Podcasts about national democratic party

Here at Matenaer On Air Laboratories And Fine Furniture, we don't want to say "we told you so", but on the topic of tariffs, we will hold our tongues. Turns out, the shining light in the president-elect's economic "package" will have some big effects on a massive, American business. Next, we turn our heads to one, Ben Wikler, Chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, who is on the short life to run the National Democratic Party. Then we welcome Civic Media's own Dom Salvia to delve into another installment of All The Best People. From Matt Gaetz, to Brendan Carr, to RFK, Jr. to Wisconsin's very own Sean Duffy, the cabinet is shaping up nicely (with creeps). As always, thank you for listening, texting and calling, we couldn't do this without you! Don't forget to download the free Civic Media app and take us wherever you are in the world! Matenaer On Air is a part of the Civic Media radio network and airs Monday through Friday from 10 am - noon across the state. Subscribe to the podcast to be sure not to miss out on a single episode! You can also rate us on your podcast distribution center of choice, they go a long way! To learn more about the show and all of the programming across the Civic Media network, head over to https://civicmedia.us/shows to see the entire broadcast line up. Follow the show on Facebook, X and YouTube to keep up with Jane and the show! Guest: Dom Salvia

11/07/24: Chris Gibbs is an Ohio Farmer, and former Chair of the Republican Party in Selby County Ohio, serving for seven years until 2015. Last year, he was elected as the Chair of the Democratic Party in Selby County in Ohio. He's also the Chair of Rural Voices USA and the Chair of Gateway Arts.  Joel and Chris talk about what the future of ag will look under a Trump administration, as well as, how the National Democratic Party could reach more rural voters going forward. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the Catch Up on 3 Things for the Indian Express and I'm Flora Swain.It's the 7th of June and here are the top stories of the week.The Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Party is set to return for a third term by winning 293 seats in the 18th Lok Sabha elections. However, the Bharatiya Janata Party suffered a major setback as it fell short of a majority – with 240 seats – on its own as it was heavily dependent on alliance partners such as the TDP and JD(U) to secure 272 seats required to form the government.The Opposition INDIA bloc combined by the Congress, the Samajwadi Party, Trinamool Congress, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam won a total of 232 seats. The Congress got back on its feet with 99 seats and the SP gave a stunning show by winning 37 seats from a mere 5 seats in Uttar Pradesh in 2019. The TMC won 29 seats in West Bengal while the DMK had leads in 22 seats. The Sharad Pawar-led NCP won 7 seats and the Shiv Sena of Uddhav Thackeray secured 9 seats. In Bihar, the RJD was ahead in 4 constituencies and the AAP and JMM in 3.In Odisha, the BJP is all set to form a majority government of its own for the first time, winning 78 out of 147 seats in the assembly elections of the coastal state. The outcome brings to an end the five-term reign of Naveen Patnaik's BJD, which managed to retain only 51 seats this time. Patnaik was eyeing to become the longest serving Chief Minister in India, but fell short by 76 days.Actor Kangana Ranaut, who recently won the Mandi Lok Sabha seat on a BJP ticket, was allegedly slapped by a woman constable of the CISF at the security area of Chandigarh airport. Afterwards, the CISF constable, Kulwinder Kaur, suggested her actions were linked to a statement Ranaut had made about women joining the farmers' protest. The CISF suspended the constable, initiated departmental inquiry, and lodged a police complaint against her. Ranaut, who was taking a Vistara flight to New Delhi and was accompanied by members of her family, said she will file a complaint with the Ministry of Home Affairs.The Chinese Foreign Ministry, which congratulated Narendra Modi, the BJP and NDA on their election victory, has protested the exchange of messages between Taiwan President Lai Ching-te and Modi on the poll outcome. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning, responding to a question on the interaction between Modi and Lai, said there is no such thing as ‘president' of the Taiwan region and that China opposes all forms of official interactions between the Taiwan authorities and countries having diplomatic relations with China. She further stated that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People's Republic of China.  This was the Catch-Up on the 3 Things by The Indian Express.

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We start this week with a simple question -- where is all the money coming from to pay for massive new housing and school lunch programs? With a budget now less than two weeks ago and multi billion dollar programs being dropped almost daily it's an important question. But so is the future of the NDP, with some high profile new departures from Jagmeet Singh's next campaign candidate list. Rob Russo filling in for Bruce Anderson and Chantal Hebert have their say.

The CBE decided on Wednesday morning to allow market forces to determine the value of the EGP, while simultaneously raising interest rates by 6%. That is, the overnight deposit rate, the overnight lending rate, and the rate of the main operation were raised by 600bps to 27.25%, 28.25%, and 27.75%, respectively.The EGP formal rate traded at c.49.5 per USD after breaching the EGP50 border.NBE and Banque Misr announced on Wednesday the launch and the amendments of high yield certificates of deposits (CDs).IMF staff and the Egyptian authorities have reached staff level agreement on a set of comprehensive policies and reforms needed to complete the first and second reviews under the Extended Fund Facility arrangement. Staff also considered the authorities' request for an augmentation of IMF support to Egypt from about USD3 billion to about USD8 billion. Prime Minister said that the agreement will be followed by more funding — in soft loans — from other international partners like the World Bank and EU, that could boost the total funds to USD20 billion.Cabinet agreed with the IMF to implement structural reforms that would also include a new framework to slow down infrastructure spending, including projects that have so far operated outside regular budget oversight.The CBE has instructed local banks to lift the spending limit on foreign currency credit cards.The Cabinet approved launching phase 7 of the initiative to refund the arrears of export subsidies program, owed to exporting companies, up to EGP8 billion.A government source revealed that the arrears owed to foreign oil companies declined in the recent period from USD6.5 billion to USD6.25 billion. The Central Bank will sell EGP110 billion worth of t-bills between today and Sunday.Cabinet has given Nilus Hotel and Commercial Services and Nilus Residential Services approval to build two commercial and residential towers on the National Democratic Party's (NDP) former headquarters, according to a decision published in the Official Gazette. The two projects, reportedly worth a combined USD5 billion, are due for completion in 2Q28.FAIT (FV: EGP39.00, EW) released positive 4Q23 consolidated net profit of EGP650 million (-71% y/y, -25% q/q),  bringing FY23 bottom line to EGP4.5 billion (-7% y/y). The stock is currently trading at P/B24 of 0.8x and P/E24 of 7.0x, with ROAE of 12%.TAQA Volt, a subsidiary of TAQA Power, the electricity operating arm of TAQA Arabia group, has signed a partnership with Wadi Degla Developments to address the surging demand for electric vehicles (EVs) and sustainable living solutions.The Ministry of Petroleum is increasing fuel injection in the local market by 8-10% during the month of Ramadan. 

Where Is EGX Heading in 2024? Which Stocks Offer Best Value Post 2023 Rerating?We believe that the market will continue to advance as long as foreign currency availability and the local exchange rate weakness continues to linger, thus driving earnings momentum.Our report also includes an appendix of all data tables for your reference.What if the electricity tariff increase is confirmed for industrial usage?Electricity tariff for energy-intensive industries reportedly increased to EGP1.32 per kWh up from the previous rate of EGP1.10 per kWh. The still-not-confirmed price increase would drag related companies operating margins down and ultimately fair values if not balanced by sufficient price increases of their final products. We ran a scenario analysis for the reported electricity tariff increase into our models, given all other assumptions constant, to capture the effect on our fair values for the stocks. The CBE earlier released the balance of payments data for 1QFY2023/24. The overall BoP recorded a surplus of USD229 million in 1QFY2023/24, compared to a surplus of USD524 million a year before.Current Account (CA) deficit shrank in 1QFY2023/24 to USD2.8 billion compared to USD3.2 billion a drop of 12% YoY, mainly due to a 13% drop in trade deficit to USD7.9 billion from USD9.1 billion in 1QFY2022/23.Egypt's Ministry of Electricity announced an increase in electricity prices for both residential and commercial use, ranging from 7% to 20% across various usage categories.The IDSC issued a document explaining the strategic directions for the Egyptian economy for the new presidential term (2024-2030). Egypt's Ministry of Transport raised ticket prices for the three-line Cairo Metro.Net International Reserves reached USD35.22 million at the end of December 2023, up from USD35.17 billion in November, on higher value of gold.Egypt's PMI posted 48.5 in December, marginally higher than the reading of 48.4 in November.  Egypt's wheat imports increased by over 14.5% to 11 million tons in 2023 compared to 9.6 million tons in 2022, Deputy Minister of Supply said.AD Ports inked a USD3 million initial agreement with the Red Sea Port Authority to operate and manage three cruise terminals in Hurghada, Safaga, and Sharm El Sheikh.An Emirati-led consortium has been awarded the bid to develop the former HQ of the now-defunct National Democratic Party in Tahrir Square, Sovereign Fund of Egypt (SFE) head said.Russian EV manufacturer Concordia is setting up an electric vehicle components factory in GV Investments' Tarboul industrial project in Giza.The government is preparing to amend the fees for using the national natural gas network for 2024, in preparation for implementing the new tariff during the current year. Around EGP11 billion have been invested in the newly introduced CDs (with yields up to 27%) during the first 24 hours of issuance on Friday. The Oman Investment Authority is in negotiations with the government regarding the acquisition of a majority stake in EXPA after it was included in the government IPO program at the end of 2023. The FRA is studying 5 applications to establish small, medium, and micro enterprise financing companies. LCSW (FV: EGP23.33, OW) will distribute its 3,200,000 treasury shares as bonus shares to shareholders (0.042 share for each original share held). Record date is 10 January 2024, and distribution date is 11 January 2024.

"Liberal-Democratic Party of Japan political party, Japan Liberal-Democratic Party of Japan (LDP), also spelled Liberal Democratic Party, Japanese Jiyū Minshutō, Japan's largest political party, which has held power almost continuously since its formation in 1955. The party has generally worked clos" "--START AD- #TheMummichogblogOfMalta Amazon Top and Flash Deals(Affiliate Link - You will support our translations if you purchase through the following link) - https://amzn.to/3CqsdJH Compare all the top travel sites in just one search to find the best hotel deals at HotelsCombined - awarded world's best hotel price comparison site. (Affiliate Link - You will support our translations if you purchase through the following link) - https://www.hotelscombined.com/?a_aid=20558 “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets."""" #Jesus #Catholic. Smooth Radio Malta is Malta's number one digital radio station, playing Your Relaxing Favourites - Smooth provides a ‘clutter free' mix, appealing to a core 35-59 audience offering soft adult contemporary classics. We operate a playlist of popular tracks which is updated on a regular basis. https://smooth.com.mt/listen/ Follow on Telegram: https://t.me/themummichogblogdotcom END AD---" "ely with business interests and followed a pro-U.S. foreign policy. During nearly four decades of uninterrupted power (1955–93), the LDP oversaw Japan's remarkable recovery from World War II and its development into an economic superpower. The party largely retained control of the government from the mid-1990s, the main exception being the period 2009–12, when the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) was in power. History Although the LDP was formally created in 1955, its antecedents can be traced back to political parties of the 19th century. These parties formed before Japan even had a constitution, a parliament, or elections and were primarily protest groups against the government. One of these was the Jiyūtō (Liberal Party), formed in 1881, which advocated a radical agenda of democratic reform and popular sovereignty. The Rikken Kaishintō (Constitutional Reform Party) was a more moderate alternative, formed in 1882, advocating parliamentary democracy along British lines. Party names and alliances continued to be fluid after the first elections in 1890, eventually leading to the creation of Rikken Seiyūkai (Friends of Constitutional Government) and Seiyūkai's main rival, which operated under several names: Shimpotō (Progressive Party), Kenseikai (Constitutional Party), and finally Minseitō (Democratic Party). With the rise of militarism in Japan, however, the political parties lost influence. In 1940 they disbanded, and many of their members joined the government-sponsored Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusankai). The Japanese surrender at the end of World War II in 1945 was followed by a decade of political confusion. New parties were formed from the remnants of the old ones: the Liberal Party built on the old Seiyūkai, whereas the Progressive Party drew on factions of both the Seiyūkai and the Minseitō. The party system was highly fluid, with parties frequently merging or dissolving. For example, from 1945 to 1954 the Progressive Party changed its name four times, becoming the Democratic Party in 1947, the National Democratic Party in 1950, the Reform Party in 1952, and finally the Japan Democratic Party in 1954. In 1947–48 this party also joined with the Socialist Party to form a brief coalition government under the auspices of the U.S.-led occupation of Japan (1945–52). Other than this coalition government, it was common for two or three conservative parties to dominate Japan's political scene in the first postwar decade. This decade ended on November 15, 1955, when the Democrats and the Liberals formally united to form the Liberal-Democratic Party. With this merger, the LDP established itself as the conservative alternat

To break down all of the news from the 2022 election, Crystal Fincher welcomes political strategist Robert Cruickshank back to the show! They review key results from the election, starting with the race for Congress in Washington's 3rd Congressional District where Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez currently leads MAGA Republican Joe Kent in a race that's still up in the air, and the blueprint this race provides for Democrats for winning in rural areas while maintaining their values. Our co-hosts discuss the King County voters repeated rejection of punitive-punishment based measures, and the clear mandate from voters for action on comprehensive public safety reforms and alternate responses that address the root causes of crime with Leesa Manion's decisive victory over the punitive "law-and-order" candidate Jim Ferrell in the King County Prosecuting Attorney race, and the comprehensive public safety and alternative response measures passed in Redmond and Shoreline. They follow with a look at the Oregon gubernatorial race where Democrat Tina Kotek beat a well-funded Republican opponent in a close race, as well as a review of key Democratic legislative victories in swing districts across Washington by candidates who are younger and more diverse, and who leaned into strong progressive messages instead of being hesitant to talk about them. They discuss the results of King County even-year election vote and Seattle's opportunity for Ranked Choice voting reform in the near future if it doesn't prevail in its current close race. After breaking down the incredibly successful Raise the Wage Tukwila campaign, Crystal and Robert end the show by predicting how the resounding success of progressive Democrats this year will impact next year's Seattle City Council races and beyond.  As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Follow us on Twitter at @HacksWonks. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii and find today's co-host, Robert Cruickshank, on Twitter at @cruickshank. More info is available at officialhacksandwonks.com.   Resources Institute for a Democratic Future 2023 applications are live! The final application deadline is November 13th. Hacks & Wonks is hosting a Post-Election Roundtable this Tuesday, November 15th at 7:30pm! Stream it live on our Twitter, Facebook or Youtube account.  “Gluesenkamp Perez, Schrier maintain leads in WA congressional races” by Jim Brunner from The Seattle Times  “$19 is the new $15: Lessons from Tukwila's Minimum Wage” by Katie Wilson from The Stranger   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Today, we're continuing our Friday almost-live shows where we review the news of the week with a co-host. Welcome back to the program, friend of the show and today's co-host: Chair of Sierra Club Seattle, longtime communications and political strategist, Robert Cruickshank - hey. [00:00:55] Robert Cruickshank: Good morning, Crystal. Thank you for having me on again. [00:00:57] Crystal Fincher: Good morning. Excited to have you on again in this election week 2022. We have a lot to cover. Before we get into that, I just want to give a couple reminders. We've talked about the Institute for a Democratic Future before - how it's been instrumental to my career in politics - just a great education and network. The deadline for applications is this Sunday, November 13th, so we'll include links to the website information about applying in the program if you are interested. And feel free to reach out to me directly on Twitter, via email if you have any questions about the program. I also want to mention that we are having a Hacks & Wonks Post-Election Roundtable - a live show Tuesday - this coming Tuesday, November 15th at 7:30 p.m. We're going to be streaming live on all platforms. It's going to include Dujie Tahat, Kelsey Hamlin, and Djibril Diop, who is the Director of Government Relations for Washington Education Association and played a very consequential role in a number of the elections and battleground districts around the state - just breaking down the results of this year's general election - expanding upon the conversation that we're going to have today from consultants' point of view and the view of people who were involved in the work being done. So please tune in Tuesday, November 15th at 7 30 p.m. - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of the platforms - we'll share that information in the show notes. So now getting into election results - there was a lot that happened. We will go through a number of them. I think I want to start off talking about the Third Congressional District. What happened in this race, Robert? [00:02:56] Robert Cruickshank: So this is a fascinating, and I think potentially really important, race where we started off with the incumbent Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the few Republicans to vote for Trump's second impeachment, and that made her a target. Joe Kent, a openly fascist Trump supporter, declared his intention to run against her and take the Republican nomination away from her. In response to that, we had Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, who is a rural working class Democrat. She and her husband own a auto repair shop, they live in rural Skamania County in a house they built themselves. She's been active in Democratic Party politics as someone who wants to bring rural working class folks back into the party. And she saw, with increasing alarm, Joe Kent getting traction, getting support down there in Southwest Washington. And she decided she would step up and run, especially since it looked like the National Democratic Party wasn't going to take this very seriously, wasn't going to do much. And so she did step in and she and Joe Kent made it through the primary. And now, as of Friday - at least Friday morning - she's leading Joe Kent by a margin of just about 51% to 48%. She, depending on - today's ballot drop may be the final decider as to whether she hangs on and actually wins. And this would be a big victory not just to stop Joe Kent, which is important in and of itself. But Marie is a really smart, sharp person who's been working hard to bring, a populist, working class, rural voice back into the Democratic Party and do it in a way that's also economically progressive and socially progressive. And seeing the campaign she ran, the ads she ran, I think potentially point to a direction forward for Democrats as they really try to figure out what do they do about rural America. She's winning right now because she has a huge lead in Clark County by double digits, but she's holding her own in the rural parts of the county. She's at 45-46% in Kelso-Longview area out on the rural Washington coast. She's not going to win this race without running up decent numbers in the rural parts of the district. And so I think there's a lot Democrats can learn from here. [00:05:16] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. And really cannot be overstated how almost miraculous it is for a Democrat to be leading in any situation in this district, given what you just talked about in some of those rural areas - that's better Democratic performance than we have seen in I don't know how long. I don't know that we have. And so even accounting for the fact that Joe Kent is a fascist, not in touch with reality, completely taken with conspiracy theories, white nationalist rhetoric, all of that stuff, she did have to run a positive campaign. It wasn't enough for Joe Kent to be bad. We saw candidates across the country who sounded like him, some of whom won. And we didn't see that here because she was such a strong candidate. She did connect with voters throughout the district in both rural and suburban areas. And it really does seem like it points to the path to victory. First of all - showing up, having a belief that you can, being willing to talk to all kinds of voters, but really connecting the issues that she's talking about - the issues that are important to people in their everyday lives - to the progressive values that actually do improve things materially on the ground and for those families. Just really, really exciting to see. I do hope that as votes continue to come in, she does hang on. We are recording this before we're receiving results on Friday, but I think it is fair to say that the Joe Kent race - if they're hanging their hopes on a comeback, was certainly hoping to see returns that would have been more in their favor yesterday than they actually were. So that is pointing to some signs of hope. We won't know until we see results today, but the ballots did not trend as hard right as they certainly could have yesterday. [00:07:21] Robert Cruickshank: That's correct. And what Marie has done is, in some ways, reclaimed Southwest Washington. There were Democrats representing it in Congress off and on. At the state level, Southwest Washington used to be more reliably Democratic than King County, for example. Like in 1980, Ronald Reagan carried King County, Jimmy Carter carried a lot of Southwest Washington - those old school, rural, logging Democrats, Union democrats had been abandoned by a large swath of the Democratic Party who just gave up. And that outraged Marie. And I know that because I've worked with her personally before within the Democratic Party. And she was one of these leaders who stepped up and said, we can win these places back, but we have to win with authentic values that are rooted in these communities. She ran ads talking not just about working class values, about inflation - she also talked about abortion without hesitation, talking about how important reproductive rights were. And you would hear from Democratic consultants around the country that - oh, if you're in a district like this, you probably shouldn't be doing that. She proved them completely wrong. Even if she narrowly loses at the very end, the fact that she made it this far, that she made it close, and potentially even wins - proves her theory of change in rural America correct. And I think Democrats going forward need to listen to Marie and people from her campaign and people like her about how we reclaim these districts. Again, she may win ultimately based on votes in Vancouver and Vancouver suburbs, but she's not going to be close without running up some good numbers in rural parts of the district. Democrats like John Fetterman in Pennsylvania did the same thing. There's a model here that the party needs to learn from. [00:09:12] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. And as you alluded to, this has impacts potentially down the ballot. We are seeing super close races in the 17th and 18th Legislative Districts. These are areas that are potentially in play for Democrats, if they do invest in expanding on the strategy that Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez has started. These areas are ready to vote for Democratic policies if people just connect with them and talk with them, listen, and understand how to communicate how these values can be helpful. I certainly hope to see much more Democratic investment, Democratic engagement on the ground next year in the off year, the year beyond, in the next cycle - these are areas that we can win if we put in the effort and if we put in the resources. And so I am certainly excited and anticipating a significant effort to continue to turn Clark County and beyond blue. [00:10:18] Robert Cruickshank: I would hope so. That's going to take the established structures of the party to take it seriously. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez has had to do this without that support - the Democratic campaign structures of the House didn't show up, they put in maybe a small token amount of money towards the end. But Marie built this herself with a great campaign team around her. This is not something where DC consultants parachuted themselves in. In fact, they've tried that in this district before in the recent past and lost. So I think another key piece of this is that those party leadership, those folks in leadership from Pelosi on down need to do a better job of listening to the voices of Democrats on the ground who know how to win, know how to win without compromising our values. That's, I think, one of the most important things Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez has shown - we can win on our values with authentic voices, especially authentic working class Democratic voices in the rural parts of the country. May not win everywhere, but if you run up some better numbers, you make a lot of things possible. [00:11:23] Crystal Fincher: There were a number of other races that we saw - races that people were expecting to be close. Of course, Patty Murray versus Tiffany Smiley was not at all close. We saw some polling results that a number of people doubted and cast some doubt on. One polling firm had this polling on a one-point race a week before the election, which just never passed the smell test, and they certainly have a lot of answering to do. But this was a race where Tiffany Smiley and the case she was trying to make was pretty soundly rejected. And certainly, I think Republicans - I know Republicans genuinely thought they had a message that was resonating, particularly with suburban voters. And wow - suburban voters just flatly rejected just about everything they were throwing out - from the fearmongering about crime that was not at all attached to reality or evidenced-based practices about what actually does make streets safer, to the economy, to health care, and absolutely with abortion. That affected the Kim Schrier versus Matt Larkin race. Several races here where it just seems that what they had fell flat. And so just a pretty sound drubbing by Democrats to Republicans across the board - certainly in the Senate and in many of the Congressional races that were originally anticipated to be close. Now, the King County Prosecutor race is another interesting one. What did you see here? [00:13:14] Robert Cruickshank: Again, this is another one of those races that - going into the election - if you listen to some of the observers in the media, was expected to be very close, expected to be an example of backlash to efforts to reform criminal justice. Jim Ferrell, very much running on the Ann Davison platform of cracking down on crime and homelessness and things like that. Leesa Manion, running not as a bold reformer, but running certainly as a reformer - someone who wants to do criminal justice correctly and certainly better than it's done now. And the assumption was that Jim Ferrell would either make it very close or win outright. That's not what happened. Leesa Manion has won convincingly, and won throughout King County. This is not just a Seattle victory. Her victory is countywide. And I think that's a pretty big rebuke to the "law and order" politics that someone like Jim Ferrell has been running on, that The Seattle Times has been trying to push hard, that KOMO has been trying to push hard. King County voters aren't there - that's not what they're looking for in terms of how we address public safety. [00:14:20] Crystal Fincher: That's not at all what they're looking for. And once again, we saw a sound rejection countywide - certainly not limited to the City of Seattle - in every corner of the county, saying that, no, we don't want these punitive politics, punishment that is not at all connected to public safety, making the streets safer, reducing the amount of people who are victimized. And that really is the ultimate goal. There's a lot of talk about punishment. There was a lot of support from very conservative forces, a lot of talk about - hey, we need to enforce the law and put these people in jail and calling into question bail reform, any kind of criminal justice reform, any kind of alternative response that does not include police. We saw police unions rally around this campaign and really see this as a vehicle for increasing their footprint and moving away from some of the things that have been asked for for voters for quite some time. In 2020, we saw with the King County Charter Amendments that - once again, countywide - voters want accountability in terms of public safety. Voters want to address the root causes of crime. They understand that even those who are saying, hey, I'm fine with the amount of police that are there, I have no issue with increasing the amount of police, but we know they can't do everything. We know they don't have the tools to address homelessness. We know criminalizing homelessness doesn't make the problem any better. We've seen them try and fail repeatedly. It's time to do things a different way that actually do have a shot at making this issue better. We know that police don't have the tools to address behavioral health issues, mental health issues - and those services are too hard to find, completely underfunded, and not at all in the shape that they need to be to adequately address this problem. We need to invest in and expand those services and the availability of that. We know that simply throwing people in jail, especially when the issues are poverty, their health, they're related around education - that that doesn't help them and it doesn't help the community. It doesn't reduce the chance that they're going to commit another crime or that people are going to be victimized. We need to do the things that reduce the likelihood of those things happening. We need to do the things where there is evidence and data to show what the path forward is. We've seen plenty of examples of those in pilot programs in Seattle and in King County and have been promised that that was the way things are going - to only see, especially with recent administrations, including the current ones, moving in the opposite direction. And not only in King County, but we also saw propositions in Redmond, in Shoreline that also reinforced that people want accountability and investing in root causes and responses to issues that do need help, issues that do need intervention. If someone is having a behavioral health crisis, if someone is out on the street, that absolutely needs intervention - but by someone who can address the issue. And that's not a policeman in those situations. And so we need mental health professionals, we need service providers, we need all of those. We saw both in local initiatives in Seattle suburbs throughout the county and countywide that this is what voters want. I really hope that our leaders listen this time. I really hope that our media listens this time. And we stop having this conversation that is such a disservice to voters and members of this community that simply focuses on - are we recruiting, are we hiring, are we doing policing? Policing is not the whole picture of public safety. We have to address those other issues. We've seen many cities increase funding and address policing, but have left everything else unaddressed. And voters are practically begging our leaders to take action on a holistic view of public safety to keep us all safer where we all benefit. And I really do hope we start seeing coverage of what's going right, of what voters are saying - beyond whatever police union has the bully pulpit for the day. Talk to people on the ground. Voters are in a much more nuanced place in this than we hear in a lot of the public rhetoric and media. It is, certainly for me, been a source of frustration that this has been pretty obvious for a while and we keep not listening as a whole. I hope finally people will start to listen to what voters keep trying to say. [00:19:24] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, I think what you said resonates with voters, Crystal. It's also something we've seen in the election results. When you were talking, I was thinking of the signs I saw from a Republican candidate in the 32nd Legislative District up in Shoreline that said - at the top of her signs - Make Crime Illegal Again. She got a whopping 18%. You talk about the public wanting investment in alternatives - I think of a young man named Kenneth Mejia who ran for Los Angeles City Controller. He put up billboards all over LA and very prominent places showing with bar charts how much money was being spent on the police and how much was being spent on things like mental health services, and how the police were overfunded yet no one was feeling safe. And he ran against a conservative law and order type guy, and won by 20+ points. The public is making it very clear - they do want crime addressed, but they want violent crime to be addressed through solutions of root causes as well as an officer showing up in the right appropriate moment. And the public recognizes that sending a officer with a gun to a mental health crisis is not the right answer. Sending an officer with a gun because someone's in a tent somewhere is not the right answer. There are other solutions we need to be looking at and the public wants those. I think also what we're seeing is that candidates who address this issue, who don't try to duck it and hide from it, do better. Again, Fetterman was a good example of this. But we saw Leesa Manion here as well and we can even look at Oregon. When Democrats start talking about this, the public will listen. When they address it and say, yeah, I hear you and here's a solution, we're not going down this ridiculous law and order path that hasn't worked. Here's what we're going to do instead, and the data shows this works and this matches our values. Democrats do pretty well. And I think that's a lesson for Democrats in local state and federal races going forward. [00:21:22] Crystal Fincher: We also saw, in a neighbor of ours, down in Oregon a really interesting race for governor. How did this shape up? [00:21:31] Robert Cruickshank: It was a race that was dominated by conversation about crime, homelessness - Portland got hit harder by the pandemic and certainly by Trump than we did in Seattle. Whereas we had a short amount of protests here in the city, Portland was where Trump sent in the Department of Homeland Security, picked people up off the streets, there's reports that he was trying to manufacture terrorism cases, working with local officials. They had 100+ nights of battles with protesters and police in the streets. What this led to was - you go to downtown Portland today and it's taking a lot longer to recover than downtown Seattle. There are real issues with folks living unhoused and not getting support services they need. And Republicans, who have come close to winning the Oregon governor's race in the past, thought they could capitalize on this. And certainly didn't hurt that Republicans had Phil Knight, the Nike founder and billionaire, funding them to the tune of millions of dollars. And Tina Kotek, who was the Democratic Speaker of the House from Portland, was being blamed for this. And the media and the Republicans and Phil Knight were all saying - it's your fault, Tina, that all these awful things are happening in Portland. Portland is dying. And what Tina did was she turned into it and said, here's actually what we're going to do, here are the solutions we're going to talk about. Yeah, we're going to get everybody housed and we're going to get everyone's needs met, because that's what Oregon is and that's what we do in Oregon. And she pulled out a victory. She won Multnomah County, which is where Portland is. She won Washington County, which is where the most populous suburbs of Portland are. It was called the day after the election. People thought that Kotek would lose outright or win very narrowly. She's won fairly, by a wider margin than people thought. Another example right there of - when Democrats take this stuff seriously, don't hide from it, but turn and talk about it and root it in our values, they can win. So I think looking at that victory there in Oregon with someone who has been very progressive as a Speaker of the Legislature in Oregon, who'll be a great governor, who's done a lot on housing policy, a lot on other issues as well. Tina's going to be a great leader for the West Coast - something we can learn from in Washington as we have our own governor's race coming up in two years. [00:23:49] Crystal Fincher: Now locally in Seattle, there was an issue on the ballot about how Seattle is going to vote. There was also an issue in King County on the ballot for how King County is going to vote. What is going to happen with how Seattle and King County run their elections? [00:24:06] Robert Cruickshank: We can start with the clearest outcome, which is King County. King County has very clearly - it's settled - voted to move elections for the King County Council and the King County Executive to even-numbered years - that'll start in 2026 - rather than having them in odd-numbered years. And what this will do is increase turnout. City of Los Angeles did this a few years ago - this was the first even year that their mayoral election happened and turnout is significantly higher. Higher turnout means more voters are involved in the process. Candidates have to speak to more voters. They can't just go talk to the old white folks who always vote. They got to talk to everybody. So that's good for democracy right there. In Seattle, the vote came down to a decision between approval voting and ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting is the clear preference with 75% support. But the first question that got asked is, do you want to change anything at all? No is very narrowly leading on that. I think that's partly due to - voters are still learning about things like ranked choice voting. You also have both The Seattle Times and The Stranger recommend a No vote for different reasons. The Stranger said they support ranked choice voting, but they wanted a different process to get there. But I think coming out of this, there is a very clear mandate from Seattle voters. We want ranked choice voting. The Legislature needs to figure it out, City Hall needs to figure it out. And in next year's legislative session, they're going to need to give not just Seattle, but other jurisdictions, more freedom and leeway to do something like that. [00:25:40] Crystal Fincher: This is coming, in one way or another, to the City of Seattle, clearly. That is a very clear message sent by the voters. Now, I do think there is a fair point to be made about the process by which it happens, just having some more time to really educate and give information about it - I think that's going to be helpful. But really figuring out the how of the implementation to make sure that it's smooth, to make sure there is sufficient outreach and education for voters beforehand, and to make sure that the voters are able to vote in a way that is fair, that there is a - with the Secretary of State - that they're adequately supporting Seattle and any other jurisdiction that wants to make this change and to help make these implementations consistent and successful. So I'm looking forward to seeing how this proceeds. I'm really looking forward to even-year elections. The difference that this makes in turnout is so clear and obvious. Again, you brought up Los Angeles. We are seeing the difference that that is making - so many more people are engaged in elections down there. Even in the primary, so many more people have been engaged and it has shown. And candidates who are not engaging with the public and relying simply on the old tried and true way of just speaking to a narrow slice of special interest supporters and having a big war chest of finances are not having the time that they thought they were. They're actually struggling in this election, and those candidates who have engaged with a broader selection of the public are much more successful this cycle. So I also think this is a positive thing just in terms of not just turnout, but in how candidates need to engage with the public and need to be accountable to their constituents. I think this is a very positive development that we've seen in Los Angeles, and I am excited to see it implemented here with county races and really hope that it expands. There's a bill also to do this in the Legislature. I hope we see that the success of this, and just the very wide margin of passage and support for this, really does help this get through in the State Legislature statewide. [00:28:03] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, I think it's a pretty strong mandate from King County to the Legislature as well - that we want that bill to pass to give local jurisdictions the ability to move their elections to even years. One thing you see in some of these small cities around even King County, going into the late 2010s - you had a lot of right-wingers controlling these city councils - Tukwila, Burien, SeaTac had Trump supporters sitting on their city councils in 2017, 2018, even as late as 2019. And even-year elections help mitigate against that because you get more people involved in the process. That's good for small D democracy. I think it'll also make the outcome more progressive, which is good for those who care about that. There's no guarantee that that happens. Ultimately, candidates have to speak to more people, and that's always a good thing. [00:28:53] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, absolutely. And in Los Angeles, we are seeing a very, very close mayoral race. As you said, this doesn't guarantee the progressive outcome, but there are a lot more people engaged. Turnout is increased - it's taking time to count those votes, but we'll stay tuned on what's happening there. Also here, we saw across the state, legislative races in these battleground districts turn out, frankly, much better than initially anticipated. For a midterm year, it's not just in Congress where the party in power traditionally struggles. And we just did not see the outcome that many feared at the start of this cycle. There were people wondering across the board, both in political circles and outside - are Democrats going to maintain the majority in both chambers of our legislature? And the resounding answer is yes. What did you see in a number of these races? I'm thinking of the 26th Legislative District, which is a district that is absolutely a battleground district - progressive senator there with Emily Randall, but who has been constantly under attack by extreme Republicans. The 42nd Legislative District in the north part of Washington, the 47th Legislative District where - full disclosure, we did work in that race - but here in King County, in one of the most diverse areas of the county, but one which is a purple district that has elected both Republicans and Democrats. What were your takeaways and what did you see in these races? [00:30:38] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, I think we're seeing Washington become a more stable blue state. And I think the Republican Party is in a permanent downward trend - doesn't mean they'll never win again. I want to make that clear. But right now, the fundamental trends favor Democrats, especially in the entire Puget Sound region. You mentioned the 42nd District way up in Whatcom County, all the way down to the South Sound - Democrats are winning consistently, and it's not just a rejection of the far right. You saw people like Chad Magendanz, who used to be a more moderate-ish Republican State Representative in Issaquah, in the 5th District. He wanted his seat back. And so he ran against Lisa Callan, thinking there's a Democratic woman I can easily beat her. No, you can't. He's losing by 10 points. He had the Seattle Times endorsement. The Seattle Times endorsed another fairly moderate-ish Republican to take on Manka Dhingra in the Redmond area - Manka's winning by a huge margin. You mentioned the 47th District, where Claudia Kauffman is winning against a more moderate Republican. And Republicans even got bounced out of the open State House race there. Federal Way is becoming much more safe for Democrats when it wasn't that long ago - 2014, 2015, 2016 - the most expensive races in the state for Legislature were happening in Federal Way - it was that close. You look at Emily Randall, who's done a great job representing the Kitsap Peninsula and that part of Pierce County out there - Gig Harbor area - really responsive to constituents, running on an unabashedly progressive agenda and winning. It's close, but she's got a pretty strong, stable lead. I think what you're seeing here is a Democratic party that is increasingly responsive. The people who are filling these seats are increasingly younger, more diverse, more representative and inclusive. And I think it is giving Democrats a more stable majority. Republicans are having a really tough time right now - finding a path to a majority. Now, that means Democrats have to deliver. They keep getting these victories at the State Legislative level, and then they fall a little short delivering on things. They did great stuff on climate, they had some good reforms on policing in 2020, which they then stepped back from the next year, which was a big problem. But there's a lot that they need to do on housing, right? Housing legislation died in the 2022 session - that's going to have to come up. We may be entering a recession and they're going to have to solve taxes. I think honestly, one of the most important victories is Noel Frame becoming State Senator. She's a huge upgrade over Reuven Carlyle. Reuven Carlyle spent his time working behind the scenes to undermine or kill progressive priorities left and right to help corporate power. Noel Frame, on the other hand, is leading the way to fix our broken tax code. And I think 2023 is the year finally for Democrats to fix that broken tax code. Now Senator-elect Frame has been leading the Tax Structure Working Group - they're expecting a report on what a new structure for the state could look like that's more progressive and brings in a bit more money. 2023 is the year to get it done - because going into a presidential election year, Democrats are not going to have a whole lot of seats at risk if they do something big in 2023. And given the fiscal forecast, they're going to have to. We have schools that need more funding, school mental health services that need more funding, a healthcare system in crisis. The Legislature needs to step up. Democrats now have majorities where they're not going into each election worrying about whether they're going to lose those majorities. They can keep them if they deliver. And now I think it's going to be on the rest of us who aren't in the Legislature, who are advocates and representing communities, to speak up and organize and make that Democratic legislature deliver in 2023. [00:34:25] Crystal Fincher: And I think you're right on - in addition to just one, being elected and having those majorities - Democrats have a mandate. We saw to a degree that we haven't before - to your point earlier - that Democrats ran hard on their values. And those who did and talked about a holistic view of public safety and bringing comprehensive public safety, who talked about housing being a human right, who talked about the absolute need to expand healthcare coverage, to house people - not simply temporarily shelter, but get people into housing reliably, to control out-of-control housing costs across the board - that these are things that Democrats across the state in battleground districts ran on and won handily on these things. Where there was some question - I know from some consultants, from some Democrats even in leadership - whether they did have a mandate to act on that, whether the public would support those things. We heard a resounding yes from voters. We saw candidates who pledged to take action on these things succeed. And we have leaders who are ready to take on progressive revenue that's going to be necessary to address all of these other issues, particularly in the event of an economic downturn, in the event of budgets going in the other direction. And I do think that we have a helpful blueprint here in the City of Seattle, who recently did implement new progressive revenue with the JumpStart Tax - that is now being used by people who originally opposed that to bail out the City from the consequences of an economic downturn, from budget shortfalls. That is actually providing the necessary revenue, providing stability throughout this downturn period. Progressive revenue really is the key to make sure that the City can continue to deliver services, to make sure that the City can continue to provide residents with the support and assistance needed, to handle infrastructure, to really start to address homelessness in a way that solves this problem, that gets people housed and doesn't just move them from place to place like sweeps do. Progressive revenue really is the stabilizer and the responsible way to handle this. And what I was gratified to see was that opponents, prior opponents of this have now come around and are embracing the JumpStart Tax, are embracing progressive revenue, and recognizing that this is a necessary element of budgets moving forward. I think that there's a lesson to be learned here, as we look at the county budget and as we look at the state budget, that progressive revenue really is the stabilizer here. [00:37:32] Robert Cruickshank: It is. And I think we can also add in the capital gains tax, which the Legislature finally got done last year. And Republicans and their billionaire friends thought, first, that they could repeal it at the ballot box. So that fizzled out. It became really clear, both in terms of their slow going in terms of signature gathering, as well as the polling - no, the public supports taxing the rich to fund education and other priorities. The Democratic elected officials who voted for it haven't paid any price for it. Why would they? The voters want that. They support that. So now you have going into the 2023 session, where they're going to have to figure out how to fund programs and add more funding for things like public education, solve health care problems, and deal with overall budget - the public supports wealth taxes. Senator-elect Frame had a wealth tax proposal that she proposed in 2021 and 2022 - that should be a centerpiece of the discussion in 2023 and her larger Tax Structure Workgroup solution. There is no political downside to making this tax code more progressive. The public wants it. The public supports it. Democrats will face no political cost for doing it. They have no excuse for failing to act. And I think what you point out about Seattle is even people who were skeptical or opponents now understand this is a popular and useful source of revenue that can help solve some problems. [00:38:54] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. And I'm definitely looking forward to this coming legislative session and seeing people take action. And I also just want to call out that we saw more diversity in all kinds this past cycle in winning candidates. There has been lots of chatter that I've heard over the years, and even in this past cycle, talking about ideal candidates and candidates who fit their district - even by Democratic consultants. And usually that has been code for - this is an older white male who is a business owner, or a veteran, or previously a police officer. And really it sounds like code for - this is someone who Republicans can like, this is someone who looks like a Republican. And really if we focus on who looks like the community, who is in the community, who reflects the full diversity of the working class, who can speak to and connect with those issues. And we saw younger candidates. We saw candidates of various ethnicities. We saw candidates of various sexualities. We saw people who can speak to the communities of today who are not stuck in some of the old paradigms that are just not fruitful or productive and haven't been for anyone. If we don't make a case on what we need to do when we're running for election, we can't then govern on that. We can't then pass that legislation. And I think we have seen in prior sessions that being a sticking point and a barrier to governing. Yeah, you can have a Democratic majority, but if it is full of people or has enough people who oppose progressive revenue, who oppose comprehensive public safety, healthcare, education funding that's adequate and appropriate - all of these issues that we're facing - then we have just as much of a barrier than if we elected people from the other party. You have to build a coalition around the action that you need to take. You have to build the case for that action in campaigns. I'm so glad that we saw that done by so many candidates who were successful across the state, and that this can then motivate action on the mandate that they've been handed. [00:41:25] Robert Cruickshank: I think that's right. And I think we may and I think we need to see a reckoning within the Democratic caucuses in Olympia on this. The Democratic caucuses have often been led by mostly older white men or older white folks, who have a lot of privilege and who spend their time telling these newly elected legislators who represent their communities more authentically and look like those communities, telling them - no, fall in line, you have to do what we say, you can't deliver on your promises. And that's been, frankly, a source of a lot of toxicity. You saw Kirsten Harris-Talley step away from being in the Legislature after only a single term and wrote a public letter in the South Seattle Emerald saying that the leadership lacked integrity. You've seen others like Jesse Johnson step away, Emily Wicks step away - but more folks keep coming in who represent those communities, who look like those communities, who aren't the older white folks of the past. And I think we who are outside of Olympia need to do everything we can to help change that dynamic, put the pressure on leadership - the old ways of standing on the tracks and saying, no, isn't going to work anymore. We've delivered the votes. We've delivered stable majorities. Now you have to deliver. We are not accepting no for an answer. [00:42:43] Crystal Fincher: Now there is another local race that we've talked about on the show before that is absolutely exciting and an example of what true grassroots organizing, true connection to the community, and what direct action and community action can do. And that's the Raise the Wage Tukwila campaign that was wildly successful. We have not seen a minimum wage initiative be this successful yet here in this state. This was something that included leaders from the business community in Tukwila, labor leaders in Tukwila, the Transit Riders Union leadership, and just a bunch of people who are really passionate about making sure that workers get paid fairly. What happened that you saw in this race? [00:43:43] Robert Cruickshank: I think what we see is that, again, King County - and it's not just Seattle - strongly supports higher wages for workers. You see worker organizing from Starbucks to Amazon is popular and people get it. Working folks are struggling. They're struggling before pandemic, struggling before inflation. And those two factors have made it only more important and more popular to raise the wage. And it's interesting that we've almost come full circle here. I think the national Raise the Wage movement took off in SeaTac in 2013, and grassroots organizations got the $15 an hour minimum wage passed there. And it was a very close vote. That was not a resounding victory by any means. And then grassroots folks led by Kshama Sawant and others in Seattle went 15 Now. And they got that done in part by gathering signatures to say - we don't have a solution that we like - we'll take you to the ballot and we'll win. Now what you're seeing - going to Tukwila - saying, 15 was a good start. It's not enough. We need to keep raising that wage. And voters are responding very, very strongly. And you can see this across the country now, even in deep red states like Arkansas, Missouri - initiatives to raise the minimum wage pass pretty easily. Voters understand that the wages are too low, that people need to be paid better for the work that they're doing, especially those in what have often been underpaid service sector jobs. The public is there. The public wants it. And again, here's another place where Democratic majorities should act. You look at the federal minimum wage, which has not budged since 2009, it's still stuck at $7.25. If Democrats hang on to the House and hang on to the Senate, one of the first things they do in 2023 should be to raise that wage. [00:45:27] Crystal Fincher: It absolutely should be. And it's something that they should move to advance, even if they don't take control of the House. Because to the point that you just made, we saw in a deep red state this year and on the ballot box, just this week, a minimum wage increase pass. We've seen these pass in deep red states. Progressive policy is actually popular with workers. It does materially improve the wages and the lives, living conditions of working people - regardless of what their political ideology is. And they recognize that and they support these things. If Republicans were smart, they would see that their voters, their constituents that they need to win, support this and they should also. And if not, then once again, they're going to be voting against the will of their constituents and something that could materially improve their lives immediately. So this is something that should be ripe for action from Democrats across the country in every state legislative house, every state legislative chamber, every - in Congress - just people from far and wide, from cities and counties on up. We need to see action on this. It's time. The federal minimum wage is pathetically and shamefully low. We can't support anything on that. It's at this point of poverty wage, and we need to do all that we can to move people out of poverty. We need to stop this exploitation at a time when we see record corporate profits with so many corporations and organizations. There is no excuse to be paying workers poverty wages at all. And communities agree. I also just want to call this one out because sometimes these efforts are kicked off and started in coalition with some really heavily moneyed interests that have positive change in mind. But sometimes they come with - it's a small group of people, the same group of people here and some individual interests doing this kind of across the board. This, to me, was really inspiring because we really saw this generate from the ground up. We really saw community activists, people with an interest in Tukwila, people who lived in Tukwila, people who worked in Tukwila deciding to do this, making sure that it worked for everyone in the community, all of the different stakeholders, really doing the work in canvassing and talking to voters. And that is critically important, and I think helped this initiative and is why we see it being so resounding - is having those one-on-one conversations with people at doors makes the biggest difference that can be made. This was a very intentional campaign. They knew that they had to do that work, planned to do that work, executed that work well, and it showed and it paid off. And so I certainly hope to see this model replicated across the state for a variety of things. My goodness, we can run initiatives to build sidewalks for people to be able to get around their communities, to advance transit, to take climate action, to address healthcare, alternative response public safety. These are all things that we can move on on the ballot box locally with initiatives. And what a great blueprint to be able to study and follow. And I really hope people do that. [00:49:19] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, I think Transit Riders Union and other folks who did a lot of that work in Tukwila really pointed the way forward for a lot of different types of organizing. Hats off to them for stepping up and getting this done. [00:49:31] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. I'm just absolutely inspired and thrilled. And again, hope people really take a look at the work that was done, the planning that was done, and how they executed it - because that's the way to get it done. Okay, so overall, we saw Democrats have just a really successful cycle here in 2022 in Washington. My goodness, Republicans are struggling. What does this mean for both parties as they move forward? [00:50:06] Robert Cruickshank: I think what we're seeing is potentially a light at the end of the tunnel out of 12 years of the Tea Party/MAGA/Trump movement - this huge backlash to progressive policy, a backlash to a Black President, a backlash to a woman presidential nominee, a backlash to social change. We may be starting to see the other side of that. Democrats picking up seats in places like Ohio is promising. There's still a lot to be done. Things didn't go well in Texas. Things went really badly in Florida for Democrats. New York was a problem, but that's also partly because of the Democratic Party structure there that's ossified and really problematic. But the United States is a center-left country, but we have a Republican Party that is trying to use the laws and the courts to undermine that through things like gerrymandering, undermining voting rights, things of that sort. And it's really a problem. And I think if we're able to have a center-left majority represented in this country - now's a good time for Democrats, especially in Congress, to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, to step up and make sure the right to vote is protected, that gerrymandering is ended. Because what you can do with that then is have a stable Democratic majority in the Congress. We can keep the Tea Party, MAGA, Trump movement at bay and finally start to make some movement on the political, social, economic challenges of this country. So I look at this election as a really hopeful moment. I know a lot of us went into it with a lot of anxiety. I know I did. Coming out of it, I think we should feel hopeful about the possibilities that exist. There's still a ton of work ahead. Maybe we turned a corner - I don't know. We'll see. Trump may announce he's running for president next week, but I feel more hopeful right now about the direction of the country than I felt in a little while. I think that's a positive outcome. [00:52:12] Crystal Fincher: I also think it's a positive outcome. I do also see cause for hope. Obviously, we can't, we don't know what's going to happen with control of the House or Senate yet. We don't know what is in store there. But we did see a sound rejection of people who are that extreme. We did see a sound rejection by voters of some of the most extreme policies there. And so let's take that as a starting point and understand that entertaining those, entertaining any of that kind of talk, painting any of that as a both-sides issue, just doesn't work and is not acceptable. I think from the media to different candidates, we don't have to treat that as valid and reasonable at all. We saw a lot of that in the lead up to this election. And I hope that one of the lessons that we learned is that it's just absolutely unacceptable. So given all of the election information that we saw, with everything that happened in these races, what does this mean for 2023 races, particularly in the City of Seattle? [00:53:31] Robert Cruickshank: There are folks out there from the mayor, to The Times, to other observers and consultants who think that 2023 is going to be a more conservative year in terms of City Council elections. I think these election results challenge that. I think you can see that - even in Seattle, where in a place like Northeast Seattle, the 46th district - Darya Farivar, the more progressive candidate, is winning and winning clearly over her more conservative opponent. You see The Stranger's endorsed candidates winning all throughout Seattle legislative races. I think that what this suggests is that voters going into 2023 are not in the same place they may have been in 2021. I think that you're going to see voters want solutions on criminal justice, on public safety, on homelessness that are responsive, holistic, that treat people as whole human beings - not law and order politics. It's not going to be a year where Ann Davison clones are going to do well. I also think there are other issues that are going to come to the fore - you see Darya, Emily Alvarado doing really well because in part, they're strong supporters of building new housing and solving the housing crisis. Someone like Alex Pedersen in District 4 is going to have a real problem - a district that overlaps the 46th - Alex Pedersen being a hardcore NIMBY, deep opponent of new housing, opponent of bike infrastructure, opponent of transit. He's going to have his hands full in 2023. You have an open seat potentially if Debora Juarez retires in District 5. I think even Dan Strauss is going to have to figure out whether he wants to be more progressive or more conservative with his new district. And you see pundits say, oh, it's going to be more conservative district. Will it? That is potentially an open question. I think that going into 2023, there's an opportunity for progressive Seattle here to lay out solutions that the public wants, that are responsive to engage on these issues - not hide from them, but tackle them all directly, and speak directly to voters' concerns, and point the way forward to building a better city that we all know we can have. Some of these races may be very close, but then Alex Pedersen very narrowly won in 2019. If I'm progressive Seattle, I'm looking at 2023 as an opportunity, not as a time to have to play defense, but a time to go on offense and show voters what we have to offer. [00:55:57] Crystal Fincher: I think that is absolutely correct. And I think you're right to point to the 46th Legislative District results as a perfect example of why. This is a district in Northeast Seattle that a lot of people considered to be one of the most moderate in the City of Seattle, to be a NIMBY stronghold, to be the place where - other places in Seattle, other districts in Seattle, other areas may elect Kshama Sawant, may elect more progressive candidates, but that doesn't work north of the Ship Canal. That doesn't work in those areas where we have more established, higher income, single-family neighborhoods, and they don't want that to be destroyed. There have been a small number of very loud voices that have come from those neighborhoods traditionally. And we have seen in this election, really, a sound rejection of the arguments that they were advancing. We saw that rejection on all levels, from legislative races to the county races to the Senate races - the types of arguments and the type of change that they have said was going to be damaging, that they directly took on in these races, just did not land with the voters. And voters sent a clear message that they want to move forward in a different way. Absolutely a message to both progressives and moderates that this is a different day. And it's not good enough to just say, you know what, I want to listen to everyone, bring everyone together. We just need not to be divisive. We don't need to do anything big or dramatic. Let's just stay the course. No one is happy with the course that we're on. No one is happy with continued inaction on housing while prices continue to just escalate and rise to levels that people can't afford. Everyone is being affected by this in one way or another. We're seeing the symptoms of inaction and I think people are recognizing that. And so people who are building a strong case for what action needs to be done and saying - I'm going to be willing to do the hard work in getting this passed and getting this through - are going to be successful. The role of progressive revenue in these races and seeing forces who fundamentally don't want taxation for extremely high income earners, whether it's landlords or people who are making money in speculative gains, to the heads of these major corporations, to the corporations themselves that have reaped windfall profits especially through the pandemic and beyond. And their workers are still struggling or they're battling unionization efforts. Seattle and these districts are on the side of the workers conclusively. They're on the side of our community. And I think there needs to be a broader recognition of that across the board - from leaders to current politicians to our media - and really get connected with what voters are saying today. It's different. And so I'm really interested to see how these 2023 races shape up. I'm frankly interested to see what even the mayor of Seattle takes away from these elections, because he had previously said in some different venues, some in some leaked commentary that he's recruiting against these candidates. He signaled that he wanted to and was aligned with a more punitive punishment approach, that he was skeptical of some of the things that passed without any kind of controversy in this past election by voters. And so is he reconsidering the direction he's taking? Is he reconsidering those candidates who he is setting up to run, perhaps with platforms and advancing policies that were just soundly rejected? And is he reconsidering how he is aligning and allocating his budget that is currently being discussed now - from the sweeps that we're talking about to asking for frontline service workers' compensation to be reduced to just a variety of different things here - is he reconsidering that? It looks like he did start to reconsider progressive revenue, because he certainly relied on that to bail out parts of his budget and to keep it from being underwater and in a deficit. So it looks like there is acknowledgement that that was the right way to go and that we're going to have to rely on that revenue for stability. Hopefully he sees that moving forward. But I'm really interested to hear what our local leaders and existing leaders' takeaways are from this also. [01:00:53] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And the public wants homelessness solved - people in a tent are our neighbors - they need help, need housing, not punitive solutions. People want crime addressed, but they don't want it addressed with punitive hardcore law and order solutions. Sometimes that may be necessary here or there, but they want the root causes addressed. And I think that this is not a year, and next year will not be a year where sort of Eric Adams-style approach is going to work in Seattle. I think it's a real opportunity for progressives. If they speak directly to the issues, hear people's concerns, and show that we have better answers. And I think certainly comes down to questions of police accountability as well - SPOG contract is becoming an important issue that will come up very soon. And I think you're going to have to see candidates declare themselves. Are they going to be for tough reforms on the police department that hold them accountable? Or are they going to try let them off the hook? And I don't think voters want to see the police let off the hook in terms of them doing their jobs and doing their jobs responsibly, constitutionally, and with accountability. [01:02:06] Crystal Fincher: And with that, we thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks on today, Friday, November 11th, 2022. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Lisl Stadler. Our assistant producer is Shannon Cheng, and our Production Coordinator is Bryce Cannatelli. Our insightful co-host today is chair of Sierra Club Seattle, a long time communications and political strategist, an excellent political mind, Robert Cruickshank. You can find Robert on twitter @cruickshank. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter @HacksWonks. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to get all of our shows. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the podcast episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - we'll talk to you next time.  

In this second part of the episode on Ella Baker, I talk to Gerald Taylor. We discuss the influence Baker's approach and vision had on him as an organizer, how he sees her understanding of organizing play out on the ground, and his own involvement in myriad grassroots democratic initiatives. Along the way, he recounts a compelling set of stories and reflections on what it means to do organizing in the spirit of Ella Baker. GuestGerald Taylor was a national senior organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) for  nearly 35 years, and for much of this time he was the IAF's Southeast Regional Director. In 2015, he co-founded Advance Carolina, the first state-wide Black led 501c (4) in North Carolina focused on building Black political power. His organizing career began as a teenager through involvement in the civil rights movement, with him eventually being elected as New York State President of the NAACP Youth and College Division at 17 years old. He then organized with the National Democratic Party of Alabama, an interracial third political party, in their historic election victories of 1970. He went to be involved in numerous organizing initiatives in the US, most notably in New York City, Baltimore, Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, and Jackson, Mississippi. Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, he spent four years organizing African American communities along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to receive disaster relieve leading to the formation of a coalition that negotiated nearly one billion dollars in disaster relieve funding for these communities. He has trained thousands of leaders, including clergy, over the past forty years in community organizing and congregational development. He has also lectured at colleges and universities, including Shaw Divinity School, Hood Divinity School, North Carolina Central Law School, Duke Divinity School, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Garrett Evangelical Methodist Seminary, and UNC Chapel-Hill on theories of social change, community organizing, and leadership. He has also worked internationally with organizations such as Bread for the World, the Sidney Alliance in Australia, and been a consultant to democratization initiatives in Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.Resources for Going DeeperSee the show notes for the previous episode

Bro History On today's Episode, Matt Hoh joins us to tell the crazy story of how his North Carolina Senate run as the presumptive Green Party candidate was suppressed by the National Democratic Party. Matt is a former Marine Corps Captain and worked in the State Department as part of the provincial reconstruction team in Afghanistan. In […] szamotah

Mike Isaacson: If your free speech requires an audience, might I suggest a therapist? [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOsLizards wearing human clothesHinduism's secret codesThese are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genesWarfare keeps the nation cleanWhiteness is an AIDS vaccineThese are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocideMuslim's rampant femicideShooting suspects named Sam HydeHiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the copsSecret service, special opsThey protect us, not sweatshopsThese are nazi lies Mike: Welcome once again to The Nazi Lies Podcast. I am joined by two historians today. With us is Evan Smith, lecturer at Flinders University in Adelaide, and David Renton, who taught at a number of universities in the UK and South Africa before leaving the academy to practice law, though he still finds time to research and write. Each of them has a book about today's topic: the free speech crisis. Dr. Smith's book, No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech, chronicles the No Platform policy of the National Union of Students in the UK from its foundation in 1974 to the present day. Dr. Renton's book, No Free Speech for Fascists: Exploring ‘No Platform' in History, Law and Politics, tells a much longer story of the interplay of radical leftist groups, organized fascists, and the state in shaping the UK's speech landscape and their significance in politics and law. Both are out from Routledge. I have absolutely no idea how we've managed to make the time zones work between the three of us, but welcome both of you to the podcast. Evan Smith: Thank you. David Renton: Thanks, Mike. Mike: So David, I want to start with you because your book goes all the way back to the 1640s to tell its history. So what made you start your story in the 1640s, and what did contention over speech look like before Fascism? David: Well, I wanted to start all that time back more than 300 years ago, because this is the moment when you first start to see something like the modern left and right emerge. You have in Britain, a party of order that supports the state and the king, but you also have a party which stands for more democracy and a more equal distribution of wealth. And essentially, from this point onwards in British, European, American politics, you see those same sites recreating themselves. And what happens again, and again, and again from that point onwards for hundreds of years until certainly say 50 years ago, you have essentially the people who are calling for free speech, whether that's the levellers in 1640s, Tom Paine 100 years later, J.S. Mill in the 19th Century. The left is always the people in favor of free speech. In terms of the right, if you want a kind of the first philosopher of conservatism, someone like Edmund Burke, he's not involved in the 1640s. He's a bit later, about a century and a half later. But you know, he supports conservatism. So what's his attitude towards free speech? It's really simple. He says, people who disagree with him should be jailed. There should be laws made to make it harder for them to have defenses. And more and more of them should be put in jail without even having a trial. That's the conservative position on free speech for centuries. And then what we get starting to happen in the late 20th century, something completely different which is a kind of overturning of what's been this huge, long history where it's always the left that's in favor of free speech, and it's always the right that's against it. Mike: Okay. Now, your contention is that before the appearance of Fascism, socialist radicals were solidly in favor of free speech for all. Fascism changed that, and Evan, maybe you can jump in here since this is where your book starts. What was new about Fascism that made socialists rethink their position on speech? Evan: So fascism was essentially anti-democratic and it was believed that nothing could be reasoned with because it was beyond the realms of reasonable, democratic politics. It was a violence, and the subjugation of its opponents was at the very core of fascism. And that the socialist left thought that fascism was a deeply violent movement that moved beyond the traditional realm of political discourse. So, there was no reasoning with fascists, you could only defeat them. Mike: So, let's start with David first, but I want to get both of you on this. What was the response to Fascism like before the end of World War II? David: Well, what you do is you get the left speaking out against fascism, hold demonstrations against fascism, and having to articulate a rationale of why they're against fascism. One of the things I quote in my book is a kind of famous exchange that takes place in 1937 when a poet named Nancy Cunard collected together the writers, intellectuals, and philosophers who she saw as the great inspiration to– the most important writers and so on that day. And she asked them what side they were taking on fascism. What's really interesting if you read their accounts, whether it's people like the poet W.H. Auden, novelist Gerald Bullitt, the philosopher C.E.M Joad, they all say they're against fascism, but they all put their arguments against fascism in terms of increased speech. So C.E.M Joad writes, "Fascism suppresses truth. That's why we're against fascism." Or the novelist Owen Jameson talks about fascism as a doctrine which exalts violence and uses incendiary bombs to fight ideas. So you get this thing within the left where people grasp that in order to fight off this violence and vicious enemy, they have to be opposed to it. And that means, for example, even to some extent making an exception to what's been for centuries this uniform left-wing notion: you have to protect everyone's free speech. Well people start grasping, we can't protect the fascist free speech, they're gonna use it to suppress us. So the Left makes an exception to what's been its absolute defense of free speech, but it makes this exception for the sake of protecting speech for everybody. Mike: Okay. Evan, do you want to add anything to the history of socialists and fascists before the end of World War Two? Evan: Yeah. So just kind of setting up a few things which will become important later on, and particularly because David and I are both historians of antifascism in Britain, is that there's several different ways in which antifascism emerges in the interwar period and several different tactics. One tactic is preventing fascists from marching from having a presence in public. So things like the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 is a very famous incident where the socialists and other protesters stopped the fascists from marching. There's also heckling and disrupting of fascist meetings. So this was big meetings like Olympia in June 1934, but then also smaller ones like individual fascist meetings around the country were disrupted by antifascists. There was also some that are on the left who also called for greater state intervention, usually in the form of labor councils not allowing fascists to congregate in public halls and stuff like that. So these kinds of arguments that fascism needs to be confronted, disrupted, obfuscated, starts to be developed in the 1930s. And it's where those kinds of free speech arguments emerge in the later period. Mike: Now immediately after the Second World War, fascist movements were shells of their former selves. They had almost no street presence and their organizations usually couldn't pull very many members. Still, the response to fascism when it did pop up was equally as vehement as when they organized into paramilitary formations with membership in the thousands. Something had qualitatively changed in the mind of the public regarding fascism. What did the immediate postwar response to public fascist speech look like, and what was the justification? Evan, let's start with you and then David you can add anything he misses. Evan: David probably could tell the story in a lot more detail. In the immediate post-war period in Britain, Oswald Mosley tries to revive the fascist movement under the title The Union Movement, but before that there's several kind of pro-fascist reading groups that emerge. And in response to this is kind of a disgust that fascists who had recently been imprisoned in Britain and their fellow travellers in the Nazis and the Italian Fascists and the continental fascists had been, you know, it ended in the Holocaust. There was this disgust that fascists could be organizing again in public in Britain, and that's where it mobilizes a new kind of generation of antifascists who are inspired by the 1930s to say "Never again, this won't happen on our streets." And the most important group and this is The 43 Group, which was a mixture of Jewish and communist radicals, which probably David can tell you a little bit about. David: I'd be happy to but I think before we get to 43 Group, it's kind of worth just pausing because the point Mike's left is kind of around the end of the Second World War. One thing which happens during the Second World War is of course Britain's at war with Germany. So what you start to get is Evan talked about how in the 1930s, you already have this argument like, “Should stopping fascism be something that's done by mass movements, or should it be done by the state?” In the Second World War the state has to confront that question, too, because it's got in fascism a homegrown enemy, and the British state looks at how all over Europe these states were toppled really quickly following fascist advance, and very often a pro-fascist powerful section of the ruling class had been the means by which an invading fascism then found some local ally that's enabled it to take over the state and hold the state. So the British state in 1940 actually takes a decision to intern Oswald Mosley and 800 or so of Britain's leading fascists who get jailed initially in prisons in London, then ultimately on the Isle of Man. Now, the reason why I'm going into this is because the first test of what the ordinary people in Britain think about the potential re-emergence of fascism comes even before the Second World War's ended. When Oswald Mosley is released from internment, he says he has conditioned phlebitis, he's very incapacitated, and is never going to be politically active again. And the British state buys this. And this creates–and an actual fact–the biggest single protest movement in Britain in the entire Second World War, where you get hundreds of people in certain factories going on strike against Oswald Mosley's release, and high hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions demanding that he's reinterned, and you start to get people having demonstrations saying Mosley ought to go back to jail. That kind of sets the whole context of what's going to happen after the end of the Second World War. Mosley comes out and he's terrified of public opinion; he's terrified about being seen in public. He's convinced that if you hold meetings you're going to see that cycle going on again. So for several years, the fascists barely dare hold public meetings, and they certainly don't dare hold meetings with Mosley speaking. They test the water a bit, and they have some things work for them. Evan's mentioned the 43 Group so I'll just say a couple sentences about them. The 43 Group are important in terms of what becomes later. They're not a vast number of people, but they have an absolute focus on closing down any fascist meeting. We're gonna hear later in this discussion about the phrase "No Platform" and where it comes from, but you know, in the 1940s when fascist wanted to hold meetings, the platform means literally getting together a paste table and standing on it, or standing on a tiny little ladder just to take you a couple of foot above the rest of your audience. The 43 Group specialize in a tactic which is literally knocking over those platforms. And because British fascism remained so isolated and unpopular in the aftermath of the Second World War, you know, there are 43 Group activists and organizers who look at London and say, "All right, if there going to be 12 or 13 public meetings in London this weekend, we know where they're going to be. If we can knock over every single one of those other platforms, then literally there'll be no fascists to have any chance to find an audience or put a public message in Britain." That's kind of before you get the term 'No Platform' but it's almost in essence the purest form of No Platforming. It's people being able to say, "If we get organized as a movement outside the state relying on ordinary people's opposition to fascism, we can close down every single example of fascist expression in the city and in this country." Mike: Okay. So through the 50's and 60's, there were two things happening simultaneously. On the one hand, there was the largely left wing student-led free speech movement. And on the other hand, there was a new generation of fascists who were rebuilding the fascist movement in a variety of ways. So let's start with the free speech movement. David, you deal with this more in your book. What spurred the free speech movement to happen? David: Yeah. Look in the 50s and 60s, the free speech movement is coming from the left. That's going to change, we know it's going to change like 20 or 30 years later, but up to this point we're still essentially in the same dance of forces that I outlined right at the start. That the left's in favor of free speech, the right is against it. And the right's closing down unwanted ideas and opinion. In the 50s and 60s, and I'm just going to focus on Britain and America, very often this took the form of either radicals doing some sort of peace organising–and obviously that cut against the whole basic structure of the Cold War–or it took the form of people who maybe not even necessarily radicals at all, just trying to raise understanding and consciousness about people's bodies and about sex. So for the Right, their counterattack was to label movements like for example in the early 60s on the campus of Berkeley, and then there's originally a kind of anti-war movement that very quickly just in order to have the right to organize, becomes free speech movements. And the Right then counter attacks against it saying, "Essentially, this is just a bunch of beats or kind of proto-hippies. And what they want to do is I want to get everyone interested in drugs, and they want to get everyone interested in sexuality, and they want everyone interested in all these sorts of things." So their counterattack, Reagan terms this, The Filthy Speech Movement. In the late 60s obviously in states, we have the trial of the Chicago 7, and here you have the Oz trial, which is when a group of radicals here, again that their point of view is very similar, kind of hippie-ish, anti-war milieu. But one thing is about their magazines, which again it seems very hard to imagine today but this is true, that part of the way that their their magazine sells is through essentially soft pornographic images. And there's this weird combination of soft porn together with far left politics. They'll get put on trial in the Oz trial and that's very plainly an attempt– our equivalent of the Chicago 7 to kind of close down radical speech and to get into the public mind this idea that the radicals are in favor of free speech, they're in favor of extreme left-wing politics, and they're in favor of obscenity, and all these things are somehow kind of the same thing. Now, the point I just wanted to end on is that all these big set piece trials–another one to use beforehand is the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial, the Oz trial, the Chicago 7 trial, all of these essentially end with the right losing the battle of ideas, not so much the far right but center right. And people just saying, "We pitched ourselves on the side of being against free speech, and this isn't working. If we're going to reinvent right-wing thought, make some center right-wing ideas desirable and acceptable in this new generation of people, whatever they are, then we can't keep on being the ones who are taking away people's funds, closing down ideas. We've got to let these radicals talk themselves out, and we've got to reposition ourselves as being, maybe reluctantly, but the right takes the decision off of this. The right has to be in favor of free speech too. Mike: All right. And also at this time, the far right was rebuilding. In the UK, they shifted their focus from overt antisemitism and fascism to nebulously populist anti-Black racism. The problem for them, of course, was that practically no one was fooled by this shift because it was all the same people. So, what was going on with the far right leading into the 70s? Evan, do you want to start? Evan: Yeah. So after Mosley is defeated in Britain by the 43 Group and the kind of antifascism after the war, he moves shortly to Ireland and then comes back to the UK. Interestingly, he uses universities and particularly debates with the Oxford Union, the Cambridge Union, and other kind of university societies, to find a new audience because they can't organize on the streets. So he uses–throughout the '50s and the '60s–these kind of university platforms to try and build a fascist movement. At the same time, there are people who were kind of also around in the '30s and the '40s who are moving to build a new fascist movement. It doesn't really get going into '67 when the National Front is formed from several different groups that come together, and they're really pushed into the popular consciousness because of Enoch Powell and his Rivers of Blood Speech. Enoch Powell was a Tory politician. He had been the Minister for Health in the Conservative government, and then in '68 he launches this Rivers of Blood Speech which is very much anti-immigration. This legitimizes a lot of anti-immigrationist attitudes, and part of that is that the National Front rides his coattails appealing to people who are conservatives but disaffected with the mainstream conservatism and what they saw as not being hard enough in immigration, and that they try to build off the support of the disaffected right; so, people who were supporting Enoch Powell, supporting the Monday Club which is another hard right faction in the conservatives. And in that period up until about the mid 1970s, that's the National Front's raison d'etre; it's about attracting anti-immigrationists, conservatives to build up the movement as an electoral force rather than a street force which comes later in the '70s. Mike: There was also the Apartheid movement, or the pro-Apartheid movement, that they were building on at this time as well, right? Evan: Yeah. So at this time there's apartheid in South Africa. In 1965, the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia has a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain to maintain White minority rule. And a lot of these people who are around Powell, the Monday Club, the National Front, against decolonization more broadly, and also then support White minority rule in southern Africa. So a lot of these people end up vocalizing support for South Africa, vocalizing support for Rhodesia, and that kind of thing. And it's a mixture of anti-communism and opposition to multiracial democracy. That's another thing which they try to take on to campus in later years. Mike: So finally we get to No Platform. Now, Evan, you contend that No Platform was less than a new direction in antifascist politics than a formalization of tactics that had developed organically on the left. Can you talk a bit about that? Evan: Yeah, I'll give a quick, very brief, lead up to No Platform and to what's been happening in the late '60s. So Enoch Powell who we mentioned, he comes to try and speak on campus several times throughout the late 60s and early 70s. These are often disrupted by students that there's an argument that, "Why should Enoch Powell be allowed to come onto campus? We don't need people like that to be speaking." This happens in the late 60s. Then in '73, Hans Eysenck, who was a psychologist who was very vocal about the connection between race and IQ, he attempts to speak at the London School of Economics and his speech is disrupted by a small group of Maoists. And then also– Mike: And they physically disrupted that speech, right? That wasn't just– Evan: Yeah, they punched him and pushed him off stage and stuff like that. And a month later, Samuel Huntington who is well known now for being the Clash of Civilizations guy, he went to speak at Sussex University, and students occupied a lecture theater so he couldn't talk because they opposed his previous work with the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. This led to a moral panic beginning about the end of free speech on campus, that it's either kind of through sit-ins or through direct violence, but in the end students are intolerant. And that's happening in that five years before we get to No Platform. Mike: One thing I didn't get a good sense of from your books was what these socialist groups that were No Platforming fascists prior to the NUS policy stood for otherwise. Can we talk about the factionalization of the left in the UK in the 60s and 70s? David, maybe you can help us out on this one. David: Yeah, sure. The point to grasp, which is that the whole center of British discourse in the ‘70s was way to the left of where it is in Britain today, let alone anywhere else in the world. That from, say, ‘64 to ‘70, we had a Labour government, and around the Labour Party. We had really, really strong social movements. You know, we had something like roughly 50% of British workers were members of trade unions. We'll get on later to the Students Union, that again was a movement in which hundreds of thousands of people participated. Two particular groups that are going to be important for our discussion are the International Socialists and International Marxist Group, but maybe if I kind of go through the British left sort of by size starting from largest till we get down to them. So the largest wing we've got on the British left is Labour Party. This is a party with maybe about half a million members, but kind of 20 million affiliated members through trade unions, and it's gonna be in and out of government. Then you've got the Communist Party which is getting quite old as an organization and is obviously tied through Cold War politics to the Soviet Union. And then you get these smaller groups like the IS, the IMG. And they're Trotskyist groups so they're in the far left of labor politics as revolutionaries, but they have quite a significant social heft, much more so than the far left in Britain today because, for example, their members are involved in editing magazines like Oz. There is a moment where there's a relatively easy means for ideas to merge in the far left and then get transmitted to the Labour Party and potentially even to Labour ministers and into government. Mike: Okay, do you want to talk about the International Marxist Group and the International Socialists? Evan: Do you want me to do that or David? Mike: Yes, that'd be great. Evan: Okay. So as David mentioned, there's the Communist Party and then there's the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group. The International Marxist Group are kind of heavily based in the student movement. They're like the traditional student radicals. Tariq Ali is probably the most famous member at this stage. And they have this counter cultural attitude in a way. International Socialists are a different form of Trotskyism, and they're much more about, not so much interested in the student movement, but kind of like a rank and file trade unionism that kind of stuff, opposition to both capitalism and Soviet communism. And the IS, the IMG, and sections of the Communist Party all coalesce in the student movement, which forms the basis for pushing through a No Platform policy in the Nationalist Union of Students in 1974. Mike: Okay. So in 1974, the National Union of Students passes their No Platform policy. Now before we get into that, what is the National Union of Students? Because we don't have an analogue to that in the US. Evan, you want to tackle this one? Evan: Yeah. Basically, every university has a student union or a form of student union–some kind of student body–and the National Union of Students is the national organization, the peak body which organizes the student unions on all the various campuses around the country. Most of the student unions are affiliated to the NUS but some aren't. The NUS is a kind of democratic body and oversees student policy, but individual student unions can opt in or opt out of whether they follow NUS guidelines. And I think what needs to be understood is that the NUS was a massive organization back in those days. You know, hundreds of thousands of people via the student unions become members of the NUS. And as David was saying, the political discourse is much bigger in the '60s and '70s through bodies like this as well as things like the trade union movement. The student movement has engaged hundreds of thousands of students across Britain about these policies much more than we see anything post the 1970s. David: If I could just add a sentence or two there, that's all right. I mean, really to get a good sense of scale of this, if you look at, obviously you have the big set piece annual conventions or conferences of the National Union of Students. Actually, it doesn't even just have one a year, it has two a year. Of these two conferences, if you just think about when the delegates are being elected to them how much discussion is taking place in local universities. If you go back to some local university meetings, it's sometimes very common that you see votes of 300 students going one way, 400 another, 700 going one way in some of the larger universities. So there's an absolute ferment of discussion around these ideas. Which means that when there are set piece motions to pass, they have a democratic credibility. And they've had thousands of people debating and discussing them. It's not just like someone going on to one conference or getting something through narrowly on a show of hands. There's a feeling that these debates are the culmination of what's been a series of debates in each local university. And we've got over 100 of them in Britain. Mike: Okay, how much is the student union's presence felt on campus by the average student? Evan: That'd be massive. David: Should I do this? Because I'm a bit older than Evan and I went to university in the UK. And it's a system which is slowly being dismantled but when I was student, which is like 30 years ago, this was still largely in place. In almost every university, the exceptions are Oxford and Cambridge, but in every other university in Britain, almost all social activity takes place on a single site on campus. And that single site invariably is owned by the student's union. So your students union has a bar, has halls, it's where– They're the plumb venues on campus if you want to have speakers or if you want to have– Again, say when punk happened a couple of years later, loads and loads of the famous punk performances were taking place in the student union hall in different universities. One of the things we're going to get onto quite soon is the whole question of No Platform and what it meant to students. What I want to convey is that for loads of students having this discussion, when they're saying who should be allowed on campus or who shouldn't be allowed on campus, what's the limits? They feel they've got a say because there are a relatively small number of places where people will speak. Those places are controlled by the students' union. They're owned and run by the students' union. It's literally their buildings, their halls, they feel they've got a right to set who is allowed, who's actually chosen, and who also shouldn't be invited. Mike: Okay, cool. Thank you. Thank you for that. That's a lot more than I knew about student unions. Okay. Evan, this is the bread and butter of your book. How did No Platform come about in the NUS? Evan: So, what part of the fascist movement is doing, the far-right movement, is that it is starting to stray on campus. I talked about the major focus of the National Front is about appealing to disaffected Tories in this stage, but they are interfering in student affairs; they're disrupting student protests; they're trying to intimidate student politics. And in 1973, the National Front tried to set up students' association on several campuses in Britain And there's a concern about the fascist presence on campus. So those three left-wing groups– the IMG, the IS and the Communist Party–agree at the student union level that student unions should not allow fascists and racists to use student buildings, student services, clubs that are affiliated to the student union. They shouldn't be allowed to access these. And that's where they say about No Platform is that the student union should deny a platform to fascists and racists. And in 1974 when they put this policy to a vote and it's successful, they add, "We're going to fight them by any means necessary," because they've taken that inspiration from the antifascism of the '30s and '40s. Mike: Okay. Now opinion was clearly divided within the NUS. No Platform did not pass unanimously. So Evan, what was opinion like within the NUS regarding No Platform? Evan: Well, it passed, but there was opposition. There was opposition from the Federation of Conservative Students, but there was also opposition from other student unions who felt that No Platform was anti-free speech, so much so that in April 1974 it becomes policy, but in June 1974, they have to have another debate about whether this policy should go ahead. It wins again, but this is the same time as it happens on the same day that the police crackdown on anti-fascist demonstration in Red Lion Square in London. There's an argument that fascism is being propped up by the police and is a very real threat, so that we can't give any quarter to fascism. We need to build this No Platform policy because it is what's standing in between society and the violence of fascism. Mike: Okay. I do want to get into this issue of free speech because the US has a First Amendment which guarantees free speech, but that doesn't exist in Britain. So what basis is there for free speech in the law? I think, David, you could probably answer this best because you're a lawyer. David: [laughs] Thank you. In short, none. The basic difference between the UK and the US– Legally, we're both common law countries. But the thing that really changes in the US is this is then overlaid with the Constitution, which takes priority. So once something has been in the Constitution, that's it. It's part of your fundamental law, and the limits to it are going to be narrow. Obviously, there's a process. It's one of the things I do try and talk about in my book that the Supreme Court has to discover, has to find free speech in the American Constitution. Because again, up until the Second World War, essentially America has this in the Constitution, but it's not particularly seen as something that's important or significant or a key part of the Constitution. The whole awe and  mysticism of the First Amendment as a First Amendment is definitely something that's happened really in the last 40-50 years. Again, I don't want to go into this because it's not quite what you're getting at. But certainly, in the '20s for example, you get many of the big American decisions on free speech which shaped American law today. What everyone forgets is in every single one of them, the Supreme Court goes on to find some reason why free speech doesn't apply. So then it becomes this doctrine which is tremendously important to be ushered out and for lip service be given to, just vast chunks of people, communists, people who are in favor of encouraging abortion, contraception, whatever, they're obviously outside free speech, and you have to come up with some sophisticated justifications for that. In Britain, we don't have a constitution. We don't have laws with that primary significance. We do kind of have a weak free speech tradition, and that's kind of important for some things like there's a European Convention on Human Rights that's largely drafted by British lawyers and that tries to create in Articles 10 and 11 a general support on free speech. So they think there are things in English legal tradition, in our common law tradition, which encourage free speech.  But if we've got it as a core principle of the UK law today, we've got it because of things like that like the European Convention on Human Rights. We haven't got it because at any point in the last 30, or 50, or 70 or 100 years, British judges or politicians thought this was a really essential principle of law. We're getting it these days but largely by importing it from the United States, and that means we're importing the worst ideological version of free speech rather than what free speech ought to be, which is actually protecting the rights of most people to speak. And if you've got some exceptions, some really worked out well thought exceptions for coherent and rational reasons. That's not what we've got now in Britain, and it's not what we've really ever had. Mike: Evan, you do a good job of documenting how No Platform was applied. The experience appears to be far from uniform. Let's talk about that a little bit. Evan: Yeah, so there's like a debate happening about who No Platform should be applied to because it states– The official policy is that No Platform for racists and fascists, and there's a debate of who is a racist enough to be denied a platform. There's agreement so a group like the National Front is definitely to be No Platform. Then there's a gray area about the Monday Club. The Monday Club is a hard right faction within the conservatives. But there's a transmission of people and ideas between National Front and the Monday Club. Then there's government ministers because the British immigration system is a racist system. The Home Office is seen as a racist institution. So there's a debate of whether government politicians should be allowed to have a platform because they uphold institutional racism. We see this at different stages is that a person from the Monday Club tries to speak at Oxford and is chased out of the building. Keith Joseph, who's one of the proto-Thatcherites in the Conservative Party, comes to speak at LSE in the 1977-78 and that there is a push to say that he can't be allowed to speak because of the Conservative Party's immigration policies and so forth like that. So throughout the '70s, there is a debate of the minimalist approach with a group like the International Socialists saying that no, outright fascists are the only ones to be No Platformed. Then IMG and other groups are saying, "Actually, what about the Monday Club? What about the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children? What about Conservative Ministers? Are these people, aren't they also sharing that kind of discriminatory agenda that shouldn't be allowed a platform?" Mike: Okay, and there were some objections within the National Union of Students to some applications of No Platform, right? Evan: Yeah, well, not so much in the '70s. But once you get into the '80s, there's a big push for it. But probably the biggest issue in the '70s is that the application of No Platform to pro-Israel groups and Jewish student groups. In 1975, there's a UN resolution that Zionism is a form of racism, and that several student groups say, "Well, pro-Israel groups are Zionists. If Zionism is a form of racism and No Platform should be applied to racists or fascists, shouldn't they the pro-Israel groups then be denied a platform? Should pro-Israel groups be disaffiliated from student unions, etc.?" Several student unions do this at the local level, but there's a backlash from the NUS at the national level so much so the NUS actually suspends No Platform for about six months. It is reintroduced with an explicit piece of it saying that if No Platform is reinstituted, it can't be applied to Zionists groups, to pro-Israel groups, to Jewish societies. But a reason that they can't, the NUS can't withhold No Platform as a policy in the late 1970s is because they've been playing catch up because by this time, the Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism are major mass movements of people because the National Front is seen as a major problem, and the NUS has to have some kind of anti-Fascist, anti-racist response. They can't sit on their hands because they're going dragged along by the Anti-Nazi League. Mike: One thing that you talked about in your book, David, is that simultaneous to No Platform was this movement for hate speech prohibitions. Talk about how these movements differed. David: Well, I think the best way to convey it is if we go back to the motion that was actually passed at the National Union of Students spring conference in May '74. If you don't mind, I'll just begin by reading it out. Conference recognizes the need to refuse any assistance, financial or otherwise, to openly racist or fascist organizations or societies (e.g., Monday Club, National Front, Action Party, Union Movement, National Democratic Party) and to deny them a platform. What I want to try and convey is that when you think about how you got this coalition within the National Union of Students in support of that motion, there were like two or three different ideas being signaled in that one motion. And if you then apply them, particularly what's happening as we're talking 50 years later now, if you apply them through the subsequent 50 years of activism, they do point in quite different directions. To just start up, “conference recognizes the need to refuse any assistance” dadadada. What's really been good at here, I'm sure some of the people who passed No Platform promotion just had this idea, right? What we are, we're a movement of students' unions. We're a movement of buildings which are run by students and are for students. People have said to themselves, all this motion is really committing us to do is to say that we won't give any assistance to racist or fascist organizations. So what that means in practice is in our buildings, in our halls, we won't invite them in. Now, it may be that, say, the university will invite a conservative minister or the university will allow some far-right person to have a platform in election time. But the key idea, one key idea that's going on with this, just those things won't happen in our students' unions. They're our buildings; they're our halls. To use a term that hasn't really been coined yet, but this is in people's heads, is the idea of a safe space. It's just, student unions are our safe space. We don't need to worry about who exactly these terrible people are. Whoever and whatever they are, we don't want them on our patch. That's idea number one. Idea number two is that this is really about stopping fascists. It's not about any other form of discrimination. I'll come on to idea three in a moment. With idea three, this is about fascist organizations. You can see in a sense the motion is talking to people, people coming on and saying like I might not even be particularly left wing, but I don't like fascists. Evan talked about say for example, Zionist organizations. Could a Zionist organization, which is militantly antifascist, could they vote this motion? Yes. And how they'd sell it to themselves is this is only about fascism. So you can see this in the phrase, this is about refusing systems to “openly racist or fascist organizations,” and then look at the organizations which are listed: the National Front, well yeah, they're fascists; the Union Movement, yeah, they're fascists; the National Democratic Party, they're another little fascist splinter group.And then the only one there that isn't necessarily exactly fascist is the Monday Club who are a bunch of Tories who've been in the press constantly in the last two years when this motion is written for their alliance with National Front holding demonstrations and meetings together. So some people, this is just about protecting their space. Some people, this is about excluding fascists and no one else. But then look again at the motion, you'll see another word in there. “Conference recognizes the need to refuse any assistance to openly racist or fascist organizations.” So right from the start, there's a debate, what does this word racist mean in the motion? Now, one way you could read the motion is like this. From today, we can all see that groups like the National Front are fascists. Their leaders can spend most of the rest of the decade appearing constantly in literature produced by anti-fascist groups, identifying them as fascist, naming them as fascist, then we have to have a mass movement against fascism and nazism. But the point is in 1974, that hadn't happened yet. In most people's heads, groups like the National Front was still, the best way to describe them that no one could disagree to at least say they were openly racist. That was how they described themselves. So you could ban the National Front without needing to have a theological discussion about whether they fitted exactly within your definition of fascism. But the point I really want to convey is that the motion succeeds because it blurs the difference between saying anything can be banned because it's fascist specifically or anything can be banned because it's racist or fascist. This isn't immediately apparent in 1974, but what becomes pretty apparent over time is for example as Evan's documented already, even before 1974, there have been non-fascists, there have been conservatives going around student unions speaking in pretty racist terms. All right, so can they be banned? If the answer is this goes to racists or fascists, then definitely they can be banned. But now wait a second. Is there anyone else in British politics who's racist? Well, at this point, both main political parties are standing for election on platforms of excluding people from Britain effectively on the basis of the color of their skin. All right, so you can ban all the main political parties in Britain. All right, well, how about the newspapers? Well, every single newspaper in Britain, even the pro-Labour ones, is running front page articles supporting the British government. All right, so you could ban all newspapers in Britain. Well, how about the television channel? Well, we've only got three, but the best-selling comedies on all of them are comedies which make fun of people because they're foreigners and because they're Black. You can list them all. There's dozens of these horrible programs, which for most people in Britain now are unwatchable. But they're all of national culture in Britain in the early '70s. Alright, so you say, all right, so students we could ban every television channel in Britain, every newspaper in Britain, and every political party in Britain, except maybe one or two on the far left. It's like, wait a second people, I've only been doing racism. Well, let's take seriously the notion, if we're against all forms of racism, how can we be against racism without also being against sexism? Without being against homophobia? So the thing about No Platform is there's really only two ways you can read it in the end, and certainly once you apply it outside the 1970s today. Number one, you can say this is a relatively tightly drawn motion, which is trying to pin the blame on fascists as something which is growing tremendously fast in early 1970s and trying to keep them out. Maybe it'd be good to keep other people out too, but it's not trying to keep everyone out. Or you've got, what we're confronting today which is essentially this is an attempt to prevent students from suffering the misery, the hatred, the fury of hate speech. This is an attempt to keep all hate speech off campus, but with no definition or limit on hate speech. Acceptance of hate speech 50 years later might be much more widely understood than it is in early '70s. So you've got warring in this one motion two completely different notions of who it's right politically to refuse platforms to. That's going to get tested out in real life, but it's not been resolved by the 1974 motion, which in a sense looks both ways. Either the people want to keep the ban narrow or the people want to keep it broad, either of them can look at that motion and say yeah, this is the motion which gives the basis to what we're trying to do. Mike: Okay. I do want to get back to the notion of the maximalist versus the precisionist view of No Platform. But first before that, I want to talk about the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism to just get more of a broader context than just the students in Britain in terms of antifascism. David, do you want to talk about that? David: Okay. Well, I guess because another of my books is about Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, so I'll try and do this really short. I'll make two points. First is that these movements which currently ended in the 1970s are really very large. They're probably one of the two largest street movements in post-war British history. The only other one that's candidate for that is the anti-war movement, whether that's in the '80s or the early 2000s. But they're on that same scale as amongst the largest mass movements in British history. In terms of Rock Against Racism, the Anti-Nazi League, the total number of people involved in them is massive; it's around half a million to a million people. They're single most famous events, two huge three carnivals in London in 1977, which each have hundreds of thousands of people attending them and bring together the most exciting bands. They are the likes of The Clash, etc, etc. It's a movement which involves people graffitiing against Nazis, painting out far-right graffiti. It's a movement which is expressed in streets in terms of set piece confrontations, clashes with far-right, Lewisham in ‘76, Southall in ‘79. These are just huge movements which involve a whole generation of people very much associated with the emergence of punk music and when for a period in time in Britain are against that kind of visceral street racism, which National Front represents. I should say that they have slightly different attitudes, each of them towards the issue of free speech, but there's a massive interchange of personnel. They're very large. The same organizations involved in each, and they include an older version of the same activist who you've seen in student union politics in '74 as were they you could say they graduate into involvement in the mass movements like Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. Now, I want to say specifically about the Anti-Nazi League and free speech. The Anti-Nazi League takes from student politics this idea of No Platform and tries to base a whole mass movement around it. The idea is very simply, the National Front should not be allowed a platform to speak, to organize, to win converts anywhere. Probably with the Anti-Nazi League, the most important expressions of this is two things. Firstly, when the National Front tries to hold election meetings, which they do particularly in the run up to '79 election, and those are picketed, people demonstrated outside of them  A lot of them are the weekend in schools. One at Southall is in a town hall. These just lead to repeated clashes between the Anti-Nazi League and the National Front. The other thing which the Anti-Nazi League takes seriously is trying to organize workers into closing off opportunities for the National Front spread their propaganda. For example, their attempts to get postal workers to refuse to deliver election materials to the National Front. Or again, there's something which it's only possible to imagine in the '70s; you couldn't imagine it today. The National Front is entitled to election broadcasts because it's standing parliament. Then the technical workers at the main TV stations go on strike and refuse to let these broadcasts go out. So in all these ways, there's this idea around the Anti-Nazi League of No Platform. But No Platform is No Platform for fascists. It's the National Front should not get a chance to spread its election message. It's not yet that kind of broader notion of, in essence, anything which is hate speech is unacceptable. In a sense, it can't be. Because when you're talking about students' unions and their original No Platform motion and so forth, at the core of it is they're trying to control their own campuses. There's a notion of students' power. The Anti-Nazi League, it may be huge mass movement and may have hundreds of thousands people involved in it, but no one in Anti-Nazi League thinks that this organization represents such a large majority that they could literally control the content of every single TV station, the content of every single newspaper. You can try and drive the National Front out, but if people in that movement had said right, we actually want to literally carve out every expression of racism and every expression of sexism from society, that would have been a yet bigger task by another enormous degrees of scale. Mike: Okay, I do want to talk a little bit more about Rock Against Racism just particularly how it was founded, what led to its founding. I think it gives a good sense of where Britain was at, politically. David: Right. Rock Against Racism was founded in 1976. The two main events which are going on in the heads of the organizers when they launched it, number one, David Bowie's weird fascist turn, his interview with Playboy magazine in which he talks about Hitler being the first rock and roll superstar, the moment where he was photographed returning from tours in America and comes to Victoria Station and appears to give a Nazi salute. The reason why with Bowie it matters is because he's a hero. Bowie seems to represent the emergence of a new kind of masculinity, new kind of attitude with sexuality. If someone like that is so damaged that he's going around saying Hitler is the greatest, that's really terrifying to Bowie fans and for a wider set of people. The other person who leads directly to the launch of Rock Against Racism is Eric Clapton. He interrupts a gig in Birmingham in summer '76 to just start giving this big drunken rant about how some foreigner pinched his missus' bum and how Enoch Powell is the greatest ever. The reason why people find Eric Clapton so contemptible and why this leads to such a mass movement is weirdly it's the opposite of Bowie that no one amongst the young cool kids regards Clapton as a hero. But being this number one star and he's clearly spent his career stealing off Black music and now he's going to support that horror of Enoch Powell as well, it just all seems so absolutely ridiculous and outrageous that people launch an open letter to the press and that gets thousands of people involved. But since you've asked me about Rock Against Racism, I do want to say Rock Against Racism does have a weirdly and certainly different attitude towards free speech to the Anti-Nazi League. And this isn't necessarily something that was apparent at the time. It's only kind of apparent now when you look back at it. But one of the really interesting things about Rock Against Racism is that because it was a movement of young people who were trying to reclaim music and make cultural form that could overturn British politics and change the world, is that they didn't turn around and say, "We just want to cut off all the racists and treat them as bad and shoot them out into space," kind of as what the Anti-Nazi League's trying to do to fascists. Rock Against Racism grasped that if you're going to try and change this cultural milieu which is music, you actually had to have a bit of a discussion and debate and an argument with the racists, but they tried to have it on their own terms. So concretely, what people would do is Rock Against Racism courted one particular band called Sham 69, who were one of the most popular young skinhead bands, but also had a bunch of neo-nazis amongst their roadies and things like that. They actually put on gigs Sham 69, put them on student union halls, surrounded them with Black acts. Knew that these people were going to bring skinheads into the things, had them performing under Rock Against Racism banner, and almost forced the band to get into the state of practical warfare with their own fans to try and say to them, "We don't want you to be nazis anymore. We want you to stop this." That dynamic, it was incredibly brave, was incredibly bold. It was really destructive for some of the individuals involved like Jimmy Pursey, the lead singer of Sham 69. Effectively saying to them, "Right, we want you to put on a gig every week where you're going to get bottled by your own fans, and you're going to end up like punching them, just to get them to stop being racist." But we can't see any other way of shifting this milieu of young people who we see as our potential allies. There were lots of sort of local things like that with Rock Against Racism. It wasn't about creating a safe space in which bad ideas couldn't come in; it was about going onto the enemy's ideological trend and going, "Right, on this trend, we can have an argument. We can win this argument." So it is really quite an interesting cultural attempt to change the politics of the street. Mike: Okay, now you two have very different ideas of what No Platform is in its essence. Evan, you believe that No Platform was shifting in scope from its inception and it is properly directed at any institutional platform afforded to vociferous bigots. While David you believe that No Platform is only properly applied against fascists, and going beyond that is a dangerous form of mission creep. Now, I absolutely hate debates. [laughter] I think the format does more to close off discussion than to draw out information on the topic at hand. So, what I don't want to happen is have you two arguing with each other about your positions on No Platform (and maybe me, because I have yet a third position). David: Okay Mike, honestly, we've known each other for years. We've always been– Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah. David: –your listeners will pick up, there's loads we agree on, too. So I'm sure we can deal without that rubbish debate. [Evan laughs] Mike: All right. So what I'd like to do is ground this discussion as much as possible in history rather than abstract moral principles. So in that interest, can each of you talk a bit about the individuals and groups that have taken the position on No Platform that you have, and how they've defended their positions? David let's start with you. What groups were there insisting that No Platform was necessary but its necessity was limited to overt fascists? David: Well, I think in practice, that was the approach of Rock Against Racism. They took a very different attitude towards people who were tough ideological fascists, to the people who were around them who were definitely racist, but who were capable of being argued out of that. I mean, I've given the example of the policy of trying to have a debate with Sham 69 or use them as a mechanism to change their audience. What I want to convey is in every Rock Against Racism group around the country, they were often attempts to something very similar. People talk about Birmingham and Leeds, whether it be sort of local Rock Against Racism groups, they might put on– might get a big band from some other city once a month, but three weeks out of four, all they're doing is they're putting on a local some kind of music night, and they might get a hundred people there. But they'd go out of the way to invite people who they saw as wavering supporters of The National Front. But the point is this wasn't like– We all know how bad faith debates work. It's something like it's two big ego speakers who disagree with each other, giving them half an hour each to debate and know their audience is already persuaded that one of them's an asshole, one of them's great. This isn't what they were trying to do. They were trying to win over one by one wavering racists by putting them in an environment where they were surrounded by anti-racists. So it was about trying to create a climate where you could shift some people who had hateful ideas in their head, but were also capable of being pulled away from them. They didn't do set piece debates with fascists because they knew that the set piece debates with fascists, the fascists weren't going to listen to what they were going to say anyway. But what they did do is they did try to shift people in their local area to try and create a different atmosphere in their local area. And they had that attitude towards individual wavering racists, but they never had that attitude towards the fascist leaders. The fascist leaders as far as they're concerned, very, very simple, we got to close up the platform to them. We got to deprive them of a chance. Another example, Rock Against Racism, how it kind of made those sorts of distinctions. I always think with Rock Against Racism you know, they had a go at Clapton. They weren't at all surprised when he refused to apologize. But with Bowie, there was always a sense, "We want to create space for Bowie. We want to get Bowie back because Bowie's winnable." That's one of the things about that movement, is that the absolute uncrossable line was fascism. But if people could be pulled back away from that and away from the ideas associated with that, then they wanted to create the space to make that happen. Mike: Okay, and Evan, what groups took the Maximalist approach to No Platform and what was their reasoning? Evan: Yeah. So I think the discussion happens once the National Front goes away as the kind of the major threat. So the 1979 election, the National Front does dismally, and we can partially attribute that to the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, kind of this popular antifascist movement. But there's also that Margaret Thatcher comes to power, and there's an argument that's made by historians is that she has pulled away the racist vote away from the National Front back to the conservatives. It's really kind of a realignment of leftwing politics under Thatcher because it's a much more confrontational conservative government, but there's also kind of these other issues which are kind of the new social movements and what we would now term as identity politics, they're forming in the sixties and seventies and are really big issues in the 1980s. So kind of like feminism, gay rights, andthat,  there's an argument among some of the students that if we have a No Platform for racism and fascism, why don't we have a No Platform for sexism? Why don't we have a No Platform for homophobia? And there are certain student unions who try to do this. So LSE in 1981, they endorse a No Platform for sexist as part of a wider fight against sexism, sexual harassment, sexual violence on campus is that misogynist speakers shouldn't be allowed to have a presence on campus. Several student unions kind of have this also for against homophobia, and as a part of this really divisive issue in the mid 1980s, the conservative government is quite homophobic. Section 28 clause 28 is coming in in the late eighties. It's a whole kind of homophobia of AIDS. There's instances where students object to local Tory politicians who were kind of outwardly, explicitly homophobic, that they should be not allowed to speak on stage. Then also bubbling along in the background is kind of the supporters of apartheid, so South African diplomats or kind of other people who support the South African regime including Conservative politicians, is that several times throughout the 1980s, they are invited to speak on campus, and there's kind of a massive backlash against this. Sometimes the No Platform policy is invoked. Sometimes it's just simple disruption or kind of pickets or vigils against them. But once fascism is kind of not the main issue, and all these different kind of politics is going on in the eighties, is that there's argument that No Platform for fascism and racism was important, but fascism and racism is only one form of hate speech; it's only one form of discrimination; it's only one form of kind of bodily violence; and we should take them all into consideration. Mike: Okay. Now there's been a fair bit of backlash against No Platform in kind of any of its forms from various sectors, so let's talk a bit about that. Let's start with the fascist themselves. So their response kind of changed somewhat over time in response to No Platform. David, you talk about this. David: Yeah. In the early ‘70s in Britain or I suppose in the late ‘70s too, what's extraordinary is how little use fascist make out of saying, "We are being attacked, free speech applies. We've got to have the right to be heard." I made the point earlier that Britain doesn't have a strong legal culture of free speech. We do have some culture of free speech. And again, it's not that the fascists never use these terms at all, they use them, but they use them very half-heartedly. Their dominant approach is to say, "We are being attacked by the left. The left don't understand we have better fighters than them. If they attack us on the streets, we'll fight back. In the end, we'll be the ones who win in a kind of battle of machismo, street fighting power." Now A, that doesn't happen because actually they lose some set piece confrontations, mostly at Lewisham in 1977. But it's interesting that they don't do the kind of thing which you'd expect the far right to do today, which is to say, like the British far right does today, they constantly say, "We're under attack. Free speech demands that we be heard. We're the only people who take free speech seriously." There's a continuous process in the British far right these days of endlessly going on social media every time anyone even disagrees with them a little bit, they immediately have their faces taped up and present themselves as the victim of this terrible conspiracy when in the mid-'70s when there really were people trying to put the far right out of business, that isn't what the far right did. I think, in essence, a whole bunch of things have to change. You have to get kind of a hardening of the free speech discourse in the United States; you have to have things like the attack on political correctness; the move by the American center-right from being kind of equivocal on free speech to being extremely pro-free speech; and you need to get the importation into Britain of essentially the same kind of free speech discourse as you have in States. Once we get all of that, the British far right eventually twigs that it's a far more effective way of presenting themselves and winning supporters by posing as the world's biggest defenders of free speech.  But in the ‘70s, they haven't learned that lesson yet, and their response is much more leaden and ineffective. In essence, they say, "No Platform's terrible because it's bullying us." But what they never have the gumption to say is, "Actually, we are the far right. We are a bunch of people putting bold and dangerous and exciting ideas, and if we are silenced, then all bold and dangerous and difficult ideas will be silenced too." That's something which a different generation of writers will get to and will give them all sorts of successes. But in the ‘70s, they haven't found it yet. Mike: Okay. Now fascists also had some uneasy allies as far as No Platform is concerned among Tories and libertarians. So let's talk about the Tories first, what was their opposition to No Platform about? Evan, you talk about this quite a bit in your book. Evan: Yeah. So the conservative opposition to No Platform is essentially saying that it's a stock standard thing that the left call everyone fascist. So they apply it to broadly and is that in the ‘80s, there's a bunch of conservative politicians to try to go onto campus, try to speak, and there's massive protests. They say that, "Look, this is part of an intolerant left, that they can't see the distinction between fascism and a Conservative MP. They don't want to allow anyone to have free speech beyond that kind of small narrow left wing bubble." In 1986, there is an attempt, after a kind of a wave of protest in '85, '86, there is an attempt by the government to implement some kind of protection for free speech on campus. This becomes part of the Education Act of 1986, that the university has certain obligations to ensure, where practical, free speech applies and no speech is denied. But then it's got all kind of it can't violate the Racial Discrimination Act, the Public Order Act, all those kind of things. Also, quite crucially for today, that 1986 act didn't explicitly apply to student unions. So student unions argued for the last 30 years that they are exempt from any legislation and that they were legally allowed to pursue their No Platform policy.

Could this be the greatest film about journalism ever made?  It's certainly one of the most celebrated investigations of one of the greatest political scandals in American history.   We follow two young reporters from the Washington Post – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – as they exhaustively get to the bottom of not only whom was behind the infamous 1972 break-in at the National Democratic Party headquarters as the Watergate Hotel, but who was covering it up….and how that went, all the way to the White House. Robert Redford plays Woodward, Dustin Hoffman plays Bernstein, and they are joined by a stellar cast of veteran actors including Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook, Jane Alexander, Jack Warden, and Martin Balsam.  Alan J. Pakula directed this classic thriller,Let's follow the money and see where it leads…..Host: Geoff Gershon Producer: Marlene Gershonhttps://livingforthecinema.com/#livingforthecinema #moviereviews #watergate #watergatehotel #nixon #allthepresidentsmen #bobwoodward #carlbernstein #robertredford #dustinhoffman #washingtonpost #nationaldemocraticparty #1972 #jasonrobards #halholbrook #janealexander #jackwarden #martinbalsam #alanpakula #scandal #politicalthriller

Sam and Emma host Angie Maxwell, associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas, to discuss her recent book The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics, on how the Southern Strategy that completely restructured the electoral college behind the GOP's turn against social progress has found long-term success in bolstering support for the Right on terms of racial resentment, modern sexism, and Christian nationalism. Professor Maxwell begins by situating the party politics after the 40s, with the Supreme Court standing behind Jim Crow laws, and the National Democratic Party being forced into a choice to either stick behind their southern force, or the unions and coalitions that drove their base after the New Deal, ultimately seeing the southern white democratic contingent secede into the Dixiecrats, leaving room for this conservative coalition in the south. Next, she works to unpack the differences between a long- and short-term view of the Southern Strategy, with the former moving beyond the years of Nixon and playing an essential role even in the Democratic victories of Carter and Clinton, before she works to outline the clear roles of racial resentment, with the Civil Rights Movement, and sexism, with the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and abortion fights, played in the GOP's Southern takeover, before shifting to the role of religion. She, Sam, and Emma dive into the complete absence of Democratic infrastructure in the South throughout the mid-to-late 20th Century – particularly when it came to unions, who made up much of their support – thus making Churches the biggest institutions of community infrastructure, in the midst of a massive ideological shift in Southern Baptist ministers to the right. Next, they turn to the role of Southern white women in bolstering the South electorally, as their religious infrastructure shifted towards fundamentalism, as they took on mass organizing to kill the ERA in their states, looking at feminism as a threat to motherhood, family, and Christianity. After touching on the role that religion played in the early aughts US imperialism and interventionism, Professor Maxwell moves to the contemporary role the strategy has played, looking at how the South, both for the GOP and Democrats, is central to setting the tone for primaries, and how Democratic messaging has to change in the south to begin to unpack and restructure voters' perspectives and beliefs on progressive policy goals. Sam and Emma also touch on how the month since the filibuster changed has obviously cemented the tool in the Senate, never to change again. And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma are joined by Nomiki Konst as they cover the GOP and Democratic analysts coming to the bipartisan consensus that their bases are what's wrong, and walk through some of the worst and even worse invocations of MLK from yesterday, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin's CRT bill, Crowder's dishonest honesty, and Eric Adams painting a picture of MLK as the baller hick from… Atlanta. Nomiki talks about Crypto bros and their ongoing attempt to recolonize Puerto Rico, Stinchfield admires the hysterical women that want national unity, and Jimmy Dore reminds us of the dangers of the white moderates that got in the way of Force the Vote, like AOC. Matt and Emma round out the show with an olive branch to our short kings, plus, your IMs! Purchase tickets for the live show in Boston on May 15th HERE: https://thewilbur.com/artist/majority-report/ Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here:  https://madmimi.com/signups/170390/join Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Support the St. Vincent Nurses today! https://action.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/ Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Subscribe to Matt's other show Literary Hangover on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/literaryhangover Check out The Nomiki Show on YouTube. https://www.patreon.com/thenomikishow Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out The Letterhack's upcoming Kickstarter project for his new graphic novel! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/milagrocomic/milagro-heroe-de-las-calles Check out Jamie's podcast, The Antifada. https://www.patreon.com/theantifada, on iTunes, or at https://www.twitch.tv/theantifada (streaming every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 7pm ET!) Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Subscribe to AM Quickie writer Corey Pein's podcast News from Nowhere. https://www.patreon.com/newsfromnowhere  Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/

The National Democratic Party and Land League were founded in 1923 to appeal to small farmers and leaseholders. It contested the 1923 General Election and disbanded shortly afterwards.

In this episode I present the case against the National Democratic Party. You serve as the grand jury. You decide if the case presented justifies the imaginary indictment against them. The charges include public perjury, willful negligence, criminal incompetency, conspiracy to destroy the union, violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, aiding and abetting tens of millions of murders via abortion, conspiracy to commit vote fraud, selective enforcement of federal law, thousands of charges of third degree manslaughter, falsification of documents, criminal intent to take down the currency and the economy, violating their oath of office, collusion with private companies to limit free speech and violation of federal discrimination laws. Show Notes Truth Quest Podcast Episode #2 - The Truth About Abortion - What About the Baby? Episode #14 - The Truth About Obamacare Episode #23 - The Truth About Nullification Episode #33 - The Truth About Abortion- Mental Gymnastics Episode #34 - The Truth About the Electoral College Episode #46 - The Truth About Roe v. Wade - Sick and Twisted Episode #47 - The Truth About Roe v. Wade - What They Don't Tell You Episode #69 - The Truth About White Privilege Episode #87 - The Truth About Secession - Part I Episode #88 - The Truth About Secession - Part II Episode #118 - The Truth About the Biden Crime Family Episode #119 - The Truth About Court Packing Episode #122 - The Truth About the Pennsylvania Vote Count Episode #126 - The Truth About Big Tech Censorship Episode #130 - The Truth About the 2020 Presidential Election - The Big Picture Episode #131 - The Truth About the 2020 Presidential Election - The Battleground States Episode #132 - The Truth About the Great Social Media Purge of 202 Episode #136 - The Truth About Politically-Induced Mental Illness Episode #143 - The Truth About the Massive Voter Drive at the Border Episode #150 - The Truth About Critical Race Theory Episode #154 - The Truth About Modern Monetary Theory Episode #155 - The Truth About the Senate Filibuster Episode #158 -The Truth About Monopolies The Truth Quest Podcast Patron Page Join the conversation at The Truth Quest Facebook Fan Page Order a copy of one of my books, Pritical Thinking, The Proverbs Project, The Termite Effect. The video of this episode is available on Rumble, BitChute, Brighteon and Thinkspot. Check out short highlight videos of each episode on Instagram.

The National Democratic Party or NDP was a short lived conservative splinter party in 1896. Most people don't know anything about it. It was a truly "national" party with a "Union/Confederate" ticket. I discuss the party and VP nominee Simon Bolivar Buckner, Sr. in this episode of The Brion McClanahan Show. https://mcclanahanacademy.com https://brionmcclanahan.com/support http://learntruehistory.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/brion-mcclanahan/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/brion-mcclanahan/support

Welcome to Riding The Wave with Dennis & Steve. We chat with Jana Lynne Sanchez, Democratic Candidate for Congress for the 6th District here in Texas.  Jana joins us to discuss the reasons she is running again. She ran in 2018, came close to flipping the district, and her campaign caught the attention of the National Democratic Party.  So much so, she was featured in the documentary "Surge".  You can see the trailer and find out how to watch the movie here:  https://www.surgethemovie.com.   Join us for the conversation!

Welcome to Riding The Wave with Dennis & Steve. We chat with Jana Lynne Sanchez, Democratic Candidate for Congress for the 6th District here in Texas.  Jana joins us to discuss the reasons she is running again. She ran in 2018, came close to flipping the district, and her campaign caught the attention of the National Democratic Party.  So much so, she was featured in the documentary "Surge".  You can see the trailer and find out how to watch the movie here:  https://www.surgethemovie.com.   Join us for the conversation!

Don Brown, a former U.S. Navy JAG officer, is the author of the book “Travesty of Justice: The Shocking Prosecution of Lieutenant Clint Lorance” and David Schoen, Civil Rights Lawyer, who has represented the National Democratic Party, are here to discuss the impeachment and continuing efforts of the left to break and destroy anything that does not stay in line with their theories and efforts about what should be in America. The establishment has one way of doing things, their way. The Sean Hannity Show is on weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on iHeartRadio and Hannity.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Welcome to Majority.FM's AM QUICKIE! Brought to you by justcoffee.coop TODAY'S HEADLINES: Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell really doesn’t want you to get a $2,000 check from the government. But the fight over survival checks is shaping up to test his control over the legislative process in the closing days of the one hundred and sixteenth Congress. Meanwhile, a new investigation reveals the use of forced labor in Apple’s supply chain. Many Muslims in China are reportedly given the choice between grueling work making iPhones or getting sent to a detention center. And lastly, a judge in Georgia has overturned a Republican-led purge of thousands of voters. Every vote counts as the state prepares to vote in a crucial runoff elections next week. THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW: The fate of what Democrats are calling survival checks remains in limbo as the Congressional session comes to a close at the end of the week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell yesterday thwarted Democrats’ bid to immediately increase the survival checks from $600 to $2,000, Politico reports. McConnell acknowledged Donald Trump’s conditions for signing a coronavirus and economic relief bill, which include increased payments. But he did not make an explicit commitment to tackling those issues in the coming days. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, insisted McConnell would have to offer a path forward on larger checks. That’s their demand in return for securing a quick vote to overturn Trump’s veto of the defense spending bill, which is McConnell’s priority. All of which means it’s not yet clear how much money the government will be sending you in the weeks ahead. There’s been movement toward embracing the larger direct payments among Republicans, Politico reports. Trump and many House Republicans want it. The handful of Senate Republicans who’ve endorsed larger checks includes Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both of whom are in run-off races that will determine Senate control next year. But getting those checks to the floor before then looks like a steep task after yesterday’s brouhaha, according to Politico. First Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to pass the House-approved bill increasing the checks to $2,000, which McConnell rejected. Then Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders asked McConnell to at least set up a roll call vote to follow the veto override. McConnell spurned that request too. Sanders responded by blocking quick passage of the veto override, leaving the possibility of keeping the Senate in session into New Year’s Day to finish consideration of the defense bill. A lot of people had to work over the holidays – the Senate can, too. Doncha think? Forced Labor In iPhones How much do you know about the technology you use every day? Where does it come from? Whose hands touched it before yours? One of the oldest and most well-known iPhone suppliers has been accused of using forced Muslim labor in its factories, according to documents uncovered by a human rights group and shared with the Washington Post. The documents, discovered by the Tech Transparency Project, detail how thousands of Uighur workers from the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang were sent to work for Lens Technology. The company also supplies Amazon and Tesla. Lens Technology is one of at least five companies connected to Apple’s supply chain that have now been linked to alleged forced labor from the Xinjiang region, the Post reports. Apple has faced criticism for its labor practices in the past, particularly in China. Some Uighur workers have told human rights groups that they were given a choice between taking a job in a far-flung factory or being sent to a detention center. In some cases, workers have said that when they accept the job, they live in heavily guarded campuses and are rarely allowed to leave. Whether the Uighurs are paid, and exactly how much, is unclear. Apple has dispatched lobbyists to Capitol Hill regarding legislation that would hold US companies accountable for using forced labor from the region, the Post reports. The lobbyists are trying to water down the bill, according to congressional staffers. Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, told the Post that the alleged use of forced labor in Apple’s supply chain may explain why the company is lobbying against a bill now before Congress that would sanction companies for their involvement in human rights abuses in China. Well, it’s probably no coincidence, that’s for sure. Georgia Voter Purge Overruled There’s some encouraging news for Democrats from Georgia. Two Georgia counties must reverse their decision to purge thousands from voter rolls in advance of the state’s January 5 runoff elections, the Guardian reports. As we mentioned before, the results will determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the US Senate. Federal judge Leslie Abrams Gardner said in an order filed late on Monday that the two counties appeared to have improperly relied on unverified change-of-address information to invalidate voter registrations. Per the ruling, those registrations must now be honored. Judge Abrams Gardner is the sister of Stacey Abrams, the Democratic activist who lost a race for Georgia governor in 2018, and led a voter registration drive that was crucial to Joe Biden’s victory in the state. National Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, who litigated the case, hailed the decision as a blow to GOP voter suppression. He said the party continues to monitor how other Georgia counties respond to the suppression scheme and QUOTE where necessary, we will sue and we will win ENDQUOTE. Of the more than four thousand registrations that officials tried to rescind, the vast majority were in Muscogee County, the Guardian reports. President-elect Joe Biden won this county during the November election. Another one hundred and fifty were in Ben Hill county, which Donald Trump won with a sizable margin. Almost two point one million people – more than twenty-five percent of Georgia’s registered voters – have voted in the Senate runoff election that started on December 14. Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are facing off against GOP incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively. The deeply significant runoff has prompted record-breaking fundraising, the Guardian reports. Ossoff and Warnock each raised more than $100 million in a mere two months – surpassing their conservative opponents. These races are shaping up to be very close, folks. And very hard-fought. AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES: NBC News reports that at the current rate of vaccinations, it will take almost ten years to inoculate enough Americans to get the coronavirus pandemic under control. Twenty million doses were promised in short order by the Trump administration – but so far, only about two million people have received a shot. Joe Biden administration hopes to pick up the pace in the new year. The President-elect yesterday named Bechara Choucair, a Kaiser Permanente executive, to be the nation's Covid-19 vaccine coordinator. A park ranger was seen on video tasering a Native American man who was walking his dog with his sister at a national monument in New Mexico on Sunday, NBC News reports. Darrell House, who is Oneida and Navajo, often prays at the Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque. The ranger tased him for refusing to show ID. Since when does one need ID to pray? Another indigenous environmentalist has been killed in Honduras, the Guardian reports. Félix Vásquez, a veteran leader of the indigenous Lenca people, was shot dead at home on the night of December 26 – just weeks after reporting death threats linked to his work. Hopes for justice are reportedly low. But the world is watching. Small drones will be allowed to fly over people and at night in the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Monday, according to Reuters. FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said the new rules get us closer to the day when we will more routinely see drone operations, such as the delivery of packages. Tip your delivery drivers, folks – it’s a hard job, and now they’ve got competition coming. That’s all for the AM Quickie. The Majority Report returns on Monday, as do we. Happy New Year! DEC 30, 2020 - AM QUICKIE HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner WRITER - Corey Pein PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn

Hunter Biden and the Special Council, President wants Ted Cruz to defend Texas lawsuit, stimulus relief bill stalled again, Dem Tim Ryan says National Democratic Party brand is terrible, Obama blames Fox news and Rush for destroying the connection he had with conservatives   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hunter Biden and the Special Council, President wants Ted Cruz to defend Texas lawsuit, stimulus relief bill stalled again, Dem Tim Ryan says National Democratic Party brand is terrible, Obama blames Fox news and Rush for destroying the connection he had with conservatives   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As Mississippi surpasses two pandemic milestones, we examine the state's response to the coronavirus.Then, the Lt. Governor reflects upon an unprecedented first session.Plus, a Civil Rights icon is celebrated on what would have been her 103rd birthday.Segment 1:Mississippi has surpassed two grim milestones in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Over the weekend, total COVID-19 cases reached the 100,000 mark, while related deaths topped 3,000. After steadily dropping for much of August, the seven-day case average in the state has leveled off recently. And last week, Governor Tate Reeves allowed his Executive Order carrying the statewide mask mandate to expire. Dr. Claude Brunson is the Executive Director of the Mississippi State Medical Association. He examines the state of the pandemic in Mississippi with our Michael Guidry.Segment 2:For first-term Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann, the 2020 legislative session began like many before it. But it was soon interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, creating arguably the most unorthodox legislative year on record. Hosemann and other legislative leaders had to quickly pivot to the emergency needs of the state in its fight against COVID-19. The Lt. Governor reflects on the session beginning with how lawmakers allocated over a billion dollars in CARES Act relief.Segment 3:Today marks what would have been the 103rd birthday of Civil Rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer is most notably known for her testimony at the 1964 National Democratic Party's Convention on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In commemoration of Hamer's life and legacy, an historic marker is being unveiled outside of the Sunflower County Courthouse. It is the product of months of planning by Mississippi Valley State University's public history students, and their professor, Dr. C. Sade Turnipseed. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sara Pursley talks about her latest book, Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book is about the role of gender and family reform projects in Iraq, two ideas of modernization and economic development, from the 1920s to the first Ba'ath coup in 1963. Pursley said, “For the 1950s, the discourses were really different. They were really focused on economic development as the basis for full political and economic sovereignties. We get different terms, different concepts playing a more important role and also much more of an emphasis on poor families, peasant families, and urban working-class families and how those could be reformed to produce workers and sort of loyal subjects of the regime.” She goes on to explain, “The equal inheritance clause was indeed very controversial and there’s a lot of things written about it in this period, but every other aspect of this law was not a consensus but there was widespread agreement on the rest of the law, especially among state authorities, feminists, communist, Ba'athists, Arab nationalists, Sunni religious authorities…. The exception was the Shia religious clerics who had a broader critique of the law.” "The differences in the public discourse kind of get submerged into the social reform project which all of the parties, you know, the Ba’athist, the communists, the other Arab nationalist party which was the independence Party, the National Democratic Party, those were the four main political parties that were sort of supporting the coup in the begging. They all, in spite of all their differences, [had] really strong consensus about the need for social reform, the need to create a new kind of Iraqi who would be the agent of economic development. And so really what I want to get at here is that consensus is partly what enabled the depoliticization of the Iraqi public sphere that many historians, not just me, have seen as kind of laying the groundwork for the 1963 coup,” said Pursley.  Sara Pursley is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Pursley works on the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the modern Arab Middle East, mainly Iraq. She has explored questions related to economic development and modernization theory, histories of psychology and pedagogy, gender and sexuality, childhood and youth, revolution and decolonization, Islamic and secular family law, land settlement projects, and the transition from British to American empire.

Andrew, Rachaud and Weldon discuss establishment politics and the National Democratic Party!  Is establishment politics enough at this time!  

In this episode your hosts Hermene Hartman and Shannon Peoples speak with the authors of the best selling book ‘For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics'. Authors Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway and Minyon Moore dive into their book which tells the story of how they got into politics, became friends and went on to change, manage and shape today's democratic party. Our guests today have been at the forefront of political history and have played a significant part in shaping it through their involvement with national politics. Our guests recount how they became involved in politics, how they rose up the political ranks and how politics has evolved across their careers. Our guests recount the highlights of their careers and the influential people they have met and worked with including Ron Brown (the first black man to become chair of the democratic party). We discuss the state of politics today and the place of black people in our political system. More about our guests...Donna Brazile, a veteran Democratic political strategist, is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, author, television political commentator and former Interim Chair of the Democratic Party. She is the author of Cooking with Grease and the New York Times Bestseller Hacks.Yolanda Caraway is the founder of The Caraway Group, Inc., a nationally recognized public relations and public affairs agency. She has played a major role in shaping the goals and objectives of the National Democratic Party.Minyon Moore, is a partner at the Dewey Square Group, was formerly CEO of the Democratic National Committee, and served as Assistant to the President of the United States and director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, and director of White House political affairs under President Bill Clinton.N'DIGO STUDIO, making talk real again!Guests:Donna Brazillewww.donnabrazille.comYolanda Carawaywww.thecarawaygroup.comMinyon MooreExecutive Producer - N'DIGO StudioAudio Director - Erik Hammond - Clear Vision Multi MediaProducer - Joi MitchellAudio Editor - Scott Stronach - Soundmind EditingSponsorsComEDMcDonald's

Arizona will play a key role in the 2020 election, and Democrats across the country are hoping to turn the state blue. But how are they going to accomplish that in a historically red state? Tom Perez, the Democratic National Committee chairman, recently visited Phoenix. Gaggle hosts Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Ron Hansen talked with him about the party's plans and priorities. Spoiler alert: it's all about health care. 

In this week’s show we discuss the election results and the gains obtained by the National Democratic Party in the Senate with Tennessee delegate Bob Hayes. He is a member of the Lawrence County Democratic Party, a former church community worker and hospice chaplain.

United States’ first Jewish governor, Moses Alexander, dies. Moses Alexander was born in 1853 in Bavaria, the youngest of eight children. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1867, settling in with two sisters before moving on to Missouri, where he got involved in the retail clothing business and politics. In 1891 he moved to Boise, Idaho to open a number of clothing stores. There, he was instrumental in opening Boise’s first synagogue and getting elected as mayor. After two mayoral terms and several attempts at the governorship, Alexander became governor of Idaho in 1914 – the first Jewish person to hold such a post in the United States. During his two terms as governor, he strongly supported giving women the vote and instituting prohibition. He chose not to run after his second term, focusing instead on his businesses and family. But he remained actively involved in the National Democratic Party, where he was a sought-after speaker until his death of a heart attack on January 4, 1932. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this week's show we discuss the current state of the National Democratic Party with Tennessee delegate Bob Hayes. As a member of the Lawrence County Democratic Party he explores the difficulty in overcoming the Trump agenda, the struggles within the party and the successes they had in the last election.

Tune in to Eyes Wide Open: DemBlogTalk on BlogTalk USA (and visit DemBlogNews) for current events in the news and politics! Tonight's Guests, Professor of Law Sahar Aziz and candidate running to Chair the National DNC, Sam Ronan  Topics, Trump's executive order stopping people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S., as well as subsequent court filings and court orders to date related to his order. Our guests will give their thoughts on the statutory and constitutional foundations for those fillings and orders.   What does the future look like for the National Democratic Party?  Is it time for new leadership and a fresh perspective?  Can Democrats unite enough to work together on winning back some of the 1000 seats they have lost in state and national races over the past 8 years?     Listen to BlogTalkUSA.com "Eyes Wide Open DemBlogTalk" with Michael Handley and Rheana Nevitt Piegols every Tuesday evening at 8:30 PM CST by phone at (515) 605-9375. Press 1 to ask your question, make a comment, or share your thoughts! Use this link to listen online: BlogTalkUSA.com. Download / subscribe to recorded BlogTalkUSA program podcasts at iTunes and Stitcher Radio.

Ghana goes to the polls today (07/12) amidst an atmosphere of optimism and anticipation. The country's over 15 million registered voters will chose their next president and members of parliament for the next four years in what is tipped to be a nail-biting finish. The battle is between President John Mahama's National Democratic Party and opposition New Patriotic Party lead by veteran politican Nana Akufo-Addo. Election observers have urged peace with ordinary Ghanians expressing their excitement at casting their vote. Senior Political Reporter Busi Chimombe reports from Accra, Ghana...

PNN The "Fully Qualified Show"  News Director Rick Spisak and PNN Present for you a wonderful new show with fresh information from the Six senses, the five corners and the four dimensions Brook Hines Political Columnist and Commentator brings you her fresh Progressive Democratic perspective from a special place beyond Regional Betrayals and National Missteps, Confusions and Contusions and Unconventional Dramatic Successes Professor Wendy Lynn Lee of Bloomsburg University (Philosophy Professor/ Human Rights and Anti-Fracking Activist)  will discuss the Medieval Throwback Candidates on the Right and the “Two” Progressive Candidates offered us by the National Democratic Party and the continuing threat posed by Nuclear Power and the relentless thirst for Fracked Petroleum products. We are also joined by  Ms Betty Oseola who has lived in her ancestral homeland: the Everglades in Florida. Ms Oseola a members of the Miccosukee tribe, and her family maintain as many traditions as possible--such as living in chickee huts, thatched-roof homes made of cypress wood and cabbage palm leaves. She speaks to the varied threats to Florida, the danger to all those who depend on the Everglades for their food and waters. And we welcome the return of Drew Martin long time guardian of Florida’s Lands and Waters. Who speaks about the Legislature dangerous plan to sell off state lands from the Georgia border to Florida Bay. TUNE IN Sunday 7pm Eastern / 4pm Mountain time  

Kirsty Young's castaway is the architect, Dame Zaha Hadid.The first woman to be awarded architecture's highest honour, the Pritzker Prize, she designed the Aquatic Centre for London 2012, Glasgow's Riverside Museum and has twice won the Stirling Prize - first for the MAXXI museum in Rome and secondly for her design for the Grace Academy school in Brixton, London. She recently became the first woman in her own right to receive the RIBA Gold Medal.She was born in Baghdad in 1950 where her father was a prominent member of the opposition National Democratic Party. After attending school there, she travelled to Switzerland and England to boarding school before returning to London in 1972 to study at the Architectural Association.In 1983 she won her first competition to design the Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong. It gained her international recognition though it was never built: her first building was the Vitra Fire Station in Germany in 1993. In the late 1990s she built a contemporary arts centre in Cincinnati & a BMW car manufacturing plant in Leipzig. She won competitions to design a new opera house in Cardiff but it was never realised and her first permanent building in Britain was a Maggie's Cancer Care Centre in Scotland built in 2006. She has designed stations for the Nordpark Cable Railway in Innsbruck, Austria and in 2010 the Opera House in Guangzhou, China. In 2014 she became the first woman to win the Design Museum's Design of the Year Award for the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, in Baku, Azerbaijan.She was made a Dame in 2012 for services to architecture.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the architect, Dame Zaha Hadid. The first woman to be awarded architecture's highest honour, the Pritzker Prize, she designed the Aquatic Centre for London 2012, Glasgow's Riverside Museum and has twice won the Stirling Prize - first for the MAXXI museum in Rome and secondly for her design for the Grace Academy school in Brixton, London. She recently became the first woman in her own right to receive the RIBA Gold Medal. She was born in Baghdad in 1950 where her father was a prominent member of the opposition National Democratic Party. After attending school there, she travelled to Switzerland and England to boarding school before returning to London in 1972 to study at the Architectural Association. In 1983 she won her first competition to design the Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong. It gained her international recognition though it was never built: her first building was the Vitra Fire Station in Germany in 1993. In the late 1990s she built a contemporary arts centre in Cincinnati & a BMW car manufacturing plant in Leipzig. She won competitions to design a new opera house in Cardiff but it was never realised and her first permanent building in Britain was a Maggie's Cancer Care Centre in Scotland built in 2006. She has designed stations for the Nordpark Cable Railway in Innsbruck, Austria and in 2010 the Opera House in Guangzhou, China. In 2014 she became the first woman to win the Design Museum's Design of the Year Award for the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, in Baku, Azerbaijan. She was made a Dame in 2012 for services to architecture. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.