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

Taya Graham:

Hello, this is Taya Graham and welcome to this breaking news edition of the Police Accountability Report. Now, as I always make clear, this show has a single purpose, holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible. But today, we will achieve that goal with a little bit of a twist and a surprise, an exclusive interview with a controversial cop watcher who was just released from a halfway house in Colorado after spending five years behind bars. His name is Eric Brandt. He’s a Denver activist and advocate for the homeless, also a prolific YouTuber who built a large following with his antics on the streets and his successes in the court. Now, Eric’s thought copwatching isn’t for everyone. His tactics were flamboyant, to say the least.

Some said they were simply over the top. Law enforcement often deemed them illegal. In 2021, Eric was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to three counts of telephonic harassment of Denver judges. The charges with results of serious threats that were made over the phone. However, the sentence was also considered extremely harsh at the time, and Eric apologized to those affected. And now, due to good behavior and perseverance, we have the breaking news. Eric was released today, and we’re going to be talking to him for his first interview since his exit from the aforementioned halfway house. But first, I want to check in with my reporting partner and co-host Stephen Janis. Now, Stephen, Eric is not just someone we covered, but he was also the subject of our most recent documentary, I Am But the Mirror of the Story of American Copwatching. Can you tell us a little bit about the documentary and Eric’s role in it?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, it basically was about Eric because when Eric received such a harsh sentence, we though we had to tell his story in depth. So I spent years becoming an Eric Brandt expert. I would say unequivocally, I am the foremost Eric Brandt expert in America at this point. So if anyone

Taya Graham:

Wants to talk – At least on the

Stephen Janis:

East Coast. Yes. But I mean, Eric’s story was a story of great achievement and great tragedy. And he was extremely creative, but also controversial. And I think as you said, he received this very harsh sentence. So it really gave us a prison to look at copwatching in general because copwatching is a very creative sort of organic movement. Eric was a part of it. And looking through the lens of Eric’s experiences, I think made the film really interesting. So I was appreciative of having that access to his life. And now, like I said, I’m ready for my interview on NBC, ABC, anyone wants to talk about Eric Brant, come to me. I’ll talk.

Taya Graham:

Okay. Now, before I get to Eric, I just want to say Eric was one of the most colorful cop watchers we have ever seen. He is a Navy veteran who served his country and he’s also a prolific filer of very successful lawsuits. But more important today, he was released from a halfway house. It marks the end of a five year ordeal for him. Eric, welcome back and thank you for joining us.

Eric Brandt:

Thank you, Taya.

Taya Graham:

Now first, Eric, I have to ask, how are you feeling and what was going through your mind when you finally walked out that door for the final time?

Eric Brandt:

Sorry.

Taya Graham:

I can understand it. I’m sorry, Eric. I know it can be tough to talk about. Just take a moment if you need it.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, take a moment, Eric.

Eric Brandt:

Sorry guys.

Stephen Janis:

No, no.

Taya Graham:

It’s okay. Take a moment.

Stephen Janis:

Of course. Of course.

Taya Graham:

We understand. Absolutely. At five years and finally having this moment, there are a lot of emotions that must be coming to the

Stephen Janis:

Forefront. Do you want us ask another question or?

Eric Brandt:

Well, I guess you saw it now that I just had the release. Yeah. Wow, that kind of hit me. Yeah, you asked me what I was feeling and I was like, oh, I guess I am having a feeling. Yeah. It’s

Taya Graham:

Understandable.

Eric Brandt:

It’s been the last two weeks have been surreal, right? Honestly, I’ve been like blah. I know that the date is there. I don’t have anything else to do. I just work. I know that I’m going to have a computer, so I don’t want to do any of my litigation work on the phone. It’s too hard. So I’ve just been blah, milling around for the last two weeks and that’s crazy. I know. And today I had administrative things that I had to do and I’m sorry that I lost it on your camera.

Taya Graham:

No, it’s okay. It’s completely understandable.

Stephen Janis:

I remember Eric when we were talking maybe a year ago, you thought the parole board was not going to grant you release. What do you think finally convinced them? I know you’ve been on great behavior and you hit every achievement you were supposed to inside the system. What do you think kind of finally pushed you out that door?

Eric Brandt:

I don’t know what eventually convinced them to release me. I’m a little surprised that I wasn’t released earlier. The risk instruments suggested that I should have been. So I really was pessimistic about it. And then when I got the halfway house, I was surprised the halfway house application went by very quickly. Once I was in the halfway house, parole was likely at that point. And I know that you and I talked about things. I didn’t really share a lot of that with the public at the time because there were certainly opportunities for people to try and sabotage that. But

Once I was at the halfway house, I had a pretty high degree of comfort that they would choose to release me. And then I had my hearing and it went status quo. It went what the instruments should have suggested, which is release upon completion of the halfway house program. I think that’s what the public expects, right? If they release you early before you finish the program, they’re like, “What’s the purpose of the halfway house program?” If they were to have delayed that further, then they would almost have to justify that publicly. So I think that that was really the only appropriate answer. And you and I knew about this, of course, some time ago, but again, we kind of kept it under wraps for a while.

Taya Graham:

Yeah. Eric, I hate to take you back to the past, but it’s something that a lot of us have difficulty imagining. If you could just talk about what those past five years incarcerated were like, how did you survive them and what did you do to help work towards actually getting out?

Eric Brandt:

Well, for one thing, I’m not criminally minded, right? So I’m in with a bunch of criminals. You get to know these people. A lot of the guys that are in there, they’re in there for a reason. And all of my instruments scored pretty low on things and my requirements and my needs were a lot lower than a lot of people. I have good education, so I wasn’t in a lot of the educational programs. So my situation was a little different. Behaving is actually easy to do. And I know that when people look at my work, what they see is misbehavior and they really have to delve deeper. And then I think that you guys did a pretty good job of that with the documentary, which I recently got to see finally. But there’s a lot that was going on there. So it wasn’t misbehavior because it was misbehavior.

It was misbehavior or civil disobedience, if you will, for a purpose. And so the classic things that I didn’t have the sexual misconduct issues that are prevalent in there. I didn’t have the theft. I didn’t have the violence, the frauds, drugs, all of these things that are really what the majority of the people I was around were involved in, that just wasn’t me. So behaving was always easy for me and my five-year track record shows that. So what did I do? I used my time to help develop programs. I helped develop a veterans program. We did a lot of service. We did a lot of community service, not just in service to the guys in the prison, but we actually extended that and did community service in the local community.

Taya Graham:

Didn’t you help pack up Thanksgiving dinners for families outside of the prison?

Eric Brandt:

Oh yeah, absolutely. We got feedback from that immediately too. We raised money internally from the inmates and we were able to raise enough money to put together. The first year we did it, we made 40 boxes and it was a complete Thanksgiving dinner box for a family. So everything that you would have at Thanksgiving was in this box. And we got immediate feedback. One guy, his wife had just passed and he didn’t know what he was going to do. And then we got a thank you card from a family whose house had just burned down. They were moved into a hotel room with their three kids. They had nothing except for the Thanksgiving dinner box.

Stephen Janis:

Wow.

Well, Eric, was there ever. I remember talking to you when they brought you down to Louisiana for that other case. Was there ever a time when you kind of gave up hope or you felt like we’re not. Because I remember being really worried about you in that particular part. And just so people know who are watching, we talked to Eric at every point that we could while we were working on the film and just trying to keep in touch with him. Was there ever a point where you’re like, “I’m never getting out of here,” or you ever felt like this wasn’t going to work out for you?

Eric Brandt:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. When I went in, 12 year sentence, I was pretty harsh and I always believed in the back of my mind that there would always be something else. They would drag something up from somewhere. And so then when they grabbed me for Louisiana, I was like, “Yep, this is what I expected.” So I already pretty much knew going into it that that was going to be the rest of my life.

Taya Graham:

Eric, I have a question. There were a lot of people who stood by you during this incarceration and they were ready to stand by you for the full 12 years. What do you want to say to those supporters who stuck by you during your incarceration? What would you want to say to them?

Eric Brandt:

What is wrong with you people?

Taya Graham:

That’s an Eric Brandt answer. Yes.

Eric Brandt:

I can’t even begin to quantify or even understand the tremendous amount of sacrifice that so many people have made. And we have as a group consciously. Again, you and I have had so much communication in the last five years that we haven’t shared with the public and for good reason, but I’m perpetually blown away at how much support there is. I couldn’t have done it without you guys and I couldn’t even begin to list all of the names. I’d almost feel embarrassed if I listed one because I wouldn’t be able to list all 5,000 of them. But I would get things out of the blue from people. Marita Gladson, I’ll tell you about Marita Gladson. She sent me cartoons and jokes on a nearly weekly basis for the entire time. Oh my

Taya Graham:

Gosh. That’s

Eric Brandt:

Amazing.

To the point there where we would come downstairs and check the list to see if we had mail for the day and the officers would be in there and they would see me in the hallway and they’d wave me over because they saw Marita’s envelope and they knew they were going to get their Marita jokes that day. They recognized the Marita envelopes. Lacey R. Abby Irizarry, Melody, Johnna, Aaron, Joe Cool. I mean, some of these people, do you have any idea how angry these people would get if I didn’t call them by a certain time of the day? And you know how I knew they were angry is because the captain would call me to the office and want to know why he was getting phone calls.

Taya Graham:

There you go.

Stephen Janis:

That’s cool.

Taya Graham:

It just shows how much concern these folks have for you.

Eric Brandt:

Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

I was going to ask you, because I never really got a chance to ask you this, but when you were in that courtroom and they gave you 12 years, because I did a lot of research, I could not find a sentence for threatening speech without some act of violence, which you did not do anywhere across any case I could find. I couldn’t find a case even remotely close. I mean, people threatened congressional members of Congress and got in two or three years. What did you think when the judge handed down that sentence and why was it 12 years?

Eric Brandt:

I’m stunned. To this day, I find it stunning. I turned to my lawyer and I said, “Did he say consecutive?” And she’s like, “I think he did.” We didn’t even comprehend it at the time. And you have to maintain a certain kind of decorum in that circumstance, and it was really my intention to accept my consequences with dignity.

Taya Graham:

I just want to pivot here a little bit because we haven’t really had a chance to speak to you publicly about the film that featured your story. Now you’re not the only cop watcher in the story, but you are a central figure. Now, okay, I’m not saying you have to necessarily give the film a thumbs up, but how did you feel watching your life unfold on screen?

Eric Brandt:

Well, so full disclosure to everybody, when I was in Louisiana, you guys sent some draft work to my lawyer. It hadn’t been through any post-processing. It wasn’t complete, but you sent it to her in case there was anything in there that we could use for mitigation. I thank you. I appreciate that. So I had the opportunity to see it or to see parts of that. I got to see it once through just really briefly. The first thing that I noted to my lawyer was I said, “Thank goodness it’s not all about me.”

Taya Graham:

It was

Eric Brandt:

Such a great story and so much of that story was not me. And that’s the point, right? I’m only on this stage for a brief time and the world is run by those who show up, and it was nice to see that there was momentum and good happening in people’s lives. It was so nice to see so many different positive aspects of all these people that are in union with my circle, but they’re doing their own thing. I was just so thankful that it wasn’t about me. Thank you. I’m

Taya Graham:

So glad. It was such a pleasure to work with you and to, like you said, one of the things that we learned through doing the documentary is that there was this circle of people that you touched that sort of reached out kind of like a constellation all across the country. And it was kind of amazing to see the effect that the copwatching and the copwatching community was having in communities all across the nation. So it was really beautiful.

Stephen Janis:

One thing I was making, I was like, the whole idea of YouTube is the minute you go on YouTube, things just go downhill and you don’t connect. But you guys were the opposite of that. It was like you went from YouTube into real life connections where

Eric Brandt:

You

Stephen Janis:

Were – It’s amazing

Eric Brandt:

How many of those connections are still active.

Stephen Janis:

I know.

Eric Brandt:

It’s impossible for me to respond to everybody in a given day. It’s just so much going on and there’s so many people involved and these are real people with real lives and yet still somehow find time for each other. And that’s what I really got out of your program was that things are really kind of good out there. People are living lives and that’s all we can hope for is that people live a good life.

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, I didn’t want to just fall into the same narrative of the YouTube spiral, which is sort of the mainstream media take on it that, oh, these are people who were like-minded in their pushback against what they felt was a faulty government, and they were able to help connect with each other in ways that were not possible without YouTube. So that’s why I focused on that part of it. I didn’t just do you got sentence. That was the beginning, but really the end was about what came out of those relationships. It’s cool to hear you say that you still have them, right? I mean, you’re still connected to these people.

Eric Brandt:

And what I think is really great is that so many of these people, they’re able to live their lives and then we touch and our gears mesh for a little while and then we live our lives. So we’re not dependent on each other. If you go off and do your thing, you’re not going to ruin my life. You’re not going to ruin my life. You’re going to enrich my life while we’re connected, and I am happy that you’re enjoying your life when we’re not connected. And so a lot of folks, we touch and then we go and we touch and we go. And even a lot of people that maybe there wasn’t a great super mesh, it’s still there. I think that’s how human connections work.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, I agree. One thing I wanted to ask you about, I’ve always wanted to ask you this, you have a lot of fans and a lot of critics and some people who say Eric Branch just went too far. I don’t care what he wanted or how he felt about the homeless or police. What do you say to them now? Given the perspective you have of more time, how do you feel about the people who are like, “I think Eric Branch is into the antics. He’s not really fighting for something specific, but just making a show.” How do you answer them now?

Eric Brandt:

Well, I suppose that’s a compound and complicated question.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, sorry.

Eric Brandt:

Yeah. Well, first of all, I was never in it for the antics, right? The street theater was the vehicle. Sorry, our rooster is apparently objecting to the interview over here.

Stephen Janis:

He doesn’t like your answer?

Eric Brandt:

No, the rooster of. I have a critic right here. No, I mean, I don’t know how you address critics. I have. I’m sorry, guys.

Stephen Janis:

No, it’s okay.

Eric Brandt:

He’s got to get his girls under control here. I’ve actually spoken with a lot of my critics, and I have a lot of critics who have turned. I would say critics that have turned friend or at least friendly, and that’s important. So the reality is I’ve never been afraid to sit down and talk with somebody intellectually, but sometimes it’s really hard to open the door, and sometimes the contrast is important too. So for example, if you look at my five-year institutional record, they make notes, they put things in the notes, you can read that and you can see the character of the person. And what you see in there is a lot of interactions with would-be foes, right? These are cops. It’s the government, it’s the man. The reality is that you are the government.

I am the government. This is government by the people, and governed by the people only works when the people bother to show up and do it. So when we have put trust, and frankly, a lot of money in the hands of these strangers, then yeah, we need to have good relationships with them. And different kinds of message and different kinds of activism at different stages requires a different kind of hat to be worn, and I’m very good at wearing the hat that’s necessary or that the work tells me it needs to be worn at the time. So what would I say to my critics? I would say, “Come have a conversation with me.” I’m not going to put any of my critics on blast. They might not appreciate that, but those of you that are watching, you know who you are, and we’ve had some good conversations, and I would have those conversations again.

Taya Graham:

It’s interesting you were talking about wearing the different hats, because one of the difficult parts of the film was trying to show how many successes you had at filing lawsuits, and you had a really big win with Liberty Freak, making case law that I believe enshrines in the 10th circuit, the right to film police. I think this came out when you were incarcerated, that’s when that ruling came out. So what are your thoughts about this win, and do you have any other lawsuits that are still cooking?

Eric Brandt:

I don’t have any that are still cooking. We had some pretty good ones going and the defendants died, and that pretty much puts an end to the litigation because you can’t get damages out of a corpse. I think I’ve had now, in my entire career, I’ve had three or four defendants die before trial. That’s terrible for a lot of reasons, and your questions don’t get answered because the litigation becomes moot. When I came to the halfway house, for the last two years, I’ve had no litigation open. I do have an active litigation right now that I can’t really talk a whole lot about.

Taya Graham:

You

Eric Brandt:

Can read what’s been filed on Pacer, that’s as much as I can give you now, but that litigation is earned, and there are some questions that need to be answered there. I lost track of the question. What was the question? Litigation successes.

The point of the work is not to have a litigation success, right? There’s no such thing as a successful litigation. All litigation is injurious, and so I wouldn’t encourage people to do litigation or to go into it for the litigation. The risks are very high. Take the liberty freak when Irizarry versus Yahia, for example. I was the primary author of that initially because we were together, and you may recall that I actually was found guilty for that incident, and so therefore I lost my part of that lawsuit under collateral estoppel. It was barred because I had been found guilty, and I, in fact, got a six-month jail sentence out of that. So this guy tries to run me over, and I ended up with a six-month jail sentence out of that, but Abboty didn’t. Abody didn’t even get charged, so his continued to move forward.

When the judge granted the officer’s qualified immunity, that’s when things really sped up. We learned that a lot of people watch these cases. The attorneys that wanted to take up that appeal crawled out of the woodwork for him. So getting it to the 10th circuit, yeah, that was my work in collaboration and collateral with Abody. Is that a great success? Well, no, there’s no such thing as a litigation success. It would’ve been better if it had been legislated instead of litigated. So I don’t consider litigation to be a success. Good litigation is difficult, it’s expensive, it’s risky, and you really don’t know what the outcome is going to be. As strong as you. You’ve got a slam dunk case. Slam dunk in the real world is like 80%. You’re not going to get better than that. You could get a weird adverse ruling and lose a perfectly good case, or more importantly, you could have a really good question with the wrong judicial environment to bring it in, and you could end up with a bad ruling.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I mean, we end up in the Fifth Circuit, which is also where good lawsuits go to die.

Eric Brandt:

Yeah. I’m pretty sure that the Fifth Circuit placed a moratorium on brains. I read that somewhere.

Stephen Janis:

Which for people that don’t know, Fifth Circuit basically covers Texas.

Eric Brandt:

I know.

Stephen Janis:

I’m just letting people know who don’t know because we’re talking about 10th Circuit would be the Denver area.

Eric Brandt:

Let me tell you one of the great comedies in my life is the Ninth Circuit.

Stephen Janis:

Which is where? Which is, just so people know.

Eric Brandt:

Okay. This is where the comedy comes in. The Ninth Circuit includes Idaho and California.

Taya Graham:

That’s a little

Eric Brandt:

Schizophrenic.

Taya Graham:

Wow. Wow.

Eric Brandt:

And it’s dominated by the San Francisco side, so those poor libertarians up in Idaho have to endure this liberal shit. Can I say shit on TV? I’m sorry.

Stephen Janis:

No, no, no. Speak the truth. No, I

Eric Brandt:

Do find that to be judicially comedic.

Stephen Janis:

Wow.

Eric Brandt:

Litigation successes though. I mean, the litigation is necessary sometimes, unfortunately, and it’s part of how we push back. There’s virtually never any accountability at the street officer level, and that’s unfortunate. And how much better would the world. Do you have any idea how many hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on attorney’s costs in Irizarry versus Yahia?

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Well, you had the electronic frontier, you had the Cato Institute.

Taya Graham:

Yeah, you had amicus briefs that were supporting you from really great

Stephen Janis:

Institutions. From really high powered organizations that probably have very expensive lawyers, I would imagine.

Eric Brandt:

Yeah. I hope that didn’t buzz through on you. I’m rejecting a call. I’m sorry. Yeah. Even in my case with the jury nullification, we had the ACLU come out from New York. Wow. They were given time to speak at the questioning of the Supreme Court here, Colorado Supreme Court. We had an amicus brief again from the Cato Institute, surprisingly. And if you took. Well, let’s take a look at the Westminster case. I was arrested for speaking about police brutality at the public microphone. It took six years to get to trial. Six years.

Taya Graham:

The

Eric Brandt:

Federal jury was impaneled. They found the city guilty or liable. In civil court, it’s liable. They found him liable of violating the First Amendment by dragging me out of the podium and arresting me for trying to talk about police brutality at my public microphone time. And I will tell you that I did tell the mayor it would be in his best interest if he let me finish my speech. That case cost the city of Westminster about $400,000 just in attorney’s fees alone.

Taya Graham:

Incredible.

Eric Brandt:

And the judgment was fairly small. It was $12,000. So you want to talk about litigation successes. There’s not a lot of money in civil rights, right? I wasn’t beaten. I was in jail overnight.What’s the real injury here? The real injury is to the community. It’s to the constitution. So while prosecutors like to say, “Oh, all these crimes, the victim is the community.” Well, that’s also true with civil rights violations, but they don’t pay out. So the fee shifting, the ability to recover attorney’s fees if you win is great. That can help convince cities to settle with you, but unfortunately, that’s money that does not go into officer training.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, good point.

Eric Brandt:

So we have a bunch of officers that we’re going to presumably say that at least a substantial fraction of them go into the business because they want to do something good for the community. And what they end up is they end up in this morass of, “I have to write my report a certain way so that I don’t lose my case.” That takes a few years for them to figure that out. So the reports go from being detailed and honest to being vague and boilerplate and embellished, and they’re not really remembering the incident. They know how to write the charges for the eight big charges that they file on a daily basis, and it’s really not refreshing their memory. It’s just one of the things. So they become jaded, and you have to remember that they’re being trained by a population that believes that they’ve been taxed enough already.

So we’re giving them the absolute most training that we can squeeze out of a population that is taxed enough already. Now, layer that onto the litigation costs. So Westminster, instead of being able to pay $400,000 for officer training, they instead paid lawyers to take that money out of their community. Those property owners were taxed for that.

That cost of litigation passes right onto the bill with no representation. Cost of litigation is the one thing that they tax you on that you don’t have a say because it has

Taya Graham:

To be

Eric Brandt:

Paid. So the community paid for that. Did they really get a half a million dollars worth of training out of that? And I seriously I don’t really question that. So what’s the word there? Again, there is no such thing as successful litigation. All litigation is an injury to the community and to everybody involved.

Stephen Janis:

Well, Eric, let me shift gears a little bit here. What do you think, you remember people called you a copwatcher. I think you were a copwatcher. I don’t know if

Taya Graham:

You’ve

Stephen Janis:

Been able to follow it from prison, but what do you think about the copwatcher movement at this point that you were a big part of? And in some cases it seems like it’s like James Freeman took down his YouTube channel. There’s been a lot of, I think, commotion in the community. Do you think it’s still as viable as it was five years ago or is it kind of waning or what do you think?

Eric Brandt:

Well, let me first be honest that I don’t have enough time to watch all of these channels. Right,

Stephen Janis:

Of course.

Eric Brandt:

So I guess I’ll give you some off the cuff observations that I’ve made in the last few months that I’ve been able to do that. First of all, when you put yourself out there and you put yourself in the public light, not only do you have supporters, but you also have critics.

And worse than critics is you have the silent enemies. You have the people that are watching your channel just to find the grew up. No, I’m talking about when your life is completely on blast all day long, then you have placed a target on your back. The guy in Texas, the head of the police union, Grimaldi or whatever his name is, I remember him saying once, “We are sick and tired of having a target on our back every day.” And I’m thinking to myself, “Well, stop putting it there.” Well, that’s the same thing with a copwatcher. You’re sticking your neck out. You are exposing yourself to liability. You’re exposing yourself to them taking a tiny little jaywalking ticket and turning it into a prison sentence. You have to look at the great risks that are there. If you have a family, if you have kids to pick up from school and you get arrested doing activism, social services is happy to give those kids a ride and you’ll see them in six months maybe.

If you have a mortgage, you can’t. We’ve seen a lot of cop watchers. I’m using the term copwatcher very loosely. I’m not famous.

Stephen Janis:

I’m famously

Eric Brandt:

Despised labels, but I’ve known a lot of activists, we’ll call them activists, that have lost their employment over their activism. So cops do go to these employers and say things to them and try to do that. That’s another reason why I’ve not shared where I’m employed because I don’t want turmoil with my employer. Does that make sense? That totally makes

Stephen Janis:

Sense. Because

Eric Brandt:

There’s risks there. There are mala factors out there. If we say that 99% of the population is good and 1% is genuinely malevolent, then if you have a channel with a hundred thousand people, you still have a thousand malevolents out there working against you and you’re just one person. Yeah. I haven’t thought of that way. There’s a lot of risk there. And so it’s not at all a surprise to me that some of these activists are flash in the pan, if you will. They do their little activism, they get into a little bit of trouble, then they’re done. And that’s as much as we can expect out of a population, that’s a tax. People can only handle so much tax and so much pressure. It requires all kinds. I will say, I don’t think I’m a big fan of the standing on the side of the road with the Zoom lens in the dispensary.

I’m not sure that I’m really advancing the First Amendment. I may be creating animosity with the First Amendment if we’re basically going after private citizens. And I’m not a big fan of the watch these people freak out until the one asshole gets sauced. I’m not a fan of that. I don’t think that that’s advancing the First Amendment very well. I think that that’s trying to make money in clicks and views. I’m not finding a lot of value in that work, but that makes me the critic and they have to make their own decisions. So

They’re there and I think that we have to tolerate it and accept it whether we like it or not. And you may like it, I don’t know. And your viewers may like that stuff. It does seem to get noticed, but that’s not my fan. My attack is against the government. I want government actors to be made aware and I want the public to be aware of the government misconduct because they’re the ones that ultimately make the decisions. They make the pressure. If you’re out there on the street creating the scene, then there are people in the back that are talking about it. If you don’t mind, I’ll talk to you about the power of how these things make it to the dinner table conversation. I had jury selection going on in an incident in Westminster, this is now about a decade ago, and we’re questioning the jurors.

And one of the jurors says, “I don’t know if this is the same guy, but my kids came home from school a while back and they were talking about a guy with this big sign and with this uncomfortable message. And we had to explain to our kids that this was not the language that we espouse, this is not how we like to live in our lives, but they used it as the teachable moment to explain the function of the First Amendment and the Constitution. So who am I to say that a particular incident does not reach the dinner table in a certain way?” And ultimately those are the people that talk in the background and that’s where the real power comes from. So I think that copwatching is still active and alive. I still see it. I do like some of these channels like John Eagle’s channel and Audit the Audit channel where they kind of go in depth on the story and they seem to put a lot of work into that.

And I would certainly, what’s that channel? She’s got the hair. We were talking with her earlier today. Oh, the police accountability report, that one.

Taya Graham:

I’m glad I’m on your list. Of course

Eric Brandt:

You’re on my list. But these are also important, right? So you have this street antagonism and then we have Tea Graham coming into us with the intrepid reporter in the field, Stephen Janice, and they kind of break down an incident or they break down a story. There’s a lot of money that goes into that kind of journalism. And so it’s so complicated and there’s so many moving parts and it’s really important for people to appreciate all of them.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I mean, we confronted that, but go ahead Tea, you had the next question.

Taya Graham:

I wanted to ask you something because we’re talking about criticism and I was just wondering, just looking back on your life, on your activism, do you have any self-reflection or criticism for yourself? Because I know, for example, I was there when you were in the courtroom in Colorado and I saw you make a statement apologizing to the folks who were affected by your speech. But looking back now, do you have any criticism for yourself or is there anything you would change?

Eric Brandt:

Oh, that’s a complicated question. Do I have criticism for myself? Absolutely. And a lot of criticisms are internal. Some of them we’ve talked about. Yeah. I mean, nobody gets it right all the time. And that’s kind of the problem when you’re out there with the spotlight on you 24 hours a day is that all of your flaws are out there. And I’ve owned my flaws. I tell people I’m bulletproof. Everybody knows I’m a schlub, right? I mean, pick the negative moniker and I’ve probably done it at least once. So that makes me essentially bulletproof. You can’t attack me. Go ahead. Try to insult me. And you have to, to a certain degree, have that kind of attitude if you’re going to go into this. You have to have a thick skin. You have to be able to handle it. I will confide in you now today that what really pushed me over the edge was them taking Otto’s kids.

Taya Graham:

That

Eric Brandt:

Was existential to me. That was so horrible. And that was too much vicarious trauma for me to endure that broke me.

Stephen Janis:

I’m sorry, Eric.

Taya Graham:

I understand that. A lot of people were very deeply affected by that.

Eric Brandt:

Oh, horribly affected. That was a horrible, horrible thing. And just because he was with us, all that, I’ve seen all of that case from both sides. I’ve seen all the body camera footage and none of it made it any easier to swallow. It made it harder. It was even harder if you knew the backside of it. So I’ll tell you that the biggest criticism is that I had too much going on at the same time. I mean, my strength was that they would kick me down and I would get right back up. And I had so many things that were being juggled and then the auto incident was just more than I could bear.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Just so people who are watching, just so they know, Otto, the watchdog, he took his kids camping and they separated him from his kids accusing him of –

Eric Brandt:

For three years.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, for three years. So it

Taya Graham:

Was an ordeal. And that’s for Otto’s First Amendment activism. Otto was primarily, essentially police would approach him for holding signs. He was not putting a camera – Still approach him. He still out there. He’s still out there holding those signs, but putting cameras in people’s faces. He wasn’t approaching police officers. He was merely standing on the side of the road holding signs. And that was the beginning of his persecution.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Well, Eric, so what’s next for you? I mean, we’re kind of wrapping up and listen, we appreciate your time.

Taya Graham:

Oh, absolutely. Oh,

Stephen Janis:

I appreciate your time. What’s next for you? What’s your future look like? I mean, people want to know, what are you going to do next?

Eric Brandt:

I had intended to get out and go to the ranch and build my ranch. And there’s a lot of work that needs to be done there and that’s my forever home. That’s what I want to build.

Stephen Janis:

With a septic tank, right?

Eric Brandt:

With the septic tank, right? My life’s ambition is a pile of shit and I’m excited about it. Well, I think it’s – Oh, you guys

Taya Graham:

Are

Eric Brandt:

Going to have to bleep out a lot on this video, aren’t you? Yes. I

Taya Graham:

Think it’s absolutely wonderful that you’re creating a life for yourself where you’re going to be able to live off the land and give back to the land, help cultivate your chickens, maybe grow some food. I’m really into pepper stuff myself, ready for the urban apocalypse. So I definitely appreciate being able to live off the grid. Well, if

Stephen Janis:

There is no population left

Taya Graham:

There.

Eric Brandt:

I want to essentially build a biodiverse zone.

Taya Graham:

Yes.

Eric Brandt:

My goal is 50 trees a year for 10 years.

Stephen Janis:

Oh,

Taya Graham:

That’s

Stephen Janis:

Great.

Eric Brandt:

Yeah.

Taya Graham:

Very nice.

Eric Brandt:

I hate to say, I have a certain amount of experience and education and expertise, so you’re not going to see Eric Brandt running down the street with sparkly purple toenails and a giant fuck the cop sign. That’s just not in the cards. So

Stephen Janis:

Those days are over. Those days of crazy YouTube videos are over.

Taya Graham:

No more Pikachu outfits.

Eric Brandt:

Maybe Pikachu.

Taya Graham:

Don’t give

Eric Brandt:

Up Pikachu. My situation is now different, right? I can’t tolerate another prosecution. The most minor thing now, if I lose, would be a very major thing for me.

Stephen Janis:

Eric, well that- That’s great. I kind of had a feeling that you weren’t going to stop working on this type of reforming the criminal justice system. And I commend you and laud you for that. That something you’re doing when you just got out. But we really appreciate you joining us today. Absolutely. It’s been fascinating discussion. We have very much enjoyed covering your career and film. Yute, you want to

Taya Graham:

Take up? And also being one little part of that constellation, of that Eric Brandt constellation. We’re grateful for you helping us be a part of that community. So thank you, Eric.

Eric Brandt:

Thank you so much for being there.

Taya Graham:

We really appreciate you joining us and sharing your thoughts and your feelings during this critical moment in your life. And we really appreciate your candor about copwatching and the criminal justice system and your own personal reflections about what you’ve been through. Now, Steven, for me, there’s not going to be any rant today for me. I mean, I thought this was a really profound conversation. I feel like there’s nothing I have to say here. I mean, love them or hate him. Eric is always insightful and thoughtful and kind of a mad genius, but not just about his own work, but the broader issues that prompted his activism. But Steven, before I walk us out, do you have any thoughts about our discussion?

Stephen Janis:

Well, it’s just interesting that Eric has projects already kind of percolating to do reform. It’s interesting to see that the activists within him did not die in prison. It came out. And also, well, I think a lot of people don’t understand the trauma of being incarcerated.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely.

Stephen Janis:

And to see Eric’s emotional reaction should be, I think everyone should see that because it’s not a big deal. It’s not a small deal to put someone in a cage and confine them. And Eric showed how that affected him. And I think we should all recognize that. Absolutely. We have to be careful about how we run our criminal justice system for a variety of reasons. But the emotional toll it took on him really moved me. And also the fact that he understood that we tried to connect the dots in his life and others and show it in a way that wasn’t just mercenary or that we use the conflict to create a story, that we showed a story of some positivity and some true emotional connections. So I was really glad that he saw that because I worked very hard to try to bring that out of the film.

So it wasn’t just about crazy cop watchers. As Eric points out, they’re people with lives.

Taya Graham:

Steve, that’s a really good point. I mean, we could have made that documentary incredibly sensationalistic, but instead what we wanted to show was the community that was there. And I’m really glad that Eric was so open with us. Okay. We’re going to keep you up to date on Eric and his work, putting his life back together, and also his upcoming litigation or legislation. We’ll see what happens. And we’re also working on new episodes of the police accountability report, which we hope to debut soon. So please stay tuned. And finally, our camera will be in the courtroom when a judge hands down his decision in the dramatic trespassing trial of Long Island Audit. This was after the popular cop watcher defended himself against charges that he broke the law when he knocked on the door of Connecticut State Trooper Brian Fahey. And as always, please be safe out there.

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. This is the second bonus episode in this series, and I’m really excited about this one. Today, I’m bringing you my full conversation with Marianne Franks. You will likely remember her from this series as I reached out to her in numerous episodes. She’s a professor in intellectual property technology and civil rights law at George Washington University and the president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. She’s also the author of the incredible book, Fearless Speech: Breaking Free From the First Amendment, which I referenced often in this podcast. That book was published in 2024 by Bold Type Books. So today I’m bringing you my conversation with her in its entirety. We spoke last year, 2025. I hope you like it. In the intro to your book, Fearless Speech, you write, “Unfettered speech does indeed exist, but only for some Americans.” Can you tell me what you mean by this?

Mary Anne Franks:

Yeah. We have this, for lack of a better word, a myth that we tell ourselves as Americans that we have just this absolute right to free speech. It makes us really unique among all other countries. And I think that part of the reason why that myth persists is because I think it’s true for some people, and it’s particularly true, as I say in the book, that if you are a person who is saying things that go to the sort of worst of American society, that is the things that we should be most ashamed of as a society, our sexism, our racism, our elitism, if you are saying something that kind of converges with some of those ideologies, you get massive amounts of protection. There’s protection for really horrific personal forms of abuse, for stalking, for racist, infective. So those individuals, I think, who are invested in those forms of speech really can say with some accuracy that they get to say whatever they want with no consequences.

Michael Fox:

Where does this happen and why do these people get to say whatever they want? Whereas those people who are trying to stand up or standing for democratic speech or standing up for those people who have always been marginalized, why are their voices silenced? I mean, it seems crazy and it’s incredible that this is, like you mentioned, this myth that goes back, but it’s still here.

Mary Anne Franks:

Yeah, it is a form of some pretty high level constitutional gaslighting, because what we tell ourselves when we say things like, “Well, we have so much freedom of speech here,” we’re using a kind of cliche that has been passed down for generations. And part of what I try to do in the book is to actually track the history of speech and not in this limited sense. I mean, you think about how, I guess tautological is the word about how most First Amendment books or articles are written is they go back and they look at the First Amendment cannon, cases that were successful, including cases not just for the pornographers in the KKK, although that’s a lot of it, but also in some cases for civil rights protestors, for people who were vulnerable and were trying to say something actually revolutionary. So if you do that and you talk about, well, there’s a success here and there’s a success here, you can sort of extrapolate from that, oh, well that means that we have always had this really protective attitude towards free speech.

One of the things I like to point out though is that if you have to go back and look at all the times where people were hauled into court, where they were either being sued or imprisoned or otherwise punished for their speech and had to try to fight for their right to be able to do those things, that isn’t really a sign of a society that protects free speech. That’s a society that keeps arresting people and suing people for free speech that may or may not be vindicated. And for every case where the ACLU decided that it was going to throw its resources behind a particular individual, there are thousands, maybe millions of incidents where people who just went to prison, who just were silenced, who were just harassed into not speaking. And so if you push aside the cases for a moment and just look at history, you look at the very first instances of radical speech in America, and some of that happens within seven years of the ratification of the First Amendment, you’ve got people criticizing the government and the war effort, the war with France, and you’ve got immediately the Congress is doing exactly what it says it’s not going to do in the First Amendment and it passes the Alien and Sedition Acts and then we’re off to the races.

From the very beginning, we say as a country, we are protecting free speech in the same way that we say we the people. We don’t actually mean it. And if you actually really uncover what we do as a country, you can see that. So you get to the question of slavery, the abolitionists who were some of the most radical revolutionary speakers the United States certainly has ever experienced, and you had abolitionist literature being literally censored and suppressed, people going to jail for producing it, people being arrested if they were making statements, if they were preaching about the evils of slavery, if they were publishing newspaper articles that tried to document the horrors of slavery. So the whole history, if you think about the incredible work of Ida B. Wells, the pioneering journalist who gave so much attention to the lynchings that were happening in the South, her entire publishing office was burned to the ground.

Elijah Lovedre was shot by an angry mob because he wouldn’t stop writing about how slavery was wrong. So you go through that history, you go through the women’s rights movement where women were picketing outside the White House and advocating for the right for women to vote, being arrested, beaten, thrown into jail. You fast-forward to what happens to Black Lives Matter protestors, what happens to people who are trying to bring attention to the Palestinian genocide, what happens to women who are making claims about Me Too. And you see it again, that these are people who are getting arrested and thrown in jail or sued or otherwise humiliated and attacked in a way that sets their entire life on fire. While at the same time, if you are on the opposite of those issues, if you are articulating, and this is complex about the American psyche, because we’ll say things like, “Well, if you are speaking the speech we hate, we will protect you or we can’t just protect the speech we like.” The problem with that kind of cliche is that what does it mean to say the speech we like?

The people who’ve always been in power in the United States have been the people who like racist speech. They like sexist speech. They like a speech that discriminates between the wealthy and the poor. And so when we say that we’re actually really mixing up what is actually happening,

It’s much more accurate to say that the forces that hold this country together at the origins, which I by no means want to suggest is the limit of our possibility or aspiration, but it was white slaveholding men who did not believe that everybody should get the same rights. So if you are saying something consonant with that, whether you are the KKK member or whether you are the pornographer, you are most likely going to get your speech protected and everybody who actually challenges that, if you trace it throughout history overwhelmingly with a few exceptions, and I do want to say there are exceptions, it’s long history, the difference is that the people who are trying to speak against racism, against misogyny, against elitism, those are the people who get punished and it’s the people who speak in the same chorus as those forces that do get protected.

Michael Fox:

Wow. Can you talk a little bit about your concept of reckless speech versus fearless speech? I think that this intertwines with everything you’re talking about, and then also what does that mean today in this moment that we’re living in?

Mary Anne Franks:

Yeah, so when I was revisiting the Canon, when I was thinking about how to write this book and what it is that I wanted to say, one thing I wanted to do was to talk about how if for a moment we set aside the law and we just sort of look at the speech itself, we forget about whether the answer is, is this constitutionally protected or not? Because that becomes a virtue in its own right and that is very distracting and you just start to look at what people actually say. And it’s really that I found the concept of fearless speech before the concept of reckless speech really crystallized for me.

And I found that concept primarily because I was looking at on the recommendation of a friend of mine who had heard me speak about the kind of disparities that I saw between the kind of speech that gets protected and the kind of speech that gets suppressed. And he said to me, he said, “Have you read much of Michel Foucault’s lectures in the 1980s where he talks about a Greek concept that I think is really similar to what you’re saying?” I hadn’t at that point. And so that was the concept of Parazia, which is Michel Foucault translates as fearless speech. And he talks about how in Greek society, ancient Greek society, that’s actually the form of speech that is the most important for the preservation of democracy. It isn’t to say it’s the only way we can approach speech or the only kind of speech that matters, but it’s the one that really is the dividing line between democracy and other forms of government.

Now with all the caveats about how the Greek democracy was also not particularly democratic, but the concept was really fascinating, which is it’s not just that you get to say whatever you want. The Greeks did have a word for that too, this kind of idea that you could just say things without consequences, but the Greeks didn’t seem to think that that was the particularly valuable form of speech. They thought the most valuable form of speech was the kind of speech where you had to speak in your own voice. That was the first qualification, which is you can’t pretend to be a devil’s advocate or take on a role or just do it for rhetorical purposes, you had to commit to it. And they said you also had to be speaking to or about something that was more powerful than yourself as the speaker, someone in power, some force in power, and you could not be praising it because praising it is possible.

Of course you can do that, but that isn’t fearless. To be fearless about the way you speak about power is to criticize it. And it’s fearless because that creates risk to you because once you criticize people in power, you are in danger that the people in power are going to hurt you.

So that was the concept that I though, okay, that speaks to me as a concept of incredibly valuable speech, a way to distinguish between forms of speech because we tend to be very, just throw it all in the same category. And I thought about the famous cases in the United States, that is the KKK, that is Larry Flint, that is any number of forms of neo-Nazi speech. And then I think about why it is that we can easily say that whatever else is true about those forms of speech, they’re not fearless. These are not people who are taking a burden of speech upon themselves and actually taking a risk that they will be hurt by the people in power because they’re reinforcing power. Now by contrast, that is to say the harm goes in a different direction. If we think of fearless speech as someone who voluntarily assumes the harm against themselves because they know that what they say may mean that they get hurt, you contrast to a speaker like for instance, Clarence Brandenburg, the subject of this really famous 1969 Supreme Court case where he is full clan regalia, doing a march around a burning cross, got the Bible in hand talking about how Black people and Jews need to be removed from the country.

Now that is not the kind of speech. I mean literally someone in a mask who is proclaiming these things and stirring up dehumanization and rhetoric against people who are objectively speaking more vulnerable in society. And in the wake of those kinds of rallies, people did get lynched, they did get attacked. And the entire question in Brandenburg was how closely related do his words have to be to the attacks for it to be illegal? And they answered that his words weren’t close enough. But forgetting the doctrine for a moment, that’s reckless. You are putting this out into the world fully knowing that the people that it’s going to hurt or the people that it puts in danger is not you, it’s someone else. And there I though that is a really important distinction that I would like to emphasize.

Michael Fox:

That’s so incredible. The thing I’ve been having trouble grappling with for a while is the fact that when we think about free speech, there’s the Constitution, there’s a First Amendment, there’s what’s permitted, what’s allowed, and then there’s how people embrace free speech in their movements, like the abolitionists and how people use it. It’s almost like there’s these two worlds. There’s the free speech of the First Amendment of the Constitution of law, and then there’s how people take this on in order to kind of push forward important ideas, which of course is linked to the fearless speech that you talk about. Can you just dig a little bit more into this question of the abolitionist movement, how they use this, how important this was for them? I feel like that’s like this first movement where within the United States, fearless speech, people are really embracing this concept of free speech for the first time and how important that history is still today.

Mary Anne Franks:

I really like the way that you put this, how you put it, that it’s the use of the concept. It’s not the abstraction of the concept. It’s how did you enact free speech? And in many cases, I think the abolitionists, I think for some periods of time you saw the abolitionist movement self-consciously talking about freedom of speech, but for the most part you don’t see it because if we back up and we think about the evolution of the First Amendment for more than a hundred years, and we had a First Amendment that literally says, “Congress shall make no law.” So the assumption that everyone made based on that reading, and that’s a fair reading, is that it only applies to the federal government

Michael Fox:

And

Mary Anne Franks:

It only applies in this really narrow sense that Congress literally can’t pass laws that say, “You can’t say that or you can’t say this.” So that when you had states saying, “We don’t like this kind of activism or these kinds of expression that suggests that slavery is wrong or bad,” that was not really seen as a First Amendment issue because it wasn’t even conceptually or doctrinally possible. Now, I will say that when you look at people like Elijah Lovejoy, he very firmly read the First Amendment as a protection of his free speech. One of the most poignant things about his story as he is continuing to move states, move cities because every time he establishes his newspaper and writes about the horrors of slavery and advocates for abolition, he’s attacked and he has to move again. So on the day that he dies, the mob has found him once again and they are at his doorstep and they are saying, “You have to stop writing about slavery.” And I can’t remember the exact quotation, but he says that he has the freedom to speak in this way and he will use that freedom as he sees fit.

And he says that right before the mob shoots him to death.

So there’s a sense in which there were some members who really though of this as could really see the vision of the First Amendment that I think eventually became how people wanted or at least idealistically though we meant free speech. Free speech for the most radical democratic forms of speech. But by and large, I think that really wasn’t how people perceived it in part because there was such a backlash. When you look at Pennsylvania Hall, so this is something I write about in the book, the early effort, this wonderful humanistic effort that happens in 1838, I hope I’m getting the date right, where you had all of these luminaries coming together who were staunch anti-slavery advocates, and they were also advocates for women’s rights. And those are two of the most controversial positions you can take at the time. But you had all of these people wanting to come together, use their own money to build this incredible building that was supposed to become a communal hall for speaking freely.

And they referred to the freedom of speech in that way and that it was going to be for the first time that America would really speak freely. Black people and white people would mingle together, women and men would mingle together. There would be lectures, there’d be discussions, there’d be a bookstore. And it was such an incredible moment in American history that I think most people never read about because what happened when the people of Pennsylvania, and not just in Pennsylvania, there was all of these white-owned presses that were speaking about the abomination of Pennsylvania Hall in their Southern newspapers and advocating for people to go and fight for their rights against what was happening in Pennsylvania and all these flyers that were put up around Philadelphia by people who were saying that there are abominations going on at this particular hall and you should do something to stop it.

And so for the first week or so when they were having their incredible lectures and there were all of this incredible progressive mingling of society that these, again, kind of living up to the aspirations that the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights actually articulated and people were furious about it. The white mobs were furious about it. White businessmen were furious about it. And what happens as I recount is that they get so agitated that they burn the entire building down and they break in, they’re breaking in with stones. They start pelting the building with stones as some of the speakers are speaking. So you’ve got, and I put this in the book too, Angelina Grimke giving her speech while there’s a mob trying to break in and trying to keep her physically from speaking. And she just incorporates it into her speech and talks about how we, she says, “We who are speaking the truth have nothing to fear.

They’re the ones who should fear and tremble.” But when they leave, the mob breaks in and sets and opens all the gas jets. And before you know it, this incredible monument to true free speech, expression, equality has been burned to the ground. So I think to some extent that was a very powerful kind of dampening of this moment that free speech and democracy were intertwined. I think it really did a lot to erase that from memory or put such a scar on that memory that that really wasn’t the way it was articulated for some time. And even when you saw the later abolitionist movements taking up the cause, I don’t think they so much talked about it in terms of free speeches. They just said, “This is about humanity. This is about evil. This is about a compact with the devil as they called the Constitution for its concessions to slavery.” So I think in some ways it was so much.

The project that they were working on was so much about democracy and the fighting against evil that they wouldn’t have articulated specifically as a free speech project because in some ways that would diminish what they were doing. It was about humanity. It was about stopping the scourge of something that was unforgivable and was America’s original sin.

Michael Fox:

Wow. What year was that Philadelphia Hall, do you remember?

Mary Anne Franks:

May 17th, 1838 was the day that the mob destroyed Pennsylvania Hall.

Michael Fox:

Amazing. Incredible. Can you talk a little bit about Ida B. Wells and her newspaper Free Speech? I think it’s fascinating that she chose that name for the newspaper and why was she so important? Why was her writing so important and what happened?

Mary Anne Franks:

It’s the post-Civil War society. She had a really interesting, fascinating career as a school teacher. And then when she started writing, she wrote about all kinds of. The way that I think she. I can’t remember exactly how she phrased it, but she was mostly speaking to Black individuals about what she considered to be sort of interracial problems and for a while was actually quite a sort of a moralistic scold, I think is even how she described herself in her own writings, that she was mostly focusing on trying to tell Black people how they should live their lives better. But then she got really consumed by the horrors of lynching because she experienced what had happened to people that she knew and in neighborhoods that she lived in. And suddenly that became what she really felt that she needed to communicate to the public. And as you might imagine, this was not received well.

And it was particularly an editorial that she wrote about the horrors of lynching where she wasn’t just talking about how lynching was a bad thing. She was saying, “Here’s what I think is actually going on with the problem of lynching.”

And this was something I think had not really been expressed before, certainly not by a Black female journalist, but she says, “The story that we keep hearing about these lynchings is that the men were told the Black men who are usually the subject of these lynchings that they’ve done something horrible to white women, that they’re raping white women.” She says, “Here’s what my research has shown,” because she went and she would follow on these incidents and she would gather information about them and ask questions. She said, “What I think is happening and what seems to be happening in these places is that there’s a problem of competition.” And she says, “And it’s not just economic competition, but that’s a big part of it. It just so turns out that many of the victims of lynching are people who are black men who were running businesses that were in competition with white businesses.” But then she suggests there’s a much more intimate form of competition when she says, “It’s not about, in many cases, sexual violence against these white women.

It was consensual relationships.” And that I think is really what drove the mob around her at this time from being very angry with what she was saying to being enraged in a way that was incredibly destructive. It was because she said, “I believe that black men are not raping white women. I believe that there are consensual relationships happening between black men and white women, and that is why lynching is actually happening. It’s a sexual vengeance project. It is why so often we see that these men are tortured in these ways that are very sexual and very physical.” And it really did seem to just animate the worst possible forces where she was in Memphis to drive them to that same kind of mob rage that we saw with Pennsylvania Hall. So she happened to be

Away when the mob kind of gathered itself together. And like Pennsylvania Hall, it was partly because there were editorials published in newspapers advocating or sort of agitating crowds to get together and do something. They didn’t know at the time that it was a woman who had authored this. They had assumed it was the previous editor of her newspaper. They assumed it was a man. They found him, they pistol whipped him until he told them who was actually the author and at that point talked about how she needed to be lynched as well. And so there’s all of this talk of what they’re going to do to silence her, and then they break into her offices and they destroy the presses of the Memphis free speech while she’s not there. So again, you see that same sense of all-consuming rage about the publication of this idea, and you can certainly see it in the way that the white newspapers talked about her editorial.

They would reprint her editorial and talk about how unbelievable it was that somebody would make such horrific accusations. And it’s so reminiscent in ways of the Pennsylvania Hall reporting. After Pennsylvania Hall was burned, there were a lot of editorials in Southern newspapers where they might say something about how, well, it’s a shame that this incredible building was burned to the ground, but not only were these radical ideas being stated in this hall, but also white women and Black men were seen leaving together and sitting together. And you could see that this was really something that was animating so much of a part of what was animating this kind of mob hatred, this real censorship was that sense of you cannot speak to that. You cannot speak to this idea that the black races and the white races might be mingling voluntarily together.

Michael Fox:

I’m fascinated by this idea that you mentioned in your book as well that racial justice advocates and social movements succeed despite rather than because of First Amendment protections. That’s what we’ve been talking about obviously for the last 20 minutes, but also that concept just breaks everything within this myth that we understand where it’s actually, they might be embracing the idea of free speech, but still they’re succeeding despite the protections that are actually waged against them. Can you just speak a little bit to this?

Mary Anne Franks:

Yeah. I think it’s in two ways, right? It’s that it’s in spite of the First Amendment in part because you think about what would’ve happened. If we imagine an alternative America where from the beginning we took the concept of free speech in the way that Elijah Lovejoy took it, which is to say we have to recognize if freedom of speech means anything, it is the freedom to criticize what we are doing, what the powerful people are doing in our society. And the most important thing for us to articulate at that time is slavery and close on its heels is the subjugation of women. Imagine if that had really been allowed to sort of take. If Pennsylvania Hall had never burned down and it really did become a temple of humanity where people began to see the things that they were deeply wedded to, ideas that they had always grown up thinking were correct, if they really had been challenged by other ways of thinking, if that had been allowed to flourish.

I mean, think about how radical and revolutionary that would’ve been. And then imagine that if that had shifted our discourse considerably, could it have meant that we weren’t going to have to have a bloody conflict to settle these scores? Could it have meant that we really did learn the lesson already too late, but still better than nothing to say that is what freedom of speech means and we have to embrace that. That’s truly the speech we hate, that is to say the speech that the powerful members of our society hate. We must give it as much protection as we can. I think about the mayor of Philadelphia being the people at Pennsylvania Hall pleading with him to give them protection because they knew that the mob was coming for them and the mayor was basically saying, “Well, what can you do? You’re saying radical things.” And he really basically declined to protect them and later blame them for their own destruction.

So imagine that we have this evolution where we move past certain types of racial injustice because we are truly radical and realize that we can get past our own original sin. So that would’ve been a very different context in which civil rights wouldn’t have had to take the path that it did. But also we would’ve learned that that is what it means to be radical and revolutionary in the sense of the First Amendment.

Michael Fox:

Instead,

Mary Anne Franks:

You get the Clarence Brandenburg version of what it means to be radical and revolutionary. We skip the part where it actually becomes the norm that slavery and all forms of racism and sexism are evil and wrong. Instead, it goes from becoming the way that society is constructed to, “Oh, he’s saying something very edgy that’s probably making you uncomfortable, but for that reason we should protect it.” And it’s like there’s nothing in between. And so at that point, quite literally, the KKK gets a second life and a third life, and it’s partly because it’s revitalized through these perversions of the concept of free speech to say, “Well, we must be allowed to say these things now that slavery has been abolished. We fix things in terms of racial injustice, and now it’s all gone too far. And so we are going to be the old guard who is going to be talking about how things used to be.” And then immediately that’s what gets so much protection, gets so much rhetorical resources and protection.

So you do that and then you allow for things like what I talk about in the book about Birth of a Nation and how it goes from being this very controversial play that sparks riots everywhere it’s performed, becomes a movie which sparks riots and lynchings everywhere it is seen. And you get one of the first sort of showdowns between the NAACP and the ACLU where the NAACP is saying, “This is going to get people killed.” And the ACLU saying, “You really need to understand that if you’re trying to advocate for censorship, it’s going to hurt you too at some point.” It’s one of those moments in the book where I’m trying to articulate the expression on my face when I read this, this idea of the NAACP being lectured by the ACLU, by the white director of the ACLU saying, “It’s going to come around and hurt Black people.

The law isn’t going to work for you if you advocate for restrictions now.” The obvious point being that the law has never really worked for Black people. Of course, it’s going to be used against them. It has been this entire time. That whole premise of the, “Well, don’t censor the radical white supremacist speech because it’s going to mean that you’ll get censored too,” completely erases the fact that radical abolitionist speech, as we were just talking about, has always been censored, has always been suppressed. So it’s this kind of retelling of history that is so perverse because it’s also this kind of lecturing that says, “If you just had a sophisticated enough view of speech and just enough confidence in the American people, you would understand that we just need to allow this kind of material to flourish so that you will be saved as much as the white supremacist will be saved.”

Michael Fox:

Yeah. I’m so grateful to talk with you today. This is so important because this is the question that I keep coming back to as well. What you just mentioned is the discourse, right? It is like it needs to be free for everybody, and that’s why we have to defend KKK and neo-Nazis and whatever else, but yet people that are standing up with fearless speech, they don’t get defended. This is the next step to that. Do we need regulation? Should there be regulation around hate speech? Should there be regulations limiting the reckless speech of people or the speech that is rooted in hate or racism, whatever else?

Mary Anne Franks:

Well, one of the things that I think we need is to stop thinking of hate Speech as a category. I say this for the American context because it is meaningful in the European context because they have a definition of it. It has legal force in other places. Here, I really feel like it always distorts the conversation because we don’t actually all agree, I’m sure, about what it actually means to say what hate speech is. And when we say either of these two very familiar assertions, which is either the First Amendment protects hate speech, it just does, that’s what makes us so special. Or the First Amendment doesn’t protect hate speech, which we heard the Trump administration of all administrations trying to say, they’re both wrong, partly because we don’t really have a category like this.

Michael Fox:

When

Mary Anne Franks:

You think about how you can’t actually use racial slurs in the workplace, for instance, you cannot threaten people, whether it’s based on their race or something else. If you’re making a true threat towards someone, that’s not allowed either. Many people would consider non-consensual pornography to be a kind of form of antagonistic speech that’s also, as far as we know, until the Supreme Court says differently, also not protected by the First Amendment. So I think we shouldn’t enter this discourse of is it hate or not hate because it’s always been such a strange concept. Part of what I think, what I sometimes refer to cynically as the free speech industries speak about this is they like those terms like hate because they’re so ambiguous that you can do whatever you want with them. That’s how you get the cliche of we have to protect the speech we hate without ever asking what does that mean to someone like Hugo Black who himself was a KKK member in his youth?He’s sitting on the Supreme Court.

What is the speech he hates? I don’t know. So I think we ask much more usefully and always have asked, but we haven’t been clear about what we’ve been asking, the best version of the First Amendment and the balance of what we’re trying to do by protecting speech, because it can’t just mean you protect all speech all the time. We never have as a country and it would not be an ideal way to run a country. I don’t think you could run a country by saying all speech is protected. When you think about all the ways that we do already restrict speech, we don’t allow perjury. We don’t allow the counterfeiting of money. We don’t allow you to say, at least knock on wood right now, that a bottle of aspirin is actually heroin or the other way around.

We don’t allow people to engage in child pornography. We don’t allow people to defame others completely even if they know that things are untrue. So the best version of what we have under the First Amendment is we separate harm from offense. The best version of the First Amendment we could have is one that says we can restrict, we always have restricted things that we consider to be harmful and we can regulate those in certain kinds of ways. Now the only debate should be over what falls into that category. What we ought to get rid of are things like hate and offense and whatever those things mean because they are so incredibly subjective and so easy to weaponize. You look at how the Republican Party has for many years tried to say that they are the free speech party and they’re just out there trying to advocate for the radical speech and the speech we hate.

And then as soon as it’s speech that they don’t like, they come out swinging saying, “Well, you can’t possibly speak ill of Charlie Kirk.” So you know how easy it’s going to be to weaponize concepts like hate and offense and people shouldn’t be allowed to say distasteful things. I think we really need to be clear though, the fact that something is offensive or distasteful or hateful also is not a sign of its merit. We don’t need to fall for that either. It’s just that it’s irrelevant. And it was really well put in a few of our previous Supreme Court cases like Cohen versus California, which is the fuck the draft case. The court says the fact that it’s offensive is not enough reason to regulate it. And that’s exactly right. But there may be points at which, for instance, as the court says about child pornography, there are certain forms of speech that are so harmful.

And just to be clear, because I know people always think when they hear that exception, they think, “Well, that’s because it always really involves a crime.” Not true. Kids who take pictures of themselves, that gets distributed by adults, that is considered child pornography even though the original act

Is not criminal. So we have just decided that certain things are harmful enough and now let’s just actually be inclusive about that and count other people than say white men in the category of people who can be harmed and things that maybe white men in particular might really like but really hurt other people maybe deserve to be regulated because they might be things that are as serious as defamation, as serious as perjury, as serious as a HIPAA violation, and actually consider what it means to articulate harm in that sense and regulate accordingly.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Can you talk about the marketplace of ideas? For you, what does this mean and is our praise for this idea flawed?

Mary Anne Franks:

For a long time I used to criticize the metaphor because I though, “Well, what a horrible metaphor that is. Tha shouldn’t be the way that we look at speech.” And now I’ve come to the point of saying it’s not that it’s a horrible metaphor, it’s that it’s entirely accurate. And because this is something I’ve noticed about the strange convergence between civil libertarians and economic libertarians, which is this idea that the market somehow is good. The presumption that markets are good and that markets work and that the best way to have a functioning market is to never regulate it. And none of that is true, but all the things that I think people who are savvy about free market ideals would say, which is that there’s no such thing as an unregulated market, full stop. There’s always regulation. You can’t have a market unless you regulate.

The question is always, how do you regulate? Who do you regulate and what are you regulating for? Once you understand that, you realize that deregulation is almost always an ideological pre-commitment to an asymmetry. The haves have and the have nots don’t. And so yeah, we’ll just freely let them have interactions with each other and hope for the best. And that’s really what we are doing with our free speech discourse. We are saying whatever the status quo is, just don’t touch it. I mean, we’ve got enough laws, we can’t possibly come up with anything now that would be wise and so just leave it alone. And that’s ridiculous. And I think most people who would hear that about the market, the actual economic market would understand that’s a crazy thing to say, that you’re going to get the best possible outcome by just letting the status quo flourish.

And so I would just suggest that we be as critical about the marketplace of ideas as we ought to be critical about economic inequality and distorted markets and monopolies and all the things that we should recognize are bad things when they happen economically and are really bad when they come to ideology as well.

Michael Fox:

Amazing. Maryanne, just a few more questions and thank you so much. What is your definition of free speech and would you say that Trump is trying to kind of redefine what we understand as free speech today?

Mary Anne Franks:

Yes. I definitely think that there’s a redefinition going on and it’s not just Trump. I mean, it’s been in the works for some time. His administration is putting it into effect in a way that we’ve never seen before. We’ve never seen on the scale. I think it is really close as many people have highlighted, is close to the McCarthy era version of what free speech, of not what free speech is, but what the McCarthy era of what we are allowed to suppress in the name of ideological conformity. And this is where I think it’s really important because I’ve noticed this about reactions to my book where people seem to think what I’m saying is, well, we shouldn’t protect any speech except fearless speech. And then the criticism is, well, who gets to decide what fearless speech is? You just want speech you like. Okay. So I want to separate that fearless speech is what I consider to be valuable and interesting and we should celebrate, but that’s actually different from the legal question of what should be protected by the First Amendment.

It’s a cultural question versus an illegal one. But the legal one I think is one about staying true to the best versions of our doctrinal tradition. And we do have some really good lights on this, and particularly the case of West Virginia Board of Education versus Barnett is I think it is the case that we should be looking to see what the First Amendment really should have always meant and should continue to mean if it is going to do its one job. And I firmly believe this, and if I’m on the other side of people when I say this, so be it, but 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.

So what do we have in 1943? We have Justice Robert Jackson who in two years later is going to become such a key figure in the Nuremberg trials, someone who is paying attention to what is happening in Nazi Germany, who is paying attention over and over again to the idea that democratic ideals, including freedom of speech, can be appropriated for fascist ends. He is aware of it in a way that I think is probably singular among Supreme Court justices. And we get this case that is seemingly innocuous, right? It’s a case about kids in a public elementary school who have refused because of their religion, their Jehovah’s Witnesses, have refused to take the pledge of allegiance in this compelled way to give the pledge, to recite the pledge of allegiance, and they’re expelled. And the question is whether a public school as an arm of the government is allowed to force that kind of compulsion.

And not only does Justice Jackson point out something that I think gets lost in a lot of our First Amendment, sort of the culturally popular, popular culture version of the First Amendment, which is the freedom to speak is as much about the freedom not to speak as anything else.

Michael Fox:

So

Mary Anne Franks:

He says, yes, compelled speech, the government telling you the ideas you have to have is just as damaging as telling you what ideas you’re not allowed to have. So why do I love this case and why do I think that is the version of free speech we need to have? And I guess I would be a little bit of a little pedantic about this to say I don’t know that it’s a. My version of free speech is large and cultural and needs sort of content. My version of the First Amendment is you cannot impose government orthodoxy. That’s what Justice Jackson says in this case, whether by punishing people for saying things that are critical of the government or by forcing people to say things that we consider to be the right way, either one of those violates the First Amendment. And it’s such a clear articulation of what is so important about the First Amendment, which is that the purpose of the First Amendment is to restrain the government, restrain the government, not to restrain social media unless of course the person who owns social media is also a government official, which is true of True Social because Donald Trump owns True Social, which was true when Elon Musk was in the government.

So putting that aside because that should never have happened, it is not about lecturing universities about what they can and can’t say. It is not about lecturing social media companies or Jimmy Kimmel or anybody else. It is about the government not being allowed to tell you what to say and not being allowed to punish you for what you say simply because it doesn’t like it. That I think is the best articulation of what the First Amendment’s job really is, and that is how the Trump administration has flipped it entirely on its head because what is the Trump administration saying over and over again? It’s saying to private actors, “We, the government, are allowed to tell you what to say.” Jimmy Kimmel said something we don’t like, “We the government are going to try to get him fired or threaten someone so that he does get fired.” The government is now saying, “We think that there’s one way for you to respond to Charlie Kirk’s death.

And if you don’t say that, then we can punish you for that.” That is exactly the opposite of what free speech means in a meaningful First Amendment sense. It has to be about restraining the government so that the rest of us who are not in the government are allowed to speak as freely to each other as we want, not to have that criticize as cancel culture or wokeness or whatever one wants to call it. DEI, look at that. Diversity, equality, inclusion, those are forms of speech. Those are forms of exchange. Those are forms of having debates, having a question about whether more values as opposed to fewer values is a good idea. Those things are speech and those attempts to restrict it by the government are forms of censorship and that’s what we have to see beyond the distortions of what the Trump administration is telling us.

Michael Fox:

So important. For you, what’s your level of concern around the state of free speech today under Trump? Have we ever seen a situation like this in modern America?

Mary Anne Franks:

I don’t think we have. I mean, in the early days of the second Trump administration, along with a lot of other people, were making comparisons to the McCarthy era. And I think most of us who are paying attention are saying this is so far beyond what happened during McCarthy, partly because McCarthy didn’t have the same cult of personality around him and he wasn’t the president. There were limitations on how much power and how much damage he could do. And there are no limitations on Trump because of our Supreme Court basically telling him that there are no limitations on what he’s allowed to do. And whether we in litigation, because I don’t want to sound fatalist in the sense that it is true that people are standing up and fighting and some courts are acting on their principles regardless of the personal threats to them, which it is a horrific thing to have to acknowledge in our society that judges are under threat because they’re doing their jobs and that litigation is going to save some of this.

But then in the meantime, we have an administration that does not believe that it is constrained by the law. I don’t think we’ve ever seen that in the United States, at least in modern history. And so it’s not just the free speech question, but again, the free speech question is hugely important, but this is a government that is in fact declared an all out assault on all speech that does not conform to what Trump says it should conform to. And so we’re being attacked on every side. It’s universities, it’s social media, it’s mass media, it’s newspapers, and it’s not just through, we’re going to throw you all in jail or we’re going to descend armed soldiers towards you, although that’s a huge part of it. It’s also because of the marketplace, the literal marketplace where Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and Amazon and a gazillion other things.

And Elon Musk has all this power to use X as a propaganda channel for his own views, for Donald Trump to be able to get personal enrichment from True Social as his propaganda channel. It is the conglomeration, all the consolidation we’re seeing around mainstream media as well. The fact that we’ve got one handful of corporations that are controlling all the ways that we get information, exchange information. This is a real problem and the Trump administration didn’t create it, but they are making such good use of the fact that our entire information ecosystem is essentially dominated by six men. So that is something that we should all be terrified by because it is the government acting with its powers to hurt people, to deport people, to kidnap people, to torture people, which is hugely, there’s no way that we can have free speech under that kind of regime.

And we know that when we look at other countries, but also unprecedented levels of entanglement between the government and all forms of media communications, social media, media, other forms. So they’re also controlling the kind of output as well as the input. It’s all under this kind of, frankly, fascistic control and it’s what I’ve called a technofascist control because the intertwining of these industries has meant we have a kind of a fully surveillant society where the capacity for the government to control what we’re saying or try to control what we’re saying, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. I want to talk about social media just for a second because I feel like you mentioned Jeff Bezos when he decided earlier this year that the opinion pages of the Washington Post would only be pro free market because now social media is there and anyone can say whatever they want. There’s this myth out there that social media has democratized our ability to communicate with each other. What’s really at play with social media? What are the biggest concerns, the challenges? Is it really a force for good and for free speech in our world today?

Mary Anne Franks:

Well, the short answer is no. And the complicated answer is could it have been? And I think the answer to that is yes, but it was again, the same mistake that America makes over and over again, which is assuming that our aspirations are reality. You think about how in 1996 when the Communications Decency Act, the first attempt to try to regulate the internet is passed and it includes the Section 230, which is trying to go in a different direction because there was this huge push to a moral panic over, well, the internet’s going to mean that kids can access pornography. So most of the Communications Decency Act was about trying to restrict the internet. And you have this little Section 230 that was trying to say, oh, actually we think that this is the marketplace of ideas. And so here’s an approach that lets them regulate themselves.

And you give it a few years and the Supreme Court has said all that stuff about regulating the internet is unconstitutional and the part that remains is that part that says, let them regulate themselves and do what they want. So I think when you think about why that was the case, the rhetoric that was already suffusing that conversation, which was, Americans are amazing and all we need is to have unfettered access to each other and to talk. As long as now we have this brand new tool, we’ll just do wonderful democratic things with it. And a lot of people want to romanticize what the internet looked like in 1996 and to explain all this by saying, well, they just didn’t know what was coming. And the truth of the matter is if you were paying attention, you did know where this was coming because what has been the story of everything of our society, which is powerful tools, great opportunities in the United States, are they going to be used to actually be democratic and to expand equality?

Are they going to be used by the powerful to shore up more power for themselves and crush everybody else? Why would we think this was going to be different, especially given the fact that for several years before 1996, white supremacists had already made clear that the internet was their future. White supremacists were writing manifestos where they said, “Imagine computers connected all throughout the world where we can bring about the next great white reckoning.” It was already there. It was all already there. And the idea that any legislator could sit back and say, “Well, I’m just going to trust that this is all going to work out because this is a new tool. New things will happen. We’re finally going to be democratic.” You can call it naivete, you can call it idealism, or you can call it a cynical kind of reaction that says that yes, people in power always assume that things are going to work out well for them.

And oftentimes they’re right. As it turns out this time, I think they’re actually wrong because unless you’re a part of the uber, uber wealthy, all of us together, including the more privileged and the less privileged, we are all in trouble. All of us are suffering because of it. And any person, it’s not just women now and it’s not just racial minorities now. It’s not just people whose gender identity is controversial. It is everyone who is going to be surveilled, anyone who can be put in jail for their thoughts. We’ve seen this in terms of the fragmentation on the right when people on the right are starting to figure out that actually, wait, you too, yes, first they came, all of that. Yo didn’t learn this lesson ever before, but I think you’re about to learn it now. So what was the problem? Part of the problem was that original kind of blank check to the industry to say, do whatever you want, we trust you.

And for that never to change, even as we saw power consolidate and we saw all the kind of radical, interesting dissent that emerged, all those kind of fun, amazing spaces on the internet just all get flattened out into Facebook and into Twitter and into, again, three or four handful of platforms that become the dominant ones who just so happen to be multi-billion dollar corporations that keep buying up other platforms and here we are. And what have they been saying this entire time? They’ve been trading on this idea that online is free speech, that they are democratic guardians somehow, but of course they’re not. And the reason that they were able to convince people they were was because they weren’t charging, right? If Comcast had tried to say, we are your democratic pathway, I think people would’ve been skeptical, but that’s partly because they’re paying. No one really likes Comcast.

But when you offer the free, and I’m putting quotation marks around this, you let people believe that no, we’re only invested in your speech. We really want to give you a platform to express yourselves, to have community. But of course, none of these companies were interested in that. And I find that to be the most perverse thing. Comcast doesn’t pretend to be a guardian of free speech. Facebook pretends to be. Twitter, X now pretends to be the whole public town square idea. There’s never been a cable company or a newspaper that’s ever had pretensions of saying, “Oh, we’re the public square.” And so you had all these companies that are deeply invested only in this kind of speech as a form of their free labor so that they can actually, they don’t have to produce anything. We can get people to produce stuff for free for us and we can tell them that they are advocating for themselves and expressing themselves and that we’re going to defend them.

And of course we’ve seen exactly what that means. So far as it might work out for the bottom line profit, will these companies protect your free speech? Sure. The moment it doesn’t become profitable, they won’t. And of course, they’re also going to be taking their side as much as they can, which is extract all the data from you that you don’t even know that they’re looking at and use you as a kind of piece that they can move around a chessboard. And then you get ideological alignment with the Trump administration, either in terms of, I really like what Trump is saying, which I think on some level that is exactly where the Musk Trump mind meld was for a while, or you get him threatening you that Trump says, I’m going to put Mark Zuckerberg in jail. Whatever the case is, you now have these companies who’ve had all the freedom, freedom that no newspaper’s ever had, no cable companies ever had, no one’s ever been given the freedom to do and to protect as much speech as the tech industry.

And what have they done for 30 years except allow people to be harassed and defamed and whenever the government asks them for information, turn it over and now quite literally say, we are going to help this administration do whatever it wants to do in terms of its ideological agenda, all the power in the world, all the power in the world. And they choose to do a Jeff Bezos to say, basically, I’m going to provide cover, ideological cover for a fascistic government. That’s what happens when you give people freedom when they’re not interested in protecting anybody’s freedom except for their own.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Not even to mention the algorithms, which is a whole other. It’s fascinating, Marianne, I’ve been in the Bay Area for the last couple days. I used to live in San Francisco. And so yesterday I drove down in front of the head offices of Meta just so I could do a standup for this podcast, kind of like, “This is what it looks like. Here I am in Meta. It’s like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, it’s all right here.” And I was driving back up to San Francisco and I was fascinated because along the side of the highway, there is billboard after billboard after billboard for AI companies.That’s the new. We went from computers and tech to internet, social media, and now it’s AI. For you, what does AI mean for free speech? What does it mean within the midst of all of this?

Mary Anne Franks:

It means that everything’s about to get so much worse. And again, these are lessons that we cannot comfort ourselves by saying no one saw this coming. Yeah, people saw this coming. When companies basically tell you, they’ll say to your face, “Well, we care about your speech. We care about protecting democracy or freedom of expression, but are extracting data from you for purposes that they will never be transparent about.” Now we’re saying, “Trust us because we’ve taken all the collective expression from you and we have in quite a direct sense, we have actually just sort of created a massive consciousness by sucking up all of the ideas that you have voluntarily given us. And now we’re going to give that back to you and sort of let that control everything. Isn’t that wonderful?” I mean, the reason why it’s not like in the horror films, I guess, is because I don’t know that this is such a.

The fact that it’s so banal at the end of the day, that they’ve really been saying, “We’re extracting data from you to manipulate you over and over again. Cambridge Analytica a hundred times over.” And I don’t want to blame the population for being passive about this. I mean, although that’s part of it, but it’s also because what were the alternatives? By this point when people realize they’re in the web, it’s a little late. So I think it’s a predictable. If we’re speaking at a very high level of what is the tech industry after? Well, the tech industry is after becoming the consciousness to replace our own consciousness. And I don’t mean that in kind of the robot overlord sense, but just look, if we have now convinced entire generations of people that what ChatGPT has to say is more important than something that they could come up with on their own or better than trying to have a conversation with an expert or to actually do research and do cross references, that we’ve convinced people of this, but that’s just a version of what Google convinced all of us with regard to its search engine, and for a brief period of time was actually not a bad description of what Google was.

So all of this stuff starts out in a way that is revolutionary and innovative, and it’s meant to serve human interest, but then you realize, and I think about a book that was written pretty early on, I guess it’s a decade old now, Astra Taylor’s People’s Platform, she was already saying in 2014 or whenever it was. So when did the radicalization happen? When did we actually get a revolutionary internet? Because it certainly looks like we are all being conformed into these spaces and told to like things, dislike things, feel this kind of emotion, shape this kind of post and have them all just talk to each other. That’s a flattening of discourse. It’s not a proliferation of discourse. She was right then and it’s just gotten worse now.

Michael Fox:

Do we need to reanalyze our understanding, our definition of free speech today?

Mary Anne Franks:

We definitely need to analyze it and we definitely need to stop. What I really do think sincerely, having now had many conversations with many different audiences about what do people think free speech means, what does it mean to them? Overwhelmingly, what I realize is that it’s because there’s a kind of narcotic effect of those words. People are kind of lulled into a sense of, “Don’t ask me about the details. I know what free speech is.” And it’s because we think we know it so well that we don’t know anything about it. So we need to do a kind of estrangement from free speech. Free speech needs to become strange to us and we need to think about if we could sweep away whatever we though we understood about the First Amendment, whatever we think reflexively about how we don’t like it when someone criticizes us or when someone doesn’t give us access to a platform.

If we push all that to a side, and I’ve asked my students about this when I teach First Amendment and I ask them, “When is the last time you had a really good conversation?” And they’ll start giving the same sort of characteristics and it’s either maybe on a bus or at the kitchen table or friends conversations, but I’ll ask them, “Well, what made it good?” And they’ll say, “Well, we took turns talking. I learned something. The other person listened to me. We weren’t shouting at each other, and we both came away thinking that there was something valuable that we learned.” I though, “Well, is that a version of free speech that is more robust and more significant than whatever we think we mean by this kind of mix of quasi-legal, quasi-psychological, quasi-cultural concepts of free speech?” I really do think that term, free speech, has become emptied of meaning, and we need to start thinking specifically about what is a good speech outcome for the environment I’m in right now?

What does it mean to have a good family conversation? What does it mean to have a good classroom conversation? What do I want a newspaper to teach me? What do I want to learn? What are my goals for this particular interaction I’m having with someone else? And really kind of resist the idea that free speech can be something meaningful in that abstract sense. It usually means something quite concrete in the context that we find ourselves.

Michael Fox:

I love that idea of, well, what do we want to achieve? And then working back from there because that’s particularly on the local within our own family members, it’s so true. Or even in a community, in the fact that we’ve been isolated into these silos and social media, or I only get these images or these posts from these people. I mean, it’s the exact opposite of what’s happening right now to all of us. Marianne, and I promise this is my last question, and thank you so much. I really, really appreciate your time. It’s been incredible. Two of the episodes in this podcast series, one of them I want to focus on Brazil, and the other is I’m going to focus on Europe. The reason being is because they have these kind of very different concepts of free speech than we do. In Brazil, Bolsonaro said the same thing that Trump did about the elections where he called them the look of the fraud and the voting machines and how there’s fraud happening and they actually banned him.

This is even before he was sentenced to jail for two decades, but they actually banned him from running for office for eight years because he was disparaging the country’s democracy. And for Brazil, they say, “Your right to free speech can go up to here, but when you start attacking our democracy, that’s a line you can’t cross.” I just spent a month and a half in Europe speaking with people there as well about their understanding of regulation over social media, around fake news, around conspiracy theories. How does this work and fit in? They’re trying to be Very much on the forefront of how to do this in a way that people have their right to free speech, but also at the same time, they’re not disparaging or spreading lies to a full extent. And I know this is so different from the United States from our own understanding of this.

How do you see these different realities? How does our free speech. Should in the United States, should we be looking at other realities abroad? Should be looking at other definitions abroad and how people are doing this elsewhere is particularly in a moment where fascism is on the rise in authoritarianism and the idea or the concept of free speech, we can say anything, is being used to actually attack our own system with the United States.

Mary Anne Franks:

Yeah. I go back and I think about that moment in 1943 where our Supreme Court is looking at totalitarianism taking over other countries and Justice Jackson saying, “Here’s why we will not be like those countries.” And it’s because we recognize that the real evil here is the government imposition of orthodoxy, that they’re being told that for their own good or for whatever reason, or being convinced that they are choosing this kind of domination. And I think about how tragic it seems to me that if we are ever going to get out of our own destroyed society, it’s because we’re going to have to look to other countries. It’s going to have to flip. It’s actually going to be Europe probably teaching us a lesson. I’ve thought about that even before the second Trump administration, even before we saw the onslaught, but that I think will change some people’s minds about how if the First Amendment couldn’t stop Trump from doing everything he’s doing, then what is it worth?

This might be what actually shakes us out of our complacence to say, why do we keep saying against all evidence to the contrary that the First Amendment protects us uniquely when we’re not allowed to say that we didn’t like some of the views of someone who was killed and other countries that would not be something you could go to jail for. So we become that country that we’re looking at as the kind of object lesson of what you don’t do in a democracy, and that is a really difficult thing to have to come to terms with. But even before that, if you looked at, and I did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, if you look at the indexes of freedom of expression, if we stop just sort of assuming the truth about our own uniqueness as a society, you look at what Article 19’s rankings of freedom of global expression, and we can quibble with the methodology, but it is a pretty robust metric.

United States is nowhere near the top, nowhere near the top 10. We’re lucky if we’re in the 20s or so. And the ones that are always on top, Scandinavian countries. Norway is always up there. Denmark is always up there. And so I look at their laws and I see how, yes, they have robust protections for freedom of expression, but they also have really robust protections against harmful speech, including misinformation, including propaganda, including the kind of health and misinformation that will get people killed. And the very logical principle that says those things are bad for society. It’s not because we don’t like them or they’re just distasteful, they cause harm and so we’re not going to have them be fully protected. And it’s not only that you get more protections because we sometimes think of those as opposites. If you lean on the side of safety and then you destroy free speech, there’s a trade off between free speech and safety.

I think the lesson of Scandinavian countries is they’re not trade-offs. They are very much the same question. If you actually want there to be something meaningful about speech, then you cannot simply say, let’s let the worst forms of destructive, actually destructive in the real physical sense, flourish. We’re actually going to teach students how to identify misinformation. We’re actually going to teach people how to have good conversations in a way that will be useful for them. And we’re going to take a pretty close look at speech that tries to dehumanize other people and tries to encourage people to commit violence because we think those things are destructive to us as a society. So not only do they get safer communities, but they also are outdoing us by a long shot when it comes to freedom of expression by really quite good metrics. Same thing is true about the Reporters Without Borders index of press freedom.

We are in the 50s at this point and that was before the most recent Trump attacks on the media. So we’ve never done particularly well in terms of press freedom. We just have assumed that we’re great, but we’re not. And again, what are the countries at the top every time? European countries that take a pretty nuanced view, not only of what is misinformation, what is harmful speech, but also free speech isn’t just about saying what you want to say. It’s about who controls the money. How much of a diversity of newspapers do you have? What is your diversity of radio stations? What is the level of education in society? How much are journalists attacked or prevented from accessing certain spaces? You look at those kinds of metrics and you see that United States is just really, really far down. We have destroyed the local news environment.

We’ve destroyed journalism. We’ve done all of these things to make ourselves less informed and less good at being able to hold our government accountable. So I take a deep lesson already before, again, before we ever got to the second Trump administration, that clearly there were certain aspects of what Europe in particular was doing that were preserving democracy and freedom of expression and freedom of the press better than we were doing. And yes, we should definitely be learning some lessons.

Michael Fox:

Amazing. Thank you so much, Marianne. I really, really appreciate this. It’s been so incredible speaking with you.

Mary Anne Franks:

It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. As I mentioned before, this is the second bonus episode of this series and 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 Mark 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 www.patreon.com/mfox. 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 series. See you next time.

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

Taya Graham:

Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to this breaking news edition of our Police Accountability Report livestream. Now, we decide to do the show because there have been serious widespread disruptions across the 1A and Copwatcher YouTube community, namely a broad and still unexplained demonetization of an array of channels related to both copwatching and First Amendment auditing. Whether this is targeted, random, part of YouTube’s overhaul to its partnership system, what it means for some very popular activists is what we will unpack today. And to help us, we’ll be joined by two influential copwatchers, Long Island Audits, also known as Sean Paul Reyes and Wright’s Crispy or Finn Vargas. Both have been instrumental members of the Copwatcher movement and both have been affected by YouTube’s mysterious move to end their ability to monetize their content, at least on YouTube for now. But before I get to them, I want to check in with my reporting partner, Steven Janis, who has been researching and reporting on what’s happening.

So Stephen, thank you for joining me indoors. Tay,

Stephen Janis:

Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be indoors. I don’t plan to stay here, so let’s get this going.

Taya Graham:

All right, so let’s get right to it, Steven. What is the scope of this move by YouTube and perhaps its origins?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, we’ve been debating that and it seems like it kind of came out of nowhere. There was no warning to any of the channels and it’s really difficult to decipher because YouTube has not made any public comments on why this has happened, but it has caused a lot of distress in the Copwatcher community. We’ve been hearing from many channels about this. People that we know, people that we’ve been talking to for years have reached out to us and told us this is happening, but no one seems to know why we have a theory we’re going to talk about in a second, but it’s just kind of like out of nowhere.

Taya Graham:

Oh, and I also want everybody watching to know, as you can tell, this is very live and we’re going to do our best to put your chats on screen and to also read your comments whenever possible. But let me just get back up right into it. I just want to say hi to the mods out there, Lacey R and Noli D. Thank you guys so much for being here. Okay, let’s get back to it. Dave, if you don’t mind putting up on the screen the graphic that shows the copwatchers and auditors. So if you take a look, there are some familiar names here like ANCAP Copwatch. There’s also James Freeman, John Felax, NC Tyrant Hunter, and of course Long Island Audit and Writes Crispy. Now, these are some of the channels we have been able to confirm directly. There really is quite a bit of uncertainty.

And let me also say this, if you are one of the channels affected, please reach out to us and let us know so we can compile an accurate and definitive list as we want to cover this closely. And I also want to say a special thanks to Friends in Code for providing us with some very valuable information. Agreed. But of course it’s not just who was affected, that’s a big question, but why? Now the YouTubers who told us they have been affected said the email they received was nebulous to say the least. Dave, if you don’t mind putting JPEG2 on the screen.

So I’m going to read some of it and then we can discuss a theory Long Island audits discussed and that you’ve been doing some reporting on. Okay? Yep. So let me just read this first. It says in the email or rather on the screen, “Your channel isn’t earning right now. After reviewing your channel using a combination of automated systems and human reviewers, we found that does not follow YouTube channel’s monetization policies. Our review found that your channel contains the following, violations of creator responsibility policy. Your channel has violated our creator responsibility policy.” Stephen, what does that even mean? It

Stephen Janis:

Doesn’t mean anything really. It’s a very nebulous, like you said, sort of definition. I dug deeper into it and it was something about reputational harm, very, very things that would be part of the normal process of journalism or reporting. I mean, anyone could create reputational harm by just reporting something that someone disagrees with or having a conflict or having a conversation. So it’s really, really loose, vaguely worded, and I think that’s the point. I think it gives YouTube a maximum flexibility, just kick people off of monetization however and whenever they want. And I don’t think it has any guidelines that are useful to any channels in terms of how to follow these. I don’t think you can follow them. So it’s really, I think, purposely vague.

Taya Graham:

Stephen, how has the Copwatcher community and the First Amendment activists responded?

Stephen Janis:

Well, a lot of anger because I think there was no warning or no sort of like, you need to do this or you need to do that. I mean, and these channels have been up and I would note that all the channel, their videos are still out there. Now, sometimes YouTube, when it really is offended by a video, will take it down or force you to take it down or take down your channel for copyright strikes, all sorts of things. But this just kind of came out of nowhere. And I think that’s why that’s feeding, I wouldn’t call it conspiracy theories, but some thoughts about there’s something behind this more than just YouTube trying to enforce its creator responsibility. I think people feel there’s something deeper there going on and something more nefarious. And I think that’s why we’ve been looking into it.

Taya Graham:

Now, there’s a theory that has emerged thanks to Long Island audits that you have been reporting on, Steven, and that we, of course, will discuss with him shortly, but we want to try to lay it out for you first. Now, as we’ve reported before on the show, Sean Paul had a fraught encounter with a powerful police union official named Lou Savillo. Sean Paul had visited police headquarters to ask about lawsuit settlements for police brutality, but the visit turned chaotic fairly quickly. Now, Long Island Audit was arrested and the ensuing fallout actually caught the attention of the New York Post, which blared headlines claiming that the resulting YouTube posts had led to angry phone calls to the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association members. Now, Reyes was eventually arrested, but Savillo is actually more powerful than just the head of a local police union. And it’s possible the dispute escalated.

Turns out he’s the president of an organization called UCOPS or the United Coalition of Public Safety. And in that capacity, he weighed into a national controversy that may have given him behind the scenes leverage. So Stephen, we’re going to watch the video where Savillo endorses Todd Blanche and discuss the theory about how his influence may have played a role in what we’re seeing on YouTube. Dave, if you don’t mind playing clip three, the Savillo clip. I’m

Speaker 3:

Lou Savillo and I’m the president of UCOPS. UCOPS is a coalition of law enforcement unions that represents over 100,000 active and retired law enforcement officers. Recently, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. We discussed how police officers are being threatened, doxed, and even targeted for violence in their own homes. The AG expressed strong support for our law enforcement officers and stated that prosecuting these crimes would be a top priority for his administration. Todd Blanche has a keen intellect. Moreover, he has a discerning nature. He also is even-handed with justice, making him the perfect candidate for our country’s top prosecutor. This is why UCOPS and the thousands of police officers we represent are urging the United States Senate to confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General. Thank you.

Taya Graham:

Okay, Steven, I know you’ve had some run-ins with police unions. I’m sure you have something to say here. Well,

Stephen Janis:

No, the important thing to remember here is Todd Blanche at that point was facing a lot of pushback. He was the acting Attorney General and was trying to get the Senate to approve him to become full confirmed Attorney General. And he was facing a lot of headwinds because he would not renounce Trump’s sort of $1.76 billion giveaway fund to people who had been supposedly wronged by government, the weaponization fund. So he was in really, really kind of rough waters and he was looking for help. And then this organization called UCOP steps in and says, “Hey, we should endorse this guy. He’s great. All 100,000 police officers are behind him.” And I think it was a very important moment for Todd Blanche’s confirmation.

Taya Graham:

And you know what? We also got a copy of a July 9th letter sent to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, that offers a full throated endorsement of Blanche. Now, Stephen, why is this important? What was going on with Blanche who at the time was acting attorney general? He

Stephen Janis:

Was just really searching for a life raft because a lot of Republican senators were like, “We’re not going to approve you.” Tom Tillis from North Carolina was like, “We are not going to approve you if you don’t renounce Trump’s weaponization fund.” And of course he wouldn’t do it. He parsed on it, he kind of danced around. But then these guys come in and say, “Hey, this guy’s great. All the cops, 100,000 cops,” which I’m going to get to about that being sort of a very flimsy claim, “are going to support you.” And I think so they were trying to bail out Todd Blanche, who’s a very powerful man.

Taya Graham:

I want to discuss a bit what he said in the video that police officers are being doxed and harassed. And I think that’s curious that he brought this up specifically, and you’ve also been doing a little digging on UCOPS organization highlighted in the letter that Lou Cevello just said he’s the head of. So what have you found?

Stephen Janis:

Well, so UCOPS is supposed to be this big organization that represents 100,000 police officers, but only was started in 2025. It has about $60,000 in revenue. It has about four or five people who don’t work for a full-time or volunteer. So it’s, I would say sort of an AstroTurf, which is claiming to represent tons of people, but being a little bit of an artifice because they don’t have any money, they don’t have any staff, and there’s no information on their 990s, which is their tax form, about how many members they have. So UCOPS kind of came out of nowhere, and I think that makes it a little bit of a strange thing to say, “Well, I represent UCOPS, which represents 100,000 police.” There’s really very little evidence of that.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So I think we’ve established a connection between a powerful police union president and the most powerful law enforcement officer in the country, namely the Attorney General of the United States of America. But to connect the dots further, we’re going to bring one of the guests, the man at the center of the controversy, and one of the most popular copwatchers out there, Long Island Audits, also known as Sean Paul Reyes. Sean Paul, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us.

Long Island Audit:

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So first, I’m just going to say a quick acknowledgement to Chuck Bronson, Noli D. I think I see Johnny Bravo out there. People are showing up and I’m hoping they’re showing their support as well. So let me ask you just to start out, how are you doing and how did you find out about your channel being demonetized and how is it hitting you? I mean, how are you dealing with it personally?

Long Island Audit:

Well, as you know, I’m usually on the road as I am right now, and my brother-in-law actually called me multiple times and I called him right back. I was in the middle of something and I was like, “Are you all right?” And he’s like, “Hey, every First Amendment auditor is getting their channel demonetized. Is your channel demonetized?” And I was like, “No, I don’t believe so.” So I opened up my YouTube studio and my phone app and it said you were removed from the partner program. So that’s how I found out. It was definitely shocking news for sure. I’ve been doing this for five years now, built a platform of over a million subscribers and just never had a violation. Till this day, my YouTube studio says no violations whatsoever. So I’ve never had a copyright strike, never had a violation.

Taya Graham:

Incredible.

Long Island Audit:

And they demonetized me.

Taya Graham:

Oh, wow. That’s incredible. I’ll just say I know some channels that have gotten strikes from personal experience. There is some other news related to your work that occurred yesterday. So you really had quite a day yesterday. You were found guilty of trespassing. Can you talk a little bit about what happened?

Long Island Audit:

Yeah. So Judge Guinari in the Danielson Superior Court found me guilty of criminal trespass in the third degree in the state of Connecticut. He found that as a matter of law, the private road dead end to no turnaround sign was not a vehicle sign. He said in his decision that he rejected my argument that that was a sign meant for vehicles. I think it’s pretty clear from the verbiage on the sign that it is really pretty clearly meant for vehicles. So I’m hopeful on appeal, but this is part of the process. The process is the punishment. They brought this judge in out of nowhere. I’ve been switching through judges so quickly, different judges, different jurisdictions. The process is the punishment and I’m going to continue to, hopefully in the process of an appeal, we can get a win here, but I don’t think anybody really believes that that sign was meant for a pedestrian.

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, Sean, this is hard to believe because there’s sort of a presumption that you can go up and knock on someone’s door. If they tell you to leave, you leave, you’re fine, which is what you did. I mean, there’s Supreme Court precedent here. Why did the judge ignore the law in this case? I mean, did he ignore the law?

Long Island Audit:

Yeah. I mean, his interpretation of the law, because in this case, his interpretation’s the only one that matters as of right now. His interpretation of the law is that unless if there is some sort of animosity between you and the person beforehand, then therefore you lose that privilege to conduct a knock and talk because you should know that you’re not welcome because of the alleged animosity and prior problems. But to me, if I’m a tenacious reporter, which I think I am, and I follow up on these stories, there’s a lot of public officials that one could argue in a court of law that have animosity with me and therefore I lose all my privileges.

Stephen Janis:

I was just thinking that because if we’re reporting on someone, they don’t like what we’re reporting, they’re aware of that, they’re angry. And I have shown up at people’s houses and places of work and stuff when I’ve been writing stories that have been critical of someone who could easily make the case that there was so-called animosity. I mean, has that ever been explored as far as you know? Because that strikes me as a really fine line and really gets into First Amendment monitoring and deciding what is conflict and what isn’t. I mean, is that something that’s been explored?

Long Island Audit:

I believe, Steven, that this is a case of first impression. That’s what it’s called in the legal world. And I think that this is something that the judge is just ruling on his own. I couldn’t find any case law where it takes away your privilege of a knock and talk animosity. And he did find that there was animosity he did find. And again, on his part, there’s a lot of animosity. I just talk about him on my channel and talk about what he’s done and what I’ve found out through investigations. And at the end of the day, I love my family and I don’t think about him after work. I’m just putting him up on there. He’s a bad man, but there’s been many, many, many bad men in law enforcement that I’ve come across over the last five years. Patrick Psycho, Ryder, Danbury where he said he would kill me 20 years ago.

There are so many examples and I would knock on any of theirs door. It wasn’t personal. I’ve knocked on dozens of government officials doors at this point.

Taya Graham:

Right. You know what? Before I ask you this question, I just wanted to make a note that one of the people that was trying to confirm the real press, NH NOW, yes, they were also demonetized. So it is hitting people out there. Wow. Sean Paul, I was wondering what are some possible consequences for you? I hate to ask, but are you going to be sentenced and could you face jail time?

Long Island Audit:

So I was already sentenced after I was found guilty by Judge Guinari. The state’s attorney did not ask for any jail time when they were making their case. Brian Fahey’s adult daughter and his wife spoke at the sentencing and the judge sentenced me, ultimately decided to sentence me to 90 days of incarceration, but suspended and one year probation. They actually have a little funny insight is that they were like, “Okay, well you’re going to transfer your probation to Suffolk County obviously, right?” And I was like, “No way. I will traverse all the way to Connecticut before I put my probation in Suffolk County with Lucivilo.”

Stephen Janis:

Okay. Well, let’s get back to YouTube and I’m very sorry that happened to you. We’ll be waiting to see what happens next. But do you think it’s a coincidence you had this encounter with Lucivillo and then suddenly Todd Blanche. I mean, he endorses Todd Blanche and then suddenly YouTube, which has been known to do carry the water for the Trump administration, decides to start demonetizing copwatchers and otters. Do you think that is a coincidence?

Long Island Audit:

I personally don’t think it’s a coincidence. It’s my theory. Could it be any other reason? Sure, it’s a theory. I’ll say that, but there’s a lot more things that go into it. Lucivillo and the union that he leads has been talking nonstop in the last weeks on radio programs that they own about directly targeting the monetization of these YouTubers. And they specifically mentioned YouTube, they specifically mentioned monetization, and this was just as late as two weeks ago. They were talking about these things and then this happens. I think it’s clear that the administration under Todd Blanche, the Department of Justice rather, I don’t think they would have an issue with sending a letter or an email to Google. And also the district attorney in my county actually subpoenaed Google for the last 14 months on a violation trespass case for the last 14 months of my earnings, and Google handed over everything immediately.

Really? And

Stephen Janis:

Google didn’t push back on that at all? At

Long Island Audit:

All. Motion to quash. Before I could even submit a motion to quash, which was only a couple days later, the district attorney had a disc full of all of my subscriber information. Your

Stephen Janis:

Subscriber information? What?

Long Island Audit:

No way. I don’t know about individual subscribers, but I don’t know if they mean, because it says subscribers with an S, but in parentheses. So I don’t know if it’s every single person or just me or maybe just my members on the channel. I don’t know exactly what it entails. I haven’t gone through the disc. My lawyer currently has it, so I have to go through it and that’s one of the many things on my plate rightnow.

Stephen Janis:

That is extremely invasive. I mean, that is extremely scary and not good.

Long Island Audit:

A non-trespass case, I obviously was leaving, the video shows that, but a trespass case to get 14 months of financial information from Google. Again, the common denominator with the police union president, the district attorney here is all that they’re focusing on monetization, financial aspect of YouTube.

Stephen Janis:

Now those charges were dropped or the ones from the encounter at the PBA, at the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association headquarters, those charges were dropped, right?

Long Island Audit:

The criminal charge was dropped, but what they do is they’ll drop it to a violation of the law, which is not a crime, and they’re prosecuting me on that right now. So basically on a non-crime, they got the subpoena as well.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. It sounds to me like just a fishing exhibition that was facilitated by a bogus charge. But sorry, Tay, go ahead.

Taya Graham:

No, it’s okay. I just wanted to let you know, if you guys see me looking down, it’s because this chat is amazing and I’m learning a lot of information here. I just found out that I for an eye free press is on the list. NC Tyrant Hunter, who I’m glad to see. Good to see you, NC Tyrant Hunter, says he can’t even get into his Google account. So this is hitting people. This is really scary. This is really scary. I even saw that the Batoosize channel had been demonetized, but it has just been restored. So perhaps that’s a sign of hope. Sean Paul, I want to ask you, what’s your thoughts on the reasons provided for the demonetization by YouTube, like violation of creative responsibility policy? I mean, why is this happening now? Because copwatchers and First Amendment auditors have been on YouTube for at least a decade.

Why is it happening now and what do you think that policy means?

Long Island Audit:

As you stated earlier, it’s very vague. I read the policy obviously, and there’s nothing really that stands out, just basically reputational harm on or off the platform. It speaks about actions being taken off the platform as well as on the platform. It’s extremely vague. I’ve never had any violations or copyright strikes on my channel in the last five years since the channel was started. So I have no idea. I have no idea what else it could be, what type of reason Google has behind doing this massive demonetization of channels like First Amendment auditor channels. I have no idea.

Stephen Janis:

Have you appealed to YouTube and communicated with them or heard anything back from them? Have they given you a message or have you at least appealed or what’s going on in terms of YouTube and your communication with them? So

Long Island Audit:

I still have time to file an appeal. I wanted to wait and see what would be the result of some of my peers that already had submitted appeals were going to be. So now that some appeal decisions are coming back, I plan on filing an appeal in the coming days. And contrary to popular belief, just because I have a million subscribers doesn’t mean I have any sort of special connections with YouTube. Right,

Stephen Janis:

Right. And what have your peers said? Have people won their appeals? I mean, I know Batusai, I think won his appeal. Has anyone reported to you what has happened to them in the appeal process? So

Long Island Audit:

The only person I’ve spoken to about the appeal process was Philip Turner, and he had told me what he appealed and how he got his monetization back. I know there’s Rogue Nation had done an appeal. I don’t know what’s the status of that, but there are a couple people out there that did appeals and I don’t know the status of them though.

Taya Graham:

Okay. I just want to shout out Chuck Bronson out there and I see the Humboldt Squid. Good to see you. Humble Squid. You know who you are. I know who you are. Good to see you. But Sean Paul, back to you. I know I keep on going back and forth between the chat, but I just want to make sure everyone knows out there how much I appreciate them being part of this live chat. So I would just want to do something to kind of strengthen the idea of ties between Google and the current presidential administration. So for example, Google Maps did change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, which I think suggests they’re willing to comply with any requests from the current administration because for example, MapQuest didn’t do this. So what do you think is the potential role of those folks in the administration?

Long Island Audit:

I think it’s definitely possible that I wouldn’t put it past Attorney General Todd Blanch for sending at least a letter to Google saying that maybe we classifying these people as domestic terrorists. They use that term a lot for a lot of different people that they do not like or who do have different points of views for them. They automatically label them domestic terrorists. So I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an incoming memo or there is one already that in existence that First Amendment auditors are domestic terrorists now. But at the end of the day, we really don’t know. It’s all speculation, but there are some sort of connections between the police union president and Todd Blanche. And I think it’s quite hypocritical because he talks about these violence docs, specifically violence against law enforcement officers, but he supports an attorney general who would give money and who has participated in the pardons of individuals who have used violence against law enforcement officers.

So I think it’s very hypocritical on his part. I think he says that just to serve his own ends and he doesn’t really care about law enforcement officers.

Stephen Janis:

Just a note, I have watched hundreds of thousands of hours of copwatcher videos, never seen anyone come close to what happened on January 6th in terms of what the people that they pardoned, that they cleared, that they wanted to compensate with taxpayer dollars who were beating cops. And so I’ve never seen anything, anything remotely. In fact, I’ve never seen a cop watcher strike or in any way threaten a police officer in that way. So the hypocrisy, Sean, is insane, right? I mean, that’s insane.

Long Island Audit:

Yeah. They try to gaslight the country. They’re trying to gaslight Americans and they want to be the heroes and the victims at the same time.

Stephen Janis:

Now we reached out to UCOP, this supposed organization with all volunteer, five volunteers and no money. And we asked them – The

Long Island Audit:

Police union has a lot of money though. They have 15 –

Stephen Janis:

Well,

Long Island Audit:

Yeah, we’ll get to that.

Stephen Janis:

But the UCOP thing is really weird. Do you think that’s some sort of ASO turf or what do you think that is? Because it just doesn’t seem like it’s a real org.

Long Island Audit:

I haven’t looked into it as deeply as you have focusing on the police union, but I mean, if it doesn’t have any members listed, again, I’ve looked into Lucivillo, the president of that organization apparently, and the players of the PBA. And there’s internal affairs reports where he’s alleged to have told officers to lie, picked officers up from DUI arrests. There’s so many different things I wouldn’t put past him for any sort of nonsense. And

Stephen Janis:

I want to make a point here that I hadn’t made before because I went through all the Suffolk County finances. Suffolk County and New York State have some of the highest property taxes in the country. And one of the reasons for that is policing. The Suffolk County budget said that $1,400 per household is what that police department cost. So your work to expose this is so important because people, I mean, I think they’re getting fleeced. Why do they have the highest property taxes in the country? Because they have state troopers retiring for $100,000 a year salary. I mean, isn’t policing tied to the fact that you guys are suffering with some of the highest tax rates anywhere? Yeah,

Long Island Audit:

For sure. I mean, it’s crazy that they talk about so hypocritically, they talk about the monetization side of First Amendment orders while having $15 million in assets. The police union in Suffolk County is quite hypocritical. $15 million in assets and I believe only $2 million in liabilities they claimed on their forms. So $13 million and they bring in $5 million every year in revenue. But then the police department, that’s just the union. The police department has a whole hundreds of millions of dollars. And if you’re counting – It’s a billion dollar a

Stephen Janis:

Year. Suffolk

Long Island Audit:

County. If you’re counting all law enforcement in Suffolk County, yeah, it’s over a billion dollars a year. Crime infested

Stephen Janis:

Long Island.

Long Island Audit:

Right, exactly. And again, what they do, Steven, is they like to gaslight and push their police propaganda. This is why they have podcasts. They’re reaching out into social media. It’s because they want to push this propaganda that, oh, Suffolk County’s one of the safest counties in the country. But at the same time, the Suffolk County, I’ve been lifelong resident of Suffolk County. Suffolk County’s one of the safest counties in the country because of the people of Suffolk County, not because of the law enforcement officers.

Stephen Janis:

Exactly. And if you want to equate public safety with the number of police, it doesn’t add up. So I think that’s why, as you pointed out, they have this propaganda arm. I’m sorry, Tay, I didn’t – No,

Taya Graham:

That’s okay. All right. I’m going to ask a question that might sort of put you on the spot, Sean Paul, so forgive me for doing this, but let me ask you, if they respond, would you be willing to debate Lou Savillo on the Real News if we could hook it up? Oh,

Long Island Audit:

He would never do that, but yes. Well, listen – It’s worth asking. I have video of him saying that he would come on the channel, so maybe you could play that for him when you asked him. You come on your channel, but I would love to debate.

Taya Graham:

Brian would be neutral third party?

Long Island Audit:

I’ve seen his debating skills and it’s just propaganda mush, so I would love to.

Stephen Janis:

Okay. Well, that’s a date.

Taya Graham:

We can set that

Stephen Janis:

Up. If we can do

Taya Graham:

It, we will. I promise. So I know you had another question for Sean.

Stephen Janis:

No, I think we’re done.

Taya Graham:

Are you good? I mean, I just want to make sure because – Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, I don’t want to keep him for too long.

Taya Graham:

Okay. Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

And so when do you file your appeal on your trespassing case? What is the next step for you? Yeah.

Long Island Audit:

So the next step is I’ve been talking to multiple attorneys. I’ve had multiple attorneys with me this entire way. So these attorneys are, now that their retainer is over, we’re speaking about getting a new retainer for them to file the appeal. And I’m excited. I think it would be a bad precedent in Connecticut to allow any sort of vague signage to be used as some sort of notice under that statute. So I’m hopeful and I plan on fighting it the whole way. This is part of the journey. You win some, you lose some, 14 arrests and one criminal conviction for now. I think that’s a pretty good record to have.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. And Sean, before we let you go, Sean Ray, sorry, what do you see the future of copwatching? We were talking before the show and you and Chris, we were talking about we’re going to keep going, which is going to eliminate one of the greatest sort of arguments the frauditer, anti-copwatcher community makes that you guys are just about clicks and views. Are you getting any feeling among copwatchers that people and auditors are going to keep going regardless and not just give up because of this? I

Long Island Audit:

Hope so. And at the end of the day, I think it’s such a disingenuous argument to make it about monetization when the fraudater, the trolls out there talk about monetization when all of these people, how am I supposed to conduct a proper investigation and travel and do all these things when I’m facing an organization that has not only the power of the law on their side, but $15 million in assets to use against me to do what they need to do? That’s why I purchased the billboard truck. I’ve invested into my company. And at the end of the day, it is a company, but it’s a mission as well. And I’m happy to continue the mission and it’s definitely going to change a little bit depending on whether I get my monetization back. But I think even now, it’s just going to change because I’m going to do more long form content now.

I’m going to do more more over the legal things, show you the videos that necessarily wouldn’t be good for the algorithm, but I know a lot of people appreciate. So it’s going to expand the investigation. I think that’s

Stephen Janis:

Great. I

Taya Graham:

Love it. Yeah. And

Stephen Janis:

Also, it might be interesting to FOIA Groton or whatever part of Connecticut it is, see how much money they spent prosecuting on trespassing charges. That’d be interesting. Yeah, we’ll probably do that. We’ll probably do that.

Taya Graham:

Sean Paul, I can’t wait to see that because just like you said, there are things that when you have to bow to the algorithm that you can’t put up because you know they won’t get views or investigations that you want to do that are going to take a lot of time. And so you might put it on the back burner. I’ve had that experience and it’s painful to do that. And so this might really set you free. And I think we had Lacey R. Put your Patreon in the live below. So if people want to support these coughwatchers who are losing their channels, now’s your time. Full

Stephen Janis:

Disclosure, I’m a Patreon member of Line Isles. Just so everyone knows,

Taya Graham:

I’m

Stephen Janis:

Biased, but-That’s

Taya Graham:

Journalistic ethics to say the truth there. Journalistic ethics. I’m

Stephen Janis:

A $25 a month Patreon member.

Taya Graham:

I

Stephen Janis:

Thought you said 10. No, it was 25. I went all in. I appreciate it. No pizza this week.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So we want to thank you again. I mean, you literally had to stop on the road to speak to us, so we really want to thank you for your time and we absolutely wish you the best of luck. And thank you for taking the time with us, especially because you’re kind of going through it right now. So we really appreciate you coming on. Guess

Long Island Audit:

What? I still got the smile on my face. I’m still healthy, still got my family, still have my good friends and good people in the space that are working really hard like you guys and Rites Crispy that you guys are going to talk to.You guys are doing great work and I’m happy. The trolls needed one little happiness in their life. I’m happy for them. When you live with your life with such misery and pain, I mean, it’s just every day you need a win once in a while, so enjoy it.

Taya Graham:

I think they will savor it while they can. Thanks again, Jean-Paul. We really appreciate you. Come back.

Stephen Janis:

Come back soon. I will.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So Stephen, we’re going to continue our discussion with Copwatchers who are caught up in YouTube’s questionable shift in policy. And we are so happy to be joined by Finton Vargas, otherwise known as the creative force behind the popular channel. Writes Crispy. Hey, Writes Crispy. Thank you so much for joining us.

Rights Crispy:

Hey, thank you, Taya. Thank you, Steven. Thanks for having me and thanks to everybody in the chat, everybody who’s watching now and in the future. I appreciate you.

Stephen Janis:

We appreciate you. We appreciate you coming on.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. And

Stephen Janis:

Being patient.

Taya Graham:

Yes. And so first-follow.

Stephen Janis:

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Taya Graham:

So first, let me just do a wellness check with you. How are you doing and how are you dealing with the decision of YouTube’s to demonetize your channel?

Rights Crispy:

Thank you for your concern and thanks for asking. But as I’ve always told everybody, I do well by doing good in my profession. This is just a bonus hobby for me. I don’t do this for money. It’s a nice bonus to have, but as we were saying before, now the trolls don’t have a reason to say that we’re doing this for the money. And if we are, what’s the difference between major news networks that get a lot of ad revenue for their sponsors and everything? I think trying to find a villain in somebody who gets paid in America, it’s what country do you think this is? We make money doing things. But I’m doing all right, thank God. And I know that Rogue Nation did get a response back from YouTube saying that they’re going to escalate it. So it wasn’t a decision, but it was a response.

So that’s good.

Stephen Janis:

What does that mean, escalate? Does that mean they’re going to continue considering it or what does that mean?

Rights Crispy:

I guess the person who received his appeal said that they were going to send it to a higher up.

Stephen Janis:

I see. Okay. Well, that’s better than having the door shut right

Taya Graham:

Away. Right, exactly. It’s a step in the right direction. That’s good to hear. But

Stephen Janis:

I mean, to your point, when you think about if you took the collective monetization of every YouTube auditor out there, it wouldn’t amount to the budget of one metropolitan police department.That’s

Taya Graham:

The truth. Or

Stephen Janis:

Let me tell you this much. When I was a reporter dealing with police departments, they had multiple staff members, like seven or eight, nine, 10 people whose only job was to deal with the media or the press and to get their point of view out there. They had massive multimillion dollar budgets to hire people who were only job was to harass us or tell us we were wrong or yell at us or call us up in the middle of the night. So what YouTubers bring in is pennies on the dollar of what the police unions and the police departments have to spend. So why are people always giving you a hard time about making $20 from a YouTube video? Yeah, it’s

Rights Crispy:

Not just the police, but I’m working on a few stories. Like I told you guys before we started, I’m not going to stop doing this. I have some really important stories that I have to get out. And I stopped feeding the algorithm on YouTube years ago. I think my last paycheck last month was a couple hundred bucks and before that, I don’t remember when I got paid before that. So it’s not something that I’m getting paid off, but I am doing a lot of good work and I’m getting it out there. And like I told you guys also, the only thing I want people to pay is attention. We have a lot of big stories coming out on the Wrights Crispy channel.

It’s not just police. Like I was saying, there are government agencies that have do nothing jobs and we discover that we find their credit cards being used for wasteful purposes and we point that out. I have an attorney here, our city attorney, he also is an attorney for eight municipalities. He gets paid about $20,000 a month. That’s $160,000 a month if that’s what all the municipalities are getting. And he’s not advising the cities correctly. They want to put in data centers, they want to keep flock cameras up even though our Department of Transportation has stopped it. But I don’t want to get off on a tangent. I want to –

Stephen Janis:

No, no, it’s interesting.

Rights Crispy:

It’s

Stephen Janis:

Interesting.That’s great accountability work, man. It needs to be done.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely.

Stephen Janis:

And it’s not getting done in many communities because of YouTube and the algorithm and the way our ecosystem is kind of constructed around conflict

Taya Graham:

And

Stephen Janis:

Not like

Taya Graham:

This all reported. The way the attention economy

Stephen Janis:

Works. So let me get you, I just was curious what you thought about some of the ideas that Todd Blanche might be doing this at the behest of police unions or that police unions have been advocating for this and that they gave Google like, “Hey, you got to kick some of these people off monetization.” Do you give any credence to that or what do you think of that theory?

Rights Crispy:

I wouldn’t put it past them. Again, I thank you both for the work that you’ve done since I’ve known you, but especially last September you were in DC and you were interviewing the victims of the Epstein files. Oh yes. That’s one of the main reasons why I got into this. I know that none of those trafficking rings operate without some corruption in our government involved. And for Todd Blanche to say that it’s not a crime to party with Epstein when there are young kids in that room, yes, it is. That’s who we’re dealing with. And if we want to think about how he goes and meets with somebody from Google, I don’t put it past him. Like I said, the narrow-mindedness of these tech companies, look at what happened, the old Twitter, which is now X, remember they banned somebody in Canada for using the wrong pronouns.

However, they allowed the Taliban to continue their channel or their. So the narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy is ridiculous, especially in our modern cruelty. America has become a cruel and vicious place.

Taya Graham:

We

Rights Crispy:

Reward the shallowest, the loudest, the meanest. And for them to think that we are the ones who are being offensive by knocking on a door. I’m flabbergasted at what happened yesterday in Sean’s trial. I mean, that’s clearly established. You can go and drop off a UPS package. You can go and knock on a door and ask for answers.

Stephen Janis:

Politics, when people go and knock on doors and say, “I’m here.”

Taya Graham:

Or if you have a Bible in your hand and you want to talk to people, you’re allowed to knock on doors. It’s an American

Stephen Janis:

Tradition,

Taya Graham:

Even

Stephen Janis:

In a. A door to door salesman. Yeah.

Taya Graham:

I just want to ask you, have you heard from any other channels about this? Because you might have noticed, I’ve been looking down into the live chat. Some people have been demonetized. Other people have luckily missed the swinging sword over their head, the sword of Damocles there. Have you heard from any other channels? What are some of the things you’ve heard from your fellow cop watchers?

Rights Crispy:

Yes, I’m in a group chat. I was actually speaking with Nasty Nathaniel. Shout out to Nasty Nathaniel. When I got a call from Rogue Nation who asked me if I had gotten demonetized, we all checked at the same time. Then we went to the group chat. We were all like, “Hey, you guys checked and everybody’s…” Except for I think a few, Chuck Bronson, I don’t think was affected. Rogue Nation’s other channel was not affected. Major Lee Awesome. He has a lot of new, good content on there. But going back to when I started this, I saw Aurora, Colorado. There was a doctor that was trying to move some Boy Scout equipment in his own office building, and there was a police officer parked in his parking garage. Do you guys remember that?

Stephen Janis:

I’m sorry, I don’t, but –

Rights Crispy:

Well, he was confronted at gunpoint and he gave this speech after everything blew over. He said, “Use your white skin, use your straight teeth, use your education, give your money until it hurts. Give your freedom until you lose it.” And I took that to heart and I’ve done all that. I’ve given more money into this than I’ve gotten out of it. So it’s really not about the money. And the J-Town Press, Lana, just last year alone or the year before I think, she paid, I think $75,000 in records requests and other such fees for getting the story out there. That’s two Florida school teachers’ yearly salaries.

Stephen Janis:

That’s amazing.

Rights Crispy:

And that’s one DMV supervisor’s yearly salary.

Stephen Janis:

One thing you brought up about Todd Blanche and the Epstein victims, Tea’s reporting in Washington DC, the way she made sure that we were there and the way she talked to almost every single victim, I just wanted to acknowledge was an amazing thing to witness. Thank you. And she was there for every moment. I mean, I was right behind her, but – With the camera right there. She was leading the way and I’m glad you saw that because Tea was just amazing about really getting the stories and getting to know the people.

Taya Graham:

And for the record, TikTok was not always fond of my clips.

Stephen Janis:

But to your

Taya Graham:

Point – That’s

Stephen Janis:

Another story. Todd Blanche pretty much dissed the victims. He would only meet with them for an hour or something and it was very, very. That’s another knock against this whole administration, the way they treated, the way Pam Bonnie wouldn’t look at the women. I don’t know if you have anything to say about it.

Taya Graham:

No, it was incredible to see all of those women who, in doing this, I don’t think people realize when those Epstein victims came forward, or survivors perhaps is a better word, when those Epstein survivors came forward, these women have to relive some of the most traumatizing experiences of their lives publicly. They have to talk about something that’s probably one of the worst things that’s ever happened to them. And then they have to deal with the scrutiny of the public with people think, oh, they just want to do a lawsuit for money or oh, they’re just doing this because of a political reason. And these women have been suffering for years. These women have been reaching out to the FBI and the DOJ for years. So it was just heart-rending to see people literally turn their back on these women.

Stephen Janis:

And to your point –

Rights Crispy:

People are talking about these women and trying to question their integrity and why are they. Think of them 20 years younger. That’s who they were when this was happening to them. And I read this story in December 2018 from the Miami Herald and it put a knot in my stomach and I haven’t been able to untie that knot. And now that everybody knows what I’ve known for the last eight years, it’s sickening to see that we are in the age of apathy. People are just looking past it. Keep telling that story, Taya. I will. Thank you. Steven, please keep it up.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

Taya Graham:

Thank you. I really appreciate that. Thank

Stephen Janis:

You. And it points to why you have to hold law enforcement accountable. They’re not always heroes, right? Because as you point out – Sometimes you got to motivate them a little bit. As the stories were told to Taya, people reached out to law enforcement. Law enforcement ignored them. Yes, they did. And in 2008, they gave Epstein that sweetheart deal of 18 months of being overnight in prison, but he was still abusing women. He was actually

Taya Graham:

Still abusing women at the office he was allowed to go to during the day when he was supposed to be in prison.

Stephen Janis:

To say we don’t need cop watchers is absurd.

Taya Graham:

I completely agree. Alex

Stephen Janis:

Acosta

Rights Crispy:

Is the DA for the SAO who gave him the sweetheart deal, right?

Taya Graham:

Alex

Rights Crispy:

Acosta then became the labor secretary under term one of Trump.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. And

Rights Crispy:

Now guess where he is? He’s on the board of directors of Newsmax. So if that’s where you guys are getting your news, shut it off.

Taya Graham:

Yeah. Wow. Thank you so much for sharing that. I actually didn’t know he was on the board of Newsmax. Thank you for that. Good fact. Not that I was watching, but.

Rights Crispy:

Back to the YouTube money thing, you were talking about what are they doing about this? Can somebody sue or anything? I know that the Federal Trade Commission is doing an investigation on the bait and switch aspect of it where they’re telling people, and Steven was mentioning how vague it is, these rules that we have to follow. There’s so many things that we can or can’t do. And it’s weird because we’ll watch a channel and there’s somebody spraying somebody with a garden hose in the garden section of Home Depot, and they’re fine. They don’t have a troll channel to bother them at all, and they get away with all that. We are holding our government officials accountable and people start looking at us. We’re not taking a penny of their tax dollars. The person who is taking their tax dollars is not doing their job right.

We’re showing them that, but they’re focused on us.

Stephen Janis:

That’s such a good point.

Taya Graham:

That’s an excellent point. I just want to ask you if you had any thoughts on the violation of the Creator Responsibility Clause. I mean, what do you think that even means and how do you think it applies or doesn’t apply to your channel or to Copwatchers? I mean, this clause is really odd.

Rights Crispy:

Yeah, I was taken aback. Again, when I started, I tried to model myself after more moderate channels like Jeff Gray, Honor Your Oath, Civil Rights Investigation, and Rogue Nation. I really liked their approach, and I saw people doing what I thought was just getting a chip off their shoulder. I tell cops, “Hey, we need those guys too to test your bearing.” But I just decided on my first audit, I said it, “I’m not going to be that way. I’m going to be professional, courteous, respectful, and I’ll give what I get. I’m not just going to be a sucker. I’m going to go up there and I’m going to hold their feet to the fire if I have to, but I’m going to do it in the most respectful manner that I think is possible.” We’ve seen a lot of people take that approach after I started doing that, and I’m glad to have inspired a lot of people to do it that way because that way we can actually make a positive change, I don’t think in our government, but in our country with people so they can see us doing what they should be doing and get them to hold their local municipalities accountable.

But we also have seen people chasing and feeding the algorithm, and they couldn’t pander any harder with their trying to provoke people. I mean, I get that a lot of people who I work with have taken that approach. They’ve gone to dispensaries and stuff. I say heroes work there, leave them alone.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, no, I’ve seen some of those videos and I can’t really figure out what the hell that’s all about. But to the Copwatcher community and the people who are doing the work like you’re doing, the government accountability specifically, do you think this lack of stability in the monetization ecosystem and YouTube in general is going to. What is it going to do to the future of this community that has been very important to keeping police in check? What do you think bodes for the future for people who do this?

Rights Crispy:

Well, it will get rid of a lot of people who do depend on this. They are working with YouTube. That’s their livelihood. And I’m not saying that they’re just making clicks and views. They do good work. It’s just they need to pay their bills.

One of the OGs, the guy, I think his first audit or Copwatch was in 2009, Tommy from Mass Accountability, that guy has really put in a lot of good work and he exposed the “shit list” in Salem, Massachusetts, and he’s out there right now and he’s trying to make money off of YouTube. I don’t know if he was hit. I haven’t talked to him, but he would struggle if he didn’t have that YouTube income. I know he’s doing good work, so it sucks to lose somebody like that. If somebody realizes, “Oh, I can’t make a quick buck off of this,” and I’ll start doing something else that is just questionable or that some people don’t like, they’ll find something else to do. They won’t do it in the YouTube genre. Tuapri was a prankster and did pranks and stuff, and then he jumped into the auditing community.

So they’ll move around, they’ll find something else, they’ll find another way to get paid, but we are going to lose good citizen journalists.

Taya Graham:

Wow. I think you make such a good point because it’s kind of funny. There are people who say, “Oh, well, this is just for money or just for clicks or views.” And it’s like, “Well, I thought this was a capitalist country, and if you did work, it was okay to be paid for said work.” But the thing is that I don’t think a lot of people realize so many folks who run these channels barely make enough money to cover their camera equipment or to even bond out of jail if they get thrown into jail. People really are not making tons of money out there. People are doing this because they really care. And so it hurts to think that this well of activism that was so grassroots, so natural, just really just came from the ground up, could be shut off at the source because these places like YouTube, they essentially are digital commons.

This is where we can go now. And if they turn off the spigot, they basically control what narrative the rest of the country sees. It’s just really disturbing. But I just wanted to get back to Long Island Audits for a second, just to get your thoughts on the verdict of Long Island Audits trespassing case. Do you have any concerns about how his case was treated? Because essentially was just going up to the door and knocking, and now he could potentially be facing time behind bars.

Rights Crispy:

Yeah, it’s repugnant on its face for that judge to have done that, but I’m shocked. We have a broken system. Oh, no.

Taya Graham:

News flash for me, right? Big newsflash for me.

Rights Crispy:

Right. No, that’s what I tell people in every situation when we’re dealing with the government is don’t pin your hopes on an illusion that you’re going to make a change and they’re going to be like, “Oh, you know right, you’re right. McDonald v. Rundle, take those cuffs off of him. You can go home.” No, you can go there with all the facts and all the law in the world. If the guy in the row behind the bench is feeling some kind of way about you, you’re not going to see justice that day, and you’ll have to take it to appeal where it’s, I think, a little bit more scrutinized. But look at how did we get qualified immunity in the first place? It had to be fought all the way up to the Supreme Court that a Black man could eat in a restaurant. They could segregate.

I mean, not segregate, they could integrate, and the cops didn’t want to do that, so they arrested him and they took it to court and they were like, “Nope, I know what the feds said, but here in our beautiful state, we want to keep it that way.” And then they took it all the way up to the Supreme Court, and even in the Supreme Court back then, they said, “Fine,” begrudgingly gave him his right to eat wherever he wanted, but from now on, cops have qualified immunity, and that’s how they got it, is from that Jim Crow law that was being enforced. I’m

Taya Graham:

So glad to explain that. It was basically

Stephen Janis:

Like the Ku Klux Klan law, 1983 federal law that was supposed to allow people to sue public officials to enforce their constitutional rights. The ironic fact is that qualified immunity, which has been a barrier in many circuits to. Yeah, that is ironic. So what’s the future? What’s the future for copwatching and what’s the future for you? Just kind of closing out the last question.

Taya Graham:

Yeah, I was going to ask

Stephen Janis:

The question. I’m sorry, Steve.

Taya Graham:

No, it’s the same question. We’re just seeing in sync.

Stephen Janis:

How do you see the future unfolding and

Taya Graham:

What’s

Stephen Janis:

Going to happen because of this, what we’re calling the great demonetization of YouTube? Well,

Rights Crispy:

I think a lot of people will get re-monetized, and hopefully I will too. It’s a nice bonus, like I said. If not, we can’t be stopped. We’re going to keep on going. I have stick it to the maniosis. It’s fatal.

Taya Graham:

Oh, I love that. I’ve never heard that before. I really like that.

Rights Crispy:

You watch School of Rock.

Stephen Janis:

What makes you think that you guys are going to win the appeals? What do you think is on your side?

Rights Crispy:

Well, for instance, I think it’s a machine algorithm that made all these decisions. I don’t think it was one person going around and watching every one of our videos. I think if anybody had gotten a yellow flag or something before on their channel, that might have affected us. Because again, why would they only do some copwatchers and not all of us? I think maybe some music or something might be affecting. I think it’s something technical, but again, I wouldn’t put it past all those clowns that we mentioned before and the police unions because they really love to hate us. And the other quote that I was saying, I have it here, it’s to be hated for loving freedom has been the weirdest experience of my life.

Stephen Janis:

That’s so interesting.

Taya Graham:

Wow.

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, I think I understand as a journalist, you write what you think is the truth, and then people hate you for it, and you have to reconcile that. You have to learn to work through that, that, well, I’m giving my best representation of the truth, which I would hope would be beneficial to the community, and there are people that just have vested interests in a power structure, and they hate you. And what’s weird about it is that institutions like policing have people who will go out and attack you who seem to have no reason to do so or no vested interest in the institution, just seem to be blinded by the propaganda, right? I mean, it’s like –

Rights Crispy:

I have two theories of one of two or both, either they don’t have the guts to stick it to the man like we do or stand for their rights, and they hate seeing somebody else showing them that they can and they don’t. Wow. Or they want to kill the messenger because we’re showing them that their heroes are actually cowards or jerks and they don’t like it, or both. And I think –

Taya Graham:

That makes a lot of sense.

Rights Crispy:

To inspire people. I’m here to let people who are like-minded know that they’re not alone. I also love to turn people around. People ask me all the time, “Oh, why’d you do this?” And when I explain it to them, I’m like, “Oh, wait a minute. Hold on.” And they get educated. My wife and I sing the Bonnie Taylor, “Turn them around,” because we turned them around, and that’s one of my favorite things. Shout out to Wolfie Gladly, who taught me how to be positive with the trolls and just have fun with them and let them know to search inward for the source of your misplaced anger. Wow.

Stephen Janis:

That is a good

Rights Crispy:

Way to approach it. Be aware of your own anger. Why are you mad at me? You don’t know me. I didn’t do anything to you. That

Taya Graham:

Is a very evolved way of handling it. Yeah, that’s very evolved and very healthy way. To be able to deal with the

Stephen Janis:

Negative comments.

Taya Graham:

Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Well, we appreciate you taking the time.

Taya Graham:

We appreciate you so much. We’re so glad you joined us. We’re so glad you were willing to be flexible with us. We appreciate your work, and I hope you keep us updated, and that if you hear from anyone else in the Copwatcher community, let us know how it’s going. Are people still continuing to get demonetized? Because as we showed earlier, there’s a chance that even though you said it might have been just an algorithmic thing all at once, there could be someone who’s putting their thumb on the scale. Well, the

Rights Crispy:

2A community was also hit. I’m sorry to interrupt. No, the 2A. Oh, the

Taya Graham:

2A? Interesting. Oh, really? Because I reached out to HBO Matt to see if he came. Well, HBO Matt

Stephen Janis:

Did get demonetized,

Taya Graham:

Right? No, no, no, he wasn’t. I spoke to him. I messaged him as of two days ago. He was not. He wasn’t demonetized. I don’t know if that’s changed, but I did know the 2A community got hit too. So 1A and 2A.

Stephen Janis:

Anyone here from Corners News?

Taya Graham:

I asked him about Corners, but actually I’ll reach out to him later. Yeah. And just please keep us updated because if we can, we’d like to be a resource for everybody. And also, we want to see how far this goes. Is it hitting 1A? Is it hitting 2A? Do we need to worry about any of the other As in our constitution? Do we need to worry about them? Yeah.

Rights Crispy:

It was HBO Matt who told me the gun channels got hit too.

Taya Graham:

Wow. Okay. All right. Well, I’ll check in with him again. Finn, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate you so much. Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

And keep doing the great work you’re doing.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Citizen journalists

Stephen Janis:

Are the best.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. I appreciate you. We have utmost respect for it.

Rights Crispy:

Dittos. I mean, you guys are inspirational. Thank you.

Taya Graham:

Aw, thank you. Thanks to everybody. That’s really kind. That’s really kind. Thank you. Oh, wow. That was right to Krispy. That was so great. Well, I guess I shouldn’t comment on our own interview. I though his interview was really wonderful. Well, it’s interesting

Stephen Janis:

To hear people. What inspires me is people do this under the most difficult circumstances, take on power with just their own sort of wits and the limited resources. Very limited resources. They’re undaunted. I know. And that, to me, is inspiring because journalism is a weird thing. It’s not like being a lawyer or something. You’re not accredited or something.

Taya Graham:

You’re in a gray zone. Yeah,

Stephen Janis:

You’re in a gray zone and it’s not something that makes you rich,

Taya Graham:

Famous

Stephen Janis:

Or anything. It’s just you get the –

Taya Graham:

Unless you’re

Stephen Janis:

On

Taya Graham:

Cable news.

Stephen Janis:

Right. But it’s something that gives you satisfaction from doing the work on

Taya Graham:

Behalf

Stephen Janis:

Of people.

Taya Graham:

You’ve got to care about it.

Stephen Janis:

And that ethos is pervasive throughout copwatching and other forms of YouTube accountability. And it’s kind of cool and really heartening to see that. Some people just get it, this bug, and they want to let the community know what’s going on, and they want to hold people accountable. And it’s just great to see it, that it’s still a spirit in this country, sort of a civic tradition, I think. We’re fierce accountability people, and to see other people just do it, and no matter what, they’re going to keep going, is pretty awesome.That’s

Taya Graham:

A really great way to describe it. That’s a civic tradition, that it’s kind of in the blood of Americans, that we care about. The First Amendment, all the amendments, our Constitution, the Bill of Rights. It matters to us. Those of them who go out to protect it in their own way, I think that’s really

Stephen Janis:

Normal. None of

Taya Graham:

Them went to journalism

Stephen Janis:

School, right? They’re not people who had

Taya Graham:

The

Stephen Janis:

Traditional training, but they figured it out.

Taya Graham:

They sure did.

Stephen Janis:

And then once they figured it out, they became very passionate about it. Just like we did.

Taya Graham:

Yeah, exactly. As journalists, that’s why we’re passionate as journalists. And so it’s great to see other people develop that same passion. And

Stephen Janis:

I was an English major, so whatever.

Taya Graham:

Well, Steven, I think that was a really intense discussion about an important topic. Absolutely. And I think all of us, meaning journalists and cop watchers, all of us understand how fragile and tenuous the right to push back against power is, which is why at least in the past, the courts have given great leeway to people over what they post and how. Do you have any final thoughts you want to share before I do my warning rant alert?

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Well, thank you for the warning. It’s interesting because this debate is over the economics of an information ecosystem, and the control that YouTube has is kind of difficult to parallel with anything I can think about. When you start a newspaper 50 years ago, you could put it in boxes out in the sidewalk, you could mail it to someone, you could have subscribers through the post office, but now YouTube has become the only place to monetize this kind of content besides Facebook and TikTok, but the kind of serious long form content. And so I think that’s kind of scary, right? That’s kind of Philip K. Dick kind of dystopian that this one particular attention machine can sort of cast people off and that creates a very unstable kind of economic system and ecosystem for people to create information and to report back to us. So this is in many ways very, very disturbing.

And then Long Island, I was talking about the subpoena of people’s subscribers and getting into that. I don’t know. I don’t think YouTube is going to represent, given the way they have responded to the Trump administration and changed Lake Ontario to Lake America and how quickly they have caved, I don’t think they’re the right people to be defending en masse a ecosystem of First Amendment information. I think they are a bad actor in this in some ways. They have created a devastating attention machine, but I don’t think they have the same ethos of protecting the ability of people to express their use. And all these channels have never been taken down or anything. They’ve been there and then all of a sudden. So it just shows you how precarious this is. It seems great on one level that everyone have their own YouTube channel, but now it’s very precarious and it’s a little scary to say the least.

Taya Graham:

Yeah. Steven, I think you made a really great point about how there is a concentration of power. And I really think that it’s important to point this out Because a world where the control of the distribution of information is bound to just a few private companies, that’s a dangerous world because that means, like I mentioned earlier, they can control the narrative. They control what we see, what we watch, what we learn, what information we take in. And that is a type of power I don’t think that’s ever been seen before in history.

Stephen Janis:

Maybe back in the day.

Taya Graham:

Right. Back where there were medieval peasants and only upper class people were literate or something. Okay. Maybe back then that was controlling the narrative. Ever

Stephen Janis:

Since the

Taya Graham:

Printing

Stephen Janis:

Press, it’s been more

Taya Graham:

Diffused.

Stephen Janis:

And now it’s oddly gone in the other direction in many ways, just evidenced

Taya Graham:

By

Stephen Janis:

What’s happened.

Taya Graham:

That’s a really great point. And I guess what I’m going to do is just start my little rant. Is that okay?

Stephen Janis:

I’m okay. I’m here.

Taya Graham:

I’m here. I’ll get

Stephen Janis:

The popcorn.

Taya Graham:

Yeah, buckle up. So what I wanted to share with everyone is that I think the idea that keeps occurring to me as we discuss what YouTube has done to copwatchers and First Amendment auditors and apparently Second Amendment auditors is fairly simple but has some complex implications. And that is, it’s hypocrisy, just the blatant and contradictory use of the notion of creator responsibility as a justification for taking away the ability of YouTube activists to monetize their work. I mean, the idea in principle sounds reasonable enough. When you read the words and discern the logic behind them, they don’t seem irrational, but then you start thinking. And then the question becomes unavoidable. Like really Google, the company that gave us Alex Jones and the flat earth conspiracies, the company that has been monetizing conflict for decades and profiting off lies and embellishment and fabrication since it was birthed and now out of nowhere, they’re suddenly concerned about this sort of nebulous sense of decency without any warning or outward provocation.

The oligarchs who run this obscenely rich company seem to become uncomfortable with content that holds power accountable in ways that are not always pretty or easy to watch. Well, I mean, Google, where was that moral qualm when child victims of the Newtown Massacre were being accused of being crisis actors when their parents were being doxed and hounded by Jones and his legions? It took Google quite a while to deal with that mess if they actually did it all. But all this debate over content, creator responsibility and the nuances of Google standards misses another really important point. Something that the powers that be would like to ignore, but we’re not going to let them. Who actually made copwatching possible and even necessary? Well, it wasn’t Wright’s Crispy or Joe Cool or Long Island Audits or Out of the Watchdog or Friends in Code or Eric Brant or Noli D or Lacey Art.

They didn’t create the environment of the law enforcement industrial complex that made policing one of the most powerful institutions in America. No, they didn’t. Power, inequality, and the police themselves invented copwatching. It was their overreach and abuse of the law that demanded a response from the people subject to it. It was their power drunk officers and biased judges and poorly constructed laws that sewed the general discontent that made any of this, basically all of this possible. I mean, let’s remember, copwatchers and 1A auditors wouldn’t garner millions of views if people didn’t tell Google through their watch habits that auditing content was relevant to their lives. YouTube’s merciless algorithm doesn’t dole out watch time to videos that no one is interested in. The platform is not a charitable foundation constructed for the public good. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It is the most efficient, reactive, adoptive, and yes, destructive attention machine ever constructed by human beings.

It’s the most elaborate ruthless flame for a moth of human cognition that has ever been devised. People watch the aforementioned YouTubers because the algorithm has determined they want to. Copwatcher videos get traction because of YouTube’s own technology and it’s crafted an audience that wants to see cops held accountable. And if you think police power is not a problem that requires people with cell phone cameras to address it, just consider something. The most recent police shooting in Pennsylvania and the role video is playing in its adjudication. 22 year old Glenwood Earl Seicher was walking to a friend’s house after a pub crawl when he stopped at the wrong address. After he knocked on the door, homeowners called the police fearing that someone was breaking into their house. Turns out that wasn’t true because Pyscher was actually sitting quietly on their back patio when police arrived. Enter Sean Farrell of the upper Potsgrove police.

He arrived on the scene, told the young man to show his hands, which he did peacefully and then inexplicably shot him twice in the chest killing him. Farrell has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, but here’s the most important point. When backup arrived on the scene, Farrell told the fellow cops that that young man had been shouting and gesticulating wildly, that he was screaming and threatening and all of it was not true. It was an absolute lie. But imagine if Officer Ferrell didn’t have body-worn camera, imagine if there was no video, what would’ve happened then? Well, I can tell you because I witnessed it here in Baltimore before cell phone cameras became ubiquitous. Nothing. Nothing at all would happen. No changes, no questions, no justice. Sure the family would’ve protested. His friends would’ve sworn up and down that he was a good kid incapable of scaring a cop, but it wouldn’t have mattered.

The officer would’ve been believed and an innocent man’s murder would’ve gone unavenged. So when YouTube or Google decides to shut down the ability of cop watchers to monetize their videos, it’s not just an inconvenience. It’s shutting down the people’s flock camera, so to speak, the cameras that are documenting power and the abuse of it. The one instance where the camera is turned on them, not us. And that is why this great demonetization should concern all of us. It’s not just about cop watchers. It’s not just about auditors or crazy YouTubers. It’s not just about who gets to shout the loudest or act the craziest. It’s about who has the right to tell our stories, who has the means to represent us. It’s about our voice and who hears it and who doesn’t. And that’s why here at the Real News and the Police Accountability Report, we will continue to report for you.

I want to thank – Wow. Was that all right?

Stephen Janis:

That was quite the Rantea.

Taya Graham:

I was moved. I couldn’t help it. After seeing this happen all week, we’ve been talking about it. We’ve been seeing people’s channels struck down and I was a little fired up. But

Stephen Janis:

You make a really good point because I covered a lot of police brutality and a guy would get shot in the back and police would come of sort of furative movements or whatever. It didn’t matter what anyone in the community, even people who witnessed it didn’t matter what they said.

Taya Graham:

10 witnesses and it wouldn’t matter.

Stephen Janis:

Until there was video. And that changed everything just like in our city, of course, with Freddie Gray, when people had the video of him being dragged into that van, Freddie Gray who died in police custody and the subsequent uprising. Without video, it just didn’t matter. The police always had the benefit of the doubt and a lot of, I think, bad shootings or criminal shootings went unprosecuted because of that. Absolutely. So your point about the camera and whether or not we need cop watchers, I think answered that question, I think for anyone.

Taya Graham:

Thank you.

Stephen Janis:

Just wanted to say that.

Taya Graham:

I really appreciate that, Steven. Thank you.You’re welcome.

Stephen Janis:

You’re

Taya Graham:

Welcome. Well, I have to thank Long Island Audit and Rice Krispies for joining on Rice Krispies. I called them Rice Krispies. Rice Krispy, sorry. Rice Krispy for joining us. And to anyone out there who might be experiencing demonetization on YouTube, please reach out to us. Even if you’re not a Copwatcher or First Amendment activist so we can try to understand the scope of this problem, you can reach out to me directly at par@therealnews.com or leave a comment here in the comment section. I’m going to be going through the comment section later. I’m going to be giving out hearts. I’m going to be looking for a comment of the week, but I also really want to see if there are people who’ve lost their channels. I want to be able to reach out to you or at least make a note that this has happened to you because I really want to keep track of this.

I have a running list and I want to confirm as many demonetizations as possible so we can really get a handle on what’s happening here. Agreed. I want to thank our moderators, Noli D and Lacey R. For their help. Thank you, Noli D.

Stephen Janis:

Thank you.

Taya Graham:

And of course our friends in the studio, Dave, Max, James, Jocelyn and Ryan. And of course, I have to thank my amazing co-host, Steven Janis, who knows better than anyone the power of pointing a camera at a powerful person. So thank you, Steven.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. And thank you to the studio. Thank

Taya Graham:

You David and Max

Stephen Janis:

And everyone for helping out.

Taya Graham:

Yeah, they do. They were heroic. Oh my gosh, Cameron. Sorry Cameron. Thank Cameron.

Stephen Janis:

Don’t forget Cameron. Cameron was very helpful.

Taya Graham:

We appreciate you all. And so I want to thank everyone watching who took the time to stay with us to the end. Like I said, I promise to go into the comments later and respond to comments. And I’m going to try to do a comment of the week. I’ll probably have it out midweek. So take a look. It might be yours. My name is Taya Graham and I’m your host of the Police Accountability Report. And as always, please be safe out there.

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez.

Jules Taylor:

And I’m Jules Taylor.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So you guys all know Jules as the producer of this podcast, but let me tell you something about brother Jules here. Jules is a renaissance man. He is a podcaster himself, as many of you know. He’s a writer, a music producer, a poet, and a brilliant musician in his own right. And he does all the music for working people as well. And that’s why I really, really wanted us to host this episode together because today we’re actually going to be talking about the work that goes into being a professional musician and the realities of working and trying to make a living in the music industry today. And that industry looks a lot different than the music industry that we grew up with. Those 20th century days of vinyl records and tape decks and CDs and tower records and MTV, man, those have gone away and given way to this 21st century age of MP3s and music streaming, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, Ticketmaster, et cetera, et cetera.

You guys know what I’m talking about. And I love music just about every single kind, and I always have. And I need music to live. And life itself would be so much less, I don’t know, magical to me if I lived in a world without music. And my playlists and my mix tapes are, and have always been, I think of Frankenstein’s mix of just the cheesiest pop, the hardest hip hop and gangster rap, the most classic Motown, the rock and roll, indie, ’80s, ’90s, early aughts, Broadway soundtracks, movie soundtracks. Just like me, my playlists contain multitudes, baby, but I can’t read music for shit and I can’t play an instrument to save my life. So my understanding can really only go so far here, but I’ve always been and continue to be in just total awe of musical people. And Jules, you are a very musical person.

You live this, you breathe this. And we’re going to dig into this more with our guests today, but by way of, I guess, introducing the conversation, if you had two minutes, how would you sum up your entry into the world of music and the good, bad, and ugly parts of your life as a working musician today?

Jules Taylor:

So hey Max, glad to see you, buddy. Man, thank you so much for the invite to co-host this conversation I’m really excited to be a part of. And I guess the short and simple of why I decided to make Go Music is that I consider myself to be, to a certain extent, largely unemployable. And I sort of just dreaded the thought of having to maintain a consistent nine to five, but I knew music was something that I could wake up early if I needed to, but something I would wake up for anytime I could be a part of it. And so in some ways it’s the only thing that I can do, but in other ways it’s also led me to everything else that I do, whether that’s studio work or live sound and eventually things like photography and shooting music videos and podcasting, flying drones and everything that it all kind of just comes back to the central urge of wanting to figure out how to make a living out of taking a guitar on stage and just playing original and covers and seeing how to make a go of that.

Somewhere in there I decided to challenge myself, see if I could actually make a living out of it. And that’s ended up why I produced podcasts too. So many gigs come out of needing other gigs to support the music.

It’s something that benefits you to help support it in some ways. I mean, it’s like a dream, hope and a prayer, but somehow you’re like, “Hey, but I ended up with seven career paths.” So anyway, but that’s how I got into this stuff, man.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about this more, right? Because I know I have so many questions and I’m sure our listeners have so many questions. What is it actually like and what does it actually take to make a living as a working musician today? What does the music industry as it exists today take from musicians and take from the rest of us? And what are we getting in return? Is that bargain worth it anymore? And how do the working and living conditions of music makers and all these moneymaking schemes of the music industry, how do all those shape the actual music that we make and consume and listen to and dance to and think to and live to? How do they shape the ways that we relate to music itself? So this is what we’re going to be talking about today, and I am just beyond excited and really, really grateful to be talking with all four members of Veteran Chicago Rock Band, The Empty Pockets.

So they’re here with us now to dig into all this. And thank you all so much for joining us on the show today. And Jules, thank you so much for co-hosting this man. So let’s go around the table and have y’all introduce yourselves and your band to our listeners.

Josh Solomon:

Max, Jules, thank you so much for having us. That was so many insightful things you guys said already. I’m Josh. I’m the guitar player of the Empty Pockets and I started this band with Nate 20 years ago. Our singer and keyboard player, Erica, is my wife, and I have made a full-time living humbly, a humble full-time living in music and the arts for well over 20 years.

Adam Balasco:

Hi, I’m Adam. I play drums with the Empty Pockets, but also as a working band, I do a lot. We all do a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with music. So I do customer service and shipping and we do warehousing. We load our own gear. We do a lot of work outside of just our instruments somewhat, unfortunately. I think we’ll get into that at some point probably, but yes, drums.

Erika Brett:

Yes, we are all Renaissance people, as you said early in this broadcast. I’m Erika. I play keyboards, so Oregon, roads, piano. And yeah, I’ve been a full-time musician for almost 20 years, maybe longer than 20 years. And my big role with the band is graphic design, merchandise development, and social media promotions and marketing. We all have a lot of hats.

Nate Bellon:

Hey, I’m Nate. I play the bass. This is one of my hats. We have a lot of roles and one of my roles is physical maintenance. And so Josh and I actually built the studio room that we’re in, and we have built this room out over 15 years or 16 years quite physically. We literally have done all of the work or very close to all of the work. And it’s just one of the things that you end up doing to become and maintain your status as a professional musician.

Erika Brett:

You’re also the vehicle guy.

Nate Bellon:

Well, that’s true. Yeah. It’s

Josh Solomon:

A physical thing. Yeah,

Nate Bellon:

Physical

Josh Solomon:

Stuff. Nate’s very mechanical.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, let’s not sell him short. We call that the getaway guy.

Erika Brett:

Nate’s perfect for that.

Jules Taylor:

Well, Josh, Erica, Nate and Adam, Matt, it’s so cool to be talking with y’all. And I think it’s funny how immediately in this conversation, there’s a sort of vibe of anything we have to do to keep doing what we’re doing. I mean, that’s kind of the credo around that I think of from time to time. But I guess I have a very broad question and in that broadness, I’d like to invite you to get as specific as you’d like, but said very plainly, how are y’all making this work today in today’s touring climate? So rarely do we get to speak to a band that has been together as long as y’all have. And so in this shared experience of performing, how are y’all contending with this changing landscape? Where have you had to pivot? Not just in rising gas prices and inflation and the evermore difficult task of convincing folks to put pants on and leave the house, but also in the merch game.

I mean, selling your music and physical media at shows has morphed into this sort of t-shirt and trinket hustle at times. So basically the odds of an independent band being successful in air quotes, however we define that, if I’m going to use the word successful in terms of carving out a meter existence, those odds are ever more stacked against us. And so what are you doing differently today compared to say maybe 2005 and where are y’all finding the most success?

Josh Solomon:

It’s Josh here and I’m 41, so 2005, 2006, I’m 20, 21 years old, totally delusional with no perspective on. How do I totally put it? Every time we go to a town, a fan says to me, “Oh, you got to come play in this place.” We’re in a 200 seat venue. Every time a fan is like, “You got to come play this little place in my town.” I look it up. That place he’s talking about every time is 2000 seats. People have zero concept. We’re like a 200 seat theater band. People have zero concept of the amount of things between us and the eras tour. And I think from my perspective, and I’d love to hear what you guys have to say too, to answer even just a part of that question is we’ve doubled down on physical media so hard and we talk to and collect, and this is working increasingly better, I think as a portion of the population feels more and more left out by the commoditization of music.

When you put music on a streaming platform and it’s the same every single song ever made on every streaming platform, which is different than movies and TV, that becomes a water tap and it’s just a price race to the bottom. So we basically, while we put our music on those services from our perspective, that’s like a token.

Erika Brett:

Yeah. We used to kind of be waiting for our prints to come, as some people say.

Josh Solomon:

Attracting an

Erika Brett:

A&R ride. Yeah. We had a song that some radio people were like, “This could be a hit.” And then you’re waiting for that to be the case. Now that wasn’t the case for us, but we were able to, over the course of the last 20 years, but really over the last kind of how you described 10 years, diversify our income streams. We went from playing whatever gig we could get to becoming a backing band for artists with large followings and then opening for those artists to gain awareness and gain more fans and also prioritizing an e-commerce strategy, which is what Josh was talking about, our physical products. And so we’ve moved away from streaming. Streaming is great and we also listen to music there, but for our business, we are directing people to physical products and shows.

Josh Solomon:

Jules, you had mentioned one of the reasons we all get into this is because I just don’t want to go to a nine to five every day. I want to do something different every day. So a couple of years ago, this studio needed repainted. And one of the ways you stay a full-time musician is you don’t hire a painter. You buy some paint and you paint the studio. So I found myself and Adam and Nate here. And Adam, do you remember what you said as we were painting it?

Adam Balasco:

Yeah. I always say I like any job, manual labor, whatever the hardest thing you’re imagining is weefing today, right now. I like that for one day, three days. I’m outside, I’m up on a roof, it’s cool.

A week. Turning anything into a career is so daunting. But yeah, that is how we save money and kind of stay afloat is like we painted that. You were talking about building this studio and then I was like, oh yeah. And then it’s white now because we painted. We painted it and stuff like that is how we’ve kind of taken. And we’re not waiting for that lottery ticket. We would love our song to go crazy on the radio or streaming or whatever. We’re not waiting for that lottery ticket. We’re acquiring fans one at a time and we’re doing all the work or we like to think we’re doing all the work ourselves and we’re desperate in a sense. And

Josh Solomon:

We’re doing it all. Jewels had the same attitude as us in terms of, I don’t want to be a painter for a living. I don’t want to look down the barrel of that. I’m impressed with somebody who can do that. I know some amazing house painters, but I’m not above painting. I’m not above doing some electric.

Erika Brett:

Well, and the thing with owning an arts business of any kind too is that you are going to inevitably become a Renaissance person. You’re going to have to learn about lighting so that you can make videos that resonate. You’re going to have to learn about editing. You’re going to have to learn all of these things about vehicle repair.

Josh Solomon:

The myth goes that when the Rolling Stones got to Chess Records here in Chicago, Muddy Waters was painting the wall. That’s the myth that when the Rolling Stones got to chess in the early ’60s that Muddy Waters was painting. So it’s not new at all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s interesting to me too, because so much of what you guys are saying, even as a self-professed non-musical person or non-musician, so much of what you’re talking about resonates with my own experience as a creative and a creator in media spaces and just that need to kind of adapt to an ecosystem that’s always changing. And there’s always opportunity in that as well as a whole host of new threats and stressors to deal with. It’s wild, man. We’re talking on a podcast I made because I was like, people aren’t reading my articles anymore. And that kind of process has sort of led me to get into audio reporting and now video reporting and any and all of the above I love to do, but there also comes a price with being able to make a living doing what you love. And I wanted to kind of talk about that too, because I can’t speak from your guys’ and Jules’ vantage point.

That is your art. That is still different from the reporting that I do. The two very much intersect. I bring a lot of my artistic heart and spirit into the work that I do, but I know just by being privileged enough to get paid to do that for a living, that it really changes my relationship to the thing I’m doing, to the ways I feel about doing it. And the love when it becomes a job takes on all of that baggage from all the unloving parts of life. So how does that affect you guys as musicians and the music that you make?

Josh Solomon:

Man, what a great question. There’s so many pieces of that. One that comes right to mind to me, and I want Nate to speak on this and Adam as well, is they both had children and we’re on the road and our dreams are kind of coming true. We’re at the London Palladium, it’s sold out, but a month into a tour doing something you love too, there’s an element of, do I love this the same amount today? And I don’t know, Nate, what do you think about, you had to leave your son at home for the first time pretty recently.

Nate Bellon:

Yeah. So my kid had just been born and then we went on tour in the UK for a month and we were in Amsterdam and all over the UK. We took the Chunnel twice. So there was a bunch of stuff where I was like, this is cool. I should be ever present in this moment. And also it’s hard because I wasn’t seeing my newborn kid and my wife and you try and balance that emotionally and then you get to play shows. So I get that sweet juice that I need in order to make it through the next couple of days.

Josh Solomon:

Jules definitely knows this feeling too. When you’re on tour, there’s the same amount of time in every day when you’re at home, except the part that you’re leading towards is like an hour and a half and the rest of the day is leading towards that moment or coming away from that moment. And it is an exhilarating but strange experience.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. And then you get to figure out that an hour is just a completely useless denomination of time. It’s just not enough to dig into anything. It’s not enough to really relax if you need to, but you have an hour before this one critical thing happens before you have another hour or something. But yeah, I totally understand that, man. Being away from home, it’s difficult to, especially with the sort of constraints that a lean and mean tour might have on its subjects, being away from home, being somewhat restricted in that sense, and being torn between these beautiful things you’re experiencing on tour while also having the regret of having to leave. I got a buddy of mine who plays guitar with Playboy Cardy. The guy is on tour with that guy playing arenas. And even he the other day texted me, he’s like, “My wife’s due in 12 weeks and I leave for tour in 13 weeks or something crazy like that.” But I wonder also, you guys also seem like you’re very chummy, right?

You’ve been together a long time, but I would say that touring and these moments also kind of create friction amongst band members and inevitably you end up with some comical story at some point. Do you guys have a singular story you could pick out of some sort of tense moment that resulted in something hilarious?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And remember, this is a worker and labor focused show. So we’re really talking about, give us a worker’s eye view into the labor of having to go on tour with each other and deal with everything you’re dealing with.

Adam Balasco:

Well, I don’t know. No funny stories immediately come to mind. I’m sure they exist, but being in a band is like doing a group project with your immediate family, which is horrible at times and also amazing. And it’s hard to communicate the band dynamic because it’s like I deeply love these people and we live in a van and sometimes an Airbnb or a hotel. So it’s like –

Josh Solomon:

There’s an interesting balance there too, and I think a lot of small businesses have this balance, like where to put your office, how nice of a neighborhood to put it in, that type of thing. For us, it’s like how much to spend on a hotel, how much to spend because there’s a balance between sustainability, vibe, morale. Man, we’ve cheaped out a couple times and checked into a hotel and you’re only there for 12 hours and it’s just crushing your spirit.

Erika Brett:

Bloody hand prints. Oh my God. Oh my God, you guys.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, what motels are you guys staying at?

Nate Bellon:

Was that the Bay Bries Inn?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I was going to say the Bates Motel, man.

Josh Solomon:

Yeah.

Erika Brett:

We’ve got some horror stories for

Josh Solomon:

Sure. And in terms of from a worker perspective, there’s nothing reasonable or OSHA friendly about how a band operates at our level at all, right? It’s like in the band at 7:00 AM, maybe stop for a lunch. We have a tour manager who does most of our driving. Then before that, it must have been really unsafe.

Adam Balasco:

Definitely.

Josh Solomon:

It

Adam Balasco:

Was just us.

Josh Solomon:

It was just us. And you go to an interview, you load in. The days are 14 and 15 hours. I always call on tour a processing deficit. You can’t even go through what you did today before you get tomorrow. And we’ve learned a lot about how to plan better, about how to demand more. I like to say a gig is legitimate when they offer you a meal. Sometimes you go to a gig and you’re there from 4:00 PM to 1:0 AM and you’re like, “Is there anything to eat around here?” And they’re not like, “Not within two miles.” Who

Erika Brett:

Wants to help with that? Why?

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. Yeah. Or the green room plate of mac and cheese. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a testament every time I talk to musicians, you can tell who’s really giving it a go because they have all of the ingredients for the recipe. They have all the social media, all the marketing. They actually have the website, the domain, the EPK, the video, the bio written by a third party that you probably paid someone for. All of these different things, this elaborate recipe that just equates out to a starting point, right? Yeah. It’s

Josh Solomon:

So depressing. It’s a starting point.

Jules Taylor:

It’s all a starting point. Yeah. Tell me. You

Josh Solomon:

Were using it as a metaphor, but just to exemplify, we’re the empty pockets. We take that seriously. We write about labor issues. Our next album is called Dear Billionaires. And to that effect, especially when we open for someone on a tour, back them up, there’s an elaborate rider in that deli tray and chips, whatever, all this food, fruit. We have permanent coolers. We never leave a venue without as much food and ingredients. We have banned salt and pepper. We literally stop at a picnic table on the side of the road and unpack our coolers, and that’s mostly lunch. And we’ve really embraced that. And

Erika Brett:

We really have to be thrifty in every part of what we do. Not only have the margins gotten worse, like you were saying everywhere, in hotels, gas, food, all the things that make our engine run, but I was watching the Today Show this morning. It happened to be on, and they’re giving financial advice. And without a steady paycheck, none of those things work for us. We can’t go to a financial planner in the same way somebody with a 401k or just even a regular paycheck can. We really have to take saving money and spending it carefully very seriously.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. It’s just a testament in so many ways whenever I talk to any musician who’s making this go and making it work is that you don’t really need the bosses because the workers can do anything under any conditions with any circumstances that come up on the road with unsure pay and just questionable sleeping conditions. It’s like where there is determination and this deep written desire to create music and to do this as a main vocation, as a focus, as a primary way of living your life. It’s just a testament to the incredible sort of willpower that comes from artists who will do anything to continue being able to create art. And so I’m not worried about a dictatorship of the proletariat at all because have you seen some of the musicians we talk to people?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, that’s what I wanted to ask about actually, is because music, as far as any of us, and I say us as musical and non-musical people, but living in America, having the culture industry that we have, music was as much a potential career path as being a famous actor or a famous athlete. I mean, there is a sort of level of super stardom that was selectively occupied by people like us, it seemed, growing up. And it was possible to play music that was so good that reached so many people that you could make not just a living, but a superstar’s living. And you could have all the security you could ever need and the fight from your humble beginnings and insecurities would all be worth it if you made it to that star echelon. I mean, same thing goes for the way I thought about being a professional basketball player with my brothers for many years growing up, or even people now who are in the media and see the media as the only path for success in journalism or in the media is the superstar path where you’re getting paid so much and you have such a far reach that you’re Joe Rogan and you can kind of have that echelon that none of us are ever going to ever reach.

But I say that all to say, obviously there’s always going to be a lot of folks who still look at these industries and vocations and arts and sports this way, but I think the veil’s been lifted for a lot of us and we’re like, “That ain’t happening. I ain’t making it and no one else is making it in today’s economy in that kind of direction.” And there is a lot to be mourned about that, but I think there’s also something that’s very liberating when we are not pursuing our passions out of a place of desperation or out of desires for lavish, luxurious, ridiculous wealth. And that struck me in something that I’d heard y’all, Josh and everyone with the empty pockets is not something that you’ve been aiming for, but you want to make a good middle class living. And so I wanted to kind of meditate on that.

Once we sort of recalibrate our visions, our imaginations and our hopes for what we want to do with this, what does that give you back that a career trying to make it in a Spotify age as a superstar would take from you otherwise?

Josh Solomon:

Yeah, totally agree, man. I like to think of it also, it’s like becoming an astronaut to say, “Oh, I’m going to go have John Mayer’s career or I’m going to go have Taylor Swift’s career.” It’s absurd. More than ever, and I think it’s good, the niche-ification of taste has made it so there are even fewer superstars than there used to be. There are very, very few superstars. Like I said, when I was in my 20s, I had these delusions and I let those go and I discovered about myself. And I think you guys would agree that more than the massive success, because for the most part there are exceptions, that comes with chains, with you were successful in this lane and now you have to deliver this thing. Brilliant people like that guy Larry, the cable guy, his persona, you’re stuck there. You have to deliver your thing.

What I want more than anything else, which we have a lot of, is freedom. We make enough money to get by, but we can do whatever we want. Our biggest constraint artistically is ourselves. That’s what keeps me going.

Nate Bellon:

Jules, you had mentioned it previously, the changing landscape of the music industry. And I think one of the things, because we started as a band in 2006, so the music industry was literally falling apart or had already fallen apart and some of the gatekeepers or higher ups hadn’t admitted it to themselves. The nature of the landscape was changing. And so we found that certain people that we would hire in positions, that’s their mindset. Let’s get you to superstardom level. And I feel like going through that cycle a couple of two, three times, we were able to not only learn, but then solidify both in our minds and then out wow later, here’s what we consider success.

Josh Solomon:

It’s such a good point.

Nate Bellon:

If we can just do that, we’re a success.

Josh Solomon:

And philosophically, when Eric and I met before we got married, one of our first dates, we went on and on to each other about scale. And Adam feels passionately about this as well. There are certain things in the world that need scale, right? We shouldn’t do small businesses to get to the moon. I get that. We need a certain amount of scale to make computer chips, but that doesn’t mean every burger joint and coffee shop and bookstore needs to be scaled. And there’s an element, okay, we have economies of scale on one side, but there’s an element of massive inefficiency. And what we found, and we keep finding in entertainment in general, is that the basic strategy to make someone a superstar is brutal Millions on raw awareness. Blanket,

Erika Brett:

Blanket marketing.

Josh Solomon:

That’s why people get annoyed about hit songs because they’re hearing a song over and over again that’s not even meant for them. Nobody wrote Espresso for me. There was, but why did I hear it a hundred times? I wasn’t interested. I gave zero indication of the choices I made in my life.

Erika Brett:

Sabrina, it’s for me. It’s for me.

Josh Solomon:

And we have the ability with technology to target so accurately now. So the major labels, including big movies, Marvel movies and stuff, they’re all still doing this super inefficient. And we’ve decided the opposite. We want to build our small business and keep building it, getting razor focused. We get new fans every day and we’re trying to maximize their fandom of us and their value to us, but without worrying about getting to 10 million people a year.

Erika Brett:

What I think you guys will appreciate is that we are a band and yes, we’re making music, but we took e-commerce strategies that are not based on music, that were based on books or smaller items. And we kind of did our own authentic application of that for our career. And that has allowed us to expand our audience and find our audience through advertising, targeted ads and word of mouth.

Josh Solomon:

Touring is about 40% of our revenue. It’s something like that. A lot of our revenue is physical music and a lot of that is shipped from here. I’m talking about vinyl, talking about CDs. Not as many for us. It’s a different type of band, not as many t-shirts for us. So I’d love to do more shirts. And that’s all about just using classic commerce, e-commerce and marketing logic to build a fan base in the same way that a book company or a razor company would build their fan base.

Jules Taylor:

I love that y’all brought up Sabrina Carpenter because she was not on my radar. And then this last album dropped and her marketing was all over the place. And I just slowly got initiated into the house tour track and the one where talks about maybe it’s slow or whatever, but now I know her lyrics. I know her visual signature. And it’s funny. Come on,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man. Manchild is a bop. The

Jules Taylor:

Whole album is great.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Manchild is such a bop. It’s such a bop. Men today need to hear it. It is an anthem for the ages. That and Olivia Dean’s Man I Need are two of the most essential songs that every fucking man who is alive today needs to hear. And I don’t think it’s an accident that our zeitgeist is producing such desperate, beautiful please from women for men to fucking be better. And I think it’s through music where a lot of men learn that kind of thing. And I think that’s a good thing. I don’t mean to stand on a soapbox here, but I didn’t realize I was going to defend Sabrina Carpenter so virulently, but you guys stirred me up, baby.

Josh Solomon:

And this newer album is fantastic and there are all these, you’re right, that thread is all around music. Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo has that same vibe. Maybe men will listen. I don’t know.

Maximillian Alvarez:

They will. And I think there’s honestly, and I’m just speaking personally here and then we’ll kind of bring things around the final turn here because I can’t keep you guys for too long, although I could talk to you for hours. I think I had reached a state of exhaustion recently and it felt like almost a decade long period of cultural exhaustion. And I don’t think I’m alone. I think a lot of us felt that and we receded into it, especially with COVID. We watched the same series that we already had seen, movies we already knew, songs we already had on our playlist. I know for myself as a lifelong lover of art and culture and new things, I really retreated. And I think part of it, not all of it, was fueled by the sort of feeling that it’s like nothing’s good anymore or the quality of everything is sucking just a little bit more each time and I’m not participating in it damn. I’m going to hang on to the things I know are good and just listen to those for the rest of my life. So that’s the kind of petulant place that I was in as a modern music listener. And again, I feel like I’ve talked to a lot of people who felt that same way. And I think that actually the Spotify algorithms and stuff sort of reinforce that sense of just playing the hits or trapping us in these silos, these cultural silos, instead of getting to explore and experience and find bands like yours that we would like but have no idea exist.

And I know that people are looking for that, they’re hungry for that. And I am so goddamn grateful when I hear it coming out of my speakers. And I guess to just tie a bow on the point, I’ve been hearing that of late with some songs that have given me some hope in pop culture of late. And I think a lot of it goes back to Olivia Dean, Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter and the somber. I think there’s a lot of necessary cultural discussion that is happening in and through those songs that needs to be had and isn’t happening in enough places. So I thank music for that. And I wanted to sort of bring us back around to that sort of beautiful, necessary part of what music is for all of us and what we look to music for. And I wanted to ask y’all, all of you, Jules, you’re included in this.

I’m roping you into our final round, but let’s start with what is your least favorite part about being a working musician and what is your favorite part that makes that and everything else worth it?

Adam Balasco:

I’ll start and say my least favorite part of being a working musician is that it made music work. And this was alluded to earlier, but I leave here a lot of times and I put a baseball game on or sports talk radio on or something like that because this saps a little bit of my musical energy. And so anyone who has a nine to five job and you get a pizza and some beer on a Friday night, you play music with your friends, know that I am so jealous of that. And the magic in that is a little bit lost, I will say. We’re

Josh Solomon:

Almost chasing that vibe.

Adam Balasco:

Yes. And paradoxically, and I love paradoxes, again, the strength, the weakness, the pro, the con. I always say we are band. We’re arts kids. We all committed to being artists. We’re artists. And the irony is we ran headfirst into running our own small business. And I was playing around with spreadsheets and exporting CSVs this morning as Ari was doing her design work as Nate is patching a hole in the- The

Erika Brett:

Asphalt.

Adam Balasco:

In the asphalt in the parking lot. And Josh literally has his hands on all of that stuff. And to me, it’s both. I like that. I like doing the spreadsheets, but also we do this, we do the drums and stuff so, so much less. It’s like a fraction of what we do is play music. Mostly we’re running a small business.

Josh Solomon:

What a great answer. I think my least favorite part or one of my least favorite parts is feeling like I’m getting in the way or looking down on or condescending in any way to the hobby musician. So it’s a similar thing to you and while not getting invited into the hobby musician world anymore, both the combinations. So it’s really similar to what you’re saying. You know what I mean? And when I do get invited to the dudes who didn’t great musicians who now do other stuff, maybe it’s just in my head, but I feel a little bit like I’m intruding. I don’t love to do. Erica is such a great singer and she doesn’t love to do karaoke and everybody goes crazy, but it feels like, am I intruding on this space? The paradox.

Nate Bellon:

Yeah. The least favorite part for me I think is early mornings, late nights while you’re chugging it out on tour. And sometimes those can become never ending based on the schedule. I don’t deal well with life without my, I don’t know, 10 hours of beauty sleep. You don’t get this good looking without a lot of sleep is what I’m saying. And so everybody out in audio land, I’m gorgeous.

Adam Balasco:

Very attractive mate’s very good.

Nate Bellon:

I’ve been compared to the Greek gods of old. And so the early mornings, late nights, it just kills you after a while. Every one of us, if we’re out for long enough, you get sick. And then you’re spreading sickness around the van because you’re all just sitting in a dumb van for hours. I don’t like that part, but it all pays off because while you’re on the road, you get the purest of the sweet juice, which is you’re playing music live and you all enter this flow state together and you’re creating art that may never exist again in this moment. Worth all of that early morning, late night stuff.

Adam Balasco:

And let me just cut off Erica really quick because we’ll get to Erica. Nate went there. So let me just say in case my wife listens to this, I miss my wife and children when I’m on a road. It’s the real answer. Sorry, Erica, go ahead.

Erika Brett:

Good job band. Good job. Mine is similar to dates whereas he was talking about late night, early mornings. What we do, the travel and the carrying of equipment and gear and bags that we do is hard on the body. And we went in age order in this wrap up and I’m the oldest. And as we get older, taking care of your body has become much bigger of a priority. And it turns out it serves the music part a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. You need to be in good health. You need to be in good shape. That’s

Josh Solomon:

Such a labor issue across the board.

Erika Brett:

You

Josh Solomon:

Have to take care of your body to keep being whatever profession it is you are.

Erika Brett:

And I had to do a lot of doctoring personally. I have a lot of chronic health stuff, so it’s been a lot to navigate. You come home from tour and you’re rushing appointments in and you’re trying to do things that you can apply on the road. So it is really difficult. But that being said, it’s led me on a path to be stronger physically, mentally. And the best part is being on stage, connecting to my best friends up there, the new friends in the audience, and feeling this cosmic moment that we share and no one can take away from us no matter what happens. It’s a radical act of joy and in a time where there’s fascism coming our direction in many ways, what we can do is create and give and be with one another and love one another.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well said.

Jules Taylor:

Excellent. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Beautifully, beautifully put.

Jules Taylor:

Man, well, to follow all that up, man, I guess my least favorite thing about being a professional musician is that everyone sees the work as play and then. So one instance of this is that I think of myself somewhat like a carpenter in the sense that I have a truck and I have all of my tools in it. And I drive around and it’s a beat up vehicle that takes me from contract to contract where I unload my stuff and I plug in and I do what I do. Right. But if I get pulled over, I’m not a worker all of a sudden. I’m a long-haired guy that probably has some weed in the car and I ain’t out doing shit. I’m out playing is what I’m doing, not working. And the whole small business thing behind stuff, man, it gets rolled real fast being the envy of every married guy being like, “Oh, you have so much freedom and you just go play music.” And it’s like, “No, man, I have bills, dude.

This is work.” But not only that, it’s like, “You must have so much fun doing this.” I was like, “Oh, you think I have fun trying to write heartfelt poetry?” I take this work more seriously than anything else in my life to where this pen and paper has ruined me. Putting pen to paper to put down some sort of heartfelt poetry that can also be abide by attaching melody to where I can go out and project that into the world for that singular cosmic moment that I live for, that is work. And people somehow think I’m enjoying the process at times. So yeah, it’s a weird paradox, man, because it’s like you’ll always be a disappointment to your parents who wanted you to become a doctor, but somehow you have to hold the knowledge of a doctor and train yourself physically to get to this apex of performance and you’re 40 now.

And you do this and somehow there’s still people that look at you and they’re like, “I don’t really understand what this guy does.”

Josh Solomon:

So spot on, Jules.

Erika Brett:

Someone said that to me in a mall once. You’re still doing that?

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. But it goes like, “Oh, you’re still doing the photography thing?” “What do you mean I’m still doing the photography thing? “That’s a vocation. It’s a career path. It’s a form of art. Yeah, I don’t know, man. But when you do have a choice in this world of pouring over Excel sheets or breathing in toxic chemicals, it’s like I’d rather the Excel sheets be my Excel sheets. I’d rather all this stuff be for me and that’s where I’ll work 80 hours for myself so I don’t have to work 40 for somebody else. Yes.

Adam Balasco:

Give me some toxic chemicals with those excels.

Josh Solomon:

I want to do it for myself.

Erika Brett:

You could talk about the baseball card gum that he ate that was like 10 years old.

Josh Solomon:

Great point, Jules.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Amen. Sadly, if you listen to a lot of the interviews we do on this show now, you’ll realize that we’re all getting blasted with toxic chemicals, whether we ask for it or not, but we’re all going to be part of the fight to stop it. And we all got to be part of the, I think, solution to our own critiques of the culture industry and the music industry especially. And I would say the same is true for media and journalism. You are right to not like a lot of the things that are unlikable, but if you want the things you like to continue to exist and flourish and give you what you get out of them, you got to support them. I mean, that’s true whether you’re talking about this podcast, The Real News Network, Jewels’ musical work, The Empty Pockets is musical work, independent creators everywhere.

If we don’t have your guys’ support, there is a very real chance that we’ll go away or stop being able to do what we do, even though we love what we do and we love doing it for you and for anyone who will ever hear it, see it, learn from it, get something from it. We’re in it to win it, baby, but we need you guys to be part of it. We do it for you, but we can’t do it without you. And so ending on that note, I wanted to just say that for any journalists and media makers and people who are interested in making a career out of that, since it’s the one part of this discussion I can speak on, the advice I tend to give people is that don’t commit yourself to doing this for a living, commit yourself to doing it to fight for life and follow where that leads you.

And in fact, it may be right and good and better for you to have multiple sources of income so that you don’t have to make the object of your devotion and your skill serve all these other ends, which means you’re not going to be able to do it the way that you want to. The work is going to suffer, you are going to suffer, but there are still some pathways available to come join me at the table of the suffering and do this work professionally. But they are so few and far between and the ecosystem is changing so much. So I can’t in good conscience advise anyone or coach anyone on that. I can just tell you that I am what I did to get where I am, what I think we all need to do to do the work that needs to be done, but the future is never assured and we don’t know what the landscape is going to look like in the coming years.

So that would be my central advice is you got to make a living however you can. And if you’re committed to this, do it, but don’t make it all dependent on your ability to make a living from it because that may actually be more of a devil’s bargain than you’re looking for, and it may take the love of this from you. So just be very mindful of that. And now to all the musicians, the artists, the creators who have been listening to you brilliant people talk about your working lives for the past hour, I wanted to kind of give y’all the last word on that, like any sort of advice you would give to other working artists out there or other folks who want to make a living making art. And also please tell our good listeners where they can find more of you and your art.

Jules Taylor:

And the new album.

Josh Solomon:

We’re the empty pockets everywhere at theemptypockets on Instagram, theemptypockets.com. And we have a new album out on Friday, October 23rd called Dear Billionaires. It’s our musical letter to the 3,600 billionaires in the world. I would say to all musicians aspiring of any kind, I increasingly agree with you, Max, and I have met more musicians, younger people that are saying, “I’m going to commit my life to music, but not commit my financial earning to that.” And I think there’s a lot to be said there. And I think it’s worth saying from our perspective, we are a very middle class band and yet still, I can think of dozens of times where we were so lucky where I look back and I think, oh my God, that happened and that happened. And then we toured the UK three times or that one thing got us 200 gigs.

So you got to be there. You can make your own luck, but still nobody’s getting anywhere on their own. A ton of people have helped us and we’ve gotten very lucky.

Adam Balasco:

I would tell artists, anyone trying to make it have realistic expectations. And I think for a lot of people that means coming to grips with you’re going to make $20,000 or something like that. You’re going to have to live on that if you want to be an artist for a good amount of time. And the harsh reality is, well, I think it’s kind of, again, paradox is uplifting and it’s harsh. A lot of people, I would say your art is fine. There’s great art everywhere that you’ve never heard of or seen. There’s great artists everywhere. A lot of people, if you really want to make it work, if you’re committed, you need to kind of treat it like a small business or something and treat yourself as an artist like a small business. And we don’t want to do that. We hate pricing of our artwork out.

It’s hard, it’s tough. But that’s the reality is good art’s everywhere. If you really want to make it a business, make it a business. Good luck. Stuff.

Erika Brett:

Yeah. I would say to piggyback off that, that balance is really important. Commercialize what you can so that you can keep making art, but don’t lose the joy if you can’t.

Josh Solomon:

Or find the perfect balance.

Erika Brett:

Or find the perfect balance. And I also agree that artists need support and that could change the world.

Nate Bellon:

And let’s not forget, the album comes out October 23rd.

Erika Brett:

You can reorder it now.

Nate Bellon:

If you want to pre-order from us, you can go to our website, pre-order it there. I have also been telling people to go to their local record store that they like to go to and request the album, pre-order it through them. Keeps the local economy going. We love local record stores. We want to build relationships with them. And we also want you to spend your money at a local record store.

Josh Solomon:

And we can say exclusively here, we haven’t said this publicly at all, we are going to be releasing a special variant pricing. So I want to make it clear, the physical CD is exactly the same. It’s not signed, it’s not deluxe, but we’re going to sell it to billionaires. If you are a billionaire, you can get our album, which we’re selling for $20 for $285,000. So that’s going to be on our website next month, and I’m pretty sure some billionaires are going to want that. They know they’re superior, and so they know they need a superior version, which is actually the same, but costs $285,000.

Nate Bellon:

I would welcome billionaires of all stripes to go ahead and take advantage of that billionaire pricing. And we handle all the packages. So if we see any billionaires buying the regular, we’re going to see that and we’re billing you. I’m not sending that

Josh Solomon:

To you, Elon Musk.

Nate Bellon:

No way. Jamie Pritzker, come on, man. What are you doing? The right version. We have a billionaire version for a reason. And to all the musicians out there, I would say continue to practice your dream, go after it, but also diversify your skillset as much as you can because you never know, A, what skill is going to become handy at a gig, on the road, dealing with merchandise or recording people, dealing with people inside the business. Diversify your skillset as much as you can and get ready to make a lot of bean recipes for 10 or 15 years. You can live on a lot of beans. It’s going to be fine. You’re going to make it just beans.

Erika Brett:

Yeah, be a learner. Be a learner and eat your beans.

Nate Bellon:

Eat your beans.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank all of our guests from the great Chicago rock band, The Empty Pockets, Josh Solomon, Nate Bellin, Adam Belasco, and Erica Brett. You can go learn more about the Empty Pockets and you can check out more of their music. Just use the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you guys for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network, and it’s brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by the one, the only, the great Jules Taylor. And man, Jules, thank you so much for doing this episode with me, brother.

I though that was awesome.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. I always love talking to musicians in the sense that they have their ear to the ground for alternatives to wage slavery in this cursed system, man. And so however they can gain traction, however they can get ahead, however they can make things work, it’s not so much a picking of the brain of music theory or what music you’re listening to that happens within conversations with musicians. It’s more like, “How are you doing this? What are you doing? What’s working for you?” So it was really great to hear that from a band that 20 years, that’s a long time to be together. So definitely some cool advice in there and some really cool moments as well. I really appreciated being a part of this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, man. It was great. We got to do more like this. And before we wrap this thing up, I wanted to ask where can people find more of your music?

Jules Taylor:

You can search my name on any of the streaming things or you just go to my website, which is julestaylormusic.com.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our different podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

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

Mansa Musa:

So we are here at Eddie Conway’s front porch, which is, we call it People’s Museum. I’m here with Dominque Conway, the wife of Eddie Conway. Tell our audience what Eddie Conway meant to you or who was Eddie Conway to you?

Dominque Conway:

That’s really, that’s hard to sum up, to be quite honest. Eddie was so many things to me and so many other people, but Eddie was, quite honestly, he was my hero as he was to many other people. He was a Black Panther. He was somebody who also served 44 years in the Maryland prison system and didn’t allow that time to break him. During that time, Eddie worked with hundreds of men in the prison system, many of whom have come out and done their own programming and continued to do really great things in the community. So at the end of the day, Eddie was just a man. But he loved people. He loved humanity and he exuded that. He loved nature. He loved animals. He exuded that pretty much in everything that he did. And I wanted to capture some of that. I wanted to capture his legacy.

I feel like it’s very important for us to own our narratives and to give those proper narratives because it’s easy for many people to just see Eddie the icon. I want them to see Eddie the man.

Mansa Musa:

Talk about how this came about in your mind and how it became a vision for people who could see.

Dominque Conway:

Well, I wasn’t even planning to come back to Baltimore. You know this, right? But I don’t know. I woke up one day, I saw this house online and thought about all the things we’ve talked about, what we want to do, and it was the perfect place. Also, I think at that time I felt like we need to do something to really preserve his legacy. I have a lot of documents, a lot of papers, a lot of things that need to be archived. And I’m like, we need to do that. It would be easy to say, oh, maybe they should go to a university. But I think we need our own people’s archives. We need our own spaces where we not only celebrate and remember, but we tell accurate histories of resistance, of black liberation in particular, but not even limited to that, the experience of indigenous people, the experience of Latino people.

We need to be able to own our narratives and share those stories with youth, with people in the community. One of the young men who’s going to perform today, he’s doing spoken word. We’ve been telling him, Hey, this is your space. Host spoken word events here. So we’re looking to get people in to just do what they want to do. We have a small theater group that meets here at times and just comes together to do storytelling. So we’re just opening the space up and wanting the community to come in.

Speaker 3:

So this is real news. So let me give you some real events. Mr. Conway, I call him Mr. Conway. He didn’t like that. He didn’t like that. From day one, we met inside a prison. I was doing youth work and he was doing outreach work inside the institution and someone had a good idea for us to come together. And right off the top, when I met him, immediately we connect. Immediately, he was everything that I read about, everything everyone told me about real charismatic, real intelligent and planning. And our first encounter was straight away about the people. And day one, we established a curriculum called Friend of Friends, which was a grassroots program inside the institution that developed outside here to where we at today.

Mansa Musa:

And you said that Eddie was instrumental in helping people constantly go in prison. And that’s where I met Eddie at. And to a point, as you’ll talk to some other brothers today to resonate this point, Eddie was responsible for a lot of us getting political education. And when you look at the time that he came into the Maryland prison system, what was going on in this country, a lot of people was resisting the establishment in society and they were putting him in prison. When Eddie came in the prison system, he didn’t come in the prison system. I’m Eddie Conway. I’m here to change. I’m the natural of the Maryland prison system. No, he came in, I’m trying to get out of prison. But the conditions made him be who he is. He responded to the conditions. Condition was so horrendous that he started educating. And one thing he said in his book, COINTELPRO, the greatest threat ever say agitate, educate, organize.

This is what he’s saying that this was a model that he want people to understand how they look at things. So I’m an example of the impact that Eddie had on people. When I got out, it was no brainer for me to fall in ranks, to become a part of this process. This house right here, if I got out tomorrow, I would be in. If I got out a year from tomorrow, I would be here. Wherever we at in this space, wherever Eddie or Dominique is doing something, we in that space. So that’s what Eddie pretty much, like Dominiqu said, it’s hard to sum up for Eddie, but we try to get people to understand that Eddie was a human being and a man and our hero always got different views on him. But at the end of the day, Eddie was a person that loved our people and did everything humanly possible to get our people to understand their right to self-determination.

Speaker 4:

I was working in the library. He comes up to get science fiction books like Star Track and stuff like that. I used to be like, “That’s nothing revolutionary.” He says, “It is. These are the things that’s going to come. This is information that was redone, replayed and put into a book.” He said, “It’s a lot of information inside fiction and it’s the history wrapped up in fiction.”

Speaker 5:

So let me first start off by saying friend of a friend. When I first learned about Friend of a Friend and I asked where the name came from, I was taught that the name came from the times of slavery and underground railroad with Harriet Tubman. People just couldn’t go knock on anybody door because the Underground Railroad was a group of people or a system of people that helped people along the road on the way to freedom. So when people would knock on the door, they just couldn’t say anything random. So when they would ask who was it, you would say a friend of a friend. And that’s how we knew that the people were official. That was the secret code. So when we say a friend of a friend, we speaking about family, we speaking about unity. We speaking about a safety net, a safety system where we could come to and be whole as family and put ideas together, think tanks, so to speak.

Speaker 4:

Eddie Conway was like a mentor and a father to me. I came in the Maryland Penitentiary Act the age of 22 years old, stayed in prison for 28 years. And during that time, Eddie Conway gravitated to me and pulled me in tight and gave me some things that I could actually make better decisions with. And ever since then, he had me under his wings.

Speaker 3:

So our experiences have always been from four different institution. Me and Eddie Conway had a different relationship. I think everybody would say the same thing had a different relationship. Him and I shared a mutual common ground about young individuals and the growth and development of young guys in prison as well as society. So our relationship was trying to build that gap between prison and society. And everything that he represent was about the community.

Mansa Musa:

So we was doing libation in Gilmore Projects and honor Eddie and our ancestors. And a guy rolled up that was on a bicycle and he was a little kid when they first moved down Gilmore and Dominique said, “Man, he was a pain.” And this is what he said. He rolled up, he seen Ms. Dominique. And this is what I said. I sai, “What she means?” Now Ms. Dominique was good. So this is an example. This guy just came out, he’s still in the neighborhood, but his memories of what we was doing in Gilmore Projects is memories of us recognizing him and saying, “You got worth, so what do you want to do with your worth? We’re here to help you maximize on your worth.”

Speaker 4:

So from that, I paid a lot of close attention to Eddie and he showed me. During that time I was already a member of the Black Gorilla family and field marshal. So I had a real good rapport inside the prison with every organization, every gang. And Eddie gave me a way to construct a unified effort of prisoners to keep down the trouble, the violence, keep down a lot of the unnecessary stuff that take place in prison with a lot of our youth. So when I got released. Well, he got released first and I was a facilitator in the program in which he created him and Ms. Dominique, friend of a friend. I was a facilitator. And it was from the facilitation that led me to college, from college out here in the street into college and to running my own business. If it wasn’t for Eddie, I’d probably still be in prison acting crazy.

So I loved him for that and he guided me all the way until his last breath. So I respect it and here I am doing the work that he taught me to do.

Speaker 5:

Oh man. So Mr. Conway was, he was one of a kind. He was exceptional. It is such a blessing when you can learn from people who experience historical times, who lived through the movement, to be able to garner that wisdom, to be able to be blessed with that type of information. I know that I was totally blessed. It’s sad to say, but I found my best leaders inside of prison. Mr. Conway was definitely one of the best of them. I learned a lot from Mr. Conway. He was a leader. He was a man. He was moral. He was principled. He was exceptional in his walk. He was consistent. He had values. He had knowledge to distill. Whenever you ask, he was ready to give a blessing. He was always strong. He always stayed 10 toes down. So nothing but mad love and much respect for Mr.

Conway, a living legend. Well, he’s passed, but he’s still a living legend. His spirit lives on through all of us.

Speaker 3:

He was genuine how his approach and how he did things and how he organized, how he was able to organize people was one of the things that stuck out a lot about Mr. Conway, right? How he was able to organize. Me, myself, I was still in prison when we lost Eddie, so I didn’t get an opportunity to work with him while he was out there, but I was still working beside him while I was still incarceration because he still kept his hands inside the institutions while he was flying throughout the country, building up the communities. I still was inside holding it down for him and his name along with his wife, Dominique. But I would like to say our experiences and he left a lasting impression on me about how we should build, how we view education and how we view our community and the young people just growing up in it.

And that last impression he left, man, is really profound, if I could say the least. He impart a lot of information on me and a lot of history. That’s one of the things I will say as well, that know your history so it won’t repeat itself, but if it does repeat itself, it repeats itself in a proper way. So that’s some of the things that I would like to say he imparted on myself personally is history and how to deal with the people based upon that. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. But I miss him. I really do miss him. I wish he was here now to view some of the things that all of us collectively as a group, because we was a family. And now that we all out here together and we building together, we missing our hierarchy. We really missing our hierarchy out here.

Even though the sister here, she holding down on his presence, we holding down his presence, but we could feel the emptiness of his not being here, although we do feel like he’s here with us.

Dominque Conway:

Right now in particular, obviously I miss Eddie every day. That’s personal, that’s love. But politically, I miss Eddie because he had such a keen analysis about everything and just the information he would provide about what’s happening in the present. But also because he had that history, he had that history of being part of the resistance, being part of a movement that was the vanguard of the revolution at the time. He had so much information, but I think it is critical. So many people are passing away. Ward Churchill, for example, was a giant. Ward is gone. So it’s really more important, I think now than ever for us to be engaging and working in multi-generational ways, which is really a very traditional way of working in say black, indigenous, and Latino communities. We have to really return to that and not see young people as a separate group.

Age is real, but generation is a social construct too. So we have to break that down and really engage, like I said, in a more multi-generational.

Mansa Musa:

And we look at all revolutionary. Malcolm was young. Huey, Bobby, Lou Bobby Hunt, they was young. These were young people that had big ideas and got together and organized their thinking around changing social conditions. And I’m with Dominique on that.

Speaker 5:

So of course I got to acknowledge and honor Ms. Dominique Conway as well, the matriarch, who is our Harriet Tubman in these days and time, who is one of my teachers. I’ve learned from a lot of women, but I would say that Ms. Conway, Ms. D taught me a lot just about self and acknowledging and having race pride and being a linchpin and a leader and what it takes and means to be a leader. So I couldn’t go do this brief interview without saying, thank God for Ms. D, because Ms. D was angel in my life and still continue to be. So much respect to her, Eddie First Lady, and thank you for having me.

Narrator:

Al-Shifa hospital is the largest medical complex in Gaza. Since October 7, it’s been repeatedly raided, occupied and targeted by Israeli forces. Over the course of the Genocide, hundreds were killed in and around the building and the hospital itself was completely destroyed.

In November 2023, under Israeli fire, 8 premature babies in incubators were hurriedly evacuated to Egypt. Joud was one of those babies.

Fatima Dakkeh:

I gave birth to my son, Joud, in July. Joud needed neonatal care at Al-Shifa Hospital. We placed him in the neonatal unit, but then the war started and Joud was there in the hospital. We couldn’t get in touch with Joud because of the shelling and the war.

Narrator:

Fatima Dakkeh and her son Joud have been unable to have a regular mother-son relationship. Joud was born in Gaza just a few months before October 7th 2023 and so, their story has been shaped by war, displacement and separation. Shaped that is, by Israel’s war on Gaza.

Fatima Dakkeh:

When we tried to get to the hospital to get Joud, we weren’t able to get to him and take him out, because of the situation—things had gotten really bad. There was a lot of shelling and there were airstrikes and quadcopters. We planned to go back another day to get Joud, once the situation calms down. But the situation just kept getting worse. The Israelis entered Al-Shifa Hospital and occupied it— that was the first invasion of Al-Shifa Hospital, and my son was inside.

About a year later, I found out my son was in Egypt. I mean, I didn’t give up; I kept going to hospitals, I went to the Red Cross and places like that to search for news about my son, no one could help me. I went to a doctor I know. I told him my story, he said, “I’ll try to get in touch with your son and see where he is.” Thank God, he was the one who discovered my son was in Egypt. After a few days, they sent us pictures of my son, and we found out he was OK. Thank God. They knew he was our son through my name—they had my name on file. We started communicating with him more through my sister-in-law—my sister-in-law in Egypt. We told her the story, and of course she didn’t hesitate; she visited him in hospital, sent us pictures and reassured us about him, thank God.

Honestly, I was happy and upset at the same time because my son was in Egypt, if he would have been here in Gaza he would have suffered a lot. We were starved, even nappies were cut off. Most children were using scraps of cloth as nappies. And milk too, was cut off—we had no milk at all in northern Gaza. I said to myself thank God my son is in a better place than Gaza. But at the same time, I was upset that my son was far from me. I would see mothers playing with their kids, dressing them, carrying them—and I would feel these feelings. I would miss my son. I wished my son was with me. At the same time, I’d look at my situation—how we’re living, in tents, in all this difficulty. I’d say to myself, hopefully he will return to us in a better situation, there will be a ceasefire and we will make up for the days we lost.

I had lost hope that he would return. With the crossing closed and the Israelis were not letting people return. When they first told us he was returning, I was shocked. My husband and I both. We were surprised—how could he come back just like that, overnight? He’s just going to come back, all of a sudden, after we’d lost hope all these years. I was overjoyed with the news that I would see my son again, it was the best news. When we went to the hospital to collect him, it took a really long time for them to bring him to us—many hours. With each passing hour, I would get more and more excited: about seeing him and about how I would greet him. I mean it was really hard, but at the same time, the moment when I saw him was really beautiful.

Yeh, honestly, when I first saw my son, he wouldn’t come to me; he’d cry and avoid me. He would go to his dad before me. he didn’t want to come to me, so I was afraid that he’d stay that way uncomfortable around us And afraid of living with us, and afraid of the situation we’re in— that he wouldn’t accept us Thank God, little by little, he started to accept us.

Narrator:

According to estimates by the International Rescue Committee, 20,000 children are still living separated from their parents in Gaza. Fatima was reunited with Joud and though their separation which lasted 2 years and 8 months impacted both mother and child, they are now reunited. As for the thousands of other survivors in Gaza, for many there will be no reunion.

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.