Why Colleges Have No Idea How To Handle Student Protests
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the pro Palestinian protests on the campus of Columbia University and the poor response by the administration, including sending in the NYPD to arrest people. They shift to the impending House bill brought forth by speaker Mike Johnson and how it could lead to the end of his reign, before talking about the Comstock Act and what it means to protecting abortion rights.
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I'm here with my good partner and friend, Nick Halseman.
Happy Passover, McCraig.
Well, thank you, Jared.
I appreciate it.
I'm in the midst of making a beautiful brisket, and the wafting smell is already intoxicating.
That's lovely.
I wish I was out in Los Angeles.
Is it warmer?
No.
It is not acceptable what's going on out here.
It's not acceptable.
Well, you know what, Nick?
Luckily, we have a show that is filled with happiness today.
Just kidding.
We have a lot of controversies and big events that we have to get into.
A reminder, go over to patreon.com slash my great podcast, become a patron, gain access to the weekly weekend or show on Fridays.
Also, keep us ad free, editorially independent and growing.
And we thank everybody who's supporting the show.
Nick, we got a growing situation within the United States of America.
It looks a lot like past histories in a lot of different ways.
It has new wrinkles and new schisms that we need to get into and really, really get our hands dirty with.
Students at Columbia have organized what they are calling the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
This last Wednesday, President Nimat Shafik brought in the NYPD, arrested 108 of them.
Since then, classes have been either canceled or moved online.
There's been massive walkouts, a huge, huge political war that's taken place there.
Since Similar encampments have grown now at Yale, where riot police were brought in, SWAT team members were brought in to arrest more members of the Yale protest movement.
It's happened at MIT and Emerson.
This was the first time Since 1968, that police and law enforcement were brought in in order to quell a student uprising in a campus, which 1968 should be in the forefront of everyone's brains.
Nick, this is a developing You and I have a lot of thoughts on this.
We have a lot of ground to cover on it.
the brutality in Gaza, the political differences between leadership and Americans on this, especially younger people.
You and I have a lot of thoughts on this.
We have a lot of ground to cover on it.
I'll go ahead and pass it over to you.
Okay.
I think the first thing we could maybe just get out of the way is that, you know, since October, they've had a heavy police presence, NYPD, which has been a real source of a problem for like people of color who, you know, who are plagued by the NYPD.
And it's not like a conspiracy theory, there's plenty of data to prove that like, people of color get harassed a lot more than anybody else in New York with NYPD.
So that's that's kind of like one of the bigger problems I think overall that's been hovering around this that has put everybody on edge for months and months and months so and I can just tell you right now watching the footage and going through this it puts me on edge and I would like to think that I'd be inspired to remember what it was like or I don't remember what it was like you know in the 60s but like
To what was, it was a proud moment in my mind in our history where we had people on these campuses who were standing up for what they believed in and trying to affect change and especially back then against the war was a really important protest.
So, but this is different, right?
This is different because everybody is really upset and everybody is persecuted in some respects from both sides.
And, you know, I have a lot more thoughts, but like at the very least, I'm thinking that what the NYPD presence is doing is not helping anybody.
No, it was an escalation of the entire thing.
And, you know, it's a regular thing for me on this podcast and anywhere I get interviewed to remind people that I was in academia for 16 years and that college administrators are some of the most inept, cowardly, oppressive human beings that you will ever come across.
We have seen that.
That is one of the reasons why the situation at Columbia and now at Yale have gotten completely out of control, because leadership is not there in order to lead.
It's there to shuffle people through on behalf of capital.
That's it.
That's the main problem when it comes to the president of Columbia and the president of NYPD.
I want to go ahead and I want to say a few things because, and listen, as always, Nick and I are friends.
We don't necessarily agree all the time when it comes to Israel and Gaza and what has happened.
We've fleshed this thing out.
I would hope that this podcast is at times instructive in how people could not necessarily be completely on the same page and have a dialogue.
Let's go ahead and set a few baseline stuff, Nick.
First things first, there is such a thing as anti-Semitism.
It is a poisonous, poisonous conspiracy theory, white supremacist, right-wing reactionary thing.
It has been used to kill millions upon millions of Jews, not just in the Holocaust, but before the Holocaust.
It has been used as a means of the powerful replicating and expanding their power.
It is an awful, awful stain on the human condition, and there is no room for it.
We have seen it with the right wing.
And Nick, I'm going to go ahead and tell you, I have no doubt that there are anti-Semitic things being said at these protests.
I have absolutely no doubt that there are.
I have no doubt that there are things that are happening there that are upsetting and intimidating.
I will also say that if I were to grab you like a crane game and I were to take you through time and drop you onto a college campus in 1968 in the anti-war movement or free speech movement, civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the feminist movement, that you would hear some shit that's pretty offensive.
You would hear some people saying some things that would probably not be great.
I mean, listen, I certainly in the 1960s would not have protested the Vietnam War movement by throwing my weight behind Joseph Stalin.
I certainly wouldn't have done it by throwing my weight behind Mao Zedong.
I certainly wouldn't be, you know, running around talking about assassinating figures.
I wouldn't have joined the Weather Underground.
That's not who I am.
I wouldn't have bombed, you know, federal buildings.
What I have heard From people who have been on the ground, is that there is a massive difference between the campus community that is protesting here and people who are coming in from outside the campus community.
It sounds like there are provocateurs.
It sounds like there are people who are coming in who are radical and they want to come in and they want to spew either pure anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism as they understand it.
I think that that, quite frankly, I think that these protest movements and communities, it's on them to tell these people to knock it off or get out of there.
But I do think that this is a moment that we should probably look through the lens and say, Listen, you don't want to be on the wrong side of history.
What has happened in Gaza is disgusting.
It is okay that we have a protest movement about it.
It should show you that there's a beating heart within the American population.
I support this.
I have solidarity with these people, but I also think that there's no room for anti-Semitism in these protests.
Thank you, yeah, I agree, and I would definitely, you know, if there were Jewish students who are walking across and seeing people dressed like in Hamas, you know, flags and masks and chanting pro-Hamas things, I would certainly understand if they felt intimidated or scared, you know, and on a college campus, you know, that was what, you know, the administration are supposedly in charge of Trying to help that, but I'm trying to figure out where to unpack all this because there are so many things that you said.
Let's just focus on I think when we talk about how you characterize the administration, you know, there is no one in our audience.
I don't think is going to defend them or is on their side necessarily, but I think I like to deal in sort of concrete ideas and solutions.
So I think that the answer what they don't seem to understand and references what you were how you characterize them is that they don't understand how to create a place to have the dialogue.
No idea.
Right.
So if they could, and by the way, they are probably so scared of some sort of, you know, if you bring together these two groups to have a Not even a debate, but just some sort of coming together meeting where we can discuss things, right?
They're probably so afraid of a spark happening or whatever that that was why they don't do it.
But if they don't come down and by themselves, you know, the Dean of Columbia should come down and meet with them one-on-one.
And have that dialogue, to have them feel heard at the very least, right?
To begin the process of filing this thing out.
And that, I think, is probably the biggest issue, is that they don't think that they want to do that, or have to do that, or are scared to do that.
Well, they don't believe it's the place of the university to have those discussions.
They believe that this is a job training center.
Is what it is.
And quite frankly, I think the administrators we have in place, I think people need to understand this.
In the past, it used to be professors and teachers who would eventually become university presidents who were very interested in the academic and sort of the inquisitive world of the mind, right?
That the college was the square where people came together to have conversations, to experiment with things, to figure out who they were.
These are corporate executives.
Is what they are.
They have no interest in the campus being that, and quite frankly, and I think this is what's been in play, Nick.
I think with Shafiq and with other administrators, they're the ones who look at the 1960s and 1970s.
They don't want that.
They're frightened of that.
And I think that everybody has in their minds that universities and colleges are like what happened in the 60s and 70s.
No.
That was an aberration.
Because this is where you get introduced into the capitalist system.
They have no desire to do it.
And for the record, Nick, while we're on the subject, remember a few years ago?
When all of these right-wing anti-Semitic assholes were going to college campuses and giving speeches and the campus community would have to run them off, they didn't know how to handle that either.
They have no idea how to have a university that is involved in these types of things.
They have no appetite for it.
They would much rather have the NYPD come in and carve people away.
And to piggyback on what you said, it's probably fair to say that any of the professors that would move up to become the heads of the school were probably because they were well-respected and well-liked and they were good at their jobs.
And to be good as a professor, you need to know how to communicate and listen and mediate.
And I think that's that skill that some of these people don't have at all anymore.
Well, just real fast, I want to say, you become like a college president now by being a bootlicker.
You basically, you deal with like the state representatives who tell you what to do, right?
Or a chancellor of like a bunch of colleges who tells you what to do.
You're basically a middle manager, going back to what we were talking about the other day.
But Nick, here's the other problem.
It used to be the professors who were the leaders of a campus.
They were the ones who helped facilitate conversations.
They were the ones who could do things like have teach-ins, who could have conversations, and basically like have all this stuff that you're talking about on campus.
They have been reduced down to being like automatons.
They have too many classes, they have too many students, and they are constantly told that they're replaceable.
So they're not actually campus leaders anymore.
What you're seeing right now are students are actually organizing themselves when in fact in the past there used to be the ability for these things to take place and have conversations about them and bring people together for that matter.
Absolutely.
And by the way, the outside protesters is another layer here, which starts to make me understand a little bit why they might have wanted to broach the NYPD getting involved.
Because as a father of a daughter on a campus right now, I'm already nervous for her safety.
And the last thing I want is people who are not part of the community, not part of the campus, wandering around on campus.
That would not be I would not feel good about that at all.
And then if it's now in an incendiary environment of a process, I totally I understand that as well.
And I'm not exactly sure what the solution to that would be because if you wanted more security and you didn't want to use NYPD because of what they stand for.
I mean, is it as simple as saying, OK, we are going to have our security beef that up, our own security, I guess?
No, the answer isn't giving more money or more power to the security.
It's what has happened, Nick.
Shafik threw like a hornet's nest into a giant hornet's nest.
You know what I mean?
And it just took off from there.
It has now turned into an oppositional thing.
Like it is now this president, who, by the way, for people who don't know, The students who got arrested were evicted from their housing immediately in New York City.
They were given 15 minutes to go and get their belongings, okay, and then thrown out on the street.
On top of that, they were completely thrown off campus.
They, you know, suspended all that.
What has happened is this has turned into an adversarial situation.
And so now, why wouldn't you welcome in anybody who wants to protest with you?
There's safety in numbers, aren't there?
You know, the NYPD coming in and get you.
Like, this has been a very, very peaceful protest, and it has gotten worse and worse.
And we got to talk about this, Nick.
The Biden administration has weighed in with a statement.
Unfortunately, Biden's statement only talked about the alarming rise of anti-Semitism, which is a problem.
It has no place on college campuses, has called it, quote-unquote, the anti-Semitic protest.
I gotta tell you, Nick, first of all, I think this is disappointing.
I think that this is where the Democratic Party is supposed to stand in and work with people.
But of course, this is the party that now supports this war and owns this war.
We are working toward a DNC convention that is going to be really ugly.
In August in Chicago.
And I told everybody that it could very well look like the 1968 Chicago Convention.
Everything is in place for that right now.
This is turning into a major, major political problem for the Biden administration and his re-election campaign.
Yeah, having grown up in Chicago and knew about this, it was before I was born, but the 68 protests were a really dark black stain on the Chicago Police Department in general.
And so you would hope that they would have that in mind going into this and make sure like we're not going to have that happen again.
We're not going to have...
Can you tell the people who might not know the history, can you tell them what happened at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention?
Yeah, well in Grant Park, which is this beautiful big park, they were having, it got out of hand very quickly, but the cops just started beating the shit out of everybody.
Can we, can we use the term, like, I think we can still, you know, you know what the thing's called, the big trucks they use to take people away?
You know what it is?
The wagons, yeah.
The wagons are called, okay I'm just gonna tell you and I'll just explain it because it probably isn't acceptable to use the term, but they called them paddy wagons back in the day and that's referring to I think the Irish people that they would be throwing in there even before that.
Nonetheless, they had them all lined up and they went in there and it was probably in a similar vein to what we saw in the park across the White House when Trump walked through to the Worse!
I mean, it was an all-time brutal thing.
Mayor Daley, of course, wanted to protect the Democratic National Convention, and anti-war protesters came to the park, and it absolutely stained the convention and the Democratic Party for years.
Yeah, and so you'd hope that they wouldn't, you know, they'd sort of have that in mind and want to try and be, you know, evolved from that.
But again, I don't know if I have any confidence that the Chicago PD has evolved at all since then.
So, you know, but the thing with the, just to get back to the South Lawn and Columbia,
Is that you know if you look at the image as much as you can you know there's a lot of tents and they're on the grass um and a lot of it does seem like the university would have been better off letting them do it right and if they let them do it at some amount of time goes past they probably will lose some energy and then it'll gonna go away whatever now again if we have a whole section of other students there that have a pretty big percentage of the of the student body
You know, constantly saying, well, we feel really we have to walk this way to class and we were feeling threatened.
I understand why there needs to be some mediation, but that's why they need to come together and talk this thing out and make everybody feel more heard.
You know, it's a lot easier to do that in theory than getting to where they are now, which is just exacerbating everything by bringing in the police and and then, you know, going in front of Congress.
By the way, did you see some of the Congress, the testimony in front of Congress from from the president of Colombia?
Oh, I did.
I've stopped watching that.
They studied what happened the last time when the other presidents got fired, right?
And, you know, they're more than willing to just sort of spout the line of saying, you know, yeah, we will kick, you know, kids, students off campus, and we will expel them if they say these things, versus the other one, which was they were trying to be more lawyerly, for a reason.
So anyway, I, and by the way, so as a result, because these students, the pro-Palestinian protesters aren't being heard, and they're not being treated properly, They have a completely not really legitimate reason to be completely upset as well, right?
I just want to say...
There's no leadership right now on this.
None.
It's a complete and utter vacuum of leadership.
We all know that Benjamin Netanyahu is committing this terrible, terrible war.
We're having to realize 13,000 plus children have been killed.
Nick, they've got drones that are playing the screams of babies and women to lure people in to shoot them.
Okay?
This is a brutal, brutal killing.
And what is happening with this?
Joe Biden is like, oh, I don't like him.
I think Netanyahu's an asshole.
The Democratic Party is everything from... John Fetterman, by the way.
What a journey that guy's on.
What an absolute evolution Fetterman is at.
To, you know, some people saying, well, maybe we can hold back weapons or maybe there could be whatever.
There's no leadership.
And guess what?
This is what happened in the Vietnam Civil Rights era.
There was no leadership to be found that was actually leading anybody in any direction.
And so what's happening?
Young people are standing up and they're saying, this is bullshit and something needs to happen.
And you're right.
The antagonism has made it worse.
The inability to have a conversation has made it worse.
And of course, and because history rhymes, Nick, Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley are calling for the National Guard to come in and clear these people out.
And I gotta tell you, I wouldn't doubt at this point that that happens.
I really truly wouldn't.
Because none of this is being taken care of and there is a massive leadership vacuum in this country.
I want to say one more thing, Nick, and I want to make it very clear.
Because people are bad faith arguments all the time.
I'm not saying Donald Trump is the leader to do this.
I'm not saying that we need to move beyond Joe Biden in order to find Donald Trump in order to make this work better.
He would make it worse.
It is the equivalent of Nixon coming in in 68.
That's what it is, right?
Maybe even worse because he's more incompetent and more fascistic in his own particular way.
What I am saying is that right now we are facing a major, major existential political crisis and we don't have the leadership in place.
It doesn't mean Donald Trump should be president, but it does mean that what's happening right now, there's a reason why it's happening.
I wonder if the state of our civilization is such that leadership's impossible.
I mean, the way things are right now, it's not, it's not easy.
I'll say that.
Yeah, like, and here's the, in my, in some weird twisted way, like, remember the conversation we had about rock and roll and how it's dead?
You know, it's because everything is so fragmented now, the way we consume everything, right?
And we're all in our own little, you know, bubbles of information.
And it's quite possible that in that same setup here, we can't get a consensus and a leader, you know, because no one wants to lead because they probably have no idea what people would want and or enough people would want to form a consensus.
You know, like I'm trying to picture if you told the President of Colombia to have a meeting, like just go talk to them.
They're probably already picturing how that would devolve into the biggest, you know, clusterfuck you can ever imagine.
You know what their demands are, correct?
What?
You know what the actual demands are, right?
They want to divest from any investments in Israel, I think, right?
Yes, they want Colombia to do that.
Colombia is not going to do that.
That's not going to happen.
And here's one of the problems that's actually occurring here, Nick.
Columbia, Yale, MIT, even Emerson, these universities are part of the elite leadership production, right?
These universities and colleges put out the people who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow.
And on top of that, they also go ahead and supply and support financial, I would say crimes, but financial strategies, basically everything that like sort of forwards, forwards everything.
They want to break Columbia over their knee.
I want to be clear about that.
That is what this protest is for.
And why part of the reason I support it, I, I think that these institutions and I think that these systems should be broken over somebody's knee, and I'm glad that they're doing it.
But the president's not going to go and have a conversation with them because they're principled.
That's the issue here.
You can't have a conversation with people who aren't going to capitulate, right?
They're not going to say, oh, we would love it if you made a statement that condemned the war in Gaza and then we'll get out of here.
They literally are there to try and divest from the state of Israel and stop the brutality in Gaza.
They're not going to play ball.
These are people who have decided they don't want to play ball, and so you can't really negotiate with them.
And so as a result, you can't have leaders going and talking to them, particularly leaders who have no principles.
That doesn't work.
Well, you're also, you might be describing leaders in Palestine as well, in Gaza.
That's the, that's part of the rub, my man, is like things have been going on for a very long time in a lot of different ways that haven't been okay.
And a lot of people have said, maybe it'll work, keep working for a while.
Right.
And then to your point, what is the solution?
You have to have a really good leader.
You know, we've been talking about leadership vacuum.
Let's talk.
You know, sometimes a man emerges from the mist and you just look at him and you realize he's a leader.
That's right, everybody.
You knew that we were talking about Speaker Mike Johnson.
That's right.
He's just, he's what a leader among men.
Speaker Mike Johnson.
Facing an ouster from the House Freedom Caucus, as we told everybody he was going to do it, we knew that he was going to have to, has struck a deal with the Democratic Party in order to push through a $95 billion aid package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
He did this to save his own neck.
Of course, it is pissed off everybody from Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I assume, isn't Yosemite Sam a GOP representative at this point?
I assume he's rooting, tooting mad.
Shooting his guns and throwing his hat on the ground.
They're so pissed off about it, but guess what, Nick?
The good news here is that already liberal institutions are looking at Mike Johnson with sparkly hard eyes.
CNN published an article that compared him to Winston Churchill, in case you wondered how this country is going and in what direction we're moving.
Well, I think, again, I've asked this before, we don't have editors anymore, right?
Pretty much not.
Go look up Mike Johnson, Churchill, CNN, whatever, and find this article, and you're not going to believe that somebody allowed this to be published the way it was.
Incredible.
An unlikely Churchill.
Yeah, it was really, the writing, it was really, you know, like, like, you know, I don't want to demean like a high school level, but it was like that kind of a writing style.
Can I say one thing about that real fast?
First of all, terrible writing.
Second of all, embarrassing for the person publishing it, embarrassing for CNN.
Winston Churchill sucked.
It was a racist fascist, okay?
Let's go ahead and point that out.
Speaking of people who created genocides, Winston Churchill is one of them.
But also, just like, Mike Johnson didn't do this out of morality or an ethical concern for what's happening in either Israel, Ukraine, or Taiwan.
He did this to save his scrawny little stupid neck.
He prayed, Jared.
He prayed.
He prayed!
God told him!
Yeah, so don't give me that.
He prayed, and he used his faith, and that's what... God said, Mike, save yourself, my friend.
But you know, obviously, what this says to me is that the Democrats have told him, we are not going to vote to oust you if they do the... Sure.
So, he knows that's what he's doing in exchange for it, which is fine.
This is probably what they, you know, this is how the government used to work, right?
Now, should we talk a little bit about the apportionment?
Because there's a couple things here that are interesting.
Like, I'm willing to go on the record and say, if they want to give money to Israel for the Iron Dome and for David's sling, fine.
I'm okay with that, you know?
I mean, knock the rockets out of the sky and help them do that, great.
If they want to give billions for aid to the Palestinians, great.
I'm really happy about that part of it, too.
I'm still holding out hope, and I really think that this could be as cynical as a political move by the Biden administration, that they're eventually, before the election, going to stop sending money to them.
You know what I mean?
But they're tipping their toe, right?
They're being a little bit more forceful and a little bit more in their condemnations of Netanyahu.
But I really, I wonder if it's like, because what they need to do is say, yes, we're not giving you any more money for arms, right?
That's what they have to do.
It would be easy for them to do it, even if it was just from now until November, right?
But do you think they're going to do it?
Well, I just want to let everybody know, Benjamin Netanyahu literally, and this is incredible, you cannot write this stuff, like how contemptible this man is.
He said thank you for the money and basically in the same breath is like, we're now going to put on a new offensive in Gaza.
Thank you, American people.
You've paid for it.
More dead children.
Can't wait.
Not in his defense, but like, you know, they've already been planning the Rafah invasion anyway, right?
You're right, Nick.
They had been planning on killing more children.
So, I will say, though, that, like, I think, to tell you the truth, I don't think that the Biden administration wants the political hit of being shown to not support Israel.
It's a huge hit!
I know, but it's also a boost on the other end.
I think they just want it to end without having to deal with it.
I think they want to kick the can down the road without having to take an actual stance on this thing, which is the more contemptible part of it.
Right.
Because you know, remember, they will get a chunk of votes probably back from the younger people, right, who are leaving because of what they're supporting that.
And again, would he lose the other part of the vote that's pro-Israel to Trump?
It's an interesting calculation they're going to make.
And again, They're already voting for Trump, Nick!
That's the thing!
The young people are not going to forgive Biden for this.
I don't think that they think about transactional politics in that way.
I think everybody who has died there, they blame on Joe Biden and the inability to rein it in and even really say the right thing at the right time.
The people who support this, I think even though they've said that they hate Donald Trump, I think they're going to go ahead and vote for Donald Trump.
I think that's the direction this is heading in.
Right, but you're expressing some concern or the idea that pro-Biden people will not vote for Biden because if he withdraws or takes funding away from Israel, right?
I think it would change the national conversation in ways that we're not sure of yet.
Right.
I'm choosing to believe, and I don't even know exactly why I'm choosing to believe this, but if they were able to achieve some sort of ceasefire at any point before the election because of our memories, even if they're younger kids who have good memories, for some reason in my mind, I feel like that's going to be enough.
For them to give him that vote.
I got a question, Nick.
Are we talking about the same young people who are probably going to get their heads bashed in by police batons in the near future?
Like, they're not going to forget that.
They're going to become radicalized by this.
Right.
All right.
I mean, that makes sense to me as well.
So.
And I mean, here's the thing.
I understand that Joe Biden didn't like, you know, put on his little Delaware hat and go down to Columbia and arrest the people personally.
But there's a line of power.
You know what I mean?
People don't understand that if you are really protesting this stuff, and you are actually radicalized by this, and it makes total sense, you see it as a power structure that you're standing behind.
This is what people don't get about the 60s.
They were like, how in the hell could young people be mad at the Democratic Party and Lyndon B. Johnson?
Well, they knew that Lyndon B. Johnson had ran the Vietnam War.
And that he had created like this environment where the power structure was crashing down on people.
They don't see it transactionally.
I think the way that a lot of pundits would look at it.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, and it also can't forget that the trauma of having gone through and assassinated the president, and then his brother, and then Martin Luther King, and then Malcolm X, like all of those things contributed to a lot of the unrest as well, where you just didn't have any faith in anything for a long, long time.
Maybe we never got that back.
Well, I don't think we did get it back.
I think we went into an apathetic lull for a while, and then neoliberalism made sure that people were more worried about their careers.
Do you know what I mean?
It didn't help that we had Nixon with Watergate and then you had Ford partnering with Nixon.
And then immediately neoliberalism comes in and sweeps up all the mess and turns into its own thing.
I mean, timeout.
You just missed the one shining beacon of light we've ever had as a president.
The only guy who probably earnestly cared about anything and cared about the people in this country Yeah, but he's also the one that started the, I mean, him and Paul Volcker were the ones who put neoliberalism into action.
And then Ronald Reagan came in and was like, thank you.
I appreciate this.
Let's go.
Well, his heart was in the right place.
Oh, yeah, I think his heart is still probably in the right place.
I would love to hear what Jimmy Carter has to say about everything that's going on right now.
But I will say that I think that America has been overtaken by transactionalism and punditry.
And I think for people like part of the problem, Nick, and you and I, I think we're able to get on this podcast.
We're able to talk about this because we like each other.
We love each other.
We're friends.
We can have these discussions.
If you go on social media, the bad faith conversations that are taking place around this are incredible.
You know what I mean?
I have seen people who are like, yes, I think what's happening in Gaza is absolutely terrible, but I think if you say anything about it, you're hurting Joe Biden.
It's like, how in the hell are we making this calculus?
Do you know what I mean?
Like, I think that's a wild, wild way to look at things.
I think, I think we have to, we have to take a look at what is right and wrong.
And it's not as black and white anymore as it used to be.
And in many ways, it's even more black.
Yeah, I would assume that you wouldn't want to take a stance on that subject because you'll just get abused and shouted at and horrible things said about you, independent of, you know, Biden.
And that's also unfortunate.
I mean, listen, I deal with it fucking with basketball, you know, and we're talking about a game, you know, and twice, three times a week, I got to deal with some of the most heinous things you can imagine being said about anybody.
It's where we're at, where we're going.
Maybe we've always been that way.
I don't know.
But, you know, it's really, really troubling.
It is.
It's terrible.
Real fast before we move to the next segment, Nick, I just want to remind everybody, as I brought up on the weekend or on Friday, only thing the United States Congress can pass, it's selling weapons for war.
That is literally it.
Tax cuts for billionaires, weapons for war, and infrastructure in order to pump cash into the capitalist system to make sure it doesn't collapse.
It's the only thing that we can do.
Incredible.
Yeah.
And Ukraine's gonna lose, right?
Ukraine is not in a position to win right now.
I'll tell you that much.
Doesn't mean we need to hand them over to Russia and or root for Vladimir Putin as J.D.
Vance and Donald Trump want, but I mean, it's, it's, this is an absolute mess of a moment, man.
It's, it's, our politics are just so screwed up.
I'll give you something exciting though.
The UAW, Nick, man, President Sean Fain is, is on a roll.
On Friday, The UAW, the United Auto Workers, successfully unionized a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee.
This is the first factory in the South to successfully unionize since the 1940s.
As Joe Biden once said, this is a big fucking deal.
It actually is a really, really big, giant deal.
It warms the cockles of my heart to see the UAW and unions on the march.
In all of this bad news and all of the things that we're fighting, Nick, I think it gets lost sometimes that democratic, small-D democratic power and organizing is on the move right now.
Yeah, I mean, again, what we've discovered through the pandemic was how we didn't discover this, but like, you know, finally, workers at that in those kind of plants had a voice, and they can finally speak up and demand better treatment.
I, you know, it's funny, because you'll get these, these economists who are going to say, well, okay, then there's that plant's going to shut down, they're not going to be able to handle, afford this.
But there's a reason why we've had to have unions in this country.
And it's because the workers are abused beyond the pale.
Unfortunately, whatever laws we have in place to stop it don't really work nearly as effectively as when you are you and you're unionized.
So it is it's a great day to hear that.
And I have no doubt that Volkswagen can figure out how to make that work and still be profitable.
Yeah, I think they're going to be okay.
I think they're going to be plenty okay as all of these corporations are making, you know, record profits left and right.
Unions are important.
There's collusion all over the place.
All over the place.
And that's the thing, is unions are absolutely important.
The reason that they're important, and by the way, one of the reasons why even the original supporters of capitalism believed that unions and trade guilds were important, is because there is no check On the capitalist class, otherwise.
Why?
Because, as we were warned from the very beginning, when it jumped out of its little crib, Nick, and it started taking little walks, little walks, as capitalism started gaining ground, everybody who supported it was like, this is the best thing we've ever come up.
By the way, it'll destroy everything if it doesn't have checks on its power.
It will take over government.
It will take over the economy completely.
There need to be people on the other side of the table who are able to negotiate this thing and keep it in check.
That's what labor unions are for.
Unfortunately, labor unions were screwed over by everybody.
And I don't just mean the Republican Party.
It was also the Democratic Party.
If you don't know about this, go back and look up the labor struggles.
Behind me is Eugene V. Debs.
I had somebody ask me about that the other day.
He's a labor leader from Terre Haute, Indiana, who ran for president from jail.
Everybody should understand that in case it becomes... I don't know.
But also, we had wars in the streets because you had oligarchs who didn't want to pay people a decent wage.
Who did they work with, Nick?
That's right, the national government, the National Guard, the military, you name it.
These people were murdered, they were undermined, they were destroyed, and they were put away to be kept away from power.
We are very, very lucky.
One, that people are not willing to work for shit wages anymore.
That the labor market has allowed people to push back on that.
And I gotta tell you, and I hope I'm not wrong about this.
I've studied this guy.
I've looked at this guy.
I think Sean Fain's the real deal.
I think that he is strong, ambitious.
I think he has a good moral and ethical center.
By the way, remember this when, I don't know, a week from now we find out something terrible about him?
I hope I'm wrong.
I think he's a really good leader.
I hope somebody is making sure that he's safe at night.
Because when you start messing with pocketbooks like this, like, bad things tend to happen.
UAW is rolling.
Next up, Nick.
A Mercedes plant in Alabama, a Hyundai plant in Alabama, and a Toyota plant in Missouri, which is a role.
That's an absolute role.
And as Fain has said, he is looking to create a very, very large union that can negotiate and really, really change things in a few years.
I find it very optimistic and very hopeful.
For sure.
And you know, part of what I think put a black stain on unions was probably the Jimmy Hoffa era, right?
Because... Oh yeah, that's part of it.
That's part of it.
In the 60s, the Mafia and the Teamsters kind of became, you know, sort of a singular entity to some degree.
Maybe they had something to do with JFK's assassination.
I don't know, but the bottom line is, you know, I don't have, we're not near there anymore, right?
These are, you know, the UAW is a legitimate union that's in there to help their workers overall.
And we know this because when we've seen this in the past, even the recent past, when there's been corruption, like they're out and they get them out of there and there's a severe penalty for that.
So I can't imagine the guy who's leading the UAW now would ever risk doing that and getting sent to prison and all sorts of stuff.
Just to give a very truncated history, going back in the early 20th century, back when oligarchs were ruling everything, labor unions were kept under their thumb, but there were still battles over this stuff.
Going into the First World War, and tell me if you hear a through line here, Nick, they were betrayed by the government.
Uh, as World War One broke out.
After World War One, uh, they used the first Red Scare in order to discriminate against labor unions and undermine them, throwing many of them out of the country because they didn't want them here in order to antagonize and grow unions.
World War Two rolls around, Nick.
Um, let me check my notes.
Oh, they got screwed over by the government once again in World War Two and by both political parties.
Afterwards, that can't be right.
Nick?
What the shit?
Oh, second Red Scare!
The second Red Scare was used to undermine labor unions.
Again, it's weird how this keeps happening.
Then, what you said is exactly right.
Later on, and this is a problem with labor unions and an economic lesson everybody needs to learn, if you are not careful, There becomes a stratified class within the labor unions.
The laborers, the people who are just showing up at the assembly line and doing their jobs, and then the leadership class.
And the leadership class gets bought off by the capitalist class.
They get a bunch of perks.
They become corrupted.
And as a result, labor unions can lose a lot of power and sway and trust.
And a lot of times that involves organized crime or other things, whether it's organized crime or organized crime of government and capitalist class.
But you're exactly right.
They lost a lot of the ability and sway and trust that they had.
But that's the truncated history.
But this UAW development is really, really exciting.
Absolutely.
Something that is less exciting, Nick.
An article by Oriana Gonzalez and not us, and this is unfortunate.
This is something that I've been hearing a lot of whispers about and a lot of conversations about in the meetings that I've had and the conversations that I have had.
Democratic legislators right now are leaking that abortion rights groups, outside groups, private special interest groups, are keeping the Democrats from getting rid of 1873's Comstock laws.
For people who don't know, we've talked about this on the show before.
These were laws that banned obscene materials in the mail, which was a way of not just getting rid of pornography, but also birth control pills, also abortion information, and this is something that the Republican Party has already said out loud that they plan on using to ban birth control and abortion information and procedures.
This supposedly is about keeping political leverage and also not dealing blows to ongoing lawsuits.
Democratic legislators have said that they really don't understand what's going on.
They've said at one point they feel like they're taking crazy pills.
The conversations I'm having with people have revealed exactly the same thing.
I think this is pretty disturbing.
Yeah, I mean, I suppose there is some political calculus here, right?
That if they keep this as an issue, it will be a really bad one for the Republicans heading into November.
So, you know, I get it to some degree, but there would be no shame in getting rid of the Comstock Act once and for all.
But the worst part about it is that it's going to be in front of the Supreme Court and some of these assholes are going to be, like, taking a shower with it.
They love it so much.
And it's like, what the fuck is going on?
Remember I said we shouldn't poo-poo laws just because they're old, right?
Well, this is one that should go away.
You were so wrong on that as well.
I'm so sorry.
I know where you were coming from because you didn't want to throw out the Constitution.
I get that.
Yeah, there are some laws.
There's probably a commandment or two we should be following as well.
I kind of feel like maybe we should have updated the Constitution following the Civil War.
I think that would have been a pretty good time.
Yeah, I'll update the language, absolutely.
Yeah, it might not have been the worst time for a constitutional convention to get together and make sure that you take care of some pesky problems.
It's funny, actually, somebody reached out to me today and they were like, Jared, have you heard about this Supreme Court case where they're talking about 3D printed, non-traceable firearms?
They're like, oh my God, can you imagine?
I don't think they're gonna rule in favor of that.
Why?
Because they don't want gun manufacturers to be hurt.
They don't want people printing that stuff off for free.
Come on now!
But you're absolutely right.
If it ends up in a situation where the Supreme Court has the opportunity to do this stuff, You think that they're not going to find some wonky Federalist Society reason to go ahead and pass this stuff?
Absolutely they are.
Get this off the books as quickly as possible.
And this goes back to what I've said, Nick.
The Republican Party has handed the Democratic Party an absolute gift in being disgusting and offensive and upsetting and being so far out of step with over 70% of the country in terms of reproductive care.
You shouldn't shut up about it.
You shouldn't lay off about it.
You should get very, very aggressive with it.
And by the way, you need to get rid of this stuff as quickly as possible.
Get it off the books.
Do what you need to do.
Stop playing around with it.
Stop being too cautious or, you know, trying to be too cute with it.
You got to get past it.
Yeah, I mean, that all sounds good to me.
Yeah.
And I don't think it's so easy to get this off the books, right?
That's the other problem.
You're going to have to get some bipartisan consensus there on that.
And so either way.
But again, the cynic in me is like, oh, great.
We'll just make sure we keep that so that it is a cudgel they can continue to hammer them with.
In that same weird way that, like, did the Republicans really want to get rid of abortion?
Because they loved it as a wedge issue all those years.
Some of them did, some of them didn't.
Yep.
I guess we're finding out now who those people were, who were the zealots, who were believers, and who were the ones being like, you know, you idiot, you killed us, whatever, from Hunt from in October.
So at any rate, yeah, it's, it's, um, I can see easily why it would be so disheartening to have to deal with this and not have, you know, a consensus, at least among the Democrats that like, yes, this has to go away right There needs to be a strategy.
And, and, and I got to tell you, I don't know how you feel about it.
Just very quickly.
The 2024 presidential campaign.
I, I look at this thing and has anybody told Joe Biden and Donald Trump that COVID is over and they don't have to repeat the 2020 campaign?
Has anybody let them know that like they can do things and go out and talk to people and roll out ideas?
I mean, you know, well, Trump had never really done that anyway, but he's a little busy, right?
He is a little busy.
We didn't get a chance to talk about it, Nick, but that article in Politico the other day that's like, Donald Trump's actually campaigning for president in New York City.
Is he?
Is he?
No, he's just ranting and raving like a loser.
He's just walking around New York City and having people run up and be like, MAGA!
MAGA!
That's great!
No, I, like, the Biden re-election campaign and the Democratic Party writ large, like, bring out, like, a plan.
Tell people what you're going to do.
Don't just say you're going to do it.
Tell them the specifics of it.
Say what you're going to do, where we're going to go.
Lay out a roadmap.
They just haven't done it.
And this is, this is as big of a slam dunk as there is.
I mean, there are only a couple reasons why he wouldn't be making more appearances.
Right?
Either, like, it could be some sort of strategy to let Trump lose it, or they don't want him in front of people.
I don't have a clue what's going on.
I saw he had a rally the other day that got interrupted by rain, and then, I'll tell you what, he scooted off that stage with a little bit of vigor.
All right, yeah.
I mean, listen, again, some of those fears we had six, seven months ago, I kind of put them down below somewhere.
I don't feel like I'm as concerned.
But I will say, Nick, the things that we've talked about today, they have to figure out what to do about Gaza.
They got to figure out what to do about this protest movement, because you have to have the young people.
You just, you have to, and you can't.
I'm sorry, but this is not stopping with Columbia, Yale, MIT, or Emerson.
It's going to grow.
And on top of that, you have to have some sort of answer about what you're going to do for abortion.
There needs to be some sort of change here because I think right now Biden is probably the odds-on favorite to win the election, but we have a lot of time and we have a lot of combustible elements on the board right now.
Yeah, I mean, 68 would not be a really good comparison only because of what happened with Bobby Kennedy.
But, you know, I can imagine the scenario where Biden would be very concerned about civil unrest on campuses across the country for his chances of winning election, right?
Again, purely cynical, political taking.
So yeah, but again, you know, Biden doesn't have any control over that per se, right?
Necessarily.
Okay, fair enough.
He has control over what he wants to do with Israel, and then that in turn will inform how... I, listen, I would not be shocked, Nick, if this grows.
I would not be shocked if one of the things that has changed is the federal government's willingness to mess around with federal funding of universities.
To all of a sudden start saying, you know, if you're going to have these protests, you're going to lose your federal funding, and then a whole row of dominoes starts falling.
I mean, watching how this is treated, I think, is going to reveal a lot about power in this country.
And I don't think it's going to fall along the same lines everybody thinks.
I think the Democratic coalition that people thought existed for the past few years is dying.
I think it's really, really going away, and I think it's being sort of extinguished on the altar of this thing.
I think it's going to reveal a lot.
All right, everybody.
That'll bring us to the end of the McCraig Podcast.
We're going to come back on Friday with a weekender edition.
Go over to patreon.com slash McCraig Podcast in order to access that.
Keep us ad-free, editorially independent, and growing.
We thank you, as always, for your support.
Until then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
SMH.
I did it.
I got it.
I did it.
And I'm a JYP fan.
I finally figured out how to get rid of that thumbs up that comes up.
Yeah, for people who didn't know and just listening to this, Nick always did a thumbs up and a big thumb would come up.
