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

Crowd Chants:

We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we.

Gwendolyn Levi:

We need to be able to say that we in our community are willing to stand up. We’re standing up for our young people. We’re standing up for our seniors. We are standing up for our communities.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

On July 7th of this year, 2026, a comrade in my brother was brutally beaten by six youth at this same said 7-Eleven, brutally beaten for over 10 minutes. He was able to get into his vehicle and only go a few blocks before he had to stop. He was in so much pain that he had to call the police and have them to take him to the emergency room at Sinai Hospital. A few days later, the video was exposed and it was something that you couldn’t believe you were seeing. When he got out of the vehicle, those brothers was laying right there.

There’s a stack of crates that they got from this 7-Eleven. Look at it. I want you to see it. That’s why we had it here. What they call ground zero. When he got out of his vehicle, they saw him. They weren’t laying for him. They were laying for somebody to come that way. They were willing and waiting for somebody to come down Towanda or Tioga, like my son did in 2017 when he left the 7-Eleven. So after walking 20 feet with my son, he put not one, not two, not three, not four, but five bullets into his body over a cell phone. Victorias fought for his life and it was stolen from him. It wasn’t taken because he fought back. It was stolen. On July 17th of this year, my comrades, this Black Panther veteran fought back.

Speaker 4:

Children today lost respect. You know what I’m saying? And I’m not saying all our children. I’m not saying that. But these little young men that came and jumped Bob and when I seen that, I said to myself, wow, they are chumps. They are cowards and they don’t have no dignity.

Speaker 5:

I don’t want it to be a blanket thing where like all our children are bad. I once was one of the little brothers out here running them up, but I’m telling you, we are misunderstood, uneducated, misguided, and easily let us stray. We need the community to gather around these young men. We don’t believe in throwing our peoples away.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

I am commissioning the entire city. There’s a $50,000 reward. Here’s a QR code. Do not call yourself an organization or revolutionary or anybody else until you click this and donate so we can find those babies. We have to find them. No one else can find them. We have to find them. We will find them. But we’re not finding them so that they can be locked up and we throw away the key. I heard that. We’re not finding them so we can throw away a key. We’re finding them so that we can follow them, hold them, love them. We’re taking whatever these demons have for them off the table. They can’t have our children anymore. That’s over. They’re our children. As hard as that is to say with what we saw, they’re still ours. They are still we are we. We’re going to walk with them every step of the way.

Yes, we’re going to walk them to the police station. They have to be accountable for their behavior, but we will never let them go.

Gwendolyn Levi:

We need to teach our community the difference between snitching and protecting our community. There’s a difference. There is a difference. If your grandmother walks down the street, she can’t even go to the store. That’s not snitching. That’s saying, I want that community. I want my storefront cleaned off so my grandma can go to the store. That’s protecting your community. That’s protecting your loved ones. If you see something, say something. That’s not snitching. Snitching is when you and I go rob the 7-Eleven and not go tell on you. You need to know what snitching is. This is not snitching. This is happening ourselves.

Speaker 6:

You young. You haven’t lived enough life to understand anything. So when you hear elder up here talk about snitching and all this, I see your faces twisting up because you’re not intellectually understanding that these things that are being said are true in fact. But the arrogance in who you are as a person won’t allow you to listen to the truth until you’re old enough to have a child and somebody takes it from you. And now you want justice. Now you want peace. Now you want understanding. I used to be your age. You never been my age. My job or responsibility is to guide you.

Speaker 7:

Yo, people just need to be taught y’all. We’ve been there done that. Let’s not be so quick to forget. But one of the things I can say, I’m 63 years old. That’s something I’ve never done. Jump on it. Y’all, an older man. No, we ain’t do that. We ain’t do that. We guarded them to factor them even though we did our little stuff on the side, but we ain’t do that.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

I watched that video over and over and over and over. Even though I kept watching it, when that baby pulled that sword out like he was a samurai, all I could think about was please don’t stab him. Even though I knew he was home, I knew he was safe. The pain is so real. The visual is so vile that even when you know they’re safe, you still fear for them. When I turned that off, I said to myself, if he can fight, we can fight. If he’s not afraid to fight, even if he dies, we can fight until we’re not afraid to die. I saw it. He proved it. You can say what should have or could have happened, but what happened is he fought back. They beat him. They kicked him. They knocked him. They tormented him for 10 minutes. Do you know what 10 minutes feel like when someone is attacking you?

All the time. It feels like forever, queen.

Speaker 8:

I was inspired when I looked at the fact that you just kept getting up. You just kept getting up! And if I take anything from that, here’s what we must continue to do as a people. We got to keep getting up. They talk about black people hate each other. Black people hate black people. And I often say to them, you can’t get this

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

If we hate each other. It’s time. One of the flyers say, if not us, then who? If not now, then when? We are going into that 7-Eleven and we’re telling those people, because I called them all week. I went in and got the phone number. I called them all week with no response. We tried. No response. We tried to no avail. Now we’re going full throttle. We’re not taking any prisoners. We’re not walking backwards. We’re going in there. We’re letting them know what they need to do to protect this community.

Ujimma Masani :

We want to walk over to this store. We want you to walk with us. We’re not going to tear up the store. We’re not going stealing anything. We just over there to let them know we ain’t playing. We write to you, not as adversaries, but as neighbors who share this corner with you every day. This location has witnessed a brutal assault of a 74 year old man, elder, an overnight break in and years of prior tragedy at the same address, including a loss of a young man’s life in March 2017. We believe you want this corner to be safe as much as we do. It is in that spirit, cordial but firm that we present the following list of demands. Number one, we are giving you a 72 hour notice to post your hours of operation in lettering large enough to be read clearly from the street.

Number two, cut down the overgrown bushes that create a hidden nook where perpetrators can wait and hide to attack unsuspected customers and install brighter lighting throughout the parking lot. Number three, we urge you to donate toward the community reward fund established to help apprehend the assailants and toward the medical costs of the 74 year old elder who was attacked. Number four, invest in stronger security measures, including roll down security grates when the store is closed to deter further break-ins. And number five, acquire off-duty police presence to enforce a no latering policy and help assure the safety of your customers and this community. This is not a request made lightly and it is not one we intend to let go unanswered. We ask for a response and a plan of action within a reasonable time and we will report back to the we. Until then, we will continue to stand on this corner in agreement until this community is safe.

Respectfully, the we community.

Ade Oba Tokunbo (Stephen King):

This gathering here is important because the community around us can see it. And they need to know that this is what needs to be done. These killings and these robberies and these auto thefts, we, I believe, can decrease it by teaching our people that hoodrats are not appreciated and should not be tolerated. I’m a veteran of the Black Panther Party. My paternal grandfather was a member of the UNIA. We are more than just a group of organizations. What I feel, because you have concern for me and care for me, this is my family.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

When I realized who it was and where it was, it brought back the night that my son Victorius walked out of this same 7-Eleven, down those steps, down to Tioga Parkway and was approached by a young man who demanded his phone. A fight pursued. The young man took out his gun and he brutally murdered my son, victorious. He shot him five times, one in the stomach, then the kneecap. Then when he fell, he shot him in the head, shot him into his eardrum, which hit his jugular vein. And as he was falling over, he shot him again and that bullet grazed his back. He left him for dead. Someone who witnessed the entire event ran over to my son, held him and told him to hold on. He called the ambulance. They took him to the hospital. And he was pronounced dead at 3:43 AM on March 26th, 2017, four days after my birthday.

That was enough for me to say I’ve had enough. The next morning, Sister Ujimma called me and asked me how the Bible was doing when she had heard about it. We talked about what had happened. I shared with her what had happened to Victoria’s and telling her that that was the same location where Victorius came out of before he was murdered. Almost the same time of night, about three Victoria’s, I think it was like 3:15, 3:20, somewhere around that same time almost. And we said we have to do something. She called Mama Gwen. And once we came into what the Sister Queen always says, we have an agreement. That was it for us. We had decided that we were going to take no more, that we were going to do the same thing that Baba did, fight back. And that’s what we started doing. So we created the we organization mindset that we were going to communicate with every organization that we could in this city to let them know, to meet us here, where the assault happened and begin the process of changing how we think and how we look at the city and how to move forward as a collective, as a we, in agreeance, in agreement.

Ujimma Masani :

In agreement.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

And that’s what we did.

Gwendolyn Levi:

Thank you. I think one of the most significant things about this gathering that we had today is that it was not retaliatory or negative. It was not we against them or – Pointing fingers. Pointing fingers. It was to say we are here. We didn’t point fingers at our young people because we know we got some good young people in the city. Many of them that were out here with us today. But we all got some troubled young people. Sister said it best when she said it early. Some are broken. Some are just bent. Hopefully we can get to the bent ones before they get broken. That’s what this cry is about. That’s what the querying cry was for all organizations to say, “Hey, we are here for our young people. We are here for our elders. We’re here for our neighbors in the community. We are here.

All you got to do is just look around your community. If you don’t see us in your community, call one of our older. We’ll come. We got brothers who can walk the streets with us. We got brothers who could go up in the alleys with us. We got sisters who know that our young sisters who are running up in stores and just grabbing stuff. No, no, no. You don’t have to do that. We know how to go get your nails done.

We can get your hair done. Come see us. Come see us. That’s what we’re saying to our young people. We are here for them. And yes, you must be held accountable for your actions. I did. I served 16 years of a sentence. Guess how many years I was supposed to serve? How many? 400 months. I’m going to let you all add it up. And the ones who can’t add it up, that’s why we need to change our board of education. That’s a whole nother source. But I’m not going to tell you how many that the 400 months is figured out. But I did 16 years over 400 months sentence. I was transformed. And if old as I was can transform, I know we can help these young people who have a whole life ahead of themselves. And that’s what we’re trying to do. Save our youngsters mainly before they get into the system.

But even the ones that get into the system, we’re here to help you so that when you come out of that system, you will come out and do what we’re doing. Do what the Tandea family, do what some of these other young or the cry organization, do what they’re doing. Help each other. Tell your story. Your story is impactful. Your story can help somebody.

You have a store, young man. You have a store young lady. And I know some of you might be mad, not mad at me. Look in the mirror. Tell yourself who you’re mad at and address that situation before you come out here and get into some trouble that you really don’t want to get into. We are here.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

We are here.

Gwendolyn Levi:

For those six men who assaulted my brother, we are here.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

We are here.

Gwendolyn Levi:

Call one of us. Yes, you have to be held accountable, but in that accountability, you will have support. You will have support so that you won’t become broken. We don’t need more broken kids in our community. This is a healing city. This is a city that can be healed. And we are here to say that the healing has begun by the we. Thank you.

Ujimma Masani :

That was beautiful. Thanks. So in our effort to address this, I guess, our trust that hangs over our city with youth being not accountable in what it is that needs to happen. We’re looking for our first step, which is to be a place where you deposit information. This is an information bank. We are a repository for every organization that’s out here helping families, youth, and elders. So if you have resources, if you have services or programs, this is the one stop shop that you come to. We are not saying at this moment that we are doing anything other than that. What we want to do is when we connect with families, elders, and youth, we could point them in a direction of where they may can go. We won’t select your program for them, but we’ll tell them where they can go to get that service.

And we’re going to aggregate all the information and make it user friendly. And you’ll be able to obtain it through our social media. We’re going to be able to obtain it through our website. And most of all, we’re going to be boots on the ground. The next event that we hope to kind of commandeer everyone together is that we’re going to be at the March on Washington on August 28th. There’s a free bus available by the National Action Network provided by the local chapters, community and city of NAN through the Reverend Al Sharpton. And we are going to take our voice across this country because I believe that other communities need the same kind of help. So we want to show that what it looks like, we’re not just the wire, we’re not just the corner. We’re not just the dancing, numbing and snowballs and the bikes.

We are more than that. And people need to see us as a whole. And we have to take this as an organic approach to what we need to be getting done. And that’s what we’re here to do. I’m a graduate from the Morgan State University School of Social Work, and I’m calling on all my social workers, all my counselors, everybody who’s doing that work in this city. This is not about the dime or the doubt. This is about remembering how to bring community together. And with that, we are a we. And when we are we, we are in agreement. With that, I say

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

Ashe. I think the most important aspect

Of what we are doing is to specifically reach out to families. We want the mothers and fathers of this city to know that their children are loved, that there is help available, there are resources available. Like mama said earlier, we’re not blaming anybody. There are no finger pointing. This is not anyone’s fault. If it is, it’s all of our faults. There’s no one person we can blame for this situation. I heard someone say we need to lock them up and throw away the key. I think, I hope, and I believe that we’ve had enough of that. There’s a system set up that eats, that sets up retirement funds, that sets up vacation time for our children being incarcerated. Being in a system where they’re abused, where they’re raped, where they’re tormented, where their lives literally stop. That has to stop. That has to stop. We can no longer accept our children being put into these systems and saying, lock them up and throw away the key.

Ujimma Masani :

I want to say one important thing. People say that things start in the home. Some people don’t have a home. We have so many people who are homeless, families that are living out here in these woods. People who have no resources whatsoever, no family in foster care. We have the largest number of foster care people in the system, youth in the system, but we’re only 13% of this whole national population. So if you keep saying that it begins at the home, did you check out whose home life you’re talking about? Because everybody don’t have a home. We

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

Don’t even know if these young men had a

Ujimma Masani :

Home. Right. We don’t know where they come from. And we don’t know that if their home is safe and protected and wholesome. How do we know if they’re not being abused or abandoned or – Neglected. Neglected or molested? We don’t know what that is. It’s in the body. It’s in the body. And so what we’re going to teach them is something called clean talk. We’re going to teach them about facts, feelings, judgments and outcomes. We’re going to change the dynamic of how we communicate with these people, with our babies. And that is where we’re going with this clarion call Baltimore.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

Changing our journey to change their journey.

Crowd Chants:

We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we.

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

Speaker 1:

Michigan is shaping up to be one of the most closely watched Senate races of this entire cycle.

Speaker 2:

Democrats will choose between Congresswoman Haley Stevens and former director of the Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services, Wayne County, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

We pay more for the stuff we got to buy, get paid less for the work that we do and watch as our tax dollars get misappropriated abroad to drop bombs on other people’s kids instead of to invest in our own kids and their schools and their healthcare.

Speaker 4:

We’re done. Business as usual politics is over.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

Most people don’t walk around thinking, where do I stand on the left right spectrum? Most people walk around thinking, how am I going to afford my groceries? How am I going to pay for my rent? Can I ever afford a home? What am I going to do if I get sick? The majority of Democrats out there, when I talk to them, they are so far away from the party elders who hold all the power. And I think we have an opportunity as a party to molt out with the old, in with what the people underneath the party really want.

Speaker 5:

Obviously politics are a very tumultuous time right now and the Democratic Party’s kind of in disarray. So I’m coming out to support Abdul.

Maximillian Alvarez:

He really knew and understood the people, that he was for the people.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

So we’re running a campaign to do three very simple things. Number one, we’ve got to get money out of politics. We’ve got to take on the system that tells us that corporations are people and that their money is speech. So we’ve got to get money out of politics. Number two, we’ve got to put money back in people’s pockets. So what does that mean? It means empowering people to join or form a union in every sector of our lives. It means standing with small businesses like this one that really do create the backbone of our economy. And it means finally taxing billionaires some wealth.

Speaker 7:

And that is precisely why we need people like Abdul in the US Senate.

Speaker 8:

I worked third shift and I made sure to get my butt out here in support before I have to go into work because the message has always been amazing. Watch out. There’s a car right there. But yeah, the way he just speaks to the working class I feel like is really what we need. And also when I shook his hand, he dabbed me up like a homie.He felt like somebody I knew already and that’s somebody I want fighting for us in the Senate. So I’m really glad I came tonight.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

The question for us is bigger than this seat. It is about what we want out of our democracy in the first place. So if everything is working just fine for you, I’m not your guy. Do not vote for me. But if you believe that you deserve healthcare, if you believe that your tax dollars ought to be spent on you, if you believe that corporations should not have a bigger say in our politics than you do, then maybe I am.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We first met when you were running for governor here in Michigan in 2018. The question was how are Democrats going to respond to Trump? But also who’s going to inherit the Bernie Sanders mantle? AOC just won. And so you were part of that progressive cohort. And now we kind of have a similar situation. How are Democrats going to respond to Trump winning again? Zorn Mamdani just won in New York. Who’s going to inherit the progressive movement? But these are two very different moments and you’re a very different person than you were back then. I wanted to ask to start how you would characterize the differences between that campaign and this one.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

Let me break it down two ways. There’s where we are as a country and then there’s the growth that you do as a person. I think where we are as a country, this is a moment where I think to be honest, we had failed to learn the central lesson of Trumpism. I think a lot of folks felt like the record had skipped, that there was this mistake and they didn’t see the fact that Donald Trump was exploiting a foundational pain in people. And I said this thing at the time, I think that was just, it was premature. Most folks didn’t see it. Donald Trump himself is not the disease of our politics. He’s just the worst symptom of the disease of our politics. And the disease is the system that allows corporations and billionaires and would be oligarchs to buy and sell politicians to do their bidding.

You watch as they use their power to suppress our wages for the work that we have to do and to raise our prices for the things we have to buy. And I think this time around people are recognizing that actually we dealt with the symptom, but we didn’t deal with the disease. And as a doctor, I’ll tell you, if you only deal with the symptom and you don’t deal with the disease, it comes back roaring worse. And that’s exactly what’s happened now. So I think folks are a lot more interested in authentic engagement with the structures of our system. Even now though, you got a lot of corporate folks out there who just want to deal with the symptoms. They’re like, “Oh, affordability? Okay, I’ll make one thing more affordable for you. It’d be great.” And they’re like, “No, there’s a structure underneath affordability. There’s a reason why everything accelerates in the wrong direction always.

And if you don’t deal with the foundational infrastructure, you’re not going to deal with the outcome.” One of the frustrations I think I have with some folks in our movement sometimes is that we want people to agree on the critique and we always break apart on the critique. It’s not about the critique, it’s about the outcome.

And I think the more you could focus on how you want the world to be like and get people to agree to that, even if they come at it with different perspectives, I think the better off we are. And I think that’s probably what I’ve learned over time.

Speaker 4:

There’s a big battle brewing. A battle brewing against not only the corrupt fascist forces of the Republican Party, but also against do – nothing Democrats that would rather sit there and collect paycheck after paycheck and fundraise from corporate donors that put your interests second to the interests of those very same corporations.

Maximillian Alvarez:

The 2024 election was less of a referendum on how much people love Donald Trump than it was a referendum on how much people hate the Democrats.

Speaker 2:

Agree.

Maximillian Alvarez:

People’s faith in the Democratic Party is in the basement right now, especially on top of a year of doing what feels like virtually nothing to stop Trump, caving on the longest government shutdown in our history while people are watching their SNAP benefits, their healthcare disappear before their eyes. So the question there is like, is why run as a Democrat? And how are you going to address that lack of faith and prove that this isn’t just the right message that you’re going to meet people’s needs?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

Yeah. I know what I’m about. And Democratic Party hasn’t always met my needs. I think a lot of people out there feel like they’re Democrats by hostage situation. You look at the other guys and you’re like, “That’s crazy.” And then you look at the Democrats and you’re like, “I don’t know what’s worse.” Being cruel and crazy or being feckless in the face of being cruel and crazy. Now the party is so far away from its voters. The majority of Democrats out there, when I talk to them out at Democratic clubs or indivisible or you name the organization that I’m out, they are so far away from the party elders who hold all the power. And I think we have an opportunity as a party to molt. Out with the old, in with what the people underneath the party really want. And I’ve said this for a very long time.

The problem with Democrats is too often they’re taking money from the very same people who created the problem. So now you’re in this weird position of trying to articulate a solution to the problem that includes the people who created the problem. That makes sense. I don’t take over money. I never have. I never will. And I understood from the day I started in politics that that wasn’t the big issue. And so when folks look at me, they say like, “At least I know what he believes because he’s not bought. And I think the party could do the same thing. Say what you will about Donald Trump. He’s got a coherent narrative. You out of a job. Immigrant took your job. Out of a home. Immigrant took your home. Out of healthcare. Immigrant took your healthcare. That’s his narrative. Simple, easy to understand, dead wrong. We could have a narrative too.

Out of a job, corporation offshore automated your job. Out of healthcare, corporation squeezed you out of healthcare. Out of a home, corporation speculated that you can’t afford a home. But when you’re taking money from corporations, guess what you’re not going to

Speaker 2:

Say?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

So you come with your little list of 10 point policy plans that’s going to deliver something for maybe somebody 10 years from now. It’s bullshit. So I think the party could be better and I’m ready to make it better. So I’m a Democrat with lowercase D, and I hope someday we can win the fight for what the Democratic Party can be. And I’m not willing to let go of all that infrastructure because a few folks who can’t let go of power say that it’s theirs.

Speaker 7:

So what the hell is going on? Why are we living in a society where workers are producing more and more and virtually all of that income and wealth is going to the top 1%?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

It’s the system that allows the richest, most powerful people, corporations, billionaires to buy and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system against us. Corporations get bigger, more powerful. Our lives get harder.

Speaker 2:

I feel like I don’t ever see hardly any campaigning politicians come to Saginaw and it’s so underrepresented given how much we’ve been through. I mean, we’re very similar to Flint in a lot of ways and how we had a booming industry and then laws were passed that just discriminated against every single person one way or another that pushed us out of different areas for companies and contractors to come in and exploit us. And I think he touched on that in a way I haven’t seen a lot of politicians really focus on, at least for again, Saginaw.

Speaker 1:

I absolutely think Abdul is right on track of having the billionaires stop having power in politics and allowing us to have a voice and making sure that everybody is treated fairly. I do a lot of the organizing of the Latino community here in Saginaw, Michigan. So I’m trying to get them a voice because for too long there are too many Republicans and Democrats that have been voting to cause harm to the Latino population.

Speaker 5:

I think an unapologetic progressive populism that’s centered on delivering for working class people is how we win in the future. And that’s exactly what Abdul’s message is.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

I mean, democracy was broken the day corporations started to buy elections. That didn’t just happen. We’re at death’s door now, but we’ve been here. We’ve been sick. And so why don’t you talk about it in ways that are actually fully complete? Hey, every time a corporation comes in and buys off a politician, that kills your democracy a little bit. But most of these folks who want us to talk about democracy now didn’t feel it when that happened. And I think we got to talk about it completely. I

Maximillian Alvarez:

Want to talk about what that means for where we are sitting right now in Saginaw, Michigan. And I have a special attachment to this place. My wife grew up here. I have a lot of in – laws who live around here. My wife’s family had generations of men work in the old GM plant up the road. It is a cold, hard, but beautiful place with a lot of families with a lot of deep roots. A lot of igrant families going from back to Poland, Germany, Mexican and other Latino immigrants, a lot of black folks who came up during the Great Depression. People don’t give towns like Saginaw credit for how complex and beautiful they actually are. But in many ways, this is the archetypal rust belt

Speaker 2:

Town.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean there is a lot of pride. There’s a lot of joy. There’s a lot of family here. There’s also a lot of boarded up windows. There’s a lot of blight. There’s a lot of pain. There’s a lot of poverty and economic devastation. So why is it important for you to come to a place like Saginaw? And again, moving past the sort of democratic messaging, I guess my question is not how do you hope to reach people who live in places like Saginaw, but what can you and other politicians do for places like Saginaw?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

Yeah. The simple question, how do you reach? You come. We’re here. You know what I mean? This is not my first time in Saginaw. It’s not going to be my last time in Saginaw. For me, I’ve trained as a doctor and that training’s been really useful for me because both doctors and politicians have to be really good at being able to sit with other people’s pain and to speak truth to pain. It’s truth to power, but also truth to pain. And then I think the way you reach folks is to be vulnerable with them. I can’t solve all the problems, but I can’t tell you why the problems exist. And I can tell you I’m going to try like hell to take it on. And then I think you need to go back to that point that I was making to be a really good listener to people’s pain and to try to forge that pain into purpose.

I can’t solve it. Anybody walks in here is like, “I’m going to fix your problems.” No, you’re not. We can solve it. And if I can be a vessel that helps to create something that can organize us and can impose what it is that we’ve been asking for, for a very long time into power, then I think we can solve it. We can’t solve it tomorrow, but we can solve it in due time. And I’ll tell you that the analogy here to medicine is clear. Somebody gets a cancer diagnosis. You want to tell them you’re going to be fine. It’s bullshit. And if I tell you you’re going to be fine, it’s a lie. But what I can tell you is I’m really sorry that this happened to you. And I can tell you what we know and I can tell you what we can do.

And I can tell you I’m going to sit here and listen for as long as you need me to listen to you and that I’m going to be your advocate for helping get the best outcome you want. In this case, it’s not terminal. Places like Saginaw can heal, but not doing the same shit that we’ve been doing. And so in some respects there is an honesty that you have to tell people. It’s not just always going to be okay or I’m going to solve all your problems. I’m not. I’m going to do my best to help you, to be honest with you about what the problem is, to sit down and think about what our approach moving forward can be and to fight like hell for you against people who’ve created this problem. And if we can do that and you can trust me to do that, we can build things over time, but it starts there.

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome back to the Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. The 2026 World Cup is now officially over after Spain defeated Argentina in the final match on Sunday. And for many of us around the US and around the world, the World Cup was a very welcome distraction from the ambient awfulness and doom and the daily delugion overwhelm of relentless war, corruption, fascism and disaster. But the games were also an uncomfortable reminder that no matter how much we love sports and the global spectacle of the World Cup, no matter how much we want them to be an escape from politics and the pain of living in a broken society, there’s just no way to truly escape those things. And the manufactured illusion that sports are somehow an escape from political reality is just that, an illusion. So what do we do with that? How do we square our love for sports and all the beautiful things and experiences that we get from sports with all these gross, exploitative and societally destructive facets of sports today?

Hat does it mean to love sports in a disenchanted age of authoritarians, war and climate catastrophe? These are the kinds of questions that I got to dig into with legendary sports writers, book authors and real news contributors, Dave Zyron and Jules Boykoff at a live event that we hosted at Chilo’s Bar in Brooklyn, New York, just days before the World Cup final. And what you’re about to listen to is the audio recording of our discussion for that live event.

The name of this event is Loving Sports in an Age of Authoritarians. And we’ll get to the authoritarians by way of this first question, but it’s so much bigger than just any one authoritarian. How do we continue to love sports and the other things that we love when everything that we know is burning around us literally? We had to move this event inside because the fires in Ontario that literally wiped a First Nation off the map are making the air toxic to breathe. So how do we continue loving sports in a time like that? Dave Zirin, softball to you.

Dave Zirin:

Well, first of all, I wasn’t told there would be science at this event. Second, very quick joke my grandfather once told me that tries to answer that very heavy question. Guy goes to visit a buddy. Buddy opens the door. His buddy is naked wearing a top hat. And he said, “Dude, why are you naked?” And he said, “Nobody visits me. ” And then he says, “Then why are you wearing a top hat?” And he said, “Someone might visit.” And that’s how I feel about sports and the environment.

Let me make that leap for a second. It’s because we are in trouble. Dude is naked. Everything is out in the open. We can’t breathe outside for goodness sakes. And yet sports presents this face like everything’s okay. Look at these incredibly fit young people running around the field, loving the fresh air on the greenfield and then off the field you have environmental catastrophe. And we need to be able to reckon with that because honestly, we’re not going to have outdoor sports. We’re not going to have winter sports unless we do something about this environment. And frankly, I think that’s a way to reach sports fans is to say to them, if you really care about sports, then you’re going to care about climate change. If you really care about sports, then you should care about fossil fuels. You should care about the World Cup and the kind of footprint it puts down on our world just by the wealthiest of the wealthy flying their private planes into these different cities.

So I think it’s really important that we have one eye in the environment of all time and not just to save humanity, but actually let’s talk to sports fans and say, if you really want to save sports, you’re going to be on this side of the question too. And so that’s the top hat, that’s the naked guy. I don’t think I made the connection, but we try.

Jules Boykoff:

Love it, love it, love it. So on the topic of climate change and this World Cup, a couple quick facts. This is the most polluting World Cup in the history of men’s World Cups or women’s World Cups. And that’s because FIFA decided to hold it in three countries and include 48 teams, which is more than ever up from 32. And also because one of the countries, the United States, just doesn’t have a good train system to get people around. So everybody, if you want to get from Kansas City to your next game in San Francisco, you basically have to fly. So the lower end estimates are like nine million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent and that’s a low estimate. Meanwhile, we got Giannian Fontino out here on his private jet crisscrossing North America. Yeah, thank you. Big boo for Giannian Fontino. And he even went to Qatar for a funeral the other day and then zipped back.

So the leadership is very much not coming from the top. But to build off what Dave was saying, I’m really interested in this idea that we can be more politically effective sometimes by being less explicitly political. And we’re living in a moment where we sort of have two models of that happening simultaneously. In New York City, since we’re here, I’ll mention Zoran Mamdani. Where was he watching a football match, soccer match yesterday or the other day in a local prison? And opening up conversations about kind of what that means, what’s the life of an incarcerated person? How can we bring sports into their lives as a positive? Then you have on the other side, one of the big topics of my book, which is Donald Trump and how he is the president in the United States that has used sports to his political advantage more than any in the modern era.

So we have two models of using sports toward political aims while not necessarily being explicitly political. And the last thing I’ll just say on this question is I’m wearing a Bosnia shirt. I was in Bosnia recently. I spent more than a month in Sarajevo and it was an exciting time to be there because the team had just qualified for the World Cup for the first time in a long time. The energy was really good in the city. And when I was there, I went to the Genocide Museum. And what struck me about the place was that there were so many exhibits at the museum that talked about the importance of soccer. There was one that literally was titled Soccer Saved My Life. There was another that talked about people in Shrebanitza that were huddling around a black and white television during the 1994 World Cup watching Roberto Baggio and getting this glimmer of joy in an increasingly difficult time for them.

So if they can do it in Bosnia and stick with sports and figure out how to use sports to their political advantage, and they’re definitely doing that in Bosnia, we can surely come together to attack the issue of climate change through sport with everyday people and talk about how it affects their everyday lives.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Two quick thoughts or a thought and a question. Thought because I couldn’t agree with you more, Jules, about we can be more politically effective by being less obsessed with politics. And I really identify with what you said there because this is a question I get all the time as someone who goes around interviewing just regular working people across the political spectrum around this country every week. And people come up to me, they’re like, “How do you do it? How do you talk to people? ” I’m going to answer that question for all of you right now. Just be a person. Just don’t be weird. Just be chill. Just be interested in other people. I don’t know how to explain that. It’s just like you don’t got to beat people over the head with politics. Just talk to them as human beings, connect on what you connect on and go from there.

And for a lot of us, that is sports. I have some of the deepest political conversations with my buddies that I grew up with back home who live very different lives than I do or like the guys I worked in the warehouses and factories and restaurants with than I’ve had in academia. Because you start with sports and then you get into some real heavy shit real quick. So I couldn’t endorse that more. And to get spicy for a second, because again, this is a live bar debate. I want to push you both on the question of sports and climate because everything you said really resonated with me. But sports is also one of the most important cultural dream manufacturing or false dream manufacturing mechanisms that we have in society. And sports is where people are being trained to see that you can just build a dome and play in freezing weather or blazing heat.

So what do you say to someone who says, “Hey, we could have a World Cup in Qatar. It doesn’t matter how many brown people die to make it happen, but why don’t we just do that? “

Dave Zirin:

That’s a great question. I would say to the person, first of all, you think we’re having a sports conversation? We’re actually having a politics conversation Because you’re talking about a set of political priorities that are not in the best interest of the people in Qatar or on the world if you think that that’s the way sports is going to be sustainable. I would say to them that what you are promoting is an incredibly elitist view of sports where the only people who really get to play are the super professionals who are in this climate controlled atmosphere because they can produce profit while the rest of us just become watchers. And honestly, we have too much of that in this country right now.This is the statistic I hate the most. 60% of kids who play youth sports quit by the age of 12. And when they’re asked why they quit at the age of 12, it’s always because they’re told that they’re not good enough to keep playing when they’re 13, 14, 15.

And so then they become either the watchers or they become alienated from things like exercise, community, frankly, some of the things that make life worth living. And so sports should never be the province of experts. It should never be the province of the super skilled. Sports should be for everyone as a baseline for what we’re arguing for in this country. Sports for all. And so people who make the climate controlled argument are actually arguing sports for few. So I would be calling them out. You’re actually making a political argument that is actually not only dooming humanity, but it’s dooming our kids to a life of actually being alienated from what makes life worth living.

Jules Boykoff:

Yeah. Absolutely. So I think that the sports world needs to grapple with this idea of the mega. We’re now living in the era – Not the mega.

And that too, actually. Okay. But the mega, M-E-G-A. What I mean is we’re living in this moment of the VVIP, this new thing, the very, very important person. We’re also living in the era of the mega, mega sporting event. And the truth of the matter is this is not at all. It’s like an oxymoron to call it mega event sustainable. It’s just never going to be that. And so we need to have conversations about how do you reduce the size? Gianni and Fontino talked about making the next World Cup 64 teams instead of 48 teams, which will just make worse what we’re talking about right now. And they’ll come back at us when we say, “Oh, well, how about just going back to 32 or at least just keeping it at 48?” They’ll say, “Oh, but we’re trying to include more teams.” And of course that’s true, but right behind it is bubbling their cauldron of money and that’s all to their benefit to have more teams, more games, more $30 million per game went into FIFA coffers at each one of these games just from tickets alone.

So the truth of the matter is that they’re kind of actually giving an argument that’s both weak and somewhat trying to seem like they’re not racist, but actually are racist. And here’s what I mean. They’ll point to teams like Kate Vaird who was wonderful. If you didn’t watch the World Cup, they were one of the most exciting stories. And they’re like, “Oh, do you want to not include Cape Vaird at the World Cup now after these wonderful stories of all their triumphs?” Cape Vaird finished first in their group. They were coming to the tournament, whether there was 32 teams, maybe even 24 teams. So don’t tell me Cape Verde wasn’t qualifying. They’re a legit team. A lot of soccer people weren’t at all surprised. So thinking about how do we both make it more of a public good sports, but also shrinking it and moving some of the money from the shrinkage to what you’re talking about, addressing the fact that so many kids drop outs too early because that’s a tragedy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s stick on that for a second. I love the sports for all in sports is a public good. So sticking with the bar debate theme, in the socialist utopia, what is the world of professional sports going to look like? Are sports teams going to be publicly owned utilities? What is the better version of this shit look like that can still retain the things that we love, but isn’t draped in all this awful shitty stuff that makes us hate the things we love?

Dave Zirin:

Yeah. I mean, for sports in a socialist utopia. I mean, first I’d be so happy in the socialist utopia. I’d be like, “Oh yeah, there’s sports on. Cool.” Which would be sort of like the opposite of my current life, which is, “Oh, there’s sports on. Good. The world is burning. Ah, sports is on. ” So I think it would take that and sort of stand it on its head, which would be nice, I must say. But I think more than anything, I mean, there are things that are wrong with the sports world now that I could say in even a democratic, socialist, capitalist country, we’re going to do away with the public funding of stadiums and saying like, “Look, you’re a billionaire, James Dolan. You want refurbishing a Madison Square Garden? Find the money between the cushions of your couch and take care of it.

Don’t ask the taxpayers to do it for you. ” So real demands like that. Second of all, if even $1 of public money goes into a sports team or a stadium, guess what? That team becomes $1 public. So it’s like the more public money that goes in, the more we own the teams. And if they want all the money for their stadiums, guess what? Your team has just become the most effective public utility in the city of New York. Congratulations, you’re making the city billions. Our schools are now funded. All is good. And I’m so sorry, James Dolan, you only get one yacht, but somehow I think you’ll survive. James Dolan’s son, by the way, 32 years old, is now in charge of the New York Rangers. I think that makes him the first grand Nepo baby in doing that. So horrible people. Just the worst.

And one other thing I would say is I think this idea of sports for all, we can be very specific for people right now of what that means. It’s not just about ability. It’s an anti-racist argument. It’s an anti-sexist argument. It’s an anti-anti-poor people argument who are denied sports, denied physical education in so many public schools. We would have full funding for physical education throughout the country. And I think this is very vital. We would never in any sort of just society tell our transgender family that they have no place on the playing field, which is the official position, by the way, of this government and the International Olympic Committee. So there’s so much we can do. And this could be the sort of thing where we have on a whiteboard behind me with a pen, with a dry erase, be like, “What actually do you hate about sports?

Hat makes it hard for you to love sports? And what about the corporate control do you hate? What about the bigotry do you hate? Native American mascotry, let us know. ” And those are actually the things we can begin to check off and say, “Let’s have a better sports world, sports for all, sports in the name of justice and sports in the name of fun.”

Absolutely.

Jules Boykoff:

Absolutely. And now is a perfectly opportune time to try some of these things where you have owners of football clubs, soccer clubs in places like Vancouver, Canada that it’s rare that you see an owner advertising their own lack of skills saying, “I can’t possibly run this club unless I get a huge infusion of public money.” At a time when you’ve got people like Avi Lewis in Canada, political leader talking about re-nationalizing some industries, this is a perfect moment for doing that with a football club. Why not experiment? We tried to do this in Portland, Oregon where I usually live. When the owners of the team, a guy named Henry Paulson, former treasury secretary under George W. Bush and his son, Dave loves this, his name is Merritt Paulson.

Dave Zirin:

He’s like, “That’s made up. Come on. Son of a billionaire is named Merritt. Come on now.” Yeah,

Jules Boykoff:

It’s –

Maximillian Alvarez:

Just like meritocracy’s made up.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah, that’s a great point.

Jules Boykoff:

So many years ago when Portland got a major league soccer team, they were asking for $85 million in public money to refurbish the stadium. $85 million. That was going to come out of the budget where we fill our potholes. Some of it was going to schools, homeless services, you name it. And a lot of people fought back. Actually, Dave Zyron came to town and fought back next to us. And we didn’t totally win the struggle. They didn’t get $85 million. Instead, they got $12.9 million from a special tax from the Portland Trailblazers. So it was like sport to sport. But we did have a good conversation about what a publicly owned team could look like. And I just cannot wait to get fully behind the city that decides to go for it. I think Vancouver’s a possibility, but anywhere that happens, I want to be there trying to do what we can to help.

Hell

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Hell yeah. I love this. And we’re doing good on time so far, but I did want to give everyone their mandatory. FIFA is requiring that I let you know that this is your hydration break. So please go to the bar, stay hydrated, stay safe.

We’re going to get to and zero in on the World Cup, the authoritarians and the stink of Trump on the Knicks NBA finals victory. But by way of getting there, I want to focus in on again, another aspect of the sports for all discussion that really doesn’t get talked enough about, especially in leftist spaces, but I don’t think at all. Because the only time we’re talking about youth sports these days is when a bunch of weirdos obsess over the genitals of some of our children who are playing them. And that’s not what youth sports was to me. It was my life. It was like the place where I found my motivation, where I learned to work on a team where my dad coached my brothers and then he coached me. It was like youth sports so much a part of me and will always be a part of me.

And the older I’ve gotten and especially after I blew out my knee playing basketball and I lost basketball, the thing that I had played three to four times a week every week for my whole life, like countless hours in the driveway with my dad and my brothers was gone. And I’ve realized since that a huge chunk of my life was gone after that. Where else in my life do I walk up to strangers and say, “Hey, you got next? Can I play with you? ” And then you play with people that you don’t know. You have to learn in a finite space with rules quickly what everyone’s strengths and weaknesses are accomplishing a shared goal or not. It’s such a rarefied space and experience that I think so many of us need, whether it’s in organized sports or just more play. And so I wanted to throw this to you guys because I don’t think I get to hear you talk enough about the human good of sport beyond just the professional sports world and capitalist shit show that most people see on their TVs.

Dave Zirin:

Oh man. So what I love about sports, I mean, oh man, I had to give a toast for my dad on his 80th birthday. And I was trying to think of what do I possibly say about this 80-year-old guy who’s had such an impact on my life? And the first thing that came to my head is like, when did my dad ever mean the most to me in my entire life? And it was like, when was this moment? Because my parents were divorced. I saw my dad like four days a month growing up. So it’s like where was that real spot for us? And it was game six, 1986 World Series, Mookie Wilson, Ground Ball, Bill Buckner’s legs. You’d say to a baseball fan, game six, that’s all you have to say. And they know what you’re talking about. My dad took me there and I still have the ticket stub.

It says $15 to go to the best World Series game. And he got that ticket not by getting on his phone because back then phones were these mammoth contraptions attached to walls, but he got it by waiting online at Shea Stadium. And we got to go to this game and then we got the game of all games. And when that ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs, I went from being happier than I could ever remember being to being terrified because that stadium got so loud and grownups got so crazy. And that was before they stopped selling beer after the seventh inning. And we’re in extra innings at this point. And my dad just put his arm around me and held me close. And it was a moment where I never felt both more imperiled and then more safe in a moment. And I feel like there’s something about…

And that kind of hooked me for life on sports. Playing basketball for the New York City fighting Quakers in high school is also an experience unto itself. You didn’t want to mess with the fight in Quakers. And me being a five foot 10 inch center for that team.

Maximillian Alvarez:

They called you white chocolate thunder?

Dave Zirin:

They called me, why the hell is he here? The one story I’ll tell is I was playing one game against a freshman for Rice named Felipe Lopez who went on to become the number one recruited player in the country. He was in ninth grade. I was in 11th grade. That was their JV. They were playing our varsity. And I shot the ball and Felipe blocked it to half court, literally to half court. And the whole crowd goes. And I hung my head. I was so embarrassed. And he put his arm around me and walked me to half court and was just like, “It’s okay, man. I do that to everybody. Do not take it personal.”

And I met him as a sports writer. I met him 20 years later and I said, “Yo man, you blocked my shot to half court and then you put your arm around me. It’s a memory I’ll never forget.” And he looked at me and he said, “Yeah, I don’t remember that at all. ” And I was like, “Oh.” And he said, “You got to understand, I just blocked a lot of people. ” That was kind of my move. And I was like, “Okay, all good still.” So that’s why I love sports. I chose to show rather than tell. I love it. I love it. But you give me a good moment in a rocky relationship with my dad or a great moment and you give me Felipe Lopez blocking my shot, couldn’t be happier. That’s amazing.

Jules Boykoff:

So I’m really interested in when creative people who don’t necessarily consider themselves athletes engage the space of sports, bringing their creativity to it. And one of my favorite places for this is roller derby in Portland, Oregon where I live, where from the names that people adopt that are freighted with beautiful politics and fight back in them to the very format of the event and to the very nature of its inclusion, because trans folks are always included on the skating rink in Portland, Oregon. It’s a really big part of the culture. Not only that, it’s also a great chance for fundraising for those kind of causes at the local level. So I’m always about how can we use creative people’s minds to come up with new ways of doing things? How can we have the soccer fields open in New York City all night long, which has been happening recently during the World Cup?

Maybe the World Cup is just an entry into having that be something that we do more often. We’ve heard about midnight basketball. I love this idea of midnight soccer as well. So I just think that to build off what you’re saying, this is a really fruitful area where we can all come together and think collectively and make some really magical things happen for sure.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell

Dave Zirin:

Yeah. Jules, how do you not say that you played pro soccer? I was

Maximillian Alvarez:

Going to say you’re bearing the lead, bro.

Dave Zirin:

Just give everybody your resume. I said I played basketball for the fight in Quakers. I’m not saying you can total that, but you should try.

Jules Boykoff:

No, it’s true. I did play soccer for a big part of my life. And honestly, that is one of the many reasons why I think it’s worth fighting for. I had a nice professional soccer career and I also played for the US under 23 men’s national soccer team. Although before you get too excited about that, the last international match that I played for the US national soccer team at the U23 level was literally against the Soviet Union. But yeah, I mean, I’m not proud necessarily of who I was back then because I was an absolute maniac in ways that weren’t always good for me and the people around me, but it is definitely part of my life.

Dave Zirin:

But you stuck it to Khrushchev. And for that, America, thanks you, sir.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you for your service. Well, I really appreciate you guys going with me and sharing that because I thought that was so powerful and again, made me feel closer to you in a way that our discussions about politics haven’t. And I think that’s kind of the point of why we’re all here. But I think it’s also really important to share with others out there, even those in our lives who don’t get why we love sports. And it’s not because we just are okay with ignoring all of the military jets flying over or Donald Trump’s bulletproof bullshit, a booth at the Knicks game. It’s that this thing we’ve loved for so long and have carried into our love for watching it and others do it. We’re holding onto that while it’s getting shrouded in so much crap. And that just makes it complicated for I think a lot of us.

But let’s sort of take that into the vibe and time that we’re in now where a lot of us are struggling with that, be it this great city during a game that was so special to it that Donald Trump put his stink on or folks around the world who loved the World Cup and have now know what that stink smells like and so much else. So let’s talk about the big title of the event here.First, how do we carry that love into sports today, especially the World Cup in a time like the one that we’re living in now?

Dave Zirin:

Wow. It’s a great question. I mean, the number one thing I say is like, look, the Knicks were ours long before they were the property of the Dawn family. That’s our team, not theirs. At best, they are renting it. It’s our team, not the team of somebody who got married at Mar-a-Lago, whose kid got married at Mar-a-Lago, who’s trying to change the name of Penn Station to Trump Penn Station and who’s given Trump millions of dollars throughout his political career. And even the worst indictment of all counts Donald Trump as a close personal friend. So these are all reasons to say, wait a minute, you’re not part of what we just want. And something you didn’t really get on TV during the parade, which I was at, I mean for the Knicks, by the way, Knicks in five, just throwing that out there, is that it was so raucous.

People were so incredibly pumped and enthused. And Mayor Mamdani, he gets up there and he does a sports speech that rivals like the Al Pacino speech in any given Sunday where he’s like, “Your claw for that inch.” The Pacino, your fingers plead for that inch. And here’s Mamdani up there. He’s saying like, “They gave us a 0.4% chance of winning when we were down 29. That’s what the statistician said. Well, guess what? You tell New Yorkers they have a 0.4% 10% chance they say, “Why are you giving me a head start?” I mean, I’m hearing this and I’m like, “Yeah, let me bash my head through the TV screen right now.” And then James Dolan gets up there and it was the only time of the whole day they cut this at people booed when he got up there. Here’s the Knicks winning the championship and people booed the owner.

And he gets up there and he says something completely snarky about Mamdani and it just didn’t fly. But that’s just to say it shows his alienation from the vibe and mood of the city. And if he wasn’t alienated from how this city was really feeling, he would never have invited Donald Trump to be there at game three when we finally had a home game in a finals at MSG in 27 years. That’s when you invite Donald Trump so it can be all about him and not the people themselves. Give me a break. And of course that’s the one game they lose in the last three rounds of the playoffs. But what’s so amazing about it is that people sort of get that. And then when he doubled up with the US Men’s World Cup team and tried to rig things for them, it’s that stink that he brings to the table.

My buddy calls what Trump does, he calls it athletic fracking environment. He doesn’t like sports at all. He wants to drill into it, destroy it, destroy everything around it if he can just get a drop of political benefit. So athletic fracking would not exist in a socialist utopia of a society. And frankly, in any sort of utopia, whatever you want to brand it, Donald Trump and the Trump family wouldn’t exist either. Or at the very least they’d be, shall we say, put in their place. But just one thing before I pass this to Jules, I got to tell a story about a very quick conversation I had with Lev in the back in the orange shirt, just to give you an idea about what sports could mean. If I could, he’s in the orang shirt.

And I’ll be real quick. I’ve been having a difficult year, if you will, or a decade, whatever you want to call it. And I was sitting with Lev the other day and I said to Lev, I said, “The last couple of months have actually been a lot better. I’m feeling really good. I don’t know why that is, but I’m just really doing better.” And Lev’s silent for a second and he just looks at me and he says, “The Knicks.” And I realized he was fucking right that having this run had this animating effect on so many other things in my life. And that’s, I guess in some ways that makes me just a weirdo, a diehard fan, somebody off the beam, whatever you want to call it. But I think it also kind of made me feel human for a second because it’s like I felt connected with the city in a way that I hadn’t, honestly, since nine eleven, but instead of it being this moment of abject tragedy, it was a moment of joy.

Jules Boykoff:

Wow. That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Jules, if I may, just to throw a little extra bit of sauce before you hop in, it’s not just Trump, right? It’s Kash Patel jumping around like an idiot with the men’s hockey team. As someone who you wore that jersey, does that piss you off? I mean, we don’t ever get to hear from your side of that.

Jules Boykoff:

Yeah. We often don’t get to hear from the athlete side of things despite the fact that they’ve got social media at their fingertips. There’s often a hesitancy to push back at things like ash Patel. And I think you make a good point, although the Trump curse is very real. I mean, talk to Harry Kane about it. He went golfing 18 months ago.

Dave Zirin:

And people were blaming Trump for them

Jules Boykoff:

Losing. Well, then he didn’t score after it was about the golf. I’m saying the Trump curse has many, many forms there. But yes –

Maximillian Alvarez:

Dave calls it the reverse Midas Touch. Absolutely. And that it is.

Dave Zirin:

I tried calling it the Trump Taint, but for a lot of reasons, not just… My editor at the nation was like, “No. We’re not doing that. “

Jules Boykoff:

Yeah. Very good call. Very good call. By the way. But you do make the really important point that it’s not just Trump himself and the Trump curse. It’s the Trump administration that is really doing this sort of athletic fracking that you’re talking about. The Cash Patel’s a really good example from the recent Olympics and the hockey team and sort of attaching themselves like a barnacle on the side of the ship that won that gold medal. But I mean, you’ve even seen during this World Cup a number of instances that maybe aren’t as high profile. Everyone knows about the Fuller and Balagun red card that President Trump made some phone calls to his BFF over at FIFA, Gianni and Fontino. And lo and behold, the thing gets overturned first time during a World Cup since 1962. The predecessor using that rule was Christiano Ronaldo a few months ago so that he could play in the World Cup because they wanted him even though he has credible allegations of rape in the United States against him.

So it was a horrible thing there all around. But what I’m trying to say is that it’s not just Trump, it’s also the administration. Think about the Department of Homeland Security during this very event. After the United States beat Australia, they went on Twitter, DHS did, and they posted two really interesting and terrifying tweets. One of them had three of the players on the tweet, a picture of them. And then behind them it said one homeland. It was basically short of just saying blood and soil. And it was like total pure fascism. And experts in fascism jumped up and said, “Wow, that sounds like a lot like a phrase that Nazis would’ve said.” And then they actually traced it out and it was very similar to a phrase used during World War II by Nazis. And I think it’s really interesting for a number of reasons and obviously disturbing for a number of reasons.

But if you’re going to talk about sportswashing, and I do talk about sportswashing in the book and more widely, and so maybe I should just define my term really quickly before I go into it for a sec. But sportswashing for me is when political leaders use sports to try to deflect attention from chronic social problems and human rights woes at home, to try to look important or legitimate on the world stage and to set themselves up for political, economic, sometimes diplomatic advancement. And a lot of people don’t like the term because of the way it’s been used in the past, which quite frankly has been done in an ethnocentric, if not xenophobic fashion where they say it’s those countries over there, Russia, China, Qatar that engages in sportswashing, but we are a democracy so it couldn’t possibly happen here. So part of the argument in the book is that even places that consider themselves democracies can very much engage in sportswashing.

But what is Trump doing here in terms of is he trying to… Does sportswashing work? When people talk about does sportswashing work, a lot of times they mean does it work on an international audience? And the truth is Trump has very little interest in having sportswashing work on an international audience. He makes it clear with his actions. He doesn’t care what Europe thinks, Africa thinks, Asia, Latin America. He doesn’t care what they all think. But that sometimes misses the key audience of people in this country who I think are the prime audience for Trumpian sportswashing and for the DHS tweets. And when Trump keeps the Somali referee, Omar Abdul-Kadir Artan out of the country, he doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks and they very much didn’t like it. But he likes the fact that the MAGA base sees a guy sticking it to a Somali person who, as you’ll know, he talked as trash and garbage in the past.

So when all these things are happening, if you look at it through the lens of Trump trying to cater to people here in this country ahead of a key election, everything starts to make a lot more sense through the lens of sportswashing. And so I think it also gives us this incredible opportunity to see things with clarity and to also kind of figure out how we’re going to push back against these things.

Dave Zirin:

Very nicely said.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Beautifully, powerfully put. And as we sort of make the final turn here, I want to end with looking ahead to Sunday. But by way of getting there, let’s look back on the path to this Sunday with the World Cup finals. There’s been a whole lot of… Again, the theme of the night is how do you hold onto the thing that you love when the stink is all around you and everything is corrupting it? The whole world has been asking itself that question over the past month as they’ve been dealing with the Ronaldo stuff, the bracket like stuff, and the very fact that the two teams in the finals now were like sort of, it was impossible for them to face each other until now. And that feels in retrospect like kind of shady, the Egypt game.

Jules Boykoff:

There’s

Maximillian Alvarez:

So much that people have had to sort of work through with that stink, including the Donald Trump, the infamous Donald Trump call. So let’s take a look back at that really quick. And I wanted to ask you guys your hottest takes on the hottest controversies of this World Cup that have sort of brought that stink that we’re dealing with here in the US to a full-blown international scale.

Dave Zirin:

The hottest World Cuptake that I’ll have, first of all, is rooting for Argentina because of Diego Maridona, which was 40 years ago. It’s like, come on. That can’t be your reason for rooting for Argentina, is Diego Maridona. I think I want Argentina to lose. There are rumors that Jewels is pro Argentina.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You got to save it. That’s the

Dave Zirin:

Final

Maximillian Alvarez:

Question. That’s

Dave Zirin:

The final statement. I won’t go there. Then I won’t go there. I’m just going to say I love doing that to you. I’ve known Jewels a long time. But my number one hottest take from this World Cup is anybody who says that if the US’s best athletes just played soccer, like if LeBron James played goalie, then the US would win every World Cup I think is incredibly insulting to people who actually play soccer. The reason why the US doesn’t do better straight up is that the pipeline is a country club and it costs so much money to play youth sports. In this country does it different than every other country? The reason why a country of 300 million people that has a large imigrant population that is sports obsessed can’t field a halfway decent World Cup team. It’s because the way we do it in this country is pay to play.

You want to be trained at the top clubs? You better have minimum 10 grand on the table for your kid. And Lord knows how much under the table to make sure your kid gets those positions. As long as that’s the case, this country will always suck at soccer. So the next time someone says to you, “Why doesn’t the US do better at soccer?” Y’all would just look at him and be like, “Because of the way this country practices capitalism.” And if you’re not practicing soccer as a democratic socialist exercise, your team is going to suck. And that’s why the US sucks.

Jules Boykoff:

Do you want to argue for Argentina or for Spain though? Do you want to give your argument? No, go.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No,

Jules Boykoff:

That’s

Maximillian Alvarez:

The last

Jules Boykoff:

Question. Oh, that’s the last question. So I recently had the good fortune of interviewing this man named Timu Furulhom. Timu Furlholm played for the Finnish national men’s soccer team. And the thing that’s interesting about him is that after his career, he’s now become a member of the National Parliament in Finland as a leftist. He’s part of the Left Alliance. Now you’ll know that soccer has a pretty notorious history of soccer players turned politicians that are right wingers, including your buddy Romario from Brazil who started as a socialist on the left and kind of eked his way over and finally endorsed Bolsonaro at one point.

Dave Zirin:

My dear friend.

Jules Boykoff:

Your dear friend Romario. And so I was talking to him and we were talking about sort of the system in Finland and how the soccer system there was so different and how it was bricked into society in a way that’s not the country club soccer circuit that Dave so nicely described. And I was asking him about Finland is the happiest country in the world year after year. And instantly I could tell it was a bad question. He’s like, “Oh God, I’m so sick of hearing about that. ” And he said, he goes, “The thing about Finland is that we don’t try to take the moon from the skies. We want everybody to be able to play sports at whatever level they want. We want people to be able to go to music concerts and experience culture for free and easily.” And he also added, “We also want people to be able to take a one week trip to the Canary Islands every year,” which I thought, “Okay.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

Throw that in

Jules Boykoff:

There. That’s fine. Yeah. But I’m just saying there are models out there. I mean, Finland is not at the other end of the universe. And I do think that they provide some ideas for how we could move forward and how we could just have a whole different way of thinking about life and how soccer and culture and soccer’s a big part of culture, how it all kind of fits into one bigger hole. And by the way, before I have to defend Argentina, I just want to say I’ve been backed into a corner, but I’m going to do my damnedest here in a second. Thank

Maximillian Alvarez:

You. Jewels drew the short straw because we were like, “We got to debate. You can’t both root for the same team. So yeah, give it up to Jules for defending the Argentina side of our final celebrity death match here. But we’ve all been watching the World Cup. We got the final coming up on Sunday. None of us are all that excited. It’s Spain versus Argentina. Okay, but let’s make the most of it. So in our final round, which is going to be a genuine debate and the crowd is going to decide who won.

Dave Zirin:

Oh my God.

Maximillian Alvarez:

But again, we’re recognizing that Dave’s got a 0.4 second head start. So as principled leftists or people of conscience, who is the right team to root for this Sunday?

Dave Zirin:

Well, Nixon five, of course. That’s what you say in New York. Get a good response. Look, here’s the thing. I get asked sometimes, why are you always trying to make sports political? This is our escape. This is our fun. Why are you trying to make sports political? And the answer is you can say you don’t believe in gravity when you fall out of an airplane. It doesn’t really matter whether you believe in gravity or not. You’re falling out of an airplane. Whether I say sports are political or not does not change the fact that they are political. It’s just whether we’re going to be quiet about it or not. It’s just if you’re pointing at a building and saying it’s on fire, that doesn’t make you an arsonist. And so to take it to this particular thing, and Jules is going to win this debate because this is soccer.

I’m a visitor on his field here. But to take it this, it’s like the World Cup is political whether we want it to be or not, not just because it’s like nation against nation or whatnot, but this is the last thing that we have that the whole world watches. And that gives it a tremendous amount of power if that can be steered in one direction politically or another. And every single World Cup, at least since the 34 World Cup hosted by Mussolini in Italy, has attempted to use this particular event to steer people politically in one direction or the next. And we have a particularly fraught political battle coming this Sunday because think about it like this, whether Spain wins or whether Argentina wins, the leader of that country will get a boost in the rarest commodity in all of politics in 2026. And that’s hope.

People feel better in a very difficult time. People feel hopeful in a difficult time. Ask Mamdani what it meant to him to have the Knicks win. It actually does make a difference if you have that collective sense of we’re really doing something here. The direction we’re going really matters. So if you agree with me up to that point, then let’s take a quick look at what we’re dealing with. In Spain, the leader is a guy by the name of, I believe, Pedro Sanchez. Pedro Sanchez is a social Democrat. He’s the leader of an organization called the Socialist Workers Party there. They believe in a much progressive stance on immigration. They believe in mass social spending and having a social safety net. And most importantly, they have earned the undying hatred of Donald Trump because they refuse to let their bases be used in the war on Iran.

And the leader of that country, Pedro Sanchez, has called out Israel’s genocide in Gaza and he has refused aid and fuel and military aid that were preexisting contracts to Israel. He pulled because of what was happening in Gaza. So you have to think… Oh, and also he’s in a very polarizing situation where the country loves him, the country hates him. There’s all this going on there. And so you think, okay, what will it mean to this individual if Spain wins? Then you go to Argentina who’s running that place. Good Lord. Good Lord. Someone who genuinely looks like a Muppet named… And I love the Muppet. So that’s the nicest thing I’m going to say about him. Named Javier Miley and Omilei here. If you don’t know him, he’s a good friend of Trump, billionaire. And Israel loves him so much that when Benjamin Netanyahu was asked who he was rooting for in the World Cup, he said Argentina.

And they asked him because of Messi. And he said, not because of Messi, Milei. He’s the superstar. And he is also somebody who’s in a huge corruption scandal. His popularity is plummeting. The country is very polarized. And so then you think what it would mean to Miley if Argentina wins the World Cup. If nothing else, I think if Argentina wins, you’re going to see Miley on the field with Donald Trump holding up the trophy. If Spain wins, Donald Trump will find him. It’ll be probably swimming at the bottom of that algae belching reflecting people in Washington. Have a better time there than at the World Cup if Spain wins. So I say root for Spain because I want to see a world as far away from the vision that Javier Milay has for this world as humanly possible.

Jules Boykoff:

That’s good. That’s good. Really good. Really, really convincing argument. But it could be even more convincing because I have a few other things I want to add to that. No,

Dave Zirin:

You can’t. Get him.

Jules Boykoff:

Well, for starters, there’s a guy on Spain by the name of Lamin Yamal. Magical left foot, beautiful player, and by all appearances a beautiful human being. 19 years

Dave Zirin:

Old.

Jules Boykoff:

19 years old. And his dad’s family’s from Morocco. His mom’s family’s from Equatorial Guinea. And he’s sure to represent every part of his heritage and background in creative and beautiful ways. He also recently, he’s on Barcelona Football Club as well, which recently won La Liga. And at the celebration afterwards on the team bus, he was on the top and he was waving a Palestinian flag. He’s a Muslim man who’s been very outspoken for Palestinian rights. So how do you not like Lamit Yamal? He’s just a lovely human being. On the flip side, over on the Argentina side, there’s a guy named Enzo Fernandez. You might remember him most recently for scoring the first goal against England to equalize 1-1 off an assist from Leonel Messi. That was about the best thing he’s probably done in his life. He’s done some terrible things after the Copa America Tournament recently after they beat Columbia for the title.

He was caught on the bus singing racist songs and singing anti-trans songs right there on the bus.

Dave Zirin:

This is the best debate I’ve ever had. I’m

Jules Boykoff:

Killing it right now. Sorry, go ahead. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. I’m just trying to help you. I’m just trying to help you. Keep cooking. Keep cooking. Because you need a lot of help over there. Keep cooking. Keep coking. So there are so many reasons if you start going down the roster, but there is one reason why you might want to slow down or two reasons why you might want to slow down and have a little bit of sympathy for Argentina. One is the one that Dave just preemptively nixed going after the Meridana factor. I don’t think we can just skim over the surface of that that easy. I mean, this is one of the all time legends of athlete activism in the history of football. Dave, you yourself have written wonderful work, columns about this man. So I don’t think we should just get rid of him into history.

I actually like, unlike some people, I like having history present in a contemporary moment. Diego Meridana. And the other thing is I do have some sympathy for Leo Messi. 39 years old. He’s going to set a record for the most steps walked on the field in a World Cup. He does not run that much. They do not make this man play any defense whatsoever. It’s fun to watch in a sense because he’s just like kind of walking. Then they feed him the ball. It’s not a very complex offensive structure that Argentina’s working with here, especially for a World Cup final. But he’s 39 years old and in some ways an inspiration in that regard. I know he took a bunch of Saudi Arabia money for their tourism. I’ve wrote about that plenty. But I got put in this difficult position of trying to make Argentina look good and I just can’t do it.

Okay? Fine. Those things.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for Jules Boycott and Dave Zauer and everybody.

Dave Zirin:

Yo, give it up for Max Alvarez and the Real News Network. Kayla Rivera

Maximillian Alvarez:

Too. Where’s Kayla? I don’t even see her. And last, give it up for Chelos Bar again for hosting us. Thank you so much Chelos for having us. Hell yeah. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real News Network Podcast. Thank you to everyone who came out in person for this incredible event. Thank you to the good folks at Chilos Bar for hosting us. And thank you to Dave Zyran and Jules Boycot for this incredible and incredibly fun and meaningful conversation. We are absolutely going to be doing more in – person events like this in Baltimore, Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York and more. So make sure that you are following us on social media and that you’re subscribed to our newsletter so you don’t miss the next one. And if you want to hear and be part of more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now.

Share this podcast with people in your circles, your friends, your family, your coworkers, and go to therenews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it makes all the difference. For The Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.

A transcript will be provided when ready

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

Michael Fox: Hi folks. Just a quick heads up before we get started. There are a few curse words in this episode. Okay, here’s the show. And you can hear me all right?

Laura Flanders: I can hear you fine.

Michael Fox: Lovely. Okay. And I will begin. Last fall, I visited the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. It’s located on this big campus in the hills west of the city. And I was there to interview people about something that had happened just the week before. So this was October, October 2025. The month before on September 10th, Charlie Kirk was killed. Remember he was a young, far right US activist, Christian nationalist, founder of the conservative organization, Turning Point USA. And he used to do these speaking tours on US campuses where he would debate people in public and put forth his controversial, conspiratorial and office racist or sexist ideas. So back in Spain, following Charlie Kirk’s killing, a young far right Spanish activist named Vito Kiles decided he was going to do the same thing in Spain, in Kirk’s honor. He was going to visit universities across the country and hold Kirk style debates in public with controversial or incendiary rhetoric.

And he kicked off his tour at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The problem was he never really kicked it off. See, the autonomous university is one of the most radically progressive universities in the country. It has staunchly defended the independence movement for the region of Catalunia. And the university actually told him he didn’t have permission to speak because of the chaos that could ensue. So he arrived anyway and so did anti-fascist protesters who filled the main plaza. They squared off with Qiles supporters holding Spanish flags. Both sides protested, shouted at each other until the Catalunia police force showed up. And then they pushed the groups back with batons and shields and riot police and shut it all down. The following week, I traveled to the university to ask students what they thought about what happened and about Vito’s plan to try and speak. So I spoke with this one journalism student. His name is Pune Velez.

He said, Vito Quiles came here to stand with a megaphone, to shout a few things, to give a speech and not to answer questions, he said. In fact, he told me that’s even worse than what Charlie Kirk did. Another student told me everyone can have their own thoughts, but to come to a university to do anything, you have to ask for permission. And from what I understand, he didn’t have permission to come here. And he was warned in fact not to come. Jugo Guillaro sees it differently. He’s a history student who was in the group of Qiles supporters with the Spanish flag. I wanted to have a debate, he said, to share ideas even if we didn’t agree because that’s really the spirit of the university and to keep that spirit. But then he said he ended up trying to separate people and almost got hit several times.

So here’s the thing. Most of the students I spoke with, but not all of them, told me that Vito Quiles wasn’t just trying to do a speaking tour in the name of free speech. He was using Charlie Kirk’s death as a way to push his far right vision of the world and a US style free speech definition across Spain. And they say his goal was to get exactly what happened. Chaos, protests, police violence, media attention. Can you introduce yourself real fast?

Sergio Villanueva: Yeah. So my name is Sergio Villanueva Barcelova. I’m associate professor in the University of Barcelona in the communication studies and media studies.

Michael Fox: And I spoke to him about this as well. And he said

Sergio Villanueva: Every time that a right wing politician watch some notoriety, he or she goes to the Autonomous University and she gets a riot. She gets public in media. She gets publicity. So Bitokiles went to that specific university because he knew that in that specific university there is this big contestation that is very politically affirmed and he would get that reaction. He wanted this. He wanted attention.

Michael Fox: And so he got it. I think it’s important to say that the next universities where he tried to also speak on his tour also blocked him from doing so. The University of Regents essentially wouldn’t give him permission because they said he wasn’t there to have an open debate. He was there to stir up trouble and to create a media attention. And I think this is interesting because again, it shows the difference in definitions of free speech in the United States and abroad. Charlie Kirk found the space to speak on university campuses in the United States despite his controversial and incendiary rhetoric, but not in Spain. And there’s a reason for that. One student I interviewed told me,

She said, “I believe that freedom of expression is the right to say whatever you want, but the limit is when you disrespect other groups of people that have a different ideology perhaps. You can debate with a person who’s different from you, but without disrespecting them, that you have freedom of expression until you disrespect the other or the other person’s ideology. In her opinion, Vito Kiles and others on the far right have a discourse that is disrespectful to others. They thrive on attacking, dividing and using others as scapegoats. And again, as I’ve looked at a lot in this podcast, this in the United States is protected speech under the First Amendment. Their free speech is seen as absolute, but in Brazil, Europe and elsewhere, the right to free speech is balanced amid other rights. So your right to free speech doesn’t trump my right not to be harmed by your speech.

But the far right and the powerful owners of US tech firms are hiding behind the discourse of free speech to push their incendiary rhetoric. And they’re doing it far beyond the borders of the United States. Spain is not the only place where far right activists or US tech firms are trying to push their agenda abroad into Europe and their US definition of free speech. But people are pushing back. 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 honored to be joined today by Laura Flanders. She is the host of Laura Flanders and Friends, formerly known as the Laura Flanders Show on public television. And she has had a long illustrious career in journalism. Laura, thank you so much for joining me today.

Laura Flanders: Michael, it’s so great to be with you and I’m fascinated by that story you just told.

Michael Fox: It is crazy and I’m sure we will dive into more of this. Laura, I just want to say I’m so excited to chat with you in particular because you kind of have a foot in these two worlds in the United States, in Europe. You grew up in the UK. You’ve had most of your professional career in the United States. And I think that’s so important for understanding this conversation today, right? Because we’re talking about free speech in these two different worlds and the different definitions and also disinformation. What does that mean? I just wanted to start, Laura, what is your definition of free speech?

Laura Flanders: Well, before we get there, I think what your story illustrates and makes a think about and what you’re alluding to in terms of what are the distinctions between a kind of European sense of free speech and an American one takes me right back to the core distinction I think really between our two cultures. One being a culture of the individual with all of its wonderful assets. In the US, we have this supposedly invilable individual right to free speech and it sort of trumps everything not to use that word. In Europe, societies there actually think about the social. It’s not horrifying to imagine a collective and to think about collective rights. Now we can always take that too far and there’s certainly histories of abuse in both countries and I hope we get a chance to talk about that. But in broad strokes, what I’m reminded, I’ve been in Barcelona also when you go back to the history, the history’s everywhere on the walls of the Civil War and that sense of a collective struggle for freedom and for a different set of priorities.

Barcelona was at the heart of that Civil War struggle for an anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian style of government complete with communists and anarchists and the autonomous university has a lot of its roots in that strugle. So anyway, you’ve kicked us off in a really interesting place because I think as we’ll see through this conversation, that comes up over and over again that European governments have a long tradition of balancing individual rights with other rights for better and for ill as well here.

Michael Fox: That’s right. That’s right. Laura, thank you so much for grounding us in that because it’s so true. And I don’t think that enough people in the United States understand this core difference and also understand this idea of society as the whole outside of the United States. So thank you for grounding us in that. So this episode, we’re going to be traveling to Europe to understand how Europeans consider free speech and also look at kind of the threats from big tech moguls to push their agenda. And in particular, this episode, I really want to focus around disinformation, fake news, and the battle against it in particular that’s happening in Europe. So Laura, I want to continue our conversation in a place that you and I were just speaking about recently and that is Northern Ireland.

Audio Clip: In a capital city in the British Isles, people are forced to flee their homes by a mob, which was intent on causing havoc and setting fires.

Michael Fox: Violent riots and fires in Belfast in Northern Ireland just took off in mid-June. They rippled across the city for several days after a violent knife attack went viral over social media. The attacker was reportedly either from Sudan or Chad and his nationality sparked a wave of anti-immigrant violence. Migrant families were forced to flee their homes. And here’s the thing, Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X, played a key role in fueling this violence. According to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a US and UK-based NGO, Musk’s role was “instrumental” in the Belfast riots. He helped to spread calls for protests from anti-immigrant activists and politicians on X. One of them read, “Only by protesting repeatedly and loudly will there be change?” According to the report, more than half of the more than 100 million views across three accounts came from Musk’s reach on the platform.

People responded to those posts on X with nearly 4,000 comments calling for lynchings and other offenses against immigrants. And the director of that organization Imran Ahmed said no individual played a bigger role in spreading this content on X than Musk himself. As the owner of X and its most followed user, Musk has unparalleled power to shape what people see online. With that power comes responsibility for the content and conduct his platform promotes. Laura, did you see this unfold? And what are your thoughts about Musk’s role here?

Laura Flanders: Well, it’s fascinating. You know, Michael, I started as a journalist in Northern Ireland. I don’t know whether you know that, but when I was like 23, I was in Belfast in the 1980s during the so – called troubles. The Irish of course called it the trouble with England and saw conflict in the streets of the sort that we saw in the story that you just told. So for many of us, it was like a flashback to that earlier era. And younger generations who had memories of that conflict where there were Molotov cocktails thrown and bombs in the streets and troops and guns and regular gunfire, I think almost sort of dug into their roots maybe to sort of revive some scene that they’d seen in the histories of their families. I was reminded in the context of this conversation of what the free speech situation was in the ’80s when British anti-terrorism law, again, this is the other side of the collective approach to speech rights in the name of protecting the British, especially the interests of the British in Northern Ireland that were being contested by a liberation nationalist independence movement at that time led by Sinfeig and the Irish Republican Army in the name of protecting certain people from other people.

The government of Margaret Thatcher passed these Prevention of Terrorism Act laws that restricted broadcasting rights for Sinfeigh, the political party that represented the nationalist’s point of view.

Audio Clip: Hello and good morning. Yesterday, the government banned all British television and radio stations from broadcasting interviews with members of Xinfein. How are their supporters? But will it reduce terrorism or merely curb press freedom?

Laura Flanders: And they literally were not allowed on the broadcast airwaves. Now this is pre-internet, pre-YouTube, any of that. But you had this ridiculous scenario that I remember where the broadcasters got around this ban by hiring actors to say the words of the politicians. So it didn’t stop the ideas getting out there. I just made an absurdity out of the situation. And it did reduce the number of interviews that were conducted with Sinfeig politicians who had members of parliament elected to parliament by, I don’t know, I’ve seen statistics of 60 to 85% because broadcasters just didn’t want to deal with it. So they have an example of very heavy handed use of censorship by the government in the name of protecting some people from other people. And this was a period of a lot of violence. Most of it in Northern Ireland, which was at the time occupied by British troops, just to remind people.

So I’m thinking, okay, well there you have the government censoring a whole political party and point of view and its representatives. Today, it’s not the government that’s causing the problem, let’s say. It’s the owner of a for – profit privately held monopoly business. And I think you can say that X is kind of a monopoly in the sense of it holds disproportionate power, sort of uncontestable power in that sphere of commentary social media, which is worse, which is better. I mean, it’s really a very good question. And when you asked me to defin free speech and I savvily avoided answering your question, I think it’s partly because I could agree with the Barcelona students who you interviewed who said anybody has a right to say anything. They just don’t have a right to say it without contestation. They don’t have a right to say it and not be confronted by another point of view.

That’s all fine and good until you get to the point of this kind of monopoly control, this corporate control. In principle, I left the UK and came to the US because it was a land of greater freedom and independence, less sort of nanny England control of life in general. But now we’re in kind of musky United States. We’re in musky world where that control is being exerted not by the nanny state, but by corporations with a private interest, a profit motive to stir up a certain kind of conflict. So we can talk more about that, but you’ve really hit at a very fascinating place, Northern Ireland, to discuss this question of speech.

Michael Fox: This brings me back to what I was speaking with my co-host Mark Steiner in an earlier episode about how speech, when it was censored throughout the history of the United States and elsewhere, it’s always been the powerful censoring the voices, the marginalized, the poor, the black and brown, the people fighting to stand up, to rise up. And this is what reminds me when you mentioned Margaret Thatcher censoring Xin Fin and censoring the speech coming out of Ireland, it is the powerful censoring the people who do not have power. That is where you see speech. And it’s the same thing now. It is the powerful, although it’s coming from a corporation, it’s coming from Musk. It is the powerful that are doing this against others.

Laura Flanders: Although interesting, they are not so much censoring as exploiting this free speech right in the name of their corporation as an individual. And I think that’s where it all gets very complicated because they are presenting themselves as bastions of free speech, opposing censorship and sort of calling the bluff of governments that say they defend free speech. We can’t possibly talk about the history of Ireland and England without mentioning that the whole Irish language was banned under British colonial rule. So the control through language control is a part of this picture too.

Michael Fox: Absolutely. And that is exactly what this woman who I spoke with this week told me about. Her name is Jude Ferrell. She’s Irish. She’s actually a former tech worker. She worked at Google for several years. And I wanted to speak with her because last year she founded this organization, Your Tech: Their Deaths, to protest against big tech in Ireland and in particular the role of big tech in supporting the genocide in Palestine. And

Jude Ferrell: It’s a grassroots led initiative, but it’s very much so brick by brick. And a small committed group of people can impact change. And that is in Irish blood, that is in our DNA.

Michael Fox: And in fact, when she spoke, she had just left a protest in Dublin against an Israeli tech company, Sneak Technology that’s trying to sign a contract with one of Ireland’s largest banks. Anyway, about the Belfast riots, she told me it was easy for these big tech companies and Elon Musk to put the blame on immigrants.

Jude Ferrell: There is a very big issue in Ireland with a cost of living crisis, with public transport, with infrastructure, with healthcare, with education.For all this money the imperialist assets are throwing in here. Ireland is really, really struggling. And it’s very easy for social media to target immigrants, which you can’t be Irish and be racist. And

Michael Fox: I just love this quote. “We are a nation that is built on immigration, “she said.

Jude Ferrell: “We had to leave Ireland due to our own genocide thanks to the British, to our own manmade famine thanks to the British. And we went to the places like America and Australia and built those countries. You cannot be Irish and be racist. But fear is a very powerful tool to use on social media and Irish people are struggling.

Michael Fox: And this is what we saw. And I just want to give a little context about Ireland today and big tech because I don’t think a lot of people understand this. Remember first that Belfast is a city in Northern Ireland. So politically it’s actually part of the UK. But regardless, Ireland and Northern Ireland have become major tech hubs over the last two decades. More than 10% of the Irish GDP comes from the tech industry. They provide more than 160,000 jobs across the country. Although AI is already taking its toll and roughly, I think the figures from earlier this year is that 20,000 people have lost their jobs to AI just recently. Almost all of the major tech companies have their European headquarters here. And in fact, some people have even called Ireland Europe’s Silicon Valley. These tech platforms chose Ireland because they speak English clearly and because the country’s low corporate tax rate.
And Jude told me in the beginning they were really excited that these tech companies chose them. She says she was really happy to work for Google, but those times have clearly changed. She says today she is really worried about the discourse from the tech billionaires and so – called free speech absolutists infecting Ireland and Europe because they have this international reach and there are no regulations coming out of the United States. So one of the things I think that she said that was really interesting is that your future, America, is linked to ours.

Jude Ferrell: So if you fuck shit up, you fuck it up for everybody. And it’s the same with the United Kingdom. It’s the same with America. It’s same with Germany. You cannot view big tech or freedom of speech in isolation. It would be the biggest and the most naive error for any of us to take that aproach. What happens in imperialist countries like the United States trickles down to us here in Ireland.

Michael Fox: And she also told me about how, this is what you were just speaking to Laura, is that how important free speech is for her, but not the absolutist free speech that we hear about from the United States or from Musk. Not free speech where you’re inciting hatred on others, but that free speech is the most important thing in Ireland.

Jude Ferrell: Ireland, we lost our language. It was illegal to speak to learn Irish. And that impact we see generations later. And we’re only starting to understand the impact. It’s like we’ve got a hangover from our own oppression, the silencing of our religion, the silencing of our language, of our culture. So yeah, free speech is incredibly important in Ireland.

Michael Fox: So free speech, but not the freedom for the big tech platforms to run ram shot over everyone in defense of their quest for evermore power and money. Laura, how do you see all this? What does all this mean as these tech companies are arriving in Ireland and what Ireland means within this context for Europe?

Laura Flanders: Well, this takes us down a different trajectory. At least my mind goes to a different, most kind of conspiratorial place. And just for what it’s worth, I think, Ireland, Barcelona. You’ve talked about right-wing activists in these two places. What are these two places have in common? Ireland North and South has been a place of progressive activism for different reasons coming from different roots in some cases, but progressive activism for sure. If you think of the conflict, if you think of the genocide in Palestine over the last few years, it’s been Ireland that has led the United Nations along with South Africa and a few others in the calling out of the genocide and the supporting of resolutions of the United Nations that use that language and call for the prosecution of Israeli leaders.

Audio Clip: To do nothing is not neutrality. It is complicity.

Laura Flanders: Barcelona, interestingly, had one of the most anti-monopoly, anti-corporate, anti-gig economy regimes until recently with the election about a Kalao years ago. Barcelona, going back to those roots in the Civil War, has been a place of progressive foment and really strong anti-capitalist collectivist experimentation, let’s just say. It’s very proud of its cooperatives and its collectives, as I’m sure you found out. So I think, well, why are these people focusing in these places? And I can’t help but get curious about what their political motivations might be. So I’ll just say I was in Ireland recently and with respect to immigration, at least according to public opinion polls, you have majorities not just supporting immigration, but saying that they appreciate migrants. So they’re taking on, I think, a big challenge, the Bannons and Musks and Peter Thiels of the world, but it’s a challenge they seem to be up to and up for.

I just saw a report that Peter Thiel is holding a conference in Dublin convening some of the same people he convenes in this country to talk about world dominance through AI. All of this is not exactly an answer to your question, but it’s the kind of thoughts I’m having prompted by your interviews and your reporting. So thank you.

Michael Fox: Yeah. Well, there’s two very interesting things. First, so Jude told me when I asked her about kind of the far right and this discourse and immigrants and kind of the rise in the country, she said actually their bark is worse than their bite.

Jude Ferrell: I think they’re like one of those yappy little dogs. They don’t have much power or control in Ireland yet, thankfully.

Michael Fox: And in fact, what we saw in the big fuel protests that were happening back in April, big protests around the country, people standing up. She said the right was also trying to steer this in the direction of blaming immigrants and blaming immigration and people just weren’t having it. They were shut down fairly fast. So that’s on the positive side. People are standing up against that narrative.

Laura Flanders: I think one thing that’s different, the two cultures going back once again, is in the US you have our two-party system and that makes it much easier to say we’re great, you’re terrible, we’re wonderful, you’re evil, you’re the threat to all things good. In Europe, generally in Ireland certainly you have a multi-party system and you may have far right parties, but you have other parties too. There’s a much more diversity of discourse and you have, of course, a long history of multiple media at each other’s throats. People are used to weighing different opinions and the idea of one enormous megaphone influencing an important and large part of the population I think is harder to pull off there than it is here.

Michael Fox: Yeah. And you mentioned Peter Thiel, Laura, which is really important because he was going to hold his event in Ireland. And of course for people that don’t remember, he’s the Silicon Valley tech financier, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir. And he was planning this international conference of his secret organization known as Dialogue. And then they wanted to talk about World War III battlefield technologies and also how to build a cult, which were some of the things that were on the agenda. Anyway, the meeting was going to take place in this upscale hotel in Ireland, but Jude and her organization and several other groups started to organize against it. They held some protests. They were going to hold more protests over the next week. And in the end, the meeting was canceled just a couple days ago. Ah,

Laura Flanders: There you go. Popular action, go for it. They didn’t even need to protest. They just needed to say they were going

Michael Fox: To protest. Exactly. Excellent. Exactly.

Jude Ferrell: It’s not just Peter Thiel. It’s not just Palantir, but it is the audacity and arrogance of individuals like Thiel that they think that they would be welcome in any country when we know that they are entirely focused on their own power and privilege. They are not using technology or data for the good of humankind. They’re only using it to fill their own coffers.

Michael Fox: This is just one of those moments that I think we need to pause to remember that sometimes A, standing up against these things, standing up online, but also getting active, getting organized and people getting out in the streets can have an impact against what we’re seeing right now.

Laura Flanders: Well, that brings me back to our US media. How come I didn’t know that? I’ve been looking at that story. Where is it? This is why the real new This is programs like mine, independent media is so important to bring people the stories not just of the threats and the dangers, but also the victories of people’s movements. So just a little self-promotion for us.

Michael Fox: Love it. Laura, I wanted to say one more thing about that Ireland that I did not know before I move on. Jude told me that the term boycott, did you know that that was coined in Ireland?

Laura Flanders: Yes, I actually did.

Michael Fox: It’s amazing. So apparently this was when tenant farmers demanded a rent reduction in the 1880s from a British captain named Charles Boycott. That’s so cool. So cool. So anyway, again, it’s kind of a reminder of the excitement and the power and the organizing of Ireland and just gives us a little bit of hope I think. Collective

Laura Flanders: Spirit. Collective spirit.

Michael Fox: That’s right. That’s right. Laura, I want to dig a little bit deeper into this question of fake news and disinformation and the attempts to fight it. And I just want to say very quickly that I kind of feel like there’s this elephant in the room in the United States that no one’s discussing because around the US elections, 2024, pretty much all the social media platforms suddenly said, “You know what? I don’t think we’re going to fact check anymore. I think that Trump is now in office and we don’t really need to do this. ” And so it’s this thing where everybody realizes that there’s a bunch of misinformation and disinformation and fake news out there, but at least from the tech billionaires and from Silicon Valley, there’s nothing being done about this. And let me just also say that not only is there nothing being done, but Musk continues to push his narrative.

And in Ireland, that wasn’t the first time that Musk was throwing his weight around. And I just have a couple of statistics that I wanted to throw out. So first off, just remember he has 240 million followers on X. It’s the most, he’s the highest number of followers on the platform. According to a report from the European Council on Foreign Relations in recent years, he has attacked prime ministers, calling them criminal tyrants or traders. He’s backed far right parties, fabricated statistics, and reorganized X’s algorithm to amplify right-wing voices and suppress democratic accounts. In Germany, he boosted the far right party before the 2025 election and spread fabricated quotes. He posts attacks against the press roughly three times a day. And here’s the thing, he has his agenda. And of course, in the name of free speech, he is then pushing his own agenda out there.

But Europe has been pushing back in more ways than one. One way was in Ireland. The other way is the attempts to battle this information by another very unique way. And Laura, I want to take us to Finland right now.

Laura Flanders: All right, let’s go.

Michael Fox: So Finland is a Nordic country. It’s in Northern Europe, just to the east of Sweden. About a third of the country lies above the Arctic Circle and it shares a border that is 830 miles long with Russia. Russia actually controlled Finland for most of the 1800s. And that’s important because Finland has faced a barrage of Russian propaganda, troll farms and fake news in recent years, in particular beginning around the time of the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. And what Finland did is pretty revolutionary. So as we’ve looked at this in this podcast, countries have tried to battle fake news and disinformation by taking content down or going after troll farms. Like in the case of Brazil, they’ve protested and tried to regulate speech in other parts of Europe. And in Finland, they’ve tried to battle against disinformation with education. So by teaching –

Laura Flanders: Shock horror.

Michael Fox: Exactly. So by teaching the young and old to how to distinguish between facts and opinion and propaganda, how to spot it, how to critically assess where the information is coming from and what are the reputable sites and what aren’t. And before I get into this, I just want to say that this is not new in Finland. So I’m just going to give a really quick history lesson here, Laura. Remember that this country, Finland, like much of Europe, was devastated by World War II. Almost 100,000 Finns died. They fought a bloody Soviet invasion from the East.

Audio Clip: The big boulder is being press into service as part of a roadblock or tank obstacle. And here in the depths of the Caribbean woods, Finnish artillery lays down a protective barrage beyond the Manaheim line.

Michael Fox: They lost parts of their territory to the Soviet Union and then they fought alongside the Axis Powers, Germany and Italy. So they were on the losing side of the war.

Audio Clip: A Finnish communique reports that 600 Russian planes bombed Helsinki last night causing fires and heavy damage. The raid lasted nearly 12 hours, the longest and heaviest air attack of

Michael Fox: The war. Anyway, the point is this, that was a time of tremendous propaganda used by all sides, in particular from Nazi Germany. And in Finland, they were just inundated with it. And when the war ended, they began to teach what they called then communication education in schools, which also came alongside the rise of film and cinema.

Saara Salomaa: Because people have always been worried about new media. And in 1950s, they were very worried about what will happen to young people when they see all kinds of garbage in cinema. And that’s how it started. And then it has been modified over the years.

Michael Fox: They now call this media education and media literacy. And Finland outlined a national policy around this in 2013. It was the first European country to do so. And I spoke with Sara Saloma about all of this.

Saara Salomaa: I work at the Finnish Arts and Culture Agency, which is a national body responsible for media education and promoting media literacy.

Michael Fox: She told me that in her life she actually wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, Laura, but that she took a class in college about this and she got hooked. And so she ended up doing her PhD on media education for kindergarten teachers.

Saara Salomaa: So I didn’t totally give up on kindergarten, but my work is now targeting all people in Finland.

Michael Fox: So she coordinates media education across Finland. And here’s what she told me. First, it isn’t just about one class. It’s something they do across all grades from kindergarten up to high school and also for adults and even seniors. And it doesn’t just happen in schools, but also libraries and NGOs. And it kind of crosses multiple disciplines. So they incorporate this in many, many different ways. I asked her the difference between media education and media literacy because I was confused about this. And she explained that media literacy are the skills you need to learn to analyze media. And media education is the actions that promote media literacy. So how to learn this. And so she explained that it’s not just discerning fact from opinion, but understanding the social perspective of media. So what’s being said, who’s being said? And I asked her to take a step back and just explain to me what this looks like actually in a classroom on a typical day.

Saara Salomaa: It’s hard to say what is a typical school day in Finland because our municipalities, schools and teachers all have a great freedom to choose how they implement our national curriculum. But if I think about, for example, 13 year olds, a media literacy lesson would be about reading a text and trying to discern what is a fact and what is opinion, for example.

Michael Fox: Or looking at a video or ads and trying to understand what’s behind the ads, like what’s the hidden message. And this is where I want to go right now to explain this a little bit more. We’re going to travel to Helsinki Finland’s capital late 2024, November. It’s cold and snowing outside. So put on your jacket, Laura.

Laura Flanders: All right, here we go.

Michael Fox: Inside the room, a teacher passes out these pages of different images to groups of teenage students sitting around desks. They’re analyzing what the media content is trying to say, who produced it, where it’s coming from.

Teacher says, “Who has produced the material that you watch? How do you produce it? Do you have your own ethical responsibility?” I think these questions are really important everywhere. One of the students said, school has taught me to interpret media as messages written in between lines. For example, through ads or fake pictures.” She says she started to look at it from a slightly different perspective more critically in terms of propaganda and disinformation. And here’s the thing, it’s not just one subject. It’s something that’s incorporated across all aspects, all subjects. And Laura, for me, I just feel like this is so important because you would imagine that this would just be a no-brainer. Everything, our entire lives is inundated today with media.

Audio Clip: In today’s fragmented media environment, it can be hard to know which news sources you can trust. Even I don’t always know where to turn if only there

Michael Fox: Was something. In social media, it’s every place. And yet we never step back and kind of analyze critically. I looked at some of the figures and the stats in the United States around media literacy. Is that happening in the states? And from what I found, it’s roughly half of the states have passed some laws mandating some form of media literacy, but it’s really incipient. It’s really early on. They’re trying to figure this out.

Laura Flanders: Michael, it’s so interesting because what I’ve been looking at a lot recently are these age-specific digital access bans.

Audio Clip: Yes.

Laura Flanders: So in Australia, you have a ban on under 16s. In the UK, you had the Labor Party leader Starmer talking about a ban on under 16s using social media, things like TikTok and X and so on. Facebook, I think even YouTube. And the aproach is very much, let’s keep people off these platforms. And conveniently enough, in order to assess people’s ages, it all involves uploading biometric data to the web so that there’s yet more information that these huge corporations have on all of us. Biometric meaning eyes and fingers and whatever else they can use. They’re even proposing having AI assess photographs to see what age people are. You can imagine the mistakes. But the whole approach is how do we keep people off this platform rather than how do we regulate the platform? What you are providing is yet another idea is why don’t we just make people smarter?

Why don’t we just educate people? And that it seems to me is a classic collectivist in a good way approach of let’s actually inform people and give them the tools to assess this. And frankly, I think younger generations are going to be smarter about all of this than we are because they’ve seen the damage that it’s doing to their fellows. And I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of high schoolers and middle schoolers who are simply going off social media themselves because they don’t want to be tortured the way that they’ve seen their friends be tortured. So I think this is an interesting third way. And gosh, wow, how far we are from Finland.

Michael Fox: In so many ways, how far we are. Yeah. In fact, there was a stat in this one organization that had done a report about media literacy, the push for media literacy in the United States. And they said that more than 80% of students in the US would like to have media literacy classes taught. And it makes sense.

Laura Flanders: Yeah. I used to host a radio show that still is out there. It’s fabulous. Now hosted by Janine Jackson for FAIR, the Fairness and Accuracy and Reporting, the media watch groups called Counterspin. And we would sometimes go to classrooms and do simply a one-off demonstration, have people pick up their local paper or look at the news for a week and just say, okay, who got to speak? Who got to apear? How many sources were cited? How much space was used by ads versus by print? People loved it. Kids loved it. And it was the kind of thing anybody could do anywhere. Any teacher could actually initiate such a thing. People at FAIR could help. But it’s a fascinating exercise just to have people think twice about what they’re reading and listening and watching.

Michael Fox: Yeah. That’s awesome, Laura. And this was one of the questions I asked Sada. I said, “What does success look like for this? What does this look like really? ” And she said, “It’s actually kind of hard.”

Saara Salomaa: Because we don’t have a parallel version of Finland in which media literacy was never taught.

Michael Fox: I love this. But she said one of the ways is the fact that they’ve had several governments in power, the left and now the right is in power right now. And none of these governments have pushed to try and roll this back.

Saara Salomaa: Both of these governments, they have had media literacy in the program of government. So I think that is success story that regardless of what kind of political parties are in power, they still want to promote media literacy in Finland. Of course, if you would ask very right-wing politicians and very left-wing politicians what they mean with media literacy, that can be a different story. But on the other hand, they are not handpicking the initiatives themselves.

Michael Fox: And they also have something going for them in that their curriculum around media literacy isn’t governed by necessarily the government that’s in power. It’s a 10-year-long plan that they set up. So it’s not one government that can come in and then derail things and whatnot.

Saara Salomaa: And here I also think that it’s very important to stress that media literacy is not there to dictate what to think, but it’s supposed to be teaching how to think.

Audio Clip: Yeah.

Michael Fox: She also brought up several things that I think are important now. She said they’re facing many challenges, in particular reaching immigrant communities, poor communities in Finland. And the other thing is, of course, AI, which is making everything so much more complicated.

Saara Salomaa: Things are moving very quickly and it was kind of surprise for me how the big tech companies, how they took a side in the US elections and then US government.

Audio Clip: The golden age of America begins right now.

Saara Salomaa: And this has now been a topic of discussion very much in Europe that should we actually trust any US tech companies or should we try to get rid of US tech companies as soon as possible? Our chessboard is constantly changing. In media education, we have to run really fast even to stay where we are.

Laura Flanders: Well, I love her idea that there’s no alternate Finland to have as your control because that’s what we have in this country too. We’re constantly told we have free choice when it comes to media, but we don’t really. We have a limited array of options. So it’s not like you can just say, “I hate those networks. I’m going to go pick another one.” So that’s another way in which our media diet is presented to us as this wonderful universe of freedom, but it’s really not. It’s really who has the power, money to get to your eyeballs and that isn’t everyone.

Michael Fox: Exactly. So Sada said in closing that this was not a silver bullet.

Saara Salomaa: We can provide people possibilities to learn and to discuss these topics, to understand that not all the information is the same. So there are more and less reliable sources and they can develop practices that help them to recognize this information, for example. But at the same time, we need to also strengthen people’s trust in trustworthy media.

Michael Fox: It’s one answer to the threat and there need to be multiple answers. And that is the direction that I want to go into right now because as the United States has always pushed for deregulation and as we see Musk and Silicon Valley tech barons always talking about how regulation is actually another form of censorship, Europe has been pushing to fight with regulation. And I think it’s important to just underline this point before we dive into this, is that in the United States, this question of tech barons talking about regulation as censorship is kind of repeated daily. It’s the same thing as the absolutist free speech thing. But we have a ton of regulation in the United States. Television, radio, newspapers, print, all the legacy media. It’s all regulated. It’s all there. So why not tech companies and social media?

Laura Flanders: It’s useful to go back and see, well, how did it get regulated?

Audio Clip: I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of a privileged fuel. And

Laura Flanders: For much of it, we’re talking broadcasting. It got regulated in the 1930s and ’40s under the FDR administration and just before when you had a rise of right-wing demagogues using what was then the most influential media, namely radio, to stir up fascist movements in this country, movements that we forget we ever had. But it wasn’t like it just suddenly got regulated. It got regulated as an effort to protect democratic values and a democratic society when a threat was observed in a growing media. So in that case, it was radio and then those broadcasting regulations were extended, some of them, to television. We’ve had a huge fight around new technology, whether it’s online or online or social media technology where the tech companies have done their best as they would to keep themselves free of regulation and to present themselves as these bastions of free speech.

Well, that’s the same thing that the fascist demagogues in the ’30s presented themselves as bastions of free speech. European law again takes us back to where we began in the sense that they do guarantee under their Ministry of Injustice Acts, they do guarantee that there is a right to free speech, an individual right to freedom of expression, but they give a little bit of wiggle room and say the restrictions are allowed in the defense of a democratic society. So a democratic society trumps your right to call someone a name in public and to rally crowds to take out unwanted folks in your community or whatever. So again, it’s that balancing act that the Europeans are explicitly doing even in their law in a way that we don’t. And where we do in regulatory law, the public’s not educated about it. And instead we get this very binary black white attitude to free speech.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of over binaries in general and get very suspicious whenever they crop up.

Michael Fox: Amen. Absolutely, Laura.

Laura Flanders: Let’s live in the squishy middle.

Michael Fox: Amen. I love it. I love it. I want to underscore really quick the links that tech platforms have gone to to push their agenda and to stop the possibility of regulation. According to a 2025 investigation led by the Brazilian media outlet Ajen Shepublica together with Reporters Without Borders and several other outlets and journalists across numerous countries, between 2019 and 2025, big tech companies carried out nearly 3,000 lobbying actions across 10 countries and the European Union. It involved more than 1,400 company representatives and 2,500 public officials. Among the tactics were disinformation campaigns, funding supposed independent groups to oppose legislation, hiring former public officials to lobby in favor of the companies and arguing that national laws don’t apply. So the tech companies have gone to very unfair extreme lengths to push their agenda to ensure that regulations are not imposed on them. And specifically for this podcast, of course, they’ve been using all of this in the name of free speech, supposed free speech to defend their right to be unregulated under the guise that regulation means censorship.

Laura Flanders: It’s interesting because it has its parallel, of course, in the world of economics where you have governments at the local level often doing things like trying to ban big box stores, Walmarts or name it, and those same corporations saying this is a violation of our rights. They’re using the same argument we’ve seen over years, their power versus community power. This is the fight we’re in. And I don’t think there’s a more important fight in our lifetime.

Michael Fox: Absolutely. Absolutely. But the EU has moved forward.

Audio Clip: Hate speech and disinformation online. This is what we’re all fed up with, right? In the European Union, a groundbreaking new law is coming into effect this week to tackle exactly these problems.

Michael Fox: The European Union approved the Digital Services Act in 2022 and the European Media Freedom Act, which went into effect in August 2025. And of course these aren’t perfect, but they are steps in the right direction. And this is complicated, really complex legislation. I’m going to try and sum it up in about a minute or two here, Laura.

Laura Flanders: Good luck.

Michael Fox: But broadly, the Digital Services Act aims to increase transparency and accountability for big tech companies.

Audio Clip: Nothing in the DSA forces or asks or requests a platform to remove lawful content. The only thing that is being asked is illegal content. Content that is illegal in real life has no place online.

Michael Fox: And the European Media Freedom Act creates a set of rules to protect media pluralism and independence in the EU. So protecting media companies, journalists, and outlets that are already there. Anyway, I sat down and spoke with Eva Nenadic.

Iva Nenadic: Here I’m the scientific coordinator of the Center for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom.

Michael Fox: At the European University Institute just outside of Florence, Italy. She’s been a journalist for 10 years. She’s now a professor and she really knows her stuff because she’s actually been working in developing the framework around fighting disinformation through these acts since 2018. And I just want to say really fast that usually when we start to talk about regulation, myself included, my eyes kind of glaze over and I start looking out the window. It’s hard to stay focused when we’re talking about regulation because it’s something that’s so complex and confusing. But this stuff has real world impacts.This is really important and we need to understand it. So first off, tech platforms, social media AI, some of it is the most powerful technology information revolution we’ve ever seen and yet it’s a free for all. And so Eva told me that the goal is to try and reign in the online lawlessness and the power of big tech.

Iva Nenadic: Innovation is important, is relevant. It will sustain the Europe as we want to have, but at the same time, we cannot just unleash the wild west of innovation that doesn’t take any accountability or responsibility for the societal implications that these technologies, the way they are designed, but also the way they are used and misused.

Michael Fox: That is the logic of this legislation. Just to remind people, the EU is made up of 27 member countries and that this legislation is what they call regulation. So it means that they create regulation and then they send that to these countries to apply it harmoniously across the EU. I’m trying to envision in my head how this is done, how you could even do this in one country. And here we’re talking about 27 countries, so I can’t even imagine. But the biggest takeaways here are the Digital Services Act. Remember, this is about creating more transparency and accountability. The platforms are mandated to carry out yearly strategic risk assessments over what’s considered illegal speech, problematic, harmful speech. Large online platforms now have the legal obligation to provide access to their data to independent researchers.

Iva Nenadic: So this is really a game changer compared to what we’ve had before where European researchers were really struggling to get acces to platform data. And this was preventing us really from understanding what the risks are, what potential implications of any kind of action or activity by big tech are here in Europe.

Michael Fox: Regarding disinformation and particularly around the online discourse during elections, this is something that they’ve been, like I mentioned, they’ve been trying to tackle for almost a decade and it’s really complicated. And she gave one example why. I don’t know if you remember this, Laura, but disinformation isn’t just used for political purposes, but often monetary purposes. And she told me about this story of the Macedonian teenager during Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign.

Audio Clip: Dmitri is 18 years old and he says that in the past six months he’s made more than $60,000 writing, posting and sharing fake news articles about the American election.

Michael Fox: NBC did this story. It was titled Fake News, how a parting Macedonian teen earns thousands publishing lies. Her point was that –

Iva Nenadic: Monetization can also be an incentive for disinformation. Doesn’t need to be just political. It can also be very economic.

Michael Fox: And so part of what they’re trying to do, the Media Services Act handles disinformation in kind of a self-regulatory framework. It loops back to the risk assessment. So they have to assess risk once a year. And then the companies have to show that they’re taking action against this risk to regulate things on the platform. Of course, the Digital Services Act, it can’t tell these companies what they should and should not do in terms of taking things down or not taking things down, but it’s pushing these tech platforms in a direction that they actually have to take actions. And there is a policing mechanism around this that these companies can be fined.

Audio Clip: If at some point we come to a non-compliance decision confirming the breach under the Digital Services Act, this could lead to fines going up to 6% of the company’s global annual turnover.

Michael Fox: So that’s the Digital Services Act. And then there’s the European Media Freedom Act, which is essentially about really protecting the legacy media companies against the power and the growth of these tech firms. Because the way that Eva explained it to me is that these other companies are already regulated. Newspaper, television, radio, they already have their own regulations. They’re doing what they’re supposed to.

Iva Nenadic: So big tech companies that do not comply to the same level of regulation and they barely have any professional standards in operating should not be the ones who kind of censor media if you want me to simplify this very much.

Michael Fox: And so the idea is kind of protecting media content and giving these media outlets more power within this to receive special treatment on these platforms. They should be allowed to register. They should be able to receive preempted information or informed if anything is supposed to be removed. And so the idea is trying to move in a direction of what she calls, what Eva Nenedice calls more democracy.

Iva Nenadic: I think the very history and constitutional understanding of freedom of expression or free speech is different between the EU and the US. I think in some foundations it’s the same. So we are both striving… To have healthy democracy and the foundation for healthy democracy is free speech.

Michael Fox: Open communication, academic freedom, the freedom for people to voice their opinions, but –

Iva Nenadic: Instead, what we are increasingly having nowadays is extreme fragmentation and polarization. One of the paradigmatic shifts that have led us somehow to this is the very change of the basic infrastructure of the information environment. Because what we are seeing and how these platforms operate social media and now also moving to generative AI with gen AI applications, they are fragmenting information environment. They are separating us first in small groups through social media of like – minded people. And now with generative AI, we are shifting to what we call audience of one, where we interact with these systems in a very isolated, individualized bubbles. This is not compatible with democratic needs of a shared information ecosystem. And so this is in basics, in design is wrong.

Michael Fox: What she told me is just like we’ve been talking, Laura, what we’re increasingly seeing is this fragmentation, this polarization. Everyone’s broken into these two sides of us versus them. And it’s because of the very structure and infrastructure of these big tech platforms that this is happening.

Laura Flanders: Well, I want to take on the word big and them, because when you talk about big platforms, we know we’re talking about this big five players in this world, in this field that we’re talking about. We talk about them. There’s not so many of them. There’s a small number. I think that’s the problem. And I don’t think that any amount of regulation by government, even governments representing 27 countries or government representing 50 states is any match for a corporation that has more revenues and more private profits than many of the countries or states that we’re talking about put together. So I want to come back to inequality, corporate power and the sort of initiative that I think we have to get much more serious about. We can regulate ourselves as much as we can and engage in no end of fights with these guys about who is more for free speech.

I think it’s a losing battle, frankly. I think that what we need to see is more legal action to break up monopolies of the sort that Lena Khan was pursuing in the Biden administration. It’ll be interesting to see what she does collaborating with Zora Mamdani in New York as New York becomes like Ireland, a tech hub for some of these media companies. But I think that at the end of the day, we’re going to need to grapple with the ownership of these companies and the size of them. And I really don’t want to end these conversations, Mike, without talking about Bernie Sanders American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which is just one example of a different approach to regulation. Rather than regulating these companies, let’s put 50% in this case, he proposes 50% of their stock assets into a sovereign wealth fund for the American people.

I think you could go further. I think you could find other ways of breaking up these huge corporations. They are running, let’s not forget, on our intelligence. It’s not artificial intelligence, it’s human intelligence, it’s ours, it’s stolen. And we not only deserve some profit from the wealth that they’ve stolen from us, but we have some right to control. And I just don’t think there’s a way to regulate companies as big as these. Not when it comes to where they put their big box stores, not where it comes to how much of our data they siphon up and how they use it. So I’m sorry to come on sounding such a naysayer to the Europeans. I think they’re doing the best thing they can. But if it’s little us versus enormous monopoly, both of them, it’s an unfair battle. In the 1800s, in the 19th century, we had massive fights to break up monopoly business at the level of manufacturing.

We are in a new economy now and we need to have those fights all over again for our sake, for the sake of our intelligence, our democracy, and for our planet. Because the other front of this conversation is these AI companies and their use of our water and air and land to process the data that they’re taking from us at no charge stealing.

Michael Fox: Absolutely, Laura. Absolutely. And I think this is interesting because it’s something that Mark Steier and I have talked about in the past about the time of antitrust and the breaking up of monopolies and how important this is and how we have to come back to this. What’s terrifying for me right now is we’re actually seeing the consolidation of media companies. Yeah,

Laura Flanders: We’re going in the opposite direction.

Michael Fox: Exactly. But that is where we need to be. And I so appreciate you bringing that back and tying this in, particularly as we near the close of this conversation.

Laura Flanders: And honestly, I don’t want to dismiss the importance of those regulations pass by Europe. They are important. They did make a difference. You can tell they made a difference because they scared the heck out of the companies. Microsoft, Google, they all freaked out. So clearly there is some bite to their bark, but I think the bigger problem is inequality and control.

Michael Fox: Yeah, absolutely. Laura, I want to just mention some closing thoughts that have been really important for me in doing this episode and also kind of closing thoughts because this is in a way kind of one of the last episodes of this podcast series. And so I have a couple things that I want to mention and I’m so glad to be doing this with you today. But first I want to go back to Barcelona and back to Cerco Villenueva. So he’s the communications professor I spoke with at the top. And he said something that I think is really important. And this is particular in terms of understanding fake news and disinformation and why it’s so complicated and why it’s so hard to push back on and why it’s so powerful for Trump of others on the far right is he said that it’s hard to combat it because it generates an emotional response.

Sergio Villanueva: This automatic answer is very difficult to train. So some author will say, yes, we can train that by education. I think education has a small part to do, but we need to be aware of how our brain works. So we need to have cognitive science knowledge.

Michael Fox: So he says we have to train our mind around this. We need to live in a constant state of skepticism. And that’s hard. And he told me this just beautiful metaphor, Laura, that’s used by the American psychologist, Jonathan Hate.

Sergio Villanueva: Jonathan Hate explains that our brain is like an elephant that has a jokey. A jokey that writes the elephant. So the automatic brain is the elephant and the jokey is difficult to manage to direct and to drive an elephant. And that jockey has to use a lot of energy to make rational cognitive processes. So I would say that try to train your jockey to be constantly active.

Michael Fox: And that’s kind of like what we’re seeing in terms of trying to handle the amount of fake news. And that’s why it goes so viral so fast. The other thing he said, Laura, is that it is not all bad. Social media is not all bad. The new media ecosystem is not all bad. And I really, as someone who has a teenage daughter and who is trying to grapple with social media means today and having worked on this entire podcast, it was important for me to hear this. So he says young people are living in a different media ecosystem.

Sergio Villanueva: And we cannot teach them how to navigate because we don’t know how to navigate in their ecosystem. So it’s a mutual learning process and we have to be very open to be taught by them.

Michael Fox: Now some youth are actually using AI, using social media in these creative ways to build new stories, to build new myths, new waves of understanding morality. But oftentimes we’re just not seeing it. Maybe we’re not on the same platforms or we’re not following the same stuff because everyone is kind of in their own silo. But there’s this one example that he gave and this is about the Puchina avocado. Have you ever heard of this?

Laura Flanders: No, I’m dying to hear.

Michael Fox: Okay. It is crazy and it’s hilarious. So basically in recent days after he told me about this, I went online and I started looking. It’s mainly on TikTok and they’re all these little one or two minute stories or tales that all start off with the legend of the Puchina avocado. And this is all in Spanish. And so people create their own AI videos. And it could be like I watched one that was like the legend of the Puchina avocado and the football game. And it’s like creating these tiny little myths. And they’re hilarious because they’re clearly done to be funny, but they also have these moral underpinnings. And it’s fascinating because people, they see it and then they copy it and they make their own. So there’s done with AI, there’s done with other forms of AI, these images. And you see this little avocado walking on a football field or little avocado.

It’s crazy, but they really are creating this whole new system of stories.

Sergio Villanueva: And you get into it and you get into a whole world. Histories that are cross values, new heroes, new heroines, new anti-heroes that we are not aware. Yeah, it’s crazy. And I guess this is in Spanish. In English, there are other similar phenomenon like this.

Michael Fox: And it’s really, really beautiful.

Laura Flanders: So how about this, Michael? Instead of a ban on under 16s on the internet, how about we have a ban on over 16s? We can listen, we can learn, but we can’t put more stuff up there. Wouldn’t be good for our businesses you and I, but hey, we could take a pause. I think we might learn something and we might learn something beautiful. How do you spell puchaina?

Michael Fox: P-U-C-H-A-I-N-A. I can send you a link and I will put a link in the show notes to where people can find this. It’s really cool. It’s really cool. The one other thing I want to mention today is one of the things that I’ve really gotten from this whole experience researching, investigating and working on this podcast over the last year, Laura, is how much we are increasingly living in a divided world and that powerful people like Trump and those in Silicon Valley use that division for their gains. It’s us versus them. And that more and more, what I come back to is the need for us to find common ground, to find our common place to return to our society, kind of what you were talking at the top. Democracy is about us being able to listen to each other and having conversations not always agree, but also disagree.

And for me, no one’s asked me what my definition of free speech is in this podcast just yet, but what I – Free speech, Michael. Thank you, Laura. Thank you. What I come back to, for me, free speech, we need to be able to listen. Free speech does not work if we’re not listening. And I mean, I feel really strongly about that. After a year, we have to have the right to speak our voice and we should be required to listen as well. And there is something that I think was really beautiful and really profound from my conversation with Sata from Finland because she talked about this concept that they put in their policy. It’s actually included in their policy booklets around media education, media literacy. And it’s a Finnish concept called. I know I did not pronounce that right and I apologize for those in Finland.

It’s similar to apparently the German concept of buldung and there is no real translation for it in English, but the idea is it’s a holistic process of self-cultivation.

Saara Salomaa: But also with Civistis comes also the kind of tolerance. It doesn’t mean that you would accept everything, but you understand that there are different points of view and different perspectives to many aspects.

Michael Fox: She says, for them, it’s like this key aspect of democracy because facts are important, but they can be used and they can be biased. But Civisti needs to always ground us in society. It’s the way we have to relate with each other in the world. It’s empathy. And I saw it described in one place as a kind heart and a critical mind. And I really like this idea as something to grasp or strive for, to ground us particularly now in this insane world as people are being pushed aside as a way for us to ground us and something to try and bring us together.

Laura Flanders: I for many, many years have used a sign off that I think speaks to exactly that. And recently I had it written on my arm because I felt that I needed to be reminded. And it was simply stay kind, stay curious, which is a lot of what I’m hearing there. And I think you’re right, it’s listening, it’s pausing, it’s empathy using that empathy muscle. I think that as we think about our education process, there’s media literacy, there’s comprehension. We need the arts. We need the arts that encourage people’s imagination and to use their imagination to think themselves into other people’s reality so that maybe there’s a moment of pause between the inhale, oh my God, scary thing and an immigrant did. I’m being told on the internet. And exhale, therefore I should go out. What should I do? Wait, maybe I should think about that.
Immigrant, does this make sense? We need those pauses. So I love this idea and I love this series, Michael. You’ve done a wonderful year of work and you and Mark did an amazing thing. And thank you so much for letting me be part of it here at the tail end. It was a pleasure and a privilege.

Michael Fox: Thank you so much, Laura. I really apreciate it. And it’s such an honor and a pleasure speaking with you today. It’s been a gem. So thank you so, so much.

Audio Clip: You’re welcome.

Michael Fox: Hi folks. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Next time.

Marc Steiner: Now the battle for a free speech is more critical than ever. We have to stand up, tell the stories we have to tell, put it out there in every medium we can find and fight for the right to speak our minds, which will be taken away from us if we don’t. That’s what we face right now.

Michael Fox: Next week I’ll spend the entire hour with my co-host, Marc Steiner. He was with me for the first three episodes and in so many ways his life has represented the epitome of what standing up for free speech should mean. Civil rights activist, community organizer, educator, journalist, radio host. For most of his 80 years, he’s been speaking truth to power and I can’t wait to bring you this exclusive finale to this podcast series. That’s next week 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, leave a review and tell a friend. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. 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.

There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer and sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting in the United States or across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work. I’m adding links to everyone I spoke with today in the show notes and a huge thanks to Laura Flanders. It was really a pleasure having you on the show. I’ll add a link to her show, Laura Flanders and Friends, also in the show notes.

Finally, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you’ll 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.