘24?

RG: And last question for you — and I know a lot of people who are listening to this who are practitioners of politics will be curious — how are you thinking about 2024 Democratic primaries? And I’ve written about this before but, you know, Mainstream Democrats, the group that you’ve mentioned, plus Democratic Majority for Israel, which works very closely with Mainstream Democrats, really transformed what was possible for progressive left-wing candidates in democratic primaries in the last cycle.

I’m curious if you think you have essentially tamed the left to the point where you’re kind of moving on from Democratic primaries? Or are you guys gearing up for another test in 2024, that if you see progressive candidates that you think are too progressive popping up, that the super PACs are going to come out guns blazing on them?

DM: I think we’re OK now. For example, when No Labels did their big launch, I think No Labels is a real threat to elect Trump again. You know, the No Labels effort?

RG: For people who aren’t familiar, this is the centrist group — corporate-backed that is — getting a ballot line on all, what, 50 states? Threatening to run, like, a Manchin-type, or a Manchin candidate, against both parties.

DM: Yeah. It’s worth unpacking just a little bit. All of that is right. The No Labels group was founded a while ago, before the current era, as, essentially, look, there’s this cloakroom consensus that exists between legislators of both sides, that there’s certain things that we just need to get done, and a lot of political posturing prevents us from doing it, and we need to just do it. And you know, a lot of it was fiscal, a lot of it was regulatory, whatever. That was the idea.

But this group of people, it’s led by Mark Penn. Who, as you may know, is the pollster and political advisor who famously lost the 2008 primary to Barack Obama, and then who got sufficiently angry about being correctly blamed for that, that he became anti-Democrat. And then, Nancy Jacobson, who’s the prolific fundraiser, who has a bunch of—

RG: His wife. 

DM: Yeah. His wife. And she has raised a bunch of money from New York Democrats. And they live in an environment where it’s easy to attack President Biden from the center-right. So, “Oh, do you see what he did on inflation?” And, “Oh, do you see who he appointed to this position? And oh my gosh, Lina Khan is so bad, and all these people are so bad.” And so, they get themselves worked up to this place where Biden’s really bad, Trump’s really bad, and then they do these polls that, like, out of a million people, who would you want to be president? It turns out neither Trump nor Biden comes to the top. And they’re like, oh, that means we can successfully run a third party that could win.

And people like Larry Hogan, and Joe Manchin, and so forth, you know, they like to think that they could be president someday. And so, they have this dance with donors and everybody, where they create this fiction that someone else can win.

And Bill Galston is a Brookings Institute scholar, who was one of the founders of No Labels, and he actually just published a piece in The Wall Street Journal doubling down on this point that I’m making, which is that, if you run a No Labels centrist, like a Joe Manchin, as an independent ballot line in every state, you will split the anti-Trump coalition, and therefore Trump will win. That’s the risk. And I think it’s a huge risk. It is one of the top five ways that Trump could get reelected, is if Nancy Jacobson and Mark Penn and Joe Lieberman continue in this path, and put this ballot line in every state.

When they launched this effort — this absurd, venal, effort — one of the things that they did in their video promotion is they talked about how bad the two parties were. And the visual images they included were Donald Trump on the right and AOC on the left. And so, they’re ignoring the existence of Biden. Now, I don’t think it works. I actually think No Labels has a real risk of collapsing in this effort, and I hope that they do. And I think that, in general, if you listen to the way Bernie Sanders is talking about endorsing Joe Biden, I am quite confident right now that the actual extremes of the left are pretty severely marginalized. That’s in general.

At the margins it’s a little bit like, for example, when a judge gave a ruling that was really unhelpful; this is the judge with the abortion pill. And AOC comes out and says, we should just ignore the ruling. Like, AOC is siding with JD Vance. The two of them are both like, “Yeah, rulings that we don’t like, we shouldn’t do it.” And it makes it hard to build a coalition of donors around the rule of law. But in terms of general voters, I don’t think it’s a problem anymore, and I don’t think we need to do more to fight back against it, at the moment.

RG: Well, good news and bad news for the left. They won’t be bombed by super PACs, but that’s because they’ve been thoroughly beaten down into the ground.

DM: Yes.

RG: There you go, congratulations.

Thank you for joining me. I really appreciate it, and I hope your mom enjoys this podcast.

DM: And she will agree with your questions and she’ll be frustrated with my answers, I’m sure.

RG: Wonderful, wonderful.

All right. Well, that was Dmitri, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, and I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week, and please go and leave us a rating or review, it helps people find the show.

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Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

The post Dmitri Mehlhorn: The Man Financing a Political Counterrevolution appeared first on The Intercept.

Penguin Random House

[Deconstructed intro theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim. We’re joined today by Ben Smith, who is the author of the new book “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.” He’s also the founder of the new outlet, Semafor.

Ben, welcome to Deconstructed. 

Ben Smith: Thank you for having me, Ryan. 

RG: This was an exciting book for me to read. I can’t tell if I can recommend it to other people because it’s kind of so personal to me. It’s like a journey through much of my own career. But I also think that anybody who wants to understand the transformation of our politics over the last 15 years really does have to understand the way that the media has been transformed, and the role that social media has played in that. So, I really do recommend this to people. 

BS: Whew. I thought you were going to say that you couldn’t recommend it, and I was like, what am I doing on this podcast?

RG: I do. I think people — And it’s a fun read, too. It’s kind of a romp through this nightmare hellscape.

BS: Yes! Oh, man, I should have gotten you to blurb it. That’s amazing.

RG: Oh, there you go. “A romp through a nightmare hellscape.”

So, you’re quite the entrepreneurial person, so I’m kind of curious, what you would have done if you look back at, say, 2010, 2011, when Jonah Peretti reaches out to you, and you eventually decide you’re going to join Buzzfeed News. If you hadn’t done Buzzfeed News, how much longer do you think that you would’ve stayed at Politico? Where were you headed next? And, for listeners who don’t know, you and I were there together for a while, and this was the early days of Politico, which was new media at the time. 

BS: Yeah, Politico had kind of professionalized blogging. Like, there were these new digital tools that allowed you to publish really fast to the internet, which people were mostly using  — it’s actually a little like Substack now  — people were mostly using them to kind of opinionate. And then it was like, oh, you could run a real news organization in this thing. 

RG: Yes, Substack is kind of reinventing blogs.

BS: Yeah. I mean, you and I, when we were at Politico, there was a period where Politico was sort of the center of the universe, and compulsively hitting refresh on Politico was what you did if you were obsessed with politics. And, by 2011, I had gotten an engineer to install a little tracking code on my personal Politico blog without telling anyone, so I could see my own traffic in real time. 

RG: I saw that in the book and I was like, oh, wow, that’s…

BS: Ryan Mannion, thank you. And I could just see the traffic and the energy of the internet moving  — as you could feel it, too  — away from these blogs and this website, and toward Twitter, in particular. And being told, “Oh, can you write the big lead story for the website?” It had started to feel like, “Can you write the big print story?” Like, “Oh God, do I have to?” As opposed to, “Wow, this is how to reach a lot of people.”

And so, what was so appealing about what Jonah said to me was like, oh, I see the future, it’s this social media thing. Come do what you’re sort of already doing, which is write stuff you’re hoping will travel around on Twitter. You know, had that not come up, I don’t know. I mean, I think there was another wave of news organizations  — The Intercept included – coming, and I probably would have wound up at one of them. It’s just hard for, you know, when you’re a reporter who just wants people to read your stuff, and is right at that kind of coalface of both gathering and distributing information, you’re very, very sensitive to the changes in the ecosystem.

I mean, what am I saying? I obviously would just still be working for Politico. I don’t know. 

RG: Or you’d wind up there again, like so many former political people.  

BS: Yeah, exactly. I would have done a stretch at The New York Times and then be back at Politico writing a column, a joint column with Jonathan Martin, my old blogging partner at Politico. 

RG: Another interesting counterfactual that rises up in the book is, you actually rejected the offer for a moment, and Jonah Peretti then reaches out to Nico Pitney  — who was actually my former boss and colleague back at The Huffington Post  — and asks if he would like to do the job. I actually asked him about this last night after reading it in the book, he said he’s thought about that a bunch. No regrets, but it’s certainly something he’s looked back on a lot. You then kind of changed your mind. Your wife was like, you’re an idiot. Like, this is a really good opportunity, so you ended up taking it.

But I wonder if Nico had taken over Buzzfeed News, Buzzfeed Politics instead, and brought more of a kind of Upworthy-ish type of style to it, how do you think the history of Buzzfeed unfolds? 

BS: I think that, in some ways, Nico was more of the internet than I was, or of the sort of big internet; I was of the political internet, and I have thought about this. And I wonder, there’s a version of Buzzfeed that does a bit less original reporting and spends less money, that aggregates the way HuffPost did that Nico is very effective at, and that leans more into  — sort of naturally  — the progressive politics of that moment of the internet, and becomes more sort of happily left-wing, basically.

Whereas I was coming from a straight news thing, and my impulse with the news brand was to resist some of what I saw as kind of the temptations of traffic. To keep it, like, pretty neutral. And I don’t, I think that’s a pretty different path. You know, the person who really brought this home to me was Steve Bannon.

I went into Trump Tower in the summer of 2016  — I’m remembering this, because I wrote about it in the book  — and he was just so perplexed as to why we hadn’t turned into an all-out Bernie Sanders propaganda factory, the way he had turned Breitbart into a Donald Trump propaganda factory. Not because he had any particular views on Bernie Sanders, but just because obviously Bernie Sanders gets more traffic than Hillary Clinton. 

RG: You also write in the book that you noticed that Hillary Clinton was drawing an intense amount of negative energy. How much did you understand, in real time, what you were watching kind of unfold in the data? And how much of it makes sense to you now in hindsight?

BS: Much more in hindsight. I mean, I do think that we had this access to this Facebook data  — until they cut it off, because I think it was embarrassing to them  — that showed that this Donald Trump thing was really real. Like, this wasn’t some television illusion. People on Facebook — it was basically meant to be a tracker of which primary candidate people were talking about in the different states. The only person anyone was talking about was Donald Trump, and everything else was a rounding error, and that was, at the time, to us, kind of surprising. 

RG: This is the time that the progressive dominance on social media is starting to wane, and Facebook is starting to get taken over by the element that now, you know, has thoroughly colonized Facebook. And you write in the book about this moment where it appears like  — reading the way you report it  — that Jonah effectively knifed that site that I just mentioned earlier, Upworthy, which was this news outlet that sprang out of MoveOn.

And people will probably remember its really happy type of clickbait-y headlines, like, “A racist guy said this to a kid and you won’t believe how he shut him down.” Things that make you feel good about the world. And it was one of the fastest growing  — maybe the fastest growing  — media company in the history of the internet, which wasn’t very long at that point, but was also extremely vulnerable to getting killed by Facebook, because all of its traffic dependent on Facebook, and all of its traffic was based on tricks to get Facebook users to share it.

And Jonah then basically goes to Facebook and says, look at all of this clickbait stuff they’re doing with this, what they call a curiosity gap. They’re not really telling you what’s in the story, you have to click. Which is great for the people that click, but the 95 percent that go past don’t get any benefit out of that. They tweak that algorithm and Upworthy basically just implodes overnight.

And so, I’m wondering, did Facebook drive progressives off the site? Or did something just change about the world that made Facebook a less fun and useful place for progressives to be? Like, they did get rid of Upworthy, but they also got rid of everybody on the left.

BS: I mean, it’s so hard to put your head back into this moment when Huffington Post is founded in ‘04 to sort of help elect a Democrat in ‘08. You know, the HuffPost team loves Obama for a variety of reasons, including that he drives a lot of traffic. It’s kind of all in for him. Helps him win the primary, helps him win the election. Facebook is sort of starting to grow up there, and Obama visits Facebook as a company. It’s obviously, goes without saying, a young progressive force that’s aligned with the Democratic Party and with Barack Obama. 

I mean, I think mostly what happened was like, our parents got on the internet, you know? Like, I think the main thing that happened on Facebook is that it was initially a bunch of college kids who had the politics of college kids, and then it was everyone in America who had the politics of everyone in America. And it sort of began to skew older and more conservative. I mean, I think that’s the biggest picture.

But, certainly, yeah. I mean, Jonah was talking to them, Upworthy was a competitor. And Upworthy was doing a thing that I think Jonah would not let us do, because he was like, “Facebook is going to kill this, because they’re going to see it as a technical trick,” which is: “You won’t believe what’s in this video, but you have to click.” Which is pretty spammy. But I think they wouldn’t be wrong to feel kind of surprised that he was mentioning this to newsfeed executives. 

RG: Speaking of tricks, it makes you wonder about Buzzfeed as well. As you think back about it, do you think it was, at least on the news side, always doomed? Like, you write in the book that you basically paid people  — not Buzzfeed News, but let’s say Buzzfeed more generally  — it pays people to find the most viral things happening online. Then it repackages them, [and] serves them back to the internet. And, at some point, it feels like the algorithm is going to figure out a way to cut out the middlemen. It’s going to figure out what the most viral thing is, and put those things in between. It doesn’t need people, actual human beings at Buzzfeed doing that for them.

That feels obvious in hindsight. What’s your sense on what the place is for something like this? 

BS: You know, the challenge for Buzzfeed and for its generation of companies was that the insight that we were built on was that there was this new thing called “social media” coming. People were going to be opening their desktop computers, going to Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and looking at that first, not at your website first. And so, then the challenge for publishers, “How do I get my stuff into Facebook.com and Twitter.com?”

And our theory was that this was like the birth of cable. These were the new pipes, and somebody was going to be CNN, and somebody was going to be MTV, and somebody was going to be Fox, and somebody was going to be VH1. But there was going to be a set of, essentially, content channels running through these new pipes. And, in fact, the chairman of both HuffPost and Buzzfeed, Kenny Lehrer, had been there at the birth of MTV, and I think that really influenced their vision a lot.

And then, what turned out was, you know, what is it? We’re 40 years into cable, and cable is still there, and that proved durable, and consumers kept watching it. You know, these social media pipes are basically going away. There are a lot of mistakes we made, a lot of tactical and strategic mistakes, but we also always knew we had this — I’m sure it’s in investor decks that our biggest dependency was on these social media platforms.

You know, consumers have moved away from Facebook. Facebook has also moved away from news for a variety of reasons, and from links, from the internet. Partly to keep consumers on their platform, not let them go somewhere else. And Twitter, you know, similarly, is in decline. That thesis just didn’t turn out to be true.

And so, all these companies are left kind of scrambling to find new pipes for their content, and that’s pretty hard. 

RG: Where do you find the new pipes? As somebody who has been thinking about this your entire career, back to city coverage to now?

BS: You know, I learned a lot from the people I worked with at Buzzfeed about this, but you have to think about, what do people want, where are people? In the beginning of our careers, Ryan, the maddening thing was that you were stuck with Newsweek, and like, these monopoly voices. And maybe you could get an alt weekly, but if only you could read the British and European press, and like, much less like independent voices who just didn’t buy the premise of the Iraq War, particularly. And these were sort of hard to find.

And so, then this explosion of new voices to sort of counter this discredited post-Iraq mainstream media was incredibly vibrant and rewarding, and people loved it. And it’s like, wow, I can just get everything everywhere all at once. But now we’re like, you know what? People are really sick of that. That has curdled and turned toxic, and people hate it, and they feel totally overwhelmed by just the amount of shit that is coming in. And, simultaneously, [they] kind of don’t know what to trust.

So, it’s not like the people have gone away, or changed. And it was always people. It was never technical. Like, you know, we’re not in a technical profession. It’s always delivering information to people who are interested. But I do think, now, what we’re trying to do is take great reporters who you can develop a relationship with, have them deliver the news in a very deliberately transparent way, where you say, like, “Here’s what I know, here’s my opinion on it. Here’s maybe somebody who disagrees with me.” You know?

And then, also to be pretty deliberate about saying, “And, by the way, here are some other sources that are kind of coming from a different place on the same thing.” And to put all that together because it feels like, in this moment, of basically reacting to the end of the last era, that that’s what’s most useful to people.

RG: As these social pipes get closed off, I wonder if the old platforms  — like, you know, HuffPost and Drudge  — are going to start to see a little bit of a rebound. That people start heading back directly to them for —

BS: You know, Max Tani at Semafor did a story this week that suggested to me that that is happening. Apparently this is sort of an interesting measure. Fox News has always been a huge Facebook publisher. Their Facebook traffic  — and I think that has a lot of overlap at this point with the demographic of the people who are on Facebook, like older, more conservative people  — they have seen their homepage traffic go up.

I find The Drudge Report relevant again. I now sometimes go there just to find out what’s happening, because Twitter doesn’t perform that service anymore. And then, the most interesting thing, I think, probably for both of us, is that when Jonah  — in what was critically kind of personally awful for me  — shut down Buzzfeed News, he decided to keep Huffington Post going, which he now also owns, because Huffington Post’s homepage remained powerful and big, and Buzzfeed News had never really developed a homepage.

RG: I noticed that line in his statement, that said that The Huffington Post is profitable, and it was kind of delightful to see him say that. It made me think back to the early days when I got there. I got there right after the 2008 election. And I remember for at least the first couple of years, on weekends in particular,  what we called our “splash,”  — which is the main story on the very top  — whatever story was up there would get something like, minimum, say 30,000 comments on it.

But, if you actually went into the comments, they weren’t people talking about the article. It was the chat room. People on weekends just all kind of agreed, I’ll see you here Friday night, Saturday night, maybe with a six pack of beer next to their laptop, just chatting away.

BS: It’s a social platform.

RG: It was a social platform. I was furious about this, but I was not the kind of person in a room to make this decision. We killed our comments section, at some point, basically at the behest of Facebook. You know, Facebook came in and said: You know, why don’t you just have Facebook comments at the bottom? And then we promise we’ll send a little extra traffic, then you don’t have to worry about all the libelous behavior going on in your comments section.

BS: You know, which was expensive and time-consuming to moderate. 

RG: Right. And so, that entire community of millions of people, just overnight, was just sent packing. And so  — maybe I could find it  — but around the middle of 2016 I gave a presentation at one of our little offsite retreats about what we’re going to do in the future. I had all of these different graphs showing that, yes, social is exploding, that’s where all of our traffic is coming from, but it can’t last, and they’re going to completely control our fate. 

BS: Wow. You were the guy who saw the future. 

RG: Yeah. I didn’t last much longer. And I want to go back and find that presentation, because I basically think I was suggesting Substack. I was saying, we need to make a community again, we need to bring back that sense of community. And, for all of our bloggers, say like, “Look, you can continue to blog, but we’re not going to call them blogs anymore. You can write, and you can email it then, out to your friends. But the deal is, then we’re also going to have access to these emails, or we can sell ads on them, or whatever.” Like, you’re building a gigantic ecosystem, mostly through email, which big tech will figure out a way to algorithm away, but it’s going to take a lot longer.

[Deconstructed mid-show theme music.]

RG: I saw in the book you mentioned that around this time you guys started looking at post-social media plays, like newsletters and other things, but didn’t move fast enough. Am I reading that right? Or what were you thinking around that time? 

BS: I think we always knew that we were too dependent on Facebook. It felt like that was the core of our strength, and it’s really hard to play away from your strengths. It’s really hard to have this unbelievable funnel of audience and money and attention, and to say, “Hey, we should hedge.”

The one place we did that successfully was in our food business. I don’t know if people remember Tasty, which continues to exist, which blew up on Facebook. And I think we realized like, oh, we’ve got to find ways to move this audience to YouTube, to the website, to other places. And I do think that ultimately if one in a hundred thousand of the Facebook visitors had been converted to a newsletter subscriber, we would’ve had a huge newsletter business. You know, assuming we were able to give people something they really wanted in a newsletter, which is pretty different from what you might want on Facebook, too.

And Buzzfeed was very — I think successful publishers in social media were very rooted in thinking about, well, what do people want to share? And that may not be what you want to get in your newsletters. 

RG: And speaking of video — and, not surprisingly, since your career is in print journalism — the book doesn’t get into video much, unless I missed it. I don’t think you go in on the Facebook-driven pivot to video? 

BS: No, I wrote about it a bit. I mean, it’s funny. Buzzfeed really was, I think, when it was strong, more sophisticated than other publishers on this stuff. And it didn’t just pivot to video, it built a huge video business of very inexpensively produced videos that people wanted to watch. And the thing that I think we were tuned into that some publishers fell down on was just that, you got these videos — it’s not, you can’t go producing TV, the economics don’t work, if you can produce videos extremely cheaply.

And at their best, they were like — you know, there was a great one of Chinese immigrants trying American Chinese food for the first time. That was a big genre, if you remember.  Mexicans try American snacks, Americans try Mexican. You know, you have a table, and you’ve got a few people, and it’s highly entertaining, and it’s so inexpensive, because the economics of digital media are so lean.

And the problem in news and news video, it’s just more expensive. You have to check facts, for instance. That’s expensive. And so, we were very, we did not do a lot of news video because it was too — for that reason. 

RG: Where do you see YouTube in the evolution of all of this stuff? And how do you think about video, with regard to Semafor?

BS: YouTube, I think, and all of these platforms, they use the word “creator” a lot. They love that word, because it’s sort of the way Uber uses “driver.” Like, Uber doesn’t want to deal with fleets, they want to deal with atomized individuals.

RG: Right.

BS: I mean, you may know a little bit about this, Ryan, but I think that there’s more leverage in groups of people than in individuals. 

RG: A little bit.

BS: And I think, whether that’s a union or a company or a cartel, these platforms are seeking and structuring forms of economic organization, where it’s very difficult to organize, and trying to kill the middlemen — see media companies as middlemen. And so, the economics really favor an individual creator.

That said, if you do really good work that’s aligned with journalism people love  — like Joe Posner did at Vox, in particular, with Explained  — you can do interesting work and build a big audience on YouTube, and you’re not going to make a ton of money there, but maybe you’ll break even. And then you can take that to, as he did, Netflix, and really do something really interesting.

And he’s now at Semafor, and we’re experimenting in a pretty careful way with video. Because, ultimately, TikTok is the platform of the moment, and a lot of people are getting news from short video. And, you know, it’s a genuine place consumers are getting news, but it’s also a very difficult place for publishers to make money, and so we’re being really careful.

RG: One of the great moments of the book, you’ve got this scene out in Facebook’s headquarters after the legendary dress story, which everybody will remember, back in 2015.

BS: It actually was a user  — a reader of Buzzfeed, in the sweet early internet days of Buzzfeed’s Tumblr  — had messaged us, and said, I took this picture at a wedding and I can’t figure out what color this dress is. 

RG: That’s right. And then she didn’t originally think there was anything to it. But then she shows it to people at work, which actually shows the value  — if there are corporate executives out there  — demanding that their worker bees come back to the hive. This is a moment where actually having people in the same space paid off, although I suppose you could just message it around if you needed to.

But yeah, so she asks people in the office, “What color is this?” And half of them see it one color, half of them see it the other. Next thing you know — You know, how many people ended up looking at that post? 

BS: Tens of millions. Tens of millions.

RG: And then, so, Jonah’s out at Facebook, and he’s talking to somebody who kind of runs the newsfeed or is involved with the newsfeed, and they say to Jonah, that was really fascinating, how often do you think something like that ought to be allowed to happen? And Jonah’s kind of taken aback, as I was when I was reading it. Like, who do you think you are to ask that question: allowed to happen? Like, it shouldn’t be up to you. But, of course, it is up to them, it’s their platform.

And, sure enough, as you write, that kind of was the last — you describe it as “the last innocent day on the internet.” It sort of was the last time that was allowed to happen.

What’s Facebook thinking there, in trying to shut down what, from other people’s perspective, is a massive success?

BS: You know, I think they were starting to see that they were losing control of the platform and they were starting to be criticized  — it was 2015  — for a new kind of nasty confrontational politics that was all over Facebook. And I’m sure they found the dress harmless, but I do think seeing, like, “Huh, this single thing can just reach everybody in the world instantly, and maybe it won’t, next time, be so harmless.” I mean, it might have been, it was probably a little worrisome.

RG: Do you think they regret any decisions they made as a result of that? Or do you think that they feel like those were the only choices they had, to take control in a way that they hadn’t before? 

BS: I think what people wanted from them changed. Like, they’re a company trying to sell ads, and are hearing everywhere that people hate all the toxic politics on their website, and everyone’s screaming at them and screaming at each other about news. And they kind of try to fix it, or think they’re trying to fix it in a way that then makes it way worse, where, basically like, you post something on — it’s called, they introduce this metric called “meaningful social engagement,” that’s meant to be like, well, if you really engage with a piece of content, that’s something people should see, because it’s meaningful. But what that actually means is, like, you post a Donald Trump meme, and then I comment, “Kill yourself,” 17 times in a row. And it’s like, “Wow, that was a meaningful social engagement, let’s show this to everyone.”

And so, I do think that their withdrawal from news and politics makes a certain amount of sense, if you’re them.

RG: And when you look back at this, and you’ve been thinking about it for a couple years now, are there decisions that people could have made differently that change how this unfolds? Or was this all baked in from the beginning? That, if you’re going to build the entire thing on the back of engagement, the thing that gets people engaging is toxicity, and that’s what we’re going to get.

BS: No, I think that there were technical decisions that did shape the culture of Facebook, for sure. I mean, also, the sense in which it was totally top-down and undemocratic. Like, what I think, if you think it through, is obviously the most successful social network in history, which is Reddit. You know, it has this very kind of democratic structure, in which mods  — who are unpaid ordinary weirdos like us  — have a lot of power. It’s very decentralized power. They are able to change with the times, and different parts of it can operate a bit differently. I do think these Silicon Valley executives are very ideological, and want to win arguments, in a way.

And culture changes, right? Something that was appropriate or interesting or felt acceptable at one point may be totally repellent three years later, and that’s not a[n] ideological decision, that’s just cultural change.

I think more broadly, with social networks, the reason they’re not like cable wires, they’re more like bars or clubs. Like, you go there because your friends are there, and then at some point your friends go somewhere else and you go somewhere else. And if they say, “Oh, we’ve installed a new sound system,” you’re not going to go back. Like, it just — Things change.

RG: To back up, you talk about how Drudge really changed the game for, at least, the more clever journalists. You don’t mention yourself, but people like you and I knew that there were outlets like Huffington Post or Drudge.

BS: Yeah, I was emailing your colleague Whitney all the time to try to get links on the front page of HuffPost.

RG: Exactly. I saw you said in the book that certain journalists knew the email address of the front page editor at the Huffington Post. I’m like, yes, certain journalists, including the author of this book.

But also, back when I was at Politico, I remember when  — and you write about this in your book  — Andrew Breitbart was in charge of  — during the day  — posting links on Drudge. And he would have his little instant messenger green light up there — I think it was “bmas,” if I’m remembering right, was his little, was his name.

BS: That sounds right.

RG: And it lasted for years after his death. And it stayed green. Do you remember that? 

BS: Oh really? I don’t remember that. That’s weird and sad.

RG: It was very eerie, because it kept popping up. But if I had a story that I thought that Drudge would be interested in, I would send it over that way. But, as I think about it, the stories that I would’ve thought then that Drudge was interested in are still the exact same kinds of stories that I think will traffic well on social, whether it’s Huffing Post or social media.

You know, there’s some interests that you know that, say, Drudge might have that are peculiar to him, or that Whitney over at HuffPost might have, that are peculiar to him. But, in general, you kind of know what clicks. So, how do you think about that today, as compared to 2007, 2008? 

BS: A lot of what we’re doing is sending out newsletters, and a lot of what I think about is what’s interesting to the audience of these newsletters, right? Who we’re reaching directly. But the Drudge report remains a big part of the internet, kind of amazingly. And Twitter, a diminishing one. But I think some of those vestigial blogger reflexes still work, but it’s a pretty changed world. 

RG: In your interview the other day with Kara Swisher, you guys talked a little bit about Buzzfeed News shutting down, and you mentioned that the unionization process at Buzzfeed News, and the fight over who’s going to be in the unit, who’s not, and the contract negotiations, had resulted in a level of — I don’t know if the word is “animosity,” but an intense relationship between the management and the staff that may have even factored into the final decision.

Do you think that’s right? Do you think that, as you’re seeing these media companies on the tail end of the social media arc, is the relationship between managers, editors, top editors, and unions, fundamentally kind of broken at this point?

BS: I don’t know. I mean, these things are always easier in times of plenty. The New York Times, there’s a very bitter conflict right now between management and labor, essentially for how to distribute the profits of a successful enterprise. Which, you know, I mean, it would be nice if it was less bitter, but it’s fundamentally an adversarial process, and that’s a great high-class problem to have: unions mad that the executives are getting big bonuses, the executives are worried about building, and they’d like to use the money for something other than raising the minimum salary. This is a healthy debate from a healthy company.

I think when things are bad, and you’re arguing over — you know, you’re glad you have a union, because it extends your severance. But, ultimately, it doesn’t change the underlying economic realities. 

RG: Last question and I’ll let you go. Did anything change for you in your understanding of the story that you lived, as you went back and reported it, researched it, and wrote it?

BS: Yeah. I think the thing that really surprised me was that, you know, I came up in a digital world that saw itself  — and I think was seen as  — basically progressive and of the left. I was genuinely surprised in reporting it out to see the extent to which the people who created the sort of populist right were just there the whole time. The guy who created 4chan  — he’s not himself a conservative, I don’t think, but who created that platform  — worked out of Buzzfeed’s office. Andrew Breitbart co-founded HuffPost. Bannon wanders through HuffPost at some point and kind of makes a study of it. You know, Benny Johnson, Baked Alaska.

Like, I think the extent to which we thought we were building this one kind of thing, and that actually the sort of main characters in this story were those other people, was a surprise for me.

RG: Right. The Andrew Breitbart who was dismissed, and just as this slovenly kind of weirdo in the Huffington Post office, you know, goes off and produces Breitbart, which has an incredible lasting legacy. Yeah, you’re right, it was all there.

How much of that do you think is a coincidence, and how much of that do you think is actually revealing about some of the structures and character of that early internet?

BS: I think we were totally, didn’t really, had not entirely thought through what we were doing. But I do think that, ultimately, the internet was going to swallow everything, right? It had been sort of this niche space, and I think when, ultimately, the big story of the 2010s is this new right-wing populism, it was totally intertwined. I don’t think it caused or was caused by  — in some, like, super simple way  — social media, but it was totally intertwined with it, and dominated it.

RG: Well, Ben, thanks so much. And, again, for folks, the book is called “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.” And congrats on the book.

BS: Hey, thank you, Ryan. Thanks for having me on. 

[Deconstructed end theme music.]

RG: That was Ben Smith, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept.

Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. And I’m Ryan Grim, DC Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to the intercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show, so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or review, it helps people find the show.

If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com. 

Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

The post Ben Smith on the Bust of the Digital Media Age appeared first on The Intercept.

Recently, peculiar skirmishes have broken out in the U.S. over our history. In Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, and many other places, conservatives have made efforts to sanitize the teaching of what exactly happened in America’s past. But it’s important to keep in mind this is just part of a much longer war — and, in fact, those who want to misrepresent history have won many victories. This is evidenced by the fact that the conventional wisdom about the past in the U.S., what everyone “knows,” is often wrong or far too simplistic.

This week on Deconstructed, senior writer Jon Schwarz speaks to historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer about their new book, “Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.” With 20 chapters by 20 different historians, the new book takes a look at key fairy tales and replaces the standard bland hokum with the far more interesting reality.

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Jon Schwarz: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Jon Schwarz, a writer at the Intercept, and I’m substituting for Ryan Grim this week because he’s decided he doesn’t care about the show or politics anymore. That’s a joke, Ryan cares a lot about Deconstructed and politics, and he’ll be back next week.

But this week, we’re going to talk about my favorite subject in the world: what societies remember about the past, or what they think they remember, and why that maybe the most important thing there is about politics.

If you’re like me, you grew up with a bunch of vague ideas about America’s past in your head, and what this vague past meant about what was possible for America in the future.

The War Department: Here, XXI Bomber Command concentrated its massive air power, and planned the ultimate crushing defeat of Japan — down to the last bomb. Here was the beginning of the end of the road to Tokyo.

JS:  Vague ideas like there was such a thing as American Exceptionalism from the start of the United States, and one of those things was that America was super duper powerful, yet not an empire somehow, and Reconstruction after the Civil War was a big failure, and there’s never been such a thing as American Socialism because it’s just not part of our DNA. And a million other things that got into my head not because I studied and thought about them but just because of a weird osmosis.

People like me truly need the new bestselling book “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.” It dismantles those specific weird squishy ideas that I had in my head and many more, in 20 chapters by 20 different historians. It’s edited by Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse. They’re both professors at Princeton. And in their introduction, they say they put the book together because: “We live in an age of disinformation. The line between fact and fiction has become increasingly blurred if not completely erased.”

And of course, they’re right about this, but I’d say we also live in a golden age of good information. People who listen to Deconstructed may well know Zelizer and Kruse already because they’re a big deal on Twitter, and they are part of a whole group of historians who’ve decided to kind of eject themselves from the cloistered academic tower and communicate with everybody about the freaky complicated gross terrifying thrilling real history of America.

There’s a famous aphorism by the Czech writer Milan Kundera, which is: “The struggle of human beings against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” That sounds a little highfalutin and pretentious, but it is also 100 percent true, and Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse are both definitely on the side of memory and regular people.

So, let’s get started. 

Julian and Kevin, thank you very much for making the time to be here on Deconstructed.

Julian Zelizer: Thanks for having us.

Kevin Kruse:  A pleasure.

JS: And so I would like to start by talking about “Lord of the Rings,” something which does not appear in your book even once. But I think the books and the movies of “Lord of the Rings” are maybe the greatest fictional depiction of why history matters, even why librarians matter. 

You know, you’re probably the kind of nerds who remember in the first movie, the “Fellowship of the Ring,” Gandalf has begun to become suspicious about this ring that Bilbo, the Hobbit, has found that it might be the great evil one ring of power, and he’s noticed that every creature who’s possessed it has started to call it precious.

So he goes to Gondor to do some archival research and the underpaid archivist there takes him to the memoir section of the library where he finds the account of Isildur, the first person to possess the ring of power, and Gandalf is reading along, and he sees Isildur has written: “I shall risk no hurt to the ring, it is precious to me,” you know, which obviously demonstrates that this ring that Bilbo has is in fact the terrifying one ring.

Gandalf (Lord of the Rings character): It has come to me, the one ring. It shall be an heirloom of my kingdom. All those who follow in my bloodline shall be bound to its fate for I will risk no hurt to the ring. It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain.

JS: And I like to think that if Gandalf were a historian right then surrounded by, you know, all this paper, he’d be thinking like, well, I could get a great journal article out of this.

KK: [Laughs.]

JS: Like, this is gonna look fantastic in my Guggenheim Fellowship application. I really do think this is a heightened version of what knowing history can do for you.

Without knowing history, the world seems like just a random jumble of stuff happening all the time, and you’ll always be confused about power and where it lies and how it works. I think it also demonstrates history always kind of naturally decays and that remembering the past takes effort and the most important things drop out of human memory without that effort, especially things that powerful people want forgotten.

Like you know, Sauron is against public schools and middle earth teaching kids how to identify rings of power. But if you do know history, you can see the patterns about how the world functions and beyond that you learn it’s just a fascinating, thrilling saga. And the more you know about it, the more fascinating and thrilling it is

And so, you have this made up fairytale and in this made up fairytale knowing history truly is a matter of life and death. And those who forget history are doomed to have repeated wars over the one ring. But I think in a more complicated way, the same thing is true here. History actually is a matter of life and death in the world we live in.

And that’s my weird theory about this and, and why what you guys do really does matter. So now you can tell me as professional historians if I am out of my mind.

JZ: No, you’re not. I mean, obviously we believe in that. That’s what we do. I think history matters in many ways. It matters just [on a] broader intellectual level.

I think we are better off if we understand where we come from, if we have some contextual sense of what’s going on today. And the more we know about other people, the more we know about other cultures, just the better off we are collectively. But then, and this comes through in some of the essays of the book, history’s used in very pointed ways on specific issues.

And the way we understand the history sometimes plays into political decision making. So you can take an issue like immigration — assumptions that we have about what immigration is, how it works, what drives it, what the effects are historically — what it’s look like can directly impact decisions in Washington D.C. or at the state level, on how the border is treated, or how people who are detained are treated and public support could rise or fall in part based on these ideas of history that we have.

So the stakes are incredibly high and when you’re not talking about debates over issues, legitimate intellectual debates over how to interpret things where you’re just seeing partisan spin that’s building support for policies, that’s a whole other realm. And that’s why it’s important historians push back with their knowledge.

KK: I would agree completely with that, and the only thing I would like to add is that that’s the first time I’ve ever been compared to Gandalf, and I hope it’s not the last.

JS: Yes. Well, we’ll have you back as a guest on this show specifically, so we could extend this metaphor.

KK: Excellent

JS: I encourage other people to use this, this Gandalf analogy, because I really do think it’s true, and it makes me wonder: Are there any other fiction, I hate to put you on the spot with this peculiar question, but are there any fictional depictions of historians that you think demonstrate the thrills and the significance of what you do?

JZ: That’s a good question and that is putting me on the spot. And Kevin is, I think he’s walking his dog as, as the question comes up.

Kevin, do you have any historians in fictional depiction of history?

KK: Look, this is the problem. You know, archeologists have Indiana Jones. 

JZ: Right, that’s who comes to mind. 

KK: We’re fighting Nazis, but we don’t have that. We’ve got the Nicholas Cage character. He’s not really a historian. He deals with a lot of primary documents. I think it’s high time we get a movie. I mean, maybe we’ll get the Julian Zelizer life story, it will be the way we’ll do it. We can fan-cast it.

JS The four hour biopic. 

JZ: Right. 

KK: Yeah, well, maybe Robert Caro could be our superhero. That man is gonna outlive us all, I think.

JZ: Just to jump in there, there’s a documentary out now about Robert Caro, “Turn Every Page.” It’s about his relationship with his editor. It’s not fictional obviously, but it’s doing well and it’s really interesting not just about the writing and editorial process, but how he approaches finding out the truth, and the strategies he uses with interviews and rigorous archival research. 

So, there’s ways I think, in which this actually can be interesting. Obviously fictional depiction is different, but I think at some level, I guess the bigger point is a lot of people are interested in the past.

You hear it all the time — I mean, and not just in politics, in sports, I mean, talk to any baseball fan, they’re obsessed with history. It’s how we understand even what’s going on the playing field. So I do think there’s a lot there that goes beyond just the classroom.

JS: Yeah. I will admit that for my childhood, I still have a section of my brain devoted to the statistics of Honus Wagner.

There’s a book that I love. I know you guys must be familiar with it, called “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” by the historian James Loewen, who died fairly recently. And in it he talks about how American students hate history. That it’s always their least favorite subject. But obviously that wasn’t true for you guys. Like, what was it that caught you guys about history when you were kids?

KK: Well, I think for people for whom it’s their least favorite subject, it’s because they’re being taught it wrong. They’re stressing kind of a precision of names and dates and not thinking about the connecting pieces between those.

For me, I mean, people and dates are important, but it was always about the stories. I really just from an early age, was fascinated by these stories about the past. The civil rights movement in particular was something that was compelling for me at a young age. I kind of never let go of it.

I find the past to just be interesting in infinite ways. I’m constantly surprised by the things I find in the past and on its own terms I think it’s just a wonderful place to get lost in another time, another place. But at another level there’s a deep connection to the present as Julian noted, and I find that history is the key to unlocking so many things, at least, I don’t understand about the present. It’s how I begin any project I start in, is: I don’t understand this. I better dig into it and start to learn more about it. 

And so for me, that’s been a process of discovery. And so rather than being forced to memorize dates, I think if we teach students that history is: you gotta be part detective digging out the story from the past and part storyteller — repackaging in a way that lets you express yourself. And so it’s two great roles combined together.

JZ: For me, I’m trying to think back. It’s unfortunately too long ago when I was a teenager, but it does help you make sense of things. The world is so chaotic and disjointed. One of the great things of what historians do or teachers of history do is that at some level they try to connect the dots. You might not agree with how they’re doing it, but it pushes you to start to make sense of how things fit together. 

So on an issue like civil rights, I remember reading Taylor Branch’s work on that, and it had a big impact on me. I really liked it. It was very riveting and it kind of wove together all these interrelated but often seemingly disparate elements of struggle over race relations into a really compelling and coherent story. And I was impressed with that.

I also like the argument element of history. Meaning Kevin and I are believers in the importance of pushing back against things that are not true, but we are also very committed to good robust arguments about how do you interpret the research and the facts that you find. 

We do this with our students. We do this professionally. And I grew up as a rabbi son, so I literally grew up constantly hearing debates about everything. I mean, that is the Jewish tradition. And I think in some ways I found how history is practiced very compelling. You take a set of facts and then you have a really good debate about what do they mean. And you try to connect it to other pieces of evidence.

And, finally for me, it’s how I make sense of politics. I was either gonna be a journalist or a historian. I remember my senior year of college I was trying to decide, and in the end I realized this is really how I enjoy interpreting what’s happening in Washington, what’s happening on Main Street to root it in something, not to look at it as something that’s totally novel and starting from day one whenever you’re thinking about it, but something that has real roots like a tree. And then it opens up, I think, your vision and analysis in very important ways. So all of that for me was really how I ended up doing this stuff.

JS: That makes me wonder if you guys have noticed a shift in journalism in the last couple of years because one of the most peculiar aspects of the professionalized rules of journalism up until fairly recently was that it was essentially illegal to remember the past and to point out to people that things that are happening now have often happened in similar ways before. And that has changed, I think, to a significant degree, and not in all the stories, not all the time. But have you guys noticed that there does seem to be more of a mention that things have happened before right now in modern day American journalism?

KK: Yeah, I think so. And I think it’s come from a new generation of journalists who not only appreciate history but really understand it.

I mean, if you read the work of someone like Adam Serwer or Jamelle Bouie, they are deeply versed in the historical traditions that they’re writing about and they bring them to bear on the present day. And so making comparisons between the Antebellum period or Reconstruction with modern day politics, the New Deal, great society, they really do a great job of putting it in the proper context because they read actual historians.

I think either of them could probably pass a general’s exam today if we sprung it on them. They’re pretty well versed. And I think they’re increasingly becoming more of a model. I don’t think — Not everyone’s as, I think, deeply read as them, but the interest is certainly out there.

And I’m not sure if this is something that has been facilitated by Twitter. I mean, it has been facilitated by Twitter in which journalists and scholars are on there, and we’re easy contact. I get, you know, DMs from — I just got off email with one from the New York Times — reporters who are looking for historians to help them explain X, Y, and Z.

And so they’re eagerly looking for these voices out there. And I think Twitter has drawn those worlds closer together and made it a little easier to do. But I think it’s not just simply a technological thing. I think there really is an interest and awareness on the part of a new generation of journalists that they need to put things in historical context.

And it may be simply the kind of uprooted feeling of the Trump era in which it seemed like everything was deeply unprecedented and they were questioning: Well, was it, was it not? And so that brought a lot of us into the conversation.

JZ: Yeah, I think it’s true. I mean, I think some of it is technological. It’s both, social media also just gave room for more people to get out there. There’s less centralization of how you can get your points. And that’s important for historians who might not have that platform than they do. The fragmentation we see in other forms of media, there’s just more places to publish. You know, there’s lots of online journals now or magazines or newspapers, lots of different radio or radio style outlets, and even television. There’s just a lot more content and there’s just platforms. And I think historians have found their way there. Then, that leads to interaction with reporters who hear bits and pieces of this and are curious.

I also think, objective journalism, meaning journalism is really focused just on providing the facts, which had virtues. There were great reporters in earlier eras, but that’s changed. In younger generation — the early two thousands became critical of that. They wanted journalism more with a point of view.

They didn’t kind of hide their own predispositions, and then it became a question: So what do you do? Like, how far do you go and what does that mean for the practice of the reporter? Part of what I think has happened is you have reporters like the two Kevin mentioned and others who look also to more contextual long-term ways to analyze things to also provide something fresh than just this happened, this happened, and then this happened.

And so I think a lot of things are at work, but I definitely believe there is a lot of interest in there from the media at least to make this part of the story. Some do it a lot like Jamelle or Adam, but others, they put bits and pieces and that’s good too. But there is an interest out there.

JS: I noticed, of course, that in the introduction of your book, you quote the famous part from 1984 about “who controls the present, controls the past, who controls the past, controls the future.” Lots of people know about that. 

I think fewer people remember talking about the past is also a big part of “Brave New World,” the dystopia about where people are controlled by pleasure instead of being controlled by pain. And there’s the section, you guys are exactly, of course, the kind of weirdos who would remember this, where the controller — the guy who’s in charge of everything — is giving a lecture to some of the students. “You all remember,” said the controller, “you all remember I suppose that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford’s: History is bunk.” And so all sorts of systems of authoritarianism intuitively understand that they need to tell a story, but it can’t be the real story. Obviously you guys are part of a fight against all kinds of people who do not seem to be very interested in the real story. What is your understanding of how they see history?

KK: Well, I think the right sees history as they want to remember the past, but a particular version of the past. And this isn’t true of all people on the right, but the partisans on the right. They’re conservative scholars that do a great job.

But there are partisans on the right who have gotten involved in politics, got involved in history for purely political reasons. And what they want is a version of the past that props up a fantasy world, a version of the past in which only the triumphs are discussed — none of the failures — or only the good traits are stressed — none of the weaknesses. It’s one that downplays conflict and presents a kind of past of a consensus in which everyone was happy. I mean, that’s the essence of Make America Great Again. But things once were working well, they’re not now. Let’s go back to that misremembered past. 

A version of history that only celebrates the good without the bad that’s not history, that’s propaganda. And it’s not the job of an historian, of an historian of the United States to tell only the good parts of the United States any more than a historian of France here in the United States would be expected to tell only the good parts about France or the Middle East or the Soviet Union or whatever, right?

We’re supposed to provide the warts and all picture and give the full truth however uncomfortable it might be. That’s our job. And so what they’re arguing for is not history. It’s antithetical history.

JZ: Right, and Kevin is correct. There’s conservative liberals left, right. There’s lots all over the place that are seriously interested in history and wrestle with it.

But what we’ve seen in conservative circles is: it’s both this nationalistic particular version of history that wipes away conflict and wipes away certain issues that they don’t want to even discuss. But it’s also weaponizing history itself. That’s what’s been pretty remarkable to watch in the last few years where this becomes like any other issue: reproductive rights, or voting, or foreign policy. We’re seeing them use this as a way to rally supporters to send out, you can call it propaganda messaging, whatever you want based on things that just are not true. And it’s not subtle interpretations of the past as you see in a state like Florida. It’s the argument that we are gonna say this entire field can’t be studied. It’s illegitimate. And using that for political advantage, and that’s a troubling trend.

We argue you see that much more in conservative circles than liberal circles. There is an asymmetry. It’s clearly most pronounced in part because of the conservative kind of media ecosystem, which gives an unbelievable platform for different persons to do this. But it is troubling, and I think it’s extraordinarily damaging and it’s anti-historical.

That’s the one thing people should realize. This is not about defending history. It’s about being anti-historical — opposed to the study of history. That’s a more accurate way to characterize what’s going on right now.

JS: Yeah. And something that I always find true about this kind of nationalistic version of history in any country is that it’s just inherently boring. And I think that is one of the reasons why kids hate the standard version of history. It has no human beings in it. It’s just, you know, in the United States version it’s like almost 250 years now of interchangeable robots singing “America the Beautiful.” Kids don’t get into that because they don’t recognize themselves. They don’t recognize any humans in that, whereas, the real history of what actually happened is something that I think kids would be fascinated by. 

I’ve always wanted to teach kids who learn about the two presidents, and almost a third, who died because of the giant pond of shit north of the White House in the mid-1800s.

KK: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, back when I was in school I think we were told Zachary Taylor had died from a bad ice cream sundae or there was some weird story. This one is much more exciting.

Yeah, I think that that’s the problem [with] that version of the past in which you’ve got an idea of the 1950s, it’s kind of: “Leave it to Beaver,” Make America Great Again.

That’s boring. And students don’t want that because it’s not an interesting story. Again, I said the stories of struggle are what drew me into history. And if you take those stories out, it just becomes bland and it’s a bunch of cartoonish boy scouts. You’ve got George Washington who chops down a cherry tree, and honest Abe Lincoln, and all these squeaky clean role models, which is not relatable, right?

I think what I find — and I’ve really found this in the last six, seven years, it’s always been true to some level, but it really became pronounced here — students have kind of embraced the study of the past by realizing: Oh, things seem crappy now, but they’ve seemed really crappy, even worse than this in previous eras, right?

You know, we had a literal Civil War. I talk about 1919 is where I start the lecture course I do, in which you’ve got the global pandemic of the Spanish Flu, right? There’s all kinds of chaos and race riots and labor strikes and things going on.

1968, a chaotic year, right? Students really get into that. They like to understand that this age that they’re currently living in is not uniquely awful. It’s not hopeless, right? We have been through bad times before in this country and sometimes we’ve risen to a challenge beautifully so, and sometimes we haven’t.

But dealing with those conflicts, dealing with those struggles, the exact kind of things that these people wanna sanitize and sterilize American history for their political purposes, that takes all the fun, all the interesting fights out of the history of the things that I think students would find the most relatable.

JZ: Yeah, I mean, anyone who teaches and teaches well, learns this pretty quickly. Students want an engaged and interesting and complex classroom. That’s what makes history pedagogy much better. And that tends to draw students in. And again, this isn’t a particular perspective. It’s about the style of learning and college students for sure.

I mean, anyone who’s had a teenager who knows debate is part of what that age spends a lot of time doing with you, with their friends, with others. And thinking critically is the skill that makes the classroom most interesting. And students are not unintelligent. They understand if you’re just teaching him something that isn’t true, that’s why they get bored.

It’s like, come on. To borrow the president’s phrase, “come on man.” And I think that just doesn’t work very well. And so in both respects, when this kind of shift takes place, it also undermines, I’m sure, interesting work. It doesn’t even make sense in the world they all live in. I mean, it doesn’t even matter where you live. You can live in the reddest part of the country, the bluest part. You know life isn’t neat. It’s not all good. You see it in your family. You see it in your friends and in your community. So if you teach a history that has none of the problems you see all around you all the time, that BS flag is gonna go up very quickly for a lot of younger people. So it’s important to take them seriously and respect them by actually teaching a complex understanding and version of this country’s past.

JS: Yeah. Speaking of George Washington not being able to tell a lie. I’ve always remembered the first time, and it was fairly recently that I heard the story of, I think, [Ona] Oney Judge.

KK: Yeah. 

JS: She was a woman that Martha Washington owned, and George Washington and Martha Washington wanted to make sure that she wasn’t automatically freed, I believe, by spending time in a free state in Pennsylvania when he was president. There are letters from George Washington telling his various people who did stuff for him, like, OK, I wanna lie about this. Here’s how we’re gonna lie. And that to me was a million times more interesting than hearing about some imaginary version of George Washington, who was a little boy who said he could never tell a lie. And I really wanted to learn more about George Washington and all of that story and who he was from that.

I wonder if there are any particular examples in your life where you’re like, wow, I had no idea that that was true and I’ve gotta find out more.

JZ: Every class I took in college on foreign policy was like that for me. Really eye-opening in terms of the disconnect between what you heard about why we entered into certain wars or what the interests were of policymakers, and then really learning what was going on and what policymakers were actually thinking of or what they did to achieve victory.

Someone just has to study foreign policy in the Nixon years and look at a figure like Henry Kissinger. And I think it’s incredibly powerful to really understand where an administration would go to achieve the principles they were talking about, but doing things you really didn’t hear about in the public.

So for me, a lot of those classes that were either about that or touched on that, or just reading about it alerted me or made me more cognizant of the need to probe a lot deeper into what was actually happening.

JS: I remember the fact that in the first presidential election that I was aware of was Reagan and Carter in 1980. And of course in the fall, there were constant rumors that the hostages being held by Iran were going to be released. And this was a big deal, obviously, for America. But it was also a big deal for me because I was on a peewee football team just outside of Washington, D.C. and our coach worked for the Pentagon, and one of his jobs involved if these hostages are released and flown to Germany then he’s gonna be one of the people debriefing them. And so whenever we heard the rumors like the hostages may be released, that meant that we were gonna need a substitute football coach. And my father volunteered to do that.

So while I was paying attention to all this throughout that. I would watch what became “Nightline.” I don’t think it was called “Nightline” then, but people may know that.

KK: No, it comes out of that crisis.

JS: You know, like America Held Hostage and then they just kept on doing it after they were released. But anyway, the reason I tell this story is, I absolutely learned nothing about U.S. foreign policy towards Iran during that period because it was never ever mentioned. And when I got older, like I think I was in my twenties when I found out the U.S., you know, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. And it just made me feel like, hey, wait a second: Like somebody should have mentioned this to me.

JZ: Look, I had that a lot in college, even after college and when I was already a historian writing about Lyndon Johnson. I always remember hearing when they released a batch of tapes. This is a great way to learn something new no matter what you have learned. And there’s a great tape that came out. It’s a while now, but it’s between Richard Russell, who is the senator from Georgia. He was the mentor really for Johnson, and he was the key power broker in the Senate of the Dixiecrats and Johnson. And Johnson and he are having a conversation in ‘64, I believe, about Vietnam. And Russell’s a real conservative. He’s not someone you’d think would be critical at all. And it’s a mind blowing conversation because he’s basically laying out the arguments to Lyndon Johnson about what’s going to go wrong and why this is not even a war that’s essential to the Cold War.

And Johnson’s talking about knowing this, and not knowing how he’s gonna get out, and worried they’re gonna impeach him if he does — basically the politics too strong. But you hear these two people — early in the conflict, before it’s really started — who are fully aware of all the problems that later on in a few years will be front and center.

And for me — and I had studied this, I’d written about it — it was just eye-opening to see how early these doubts existed, and were being discussed behind the scenes all the time.

There’s a great book that came out of those tapes by Fred Logevall, “Choosing War,” which emphasizes the contingency of that moment, and it’s all premise on these kinds of tapes where we learned how much doubt existed before the disaster and before the quagmire really happened. There was that moment when they were all talking about it. So that’s just another recent example where a piece of evidence — real evidence, real archival material — kind of has the potential to transform how you think about it.

You can’t think about this idea of a domino theory where everyone agreed they had to do this, and if they didn’t do it, the whole region was gonna fall to Communism. Then you hear these two Cold War hawks saying, not really. And I’m not sure this is a great idea. It changes the way you think and those are exciting moments, disturbing moments for sure, but also exciting because they open up the questions you’re gonna ask about material you’re often familiar with yet.

JS: I would, I would encourage anybody young listening to this who is not yet super devoted to history to understand from that story that history is something that really absolutely gets better as you get older. You’ve lived more history, you’ve seen more history. The more you know about history the more context you have for everything, the more interesting everything else becomes. So, if you’re not completely devoted yet, as I say, just like keep on trucking, and you will get there.

And so I’ve been asking you guys a lot of meta history questions. I wanted to give you a chance if you could, to just talk a little bit about the two chapters, each of you wrote one for “Myth America.” Kevin’s chapter covers an earlier period about the Southern Strategy.

KK: Yeah.

JS: And it’s full of— go get this book and read this chapter if you ever want to discuss the subject with anyone. The amount of information in this one short chapter is extraordinary. But anyway, if you could tell us a little bit about that.

KK: Thank you. Yeah. I wrote this chapter, in fact, one of our impetus for this book came out of things that we were doing on Twitter and online and Julian on CNN and his column pushing back on historical mistruths. And one of the ones, if you follow me on Twitter that I’ve been pushing  back on for ages is this idea that the Southern Strategy is somehow a myth.

And for those of you who don’t know, the Southern Strategy is basically a shorthand term for: Republicans in the 1960s decide that they can no longer maintain their kind of past commitment to civil rights as the party of Lincoln. And in order to have national success, they need to reach out to southern conservatives and effectively make peace with segregationists and recruit them into the party.

This is a story that has long been, I mean, just as conventional as they get. It was written about at the time, in real time reporters were talking about it. Nixon’s strategists were explaining this in newspaper columns. In 1970, Kevin Phillips talks about how the Republican Party is going to win over “negrophobe whites” who are fleeing the Democratic Party because of their commitment to civil rights.

It’s all over the place. It’s in their archives. You can find this in everything from Nixon’s memoirs to the memoirs of Harry Dent, who was the chief southern strategist to papers of Goldwater, on and on. The Republican Party had long accepted this. Lee Atwater talks about the Southern Strategy being racist in the 1980s during the Bush era. Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele and Ken Mehlman both apologized for the Southern Strategy. So this has long been an accepted fact.

But during the Trump era, there was a change in Republican politics and while in the Bush era, apparently the idea had been to apologize for this past mistake and to say look: “We’re different from that now. We are now a multiracial party. You can look at the Bush administration. It’s got a commitment to racial diversity making moves on immigration reform. This is not the old Southern Strategy Party.”

Well, the problem is that the Trump administration came to power and embraced a lot of those old racist policies that the Bush people had tried [to] veer away from. And so instead of apologizing for that past as if they saw there was nothing to apologize for. They decided to pretend it never happened. So there was a new wave of partisans, people like Dinesh D’Souza, Carol Swain, other people like that who have spread this idea far and wide on the internet and in conservative social media that this is simply a fiction made up by academics like a dozen years ago or so. And again, it’s all in broad daylight. 

And as I note in the book and as you said, there’s lots of evidence there. And I do hope anyone who’s interested in discussing the Southern Strategy with someone who doubts it will draw this as a resource, because that’s why I wrote it. And all the time I did those threads I kept on thinking I wish there was a short, pithy piece that I could point people to.

All I could do with these kind of, you know, 600, 700 page tomes of political science or works that talked about it tangentially and there’s just nothing directly on it that was short and sweet. And so that’s why I wrote this piece to try to fill that need.

JS: One of the sentences in the beginning of your chapter — is one of the greatest, frustrated historian sentences ever written — where you say “This is well-documented in manuscript archives, public speeches, party platforms, contemporary reporting, polling data, oral interviews, memoirs, and elsewhere.”

KK: It’s all over the, I mean, again, this is not, again — I think people maybe have an eye that, you know, left-wing historians are rubbing their hands together trying to distort the past.

This is literally, you know, Bill Dickinson out of Alabama when he switches from the Democratic Party to the Republican party, says in his announcement. “I am joining the white man’s party.” He wins the election on that campaign. 1964, the first Mississippi Republican to win a house seat, where does he celebrate the win? At a Klan front group. The next day he goes to meet the Americans for the Advancement of the White Race or something like that.

Again, they’re not hiding this. And it’s not that Southern Democrats were all racial liberals. They weren’t. But this evidence of the Southern Republicans really being segregationist is out front.  The Mississippi Republican party — to give one more, just one more point. Mississippi Republican Party in 1964, its party platform declares its support for segregation, [saying] it’s necessary in order to maintain white supremacy essentially. So this is, again, hiding in plain daylight. 

What I did uncover, I’ll give myself a little credit for this, is that it goes back a lot further than the sixties. We often talk about this happening with Goldwater. What I found is from the Dixiecrat Rebellion of 1948. From the moment that happens — the moment southern Democrats start to balk at the new directions Harry Truman’s sticking the party with a support of civil rights — Republicans realize those southern Democrats are up for grabs. And they’re down there trying to recruit them.

Karl Mundt goes on a nationwide tour, spends a lot of time in the South in ‘49 and ‘50, arguing for a merger of the Dixiecrats and the Republicans. The chairman of the RNC is down in Alabama in 1952 saying Dixiecrats believe in state’s rights. Republicans believe in state’s rights. Let’s get together and form a union.

It doesn’t happen, right away. It doesn’t even happen completely in the sixties. It’s a process that unfolds over decades into the early 21st century. But it’s a really important transformation and again, it’s incredibly obvious, and I should stress that a lot of these essays aren’t saying anything new to historians. We’re really recapping the things that we know well. We’re trying to correct mistaken assumptions and misbeliefs held by the general public.

JS: Yeah, one of my very favorite parts of the chapter is Trent Lott, who people may know went on to become the Republican Majority Leader in the Senate, telling the sons of Confederate Veterans that “the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform, [and I am proud to be a part of it].”

I was like, well, that’s very straightforward. You can’t fault him for being dishonest here.

KK: Lott’s own career is a great example of this transformation. Lott had been the top aid to a long-serving segregationist southern Democrat, William Colmer. And when Colmer retired, he tapped Lott to be his replacement, but said, run as a Republican. And Lott did. And that’s the transformation that takes place all across the south. This old generation dies out, new generation comes up — comes up as Republicans.

JS: And so that chapter is an amazing resource on this subject. And Julian, your chapter about the Reagan revolution is also a fantastic resource for that subject because as you know in a lot of the popular imagination, what really happened during the Reagan administration has been totally reconstructed.

JZ: I mean, this is a powerful, I think myth. Certainly it’s become important to the conservative movement. A founding myth in many ways of a president who just transformed the nation almost completely toward the right, who was very successful and set the template for where we are today. 

It’s also, as I’ve said it’s a myth that a lot of, I think, liberals also subscribe to. And I wanted to really emphasize two elements of the period that I think are central and are either forgotten or ignored. Not that Reagan was not influential, not that conservatism didn’t have a big impact, but liberalism remained incredibly strong in 1980s’ America.

You can look at almost any area of politics and policy, whether it’s domestic welfare programs, whether it’s resistance toward excessive, interventions overseas. And there was a lot of strong support for all of this. I mean, to the point, Reagan backed away from many of the things that he actually ran on in 1981.

So it’s not really a revolution when there’s so many checks by the end of his term on what he’s able to achieve. And secondly, the notion this was a consensus that everyone was in on, as the ad said “Morning in America” again in 1984, just not true. He was incredibly divisive as president and Democrats from speaker Tip O’Neill in the House of Representatives to many voters in suburban parts of the country to organizations fighting against U.S. policy in Central America, the nuclear freeze movement — one of the largest international grassroots movements we’ve had, ever.

It’s just a very different portrait once you put all of this into that understanding of the 1980s. And so, that’s why I wanted to really hone in on that particular myth. And it’s important not just to understand Reagan or the ‘80s in a better way. And I think you actually understand Reagan in a more interesting way.

It’s not discounting him, it’s really taking him seriously. But you’ll see that the trajectory of politics that leads to today makes a lot more sense where you still see a lot of support for ideas that are more rooted in the New Deal and the Great Society than in Reaganism, which is perpetually a source of frustration to conservatives.

But it doesn’t really make sense if that was a revolution. And so that’s why I put it together and like Kevin, I wanted to write it in a way that was interesting and intellectually rich, but short to the point, easy to access and putting together a lot of literature that’s come out in the last decade or so on this subject.

JS: And I will admit, like I was genuinely surprised by your quotation from Tip O’Neill’s memoirs where I had bought into the public presentation of like, oh sure, you know, they fight during the day, but they get along great, you know, after hours and they’re all buddies in Washington. And you quote Tip O’Neill saying, “I’ve known every president since Harry Truman,” and “there’s no question in my mind that [Ronald] Reagan was the worst.”

JZ: And that wasn’t simply a normative statement about Reagan’s style. That was a fundamental sense of frustration with what Reagan was doing, what Reaganism was about. And O’Neill and many other Democrats were determined to stand their ground because the stakes were so high. There were ways in which Reagan was as divisive and contentious — I would argue — as Donald Trump.

And many people feared where this country was going to go and they fight back. That’s why Reagan has so much trouble achieving many of his ends. But that Tip O’Neill quote that is kind of the embodiment of how people now talk about this presidency, which is just unbelievable. I think, certainly for me as a student of the period, but also someone — a Gen Xer — who lived through the period. I remember a lot of people who were not so swept up and, not only friends, but just reading about it at the time. And so, I think that is a good accurate story to focus in on. And part of what I wanted to explore. And again, the point — and this gets back to earlier in our conversation — is not to diminish Reagan as president. It’s not to discredit Reagan as president. I actually take him seriously. 

And so I’m not going to present him given all I’ve learned as this guy who just walked through and erased decades of public policy and politics that had really had a big impact on the country since FDR, but rather, a president who struggled to achieve a lot of the goals that were central to the movement that brought him into power and learned this country was not exactly where he hoped it would be going, and that it wasn’t a revolution. It was a civil war. It was a kind of fraught decade that’s never been resolved since, because older ideas and older interests did not go away.

JS: Yeah it really is particularly striking the similarities between Reagan and Trump in so many ways. I’ve come to believe, you know, so Reagan was the prototype and Trump was the final product.

They had a lot of things that they said they were going to do, and the difference that they made I think much more was sort of in the tone of the country and just like the level of meanness and just overall vibe than actual like political standard, political achievements. So, the main question that I have now at the end of this for you guys is, I read this book and I thought there need to be 10 more versions of this. There are enough American myths that there needs to be a bunch of sequels. And so this has been a big success. It’s been a New York Times bestseller. Is that plausible in the future? Are there gonna be more “Myths America”?

KK: We haven’t talked about it. I mean, we agree that there are many more that could be done.

The 20 myths we’ve gotten in this book are by no means exhaustive. There are some big ones still on the table that would make for a great second volume. The question of pulling it off again is difficult. I’ve been kicking this current book project I’m working on down the road way too long.

Julian can multitask with the best of them. And I think he’s probably currently writing six books that will be out this fall. I cannot do that. I cannot multitask. So for the time being, I’ve gotta focus my attention on this, on this new project. That said, we might come back to this later on.

In the meantime, if other people wanna pick up the ball and run with it,  jump in. The water is fine.

JZ: I mean, right now we’re doing different things. Who knows? We can come back to it. We had written something a few years ago together. And so that’s always a possibility. And we’ll just see, but I think more importantly, I mean, the point of the book wasn’t to capture everything. It’s not encyclopedia of myths. I’s more an approach to doing this that I hope is actually portable, meaning that other scholars can find ways to do this as well. 

I hope the reception, which was so good, is encouraging, that there actually is an appetite out there to do this, and hopefully that will create an incentive, whether it’s someone writing one book or someone doing what we did. That ultimately is the best kind of accomplishment. Not just we produce more and more but we encourage others to think about maybe better ways to do it and in their own take, which is fine with us. But it’s a conversation that we started rather than some effort to definitively tell everything. 

And very important in this book is our effort to just showcase great scholars in the history profession who are not always the people you might see or hear in the media, but are very good writers who really have something to say about the issues that are going on today. And, maybe to push back a little bit on some of the hostility or tension a lot of people have with the university, which I think both of us think still does great things, and our authors are all part of that. And so I hope this also just fuels more interest in actually learning and broadening how many historians or how many kinds of scholars that you go to when you want information about what’s going on or what has gone on in the past.

JS: Well, as I say, I hope there are more versions of this book. There are so many more myths that really do deserve to be treated like this. In the meantime, everyone should go get “Myth America.” 

If you have any interest in American history, if you have any interest in American politics, this is really the book for you. Get it for your bright 15-year-old nephew, your bright 15-year-old niece. It’s a great book for teenagers to learn and they will be outraged by everything that they’ve been lied to about.

And you know, this is a great entryway to more and more and more history, but thank you guys very much for your time and I hope we can have you guys back here at some point to talk more history.

JZ: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. 

KK: Anytime. It was a pleasure.

[Deconstructed credits.]

JS: Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is the Intercept´s editor in chief. And I’m Jon Schwarz, a senior writer at The Intercept. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or review. It helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thank you very much. Ryan will be back next week, still in love with politics no matter what I said at the start of this episode.

We will see you then.

The post “Myth America”: New Book Dismantles 20 Legends About Our Past appeared first on The Intercept.

If engagement on TikTok is any indication, a Democratic primary held today among people under 50 would result in a landslide for Marianne Williamson. Williamson has only posted 63 videos but has drawn more than 10 million views, according to a TikTok data counter. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim speaks with Williamson about her growing popularity with Gen Z, why her message focusing on the economic hardships Americans are facing resonates, and what the Democratic Party is missing.

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim, and I’m probably not telling you anything you wouldn’t have guessed when I say that I’ve struggled to get into TikTok. I started an account a while ago to try to understand it and, within days, my daughters had renamed it and taken it over, so I gave up. But I do understand how important it is, now that it’s reaching more than a hundred million Americans, and it helps to define everyday life for perhaps a majority of people under 30.

So I didn’t discover this thing for myself, but one thing I can tell you is that, if the Democratic primary were held today on TikTok, the result would be a landslide for Marianne Williamson. Now, she’s only posted 60-some-odd videos, but has drawn more than 10 million views there.

But that’s just her official account. There’s now a cottage industry of Marianne Williamson fan accounts that post her speeches and regularly rack up millions of views themselves. An early poll recently showed her at over 20 percent with voters under 30, suggesting that the buzz on TikTok is translating into real support.

So, to help unpack what all that means, we’re joined now by none other than the TikTok phenom herself, Marianne Williamson. Welcome to Deconstructed. 

Marianne Williamson: Thank you, Ryan. It’s great to be here, and it’s always good to be with you. 

RG: And so, when you launched your campaign, how did you think about TikTok, and are you surprised at how you’ve taken off there? 

MW: Well, I wasn’t thinking about TikTok, specifically, but I was thinking about younger people. I had gone on a college tour speaking at eight colleges and universities, because I thought it was important to understand whether or not there was a connection between myself and that younger generation. Once we actually started the campaign, people younger than myself and far more technologically adept were in charge of things like TikTok.

So, there was this gentleman named Christian Perry; all credit really goes to Christian. He was doing this account, I think “Marianne4Prez” or something, on TikTok or on Instagram.

RG: I’ve seen that one.

MW: I’m not even sure why. But for months, and we just started seeing — I think it might have even been longer than months, I don’t really know — but we started seeing all these cool things that people would show us. And I said, well, we should call him, and ask him if he wants to be on the team with us and work with us on the campaign.

So I just kind of let Christian — There’s a wonderful woman named Sandy Fisher and she makes clips, she finds clips from things that I’ve done. And then the wonderful Christian makes these TikToks, and Alex Furlin, who is in charge of social media— It’s just a great group of people. And I put in my two cents here and there about specific content, but they’re the ones who create the magic, and I know enough to just let them do their thing, because they do it so well. 

RG: And since I’m not on TikTok a ton, people had to flag this, for me. So, how did you learn that you were becoming kind of a sensation on this platform?

MW: Well, you know, Ryan, how these things are. On any given day, you might get news that you’re popular in this particular circle of people, and then you’re very unpopular in this circle of people. So you can’t take too much of it too seriously because, if you take all the great stuff seriously, then you have to take the not-great stuff too seriously.

So, I’m grateful for youthful support; I’m grateful for any support, but I’m not kidding myself that anything can be counted on going forward, you know? I mean, I’ve said a couple of times, “Are we still popular on TikTok?” I mean, you were popular on Thursday, are you still popular the next Monday? I’m not taking anything for granted, but I’m certainly appreciative, very grateful.

And I feel seen, you know? I feel seen, and I think that’s really exciting because — and you and I have discussed this before —I’m fascinated by Gen Z, because they’re not 20th century people. They’re not, their thinking is not dominated by some of the 20th century narratives that we just were born into. They don’t see why they should live at the effect of bad ideas left over from the 20th century.

And I learned things when I was traveling, and even since the campaign began. I’ll give you an example: I remember meeting a young woman who was graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, and I asked her what she was going to do now. And she said — with a totally straight face — she said, well, I can’t decide. I was accepted into Columbia Law, but I’m trying to decide, I might do Columbia Law, and I might be a professional astrologer. Now that’s a new world. That’s a new world.

And also, I find today — and I found this the other night — so there’s this article that came out about me, about Greek gods and goddesses, and sort of explaining the campaign in terms of this Greek goddess named Eris. And I was talking to these young people and I realized that, today, people in college who are studying economics, political philosophy, don’t find it odd or uncomfortable in any way to discuss in the same sentence economics and political philosophy and Greek gods and goddesses.

The idea that there are underlying dynamics — They’ve also read Jung, they’ve read Joseph Campbell, they’ve been in therapy sometimes since they were young. So, this younger generation doesn’t find a more whole-person holistic perspective on life wacky or cuckoo. What they think is that anything other than that is fractured and inadequate to the challenges of our time. And, on that, we agree.

RG: What do you think it is about your message that is really appealing to them? And what do you hear back from them? Like, which parts are they picking up that you’re putting down? 

MW: Well, first of all, this country is not a monolith, and no generation is a monolith, no ethnic group is a monolith, so I can hardly speak about all young people. But, I can say that for many of the people that are responding to my work who are young, it’s from this progressive place, but it’s a very different progressivism than some of the progressivism that you and I know, Ryan, because it’s not in any way institutionalized.

I find a lot of the people on the left — the kind of people that you and I know — very, “Oh, I don’t know. Yeah, I like those ideas, but I’m not sure it should be her.” This kind of like — They branded themselves as the official resistors, which really makes you question. Really? I thought it was all about these principles and these ideas and these policies.

Young people don’t have any of that, they’re not interested in any of that. They’re interested in their lives. They’re interested in whether or not they’ll ever get out from under the burden of these college loans. They’re interested in whether or not the planet will be habitable for them. They’re interested in whether or not they’ll be able to make a livable wage, and send their own kids to college, and have healthcare.

So they’re just not interested in the games, and it seems to me that they have as much healthy disrespect for formalized institutionalized progressivism as much as they have disrespect for formalized institutionalized neoliberalism. They’re just not interested, they’re really thinking about how they’ll be able to live their lives and thrive within them over the next few decades. 

RG: And one reason I was so interested to do this interview is because the Democratic Party has just been so good the last several cycles at just missing phenomena that are coming its way. If you go back to 2016, Bernie caught them completely off guard. The Clinton campaign, the DNC, the party itself just had no idea that he was going to resonate so much with Democratic voters until he was just right at Hillary’s heels. Which, okay, that’s one thing.

They also missed the Trump phenomenon, basically.

MW: Which is much more important and significant.

RG: And it’s one thing to miss the first Bernie Sanders campaign. They then got caught off guard by the second Bernie Sanders campaign. That, to me, was stunning, you know? It’s like, OK, fine, you got fooled once, no problem. But, 2020, he came back, almost shocked them into defeat again by the Biden campaign, managed to get all of that consolidation at the very end, and they hung on, but they had still missed the phenomenon.

And so, now I’m wondering, what other phenomena are they missing? And what do you think the party doesn’t understand about younger voters that is causing them to miss what’s going on here? 

MW: Well, there’s a lot in what you said. The first thing I want to address is how they missed the Trump phenomenon. This is extremely dangerous. Somebody was talking the other day about AOC saying that some of this drift rightward of the Biden administration is so dangerous. What they missed in 2016 is how angry people are at the fact that they’re living at the effect of an unjust economic system. And my fear is that they’re making the same mistake this time.

Sometimes when people get upset with my running, “You’re not taking seriously that fascists are at the door.” Excuse me, I’m the one who is taking most seriously the fascists are at the door. I’m the one who’s saying, coming to the American people at such a time as this and saying, basically, the economy is doing well, is an outrageously stupid agenda if we want to win in 2024.

What Bernie and Trump both did was that they validated people’s understandable rage. The difference, of course, was that Bernie meant it, and Bernie would’ve done something about it — about the economic conditions that are shackling people. So, they missed that, and it seems to me that they’re missing it this time as well. Because, for 80 percent of the American people, the idea that the economy is doing well is directly contradictory to their visceral experience on a daily basis.

However, if we look deeper into it, Ryan, is it that they missed it? Or it’s that they just don’t want to see it? It is inconvenient to their own power purposes and financial purposes for them to acknowledge it, because if they were to acknowledge it, they’d have to change their entire game plan. And so, it’s almost like white-knuckling; we can power our way through it. It’s not that we don’t see it, it’s that we can power our way through it.

So then you get to this additional — what I believe is — stupidity, lack of wisdom. Which is, if anybody in our own ranks wants to acknowledge it, as Bernie did in ‘16 and ‘20, we will suppress them, because even though they have such high popularity, even though what they are saying is aligned with the professed will of the majority of the American people, even though, theoretically, those things would actually expand our voting base, we don’t want it. Because we are interested in our club, and we’re going to just power through. And I think that’s dangerous for the Democrats winning in 2024, and much more significantly dangerous for our country. 

RG: And so, you and I talked briefly about this on Counterpoints when you were on this week, but I wanted to get your more expanded take here. So when I think about your campaign and the way that you’ve been catching on, I think about a couple of things. And one is that you are really running on and championing the Bernie Sanders agenda. Like, there’s a lot of similarities between your critique of the corporate autocracy and what you would hear from Bernie Sanders.

But, at the same time, you have this more holistic campaign that — and this is the more controversial point I want to get your take on — that, to me, feels like it’s tapping into some of the same energy, the same anxiety that very early Jordan Peterson, who has now become a kind of reactionary rightwing  phenomenon, but he wasn’t instantly coded as rightwing when he kind of burst onto the scene in the mid-2010s, with his whole 12 Rules For Life, and urging people to clean their room and get their act together, and that sort of thing. Now, he has channeled them in a different direction, but I feel like the media missed the phenomenon of Jordan Peterson, and missed kind of what it said about young people at the time that he could catch on in the way that he did. And I feel like you are speaking to that, that same kind of void, and speaking to that same anxiety, while also then coupling it with a more kind of social democratic Bernie Sanders style of politics that links the two together. That says that the answer is not to just become victims and blame whatever conspiracies are being put upon you by these Davos elites, it’s to actually collectively fight for this other agenda.

What’s your take on that read? 

MW: Well, Ryan, my career started long before Jordan Peterson’s did. Or, at least, in the public realm. So, a lot of the things that you are pointing to that Jordan Peterson was saying early in his career about how we do need to rise up within ourselves, qualities of our own personhood need to demonstrate greater maturity. That we’ve had long post-adolescence in our society because there was not the kind of coming of age for several generations that there had been for generations before us. I was talking about those things, and writing about those things for decades, actually, before Jordan Peterson was even speaking.

So, when he did start talking, it was very much within a realm of conversation that I had been speaking into for decades. I agree with you he has taken it — 

RG: On that point, what do you think made his approach take on a political valence, whereas yours was sort of proto-political? Like you said, you have been writing, philosophizing, thinking, talking in this way for decades, but it wasn’t really coded as politics as we understand it, the way that Peterson very quickly did become coded as a political actor rather than a kind of cultural or psychoanalytical actor.

MW: Well, I don’t know that much about his career. All I know is that, early on, I liked some of what he said, and later on I was horrified by the things that I heard him say. But what the trajectory was that took him from A to B, I don’t know. I think, oddly enough, on the right, there’s almost more openness to somebody talking outside the political boxes. This should not be the. When I was growing up, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, spoke in soulful terms. And today, at least among Democrats, there is often this distrust of anything that goes outside the box of this very secularized analysis of political dynamics. Even though, to any intelligent observer, it’s so obvious that’s not working. It’s not. That alone is not taking us where we need to go. 

So, I don’t know. You know, I’m a writer. I’ve been at this for a long time. There’s a level past which doesn’t really concern you what other people are saying, what other people are writing, what other people are doing, what’s happening in popular culture. I have my own career, and I’ve done my own writing, and the only person’s trajectory I really know much about is my own. 

RG: I guess what I mean, not on that trajectory, but what changed about our society is what I’m trying to get at, in the 2010s that enabled whatever he was doing to be understood as political rather than as kind of cultural.

MW: Well, he became specifically political.

RG: Yeah. Maybe he brought that in, yeah.

MW: Yeah. He brought it in, and people didn’t say, “how dare you, stay in your lane.” Because, in his world, they weren’t doing that. In my world, it’s like, when I started talking about political things, “Stay in your lane. How dare you.” Even though my first political book was published in 1998, and I wrote Politics of Love as a kind of compendium to my campaign the way all candidates do. Andrew Yang did everybody did. Kamala had a book. Pete had a book, I think, but only in my cases it’s that she’s doing it to sell books.

I mean, the left has its own mishigas. The left has its own smug arrogant dismissal of anything that isn’t the conversation they’ve already been having. And that isn’t officially sanctioned by their establishment leadership. It’s really sad to think that the independent thinkers are on the other side. 

RG: It does feel like if you read the comments on TikTok, on a lot of the videos that either you’ve posted or that have been posted by other people about you, you see a ton of people saying, “What I really like about her is that she’s willing to criticize both parties.” And that seems to earn trust in them. Is that what you mean about there being less space on the left for that sort of internal criticism? 

MW: There’s this codependent relationship that many Democrats have with the DNC that you don’t see Republicans have with the RNC. So, yes, this idea that — You see it right now with what’s happening with the president and the primary. You know, it’s like some voice on high of the democratic establishment leadership has decided we are going with Joe. I mean, that’s not the way it’s supposed to happen. The DNC, for instance, is supposed to stay in the background. You’re supposed to have an election, that’s what primaries are. Then the voters — hello — the voters decide who the candidate will be, and that’s when the DNC is supposed to come in.

But there’s been this decision made on high. A bunch of guys, what, smoking cigars like it’s a hundred years ago? They’ve decided that it’s going to be Biden. Clear the field, we’ll change the primary schedule if we have to, we’ll do whatever. And you can tell. And a lot of Democrats seem to be just falling in line as though the DNC knows better.

I don’t know how you can look at the last several years and say the DNC necessarily knows better. What are we talking about here? You know, I believe that if the DNC  kept their fingers off the scale in 2016, I don’t know who would’ve won. I don’t know if Hillary would’ve won or Bernie would’ve won. It would’ve been probably a close contest. One of them would’ve won the primary, the primaries in 2016. But, whomever it was, if Democrats had all gotten the sense, well, this was a fair race, then I don’t think Trump would’ve ever been president.

RG: Yeah.

MW: How can you claim to be the party that is the conduit for the protection of democracy if you yourself are so wary of the democratic process? And I’ll tell you something: candidate suppression is a form of voter suppression. If you’re going to make it clear that you’re going to do everything possible to keep someone’s voice from being in the mix through your influence on mainstream media and so forth because you find it inconvenient, that’s a form of candidate suppression.

And I think that the fact that I’m willing to name that — You know, somebody said to me — I saw it online, I think — somebody saying about me, “She’s committing political suicide.” And I laughed, I guffawed, because what political career do I have to kill? You know?

So I’m not coming at it from what you’re supposed to say. You know, a writer, and people in the careers like mine, we don’t wake up in the morning and ask ourselves what we are supposed to say. Including what’s supposed to sell a book, what’s supposed to get people at my lectures? That’s not the career space I come from.

[Intercept mid-show theme music.]

RG: I wanted to play for you a clip that’s been circulating on TikTok and get your reaction to it.

Marianne Williamson: People these days talk about how traumatized they are by the Trump phenomenon. “I’m just so traumatized by it.” Do you think the people who walked across the bridge at Selma were not traumatized? Everybody’s saying, “Oh, I’m so anxious. It’s just, this whole thing has me so anxious.” Really? What about those women standing up in Iran right now? We need to toughen up, buttercups. Everybody in this room, however pushed down we are, it is nothing compared to how push down the Iranians are right now, and they are showing up.

So I think we have gotten to a point where we’re coddling our neurosis a little too much right now. We need to say, meditate, take a shower, pray in the morning, and kick ass in the afternoon. This is not to minimize the pain. Sometimes you call your girlfriends, you call the people in your life. “Can I share my pain?” And then that call is over. And the person who loves you on that call says, “Promise me you’re going to get out there this afternoon and show them what you got.”

RG: I was intrigued to see this one circulating, because, to me, it’s one of the clearest expressions of you linking the collective politics of struggle against the villains that you identify with the way that that struggle can then kind of help you yourself, emancipate you from the anxieties that you’re facing. First, when you saw that circulating, were you like, “Great, this is the kind of thing I do want out there?” Were you surprised that that clip resonated?

MW: No. Listen, it’s the kind of thing I’ve been saying for years, like I said, I’ve been saying for years that we had a long post-adolescence. This sort of pathologizing every heartbreak, do you know what I’m saying? I’ve been talking about this for years, that sometimes, you know, shit happens. Sometimes life is hard, but this is how we grow up. I’ve been particularly concerned with people in their twenties. I say to these young people all the time: the twenties are hard, but they’re not a mental illness.

Individuating, becoming mature, evolving, becoming real grownups, becoming responsible for your country, for your democracy, for your family, for your planet. It’s a maturation process. We all go through it, and it’s not always easy. So, in order to answer the challenges of our times, we’re going to have to do more than do certain things differently; we’re going to have to be certain things differently.

And so, I’ve been saying for a long time, the fact that that was picked up, it’s interesting. That was the Chicago Humanities Festival where I was in conversation with Nina Turner on stage. So it was interesting when I saw you play that the other day, but it’s the kind of thing I’ve been saying for a very long time.

You know, in the book that I published called “Healing the Soul of America” in 1998, I wrote a lot about Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. And Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence which, then Dr. King had gone to India, he studied those principles, and he brought them back to the United States for application to the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s. The essence of nonviolent philosophy is that who you are is as important as what you do because, in the words of Gandhi, the end is inherent in the means.

Now, if you look at just traditional political activism, you might say the end justifies the means. Gandhi said, no, the end is inherent in the means. Or, another way of putting it is, everything you do is a reflection of the consciousness with which we do it. If we want to fundamentally change the civilization, we’re going to have to fundamentally change. And we can’t just be wimpy, we can’t just be — you know, I’ve said it for so long — we can’t just identify the problems in our past, we have to identify with the problem solvers. 

Don’t just look at abolition; think about what it had to have been in those days to be abolitionist. Don’t just look at women’s suffrage; think what you had to be in those days to be a women’s suffragist. Don’t just look at the civil rights movement; think what you had be to be in the civil rights movement. Let’s not be the first generation to wimp out on doing what it takes to put our country back on track when we have swerved.

Now, this is slightly tangential: did you read the [inaudible] book that came out a few months ago about Lincoln called “[And] There Was Light”?

RG: No. Uh-uh.

MW: OK. So, one of the things I came to understand from reading that book is the difference between the provocateur and the activist and the politician. So, the provocateur, take something like slavery, OK? So, the provocateurs were the John Browns, the provocateurs were the people yelling about slavery long before there was any popular listening for it. Just screaming and yelling about how wrong it was, how bad it was, at a time when hardly anyone would listen, much less embrace the message. And so, the provocateur is willing to take a lot of hits and not very much approval, because you’re yelling it into the wind at a time when very few want to hear it.

RG: Yeah.

MW: OK. But they make the space for the phase of the activist. That space having been open, the activist can come along and actually do all of the traditional activism necessary to start — not just planting the seeds, because the provocateur planted them— but in order to start really building a field of political possibility.

The politician comes in after that. And if you look at Lincoln, Lincoln was not early to the abolitionist movement, even though there’s a famous line, where he had said early in his life, after he had seen many people who became abolitionists had some personal experience. They saw slave trading, they saw enslaved people in chains, something that really had this profound impact on them, the kind of amazing grace phenomenon. He is quoted as having said when he was young about slavery, If I ever get a chance to hit it, I’m going to hit it hard.

But he remained, you know, in the Missouri Compromise, he was trying to hit a compromise, it took a while. But he is the one. First you had the provocateur, then you have the activist, and then you have someone like a Lincoln — Roosevelt was a similar character — who are able to come in, say, OK, it’s time. And they can harness the consensus of enough people. That’s their role. They’re not the early provocateur or even necessarily the activists, but they’re the ones who bring in a different phase of possibility, because of their ability to work with a population in order to bring the change into manifestation.

That fascinates me, the different phases that we go through, and I think that we’re at a fascinating phase right now. I don’t think Americans — I think there’s a consensus of Americans who are no longer in denial about what trouble this country is in. And I think a lot of that comes from these young people. They’re not buying the illusion that things are better than they are. They understand. 

And I think Covid had something to do with this, too, for a lot of people, Ryan. That they really saw how the system operates, and how many of the institutions that they might have thought would protect them at such a time made it clear, we would rather you drop dead than in any way undercut our financial bottom line.

So, now the issue is, how do we take this moment and turn it into an inflection moment? Because I don’t think that we are going to remain where we are. Things will not remain where they are. We’re either going down or we’re going up. We’re either in a downward spiral or we are going to come together and create the energy for an upward spiral. And I believe that young people are heading that movement. There’s an audacity and a rambunctiousness that we desperately need in the service of justice, and peace, and true prosperity, and democracy, in this country.

RG: And, as you think about it in those terms, how do you think of your own role? What is it that made you want to move from the activist to the politician? 

MW: Well, I think that because I come from the role of spirituality, and religious pursuit and interest, and a kind of non-denominational clergy of sorts. The non-denominational — or institutional clergy, for that matter — kind of hovers right above what’s going on. And you see it from a larger perspective, so you have a freedom. If you’re on a podium where people are expecting a spiritual or religious conversation, or bema, or pulpit, you are allowed to speak in terms of prophetic vision.

Look at Martin Luther King. You know, when I was younger, I read every biography of Martin Luther King that I could get my hands on, and I remember what they all said. They said, on the third Sunday of January in 1960, Martin Luther King went from a religious leader who spoke on political terms to a political leader, a social and political movement leader, who spoke from the space of spiritual understanding. One of my favorite quotes of Martin Luther King is: Any religion that purports to care about the soul of a man, but doesn’t address the economic conditions that oppress him, and the political conditions that strangle him, is a moribund religion awaiting burial.

And I might have gotten the words a little bit messed up there, but that’s the gist of it. And I have felt that same yearning in my heart. At a certain point, you know, there’s no religious or spiritual tradition anywhere that gives any of us a pass on addressing the suffering of other sentient beings. So, at a certain point, for me, it was simply a matter of coming out of the pulpit, or out of the library, or the book publishing, out of the bookstore, onto the streets, in a way. And I think that, at this point, electoral politics is an aspect of the streets. 

RG: So, in order to co-opt the support that Bernie Sanders had, the Democratic Party establishment co-opted a decent amount of his agenda. Not as much as some of his supporters would’ve liked, but enough to kind of bring people toward Biden in the November 2020 election. And so if, let’s say you were a political consultant who’s been hired by the DNC who has noticed that you’re doing extraordinarily well on TikTok and with young voters, and they’re nervous they’re going to be caught off guard in 2024 like they were by Bernie in 2016 and 2020.

They say, OK, what do we do to blunt her momentum? How do we co-opt, how do we steal enough of her agenda that we can bring her people in? What advice would you give to them if you were put in that situation? 

MW: [Laughs.] The whole thing is sort of ridiculous, isn’t it? I will tell you this: they have this woman on TikTok now that they’ve sent out, I call her “fake tattoo girl.” She’s a girl who obviously has fake tattoos, so it’s like, sent from central casting to look like a TikTok influencer. She didn’t even have a TikTok account previous to this. So, she’s out there, she’s the designated one to make it, like I’m this awful person that nobody should listen to. So that’s what they’re doing right now, is trying to — 

RG: That’s amazing. How’s fake TikTok girl doing? 

MW: Oh, she’s getting a lot of people, she’s getting a lot of people. Yeah, yeah. Of course, I want to go out there and talk to fake TikTok girl, but I’m told that I should not do that.

If people, if they really wanted to absorb some of the sort of moral components of my message, they would be looking to Reverend Barber. Just as the economics of Bernie Sanders have been so influential to me, Reverend Barber, and the lineage, the spiritual, religious, and political lineage of Reverend Barber has meant a lot to me as well. I think we have in our midst truly a great genius, a religious genius, and intellectual genius. He’s just amazing. But, you know, he’s a man. So. 

RG: And while I’ve got you here, I also wanted to ask you to respond to the scrutiny that you’ve gotten in the press as you’ve kind of risen a little bit, and particularly as — I think the article was in Politico talking about your performance as a boss. You had a bunch of former staff of yours saying that they didn’t like working for you. That you were too tough on staff, basically. 

Have you been hearing about that from people on the ground? And how do you respond to them, and how, how would you respond to those claims?

MW: Is that scrutiny, really, or is that just smear and hit? Which is not to say that none of it’s true. It’s not to say I haven’t gotten angry at the office or all of that. I mean, I have, at times, gotten angry at the office, as many people have, including political leaders. Certainly including the men who run Washington. That’s not to justify times that I’ve raised my voice or had a tantrum because work wasn’t done or whatever.

I think people with the eye for understanding what those things are about knows what a hit piece is. And, you know, I’ve been a bitch at the office at times. And, you know, if that’s the worst they have on me, I should be OK.

RG: And where does the campaign go from here? Are you seeing the support that you’ve generated among young people translate into small contributions in the same that Sanders did? The thing that really helped his campaign take off, as I’m sure you remember, I think he raised something like a million bucks in the first 24 hours of his campaign back in 2015, which then gives you the chance to hire up, and strategize, and travel in a real way. Are you seeing that happen yet?

MW: No, I haven’t seen anything like that. And one of the disappointments to me has been, how many people on the left, Ryan, have actually been out there saying, don’t send her money? It’s unbelievable to me. And, you know, we have raised enough that I’m able to have a staff that’s holding together what we’re doing right now. I wish we did have a million dollars in the bank, I wish I could staff up much more. Because, really that is what it’s about, you know? It really is. How many people do you have on your social media team, and your digital team, and on the ground in South Carolina, in Nevada, in Michigan, in New Hampshire, and so forth. It really is about staff, about the people who work for you.

But we have enough for now. I hope that more people will realize, in a campaign like mine, obviously not backed by corporate dollars, small donations are everything. I hope that more people, and particularly more young people, more people who believe in the message of this campaign and realize that or who feel for themselves that this is a message that should be out there. I hope they don’t underestimate how much a $3 donation can make a difference. It’s those $3, those $5, particularly people who are, like, recurring $5 a month.

It doesn’t have to be the 3300-dollar donors, or the thousand dollars, or the 500 or a hundred or, or even 50. You know, that $25, that $10, that $5 that $3. That’s what fuels a campaign like this, and I hope that more people will get into the habit of financial giving.

Obviously, the fact that this is about money is itself the problem. The undue influence of money on our political system is the cancer underlying all the other cancers. But what you have is all that dark money, all those multi millions given. Dark money, corporate money; you have a system of legalized bribery in this country. The only way to override that is through the power of the people, and that has got to include, at this time, the dollars of the people. And Bernie certainly demonstrated that this can be done. He raised tremendous amounts of money, and they were small-dollar donations.

So, no, I mean, between what the mainstream, you know, the invisibilization by the mainstream media, the hits by the DNC and the establishment, the fairy dust about me. I’m wacky. I’m mean, I can’t — They can’t make up their mind. Am I wacky fairy princess who just walks around like this? Or am I some awful mean person, that bitch, you know? So they seem to flip back and forth between the two.

But, the point is that those caricatures and those mischaracterizations do have an effect, you know? They throw dust into people’s eyes. But on TikTok and elsewhere there are more and more people who are saying, I’m interested in her policies, I’m interested in her policies, I’m interested in her analysis of this country and where we can go. If you’re going to tell me she’s got a spirituality that you don’t like, you know?

Ryan, I say to myself all the time, the president has stood up in church. He’s a Catholic, right? And he has stood up in church, and how many thousands of times has he affirmed his faith in the virgin birth? Now, nobody thinks the president doesn’t know where babies come from. So, when people speak in metaphysical terms, this doesn’t mean that they don’t understand how the world works.

And then, on the other hand, yeah, you know? I’m sorry if I’ve ever been in the office — which I think I have been, I clearly have been, actually — but that person described in articles like that? No. So, I’m not a perfect person, but I think that, you know, I’m not running for sainthood. I’m running for president.

RG: The point about the there being less fundraising, and people on the left, encouraging people not to give, is fascinating political development. And I wonder if some of it has to do with the way that the economy of the media has reoriented itself in the eight years or so since Bernie Sanders ran. Back in 2015 or 2016 there wasn’t the same type of creator economy, where you had so many YouTubers, podcasters, Substackers, and other kinds of independent journalists who were really relying on people giving them $5 a month so that they could maintain their voice in the public square, and maintain their independence from corporate media.

But, today, it’s almost as if the kind of media that ecosystem that has developed that supports left candidates, they’re now in competition with those candidates for that same money, those same small dollars. And I wonder if that’s — I’m just thinking through this now — but I wonder if that is going to play a role in the future about how this develops. Like, it could be, unfortunately, in the interests of people to tell their audience, don’t give money to these people. 

MW: Well, yeah. I love how all these anti-capitalists act like such capitalists. This is my brand, right? This is my brand, and I don’t want to, you know, I’m protecting my brand. It’s quite illuminating, it’s quite eye-opening. And I think, also, many people on the left when it comes to me seem to resent that I didn’t enter the room through the same door that they did. I didn’t kiss the rings that they think — You know, there’s one leftwing popular voice, and I heard him on a major platform the other day say Marianne Williamson doesn’t know anything about the working people, she doesn’t know anything about the working class.

This is a man whose entire career has been being a professor at Ivy League Colleges, which he attended. I spent six years on the pulpit of a church in Warren, Michigan. Maybe he would like to look up that church in Warren, Michigan, where I spoke every Sunday to 3,500 people. And, during the week, every day of the week, was working with those individuals and their families. And he has the audacity to get on a left-wing platform and talk about how I know nothing about the working people. How does he know what I’ve done with my life? How does he know who I’ve been with or what I’ve done?

But, yeah, it’s been pretty eye-opening to see how many people who I know are aligned with me as I am aligned with them on political issues who find me not up to their standards, even though they have no idea who I am.

But, whatever. You know, it’s funny to me. A lot of people who would think of themselves as not easily disinformed sure have been disinformed when it comes to me.

RG: Well, a fascinating new world that we’re in. And, Marianne, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. 

MW: I appreciate it, Ryan. Thank you.

[End credits.]

RG: That was Marianne Williamson, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept.

Our producer is Jose Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is the Intercept’s editor-in-chief, and I’m Ryan Grim, DC Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. See, I was just talking about how everybody needs your money now to support us. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review, it helps people find the show.

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Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

The post Marianne Williamson on Being a TikTok Phenom appeared first on The Intercept.

Last month, the United Auto Workers took part in a historic election. Shawn Fain was elected president of the union, who represents a reform group, looking to give more power to its workers. At the same time, DHL workers have been engaged in a unionizing push, at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport; the Teamsters, a union with a rollercoaster of a history, are trying to organize the DHL workers. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Brandi Dale and Steve Fightmaster, two DHL workers active in the unionizing efforts at the airport. Then, Grim is joined by labor reporter Alex Press, who breaks down developments with the United Auto Workers leadership and provides an update on Amazon’s unionization attempts.

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim, and today we’re taking a look at the radically changing fortunes of the American labor movement. 

Organically, without the intervention of organized labor, we’ve seen a surge in workplace union drives, everywhere from REI to Amazon to Starbucks. That led to the spectacle of outgoing Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz getting dragged before the Senate’s Labor Committee to explain why his company’s been breaking labor law to push back on the unionization wave. The committee happens to be chaired by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders: Over the past 18 months, Starbucks has waged the most aggressive and illegal union-busting campaign in the modern history of our country. That union-busting campaign has been led by Howard Schultz, the multi-billionaire founder and director of Starbucks who is with us this morning only under the threat of subpoena.

Howard Schultz: Yes, I have billions of dollars. I earned it. No one gave it to me. And I’ve shared it, constant —

BS: — [indistinct phrase]

HS: — ly with the people of Starbucks. And so anyone who keeps labeling this billionaire thing is —

BS: Mr. Schultz, I don’t mean to cut you off. We have time limits here and you have opportunity — I’m not cutting you off. 

HS: Your moniker, constantly, is unfair.

BS: Were you informed of or involved in the decision to withhold benefits from Starbucks workers in unionized stores, including higher pay and FAFSA sick-time accrual? 

HS: My understanding when we created the benefits in May, one month after I returned as CEO, my understanding was, under the law, we did not have the unilateral right to provide those benefits to employees who were interested in joining a union. 

BS: Am I hearing you say that you were involved in the decision to withhold benefits from Starbucks workers in unionized stores? Is that what I’m hearing?

HS: It was my understanding that we could not provide those benefits under the law.

RG: Inside labor unions, meanwhile, we’re seeing a process play out that is quite similar to what we’ve seen inside the Democratic Party. In the 1980s, unions, like Democrats, were in retreat, and union leaders played defense on one hand while getting cozy with corporations on the other. 

There were stirrings of opposition to this, just like there were protests against the same tendency inside the Democratic Party, but those workers, who pushed for union democracy and reform, represented a largely powerless rump through the 1990s and into the 2000s. 

But workers aren’t putting up with it anymore, and these movements inside labor unions have grown too large to ignore. 

After years in the wilderness, militant teamsters managed to elect Sean O’Brien to take over the union, which could lead to a titanic clash this summer with UPS. 

And last week, UAW workers responded to years of weakness and corruption at the top by electing Shawn Fain president. 

A member of the caucus that has been fighting for union democracy, he pledged to empower workers to seize the reins of power:

Shawn Fain: Our power as a union as the UAW is our unity. Our power is in our members. It’s not who we call our president. It’s not who’s up here on this stage. It’s in you all. So I want to ask all of you: When are we, all of us, going to rebuild our power as a working class? [Audience yells: “Right now.”] Damn right. Right now.

RG: Labor reporter Alex Press covered Shawn Fain’s victory and has written about it in her latest piece for Jacobin, and we’ll talk to her later in the show about the historic resurgence of the UAW and the Teamsters. 

But first, the newly revitalized Teamsters are now trying to organize roughly 1,000 new DHL workers at the CVG Airport situated in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. It’s a crucial hub in our global supply chain, and can also be a dangerous place to work. 

Two DHL workers involved in the union drive, Brandi Dale and Steven Fightmaster, join us now to talk about why they’ve decided to try to join the Teamsters.  

Brandi and Steve, thanks so much for joining me.

Brandi Dale: Thank you.

Steven Fightmaster: Yeah, absolutely, thank you for having us today.

RG: Brandi Dale, can you kind of walk us through what a day in the life of an intercontinental ramp agent is?

BD: Yes, absolutely. So when we arrive at work, our lead usually sends out a text message and lets us know what gates we will be setting up; setting up means we get the dollies, which is what we call the freight on, we put out the cones that go around the engine and around the plane. We put out the chalks. We get the stairs ready. Basically,  almost like if you were setting up for a restaurant, you would get all your food ready. 

So we get that done. And then we find out what our actual assignment is, what plane will be downloading or uploading, or we just need the check one to make sure that it can be sent to, um, the remote part of the airport to be maintenanced properly. Then we do our download or we do our upload. We usually have one to two of them before we go to lunch. We go to lunch, and then when we come back out onto the ramp — for my crew when we come back out, we do our upload, which is we put the freight on a plane to send it to its destination. Nine times out of ten, our destination is Narita, Japan. 

So we load our 747. We make sure that everything’s in place, everything’s secure. We get the plane all closed up. We check and make sure that everything’s right, everything’s where it’s supposed to be. We talk to maintenance and tell them we’re ready. They tell us when it’s time to take the chalks out; when the flight crew is ready. And then we take the plane, we send it out, and we go on our merry way, and the freight is on its way to Japan.

 RG: And Fightmaster, you’re a ramp lead. What’s the difference there? 

SF: The biggest difference, really, is just between the intercon ramp and the domestic ramp in general. When I get there, I’ve gotta get all the equipment ready for my guys for the night, right? And then I go and pick them up, ’cause I arrive just a little bit before they do. And then we’ll call what we call ramp control or the tower; they give us assignments. And so we’ll call up shortly after midnight and get our inbound assignments as they come. And depending on the night, that can be anywhere from two to five offloads in a night; usually take a quick break and then go and do our outbounds.

And so the biggest difference, um, really is just in the size of the aircraft we’re working on. While Brandi’s crews are working on 777s and 747s, a lot of times I’m on 767-300s. It’s just slightly smaller. 

The real difference is the automation between our aircraft. My crew’s much smaller. I have six guys on it, including myself, also including my tug driver. So realistically, when we’re working on an aircraft, there are four of my guys on the plane between the top side of the aircraft and the belly side. We have six people, but I’m on the ground, and my tug driver’s on the ground. 

So without the automation, it’s tough ‘cause a lot of times I might only have two guys pushing a 6,000-9,000-pound can, and depending on the gate we’re at, that can be almost entirely uphill.

RG: Geez. [Laughs.]

SF: So it’s definitely a physically demanding job. 

RG: Yikes. And so, Brandi, you’ve been there about five years.

BD: Yeah. 

RG: So, I’m curious: When did people start kicking around the idea of organizing into a union, and what were the things that got people talking and thinking in that direction? 

BD: I actually wasn’t around for the very beginning of the talks. I didn’t really know about it until they had already contacted the teamsters and they had already started to kind of organize stuff. 

But I would say, as far as my own experience, I noticed that there were a lot of things that could be better, a lot of things that could be changed; there was a lot of favoritism. And there was no real accountability for the management team to uphold the rules and regulations that they were supposed to be following. There was no real drive to be honest and fair about things. And I think that, as far as I’m concerned, at least, that’s one of the biggest reasons that I was interested when someone mentioned to me that we would be getting, possibly, the Teamsters Union in, I knew that there could be a lot of room for change. I mean, I feel like it’s a great company, but I feel like it could be a phenomenal company with just a few tweaks here and there, you know, and having the employees actually have a voice rather than being basically held verbally captive for the most part. 

RG: Yeah. And Brandi, can you talk a little bit about what the conditions are like and what the safety is like? I hear you got hurt on the job recently. What happened? And what are the types of situations that you’ve experienced a rise as you’re kind of moving all of this cargo around? 

BD: Yeah, sure. So at DHL, safety is paramount, according to their word of mouth. It’s written on all of the supervisor’s trucks: “Safety before block time.” And it puts on a great front. I mean, to the naked eye, it would definitely seem like safety is paramount there.

However, on a daily basis, we have so many things that are just completely unsafe and really unrealistic to be done the way that they want them and be able to be safe. I mean, you have K-loaders that are broken. I witnessed a K-loader the other day, which is, as Steven said, the unit that we use to bring the cargo into the plane, OK? So you’re 25-30 feet up in the air on these big planes and sometimes they just kind of have a mind of their own, they just do whatever they want. You won’t be touching a switch or anything, and the K loader will start to rise. And that’s very dangerous because if your freight isn’t in the right place and your K loader rises, it could drop a can that weighs 9,000 pounds right on somebody’s head. I mean, I’ve never heard of that happening, where it hits someone, but I’ve seen them come off a K loader I don’t know how many times. And just the other day, I was in the airplane and the K loader started rising by itself and it rose to such a pitch that the guy that was operating it could have been seriously hurt. 

So with my experience, we were doing a domestic plane, the kind of plane that Fightmaster works on. I believe it was a 767-300. Is that —?

SF: Probably. 

BD: Yeah. And there was a can in the back — cans are just these big, big containers that are made of like metal and almost plexiglass.That’s what we put the freight in. And they have different sizes. So you have an LAK as a small can and an AMX is a huge can, and they fit the contour of the plane. So these cans are on rollers and they have sections on the bottom that help them roll down the plane to make it easier to push them. But if they get, it’s a nightmare to get them unstuck, especially on domestic planes because you don’t have an automated switch helping you. 

So myself and another employee were on this plane and the last can in the plane was bowed. So I was standing on the can trying to level it out a little bit to get it to where it would catch on the rollers so we could pull it. And we got it to move, so I got off of it and I turned around, and I was trying to pull it behind me, and the can went up over the back of my shoe and caught me right on the Achilles tendon, and it took my shoe down and it wedged my foot between the can and the floor of the plane, it pressed my heel down while bending my toes up, so it’s nothing that my steel toes could have helped. 

And initially, I thought that it was like many injuries or incidents that happen at DHL — and it hurts for a little while and then doesn’t hurt anymore. So I didn’t immediately turn it in because I figured, you know, it’ll be OK. And my lead kind of looks down on anyone that gets hurt. He kind of — for lack of a better word — he kind of treats you like a sissy or like you’re being a wimp if you get hurt. 

RG: Just toughen up?

BD: Yeah. Basically, yes.

RG: Yeah. 

BD: Kind of tough it out, shake it off kind of thing. So I was trying to continue on and it started to really hurt. So I came down off of the plane and I was kind of taking it easy. 

We went to lunch, and when we came back from lunch, I was walking down the plane, and I just noticed that it just hurt really bad. So I went to the nurse. She treated it as a first-aid incident, not an injury, not an incident, just first aid. Basically, the equivalent is I came there for, you know, a bandaid or an ice pack or something. 

RG: Right.

BD: So then on Wednesday, I was driving a tug, which is what we use to haul the freight around. It’s a little, almost looks like a Tonka truck, and I noticed around lunchtime when I really actually started driving and getting in and out of my tug that my foot just was in an incredible amount of pain. So I went to the nurse’s station and I told her what was going on and she said: I have some people in front of you, so it’s gonna be a wait. 

As I’m sitting there, waiting for the nurse, I hear a lead— no, I’m sorry, let me take that back. He was a supervisor. I didn’t catch his name or his department, but I heard him tell someone on the phone that he was there for someone’s injury, and I heard him say the most appalling sentence. He said: How can I keep this from becoming an injury and just make it an incident? 

So DHL, when they classify injuries and incidents, the incident is something less serious. It just says: Hey, this happened. It’s not really a big deal, but somebody should know about it. 

RG: Mm-hmm. 

BD: When they have an injury, it’s more of: Hey, somebody got hurt. 

The man in question had somehow been hit by a tug. And I believe he said he had back surgery from it and he hadn’t healed up all the way, so they had him on light duty and he re-injured himself on light duty and the guy was trying to find out how to, basically, keep it less serious so it didn’t reflect badly on management.

I was just flabbergasted. I mean, here’s your employee, and this guy, from what I understand, is an incredibly hard worker. He was injured trying to do his job! And they want to try to sweep it under the rug. Like, that’s just insane to me. That’s basic human decency to not want someone to be swept under the rug. And he said it right out in the open! And he was totally unashamed, like it was the most normal thing ever, like he was asking someone if they wanted a piece of candy or something. 

And I felt very disrespected and I felt bad for the guy because the guy was standing right there! He heard his manager basically say: This guy doesn’t matter all that much. 

And it’s just stuff like that that I feel like we definitely need to be able to have our voices heard and have representation.

RG: How’s your heel?

BD: So my heel is doing OK. When I actually went back the second time, they transferred me from an incident to an injury because, when I went back the second time, they had noticed that I actually had sprained my ankle. So that’s when they moved it from just being basic first aid to actually being an injury; they opened a workman’s comp case and all of that. 

So at DHL, they do what’s called a job offer when you’re injured, and they give you something to do that’s light duty. So my job offer was, they call, it “stop bar audits” and a stop bar is, it’s out on the ramp, we can’t have signs because a metal sign going through a plane engine would be a terrible thing. It’s like on the ground at a stop sign, when you see the word “stop” painted, it’s that exact thing. There just isn’t a sign there with it. So when a vehicle comes to a stop bar, they are supposed to honk their horn. They’re supposed to come to a complete stop. You have to document whether they were speeding or not, whether they had on their PPE, their personal protective equipment, and whether they had any distractions like they were on their cell phone or they had a Bluetooth speaker or something of that sort.

So I got that job. And the first day I was on stop-bar duty, I was told by safety, which is the person that assigned me to it that I needed to ask my supervisor for a chair if I wanted a chair. Well, I’m on light duty; I mean, it’s for my foot, I can’t be standing for eight hours. So I asked my supervisor for a chair.

At first, he just completely ignored me; did not answer me at all. I then realized that it was his night off, but he actually had come in because he was mandated to work that night. So I asked him for a chair. He didn’t answer me. And then I asked another supervisor for a chair. He also didn’t answer me. 

And then I asked my lead: Hey, what can I do about this? How can I get a chair? 

He said: I don’t know anything about it. 

Now, I’ve been on the same crew for the whole five years I’ve been there, and I usually have a very good rapport with my lead. We’ve gotten along very well. I’ve worked overtime. We’ve talked about our lives. He’s told me about things that he’s had. And I feel like since I got hurt, I feel like the whole dynamic has changed. I feel forgotten and disrespected. I mean, my crew got food catered in for a 90-day safety thing — [laughs] — ironically. I was not included in that. They have meetings at the beginning of the shift called a pre-shift; I have not been at a pre-shift since I was hurt. My lead will walk right past me and not talk to me. My supervisor, I have messages in my phone — I never delete any of my messages and I’m thankful for that — I have messages in my phone where I’ve sent him five, six, seven, eight texts that have all gone silent. No response; no anything. 

I’m an open supporter of the Teamsters Union and I just feel like since I started wearing my Teamsters vest and since I have been injured, I just feel like I’m a nobody. I feel like I’m invisible half the time. And it has totally jaded my whole opinion of working there. I mean before, I mean I’ve made like $5,000 in referral bonuses because I love working there and I tell everybody I meet like: Oh, you need a job? Come to DHL. It’s a great place to work. But now I just feel like I’ve been so disrespected that I don’t know that I want to tell people that anymore. I feel like if they’re gonna treat me like that after five years — five years doesn’t sound that long, but on the ramp, it might as well be 20. 

RG: Mm-hmm. 

BD: You talk to people, and people in lead positions say: I’ve been here for two years, I’ve been here for a year and a half, I’ve been here for three years.

I’ve been there for five years! There should be no reason — they know my work ethic. They know my attitude towards my job. And I just feel like all of that has changed and I don’t feel like a simple article of clothing showing support for something they say that we should be able to have should change that whole dynamic.

RG: And Fightmaster, you’ve also been kind of publicly supportive of the union. What’s been the response from managers and supervisors to that?

SF: It’s been a lot of harassment and intimidation. Not always directly. 

I mean personally, I’ve been followed off of the property by corporate security and security contractors. I’ve been followed to my place of residence. I’ve been followed to union meetings. They’re stepping up and increased security outside so that it’s harder for us to talk to our coworkers in our parking lots. From my understanding, they just hired a bunch — I believe the number was 20 new security guards — to help patrol out there. 

RG: And so what’s the organizing like? How much help are you getting from Teamsters, folks from the outside, and how much of it is being done kind of organically by workers who are already inside the airport?

SF: Not to downplay what anybody in this is doing, ‘cause it’s a team effort, right? But just in any organizing situation, the vast majority has to come organically from the workers. Otherwise, it’s never gonna be successful, right? 

So, I mean, we have an organizing committee. There are several of us that are talking and trying to get things together. And we’re working with workers inside every night. And while we’re inside in our crew vans, on breaks, we’re talking to folks. We’re in the parking lots trying to talk to our coworkers before and after our shifts.

RG: Yeah. What are the counterarguments that you hear from people? Like when you approach them and say: We need to organize — you don’t have a date yet, but it does look like there’s gonna be an election at some point. What do people say, in general, when you’re suggesting that you unionize?

SF: There’s a ton of fear out there still. There have been failed organizing campaigns at DHL in the past — never with the Teamsters Union, to my understanding. And some of the people that have been there a long time are afraid for that reason, right? Because it failed in the past. 

And I think really that’s the biggest obstacle we have right now is just the fear that’s been created and persists because of the atmosphere there that the company’s created — that they can put out these things where they say they respect our right to organize, they can talk all these great things, but in reality, I mean, when you hear management referring to the employees as inmates — 

RG: Yeah. 

SF: — when you see the increased security, when you see them patrolling and coming up to myself and my coworkers as we’re talking to other people in the parking lot, their words and their actions don’t align.

RG: Just so people know what you’re talking about, there was a report in The Guardian that a manager quit his job in management because he was angry that his fellow supervisors were referring to workers at the airport as inmates and themselves as wardens who needed to get them under control and squash this union drive. Had you heard that from anybody else before it was reported in The Guardian? I would assume that the supervisors are not saying that around the workers, that that’s the kind of thing that they’re just saying kinda in back rooms. 

SF: Yeah. I mean, you would think that that would only happen in back rooms. Right? The reality is that I have heard things like that and including that itself nearly since I started. 

RG: How so? How would that come out? 

SF: As a lead, part of the equipment that I have to go and grab is in the office where a lot of the managers are, and supervisors are, and they talk openly. Just not really — there’s such a level of disrespect towards us that they don’t care to hide it. They don’t care to try and openly say things like that behind our backs. I mean, I’d been there maybe two months by the time I had heard a supervisor or a manager refer to hourly employees as inmates or whatever other disparaging names that they think of to call us.

And then they’ll turn around and say, well, we’re a family and we have this great culture here. And then they’ll continue to just blatantly disrespect us. And it’s really unfortunate that it takes us coming, coming together and trying to form a union, trying to become Teamsters, to get the respect and dignity that every man and woman in this country deserves in the workplace.

RG: So Brandi, he mentioned the fear of losing, because, you know, you come for the king and you miss, you’re in trouble. What about some of the other kinds of propaganda that you often hear from management that, oh, things will be worse actually if you get a union? The dues and you’re not gonna have the same kind of freedoms in the workplace … do you ever hear that from other workers or what types of responses have you been getting from people?

BD: It’s almost like you work at DUL. You’re so accurate with what you’re saying. 

RG: [Laughs.]

BD: My personal experience, even just to touch back on what Steven said, my own lead back in, I think it was December, we had just started wearing teamster vests out on the ramp and management had decided that it was not part of the dress code. However, I’ve literally never in my five years seen the dress code. So, my supervisor came to me and told me I wasn’t allowed to wear my vest, and my lead had just finished a meeting in which he told us basically — to summarize what he said and not make a long story out of it — he said that unions before, when they had come in, had failed and everyone that had signed a card or showed that they were openly supportive of the union was terminated. He put that fear into not only myself but my entire crew. 

So there are roughly 10 people on my crew. And out of those 10, me and my nephew also work there. We are supporters, we’re open supporters, we wear our vests, we wear our Teamsters bracelet. We were the only people that were even daring, shall I say, to show support because everyone else was afraid that, they would be terminated or that they would be ostracized or treated differently. And some of the other things that I’ve heard is people are afraid that, oh, if we get the union, they’re going to take away the lead positions and they’re going to take away overtime and they’re going to make it to where people that don’t work and don’t do their jobs basically are treated better than the people that are working and doing their jobs — and it’s just a lot of propaganda, honestly. I mean, it’s just management thinking of anything they can say to kind of make the employees, again, to come back to it and circle around [it], scared; scared they’ll lose their rights, scared that they’ll have a harder time at work.

And it comes down at the end of the day, too, DHL still has product to get out. They still have jobs to be done. The union isn’t some outside force that comes in. The union is us. And if you’re not going to vote to have your rights taken away or your wages decreased, or your vacation time decreased, they can’t do that. They don’t just say: This is what happens! 

It’s not a dictatorship. 

RG: So if you think about things on a national, kind of 30,000-foot level, you’ll hear economists and politicians talking about the way that kind of full employment — once they’ve pushed unemployment down below 4 percent, they start calling that full unemployment. Which kind of means that if somebody is not a felon and is remotely qualified for a job, they can find a job. There are more jobs than there are job seekers now. There are millions of people who, because of criminal justice laws, et cetera, are locked out of that workforce. But within the people who are trying to participate in the workforce, they’ll say: Look, there’s more jobs than there are people looking for jobs, which is way different than say10 years ago when you had five or six people competing for every job opening. If you’ve got a lot of people competing for reopening, then it becomes much harder to talk people into joining a union. 

So I’m curious if you’re seeing the effect of full employment — and Brandi, I’m curious for your take, too, but let’s start with you Fightmaster — like if you’re seeing the effect of full employment, that it kind of puts some steel in the spine of workers, they’re saying like: You know what? Let’s go for it because they need us here. There’s a labor shortage. They can’t just easily push us out and replace us. 

Or is there so much precarity just generally in life and in the workforce that isn’t really a factor at this point? 

SF: I think it goes kind of both ways, and it depends on who you’re talking to. For me, I definitely kind of come from more of that line of thinking. They absolutely do need us to do their job. We handle a vast majority of the freight that comes through the Americas at the CVG hub. We’re extremely important to DHL’s global business model. And they’re making record profits just like almost every other Fortune 500 company in the world. They absolutely need us.

That being said, I mean, the way we’re treated out there we’re just numbers to the company, and I definitely think that’s felt. I mean, things that aren’t necessarily your fault or things that you can’t necessarily control, you can be punished for. If you get injured and they think you didn’t do something properly. 

I mean, you’re getting written up, you’re getting disciplined for getting hurt at work. So there’s definitely a fine line of we definitely realize that we have that power and that kind of momentum just generally in the country, I think is in our favor. 

But at the same time, just the daily environment we work in intends to push back on that because they’re completely fine to run us ragged, run us short-staffed, and give us too much to do that can be done safely with the amount of people that we have.

RG: Brandi, what do you think? Is the national labor shortage, the low unemployment rate, empowering folks? Do you feel a stronger sense of power in the workplace than you did, say, 5, 10 years ago?

BD: I agree a lot with what Fightmaster said. I feel like, at DHL, there is a high turnover rate anyway. I feel like there shouldn’t be because the job we do is a good job. It’s a needed job. When the pandemic hit, I mean, we were absolutely essential to getting supplies to people, to shipping face masks, and gloves, and Covid tests and everything like that. I mean, I don’t wanna sound like I’m trying to make us heroes or anything, but —

RG: Well, that’s what everybody was saying then. 

BD: Yeah. I mean, if DHL wasn’t running; if we weren’t there putting in the hours; doing the work, running short-staffed with entire crews off for Covid or if we weren’t doing that, the country wouldn’t have been able to function. 

And I feel like for us having such important roles, such necessary roles, we’re just treated with such disregard — they basically wanna pretend that, like Fightmaster said, we’re just numbers. You know? 

I mean, they give us all an employee number and sometimes I almost feel like their analogy about the prison thing, I almost feel like it is accurate in their eyes because you know, on documents you write your name, but you also write your number. And it just makes me feel like that is all we are, is a number, and 1054264 can be replaced by 1054265 — that we’re all replaceable, and we’re not that important. 

I feel like once we have our voice, once we can say what we need to say without worrying about being bullied or being fearful, I feel like we’ll be able to stand up and make the changes that we need to make people feel respected, to make people feel like they’re not just a number, that they are part of a team and part of a — honestly, we’re around these people so much, they’re like our family — so part of a family. 

RG: There’s also an Amazon warehouse nearby that’s going through — 

BD: Directly across the street. 

RG: — an organizing drive. Yeah. Is there any interplay between the people organizing that and you guys? Are you kind of trading tips and tricks or anything?

SF: I’ve got a couple of friends that work over there that I talk to from time to time just kind of about, you know, what’s going on on their side and what’s going on on our side. 

BD: Hmm!

SF: I think the biggest difference is from my understanding, they’re not going with the Teamsters Union for whatever reason.

RG: They’re Amazon Labor Union, is that right? The crew that organized the Staten Island one. Is that right? 

SF: Yeah. And so I wish nothing but the best of luck to those folks over there. We need more organized labor in this country, especially when it comes to these supercorporations. We handle a lot of Amazon freight at DHL and a lot of their international shipments we will carry for ’em. I think it’s hugely important that the men and women across the street also get a contract.

BD: That’s very true.

RG: And so, how optimistic do you guys feel about the coming election? 

BD: I feel like we’re definitely on track with where we should be. I feel like it’s gonna be great. I feel like if people stop being afraid and stop feeling that they’re alone and recognize the unity and the numbers, I feel like people are gonna come out in droves when they finally feel like they’re actually free from concern about being fired. I feel like they’ll see the numbers and see that there is a lot of support and they won’t be afraid to come out. They won’t be afraid of being singled out as a single unit, when we all stand as a united front.

SF: I’m very optimistic. I wish we had a date at a time already. 

BD: Yes. 

SF: But I mean, we filed for this election on September 13 of last year. They’ve done everything they can up to this point to drag it out as long as possible. So I’m not surprised we still don’t have an election date. But we’ll get there and before long, before anyone knows it, we’ll be at the bargaining table. 

BD: It’s been a long wait, but it’s definitely gonna be worth it for the prize at the end of the race. 

RG: Well, Brandi, Fightmaster, best of luck to you when the election’s called. We will continue to follow this and thanks so much for joining me.  

BD: Excellent. Thank you for having us. And, I’d just like to also say we don’t need luck. You don’t need luck when you’re good and it’s the right to. 

RG: [Laughs.] There you go. 

SF: Yeah. Thank you all very much for having us. We definitely appreciate the platform and the time.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: That was Brandi Dale and Steven Fightmaster. 

So we searched through NLRB filings and found 16 open complaints against DHL in Kentucky, including three retaliatory dismissal complaints filed by the union. We invited DHL to appear on the podcast, but the company declined, instead sending a lengthy statement, which I’ll include at the end of the show. 

But next, we’re joined by Alex Press, a labor reporter for Jacobin. Alex, welcome to Deconstructed. 

Alex Press: Thanks for having me, Ryan.

RG: And so you have this great new piece out in Jacobin on the UAW reform movement. And I wanted to start by reading a little piece of it to you and ask you to kind of unpack where this tension that you witnessed is coming from. You might know the part I’m talking about, but I’ll just read it here — 

AP: Yes. 

RG: You say: “Not everyone was happy about the unprecedentedly democratic nature of the convention. Late one evening, I was speaking with a well-known reformer. We had been interrupted repeatedly by fellow delegates who wanted to shake his hand, some of whom were supporters of the old guard but wanted to show their respect. But one man approached us and quickly became belligerent. When the reformer calmly responded, saying, ‘OK, thank you, brother,’ the man shouted, ‘I’m not your brother. Don’t ever call me your brother.’ He made his opinions about the reform caucus clear: ‘Fuck you and fuck that UAWD shit and go to hell.’

So, what is the UAWD? And why does this guy want it to go to hell?

AP: [Laughs.] Great questions. So the UAWD stands for Unite All Workers for Democracy. It’s an internal union caucus that was formed in 2019. 

Now, the context is in the UAW, for about seven years, there has been one caucus, it’s called the Administration Caucus. It was formed by the UAW’s most famous president Walter Reuther. And it has ruled the union with an iron fist, basically. People call it a one-party rule, right? There have never been real challenges to that. 

And part of how that was maintained was there weren’t direct elections for leadership. It was a system where delegates elected leadership, and that system, for reasons that probably will be a little too boring to get into here, was very rife with favoritism and kind of was rigged in certain ways that allowed this caucus to always win every leadership election. 

Now in 2019, UAWD formed and pushed for something that a few people — they weren’t the ones to come up with this idea, of course — but it was for direct elections for higher leadership. So that was their goal, was direct elections, more democracy. And because of — they’ll go into it as they thought they could win it through constitutional measures, they’ll tell you, but then Covid hit, and that sort of hurt their momentum.

But then a federal monitor who had been appointed to oversee reforms within the UAW, thanks to an incredible corruption scandal that has been ongoing, and has landed two of the union’s former presidents in jail, that monitor directed the union to have a referendum about one member, one vote direct elections. 

That passed. And so the result was this new president that had been sworn in one day before the convention I was writing about, the UAWD ran to challenge for seven seats, and they won all of them — all of which is a lot of important context to say that that meeting in a convention lobby in which I’m speaking to a reformer, and a guy comes up and gets extremely belligerent, it’s because, he sees which way the wind is blowing within his union. And a lot of these guys who were at that convention and who supported the old guard, right, the administration caucus, they’d spent decades really building those relationships, showing their loyalty, in hopes that they’d get more resources or maybe a union staff job. And so there’s a real reason for them to be extremely upset, as is shown in that paragraph in which the guy almost comes to a fistfight with my interview subject.

RG: Mhmm. 

And you also have a cool moment in the piece where there are some UAW union members who are working on a pension amendment, basically, that they’re going to put forward, a pension motion. 

And a Harvard graduate comes up and kind of helps them with the wording and, and she says, like upfront, like, hey, I’m probably not going to need this pension, which is a nice acknowledgment of the career track that she’s probably going to have, but let me help you out anyway. And it’s a reminder that the UAW has become this kind of diverse union that pulls in different workforces. And it also — I had kind of forgotten, I almost became a UAW member back in the early 2000s when I was in graduate school, there was a union drive going on at the University of Maryland, where I was, and I was the shop steward for our drive in our public policy department. I was a shop steward there, and we had over 90 percent cards signed because people there are like Union? More power, better hours, better wages, sounds good to me!

Elsewhere, when I would try to organize the philosophy department or history or whatever, it would just be a complete nightmare, because they wanted to argue with you constantly about the nature of a union. 

You get into the sciences, like engineering and math, you just explain to them what the situation is like, and they’re like: OK, sounds good. I’ll sign the card. 

And we actually had a UAW staffer, we had an office, and one person that they had sent down to help us. We ended up never succeeding in actually pulling it off. It’s incredibly difficult. It was illegal in the state of Maryland to even do it. So we had to lobby the legislature and on and on. I really did learn how insane it is to try to organize this union.

But it also reminded me that the history of the UAW has been this complex and this overlapping in different social movements basically since the beginning, and you touch a little bit in your piece about their role in the civil rights movement, and the role even in supporting Students for a Democratic Society. Can you talk a little bit about how that history at least made it so that this type of reform movement had something that it could grab onto?

AP: Yeah, definitely. And I’ll just say that I also was part of the early days of a UAW grad union at Northeastern University. 

RG: How’d that go? 

AP: [Laughs.] We have still not won official recognition. I say we — I left many years ago, which is why it feels like ancient history. But, likewise, was an incredibly sort of formative experience for me. I mean, it’s largely how I wound up becoming a labor reporter. I’d long been on the left, but I’d never really been in a union. Seeing that process and how tedious it is and how much more interesting it is to speak to new people and win them over versus kind of preaching to the choir, which is, you know, what’s required when you’re union organizing, you have to just talk to the other people that work for the same person, many of whom are not going to agree with you, that basically won me to a lifelong commitment to the labor movement. 

So just to say that I think that’s a common story for a lot of people who may no longer be in higher ed, that it was their grad union that kind of formed this new understanding people have about labor unions in the United States. 

Anyway, yes. What you said is correct. The UAW, I brought that up, because people do think it’s sort of odd bedfellows for grad students and auto workers to share a union. Right? And they’re not wrong that there are some tensions involved. I mean, there were comical moments throughout the convention around miscommunication and things.

But at the same time, as you said, it’s not new for the UAW to welcome young people in who might not be sort of the traditional image of an auto worker. 

As I mentioned in the piece, the founding statement for Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, their Port Huron statement, Port Huron was like a UAW summer camp, right? A lot of the leaders of that organization were the children of UAW members and UAW officials. That’s why they ended up there. And likewise, ditto during the March on Washington. Walter Reuther spoke at that; I believe he was the only white guy who spoke during that day. He and Martin Luther King —

RG: And they were major financiers of it, too.

AP: Yes. Yes. Martin Luther King and he were friends, and they spent quite a bit of money on all kinds of aspects, from the sound system to signs, and all kinds of other things. They footed the bill, basically. And the leadership of the UAW back then, not that they all agreed all the time on this, but they felt that it was distinctly important because they felt that the sort of future of the labor movement and of the working class in the United States was intimately bound up with the future of the civil rights movement and Black workers’ rights in particular. 

And that was a forward-thinking analysis. It’s something I agree with, right? If workers are able to be divided around race in particular, that’s going to weaken every worker’s working conditions, it’s going to destroy unions; the history here is very clear on that in the United States. And so the UAW over time has sort of lost those roots. And the interesting thing about this growing number of grad student members is that those are the kinds of people who would sort of be taking, for a variety of reasons, a leading role in the left-wing movements of the current moment. And so by bringing them into the union, it sort of starts rebuilding that question of: What would it look like to take a more political role that the UAW once held?

RG: How influential are the grad students inside UAW? Would the reform movement have been able to prevail without them?

AP: Yeah, I mean, so this is a fraught question. Actually, the numbers are really interesting here. They had an incredibly low turnout for the leadership election that saw Shawn Fain, who we haven’t discussed yet, win the presidency. And it was a very close election. He won after a sort of runoff, revote. He won by something like I think the number now, there are a couple of ballots still contested, but it’s less than 500 votes, right? Which is very convenient, because of course, then we can all say: Well, it was this local that did it, it was those grad students, it was this auto plant. 

RG: [Laughs.] Right. Yeah. 

AP: But the truth is that, of course, the grad student members did play a role. But interestingly, in California, which is home to one of the biggest higher ed locals for the UAW, that was in an administration caucus stronghold. And so your vote was very low there, their leadership tried to keep Shawn Fain and the reformers’ momentum small. And so it’s actually hard to say that all of the grad students, you know, are like the progressives. 

But at the same time, I spoke to a fair number of manufacturing workers, and autoworkers, who are very much reformers. And they said that the grad students did help them, right? I mean, in the way that that anecdote points to, where that Harvard grad student is speaking with an auto worker, about a resolution they’re working on to pass around restoring pensions for auto workers. 

And the grad student, it’s very concrete, the grad student knew what page to cite, because as she says, in the piece, she “does her homework,” which was a very funny turn of phrase for a grad student to say. And so that sort of thing. It’s less that they’re like directing in some sort of nefarious or organized way, a different UAW, and it’s more like they just have certain organizational skills that I think at least a lot of reformers I spoke to were very impressed by. 

There is one funny anecdote I’ll say that’s not in the piece, which is that another reporter had been trying to speak to the administration caucus supporters, and had been failing to do so. You’ll notice in my piece, there are basically no interviews with them, they did not want to speak to the media at all, but certainly not to me, a Jacobin magazine writer. 

RG: [Laughs.] 

AP: So this other reporter had also failed to get quotes. And she happened to run into a few of the people that she had been trying to speak to, at the gate, at the airport on her way out of town out of Detroit. And so she did start chatting with them. I have no idea whether those quotes made it into her piece. But the administration caucus people still hated the UAWD, they had things to say about that. But they sort of, by the end of the conversation, grudgingly admitted something like: We do love those higher ed kids. Like they were sort of impressed by the way they could organize, even if they didn’t like what they were organizing for. 

And so I think that sort of sums up the dynamic that people are kind of working through right now within the union.

RG: Yeah, I liked the one quote that you had in here, where you got the worker name Vicente who says: “‘As an auto worker in manufacturing, when I found out that we have grad students, I was shocked […] then I also thought, why have we never talked to these dudes? You hear the words “Harvard graduate,” and it’s like, “Oh my God, these are the most highly educated people in the world. We should be tapping into that resource.” Then you meet them and they have a wealth of knowledge, and they’ve been able to help us to try to organize ourselves.’” 

It all kinds of subverts the kind of flat understanding that we kind of impute to the relationships between working people, Ivy League grad students, like it’s more complicated and mixed in with some type of appreciation for maybe what can we get out of this? How can we get an advantage by linking up with these folks?

AP: I mean, I’ll just say in closing here on this topic, that I think the general dynamic that that’s at play right now in the UA, with all of these reformers ascendant, and with these changes afoot in the union, it’s really, not to get to sort of dogmatic Marxist, use some old language here, it’s really a process of class formation going on right now. The question is — the watchword of the entire convention was unity, and that wasn’t just about unity between the caucuses, right? Unity between the old guard and the new guard so that they’re not a divided union. But a lot of these people really want unity as the working class. And that might sound silly or neat, but that’s really the stakes of what they’re doing right now. 

And when you see quotes, like from that guy, Dan Vicente, who was elected to lead, he’s now the Region 9 director for the UAW, which puts him on the International Executive Board. He’s one of the reformers and he was elected straight from the shop floor of a manufacturing plant in western Pennsylvania. And so I thought his perspective on this was really interesting. But those workers that have you know, been taking the lead in the UAW now, they really want to know how do we unite workers across divides — whether that’s race, sector, age, anything — to build power that has been completely clawed away, or even given up, in the sake of the UAW, by corrupt leadership. 

And so quotes like that are not just about this particular issue, but really the vision that is being fought for right now.

RG: You also touch on another kind of contradiction that is working its way out too. And there’s a good quote from a worker in here that says: “‘I know that I have a vested interest in keeping gasoline engines around as long as possible because there are a lot of jobs involved,’” — which touches on the old climate versus labor argument. But what’s underneath that is the ease with which workers can kind of build electric vehicles is so much greater than the complex process required for a combustion engine. And that’s at the front end, but also then when it comes to mechanics, repairing them, as well. You look at an EV, it’s like four wheels and a battery, basically. 

AP: Yeah. Yeah. 

RG: Whereas you pop the hood on your old car, you stare at that thing and you’re like,: There’s no way I could ever figure anything out that’s going on in here. 

AP: Absolutely. 

RG: And so how high a priority is kind of the EV space for this new, militant UAW?

AP: I think it’s a really big priority. It came up a lot. And you know, it’s one of the things [on] Sean’s slate. I haven’t gone into much about Sean. But to be clear, Sean is a member of the UAWD. And he really acts like one; he does not act like they’re there to help him. He really, at one point in the convention, said: I’m so proud to be a member of this caucus — and teared up, right? So this guy is a serious reformer. He’s a member of that group. 

And one of their priorities during the election and now as well is about finding a way to not only organize the EV plants that are going to be where job growth is coming in coming years as that transition happens, but where they’re organized as well, also putting them in the Big Three master agreement that the UAW has that a lot of people are going to be familiar with. The Big Three auto agreement used to be the sort of historic signal in the United States of: This is what manufacturing workers are going to be able to kind of base their demands around, whatever the Detroit auto workers can win at the bargaining table. That contract still exists, though, of course, it is less of a pacesetter than it used to be. And yet, the Big Three automakers have managed to basically find ways to carve out their EV plants and EV jobs from coming under that master agreement. 

It’s very complicated. And I’ll be honest, I’m not an expert on how this is working. But part of it is that battery plants and things are joint ventures. And so a Ford will be like: Well, it’s not really our plant. It’s this other thing. And the UAW’s prior leadership did not fight hard to sort of push back against that. 

So that’s going to be a big priority. And it was something that all kinds of people brought up to me, from Shawn Fain down to the rank and file. That guy you quoted who works in a Jeep Wrangler plan, it’s something that’s on everyone’s mind. And again, it does sort of bring up these broader questions about if the UAW can play a political role. If we’re talking about EV plants, and the wrench turners like that guy, we also start thinking about what is the Green New Deal. Where does the UAW sort of play a role in broader environmental questions?

RG: And that contract, that four-year contract is up in September, and so we’re probably going to see a pretty significant fight around that, particularly with this newly energized UAW. 

But I want to talk about the Teamsters as well because they’ve been going through a similar process. They’ve got this major UPS contract coming up this summer that could end up dominating the news, at some point, and they have their own reform caucus that you that you touch on in the story, TDU, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, that has been kind of pushing against the Teamsters’ leadership for years, and ended up endorsing a candidate, Sean O’Brien, who won. Now, he’s not a member of the TDU but they had allied. So who is Sean O’Brien, and how does differ from Shawn Fain? By the way, Shawn Fain, what an amazing name, by the way.

AP: It’s incredible. 

RG: [Laughs.]

AP: I mean, I keep joking that I’m so glad I spent seven years in Boston because it’s really prepared me for the fact that the two most exciting developments are being driven by middle-aged Irish American guys winning the leadership of the big manufacturing and blue-collar unions. Yeah, so Shawn Fain, from the UAW, he had been first a local leader in Kokomo, Indiana, and then was moved on to the union staff, but he was not really like a — he was not super powerful, right? He was just kind of part of the middle layer, as I’ve been calling it, of leadership in the UAW. 

Sean O’Brien, by contrast, very much comes out of what a lot of people who don’t follow labor are still familiar with, which is Jimmy Hoffa’s regime. Hoffa’s son was the leader of the Union for a long time. And Sean O’Brien was a very loyal lieutenant of Hoffa, Jr’s. He comes out of local 25 in Boston. So that’s his home base. But he had moved up to basically — he was supposed to be the lead negotiator for the UPS contract nationally last time it was negotiated. And that is where he started to break with that regime, right? 

His ascension is a bit like a palace coup in certain ways because he so was an insider. And the reason he broke with his former boss is that the UPS contract that Hoffa negotiated last time was very, very bad. It introduced new tiers into the contract, which are basically the death sentence for a union. It means different pay for equal work breeds resentment, all kinds of problems. And it has a variety of other issues as well. 

Now the membership, which is the UPS contract, is the largest union contract in the private sector in the United States — now it covers almost 350,000 workers. So this is a huge number of people. If every UPS driver, as well as everyone who works inside UPS buildings, deals with the packages, and sorting, and so on. So the membership voted that contract down, which took an incredible amount of organizing, including by TDU, the group you mentioned, the Teamsters reform caucus. 

But the result was not that they got to go back to the table and negotiate a better contract. It was: Hoffa invoked a very arcane sort of measure from the Teamsters’ constitution to force the workers to accept the contract. So he overrode democracy. And as I say, or demonstrate, or try to in that piece, it really was a sense of betrayal. A lot of UPS workers and a lot of Teamsters knew at that point — they already knew that Hoffa was not a perfect union leader. They knew he added problems, he was way too close with the bosses, but to have him fully override their voice here and force a bad contract down their throat, basically was the end for Hoffa. So Sean O’Brien is one of the people who sort of takes the lead on denouncing all of the things that are going on here with this contract, he breaks from his former ally. And then he announces, he’s running for leadership, and he wins. And so that is where we are now is we are going into that new UPS contract negotiation and it’s what Sean O’Brien ran on that he would undo the tears, that it would be the best contract ever negotiated, and it holds this incredible kind of gravity within the union, because it’s exactly why they got Hoffa out and Hoffa’s successors out. And so there’s a lot riding on this — not just in the broader economic sense for the country, because it’s such a gigantic contract, but also for the internal politics of that union.

And my sense is that Sean O’Brien’s base of power really is coming from the reform caucus, because correct me if I’m remembering this wrong — so he was tasked with basically leading the UPS negotiations, and Hoffa ordered him not to put these TDU guys onto the bargaining team that had criticized Hoffa in the past. And O’Brien did it anyway, and said: No, I want to involve the TDU in this so that we’ve got rank and file support. And either he got booted off the bargaining team as result or quit in protest. But then, like, that was the thing that triggered it. And then he ends up speaking at the TDU convention, and really linking up with them, which would mean that even though he’s a Hoffa stooge from way back in the day, his actual power today derives from those rank-and-file workers. Is that a fair assessment of what the politics of it are now?

AP: Yeah, I would say so. 

I mean, again, Sean O’Brien is a little different than Shawn Fain, in that — it’s so funny that these guys have these similar names. 

RG: [Laughs.] 

AP: So Sean O’Brien, but you’re right, that it’s largely his power, as far as carrying out a successful strike, would come from these rank-and-file militants, not all of whom are in TDU, for reasons that are a little too complicated to get into, but certainly a lot are. 

But also, Sean, at least in winning the election, part of it was that he managed to — I said palace coup because he kind of managed to split off certain of the old guard leadership, who saw again which way the wind was blowing, or had had enough. They weren’t ou- leading in their criticisms about the problems in the union. But they did have frustrations and finally saw a chance to break off and actually win some reform. So he still has some support from those guys, too, which makes the dynamic a little more complicated than, say, the UAW dynamic. 

But it’s certainly the case that, as I mentioned in the piece, he knows that TDU and him needed each other and they still need each other in the lead-up to the negotiations, which are starting in about a week and a half, I think, for the UPS contract. It expires at the very end of July, to give people a timeline. And there are definitely TDU people who are helping with planning the negotiations, really the rank-and-file more generally. So Sean pledged that there would be rank-and-file members on the negotiating committee, which is not what used to happen. And so his power is gonna come from whether you can really win back his rank-and-file members to be engaged in the process, not only because that’s the right thing to do, and it’s democratic, but because the pull off a strike at UPS is going to take — that’s what the piece is about — it takes an incredible amount of kind of engagement and preparation that cannot be done — there’s no shortcut from the top down. UPS is spread out across the country. The locals are incredibly uneven. This is not a traditional workplace, you got to get your UPS drivers in Iowa and Idaho to be just as able to strike as the ones in New York City or Chicago. And so that process really needs to be kind of bottom-up if you’re going to pull off a strike.

RG: In the meantime, two workers for DHL in basically the Cincinnati airport on the border of Kentucky and Ohio, there’s a Teamster drive going there. There’s some dispute about the size of the bargaining unit, could be anywhere between 900 and 1,200 workers and the Teamsters already represent a decent number of DHL hubs and workers around the country. And just across the parking lot from there is a gigantic Amazon Fulfillment Center, as they call them, which is a target of the Amazon labor union, which organized the Staten Island warehouse to so much national fanfare about a year ago. 

So can you explain to folks a little bit about how you wind up with, say, Teamsters organizing one hub, ALU kind of organizing another one, UAW coming in and organizing something else? 

AP: [Laughs.]

RG: And also, can you give us an update on the Staten Island organizing drive that we heard about a year ago?

AP: Yeah, a lot of questions! 

Yes. I mean, generally, in the United States, this question of turf is very confusing to people who are kind of new to the labor movement. It’s correct that the Teamsters represent 6,000 DHL workers across the country. And so they’re trying to sort of aggressively add to that. And it seems like with very good reason. I mean, I was reading about the working conditions these workers are speaking of — and, I mean, these are brutal jobs, right?

RG: Mhmm.

AP: Grueling, incredible, awful temperatures, whether hot or cold — all kinds of reasons to want to organize. And it happens that, with Amazon, part of the reason that the ALU came into existence is that there was a lot of — I had been writing about Amazon for many years. My hobby horse was that, to the labor movement, we have to figure out what we’re doing here, folks. This is about to be the biggest employer in the United States, and no union will touch it, you know? Aren’t we just setting ourselves up for further decline? 

And there were many good reasons that unions didn’t want to touch Amazon. People had tried here and there and seen how hard it was in the past. And the answer I often would hear is: Look, there are so many other unions, organized workplaces, that have all but dead unions, right? They’re operating, the union is in decline, it has members, but it’s basically doing nothing. Isn’t it better for us to focus our energy in reviving those unions, rather than taking something on that we’re almost certain to fail at? 

And, I mean, they had a really good point. I mean, it’s certainly the case that this is still true today and I’m saying it because I think almost any Amazon organizer will tell you the same thing: You’re almost certain to fail at organizing Amazon. This is true for the ALU, this is true for even the Teamsters. You know, it’s so hard for reasons that we can’t go into here. That said, so all of that to say, that when you have someone like Chris, who had something happen to him, as a mix of the time that it happened when he was fired in response to sort of helping organize a protest around Covid —

RG: You’re talking about Chris Smalls, the ALU organizer. Yeah.

AP: Yeah.

So for a. variety of reasons, some related to the moment he was in, Covid. Others related to the fact that this became a national media story, because Amazon’s leadership said really horrible things about him. And in part because of his own personality — if you meet Chris, you’ll understand this one — he decided this was it, he was going to try to take on and do the impossible.

So you get that sort of random, independent union, entirely worker-led, but also totally isolated from existing unions. You get that because of this long-standing reticence from existing unions to touch Amazon, which led to a lot of resentment by Amazon workers, including Chris Smalls, the first time I talked to him. The question always was: Where are the unions? Why don’t they help us? 

And so that’s how you get where we are today.

RG: And it seems like Amazon has launched a pretty effective counterattack on the Staten Island — 

AP: Yes. 

RG: — warehouse. It sounds like they’re just refusing to ever come to the bargaining table. What can organizers do to force that? Or can Amazon just drag this out indefinitely?

AP: So there are varying opinions on this one. I mean, basically, there’s a two-pronged fight that a union like the ALU can wage. 

One is external: They need to launch, and there needs to be organizing campaigns at so many other Amazon facilities across the country, that it sort of becomes this like fire. There are too many fires to put out. And Amazon both has to focus on those other facilities — but also kind of like how we are seeing at Starbucks is kind of the parallel right now. Not that Starbucks workers have a contract, but there is a sense of momentum there. I hope I’m correct in saying this: it’s going to be very hard for them to ever get a contract in the same way, but there’s a sense that come on, it has to happen, right? There are so many people at Starbucks who voted for unions. So that sort of sense of pressure. 

Internally, what a union like the ALU can do is start building up the rank-and-file strength towards basically getting strong enough to be able to strike for recognition. The ALU is a long way from that. And there are many good reasons for that, of course. It’s very hard to organize a giant Amazon warehouse. You really have to show the company that — they’re never going to do it unless they’re forced. And so you have to figure out how to force them, and stopping work at a key facility like that is about the only way you can force them. So it’s the inside-outside two focuses here. And that’s going to be true at any Amazon facility, really. But certainly JFK-8 and Staten Island is going to be the test case.

RG: And it’s tough because people who follow it kind of casually in the news would have seen that a year ago and be like: Oh, that’s great. Good for them. I’m glad that they’re gonna have a union down in Staten Island. 

And then a year later, you’re like: Oh, actually, they don’t have one and they might never have one if something doesn’t change. 

AP: Yeah. 

RG: And so as we head into the UAW contract negotiations, the UPS contract negotiations, let’s say they do successfully eventually organize in the Cincinnati airport, how far away are they from the prospect of joint actions? Because it feels like, like, at the hub in CVG, for instance, if those workers go on strike, supply chains kind of collapse. And so is there any talk about an industrial approach that coordinates these different actions? Or no, they’re just going one by one?

AP: I mean, I certainly wish the answer was stronger: Absolutely! 

I know, of course, there are people in both of these unions or in all of these unions, who really want there to be a more kind of one big union approach, even acknowledging that technically, they’ll be in separate unions. But the reality is that that is very hard to pull off. We’re looking at this DHL story where even just getting to a Union election is taking so much of a fight: to sort of line these things up, these contracts or joint actions, given the constraints of the U.S. labor law regime, is really tough to fight. That said, I think there are very concrete moves in this direction. One of the few resolutions that passed at the UAW convention was about honoring picket lines. The Teamsters are known as the only union that really, in their contracts, is the right not to cross a picket line. 

So if workers say, at your hub or at a place you’re delivering stuff to — this happened at Conde Nast when there was a The New Yorker strike — if workers at another workplace are on strike, Teamsters do not have to cross that picket line. So they effectively make that strike much more effective because it’s the Teamsters who really often do the work that keeps a company sort of moving and profitable, delivery, things like that, moving things around. 

And the UAW the rare resolution the members passed at that convention was: We want our contracts to have that same provision. We need to make that a priority. They cited a time when their members were basically pressured to cross a picket line. And that picket line had been by other members of their locals is really tragic.

And so there, it’s very clear that people want this. They want more coordination, as I said. The reformers in the UAW are about: How do we organize across division? And of course, the landscape of union kind of turf and laws is incredibly annoying and sort of makes you want to hit your head against a wall. But people are trying to see: How do we link up and coordinate? And you’re seeing that also, even among Amazon workers in the Teamsters.

In this moment of greater enthusiasm, there is also greater coordination. It just might take a little bit of time for people to be able to see that.

RG: Well, Alex Press, her latest piece for Jacobin is headlined: “Can the UAW Rise Again?” And I really appreciate you joining me today.

AP: Yeah, thanks for having me so much, Ryan.

RG: That was Alex Press. And that’s our show. 

Daniel McGrath, a spokesperson for DHL told me this in a statement: 

“At the CVG hub, we prioritize treating our employees with the utmost respect. We deeply value the rights of our workers and always prioritize their safety and welfare, not just at our hub, but in all of our operations. 

Since 2018, we have created thousands of job opportunities at CVG and have raised our wages by $7.45 an hour. We’ve also increased our PTO for all full- and part-time employees, significantly increased both maternal and paternal leave for employees, and recognized MLK Day as an additional paid holiday. We’re committed to remaining a competitive and attractive employer in the region.”

He goes on, “Moreover, we’ve implemented a range of initiatives aimed at improving the safety and well-being of our employees. We offer individual counseling and we’ve introduced automation that reduces physical demands. In fact, our lost time injury frequency is one of the lowest in the industry. 

We also provide training and orientation programs for all of our management levels. To ensure that our core values are integrated into every aspect of our operation. We’re dedicated to creating a healthy work environment both physically and emotionally for all of our employees. 

Additionally, we recognize our employees’ right to unionize within the confines of the law and are fully committed to all agreements we have with our local, national, and international labor partners. We believe that fostering a collaborative and respectful relationship with our employees and their representatives is key to our continued success. 

With regard to the allegation that management used derogatory terms to describe our employees, we first became aware of this allegation via media reports. We have initiated an investigation into this and will seek to take corrective action against any manager found to have used such language in accordance with our code of conduct. DHL prides itself on our positive, inclusive and respectful working environment, and the behavior described does not reflect our values or culture.” 

[End credits music.]

RG: If you missed it, last week’s episode was a bit different than the normal interview show that we normally do, more of a narrative investigation I did with journalist Neha Wadekar into an American company that runs a chain of low-cost, for-profit schools in Africa and India. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t listened yet, if I do say so myself. 

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show was mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week.

And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

And I’ll see you soon.

The post The Teamsters and the UAW Gear Up for Struggle appeared first on The Intercept.

Bridge International is the largest for-profit education chain in the world, serving upward of 750,000 children in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Liberia, and India. The founders, two Harvard graduates, developed an attractive business model for investors. With centrally-produced curriculum and bare-bone standardized schoolhouses, Bridge offered a vision of making a profit while doing good. But then rumors started to swirl about the dark side of the company.

This week on Deconstructed: Journalists Neha Wadekar and Ryan Grim narrate the saga of Bridge International Academies. As allegations of sexual abuse and neglect emerged against Bridge, investor responsibility became the center of a controversy at the World Bank.

[Upbeat music from video.]

Shannon May: Between 700 million and 800 million children living in poverty across the globe, the majority of those children are not accessing a reasonable education.

Ryan Grim: In the early days of the era of big tech disruption, two Harvard University graduates dreamed up a bold experiment in education. 

Shannon May: In 2007, we came to Africa where due diligence had showed us that there were an incredibly high number of enrolled children who were still illiterate upon graduation. And was there a possible business model that could solve this? Was there something that could be done? Even though people said there wasn’t anything that could be done? 

Ryan Grim: That’s Shannon May. She studied education development in rural China and she spied an untapped global opportunity. She teamed up with her husband, Jay Kimmelman, an education software developer.

Shannon May: If you go direct to that family who needs the service and you figure out what their problem is and you create that service and then you could have a business because you can charge them the fee that’s affordable for their current income levels and change their life and their children’s lives.

Ryan Grim: In a MIT case study that opens with children running around informal settlements, more commonly known as slums in the west, May details their vision and how they accomplished it.  

Shannon May: We all moved to Nairobi in 2008 and within six months we had the first school up and running.

Ryan Grim: The couple did the math and found that parents of impoverished children around the globe were spending tens of billions a year on schooling. They would go on to start: Bridge International Academies.

Shannon May: We started in Kenya because this seemed the right place to start. It had the population density we were looking for. It had a neutral regulatory environment. It had people we could hire into our head office support staff who could help us build out the business.

Neha Wadekar: Over the next decade, Bridge grew into a chain of private schools providing an easy to deliver standardized curriculum — school in a box, if you will. 

The curriculum was developed by researchers in Cambridge, Massachusetts and taught to hundreds of thousands of students in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Liberia, and India. 

Shannon May: From the very beginning. Bridge was never designed to be one school or two schools, or 10 schools even.

Neha Wadekar: Today, Bridge is the largest for-profit primary education chain in the world. As the company mushroomed, it found ready investors.

Shannon May: I’d say between 2011 and 2012, it became clearer to more investment professionals that wait, there really does seem to be a market for this. There is a market for this, that there are people paying for this service. There’s a great demand for this. It was not social impact investors who were interested. It was straight commercial capital who saw like, wow, there are a couple billion people who don’t have anyone selling them what they want.

Neha Wadekar: Sounds promising, right? 

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed, I’m Ryan Grim. 

Neha Wadekar: And I’m Neha Wadekar, reporting from Africa.

Ryan Grim: Over the last few months we’ve been looking closely at Bridge, whose founders became darlings of Silicon Valley and Beltway donors. 

Neha Wadekar: One Bridge investor told the New York Times, “It’s the Tesla of education companies.” Some of the highest-profile do-good donors in the game stepped in to finance the education start-up, including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar (also a major funder of The Intercept), and Bill Ackman. The United Kingdom’s development bank, the European Investment Bank, and the International Finance Corporation — the IFC — of the World Bank funded it too. 

Shannon May: So one of the ways we first tried to get our investors to understand what we were doing was by calling it a “school in a box.” And then when we realized everyone here calls a private school, that’s good, an academy. An “academy in the box,” was to help our investors understand that you could scale education.

Because one of the early questions: How do you scale education? Isn’t that a one-off? Isn’t it just a teacher in a classroom? So don’t you have to have brilliant teachers in every room in order to have a well-educated child? Because honestly, that’s how a wealthy person would think of it. 

Honestly, that’s an incredibly luxurious way of approaching education and is why there hasn’t been extensive education reform in the developing world.

Neha Wadekar: To become profitable, May and Kimmelman had to scale up quickly while keeping costs down. To do well with small margins, thousands of classrooms would be needed, because each classroom could bring in a profit of just tens of dollars a month. Here’s May again from the MIT case study video. 

Shanon May: We decided to use what’s called teacher guidelines, where you prepare heavily scripted instruction for the teacher that they then present to the child. 

Ryan Grim: The idea was straightforward: The largest cost when it comes to education is teacher salaries. So if curricula can be centrally produced and distributed on tablets that teachers read to the class word-for-word, then you can significantly reduce their pay. 

Shannon May: You have to be able to upscale the teachers that would be available within the same community as your child. 

How are you going to get tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands, of teachers to be working with hundreds of millions of impoverished children? They need to be from the same community, they need to face similar challenges, but also economically, they need to be part of the same economy. 

Ryan Grim: Hiring teachers who are “part of the same economy” meant paying them just a few dollars a day. 

Shannon May: The operations still have lots of tweaks they need, but they’re working well enough that it makes sense to now blow the business out a little more. The stage we’re at now, it’s much more hard to hire people. So to hire people who can grow as quickly as the business can grow, right? And I think that’s one of the difficult things a lot of people don’t talk about with really rapidly growing companies.

Ryan Grim: Bridge plowed ahead, hiring less qualified teachers at significantly less cost than rival public schools. In 2022, Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Kremer conducted a study in Kenya to assess the efficacy of standardized learning at Bridge schools.

The resulting report, which was paid for by the World Bank and which Bridge heavily promotes, found that public school teachers in Kenya were paid between two to four times more than Bridge instructors. Benefits are also far less generous than what public schools offer. Kremer’s study read, “By not requiring post-secondary credentials, which typically represent a smaller share of the labor force in lower-middle income countries, Bridge has been able to draw from a larger pool of secondary school graduates.” When we asked about this, Bridge said that all the teachers it hires meet the Kenyan government’s requirements. 

Neha Wadekar: Bridge also whacked away at the second highest education costs: facilities. While public schools in Kenya are required to have stone, brick, or concrete walls, Bridge designed schoolhouses out of wooden framing, enclosed by iron sheeting with mesh-wire windows.

The schoolhouses are meant to be as easy to put together as Ikea furniture. The standardization, according to Bridge, allows the company to free up resources to dedicate to other school improvement measures. Bridge says all its schools meet local standards. Here’s Jay Kimmelman, Bridge co-founder, speaking at a venture capitalist event in 2013. 

Jay Kimmelman: So how do we do it? Well, we take lessons that other large global service providers use like McDonalds or Starbucks: We build for scale, we systematize, we standardize, we build in places systems of audit and accountability, we heavily leverage mobile technology to drive down the cost. 

Neha Wadekar: It was a familiar model to investors, one that would understandably lose money in the early years, but as long as user growth was steady, profitability could ultimately be reached.  

Shannon May: How can you convince them of your knowledge of the product and the market while making sure that they know that they could make a return because if you can’t help them make a return, you’re not starting a business. So you have to make sure you have that all kind of locked up at the beginning.

Ryan Grim: Bridge opened hundreds of schools throughout Africa and India, often without obtaining the bureaucratic approvals and permits required to do so legally. By 2022, the World Bank reported, Bridge was serving some 750,000 kids. And the results were encouraging. 

The study by the economist Michael Kremer found that underserved pre-primary and primary school children received more learning and had higher test scores at Bridge than in other Kenyan schools. The study also showed that so-called “higher-order skills” and creativity did not appear to be affected by Bridge’s uniformed teaching model. 

And for the last eight years, Bridge Kenya students have exceeded the national average exam score in their primary school exit exam, according to data compiled by Bridge. The data seemed so promising that Liberia even contracted out some of its struggling public schools to Bridge, as the company’s global expansion accelerated. 

Neha Wadekar: Then in March 2022, the World Bank’s financing arm quietly divested from NewGlobe, the parent company of Bridge International. No announcement was made. No reason was given. Just a short disclosure in small print at the bottom of a portal reading: “Update: IFC has exited its investment in NewGlobe Schools, Inc.” 

Among locals and within the global network of civil society organizations that work on development projects, rumors swirled that the dark side of Bridge’s success may have played a role — specifically, a series of abuse and neglect allegations in Kenya that had caught the eye of a Nairobi-based human rights group, the East African Centre for Human Rights, or EACHRights, as well as the internal watchdog at the World Bank, known as the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, or CAO.

In February, we reached out to Bridge about the “abuse and neglect” allegations the World Bank watchdog was probing, Bridge thought we were inquiring about different allegations that were  “unsubstantiated.”

A Bridge spokesperson pointed out that the CAO was duty-bound to assess all allegations pertaining to their investments, but suggested EACHRights, who filed the complaints, had a longstanding opposition to its schools in Kenya.  “EachRIGHTS [sic] has campaigned against Bridge Kenya for many years. Bridge Kenya has been fully cooperative with the ongoing CAO process over the years.”

It’s true that EACHRights has campaigned against Bridge, but behind some of the allegations lodged with CAO was a haunting story of abuse.

David Nanzai: It all started with a note from one of the pupils in the class where I was teaching.

[Sounds of children playing at Academy Mukuru Kwa Reuben school.]

Ryan Grim: During lunch break on a school day in 2016, David Nanzai, an eighth grade teacher at the Bridge International Academy Mukuru Kwa Reuben school in Nairobi, found an anonymous handwritten note that had been left in the pages of a textbook sitting on his desk. 

A note to listeners, what he eventually uncovered was deeply disturbing. 

And the next portion of this episode includes details of sexual abuse. 

David Nanzai: A pupil did a note to me and told me, you know, teacher, you are like my father, and there is this thing that is happening to me. I’m uncomfortable because of this particular teacher. 

Neha Wadekar: So you have a student write you an anonymous note. 

David Nanzai: Yes.

Neha Wadekar: Did they say in the note exactly what was happening? 

David Nanzai: Yeah. The student described clearly what was happening. She tell me, she told me that the teacher was touching her inappropriately and to some extent asked for sexual intercourse.

Ryan Grim: The man had touched her, the letter said, taken her hand and put it on his private parts, and asked her for oral sex and intercourse. 

Neha Wadekar: She wrote this all in the letter? 

David Nanzai: She wrote it on the note and then left it there. So I went, I had to go and find out more because I wanted to find out who the pupil is. The letter was anonymous. 

Ryan Grim: Nanzai shared what he learned with a colleague, Andrew Omondi, and the two set out to investigate. 

David Nanzi: How I had developed my own rapport with the kids. They looked at me as a father figure so they approached me.

Ryan Grim: He considered the best way forward and decided to meet privately with each of the female students in grades six through eight.

David Nanzai: So that is why I had to clear the class and then decided to call those girls one by one. So that I could create an environment whereby they can open up and share the story so that I get to know. 

Neha Wadekar: Omondi encouraged him to record the conversations so they’d have evidence. 

Andrew Omondi: So he had to record all of the information and he sent me the clip. 

Neha Wadekar: Eventually, they figured out who had written the note, and as they investigated further, they found at least 11 girls, aged 10 to 14, had been assaulted. They suspected three other girls may have been too frightened to come forward. 

We spoke with more than two dozen sources for this story including interviews with parents, former Bridge teachers and staff, nonprofit workers, community leaders, education activists, and police officers. We corroborated the scope and many of the details of the sexual abuse. 

Many of the sources asked for confidentiality, expressing concern about a culture of secrecy and fear of reprisal from Bridge. The students’ stories were eerily similar, as parents and teachers relayed to us. 

The accused teacher would instruct the students to come to school as early as 6:00 am for extra prep. He would call them into an office one-by-one and close the door. The crimes he was accused of ranged from unwanted touching to rape – without a condom.

Andrew Omondi: In fact, I’m the one who connected him with the job, because he was a fellow friend from a different church. 

Neha Wadekar: Omondi had introduced the accused teacher to Bridge. Omondi knew the instructor was fired from his previous teaching job. But he didn’t know why. The accused teacher had reached out to Omondi’s pastor for help.

Andrew Omondi: After that he talked to my pastor. Then I connected him on this end. We brought him on board. He came for an interview. He was a good friend, a close friend.

Neha Wadekar: The teacher was married and a devout church attendee who styled himself as a man of God — something David Nanzi noticed too. 

David Nanzi: This teacher also tend to kind of camouflage in Christianity so much that he was seen as a pastor. He camouflaged as a pastor and that really made even parents get into believing him.

Neha Wadekar: During an interview at a community center in the Mukuru settlement, Omondi said he received training on how to identify and handle cases of sexual abuse when he first started teaching at Bridge in 2012. Bridge told us that it has been providing “safeguarding training” to teachers and school leaders since December 2008. 

Nanzai reported his findings to the school’s academy manager, similar to a principal, a woman named Josephine Ouko. Ouko called a staff meeting in her office with the alleged perpetrator in attendance. We were unable to reach Ouko for comment. 

The other teachers confronted him, seething. Initially, he denied the allegations, according to four Bridge teachers present, but the teachers played audio recordings of Nanzai’s conversations with the students and shared their written testimonies. Here’s Omondi again. 

Andrew Omondi: So we called a meeting with the head teacher — the academy manager —by then. She was called, Josephine. And we talked. We played the audio clip that the pupils were now testifying how these things have been happening. And the guy [was] there.

We had to play because that was the only evidence that we had. The pupils were not able, were not comfortable testifying the presence of other teachers. And so we had to play the audio. All the staff were there, plus the teacher himself. 

One of the teachers was so small she could not hold the tears. She fell down and the guy now had to submit that indeed, it has, it has been happening that way.

Neha Wadekar: Four teachers confirmed that the accused teacher eventually admitted his guilt to his infuriated colleagues. We identified the man but were unable to reach him. 

After the meeting, the teachers expected Ouko, the academy manager, to notify Bridge and call the police. But Ouko instructed them to leave her office so she could speak to the accused teacher alone.

[Sounds from the streets of Mukuru settlement.]

The next thing they knew, the man had disappeared into the maze of crowded dirt streets that make up the Mukuru informal settlement. He was gone.

The following day, Omondi got the parents involved. He called Daniel Wambua Ndinga, one of the survivor’s fathers, asking him to come in immediately. 

Neha Wadekar: I’ll check this every once in a while to make sure it’s working, but just keep— 

Daniel Wambua Ndinga: [Crosstalk.] My name is Daniel Ndinga.

Ryan Grim: At the school, Omondi told Ndinga what happened. 

Daniel Wambua Ndinga: My daughter was defiled. 

Ryan Grim: Ndinga called in his daughter and several other students, and they verified the story. He mobilized the other parents and escorted them to the nearby police station to begin an investigation.

Daniel Wambua Ndinga: I do mobilize the parents to take that matter seriously so that we can protect our children.

Ryan Grim: We spoke with a police officer involved in the initial report who confirmed that the incident was indeed reported to them. No further details were provided.

The girls were taken by ambulance to a nearby Doctors Without Borders clinic for check-ups. One student’s medical records, provided to us by a parent, read that she was forcibly violated by a teacher in the early morning hours before school started. She was described as being anxious. She was prescribed prophylaxis for sexually transmitted infections, given vaccines for Hepatitis B and tetanus, and encouraged to attend counseling. 

But the abuse could have been caught sooner. Sometime in 2015, a year before the serial assault came to light, two girls had attempted to get help from another teacher, Jackline Anudo. 

The girls had approached Anudo alleging that the same teacher was sexually assaulting them. Anudo tried to speak with the accused teacher, but said he initially denied any wrongdoing. Several days later, Anudo said three other girls approached her with the same story. Anudo said she spoke with the teacher again, and this time, he admitted the assault. When she raised the issue with the then-academy manager, Josephine Ouko, she said Ouko warned her not to tell the parents and refused to investigate the allegations. 

Neha Wadekar: Anudo told us, “I kept quiet. I feel very, very bad because when we are there, we, as the teacher — I wanted to make the pupils’ future better, to better their future.”

In the months following the incident, Ndinga and several Bridge teachers attempted to find the man in the depths of Nairobi’s informal settlements. Several times, they got word from their contacts that he was in a certain location, but by the time they arrived, he had disappeared. Even his wife claimed she had not seen her husband. 

Told that we had identified the alleged perpetrator by name, a Bridge spokesperson acknowledged the abuse had taken place and confirmed the former teacher’s identity. Asked why the company had previously dismissed our inquiry, the spokesperson said that the company thought we were referring to different allegations. And the company added the threat of a lawsuit against The Intercept. 

Bridge’s attorneys sent us a letter saying, “a few bad apples” shouldn’t “tarnish” the overall work and success of their educators and schools. They also posited that the problem was simply endemic in Kenya. “It is also important to acknowledge the sad reality that sexual abuse of students by teachers has historically been a serious problem in Kenyan schools.”

The legal threat was a glimpse into the aggressive posture Bridge had become known for, a reputation that was forged in the global press amid its battle in Uganda with a Canadian graduate student named Curtis Riep.

Ryan Grim: In May of 2016, just weeks after the teachers and parents had reported the perpetrator to the police in Nairobi, Curtis Riep sat down in a cafe in Kampala, Uganda. An education policy Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alberta, Riep was in the city researching Bridge for Education International, a global federation of teachers unions. He had managed to schedule an interview with a Bridge national director and a regional manager. 

As the men began their conversation, Riep hit start on his recorder, as he did for all such meetings, so that he could later transcribe the answers.

Neha Wadekar: Moments later, a plain-clothed police detective – or, at least, a man identifying as one – and two men in militarized uniforms carrying assault-style weapons approached them. Riep transcribed the whole incident, verbatim, in his dissertation. 

Ryan Grim: After exchanging pleasantries with the executives, one of the men told Riep, “I work with the police – the Uganda police.  I’m going to be taking you now.”

It would later emerge that Bridge officials in Uganda had accused Riep of gaining access to Bridge schools by impersonating a teacher. 

Riep insisted he had permission. He said, “These are the directors of the schools, so maybe we could have a conversation here.” 

Neha Wadekar: Andrew White was one of the Bridge executives there to meet Riep. White, a Bridge national director, was also later part of the Bridge team that responded to the investigation into serial assault in Kenya. 

Riep asked White, “Did you make a complaint to them?” There was no answer from White. Riep asked again. 

Sipping his coffee, the Bridge national director said, “I don’t know what you mean. This has nothing to do with me personally. I don’t know what it is.”

Ryan Grim: Feeling uneasy about the situation and unsure if the uniformed men were even cops, Riep asked to send an email to his fiancé. In the message he was able to fire off, Riep told his fiancé he was being escorted by the police and that if she didn’t hear from him within 24 hours, to take action. 

After several failed attempts to get the executives to clarify and resolve the situation, Riep pleaded one final time, telling them “Please, I don’t know if these are real police. I mean, I don’t want my life to be in jeopardy. So, if you feel like you really need to protect yourself and Bridge to this extent, I think it is a mistake. Let’s not make this more of an issue. You are the director of Bridge so obviously we can sort this out another way.” The executives remained silent. 

Neha Wadekar: Riep was escorted to an unmarked car, noting that the men bore a “striking resemblance” to the private security guards the Ugandan elite hire to protect their homes and businesses. Inside the car was another man, who identified himself as an attorney for the government of Uganda, but whom Riep later told the press he learned was a lawyer working for Bridge. 

They passed the Kampala Central Police Station and kept driving for more than an hour and a half, arriving at a two-room, clapboard police station, home to a front office and a holding cell. Four media outlets waited outside, filming Riep’s arrival. Two Bridge officials held forth about the danger Riep represented to the community. 

Ryan Grim: He was interrogated for several hours and told that Bridge had taken out an advertisement in a major local paper on May 24. The ad warned the public Riep was “wanted by the police,” underneath a photograph of his face. 

After being released on bond, Riep was required to return the next day for more questioning. Fortunately for him, he had consistently signed into log books at schools under his own name and affiliation, according to later reporting by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 

And Bridge could produce no staff witnesses or other evidence to sufficiently back up the claim that he had impersonated its personnel. The police dropped the charges, but warned that Bridge may “come after you again,” he said.

Riep’s arrest was covered by the Washington Post and CBC and led to the co-founder of Bridge, Shannon May, being questioned in the U.K. Parliament about the arrest. 

Stephen Twigg (Chair): There have been allegations of some of the Bridge staff exhibiting threatening behavior towards independent researchers, both in Uganda and Nigeria. What is the response to those allegations?

Shanon May: I believe I know the case you are talking about in Uganda, which we found incredibly unfortunate. There was a gentleman who did not have ethical review board approval from his university who was misrepresenting his identity, stating that he was someone who worked for Bridge.   

Ryan Grim: Shannon May was asked about this incident in an interview later by Graham Brown-Martin.

Graham Brown-Martin: Who placed and funded the advert in the newspaper that was suggesting that this gentleman was wanted?

Shanon May: No, so I think Graham it’s important to understand what’s expected and recommended practice in Uganda. 

Graham Brown-Martin: Listen, Shannon, Shannon, I’m just trying to get beyond this. I’m just trying to say, I guess asking you a simple question: Who? 

Shannon May: It wasn’t a wanted article. You should look at it. 

Graham Brown-Martin: I have. I’ve got a copy of [crosstalk]. Shannon I’ve done my research. I have a copy.

Shannon May: Bridge in Uganda posted that article. 

Graham Brown-Martin: I have a copy.

Shannon May: Bridge in Uganda took out that advertisement as recommended by the police and legal counsel because he was faking false identity. 

Graham Brown-Martin: [Crosstalk] Shannon, which, which organization paid for the advert? 

Shannon May: Bridge in Uganda. 

Neha Wadekar: The British version of the World Bank, which had invested several million dollars in Bridge, pulled its support following this incident.

Riep’s subsequent report did not paint Bridge in a positive light, but Bridge offered a confounding response alleging that Riep had only been able to unearth what he had from Bridge teachers because they believed he was a fellow colleague and therefore trusted him and “freely discussed work-related grievances, as one usually does with co-workers.” 

The Ugandan Ministry of Education soon moved to shutter Bridge schools on the basis that they were “operating illegally because they have no provisional or other licenses.” Bridge fought the order in court, and ultimately lost. But Bridge has continued fighting and has not closed the schools. 

Ryan Grim: Bridge wasn’t finished with Riep. In December 2016, it filed a complaint with the University of Alberta accusing him of violating the University’s Code of Student Behaviour. Riep said that a two-month investigation resulted in the allegations being dismissed. A university spokesperson said privacy rules barred him from commenting, though he said Riep received his doctorate from the school in 2021.

Riep, reached by phone, said, “They basically tried to paint me out to look like some perpetrator, which I find obviously just full of irony, especially given this new news that they had a sexual perpetrator within their own ranks, sexually abusing their students at this point in time.” 

Neha Wadekar: The stories coming out of Bridge’s work in Africa did not go unnoticed by investors — civil society and non-governmental organizations working in the region, like Oxfam, made sure of it. Bridge had been battling a growing coalition of opponents for years, establishing a reputation as a sharp-elbowed company that responded aggressively to any hint of criticism. 

In 2014, a Kenyan court ordered Bridge schools closed in one county for not complying with the minimum education safety and accountability standards. When the county education board moved to enforce the court’s decision two years later, Bridge responded by suing the Board and its director saying they had not followed the required process. 

Ryan Grim: In 2015, more than one hundred national and international organizations across the world released a joint open statement addressed to World Bank President Jim Young Kim, expressing deep concerns about the bank’s support for the development of Bridge in Kenya and Uganda. 

Neha Wadekar: In March 2017, Bridge sued the Kenya National Teachers Union and its leader based on a damning report they released called “Bridge vs. Reality.” 

Ryan Grim: That same year, over 170 unions and civil society organizations globally released a statement calling on investors to withdraw support for Bridge. The following year, 88 groups wrote an open letter to discourage current and potential investors away from Bridge.

“It is clear that Bridge is a contentious partner,” a House of Commons report concluded, as the United Kingdom’s development bank decided to divest from Bridge. 

Neha Wadekar: In 2018, the Kenyan nonprofit EACHRights filed a complaint with the World Bank’s watchdog about general noncompliance with country regulations, labor abuses, unfair fees, and unqualified teachers on behalf of current and former parents and teachers. That complaint, which we mentioned earlier, kicked off an investigation that quickly mushroomed and, five years later, is still ongoing. 

Ryan Grim: The investigation of the Bridge investment has become the center of a controversy at the World Bank over investor responsibility when their investments result in harm and the nature of the accountability process inside the IFC, the World Bank’s financing arm. 

The IFC’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman or CAO was created in 1999 amid pressure from the anti-globalization movement for accountability related to private sector projects financed by the World Bank Group. Under the tenure of CAO head Osvaldo Gratacós, which began later in 2014, the ombudsman completed a litany of hard-hitting investigations, uncovering major scandals. 

In 2020, CAO staff and experts traveled to Nairobi to look into the complaints EACHRights had filed a few years earlier. Accoding to the CAO report, their team spoke with community members who raised concerns of sexual abuse allegations by teachers at Bridge schools. 

Neha Wadekar: Around the same time, African civil society groups brought their concerns to U.S. House Representative Maxine Waters, one of the more outspoken congressional advocates of human rights in Africa and the Caribbean. Waters, as the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, wielded enormous influence over U.S. policy on the World Bank, which was looking for new capital from Congress. 

Waters conditioned the new capital on a series of demands, including the bank divesting from Bridge. Her letter cited EACHRights, which worked directly with some of the victims. The pressure from Waters led to the IFC’s eventual divestment from Bridge. 

Meanwhile, the sheer length of time the CAO was spending on the investigation began to capture the attention of the global civil society community. CAO’s head, Gratacós continued to pursue the investigation. 

Typically, CAO just investigates allegations when a complaint is filed by a third party. But in September 2021, the CAO filed its own child sex abuse complaint regarding Bridge. The decision to move ahead with the sexual assault investigation ratcheted up the tension between the bank and the CAO.

It would be the last major decision Gratacós made at the bank. In October of that year, the World Bank announced that Janine Ferretti would be taking over as CAO head. Reached by phone, Gratacós, now listed as a realtor in Northern Virginia, said he can’t comment. 

Ryan Grim: Organizations who represented clients with open investigations at the CAO privately reacted with alarm to Ferretti’s appointment. Three U.S. senators also expressed concern. This was because Ferretti was seen as a management insider with no experience in accountability investigations, unlike Gratacós. Previously, she had spent most of her career as an executive at the Inter-American Development Bank, involved in setting environmental and social policy — the very type of management official she’d now be tasked with investigating.

She unleashed a storm of protest when she tried to bring in a new head of compliance, Emmanuel Boulet. At the IFC, he is in charge of dealing with the CAO and would now be switching sides. Under pressure Boulet’s appointment was withdrawn, but officials at civil society organizations who interact with CAO say they’re increasingly finding management types working for the watchdog. 

One civil society source said,  “The whole office is just stacked now with management people, people who’ve spent their careers defending financial institutions against allegations of impropriety and environmental and social harms. It’s very sad, because the CAO has always been the kind of beacon of accountability of any kind of institution, public or private. No more.”

The CAO’s most recent update in the Bridge investigations was published in January 2022, after an extraordinarily long delay. The full investigations have yet to be released. A CAO spokesperson told us that the investigation has been slower than expected due to the heavy caseload and staff turnover, and expects to publish the results of their investigations not until the fall of 2023. 

Neha Wadekar: Seven years after Nanzai first discovered the note, the case remains unsolved and unresolved, and the victims uncompensated. 

In late February, the IFC put forward a new draft proposal addressing what it calls its “Approach to Remedial Action”: its effort to respond to the ongoing pressure to take responsibility for any harmful outcomes associated with its investments. Dozens of civil society organizations critical of the new proposal, signed on to a letter saying the IFC’s proposed approach  “falls short of expectations.” Neither Bridge nor the IFC have offered the survivors of the serial assault any compensation.

We asked the IFC, Chan Zuckerberg, and the Gates and Omidyar funds what, if any, responsibility investors had to remedy the situation. A Chan Zuckerberg spokesperson said,  “Any instance of harm to a child is unacceptable. We would refer you to the letter from Bridge Kenya on the practices it has in place to safeguard students and immediately investigate reports of any safety issues.”

A spokesperson for Omidyar’s Imaginable Futures said the fund owns a 2.7 percent stake in the company and  “We refer you to the statement provided to you by Bridge Kenya.”

Ryan Grim: Even the best schools can find themselves in a situation in which a teacher or other school employee has broken the law and violated the trust placed in them by students. The question is what safeguards the school had in place and how the school responds. 

Bridge provided us with a bullet-point list of nine action items the company took in the wake of the revelations of the abuse. The serial assault, a Bridge spokesperson said, sparked the creation of the Critical Incident Advisory Unit, which advises schools on how to respond, and led to additional training to “recognize ‘grooming’ behavior” and otherwise stop abuse before it occurs, or report it as quickly as possible. “Since 2020, all staff are asked to affirm their commitment to child safeguarding every year by re-signing the ‘Child champion promise,’” the spokesperson told us. 

Students now learn a “Magic number cheer,” which teaches them to remember a phone number they can use to report abuse. The number is also printed out and stuck to the walls and on other signposts and informational fliers. The company also takes a hardline, the spokesperson said, with failing to report abuse:  “If you do not report a safeguarding concern and that is subsequently discovered it is a gross misconduct offense for which you are dismissed.”

When Bridge learned its academy manager, Josephine Ouko, had not reported the crimes, the company said, she was suspended and then fired. 

Neha Wadekar: The company commissioned an education consultancy, Tunza, to evaluate its practices and policies. The report found that public schools faced far greater rates of abuse than Bridge schools, though the methodology betrays an extraordinary confidence in Bridge’s reporting systems. For public schools, the study relies on anonymous surveys of students. To gather the rate of abuse at Bridge schools, the report largely relies on actual cases that were reported to higher-ups and investigated. 

The report, funded by Bridge, gently suggests that Bridge ought to at some point also survey its student body to find out if its assumption about nearly universal reporting through official channels is accurate. The Tunza report also pointed to a lack of sufficient training and education for academy managers like Ouko.

Many of the other action items that Bridge listed were carried out by Bridge teachers, and parents, including taking the girls to the clinic and reporting the case to the police. The report also claims, “Bridge partnered with local institutions to provide ongoing counseling.” That counseling continued for months, Bridge said, and “would have continued as long as it was needed.”

Ryan Grim: Ndinga was one of the parents who encouraged the others not to pursue the case, legally or in the media, because he feared that the girls would be stigmatized and shamed if the incident became public. 

Daniel Wambua Ndinga: That will make them be ashamed by other childrens.

Ryan Grim: And after his daughter went back to Bridge to finish her schooling there, Ndinga said he felt scared. He used to “monitor” her, checking in and investigating when she went to school early in the morning or came home later at night. 

Daniel Wambua Ndinga: Even her was scared. I do monitor. When it was late I call teacher, why? Sometimes I take time and go and visit them. Sometime when it was late, I just go to school to know why, because I was very scared. 

Neha Wadekar: Well thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I’m just curious, why did you agree to speak with me? 

Daniel Wambua Ndinga: It’s good to share. So that we can heal and to protect others who can fall to the trap in the future.

Neha Wadekar: The effects of the serial assault on the parents and students involved have been severe. 

The aunt of one of the survivors at the school in Nairobi, an illiterate laundress who was caring for her sister’s child when the incident occurred, said she has never spoken out until now. She said that months of being raped by her teacher changed her niece in front of her eyes. Before, she had been a jovial child who loved to play, and she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up. As the assault continued, unbeknownst to the aunt, her niece grew unhappy and withdrawn. Often the aunt said she came home and saw that the girl had been crying.

[Voice of aunt speaking.]

Neha Wadekar [translating]: “I did not report the matter to the police. I saw that my niece had waited for a very long while before reporting, and the days had passed. I did not know what else I could do,” she said. “No one from the school has ever followed up on the matter… No one else has come out to ask me about this issue.”

Her niece declined to speak to us about the incident. Her aunt said she wanted to put it behind her and forget the whole thing ever happened. 

Ryan Grim: Bridge Kenya provided a statement from its director of Gender and Child Empowerment, Lilllian Wamuyu, writing  “Bridge Kenya is appalled by any safeguarding breach. We have always treated safeguarding as our number one priority. All Bridge teachers and school leaders have been continuously trained in safeguarding since Bridge Kenya opened its first school in 2009 and students are recognised as safer in our schools. If any safeguarding concern is reported, swift and decisive action is taken, including alerting the authorities and providing full support to students affected. It is horrifying if any indecent act takes place in a school and it is the duty of all those that work in education to ensure perpetrators are brought to justice as quickly as possible.” 

Wamuyu’s statement also pointed us to the Tunza report and the list of measures it had taken in the wake of the 2016 incident to improve child protection at Bridge schools. “In 2022, Bridge Kenya became a founding member of the Child Safeguarding Association of Kenya (CSAK). Bridge continually ensures that safeguarding policies and practices are reviewed and updated, so they remain best in sector,” Wamuyu concluded. 

Neha Wadekar: Despite its efforts to address these issues, there have been other troubling cases at Bridge Kenya, both before and after the 2016 incident at Mukuru Kwa Reuben. Court records show that in 2017, several prepubescent female students were sexually harassed by a teacher at a Bridge school. The perpetrator was arrested, and the case is still being adjudicated in court. 

In one particularly gruesome case, a Bridge teacher was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2014 for cutting the genitals of a 7-year-old student with a razor. The case, despite its made-for-the-tabloid details, was hardly reported, nor did we find any announcement or statement by Bridge International Academies pertaining to the incident. 

Ryan Grim: One morning in September 2019, the mother of a Bridge student at another Nairobi school was startled to find a crowd of her son’s classmates outside her home. They were there to deliver harrowing news.

After the school’s daily assembly, her son, a young student named Bernard, reached up to touch a wire that was dangling inside school property. It was a live wire, and he was electrocuted and killed. Another 9-year-old boy was badly hurt and rushed to a nearby hospital.

Halima Ali, the mother of the second boy injured in the incident, is currently fighting to get monetary compensation, support for her son’s ongoing medical care, and an apology from Bridge. The financial burden of the incident was devastating to Ali’s family, she said, but Bridge hasn’t budged an inch. 

Here’s Halima. 

[Halima Ali speaking.]

Neha Wadekar [translating]: “To be honest, I have so much pain,” she said, crying during an interview in her family’s one-bedroom shanty house in the informal settlement. “I wish it happened to me and not my son.” 

Ryan Grim: The case around Bernard’s death was settled through a mediation process, with CAO bringing Bridge and the student’s mother and her advocates together to agree on terms. Throughout the confidential process, according to people briefed on the talks, Bridge was reluctant to give her even the most basic remuneration for her son’s death. The mother wanted to know exactly what happened to her son and to get back the sweater he was wearing that day. She also wanted a public apology. But the company fought to keep from admitting liability. 

Neha Wadekar: Bridge and the mother ultimately agreed to a public statement that acknowledged the child’s death, but offered no apology or detailing of events. The family has never gotten his sweater back.

[End credits music.]

Ryan Grim: And that’s it for this episode of Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. 

Neha Wadekar: And I’m Neha Wadekar, a journalist reporting across Africa. You can find me at Neha Wadekar on Twitter.  Ryan and I reported and wrote this story. Find the print version at the Intercept.com. 

Ryan Grim: Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. 

Nausicaa Renner edited this story. Laura Flynn and José Olivares produced it. And William Stanton mixed it. Legal review by David Bralow. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

To support this podcast, and the rest of the work of The Intercept, go to theintercept.com/give — your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. 

Thanks so much!

And I’ll see you soon.

The post A Is for Abuse: The Saga of For-Profit Schooling in Africa appeared first on The Intercept.

In a matter of a few days, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed when a panic set in, causing a run on deposits. “The blue chip VCs suggested something, then that leaked to other ones, then other ones — we had all our investors calling us and basically demanding we pull our cash,” one source told Ryan Grim. This week on Deconstructed, Grim is joined by Damon Silvers, who has been involved in trying to prevent financial fraud and crisis for more than 20 years. He was the deputy chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the 2008 bank bailout, and was formerly the policy director of the AFL-CIO.

Grim and Silver discuss what led to a rush of Silicon Valley Bank depositors withdrawing all at once, the subsequent fallout, how the weakening of Dodd–Frank in 2018 paved the way for the current banking crisis, and what reforms are needed to prevent a future and even bigger economic catastrophe.

[Deconstructed intro theme.]

Ryan Grim: The Silicon Valley Bank debacle might be the most pitch-perfect encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with our current financial, social, and political systems all at once. 

I’m Ryan Grim, and we’ll be unpacking that meltdown on today’s Deconstructed. 

One of the incredible feats of today’s tech moguls is to somehow manage to make the old robber barons look downright civic-minded by comparison. So during the panic of 1907, before there was a central bank, J.P. Morgan famously gathered together the country’s biggest bankers and persuaded them all to put their own capital on the line to restore confidence in the financial system, a populist movement followed by demanding the creation of the Federal Reserve to take power out of their hands. But it’s impossible to even conceive of today’s robber barons putting their capital on the line. 

And last week, it quickly became every-man-for-himself with billionaires telling each other there was no downside to pulling their money from Silicon Valley Bank, so they might as well just do it and do it quickly. It’s striking that the collapse of the bank that fuels much of the business in Silicon Valley, and the resulting threat of contagion, didn’t strike these radical Randian libertarians as something that might qualify as a downside. As long as they got out, they didn’t care. And of course, these libertarians immediately began demanding a government bailout. 

Back in 2018, we at The Intercept spent a lot of energy covering the assault on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms that were then underway. It didn’t take hindsight to know it was a terrible idea.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren: And this bill says, let’s let those 25 banks be regulated, just like they were tiny little community banks. I gotta tell you, a quarter-of-a-trillion-dollar bank is not a community bank. 

So what’s the consequence of doing that plus other changes that helped the remaining banks? The answer is: It puts us at greater risk that there will be another taxpayer bailout, that there will be another crash, and another taxpayer bailout.

RG: That was Elizabeth Warren. And here’s Bernie Sanders on the Senate floor.

Sen. Bernie Sanders: But now 10 years later, hoping that we forget all about that, these large financial institutions are back again. How pathetic is that? Just yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office told us that the legislation we are debating today will, and I quote, “increase the likelihood that a large financial firm with assets of between 100 billion and 250 billion would fail.” End of the quote. That’s the CBO. 

In other words, this legislation makes it more likely that we will see another financial crisis, makes it more likely that there will be another huge taxpayer bailout, and massive dislocation of our economy.

RG: One of the most active opponents of that law was the AFL-CIO’s policy director at the time, Damon Silvers, who had also served as Warren’s deputy on the panel tasked with investigating the 2008 bailout. 

He’s been one of the most influential progressive figures in Washington when it comes to regulating finance over the past two decades. And he’s currently a visiting professor at the University College of London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. And he continues working with the labor movement in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. 

Damon, welcome to Deconstructed.

Damon Silvers: Thanks, Ryan. It’s good to be with you.

RG: So Damon, you’ve been involved in trying to prevent financial fraud and financial crises and responding to fraud and financial crises for more than 20 years now, going back to Enron and maybe even before, up through the 2008 financial crisis. I’m curious as you’re watching the Silicon Valley Bank crisis unfold, flowing into the Credit Suisse one, which type of crisis kind of occurs to you, or is this a synthesis of everything you’ve seen?

DS: [Laughs.] Well, that’s a really good question, Ryan. 

I mean, as somebody at the IMF once told me, you know, bank crises all are kind of the same, right? They all involve somebody essentially trying to get something for nothing and getting caught. 

RG: [Laughs.] Mhmm.

DS: And then potentially an atmosphere of fear and panic taking hold around larger markets. I think one thing about this that is different. I mean, it resembles some episodes that have been forgotten in the ’90s, where, in the context of rising interest rates, individual institutions blew up, without there actually being a kind of genuinely systemic problem. 

So if you think about what happened in 2008, that was a monster crisis because what was wrong was that the entire banking system globally had kind of gone off in a really destructive and irresponsible direction around Mortgage Finance and around all the financialization that grew out of mortgage finance. 

This is not that, I don’t think. I think this looks a lot more like Long-Term Capital Management. A bunch of people who thought they were the smartest people in the world, went and did some incredibly stupid things in the context of interest rates and then essentially said: We’re so smart and important that we have to be treated specially, we have to be treated differently than we would be treated if we were just ordinary people running a bank somewhere in the Midwest,

RG: It actually kind of shows the way that we think about the smartest people in the universe: Wasn’t Long-Term Capital Management run by a couple of Nobel Prize winners? 

DS: It was. It was indeed. 

RG: So back, then you need credentials. Now, if you dropped out of Harvard or Stanford —

DS: [Laughs.]

RG: — and instantly became worth $10 billion, that’s the kind of Nobel Prize for our period of time.

DS: Yeah. I mean, there’s something to that, Ryan. Unfortunately, I also think here that we’re really talking about the nexus of two cultures of greed and arrogance that connected in Silicon Valley Bank — maybe three, actually, because really, you’re talking about something that was so powerfully aided and abetted by the politics of plutocracy in our country, right? Where I don’t think any of this would have happened had Donald Trump and the Republican congressional leadership, with the help of a few Democrats, weaken Dodd-Frank. I think we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation had that not happened in 2018.

RG: And why is that? What’s the mechanism specifically that would have prevented this from happening, you think?

DS: Well, the way that the Dodd-Frank Act, which was passed under President Obama’s leadership in 2010, in response to 2008, what the Dodd-Frank Act did was recognize that there were financial institutions that, if they failed, could have really broad effects. And therefore, those institutions had to be carefully watched, more carefully watched than just your small-town bank, and they were called “systemically significant financial institutions.”

And what being carefully watched meant was that they were subject to regular stress tests by their bank regulators. And stress test means you would do a financial exercise, like you would run a set of computer programs against the financial picture of the bank, and then you assume that something bad happens, you assume that interest rates go up or down, depending on what the vulnerability of the bank is, you assume rates move, you assume that maybe your key customers have business problems, you make assumptions, and then see what happens to the bank’s finances. And those tests applied to any bank with over $50 billion in assets. 

At the time, in 2018, when the Trump administration pushed this through Congress, this weakening of the bill, in 2018, it was, as I said, $50 billion. And at that time, Silicon Valley Bank was kind of around $50 billion. I don’t remember exactly what their net assets were in 2018 — they moved that number up to $250 billion, right? 

RG: I remember them saying: We’re approaching $50 [billion]. And we’re not going to want to hit $50 [billion] if you don’t pass this. 

DS: Right. 

RG: Lift this up so we can keep going.

DS: Right. And Silicon Valley Bank was important to advocate for this deregulation. And so after the deregulation, they grew dramatically — and in particular, they grew dramatically from 2020 to last week, when they collapsed, in a way that should have rung alarm bells everywhere, right? A big bank doesn’t triple in assets in two years in competitive banking markets without something being wrong, without essentially something being mispriced. But during that period, any kind of stress test around rising interest rates would have shown that there was a real serious problem. But those stress tests never happened, because of the weakening of regulation during the Trump administration.

RG: And I remember covering this in 2018, and Republicans controlled the House, so they didn’t need any help there, but they needed at least 10 Democrats in the Senate. I think they wound up getting about 17 of them. What was it like at the time pushing back against it? And did you ever have a shot of getting that down to nine or was it always baked in that they were going to have enough to push this over the finish line?

DS: I have no idea whether it was always baked in. I can tell you that at the time I was the Policy Director of the AFL-CIO; then AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was just outraged by this bill. He had been involved in pushing for Dodd-Frank; the AFL-CIO has been a major political force pushing for the passage of Dodd-Frank, for the strengthening of Dodd-Frank. We thought Dodd-Frank should have gone a lot further, we thought it should have really more or less restored the New Deal banking regime of Glass-Steagall separating investment banking and commercial banking. We thought we should have had a financial transactions tax; we should have thought we should have done a number of things. 

But we were very proud of what we did accomplish in working to pass Dodd-Frank. And so the weakening in this way we thought was just outrageous. And we were particularly outraged by the fact that there were Democrats who had voted for it. I think it’s really important to be clear here: This was a Republican project. This was a project of the Trump administration and Republican leadership; had Democrats been in control of Congress during this period, or the White House, I don’t believe this would have passed. But it did get Democratic votes, and it wouldn’t have passed without them.

RG: So I want to put a separate theory to you, which is that no bank, unless it’s backstopped by a complete Fed printing press, can survive a full-on banking run. And so, I want to probe a little bit into how this happened; how the depositors, the folks that had their money in Silicon Valley, went about pulling it out so quickly. 

This is from a source of mine that I’ve known for a while out in Silicon Valley. I’ll just read it to you. He said: “I’m not billionaire level, but I’m in a lot of the signal groups. One of the groups I’m in collectively took out 1.4B, another 850M [million], and another 550M [million].” He says, “(I can’t verify if people are telling the truth, but self reported and not coordinated, just a lot of ‘hey who took their cash out and how much?’). Most of this cash was company cash, as well.” he said. 

Then he said: “What was interesting about the conversations is it basically felt like a group of people talking about why X team was going to win the superbowl vs Y team. . Some camps Thursday were “let’s stay in, SVB is fine”, another camp “there’s no risk to taking it out, why would I keep it in off principle”, and plenty of other views as you could imagine.”

And then he finishes that: “The funny part was it felt almost exactly like how other tech stuff goes – rushing in reaction to everyone talking about something. The blue chip VCs suggested something, then that leaked to other ones, then other ones – we had all our investors calling us and basically demanding we pull our cash.”.”

And you could call this person a grassroots — he’s only worth a couple hundred million dollars. So he’s seeing it from the bottom of the Silicon Valley echelon. 

What did you see from the outside? And what’s your sense of what went on?

DS: Ryan, I think this is such an important question. I think this may be the most important question involved here, or at least the one where the answer is least clear and most important, right? To your point about [how] no bank can survive a full-on run. That’s almost precisely one of the most powerful figures in the 2008 financial crisis said to me at a key moment. We were having a debate about what banks were solvent. And this person whose, frankly, experience and knowledge in this area dwarfs mine said to me: absent confidence, no bank is solvent. 

And in a way, we all know this. Any one of us who’ve watched It’s A Wonderful Life know this, right? [Laughs.] A bank intermediates. On the one hand, all us depositors are entitled to take our cash out at any time. On the other hand, as Jimmy Stewart said, your cash is invested in people’s houses and loans to operating companies, which is in machinery and software and so forth, right? So, the idea that everyone can just run into the bank one day and ask for all their cash, and somehow the bank is going to be able to do that, without help from somebody, right, is silly. 

And so there are two ways in which banks can be understood to be insolvent. One way is that if you took all the assets of the bank and liquidated them, would they be enough to pay all the liabilities all in one go, right? That’s a kind of insolvency. It’s important and has to be addressed, but it won’t lead to catastrophe as long as everybody doesn’t demand their money on that day, right? And there are all kinds of accounting games surrounding banks that make it hard to know whether or not on any given day that bank could actually meet that kind of run. 

By the way, this is why we have a Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve was created after just catastrophic bank runs in, in the first decade of the 20th century. 

RG: Right. 

DS: To provide liquidity to banks, should there be a run, right? So that banks could turn those illiquid assets into cash very, very quickly and at fair prices, not at fire-sale prices, in response to any kind of loss in confidence. 

So the other kind of bank collapse is when the bank literally runs out of cash, when the bank does not have enough money to pay the normal demands on that bank, or to pay extraordinary demands when there is a loss of confidence. And I think we saw SVB go in a matter of days from an accounting problem to a liquidity problem, right? 

Now, why did that happen? It seems to me, watching from a distance, that it happened because of the process you were just talking about. And some very inside people appear to have set it off. And some of the people whose behavior I have seen, I saw literally Peter Thiel, Bill Ackman at Pershing Square, Larry Summers, all were in the media in one form or another or in social media or on big listservs telling people that a., there was a crisis in this bank; that b., people should pull their money; that c., if the federal government didn’t take extraordinary action, that there would be a broader crisis in the banking sector. Right? This then connects to all of the volatility we saw over the last four or five days. 

It is, I think, really unclear what information set these people off, where did they get it, was it legal for them to have it and use it the way they used it? Was it even accurate in relation to where things actually stood when they started doing it or were they engaged in a self-fulfilling prophecy? And, in particular, once it became clear that there really were risks, were some of these people engaged in an attempt to coerce the banking regulators by setting off a larger bank run in banks that actually were more or less OK? 

And what interests were at play here? What securities positions did these people have? What trading did they do? Were they in derivatives markets? There are a million ways to play a game in this kind of situation, particularly if you are driving the market. And this is a matter that requires investigation by people with subpoena power.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: And there are those smaller games that you can play — take certain positions that benefit by the actions that you take. But then there’s the bigger game. And I’m curious for your take on this if you think this is something investigators ought to look into, too. I mean, essentially, Silicon Valley understands that its ability to thrive relies on extremely loose monetary policy; the quantitative easing and the low-interest rates really juiced their ability to quote-unquote innovate. 

The tightening of monetary policy has been brutal for them. You’ve seen layoffs, the techpocalypse, you have the obituaries of Silicon Valley being written. As a result of this crisis, it is going to be more difficult for the Fed to continue pursuing its tight monetary policy. So is that just a happy coincidence for the people who were involved in this bank run? Or do you think it’s worth investigators actually probing whether there was some coordination around a broader goal here?

DS: [Laughs.] Ryan, I would say that once you start asking the first kinds of questions about basic issues around securities manipulation, and promoting a bank run — both of which are criminal acts, by the way, promoting a bank run or committing securities manipulations around a bank run, those are crimes — once you start asking those questions, I think you’ll certainly find any evidence that there is of a kind of macroeconomic manipulation, which is what you’re talking about. 

I wouldn’t put anything past some of the individuals I just mentioned, but I think it’s unlikely that they consciously did that. The relationship between means and ends is too sort of strange. But there’s no question that it had the effect that you’re talking about. 

RG: Mhmm. 

DS: And there’s a stupendous irony here from the perspective of the Federal Reserve. 

The Federal Reserve has been saying now for some months, that really, in order to stabilize inflation, they need to crush worker bargaining power. Now, by the way, there’s absolutely no evidence that worker bargaining power, which has grown a bit during periods of full employment, has anything to do with the inflation we’ve been witnessing, which is clearly supply-side driven. It’s driven by issues with COVID, and China, and Ukraine, and Russia, and so forth. 

So the Fed has been saying: We’re going to raise rates until we see, essentially, more unemployment. Now, that’s really wrong. Right? It’s wrong empirically; it’s wrong morally; it’s wrong every which way. But the irony is that actually, the job market is pretty healthy, despite the Fed’s efforts, inflation is coming down, while the job market remains healthy. 

But they seem to have really put a knife in the back of meaningful segments of both tech and finance. And those people, some of whom were active advocates of the Fed attacking working people. I mean, Larry Summers has been very, very clear that he thinks interest rates should rise until working people suffer. And now when Larry and his friends started suffering, all of a sudden, it’s a different story. 

RG: Mhmm. 

DS: But my view is that whatever the reasons for this, it’s long past time for the Fed to ease up. And perhaps now they will.

RG: And so if you watch the kind of commentary on this, you saw a lot of anger and a lot of frustration. But if you lifted the veil a little bit, you saw that almost everybody, in the end, agreed on some level that most or all of the depositors actually did need to be protected and protected quickly by the Biden administration — which then gets us into the realm of talking about bailouts. 

But I’m curious, having both studied the New Deal, and also having been deputy chair of the oversight commission of the bailout back in 2008-2010 — how this feels relative to 2008-2010? Is it that type of bailout or are we looking at something else? 

And what should U.S. bank policy be in situations like this, rather than doing it ad hoc, as we seem to do it now?

DS: Yeah, Ryan, you raise a whole bunch of different issues. 

I think first, it’s important to say that the treatment of SVB is actually mostly not ad hoc. But the exception, the ad hoc part, is very important.

The treatment of SVB has largely been within the framework of New Deal bank regulation, meaning that they have been put by the FDIC into receivership, the management has been removed, the stockholders essentially have been wiped out, it’s unclear exactly what will happen to the bondholders, but it will depend on whether there’s anything left over after the depositors are covered. And it will also depend on whether or not ultimately there is a sale of the bridge bank that SVB has been turned into, whether there’s a sale of that to a solvent bank, which is also kind of generally how this kind of thing has been dealt with since the New Deal. 

This goes back to what I said earlier: At the moment, despite what people like Larry Summers were saying, this is a one-off. This is a uniquely mismanaged bank. True, I mean, the right rising interest rates have created some stress in the financial system. But we’re not seeing the kind of situation that we saw in the fall of 2008 in terms of the entire banking sector having essentially sort of destroyed itself. 

So what you have here is something that has largely gone on within the New Deal order, and in a way that, in my view, should have been done with some important modifications in 2008. The thing that’s different; the thing that’s ad hoc here is the decision to — and you began your question with this — is the decision to ensure, to extend and deposit insurance to all of SVB’s depositors. 

Now, some background here is necessary to understand this. The federal deposit insurance system that’s run by the FDIC insures deposits up to $250,000. And there’s a system of insurance premiums that are paid by banks that support that system. And there is a theory behind it, which is that under $250,000 are people who can’t afford to lose the money and have no real ability to figure out whether or not their bank is strong or not strong, whereas over $250,000 is amounts of money deposited largely by financially sophisticated people and institutions who have a capacity both to absorb losses and to police the banks themselves and that this is an important mechanism for market discipline over the banking sector, while at the same time, we have this broad insurance that there is a balance maintained between ensuring that we don’t have runs on banks and that ordinary people aren’t victimized by poor bank management or bank fraud. And on the other hand, we don’t just have, essentially, a nationalized banking system with private profits, right? Which is what would happen if said: OK, well, we’re gonna just guarantee the banks, everything about the banks will be publicly guaranteed, but we have them be run by private parties for private profits. 

RG: Good deal. 

DS: [Laughs.] Right! It would be a good deal. 

RG: For the bankers. 

DS: Right. And the FDIC insurance system is designed to maintain a balance between those two things. 

Now, here comes SVB. And with SVB, almost all of its deposits were uninsured because they were so big. Right? Only about 7 percent of the total deposit base of SVB was within the insurance limit. And it’s not just anybody: it’s very wealthy, powerful, connected people — the people on the Signal chats you’re talking about. And it’s not just that they’re wealthy, powerful, and connected, it’s that the nature of their connections runs to venture capital firms and to larger aggregations of wealth and power. 

And so all these people show up and say: Oh, never mind! All of these people who are exactly the kind of people that the policy system envisions taking responsibility for themselves, show up and say: Oh, no, we need a bailout. Never mind that we didn’t pay the insurance premiums for our deposits. Never mind that many of us knew something about this bank because we were all close to it — or should have known something about this bank. We want a special deal. 

And they went and pounded the table and they called their political friends and all that went on last week, Thursday and Friday, right? Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and into the weekend. 

Some of them said: Our payroll is in this! 

The wine industry particularly was saying: Our payrolls are in this bank. I don’t know what the truth of all that is and how many weeks of payroll they had on an advance deposit — that’ll be worth looking at in some detail later.

RG: And as Ken Klippenstein reported, Gavin Newsom’s wineries had banked at Silicon Valley Bank. 

DS: Right, well. 

RG: So, speaking of friends in high places. 

DS: Well, and it was, after all, a California State Bank. It was regulated by the California State Bank regulators. But these demands were then made. And if you’re an experienced bank regulator, you take all this with a grain of salt, right? 

Silicon Valley Bank was not big enough by itself to set off contagion. It was a tiny portion; it is about 2 percent of the U.S. banking system. It’s .01 percent of the world banking system. It’s not like there’s a contagion issue in that sense; the risk of contagion was psychological. And the risk of contagion had to do with the size of uninsured deposits in other medium-sized banks around the country. 

So the policymakers had to decide what to do here, against the backdrop of it being ad hoc, and really not good policy, to extend insurance to these very favored people, whereas a number of banks have failed in this country in the last 15 years — like hundreds have failed. And most of them are small banks and community banks, some of them were fairly large, across the middle of the country. Banks supported not by tech geniuses, but by people doing useless things like farming and small business. 

RG: [Laughs.]

DS: And those people were not rescued. Right? The leading citizens of those small towns, cities, and counties, who put money into those banks, I mean, sometimes they may have been fortunate enough to have their bank sold in whole to another bank. But to the extent that buyers could not be found, or the banks were really in terrible trouble, the leading citizens of those communities who put their deposits in those banks were not rescued. 

So the demands from the Silicon Valley elites and the winery elites and so forth, to have their deposits, all of them over the insurance limit, insured was really problematic on a lot of levels. But the regulators, and the Biden administration — and I think it’s important to understand [that] this wasn’t a decision the President of the United States made on his own. It was a decision that was jointly made by independent regulators, including some Republicans, most prominently J. Powell at the Fed, it was a decision jointly made by everybody. 

And I think they made it for a good reason, which was that there was a serious risk of contagion, psychological contagion here, across the middle of the U.S. banking industry. The four giant banks that dominate the banking industry post-2008, they were never in trouble, this never threatened them. But it threatened that middle section of the banking industry, which is important, and which, if it came apart, you don’t know what the knock-on effects would be. We’re not talking about tiny banks. We’re talking about banks with tens, hundreds of billions of deposits and investments. 

So they made that decision. And as you said, Ryan, I gotta say that I can’t fault them for that, given what we are told they knew about movements in the financial markets, as of Sunday. It was a case of being kind of over a barrel. 

But now, really, we’re close to being back in the calm moment. And now there are some important things that need to happen to ensure that our democracy functions the way it should. 

The most important one is to make every effort — and I mean every effort, the full power of the American state needs to be deployed here — to try to find the remnants of SVB a home in another private institution, and to take the responsibility for covering these deposits off of the entire banking industry, and place it someplace where it can be managed in a way that’s not effectively socializing it. That is really important that that happened. And I believe that the regulators and the Biden administration understand this. The question is: Can they get it done? Is it possible to do? And I think the question of whether they can get it done or not is a deep question. 

The second thing that needs to be done is the type of investigation we were discussing earlier, and everything about this, every step of the way. And the third thing that needs to be done, which is kind of obvious, is what Elizabeth Warren has been saying. Elizabeth Warren chaired the oversight panel that I was the vice chair of; Elizabeth was the most, I think, a ferocious opponent of weakening Dodd-Frank in the U.S. Congress. Elizabeth is one of the heroes of this story. OK? There aren’t a lot of heroes in this story. Elizabeth sure is one of them. 

RG: Mhmm. 

DS: And another hero of this story, unfortunately, is no longer with us, who was the president of the AFL-CIO at the time, in 2018, Richard Trumka, who wrote a letter to every Democratic senator who voted for this bill demanding that Senator explain directly and personally to him, why he had hurt working people so badly. That letter, by the way, is in the American Prospect this week. And, as I think you know, Rich died tragically of a heart attack two years ago. 

But Elizabeth has three things that she said need to be done. The first, obviously, is to reverse the 2018 rollback of Dodd-Frank and move the systemically significant number back from $250 billion to $50 billion. The second thing that needs to be done is to do something about payroll bank accounts. It does seem kind of correct that we shouldn’t have payroll bank accounts at risk in a situation like this. But we need the insurance system to cover them in a systematic and ordinary way with premiums. And that needs to be worked out between Congress and the bank regulators on how to do that because we can’t be put over a barrel like this again. And then the third thing is to look into the question of whether there need to be further legislative reforms to address the fact that such a fundamental failure of bank regulation occurred here. And are there further measures that need to be taken? And Elizabeth has been talking about some of that recently. But those first two things are no-brainers that need to happen immediately.

RG: Well, Damon, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

DS: Oh, you’re very welcome, Ryan. It is a pleasure to be able to talk to you in a non-trivial way about this. [Laughs.]

RG: [Laughs.] Yeah, well, it’s non-trivial stuff. So I appreciate it. 

[End credits music.]

RG: That was Damon Silvers, and that’s our show. 

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show was mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

I’ll see you soon.

The post Understanding the Silicon Valley Bank Run appeared first on The Intercept.

This week, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., brought forward a war powers resolution, backed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, that would bring U.S. troops home from Syria. On Wednesday night, the resolution was rejected by Democrats and Republicans alike. During the debate, some advocated for an endless occupation, while their arguments unwittingly made the point that the U.S. government may not be the best group to solve the crisis. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Robert Ford, who was President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Syria up until 2014. Although he was known inside the White House as a hawkish supporter of arming the Syrian opposition, this week he came out in support of Gaetz’s resolution to pull out U.S. troops. Ford describes some of the political maneuvering and behind-the-scenes conversations taking place in 2013 and why he is calling to remove U.S. troops from Syria.

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome back to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim. 

So if you were watching the House floor this week, you could have been forgiven for wondering if you had stepped into a time machine and emerged somewhere between 2002 and 2003. 

Here’s Rep. Ryan Zinke, Trump’s former Interior Secretary who now represents Montana in Congress, explaining why the House should reject a War Powers Resolution brought forward by Rep. Matt Gaetz, and backed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus that would bring U.S. troops home from Syria. 

Rep. Ryan Zinke: The hard truth is this — either we fight them in Syria, or we’ll fight them here. Either we fight and defeat them in Syria, or we’ll fight in the streets of our nation.

RG: Gaetz is a Republican who represents the Florida Panhandle and led the rebellion against Kevin McCarthy in January. His War Powers Resolution came up quickly with little time for anti-war groups to mobilize their membership and lobby Congress, and it came up for a vote on Wednesday evening. 

Here’s Gaetz with a brief history lesson on how we got here: 

Rep. Matt Gaetz: And so people watching this debate might wonder how has it come to be that Syria has become the great platform of great power competition in the world. In begins in 2011, during the Arab Spring, when Assad, who is undeniably a madman and a despot, opens fire on his own people protesting; then part of the Syrian Army defects, they engage in warfare against Assad, and all of a sudden, they got a whole lot of weapons and money being sent from the rich Gulf monarchies through Jordan, into Syria.

So Iran’s no trust going to watch this. Assad’s their ally. They activate Hezbollah; they then invade Syria; so now you’ve got Jordan, the Gulf monarchies, Iran, but wait — Russia is pitching their vision of the world as a regime preservation force, whether you’re Maduro or Assad, so they get involved. And what do they get for their time? A warm-water port in the eastern Mediterranean.

So you’ve got Russia, the Gulf monarchies; Israel starts to get worried about Hezbollah and Iran. So Israel cuts a deal with Russia to keep Iran out of southern Syria. And if it doesn’t get any worse than that, now, all of a sudden, you’ve got the Kurds who declare war on Syria. And it makes it a little messy that the Kurds are also in conflict with Turkey, which is a NATO ally. 

And then somehow the United States, in 2015 says: You know what? We need to get involved in this mess in Syria. 

And since we have been there, we have seen Americans die. We have seen tens of billions of dollars wasted. And what is hilarious about the 2001 AUMF that the neoconservatives wave around like some permission slip for every neoconservative fantasy of turning an Arabian desert into a Jeffersonian democracy, is that that very 2001 AUMF would justify attacking the people that we’re fighting against, and the people were funding.

RG: Democrat Greg Meeks, previously chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee stood to oppose it. 

Rep. Gregory Meeks: This measure forces a premature end to our mission at a critical time for our efforts. Forcing such a premature removal of U.S. forces not only endangers our national security, it threatens that of our allies and partners across the region and beyond. 

RG: He made a version of Zinke’s argument, too.

GM: Our very small footprint in northeast Syria, alongside our courageous Syrian Kurdish partners, continues to serve a valuable purpose as we partner with them, in ensuring ISIS does not reconstitute and again, destabilize the region, or use Syria as a base for attacks elsewhere. 

RG: So last year, an amendment from Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman, which required withdrawal within a year, got 130 Democratic votes, which is 60 percent of the caucus, and it got 25 Republican votes. With Gaetz as the lead sponsor, Democratic support was cut in half this week with just 56 voting to support it. Yet GOP support nearly doubled with 47 Republicans backing it. The rest sided with the types of arguments made by Zinke, who took his position to its logical extreme. 

Rep. Zinke: But there is no doubt that Syria also remains a center for radical Islamic forces and terrorism, like ISIS, like PKK.

These are organizations that will never stop — ever. They are committed to destroy this nation and our allies, and we should be aware of their objectives. 

RG: So not only is Zinke advocating an endless occupation there, his reference to the PKK exposes how bizarre and tangled all this is. The PKK represents the leftist separatist Kurdish movement in Turkey, and the PKK is allied with the leftist separatist Kurdish movement in Syria, the PYD, which is itself allied with the United States to fight ISIS. 

When Zinke says the PKK is committed to destroying the United States and its allies, he is effectively saying the PKK is committed to destroying itself. 

And this is not to pick on Zinke for being dumb. It’s not about that. New York’s Rep. Jerry Nadler, one of the smartest members of Congress, made a similar mistake. 

Rep. Jerry Nadler: We are defending the courage against certain slaughter at the hands of the Peshmerga, if we were to withdraw our troops. The Turks, as we know, are supporting the Peshmerga. In addition to which, if we were to withdraw our troops, that increases the worry that Israel has to have about Iran. And that increases the odds of a conflict between Israel and Iran, which is the last thing the Middle East needs or the world needs. 

RG: So the Peshmerga are actually Kurdish, not pursuing the annihilation of the Kurds. Peshmerga is a Kurdish word that means “those who face death.” There’s plenty of sectarian infighting among the various Kurdish factions operating in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran — and certainly, some Peshmerga forces have battled some PKK or YPG forces — but the Peshmerga are certainly not bent on self-genocide of the Kurds. 

All of this confusion kind of makes the point that the U.S. might not be in the best position to resolve this crisis. 

Robert Ford: The Americans can’t fix that. 

RG: So that’s Robert Ford, who was President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Syria up until 2014, and was known inside the White House as a hawkish supporter of arming the Syrian opposition. 

This week, as The Intercept first reported, he came out in support of Gaetz’s resolution to bring the troops home, and he is our guest on today’s Deconstructed.

Ambassador Ford, welcome to the show. 

Robert Ford: It’s my pleasure to be with you. 

RG: And so this show comes out on a Friday. So by the time that it airs, it’s now Wednesday morning. By the time that it airs, the House will have already voted on the War Powers Resolution put forward by Matt Gaetz and endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus to withdraw troops from Syria within the next six months. We don’t, at this point, know exactly how that’s gonna go, but unlikely to get 218 votes, but it could be a respectable showing of pushing 160, 170, or something like that. 

So you sent a letter to members of Congress recently advocating that they vote for this resolution as a way forward. What was your thinking of why you wanted to weigh in here?

RF: I think anytime we deploy American forces into a combat situation, anytime we do that, there needs to be a full explanation to Congress first and to the public, more generally, about the strategy that we will use to achieve the militarian mission, about timelines — estimated timelines — about the resources needed, benchmarks so that we can sort of measure progress on the way. And it needs to have a good discussion among people in Congress first because they vote, and ultimately, they’re responsible. 

But it also needs to have discussion in a public realm so that there’s public support for it. And I don’t think we’ve had any of those things with respect to the American mission in Syria since it began in earnest in 2015. 

RG: And we sort of had a public debate back in 2013, when Obama himself said that he wanted to get congressional authorization for airstrikes, for strikes inside Syria. There was then a public debate, and as it became clear that it looked like there wasn’t going to be support in Congress, my recollection is they decided not to have that vote. 

Here we are 10 years later. So I wanted to get from your perspective since you were there, how did U.S. policy get to where it is today? Because I remember this kind of amazing moment — I don’t know if it was in New Yorker or somebody that reported it where Obama was sitting around with his team. And maybe you were in the room at this point, where people from the CIA are suggesting: Let’s arm these opposition groups, or let’s arm this group, and this is how we’ll get to the place we need to be. 

And Obama said: When has that ever worked? Go back and tell me, find me over the last decades, when the CIA has armed an opposition group and we looked back on that fondly and said, We are glad that we did that. 

So were you in that meeting? Do you remember when that happened? And how do we go from there to here?

RF: So there were multiple meetings about whether or not to arm elements of the Free Syrian Army, the rebel-armed opposition. So I was not in a particular meeting where Obama raised this question, but we certainly heard about him raising it.

RG: Mhmm.

RF: And I would just say two things. Number one, first of all, the situation in Syria was dynamic. And we were going to get involved one way or the other. And we did get involved, even if we didn’t arm the moderate opposition, we ended up sending the U.S. Air Force and ground forces into Syria.

A big point that I made at the time was that if we don’t arm elements of the moderate armed opposition, extremists will take over the rebel forces, and we will end up having to send troops. So it’s, I mean, you can have it one way, or you can have it the other way, but it will happen. 

And the second point I would make is that, in many cases, what the CIA was looking at was arming opposition groups to overthrow a government, such as in Latin America. The point of the American policy at the time, when I was there was not to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Nobody wanted a repeat of Baghdad in 2003. And I spent five years in Iraq during the war. It was the last thing that I wanted was to get into another round of nation-building.

Instead, the idea was to get Bashar al-Assad to accept that he could not win militarily and that he would have to negotiate some kind of a transition in which he could or could not play a part; that would be up to the Syrian negotiators. But the idea that he would just impose his will by force, we said, would not restore stability in Syria, and to a large extent, it still hasn’t. 

RG: So what did we end up doing when it came to arming different elements of the Syrian opposition? 

RF: So in 2013, Obama finally agreed to begin. The program took a long time to get started; it didn’t really begin in earnest until 2014. 

And to be very frank, there were two big problems with it. The first was — and I take personal responsibility for this — we did not get from the Syrian opposition a matching political program to win political support from Syrian communities so that they would push Assad to go to negotiations. Frankly, the rebel opposition thought they could win militarily, which was, we thought, never going to happen with Russia and Iran, but they thought they could. And we failed to condition the armed assistance, the weaponry, on the Syrian opposition, reaching out politically to pillars of support of the Assad government. That was a mistake. 

The second problem we had was that we were not the only ones arming the Syrian opposition: Turkey was arming, Qatar was arming, for a time the Saudis were, for a time the Jordanians were — and everybody had their own favorite client groups. We did. Turkey did. Turkey was arming hardline Islamists. So were the Qataris. The Saudis were arming lots of people. And because everybody had their own favorite client groups, the armed opposition had no unified leadership. And it was almost chaotic. And that diminished the military pressure on Assad that we had hoped would compel Assad to go to the negotiating table.

RG: And there eventually seemed to be some daylight between the State Department and some of the opposition groups and their willingness to negotiate with Assad —

RF: Well that was true throughout. I had numerous hard conversations with the Syrian opposition about that and they had a reaction, which I think was understandable on a human level — barrel bombs were dropping, and chemical weapons were being used. And they would ask me, and in a very pointed, not friendly way: How can you possibly ask us to negotiate with a war criminal, with a guy drenched in blood? 

And we would say: You can negotiate a transition government, that’s up to you, but there’s just no way you’re going to win militarily. It’s never going to happen. And there has to be a negotiation. 

That was a very, very hard sell. 

RG: Can you talk a little bit about the U.N.-brokered talks around 2014? 

RF: Sure. So after much, much hard negotiating, we finally got the Syrian opposition, including elements of the Free Syrian Army, the armed opposition, to agree to a negotiation under United Nations auspices in Geneva in January of 2014. 

I cannot tell you how difficult it was to get the Syrian opposition to agree to sit at the table with Bashar al-Assad. The Russians had agreed with us; John Kerry, for example, and then political Undersecretary Wendy Sherman, that they would get Assad and his government to come to the table — and they did.

When those talks started, the Syrian opposition gave the United Nations mediator, a diplomat named Lakhdar Brahimi, a written proposal that they were willing to negotiate a transition government, a new cabinet, a new set of leaders for the brutal, repressive security apparatus. They were willing to negotiate all of those, all positions in the government, they were willing to negotiate. 

Lakhdar told me later that he was very surprised to get this in writing from the Syrian opposition. And he had asked them: Does this include negotiating the role of Bashar al-Assad? 

And they said: It includes all positions, including the president.

Therefore, when people say that the Syrian opposition insisted that Bashar has to go, that’s a gross simplification, they were actually willing to negotiate it. [Laughs.]

When I explained this to Secretary John Kerry, what the opposition had put on the table, he looked at me in surprise, and he said: Well, Assad has to go! 

And I said: Mr. Secretary, we can’t be harder-line than the Syrian opposition. I mean, that just would make no sense whatsoever. 

And he readily agreed, as it turned out, the Assad government was prepared to negotiate no position in a transitional government. And they insisted that the only thing they would be willing to do is to have the opposition denounce armed resistance. And the armed opposition wasn’t willing to do that in return for no concessions. 

So the talks foundered in February.

RG: And Secretary Kerry might have been willing to agree to that privately, but I don’t remember him ever saying publicly that the United States was willing to actually negotiate his staying. 

RF: Yeah. What Secretary Kerry would say is there can’t be any stability with Bashar al-Assad’s government staying in power, which I think is essentially true. But he also said: The Syrians have to negotiate this. 

It was very clear to everybody that the Americans couldn’t dictate a solution to Syria, and especially after Iraq, nobody in the United States government wanted to dictate a solution to Syria, and people understood how fractured Syria was. 

RG: So how did U.S. troops end up inside Syria? 

RF: In a sense, the extremists that I was talking about a little while ago did take over the Syrian armed opposition. The people we supported eventually got overrun by better-armed extremists. And the Islamic State captured major cities in Syria in 2014 — actually, starting in late 2013 and into 2014. And also then, using Syria as a kind of safe haven, went into Iraq from whence they had originally come, and captured cities in Iraq, notably Mosul in the summer of 2014. 

President Obama looked at this very large territory that the Islamic State captured — and it had a lot of revenue, it captured money when it seized banks in Mosul; it had oil production in eastern Syria; it was on a totally different scale, from Osama bin Laden operating out of safe houses in caves in Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001, prior to 9/11.

And so the President decided to drop the issue of a transitional government in Syria and focus on the fight against ISIS. And the Americans quickly linked up with a Syrian Kurdish faction fighting the Islamic State in northeastern Syria, right up close to the border with Turkey. We began with just airstrikes. Then we dropped some supplies, which infuriated the Turks — that was a forerunner of where we are today.

And eventually, in 2015, to better enable that Syrian-Kurdish faction to fight ISIS, the United States sent in small special operations teams to coordinate airstrikes. 

RG: Now, by this time, you had resigned. What was the rationale behind your decision to step away?

RF: It’s really important when you’re an official, and in the administration, any administration, any administration, that you be willing to defend the administration’s policy when it’s challenged in any kind of public format. And I regularly had to go up to the Hill, to Capitol Hill, to testify to either the House of Representatives or to the Senate, about President Obama’s Syria policy. And many of the senators, both Democrats and Republicans, really laid into me about the tepid American support for the Syrian opposition. And my job was to defend the Obama administration’s policy, even though behind closed doors, in deliberations within the Obama administration, I was advocating for much greater action and greater support. 

But in public, in these hearings, and there was one that stood out in the late summer of 2013, I had people like Sen. John McCain say that I didn’t understand Syria, and I should be working on some part of Africa instead of something important like Syria policy, and I had Sen. Bob Corker telling me I should personally be ashamed. 

And I decided after that, I told Secretary Kerry and Bill Burns and Wendy Sherman, I was not going to have my personal integrity challenged over a policy I didn’t even agree with in the first place. And so there was nothing for me to do but resign. I stayed on at the request of Secretary Kerry as we tried to get those government opposition negotiations in Geneva underway, the ones that I had mentioned before, but they foundered in early February, and I was out the door at the end of the month.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: And so you went from somebody who was pushing for the U.S. to do more when it came to confronting the Assad regime, to now supporting the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Rep. Matt Gaetz and others who are saying —

RF: That’s right.

RG: Right. So how did that evolution come about? 

RF: So the evolution is this, it’s really important in foreign policy to recognize when realities change, and the chance to get a negotiation to deal with the deep-seated Syrian political crisis, that window has long closed; I think it closed when Aleppo was recaptured by the Assad government in the winter of 2016. But in any case, it’s a long shot. And so the idea that somehow a small American Force out in the desert of eastern Syria is going to influence the course of events in the larger country of Syria, I think, is ridiculous. And it’s been shown to be completely ineffective; people who argued that this would give us leverage — and they made this argument a lot in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, have been shown to be wrong. The reality is it doesn’t give us leverage. 

The idea that the United States can somehow achieve the enduring defeat of ISIS, the Islamic State in Syria, is also ridiculous for two reasons. Number one: The Syrian government controls most of the country and its control is not always very firm. And the Islamic State operates freely in central Syria — just today, there was, again, reports of an attack, an ambush and a small Syrian government control that killed four soldiers. So they do this a lot. And then they can move into the areas where the Americans operate farther east. So they go from central Syria and eastern Syria where the American forces are, and then they can run back out again. And how you achieve an enduring defeat of ISIS when you can’t get at them in central Syria, I genuinely do not understand. 

The second point I would make is ISIS recruits; it recruits new fighters. Not a lot. I don’t want to over-exaggerate. They take casualties, but they replace them. And they maintain now, for four years, they’ve maintained a low-level insurgency. I don’t think 900 U.S. Special Operations forces can stop that recruitment. The recruitment is a result of bitter political divisions, and social problems in that part of Syria, and the Americans can’t fix that. Frankly, the Americans don’t even speak the language, much less have the ability to address these kinds of political divisions that enable recruitment. And so the mission itself, I would argue, is unachievable.

And that’s why I want a debate in Congress about this because it’s not that the operation is so expensive compared to the larger American military budget — maybe $2.5-$3 billion a year. But we’re putting people in harm’s way, for what reason? And that needs to be discussed.

RG: If we did have that debate, I would suspect that one of the arguments that you would hear from people would be: Well, if you withdraw U.S. troops now, then Turkey is just going to annihilate our one-time allies, the Kurds there, who have been fighting for their the autonomy that they now appreciate. 

So one, is that actually the U.S. mission to defend the Kurds? But, two, is that true? What would happen vis-a-vis Turkey and the Kurdish separatists if the U.S. did withdraw?

RF: Well, I cannot overstate the animosity that the Turkish government feels towards this Syrian militia faction that we work with against ISIS. It’s deep-seated; it predated the Islamic State; it goes back decades and decades. 

I’m happy to go into it in greater detail, Ryan, if you’d like to, but what I would say is, because of that severe Turkish animosity, the Syrian-Kurdish faction with whom we work actually has long-maintained relations with the Assad government in Damascus. They had very good relations with Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad. For a long time, the leader of the faction, Abdullah Öcalan, lived in Damascus, from where he could harass Turkey. The only reason he’s not in Damascus now is the Turks threatened a full-scale invasion and Damascus was afraid enough that it actually expelled Abdullah Öcalan from Damascus, but prior to that he’d been living there for many years. 

Fast forward to today, this Syrian-Kurdish faction, our partners on the ground against the Islamic State, regularly — I mean, daily, weekly — talk to the government in Damascus. At one point in 2019, when Donald Trump said that the American troops would move back and not resist a Turkish advance into a border area in northeast Syria, the Syrian-Kurdish faction that we work with, went to Damascus and said: Would you please come up to the border and operate patrols with the Russians in order to deter the Turks? And the Syrian government did that. And to this day, there are Syrian government patrols with the Russians up along that portion of the border. 

So if you think about what would happen if the Americans leave, I think you would see the same model repeated — worried about a Turkish incursion, this Syrian-Kurdish faction would go back to Damascus and ask for more of a symbolic presence of the Syrian government forces up in that area to deter a Turkish invasion. 

I have to underline here, that the Syrian Government is not very strong, its economy is a mess; it doesn’t have a lot of resources, and they’re not going to be able to hold that part of the country sternly. I mean, as I mentioned, they’re already having trouble with the Islamic State in central Syria. So they’re not going to be able to hold eastern Syria in a rock-hard way — would it be enough to deter the Turks? Very possibly, especially if the Russians are doing the patrols, again, along the model of 2019. But the idea that somehow the Syrian-Kurdish communities of northeastern Syria are going to be destroyed by the Assad government or by the Turks, I think, is not accurate. It’s expressing an anguish that the Syrian-Kurdish faction, which has political control now, is relaying to us as a justification to keep us in Syria. 

RG: Now, a separate issue from the U.S. troop presence is the ongoing international and U.S.-led sanctions. Where do you stand today on the effectiveness of those sanctions? You talked about the extraordinary weakness of the Assad government. Assad, like you said, drenched in blood, one of the most cruel, vicious evil people — 

RF: A war criminal. There’s no other way to describe it.

RG: Absolutely a war criminal. But it raises an uncomfortable question, then, of: Are these sanctions on the Assad government actually effective? Or are they counterproductive and causing too much harm to a civilian population without doing anything useful? So where are you at now, when it comes to the effectiveness of the sanctions? 

RF: Well, the first thing I have to say is that when I was the policy lead on Syria, I approved imposing additional sanctions on the Syrian government, particularly in 2012. So it’s not that I’m against sanctions as a matter of principle. But I think, as I said before, you have to understand how things evolve and what the reality is. 

The reality now, in 2023, is that we have a very dense web of sanctions on the Syrian government, many of them predate the Syrian uprising and go back to the 1980s and 1990s, but it’s a very thick web of sanctions. They have produced no visible political concessions from the Assad government. 

I want to repeat that, again, for the listeners: The sanctions, as harsh as they are, and they would be about as harsh as what we impose on North Korea and Iran; they have produced no political concessions from the Bashar al-Assad government. Yes, they do impose financial costs on some of Bashar al-Assad’s economic buddies, his business buddies — his crony, business buddies, yes. 

But they also have put pressure on the Syrian currency, which has dropped in value, raised inflation in Syria, and raised food prices, for example, and ordinary Syrians suffer because of that. The sanctions are intended to, and do, disrupt capital flows that would enable the Syrians, some of these crony business people, to undertake redevelopment projects and build new housing, for example. That means without those projects, there are fewer jobs and fewer people who would earn wages to support their families. 

So it hurts the cronies, absolutely. But it also hurts ordinary Syrians who are kind of caught in this really unhappy situation. And I think it’s disingenuous for the backers of sanctions to say: Oh, they don’t hurt ordinary Syrians. 

Of course, they do. They’re intended to. I mean, if you’re going to disrupt an economy, it’s going to have an economic impact on citizens. 

So I think there is a debate to be had about whether or not the pain we inflict on ordinary Syrians is worth whatever we’re trying to get out of the sanctions in terms of political concessions from Bashar al-Assad. That’s not self-evident to me.

RG: Do you have a sense of whether that debate is happening anywhere? And has the recent horrific earthquake, or series of earthquakes, at least sparked some interest in relooking at this policy, or is it so far down on the list of urgent priorities that it just gets — one week becomes another and it just goes on? 

RF: There’s there’s an attached argument to this that American financial sanctions on Syria are so strict, are so tough, that most Western financial institutions, whether they be banks, or just Western Union doing money transfers — they just won’t touch Syria. I mean, anything on the address line of the recipient says Syria, they just won’t even process it. They’re just like: Thank you; no thank you.

So the Treasury Department shortly after the earthquake issued what it called a general license, saying anything involving humanitarian aid, we absolutely will not prosecute any bank or financial institution for moving money to Syria for the purpose of humanitarian aid in the wake of the earthquake. Whether that’s going to remain in place after a certain period, I don’t know. That’s up to the Treasury Department and the Biden administration.

There was an article, maybe some of the listeners saw it, a few days ago in The New York Times, where it mentioned that opponents of the Assad government are unhappy that the Treasury Department took this step of reducing the sanctions at least for a temporary period with respect to humanitarian aid. So maybe The New York Times article will be followed by other discussions about what are the sanctions achieving, versus what are they imposing in terms of pain on ordinary Syrians.

But if that debate, if it’s even going to start, it’s going to start from zero. 

RG: Well, Ambassador, thank you so much for joining us. Maybe this will get a little bit of the debate started. And maybe Congress will actually take some interest in foreign policy. 

RF: That would be great. I hope so.

[End credits music.]

RG: That was Robert Ford, the former American Ambassador to Syria.

And that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show was mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

And I’ll see you soon.

The post Ending the Hidden Occupation appeared first on The Intercept.

Mehdi Hasan’s debates tend to go viral, like those against John Bolton, Erik Prince, or a Saudi ambassador. Hasan wipes the floor during debates and interviews. But it’s not an easy process; as Hasan says, it requires a lot of preparation. In “Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking,” Hasan outlines the best ways to win debates against all sorts of opponents. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Hasan, where they discuss some of his greatest viral debate clips, along with helpful tips to win debates.

[Deconstructed intro music.]

Ryan Grim: I’m Ryan Grim. And this is Deconstructed. 

But if you’ve been listening to it for more than the last couple years, you know this wasn’t originally my podcast. That title belongs to Mehdi Hasan who has since moved on to his own cable show on MSNBC called “The Mehdi Hasan Show.” 

He’s now out with a new book called “Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking,” which is, in many ways, the book he was born to write. 

Mehdi, welcome back to your show.

Mehdi Hasan: [Laughs.] Thank you, Ryan. And it’s funny you should say that because a fair few people have said that not always in a positive way.

RG: [Laughs.] Well, they are probably still a little bit sore from the last time you out-argued them.

MH: I try. I try.

RG: So you and I first met back when you were interviewing to join HuffPost U.K. 

MH: Yes. 

RG: And it was the most quintessential Arianna Huffington moment ever.

MH: [Laughs.] It was.

RG: The interview happened in a chauffeured car on the way to the airport with a random extra dude along for the ride — which, in this case, was me. Did you have any warning that that’s how this interview was gonna go down?

MH: Absolutely none. And I’m not someone — I’ve been blessed with the fact that I’ve not had to do a traditional job, interviews of jobs I’ve had over the years. The media, as you know, Ryan, is a weird place. The way we get jobs, we sometimes fall into them.

RG: Right. Because everybody knows you already, because of your work.

MH: Or it’s word of mouth, or it’s a connection; it’s a coffee, whatever — formal job interviews don’t really happen in our line of work that often. And I remember that I was living in the U.K., and I came to visit D.C. for another reason. And while I was there, the HuffPost folks who were trying to hire me in the U.K. said: Hey, why don’t you meet Arianna? She’s in D.C. that weekend, too.

So I said: OK! [They said:] Hey, meet her at this hotel.

So I go to the hotel thinking that we were going to meet in a restaurant, or in a bar, or in the lobby. No — apparently, she’s giving a speech at a conference in the hotel, you’re there as the D.C. Bureau Chief at the HuffPost to, I don’t know what — collect her? Hold her hand?

RG: Who knows what. 

MH: And she comes out and says: I don’t have time to talk to you because I have a flight to catch. Why — I’m not going to do the impression — why don’t you just jump in the car with me and come with me to Reagan Airport? 

I’ve got nothing else to do. I said: Alright! And we sat in the backseat of the car. You were in the front. And she interviewed me while on two phones. So she was talking to me, you, the driver, and texting and emailing on two BlackBerries at the same time. This is 2012, I want to say? 

And she told me that she would hire me, but I would go beyond left and right, Ryan, and you and I are well known for being beyond left and right.

RG: There you go. And I remember us both praying that her flight was not in Dulles.

MH: Or not delayed. 

RG: We were just hoping like —

MH: And you had an interview lined up for her at the airport with some guy, some former cop, or some criminal justice —

RG: Oh, that’s right.

MH: I was like, wow, that’s a lot of conversations going on — she, yeah, I mean, I’ve had some fun conversations over the years. I’d forgotten about that. It wasn’t, per se, an argument, so it doesn’t make it into the book. I do tell a lot of stories about fun debates and conversations and arguments I’ve had in this book, but all of the ones I’ve had with Arianna are memorable. You’re right.

RG: That was right. We were doing actual journalism. We were meeting a source out at the airport — 

MH: You were. 

RG: — before her flight, now that I remember that. 

I had my own perfectly-Arianna Huffington interview in 2008. It was scheduled at the Four Seasons in Washington, one of the nicest, most glamorous hotels in Washington. I show up and, randomly, Jose Antonio Vargas is there — 

MH: OK. 

RG: — at the time, a Washington Post reporter. Luckily, I knew him. But just classic that there’s just going to be a random other person, just —

MH: Always multitasking with the meetings. 

But I owe Arianna a lot, because without her I wouldn’t have got to the U.S.

Because, ironically, I came to the U.S. with Al Jazeera, but originally I had said to Arianna: My wife’s American; I’m interested in covering the American election.

She said: Done! Move! I’ll make it happen. 

And then when Al Jazeera English found out, they said: Well, why don’t you just come to D.C. and we’ll give you a weekly show. We got a new studio there. 

So I ended up being in D.C. But it all started with the kind of conversation with her. 

And here I am, eight years later — eight years ago this month, Ryan. 

RG: Yep. 

MH: Stepped foot on U.S. soil.

RG: And at the time that you came to the Huffington Post, you were already pretty well known in the U.K. for your debating style. So like, when did you first realize that you were particularly good at arguing?

MH: As I say in the book, I think I realized around the dinner table with my parents and my sister. I come from a very disputatious household. The Hasan family likes to argue, perhaps argue too much, many of our visitors and guests might say. But it did give me some skills in life; as annoying as it made me, it did remind me of the importance of being able to argue your way out of a situation, debate any topic, see more than one side to an issue. And I think that is something I say in the introduction to the book, that I will always thank my dad for, this idea that you kind of take on issues and you do it in an intellectually honest way. 

And I tell the story in the book that my dad was, in the late ’80s, when people were burning copies of “Satanic Verses,” Salman Rushdie’s novel, Muslims were burning it in the streets of Bradford and were horrified by this book, my dad buys the book, reads it, and puts it on his bookshelf next to the dining table. So anytime any guests come over, they’re like, shocked: Why do you have this book? 

And my dad’s like: Well, you can’t condemn it unless you’ve read it. 

And this was the point. And that was kind of instilled in me from a very early age — read the other side’s newspapers and publications. If I’m on the left, read the right; if you’re on the right, read the left. Open your mind to all sorts of arguments. And I realized early on that I enjoyed doing that; I had a skill for it, a knack for it. 

I turned up at Oxford University in 1997. And it’s a perfect place for someone like me to be because they have the Oxford Union debating society, the most famous debating society on planet Earth. And I kind of threw myself into debates there and loved it. And when I graduated from university, I knew I had no skills in life, other than having a big mouth. 

RG: [Laughs.]

MH: So the media is where I ended up.

RG: And I was hoping that the book would kind of be an easy how-to, like: Here’s four easy steps to become just like Mehdi Hasan, but I was kind of demoralized by how much you talk about how extensive preparation is the key to everything. 

MH: [Laughs.]

RG: And I was like: Just show me where the club is, so I can beat somebody up. 

MH: [Laughs.] 

RG: But no, that’s not what it’s gonna be — which means, I guess, that you can’t eat anybody else’s lunch for free would be the way to put that.

MH: I think yes or no. So I’d say yes, in the sense that it has annoyed me over the years that people think you can just wing this stuff. 

RG: Mhmm. 

MH: They assume that what those of us who do it are doing is winging it, which we’re not. And they assume that they can do it by winging it and cutting corners, which they can’t, and then they end up making a fool of themselves. And I’ve seen that over the years — as a producer in television, as a host of a TV show, and before that I was a TV producer. Booking guests, you’d see people — you’ve seen them, Ryan — on TV crash and burn. They might be great. They might be great intellectuals. You might be like: Oh this guy’s gonna be great. You put them on TV — because they haven’t prepared, their skills as a professor, or as a doctor, or as an actor, whatever it is, when it comes to the medium of what we work in, a combative interview, it doesn’t work, it falls apart. 

So I would say yes, you need to prepare. It’s a major theme of this book. And I devote the last third of the book, the last four of the last five chapters to building your confidence, staying calm, how to do research, and how to actually prepare your delivery. That’s almost a third of the book at the end. I start with the key principles to rhetoric debate, public speaking. 

I then do — this is where I would say no, you can occasionally wing parts of it — have a middle section of the book which is all about the tricks of the trade. What are the techniques you can use to get yourself out of a hole? What are the quick fixes you can use when you’re in trouble; when you’re being beaten up rhetorically? 

And I talked about how to deal with the Gish galloper; the Trump-type person who comes with bullshit, to overwhelm you with bullshit. How do you deal with that? I talked about: How do you structure your speech? How do you do a quick fix when it comes to confidence? How do you fake it? Fake it to make it — all of these things in the book! How to use booby traps, to trip people up in an argument, or a debate, or an interview — a very important skill that some people think is unfair, but I don’t. 

So there’s a lot of practical stuff in the book. 

I actually devote a chapter in the book to ad hominem arguments, and why I think they’re totally justifiable, and legitimate, and why you should actually use them. Because we live in a world where, oh, you don’t go ad hom! Ad hom is a logical fallacy! Ad hom is rude! Ad hom is bad! But no, actually, there’s a very good argument for why you should actually be questioning the credibility, qualifications, and expertise of your opponent.

RG: And so when you started this podcast, I remember you saying that you wanted to do something deeper and more thoughtful. That you were tired of being pigeonholed only as the guy who was going to own your opponent, crossfire style. And it made me realize — I want to get your take on this — that in some ways, and you allude to this in the book, too — that in some ways, being an innately gifted speaker can be something of an intellectual curse. 

And you could think about it as similar to how inheriting a ton of money might be great, but might also make you lazy; it’d be kind of the same thing as how a superstar athlete might train a little bit less, they might practice a little bit less, because they’re still going to be able to beat their opponents on the field. 

And the intellectual corollary would be something like if you’re an incredibly gifted debater, in some ways, you have to think a little bit less and interrogate your own belief system less, because you’ll always be able to kind of convince yourself and convince others that you’re right even if you’re not right. And you talk in the book about how debating should never be a substitute for learning or for actually being right. But as somebody who is like, without a doubt, the best debater I’ve ever met — and maybe the best one out there — how do you combat that tendency and make sure your mind always stays crisp.

MH: Well, first of all, that’s very kind of you — the check’s in the mail. 

RG: [Laughs.]

MH: Second of all — look, I talk about, in the book, confirmation bias, right? We’re all guilty of that; we’re all susceptible to it: This idea of, as you say, you convince yourself that you’re right, and then find the arguments to justify it. And you know, if I didn’t get into this in the book, but you know, go back to ancient times, and you have the sophists — and the word that we get today, sophistry — this argument you’re just arguing for arguing’s sake, you’re trying to win an argument without any substance. And some people have responded on social media to the title of the book — “Win Every Argument” — with the kind of snarky: Well, why would you want to win every argument? Sometimes you should lose an argument! 

Well, obviously, duh, it’s a title. I know that. And I’ve enjoyed losing some arguments and learning something. And to come back to Deconstructed, I think that was about being known in the U.S. as an interrogator, as the Erik Prince guy, as the guy who’s debated at the Oxford Union. And I’m a big fan of that style of debate. I do it, obviously; I’ve just written a book about it. But also, yeah, nobody wants to get pigeonholed in the world. And I like to do a lot of different things: On my cable show, I do something different; I think if you look at my journalism over the years, Ryan, as someone who’s known me for the last decade, I’ve done a lot of different things. In the HuffPost, my journalism style was different; in Al Jazeera it’s been different; for The Intercept, it’s been different; and for MSNBC it has been different. 

Now, underlying all of that is one common theme with which I do like to interrogate ideas. I don’t like to take things at face value. And you can do that in different ways. You can do that in a grand debating style onstage at the Oxford Union in front of a live audience where you’re trying to pick apart Erik Prince’s position on mercenaries. All you can do that, as I did on Deconstructed, in long form interviews with interesting thinkers, as you and I have done over the years, trying to understand an argument from all sides and going really deep into the detail — which, unfortunately, in our media industry, which is time-poor, gets lost. 

And that is something I miss. I’m very open about this. I miss a lot of that from The Intercept days, from Al Jazeera English days; and that cable news has a lot of pros, but one of the big cons is your time-poor. You’re trying to cram a lot of stuff into an hour with ad breaks. 

And some of us try to go longer. Rachel Maddow is known for her very long A blocks, her very long form explainers. I’ve tried to do a lot of those. We’ve tried to do some deep dives; on my Peacock streaming show right now, we do big, long essays at the top of the show, podcast-style almost, to try and break down an issue; whether it’s the debt ceiling, whether it’s Nikki Haley’s career arc and flip flops — whatever it is, we do that. 

But underlying it is the same premise, which is — just to go through some of the chapter headings in my book: focus on feelings, not just facts; appeal to people’s hearts, not just their heads; bring your receipts — one of the mottos of my entire life and career — always have your evidence. Be able to listen as well; people think speaking is just about speaking, it’s not it’s also about listening. All of those qualities — the ad hominem argument in the sense of questioning the credibility of the person you’re speaking to — all of those skills — the art of the zinger, which is very good, as you know, for kind of viral moments — all those things that are in the book, as chapter headings, as chapters are things I’ve brought to my journalism wherever I am, whether I was at The Intercept, whether I was at Al Jazeera English, whether I’m at MSNBC. 

And the point of writing this book, I have many reasons for writing this book, but one of them is for my colleagues, for fellow journalists in the media industry. I’m very critical of the media on both sides of the Atlantic as to where we have fallen short. And I think there are certain things we could improve, and one of those is holding power to account in a much better and [more] focused way.

RG: So for this episode, I want to go through some of your greatest hits and draw out some of the lessons that we can take from them. And what I liked about your book is this is kind of how you structure it: Like, here’s generally how you do something, here’s a tip, and then here’s an example of how I did it — and then it helps it land. 

So tell me if you agree with this [that] your most viral debate ever has to be that one at the Oxford Union where the debate was about: Is Islam a peaceful religion? 

Do you think that’s right?

MH: I think so. I think so. I think in terms of actual pure debating, I mean, there have been interview clips that have gone equally viral. But that one had more than 10 million views —

RG: Mhmm. 

MH: — and went crazy in the Muslim world in particular. I still get free cab rides and free dinners from Arab and Pakistani friends I bump into, and Arab and Pakistani friends I make because people say, even though they don’t know my name: You’re that guy from the YouTube video! 

So it’s always been fun. That was one that went really global. A lot of Americans got to know me before I moved to the U.S. from this debate. And just for your listeners, it was 2013. It was 10 years ago. 

RG: Mhmm. 

MH: I can’t believe it was 10 years ago, and it was the day after a terrorist attack in the U.K., just ironically and tragically, which killed a British soldier. And the Oxford Union hosts this debate. This House believes Islam is a religion of peace. And I’m the final speaker for the propositions on making that case. 

MH: Daniel talked about my article in The New Statesman, which got me a lot of flack, where I talked about the anti-semitism that is prevalent in some parts of the Muslim community, which indeed it is. Of course, I didn’t say in that piece that it was caused by the religion of Islam. In fact, modern anti-semitism in the Middle East was imported from — finish the sentence — Christian, Judeo-Christian Europe, where I believe some certain bad things happen to the Jewish people. 

In fact, Tom Friedman, Jewish-American columnist in the New York Times, told me in this very chamber last week that he believed, had Muslims been running Europe in the 1940s, six million extra Jews would still be alive today. So I’m not going to take lessons in anti-semitism from someone who’s here to defend the Judeo-Christian values of a continent that murdered six million Jews.

Moving swiftly on.

[Someone makes an indistinct point.]

Female Voice: Absolutely.

MH: Well, I’m about to at that point. No, no, no — I’m about to make the point! You’re right! [A flurry of applause erupts in the room.] I agree with you. I agree with you. I agree with you 110 percent. That is my point. I don’t think Europe is evil or bad. I’m a very proud European, I don’t want to judge Europe on the basis — but if we’re going to play this gutter game, where we pull out the Bali bombing, and we pull out examples of anti-semitism in the Islamic community, then of course, I’m going to come back and say: Well, hold on.

RG: And can you give us a little bit of the backstory on that one? Was this a kind of rip-the-speech-up moment?

MH: It’s a really good question. Because I prepared the speech. And I say in the book, different people prepare their speeches in different ways. You can memorize it. That’s the hardest way — Ancient Greece-style or David Cameron-style. You can do cue cards, which is a common form; bullet points, just have your key bits; or you write out the whole thing, but you don’t read from it, you know it well enough that it’s just there. And that’s my own personal preference. I tell people: Try it out, try out all three, everyone’s different. 

So I had written out an entire speech on the train, on the way to Oxford. I was a journalist at the HuffPost at the time, and I go to the Oxford Union to do this debate, knowing there’s a lot of pressure because there’s been this terrorist attack the day before, surely we’re going to lose. No one’s gonna say Islam as a religion of peace a day after two Islamist terrorists have just murdered a British soldier in broad daylight on a London street. 

So I go there — but the opposition speakers who all speak before me are so bigoted, are so ignorant, that yeah, I get really mad. And you see I get mad. And I talk about it in the book where I do tear up — not physically — but I do kind of ignore a lot of my speech. And I spend a lot of time just rebutting them, mocking them, taking their arguments apart. I went over my time, you can hear the bell go “ding, ding, ding,” and I keep going. 

But it was important — because as I said in the book, you have to bring some passion and authenticity to your presentations. If you’re doing a debate on Islam, and you’re a Muslim, and you’re facing bigotry, a bit of how dare you, sir goes a long way. And also, I had my receipts; I had my polling, and my statistics, and my research, and my reports and my studies, and I deployed them all. But yeah, it was a lot of: I have to be able to stand up to this thing. And we won that debate. I was shocked that we won that debate, but we won by more than 100 votes.

RG: And people should just go Google that one. It’s well worth watching in full — I don’t want to play the whole thing here. I want to move to a couple of clips. Let’s start with — and you talk about it in Chapter 11— this is a Trump adviser. And this is an example of the thing that is called the Gish-gallop. It’s a guy named Steve Rogers.

José, can you play that first one?

MH: When he says we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and that baby is essentially a citizen of the United States, is that true or false?

Steve Rogers: No, it’s false. It’s a misstatement. That doesn’t mean it’s a lie.

MH: A misstatement. OK. 

He said there were riots going on in California against illegal immigration in so-called sanctuary cities. Were there any riots in California?

SR: Oh, yes. There were a lot of civil servants. 

MH: Where? Where were the riots? Can you tell me where they were? 

SR: In California, there were street skirmishes in Los Angeles. That’s a fact.

MH: No, hold on. The spokesman for the California Police Chiefs Association says there was no there were no riots taking place as a result of sanctuary city policy. There were no riots! He just made it up! When he was asked to say where they were. He said: Go look for them!

I can give you many more. He said during the campaign that there are six to seven steel facilities that are going to be opened up. There are no — U.S. Steel has not announced any facilities. Why did he say they’ve announced new facilities? That’s a lie, isn’t it?

SR: No, it isn’t. Because there are a lot of companies opening up. There are steel facilities that are going to be opening up or I think actually one opened up —

MH: No, Steve, that’s not what he said. I know it’s difficult for you. I know you want to try and defend him. 

SR: No, it isn’t difficult for me. [Laughs.]

MH: Well, OK, let me read the quote to you: “U.S. Steel just announced that they’re building six new steel mills.” That’s a very specific claim. U.S. Steel has not announced six new steel mills. They have said they have not announced six new steel mills. There’s no evidence of six new steel mills. He just made it up! And he repeated it. He didn’t just say it once.

SR: Look, I don’t know in what context these statements were made. But I can tell you this: The President of the United States has been very responsive to the American people and the American people are doing well. Look —

MH: That’s fine. The American people can be doing well and the president can be a liar. There’s no contradiction between those two statements.

SR: I am not going to say the President of the United States is a liar.

MH: No, I know you are not, but I’ve just put to you multiple lies and you’ve not been able to respond to any of them. Let me ask you this:

SR: I did respond to them. What didn’t happen is you didn’t hear what you wanted to hear.

MH: What did I want to hear? I wanted to hear that there are no steel mills, he just made them up. 

SR: You wanted to hear me say — well, let’s go on.

RG: Mehdi, what you’re particularly good at is just not letting people off the hook. How did you prep for that? Because it seems like a difficult thing to grapple with.

MH: Yeah, it was. And it was interesting — this was post the 2018 midterms. This is less than two years into the Trump presidency. People are still grappling with: How do you cover this guy?

And we were all grappling with it — I was at Al Jazeera English at the time and you thinking if you get a Trump person on, you know what they’re going to do: They’re going to b.s., they’re gonna ramble, they’re going to flood the zone with nonsense. What do you do in that situation? And my team and I decided we need a theme; the theme of the interview is that Trump’s a liar. The Washington Post had already documented at that point more than 10,000 lies. And we thought: What do we do? We pick a handful and pick one we really want to focus on — the steel facilities, you mentioned. A brazen lie! There’s no kind of it’s a half-truth, it’s a misstatement. No, it’s that he just made it up. 

RG: There are no — the steel mills don’t exist. 

MH: They don’t exist. The company says they don’t exist. He plucked it out of thin air. And yeah: So I talked about it in the book, this tactic that Trump and his acolytes do – not just Trump, people would argue Vladimir Putin, a lot of fascists use this tactic, which is called the Gish-gallop. And it actually comes from the creationist world, from the world of creationist debating, a lot of creationist Christians love to debate evolutionary biologists. 

And there was a famous guy called Duane Gish. And what he used to do is he would just trot out non-stop, one line after another, pseudo-scientific, seemingly legitimate sounding things that you couldn’t rebut — that no sane normal person could rebut all of it in the space of 5, 10, 15 minutes. So it became known as the Gish-gallop — overwhelming your opponent, burying them in a deluge of distortions, deflections, and distractions. Trump does it so well, and so do his minions. 

So what we wanted to do and what I say in the book is that this is a three-step process for stopping that. And this is advice I would give to listeners involved in debates — people who just argue with someone in a bar, or a pub, or at the Thanksgiving table, or interviewing Trump’s spokesperson — you’ve got to do a three-step process. 

First of all, you’ve got to pick your battles. You can’t rebut every lie, it’s just not possible. They want to distract you with sheer quantity. You’ve got to pick one or two things you want to focus on. Number two, you gotta not budge. Once you’ve picked on it, don’t budge. And number three, call it out. And I do that in that Steve Rogers interview. We came, we prepared, we got our receipts, we had our facts, we had our quotes. And then when he does what you just heard him do, I pick my battles. I said: No, look, steel, you want to talk about other things, you want about manufacturing — no, steel. What about the steel facilities? Don’t let it go. Don’t budge. 

A lot of interviewers, unfortunately, just move on to the next question, which is gold for an interviewee who’s trying to dodge answering it? My position is: No, less is more. I’d rather do fewer questions, but stick to the topic until I get an answer or a non-answer. 

And then third of all, call it out. You heard the bit at the end, he says: Let’s move on. And I say after that: Of course, you want to move on because you have no answers. You’ve got to call out what’s going on. You’ve got to identify the tactic to expose to the audience: this is all B.S. from your adversary or opponent or interviewee. So yeah — for me that chapter on the Gish-gallop is a crucial chapter because we live in an age where there isn’t much good-faith debate, like I’m a believer in good-faith argument, good-faith debate.

Ryan, you know very well: Today’s Republican Party, today’s conservative movement isn’t interested in good-faith debate. A lot of it is just pure B.S., just trying to grind you down. And journalists have had this debate: Who do you platform? Who do you not platform? 

I have a personal rule on my show that I won’t platform an election denier; I won’t platform a climate denier; just like I wouldn’t platform a Holocaust denier. Other people will have election deniers on, even within my own network — each to their own, I say, but that’s my position. And you have to draw a line and say: What do you define as good-faith debate? 

For me, personally, that was 2018 when I debated Steve Rogers on that Al Jazeera show; today, Steve Rogers — I’m guessing, I don’t know the man personally — I would assume he’s an election denier, if he’s still a loyal Trumpist. Would I have him on again? Probably not. Because I’ve now made a decision that debating the election, debating the big lie, is pointless. It helps no one but the big liars. So something that’s not in the book, maybe for a sequel to this book, if everyone buys it, it becomes a success, is when to walk away from a debate because that’s an important discussion as well, when do you not have the argument because it’s actually pointless?

[Musical interlude.]

RG: Let’s do John Bolton next. 

MH: [Laughs.] 

RG: But first, I think a lot of people are probably wondering how you keep getting people to come onto your show.

MH: That’s a great question. 

RG: A normal person would look at the track record and say: you know what, speaking of knowing when not to debate, I think I’m gonna pass on this request. 

I have my own theory for why you’ve continued to be able to get people to come on your show, but I’m curious [about it] from your perspective.

MH: I think it’s a mixture of things. When I was at Al Jazeera English during the show at the Oxford Union, I do think it was partly the prestige of being able to come to the Oxford Union, especially for a lot of Americans, especially for someone like Erik Prince. People say why did Erik Prince agree to do an interview? I’m like: I don’t know! I wouldn’t have done the interview with me if I was him. 

But he did it. And I think it was partly — and I don’t say this in a bad way — but ego.

RG: Mhmm.

MH: People in public life, they’re in public life because they like being on camera, on TV, they have a high opinion of themselves. 

I think a lot of the right-wingers — and John Bolton is a great example of this — I think people like John Bolton are intellectually arrogant. And again, I don’t say that in a bad way. I mean, John Bolton is a smart guy. The guy was a Yale Political Union debater, the guy has basically bested most of the interviewers who have tried to take him down. As much as I loathe his politics and what he’s done. He’s clearly very good at rhetoric. He’s very good at argument and debate, and he knows his stuff. So someone like that thinks it’s the prestige of somewhere like the Oxford Union or cable TV primetime. It’s the intellectual arrogance of: Well, nothing’s gonna happen to me. I’m really good at what I do.

RG: Mhmm. 

MH: And then it’s just a lack of preparation. To come back to the point, Ryan, you made earlier, I say in the book: Don’t go into any debate or argument without having prepared everything. Steel-manned your arguments, prepared all your arguments, have all your receipts, check out the other side of the argument — know both sides, as John Stuart Mill would say. 

And do research on your opponent. A lot of people don’t research me. I’ve benefited from the fact — 

RG: Mhmm. [Laughs.]

MH: — that I flew under the radar for a while. When I moved to the U.S., I was a new unknown quantity. Even in the U.K. for Al Jazeera English, it’s a global show that I did there. 

I won’t say the name of this person, but a very, very prominent government official from a foreign country did an interview with me on Al Jazeera English show “UpFront,” and the mic was up before the interview began, and they turned to their assistant and they said: Who is this person again? 

RG: Oh, good lord. 

MH: Which I loved! I loved the fact that they turned up for the interview not even knowing my name. I was like: OK, well, here we go. And that same person then complained to the Qatari Government afterwards on behalf of their government saying I was unfair to them. 

So yeah, I think it’s a lack of preparation as well. But yes, let’s not jinx it, because I love having people on.

RG: Right!

MH: I’ve got people on by all sorts of roundabout ways. Dan Crenshaw, Congressman from Texas and I, had an argument on Twitter and I just said to him: Well, why don’t you come to my show and continue this? And he agreed, and it was a great bit of TV, which I talk about in the book.

RG: Alright, let’s roll this John Bolton, speaking of the Yale debater:

MH: Let me ask you this. Can I ask — how much of your antipathy and your criticism towards Iran, you’ve been very critical of Iran —? 

John Bolton: — for over 15 minutes now. 

MH: The 15 minutes are nearly up, let me ask you this. How much of your antipathy towards Iran has to do with geopolitics? How much of it has to do with the fact that you’ve had a long association with a group called the MEK, which was once a terrorist group banned by the State Department while you worked there?

JB: — it —

MH: You don’t mention it in your book. I looked in your book, there’s no mention of the MEK. I think you took tens of thousands of dollars for several speeches, just wondering how much that influences your policy on Iran.

JB: You know that I took tens of thousands of dollars for speeches at liberal universities in the United States. This is really about as low as it gets. The fact is that Hillary Clinton, perhaps someone you support, took the MEK off the U.S. list of terrorist organizations. How about that? I speak what I believe —

MH: She took them off in 2012. You were speaking with them in 2010, when they were still a banned group.

JB: Yeah. Now look, you’re simply wrong on your facts on this.

MH: No, you were there in Paris in 2010, speaking at the MEK rally, when they were still a banned terrorist group, according to the State Department.

JB: — nobody buys my opinion. And you could ignore that if you want. I’m very comfortable. I’ve never said anything other than what I believe. And we are now sir. 20 minutes into this interview, which you said was for 15.

MH: I believe it’s 15 minutes. I’ve got a timer going off in my ear. So —

MH: [Laughs.]

JB: So tell us about that one.

MH: So I love that clip, because it has everything. It has everything. 

So it has John Bolton, a guy who is a deeply odious figure who has never really been held to account for his odious policies over the years. And there’s another clip that people can watch where I pushed him on the Iraq War and whether he sleeps at night. And obviously, no one actually ever asked him a basic moral question, how he feels about all the dead people that he helped bring about. 

But that exchange on the MEK I love because he’d never been asked about that. This guy has spoken at this group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization, the MEK. A lot of American politicians, a lot of Democrats, have also spoken at that group. But Bolton has been there for a while. And what I love about that is: We did our homework. I went, I watched YouTube; I transcribed it myself. This was for MSNBC — Peacock at the time — I’d left Al Jazeera English now. And I said: Look, I’m still gonna bring the same style, the same research. 

We did our homework — I have a whole chapter on homework — we do our homework. So when you do your homework, and when you plan out the interview, something I talked about in the book is roleplay. Roleplay anything you’re going to do. Try to think about: they’re gonna say this, you’re gonna say this. Get a friend, get a colleague to talk you through what’s going to happen. 

So when you do that, you know what’s coming. So when I say: you spoke in 2010. I know that he’s gonna say: Well, Hillary Clinton delisted it. 

Well, no, she didn’t. That was 2010 — I’m ready with my comeback. Everything is planned out. You’re not winging it. It’s all there: I have a structure. I have a plan. And it’s going fine. Because he’s walking into all the traps that have been set for him. I know exactly where he’s gonna go. I know exactly what he’s going to say. I didn’t know that he was going to hide behind the clock and say: Well, the time’s up, which it wasn’t.

RG: [Laughs.]

MH: That was a great moment because we were nowhere near 15 minutes, but it clearly showed that he wanted to end the interview without kind of walking out dramatically. 

And it’s just a great moment. It’s a great moment to be able to put down your receipts which are undeniable, unbeatable, unquestionable receipts — the facts; see someone say, Well, you’re wrong on the facts, and say, well, actually no, the facts are on my side; and then have them hide behind the clock. So it does a lot of things, that clip, in terms of preparation, in terms of research, in terms of role-playing, in terms of bringing your receipts, in terms of having the follow-up, so not just moving on to the next topic.

RG: It also shows the value of a book tour —

MH: Yes. Very true. 

RG: Because I’ve noticed that I’m able to get people that wouldn’t want to talk to me otherwise when they have a book out.

MH: That’s such a good point, to go back to the earlier question as to why people come on. They’re promoting books, as I am right now.

RG: There you go. That’s right. 

So you mentioned Erik Prince being unable to resist the allure of the Oxford Union. So let’s play that famous clip.

MH: You’re a big supporter of Donald Trump. You’ve been questioned by Special Counsel Robert Mueller over the Russiagate investigation — he’s looked at your laptop and your phones, I believe. You’ve also testified to Congress. In November 2017, you told Congress under oath that you played, “no official or really unofficial role in the Trump campaign.” 

What you didn’t tell Congress is on August 3, 2016, you were at a meeting during the campaign at Trump Tower with Don Jr., Trump’s son; with Stephen Miller, then a campaign adviser to Trump; with George Nader, a former Blackwater colleague of yours who acts as a backchannel to the Saudis, the Emiratis — he also happens to be a convicted pedophile; and also Joel Zamel, an Israeli expert on social media manipulation. 

How come you didn’t mention that meeting to Congress, given it’s so relevant to their investigation?

Erik Prince: Uh, I did. As part of the investigations. I certainly disclosed any meetings —

MH: Not in the Congressional testimony you gave to the House, we went through it. You didn’t mention anything about the August 2016 meeting in Trump Tower. They specifically asked you what contact you’d had. And you didn’t answer that.

EP: I don’t believe I was asked that question. 

MH: You were asked: Were there any formal communications or contact with the campaign? You said: “Apart from writing papers, putting up yard signs, no.” That’s what you said. I’ve got the transcript of the conversation here.

EP: Sure, I might have been. I think it was at Trump headquarters or the campaign headquarters.

MH: Trump Tower. August 3, 2016.

EP: Possible.

MH: You; an Israeli dude; a back channel to the Emiratis and the Saudis; Don Jr.; and Stephen Miller.

EP: We were there to talk about Iran policy. 

MH: You were there to talk about Iran policy?

EP: Mhmm. 

MH: Don’t you think that’s something important to disclose to the House Intelligence Committee while you’re under oath? 

EP: I did. 

MH: You didn’t. We just went through the testimony. [Audience laughs.] There’s no mention of the Trump Tower meeting in August 2016? Why not?

EP: I don’t know if they got the transcript wrong. [Audience laughs and murmurs.]

MH: Oh! They got the transcript wrong. So we go —

EP: I don’t know, I remember, certainly discussing —

MH: I mean, this is a problem for you. Because we know that Robert Muller, he hasn’t been able to establish collusion yet. But he has gotten a lot of guys for lying to the authorities and not telling the whole truth. Is that a problem now? That even if you accidentally didn’t tell them, that could come back and haunt you?

EP: I fully cooperated? I haven’t heard anybody — I haven’t heard from anybody in more than nine months.

MH: I mean, members of Congress after they discovered this meeting, have talked about certain witnesses not telling the truth. But you believe you told Congress about this meeting, even though it’s not in the transcript, just to be clear?

EP: I believe so. Yeah.

RG: Oy. Brutal! [Laughs.] What were the actual — what was the fallout from that?

MH: It’s a good question. Because obviously, Erik Prince remains a free man. The fallout, the short-term fallout, I mean, it was a Trump DOJ. But Adam Schiff, who was the House Intelligence Committee chair, took my interview clip. It was played to him that Sunday on “Meet the Press,” and I was like — oh, wow, this is good, this is getting big. It had already gone viral. It had millions of views online. And he referred it to the DOJ as an example of: Was it untruthful testimony? 

That investigation in the end, I don’t know what happened to that. It is a great question. I should go back and check into it. But what was interesting about that was that Prince had been on multiple interviews up until that point — he wasn’t on a book tour, but he was doing a media tour promoting his idea of a mercenary army in Afghanistan. That’s why he had agreed to come on the show. He was promoting something at the time. 

And it was amazing that no one had actually — my team and I sat and went through the transcript. I printed it out and brought it with me into the Oxford Union chamber and waved it in my hand. By the way, a prop is always very useful to have in a debate or argument; can’t beat actual physical receipts in your hand. Also always great to have a live audience. I say in the first chapter of the book, that it is all about the audience, how to use an audience. In that clip, just listening back to it 10 years later, the audience laughing is almost like a force multiplier.

RG: Mhmm. 

MH: In that, if it’s just me and him in a room on our own with a cameraman, he can get out of more stuff than he can when he’s on stage and hundreds of people are laughing at the ridiculousness of his responses. And there is an example of where we’ve gone through the transcript — a lot of interviewers aren’t able to do that. When he says: Well, I said it, it was in the transcript, they’ll just move on to the next question. 

I’m able to say: But you didn’t say in the transcript because we went through it. Not only do we go through it, we have it here in our hands. So it was a powerful moment. And I think it helped me get my current job. When I was interviewed at MSNBC, the bosses made it clear that they knew me from the Erik Prince clip. That’s how they knew this British dude who had worked at The Intercept and Al Jazeera at that point.

It certainly made me well-known in American media circles. And again, it was because, like with John Bolton, you have this kind of right-wing odious figure who’s done awful things, but has never really been challenged on them. And despite doing multiple interviews, it’s not like Prince or Bolton run away from cameras. They do loads of interviews; they just never seem to get caught in any of them. And I made it my goal to make sure that I hold them to account whether it’s on Iraq and the MEK with John Bolton, or whether it was on the Trump Tower meeting, and many other issues with Erik Prince — I urge people to go watch that interview. We talk about a lot of stuff where we catch him on, for example, his reference to Iraqis as barbarians, which he tried to deny, but I had his book and the quotes ready to go. 

So for me, that was a great interview for me in my career. But I also think, as you said, it had an impact; it had members of Congress discussing it, sending it to the DOJ. It reminds you of the value of an interview. Some people think: Well there’s no point in doing interviews, you’re probably not going to get anywhere in this day of spin and spin doctors and media training. But no, there are moments that can still make a difference. And that’s why I’m a great believer in the interview; I’m a great believer in the power of debate.

RG: And I think it really does show the value of that physical receipt. 

And I think with the Bolton interview, mentioning that his speech was in Paris at a rally was somewhat tantamount to a physical receipt, because it had so many details.

MH: The specificity. 

RG: If you’d have just said: No, no, you spoke in 2010. 

And he’d say: Well, no, I didn’t. 

Then it’s like, you’re kind of going back and forth. It’s a he said, she said!

MH: Well I have the clip!

RG: Right. 

MH: I was gonna play the clip. Remember, but he was saying: your time’s up, your time’s up. 

RG: He would have been gone by the time the clip was playing. 

MH: I had the clip.

RG: Right. And so then when you have the physical paper — like, here’s the transcript — then the only thing that’s left to him is to say: Well, somebody typed it wrong. Which then, as you said, draws the laughter.

MH: It draws ridicule. The only option I said in the book was: What was he supposed to do, run out of the hall? Joey Tribbiani-style in Friends, does he just run out when he’s caught embarrassed? 

And what was funny is of all the guests I’ve interviewed on that show, which was called “Head to Head” on Al Jazeera English, the only two guests that basically left without speaking to me after the show, just completely silent in the green room afterward. And one was Erik Prince. 

RG: [Laughs.] Unsurprising. 

MH: Who had a very firm handshake, you’ll be shocked to know. 

RG: Shocking. 

So for the last one. You’ve got kind of a fun clip here with the Saudi ambassador, Abdallah al-Mouallimi, let’s play that one. This is from “UpFront.”

MH: Many people might say that’s a good thing: There should be democracy in Syria, and there should be an elected government in Syria. But they might also wonder: Why are you OK with an elected government in Syria, but not an elected government in Saudi Arabia? If the people of Syria get to choose their own rulers or head of state? Why can’t the people of Saudi Arabia, choose their own heads of state?

Abdallah al-Mouallimi: Go and ask the people of Saudi Arabia, are you happy with —

MH: Can I?

AM: Of course you can.

MH: No, it’s illegal in Saudi Arabia to offer a change in the government, to call for the king to come out of office.

AM: I didn’t, I didn’t say go and call for a change of government. I said: Go and call and ask the Saudi people whether they are happy with their system of government.

MH: How do I do that? What’s the process? 

AM: In any way you want. In any way you want. 

MH: Opinion polls. 

AM: Opinion polls. Anything. 

MH: What about an election? 

AM: And you will find, well, we will have elections at some point in time. We’ve started with municipal elections. But “elections” is not the panacea for everything.

MH: No, I agree. But you said you want elections in Syria? I’m saying why not have elections in Saudi as well?

AM: Well, just because there are elections in Syria doesn’t mean there have to be elections somewhere else. I said the elections, and you agreed, is not a panacea for everything. 

The key question is, is the population content and happy and satisfied with the form of government that they have? And I would like to claim that if you went to Saudi Arabia, and if you conducted a survey in Saudi Arabia in any way — official, formal, or otherwise — you will find a high degree of support for the system of government in Saudi Arabia.

MH: Isn’t that partly because if they do say they don’t want this government, they want another —

AM: No.

MH: — government, they’ll go to jail?

AM: No. No. 

MH: — it’s against the law in Saudi Arabia to call for a change in the system of government. 

AM: But that’s not the issue. 

MH: That is the issue!

AM: No, no, it’s not.

MH: How can I as a Saudi say: I want a different system of government — if it’s illegal for me to say that?

AM: I’m saying that if there was a way by which you can ask the common people in the street, anonymously, privately, anyway. 

MH: There is. It’s called voting. 

AM: Well, voting along the lines of Western democracy —

MH: No, along the lines of whatever you want in Syria. 

AM: OK. Well, I mean, even that is not the solution for a system of government. What is important is the pact between the governed and the governor, the mutual acceptance. I can tell you that mutual acceptance is much higher in Saudi Arabia than in almost any other country in the world.

RG: Yeah. Beyond how painful that is, what lessons should people draw from that one?

MH: Well, the lesson is don’t do what I did and go into a Saudi consulate as a journalist because that was pre-Jamal Khashoggi days, but I was able to leave alive from the Saudi consulate at the U.N. — that’s where Ambassador Abdallah al-Mouallimi serves — and that interview. 

And actually, let me just make — without wanting to bang my own drum too much — all the clips you played, make one important, overall point, which is: You have a Trump supporter, Steve Rogers; you have Erik Prince; you have John Bolton; you have a Saudi ambassador. What do they all have in common? They’re not people who are shy of the media. They’re all people who do a lot of interviews. Why did those four clips, all of them, go viral, like millions and millions of views? Because what I did was I asked them questions and did things with them and held them to it in a way that they hadn’t been held before. 

And that is what I say to people — to be honest, it’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. Which is to try and do what I do — what I do is not that hard. I’m not coming here to say, I’m amazing, look, how unique I am. No, I’m saying, anyone else could have done what I did prior to what I did, but they didn’t. And I’m saying you can do it, it can be done. Let me show you how. 

And some of the different lessons in the book, you take that Saudi clip, in particular, the Saudi ambassador is a guy who does lots of interviews with Western media. And I came along with one goal in mind, which is: I want to talk about democracy, the lack of democracy in Saudi Arabia. And everything leads to that goal. I have a clear goal. And that’s where I want to get to; that’s the end route of the journey I’m on. 

And I deploy multiple different things. So there’s a chapter in the book on bringing your receipts. 

I have my receipts. When he says: Well, you know, it’s not a panacea. 

“Well, what about Syria? You just said, Syria” — that’s my receipt. I’m quoting him back to him. 

When I say, for example, there’s a chapter on booby traps. In the media, politicians like to call it the gotcha question, right? I’m sure someone has accused you once of asking me a gotcha question.

RG: [Laughs.] 

MH: Gotcha questions are fine! I mean, politicians use the phrase gotcha to try and dismiss a totally legitimate question. What a gotcha question is doing is showing you that you’ve got yourself trapped, nothing wrong with showing someone that — I don’t think there’s anything untoward with that. I do a chapter on booby traps, this idea that you unbalance your opponent by trapping them in their own words, in their own contradictions. 

And with the Saudi ambassador, I led him to that point, I led him into that booby trap. The reason I brought up Syria when I asked him: Do you support elections in Syria?

I knew that he’s gonna say yes, and the only reason I brought up elections in Syria is because I was gonna say: So what about Saudi Arabia, then?

You should have seen his face! He just walked into that trap. He knew now he was on uncomfortable terrain. He doesn’t want to talk about democracy in Saudi Arabia. 

And then there’s the art of the zinger, the one-liner, do you have one good line, one good put-down, that just stops everything in their tracks. And my line there, as you heard was, if you can find one way to ask the people — I’m like, yeah, it’s called voting. 

RG: Mhmm. [Laughs.]

MH: Boom, he doesn’t really have a comeback to that. If you have that one line that shuts everything down — 

RG: That’s when he stammers.

MH: You can call it a mic-drop, I call it a zinger — whatever you want to call it, that one-liner. So that clip shows you a mix of different things. It shows the planning and preparation of what the interview is about, it shows you the importance of bringing receipts, it shows you the importance of setting your little traps; it shows the importance of having the one-liner, the zinger. And he wasn’t expecting any of that. And I was just glad to leave with the tapes.

RG: Right, you can see how you walk him into that amazing line of him saying: If you could find a confidential way that people could express their preferences on public policy, then you would be able to find out what people — 

And I think that’s a good place to end it. Because if you go back to the Oxford Union debate over whether or not Islam is a peaceful religion, I think pretty much everybody listening to this can say well: That’s incredibly impressive, but not something that I could see myself being able to actually do. 

But these other clips actually are, I think, within the capacity of most people to do, if they just do their work ahead of time, and focus on the interview, and don’t let it go. 

And so that’s where I think this book is so valuable. And I really encourage anybody who — I can’t think of anybody actually, who wouldn’t benefit from this. Who in this world at some point doesn’t need to argue with somebody?

MH: Well, that’s that’s the point I make. I make the point in the introduction that people like Dale Carnegie and others are like: Arguments are bad, run away from them. And my point is, I like to run towards arguments, partly out of my personal preference, but also, whether we like it or not, everyone at some point or another — every man, woman, or child wants to win an argument, needs to win an argument, and I believe can win an argument. We’re all capable of doing it; having that debate. And I say in this book, here are some of the tricks and techniques. Here are some of the tried and tested principles going back 2,000 years, like much greater minds than me have developed a lot of this stuff. I don’t claim to be original on a lot of the stuff. I’m bringing tried and tested methods from ancient Greeks, Ancient Romans; from Churchill, JFK, and MLK; and I’m throwing in my own experiences as well. And I’m saying here’s how you learn it. Here’s how you develop it. Here’s how you teach it.

RG: And the book is called: “Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking.”

Mehdi, thanks so much for joining me.

MH: Thanks so much, Ryan. It was great to be back on Deconstructed.

[End credits music.] 

RG: And that was Mehdi Hasan, and that’s our show. This is the outro that he wrote years ago: 

Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show was mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

And Mehdi, could you have done that outro by heart?

MH: I could! As you said it, I was like: Wow, it’s been a few years, although every name in that has changed. 

RG: It’s true. 

MH: Except for Bart Warshaw, who did fantastic music. 

RG: That’s right. That name will never change. 

MH: But it brought back some great memories. And I love this Deconstructed audience. Thank you for listening.

RG: All right. Thank you. See you soon.

The post Win Debates Like Mehdi Hasan appeared first on The Intercept.

This week on Deconstructed, host Ryan Grim revisits his reporting on how the Democratic Majority for Israel, Mainstream Democrats PAC, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent so much money on the politics of Israel that the question of Israel-Palestine now dominates Democratic primaries.

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim. 

Today we’re bringing you something a little bit different — an audio version of a recent story I wrote for The Intercept. 

The story is ostensibly about the role played by an unusual coalition of big money groups: AIPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, a Super PAC backed by LinkedIn-billionaire Reid Hoffman, and another Super PAC funded by the now-indicted Sam bank and freed. What brought them all together, though, was the goal of beating progressive Democratic candidates in Democratic primaries. 

In the story, Mark Mellman, the head of the DMFI, justifies his strategy explicitly on the basis of his pro-Israel politics, telling me that the left in the United States is too critical of Israel, and that the Israeli right uses the American left to fearmonger their way into power. So he’s trying to beat the Israeli right by first beating the American left. 

The money behind these organizations, of course, has other reasons to oppose the wing of the Democratic party that wants higher taxes on billionaires and wealth to be redistributed downward. Mellman’s explanation, though, takes on a different flavor now with the extreme-right in power in Israel. (Check out our episode from January 6, titled “Israel’s Rightward Turn” for more background on that.) 

I wanted to do an audio version of this story, because it’s increasingly hard for people to read super long features and investigations on a phone or a laptop, and they don’t easily slot into a Kindle. So this is something of an experiment. And if you like it, or you don’t like it, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com to let us know what you thought of this format. And if you really, really liked it, go and leave a review at Apple podcasts or somewhere like that. 

I also wanted to put out a new version of this story because while it’s about last year’s Democratic primary, and it uses one primary campaign in particular as the vehicle to tell the story, it’s about much more than that — and is particularly relevant as we head into the next election cycle. And with Israel’s increasingly rightward shift, it raises questions about whether Democrats should be allowing outside spending to so fundamentally shape the process Democratic voters used to choose their candidates, and by extension, decide what kind of party they want representing them in Washington. 

The story centers around a young Democratic House candidate named Maxwell Alejandro Frost. In November, Frost was elected to his first term representing Florida’s 10th Congressional District.

I’ve heard some readers describe this story as a takedown of Max Frost, and people are entitled to read it however they want, but my own humble opinion is that that misses the broader picture. As you listen to this story, consider what would have happened if Frost had made different decisions along the way, perhaps decisions that many of the listeners would have preferred he made: Would he then have been elected to Congress? 

Alright, but from there, we can say: Well, it’s better not to be elected than to compromise one’s principles. That’s a fair ethical standard. 

But if we allow a system to prevail that requires a candidate to make those compromises just to be considered for office, we guarantee we’ll only get compromised candidates; if we allow a system where the choices are either to lose nobly or to win on the terms of multimillion-dollar Super PACs, we’re the ones who lose. Democrats have it in their power to set rules around outside spending in primaries but have simply chosen not to do so. This is a story on the consequences of that choice.

All right. Here it is.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: As Maram Al-Dada, a 34-year-old aviation engineer in Orlando, Florida, prepared to speak at a rally in May 2021, he couldn’t help but think of his family. One particular moment from his childhood in Gaza was seared into his memory. His grandmother would often walk him as a boy to the border fence and point to the property on the other side that had been the family’s home until 1967 when the community was evacuated amid the Six-Day War. On the seventh day, the family hadn’t been allowed to return, but his grandparents would sneak out at night to tend to their crops, making sure things would be in good shape for the family when they eventually did make it back. They’d be shot at by Israeli troops and sneak back. But soon the fencing went up, leaving only the pointing to be done.

Then one day in the early 1990s, about 25 years after the family had been forced from their home, a lighter-skinned man speaking broken Arabic came to their southern Gaza village of Bani Suheila looking for Al-Dada’s grandmother. His grandparents still held the deed — or the paper, at least — but the man was now living on their property. Al-Dada still doesn’t understand why the man came to see his grandmother, or what he wanted, but vividly remembers an intensely demeaning experience.

Now there was more fighting, and Al-Dada and his fellow Floridians — he’d moved to the Sunshine State in 2011 — were there to protest Israeli evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, in East Jerusalem, and airstrikes on the Gaza strip during Ramadan, 2021. They were the latest violent attacks in what had become known as the Gaza War.

Al-Dada hadn’t been back in years. In 2008, as his grandfather was dying, he tried to visit through the border with Egypt but was denied. A crossing from Israel for a Palestinian is effectively impossible, given travel restrictions that apply only to Palestinians. His grandfather died, and a follow-up attempt to gain humanitarian entrance for the funeral was rejected, and he hasn’t been to Gaza since.

Al-Dada saw those at the rally as another type of family. After he’d gotten to the U.S., he joined the Florida Palestine Network, a thriving grassroots organization that included many Palestinian emigrés and non-Palestinian kindred spirits. One of the most active young men in that group stood next to Al-Dada: Maxwell Alejandro Frost, who, for all appearances, was a true believer in the cause. “Free, free Palestine!” he and Al-Dada chanted as they both got ready to address the crowd.

When it was his turn to speak, Frost told those gathered: 

Maxwell Alejandro Frost: We have to demand that our leaders see the world through the eyes of the most vulnerable [cheers in the background] and use that vision to make every goddamn decision they ever make. Thank you! [Cheers and applause.]

RG: Following the rally, Frost, then 24, posted a photo on Instagram, with the caption, “Orlando is in solidarity with all facing oppression across the globe. From Palestine to Colombia, we denounce it all.” He added a thank you to his friend, Rasha Mubarak, another Palestinian American, for leading the organizing of the rally. “Much love,” he said. The most committed activists were all part of a group chat, where several dozen of them, including Mubarak, Al-Dada, and Frost, all celebrated the successful event.

It was also the start of something bigger. In the weeks leading up to the rally, rumors had swirled around Orlando political circles that Val Demings, the local congresswoman and former sheriff, was being courted by party leaders in Washington to run for Senate and would soon take the plunge. Frost reached out to Mubarak, who he had met amid the street protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and asked her to be part of his kitchen cabinet, an informal circle of advisers who make up the early infrastructure of a campaign. 

MAF: Rasha connected me with a few different politicos, people here in Florida, and stuff like that. And then she was a member of the kitchen cabinet.

RG: Mubarak laid out his path to victory. 

Rasha Mubarak: It was: OK, so we’re going to run a really progressive race, that’s inclusive of Palestinian human rights, right? Understanding that this is a Black seat and the other candidates will be a split vote.

RG: Frost is Afro-Latino so they thought he would have a shot, even if he wasn’t a shoo-in. 

RM: If he’s able to be the progressive, bold candidate, people are gonna believe in that. And he’s gonna bring out a different base than other voters.

RG: Just being the “first Gen Z candidate” for Congress wouldn’t be enough. She said: “Being the first is historic, but changing history via policy is entirely different. Being the first Gen Z is only surface-level and what we need as his residents are deeper: a congressional leader in the state of Florida that aligns with the notion that everyone deserves to move with freedom, experience liberation, and live equitable lives. A congressional leader that did not leave any community behind. We do not have that in Florida,” she said.

A week after the rally, Demings made it official. Mubarak began connecting Frost with donors around the country and activist groups in the district. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Central Florida, Mubarak’s Palestinian family hailed largely from the West Bank and Jerusalem. A national political consultant and organizer, she’d become a prominent figure in Orlando politics. Frost also brought on Rania Batrice, a progressive Palestinian American consultant, to do his media strategy. Word spread that Frost, an anti-gun violence advocate connected to the Parkland survivors, was the genuine progressive in what was, as hoped for, becoming a crowded field. In August 2021, he officially launched his campaign.

While bombs were raining down on Gaza that May, another air war was playing out in Cleveland, Ohio, that would not just profoundly shape the Orlando election but bend the arc of the Democratic Party in a new direction.

In a special election to replace Rep. Marcia Fudge in the House after Fudge was named Housing and Urban Development secretary, Nina Turner, a former state senator and surrogate for both of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, was polling some 30 points ahead of the field. Amid the Gaza War, she retweeted a Jewish advocacy group, IfNotNow, that is the bane of right-wing “pro-Israel” groups.

Jewish Insider flagged the post in an article, noting the divergence on the issue between Turner and her leading opponent, Cuyahoga County Chair Shontel Brown. “Advocacy groups such as Pro-Israel America and Democratic Majority for Israel,” reported Jewish Insider, “have also thrown their support behind Brown, who has had to contend with Turner’s substantial war chest with less than three months remaining until the August 3 primary, according to the latest filings from the Federal Election Commission.” 

Brown would not have to contend with that disadvantage for long. Two groups — Democratic Majority For Israel, known as DMFI, and Mainstream Democrats PAC — began spending millions, pummeling Turner on the airwaves. 

Advertisement Voiceover: Unified Democrats? Turner said no. Support Clinton over Trump? Not Nina Turner. Help Biden defeat Trump? Turner refused. Instead, Turner said voting for Biden was like eating [censored].

RG: The two were effectively the same organization, operating out of the same office and employing the same consultants, though Mainstream Democrats claimed a broader mission. Strategic and targeting decisions for both were made by pollster Mark Mellman, according to Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democratic operative and Silicon Valley executive who serves as the political adviser to LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, who funds the Mainstream Democrats PAC. DMFI has also funneled at least $500,000 to Mainstream Democrats PAC.

“Our money is going to the Mainstream Democrat coalition, which we trust to identify the candidates who are most likely to convey to Americans broadly, an image of Democrats that is then electable,” Mehlhorn told me, saying he relies on the consultants linked to DMFI to make those choices. “I trust them. I think Brian Goldsmith, Mark Mellman, they tend to know that stuff.”

While DMFI is ostensibly organized around the politics of Israel, in practice, it has become a weapon wielded by the party’s centrist faction against its progressive wing. In fact, DMFI, Mainstream Democrats PAC, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have spent so much money that the question of Israel-Palestine now dominates Democratic primaries.

Across the country, progressive candidates, who a cycle earlier had been loudly vying for national attention with bold ideas to attract small donors, were instead keeping their heads down, hoping to stay under the radar of DMFI and AIPAC.

When Justice Democrats, in the wake of Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign, began its effort to pull the party to the left by competing in Democratic primaries, the issue of Israel-Palestine was not central to its strategy. But its candidates tended to be progressive across the board, rather than what had previously been the standard, known as PEP, for “progressive except for Palestine.” The insurgency inside the Democratic Party has since produced a counter-insurgency, funded heavily by hedge fund executives, private equity barons, professional sports team owners, and other billionaires and multimillionaires, many of them organized under a “pro-Israel” banner.

“It’s been a radical transformation in the politics of Israel-Palestine and the politics of Democratic primaries,” said Logan Bayroff, director of communications for J Street, which describes itself as a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization. Last cycle, Bayroff helped run J Street Action Fund, an outside spending group designed specifically to counter the influence of DMFI and AIPAC. It spent less than 10 percent of the amount its rivals were able to put in the field.

Mehlhorn was explicit about his purpose: 

Dmitri Mehlhorn: I mean, Nina Turner’s district is a classic case study where the vast majority of voters in that district are Marcia Fudge voters, they’re pretty happy with the Democratic Party. And Nina Turner’s record on the Democratic Party is [that] she’s a strong critic. And so this group put in money to make sure that voters knew what she felt about the Democratic Party. And from my perspective, that just makes it easier for me to try to do things like give Tim Ryan a chance of winning [a Senate seat] in a state like Ohio — not a big chance, but at least a chance. And he’s not having to deal with the latest bomb thrown by Nina. So anyway, that’s the theory behind our support for Mainstream Democrats.

RG: Mark Mellman, in an interview with HuffPost, acknowledged that his goals extended beyond the politics of Israel and Palestine. “The anti-Biden folks and the anti-Israel folks look to her” — that’s Nina Turner — “as a leader,” Mellman said. “So she really is a threat to both of our goals.”

Turner said she was told she had to distance herself from members of the Squad, particularly Muslim Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, or face an onslaught. Here’s Nina Turner speaking earlier in a Deconstructed interview:

Nina Turner: I was told by a prominent Jewish businessman that ‘We’re coming at you with everything we got, you need to disavow the Squad.’ If I didn’t do it, they were coming for me. And that also the Palestinian community didn’t have rights that were more important than the state of Israel. 

I even have emails right now, to this day, of local — primarily business — leaders in the Jewish community where they were encouraging Republicans to vote in this primary and were saying things like: We must support Shontel Brown, in no way can we let Nina Turner win this race.

RG: Turner then shared those emails with me: “This is a very important election for our community!” wrote one Turner opponent in an email to neighbors. “Shontel’s main opponent, Nina Turner, was the honorary co-chair of the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, as well as the leader of ‘Our Revolution,’ the post-2016 organization of Sanders enthusiasts. She has raised money proclaiming her desire to join ‘the Squad’ and has been endorsed by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (see Turner fundraising emails attached below),” the email read.

Another neighbor forwarded the email on to still more folks, adding, “Many of us wouldn’t bother with this primary election but this one is really important and electing Shontel Brown is a must. Whether a R or a D you can elect to vote in the D primary.”

On August 3, 2021, Turner lost to Brown 50 percent to 45 percent, falling short by roughly 4,000 votes. The deluge of money — DMFI had dropped more than $2 million — following the Gaza attacks tilted the race, Turner told me later. 

NT: Clearly Ryan, had that race been in May — 

RG: Right. 

NT: — you would be interviewing Congresswoman Nina Turner, that’s irrefutable. 

NT: [On election night.] I am going to work hard to ensure that something like this never happens to a progressive candidate again [cheers and applause] —

RG: — she said on election night —

NT: See, we didn’t lose this race. Evil money manipulated and maligned this election.

RG: The characterization of the funding as “evil,” mixed with the notion of manipulation, brought out fresh charges of antisemitism.

The race in Orlando largely stayed off the national radar through the rest of 2021, since the primary wouldn’t be held until August 2022. As the year closed out, Mubarak set about posting her end-of-year Instagram shoutouts and wanted to highlight the work they’d all done the past May in opposing the Gaza War. She went to dig out Frost’s old post, which had singled Mubarak out for her organizing that day and discovered it had been taken off his feed. Mubarak called Frost out on it; she said he explained that a social media staffer had scoured his accounts and archived some posts and that it must’ve been caught up in the sweep. He’d put it back up, he said.

But the reference to Mubarak was removed and a subtle but meaningful edit was made to the caption: Gone were references to “all facing oppression across the globe” and the pledge that “we denounce it all.”

The post now reads simply: “Orlando stands in solidarity from Palestine to Colombia!” When Mubarak flagged the change and her omission, she said, he explained that “local endorsers have a problem with your advocacy.”

Frost told another ally that his goal was to avoid getting crushed by DMFI. He said: “We’re just trying to see if we can keep them out, and maybe if they come in, they won’t spend anything,” the ally recalled him speculating.

Frost told me that he wasn’t really aware of the influence of outside spending at that point in his campaign:

MAF: I honestly didn’t know much about outside spending. I didn’t really learn about the outside money that played into [Turner’s] race until months after —

RG: OK. 

MAF: — to be honest. So even as it was going on, I mean I saw the results come in, I looked at my phone, I remember I was like, sitting in my kitchen and I was just like: Damn — you know? 

RG: Right. 

MAF: — we lost. I remember being surprised, and being upset, and then kind of saying: I need to win, we need more progressives in Congress. So I hadn’t really connected those dots, to be honest, and wasn’t really fully aware of, kind of, the role of outside money in general.

RG: Campaign sources, however, say the issue was front and center, with questions about what type of positioning might keep the outside money out. When allies in the free Palestine movement warned him that DMFI and AIPAC wouldn’t let up, even after he was elected, whether he capitulated or not, they recall Frost saying, “I’ll figure that out when I get there.”

On January 31, kickstarting the primary season, Jewish Insider published a list of 15 DMFI House endorsements. Among them was Randolph Bracy, a local state senator who was considered one of the most competitive moderates in Frost’s race. Mubarak texted Frost the news. “Didn’t think they would hop in so early,” Frost replied. “They hate progressives lol.”

The names on DMFI’s endorsement list, and the names left off, tell a story of the group’s commitment to fighting back against the party’s left flank in Democratic primaries and an increasingly extremist view of what being pro-Israel meant.

“In Michigan and Illinois, Reps. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and Sean Casten (D-IL) are, with support from DMFI, waging respective battles against progressive Reps. Andy Levin (D-MI) and Marie Newman (D-IL), who have frequently clashed with the pro-Israel establishment over their criticism of the Jewish state,” the Jewish Insider piece read.

Levin was an incumbent member of Congress and a scion of a powerhouse Michigan family that included Carl Levin, his uncle and a former lion of the Senate, and former House Ways and Means Chair Sander Levin, his father. Levin had been redistricted into a primary against another incumbent Democrat, Stevens, who became conspicuously outspoken about her unwavering support for Israel, becoming one of just 18 Democrats casting public doubt on the wisdom of President Joe Biden reentering the Iran nuclear deal. To include Levin among an anti-Israel cohort stretched the definition to a breaking point. Here’s how Jewish Insider put it: “While Levin, a former synagogue president, describes himself as a Zionist and opposes BDS, the Michigan political scion has frequently clashed with the pro-Israel establishment over his criticism of the Israeli government, including the recent introduction of legislation that would, among other things, condemn Israeli settlements while placing restrictions on U.S. aid to Israel.”

The attack on Levin helped define what DMFI meant by pro-Israel, and it included support for expanding settlements and ruled out criticism of the Israeli government. That Levin couldn’t be written off as antisemitic made him that much more of a threat. That he was willing to defend his colleagues like Omar and Tlaib was intolerable. Accusing Tlaib of antisemitism is made difficult if a former synagogue president has her back. AIPAC CEO Howard Kohr, asked by the Washington Post in a rare interview why Levin was targeted, said, “It was Congressman Levin’s willingness to defend and endorse some of the largest and most vocal detractors of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

The list also included Summer Lee. In 2018, as an unapologetic democratic socialist, she unseated a member of a powerhouse Pittsburgh political family in a state House race. Her win made national news. Now she was running for an open congressional seat with the backing of Justice Democrats, and, Jewish Insider noted, was a member of “the Democratic Socialists of America, which formally endorsed the BDS movement in 2017.” BDS — which is modeled after the effort to boycott South Africa’s apartheid government and stands for boycott, divestment, and sanctions — was launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society groups in response to Israel’s construction of a wall that cut deep into occupied Palestinian territory.

DMFI came out early for her opponent, attorney Steve Irwin. “There’s a context here that I think we ought to take cognizance of, which is to say that we have had some organized groups out there that have said they are attempting to execute, in their words, a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party,” Mellman told Jewish Insider, referring to the organization Justice Democrats, which cultivates progressive congressional candidates to primary moderate Democrats, but expanded his discussion to include DSA.

Freshman Rep. Marie Newman had also been backed by Justice Democrats in her campaign to unseat a conservative Democrat the previous cycle. Mellman said, “A number of those groups have moved anti-Israelism from a peripheral part of their issue agenda to a central part of their issue agenda. Their strategy is to go into deep-blue districts that the party doesn’t care about because it’s going to be a Democrat no matter who wins.”

Lee heard early on that her campaign was going to have an “Israel problem,” she told me. 

Summer Lee: We heard people in the establishment talk about it. You know: Summer’s gotta have an Israel problem, right? That was kind of the first —

RG: Mhmm. 

SL: — thing that we heard from folks, that she’s gonna have an Israel problem. It’s an issue that we knew was going to come up. And I think it’s really funny because, for me, as a Black woman who is a progressive, Israel is not, at the state level, it’s not an issue that we ever had to talk about.

RG: Lee’s point echoes a similar one made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, in 2018 when she was getting knocked around in the press for flubbing an answer on the Israel-Palestine question. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I come from the South Bronx, I come from a Puerto Rican background. And Middle Eastern politics is not exactly what was at my kitchen table every night.

RG: But, during the Gaza War in 2021, Lee had once posted support for the Palestinian plight. 

SL: It was really one tweet that kind of caught the attention of folks. And it was kind of used as: Here, this is it, we got you. And it was really a tweet talking about Black Lives Matter and talking about how, as an oppressed person, I view and perceive the topic. Because the reality is — and that’s with a lot of Black and brown progressives — we view even topics that don’t seem connected, we still view them through the injustice that we face as Black folks here, and the politics that we see and experience here, and are able to make connections to that, and bring up connections to that, and we try to do that in a very good-faith way.

RG: Her tweet read: Trayvon, a kid, was walking in his own neighborhood, going home.  

George didn’t like the way he looked and assualted [sic] him.

Trayvon fought back with his fists. 

George drew a gun and killed him.

American government: “George had a right to defend himself.”

She goes on: “When I hear American pols use the refrain “Israel has the right to defend itself” in response to undeniable atrocities on a marginalized pop, I can’t help but think of how the west has always justified indiscriminate& disproportionate force &power on weakened & marginalized ppl,” she tweeted.

The comment was shocking to some in Pittsburgh. Charles Saul, a member of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle’s board of trustees, was later quoted by the paper saying he was concerned about Lee because “she’s endorsed by some people I believe are antisemites, like Rashida Tlaib.”

He also said: “Another thing that worried me was her equating the suffering of the Gazans and Palestinians to the suffering of African Americans. That’s one of these intersectional things. If that’s her take on the Middle East, that’s very dangerous,” he said.

Lee had no doubt she would be hit, she just didn’t know when or how hard. 

SL: There was no world in which, I’m being very honest, there was no world in which I did not think this wasn’t gonna happen. 

RG: Mhmm. 

SL: I knew this was going to happen from the moment I saw the ways in which the four Black and brown women who came in in 2018, which is the same year that I came into the state House, watching the way that they had to navigate the issue, knowing the way that they had to navigate money and politics, then seeing Nina Turner, it was a very clear trend to me.

So we honestly knew on day one — and before, so on day zero — it was something that we were thinking about, having to think about: How do we navigate it, when will it come? The question was always: When does it come in?

But I didn’t think that I would have the privilege of avoiding it. [Laughs.]

RG: Right. 

RG: Tweet or no tweet, Lee is convinced that she would have been targeted regardless, because the issue of Israel-Palestine is a cover for a broader assault on the progressive wing of the party. 

SL: There’s a difference between having controversial views. There’s a difference between having problematic views. But what this does is it says you can’t have any views, right? This is a way to chill and to keep the progressive movement from growing as a whole. This is a way to temper a movement that centers, particularly, Black and brown women who are progressives, and stops them from building power.

RG: Marshall Wittmann, a spokesperson for AIPAC, denied the group targeted progressives specifically, saying: “The sole factor for supporting Democratic and Republican candidates is their support for strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship. Indeed, our PACs have supported scores of pro-Israel progressive candidates, including over half of the Congressional Black Caucus and Hispanic Caucus and almost half of the Progressive Caucus. Our political involvement has shown that it is entirely consistent with progressive values to support America’s alliance with our democratic ally, Israel.”

Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, another Braddock resident was looking for a way to dodge DMFI’s fire. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman was locked in what threatened to be a tight race with Rep. Conor Lamb for a Senate nomination, and Lamb’s campaign was openly pleading for Super PAC support to put him over the top. 

Early in the year, Jewish Insider reported, Mellman had reached out to Fetterman with questions about his position on Israel. Democratic activist Brett Goldman told Jewish Insider, “He’s never come out and said that he’s not a supporter of Israel, but the perception is that he aligns with the Squad more than anything else.”

Mellman said the campaign responded to his inquiry and “came with an interest in learning about the issues.” Following the meeting, the Fetterman campaign reached back out to Mellman. “Then they sent us a position paper, which we thought was very strong,” Mellman said. 

But it wasn’t quite strong enough. Jewish Insider reported that DMFI emailed back some comments on the paper, which “Fetterman was receptive to addressing in a second draft.”

In April, Fetterman agreed to do an interview with Jewish Insider. Fetterman said: “I want to go out of my way to make sure that it’s absolutely clear that the views that I hold in no way go along the lines of some of the more fringe or extreme wings of our party,” he said. “I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive in that sense.”

Fetterman, unprompted, stressed there should be zero conditions on military aid to Israel, that BDS is wrong, and so on, and so forth. Fetterman said: “Let me just say this, even if I’m asked or not, I was dismayed by the Iron Dome vote.” DMFI and AIPAC stayed out of the race.

As the campaign wore on, progressive forces consolidated around Frost. It was a meaningful achievement since the left is often hobbled by multiple progressive candidates splitting the vote and allowing a centrist candidate to slip through. (Levi Strauss heir Dan Goldman winning a Manhattan primary with less than 30 percent of the vote is just the latest example.)

The field initially included not just Frost, but also populist firebrand former Rep. Alan Grayson and Aramis Ayala, a popular former progressive prosecutor in Orange County, Florida, who had repeatedly clashed with state Republicans. Grayson had a dedicated but diminished base in the district, but Frost, in significant part thanks to the alliance with movement organizers in the district that Mubarak helped him build, began emerging as the leading progressive. A truce was brokered, with Ayala dropping out of the race in early March and winning the nomination for state attorney general instead.

Consolidating support was key but so was fending off DMFI. The critical question was whether they or AIPAC would put money against him. “It was a conversation from the jump, honestly, because DMFI endorsed Bracy so early,” recalled Mubarak. “Every progressive under the sun who has even a little sympathy for Palestine, [the question of DMFI] comes up, because they just dump so much money.” 

Frost, according to people on his campaign, made it his mission to keep them at bay or find a way to neutralize them. But he had a balance to strike: Until March, Ayala was still in the race, so he needed to keep the full support of the progressive wing of the party without inviting a multimillion-dollar onslaught.

The answer came in the form of Ritchie Torres. A Bronx congressman in his first term and also Afro-Latino, Torres had made a name for himself in three overlapping areas. He was at war with the progressive wing, an outspoken ally of right-wing pro-Israel groups, and a cryptocurrency evangelist.

In a private meeting with DMFI after winning his 2020 primary, audio of which was leaked to me, Torres said this: “In New York City we’ve seen the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is explicitly pro-BDS. The Democratic Socialist left endorsed in about 11 races and won every single one except mine. So it’s proven to be effective at winning elections and I worry about the normalization of anti-Semitism within progressive politics.

Torres went on to say that his own identity as a gay man influenced how he approached the question of Israel: 

Ritchie Torres: If the message to those who are both progressive and pro-Israel, especially people of Jewish descent, is that in order for you to be part of the progressive community you have to renounce your identity and your history and your ties to your own homeland — and you have to be in the closet — that to me is profoundly evil. That’s a perversion of progressivism.

RG: A DMFI board member said: 

DMFI Board Member: It was so beautiful and almost not otherworldly, but amazing the way you speak with such honesty and conviction about Israel. … I just wish we could clone you so there were a million Ritchies running around talking about Israel.

RG: Another DMFI member on the call asked how a progressive, pro-Israel Squad could be built, and Torres told them it was all about building infrastructure and support for progressive candidates willing to side with Israel.

When the January list of races DMFI was building infrastructure around came out, the progressive campaign ecosystem breathed a sigh of relief that Austin, Texas, was not on it. Progressives were backing a would-be Squad member in the form of 33-year-old City Council Member Gregorio Casar.

Frost said he watched Casar’s race:

MAF: We watched all the races. We were keeping up to date on everything that was going on across the country as far as voting trends, especially looking at the youth vote, different stuff like that, that we thought might give us some trend information to help us in our race.

RG: Casar’s absence on the list, it turned out, came after a letter he had sent that month to a local rabbi laying out his position on Israel: He was opposed to BDS, he promised; supportive of a two-state solution; and in support of military aid to Israel. He also wrote, “The humanitarian crisis in Gaza and indefinite occupation in the West Bank are untenable for Israelis, Palestinians, and our collective conscience,” and added that he was against “unchecked settlement expansion.” Casar’s letter to the rabbi was published by Jewish Insider the day after DMFI’s endorsement list was unveiled.

Gregorio Casar: Ultimately the letter was in response to a lot of people continuing to insinuate that progressives are, cynical actors and insinuate that progressives are antisemitic. 

RG: Right. 

GC: That is just not true, you know? And in particular, I also mean really progressive members of Congress, who fight for Palestinian rights, I do not believe are antisemitic.

RG: Mhmm.

GC: But I have a certain policy position, which is, I do not believe we should be writing a blank check on military aid, I think that we should provide some amount of aid, but we should also make sure we’re not funding human rights violations anywhere in the world. That’s just kind of a summary position I’ve taken the whole time. 

RG: He decided to put that position down on paper. 

CC: I said, Let’s just write this down, so that Rabbi Freedman can share this with people. And that means that there’s a very decent chance it’ll become public. I did not share it with JI, but I’m not — I don’t hold it against journalists — 

RG: Right. 

CC: — to get hold of things — 

RG: That’s what we do. 

CC: — however you guys do it.

RG: His colleagues in DSA were shocked and began the process of rescinding their endorsements. To avoid a nasty fight, Casar voluntarily rescinded his request for DSA backing. The Austin chapter said in a statement: “We have a long history of working with Greg Casar on health care, paid sick time, police budgets, homelessness, housing justice, union rights, and more. We will continue to discuss this issue within our chapter and many individual members will continue to support the campaign, but we will no longer be working on this campaign as an organization.” 

Justice Democrats, which does not have an Israel-Palestine litmus test, despite the protestations of DMFI, continued to back him, spending just over $100,000 in support.

An infrastructure around Democratic candidates who sided with Israel was, more or less, already the stated vision of DMFI. 

In late January 2019, in the wake of the election of the first two Muslim women to Congress, Omar and Tlaib, Mellman announced the formation of a new hybrid Super PAC, saying in a statement that he would stand up for Israel inside the “progressive movement.”

Mellman had been the leading pollster for John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004 and was also a longtime AIPAC strategist. DMFI was an effort to do something of a rebrand for AIPAC within Democratic circles. AIPAC itself had become a toxic brand inside the Democratic Party after the organization worked to torpedo Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal. Mellman’s firm, the Mellman Group, had consulted for AIPAC’s dark-money group, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran. The Mellman Group was also the second-largest contractor for AIPAC’s educational arm — the American Israel Education Fund, which organized congressional trips to Israel — in the year it fought the Iran deal. The biggest contractor that year was a travel business then owned by Sheldon Adelson, a casino mogul and Republican mega-donor.

DMFI would also be able to deploy tactics AIPAC wasn’t yet ready for. Before Citizens United, AIPAC had grown its power not simply with the wealth of a handful of mega-donors, but through genuine and sustained grassroots organizing. Synagogue to synagogue, from the 1980s onward, AIPAC organized powerful local support for politicians who voiced unqualified support for Israel and ran high-profile campaigns against those who deviated. AIPAC’s informal slogan was that it didn’t have enemies in Congress, but had “friends and potential friends.”

David Ochs, founder of HaLev, which helps send young people to AIPAC’s annual conference, described in 2016 how AIPAC and its donors organize fundraisers outside the official umbrella of the organization so that the money doesn’t show up on disclosures as coming specifically from AIPAC: “In New York, with [hedge fund titan] Jeff Talpins, we don’t ask a goddamn thing about the fucking Palestinians. You know why? ’Cause it’s a tiny issue. It’s a small, insignificant issue. The big issue is Iran. We want everything focused on Iran,” Ochs said. “What happens is Jeff meets with the congressman in the back room, tells them exactly what his goals are — and by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million — basically they hand him an envelope with 20 credit cards, and say, ‘You can swipe each of these credit cards for $1,000 each.’”

Much like the National Rifle Association, its strength was in numbers and a narrow focus on a particular issue. After Citizens United, DMFI could skip the grassroots organizing component and go straight to big-money efforts directed through Super PACs. At least 11 of DMFI’s 14 board members had links to AIPAC; DMFI’s founding chair, Wall Street banker Todd Richman, also sat on AIPAC’s national council.

Mellman told me that his work against the party’s left was meant to undermine the Israeli right. “I have substantial direct experience in Israeli politics, having helped bring down Netanyahu,” he told me in an email, referring to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mellman had worked as a key election consultant for Yair Lapid’s political campaign, serving as a paid adviser, consulting with him in Washington, and meeting with his deputy minister of foreign affairs. Lapid’s center-right political party, Yesh Atid, would surge under Mellman’s guidance, making Lapid prime minister of Israel.

Mellman told me: “The simple fact of Israeli politics is that the right uses attacks from the U.S. and Europe to its great and consistent benefit. That’s correct, anti-Israel forces in the U.S. do vastly more to help the right than to hurt it,” he said. “They enable Bibi to run as the guy who will stand up to the U.S. and the world to protect his country. That has been a key element of most of his campaigns. …The anti-Israel far left has propped up the Israeli right and done tremendous damage to the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Dmitri Mehlhorn made a similar argument about Mainstream Democrats PAC’s interventions against progressives: that they were actually targeting the left to beat the right.

DM: If you look at America as a whole, and you want the fascists not to take power, what you need to do is trade a little bit of your enthusiasm in urban districts — enthusiasm that does not generally translate into meaningful votes, because a lot of those people don’t vote, and if they do, they [are] often in a safe district, [and] they often don’t vote. Transfer some of that enthusiasm and energy, just trade it, for people who are actual swing voters, who vote but make up their mind kind of at the last minute. It’s like, not a big part of the electorate, maybe 10 percent, maybe less now, as things get crazy. 

But you’re going after the populist turnout, if you’re going for a populist, and you’re also handing a message that is going to motivate the shit out of the other side, because remember, they’re already amped to be motivated out of fear. … If Nina Turner would have won that [Ohio House] race, she would have been 20 percent of Sean Hannity’s chyrons out of the gate. You know, it just makes their job easier if some of what they’re saying is actually based in some fact of some sort.

RG: Mellman’s new organization was rolled out with a splashy New York Times profile and supportive comments from Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (who leads the AIPAC-sponsored congressional trips), Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Menendez, and Arizona’s freshman Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema. DMFI provided a forum for Lapid’s first call with an American Zionist organization after his election, during which he declared his intention to reinvigorate Israel’s ties to American political parties.

But in DMFI’s first cycle, it hit obstacles. The group’s first play for power, an effort to persuade Bernie Sanders to dismiss two Muslim advisers from his presidential campaign, was unsuccessful, as was DMFI’s later effort to hit him with TV ads in Iowa and New Hampshire. Next, would-be Squad member Jamaal Bowman of New York overcame more than $2 million in DMFI spending in 2020 to oust Rep. Eliot Engel, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and one of the most outspoken Israel hawks in Congress. That Bowman won in a landslide, and even carried heavily Jewish precincts, was a stinging defeat for DMFI and AIPAC, as Bowman had refused to back off his support of Palestinian human rights.

On May 13, 2021, around the same time Frost was rallying in Orlando, history was made on the floor of the House of Representatives, as Democrat after Democrat paraded for an hour to denounce Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Rep. Ilhan Omar: I feel the pain of every child who is forced to hide under their beds, and every parent who deals with that anguish.

AOC: This is our business because we are playing a role in it. And the United States must acknowledge its role in the injustice and human rights violations of Palestinians.

RG: Throughout the 2020 cycle, AIPAC had been content to let DMFI run the big-money operation in Democratic primaries. To encourage support for it, AIPAC donors were even allowed to count money given to DMFI as a credit toward their AIPAC contributions, which then won them higher-tier perks at conferences and other events. But the unprecedented display of progressive Democratic support for Palestinians amid the Gaza War on the House floor was triggering.

AIPAC’s Howard Kohr told the Washington Post: “We’re seeing much more vocal detractors of the U.S.-Israel relationship, who are having an impact on the discussion. And we need to respond.” 

The problem, he said, was “the rise of a very vocal minority on the far left of the Democratic Party that is anti-Israel and seeks to weaken and diminish the relationship. Our view is that support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is both good policy and good politics. We wanted to defend our friends, and to send a message to detractors that there’s a group of individuals that will oppose them.”

That group of individuals began coming together in January 2022. AIPAC transferred $8.5 million to the Super PAC it set up called United Democracy Project. Private equity mogul and Republican donor Paul Singer kicked in $1 million, as did Republican Bernard Marcus, the former CEO of Home Depot. Dozens of other big donors, many of them also Republicans, kicked in big checks to give UDP a $30 million war chest. By the end of March, it had spent $80,000 on polling, as it targeted races and honed its messaging, according to disclosures.

In April, it dropped its first ads of the cycle, tag-teaming with DMFI to make sure Turner’s second run against Brown never got off the ground. That same month it launched its assault on Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner and the first Muslim woman elected in North Carolina. She ran for office after three of her Muslim friends were murdered in the gruesome Chapel Hill hate crime that drew national attention. AIPAC spent millions to stop her rise, backing state Sen. Valerie Foushee in the May primary. Elsewhere in the state, AIPAC spent $2-million-plus against progressive Erica Smith in another open primary.

The United Democracy Project also began hammering away at Lee, who was running in an open primary to be held the same day as North Carolina’s. J Street’s new outside money group had been planning to raise and spend about $2 million to compete with DMFI, which they guessed would spend somewhere between $5 million and $10 million. That, said J Street’s Logan Bayroff, would at least be something of a fair fight, given that AIPAC and DMFI had to overcome the fact that what they were advocating for — unchecked, limitless support for the Israeli government, regardless of abuses — was unpopular in Democratic primaries. 

“We’re always gonna expect the right to have more money, given that they’re operating off of the basis of big donors. But that’s a little bit more of a fair fight,” he said of the disparity between J Street and DMFI. “But now you add to what DMFI is doing — $30 million from AIPAC — that’s just in a whole other realm.”

Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, Indivisible, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and the Sunrise Movement worked in coalition with J Street on a number of races that DMFI and AIPAC played in, and where they could muster enough money, the candidates had a shot.

Joe Dinkin, national campaigns director for the WFP said, “If you look at the races we lost, we were outspent by the bad guys 6, 8, 10 to 1. If you look at Summer’s race, it was more like 2-1.”

In a Chicago-area district, DMFI, AIPAC, and Mainstream Dems backed Gilbert Villegas against progressive Delia Ramirez. But DMFI put in only $157,000; Hoffman’s PAC chipped in $65,000; and the United Democracy Project didn’t run an independent expenditure. VoteVets, an organization that almost exclusively backs centrist veteran candidates against progressives when it comes to Democratic primaries, was the big spender, putting more than $950,000 in.

With support from WFP (which dumped more than $600,000 into the race), the CPC PAC (which put in $400,000), Emily’s List (which put in $262,000), Indivisible (which put in $240,000), J Street (which put in $45,000), and a slew of progressive members of Congress — Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley — Ramirez won by more than 40 points and is poised to become a Squad-adjacent member of Congress. All told, Ramirez had more outside support — $1.7 million — than did Villegas, at more than $1.2 million, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. (Villegas’s campaign, however, outraised Ramirez directly by about $400,000. In other words, it was a pretty fair fight.)

And in one case, where the PACs found themselves up against somebody with pockets as deep as theirs, they fell short. In Michigan, AIPAC spent more than $4 million against Shri Thanedar, an eccentric self-funder who didn’t know what party he wanted to join before he funded a bizarre run for governor in 2018, followed by a successful buying of a state House seat in 2020, then followed by his 2022 House bid. DMFI didn’t run an independent expenditure, but AIPAC’s effort was backed up by $1 million from Protect Our Future. Their candidate, state Sen. Adam Hollier, fell short by 5 percentage points. Thanedar had loaned his campaign more than $8 million and spent around $4 million of it to win.

In the wake of DMFI’s endorsement of Frost’s opponent, Torres and Frost began talking. Mubarak warned him away, saying: “Do you know that this person is not progressive at all? He seems progressive, but he’s actually very problematic, not just on Palestine.” She pointed out that he had been dodging other candidate questionnaires yet made time for Torres. 

Frost replied: “Oh, I know, but he just took me under his wing because I’m Afro-Latino.”

To reassure his early and most energetic supporters, Frost sat down for a Zoom call on March 9 with several dozen activists with the Florida Palestine Network for a conversation about his views.

A former state senator, Dwight Bullard, joined the call as well. Bullard told me: “My hope was in being on that call that he would feel a sense of camaraderie if you will: ‘I’m letting you know publicly I’m an ally of Florida Palestine Network, and it’s OK to speak your mind.’”

In the legislature, Bullard had been introduced to the issue of BDS when Florida lawmakers pushed to strip state contracts from any company that endorsed the boycott. Bullard was not himself a BDS supporter but believed the right to boycott was central to any struggle for dignity or civil rights, and certainly no business of the Florida state Senate.

“To me, just on its face, it sounded like a repressive anti-First Amendment kind of thing. If students at Florida State wanted to boycott Coca-Cola we wouldn’t even be having this conversation, but here we are making this part of our legislation.”

He took enormous heat for voting against the measure and began looking into the issue further. The organization Dream Defenders, affiliated with FPN, invited him to visit the region, and he took them up on it in 2016. “You can’t unsee what you saw, and to come back and have people be like, no, it wasn’t that — I had people trying to tell me that everything I had experienced was a completely staged exercise,” he said.

That year, thanks to the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, Bullard’s district was redrawn, and he spent the 2016 campaign not just fending off charges of antisemitism, but also of terrorism. One of the tour guides, a Palestinian, had previously been affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the State Department labels a terrorist group, and an attack ad overlaid images of 9/11 with Bullard.

“Seventy percent of the district is new voters,” Bullard told me. “And you have to reintroduce yourself to people while they’re putting up television ads saying you’re a terrorist. So that was my journey.”

On the Zoom call, Bullard came away believing Frost was in sync. “I heard him say he was in alignment with that group, that he would be an ally if elected to Congress,” Bullard said.

A year earlier, Frost had signed a Palestinian Feminist Collective pledge and another Florida Palestine Network petition that was to be delivered to Demings. Among their propositions, the latter called to “end U.S. military aid to Israel” and the former pledged to “heed the call of Palestinian civil society for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.”

According to four Florida Palestine Network members and allies on the call, Frost was clear he still stood with them: “I support BDS, which is a grassroots movement,” Frost said. 

Though there is no recording of the call, Ahmad Daraldik, who was on it, added the quote to a group text that was going on at the time, and others on the call remember him saying it as well. 

Maram Al-Dada texted the group in response to Daraldik’s transcription: “AWESOME!! Good job everyone.”

Perhaps even more importantly, Frost had said that as he crafted his official Israel-Palestine policy position, he would do it in direct collaboration with his longtime allies in the Florida Palestine Network.

As far as political organizing in America is supposed to go, the Florida Palestine Network had done everything right: build an association of like-minded people, project power through rallies and lobbying of local officials, and back a candidate for Congress, holding him accountable to the positions he staked out. Alexis de Tocqueville would have easily recognized their work as a quintessential element of democracy in America in action. But Tocqueville knew nothing of Super PACs.

Later in March, Rep. Torres publicly endorsed Frost. Torres told me: “Multiple members [of Congress] approached me and said you have to meet Maxwell Frost. And what I found most compelling about him was his youth. I remember running for the city council at age 24, and I was drawn to the notion of the first Gen-Z member of Congress. And then when I met him, he’s just incredibly impressive. I’ve been critical of Congress as a gerontocracy.”

I asked if he had talked to Frost specifically about the Israel-Palestine issue: “We spoke about a variety of issues and it is not my place to tell either a present or future colleague how to think or what to think,” he said. “You know, I might encourage him to keep an open mind, listen to every side of the debate. But ultimately when you’re a member of Congress, you have to be your own person. You have to come to your own conclusions and he’s going to be fiercely independent.”

DMFI had already endorsed Bracy in the race, and I asked if Torres helped talk the group out of spending actual money on behalf of Bracy. 

“We had a difference of opinion in the race. I’m convinced that Maxwell represents exactly what we need in Congress,” he said. “Those organizations are going to do what’s in their interests. It’s not my place to tell people whom to endorse or what to endorse. Just like I want others to respect my right to act independently, I would extend other individuals and institutions that same courtesy.”

I also asked if he had put in a good word with the crypto world on behalf of Frost. “I don’t tell them what to do, and you have to be careful,” he said, referring to campaign laws around Super PACs and coordination. “But obviously it was known that I had publicly endorsed him. 

“We mainly just spoke about being young and Afro-Latino,” said Frost. “He said that he was really excited to get more Afro-Latinos in Congress, and especially young men of color, and that’s when he offered up his endorsement and his help and support.”

In early April, in the wake of Torres’s endorsement of Frost, the fight for crypto support was on. Bracy, the DMFI-backed candidate, announced the formation of a legislative caucus that would include federal and state lawmakers interested in crafting crypto policy. Frost followed on April 27 by announcing a “national council” to advise him on “cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.”

The council included experts but also Adelle Nazarian, CEO of the American Blockchain PAC, and Sean McElwee, co-founder of the progressive polling operation Data for Progress, who had played an early role in Torres’s election to Congress.

On May 10, Frost appeared on a crypto podcast hosted by one of the crypto council members, and that evening, at an Adams Morgan bar in Washington, D.C. that held a fundraiser hosted by McElwee; Ben Wessel, campaigns director for the Emerson Collective, funded by Laurene Powell Jobs; and Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a progressive organizer and founder of Way to Win and a member of Frost’s crypto advisory board. Gabe Bankman-Fried, the brother of crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, spoke at the fundraiser. Gabe is the head of Guarding Against Pandemics, a PAC funded by his brother and dedicated to policy advocacy around pandemic prevention, which teamed up on high-profile races, such as Nida Allam’s, with DMFI, AIPAC, and Mainstream Dems. Building a Stronger Future Foundation, one of Sam Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic entities, provided financial support for The Intercept’s bio-risk, pandemic prevention, and lab-biosafety coverage. (A nonprofit affiliated with Way to Win, Way to Rise, has also donated to The Intercept, facilitated by Amalgamated Foundation.) In April 2022, according to campaign finance records, Protect Our Future paid the Mellman Group for polling. (The report doesn’t indicate which race they collaborated on, but both DMFI and Bankman-Fried’s PAC spent heavily to beat Allam in North Carolina.)  

At the fundraiser, for longtime D.C. hands who’d seen hundreds of candidates come through town, Frost, charming in person and charismatic on the stump, was talked about as a future presidential candidate, not in terms of if but when.

Frost said that his involvement with Gabe Bankman-Fried’s PAC was rooted in an interest in preventing future pandemics. 

MAF: I remember we had our first Zoom, where Gabe was talking to me about, what are the policies that they’re championing? Why are they doing this at this time? And honestly, pandemic preparedness was something I knew zip about.

RG: Mhmm. 

MAF: So I actually had a pretty informative call with Gabe about what Guarding Against Pandemics is fighting for and it actually really piqued my interest, because I remember a few weeks prior to that I was speaking with some community members, and they had brought that up. And I felt like wow, the appetite for pandemic preparedness will kind of get lower and lower and lower as time goes, as that happens with mass shootings and gun violence. And I saw a parallel there. So I told Gabe this is something I can get behind.

RG: Protect Our Future, a Super PAC linked to Guarding Against Pandemics, announced on May 17 that it would be spending at least $1 million to back Frost. Former Rep. Alan Grayson, competing with Frost for progressive votes, didn’t buy the rationale that it was all about pandemic preparedness. Grayson said, “I don’t think you’ll ever see a more clear-cut example of somebody putting themselves up for sale.”

“He auditioned for the role of corruption, and he won the part,” said Grayson, who was polling competitively before the deluge of money.

Mike Levine, a spokesperson for Protect Our Future, said the group’s support of Frost revolved genuinely around his pandemic preparedness position. “Protect Our Future’s support for Maxwell Frost and other candidates across the U.S. was driven exclusively by our desire to prevent the next pandemic. We take no position on anything related to cryptocurrency. Florida primary voters clearly saw through efforts to distract from the real issues and overwhelmingly nominated a leader who will do what it takes to protect against catastrophic pandemics.”

Relations between Frost and his earliest backers deteriorated further, even as that week he also received a number of endorsements in Congress, from Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ed Markey to Rep. Pramila Jayapal and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

It was becoming difficult for Frost’s activist allies to square his commitments to the Palestinian community in Orlando with his alliance with Torres. On May 11, Israeli forces sparked global outrage first by killing Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and then again days later by attacking mourners and pallbearers, nearly toppling her casket at the funeral procession.

Mubarak reached out to Frost, asking why he hadn’t spoken out yet. “A journalist was murdered,” she texted him. “This is an easy time to speak out in solidarity for Palestine. You’re mad because I didn’t put out a tweet,” she recalled him saying. That missed the point, she said. A tweet was the bare minimum she was calling for.

RM: So I said it’s as if you don’t believe in the humanity of the Palestinians anymore for you to respond that way. Because on any other issues, he would never respond that way. 

RG: Right. 

RM: Palestinians are disposable, our lives are discounted, our freedom isn’t measured, all of a sudden, the same way as others. 

RG: Mhmm. 

RM: Right? That’s what it felt like when he reacted that way. 

RG: He told Mubarak he had seen the horrifying video of the funeral and was willing to do a post, he texted. She asked him to send her a first draft. She was underwhelmed, to say the least, by what he sent. 

RM: In his first draft, he didn’t even include the word Palestinians. Called us “folks.” I said, you’re not even using the word Palestinians? That’s part of an erasure in itself.

RG: The examples were apparently not persuasive — or, perhaps, were persuasive in the opposite direction. DMFI had spent heavily against Sanders during his presidential run and was also busy spending Newman into retirement in a primary. On May 15, Frost quote-tweeted a 2-day-old Blinken post, leaving in the word “folks” and adding a reference to “Palestinians” at the end as people who “deserve to mourn without facing violence.”

That Tuesday was a day that DMFI, AIPAC, and Mainstream Democrats had hoped would be a death blow to the nascent insurgency that had been gaining traction in the primaries. Reid Hoffman’s PAC had spent millions to prop up conservative Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader, who was facing a credible challenge from Jamie McLeod-Skinner in Oregon. There was also Summer Lee in Pennsylvania, and Nida Allam and Erica Smith in North Carolina.

Allam lost 46 to 37 percent. Mubarak said, “[Frost] really got scared after Nida got beaten.”

Smith, who also faced more than $2 million of AIPAC money and $467,000 from DMFI, was beaten soundly. And in Texas the following week, Jessica Cisneros was facing Rep. Henry Cuellar in a runoff she would lose by just a few hundred votes. But McLeod-Skinner knocked off Schrader, and progressive Andrea Salinas overcame an ungodly $11 million in Bankman-Fried money through Protect Our Future PAC to win another Oregon primary.

The marquee race, however, was in Pittsburgh, where AIPAC and DMFI combined to put in more than $3 million for an ad blitz against Lee in the race’s closing weeks. (Mara Talpins — the wife of hedge funder Jeffrey Talpins, named as the one hosting credit card-stacked AIPAC fundraisers in New York — gave $5,000 to Steve Irwin.) In late March, Lee held a 25-point lead, before the money came in — and that amount of money can go a long way in the Pittsburgh TV market. As AIPAC’s ads attacked her relentlessly as not a “real Democrat,” she watched her polling numbers plummet.

But then Lee saw the race stabilize, as outside progressive groups pumped money in and her own campaign responded quickly to the charge that she wasn’t loyal enough to the Democratic Party. Justice Democrats poured in nearly $1 million, WFP put in $450,000, and the Progressive Caucus PAC put in $200,000. Her backers made an issue of the fact that AIPAC had backed more than 100 Republicans who had voted to overturn the 2020 election while pretending to care how good of a Democrat Lee was.

On Election Day, she bested Irwin by less than 1,000 votes, 41.9 percent to 41 percent, taunting her opponents for setting money on fire — $4.5 million set on fire, she posted.

Had she not enjoyed such high popularity and name recognition in the district, AIPAC’s wipeout of her 25-point lead in six weeks would have been enough to beat her. John Fetterman, meanwhile, was able to face his centrist opponent in an open seat for Pennsylvania Senate without taking on a Super PAC, too — and he won easily.

Mubarak let Frost know she was disappointed by the soft-pedaled post on Abu Akleh, but told him not to dwell on Allam’s loss. What was the goal of winning if he didn’t stay true to his values? “Just to put it into perspective, last year, you were screaming and leading chants with us. This year we are begging for a retweet,” she texted. “I keep trying so hard to be a resource, a good friend and an advocate to and for you since the very first day I met you. Even before you wanted to run for office. You can’t say the same to the very folks who you may be listening to re Palestine.” On May 21, Frost dissolved his kitchen cabinet.

Bracy, the Frost opponent whose hoped-for surge of DMFI money never arrived, had been disappointed Mubarak had gone with Frost over him. “I’ve known her for a long time and we’ve worked together on stuff, but she was so mad when I got endorsed by DMFI,” Bracy said. “This was something where we just didn’t agree, because I guess I’ve got a different viewpoint after going to Israel myself and going to Palestine and seeing things for myself.” Bracy had previously gone on an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel. She told him the issue was deeply important to her and that she’d be publicly supporting Frost. “She was saying how she was just going to support Maxwell, just because of this issue. And I was like, you know, that hurts, but I get it. And then he basically, after he got all of her contacts, put her political capital behind him — she’s got a following in Central Florida — and he flipped. I was like, at least I really believed it.”

By early June, pressure was building for Frost to grant an interview to Jewish Insider. For months, campaign manager Kevin Lata had been fending off the request, which had come in shortly after Torres’s endorsement. He told the campaign’s consultants in a group text on June 4 that: “I’ve been kicking the can on this for 2 months. I don’t think we can kick it much longer. I was just going to get them to send the questions and we can respond over email. Seems like far too much risk to do it over the phone. J Street has offered to review our responses before we submit them. We’re definitely aware of the sort of coverage that JI does. Any flags or thoughts before we proceed?”

One of the consultants asked if Lata knew the angle of the story and who was reporting it, and Lata shared the reporter’s email with the group. The reporter had written: “Maxwell is of interest to us for a variety of reasons, one among them being that he earned an endorsement from Rep. Torres, which is likely of interest to our readers because we often write about his efforts in the House,” the reporter had explained on April 13, noting he’d want to ask about the Iran nuclear deal, combating antisemitism, and “the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

Lata texted, “He hit me up again 3 days ago, which coincided with us sending around our paper. So I feel pretty confident that he has it.”

Our paper. The Frost position paper on Israel-Palestine was out. The paper that the Florida Palestine Network was sure Frost would workshop with them had already been drafted and submitted.

Some of the consultants seemed taken aback. Victoria McGroary texted, “What is the paper and how did they get it?” 

Rania Batrice, the Palestinian-American media consultant on the chain, asked about it too, texting: “I still haven’t seen the paper. And would very much like to. What is Maxwell going to say about the Iran nuclear deal? What about things like additional funding to Israel, etc. What is the ‘non-worst case’ you’re envisioning here?”

Lata responded, “It’s all in the paper.” Batrice continued to argue against granting an interview and insisted the paper be shared more widely. But she and others pushing Frost on Israel policy had already lost. Within 48 hours, Frost fired Batrice, who declined to comment for this article. To replace her as a media consultant, he brought in Mark Putnam of Putnam Partners. Putnam often partners on campaigns with Mark Mellman, the head of DMFI.

Though Frost had formally dissolved his kitchen cabinet, he stayed in touch with Mubarak. On June 23, they met one on one in a cafe in downtown Orlando, where she raised the firing of Batrice. Mubarak warned him that at a bare minimum, the optics of having pushed out the only two Palestinian women on the campaign, while he was shifting his position, were troubling. Frost, she said, denied his break with Batrice had anything to do with her pushback. Mubarak asked if it was true that an Israel policy statement was being drafted or had been drafted, and he told her it was and talked through some of his new thinking on the issue. 

RM: I reminded him of his commitment to the Florida Palestine Network saying, you promised this organization, this group of people that you were a part of at one point, that you would only release something with our eyes on it, our review and our approval. And he never sent it to us. We had no idea it was coming out. A part of my false hope kicked in, like maybe he’s still gonna come through. And then it just was released. And we had no idea about it. And — yeah. 

RG: The Bracy campaign, concerned that there had yet to be an independent expenditure by either DMFI or AIPAC, reached out to both to ask what was up, according to a source with direct knowledge of the exchanges. Bad news came back: Torres and other influential figures had weighed in on Frost’s behalf, and his new position made Super PAC spending unnecessary.

In mid-July, Maryland voters went to the polls in another Democratic primary, this one pitting former Rep. Donna Edwards, who had won an insurgent campaign against an incumbent-turned-lobbyist back in 2008 and was now trying to make a comeback, against an establishment Democrat. During her first year in Congress, she had voted “present” amid a pro-Israel resolution amid its latest war on Gaza and cast a handful of other votes that deviated from a 100 percent AIPAC-aligned voting record. DMFI and AIPAC backed her corporate attorney opponent, taking a race that was Edwards’s to lose and, with a staggering $6 million-plus in spending, turned it into a landslide against her.

The ads, as usual, did not mention Israel-Palestine but instead attacked Edwards, a Black woman, as lazy when it came to constituent service, a charge even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an ally of AIPAC, weighed in to protest. 

Howard Kohl, the AIPAC CEO told the Washington Post this, explaining why its primary ads don’t mention Israel, “It’s focused on the issues that are important to the voters in that district. The objective here is to ensure that your candidate emerges victorious and that the anti-Israel candidate is defeated.”

Florida’s primaries were among the last in the country, and the Frost campaign did manage to delay the Jewish Insider piece a bit longer, helping Frost solidify his standing as the leading progressive in the race. But on August 11, less than two weeks before the primary, and after early voting had begun, the article finally ran. (Frost said the campaign had submitted its answers by July, but the article didn’t run until later.)

Reported Jewish Insider: “The first-time candidate has indicated that he will pursue a nuanced and somewhat more balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than one might expect of a staunch progressive who is otherwise aligned with the activist left on such trademark legislative objectives as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

In a candidate questionnaire solicited by Jewish Insider, however, Frost distanced himself from measures that would penalize Israel, rejecting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as ‘problematic’ while opposing calls to condition U.S. aid to Israel. More broadly, Frost said he is “committed to supporting” continued military assistance that “helps ensure” Israel “can properly defend itself.”

Frost elaborated in his position paper, which was obtained by JI, that he would also advocate for “robust U.S. assistance that benefits the Palestinian people and is in compliance with [the] Taylor Force Act,” referring to a law that withholds aid to the Palestinian Authority on the condition that Ramallah ends payments to families of terrorists. The assistance, he wrote, “serves an essential role in meeting Palestinian humanitarian needs.”

The position paper, published by Jewish Insider, was even starker. No conditions should be placed on military aid to Israel, he wrote in the paper, and he reversed course on BDS. He said, “I believe that the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) movement is extremely problematic and undermines the chances of peace and a two-state solution. Additionally, It hurts both Palestinians and Israelis who suffer economically from it. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have been designated by the United States as terrorist organizations and all these groups are a part of the Central BDS movement’s council, which in my eye delegitimizes the entire organization and movement.”

Al-Dada, who had chanted next to Frost at the Gaza War rally and then volunteered for his campaign, was shocked. But it was so late in the campaign, most voters had made up their minds. “I know personally about 35 people who, for a fact, voted for Max because of me,” Al-Dada said. “I didn’t vote at all.”

Frost said that in his March meeting with the Florida Palestine Network, he was honest about where he stood at the time but later evolved his position, particularly on BDS. His support of it as a “grassroots movement,” he said, was undercut when he learned that groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were central players in it.

MAF: I think there was a nuance that I was trying to hit there that I was asking about, that, as I spoke with other organizations, other people from all different sides, I found out that what I was trying to hit at just didn’t make sense. And that was part of my being naive on the issue. … But [as] time went past, I contacted Rasha and other folks to express kind of where my head was at.

RG: As for military aid, Frost said, he had evolved there too after numerous conversations:

MAF: I spent a long time speaking with different groups and different people, individuals in my district, clergy leaders, different organizations, and it really came down to understanding how things are over there and in the region,” he said. “I just really feel like our commitment to Israel that we have, and the [memorandum of understanding] that President Obama signed, is something that I support. And so that’s why we were pretty specific writing that out in the paper.

RG: Bullard said he was disappointed to learn of Frost’s turnaround. “You want people who have a level of conviction who, when confronted with — and I get it, you’re now being put in a position where people are telling you why you need to think a particular way — but you also have to recognize that there’s a dominant narrative that does not create a sense of equity around issues of Palestine in the American context,” he said. “You have to make the decision of whether you’re going to stand firm or you’re just going to take the safe position.”

Frost said that DMFI and AIPAC can’t take credit for his evolution because it came from inside his district.

MAF: For me, it wasn’t really about the spending, but it was about the dialogues in the district and my conversations with people. So my district changed a lot in the middle of the campaign. And it became a district where, like, the JCC [Jewish Community Center], is in it now. There’s a lot of Jewish communities in it. And when that change happened, I engaged with those communities and just started to really dive into it.

If I were to look at the timeline, the maps, I think, changed around March or April. And that’s exactly when I started having these conversations.

RG: Whatever the fears of hard-line Israel hawks, the rise of Omar, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez to power in Congress did not materially slow the expansion of Israeli settlements into occupied Palestinian territory.

In 2019, their first year in office, Israel added more than 11,000 new settlement units. In 2020, the figure doubled to over 22,000, many of them in East Jerusalem and deep in the West Bank. A European Union representative to the United Nations said in a report chronicling the increase, “As stated in numerous EU Foreign Affairs Council conclusions, settlements are illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible.” The settlement expansion included multiple “outposts” — which are seizures of farmland and pasture — that puts any semblance of Palestinian independence or sustainability further out of reach. 

In 2021 — despite Yair Lapid’s campaign promise not “to build anything that will prevent the possibility of a future two-state solution” — settlement expansion in East Jerusalem doubled in 2021 compared to the year before, threatening to fully slice the remaining contiguous parts of Palestinian territory into small, prison-like enclaves.

In Congress, Jamaal Bowman ended up siding with constituents who pushed him to support $1 billion in new funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, drawing the ire of a faction of DSA organized through its BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group. Bowman told me that ahead of the vote, he heard almost exclusively from supporters of the Iron Dome system and “not much at all” from opponents. 

Jamaal Bowman: Those on the ‘yes’ side were very clear, and very loud, and very consistent with why they believed the vote needed to be ‘yes.’ It’s an important issue for this district in particular, which is why I voted yes. But it’s also, as I’ve been asked before and stated before, that vote is not going to stop me from continuing to fight for Palestinian rights, to fight to end the occupation which absolutely needs to happen, and to make sure Palestinian humanity is centered.

RG: On August 5, without the support of his cabinet, Lapid launched airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, agreeing to a truce on August 7. Palestinian militants fired over 1,000 rockets, though no Israelis were killed or seriously wounded. The three-day conflict left 49 Palestinians dead, including 17 children.

Israel’s initial denial of any role in the killing of Abu Akleh gradually morphed under the weight of incontrovertible evidence into admission of possible complicity. Partnering with the London-based group Forensic Architecture, Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq launched the most comprehensive investigation into her death. On the morning of August 18, at least nine armored Israeli vehicles approached the group’s headquarters in Ramallah and broke their way in, ransacking it and later welding shut its doors. An attempt by the Israeli government, headed-then by Mellman ally Yair Lapid, to label it a terrorist organization was rejected by the EU, which reviewed the evidence Israel provided and found it not remotely convincing.

On August 23, voters went to the polls in Orlando and cast their ballots. Frost won 35 percent of the votes, Bracy pulled in 25, and Grayson — who’d taken to calling Frost “Maxwell Fraud” by the end of the campaign — took in 15 percent. In the end, neither DMFI, AIPAC, nor Hoffman’s group had to spend a penny in the race. Bracy lost, but they had won. “That’s the goal,” observed a source close to AIPAC after the election. “That’s the whole point.”

Summer Lee agreed. 

RG: Have you noticed it all, on the way that you think? Because what they’re trying to do is put pressure on the way you’re acting as a politician. 

SL: Absolutely, and not just with me, I see it with other people, right? I see people who are running for office or thinking of running for office in the future and they feel deterred because this is a topic that they know will bury them.

RG: “There’s absolutely a chilling effect,” Lee continued.”I’ve heard it from other folks who will say, you know, we agree with this, but I’ll never support it, and I’ll never say it out loud.”

More broadly, though, it makes building a movement that much more difficult, Lee said: “It’s very hard to survive as a progressive, Black, working-class-background candidate when you are facing millions and millions of dollars, but what it also does is then it deters other people from ever wanting to get into it. If you’re somebody who sat through my race as a supporter or not, someone in our district, who’s witnessing the movement that we’ve been a part of, they will look at the onslaught, they will look at what they said about me and how they conducted those campaigns, and then they would say, ‘I would never want to run myself.’ So then it has the effect of ensuring that the Black community broadly, the other marginalized communities, are just no longer centered in our politics.”

In September, the Democratic National Committee refused to allow a vote on a resolution, pushed by Democratic National Committee member Nina Turner and other progressives, to ban big outside money in primaries. Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, said it was absurd that Democrats continued to allow outside groups to manipulate Democratic primaries even though they clearly have little interest in seeing the party itself succeed. Their goal is to shape what the party looks like — whether it’s in the minority or majority is beside the point. Greenberg said, “For a group called Democratic Majority for Israel they don’t seem to be putting much effort into winning a Democratic majority. 

Dmitri Mehlhorn said Mainstream Democrats, for its part, remains invested in the party, and is focusing on swing-state governor’s races, adding “we’ve moved quite a bit to Pelosi’s team.”

Not so much for AIPAC. Though Rep. Elaine Luria, a Democratic of Virginia whose race is listed as “key” by AIPAC, has been one of the organization’s most outspoken and loyal allies since her 2018 election, United Democracy Project has declined to help her so far. Instead, its only foray so far into the general election has been to spend in a Democrat-on-Democrat race in the top-two state of California. According to Jewish Insider, “a board member of DMFI expressed reservations over [David] Canepa’s Middle East foreign policy approach, pointing to at least one social media post viewed by local pro-Israel advocates as dismissive of Israeli security concerns.” The allegedly dismissive message, posted on May 13, 2021, as the Gaza War raged, read: “Peace for Palestine.”

The ad was about abortion. Both candidates, of course, support abortion rights. Only one called for peace.

[End credits music.]

The post How Progressive Democrats Were Railroaded in the Primaries by AIPAC and Allied Groups appeared first on The Intercept.