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| Good evening, it's Thursday, September 19th. | |
| Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. | |
| Tonight, over the past couple of months, Democrats and their leading surrogates have been dispatched, obviously, to attack Jill Stein and the Green Party in ways quite vicious and systematic, in ways that I've never seen before. | |
| They ordinarily love to dump on the Green Party after they lose an election in order to blame the Greens for their loss, as if they own those voters by divine mandate and they were stolen from them. | |
| Their voters were by the Green Party. | |
| And more so they like to do that after the election to avoid taking any responsibility in any way for their own losses. | |
| But it's very rare, I would say almost unprecedented, that they give the Greens party this amount of attention and oxygen by attacking them so vocally and continuously before the election. | |
| That, however, is exactly what Democrats have been doing over the last couple of months and they sent out They're self-identified left-wing spokesmen for the party, people such as AOC and Keith Ellison, to lead the charge against the Greens. | |
| It is very evident that their internal polling, as well as public polling that we've seen, must be showing very alarming data about how many Arab and Muslim voters and even young voters and African-American voters intend to vote for the Greens in key swing states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, because absent that alarming data, they would not be so vocally giving oxygen to the party. | |
| Now, all of these unhinged attacks AOC called the Green Party a, quote, predatory party, have only fueled that party even more, giving them far more attention. | |
| And one of the most beneficial results of all of this has been the elevation in terms of platform and visibility of Stein's vice presidential running mate, the newcomer to politics, at least as a candidate, Butch Ware. | |
| He's a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania, and he's someone who has come from a childhood of immense poverty and instability and deprivation. | |
| And yet Ware has made quite an impact in a very short period of time due to his eloquent and clearly genuinely felt defense of his political and social values. | |
| Last week, both Jill Stein and Bob Butch Ware appeared on The Breakfast Club, the highly popular political show among African Americans and others, and had this very telling exchange with one of the hosts, Angela Rye, as she sought to join the Democratic Party in leading the charge and attacking that duo. | |
| I am personally offended by the way that blackness is being weaponized in this electoral cycle in order to justify white supremacist genocide in Gaza. | |
| Malcolm said of Zionism, of the Zionist state, the Israeli state, he said that this is a white Jewish population, Ashkenazi population. | |
| Being given power by white imperialists to remove brown Arabs from their land. | |
| He said, so therefore Zionism is white supremacy. | |
| In 1979, open letter to the born again, James Baldwin said the same thing. | |
| He said the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews. | |
| It was created for the salvation of Western interests. | |
| When you go through Kwame Ture, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, these are all people that cited The Palestinian resistance movement, not even to bring the Africans, right? | |
| Not to mention Nelson Mandela, not to mention Thomas Sankara, who talked about Zionism as being the face of imperialism in the Middle East, right? | |
| This is what the black radical tradition taught me. | |
| And the black radical tradition taught me that if we weaponize our blackness in favor of white supremacy, then we become apostates from blackness itself. | |
| Because blackness is not a race. | |
| It is an oppositional ideology to white supremacy. | |
| I'm a historian of Africa by training. | |
| Never before in human history had people speaking hundreds of different languages made themselves into one people, developed a common culture so that you and I can relate to one another. | |
| You and I can relate to one another on the basis of a shared culture. | |
| And we got our Latin and Caribbean brothers and sisters, you know, especially Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, but hey, but also, you know, more broadly, right? | |
| They're sharing that culture. | |
| That is a miracle. | |
| It's never happened before in human history. | |
| Because what happened is, is that an oppositional identity to white supremacy came into being. | |
| And that is us. | |
| And when I see that identity now being weaponized to justify the most heinous genocide in our time, Like, Harriet Tubman is rolling over in her grave right now. | |
| Sojourner Truth is rolling over in her grave right now. | |
| Bell Hooks is rolling over in her grave right now. | |
| Who did I miss? | |
| Do you know what I'm saying? | |
| The idea that we would weaponize something as sacred as black womanhood and then utilize this to justify blowing up Palestine. | |
| Now, the more I've watched Ware, the more impressed I become. | |
| And if he continues to try and build the infrastructure and the groundwork for a real 30-party movement in this country, as he insists he intends to do, I have no doubt that his visibility and impact will only grow, as it deserves to. | |
| In a discussion we recorded yesterday, simply because I'm traveling tonight and could not do the show live even though you're looking at me, I'm not actually here, I'm traveling. | |
| But we sat down with him yesterday, we did with Butch Ware, and we had a very wide-ranging conversation that covered his personal and political trajectory, his view of the two-party system, his answers to some of the most powerful and good-faith critiques of the Green Party. | |
| What he has been learning from his ongoing conversations with Muslim, Arab, Latino, and black voters and working class white voters in key swing states, as well as his view on the various ways in which the U.S. | |
| is now engaged in two wars, at least, both in the Middle East and in Ukraine. | |
| Now, whatever your perspective is on his views and ideology, there's no doubt that he brings a new type of energy and passion and advocacy to our national conversation. | |
| He's clearly a charismatic and compelling figure, and I think you will see that, as did I, in the 45 minute or one hour conversation or so that we had with him now before we get to that just a quick programming note Even though tonight is Thursday, and we were ordinarily do our after show on locals tonight We won't be doing that simply because as I said, I'm not actually in the studio live It's just a an illusion that you're seeing here, but we can't do the after show because I'm actually traveling, but we will be back in | |
| Next Tuesday for our standard after show, which we do on both Tuesday and Thursday for members of our local community. | |
| But for now, here is the interview that we conducted with the vice presidential running mate of Jill Stein on the Green Party ticket, Dr. Butch Ware. | |
| Dr. Ware, it's great to see you. | |
| Thank you so much for taking the time to come on our program and talk with us. | |
| We're glad to have you. | |
| Great to be with you, Glenn. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| So you have certainly had over the past several months a significant increase in visibility, definitely doing a lot of the rounds in media, making people very aware. | |
| You've created a lot of positive impact on social media. | |
| So I think people have a good understanding of sort of the summary background of who you are and where you've studied and what you've done. | |
| But politically and ideologically speaking, could you talk about your trajectory from when you got into politics and what led you to the Green Party and now to become a candidate on its national ticket? | |
| it. | |
| Yeah, not sure I am in politics. | |
| I would definitely qualify myself as a public servant before I would qualify myself as a politician. | |
| And I think when reclassified as a public servant, then it's really been 20 plus years doing similar work, activist work, academic work, organizing work, bringing communities together, trying to leverage, you know, kind of public visibility, as well as kind of community backing to bring about social change. | |
| And I think that that was probably what drew me or what put me on the radar with the campaign. | |
| I did an Instagram live with Dr. Jill Stein just to learn more about her candidacy, to learn more about the Green Party platform. | |
| And after I did that, literally within 24 hours, the Green Party reached out to me about the possibility of running as the VP candidate. | |
| So I went through a lengthy vetting process, made a lot of phone calls, reached out to mentors, people in the Palestinian community, in the Black community, the Muslim community more broadly. | |
| And I also realized that, like, I actually have very deep roots with the Green Party that I hadn't thought about, you know, sort of actualizing. | |
| My closest friend growing up, Shawn Young, was actually the son of the longest-serving and first-ever elected Green Party official in the state of Minnesota on the south side of Minneapolis, Annie Young, who was like a backup mother to my single mom. | |
| You know, basically is the one that taught me everything I know about public service and, you know, kind of being engaged in political life in public. | |
| So in a lot of ways, it made a ton of sense. | |
| And then when I found out that actually Dr. Jill Stein had been mentored by Annie Young in her early days in the Green Party, I realized that while some people might not have seen this coming, that this particular move makes a lot of sense at a lot of levels. | |
| There's, of course, a long history that I think is deliberately whitewashed to make people think this never happened, of third-party candidates, of independent candidates having a very major role in our politics going back to the prior century or the century before. | |
| During the Woodrow Wilson administration, Eugene Debs, a socialist candidate, was such a threat that they had to imprison him. | |
| Obviously, you go through the 60s and 70s and you're talking about things like the Black Power Movement and radicals like Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey and the socialists, the Weather Underground that grew up around the Vietnam War. | |
| I think in the last several decades, though, they've really kind of clamped down on this notion that, no, there's just a two-party system. | |
| Unless you're a billionaire, you can't really have any meaningful impact as someone outside of the two-party system. | |
| And a lot of people I know who now support the Green Party who want an alternative to both parties were people who originally, when they got into politics, had critiques of the Democratic Party, but at the end of the day, they felt like voting for them was the best way to advance their values. | |
| however unsightly And I'm wondering if that's the case for you. | |
| Was there a time ever in your kind of political consciousness how you saw the political world and social activism where you felt like the Democratic Party was a viable vehicle for you to do work in? | |
| Never, not for a single day in my entire life. | |
| And the reason is that Malcolm X, Alhaj Malik Shabazz, was, you know, sort of, you know, a mentor at distance, you know, temporally and spatially. | |
| You know, I was born in 1973. | |
| Malcolm, you know, passed away before I came along. | |
| But the autobiography of Malcolm X led to my conversion to Islam, was the beginning of political consciousness for me at age 15. | |
| And Malcolm warned, you know, about The liberal, he described the liberal as a fox. | |
| It bears its teeth and you think that it is smiling at you but you are on the menu. | |
| Whereas the conservative is a wolf, it bears its teeth and you know that it's there to eat. | |
| So I've never in my entire adult life Trusted either liberals or conservatives and the two, you know party system that we well, we don't have a two-party system But the two parties that have come to dominate the American political system are dominated by liberals and conservatives. | |
| So I've never Thrown my lot in with the Democratic Party at any level. | |
| I voted for the Democrats In my first election that I ever voted Bill Clinton I voted for Clinton in the first time around I was 18 years old and I voted for Obama in In 2008, and I think that those are the only two times that I've actually voted in a presidential election. | |
| I'd have to, you know, go back and check on that. | |
| I think I've voted in primaries at other points in time. | |
| My mom was somewhat engaged in Democratic Party politics in the city of Minneapolis, but because of Annie, we mostly stayed around green and third party movements. | |
| To return to your broader question, Yeah, so that Bill Clinton election was the beginning of the end of viable options for third parties for a generation. | |
| And the reason is Clinton sold out on campaign finance reform. | |
| My own understanding was that At that point in time, you know, the Democratic Party was interested in campaign finance reform because all the corporate money was behind the Republican Party. | |
| And this was something people now forget that Bill Clinton ran on. | |
| And I was actually very much motivated by this because I thought that the influence of money in politics was going to make it impossible for people like Annie Young and others to do well and be successful. | |
| And what the Democrats found out is that if they went corporate too, they could raise as much money or more than the Republicans could raise. | |
| And we saw essentially for the past 30 plus years, the Clinton political machine dominate the Democratic Party and go further and further towards corporate selling out to the point that they are now fundamentally indistinguishable. | |
| There is an ideological difference between quote-unquote liberals and quote-unquote conservatives, but there is no functional difference between Team Blue and Team Red when it comes to their beholdenness to AIPAC, to the war machine, to the 1%, to corporate dollars. | |
| And I made a social media post before I ever joined the campaign that I said whether you vote Team Blue or Team Red, militarized fascism wins. | |
| Because what we're essentially seeing in the struggle between Democrats and Republicans is a struggle for factional control over the corporate machine of the 1%. | |
| Their patronage networks overlap, you know, fundamentally with AIPAC and the war machine. | |
| And there are just kind of fights at the margin between certain kinds of identity groups on one side and Christian nationalists on the other. | |
| But ultimately, they say they say they serve the same corporate masters. | |
| And you are now seeing this with Team Blue, as they recruit, you know, people that were well to the right of Ronald Reagan. | |
| And without blinking an eye, you know, the Democratic Party embraces war criminals like Dick Cheney, because fundamentally, Team Blue and Team Red are the same team. | |
| I call them purple fascists. | |
| Yeah, it was really interesting when Liz Cheney talked about not only her endorsement of Kamala, but also her father's. | |
| She made very clear it's not just because of animosity toward Trump or his comportment. | |
| She said very clearly that I'm more comfortable with the foreign policy ideology. | |
| Of the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, and I am a Trump-led Republican Party, and no one was even confused by that. | |
| For me, that made complete sense. | |
| If I were Dick Cheney and my views had been what they had been his whole life, I'd feel very comfortable in the Democratic Party as it's currently constituted as well. | |
| Let me ask you, just on a personal note, it kind of attracted my attention that you said, look, I'm not a politician. | |
| Don't call me that. | |
| You know, but the reality is if you're running for Any office where you're trying to get votes for yourself. | |
| By definition, you sort of are, even if you don't think of yourself primarily as that, which I understand. | |
| I'm wondering, though, in the past, the Democrats attacked the Greens only when they lost and needed somebody to blame for their own failures. | |
| They couldn't, of course, accept responsibility. | |
| So it would be, oh, after the election's over, we're going to keep all this scoring on Ralph Nader, and then in 2000, and then Jill Stein in 2016, and blame them. | |
| This time, I think it's the first time we're seeing this, There's a great deal of venom and attacks in a very coordinated way coming from some of the most prominent surrogates of the Democratic Party, AOC, Keith Ellison, coordinated DNC attacks, not just on both of you, but sort of on your person and your integrity. | |
| I mean, AOC called your party predators. | |
| I'm wondering if... Yeah, predatory, exactly. | |
| I'm wondering if I guess predators is the noun for being predatory. | |
| But I'm wondering, I assume you knew you were going to open yourself up to attacks, but I'm wondering whether you understood or expected that it was going to be at the level of vitriol and kind of personal destruction that you're now seeing it. | |
| Yeah, I mean, to be perfectly honest, those really pathetic and meek attacks made me know nevermind. | |
| I was not in the least bit moved by AOC Pelosi or Kunta Keith Ellison and their unfortunate attempts. | |
| Because the Democratic Party, and George Takei for that matter, so they round up people of color and use them as their attack dogs because the Democrat Party is a plantation. | |
| Massa say jump and they say how high and they have to. | |
| What's ironic about the attack from Keith Ellison is I had literally seen Keith Ellison at Friday prayers on the north side of Minneapolis in a neighborhood mosque that we've both gone to for years and he's known me for years. | |
| And like he shook my hand. | |
| I gave the Friday sermon that day and he came up to me and talked about how moved he was by my words. | |
| And I said, can we get a picture together, brother? | |
| And he said, absolutely. | |
| I said, this picture is not going to get you in trouble. | |
| And he said, no. | |
| And he said, we agreed that we would talk about things black man to black man, Muslim to Muslim. | |
| But then as soon as... | |
| As the Democrats call him out for a hit job, he has to go and do what he did. | |
| And so I'm not the least bit surprised. | |
| It's unfortunate. | |
| But to be perfectly honest, I mean, my mentors and heroes in black resistance movements, people like Malcolm, people like Fred Hampton, people like Kwame Turek, people like Huey, P. Newton. | |
| These are people that were running for their lives or standing and fighting for their lives. | |
| So, you know, these little sorry attacks from the Democrats, that doesn't do anything to me. | |
| And let me just say one other thing about these really unfortunate and ill-fated, because they have not been effective. | |
| They've actually, quite the contrary, they've served to amplify our message as Greens. | |
| The only reason why they are making these attacks beforehand, rather than, you know, clean up on aisle blue after the fact, is because Democratic polling has to be showing what I've known since I joined the campaign and started to do a careful study, which is that the Democrats cannot win in any of the swing states that they need in order to win the election. | |
| The Muslim vote in 2020 in the swing states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan was 65% of the vote. | |
| That dropped to 12% with Biden. | |
| And there's polling that is about to come out from a major Muslim institution that shows that right now in the Muslim community nationwide, over 50% of the vote is going towards third party with us taking the lion's share of that percentage. | |
| and that about 15% of the Muslim vote is going to Harris and 4% to Trump. | |
| The Democrats are dead. | |
| And I know it, they know it, the American people don't know it because CNN and MSNBC run cover for them, but they have absolutely no hope of winning this November election. | |
| And so personally, I've turned my attention to trying to draw Those Bernie Trump voters and to make a cogent argument to people that haven't registered at all, because I think that the Democratic Party is about to go the way of the Whigs. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it's very obvious they would never be giving you airtime and oxygen and attention if you weren't actually a threat to them. | |
| And that's exactly what I said when I saw Keith Ellison following O.C. | |
| is their internal polling on this must be extremely disturbing to them. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Let me ask you about a couple of critiques of the Green Party that come not only in bad faith from Democratic hacks like the two we've been talking about, but Most recently as well from Ralph Nader who gave an interview in Mother Jones where he said, I don't have any regrets about running in 2000. | |
| I want to see a vibrant third party in the United States. | |
| That's one of the most important things. | |
| The one concern I have about the Green Party is that there's not a lot of work, a sufficient amount of work being done between the four years when you get a lot of attention because of the presidential election. | |
| And I've had Dr. Stein on my show many times before I've asked her about this. | |
| I know what the argument is. | |
| No, we have this, we have that, we have this, we have that. | |
| But when it comes from Alf Nader, I think it's a pretty serious critique that has to be analyzed and not defensively rejected. | |
| Do you agree with the critique that, I know it's not that there's nothing, that you just pop your head up every four years and then disappear, but can the Green Party and should the Green Party be doing a lot more to kind of build a more sustainable, a larger grassroots movement? | |
| I would not have joined this campaign if I did not think that we could and should grow the party between four year presidential cycles. | |
| And I've made the commitment personally, internally, you can now break the story, Glenn, you're going to be the first one to have this, that I have been doing research with my team, and I fully intend to run for governor of the state of California in 2026. | |
| And I am putting together a slate personally, like, of people that I have worked with, you know, over the past two decades. | |
| And, you know, in consultation with Jill, in consultation with our campaign manager, Jason Call, of putting together a roster of people to run for congressional seats, quite possibly one to run for a Senate seat. | |
| So I absolutely agree with the... | |
| So we know that there's a bad faith version of this argument, right? | |
| But there is a good version of this argument. | |
| Now, the good faith version of the argument perhaps understates the importance of that four-year electoral run, which is that without that presidential candidate at the top of the ticket, ballot access is compromised. | |
| Um, you know, uh, uh, in subsequent years and the, the ability to, for the, of the green party to stay on nationwide ballots is extraordinary amongst, um, what, you know, Dr. Jill refers to as people powered parties, right? | |
| Usually people powered parties show up for one or perhaps two electoral cycles and simply cannot maintain. | |
| Um, and the reason why I considered this, um, offer seriously and eventually accepted it is that, you know, The Green Party, going back to its roots at Macalester in 1984, has demonstrated not only the staying power, but the capacity to extend its electoral reach. | |
| We are on enough ballots to win the election, and I would not have joined any campaign that did not have the capacity to win this election, even if it is a Muhammad Ali, Sonny Liston, one-in-a-thousand type shot. | |
| As a black Muslim, I'm happy with taking Ali odds. | |
| And I think that even if we don't land that knockout punch this time around, that the visibility of this national campaign combined with a consistent approach to running for congressional and Senate and mayoral and gubernatorial, that by filling out a robust roster and slate of candidates, that we are going to be very, very well poised in 2028. | |
| I would never ask a candidate to affirm the idea that there's no way to win. | |
| That would be ridiculous, nor should you affirm that. | |
| As you say, you're on the ballot in all 50 states. | |
| Strange things happen. | |
| 47 technically. | |
| Because Democrats have gotten you removed. | |
| Exactly. | |
| There are three states. | |
| It's only, I think, like 15 or 19 electoral college votes that we're ineligible for. | |
| But yeah, other than that, we're doing pretty damn good. | |
| Right. | |
| Because the party that loves democracy has made such a concerted effort to get you off the ballot in as many states as they can. | |
| But what I'm really interested in is like, When you spend a lot of time talking to grassroots voters and, you know, we have all these elites who are anointed in the media and NGOs who purport to speak on the behalf of people in various groups with whom they actually have nothing in common or very little in common. | |
| There's a huge gap between elite discourse for many groups and what the people in those groups are actually thinking. | |
| We see there's so much evidence for that. | |
| When you go and you speak to Muslim and Arab voters, particularly in places like Michigan or Pennsylvania and other states where their votes can matter, I'm curious what kind of pitch to them that, especially if they're not convinced that you're going to win, but nonetheless want to support you, what do you think is their driving What is the motive for that? | |
| Is it that they just want to kind of hurt Democrats out of anger? | |
| Is it that they want to make clear what their protest is with the hope that the Democrats will know that they can't continue to get their votes for nothing? | |
| What is it that they're thinking rationally about why they want to do that? | |
| Excellent question. | |
| So I'll tell you what it's not. | |
| It is not a protest vote that is designed to make the Democrats do anything. | |
| The Democrat Party has lost Muslim voters and it will not get them back. | |
| Participation in a genocide where you have offed one-tenth of the population of the third holiest place in Islam, that That loses you, the Muslims, forever. | |
| So the Democrats are never getting the Muslim vote back, and the Muslim vote is growing. | |
| And just with respect to interaction with communities, let's just be clear. | |
| So first and foremost, the Black Muslim community, the African-American Muslim community, is still the largest single ethnic contingent inside the Muslim community in America. | |
| So that means that when I'm having face-to-face conversation with folks about this, it also means that there's this massive section of the black community that is in no way listening at all to anything the Democrats have to say. | |
| They have simply checked out of the Democrat Party altogether and have no interest in ever voting for them again. | |
| So when you talk about Muslims now specifically, and I'm somebody that has served not just as a kind of academic position, but I give Friday sermons routinely at different places around the country. | |
| I've never, you know, kind of tried to depict myself as a spiritual leader, but I am rooted in the Islamic tradition in ways, you know, probably that are similar to the way somebody like Raphael Warnock would be rooted in the Black Christian tradition. | |
| So when I make this argument in the Muslim community, black, Arab, South Asian, white convert, all of them, there's a very clear argument that comes back, which is that nobody wants to have their vote recorded in the eternal tablets as having co-signed for genocide. | |
| And quite the opposite, people want to have an opportunity to register their descent from this moral abomination. | |
| They want to write this in the registries of, you know, of cosmic scales. | |
| Or for those that are just people of conscience, more than they are conscience people, people of conscience rather than people of faith, they want history to record their descent. | |
| from the most heinous genocide that we have witnessed in our lifetimes. | |
| I think that it's very, very difficult to overstate the extent of the moral repugnance of this genocide for all people with functioning hearts, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, agnostic, all of the above. | |
| If you have anything resembling compassion or mercy for humanity in your heart, you cannot take seriously voting for the people that are complicit in execution of this genocide. | |
| And I think that... I can't tell you... Okay, sorry, go ahead. | |
| No, go ahead. | |
| I was going to say, there are a few things that have made me more disgusted and enraged than watching a lot of establishment left liberals posture in a very radical pose over the last 10 months by screaming genocide, this is a genocide. | |
| Making a lot of benefits for themselves and traffic and profit and better branding who on a dime very predictably turn around now and aren't just saying they're going to vote for the part of the government, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, that have been arming the Israelis, that have been funding the Israelis, that have, as you said, facilitated it. | |
| But who also, they're being very enthusiastic about it. | |
| Like, oh, they're lying to themselves and others saying, this is going to change. | |
| How is it that you can, on the one hand, accuse people credibly of facilitating and being a conspirator in genocide? | |
| And then turn around and devote all your energy to continuing to empower those very people who did it unless you have no authenticity in what you said or you just don't have a soul. | |
| I think you said it so well and it was kind of cathartic for me to hear that. | |
| Let me ask you a question, a critique of the left that I think is really important. | |
| As you might know, I've been based in Brazil for a long time, and there was a sort of, you know, Brazil has been dominated by what you could call the left. | |
| It's really a center-left party, not a left-wing party that, you know, would be recognized by real left-wing radicals. | |
| But it's certainly more to the left. | |
| Lula da Silva, you know, was born poor, very poor. | |
| He then, you know, got his start working in factories where he lost a finger. | |
| He became a union leader. | |
| So it's a very obvious trajectory and kind of, you know, origin out of which he's coming. | |
| And as a result, even just the way he speaks, you know, it's mocked by the elites. | |
| He's Portuguese. | |
| He makes, you know, errors that people in very elite circles in Sao Paulo and sort of the city centers mock him for it. | |
| It just gives him more of a connection to the people. | |
| because he's so obviously one of them. | |
| Sounds like my kind of guy. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, in terms of political talent, there are very few people like him. | |
| But the problem is, is that in the Brazilian left, and I think this is true of the left throughout the democratic world, certainly in Western Europe and in the United States, the left has started to become a party of affluent, credentialed elites who are really removed from the ordinary people on credentialed elites who are really removed from the ordinary people on whose behalf they're trying to And I don't want to make it personal, but Jill Stein, who's heading this ticket, is a Harvard-trained internist who practiced medicine at a very high level. | |
| You yourself are a PhD in history from one of America's most elite schools. | |
| I don't think that precludes you from keeping a connection to ordinary people, but I do think it makes it more of a challenge. | |
| And I think that's one of the reasons why we're seeing so many people who could easily support a left-wing agenda, you know, you sort of talked about the Bernie Trump voter, migrating instead to right-wing populism that seems to have a much better capacity to speak in a language that they respond to more viscerally, that doesn't seem patronizing or artificial. | |
| First of all, do you agree with that critique of the left and the democratic world, this difficulty? | |
| And if you do, what do you think can be done about it? | |
| I would not put the left and the democratic world together in that equation. | |
| So similar, perhaps, to the depiction that you would offer, I actually don't really see the Green Party, and some people in the Green Party would have a problem with this characterization, but I'm just going to be blunt about it. | |
| I see it also as a center-left party. | |
| I see the Democrats and the Republicans as being so far to the extreme right that they are barely visible from the center-left. | |
| And what I would say in response to this, like for myself personally, let me just be clear. | |
| So I'm the son of a locksmith with a sixth grade education. | |
| My mother was a teenage mother who at the age of 15 was pregnant with me and was told by her high school guidance counselor to abort the child. | |
| I never lived at the same street address for a calendar year consecutively until I was nine years old. | |
| Living at relatives houses one eviction after the next sometimes living in a vehicle Sometimes living in a battered women's shelter sometimes living in other kinds of shelters It was having the heat cut off the electricity cut off through my childhood Learning to use the stove at eight years old because my mom was working two jobs to try to keep a roof over our head and so I was cooking for my brother at age eight so | |
| I fundamentally and thoroughly reject the idea that there is anything elite or elitist about my background. | |
| I was able to get a PhD and have taught at major research universities for the last 20 years. | |
| And most of my organizing and activist work has been inside Black and Muslim communities that are oftentimes operating below the poverty level. | |
| And those are my primary constituencies. | |
| Those are the people that I ask to hold me accountable. | |
| Yes, I can sometimes get academic in my jargon and my lingo, but I can also always try to find a way to express things in ways that are going to be relatable to your average person that is trying to make sure that they get the next meal onto the table. | |
| So, yes, I agree with your overall depiction in some ways, especially of the Democrats, obviously, especially of some doctrinaire leftists, but I don't consider myself any of those things. but I don't consider myself any of those things. | |
| I consider myself somebody that is raised and steeped in the black radical resistance and revolutionary tradition, but that I've always been Yeah, I've seen this many times, including with my late husband who was a member of Congress but grew up in a favela in Brazil, was an orphan at the age of five, often didn't have food. | |
| Those kind of experiences mark you forever. | |
| They become a part of you even if you want to escape them, which he didn't. | |
| It doesn't sound like you do. | |
| They're in your blood, they're in your bones, and you speak about them not as an abstraction, but as something that you just understand on such a visceral level, and I think that's a big part of it. | |
| You know, you can be well-intentioned, you can be kind-hearted, you can be empathetic, but if these issues are kind of an abstraction to you from in terms of the way you've lived your life, I think it's very difficult to, unless you're kind of a sociopathic, you know, political talent, to convince people that you understand them. | |
| When I talk about the impact of the carceral state, I'm talking about my dad being in and out of jail, in and out of our lives. | |
| When I talk about the dependency complex that the Democrats have cultivated, I'm literally thinking about going and visiting my half-brothers on the most dangerous block in Washington, D.C., the corner of Georgia and Morton, where I got shot at almost every time I visited them. | |
| And during the time when my dad, who essentially drank himself to death on the streets of D.C., but in one of the time periods where he was clean, I'm going to visit my half-brothers at that block, which they called Lorton Morton, because it was essentially a back and forth between that block at Georgia and Morton and the Lorton Penitentiary. | |
| that he had all of his clothes in trash bags in my stepmother's closet because the welfare people that provided her benefits would do spot checks to see if there was a male living in the household. | |
| So at a time when my father was doing everything that he could to get himself clean and straight and be there for his kids, The dependency complex that the Democrats have cultivated, we're making it so that it was incentivized that there not be a male in the household. | |
| So he's literally living with his stuff in trash bags. | |
| If you do not know what that experience looks and feels like up close, then miss me with everything that you have to recommend in the way of policy. | |
| Totally. | |
| And I think, honestly, the reason why you've made the impact that I referred to earlier, and I guess you'll like this since you want to avoid the professional politician label, is because I think the way you're speaking, it's not even the ideology or the fact that you're a Green Party member, I think the way you're speaking is a much rarer and more authentic form of communication that translates so well, it becomes so conspicuous when surrounded by so many people who just don't have the capacity to do that or their willingness to do it because they just don't have the experience for it. | |
| Let me ask you this last question. | |
| Um... | |
| One of the, I know there's a wide range of issues that both Dr. Stein and yourself and the party are emphasizing during this campaign, but clearly one of the things that is front and center is the fact that you're the only ones who remotely want the U.S. | |
| to stop arming and funding the Israeli state in general, having American workers pay for the Israeli military, supporting and placing no limits on what they can do with American weapons, and that's a huge issue for a lot of people. | |
| What do you, in these conversations you're having, these trips you're having, is that an issue that, obviously for Muslim and Arab voters it is, including for black Muslims, but when you're talking about, say, African Americans in these swing states in the Midwest, people like that, and they're migrating away from the Democratic Party, is this an issue of central importance to them, or is it just more kind of symbolizes what the values of this party really are? | |
| So I think both. | |
| So the first thing that I would say is that if you look at the people that have been bearing the brunt of the repressive attacks on campus, encampments and so forth, These have been people of color broadly, and especially African Americans. | |
| Like, Black folks have been at the forefront of a lot of these struggles. | |
| And while, yes, it's true that, you know, kind of there's been a weaponization of Black identity that Kamala has tapped into, you know, and that many of us are struggling against, it's nonetheless the case that Black communities specifically have been at the forefront of the Free Palestine movement, in large part because people like Malcolm | |
| People like Kwame Ture, people like James Baldwin, people like Angela Davis, people like Assata Shakur, people like Thomas Sankara, people like Nelson Mandela, all taught us, the black radical tradition as a whole, taught us that the Palestinian freedom struggle was an important part of anti-imperial struggle Because this was a struggle against white supremacy, and I actually started the hashtag in 2021, Zionism is White Supremacy, based on the teachings of those scholars. | |
| So the first thing that I would say is that yes, this absolutely is an issue in Black communities, though for an older demographic, it is not as acute, right? | |
| That there are, you know, kind of entrenched political allegiances on the north side of 30 to the Democratic Party in all kinds of communities of color that we have to work against. | |
| Which brings me to really the fundamental response to your question. | |
| For the 18 to 30 demographic, the freedom in Palestine and the freedom from fascism here, not just red fascism, but blue fascism, with the establishment of these cop cities, with the attacks on encampments. | |
| Listen, the 18 to 30 demographic is something like 70 to 80 percent against the genocide in Gaza. | |
| This is a group of youth that are mobilized and actualized. | |
| And I'm not going to give away any of the kind of campaign secrets that I've literally brought into the campaign about how to reach that generation. | |
| But let's just say that they did not ban TikTok fast enough. | |
| That we have a technical plan to increase voter registration and turnout in that 18 to 30 demographic by 20 to 30%. | |
| And if we are able to do that across the board, then we are going to tap into this vast and deep well of resistance to imperialism abroad and fascism here at home in this younger generation. | |
| And like Ali did, we might just shock the world. | |
| Yeah, it was very apparent to me the first, second, third time that I saw you participating in these public conversations that your visibility, your impact were only going to grow. | |
| And if you continue down the road that you're describing, which I really hope you will, I think that's just going to continue even more. | |
| It's been great to talk to you. | |
| I wish I had more time. | |
| I actually have a lot of things, other things that I wanted to ask you about, but we'd love to have you back on. | |
| And I hope you continue doing what you're doing. | |
| And thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us. | |
| Anytime, brother. | |
| Let's make it happen again. | |
| Absolutely. |