The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Today we are joined by Courtney Teasley, who consider herself and identify herself as a legal disruptor and justice strategist. We’ll be discussing her perspective on how she is intervening in the criminal injustice system and her work challenging the prison industrial complex as it exists today. Thank you, Courtney. Welcome to Rattling the Bars.

Courtney Teasley :

Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited. I’ve heard a lot about this podcast, and so thank you so much for this opportunity to talk to your audience.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. Let’s start by introduce yourself to our audience and tell our audience how you came into this space, but more importantly, what is a legal disruptor and a justice strategist? What’s your identity as how you identify those things? So tell us a little bit about yourself.

Courtney Teasley :

Yes. So my name is Courtney Teasley. I am a licensed attorney in Nashville, Tennessee. I have practiced mainly criminal defense for the last 13 years and am now a retiring lawyer, a criminal defense lawyer, because I have done all the things within the criminal justice system from teaching and training in mock trial, training and coaching other lawyers to open their own law practices, and also then to teaching as a criminal justice educator over at a historically black college and university here in Nashville called Tennessee State University. So I taught there for a number of years as well. And then that is where I was able to see the big three that were creating this cycle. I call them the big three education topics that people from what I like to call the DAMM community, D-A-M-M, and that’s the disproportionately affected marginalized minority community. And people from that community are often not educated in the big three that I call financial literacy, criminal justice literacy, or legal literacy, and civics.

And these three lead directly to mass incarceration. And so after running a campaign, it was a historical campaign here, we unseated a criminal court judge for the first time ever in Nashville. I decided to create a legal education company to help fill that gap of legal literacy that so many of us never received and that basically you had the cops saying, “Hey, ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking the law, but you never taught me the law.

That’s legal literacy and then financial literacy. You keep me in cycles of poverty. You keep me broke. You don’t teach me ever how to really make money.” And so that leads right back into the criminal justice system. And then finally civics, the last one we’re undereducated in, you teach us nothing more than go vote. You don’t teach us anything else around how to actively participate as a citizen. So we don’t really take advantage of the things that we should. We don’t really hold people accountable the way we should. We don’t show up the way we should when it comes to voting because of that. So that’s why I created my company is called MFN and I created it with the intent to help reduce mass incarceration.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. And it’s interesting that you identify three areas that you say are essential in disrupting this cycle. So let’s talk about those. Let’s talk about those things. Walk us through your program. How do you engage the community or who is your target audience?

Courtney Teasley :

Yeah, so like I was kind of telling you why I created it, I forgot to mention a very important part of that all the things we do are proactive in the criminal justice system, meaning I feel like if mass incarceration is going to go anywhere, the efforts to fight it must happen before someone has been found guilty or someone has pled guilty. We know 97% of people take pleas. And so the majority of efforts in the criminal justice system usually are happening after someone has already pled guilty and been found guilty. They have received that ultimate if, made a felon. Their rights may be restricted. They have a lot of different things. They have a lot of different hurdles at that area versus fighting proactively where I think we can be a lot more strategic and a lot more effective. So that’s my company focusing in on the proactive portion of fighting back.

And so how we do this and how I engage in the community, and I think you asked me also who is my targeted audience. And so the ways that we’ve been. My target audience is who I was telling you, the damn community, disproportionately affected marginalized minority community, the 97% of people who take pleas, the people from areas of town that others may look down on. I’m talking about the hood.

The people who most likely come into contact with the criminal justice system, that’s my target audience. And so we engage the community through multiple efforts, whether it’s through our partnerships and collaborations with schools, churches, community centers, organizations that care, from us going out and creating the activations where we’re bringing the legal literacy, but we’re bringing it in a fun way where people actually want to take part in and they’re getting to understand it, they’re getting to participate. So we do that and then we do some advocacy training where now we train organizations how to fight back proactively. So I’m a criminal defense attorney and when I say a justice strategist, I’m a fighter and I’m a strategic person first. And

So I’m going to pull back the veil and I’m going to show you what the criminal justice system really is and then I’m going to teach you how to do what I teach my lawyers how to do, play chess and not checkers, how to fight back unapologetically, vigorously. And so that’s what we do in our advocacy training. And so that’s how we engage the community. A lot of times we’re doing events where we’re going out to people who are having events in the community and a lot of people just don’t feel competent in teaching legal stuff. And so we bring that to you because we speak the language of the damn community, D-A-M-M community, African American English.That’s how I’m so successful as a lawyer because I’m bilingual. I speak two languages and that’s how the community resonates. If my life is on the line, I don’t need you speaking above my head.

So that’s how we engage in the community in an authentic way.

Mansa Musa:

When you saying legal literacy, are you educating me on understanding my rights somewhere like the Black Panther Party had, when they came out, they was going around, they was telling people they had the right one to be on, but they wasn’t saying your right to bear saying you have a right to be arm, but you have certain rights when the police pull you up and stop you. You have a right to not say nothing. You can ask to speak to somebody. When you say legal literacy, you talking about pre, post incarceration or do you deal with people at all sectors, like a person in society or people in prison or people that got out on what we call paper, out on parole?

Courtney Teasley :

Yeah. So with legal literacy, when I’m speaking about that, we’re talking about all facets of it. So I have books already for the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, books on that. And I teach out on the Sixth Amendment because that book is not out yet. We have plenty of books that are coming out, but the Fourth and the Fifth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment is the one that just came out. And actually I’ll send y’all over a copy of it so you can check it out.

But the way that we really just break, it’s packed full of pre-protection. Now, and when I say pre-protection, that means protection that jumps in from the moment you’re accused of anything. A lot of times we like to rely on the Fifth Amendment and wait until the police tell us, oh, you got the right to remain silent or you’re being forced to testify and you’re like, oh, I plead the Fifth. However, no, the Fifth Amendment, it actually came into play the very moment you were suspected. So when that cop gave you a call and said, Hey, I want to talk to you, you know what I mean? We’ve heard from such and such. You mind coming down here talking to me? At that moment, even though they haven’t told you that you’re a suspect or whatever it may be, you have the power to say, oh, hold on.

I think I’m going to choose to stay silent. I’ll have my lawyer contact you. So you get to make a determination whether it’s in your best interest to talk about anything. So you have that pre-protection. And so that’s how we kind of engage with the amendments that really pop up in the criminal justice. The fourth, fifth, and sixth are the ones that we focus in on when we’re teaching our advocacy training. But those come into play when you’re incarcerated.

If you’re just on bail and you’re waiting, well, those are in play. Or even if you’ve been found guilty and you’re appealing, those are in play. You need to be able to understand those. And so then for other ones that we don’t have books on, then you rely on a person like myself to be able to train you on what that means for your organization or your specific

Mansa Musa:

Situation.

Courtney Teasley :

Okay.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. And then in financial literacy, because I was telling off camera that when I got out, I hadn’t established no credit, but I had established a savings. So when I went to get an automobile, my mind was I ain’t want no car note. So I wind up paying $15,000 for 2015.

Courtney Teasley :

Oh

Mansa Musa:

God. And had I had established credit, I would’ve had made out better. But since then I had established credit. I went to a dealership in 2023 and I had the same amount of money and because I had good credit, I was able to get a 2023 and I paid the same amount of money I paid to get for that 2015. So my concern with the financial literacy, what is this? Because when you talking about the damn community, a lot of us don’t have a pot to piss in the window to throw it out. So we don’t have no funds. So are you teaching how to create your own business? Are you teaching how to go about getting grant, how to get money and then how to manage it? What is this, your financial literacy model? I

Courtney Teasley :

Love that you asked that. So after I declared retirement from the practice of law, I went and got certified as a business coach and I’m also a certified strengths coach. And so I basically am talking, when I’m teaching about financial literacy, I did that to go be able to teach my lawyers who were never taught anything about business. But when we transition it over here to people in the damn community, we started the very basics, like you said, learning about building credit. It’s just something so simple that it’s like a lot of times we don’t think about it or we’ve been so used to having not so good credit that we try to disregard it, that we never try to maybe get it back together. Well, and I understand that, but I think that there are multiple ways that you can start building your credit in smaller ways that a lot of people don’t talk about.

So we like to bring in financial strategists and people who are investors who actually have done these types of things to help you understand what to do. A lot of times, think about it like this. When you were just talking about you had a savings and the thing is you’re thinking about how can you make more money? How can you do whatever? You got your job. Then it’s like, well, who is here teaching us about investing? These are things we never learned about. Nobody’s sitting here giving us the playbook on what to do or how to do it. Like you said, you might be working a dead end job, a job that doesn’t promote you. Well, then you need to learn about what kind of jobs are out there, what kind of jobs, what kind of skill set do you have? What have you already done?

And then how can we use those same skills to get you a job that now has advancement opportunities? So it’s just all of those things that come together and that comes with us partnering with other organizations and actually bringing the experts to you to be able to help understand how do I segue now? I have not partnered yet and I’m open to it. I have not yet partnered with an organization for reentry where we’re teaching the coaching to them, but I have connections with one of the world’s top traders just in the last couple of years. I did an interview with him and he’s actually a Nashville native and he came down and he did a gig where he just talked to us all about investing, the bare minimum, how to start, what to do. Then you want to get somebody else. What’s a 401k?

How do I start it? What’s the IRA? You bring the experts to be able to bring it down, take all the high paid jargon out of it and speak the language of the damn community and explain to me, how do I get my ducks in a row? How do I protect myself and my children? And so that’s what I think we do well with partnering with other orgs to help

Mansa Musa:

That. And then we talk about civic and that in of itself speaks volumes in terms of our lack of understanding of electoral process, our lack of understanding of different institutions that regulate, responsible regulatory type things that affect us. So what is your civic model? Because when we learn civic in school, we know that at a certain age you get a right to vote. We know now that that’s not a guarantee with the latest Supreme Court decision, but be that as may, what’s your civic model?

Courtney Teasley :

Yeah. So with civics, my big thing has always been people get so mad, especially the new generation, it’s like, oh my God, they don’t vote. They won’t do this. They won’t do that. And it’s like, well, you got to teach them more than just go vote. It’s more to civics than just going to vote. And I like to bring up a case that I was fighting vigorously back in 2023. It was called disruptmanchester, if you look on Instagram or Twitter. And a family with five children, five Black children were driving through Manchester, Tennessee and had their children taken and forced into foster care all over marijuana. And so in that case, I had to publicly put it out to people and let them know what’s going on in this city that we consider a sundown town. A lot of Black people have known it to be that over the years.

And so we know what it is when these people are taking Black children and forcing them into foster care. And so when you’re making it public and you’re letting other people know what’s going on, and basically I call it criminal defense organizing, “Hey, this is what they’re doing to us in real time. We need you to be concerned about what’s going on.” I want to ignite their civic abilities and a lot of times they have to know what that means. And your civic abilities just meant, “Hey, you got the power to come court watch. You know that you can come. You have a right to come into a courtroom. You have a right to sit in here and see what they’re doing.” That’s accountability, making sure that the people that your taxes pay, that they’re accountable to you. And then also when we had issues where we were saying, “Okay, well, you guys took the children.

The state trooper did this, the county did this.” Well, people started to request records. So as citizens, like, “Hey, I’m requesting to see the stop. I’m requesting to see your personnel records. I’m requesting…” So that’s the type of thing when you’re igniting people to understand that as a citizen, because government officials, public officials, you pay them, your taxes pay them, you have the right to inquire into anything that’s going on, and you have the right to demand answers, you got the right to transparency, you got the right to ask for, you can file complaints, you can come court watch. So igniting them to see that your civic duty far exceeds just voting, right? You have power and you just need to know how to utilize it.

Mansa Musa:

In the District of Columbia, before you answer, we got the right returning citizens. Anyone formerly incarcerated, you’re a DC resident, you got the right to vote. And so we got that right. But with this latest decision that came out the Supreme Court, we looking at how they might try to take that back because the federal government got complete control over the District of Columbia, everything relative to District of Columbia, the federal government. We’re not a state. We got home rule. So talk about how you look at people that’s disenfranchised because that’s your costume population specifically. And not only that’s them and their family, because their family is highly affected by their incarceration.

Courtney Teasley :

Absolutely. So basically with what you’re talking about is probably going to go more into efforts that are reactive, but very necessary. And so what I did recently is incorporate a nonprofit so that way we are able to partner with organizations that do a lot of the rights restoration. And so most recently we hosted a judicial forum and in the judicial forum, we talked about, we educated them first on what all these seats, because right now we have a special election for judges going on right now. So we educated them around that. And then we had a forum so they could hear from the people. But one of the big pieces was we wanted people who did not have their rights, who may have been made felons at young ages. We wanted them to be able to come in and inquire about how to get your rights back so we can start that process with them.

And so what we do is we’ll have them come in, let us know, “Hey, I’m interested in getting my rights back or however, just let us know you’re interested.” And then we can do the connections with making sure you get that done. And we do that through collaborating with other orgs who are already doing it. So that’s how we try and fight back reactively by partnering and empowering, kind of like you were just saying, how you give amplify people’s voices. So we try to do that with other organizations. We’ll connect with them and allow them to do what they’re doing best in that field around rights

Mansa Musa:

Restoring. Yeah. And I mentioned earlier that I was incarcerated. Prior to being released, I did 48 years in the Maryland system. And a lot of what you’re saying, we would educate ourselves on all those levels. You had guys that did financial listing, they studied the stock market. They understood it and they invested their money. We had people that was jailhouse lawyers and did legal and was proficient at that. And then we had people that came together around organizing the community around social issues in general. If a person, and I’m looking at the prison population in particular, if a person in the prison population, when they let me out, they gave me $50.

They didn’t give me no bus ticket. They let me out in the city. They let me out in Baltimore City. I reached out to my family. I ain’t know if they had got the message or not, but that’s what I left out with $50 after serving all that time. The average person leave out a prison in the Maryland system with about that much money before they leave. If they leave with any kind of money, it’s not enough money for them to sustain themselves. So what’s your economic, that component and why you call it the missing curriculum and how do that factor into the system eradicating it or stabilizing the people that’s coming out?

Courtney Teasley :

Yeah. So I love that you asked this and I think you’re talking about when I call it why financial power is a prerequisite for social justice. Because one thing for me is as a criminal defense lawyer, I didn’t take the public defender route. I didn’t want to work for the government. I didn’t want my hands tied. I didn’t want to go to handcuffs. I wanted to be able to fight because the moment you fight a little too hard, guess what they going to do? Take your money from me, right?

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Courtney Teasley :

So that’s the way they keep us in order. And so I wanted to be able to fight without having that issue. And so I started to see that the fact that I was private practice, I was able to create, I charged my worth the majority of the times, but because of that, I was able to create scaling fees, sliding fees, low income, and represent people who really needed it because I charged my worth over here in my law practice the majority of the time. The people who can’t afford it were able to pay that and the people who were not able to afford it, I’m still able to represent you because I get to create that. I didn’t need the government to tell me to do a pro bono or to take a court appointment. I knew how to serve my community. And so one thing I kind of started to see is I would do all the things.

I told you I did the mock trial. I was the NAACP legal redress chair. I was the equality and justice committee chair for the Tennessee Association Criminal. I was all these things. And I started to see that real change. Y’all trying to burn me out. You know what I mean? And you’re not going to pay anybody for it. So I started to see that if the narrative being pushed is if you want to help your community, you need to do it for free and long hours, do it under a nonprofit, don’t get paid much. And I was like, well, that’s the reason none of these initiatives are long lasting.

Mansa Musa:

They

Courtney Teasley :

Only last for a little bit of time. And then as soon you run out of money and then now you can’t help anybody else. And so what we have to do is be able to be self-sustaining. So when people in our community are creating businesses, when I had my legal education company and 10% of all my product profits go back into the very people who are fighting proactively. So one of the Middle Tennessee National Action Network, I trained them and my trainings was $5,000. Well, they didn’t have to pay for that because people that actually were supporting and buying our product books and buying into our other things. And so that is, to me, a model that other businesses can take and see that, look, there are problems in our community. I’m making money over here. Well, let me figure out how to best assist.

And then that means in your situation, when you’re talking about a person coming from prison, well, if you have a business that actually cares, that you’re partnering with a business and they’re like, you know what? This is hard. People are trying to get back on their feet. We want to be able to make sure that they can do just that so that person can come and maybe they can do an externship. They can get a job over here and then they can get a stipend up front. Whatever it is, we are the ones who have to create the solutions. Nobody’s coming to save us. And the solutions that are coming through nonprofits are the monies. Come on, we’re under this administration. A lot of people aren’t getting money for anything that’s assisting Black people in general. So it’s going to be up to our community to be able to build financial power, to be able to become financially literate and to be able to be creative in actually helping assist.

For me, I care about any mass incarceration. For somebody else, it could be something different, but it’s going to be up to us to create those solutions and then partner with the ones that are doing it.

Mansa Musa:

And I think your approach to this mindfulness and skill building, it goes back to an era where we was educating for liberation. So I think we get caught up on how we see the problem and therefore we let that be determined the solution. But more importantly, who telling us what the problem is? Not so much as it how we see it. Let me rephrase that. Somebody telling us this is what the problem is, and then we say, okay, then the solution is, and trying to get a solution, it become, to your point, we try and get something from the government and the government ain’t going to fund you to get your freedom. That’s not happening. Government ain’t going to come and say, okay, because we still waiting on our 40 acres of the mule. And

Courtney Teasley :

It ain’t

Mansa Musa:

Coming. It ain’t coming. So the best thing we can do is do what we’ve been doing. But Courtney, I really appreciate you coming and having this conversation. And I hope our audience can really understand the importance of this approach, mainly when you’re dealing with the cost population. I know from experience that when people come into that system much like yourself and provide education, information and knowledge that we’re receptive. And there was a lot of people that was locked up with me, all of us that got out in the last 10 years. And a lot of what we learned while we was incarcerated, we’re doing it now in the Baltimore community and other communities. But you got the last one. What you want to tell our audience about how they can get in touch with you and how they can support your work?

Courtney Teasley :

Thank you so much, Mansa. First of all, what you just said is exactly why I’m doing the work I do and why I focus proactively prior to someone becoming incarcerated, prior to someone taking a plea or pleading guilty because I think it sucks that you did 48 years. Could you have helped me prior to that? And a lot of times you’ll see the Innocence Project, which is good and they’re doing good work, but it’s like people are only getting out and that effort’s only coming in after people have done 30 and 40 years. And it’s like, I think we can do something way before then while they’re fighting their cases more proactively. And so you can find me over on TikTok. I do a lot of legal literacy education over there. I have a whole course up there called Easy Way to On Your Right.

It’s Criminal Justice Literacy 101. It went most viral. We have over 30,000 followers and we have so many resources like a fight your case manual. So anyway, come over and follow us at MFN, that’s E-M-E-F-F-E-N. And we’re also over on, if you want to follow me personally, you can hit me up on LinkedIn, Courtney Teasley, or you can find me on Instagram @thecourtneyteasley. And so YouTube, again, we have the same thing. It’s not MFN, it’s @blacklawgirl. So if you want to find us on YouTube, it’s @blacklawgirl.

Wherever I am, look, come find me, come get me, and let me know. I love to come collaborate with y’all wherever you are. Let me bring the legal literacy and let me bring it in a fun way that’s easy to understand.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and this is The Battle for Free Speech. So as promised, this is the first of a number of bonus episodes we’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks. Today, I speak with Fara Dabhoiwala. He’s a professor of history at Princeton University, and he’s the author of the book, What Is Free Speech: The History of a Dangerous Idea. That book was published last year by Penguin Random House and Harvard University Press. And if you’ve listened to this podcast series, you have heard his voice before because I go to him for analysis and insight in numerous episodes. That’s because he’s a wealth of knowledge on this subject, but also because his book in many ways challenges the status quo about our understanding of free speech. In this podcast series, I feel like I was able to only just barely scratch the surface on so many questions, particularly about the beginnings of what we understand as free speech in the United States and elsewhere, and also the difference between free speech in the United States and abroad.

So today I’m bringing you my conversation with him in its entirety. I know you will appreciate it.

Well, Fara, I just want to start off. Thank you so much, so much for your time and for being here.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

A pleasure to talk to you, Mike.

Michael Fox:

Fara, can you start with by just introducing yourself and tell me a little bit about why this became such an interest for you, why you wrote this book?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, I’m a historian at Princeton, but I used to teach at Oxford University in England. And more than 10 years ago now, I published a different book on the history of Western attitudes to sex and what I call the sexual revolution of the 18th century. And that was a very popular book and I went around the world talking about it. And in the course of that, almost immediately, I was censored in various ways. I was deplatformed, I got into trouble for saying things on the radio, and then it all culminated in my book being translated into Chinese. And when it was translated into Chinese, it was censored. And then I went to China and traveled around talking about it. And at that point, my interest shifted from my own experience of being silenced to the extraordinary things that were happening in China already 10 years ago, which was, as a historian, I realized every single apparatus of censorship ever invented in the history of the world was now simultaneously being deployed to muzzle free speech in China, as well as some totally new ones that the Communist Party had developed to deal with the internet.

And of course, 10 years ago, everyone still generally believed the internet was a technology of freedom that would set people free. And before long, surely the Chinese would also experience it that way. And my experience traveling around taught me that actually that was a very naive idea and the opposite was happening. So I came back from that trip really shocked by the way in which a modern dictatorship like China can operate to muzzle free speech and silence dissent at every level, believing myself in free speech and starting to think, well, why do we have such different views about this? Where does first of all, this Western belief in free speech come from? And given that we all believe in it, and I do very strongly myself, why can we never agree on what it means? I mean, within our cultures, we’re fighting about that all the time and across cultures now, this is a really important political transnational problem in the world, but it’s not just a political series of questions and problems.

It’s also a historical problem because people didn’t always believe in free speech. Anyway, so that’s where I started. I though in 2015, oh my goodness, it’s peak free speech time now. I should hurry up and write this book before the moment passes. And sadly, the moment has not passed. It’s just got worse and worse. But I can explain why that is, which is part of the interest of the subject.

Michael Fox:

Yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to ask you. How did we get into this mess? And obviously through reading your book, I’m just fascinated by the Cato letters and all this, but if you could give me a little bit of how do we get to this point?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, it’s taken us 300 years to get to this point because the modern idea of free speech really is invented about 300 years ago. But the reason it’s such a hot topic right now, let me just deal with that. The reason it’s such a hot topic right now is because we’re living through a giant communications revolution. I mean, the internet has completely transformed how humans communicate at every level about every subject. And every time that’s happened in the past, in the 18th century with print, in the 19th century and the 20th century with new forms of print and the telegraph and broadcasting and all the rest of it, every time there’s been a new communications revolution, people have needed to think about free speech harder and in different ways. And so that’s part of what’s happening right now. Do you want to come back to me about the history?

Michael Fox:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Let’s dive all the way back in the history and we’ll bring it up to the present. Talk to me about those beginnings of what free speech meant in those days.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Yeah. So really the first thing you need to understand about free speech is it’s on the one hand, a very old idea. There are various forms of freedom of expression that go right back to the classical period. On the other hand, our current sense of it is really quite recent because older ideas of free speech are always very restricted. They had to do with speech in an emergency, the idea of scholars communicating peacefully amongst themselves. But what’s always lacking in all those earlier notions is a notion of political free speech, that everyone has the right to speak out on matters of public concern. That’s really the core of our modern idea. One reason that’s lacking before the 18th century is that people have a very sophisticated understanding of what words really are. That’s to say words are not different from actions. Words are a type of action in the world.

Everyone in the past knew this. They also know that words, although often trivial and harmless and fleeting, sometimes can have really potent consequences in the world. And thirdly, they know that sometimes those potent consequences can be dangerous and harmful. And they’re particularly focused on the harm to individuals from lies and slanders and defamation, which is something that everyone sees is a real problem. And people all the time in the pre-modern world are going to court to defend themselves against the bad words, the slanders, the lies of others. And the second way in which they are focused on this is the dangers, the problems of untruth and misinformation and conspiracy theories. Everyone knows in the past, and it’s a documented fact, that first of all, lies and misinformation spread very quickly, much more quickly than the truth, and that they can, if left unchecked, cause riots and political disorder and pogroms and massacres and bloodshed on a horrible scale.

Everyone in the European past knew this. Happens time and again. And so because of these insights into the power of words, they are very keen to control technologies of print when those are invented and they’re keen to regulate speech in all sorts of ways. Okay, so that’s the background. Then what happens in the early 18th century, and it happens first in England, is that for contingent religious and political reasons there the government cannot anymore agree on exactly how to regulate the printing press. There’s been a political and religious revolution. And so the normal forms of prior censorship whereby you go to the church with anything controversial on a spiritual subject and ask them to sign off on it before you print it, that doesn’t work anymore. Anyway, I won’t go into the reasons, but what you get is this explosion of new kinds of printing because now for the first time people are allowed to just put it out there.

You can still be punished and prosecuted if you publish something that is beyond the pale, but still it’s a different form of regulation. And so in London, which is the epicenter of this, you get an explosion of political pamphlets, newspapers, a much more fast-paced, a different kind of media world than has ever existed before. And the reason for this is partly also that this is the first age of permanent political parties. In England, the Wigs and the Tories are constantly, they’re popular parties. They’re appealing to the people. And so they use this new technology right from the outset to start to attack each other. And as part of that, they are constantly shouting back and forth across the partisan landscape that the other side is lying and abusing words and misinforming the public. They on the other hand are trying to tell the truth. Anyway, it’s a situation very analogous, very evocative of our own age.

And in this new landscape, people get addicted to fast-paced news and newspapers and so on. They like it and they celebrate that this has come about because of the liberty of the press. So the liberty of the press comes this new slogan that everyone loves to be in favor of, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes. On the other hand, they can also see actually very sharply, acutely, that this new technology has also made worse all the problems of mass communication that have always existed. I mean, the first law against false news in the English speaking world dates back to 1275. These are not new problems at all. So in the 18th century, people see that, for example, print has only made worse the problem of lies. There’s a great quote by Jonathan Swift, the great writer of the early 18th century, which is basically that truth is slow and lies are false.

It goes like this, falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it like a man who’s though of a good repartee long after the party’s over. It’s still true. And Daniel Defoe, his co-journalist and writer, brilliant novelist as well, complains that newspapers have created an explosion of “false news, forgery, infamy, and absurdity, masquerading as fact.” So everyone who looks into this and understands how the world works knows that this has just made things worse. And the final aspect of that, that all people in the know are aware of is that this new media world is hugely corrupt. It’s not about spreading truth so much about making money. Everyone is trying to make money out of the print revolution. It’s hard to do, many newspapers go under, but everyone wants to make it big. They’re always primarily concerned with selling advertising, getting sales, and above all, getting sponsorship by a politician.

And so the world of journalism is hugely corrupt. People are writing for money. Newspapers are being bought and sold all the time, and this is not a neutral marketplace of ideas at all on the contrary. So in this world, liberty speech, everyone agrees is great, but because of all these problems, they also agree that liberty speech is easily abused and they call that licentiousness. Licentience is bad, liberty is good. But the problem with this balancing model of saying liberty speech is good as far as it goes, but you shouldn’t abuse it, is that everyone can also see this lies entirely in the eye of the beholder. It’s a subjective judgment. And that’s why no one is able to put forward a really cogent theory of free speech. Everyone can see that, for example, opposition politicians are always banging on about freedom of speech and all for it and maximally for it.

And then the moment they get into power, they start censoring their opponents as heavily as they can. So there’s no worked out theory of free speech. And into this moment come these two journalists called John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who put forward the first much more hard-edged theory of free speech in which they describe what we might call the origins of the absolutist view of free speech. And their argument, which they put forward in an anonymous newspaper column called Cato’s Letters, which is immensely successful and has a very long afterlife, is that liberty of speech is the foundation of all liberty and that governors are always trying to abuse power and aggregate more power to themselves. Governors are in fact always trying to turn into tyrants. On the other hand, the people are always noble and virtuous and able to see that. And so you should allow the people maximum freedom of expression in order that they can keep a check on their tyrants, their governors, and call them to account.

And so they claim this, they claim that liberty’s speech is the foundation of all liberty because the moment you see it being reduced even a tiny bit, then you know you’re on a slippery slide to tyranny because that’s the first thing that tyrannical governors try to do. Now, everyone has always known that Cater’s letters is a tremendously influential text in the history of free speech. Cater’s letters is this not just about free speech, it’s a series of essays putting forward simple understandings of important Republican thinkers like Locke and Machiavelli. And in the Americas, in North America, it becomes the most important political text for the Patriot movement in the middle and later 18th century. So the founders of the United States take this as gospel truth and they import these slogans from Katie’s letters into the Declarations of Rights about free speech in 1776 and then into the First Amendment.

So it has a very long afterlife. It’s very powerful. Everyone’s always known about this, but when I started reading it, two things revealed themselves to me that no one had ever really noticed before, and they’re really quite astonishing. The first is this is a theory full of holes. This is not a coherent, sincere doctrine of free speech. It’s in fact an attempt to justify the practices of these two hack journalists themselves in attacking the government and calling for the lynching of stock market profiteers and the overthrow of the current administration. They are justifying themselves by saying, “Well, of course, freedom of speech can never be abridged and there’s no such thing as liable.” That’s another thing they try and claim that if you attack someone and you spread lies about them, then the people will just see that they’re lies and that will just have no effect at all.

On the other hand, if you criticize someone and it’s true, then it’ll stick. And so really there’s no such thing as liable. It’s a very dodgy argument, but they make it with great passion. So the first thing is they don’t pay attention to any of those things that everyone else around them notices, that this is a deeply corrupt media world, that the newspapers themselves are writing and the journalists are writing for money, that the people don’t always agree on everything, that truth is difficult to establish, and that lies can spread dangerously if you allow them to. None of those things are there at all. So it’s full of holes. The second thing, even more remarkably, that I discovered is that they themselves are not writing in good faith. They’re not just writing to defend themselves. They are deeply, deeply complicit in this corruption and political partisanship of the age.

They are writing basically to be noticed by the government and then to be paid off by the government. And the lead author, Thomas Gordon, he does exactly that. He writes Cater’s letters about the people are always right, the people should never be suppressed. And then the government reaches out to him and say, “Hey, you are quite a good writer, but why are you wasting your time with this muckraking rabble-rousing stuff? Why don’t you come work for us?” And he says, “Oh yes, that sounds quite interesting. Thank you so much.” And he starts writing simultaneously for the government press, exactly the opposite. The governors know what they’re doing. People are often being misled by dangerous hack journalists. Misinformation is rife. And then finally he jumps ship and they shut down Cater’s letters and he makes a deal with the government and he becomes the prime minister’s chief propagandist.

He goes rich and famous over the next 20 years as a spin doctor on the establishment side. So anyway, these were remarkable discoveries and they really also I think are important, not just historically, but in showing up that from the outset, theories of free speech are very difficult to make watertight. They often are concocted in bad faith, and yet what lasts is powerful rhetoric. And so over time, no one knows about Thomas Gordon’s own corruption, but his text lives on and it’s very powerfully still read as an epitome of wisdom and truth and foundation for why we should think of free speech in a particular way.

Michael Fox:

Why has this concept, this absolutist concept and these concepts of free speech at all costs, particularly in the United States, why has this remained so powerful over the centuries up until today?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, one of the revelations of my book is that actually Americans didn’t always think exactly as they do now about free speech, that for most of American history, actually from 1789 all the way to the 1960s, Americans had views that were quite similar to those in the rest of the world, a more balanced understanding of free speech as a matter of both of rights and of responsibilities as something that required attending to the public good, something that required looking at the role of the mass media, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s only because of the Cold War really that they diverged into a more hard line libertarian outlook, the results of which we’re living through today. But more fundamentally, I think the reason that these slogans are so attractive is that everyone wants simplicity and everyone likes the idea that the rules of free speech should be simple and straightforward.

And everyone can also see that if you take a balancing approach that on the one hand talks about this as a right and on the other hand talks about the possible harms and thinks about the public good and gives powers to regulate and so on, that this can lead to all sorts of serious problems of subjective interpretation, of censorship on grounds that we don’t agree with. That creates all sorts of problems that you can see playing out in countries around the world that take that approach. If you look at Britain, for example, right now, it’s a mess.

So that’s not a good solution. It’s not a perfect solution either. I happen to think that that approach is more intellectually justified, but I don’t think that it is problem free at all. And so the alternative of just saying, “Well, this is a simple matter. We just need to make the rules as simple and as hard edged as possible has an obvious intellectual appeal.” I think there’s also a really interesting psychology here, which I experienced myself when I was censored in trivial ways at the start of this project, which is no one likes to be told that they can’t say something. No one likes to be told to shut up. So the reverse psychology here, again, makes this a wonderful slogan to appeal to. If you feel censored, you feel aggrieved in a way that other rights maybe don’t quite have that immediate emotional purchase.

Michael Fox:

I thought one of the themes, the essential themes of your book, which I found fascinating, is that freedom of expression, freedom of speech isn’t just about the words that are used, the individuals that are speaking, but it’s also about power, the different groups and structures and systems that exist in order for some people to be able to speak and others not to speak. Can you speak a little bit about that?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

So another problem with laws about free speech is that if you think about communication and free speech in a sophisticated way, you need to acknowledge that speech is always exquisitely contextual. It’s never just about the words, the action in the world. Voltaire once said, “I write in order to act.” Let me just remind people, this is an action in the world, but the outcome of that action, the impact in the world is different, not just according to the words, but according to who is speaking, who is the audience, what is the context, what is the intention, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Me saying something to you in a bar in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere is a completely different speech act, even if I use the same words as the president of the United States standing up and broadcasting this around the world repeatedly over and over again.

Just to take a trivial example, and that’s a problem, this exquisite contextual understanding of what’s happening when someone says something. We can navigate that in real life. We can navigate that face-to-face pretty well. We know when someone’s joking or when they’re saying something seriously, we know if we’re aligned in our understanding of what this conversation is about. When we’re not, that’s when miscommunication occurs. Online miscommunication is much easier than face-to-face. The larger the setting number of people involved, the greater the problems of miscommunication. But basically we know this is a matter of judgment on all sorts of levels. And the problem is laws are predicated pretty much on the opposite set of principles. That is to say consistency, transparency, everyone has the right to be treated the same. And if you think that for the same action, and if you think that the action is basically saying X, Y, Z, then it doesn’t seem right that people should be treated differently or that these other contextual elements should be brought into the frame.

And again, then you come into the problem that it becomes very subjective to judge exactly what’s happening, what the effects are. Anyway, so that’s the problem with laws, but it also points to the complication of the real issues, right? Free speech is a great noble ideal, but communication is really quite a complicated thing. And if we don’t attend to that, if we just push it all aside as American free speech jurisprudence increasingly does for the sake of simplicity, then we’re throwing out with the bath water, we’re throwing out also the baby, which is the fact that speech is an action and it’s an action that can cause harm. Now we need to take a minimalist approach to making laws. We need to take a maximalist approach to rights, but still there is something called truth. Sometimes the truth is very important. There are ways in which communication can cause harm.

We’ve known this throughout history, see it time and again. If we just ignore that completely, we’re opening up a whole set of different problems, which is where the absolutist doctrine leads us.

Michael Fox:

This is the thing for me that I find shocking, surprising, is that every time we’re talking about free speech or people are speaking about free speech, it’s as if this question of hate speech, truth, fake news, disinformation, intentional disinformation, particularly in the United States, it’s like this huge elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. It’s just there and then people go, “Oh yeah, well there’s a…” And then we end up in this same cycle where then obviously, as you’ve mentioned, that’s the stuff that goes viral, right? It’s the lies, disinformation. This is why Brazil has really cracked down hard on that, particularly around the election time and why the United States is of course calling Supreme Court justice censorship judges and things like that. Where does fake news fit into this question of free speech or where should it fit into this question of free speech or how are some countries handling this vis-a-vis how the United States is handling in a different way?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Yeah. So one of the problems with free speech and one of the reasons why we’re in such a mess today is that our approach to it is really way too simplistic. There’s a reason why, because everyone wants the rules to be simple and just to be about individual rights, but it’s not enough. And so one thing we might start by acknowledging is that free speech can be many different things. There are many different forms of free speech. For example, free speech for writers of fiction or artists or comedians is one thing, and free speech in the political sphere is another thing because for artists and comedians, the aim of their freedom of expression is to amuse people, to make them laugh or to enlighten them, to spin worlds that will blow their minds. But in doing so, the literal truth is actually not really that important.

The literal truth is something that you play with in art and comedy, and rightly so. So we need to think about what the free speech is for. Now, in the case of democratic discourse of citizens trying to deliberate around the public good and about politics more generally, truth is actually very important. And the foundation of our democratic discourse has always been that we deliberate in good faith and that we don’t spread lies and misinformation because that way we are going to end up with a corrupted public sphere. So there, if we’re talking about freedom of speech, we do need to have truth somewhere in our sights as part of the aim and the purpose of the speech. Now, already in the 19th century, people started to see, here’s another way in which our notions of free speech are too simplistic. They started to see that thinking about free speech just in terms of the rights of the individual on the one hand and the powers of the state and the government on the other hand was not sufficient.

Why is it not sufficient? Because if you’re thinking about the sphere of political discourse, the marketplace of ideas, if you like, then what also is very important and shapes that whole sphere is the power of the media, the power of the mass media, the power of the private media. And already in the 19th century and into the 20th century, people who thought about this in sophisticated ways, including in the United States, focused on that as a real problem because from early on, people could see that the incentives, the motives, the aims of the mass media, not primarily to educate the public or to advance truth, they are on the contrary to sell advertising and to increase the power and the wealth of their owners. So out of that comes a very powerful socialist and communist critique, but also conservative and across the political spectrum, people can see this as a problem.

And so if you fast forward to the 1930s and 40s, this is something that Roosevelt and the administrations and indeed the Supreme Court of that era are very highly focused on. If you read First Amendment jurisprudence of that era, it’s full of people saying, “Well, it’s completely insufficient to think of this in simplistic way of just about individuals versus government. The real problem of our age is how to tackle the power of the mass media.” And out of that comes an attempt to reconsider free speech as also a matter of the public good, and indeed as people conceptualize it at the time of the right to truthful information on the part of citizens. This is also, of course, a time where people everywhere are thinking about this against the backdrop of The 1930s in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and they can see how powerful propaganda is and that vehicles of mass communication are not neutral.

They are instruments of power. Anyway, so out of that comes a jurisprudence, which feeds into, for example, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which after all an American document drawn up under Eleanor Roosevelt. If you look at that document’s definition of freedom of expression, it channels what is then the mainstream American and European view, which is on the one hand, freedom of expression is a right. On the other hand, it can never be abused to harm the rights of others. So it’s a balance between rights and responsibilities, and it includes the right to truthful information. And out of that also came a huge effort to impose on or remind the mass media of the age of their responsibilities. So out of that come ways of rethinking what mass media could be, public broadcasting, subscription models, all sorts of ways in which we might have a better alignment between the incentives of the media and the incentives and the needs of the public, but also journalism school, the professionalization, especially in America, and the taken seriously by news organizations of their responsibilities, fact checking, making sure that you’re not telling lies to the public and correcting things as necessary.

It’s hard. It takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of effort, but people generally in what we now disdainfully call the legacy media were very heavily invested in that project because they saw what the stakes were. The stakes were a healthy public sphere with truthful information. I’m afraid what’s happened in the internet revolution and the communications revolution of our own time is that model has been destroyed by a new ecosystem where these things are simply not attended to at all. And we as a public have lost sight of the fact that we used always, including in the United States, to regulate mass media in the public interest for the public good for precisely this reason. That happened to broadcasting, it happened to television, the FCC was set up for that purpose. All markets, even in the United States are regulated. Again, this doesn’t mean by the government, precisely regulated at arm’s length by non-governmental organizations that are supposed to be nonpartisan or at the very least bipartisan, the FTC, the FCC.

All that is now under assault by right-wing authoritarians whose project is made easier by the fact that our public discourse is now being overwhelmed by greedy social media companies that take no account at all of the public good insofar as it contravenes their profits.

Michael Fox:

You mentioned as well this weaponization of the discourse of free speech. Everyone should have it, but then how it’s used over time is usually the powerful and eliminating free speech from folks that are marginalized or minorities. And I think we’re at this even hyper moment because social media has this image of appearing as though anyone can say whatever you want to, but you still have the algorithms. It’s controlled by some people and not by others. So how dangerous is this moment? And if you could just speak for a moment about this use, this weaponization of the discourse of free speech, either in the past or currently still.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, sadly, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan. It was a weaponized slogan at the outset in the early 18th century and that has never gone away. We see that today. I mean, the worst senses are often the people shouting most loudly that they ask for free speech. Trump is a great example of that. The moment that we’re in is really very dangerous political moment because of the ways in which social media. Social media is really an old-fashioned anachronistic term for the mass media of our age. It’s not social, it’s political discourse and every other kind of discourse.

The difficulty with that is really manifold. One is, as that nomenclature already indicates, we’ve now shifted to a moment where all discourse happens in the same medium, on the same level. So pictures of cats, jokes, serious political debate all happening in the same sewer, and that muddles the rules and how the audience understands what’s going on. And it makes it much easier for untruth to spread, for sloganeering to take over from fact-based, evidence-based argument. So that’s one intrinsic difficulty with the medium. But the deeper problem is that these social media companies to begin with had some sense of the public good and of moderation and of applying standards of truth, for example, and not allowing someone who’s just attempted a coup against the elected president of the United States as Trump tried to do and whipped up people on social media to attack the capital.

It seems a long time ago, but that could get you banned on de-platformed and rightly so. In the political moment that we are in now, of course, all of these companies are rolling all that back and hiding behind the slogan of free speech to moderate as little as possible because again, it’s politically inconvenient. It’s also expensive. They never put a huge amount of effort into it. They always try to get away with as little as possible. And finally, it plays into a political discourse which is increasingly dominated by populist rabble rousing. There’s an understanding that this is good politics on the part of right-wing politicians that chimes with good business model of just allowing anything to go. And at the heart of this, in terms of the technologies, as it were, of our mass communication now, first of all, these media companies, the online media companies are the most powerful publishers the world has ever seen, but they’re not treated as publishers.

No one thinks of them as publishers. Governments fail to think of them as publishers. We as citizens are no better. They are publishers. The reason that’s important is that it focuses on two things. First of all, that they are constantly censoring discourse. Their algorithms amplify certain voices and certain messages and they suppress and silence others. That’s what publishers do. They make judgements automatically or otherwise about what they want people to see. So in that sense, they are deeply influential on public discourse. They also, of course, when it suits them, don’t stand up for free speech. When they are issued with a take down notice by an unsavory overseas government, they obey the law. So what can they do? They say, “We’re just trying to obey the law.” I would feel slightly less contemptuous of them if they did sometimes stand up for what we would think of as real free speech in countries under unsavory regimes, but they don’t.

Michael Fox:

Or just the situation in the United States and students protesting at universities and university freedoms and things like that. Oliver Wendell Holmes, I wanted to touch very briefly on his marketplace of ideas because I feel like this is this mythic idea, this concept that people bring up again and again every place and how everyone uses this as the reason why free speech works in the United States. What’s your analysis of that today? What do people actually have to understand about this idea and what it means for us today?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s a wonderful ideal and he’s a wonderfully readable writer of opinions, Holmes. One of the interesting things about Holmes that I discovered was that he was too high-minded to read newspapers. He didn’t really engage in the mass media of his age. And so he was able to take this Olympian view of the marketplace of ideas and how it might work. I think he also, to be fair to him, he wasn’t sure this would work out, but he was willing to let the experiment run out. It’s a noble American ideal. They’re always saying it’s an experiment. Oh, well, it’s slightly annoying to an outsider. Slavery, oh, it’s just an experiment. Oh, genocide of the unions. Oh, we’re just doing an experiment here. Anyway, back to your question, a marketplace of ideas is a fantastic ideal, but think about what it really means. It would mean that each of us is independently able to walk around a marketplace where all ideas are given equal weight and airing, that we are all equally reasonable in our approach, and that we’re equally able to judge truth against falsehood somehow intrinsically, and that we’re all doing so in good faith and that all the arguments being put to us are being put in good faith and in reasoned ways.

That’s absolutely the opposite. And we could go on. There are many other ways in which we could flesh out this as an ideal. It’s actually the opposite of the kind of shit-filled sewer of public discourse through which we have to wade every day with our very different levels of understanding of things, our very different perspectives and backgrounds and abilities to judge the truth. No one has an intrinsic ability to judge the truth. That’s a presumption that is there in many free speech doctrines, but it’s actually conclusively debunked by history and by science. What we require is attention to how as a society might create a better marketplace of ideas. And I’m afraid just throwing everything into the jumble of social media and allowing private companies basically to determine how they can best keep people hooked on their platforms is not the best way of creating, especially a political sphere of debate.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Would you say that there’s a battle today over the definition of free speech, the absolutism versus a more balanced approach or at least going back to what we understood, say free speech in the 1960s where people can get out and protest and now kind of a free for all of absolutism?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

I mean, free speech has always been about power, both in the theory and in practice. We see that today, what voices are silenced or elevated is about power. It’s a noble ideal because everyone can appeal to it and throughout history, as my book shows, those without power and those who attempted to be silenced have also appealed to it from abolitionists and early feminists onwards into the present day. So that’s the good side of why it’s a dangerous idea. And we should all be shouting from the rooftops that right now free speech rights are being trampled upon. The First Amendment is being completely disregarded in the United States and the rest of it. But I think that the real global battle here is about how to deal with the communications revolution that we’re living through and how to deal with the power of media companies, the unfettered transnational power basically of American media companies.

And I think that the minimalist approach that the Europeans have taken to this is really an encouraging way forward. Again, it’s being faced by massive amounts of corporate and political opposition from the United States. It’s always in danger of being watered down. Nonetheless, what they have said and what the Brazilians are also trying to do is basically to ask these companies, it’s not censorship, it’s to ask these companies to be transparent upfront about their moderating practices. They are publishers, they’re constantly censoring. Tell us what the rules are, A, secondly, apply those rules consistently and fairly. Thirdly, show us the public that you are doing that consistently and fairly. Report back, commensurate with the power. The Europeans have this in their legislation. I don’t know if the Brazilians do, but proportionate to the power of your platform, you have a greater obligation because you have greater power, you have a greater obligation to report on how these rules are being followed.

And that’s not imposing any kind of censorship from the outside. It’s just asking them to be transparent about what they’re doing. I would go further as a citizen and require them to uphold standards of truth in political discourse and to do more about curbing misinformation and so on. But as a first step, we really do need to tackle the power in our societies. Americans are very bad at tackling corporate power of any kind. The First Amendment has always been weaponized by corporations and by people with money to claim that money equals speech and corporate power should never be limited. But even Americans, I hope, will see and try and do something about this big problem of our time.

Michael Fox:

Fara, last question is, could you just speak a little bit about what free speech meant for the abolitionist movement back in the 1800s?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Frederick Douglass once said, I think something like the Civil War would never have happened if American politicians had taken government had taken the First Amendment as seriously as it took the rights of states. And by that, he was alluding to the fact that abolitionists before the Civil War were routinely appealing to their right of freedom of expression to make their case. And they were met with violence both in the north and the south and by the presumption that what they were saying was completely beyond the pale was dangerous and harmful and couldn’t be allowed. It’s a good example of how our understanding of the First Amendment has evolved, our understanding of harm has evolved. When I say that harmful speech is something that societies should be allowed to take a view on and potentially to regulate public discourse about, I don’t mean that those things are set in stone and they’re always self-evident.

I mean that instead of shouting about censorship and free speech, we should be having a discussion about what is harmful and as a society trying to take a view on that and that view will evolve. So abolitionists are shut up violently and otherwise and out of that develop even stronger passionate view that they have a right to speak out. The same is true of early feminists who are told. Actually this comes out of the abolitionist movement. First American feminists are told when they are leading the campaign for abolition that they may not sit with men or address men on equal terms and out of that develop the view that actually there’s something wrong here. Their voices deserve to be heard. And so the early women’s movement starts not primarily as a campaign for the vote, but simply for the most basic right of all, which is to speak out and be heard by the public.

Michael Fox:

Fara, is the United States really such an outlier in the world in terms of its understanding, absolutist understanding of free speech?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s an outlier at the moment in the jurisprudence of free speech in the way that the laws are drawn up. I don’t think it’s an outlier in the sense that actually even absolutists or self-proclaimed absolutists are always drawing limits and balancing harms against rights. The Supreme Court does that all the time, even when it’s supposedly not. So in that sense, not. But I think the difficulty that United States has is that it has a very ancient constitution. It’s a bit like having a very ancient car. You can be proud of it, but it’s not necessarily roadworthy in the 21st century. And there are very few citizens’ rights in that. Indeed, even the First Amendment is not a right of citizens. It’s another big flaw that Americans tend to overlook. It’s only a prohibition on the government censoring anything. In the private sphere, people get sacked and fired all the time for expressing their views, political or otherwise.

So it’s not a right of citizens. But the fact that there are very few other rights in the Bill of Rights and in the Constitution and that this one happens to be named first, and because we all love free speech, of course, it’s given it this elevated popular kind of supremacy, which means it’s the ultimate legal Trump card. There’s nothing that can trump the First Amendment. So that’s why it’s especially been weaponized by anti-regulation corporate forces, by people who want more money in politics and all sorts of ways, because there’s no legal comeback against it. Once you can define something as free speech in an American courtroom, you’re home and dry. And that’s not necessarily the best way of balancing the right free speech, which is a great thing against other important rights and indeed the common good.

Michael Fox:

Fara, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate your time. This has been fantastic.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s great to talk to you, Mike. Thank you.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. As I mentioned before, this is the first bonus episode of this series. There are more on the way. Please watch out for those in your feed. This is the battle for free speech. This podcast is co-hosted by myself and Marc Steiner. This show is produced by The Real News. You can find out more about my work and this show on my Patreon. That’s patreon.com/mfox. And as always, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. Thanks so much again for listening to this podcast. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Speaker 1:

A few weeks ago, the US State Department released this video over X.

Speaker 2:

It’s 1823. The map of the Americas is being redrawn. Spain has spent centuries amassing a new world empire stretching from Patagonia to California. Now their grip was slipping fast.

Speaker 1:

The video is narrated by Kevin Marino Cabrera, the US ambassador to Panama, and it’s highly polished with images, map graphics, animations, and dramatic music.

Speaker 2:

Monroe then declared a decree to Congress, among the boldest diplomatic statements in American history.

Speaker 3:

The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.

Speaker 1:

The text of the post reads, “The Monroe Doctrine has shaped US foreign policy for over two centuries. American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

Speaker 2:

But these were defensive applications, keeping European powers out, not asserting American control over the hemisphere’s affairs. That changed in 1895 when Secretary of State Richard Olney invoked the doctrine, declaring that the United States was practically sovereign over the Western hemisphere and demanded for its submit to American arbitration. He had redefined the doctrine. It was no longer just a warning. It was now a claim to regional primacy.

Speaker 1:

The video is remarkable because it doesn’t mince words or attempt to paint a rosy picture of the United States. In five minutes and 31 seconds, it just lays out the justification for the US imperialism that has cast a shadow over the region for the last two centuries up until today.

Speaker 2:

Three years later, war with Spain erupted and when the smoke cleared, it transformed the hemisphere. The United States expelled Spain from Cuba, seized Puerto Rico, and stepped into the world stage as a genuine imperial power with dominance over the Caribbean. Just four years later, that dominance was tested again. German and British warships sailed into Venezuelan waters and blockaded its ports over unpaid debts. Roosevelt intervened and declared if a Latin American nation fell into chaos or instability, the US would step it and manage it. The doctrine has started as a shield. Roosevelt had just turned it into a mandate.

Speaker 1:

This was all a good thing, the video seems to say. A natural course of history that the US should be proud of and the rest of the region should just accept. And all this backstory is a lengthy setup for the video to then make the case that Trump’s actions in Latin America are nothing more than a continuation of the same model of imperialist intervention that the US has carried out since its inception, or at least since the beginning of the 20th century when Roosevelt declared his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Speaker 2:

Fast-forward to the modern era where the doctrine has found its latest champion in President Trump. Through the execution of Operation Absolute Resolve, the United States seized Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, transporting him to American soil to answer for charges of narcoterrorism. This calculated maneuver delivered a resident signal across the hemisphere, punctuated by President Trump’s own declaration.

Speaker 4:

Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.

Speaker 1:

It’s a fascinating piece of propaganda that tries to place Trump’s actions as the logical next step in the long trajectory of US imperialism in the region.

Speaker 2:

Over two centuries, Monroe’s declaration had shaped US foreign policy across administrations and throughout fundamentally different geopolitical eras. Well, began as a warning to European powers evolved into a framework for regional dominance, one that remains the cornerstone of American strategy in the hemisphere today.

Speaker 5:

What is extraordinary about that video is that it says what has never really been said about the Monroe Doctrine by US officials, which is that the Monroe doctrine has served as a pretext for US intervention in the region and is essentially there to ensure that the US has a great deal of political influence and economic influence over the entire Latin America and Caribbean.

Speaker 1:

That is Alexander Main. I reached out to him to get his take on this video. He’s an old friend and the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC.

Speaker 2:

When Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba in 1962, Kennedy didn’t need to invent a new framework. He simply invoked the doctrine. The weapons had to go.

Speaker 5:

This video is saying that there is such a thing as the US Empire, something that most US officials have never wanted to publicly recognize and saying that that is a good thing and that more needs to be done to ensure that the US can be an effective empire over the entire Western hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Key to this video, Alex says, is the idea that brute military force must be deployed to achieve this imperialistic doctrine. And right now that is being done under the pretext of a new sort of war on terror. There’s no clear definition of exactly who or what narco-terrorist is, but that might be part of the point. Alex says that much like the Cold War’s fight against communism, the vague image of the narco-terrorist boogeyman allows US authorities and their allies to go after left-leaning opponents with force.

Speaker 5:

We’re seeing something similar now, and I think this is really what the US is going to be relying on under the Trump administration. They’re going to be relying more and more on military action and the threat of military action in order to advance this vision of complete political domination over the region.

Speaker 1:

In Brazil, high stakes elections are coming up in October. Advisors for leftist president Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva saw the timing and content of this video as a direct threat against the president’s reelection campaign, a sign that the Trump administration has its sights on Latin America’s largest country. According to Brazilian columnist Valdo Cruz, Lulu’s advisors compared Trump’s foreign policy team led by Cuban American Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Madagascar Penguins piloting Air Force One. It’s a reference to the Madagascar cartoon.

Speaker 6:

Attention, this is your captain speaking. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is we’ll be landing immediately. Bad news is we’re crash landing.

Speaker 1:

That is where we are at, a new definitive Monroe doctrine for the Western hemisphere, and it’s being fueled by brute US military force in the region as we have already seen unfold in unprecedented terms over the last year. And the Trump administration isn’t just using those actions and threats abroad. They’re now going after progressive individuals and groups in the United States accusing them of being pawns of foreign nations. People have even been subpoenaed.

Speaker 7:

There’s nothing organic about it. It is funded, it is organized, and Cuba is a part of that network and in some cases a critical part of that network.

Speaker 1:

It’s like something out of the McCarthy era or the Cold War. It’s a fabricated witch hunt. And as we will look at today, it’s being supported by artificial intelligence, but people across Latin America are also organizing against the threats. All of that in a minute. This is Under the Shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very present. This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. I’m your host, Michael Fox, longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist, the producer and host of the podcast’s Brazil on Fire: Stories of Resistance and my new series, The Battle for Free Speech. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad, and most often sadly, it is not for the better.

Invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does. This is season two of Under the Shadow: Trump’s attack, episode 13, American Dominance.

Okay, let me just first say that I’m so excited to be diving back into this season of Under the Shadow. If you have been following this podcast, you’ll know that I was largely absent this summer. I was busy cranking out my podcast about Trump’s attack on free speech rights today in the United States. It’s called The Battle for Free Speech. It’s now out completely. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I’ll add a link in the show notes. In July, we shared an episode from that podcast on the Under the Shadow feed about the battle underway in Brazil right now ahead of the general election in October. I think it’s really good. Before that, my last Under the Shadow episode was about Honduras Gate back in May, so it’s been a while. Today, I want to catch up on several important developments related to US intervention and the pushback against it in the region, including the latest boat strikes, the State Department’s war on Cuba, and the recent Pan-American Congress in Uruguay.

These all fall under the rubric of where we started at the top with the video about the Dunro Doctrine and Trump’s promise that American dominance in the Western hemisphere will “never be questioned again.” In this episode, I’ll look at ways that this is unfolding, both abroad and inside the United States, and also how progressive leaders in the region are very much continuing to question American dominance and organizing against Trump’s rhetoric and threats. Okay, we begin in the abnormally warm waters of the Caribbean and Pacific oceans.

These waters have been central to Trump’s military attack on the region, and this week marks a sad anniversary.

Speaker 8:

When you come out and when you leave the room, you’ll see that we just over the last few minutes literally shot out a boat, a drug carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat, and you’ll be seeing that and you’ll be reading about that. It just happened moments ago.

Speaker 1:

On September 2nd, 2025, one year ago this week, Donald Trump announced the first airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean. Trump said the boat allegedly carried drugs off the coast of Venezuela. He later posted on True Social a video of the airstrike, black and white labeled unclassified. A missile hits the boat and it explodes. The White House said without providing evidence that it killed 11 alleged narco terrorists. If you remember, this is where I began this podcast series, because for me, it marked a clear break with the decades of US foreign policy in the region. The US attack on that boat in early September was the very first time the United States had launched a unilateral airstrike or carried out a deadly military operation on its own in Latin America in nearly four decades, not since the 1989 invasion of Panama. According to Trump’s national security strategy published in December 2025, his administration was planning to ramp up US intervention in the Americas with his new Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

He has made good on that promise. With the US invasion of Venezuela, the oil blockade of Cuba, the shield of the America’s initiative and the boat strikes, the administration labeled those strikes Operation Southern Spear. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined Fox News Live to gush about the boat strike.

Speaker 9:

So we’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike. Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate, and it’s important for the American people to protect our homeland and protect our hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Hegseth was right about one thing. That strike was just the beginning. They’ve been ongoing since last year. There was a two-month lull, which miraculously coincided with the World Cup competition in the United States and Trump’s grand 4th of July 250th anniversary celebration. But in recent weeks, the US military has kickstarted the strikes again. This news report is from August 26th this year.

Speaker 10:

The human rights groups are condemning the latest round of US military attacks on a high speed boat in the Caribbean, which the Pentagon says killed four narco-terrorists. This is now the second strike this week as the White House targets vessels accused of transporting deadly drugs into the US for the past year.

Speaker 1:

But the whole justification for the first strike last September and everyone sense that they’re fighting drug trafficking is just false. This has never been about fighting drug trafficking. Most of the cocaine trafficked into the United States doesn’t come from Venezuela and it doesn’t travel across the Caribbean, but the Pacific. Fentanyl’s the same thing. It’s not made in nor trafficked from Venezuela despite Trump’s discourse.

Trump’s campaign has been about sending a message, even if it means carrying out extra judicial killings in international waters against innocent people, because it’s become clear that many of the boats they’ve hit haven’t been operated by narco terrorists, but fishermen. And contrary to Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s claims, other Trump administration officials admit that the strikes haven’t decreased the amount of drugs being run into the United States. In late July, the Washington Post reported that both Pentagon and DEA officials had said the boat strikes hadn’t impacted the supply of cocaine in the United States. Drug traffickers just developed new strategies. They were taking different routes, bigger boats, or relying more on planes from clandestine airstrips. One DEA official who asked to remain anonymous told the Post, “When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side. They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” Nevertheless, the boat strikes have continued.

Welcome to the closing session, hosted by the Secretary of War and Chairman of the America’s Counter-Cartel Coalition, the Honorable Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth spoke about this during a Counter-Cartel Coalition conference in Panama City on August 12th.

Speaker 9:

We have knocked the narco terrorists and the maritime domain on their heels. We forced them to adjust their tactics, techniques, and procedures, their TTPs, and operate outside of their comfort zones. We are retaking the open seas and our maritime borders. This is a bad time to get in a drug boat in the Western Hemisphere.

Speaker 11:

In one year now, at least 68 publicly acknowledged strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels right in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, extraditionally killing over 228 civilians.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston is the director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. He also runs SIEPR’s US Escalation in Latin America Tracker, which he has updated almost daily since last year. I just want to pause here for a moment to underscore that number. More than 228 civilians, and that is a number that’s likely to only continue to grow. Just to put that into context, before the September 11th attacks, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the deadliest terror attack in the history of the United States.

Speaker 12:

If it seemed like war yesterday, the reinforcement showed up tonight. At the center of it all, of course, is the bombed out shell of the federal office building, and in its shadow, the exhausted, who for a day and a half now have sifted through its debris and counted its dead and seen up close why they call it terror.

Speaker 1:

168 people were killed in that bombing on the Alfred P. Murrow Federal Building. It shocked the nation. Yet the United States has unleashed a round of terror attacks over the last year in international waters in the Caribbean and Pacific, which have killed far more people than the second most deadly terror attack in the history of the US. In fact, the US drug boat terror campaign is deadlier than both the Oklahoma City bombing and the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting combined. Now, it might seem strange that I’m making this comparison. The US government has carried out the boat strikes, individual perpetrators carried out these other attacks, but I think it’s an important comparison to make. All are acts of terror, all are illegitimate uses of violence without any legal founding. The US boat strikes aren’t operations against enemy combatants in a time of war. The US government hasn’t carried out a trial against the victims or offered any proof that the people killed in these raids are actually drug traffickers.

Their actions are illegal under international law, and the result in all cases is the same, the extra judicial killing of innocent people, which undermines the basis of the rule of law in the United States, the United Nations, and most democratic countries around the world, that you are innocent until proven guilty. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

What is the sort of takeaway after a year? I mean, this is an assault on the rule of law. This is assault on international law. And I think you can see over the course of the year how these strikes serve this broader purpose of normalizing, rationalizing and sort of gaining at least some public acceptance of just the sort of trampling of international law. And now we have transitioned, or at least the US is saying they’re transitioning from these boat strikes to land strikes. It’s there. We’ve already seen, in fact, some strikes on land in Ecuador, or hitting a dairy farm, reports of torture of the farm workers who were there. And so you can see how this can extend and expand. You can see how the erosion of international law comes right back here to home, and you have ICE agents killing US citizens in the streets with impunity, and these things are connected.

These developments are connected, and they certainly mutually reinforce each other through this administration’s policies.

Speaker 1:

Ecuador has been collaborating with the US military under the Counter Cartel Coalition, which I looked at in episode eight of this series, and not just on that dairy farm strike. The United States has also taken some concerning actions against boats off the Ecuadorian coast.

Speaker 11:

This started earlier this year, the bombing of at least three fishing vessels off the coast of Ecuador, which took place in a very different manner than these other boat strikes we were talking about where SOUTCOM was posting smut on the internet about them blowing up boats. These ones were totally unacknowledged, and the reports that we’ve had from investigative outlets that have looked into it, local press in Ecuador, human rights organizations, et cetera, one of the boats first off is still missing and all the crew members are still missing.

Speaker 1:

People from some of those boats were killed and others have been returned to the country, but that was only after being abducted on the high seas.

Speaker 11:

Onto a nondescript boat in the middle of the ocean with gringo looking guys with US flags on their uniforms and being taken to El Salvador of all places before facing torture and abuse and then eventually being released back to Ecuador where they face no charges, it should be noted. And you mentioned in each of these cases, the reporting indicates that Ecuador and Coast Guards actually stopped the vessels and cleared them prior to them being bombed, right? Obviously, there’s been reporting, the Washington Post reported a few weeks ago that this was part of a clandestine CIA operation. The New York Times has come out with reports suggesting that the potential involvement of private military contractors. So there’s tremendous questions that remain exactly about who is responsible, who is involved, why this was happening. But what seems quite clear is that US intelligence is operating out of El Salvador, a CIA base that was white active during the Dirty Wars in the ’80s.

Speaker 1:

Jack here is referring to what we learned from reporting in the Washington Post in mid-August, which broke the news that a covert CIA program based in El Salvador was likely behind the Ecuadorian boat attacks. According to the Post, a plane operating out of El Salvador’s small Ilopango International Airport was likely responsible for the attacks during the 1980s. This airport was also a launching pad for US operations in nearby Nicaragua.

Speaker 11:

This didn’t come out of nowhere, right? I mean, it is really based in the past, and a lot of the people who are involved in this are really rooted in those previous episodes of right-wing dictatorship and US interventionism in the region. And so in a lot of ways, it is a return to that earlier period.

Speaker 1:

There is another country in the region whose conflict with the United States hearkens back to US intervention of the past, Cuba. So back in episode seven, we looked in depth into the US actions against Cuba, and in particular, the devastating oil blockade which is strangling the country, and it’s still ongoing. The situation in the country has only deteriorated. It’s ironic because the United States brags about how they’re sending aid to the country, and yet the US is solely to blame for the crisis. The US government could fix the problem almost overnight by just lifting the embargo, both the oil blockade and the larger embargo that the US has had in place in some shape or form for more than 65 years. Belly of the Beast is a Cuban investigative journalism outlet based in Havana. I spoke with Belly of the Beast Liz Fernandez in my previous Cuba episode of this series.

A couple of weeks ago, they released this great video report titled Helping Cuba While Destroying Its Economy. The word helping is in quotes. Here’s a clip. It starts with Belly of the Beast journalist Johan Rodriguez standing on a Cuban street.

Speaker 13:

Good news for us here in Cuba. The United States is here to help.

Speaker 1:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears on screen. In Spanish, he says, “I want to tell you that we in the United States offer to help you not only alleviate the current crisis, but also to build a better future.”

Speaker 13:

A better future deliver in cardboard boxes.

Speaker 10:

This is the first of a hundred million dollar humanitarian aid package promised by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Speaker 13:

The US government is donating 700 boxes of food and hygiene products. Each one is supposed to last 10 days. That’s nice, although it might be even nicer if they had simply lifted the oil blockade.

Speaker 1:

The video cuts to numerous Cubans who are suffering. “They give us 20, 24 hours without electricity,” says one elderly resident. “It’s the whole day cooking with coals, “says a woman. “I haven’t had water for three and a half months,” says another woman.

Speaker 13:

The boxes of aid are welcome because people here are desperate. If someone breaks your legs and offers you an aspirin, you’ll take aspirin, but when you wear soft, your legs are still broken.

Speaker 1:

That is the state in Cuba right now, a country on life support. The United States could fix it, but it doesn’t want to. It wants the people to suffer an indirect way to try and force regime change, or at least that has been the stated policy since the beginning of the embargo in the 1960s. And the Trump administration is blatant about its motives. On July 20th, the US State Department released a 100-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. It essentially accused Cuba of infiltrating the US left over the last half century and being behind a host of progressive organizing, everything from Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests to pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses and “the rise of Antifa.” It’s incredible because it makes the United States look like it’s in the crosshairs of this tiny Caribbean country, the US, a country that is nearly 90 times larger than Cuba and has a GDP that is more than 300 times the size of the islands.

The report makes no mention of the countless US attempts to overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro, undo the Cuban Revolution, and above all, the decades long US blockade on the country. Instead, the document paints the United States as the victim of a Cuban plot to overthrow US capitalism and Western society.

The summary for the report reads, “Cuba’s assault on the United States was never at root a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself, waged in part via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” Let me just repeat that. Persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance. I’m not exactly sure what that inheritance is, but the report paints activist and leftist organizations in the United States as willing pawns in Cuba’s evil plans to subvert the United States. The document reads, “Through its cultivation of American activists, its infiltration of American universities, its sprawling influence and espionage networks, and its position as the spiritual hub of the Third World Revolution, becoming a pilgrimage destination for generations of new left activists and intellectuals, Cuba has played an instrumental role in shaping America’s radical left from the 1960s through to today.” It singles out organizations like the Vencerimos Brigade, Pastors for Peace and the Anti-War Group Code Pink as essentially Cuban front groups.

It’s a ridiculous claim because these are solidarity organizations that literally carry humanitarian aid to countries harmed by US policies. And this idea in the Cuban report assumes that everyone in the United States should just be on board with US administrations that punish other countries and peoples for not bowing to Uncle Sam. The document also accuses the New York Political Education and Community Center at the People’s Forum and the National Lawyers Guild of being influenced by Cuba. The document states, “From its very first years of existence, the National Lawyers Guild operated as a defacto communist front group designed to organize and agitate for revolution in the United States. It’s interesting that the document also spends three and a half pages discussing the Democratic socialists of America’s support for Cuba. At a time when DSA is growing and actually winning primaries ahead of the US November midterm elections, it’s clear that Marco Rubio’s State Department is interested in doing all it can to paint that group as Cuban influenced.

The document sums up all of this by saying, “These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” Too bad that statement is not only totally conspiratorial, it is also not based on reality.

Speaker 14:

And it was shocking on every page to see the way in which the State Department’s report was reiterating the same claims, and many of them very fraudulent claims, that had been leveled against American solidarity activists in the 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker 1:

Bailey of the Beast recently interviewed historian Tayshon Latner about this report in his 2018 book, Cuban Revolution in America. Latner writes about how generations of activists in the United States have found inspiration in Cuba, but he says that if State Department officials were reading his book, they completely missed the point and blew it out of context.

Speaker 14:

But in reading Rubio’s report, it was enormously clear that they were reiterating, you could almost say regurgitating the same claims and some of the same material that had been circulating in the 1960s and 1970s. The FBI and the CIA both produced copious reports that claimed to, let’s not say prove, because I don’t know if even they themselves would’ve used that terminology, but they tried to demonstrate a linkage between American solidarity movements and the Cuban revolution.

Speaker 1:

That is what they’re doing now. Even before the report came out, the Trump administration was already investigating activists for traveling to Cuba in March for the Nuestra America convoy. Their solidarity groups brought 20 tons of humanitarian aid to the Caribbean Island. In May, roughly 40 US activists were subpoenaed, including progressive influencer Hassan Peiker and Code Pink founder Mydia Benjamin, who I’ve spoken with in this podcast. In the days following this Cuba Reports release, several groups that were mentioned in the document were also subpoenaed to testify before Congress, including the People’s Forum, Breakthrough News, and the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

Speaker 5:

Are you agents of foreign influence?

Speaker 7:

I’m an agent of my own conscience.

Speaker 1:

Manolo de Los Santos is the director of the People’s Forum. He responded to the Trump administration’s allegations against his organization on MS Now in late July.

Speaker 7:

I’ve been moved constantly by the belief that the United States has to do better and that we can change the reality in this country. If we were to accept what this committee is demanding from us, it essentially would be to accept that people in the United States have no right to protest, no right to organize, no right to express their differences with the US government. The Trump administration is mired in a series of failures. It has been incapable of convincing the American people that deporting millions of immigrants is the right thing to do. And therefore it goes after the people who organize the defense of immigrant families. The fact that we stand with the Palestinian people, that we say no to a blockade against Cuba, these are not fringe positions. These are the positions of majority of Americans right now. It’s our consciousness that’s moving us to say that these things are wrong in our society.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

Yeah, it’s a great example of our interventionist foreign policy blowing back at home and seeing these connections. I mean, this is pretty clearly for the Trump administration, part of going after its domestic opposition ahead of midterm elections, consolidating its own political power, but of course at the same time, justifying its illegal blockade and siege of Cuba in doing so.

Speaker 1:

Here’s the thing. I read through the report shortly after it was released and one thing stood out for me above everything else. It was like the report was grasping at straws, like it was trying to string together a random hodgepodge of people and groups to make the case that Cuba had infiltrated the United States and was responsible for leftist descent going back decades. It seemed like it was generated with artificial intelligence. So I tested it. I ran it through some of those sites online where you can see how much a document was likely created using AI. One of the results came back with a 96% chance that it was made with artificial intelligence. ChatGPT told me the likelihood that “AI was substantially involved in producing or editing this report was high, roughly 80 to 90%.” Now, I’m not saying that it was completely AI generated.

I don’t believe that, but the State Department did likely use substantial artificial intelligence in research gathering, writing, and editing. Okay, you might be saying so what? A lot of people are using artificial intelligence today. Well, here’s the problem. AI we know has the tendency not to argue with us, but to give us back what we want to hear. It helps us to find information that will support our beliefs or our objective regardless of if they’re based on fact or not. It’s called AI bias. And look, it’s one thing if AI is being used to write an email to a friend or to help me pick out my clothes. I think I look good in blue. Thank you. Those have very little, if any, geopolitical implications. It’s another entirely, however, if you’re using this to develop an official government document that will guide public policy and which will be used to attack your political opponents, that is dangerous and it means that AI is being weaponized to benefit a certain political class and silence dissent.

In other words, government censorship. There has been limited discussion about the possibility that Marco Rubio’s Cuba document was likely created with the help of AI, and I wanted to get a deeper sense of the implications. What does that actually mean? So I reached out to Tal Hagen.

Speaker 15:

There we go.

Speaker 1:

All right, fantastic. Okay, so Tal, this is what I’m trying to figure out today. You might remember him from my episode about disinformation and deep fakes on Venezuela earlier this year. He is an online AI watchdog. He’s now the director of Otis, which provides human-run intelligence services. Anyway, he’s an expert on artificial intelligence, and I wanted to get his analysis of what it means when AI is being used to develop policy like this. And let me just say that I didn’t ask him specifically about the Cuba document because I wanted his objective opinion about the concerns over the use of AI in these circumstances. Because we know that if you go on a ChatGPT and you’re chatting with ChatGP and you’re saying, oftentimes it’s going to give you back what you want. Do we see the same thing in reports and documents where if you’re looking for something, if you’re trying to find something, the document that is produced through AI has the possibility of also giving you what you’re looking for because you’re asking it to go out there and find stuff that would make your statement true.

That make sense?

Speaker 15:

Yeah. At the end of the day, something that we need to understand with AI is that AI always agrees with us. It always wants to give you a simple, fast answer as quick as it doesn’t argue with you.

Speaker 1:

Tao says that you can test this by asking AI something in two different ways. One where you’re trying to get it to agree with you about something and the other where you’re playing a devil’s advocate and you’re trying to get it to agree with you about the exact opposite thing. Depending on how you phrase your question, you can get either result.

Speaker 15:

But AI almost always will give you what you want.

Speaker 1:

But Tao says that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue or false.

Speaker 15:

For example, maybe I’ve collected all the evidence and then I’ve asked AI to compile that into a comprehensive report for me. It’s still my information. I just asked AI to help me build it. So it’s not an AI made report, it’s an AI enhanced report. So that also complicates things because just because it was AI generated doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

Speaker 1:

It also doesn’t mean that it was. For instance, Tao says, “It all depends on the input or information that you give the AI tool.”

Speaker 15:

Sometimes it also has access to the web, but it doesn’t actually understand what’s true, what’s false, and especially in evolving crises when things are just happening right now, whatever is on the web, that becomes the truth. And I’ve seen AI mess this up a lot. And so the bias is from what information you even provided in those documentations because when you provide me with documentation, I will ask you, “How do you know this is true? How do you know this is true? Where’s this from?” The AI doesn’t ask you that. It just assumes that everything you’ve given it is correct. It doesn’t start refuting your sources.

Speaker 1:

Tao says many officials and government departments, not just in the United States, are now using AI.

Speaker 15:

A lot of the governments, agencies, and individuals are using AI now to craft their official responses. We know there was some government official on Twitter who put out a post and he accidentally left in the prompt of making it sound better.

Speaker 6:

Madam Speaker, another concern relates to expectations.

Speaker 1:

There was also this Canadian politician who read an AI prompt in the New Brunswick legislature.

Speaker 6:

Here’s a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points. Madam Speaker –

Speaker 15:

The US government released photos of their war room and you could see them using AI, like writing different types of prompts.

Speaker 1:

Should we be concerned about governments, entities that are creating policy and an increasing use of AI and what that might mean for the policies that they’re creating?

Speaker 15:

Even when you’re writing in the Chachemia and you’re creating what you want or you’re creating a policy decision with AI, you are creating the report. But the problem is that your critical thinking skills are diluted because you are asking AI simple questions, you’re asking it to do the heavy labor. And if you say, “Find me an issue, find me an issue and then solve that issue,” you’re not the one solving that issue and it’s solving an issue just based on general information from the public. The problem with AI when it’s used by many different individuals is it replaces your own critical thinking where you no longer are researching the work, you are just editing it.That’s essentially what it becomes. You become an editor, you stop being a researcher. And so instead of you looking at all these different sources, trying to understand what the truth is here, what’s the facts and what’s the narrative being driven, you’re allowing the AI to just compile random pieces of information through its token generation and that’s the result that you’re

Speaker 4:

Getting. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again and we will make America great again. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 15:

It’s why we like things that rhyme. The reason that a lot of political slogans are rhymes is because things that sound good are right. If it sounds good, it’s right. It’s why when you look at the comment section of a right-wing activist or a left-wing activist, all of its supporters say, “This sounds amazing. This is so good because they’re hearing what they want to hear.” And so even though the policy that they’re writing or they’re talking about might be complete and utter bullshit, it sounds good, but it’s not based on factual information. The same thing is happening with AI where it sounds good to the user, but they don’t actually know what it’s based on. And so they’re essentially being driven by just a random algorithm.

Speaker 1:

In other words, ask AI to give you a report that says Cuba has infiltrated the US left and is behind protest movements in the United States going back decades and it will do your bidding. We can’t know for sure, but that likely sums up Marco Rubio’s Cuba report. With or without AI, this Cuba report is a dangerous weapon that is now being deployed against progressives and opponents of the Trump administration. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

I mean, I think just about everybody who read it laughed, but it is serious because this is about justifying war crimes. I mean, what we’re doing to Cuba right now is an active war. It is illegal and is an act of war. And yet here we are justifying it and at the same time sort of demonizing the opposition, the domestic opposition to those very actions.

Speaker 1:

The opposition to Trump’s policies has also been organizing abroad. On August 21st, 150 leaders from 15 countries from across the hemisphere and Europe met in Montevideo Uruguay for this year’s Pan-American Congress. It’s an event founded three years ago with the stated goal of fostering “solidarity among peoples and sovereignty among nations.” It’s been an important event for organizing the left in the region. The first two summits were held in Columbia and Mexico, both then countries run by progressive governments. SIEPR’s Alex Main, who I spoke with at the top, attended the conference.

Speaker 5:

The bulk of the people that were there are lawmakers who are doing their best to try to push forward progressive policies despite often being the minority and despite dealing with increasingly authoritarian right-wing governments. So they had a lot to share.

Speaker 16:

Good afternoon everybody. I’m Congresswoman Primila Jayapal. I represent the great state of Washington in the United States. I’m the first Indian American woman in the United States Congress. We are here, my esteemed colleague, Chuy Garcia and I, because we want to be very clear about two things. Number one, we oppose the Trump administration’s Don Roe foreign policy doctrine. We oppose the unilateral executive actions that Donald Trump has been taking without our congressional authority for both strikes, extra judicial killings in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. We oppose the use of military might, of economic tariffs to try to bully and coerce nations into actions that do not benefit the people of those sovereign nations. And we oppose the election interference of the United States in other nations’ elections.

Speaker 1:

Talk of President Donald Trump’s onslaught on the region was front and center, as were discussions about how to push back. Uruguayan Congresswoman Ines Cortez spoke to the press.

Speaker 16:

She said,

Speaker 1:

“Above all, the issue that cuts across the different workshops and debates is the current situation in which we still have the United States interfering in the local politics of each of our countries more than ever.”.

The former Honduran Minister of Defense and the former presidential candidate for Honduras’ leftist Libre Party, Rixi Moncada, said they must stand for national sovereignty and a multipolar world. She said, “The United States is a military technological and financial power, but the world is no longer unipolar. China, India, Brazil, Russia, the BRICS, they’re all participating in defining the new international order. Multipolarity is a reality and our stance must not be to trade one form of subordination for another. The Latin American dilemma is not Washington versus Beijing. We want relations with all the nations and peoples of the planet to engage with everyone, to submit to no one. There were also discussions among progressive leaders from Trump allied countries where democracy is being rolled back and there’s a breakdown of the rule of law and respect for institutions. Alex Main said the meeting went a long way in helping to build solidarity between progressive leaders from across the region and leftist leaders in the United States.

Speaker 5:

For instance, in Ecuador, and we’re beginning to see this in Columbia and also in Honduras, both those countries of course are now governed by right-wing governments since quite recently. So yeah, I think it was important for the US delegates to be hearing from these other countries in the region. They’re all impacted in different ways by the Trump administration’s policy, by the so-called Don Roe doctrine, which is really very heavily interventionist. And they heard about US electoral interference. They heard about the US support for the expansion of militarization in the region and this pretext of a war on so-called narco-terrorism to, in a lot of places, bend the laws or declare sort of states of emergency and deploy the military and engage in egregious violations of human rights. So there was a lot to take away for these US delegates.

Speaker 1:

Alex explained that on top of the Congress people who were in attendance, you had staffers for Senator Bernie Sanders and Chicago Congressman Jonathan Jackson, as well as a number of delegates who won primaries and who will likely be elected to Congress in November.

Speaker 5:

Three of them belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America, the other one supported by the Democratic Socialists of America. I think it was very productive, and I think certainly the US delegates left Montevideo with commitments to themselves to do a lot more on Latin America that is of course suffering a new era of extremely aggressive interventionism from the current Trump administration.

Speaker 1:

But it wasn’t all about the United States. Alex says there were meetings about the impact of artificial intelligence on these countries, a session about green industrial development, multilateralism, and of course, democracy, peace, and security.

Speaker 5:

That is what was kind of important about these sessions is that there was a lot of information sharing, experience sharing, and people talking about various policy ideas that can be implemented sometimes at the congressional level. But also, the pendulum is bound to swing back in the other direction in spite of the best efforts of the Trump administration and some of the other more authoritarian governments in the region.

I absolutely came away with a sense of hope from the conference in Montevideo because one, you had a lot of strong leaders from the region that despite the rise of authoritarianism everywhere are not giving up. In fact, they are optimistic about the future and about returning to power. They know it’s in many cases going to be a tough process because in some instances, democracy, the rule of law and so on have to be reestablished. So it’s going to take very strong people’s movements to do that, but they really seem up to the task. And what was also very encouraging was just the amount of young leaders from the region, a new generation of progressive leaders that have very big plans for their countries and for the region, and in particular for regional integration between Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Speaker 1:

The final declaration referenced Simon Bolivar’s historic Panama Congress, which took place 200 years ago this year. It read, “Today, August 23rd, we therefore unite to combat the renewed doctrine of domination in all its forms, defending the rights and freedoms won across centuries of struggle for self-determination, collaborate from respective legislatures to advance our own vision of hemispheric cooperation based on solidarity between peoples and sovereignty among nations. They plan to meet again in Brazil next year.” Hi folks, that is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. I’m now getting back on track and I will be bringing you much more in the coming weeks, both about Trump’s shadow looming over the upcoming Brazilian elections and the shocking revelations in the wake of the arrest of Argentine right-wing election fixer Fernando Serimedo. If you can’t wait for my reporting on Brazil, I’ve just released a 10-minute video from Sao Paulo.

I’ll add a link in the show notes. Also, please check out Belly of the Beasts reporting. They are so, so good at what they do. Many thanks to the team for allowing me to use clips from their footage. I’ve added links in the show notes. In the meantime, as always, you can find me on Patreon, that’s patreon.com/mfox. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. You can find a ton of content there exclusively for my supporters. As always, if you’re looking for more information, news, and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad, please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. The theme music is by my band Monte Perdido.

You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. Under the shadows of co-production of The Real News and NACLA, it’s produced in partnership with Global Exchange. This episode was written, researched, reported, and produced by me, Michael Fox. The script was edited by Heather Geis. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. An updated version will be made available as soon as possible.

Michael Fox: Okay. Max, can you hear me?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, brother, you’re coming in loud and clear on this.

Michael Fox: All right, fantastic. Max, I want to tell you a story. It’s a tale of two countries, the United States and Brazil. They are the two countries with the largest populations and the largest economies in the Western hemisphere. Brazil is about the size of the lower 48 of the United States. And politically in both countries, something very similar has happened in recent years. In both countries, far right presidents come to power. In both those countries, the president spends several years unraveling democratic institutions and public policy. Then both those presidents run for reelection. Both the presidents lie about their country’s voting systems in order to undermine the elections and whip up their base. Both those presidents lose their reelections. They both claim fraud and then they both try to carry out a coup to stay in power. But that is where these two paths diverge. In the United States, President Donald Trump continues to peddle his lies about the election.
He creates his own social media platform and uses it to push his agenda. He returns to power in 2025. You know the story. In Brazil, however, the country’s supreme electoral court blocks former President Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years because of the lies he told about the country’s electoral system. It is not censorship. It’s a different interpretation of free speech, one that says the right to free expression must be balanced within the other rights in the country and the country’s democratic system. To quote Robert Frost, that has made all the difference.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Bolsonaro is basically being punished by something that he said about the electoral system.

Michael Fox: I’ve been speaking lately with Fabio de Sae Silva. He’s a Brazilian legal expert and an associate professor of international studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: And in the United States saying things, propagating lies and misinformation about the electoral system, I don’t think it would be punishable at all under any circumstance because of how strong the protection to free speech rights is in the United States. And in the past, I think a lot of people though of this as an advantage of the United States in comparison to other societies. But I think more recently there has been a rethinking of this and there has been an understanding that it’s not that other countries lack free speech rights. It’s just that they have other rights that they balance free speech rights against. And in the case of Brazil, because we all understood in the 2018 election that misinformation was a serious threat to democracy, the legal system began to offer a response.

Michael Fox: In 2023, Bolsonado was banned from running again. And if you’ve been following news on Brazil, you know that he was later sentenced to 27 years in jail. He’s currently under house arrest because of health issues. He was sentenced for his participation in a plot to carry out a coup and overturn his 2022 electoral loss and to even assassinate leftist President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In other words, in the United States, Trump is allowed to say what he wants, disparage the electoral system, create his own social media platform, spread as many lies as he likes, and he is awarded for it by being allowed to run again and win reelection where he is now presiding over an assault on free speech rights, the likes of which we have not seen in modern day history in the United States. Meanwhile, in Brazil, Bolsonado is banned from running and he is in jail.
And here’s the point. The roots of all of this, the roots of this difference are the two countries’ vision and interpretation of free speech.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: All these things that Bolsonado has been accused of at the center of them was speech because what the federal police points to in their investigation is that the attempted coup involved promoting publicly and even internationally this idea that the Brazilian elections had been defrauded. They associated with the attempt to co-ops the military to take over and nullify the elections basically. And also including maybe some more unorthodox activities such as assassinating the elected president and some judges. But just to stay in the first component of this criminal enterprise, it is something that involves limitations to speech in Brazilian law.

Michael Fox: In past episodes, we’ve been looking at the attacks on free speech in the United States. Today we look at how another country, Brazil, has pushed back on the fascist and far right wave with its own interpretation of free speech. And here’s the thing, Brazil’s understanding of free speech, as we will look at throughout this episode, is pretty similar to most of the rest of the world. The United States is the outlier, but Trump far right activists and owners of big tech platforms are trying to change that in order to push their absolutest interpretation of free speech abroad and undermine Brazilian democracy in the process. All of that in a minute. This is the Battle for Free Speech, a multi-part narrative podcast brought to you by The Real News. In this series, we take you on a journey to understand the important role free speech has played in US history and the fight being waged over it today.
I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and I’m so excited to be joined today by Max Alvarez. He’s the editor-in-chief and co-executive director of The Real News and the host of the Working People Podcast. Max, seriously, thank you so much for joining me.

Maximillian Alvarez: So grateful to be here, brother, and grateful for all the incredible work that you and Marc and the whole team have been doing on this very, very necessary podcast. And also I’m just like a massive fan as you know of Under the Shadow and everything else that you do. So I’m very excited to finally be on one of the podcasts I’m going to be listening to from you.

Michael Fox: Aw, thanks Max. And in particular, I’m really excited to speak with you today because you are on the front lines of standing up for free speech, but also the working class and also covering the rise of the right. So you kind of straddle all of these things at the same time, which we’re going to be digging into today. All right. We are going to begin on our journey here. Let me just say this before we get started. So far in this podcast, we’ve looked back on the attacks on free speech and press freedoms today. Under the Trump administration, we’ve looked at movements using free speech to stand up for their rights. Today we’re going to look at how Trump and the far right are trying to push a US definition of free speech abroad in order to lift their agenda internationally and so much more.
I got into this a little bit in the beginning. Today’s episode is going to focus completely on Brazil and the role the United States is playing in the country. And today’s episode is a joint collaboration together with my podcasts, Under the Shadow and Brazil on Fire. Because as you will see, there are connections throughout. If you haven’t heard those, I suggest you go check them out.

Maximillian Alvarez: Oh my God. If you haven’t heard those, I envy you because you have a feast in front of you. Under the shadow, Brazil on Fire. They are so good and so essential. And they’re award winning contributions that I guarantee if you’re listening to this, you are going to love them. So go check them out. And I don’t say that just as a collaborator with Mike on producing these series, but as a devoted listener who always learns a lot from them.

Michael Fox: Thanks, Max. Three things to say before we get started. If you have been listening to this podcast series, The Battle for Free Speech, you know how this works. I go out, I do a ton of reporting. I bring that back to discuss it here. Two, I love time travel. I often say that podcasting for me is the closest thing we have to actually traveling in time. So my goal here is to take you to another time and place and I’m glad you’re along for the ride, Max. And three, I know Brazil well. My wife is Brazilian. I’ve lived here for years. I’m here now. And I say this so that you know that everything that we’re digging into today isn’t just based on my interviews for this podcast, but on my on the ground reporting on this over the last decade. And I seriously have been wanting to do an episode like this for a very long time, so I’m super excited.
Okay. Max, are you ready?

Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s do it, baby.

Michael Fox: Okay, here we go. I want to begin exactly one year ago today, July 9th, 2025. US President Donald Trump writes a letter to Brazilian President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In the letter, he announces that he’s levying a 50% tariff on all Brazilian goods. Among the reasons for this new tariff is the country’s legal case against Trump ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, for attempting to carry out a coup amid the 2022 elections. He also chastises Brazil for allegedly violating free speech rights. In the letter, Trump denounces Brazil’s insidious attacks on free elections and the fundamental free speech rights of Americans. He also criticizes the Brazilian Supreme Court’s secret and unlawful censorship orders to US social media platforms. It’s incredible to see the Trump administration lecturing anyone on free speech, but that is how our most basic right is being weaponized today. Anyway, moving on. A few weeks after that letter, the US Embassy in Brazil releases a fact sheet explaining Trump’s new tariffs.

Artur Romeu: It was like a one and a half page document.

Michael Fox: And I spoke with Arturo Romeo about this. He’s a Brazilian journalist and the director of Reporters Without Borders for Latin America. And he says he’s reading this and they mention free speech, free expression or censorship like 10 times. It’s only a page and a half, but the entire thing, it gets into just repeating this line basically saying that the United States is tariffing Brazil because it was promoting censorship.

Artur Romeu: Free speech is being weaponized against freedom off expression.

Michael Fox: He describes this as the United States trying to make it look like a free speech champion.

Artur Romeu: But actually what your distorted vision of free speech is doing is fragmenting the diferent ideas behind what freedom of expression really is and mostly the social and collective dimension of freedom of expression. You are only saying that people should say whatever they want without any kind of interference. You are basically ignoring completely the fact that people live in a society and part of the freedom of expression right is related to receive pluralistic, diverse, reliable information.

Michael Fox: And I should just pause here to say that internationally, and this is really important, especially for our US audience. Internationally, many definitions of free speech include the right to receive reliable or truthful information. And that’s key because in the United States, that clearly is not part of the equation. Anyway, this is a really important distinction between how free speech is generally understood in the United States and elsewhere around the world. I got into this a bunch in the last episode. If you haven’t heard that, you can go back and check it out now, but the idea is this. In the US, your right to free speech is generally seen as absolute. In other words, you can pretty much say what you want without repercussions regardless of how bad it is or racist or homophobic or discriminatory. In every other country in the world, every one, your free speech rights are seen as balanced with other rights.
So your right to free speech isn’t more important than my right not to be harmed. For instance –

Brian Mier: The view followed in Germany, France, and especially for the case of this conversation, Brazil said according to the Constitution, all human rights are equally important.

Michael Fox: Brian Mier is a correspondent for a Telesur who’s lived in Brazil for more than 30 years. And I spoke with him about this. You

Brian Mier: Can’t say that one human right is more important than another human right. So you can’t have one human right that’s absolutist in its nature, free speech, that would enable someone to limit or deny other people’s human rights.

Michael Fox: For instance, in Brazil or in Germany, Nazism is a crime. It’s illegal to be a Nazi or to spread Nazi propaganda.

Brian Mier: Because it damages the peace of mind, the freedom to come and go as they please, the freedom to interact with the public of certain minority groups in Brazil, mainly Afro-Brazilians, Northeasterners, but also Jewish people as well. So in Brazil, this is called the harmony of rights according to the Brazilian Constitution. All rights are equally important. Freedom of a speech is a very important right, but it can’t be used to trample over some other group of people’s rights.

Michael Fox: That’s the idea and this distinction is really important. And let me just say that as I touched on last time, in the United States, we also had this kind of balancing definition of free speech until roughly the Cold War in the 1960s. And that’s when our current day libertarian absolutist view of free speech really took hold. What’s interesting is that we don’t even really realize this. We don’t know this past, right? And yet our definition now of free speech, absolutist definition within the United States is now being weaponized by Trump and his far right supporters and far right allies abroad to push their agenda as we will look into throughout this podcast. Before we move on, Max, do you see this? Have you been seeing this battle over free speech? And do you think that people understand this within the United States, understand how free speech kind of is being weaponized and this interpretation of free speech is being weaponized?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yes. And I would say that we are not only aware of the hypocrisy of these people using free speech to take our free speech away or to impose their will on Brazil or other countries because that’s what we’ve come to realize our country does. That’s as American as apple pie. That’s in fact what most of the world knows America to be. They don’t know it anymore as the America my parents knew it to be. And my dad came to this country for, his family came to this country for. So the world today does not know us as that. They know us as the place that the most powerful country and military empire in the world that has been going around the world undemocratically overthrowing democratically elected leaders, undemocratically invading other countries and bombing other countries and torturing people in the name of democracy and saying like, we’re spreading democracy to you, you’re welcome.
And now smash cut to 2026 these sort of fascist posters of Donald Trump are draping Washington DC and everything that we’re talking about on this series unfolding before our eyes. And I don’t think a lot of us know what free speech means in this context. And I think that is why the takeaway for this discussion and any discussion that we have about it is like, well, what are we going to fight for it to be?

Michael Fox: Yeah. Max, I really appreciate you wrapping in this question of how the United States has justified interventions abroad in the name of democracy and how what we’re seeing now is the justification for the tariffs in the name of free speech, which I think is a great connection. In order to understand all of this, Trump’s letter in particular, his pushback on Brazil and Trump’s rationale for imposing these tariffs, we need to back up a little bit. So we’re going to go back in time. We’re jumping in the time machine, Max. Here we go.

Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s go.

Michael Fox: The year is 2018. It’s the lead up to Brazil’s huge presidential elections. Former President Lula was the front runner, but he was jailed on trumped up charges of corruption. Bolsonaro is the Trump outsider candidate, longtime congressman, former captain under the Brazilian military dictatorship, something he is still vocally proud of. And he’s surging in the polls because of a slew of fake news and disinformation, the likes of which the country has never seen. Just one example. I was covering the election for numerous outlets and I went to this press conference for the then leftist candidate, Fernando Adaji. And in this press conference, it was just a couple of days before the first round vote and he had called it because his workers’ party had created a WhatsApp hotline to receive complaints of false or misleading news and memes being spread. They said that within 24 hours they’d received 15,000 messages.
24 hours, 15,000 messages. The day before I spoke with this street artist who told me, “Our election will not be decided by the candidate’s proposals or their speeches. It’ll be decided by the lies spread online. The Brazilian elections will be decided by the ability of some groups to push fake news and the ability of us, the voters, to discern what is and what is not real.” And that is exactly what happened. The voters could not discern. Most but not all of the fake news or misleading news were being pushed by Bolsonaro’s allies and supporters. The country was overwhelmed and unprepared for the disinformation campaign and so was the Supreme Electoral Court, which oversees the elections.
They were able to request that dozens of posts be taken down, but they just didn’t have the breadth of being able to handle a barrage of posts like this. In the end, the result. This is Bolsonaro’s, Brazil. The world’s fourth largest democracy has voted on a new president. Bolsonaro won the election with roughly 55% of the vote. I was covering the election outside of his home that night in Rio de Janeiro. And then Bolsonaro came into power and proceeded to run the country into the ground like I detailed in depth in Brazil on Fire, my podcast. He guided social programs, privatized state businesses, denied the COVID pandemic, pushed unproven drugs, attacked universities, much of which we saw under Trump in the United States as well. But in Brazil, and this is the reason why I’m bringing all this up now, the courts learned their lesson.

Fernando Paulino: Joseph’s system learned to create and to stimulate some vaccines for this information and misinformation during the electoral periods.

Michael Fox: Fernando Paulino is a communications professor at the University of Brazilia. He’s also the president of the Latin American Communication Researchers Association and a fan of heavy metal rock music, Max. In particular, he likes stuff from Rage Against the Machine, Metallica and Sipultra, who he said stand for free speech. And I think that’s like, I’m sorry for the aside, but I think it’s really cool because in our conversation we got into some of these questions about how this heavy metal music has stood up for free speech in time. Anyway, he says that the

Fernando Paulino: Judicial system using the constitutional principles established some procedures to avoid misinformation information during the campaign and also before the campaign because Jaibosonaro tried to disseminate misinformations information or in other words, fake news against the political and electoral system.

Michael Fox: The other thing that came out of the 2018 election was they created Brazil, the Brazilian courts created a precedent for making it illegal to promote conspiracy theories about the safety of the electoral system. And this is key. I spoke with Professor Fabio de Saisilva.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Because there was one candidate who started spreading videos, fake videos of Bambagi trying to vote for Bosona and the vote going for Adat at the time. And there was a case that was filed against him by the public prosecutor’s office for violating electoral laws. And that case got up to the Superior Electoral Court where the justices on that court ruled that if you spread conspiracy theories about the safety of our electoral mechanisms, you’re violating the law and you can even lose your seat if you have been elected.

Michael Fox: Let me just pause here to explain why this is so important for Brazil because I think a lot of people in the United States might not get this. Brazil, if you remember, is a country that returned to democracy again in just 1985. For the 21 years prior to this, from 1964 until 1985, it was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that censored speech disappeared and killed hundreds and imprisoned and tortured thousands. That was not long ago. My wife was born under the dictatorship. For Brazilians, the right to free speech and every other right for that matter fall under the umbrella of their democracy. The democracy is most important. That’s what comes first. And that’s codified into their laws. It’s codified into their constitution. As Brian Meir mentioned earlier, their right to free speech doesn’t trump their right to free and fair elections. Okay, just want to say that fast-forward to the 2022 vote.

Speaker: Their politics couldn’t be more different, but both of Brazil’s main presidential candidates have gone into overdrive online.

Michael Fox: Campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation. You’ve got Bolsonado running for reelection against President Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva, who is now out of jail clearly. And so campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation in particular on behalf of Bolsonado, but the Supreme Electoral Council’s ready. They demand flag posts must be taken down within two hours and then just one hour when it got close to the election. Bolsonado tries to raise doubts about the country’s electoral system. Fabio de Saisilva says that the discourse was central to Bolsonado’s attempt to cause disruption in the country and to maybe open the space for military intervention.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: So it was very central to Bolsonago’s speech as well as to the activity of his supporters on social media. And what the Lula candidacy did and the public prosecutor’s office sometimes did was to take those cases to court saying, “We have a law that says that you can’t say those things and these people are saying those things.” And so what Mogayas did, he was presiding over the Superior Electoral Court, was to just try those cases and enforce the decisions sending communications to social media platforms, ordering the social media platforms to remove those forms of content. And so there were some profiles that were taken down during the elections for spreading that conspiracy theory all based on Brazilian law, just as he took down some posts against Bosonago by the Lula campaign that violated other aspects of Brazilian law. So that was happening on both sides.
The only difference was that the Bosonago campaign was using this to victimize itself and to say that it was being persecuted by this censorship judge.

Michael Fox: So later on when you hear that, and we’re going to be talking about it in this episode, but from the United States and from elsewhere, you hear people talking about this censorship judge or censorship that’s been happening.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: That accounts for a large number of the cases involving guys and this accusation of censorship.

Michael Fox: Because there are measures in place to stop fake news and disinformation from being spread and trying to roll that back amid this electoral moment. Max, let’s stop your pause really quick. I mean, is this all making sense? Do you have any questions?

Maximillian Alvarez: Sadly, it is making sense. I mean both in terms of why these things happened the way that they did and why they didn’t happen the same way here in the United States. I
Mean, because you talked about where the roads really diverged in the past five to six years especially with how we dealt with these attempted coups. Donald Trump is not in jail. Donald Trump was not barred from running for president. In fact, he used the presidency to outrun the legal system and proving that actually power wins over principle in America and has now thus taken all of our institutions to serve his will. But I think in terms of why we didn’t do that, I mean the answers are very complex, but I think what folks just need to know is that should we have a more stringent, robust kind of understanding of the people’s right to truthful information and the harm, the social harm, the harm to our society and our democracy and not our health and safety by treating lies and truth as having equal standing.
That problem that really showed the differences in how America and the USA and Brazil have treated this question in much deeper ways.

Michael Fox: Absolutely. Absolutely. Max, I want to bring in an important figure here. His name is Aleshande de Morais.
Fabio de Saisilva just mentioned him. He’s a member of the Brazilian Supreme Court and he presided over the Supreme Electoral Court during the 2022 elections. As you will hear today, he has been a major thorn in the side of Bolshonato and his supporters for years, but he’s not necessarily left wing. He’s a bit of a wild card. He was appointed by Michelle Temmer, who was the right wing president back in 2017. Bolsonado supporters understandably hate him. After President Lula, he’s pretty much public enemy number one for the right and they’ve actually compared him to Superman’s archenemy Lex Luther. I know you like that reference, Max. He kind of does actually look like him, which is the reason why they make this comparison. Mordaise is the top person who they have accused of censorship in recent years. Trump and his supporters have joined the campaign because Aleshander Morais has been the top Supreme Court judge in Brazil to push back on Bolsonaro’s measures during his presidency and the fake news over the last eight years and the power of US social media companies in Brazil, which we’ll get into in a second.
But as Fabio Desai Silva says, he didn’t ever do it alone.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: He was backed, for the most part, he was backed by two courts because he sat on the superior electoral court where he handled some cases that had to do with speech and he sits on the Supreme Court where he handled other of such cases. And like I said, he was for the most part backed by if not all the other justices in those courts by the vast majority of those justices.

Michael Fox: But he was always the most visible figure, Lex Luther, but a good guy if you like democracy. Anyway, he was also the judge charged with investigating what would become known as Bolshonato’s hate cabinet. And this is crazy, Max. I don’t know if you remember hearing about this, but imagine if you will, a troll farm inside the White House with connections to right-wing influencers within the United States who used their power, influence and social media prominence to attack political opponents. This is what you had in Bolshinado’s government.

Maximillian Alvarez: Wait, that’s what we got now, baby.

Michael Fox: That’s what we have now. Okay, true. But this is an actual entity. It’s like its own little office within Brazilia. Fabio de Sali Silva, talk to me about this.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: As far as we know, it was a relatively well organized and hierarchical structure where you had people whose job was to produce content. You had people then outside of the presidency, big influencers whose job was to disseminate the content.

Michael Fox: This is all coordinated so they would target someone and say, “We want to take this person out. ” And it wasn’t always someone on the left. In many cases, it was a bolsonado supporter who split with bolsonado or criticized bolsonado for some reason. And they say, “This is the enemy of the day.” And everyone would just pile on posting whatever they could about that person to intimidate them and make them stop criticizing bolsonada or whatever. And when you say it’s what we have now, in many ways it’s true because there is no doubt in my mind that this tactic is influenced not just by… It didn’t just come out of thin air in Brazil. Clearly the far right is organizing when it has to do with tactics and things like this.

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. And Bolsonaro is like government. It was like sort of a department within a government that was still trying to present itself as a government. In the United States, it’s Trump. And so the fish drops from the head down. So it’s just like Trump is the megaphone who owns his own social media platform who is sicking his entire government apparatus and his billionaire oligarch network to gobble up all the legacy media, destroy the ones that he doesn’t like, yada, yada, yada.

Michael Fox: So Ali Shander de Morais is the point person for the investigations. He coordinates this together with the federal police and they work to undo this and they do an incredible job at it. So they issue search and seizure warrants, arrest warrants. Some Bolsonaro influencers went to jail, others had their social media accounts blocked. And this is just another example of why Morais is so hated by Bolsonaro and his people. Anyway, 2022. Lulu wins the elections, but then Bolsonaro supporters hit the streets.

Maximillian Alvarez: The president’s office may have conceded a feat, but many of J. Bolsonaro’s millions of supporters have not

Michael Fox: They’re spurred on by Bolsonaro’s claims of fraud in the elections. They block roads across the country. They set up vigils in front of military barracks all across Brazil demanding that the military rise up to overturn the results and they stay there for more than two months and then on January 8th, 2023. Balsinado supporters invade the Brazilian Congress and Supreme Court. They attacked the buildings causing more than $3 million in damage in a copycat performance of January 6th, 2021, Washington.
I should probably also say that the police response, because we’re talking about free speech right now, but I should probably say that the police response to the Bolsonaro protests before January 8th was initially pretty lenient, like far more lenient than you would see in the United States if thousands of people decided to block roads all across the country and then set up vigils in front of military barracks, you probably wouldn’t see that like, “Okay, you can stay there.” But in Brazil, they basically let him do what they needed to do. But after January 8th, when it was clear that an attempted coup was underway, the response was far quicker than in the wake of January 6th in the United States.
They did away with the encampments. Hundreds were arrested in Brazilia. The Supreme Court would convict more than 1,400 people for their involved in the Capitol invasion in Brazilia. Hundreds are still in jail. I mention this all because like in the United States, many of the claims that Brazil has been imprisoning political opposition come from the legal response to the country’s capital invasion. In other words, some of the people that they call political prisoners are those people who are in jail or who were in jail or who were convicted by the Supreme Court for their role in the Capitol invasion. But again, this comes back to the idea of the importance of democracy in Brazil and particular Brazil’s interpretation of free speech. The point is here, you have a right to protest. You have a right to speak. You even have a right to protest for months.
You just don’t have a right to try to overthrow the country and don’t mess with the country’s democracy. June 30th, 2023, six months after Brazil’s capital invasion. The Supreme Electoral Court bans Bolsonaro from running for political office for eight years for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Five judges agreed that he used government channels and social media to spread misinformation about Brazil’s elections.
The ruling focused on this meeting that Bolsonaro held a few months before the election, where he told foreign ambassadors that the country’s electoral voting system was rigged and the elections could be manipulated. Of course, this was despite the fact that Brazil’s electoral system had long been internationally recognized as safe and secure. Brazilians celebrated the ruling across the country. It was the first time a Brazilian president had been borrowed from holding public office for election violations. Bolsonaro denounced the judgment against him calling it politically motivated. Max, can you ever imagine something like this happening in the United States?

Maximillian Alvarez: Now, no, but I think a lot of us had still had lingering hope that our institutions would hold and that we would prove ourselves capable of this as well, but we didn’t.

Michael Fox: So I just want to focus on this point I made at the very beginning of the episode right now to kind of tie this into where we were at the beginning. Remember how I mentioned that the two paths diverge between the United States and Brazil. Clearly I’m generalizing, but in many ways, this is one of those moments where you can really tell the difference. Bolsonaro is blocked from holding electoral office. Meanwhile, in the United States, Trump continues being Trump. It

Donald Trump [Recording]: Is great to be your president. It is great.

Michael Fox: In Brazil, something else is happening at the same time Bolsonaro is banned from holding office. There is a nationwide debate over a new bill that would regulate social media platforms as if they were television or radio. Tech platforms push back with all of their might. Telegram, for instance, sends millions of Brazilians a message telling them that if Brazil passes the law, it will “end freedom of expression.” Congressional leaders attack the message on the floor of the lower house. The head of the government coalition of the Senate, Randolph Rodriguez, told press, “To the heads of the big tech companies and their shareholders, Brazil will not be no man’s land. It’s a threat against Brazilian democracy. We need regulation. The big tech companies say they are tech companies, but more and more they’re acting like communication companies and our telecommunication sector has been regulated since 1964. Social media is the same.
Brazil had suddenly become the battleground over the power of tech companies to remain unregulated and free to push their agenda. At the time I sat down with David Nemer. He’s a Brazilian University of Virginia communications professor who studied social media platforms for years. And he told me that these platforms, as we’ve looked at in this podcast, they are not neutral.

David Nemer: These platforms are not just publishers. They are part of the message as well in curating the message.

Michael Fox: And this bill is really just about bringing transparency from big techs.

David Nemer: In terms of access to the algorithm, access to reports about the algorithm, understanding how these platforms behave. So we have a more transparent way of understanding how these platforms, like the role of these platforms in everyday life. This is why the big techs are playing hardball in Brazil because they know that if Brazil pisses this bell, then it sets the precedent and the other countries will follow as well.

Michael Fox: Sxzo that was enough for these tech firms to fight tooth and nail and the bill stalled in Congress. Max Brazilian lawmakers, they want to regulate the social media platform, say its censorship. Where do you stand on this? Do we need regulations for tech firms and social media platforms?

Maximillian Alvarez: I mean, absolutely. And when I say yes, we need regulation. I don’t want the current powers that be being the ones who to regulate it, nor do I want the ones who are in power before to be the ones regulating it. So do I think they need to be regulated? Yes. Do I think we need a better system of regulation and a better sort of societal understanding of what the hell regulation is and is for? Yes. But right now that ain’t going to happen in this country where the worst parts of capitalism will kill the best parts of democracy. Any semblance of an understanding of free speech that we have had as Americans that gets that free speech is important for a healthy democratic society has been eroded by this sort of individualistic consumer capitalist model of free speech for me is the only thing that matters.
Like my rights and my ability to say whatever I want whenever I want is the only point of free speech and no one can take that away. But it’s like Margaret Thatcher saying society doesn’t exist. There’s only a collection of individuals in pursuit of their own self-interest.
That’s what they have tried to make true in America. Out of the same country that birthed so many incredible contributions to democratic history, that same country has been overtaken by this democracy killing capitalist serving system.

Michael Fox: Well, no, and it’s interesting that you mentioned Margaret Thatcher because I got into this a little bit several episodes ago. We don’t think that, for instance, a financial system can be completely unregulated. You have to have rules. It can’t just be a free for all. There have to be certain rules or else what happens? You have massive monopolies. You have massive corporations with huge power, which we do right now, but still there needs to be regulations and all these things. And it works the same way with social media platforms and with communications. That’s why we have communications, telecommunications laws. That’s why TV and radio are regulated. Newspapers are regulated. The way that most people get their news nowadays is through social media. There has to be some form of regulation. It can’t just be a free for all, but these companies are using the discourse of free speech in order to push their vision for the world and really sell their agenda, really push their bottom line, their profit margin.
They don’t want to be regulated because they’re a business. And of course, now they’re in cahoots with Trump even more.

Maximillian Alvarez: America is the land of deregulation. And so when we say we need to regulate these companies and that we live in a more deregulated kind of society, I don’t know if people outside of America fully grasp how deregulated we are. I mean, look at the way that big tech has forced AI into our lives with like no regulations whatsoever. And look at the effects that it’s having on our society, on our politics, on our children, on our sense of truth. I mean, it’s such a big world changing technology that has been allowed to just kind of flood every device that we use and change society however it’s going to under a system where the companies that own and invest in these technologies are consolidating power and collaborating with state power to ultimately, like you said, serve their agenda. And their agenda is basically continue to twist and bend and force the world to be something that continuously delivers more and more power and wealth to them at our expense.

Michael Fox: So I want to underline something here that underscores the question at the heart of this debate and I think is really important. All of these tech companies are from abroad. None of them are in Brazil, mostly from the United States, but not all. And they’re all pushing their corporate agenda, wrapped in the discourse of free speech, but they’re companies. They’re concerned with profit like you were just talking about Max and yet they’re actually attacking the sovereignty of foreign countries in the name of free speech. There’s something just so wrong with this, but because of the way that this discourse kind of permeates into the mainstream or the way that it’s covered and the way that they sell it, that’s not the way that people read this. It’s usually seen, oh, well, Brazil is censoring speech, whatever else. But here’s the thing, Max, Brazil’s battle with the tech platforms is just heating up.
Fast forward one year August, 2024. Brazil’s dispute with tech billionaire Elon Musk is heating up. One of Brazil’s. Elon Musk. Richest man on earth, owner of Tesla SpaceX, old buddy of Trump’s, or I guess frenemy now perhaps. Of course, he ran Doge, Department of Government Efficiency in the first 120 days of Trump’s second term. Remember that he bought Twitter in 2022 and transformed it into X. So in August, 2024, he begins to butt heads with our friend, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Aleshandre Morais, who we introduced earlier. Mordais orders X to take down a number of users on Musk’s platform who are actively sharing fake news online and who in some cases are wanted by the Brazilian judiciary. They are all supporters of far right President Bolsonaro and here’s just one example of someone Morais ordered to be taken offline. Alen Lopez Do Santos. He’s a Brazilian blogger who fled to the United States after being under investigation in two Supreme Court inquiries for threatening justices, spreading false content online and financing anti-Democratic acts.
Musk refuses Mordeise’s order. He calls it censorship. His app X still works in the country, but he pulls his team out of Brazil so they can’t face reprisals from the Brazilian judiciary. In response on August 30th

Speaker: A Brazilian Supreme Court judge has ordered the immediate suspension of the social media platform X in Brazil, meaning people there can no longer acces or use it. Ex-owner Elon Musk failed to meet a deadline set by the court to name a new legal representative in the country. The Brazilian court and –

Michael Fox: Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes. I spoke with Fabio de Saisilv about this.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Elon Musk is a businessman and like all businessmen, he doesn’t want to see his business regulated and this is what the Brazilian judiciary is doing indirectly to the extent that Mr. Musk’s platform is hosting speech that’s contrary to Brazilian law in different ways and the judiciary is pushing back against that.

Michael Fox: Again, these are corporations pushing their bottom line and Musk is also a free speed absolutist aligned with the far right. Aleshandani Morais pushes back defending his opinion. He says basically. Spread hate, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. David Nemer.

Donald Trump [Recording]: The Brazilian politicians have very specific interest in keeping Twitter the way it is. They prevail because of misinformation. They prevail because of hate speech that they promote and in Brazil, that’s not allowed. So they need a platform to create that sort of engagement and build their base. So it’s like a win-win situation for both of them.

Michael Fox: X was blocked for 40 days until the company finally gave in. Musk paid the fines and began taking down the accounts ordered removed by Morais. So in the end, X did everything that Morais wanted them to, but Musk created this whole problem for himself in the meantime and actually convinced thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of Brazilians that they should move to other platforms because during those 40 days, they couldn’t use Twitter. So a bunch of people started moving to Blue Sky or Mastodon or other places. Max, did you see this unfolding? Do you remember watching this?

Maximillian Alvarez: Not only do I remember watching it, I mean, I’ve lived through it and I’ve tried to navigate a media organization through it. Musk buying Twitter was a seismic change to our industry, the entire kind of way that our public discourse operated and who participated in it, right? I mean, the Twitter of old was in no way perfect. None of these platforms are, but it was a space where politicians, corporations, journalists, artists like public figures of all sorts kind of had access to each other in a way that they never had before and it is not that after Musk bought it. And I would actually just push back when you called Elon Musk a free speech absolutist, he is absolutely not a free speech absolutist. I mean, I think so many people on the right, particularly people in power on the right, like Musk embodies what in the internet age has come to be known as Wilhoit’s law, which boils down to this quote, which was actually left in a comment section on the internet, but it so succinctly articulated this problem that it’s become a meme in and of itself.
But Wilhoit’s law states that conservatism consists of exactly one proposition to which there must be in groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside outgroups whom the law binds but does not protect. I think this applies not just to kind of like how people like Elon Musk see free speech. It’s always free speech for me and the people who agree with me and not for thee. Musk has censored plenty of people on X. Totally. Musk artificially alters the algorithm so that it’s artificially like visibilizing certain views over others.That’s the way that this stuff operates. And then you add on top of that, like you said, just the bare fact of these people are businessmen and capitalists whose primary goal is to get more money and power for themselves.

Michael Fox: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s so important because what we often see is so – called self-described free speech absolutists use that discourse to say that, “Oh, I believe in free speech for everybody and it’s part of this image,” which is exactly what Musk is. When he bought then Twitter, now X, his whole thing was, “Oh, I believe in free speech and everyone should have it. ” But in the end of the day, what they’re actually doing is canceling and censoring people that don’t believe in their viewpoint.

Maximillian Alvarez: And this is, again, the continuing line of how the sort of media ecosystem in America, it’s not just Musk and X. This is why the freaking Ellison family who just acquired Warner Brothers also has control of CBS and a controlling stake in the American owned TikTok. This is why Silicon Valley oligarch and Trump advisor Mark and Dreesen is the primary backer of Substack. This is why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, right? This is why Mark Zuckerberg controls not just Facebook but Instagram and WhatsApp and threads and so much more. You can subvert the sort of democratic principles of a healthy public sphere in which truth wins out through debate, inquiry and honest, open discussion by buying all of the platforms and networks and artificially imposing your designs and desires on the discourse and subject everyone else who depends on it for their information.That’s kind of how things work in this country.

Michael Fox: And here’s the thing, it’s not just the tech platforms. Far right activists have also been pushing their agenda of free speech absolutism or quote free speech absoluism and using it to cry censorship against Brazil. Here’s an example. The

Speaker: Hearing of the subcommittee will come to order and I want to welcome our very distinguished witnesses and –

Michael Fox: May 7th, 2024. Republican leaders held a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It’s titled Brazil: A Crisis of Democracy Freedom and the Rule of Law. The hearing was chaired by New Jersey Republican Representative Chris Smith. He kicked off the meeting.

US Rep. Chris Smith: Since late 2022, Brazilians have been subject to grave human rights violations committed by Brazilian officials on a vast scale. Documented right violations in Brazil include the political abuse of legal procedures to persecute political opposition, including jailing opposition figures on sparious charges, violations of freedom of speech and media freedom, including persecution of journalists, the silencing of opposition media, banning individuals from social media, thinly veiled censorship laws claiming to fight disinformation and many violations of rule of law and judicial malfeasance.

Michael Fox: If you heard what he was saying, you would imagine that the country had been taken over by a tinpot dictatorship and not just saved from an attempted coup. Among the individuals invited to speak are Paolo Figueredo, the son of the former Brazilian dictator, Christopher Favlotsky, the Canadian founder of the video platform, Rumble, considered the right-wing YouTube. And unsurprisingly, they painted a terribly disturbing vision of Brazil as if the country had fallen into an authoritarian censorship regime.

Donald Trump [Recording]: There’s one single name behind every one of these decisions. That’s Alexander DeMaris. Remember this name. He’s the defacto dictator of Brazil.

Michael Fox: Rumble will never back down from our mission. We are the tip of the spear in this fight and we relish that. We urge everyone, especially the US State Department to join us. The other person invited to speak at the hearing, the only legal expert invited, in fact, Brazilian University of Oklahoma Professor Fabio Desai Silva. Remember, I’ve been speaking with him throughout the episode.

Speaker: In your assessment, how high was the risk of the coup succeeding had then President Bolsonaro managed to gain the support of these branches of the armed forces?

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Thank you, Congresswoman. It was very high. I believe when you draft a decree outlining what’s going to happen once the military take over, which in some versions of this drafting even included the arrest of Justice Mogais. I think you’re trying to anticipate what you’re going to do when push comes to shove.

Michael Fox: And Fabio told me that he was there to basically clarify that in Brazil

Fabio de Sa e Silva: It has been a violation of the law to articulate speech that’s intended to undermine confidence, public confidence in the electoral system if you don’t have any proof of that as well as to, as I was mentioning before, pit the military against civilian power and incentivize the military to take over because of the history of the country. So one of the reasons why I was there was precisely to share my knowledge of Brazilian law and to show to the people in Congress that You cannot say that the Brazilian judiciary is abusing its powers because it’s holding people accountable for committing those violations of the law. And even if in the United States, these things would not be necessarily a crime or could not be criminalized. In Brazil, it’s been well established in Brazilian law that you can’t do those things. You can’t convey those messages, especially if you are in office sitting in the president’s office and therefore having all that attention at your disposal as the chief executive in the country.

Michael Fox: So that was 2024 and that’s happening on Capitol Hill Max. These are the debates that are happening in Washington, which are then pushing this image that there is censorship happening in Brazil. And it’s the same thing we’ve seen from Trump time and time again and his people is that if you repeat a lie long enough, then it becomes truth. But the threats from Washington and Silicon Valley are ongoing.

Speaker: Also developing this morning, the Trump administration placing sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice over concerns of human rights violations and politicized prosecutions.

Michael Fox: Just last year, alongside the 50% tariff on Brazil that Trump levied that we started this episode, the United States also issued sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alice Andre Morais and his wife.

Speaker: Well, look, Muris is an activist judge that abused his authority by engaging in a targeted and politically motivated effort designed to silence political critics through the issuance of secret orders, compelling online platforms, including US social media companies, banning the accounts of individuals for posting protected speech. The actions taken by Muris impact US persons and companies and the United States did not tolerate maligned foreign actors who abuse their positions of authority to undermine freedom of expression of American citizens.

Michael Fox: Mordeise called the sanctions illegal and deplorable. He said the court would not quote bow to cowardly and fruitless threats and that he would ignore the sanctions. The sanctions were later dropped in December of last year, shortly after Trump also removed the 50% tariff he levied on Brazil. But the thing is, is here again, it’s the use of this vision of literally fake news and a false narrative to spread these lies in order to undermine a Democratic country, Brian Meir.

Brian Mier: The American far right supported by these crypto fascist libertarians in Silicon Valley like Elon Musk has teamed up through Steve Bannon, the point man between the US far right and the Brazilian far right and the bolsonaros and their allies to try and force a change in Brazilian laws citing free speech absolutism to legalize Nazis in Brazil and other hate groups and to undo the hate speech legislation and things like that. And the reason the Silicon Valley tech fascist social media companies are interested in this is that it’s to eliminate any kind of liability for their platforms being used to disseminate hate speech. And so they’re interested in weakening Brazil’s regulatory atmosphere so that they can’t be held liable for crimes, currently crimes committed on their platforms by Brazilians.

Michael Fox: And the problem, Max, is that this is not the end of what the far right and the US campaign is planning against the government in Brazil. There are high stakes elections happening again this October. President Lula will be running against him is Bolsonaro’s senator son Flavia Bolsonaro.

Speaker: At the end of this last year, my father gave me the greatest mission of my life to run for president in his place in October 2026 elections.

Michael Fox: Flavio recently wrote to Marco Rubio and told him that if he won, he would be willing to place a transition team at the disposal of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Trump is considering new tariffs on Brazil over the country’s financial system of payments and the US government has placed Brazil’s two largest gangs on the US foreign terrorist list. So it all is clearly leading up to the October vote. It’s clear that Trump and his people will be pulling out all the stops to influence the elections in the same way they’ve done all across so many other countries in Latin America. Brazil at this point is one of only a handful of countries still on the left in Latin America. All of the others have fallen to Trump’s sphere of influence and many are concerned that the US pressure is going to only get worse in the coming months and it will likely be using free speech as a weapon, using it in absolute free speech terms.
Brian Meir told me that they’ve been successful in Brazil with that language because it’s become a rallying cry for the far right.

Brian Mier: And so free speech is one of those things. It’s on their list of things that weaponizing anti-corruption, rhetoric against leftist politicians. And this take of free speech is definitely a weaponization of the concept of free speech.

Michael Fox: But he says it’s not necessarily an end in itself. It’s just a tactic for the far right to achieve its goals.

Brian Mier: That’s what it really comes down to. I don’t even know how much these tech fascists even believe in their own ideology. It’s just being spread around because the end goal from a business standpoint is to have total regulatory liberty or freedom. I feel bad calling it freedom, but total deregulation so that they can’t have any kind of scrutiny. They can’t be punished in any way for collectively brainwashing large segments of the population to supporting them and their goals.

Michael Fox: This is a really useful tool, this kind of absolutist free speech framework. And we’ve seen over these platforms, speech has become privatized. It’s not about our right to speak freely. What these tech platforms and absolutist free speeches are pushing is the censorship of other viewpoints of free speech in the name of their vision of free speech. It’s again, like I’ve talked about so oftentimes in this podcast, censorship in the name of free speech.

Maximillian Alvarez: So like the very reality of the world that we live in today kind of proves that free speech needs to mean more than just like my ability to say what I want when I want.
It’s much more complicated than that. These big tech oligarchs and the platforms that they own, the oligarchs who own the legacy media that we still have, they are proving that you can accomplish censorship in a number of ways while still sort of ostensibly bearing the flag of freedom of speech.

Michael Fox: Yes, absolutely. Max, I want to close on a couple of thoughts here that I think are really important for this discussion and also that shine a little bit of positive light on things that were where they are right now despite everything. First, in Brazil, according to recent surveys, roughly 60% of Brazilians are in favor of some form of social media regulation. According to a Nexus poll from this time last year, 80% of Brazilians believe social media companies should take more responsibility for the content they publish online. 60% of those surveys say they believed digital platforms should remove more posts than they do and 60% of Brazilians said that regulating these platforms is essential to tackling anti-democratic content and hate speech. There is a 2014 Brazilian law titled the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, which was really important when it came out and it can be used to hold companies accountable in some cases, in particular when they don’t apply with court orders to remove content, but that doesn’t specifically regulate tech companies or apply in other cases, but that’s one thing that can be used and is used.
The other thing that people are thinking about is how to democratize this space in particularly around what we want, public policy. So I spoke with Fernando Paulino. He’s a communications professor from the University of Brazilia. He’s the guy we heard up from up top and I love how he says this, Max. He said we should be thinking in terms not of freedom but of fairness.

Fernando Paulino: It’s important to establish these parameters, especially during electoral periods to organize fair competition. I think maybe we need to use this word as well, maybe the society needs more fair, more accountable, more equal principles to defend and promote democracy

Michael Fox: We talk about free and fair elections, but oftentimes there’s so many barriers to actually holding those elections, but the same thing works within the communication sphere in which in social media. How do we create equal principles to defend and promote democracy and to replace the authoritarian push that we’ve seen recently? And I think what’s important about this is also to look at something that Brazil’s been really successful at over the last 30, 40 years since democratization. Like I’ve mentioned in this episode, Brazilians really care about their democracy. And so one of the things that they’ve done really well since the end of the dictatorship is pushed to try and incorporate all sectors of society in the decision making of public policies

Fernando Paulino: To involve social organizations, universities, researchers, to expand the debate about communication and democracy. And I think especially in terms of the social media regulation and the internet context right now, this debate expanded a lot with more people involved in this discussion.

Michael Fox: And I think this is really, really important because what Trump and Silicon Valley tech moguls are largely demanding is corporate free speech, not free speech for everybody. They want speech that can be decided behind closed doors. They want speech where there’s hidden algorithms in which nobody knows what they are and they’re decided by Musk or some high end people within these social media firms. That is not free. That does not create a free media. That doesn’t create free speech. It’s the exact opposite. And so what Fernando talks about is the need for diversity when we build public policies around things like social media, online speech and regulations.
We need to think about how do we make these decisions in which more people are included, other voices are included, and not just rich powerful men from Silicon Valley. I think this is really important as we’re looking forward and trying to grapple with these questions, free speech, the whole idea of free speech is it has to be at the root of our democracy. And if it is leading us in the direction of less speech, if it is leading us in the direction not of democracy, but of authoritarianism, if it’s leading us in the direction of a space where less people have a voice and less people have the ability for their speech to be heard, then something is drastically wrong. And this goes back a little bit, Max, to what I was talking about in the last episode with Maryanne Franks.

Speaker: The First Amendment’s one job is to keep us from becoming a totalitarian society. That’s its primary job. Everything else is secondary. And if your free speech doctrine, if your free speech law isn’t keeping us from sliding into fascism, but is instead accelerating our path to fascism, then it’s not working.

Michael Fox: And I think we need to look at what do we want from our free speech? What do we want of our media sphere? And this is something that people in Brazil are trying to grapple with. When they weren’t able to pass the social media regulation law, then they started to piecemeal things. And so they started to look at, okay, well, let’s pass a law having to do with children and social media. Let’s look at this other case. And so they’re looking at how to break this apart and pass these smaller laws in order to still get in the direction they want to get into. We need to understand speech within democracy. And if that is being undermined as it clearly is right now and when countries like the United States are using the discourse of free speech to attack and undermine the Democratic principles of a foreign sovereign nation, we absolutely have a problem and we need to understand it like that.

Maximillian Alvarez: Mike, you said earlier that Brazilians are very proud of their democracy. I don’t think a lot of Americans are anymore. I think that we grew up to feel proud about it, but like right now there’s so little to be proud about. But also like I remember growing up again in the ’90s and early aughts and sort of being berated by older generations of how we didn’t know what these freedoms meant. We didn’t know what it meant to sacrifice and die for our country and the freedom of speech and freedom of religion and yada, yada, yada. And that was the sort of message that we got, but simultaneous with you should be grateful for all the rights that you have and go live the best life that you can with them. And like now is the moment where we got to fight for something and it’s not just something we got to fight for everything.
Everything that we hold dear is at risk of going away. Democracy and all the people who fought for that idea over the centuries is at risk and we are now the ones who have to pick up that fight. And I don’t know about you, brother, but like I’m ready to rumble. Like I said, I ain’t going down without a fight and I’m not giving up on these principles. This is too beautiful of a country. This is too important of an idea and people’s lives are worth too much to just give up on so that Jeff Bezos can have three more yachts and Elon Musk can have another trillion dollars and a space rocket to Mars. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is unacceptable and I will not accept it. Neither will you and neither should anyone listening to this.

Michael Fox: Max, thank you so much for joining me, man. I really appreciate it. It’s been fantastic.

Maximillian Alvarez: Thanks for having me, brother. Sorry I talked so much.

Michael Fox: Folks, that is all for now. Thanks for listening. Next time we hop across the pond to Europe to take a deep look at their definition of free speech, how countries there are fighting disinformation and also grappling with these same questions of social media. That’s next time on The Battle for Free Speech. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you like this series, please do us a favor. Go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe, or tell a friend about it and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. This podcast is now on Blue Sky, not X. Just search for the Battle for Free Speech. If you’d like to find out more about the Battle for Free Speech and my work on other podcasts, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox, or you can follow the link in the show notes.
There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work. I’m adding links to all the people who I spoke with today in the show notes. A huge thanks and shout out to Max Alvarez. You can find his Working People Podcast wherever you listen. Also, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. The Battle for Free Speech is a production of the Real News. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The campaigns are underway ahead of Brazil’s October elections

And U.S. President Donald Trump is doing his best to sway the vote…

“Lula, Lula!”

Thousands of supporters of leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva attended his campaign launch in mid August.

Karen Silva

“We came to support Lula, especially in his last election. And we believe that we are going to win. This is a fact.”

They filled May 1st Stadium in Sao Bernardo do Campo….

A place, where Lula led an iconic metal workers strike and rally in 1979.

They say Lula has changed their lives. 

Raimunda Silva Santos

“Yeah, he changed my life. He changed the life of my whole family.”

During his years in office, he promoted education, health and social programs. He helped to lift millions from poverty. They have not forgotten.

Raimunda Silva Santos

“Wow, this is the greatest joy of my life. I’m 76 years old. I’m so happy. Lula is coming to stay. He’s an incredible person. He’s helped a lot of people there in the northeast. We owe a lot to Lula.”

They want him back for a fourth and final term.

Valmir Lima, Movement of People Affected by Dams

“Lula will win with the strength of social movements, of the movements of people affected by dams, all the social movements that are helping on his campaign. And all of civil society.”

Applause

Lula has promised to continue to fight poverty, promote industry, create jobs and invest in Brazil’s future.

Lula

“What kind of a future do you want for the Brazilian people if you don’t invest in education? What future do you want for the Brazilian people if you don’t invest in health? What future do you want if you don’t invest in jobs?” 

Lula

“We need to win these elections. To elect our people to congress so we can do everything we need to do for this country.”

Lula’s challenger is the son of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. 

His name is Flavio Bolsonaro. He’s a Senator and he launched his campaign in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro.

Flavio Bolsonaro 

“Come with me and rescue our nation. Brazil above all. God above everyone. Brazil above all. God above everyone!”

Flavio is in the race, because his father is under house arrest. 

Former president Jair Bolsonaro was first barred from running for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Last year, he was convicted of attempting to carry out a coup to return to power.

His son, Flavio, has attacked the left, and promised to fight crime and insecurity, cut bureaucracy, promote private business and privatizations, and develop close ties with the United States

He spoke at the US Conservative Political Action Conference in March.

Flavio 

“Let me look you in the eyes and tell you,“we will win.”

Much of his discourse, and that of his supporters, is wrapped in a religious language of good versus evil.

“You are the son of hope. You are the first born. You received the legacy of representing your father. And now, for everything that is more sacred on the face of the earth, honor your father. Honor his days on earth.”

That goes over well with his evangelical supporters, an important base for Bolsonaro and far-right politicians in Brazil.

Glayson Araujo is a youth pastor at an evangelical church in a working class neighborhood of São Paulo. He joined others on the streets in mid August to promote Bolsonaro and other far-right candidates running for local office.

Glayson Araujo

“I believe that Flavio Bolsonaro is the only viable candidate, who can beat Lula and the Workers Party.”

Glayson Araujo

“I am a Christian here, I behave as a Christian, but I am also a political activist. Here on the streets to defend my beliefs.”

Flavio Bolsonaro also has powerful support in high places.

In particular… from Donald Trump.

The U.S. president is a longtime ally of his father, Jair Bolsonaro. 

Last year, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil, in part, because of the country’s trial against the former president. In May, Trump met with Flavio Bolsonaro at the White House. In June, he reposted an article over Truth Social that said Brazil was his next big challenge. He recently imposed new tariffs on the country and revoked the U.S. visa of the Brazilian ambassador.

Igor Fuser is a professor of foreign relations at Brazil’s ABC Federal University.

Igor Fuser

“This is not just about the United States trying to remove the government of a left-wing party, the workers Party or a left-wing leader, which is Lula. It’s about subjecting Brazil to the policies of the United States. And Brazil, being the largest country in Latin America, is precisely the biggest obstacle to the American project of global dominance of the Western Hemisphere.”

Over the last year, Trump has pushed the United States into a new era of dominance over Latin America the likes of which the region has not seen in decades.

Boat strikes in the Caribbean. The U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of president Nicolas Maduro. The oil blockade on Cuba.

And Trump throwing his weight around… and meddling in elections across Latin America.

It is all justified by a renewed Monroe Doctrine…

Pete Hegseth

”President Trump has established the Trump corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine. And the War Department is implementing it as fast as we can.”

Brazil is the latest battleground.

Igor Fuser

“So, it is clear that the United States is doing everything, and will do everything possible to prevent the re-election of Lula in the next elections.”

Fuser says that if Flavio Bolsonaro wins, he will bow to Trump and the United States.

Igor Fuser

“Brazil will become a country under the tutelage of the United States, a colony, or almost a colony, of the United States, as it already happens with Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and many others. And if Lula is victorious in these elections, we will live a very intense period of confrontation between the two countries.”

Fuser says the U.S. stated dominance over Latin America imposed by Trump is analogous to the control of the Soviet Union over the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War, under a Russian foreign policy imposed by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1968.

Igor Fuser 

“So, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, all those countries were formally independent countries, with their own government, their own laws, their representation in the United Nations, but these countries were not autonomous, they did not have sovereignty. Any movement that they made that clashed with the interests of the Soviet Union was repressed. Some of them were invaded, etc. So, we are living in Latin America a Brezhnev Doctrine, capitalist, imperialist, dictated by Donald Trump.”

Lula has accused Trump of trying to influence Brazil’s October election. Lula’s allies are taking action ahead of the vote…. to stand up to Trump and to push for Lula’s reelection. Brazil has denied visas to U.S. State Department officials who they feared wanted to travel to Brazil to cast doubt about the country’s electoral system. People are hitting the streets to campaign for Lula, who has long stood against U.S. intervention in Latin America. Over the next two months, Brazil will be a key battleground for Latin American sovereignty against Trump’s attack on the region. 

For The Real News, I’m Michael Fox. Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Inequality Watch Report, a show that examines government policy and action through the lens of extreme economic inequality, the existential issue of our time. Today, we’re going to discuss a topic that defines who holds power in America and how they keep it despite growing voter dissatisfaction amid a historic wealth imbalance. It’s a story of money, access, and self-enrichment that is at the root of the bad policies and broken institutions we all struggle with daily. And it’s an issue that transcends the nominal state of play in this country to ensure entrenched power never loses its grip on our wavering democracy. I am talking about, of course, the hoards of cash that have turned our political system into a pay-for-play utopia since the infamous Citizens United decision in 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could make unlimited independent expenditures to influence elections, super PACs, and other vehicles have transformed our elections into a veritable auction to the highest bidder.

But there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes where all this money is going, how it’s warping our electoral system, and ultimately who is cashing the checks. To help us uncover the dark details of how the system constrains us, we will be speaking with journalist and filmmaker David Sirota. But first, I want to check in with my reporting partner and co-host, Steven Janis, to set the stage for our conversation. Steven, how are you?

Stephen Janis:

Very beleaguered. Very beleaguered by the cash system you were just talking about, the ATM and politics.

Taya Graham:

Have I already depressed you?

Stephen Janis:

Yes, quite a bit.

Taya Graham:

Stephen, there was a question I had for you. There was a weird mystery in democratic circles that was sort of a one-day story, but it speaks to a less talked about aspect of today’s topic. It’s a missing chapter from the so-called Democratic autopsy of the 2024 election. What was it about and why do you think it’s important to our discussion today?

Stephen Janis:

Well, the basic story was that the Democratic Party didn’t want to release an autopsy in their 2024 loss to Trump. So there was a lot of controversy about that. Eventually they released it, but then the New York Times broke a story about a missing chapter from that report. And the missing chapter was really interesting. The fact that they left this out was talked about the consultant class that works elections that literally had somehow through this entire process of running elections obtained generational wealth. Generational wealth. That’s a direct quote from the New York Times story. And so that just really got my attention. I know money in politics is ridiculous at this point in our historic run towards authoritarianism, but I had no idea that you could get generational wealth. And I do recall a tweet from our guest, David Sirota, talking about people after 2024, all these consultants going to beaches and living the luxurious life thanks to their consultant fees for these elections.

So that really, I think was something that just stunned me that you could become that wealthy losing.

Taya Graham:

I think I chose the wrong line of work apparently. Generational wealth. Exactly. Incredible. I think this explains why working people’s issues are always on the back burner. I mean, we both cover Capitol Hill and despite a recent poll showing that 91 million Americans say they could not afford quality healthcare if they needed it, we can go months without hearing even a peep about it. It’s just silence. But I’m sure our guest will have plenty to say about it. David Sarota is the founder of the investigative news organization, The Lever. He is a former speechwriter for senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and was nominated for an Oscar for his work creating the story for the Netflix film Don’t Look Up. He’s also the producer of the podcast series, The Master Plan. I could go on, but we wouldn’t have time for the interview. So David, let me just say thank you so much for joining us.

David Sirota:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Taya Graham:

So first question, just to get a sense of this consultant class and how their role in politics and how much money they’re pocketing and the report, it actually cited generational wealth for these people. How on earth are political consultants soaking up this much money just working for a campaign?

David Sirota:

Well, it has to do with in many cases how their fee structure works. A lot of the way the consultant fee structure works is related to how many television ads are purchased. So they get in a lot of these deals a cut of the buy. So the larger a TV ad buy is, the more the consultant stands to make. Now obviously that creates, there’s sort of a conflict of interest problem there, which is if your main campaign strategist stands to benefit from a certain form of spending and will not benefit from other forms of spending, then the consultant is more likely and is really financially incentivized to suggest that the campaign spend in the way that it benefits the consultant rather than spending in different ways. So in practice, it’s not that TV ads aren’t important in elections. They certainly are, but a disproportionate amount of campaign budgets go into TV on campaigns where the consultant is paid as a percentage of the cut of the buy.

And in many cases, less money goes into mail, goes into organizing, goes into a field and ground game. It’s like there’s a baked in financial incentive. And we’re talking about in these major races, we’re talking about millions and millions of dollars that are at stake here. If you’re a consultant who’s getting a cut of a hundred million dollar ad buy, I mean you are making a ton of money.

Stephen Janis:

And David, what do you say to the idea this is generational wealth being generated for these consultants? Do you think the New York Times or the reporting from the autopsy was accurate in that, that these people are making that amount of money doing this?

David Sirota:

Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me. I guess it surprises me that this is mentioned in this conversation because this is a really taboo topic, but yes, we’re talking about just enormous sums of money. And to be clear, look, I’ve worked on a lot of campaigns before I was a journalist. I understand people on campaigns need to get paid. I mean, it’s real work, it’s hard work. But when we’re talking about the levels of money that we’re talking about here, I mean this is something that’s way beyond that.

Taya Graham:

You know what? I was curious, how much are these people, and they’re vested in what we would call the great moderation fallacy, which is that voters actually want a moderate or a centrist path. So basically how much are these folks responsible for sowing doubt in the party when a progressive candidate wins? The pundits are on the same page with the same talking points about how the Democrat socialists are somehow bad for the party. How are these people responsible for making progressives look to be the lesser choice even when voters seem to be supporting them?

David Sirota:

I think a lot of it has to do, as we’ve been discussing, it has to do with the money and the financial incentives. There’s huge money to be made, not just on campaigns, but there’s actually even bigger money to be made if you’re working for advising a consultant for super PACs. Super PACs are these supposedly outside entities that are spending huge money in elections. And obviously those PACs, the biggest of them are funded by billionaire donors, oligarch donors, corporate donors, donors who have a vested interest in the status quo, in the economic status quo. So if you’re a consultant who’s working at the nexus of campaigns and super PACs and you know your next job is going to be at a corporate or oligarch funded super PAC and you’re also working, you know that those Super PACs pick consultants from specific kinds of campaigns and candidates, well guess what?

There is a kind of nexus between what that consultant is going to advise and who their next client is. I mean that is really where this is at. The consultant class appropriates the agenda of the donor class and the consultant class is advising the candidates. And you mentioned the media. I mean look, billionaire and oligarch and corporate owned media has a viewpoint. It has a political agenda. It’s not to say that good journalism can’t be done inside of corporate media and the like, it certainly can, but there is a filter there.

Stephen Janis:

So I mean is this why we keep hearing this question come up again and again on CNN and other punditry saying, well, is win of democratic socialists bad for the party rather than inquiring or trying to understand why people would vote for democratic socialists? It’s like a mantra. They say it every time. All they talk about is why it’s bad. Is this coming kind of from that consultant industrial complex that you’re talking about, like the intersection of this wealth they’re making versus actually listening to the voters?

David Sirota:

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the conversation about electability, I put that in quotes, this idea that candidates can’t be too populist, too far left, the Democrats shouldn’t nominate them because they can’t win general elections. I mean, I’m old enough to remember when Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the media said that Barack Obama could not win a general election. I’m old enough to remember when the Democratic Party elites and the media sort of celebrated Donald Trump being nominated as the Republican presidential candidate because they

Stephen Janis:

Though

David Sirota:

He couldn’t win a general election. Electability is sort of this manufactured idea that anything that strays too far from the norm inside of where politics and democratic politics specifically is can’t actually end up winning a general election. And I think that that’s how this sort of frame is laundered into the conversation. So then it becomes that DSA candidates or economic populist candidates, they supposedly have an electability problem. Oh, it’s not necessarily that they may be wrong on specific issues. It’s that even if they are right, if democratic voters vote for them, those candidates can’t win general elections. And what I see happening is that the corporate democratic faction is sort of weaponizing this argument and also playing a role in sort of wish casting that idea into reality that you see in various races where when populist candidates win the nomination for a general election, that the corporate faction is still attacking and criticizing them in the general election, even though they are now the candidate going up against the MAGA Republicans.

And I think what that speaks to is that the corporate faction of the Democratic Party in specific here is willing to potentially lose general elections to MAGA and Republicans

If that is the cost of maintaining the corporate faction’s power inside the Democratic Party.

Taya Graham:

Incredible. Now just to touch on your podcast, which is the Master Plan for those who haven’t heard it yet, I know it gives a history of something we’re dealing with at the moment, which is the Unitary Executive Theory of Power and of course our current president, Donald Trump, but it also focuses on systemic corruption that you say affects all of our lives. So this isn’t just about one man, right?

David Sirota:

Absolutely. So the first season of Master Plan was about the 50 year plot to legalize corruption. And that story basically starts, and both seasons do, excuse me, in the early 1970s in the aftermath of Watergate. Watergate was the first real dark money scandal of the modern era. And what we trace is how conservatives, and they wrote this down in documents and we have all the evidence there, they really made a blueprint to deregulate the campaign finance system, equate corporations with people under the law and narrow the definition, the legal definition of bribery. And they did that because they understood that they became nervous that elections were causing the government to react to what the people wanted. And the Powell memo that we talk about in the, it was a memo written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, talks about how at that time conservatives, oligarchs, corporations need to invest in politics because the government had become too responsive to what the people wanted.

So one way you deal with that if you’re an oligarch and you think that’s a problem, the one way you deal with that is to turn elections into auctions, is to turn your one person, one vote democracy into a $1, one vote oligarchy. So that was season one. This relates to season two in this way. So that’s the first pillar of how you, if you think democracy is a problem, you legalize corruption, you turn elections into auctions. The other thing you do is what we trace in season two. You try to concentrate as much power as possible in the hands of one person and strip it away from more small democratic institutions and all the ways power is dispersed across the country. You concentrate that power in the hands of one person and then make sure your person is that person. And that is what we are tracing in season two called the Kingmakers, which is about essentially the unitary executive theory, where this idea came from.

Because again, it started after Watergate where Watergate was seen as a crisis of an imperial presidency. Congress passes a bunch of laws to strip power from the executive branch and it catalyzes a conservative backlash that carries through the Reagan administration, obviously into the George W. Bush administration with the war on terror and into the Obama administration, I should say, with its use of drone warfare to say that the executive branch gets to make all of the decisions. And so the point is, you asked is what’s going on today, Donald Trump, the situation, is that all just one person? No, Donald Trump is in an office with a control panel of tools that were handed to him and a system of legalized bribery that was handed to him by 50 years of plots.

Taya Graham:

To your point about how these oligarchs are essentially controlling our conversation and controlling our national narrative, and Stephen and I are actually on Capitol Hill quite a bit, rarely do we ever hear anyone talk about healthcare despite what could be described as a literal crisis in the country. I looked at a recent report from Yale University and it estimated 27 million Americans don’t have healthcare. It’s top of the list in the polls in regard to priority concerns from Americans, and yet we’re hearing silence on Capitol Hill. Would you be willing to connect the dots with some of the reporting on your podcast about systemic corruption and our current healthcare crisis?

David Sirota:

Absolutely. I mean, I think this has a lot to do with how money doesn’t just buy legislative favors, money also buys silence. And sometimes not even a transaction has to occur in order for silence to nonetheless be purchased. And it works in a lot of ways in this way, that if you’re a senator, if you’re a congressperson, you know implicitly now that if you propose a bill to deal with the healthcare crisis that let’s say challenges the power of or threatens the profits of the private health insurance industry, you know that what you’re doing is potentially provoking that very powerful money interest to spend a lot of money to get you thrown out of Congress. So many legislators basically choose to not do anything or not say anything for fear of sticking their neck out and seeing their political career ended. Money doesn’t necessarily have to even be transacted for that situation to exist.

And so what I’m describing really is the norm, that there is an implicit threat that if anybody tries in a serious way to deal with the healthcare crisis, they will be targeted. We know this, by the way, from the Obama era where the first thing that the Obama administration said when it got into office and started pushing for some kind of healthcare reform was we are ruling single payer healthcare off the table. It was immediately the administration made an announcement that this is not part of the conversation. And this is only at that point, four years after Barack Obama, when he campaigned for the Senate, said he’s a supporter of Medicare for All. We just need to get a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president. And four years later they had that and they immediately said, “We’re not even going to talk about this.” And I think that was because they saw the collective power of the healthcare industry and said, “If we do this, there will be a ton of spending to try to get every member of our party thrown out of office.” And they also ruled out the public option.

So my point in just mentioning this is that even though money doesn’t get transacted, money is overlaying and creating the political conditions at all times.

Stephen Janis:

One thing I really appreciate about the podcast is it goes back 50 years, which a lot of times reporters, we get caught up in the contemporary moment and don’t understand the roots of this. But I was thinking when I was listening to it that all of the sort of trends we’ve seen in economic inequality, and this show is about economic inequality, started about the time your podcast starts digging into this sort of systemic corruption. I mean, is inequality intertwined in this story in terms of how the process that you kind of illuminate sort of set the seeds for this almost traumatic wealth inequality and wealth imbalance now? Are they intertwined in that sense?

David Sirota:

So there’s an amazing website. People can Google it. I think if they put just the year 1971 into Google, you’ll find it where it traces how so many trends started in the year 1971. It’s kind of amazing, like de-unionization, inequality, et cetera, et cetera. I do not think it is an accident that so many of the trends started at roughly that time. This is the lead up to the Watergate era. This is a moment where the consumer movement and the broader left has sort of culminates a lot of its agenda, right? Medicare, Medicaid, the great society, all this is culminating. Ralph Nader is having huge success, regulatory success in Congress, but there is this backlash. A well oiled, moneyed, conservative machine is starting in earnest to build what ultimately ends up culminating in MAGA. And I think that that machine was based on preserving and expanding the wealth of the people who were funding that machine.

We’re talking about people like Joseph Kors to name somebody, like the Kochs. That machine started to be built then and it was a machine designed ultimately for wealth protection for that small group of people. And this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s not a theory. It was a conspiracy. And look, they used the tools of the government, they used the laws of the land and the lobbying system and the campaign finance system to get what they wanted. And we are now here living through that reality. So when I think people look at the affordability crisis, when they look at gilded age levels of inequality, we have to understand that goes along with the corruption that we’re talking about. The original gilded age was also one of the most infamously corrupt ages in American history. These two things go together. The wealthy and the powerful are buying politicians, buying elections, buying policy outcomes that preserve and expand the wealth of the already wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

This is the oldest story in America.

Taya Graham:

You broke a story about a really troubling phenomenon inside the Democrat political machine, and it basically uses dark money to push or bolster so-called moderate candidates. The organizations you identified were called the Bench and Majority Democrats. Could you explain how these organizations work and what’s really behind them in terms of pushing this moderation fallacy we keep on coming upon?

David Sirota:

Right. So listen, we’ve seen iterations of this for most of the post New Deal era of politics. And I would pinpoint that to probably in the modern era starting in the 1980s. You had a movement among, they were called at one point so-called Atari Democrats. Then they became the Democratic Leadership Council. Now they exist as groups like Third Way. So this is not something new. And you’re right, they exist like a group like the Bench and Majority Democrat. They have different names and different faces, but it’s the same idea. And the idea is that the Democrats need to abandon their new deal roots in order to compete with Republicans and to do that, to compete with Republicans for business support, corporate support, oligarch support, and all of those entities’ money. This has been going on now for 40 plus years. And so I think this is the latest iteration of that.

You have shadowy billionaires funding this network of groups and think tanks, which are designed to support candidates who are, and I’m putting it in quotes here, like moderate. But what that really means is much more corporate and oligarch friendly. And again, they don’t come out and say that. They are cast as we are pushing this because these are the most electable candidates. They’re not acknowledging the actual mission of what’s going on. They’re shrouding it in the veneer of what seems like a rational and logical political argument. But what’s really underneath here, it’s not a coincidence that there is billionaire money and there’s big money that wants specific things from these politicians.

Stephen Janis:

Citizens United obviously is the core of this story in terms of things getting worse in the past decade, but there is a recent decision, NRSC versus Federal Election Commission, which also I guess loosens some of the restrictions on spending and coordinating. Can you talk a little bit about your concerns about that decision and how you think it’ll make this political campaign finance system even worse?

David Sirota:

So Citizens United mostly dealt with so-called outside Super PAC spending. The idea was that these Super PACs, which are backing specific candidates, because they are supposedly independent from the candidates, they can’t be regulated because they have free speech rights, they have First Amendment rights. That ruling, now I say all this understanding and implying that those Super PACs aren’t in practice really very independent from those candidates, right? It’s almost like a fallacy, but the Supreme Court’s argument was they’re independent, so they can’t be corrupting, and so their First Amendment rights suspend must be protected. What Citizens United left in place though was the government’s interest in preventing straight up quid pro quo corruption means that campaign contribution limits directly to candidates can still be maintained because you can’t argue that a donation directly to a candidate cannot be corrosive from a corruption standpoint, cannot be a vehicle of quid pro quo corruption.

So even in the post Citizens United era, campaign contribution limits directly to candidates have been maintained. Well, along comes this case and what this case sought to do, a case spearheaded by JD Vance, we call it Citizens United 2.0. It

Was designed to say that there was a law in place to preserve those campaigns contribution limits to say, listen, you can’t route your campaign contributions through a party to get around the campaign contribution limits to a candidate, right? You need to make sure that if a donor wants to give a candidate six figures worth of money way above the campaign contribution limit, they can’t just be able to give it to their party and know that their party’s going to coordinate as if they were the candidate with the candidate to spend the money. So the Republicans led by JD Vance went into court to say that law should be taken away. And so the Supreme Court agrees. And so now what we have, we have a much larger conduit through which big donors can now give much larger amounts of money to political parties and the political parties can spend in coordination with those candidates.

So what that does in practice, it means that the original campaign contribution limits that were designed to prevent corruption, they were just circumvented. They were just significantly weakened and widened. A much larger amount of money can now be funneled directly to candidates.

Taya Graham:

I was just wondering if you could make the public understand just one thing about corruption that normally our legal systems obscure or political systems obscure or the oligarchs are actively working to obscure, what would it be? What would you want voters to understand and know?

David Sirota:

I’d want voters to understand and know that there’s a direct connection between the policies that are harming them and the corruption that’s taking place. That when they’re paying a higher prices for a medicine, a medicine developed already at US taxpayer expense, most major medicines are originally developed, we’ve already paid for them as taxpayers. The average person should know that the reason that they are now, when they need that medicine for some illness or the like, the reason they’re paying the world’s highest prices for that medicine is because the pharmaceutical industry gave a lot of money to politicians to rescind the rule that said if a drug is developed at taxpayer expense, it has to be sold to taxpayers on the market at a fair price. That rule was removed because the pharmaceutical industry gave a lot of money to politicians to get them to remove it.

I could go on and on and on, but I guess what I’m getting at is that every policy that is responsible for the affordability crisis in the United States can be traced back to a policy written and bought by big money. That corruption is not some esoteric abstract issue. Corruption is why the working class and middle class of this country is being immiserated.

Stephen Janis:

David, before we let you go, I’ve been wanting to ask you this question. If Bernie Sanders wins in 2016 or in 2020, would we even be talking about Donald Trump? I mean, if the Democrats let Bernie Sanders win rightfully those primaries, do you think we’d ever even be having. Would he have beaten Donald Trump either way?

Taya Graham:

Ooh, that’s

David Sirota:

Interesting. It’s hard to run that counterfactual. I mean, I know one of Donald Trump’s pollsters said after 2016 they though Bernie Sanders might’ve beaten Donald Trump, would’ve been a stronger candidate against Donald Trump. It’s hard to know, but I take it back a little farther. I think the more interesting. The question that haunts me, and I think should haunt us all,

Is whether there would’ve been a Donald Trump phenomenon had Obama and the Democrats when they had a super majority or a near super majority, had they really genuinely delivered a new, new deal as was rhetorically promised in 2008. I think a lot about in 1938, FDR gave this speech, it was about democracy and he had said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Democracy did not go away in other countries.” He’s looking out at Europe and the like. He said it did not go away in other countries because people there didn’t like freedom, didn’t like democracy. Democracy went away because people saw a dysfunctional government and they ultimately decided to vote to get something to eat. The idea being that the New Deal actually significantly delivering in a real way for the working class, FDR understood it to be an anti-fascist program, a way to prevent the rise of fascism in the United States.

The idea that if you raise people’s hopes and you don’t deliver for them, you will sow a level of disillusionment that will be channeled by the right. So I think a lot about those two years, certainly those first two years in the Obama administration, that

Had the administration used its political capital to serious Deliver for the working class rather than bailing out bankers who were foreclosing on 10 million people, rather than ruling out single payer healthcare and getting rid of the public option and instead passing a kind of heritage foundation version of healthcare reform. Granted, better than the healthcare system before it, but not a full delivery on the promise. Had the Obama administration used that political capital and the Democratic Party used its political capital to really deliver, would there have been a Donald Trump? Now that is a question I don’t know the answer to. Maybe there still would’ve been, but I do know this. 200 plus counties voted twice for Barack Obama and then voted for Donald Trump. So I think when you look at that, it’s hard to say, “Well, Trump only got elected because of racism.” I think you have to be honest and look deeper and say people were extremely disillusioned.

The Democrats, yes, they chose to put up in 2016 a nominee who seemed like an avatar of the kind of problems that people were disillusioned with. And people voted for the political version of the Joker. They voted for Donald Trump to just blow up the system. I’m not saying I think that was a good thing at all, obviously, but I think that is what happens. And what I worry about is looking ahead to the next set of elections. If a Democratic president is elected in 2028, making big, bold promises and does not deliver, do we relive that cycle again? And is the next Joker who gets elected at the end of that disillusioning cycle, is that somebody who’s smarter, shrewder, and even more dangerous than Donald

Stephen Janis:

Trump?

David Sirota:

That’s what haunts me.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, even now it doesn’t seem like the Democrats are making a great case for a new new deal that we can see on Capitol Hill.

David Sirota:

Not yet. I mean, listen, listen, I’m not apologizing for the Democrats.

Stephen Janis:

Understood.

David Sirota:

I think their argument in this election is put us into power so we can at least be a check on the last two years of Donald Trump. I think that’s actually a fair argument. I think what everyone should be watching for is in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, who is proposing what? Who looks like and who can we detect is really serious about delivering in a real way? Because if whoever gets the nomination and if they win the election, if they do not deliver, we are going to live through this cycle again and it will be even worse.

Taya Graham:

David, what you said was absolutely amazing and that’s what should be keeping the consultant class awake at night despite their generational wealth stuffed in their pillows and mattresses.

David Sirota:

Absolutely amazing. I mean, you’d hope. And look, to be clear, I’m heartened by some of the elections happening right now. We are finally at a point where it seems like Democratic voters are not only angry at what’s going on in the country, but disillusioned with their own party’s leadership. And I think that’s actually a moment of opportunity to actually fundamentally change that party, to fundamentally make it into a vehicle that actually is serious about delivering. But to be clear, the corporate faction of that party is not going to give up power without a big fight. So I don’t think there’s been some encouraging elections, but I don’t think it’s an inevitability that this all goes in a sort of positive constructive direction. There is a lot of power and money that is trying to stop that from happening.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. David, we don’t want to keep you too long. We promise to respect your time, but I have to say this has been an incredible conversation. We are so lucky to have an investigative journalist like you watching the machinations of power and the threat that it poses to our democracy. We have to thank you so much for your time and we really hope that we’ll speak to you again in the future.

David Sirota:

Anytime. Thank you so much for having me.

Taya Graham:

We really appreciate you so much. Thank you. Okay, Steven, before I do my final rant or analysis, do you have any thoughts about ourdiscusion you

Stephen Janis:

Want

Taya Graham:

To share? Absolutely. I bet.

Stephen Janis:

Okay. Tell you, I was really struck by the idea that democracy has to deliver to survive. I mean, that’s a really important concept. We talked about this with Dr. Richard Wolf, who told us in terms of the Cold War, there was a concerted effort to make people’s lives better because otherwise democracy would not survive. And I think that is a critical takeaway from what we see covering Capitol Hill where there’s just no attention to the immediate needs. We watched while the Democrats were Republicans, and I don’t blame the Democrats for this, where the Republicans couldn’t even pass ACA subsidies so that people could keep their healthcare. If democracy is going to survive, then this political system has to freaking deliver like now, and people have to make promises and keep them. And it just really struck me that democracy in this age of inequality is not delivering for the people it’s supposed to serve.

And if it doesn’t, that’s why it’s going to collapse. Not because Donald Trump is an idiot or we hate him or whatever, not because of those things and not even because of MAGA, because overall the system doesn’t deliver. And I hope that who’s ever going to try to get elected in 2028 is listening to that important point. You got to deliver real benefits to the people who live in this country.

Taya Graham:

You know what’s crazy, Steven? What you just said actually almost sounds like a foreign concept that a politician makes a promise and is supposed to deliver on said promise. Right. I agree. That sounds groundbreaking for some reason.

Stephen Janis:

It really does. Sounds revolutionary.

Taya Graham:

So if there is one takeaway from David’s insight to how our political system works and doesn’t, it has to be the role of fear and making us believe change is simply impossible. I mean, the whole moderation fallacy he discussed with us is based upon the idea that fear is more important than any idea or change or simply transforming a system that does not serve us the people. Taking risks, believing something is possible and embracing change is just foolish, that new ideas, new candidates and new voters should be avoided all because a party establishment fears it will lose power. And that’s where I think the establishment Democrats and Trump intersect because in a sense, President Trump is the perfect foil for a party seeking to maintain the status quo. He’s the perfect instrument of fear. We are told the only way to rid ourselves of him is to stick with the establishment that lost to him twice.

Yes, that’s right. Remember, they actually already lost twice. That’s why when you turn on the mainstream media, you hear a chorus of highly paid anchors and apparently very rich pundits having the same circular conversation. It goes something like this. Will the success of democratic socialists hurt the party’s chances in November? Will the historic wins of popular candidates with new ideas keep the establishment dems from taking their rightful place in the chronicles of power come the midterms? But here is what you don’t hear. And Steven, please correct me if I’m wrong.

Stephen Janis:

I will.

Taya Graham:

What you don’t hear is a question and it’s a simple one. It’s actually just a one word question. Why? Why do you think voters want change? Why did so many young people show up at the polls when socialists are on the ballot? Why were their candidates funded by APAC and other Super PACs unpopular? And in many cases, they just outright lost. And what? I know this is really crazy. What do the voters actually want? Why have they rejected the status quo? Why have they set aside fear for something different? And why aren’t they buying the consultant class talking points that have been shoved down their throats for decades while wealth inequality flourishes and they just can’t get ahead? Why? It’s a much better question than trying to characterize every socialist Democrat as a burden. Maybe, just maybe legacy media. That’s the question you should be asking in your multimillion dollar studios with ultra rich consultants trading barbs as if there’s some sort of substantive difference between a high price democratic operative and an overpaid Republican pundit.

Perhaps you should try to understand what motivates people to support candidates your infrastructure of manufactured consent has rejected. You should ask, be curious, be interested in the people who’ve expressed dissatisfaction with the state of America today. They’re actually important. They’re just as important as the Trump voters you fetishized and chased down. Really, they’re not as irrational as you often characterize them. They’re not monolithic or unreasonable or even unreachable. Stephen and I spoke to them during Mondami’s campaign and they were more than happy to share their thoughts. Legacy media, please try listening, try understanding, try empathy. You might learn something. You might learn that while our concerns for our hyper expensive healthcare system tops poll after poll, you never talk about it. You might learn that while the earth is consumed by a historic rise in heat, you talk about wildfires, but not the policies and oil subsidies that fuel them.

Well, for those of you out there watching, I want you to know that here on our show, we’re going to try to do the opposite. We are going to listen and we’re going to learn and we promise to keep doing so in order to bring you the truth, not the truth of the pundits, not the truth of corporate media, but the only truth that matters. And that is the truth that belongs to and is spoken by we, the people. My name is Taya Graham, along with my reporting partner, Stephen Janis. Thank you so much for joining us on the Inequality Watch. And as always, we are reporting for you.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Speaker 1:

I’m going to be super brief. I largely just want to, again, thank everyone for coming out. I’m the producer of this film, but I’m sure you guys know you can’t do something like this by yourself, right? So I want to also thank the Baltimore Legacy Project Youth Crew who’s outside, who took your. I mean, they’ve just been really on point getting B-roll setting up. Really appreciate them a lot. Also, the folks that you saw in the film, thank you so much for trusting me with your voice, your story. I don’t take that lightly. And when I say you don’t do it by yourself, one of the. Oh, I also want to shout out. She’s not in here, but the narrator is actually here too. She’s part of Baltimore Legacy Project Youth Crew in the front. Her name’s Empress. Yep. But someone who is definitely in the thick of all of this with me is there’s several cinematographers, but there was one person who was the lead cinematographer, more or less the director of photography on this project.

They were also the editor who edited all of this. They also edited the trailer that I did, and there was a lot of back and forth. Do this, do this. I mean, that’s a person who I spent really most of my time with in terms of creating this. And I just wanted to give a few moments for him to just say a few words. His name is Imani. He’s making his way up here. His name is Imani. Imani.

And I’ll let you finish explaining.

Speaker 2:

No, great job, everybody. Thank you all for coming out. This was amazing, right? I mean, this was one of the best things I worked with. I’ll be real quick. My name’s Imani Mulayer. I was part of the production crew, but also the founder of the Baltimore Cinematic Universe. And for some people who know it, some people don’t, I can just let you know we are a film studio. We’re new in Baltimore with a core mission is to change division of Baltimore around the world to have a new perception of our city. Yeah. So yeah, I’m a TV producer, lifelong TV producer, two-time Emmy Award-winning. We have a whole staff of award-winning filmmakers. We have a whole advisory board of all the leading industry experts in the city. We launched in December thanks to Nancy from the Parkway. I think she was here. But yeah, there you go.

Thanks, Nancy. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Nancy Froctor back there. And since then, we already have four TV shows, one feature film, one vertical series, either in active development or already shopping to major networks. And so I started working with Rashim because I was like, how do we offer this to the Baltimore community? All of our resources, all of our pipeline. So after the success of this documentary, I said, that’s what we can do. So today I want to announce that’s what we’re doing. The Baltimore Cinematic Universe is opening up our film studio to the city, to individuals, to organizations. If you have a story that you need to tell, we do everything from feature films, TV shows, web series, social media campaigns. More importantly, we produce and we distribute. We get it out. We promote and market it. So your video will be seen by the people who need to see it.

And we work at all production levels, all budget levels. We just want to continue our mission to get that real Baltimore out. So feel free. You can contact me directly. I’ll be here for the rest of the evening. We’re online, baltimorecinematicuniverse.com. My email, Imani, I-M-A-N-I at baltimorecinematicuniverse.com. All social media, all that. But yeah, yeah, we’re here to stay. We’re going to make a difference in the city. So hopefully we can do it with y’all. Thank you.

Speaker 3:

All right. If you are a panelist, come on up to the stage. Beyond the Wire. One of the things that I’ve said, and y’all have heard me say versions of this in other premiers, that one of the beautiful things about this film is that I think it gives words, images, narratives to a feeling, to an instinct, to an inclination that I think a lot of people had, but just put words and the images to it. And one of the things that when I talk in general in policy arenas about the work of violence prevention, like the work of it, I think for a lot of people, it’s rather abstract. A lot of people don’t know the work. So what I’m going to first ask each of you to do is to introduce yourself, your organization affiliation work, and then answer this question. When a lot of people think about public safety, they think about the courts, thinking about police, think about jail.

And that’s not what any of y’all do. So in your introduction of yourself, if you can talk about your own contribution to declines in violence and homicides in Baltimore, talk about your work and your contribution to it, because it’s important for the audience to have a concrete sense of what the work is. So I’m going to start at the end with Brother Anthony and then come down this way.

Speaker 4:

I like

Speaker 5:

The plane. Thank you. Good evening, afternoon, everybody. First and foremost, I want to thank God for this opportunity. Of course, giving him all of the honor, all of the praise and all of the glory. I also want to begin by, of course, thanking Dr. Rashim for this amazing opportunity and the great work that she has done and continue to do with this project and helping us control the narrative about the real Baltimore, as we say. So I want to begin with a quote here that kind of just set the tone for me. And those who do this work will already know where this quote is from. And those connected with this facility absolutely will know where this quote is from.

Do your little part. Do whatever you can to help change these conditions because we’re moving into a critical period in history, not just for poor and oppressed people, black people, but for humanity itself. Do whatever little you can, but you need to do something. That quote is from one of my elders, one of my mentors who helped mold and shape me to be who and what I am today. The late great Eddie Conway, Eddie Marshall Conway. And so I’m honored to be here at the Real News Network where his influence is still alive and well in the work that we do. I also want to thank all of these amazing panelists here who are literally the boots on the ground and doing the work that we do. I’m honored to just share space with them anytime we get the opportunity, especially Ms. Erica here. The other two I’m with every day, practically seven days a week.

But Ms. Erica here, we have the lived experience at doing this work. She literally did the victim offender mediation in my own case, who set me down with the families of the victims in my own case, literally. So anytime I have the opportunity to be in the same space with her is a blessing because that got me off to doing the work. I couldn’t engage the work without doing that first after my own release. So right after that, that kind of gave me the license, the permission to do what was in my heart to do anyway, which was kind to help other young 15 year olds in Baltimore City not make the same horrible decision that I made at the age of 15. For the last four years, I’ve had the great honor and privilege of serving as a community engagement specialist for We Are Us where we literally boots on the ground, door to door, block by block, street by street, engaging the people in this city that most people don’t want to engage.

But we’ve been up to that assignment and that task over the last two, three years. As of August 1st, I’ve kind of moved into a new space. I’m now the director of reentry services for the We Are Us organization where I have the opportunity to work more hands-on with the people behind the walls who are preparing to come back home into the community to kind of get their mind, their heart, their spirit right, to let them know that they have a debt to pay as well even after and beyond their release from incarceration to kind of fix some of the stuff that we kind of messed up in our communities. So that reentry space and work is what I’m headed into now. And I’ll leave it at that.

Speaker 6:

Hi everybody. So I’m Erica Bridgeford. And I just got to say out loud, I just now over there realized who he was. I mean, I’ve been engaging with you in community. We’ve been hugging. I did not realize he was the same person in that mediation because the work that we do at the Baltimore Community Mediation Center is confidential work. So from the mediator side of it, we had permission from Anthony and the person that he was in mediation with. A part of what they talked about gave permission for him to tell his story about their conversation and for us to tell the story. But I’ve always told it in anonymity. So I never remembered what his name was. I remembered he was 15. I know what happened, but I never remember what his name was or what he looked like. And this is my third time seeing the film and it just hit me.

I was like, “What he talking? What?” And so over there I had to like. So okay. So I’m just blessed and amazed and shocked at my own ADHD and menopausal brain right now.

But a piece of that too is that I literally meet thousands of people a year. I have trained thousands of people at this point to be mediators and in conflict management. I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of mediations. So I’ve been in person and during the pandemic, it was during the pandemic. So we did it on Zoom, but in person, helping people resolve their conflicts, mediate things. We say it’s never too early and it’s never too late for people to sit down and have a conversation about what’s really going on between them. And so even after there’s been harm, even after people have filed assault charges, they still have the power to make the decisions about what does justice look like to them? What does resolution look like? All of that stuff. And so I have been, before I got involved in mediation, so I’m turning 54 years old this year and that’s when y’all ppose to say, “Girl, you look good.

Okay.” My favorite thing to do on any panel because I almost didn’t survive birth, but that’s a different conversation. So for at this point, over 30 years of my life, I’ve been doing something in this city to help nurture Baltimore’s peace and Baltimore’s joy. And so to Dayvon’s point, all of the things that my contribution has been taking the pain of my brother being murdered in the streets of Baltimore, my stepson being murdered, two of my cousins who were brothers being murdered and years apart from one, just since I was 12 years old, seeing people die in the streets of Baltimore, taking that pain and letting it remind me of the purpose that God gave me as my parents called me into being. And anywhere that I go saying, “Oh, if there’s something I don’t like, what is my soul calling me to do about it?

What is my part to do about it?” So I became a mediator in 2001. I became a trainer in 2002. I helped lead the 300 Men March movement. Now Baltimore Peace Movement, which was Baltimore Ceasefire. Funny story. When I left 300, I said, “Y’all not going to get me to lead a movement.” So I don’t know how I ended up leading a movement. I also, when I became a mediator, I was like, “Oh, executive director, that don’t look like the fun job. I’m never doing that job.” And now I’m the executive director at that same place. And so I’m blessed to be standing in my purpose and doing my purpose work. And I know that it is not a mistake that I was born at this time in history in Baltimore City to parents who were teenagers who said, “Let’s have a child that’s going to change the world.” And they intentionally named me after people who they believed were changing the world.

And then they nurtured me as a Black girl born with one hand in West Baltimore. They nurtured me to be everything I could possibly be. I scare them to this day.

I’ve been talking since I was five months old, so they never knew what was going to come out of my mouth. They always had to go meet with teachers because I was challenging authority. My children worry about me. It’s not safe to be in the streets after a murder happened. And that’s when I’m going. And so they nurtured me to not just be physically who I’m supposed to be, but spiritually to walk in strength and power and to not look at it like, “Oh, it’s dangerous.” I look at it like, “Oh, I’m covered. I got a gang of angels, ancestors, spirit gods.” Everybody walking with me. So it never occurs to me that I’m in danger. All it occurs to me is that people are hurting and I’m showing up with love. And I hope that people are open and allow me. I’m grateful that people allow me into their neighborhoods to just give them any little bit of love that they might need in those spaces.

And so like I was saying in the film, and I will keep saying, it doesn’t matter who is in office and what they do in their four or eight years that they have, that time is not enough to see what we are seeing happening right now in this city with these drastic drops. It is decades of work before them. It is people who kept saying, “We love our city. We’re not giving up on our city.” While the narrative is throw Baltimore in the trash, we kept saying, we going in the trash. You see trash, we see gems and value. And we kept pouring love into our city because our city is us. You can’t separate yourself from where you live. If you say, throw the city in the trash, where do you think you going there? I mean, you living in dumpsters now? And so a big part of my part to what’s happening right now is I am aware and I’m grateful that when people see my face, they see a symbol of hope.

When people see me and I say, “Oh, I look broken, but I’m whole, just like Baltimore looks broken and it’s whole.” I’m grateful that one thing I get to be at this time in history is a symbol of hope and hope in action, not just hope in theory.

Oh, that’s right. We’re used to passing mics down. We have our own this time.

Speaker 4:

It’s on. Okay. Well, what is it? Good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon. Well, I’m Ebony Harvin. I’m a pastor of New Solid Rock Church, which is located in the Pigtown area. I first want to just give honor to God. Honor to God, honor to God, honor to God. Thank God for all of you guys here. The great doctor that wrote this and put all of us together. I work with We Are Us, and I’m the project manager for the Thrive Academy. And Thrive Academy, I deal a lot with young people. And that’s my passion. I love young people. When I say I love young people, I love young people. And when I see young people, I see me. I see my children. I see nothing but greatness. And I’ve been doing this work for over 25 years. And when I say over 25 years, over 25 years.

Pastor, on Sundays because I’m a talker, I can talk, talk, talk. But this work right here, it’s about doing the work. And doing this work in these streets, as our brother Anthony mentioned, I’m with these two, like six days a week. I’ll say that we can be more in Baltimore City and there’s so much greatness in our city. We have to see beyond what we see. And I was a teen parent. I was a teen parent. And I thank God that I have an attorney. I have a school teacher. I have an entrepreneur. I did lose one of my sons to gun violence. It’ll be eight years on August the 15th, but God, but God, but God, but God. So before that happened, I was doing the work. And after it happened, it slowed me down a little. But now I just work extra harder.

I’m out there doing whatever I can to let another mother know that we’re going to do what we can to save life. We’re going to educate our young people. We’re going to make them see different and see that you can be more in Baltimore City. Some of the other things that I have done, have a used car dealership in Glen Burnie.

Speaker 6:

Come on, hustle.

Speaker 4:

Yes, yes, yes. I’ll say this, you guys. So sometimes when I get this mic in my hand, I’m like, look, let me just be quiet because I’m a little all over the place. But my most important gift, you guys, is just truly loving on our young people and loving Baltimore City. And when I say I love Baltimore City, my children say, Ma, you have so many children. What’s going on? I say, yes, the entire Baltimore City youth, they belongs to me. They belongs to me. So if y’all have any problems with the good, just, hey, let me find Pastor Ebony. So I’m not going to talk too much. I’m going to pass this mic on. But yes, you guys, just always remember this, that this city is so powerful. We’ve been through so much, but the strength, when I say the strength that this city have, the strength.

Baltimore City. And listen, five years from now, every other city that experienced some of the things, the heartache, the pain that we did, they’re going to say, wait a minute, we want to be like Baltimore City. Everybody came together on one accord because guess what? And community is unity. But once we come together, we’re going to be that change that guess what the world need to see. Not just other city that the world needs to see. So you guys, I’m going to pass this on to. He said, don’t pass the mic. I’m passing the mic. Okay. Listen, listen. I said I’m going to pass. I’m going to be quiet. Okay. I’m not passing the mic. Go for it.

Speaker 7:

Hey, good afternoon. My name is Delmont Player. I’m a lot of things. So I’m We Are Us. I’m ICAN. I’m LEC, which is Lived Experience Committee under Carolyn Shrugs. I’m AVP, Alternative to Violence Program. Absolutely. But in a nutshell, I’m the youth that you see out here. So quick story, I went to prison when I was 17 years old. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write. I became one of Maryland’s most violent and disruptive prisoners. I was sent out of state. I did Fed Time. I’ve been in and out of Supermax. I’ve been beat by the police, rives broke and everything. I was probably one of the worst prisoners in Maryland State history. And I don’t say that. I say that humbly because I want you to understand the pits that I climbed out of. But at one point, something clicked, something changed, because the more you know, the better you have to do.

I’m a Muslim. I’m an FOY, so I’m a husband, I’m a brother. But what I often like to say is that for me, the work really began to resonate for me when the gang culture really ushered into the prison system. I didn’t come in under the gang culture. When I came in, it was man everybody for every man for themselves. But at some point, the gang culture began to usher into the system. And I’ll never forget, I came into the day room one day. And I’m not saying to say this is like when the change started because for a couple years I was already fighting with who I was becoming and who the world had been telling me I was, who the system had been telling me I was, who the court systems told me I was, who the streets told me I was. But I came in the day room.

It was the older guy. They were one of our pioneers from back in the day. And when you get old in the system, it tend to chip away at you. So he wasn’t as active, as agile as he used to be. And I came to the day room and he said, back then they used to call me by my last name. He said, “Lord Player, they won’t let me get on the phone.” And I was like, “What you mean?” He said, “Man, they saying because they was clicked up. This click had this phone, this click.” So what I did, I walked around the day room. I went to everybody on the phone because I get it in. And I said, “I’m at the U. I’m out of you.” So they clips begin to end. Yeah, I’m stealing. So I would hang the phone upside. That means ain’t nobody on it, but don’t touch it.

Let the phones hang. So at some point, about three, maybe four phones was hanging. Somebody came to the day room and said, “Man, I’m trying to get on the phone. Who on the phone? I’m still at the microwave cooking.” Somebody say, “Lord, player.” So he come over to the phone. “He said, Lord, player. “He turned and me say,” Player, “he said,” Player, you on the phone? What phone you getting? “I said,” I’m getting on all of them. “I said,” Yeah, I’m getting on all of them. And I’m with all the dumb, whatever. We can do whatever. “And like I said, God had a plan. Allah had a plan for me because really I suppose died behind those walls. But I noticed that the young brothers from various different organizations was willing to follow me in my ignorance and in my stupidity. And I realized at that time that I’d had about 17 years and nothing had changed.

All the work I continuously put in, it never stopped the next kid or next man from rising to think he can take the throne. So it never really stops. So the next day, what I did was I called a group of little young brothers in the yard and I grabbed a book called Mine is the Master by James Allen. It’s a compilation of all the books he ever wrote. He wrote a lot of people know him mostly for as a man thank you. And I just would read little parables out of that book to them, and then we would just build on it. And from there, it just trickled in my teachers from Moss number six, all that. And it continued to trickle. And then I started hearing about what different organizations was doing in the streets, Peace Movement, We Our Us, Baltimore Brothers, Uncle T Channel for Change.

So what I did is I got all the good men that was in the institution that I was in, and we went to all the various organizations, BGF, Blood, Crip, Murder Inc. DMI, whatever. And we brought them onto a board in a commission. This is how I met Carolyn Shruggs. We brought them onto a board under a program that we ran called GRIP. We would’ve overseas and GRIP was gang response intervention program. And what we did was every time a beef happened, we went on the compound and brought all the gang leaders into a room to squash it. And then there was meetings that took place in the chat when the Nation of Islam chat where I would stand between two knife slingers essentially and tell them that, man, your guys can’t move and they guys can’t over. That’s what I talk about, putting our lives on the line.

So I was mediating conflict behind a wall that spills out into the community. One of my biggest supporters to this day is the men and women that I left behind the prison walls. I still mediate conflict so it don’t spill out here into society. So that’s who I am in a nutshell. And that’s my portion.

Speaker 3:

And again, for me, it’s important for people to hear those stories and hear that context. You know what I’m saying? Because it’s important, I think, to normalize the fact that this work is happening and what it takes. And what I hope people get from these responses is that this is work. Each of the people on the stage, they’re the ones that got to do it, the work that they’re doing. It takes a certain kind of person, pedigree, perspective to do it. Pastor Ebony, you talked about the importance to you of young people and really loving on young people. Could you talk about what are some of the misconceptions that people have when it comes to youth, particularly as it relates to gun violence? What are some of the things that for you, you think it’s important for this audience to know about young people and gun violence in Baltimore City?

Speaker 4:

One thing, we have to stop judging young people from what area they’re from. We have to stop judging them because of their family members. A lot of our young people are judged and truly you don’t even know them. We have to learn how to understand that none of our young people are born murderers. None of them are born criminals. Some type of trauma happened in their life. A lot of our young people are on survival mode. But if you get a chance just to know them, not the costume that they have on, because guess what? I’m going home. I’m 10 years old and I’m going to a house where my mom is out there getting high. I got to take care of a seven-year-old and a five-year-old. I don’t know where my father at. So instead of us judging, how about we just have a conversation with them?

See what they need. How can I help you? Because a lot of times these young people just need some love. They need some support. But as long as we look at them, they coming outside, that little boy bed, that little girl, look at her. But you don’t know their story. So we have to help them rewrite their story. And I’m going to say this real quick. I received my honorary doctorate degree. And at first I was sitting up there like, wait a minute, me? My son went to school all these years. And my son, he said, Ma, let me explain something to you. When I was up there, sitting up there studying at night, you was at a hospital where a child was shot. He said, when I was sitting up there worrying about a test, you was up there praying because guess what? Some little girl or somebody, something just happened to him.

He said, For 25 years, I’ll watch you work hard. And when I said work hard, work hard. He said, when I was sitting up there saying, I’m going to pass this test. He said, look, the test that I thought that I was going to pass, you was up there making things happen, relocating families, relocating young men that got caught up in mess. He said, so you deserve it. So I say on today, you guys, I didn’t. I was sitting up there like, wait a minute. Do I really deserve this? I do. I do. I’ve done over 300 funerals in Baltimore City, but God, but God. So I was able to help that family or help them in the midst of their pain. So I say this back to your question, I’m a little all over the place, so y’all mind me. Okay? All right, y’all got to get a Sunday morning message.

But no, no, no, no. So let me get real back. One thing, just please, please stop judging our young people from where they live. Stop it. When you get to know these young people, you’ll say, My God. Some of these young people have been through some things that in my 50 years I haven’t experienced, but God. And when I say but God, but God, I have a young man, and I’ll say this, he lost his mother and his father. He was 15 years old. He got himself in some trouble. His grandmother said, “What did you do to my grandson?” I said, “I listened to him because a lot of times we got to get to the root of the problem in order to fix a problem.” She said, “Wait a minute. I sent him to this therapist. I sent him everywhere.” I said, “He needs somebody to experience some things.” I said, “See, I’ve been through some things.

Amen. So I can listen. I can relate to him. Okay?” I said, “So instead of us you guys judging our young people, give them a chance.” And when I say give them a chance, just give them a chance. Just listen to him. When you see them young men on the corner, don’t walk past them. Say, “How you doing?” When I see young men, guess what I don’t say? I don’t have to say, “Pull your pants up.” Oh, that’s past Ebony right there. They’re going to pull their pants up because it’s about the relationship. And I’ll say this, when you’re doing this work, I fear nobody but God. I’m not afraid to go to East Baltimore, West Baltimore. And I grew up in Charli Hill. Love Cherry Hill. Amen. When I say love Char Hill, love Cherry Hill. So you guys, just one thing. Just always that young person want.

They want to know that, hey, somebody care about me. Somebody love me. How many want to feel loved? How many want to feel loved? That’s it right there. And that’s All they want. They just looking for someone to love them. And I’ll say this, I love on our young people too. I love the hell out of them. That’s it. There we go.

Speaker 5:

Davon, can I add something to that? You

Speaker 4:

Answer while I’m passing the mic. Okay, let me stop passing the mic.

Speaker 5:

Can I add something to that on the young one of you?

Yes, sir. We took a group of young people to Dr. Rashim’s facility about two weeks ago, about 25 of our young people in the Baltimore Brothers Program to help Dr. Rashim with another project specifically towards youth that I hope she’ll share some more information about. But she started, when we brought them in the room, she started them off with a question that I’m going to ask you. She asked the young people that we brought to her, “What percentage do you think of young people in Baltimore City are involved in crime and violence?” And we heard all kinds of numbers, didn’t we, Doc? One said like 90%. One was like 99%. All kinds of numbers. But the actual facts, the truth is less than 5%.

But there’s a narrative that’s prevailing, that’s pervasive, that young people are not just inherently criminal, but pervasively involved in crime and violence. There’s just not no truth in it at all. And what troubles me the most about the narrative is not just the projection of the narrative, is that some people will allow themselves to be used as vehicles to portray the narrative. I’m talking about people in positions of leadership, authority, and power who make comments about young people that are just not rooted in facts, who take isolated incidents involving young people and allow themselves, their office, their position to portray narratives as if all young people in Baltimore City are doing this. I just wanted to add that to that answer.

Speaker 3:

I appreciate that. No, it’s good. So Erica, one of the things that I think in this kind of Western civilization, Eurocentric cultural environment, oftentimes spirituality gets marginalized. People tend to marginalize it. And a lot of what you talked about in the film and even what you’ve talked about a little bit on this panel so far, the importance of spirituality. And again, that’s another one of those things that for some people can feel abstract. Can you speak to the spiritual impact that the work has had and why that’s such an important aspect of the work?

Speaker 6:

Okay. So I’m going to try to describe it in a simple way, like how I would describe it to children. I used to be a preschool teacher and an elementary school teacher, so I think. Okay. All right. And what you’re talking about is what I call colonizer reindeer games. Y’all like that? Free to use it. Trademark archabrish boy. Okay. Where like, yes. Okay. So we are all more unseen than we are seen. And this is not about religion or who you call God or any of that. It is just a scientific fact. Human beings, what you are as a being, you are more unseen stuff than you are seen stuff. If we remove all of the space out of your human body, your physical mass would fit on the tip of a pen. And I mean, not a writing pen, I mean like a needle pen.

So there’s this physical aspect of there’s more to us than what we can actually see and touch, which means there’s much more going on with us.

And so if you ever wonder if that’s true, if there’s way more of you that’s unseen, your thoughts are an unseen realm. You’re right now having a gazillion thoughts that can never be physically spoken, heard, manifested. But they are a part of how you feel right now. They are a part of how you’re experiencing this. We’ve all been saying the same words to everybody in this room, but everybody in this room have not heard us say the same things because of the unseen part of you that is so vast and that influences the experience you are having as a human being. And so what we do with that unseen part of us that whispers quiet nudges to us about what we could do, what we should do, what we shouldn’t do, make this right, make that left, don’t answer that email. Ignore that person. Call your cousin and apologize.

Y’all know the shit y’all be ignoring.

There’s so much about who we are that when we just manifest a little bit of it, it changes things. And here’s the very elementary example that I used some years ago when the Baltimore Ceasefire Now, the peace movement started that it just occurred to me recently we’re seeing now. So in 2017, people were being killed every 19 hours in Baltimore. And Baltimore had more murder than it had ever seen in its history. And people were saying there’s nothing we can do about it. So murder is this vibration. So I’ve just got finished talking to you about how much you are vibration. So there’s this vibration about murder that makes you feel like you as one person, there’s nothing you can do about that. But there’s this unseen part of you that says, “But I want to do something. I feel like if I was just more kind to people because you don’t know what people are going through.

I feel like if I just shared that post that I saw that was positive so I could add to positive algorithms and the interwebs that are also vibration.” And so I compared it to an ocean because that’s what people would say. “Oh, y’all just spitting in the ocean. This little bit of stuff y’all doing, it’s not going to work. Y’all just spitting in the ocean. “So I was like,” They right. I’m just spitting in the ocean. “But if the ocean is red and the unseen parts of me are nudging me to go take a little dropper full of blue ink and just start dropping it in that ocean, somebody’s going to say,” She crazy. What is she over there doing? “Just like they told Harriet Tubman.

It’s crazy. It’s dangerous. The tide going to come in and take you away. People going to come and try to take your dropper away from you like I can’t go find another dropper and find some more blue ink. You know what I mean? Okay. And while people saying that, somebody is going to say, but that little part where she at is starting to turn purple, it looked like. Right? And somebody else is going to say, I always wanted to put some blue ink in the ocean and they going to come and put their little blue ink. And more and more people are going, they’re putting their little drops in the ocean. And before you know it, the whole ocean is turning purple like it started doing in 2023 when the murder rate was 20% less. And people was like, wait a minute. Something is happening.

And we was like, I’ve been over here at the ocean. Before y’all could see it start to change, I’ve been following my spirit. I’ve been following the calls on my heart. I’ve been healing the things inside me that need to be healed that I know are standing in the way and blocking more of my power, more of my authority, more of my confidence in whatever it is that I’m supposed to be doing in this world. And I’m over here working on me while y’all calling me crazy and my blue drops are blessed. And they call more people who say, uh-oh, well, I want to be a blue dropper too. And now that the ocean is purple and looking more blue, people that’s been talking trash about Baltimore want the credit. People that just want to lock everybody up in Baltimore want you to think it’s their policies that’s changing things.

And so the spiritual aspect by science, by universal law, when you are focused on something with strong emotion, you have no choice but to manifest into your physical experience, that thing. That is just how it works. That’s how creation works. And so we have been focused on Baltimore’s joy with strong emotion. We’ve been focused on Baltimore’s love, Baltimore’s value, Baltimore’s gangster with strong emotion. There was no choice but for us to start experiencing in our physical realm, all of the things that we know God created us to be.

Speaker 3:

So Brother Delmont and Brother Anthony, this next question is for the two of you. Both of you mentioned both on this panel and in the movie, the importance of doing work behind the walls and its influence on the work that’s happening in the streets of Baltimore. Can you talk a little bit more about the importance of, and walk through some of the mechanics of the work that happens behind the walls and how that translates out into the streets in terms of the work to reduce violence?

Speaker 7:

I knew he was going to do that.

Speaker 2:

Fight, fight, fight, fight.

Speaker 7:

So growing up in the juvenile justice system, I did Skid Straight. I did Big Brother. I did Choice Program. I did Big Brother. So I did all the youth programs, but none of them worked. The reason why they didn’t work because I didn’t sit in front of men that I resonated with. So the people they would sit me in front of was guys who was nothing like me, had experienced nothing like I experienced, who didn’t have brothers that was in and out of prison, cousins that was in and out of prison, mothers and fathers who were strung out on drugs. Everybody, guys that they hung around with 10, 15 years they sent you. So that’s the one thing that I think make us so impactful with the young men. But to be more specific is without saying names, I’ll give you a scenario of an entire family.

So a father gets locked up when me and my guys basically growing up. His father goes to jail for shooting somebody a couple blocks over. Both of them got sons. So before we even encounter each other, our families is already telling us that we don’t get along. We don’t deal with them. We don’t really know what the whole situation is about. We just inherit a beef. So now we grow up and we condition that we just don’t like these guys. So any little thing triggers the beef. Now a kid goes to jail. A father is already in jail. He goes to jail for somebody that’s involved in his family. So now he got to what we call home field advantage because the father’s already been on the scene 15, 20 years in the prison system and he considered a soldier. So now a young man has to walk into a prison system at 16, 17 years old and contend against grown men who are hardened criminals, who have been serving time for 15, 16 years, who have all kind of connects through the prison system.

So now he has to rise up and rise to the occasion. So situation like this, so now he get in, he has no uncles. He has no big cousins on the yard. So in response to that, since you did that behind the walls, and that’s my homeboy and we out here, we going to address it out here. So since you did that and we can’t get you and you got the prison system and he can’t do nothing to you, we’re going to touch your peoples out here in the street. So we going to send you a message from out here. Every time something happened, we going to hit one of yours out here. So stepping in between it, it don’t really seem like much. But the ripple effect of a lot of people in a lot of those murders, a lot of that stuff come from behind the prison walls.

Orders, hits, because somebody get touched on a yard and they feel like they can’t do nothing. So I’m going to send somebody out there to do something to your mother. There are tapes and phone recordings where they have men on the phone because somebody took somebody off for some drugs behind the wall and say, “Man, go to that house and do something, beat his mother up.” Because since he won’t act like he ain’t playing, people get on the phone, they call people parents and tell them, “If you don’t pay that money, we going to do X, Y, and Z to him.” And so how do they children respond to that? So mediating conflict behind the wall, it has a profound effect. And not just mediating conflict from behind the wall, but mediating conflict from this side. When I was speaking at the situation what happened with one of our elders and I was just saying people so quick to, like Pastor Ebony said, throw the youth away.

And the brain science is real that the brain doesn’t fully develop until the age of 25. That is a true thing. It’s not that. No. Am I saying that I didn’t know that I was doing right from wrong? Hell no. I definitely knew that.That’s why I tried to put on black to try to disguise it. But what I’m saying is you did not know the magnitude of the prophetic effect it was going to have and the ripple effect on yourself, on your family. So when something like that happened with a youth out here, that man got family on the inside. So now we got to be on the phones mediating conflict because if those young men get caught and go behind those walls, they got to stand on business. So it’s somebody back there that want to address that. If just for no reason, just because he got on the phone and heard his mother say, “Yeah, they out here doing that.” He say, “Yeah, when he come back, I’m going to knock his head off just for GP.” So yeah, it’s very important that we are mediating conflict on both sides of the fence because I’m telling you, the ripple effect that it has when somebody is stabbed behind those prison walls or somebody is shot out here on the streets, whether they’re part of organization or whatever, it spins behind those walls and vice versa.

It spills out into the streets.

Speaker 3:

And Brother Anthony, let me add to the question because I think the other thing that I’ve heard you address that I think is important for this audience to hear is WeRS has the Stop the Beef hotline. No law enforcement involvement in that process. Can you talk about the importance of that? Because I think there’s some people who can’t fathom why it’s important in that particular context for law enforcement to not be involved.

Speaker 5:

Absolutely. I’ll say this, right? There’s so much that we do on the Stop the Beef side of this work that you’re just never going to hear about. You’re never going to read about. You’re never going to see on Instagram, Facebook, that part of the work. Because it involves a level of confidentiality where if the individuals involved don’t trust us, not only do you not stop the beef, but you potentially put yourself in harm’s way, as he articulated in the documentary. So all of the people, all of the parties involved have some sort of connection to the criminal legal system. So traditionally, that’s just not going to work with law enforcement in the room. Not only is it not going to work with law enforcement in the room, but we’re never even going to get them to the mediation. If they believe in the slightest way we have any connection to law enforcement, that we cooperate with law enforcement in any way, they’re never even going to be in that room.

That’s just not going to happen. That’s the reality of it. So that’s not to say that law enforcement doesn’t have a role to play in solving crime and violence in the community. That’s separate from mediating conflict, completely separate from resolving beefs and disputes, especially where blood has already been spilled.

So involving law enforcement from that perspective makes no sense at all for us. And you’re never going to hear about that. You’re never going to see two people that called their hotline, that called one of the mediators and said, “Bro, they shot my brother. I’m going to burn half of East Baltimore to the ground.” You’re never going to hear that. And you’re never going to see our response to it. You’re going to see our public response to mass shooting events. You’re going to see that. You’re not going to see what we do behind the scene in terms of who we calling, who we talking to, what we talking to them about. Because that confidentiality has to be there and that level of trust has to be there between us and them. So that’s the reason for the no police involvement. But for this audience particularly also, according to the Department of Justice statistics, over 650,000 people are released from prison throughout America every year.

650,000. I want that number to sink in. These are the number of people that are coming home from prison every year, according to the federal government. In that same report, they said that here in the state of Maryland, almost 10,000 people are in this revolving door of going into prison, coming home from prison every year, right here in the state of Maryland. All of them are coming home to a community near you.

So it only makes sense that we put some effort into rehabilitating the 2.2 million people that we have locked up behind these prison walls. We incarcerate more people in this country than any nation on the planet. There are some states that incarcerate more people than any other civilized nation on the planet. But as a society, we give zero thought. Zero though to the fact that these two million people, the majority of them at some point are coming home. And if there is nothing done to help repair them, then it leads, it produces a cycle of crime and violence that continues. So we got to get to this tendency, the orientation and the mind to return to criminal behavior and conduct. And that don’t stop when they’re released. It actually starts when you send them there. We have to be involved in that. So that’s the part I’ll add to the incarceration piece.

Can I say

Speaker 8:

One thing?

Speaker 3:

So I’ll let y’all say two quick things. After they say what they’re about to say, we’re going to do Q&A and we’ll pass a microphone around. So if you have questions, you can raise your hand. We’ll bring a microphone to you. Go ahead. I

Speaker 4:

Just want to say one thing. When it comes to the Stop the Beef team, in order to stop a beef, you have to have a relationship. And when I say have a relationship, have a relationship. And I deal a lot with young people, you guys. They have to trust you. And when I say trust you, trust the fact that I know that they care about me, they want the best for me. So it’s all about the relationships. So if we are us have a situation, they can reach out to other organizations that’s trustworthy. And one thing I thank God for the organizations that we all work for, we don’t have a foot in and a foot out. Got to be real about this thing. It’s no halfway thing. Either you’re going to be real or you’re going to be fake. And when you are in that position, these young men and young ladies, because there’s a lot of young ladies now that’s carrying guns, you have to be able to put your life on the line.

There’s many a times that our lives just there. Not knowing if we’re going back home, but God. But one thing, relationship, keep that. You have to have a good relationship. And I’m going to be quiet, okay? There we go.

Speaker 6:

About the reentry part, just how important it is to. Just listening to Delmont talk, it’s like, oh, he’s somebody that society would’ve been like, oh, throw him away. You one of the most dangerous and we can’t control you and the choice program ain’t even work. And they’re saying like, okay, throw him away and look at what we have. And so all of the research shows that what happens in the first 48 hours when somebody comes home from prison determines where they’re going to be three and six months later. And so if they come home and they have not resolved conflicts, if they have not rebuilt relationships with the people who’ve been raising their children, if they have not really gotten clear about what does getting a job look like when I come home, I know I’m going to go live with my aunt, but really what’s going to happen when I go there?

If they have not had hard conversations with people who they believe have harmed them. And so when we do reentry mediation and people can two years before they come home, we go into the prison. Whoever they said they wanted to talk to comes in. It took a lot to just build a relationship enough with the Department of Corrections to get them to let us be in rooms with the person who’s incarcerated and who they want to mediate with and no COs can listen and no COs are in the room.That was five good years of Lord Charcotian banging her head against brick walls to be like, no. Because nobody is more institutionalized than people who work within those systems. So all of those people kept saying to us, oh, if y’all come into prison and work with them, they going to be tricking y’all into sending them money and sending them drugs.

And I’m like, boo, it’s just y’all just bringing the drugs in here. I don’t know what y’all talking about.

But when people are coming home, if they have not built strong relationships, if they have not rebuilt trust, if they have not resolved conflict, if we don’t understand that there is no such thing as an offender who has not first been a victim of a lot of things, sometimes it’s a mediation between the son who one of the things he went to jail for is he kept stealing from his mother while he was selling and using drugs. And him and mom are now in mediation before he comes home. So you would go in thinking, oh, he’s the offender, she’s the victim. And we go, okay, what do you all want to talk about? And the first thing out of his mouth to his mother is, how come you always put men before me? And that’s where we’re starting the conversation. And so whatever it is that can be.

And getting into prison is very hard work. It’s as difficult as getting into schools. So just the comparison is crazy. But to get in and be able for people to really have real conversations where there’s no CO presence, there’s no police presence, there’s nobody that works in the prison. There’s just the grassroots volunteer mediators and the people who are having the conflict and need to work it out and make plans about what does a smooth transition home really look like? What is success? What is healing? All of that stuff, what does it really look like? The research shows that people who have that opportunity are in that first two hour session, 8% less likely to reengage with the criminal justice system at all. They can have as many mediations in prison as they want before they come home. With every additional session, it increases by another 10% that they’ll be less likely to reengage with the system.

And all that is happening is they’re building a stronger relationship with the support systems or whatever it is coming home is going to look like. They’re building a stronger foundation to actually, when they come home in that first 48 hours, it’s going to determine a much healthier place they’ll be three and six months later.

Speaker 3:

All right. So what I’ll do is if you have a question, I’ll ask you to raise your hand and a microphone will come right to you. You’ll see a young man in the red vest coming to you with the microphone.

Speaker 8:

Thank you. And just so much respect to all of you for giving hope to Baltimore and our communities. It’s humble to be in your presence today. And I wanted one shout out to Tawanda Jones who’s been doing work in the community to get accountability amongst the police and to reduce the amount of police brutality and violence in our communities that also leads to the violence, community violence. They’re interlinked. And so somewhat in that vein, and I think some of you were kind of touching on this, the fact that our state’s attorney is trying to take out safe streets through the Inspector General’s office, both the state’s attorney’s office and the police trying to grab credit for the things that we all know. I’ve been saying this for a long time, that the only reason we’ve had the reduction in crime is because of folks like you guys doing the work, people who really understand the community and are been a part of it.

But at the same time, I heard you say it takes everybody and everyone has a role, et cetera. But how do you move in those spaces where the police, law enforcement and the state’s attorney’s office are involved? You can’t extract them from everything. We could do it from conflict mediation, et cetera. So the question is, how do you guys move in those spaces to maintain enough of a relationship, but also not to be trapped in it as well?

Speaker 5:

Absolutely. Yeah. Good question. Absolutely a good question. It’s common sense that law enforcement is part of the village. It has its role, its responsibility, its assignment. And that’s why I started with the quote from Eddie Conway that said, “Do your little part.” That’s their part that they have to do. And we hope that they would do that part. We’re not advocating that we don’t want law enforcement to do their job. But what we are saying is that in the work that we do, just specifically in terms of the conflict mediation, that doesn’t work with law enforcement there. I would hope that the state’s attorney is committed to doing his job Right? Because if your idea is that it is acceptable to kill men, women, and children, if your idea is that it is okay, it is cool to harm the elderly in the community, then prison is a mercy for that individual.

But that’s not our job to do, but we will hope that the people whose job it is to do that will deal with that as they should. And they have every right to claim whatever credit that they feel they deserve for doing that. But we are clear in terms of the work that we do. In terms of reducing homicides in non-fatal shootings, we know what we have contributed to because we know what we do on a day-to-day basis throughout every area of the city. So I want to be clear that everybody has a role to play. Everybody has a part to play. There’s no part of the village that gets to sit on the sideline in this and say, “Nah, I’m going to sit this one out.” So we hope that BPD is doing their job and improving that doing they job. Anybody that will say that the Baltimore City Police Department in 2026 is even remotely close to the Baltimore City Police Department from 2015 is just, you’ve been missing.

I don’t know where you’ve been at. Completely different institution, but that’s not our job to talk about. I mean, we don’t talk about it. We let them talk about it. Do y’all job talking about it and we’re going to do what we do over here. We interact. Of course, we interact in the work that we do. We’ve been to plenty community engagement walks with law enforcement. They come, they show up and we politely tell them, look here, we got this.

We’ve been doing this pretty good on our own. Thank you for showing up. They had all of the community meetings, events. We’re in the same space, the same room. So we’re not ducking or not working with each other in a collaborative aspect of doing the work, but we talking specifically about the conflict mediation part. There’s no police involvement in that from our perspective.

Speaker 6:

So the way that I have navigated in all of my work throughout the 30 or however many years with law enforcement specifically and city agencies, state’s attorney, all of that is we just explain to them why it behooves them to do their part in supporting what it is we’re doing. So Patricia Jessame, she was state’s attorney way back in the day. And we did research that showed if people use mediation with us, it reduces the court’s load, right? Because people can make agreements in mediation to drop the charges because they’ve actually resolved whatever the conflict was. And so now the state’s attorney, all they got to do is honor that the people wanted to drop their charges.

And so that made Patricia Jestami set back in the late ’90s a contract every year to fund a position for one of our case workers so that we receive stuff from the state’s attorney when people have conflict. And so when and Ivan Bates comes along, who. When and Ivan Bates comes along, who when we were both on Governor Westmore’s public safety transition team, him and I had very different ideas about what should happen. His office signs a contract with the community mediation center every year to send us money for that position. And I’m not sure he knows it. And I’m glad that he doesn’t know it because from what I’ve experienced, I think that if he knew it, something weird would happen where maybe suddenly we would not get that money.

But in building those relationships and saying, it behooves you. You live in Baltimore too, or you have to work in Baltimore too. And so this work is helping to make your job easier. If we are doing police complaint mediations where a community member who had a problem with the police officer gets to sit down and have an honest conversation with that officer who’s in that community, y’all are saying you need police community relationships to be better so that the murder rate can come down and so that policing can be better. Don’t you want to be seen and saying you support community being able to have these hard, confidential conversations? You know what I mean? And so if you are and honoring individual officers humanity. So Erica Bridgeford is an abolitionist from that standpoint. I think the police department need. I just get rid of the whole thing, do something else.

That’s not where we are in human history right now. I honor and understand that. So I work within while visioning the world that I want, I work within the world that I have. And so from that standpoint, I can honor individual officers as human beings when they show up directly in front of me. And so if you are respecting and honoring what I do, if I show up because somebody got killed on this block and here I am doing a sacred space ritual and I look up and two police cars have blocked off the block because I’m crazy and they got killed in the street. So I’m kissing the ground right in the middle of the street where they were. And the police see that. And without a conversation, they just block off the street so that nobody interferes with the sacred work that’s being done.

I’m going to go over there and hug them and thank them. Thank you for being a human person happened to be wearing a. And you used your authority in that moment to benefit the healing of this community. And so when we treat each other with humanity in the moments that we can and in the work that I do, I’m helping to, when there are those disputes between police and community, I’m a bridge that can help them work on understanding one another as well. While in my personal life, I might be totally against policing, period. You know what I mean? But when I got my mediator hat on, I’m a trusted bridge because in that bridge role, if I hold up one side, this is the bridge and I hold up the side that I agree with, everybody falls into the boundary. So the ethics of our work is very important, whatever your ethics are in it.

And when institutions and agencies and policymakers see that you stand in the ethics of the work that you do without attacking and demonizing them while holding them accountable when it’s necessary, if your humanity shows up, somebody’s humanity is going to show up in that and it’s going to make it go how it’s supposed to go.

Speaker 5:

David, I also want to add this to that. And a lot of times what we get caught up into, we get caught up into the politics of law enforcement, the offices, deceits in terms of the. Because it’s a whole different reality on the ground as opposed to the people who are sitting in the seats running the offices and the administration. It’s a totally different reality. On the ground, BPD has phenomenal community engagement officers that we interact with on a daily basis. I mean, we know them, we got their numbers on speed dial. They have our numbers. So we interact with them daily on the ground. I mean, the real people. And a lot of times that gets lost in the translation of the politics that you see in newspapers and on news shows. And like the chief of school, we are in the schools all day.

We’re in all of Baltimore City public schools engaging young people. So I mean, the chief of Baltimore School Police, Jeff Short is one of us. He’s with We Are Us. So his staff, his team, they do the same kind of work we do from a community perspective, not from a law enforcement perspective. So I mean, just wanted to separate the politics from the community engagement and the people that do the work on a daily basis. They love Baltimore just like we do. And the people with the boots on the ground are doing the work from a community engagement perspective, not necessarily from a law enforcement perspective.

Speaker 7:

Yeah. I was just going to add, when I was growing up, it used to be a thing called officer friendly.

So what we do, we don’t dislike the police. And that’s never to be misunderstood. We love good police. We love good police work. You know what I’m saying? Because if we have a situation with a stop the beef where we need to relocate somebody, we call good police. When we have a situation when a brother need to turn himself in to mediate a conflict because people is in the streets hunting him, we call good police. But again, like Anthony said, you’re not going to really hear about that. You’re never going to hear about us meeting an officer or a couple officers in a house in West Baltimore for a brother to turn himself in. You going to see them on TV walking them into the building like they went and caught him. But we respect good policing, but we have a job to do. I always think about Bill Belichick.

If you ever had been fortunate enough to go to their arena, it’s no signs or nowhere on the wall. Just one thing when you walk in that building and say, do your job. So that’s what we do. We do our job. And then we expect good policemen to do their job when it’s their turn. But when we out and we mediating, we trying to stop it before we even get there. We trying to stop somebody before they pull a trigger to have to engage with the police. We trying to alleviate all that. We trying to cut that off before we even get to that point. Because when you get to the point of no return, then you get into, like he said, a lot of unnecessary politics. So yeah, we work closely with a lot. There’s a lot of, like you said, speed down everything else.

So I definitely want to think that we not, and I often say this when I’m speaking about Stop the Beef because I’m one of the mediators, that the reason why we do no police involvement, because we come from a community and a culture where you’ve seen men from the nation of Islam had to stand in between police and the community doing the Freddie Gray ride. Because our people in our communities have a distrust and a distaste for law enforcement because things have happened that went uncovered, beaten alleys, drugs planning on them. So the last person they want to call is the police. The last person they want to talk to or see is the police. So now you’re starting to see when, because of work like that, you seeing officers sometime may come out and it goes. So now they starting to get to like, oh, when the officer, well, oh yeah, that’s officer such and such.

When I grew up, we knew the officer’s name. High them bright eyes. High them what’s the name? We got out of there because we knew them. They knew our parents. But now they trying to put people in the community to police a community that they don’t know. So when you try to police a people that you don’t know, it’s always going to be conflict. So they got to be boots on the ground also back in the community so you can have an officer so everybody knows. So we come in. You can walk in your community and stop something that I can’t because it’s your community. But if I walk into them little brothers and I say, man, they see me coming. And I go to one of the brothers. And this is real quick. I was just in Hershey Park the other day, literally with some other student because I’m a student support staff member.

Ran into a couple of my little Baltimore brothers. They out there and I jumped up on them. Yeah. Sent a picture to Captain Andrew. And when I was walking off, the grandmother didn’t know who I was, but moms did. So when I was walking off, I heard her say, “Who was that?” She said, “Well, that’s one of the brothers. They everywhere.” And he and Hershey parked acting crazy. I’m just popping up on a whole nother gig. So yeah, you know what I’m saying? But you got to know your people’s communication and relationships matters no matter what you’re doing in this line of work in the community.

Speaker 3:

So after Pastor Ebony makes a remark, we actually have time for one more audience question. Yeah. So Pastor Ebony, you go ahead and then we’ll address what’s happening in the back. Go

Speaker 4:

Ahead. I just want to say one thing. As you mentioned, back in from like 2003 to 2010, police department. And as far as experience, it was hard. Certain things that I witnessed in Baltimore City. And at that time I was a youth pastor. 2018, so I grew up in Cherry Hill. And I’ll say this real quick. My son was murdered August the 15th of 2018. And I would always pray, do the prayer walks for Safe Street and Cherry Hill. Never worked for them. Self-employed. Did 20 something years with Marriott General Manager. However, when my son was murdered and I made it to the scene, I threw my wallet up. So at that time, Safe Street workers, they were trying to find my wallet. The two detective that came in my office at my dealership two days later was like, “Hey, your coworkers, they got rid of all the witnesses.” So I’m saying, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Yeah, one of the officers told me you work for Safe Street, so unfortunately we don’t have anything for you.” And I’m sitting up there.

I’m hurting. Oh my God. And I’m sitting up there saying, wait a minute. First of all, I never was on that payroll. What I do, I volunteer. Bust my butt every day. Hard work dealing with these young people out there. But because they assumed or some of the officers was not doing their job, did not like me. They told these two detective, oh yeah, she worked with Safe Streets. They got rid of all of the witness. So maybe they’re going to figure it out. Maybe they’re going to go and try to hurt them. And I asked that officer, the detective, I said, “Sir, are you serious?” I said, “You just told me that you can’t do anything about my son murder.” He wasn’t in the streets or anything that because someone assumed that I worked with Safe Streets and because they don’t like these guys, they’re not going to do anything about my son murder.

Three weeks later, but I tell you about God.

One of the detective, he called me, he apologized. He was like, “I want to tell you that I’m sorry.” And I was so hurt. I told him, I said, “Get up out my office.” I said, “Leave.” I said, “Leave.” I went down to Southern District and I asked them, the lead detective at the lead office at that time, I said, “Yes, I fight for these children, but wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong is wrong. Right is right. That’s in my book. I don’t care who you are.” And I said, “Because you assume, not knowing who I am, not knowing I work hard.” I’m the general manager at that time, I think at the Fairfield at BWI. I said, “You assume because I’m out here in the community working, that I work with this particular group. So you’re telling these detective not to investigate my son murder. Till this day, the young man has not been arrested.” So when I say that, it’s hard sometime, and I thank God for Colonel Russell because yes, me as a pastor, because of certain things that I witnessed in Baltimore City with the police department, with my own eyes or what they done to young people, it’s hard.

It’s hard. So I’m learning. I would say this year, 2026, I see more officers that genuinely care now in doing their job. My thing is, do your job. Don’t beat them up. That was my thing. Lock them up if they’re doing wrong, but you’re not going to beat them up in my face. You’re not going to plant guns on them. You’re not going to do things like that. So when you say as far as relationship and trust in the officers, I would say today I do. I was a chaplain as well for five years for Baltimore City Police Department. And they had to learn me and I had to learn them. But that’s one thing that I tell you guys. If you don’t know someone, don’t judge them. Get to know who that person is. And this other detective now, he’ll reach out, say, “You know what?

I’m truly, truly sorry. I know it been a long time. I’ve retired, but I’m going to do whatever I can to help you.” So say this, we all go by off of what we experience, what we experience. A lot of these children go off of what they experience. A lot of young men and young ladies that I dealt with in Baltimore City, I had people calling me, “Hey, can you take this gun?” And I’m saying, “A gun?” Well, Sarge said, “If I don’t get a gun, they’re going to plant this gun on me.” So our children experience so much. So then we wonder why they don’t trust the police. That’s the reason why. That’s the reason why. Our young black men have been through so much, but God, you guys, but God. So listen, I’m a pastor, but just to answer your question, I know I’m going to be quiet.

I know I keep saying I’m a pastor, but just to answer your question, it’s all about relationship with the good ones. And I’ll say the good ones. It’s a lot of good ones out here that get up, put that uniform on, that genuinely care. And they are the ones that we have relationships with, that we trust. So that’s it. Yeah. Had to get that off of me.

Speaker 3:

All right. We have time for one more question from the back.

Speaker 9:

First of all, I’d like to say thank you to each and every one of you for the work that you do in our communities. I just left Maryland Correctional Institution for Women, The Lifers Group. Listen to all the things that you just talked about. Listen to the women tell me about the things that you just said, the reentry, the lack of it, the lack of cooperation from the staff, all that. It’s a story that you all know, so I’m not going to repeat it. A couple of weeks ago, me and a couple other ladies did what we called a quarrying call. It was a call to every organization in the city of Baltimore that we knew that was operating and helping our young people, our seniors, whatever community involvement you had. You had an organization we called you out and guess what? See that group up there?

They all were there. They all were there. On the back of my t-shirt, it has a number of groups that were there. And what all we called to say was this. Our young people need us. We are the solution to Baltimore’s problem. You all just said it. You were the solution to lowering those murder rates. We, all of us in here are the solution to what’s Baltimore is going on in Baltimore, not within our young people, with our seniors not feeling comfortable to walk to the store. Our organizations can offer that assistance. All we’re saying is that we can get this done in our city. Let’s continue to have these talks. Let’s continue to have these gatherings. Let’s continue to show up. First day at school was coming up. We got six young men who attacked a 74 year old man a couple of weeks ago at a 71.

You all probably seen it on the news. Guess what? They have not been apprehended, but guess what? It’s going to be groups like We Are Us, Del Mon’s group, pastor’s group. It’s going to be groups like them who go, somebody’s sister.

One of those six men have a mother, a sister, an uncle, a neighbor who knows who they are. Call one of these groups, please. Tell them, let them walk your son. Let them walk your son. Let them talk to your son. Let him do media. Let him do whatever. But try to get them before they kill somebody else. We don’t want them to have a murder charge. They just got an assault charge right now. Let’s get those young people, but also let our young people know accountability is there. It has to be done. But you got the support of a whole community. So if you need to talk to someone to get out of a gang or you’re in a situation where you’ve been bullied into something you don’t want to do, we are us. I mean, I can’t even name the many groups. This lady right here,

You all talk about re-entry. That’s Monica Cooper. Yes, it is. Okay, that’s Monica Cooper. She does the reentry programs. She has an organization called Maryland Justice Project. We would not have a pre-release center proposed now. It hasn’t been built yet because the women in this state of Maryland, they didn’t feel we deserved a pre-release center until Monica got on top of them. Now we are getting a pre-release center so that the women come home can get all the services that you say we needed. Yeah. So there are other people. There’s Mr. Linda Moore in this organization with the Second Good Coalition, who I’m a member of. There’s Delmar. All of you all are members of the Grived Experience Committee. Formerly incarcerated people in this city are doing some great things, you all. We are doing some great things. And all I’m saying to you all is support those organizations that are helping.

Tell your neighbors, tell their children. If they got a little board that they know is doing something wrong, call Muhammad. Tell them, say, “Hey, go. Come walk with me so I can introduce you to little Johnny. Come walk with me so I can. Pastor Ebony, can you come? I want you to talk to Mary Jane or Alicia or whatever her name is. We can do this. Come on now. We can do this.” And that’s what I’m saying. We. We. The we is us. Come on. The we are we. We can do this. Thank you.

All we need. We are we. We are the we. Come on, don’t forget that.

Speaker 5:

Davon, can I add one point to this right here? Yes sir. She mentioned it. And

When Ms. Gwen called me, right? I mean, I had some reservations when she called me. She wouldn’t let me off the phone till she got a confirmation. But I had some reservations and I have to share the reservations because we have to be careful. Just because we are good intention don’t mean that everybody else has good intentions. And there are some people who are deliberately trying to use isolated incidents involving young people to paint a big, broad picture and cut funds. So we have to be careful that we don’t allow ourselves to be used to promote that narrative. That was my reservation. We were there. We showed up at the walk because Ms. Gwen made the call. You can’t not respond, right? But at the same time in my mind is that the enemies of Baltimore, the enemies of young people in Baltimore who are not good intentioned are going to use this.

They’re going to use six young black men and paint the picture that this is all young black men in Baltimore. And I have a problem with that. So we just have to be careful that in our messaging, we are on the same page. That we are not promoting the narrative that this is all black youth in Baltimore City. And I’ll leave it at that.

Speaker 3:

Appreciate that. Appreciate that. So I’m going to just say something quickly. And in fact, Brother Anthony kind of teed up what I wanted to say, which is that all the work that has been talked about in the film and on this panel, this work is under attack. And folks that are familiar with LBS, Sinclair Broadcasting, David Smith, who owns the Baltimore Sun, Fox 45, ABC seven. These are folks for whom are carrying out a political agenda that benefits the law enforcement establishment, Maryland State’s Attorney’s Association, FOP, the Association of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs. These are folks that are tied into a media company and a media empire that is putting out propaganda for the purpose of taking away the resources that funded a lot of the work that you see on screen. So that’s one of the things that I wanted to make sure to communicate because in order to protect the work, we have to fight against the enemies of our community that are trying to take the resources away to do the work.

And one of the things that I’ll quickly add is that one of the things that LBS will be working on in the 2027 Maryland General Assembly is to have legislation passed that will bar the state of Maryland from doing business with Sinclair and any of the things that David Smith owns. So that’s something we’ll be working on in 2027.

Speaker 6:

Ever.

Speaker 3:

And for us, that’s our role in the ecosystem in terms of violence prevention. Our role is to protect the work. And so that’s one of the things I wanted to make sure to share. There will be another screening at the Parkway Theater on August 29th on a Saturday. Please get your tickets. Tell all your friends it’s going to sell out. So get it sooner than later. The other thing that I want to announce is that Rashim and I have been having conversations about, and I hope you don’t mind me sharing this. One of the things that I often have said to her about this documentary is that part of the beauty of it is that it gives humanity to folks that typically their humanity has to be qualified. You know what I’m saying? And because it’s an independent project, that she was able to really give voice to that in a way that folks that are operating within institutional constraints, you often have to think about what are white folks going to think?

What are the institutions going to think? And none of that appears in the documentary. And I think that the evidence of that is that the Department of Corrections is in talks and want to make this available to those that are behind the walls.

So I think it speaks to the importance of these narratives about the power of them and the importance of people actually understanding the benefit of this work and also understanding the importance of protecting the work. So again, please make sure, tell all your friends, August 29th is the next screening. When you go out and it costs money to do it, so please, if there’s QR codes out on the front desk that’ll allow you to be able to contribute, to make contributions. This project, it is independent. There’ve been a handful of folks that have invested, but not nearly at the level that you would get from films of this quality. So it’s extremely important that you all continue to contribute, to promote the work, to provide resources, and also do the surveys. Dr. Rashim is a social scientist, so she likes reading those surveys. She actually does read them.

We’d be sitting together, she’d be reading through the surveys. So it’s really important. So if you click the QR code to be able to fill out the survey, to give good feedback, it really helps the project move forward. Give the panel another round of applause.

All right. Safe travels on the rest of your Saturday afternoon. You all take care. Thank