2473 - Trump Folds; ICE Disappearances; Decoding Copaganda w/ Prem Thakker, Alec Karakatsanis

Summary

The Majority Report with Sam Seder Episode 2473: Trump Folds; ICE Disappearances; Decoding Copaganda Release Date: April 10, 2025

Hosts: Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland

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Introduction and Overview

In Episode 2473 of The Majority Report with Sam Seder, host Sam Seder delves into pressing political and social issues dominating the national conversation. The episode features in-depth discussions with Prem Thakar, a reporter for Zateo News, and Alec Karakatsanis, author of How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. Key topics include the aftermath of Donald Trump’s tariff policies, the alarming rise in ICE disappearances targeting students, and an analysis of media manipulation through copaganda.

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Trump’s Tariff Policies and Economic Impact

Discussion Highlights:

• Tariff Reversal: The episode begins with a discussion on Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to pause several tariffs, excluding China. This move sent shockwaves through the bond market, leading to increased yields and decreased confidence in U.S. treasury bonds.

• Economic Indicators: Sam and guests explore the implications of the bond market’s response, highlighting the inverted yield curve as a potential indicator of an impending recession.

Notable Quotes:

• Prem Thakar [10:52]: “If there’s a mass sale of bonds, that means people are losing confidence in the US Economy on the ability to do deals with us.”

• Alec Karakatsanis [19:27]: “We’re looking at long-term damage to the health of the United States economy because this bond market is not recoverable.”

Key Insights:

• The reversal of tariffs created significant uncertainty in the market, undermining global confidence in the U.S. economy.
• The bond market’s instability is a critical indicator of broader economic health, with foreign investors like Japan and China selling off U.S. treasury bonds.
• An inverted yield curve, where short-term bonds yield more than long-term ones, traditionally signals a recession, raising concerns about the economic trajectory.

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ICE Policies and Disappearances

Discussion Highlights:

• Mahmoud Khalil Case: Prem Thakar sheds light on the case of Mahmoud Khalil, an immigrant student detained by ICE, highlighting a broader pattern of targeting student activists.

• Systemic Targeting: The conversation expands to discuss multiple high-profile cases where ICE has unlawfully detained individuals without due process, often under dubious foreign policy justifications.

Notable Quotes:

• Prem Thakar [27:07]: “There are now seven, if not more, high-profile cases of students who’ve been targeted specifically for this sort of weird foreign policy authority.”

• Emma Vigeland [36:14]: “She was arrested... They didn’t answer her. She said, I want to talk to my lawyer.”

Key Insights:

• The Trump administration’s aggressive ICE policies are resulting in the disappearance of immigrants, including students, without proper legal proceedings.
• These actions mirror historical patterns of targeting marginalized communities under the guise of national security.
• The erosion of due process rights is a critical concern, as individuals are detained based on flimsy or fabricated evidence linking them to broader foreign policy agendas.

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Decoding Copaganda: Media Manipulation of Crime Narratives

Discussion Highlights:

• Alec Karakatsanis on Copaganda: Alec discusses his book, Copaganda, emphasizing how mainstream media collaborates with law enforcement to distort public perception of crime and policing.

• Selective Reporting: The media’s focus on minor crimes like shoplifting while ignoring systemic issues such as wage theft perpetuates a skewed narrative that justifies aggressive policing tactics.

Notable Quotes:

• Alec Karakatsanis [53:30]: “The police call themselves law enforcement, but that’s really a term of propaganda. They want you to think that a law is broken, a law is enforced.”

• John Ehrlichman [54:56]: “They focus a lot on shoplifting. They created this kind of shoplifting epidemic in the news right at a time when actual shoplifting was down.”

Key Insights:

• Copaganda Defined: Copaganda refers to the media’s role in promoting a pro-police narrative that obscures the realities of systemic abuse and misconduct within law enforcement.

• Historical Context: The perpetuation of stereotypes through media, such as associating marijuana use with Latinos, has historically been used to justify the criminalization and targeting of marginalized groups.

• Media’s Role: Mainstream media outlets, often perceived as liberal, inadvertently support far-right agendas by selectively reporting crimes and framing law enforcement as inherently necessary for public safety.

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Historical Context and Propaganda Mechanisms

Discussion Highlights:

• War on Drugs: Alec provides a historical analysis of the War on Drugs, revealing how it was never genuinely aimed at reducing drug use but rather at controlling and marginalizing specific communities.

• Media and Political Alliances: The collaboration between government officials and media moguls, such as those in the Hearst newspaper chain, facilitated the widespread dissemination of anti-immigrant and anti-minority propaganda.

Notable Quotes:

• Alec Karakatsanis [72:17]: “It was the New York Times, it was media oligarch, the Hearst newspaper publications that actually spread the fear of Mexican immigrants and the cannabis panic and epidemic.”

• John Ehrlichman [75:10]: “We didn’t care about drugs. It wasn’t a problem. We actually understood... the point of the War on Drugs was never to reduce.”

Key Insights:

• Intent Behind Policies: High-ranking officials admitted that policies like the War on Drugs were tools for suppressing dissent and targeting minority communities rather than public safety initiatives.

• Media Complicity: Mainstream media played a crucial role in manufacturing public fear and normalizing repressive policies through persistent negative coverage of specific groups.

• Long-Term Impact: These propaganda efforts have had enduring effects, including mass incarceration and the erosion of civil liberties, which continue to affect marginalized populations today.

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Conclusions and Call to Action

Discussion Highlights:

• Understanding and Challenging Narratives: Sam Seder and his guests emphasize the need for critical analysis of media narratives and governmental policies to uncover underlying agendas aimed at controlling and marginalizing communities.

• Advocacy for Change: The episode calls on listeners to support independent journalism, advocate for policy reforms, and resist the normalization of repressive tactics.

Notable Quotes:

• John Ehrlichman [80:40]: “The myth, that lie, what I call, in the book, that big deception, is sort of the core of what we have to understand if we’re going to actually change how these issues are discussed in our society.”

• Alec Karakatsanis [65:43]: “There’s nothing new about what’s happening now, except that now there are incredible technological tools at the disposal of these people.”

Key Insights:

• Resistance through Awareness: By recognizing the patterns of media manipulation and governmental overreach, individuals can better resist and advocate against the forces that seek to undermine democratic principles and civil liberties.

• Support for Progressive Initiatives: Encouraging support for organizations and movements that fight against systemic injustice and promote transparency and accountability in both media and government operations.

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Final Thoughts

Episode 2473 of The Majority Report serves as a compelling examination of the intertwined relationships between political power, media narratives, and systemic oppression. Through insightful discussions with Prem Thakar and Alec Karakatsanis, Sam Seder highlights the urgent need for vigilance and action to safeguard democratic values and protect vulnerable communities from ongoing abuse and manipulation.

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For more in-depth analysis and updates, visit Majority.FM.

Transcript

[Emma Vigeland]

You are listening to a free version of Majority Report with Sam Steater. To support the show and get another 15 minutes of daily program, go to majority SM please. Hey folks, it's about that time of year again. 20 April. It's around the corner and our friends at Sunset Lake Saba Day are celebrating with their biggest sale of the season. You can celebrate too. This data is actually on a weekend so you can enjoy and celebrate all day.

[Sam Cedar]

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[Emma Vigeland]

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[Prem Thakar]

The.

[Alec Karakatsanis]

Majority Report with Sam Cedar.

[Emma Vigeland]

It is Thursday, April 10, 2025. My name is Emma Vigiland and for Sam Seether and this is the five time award winning Majority Report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, usa. On the program today, Prem Thakar, reporter for Zateo News, will be with us to talk about the ICE disappearances. And later in the show, Alec Karakatsanis, author of How Police and Media and the Media Manipulate. Our news will be with us to talk about his new book. Also on the program, Trump folds on tariffs. A 90 day pause on the craziest tariffs, except for China, still quite a lot of tariffs. Yeah, like he's keeping the blanket 10% one and that will be inflationary. Also, Wall street was panicked because the bond market was tanking the underpinning of the US Economy essentially. On a related note, egg prices just hit a record high. Chinese companies, which are half of Amazon sellers, it's the number one export quarter in the world. They've already started raising prices. And you know what this does. Even non Chinese companies see this as an excuse for them to raise their prices. Democrats call for an investigation into MAGA, insider trading and market manipulation because there was tons of shady activity right before Trump's tariff pause. A quinnipiac poll shows 72% of all Americans thinks tariff tariffs think tariffs will hurt the U.S. economy. The House passes its budget resolution paving the way for the extension of Trump's 2017 tax cuts for the rich. His donors also want him, apparently, according to Reuters, to colonize Greenland so they can create their private utopia, that network state we've been talking about with Gil Duran. A Supreme Court temporarily blocks a ruling that forced Trump to reinstate the NLRB board members. Trump orders a DOJ investigation into his first term election security director because he wrote that Trump lost. He's also instructing ICE to monitor immigrant social media activity for anti Semitism. You know Donald Trump, he really cares about hatred. Nearly 400 students have seen their visas revoked in recent weeks over their expression of free speech. And lastly, the Trump administration announces it will no longer require environmental review for oil spills in the Western United States. All this and more on today's Move Majority Report. Welcome to the show, everybody. It's an M Majority Report Thursday. We have a packed day today. Hello to Russ, hello to Matt, hello to you all. I wasn't able to watch the show yesterday, but I did get a text from Sam saying that in real time, basically, Donald Trump reversed course on these tariffs and you guys were able to react to it live on air. But, but the dust has settled a little bit now. I think the globe kind of just understands that Donald Trump doesn't know what he's doing. He's repeatedly confused the trade deficit and the budget deficit or at least conflated it for lying ends. He doesn't seem to understand who will pay the tariffs. Right. He keeps saying that it's going to be these foreign governments. No, the businesses will pay the tariffs and then they offset it on the American consumer. And his that that goofy formula that Peter Navarro came up with has been mocked endlessly, as it should be. But even with this reversal of the most insane tariffs, like we are kind of screwed regardless because of the level of uncertainty that this created in the market. U.S. treasury bonds, this is the best of my ability to explain this. So bear with me and feel free to IM if I get some stuff wrong. But to the best of my understanding, they're supposed to be some of the safest investments available because they are backed by the United States government. If there's a lot of demand for US treasury bonds, it means that global confidence in the American economy is very high. Right.

[Sam Cedar]

For instance, the great financial crisis when the stock market was tanking and nobody wanted to invest in people were investing in ironically, America was benefiting because our treasury bonds were the safe place for all that money to go, the extra.

[Emma Vigeland]

Money, because also the yield is high. If the treasury bonds are healthy, the longer they are, meaning you're betting on it's more stable. If the, the people that are betting on this think that you're going to get more of a return if you invest in the US Economy long term. Right. And when the United States borrows money from other countries, it does so by selling treasury bonds. So the stability of these treasury bonds is essential really to everything. Right. Like it's the foundation of everything in our economy. Our government debt is issued as bonds to the public. And so with, with these bonds, it's a little bit misleading to people when they see the price is going up because it makes it more likely or when you see the graph going up here, I'll abandon that for just a second. Let's play this clip and we'll get back to this. The bond story from from FOX News, this is FOX Businesses, Charlie Gasparino. And he's trying to basically throw cold water on the idea that because the market somewhat rebounded, that Trump has outsmarted the world.

[Charlie Gasparino]

From FOX Business Network. Now this is, this is quite the moment, as you can imagine, the art of the deals all over the Twitter sphere right now, as people say, I mean, maybe this is the way he planned it to John's point, Charlie. But the treasury secretary saying maybe you could say that he goaded China into a bad position for themselves. Don't retaliate, things will work out well.

[Prem Thakar]

He said.

[Alec Karakatsanis]

I mean, I want to tell you right now that Donald Trump outsmarted the world. Trust me, I'm an American, I support my president. But that's not really what happened here from what I understand and I know I'll get pushed back. But here's what it is. First off, we should point out that one of the good things about this is that Scott Bessant is finally in the White House. He's finally leading this. I mean, up until a couple days ago it was Lutnick, it was Peter Navarro, the commerce secretary, the trade adviser, very much hawks. Now it's Scott Besant who believes in cutting deals as opposed to, you know, just not, you know, just putting these tariffs out there and let's be a mercantilistic economy. That's number one. But number two, let's recall what happened overnight. And from what I understand, and I'm getting this from people that are talking to the White House, the what happened in the bond market overnight, the spike in yields on the 30 year and the 10 year bond which showed that people were dumping our bonds. And who were those people dumping our bonds? Japan, the biggest holder of bonds was selling bonds. That's what I'm getting from some very.

[Emma Vigeland]

Big for a sec. So just to stop right there, as I mentioned earlier, the foreign governments, if there's high faith that the US Economy is going to be stable, they're going to buy U.S. treasury bonds. But the yield falls, yields fall when the bond prices really start to go up. And you may have heard the term yield curve inversion. This is usually a recession indicator. Right. And so that's what he's referring to here. But we can go back to this.

[Alec Karakatsanis]

Clip with selling bonds. That's what I'm getting from some very big money managers. China maybe to some extent, but it was largely Japan and others. If you have a mass sale of bonds, that means people are losing confidence in the US Economy on the ability to do deals with us. And from what I understand this is what forced the hand of this 90 day reprieve. Now is it a good, you know, are people coming to the table? Yeah. But if, you know, if you read between the lines and not even what Scott Besant said, we have no deals. Right. There's nobody that is really there saying this is what we're going to do. And they paused it anyway. So my thing said, well, I'll give you this, there is Some art of the deal here. And by the way, brilliant move by putting China in the corner. But that's a whole separate thing because remember, that's a very difficult negotiation. Everybody else is a lot easier. They really wanted, they do want to deal with us. Whether they want to be, you know, forced into really bad trade deals on their end is a whole other negotiating story. But make no mistake about it, you cannot divorce this decision right here from what happened last night, which was, you know, people focus on the stock market all the time. It's the bond market and the sort of lending markets that's the plumbing of the economy. And those markets were imploding last night and that's why we have a 90 day, 90 day freeze. Let's see if those markets improve. Someone told me we had a decent treasury auction today, but if you can't sell your Treasuries, guys, and people are unloading your Treasuries like Japan, which is I believe the largest foreign holder after, after China.

[Charlie Gasparino]

Just to be clear, there was an auction that just happened a few moments ago that just referenced. And it was a healthy auction, Charlie.

[Emma Vigeland]

But they are not. Well, that was, that was yesterday. The stock market is not in as great of shape today. So like it's even worse than what they're basically describing there. But it is that he hit on it that yes, it's the bond market that is the most important to look at the health of our economy. And it's really important that treasury bonds are stable because they have lower returns compared to stocks, which is the casino capitalism that we talk about here. But they need to be trusted because that is the foundation of our economy and really the global economy. And now the markets are basically showing that you can make more money by buying shorter maturity U.S. treasury bonds versus the ones that are longer maturity. And what that means is that people think you can make more money on short term US Bonds versus betting on the US Economy continuously growing as it has throughout our history, over like a 30 year bond versus a one day or one year one or a multiple month bond, et cetera. So it's the bond market is dependent on the people having faith in the US Economy, other countries having faith that the United States will find a way to pay people back. And then that translates to the health of longer term bonds having those higher yields. But that's not the case right now. And that's what he's talking about there. So like, yeah, the Trump administration is going to play with the stock market. We're already seeing what happened. We're already seeing that there was this extremely bizarre spike in trading right before in call volume, right before Donald Trump made this announcement about tariffs. And maybe we just pull up this video of Schwab here. Sorry to throw this at you guys without saying I want to play this, but I just got to this thought. Oh, the link's not there. Okay. All right, well, there's a short clip and we'll play it later in the show of Donald Trump just like bragging within the Oval Office about how much money his buddies are making. And so there's a lot of that that's happening. Right.

[Sam Cedar]

But this is fundamentally a freak out about China. Adam Tooze has this piece in his chartbook. Did in fact have a certain logic, shake the world, flush out and isolate China. He continues at the next stage in negotiations with those who are willing. There is nothing to prevent the White House from demanding conditionality with America's other partners to further target China. Probably all places that have relationship with China. Remember the penguins and closing the door to indirect imports from China. A radical move to decoupling was always going to be a shock. It was always going to hurt the markets. But you do it this way where you announce it on the entire world and then just do it to China. He writes this way. 125% tariffs on China almost come as a relief.

[Emma Vigeland]

And it's just the idea that basically the administration is in, in somewhat, is somewhat like resentful of the fact that China doesn't need us and that they have kind of onshored a lot of their manufacturing and they've centralized their trade policy, or not their trade policy, but their industrial policy. And so they have this kind of resiliency as opposed to all this outsourcing and globalization and contracts that the United States has engaged in. It's made us in a more precarious position that the Trump administration has just exacerbated because Trump is an idiot.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah. And, you know, I mean, I think that certain tariffs to support labor and stuff away from, you know, countries that have horrible conditions is good. I think this is escalating towards. This is the full out trade war. And I worry that it could be more than that in the future because we're just, instead of like competing and saying like we're going to use industrial policy to try to compete to be the country that produces the batteries best or cars the best or airplanes the best, what if we just blow up their dams instead because they're beating us on this stuff? That's my fear about all this.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yep. This is what I was referring to earlier. The AOC and Adam Schiff have both kind of talked about this and starting some sort of investigation that the NASDAQ call volume spiked minutes before the 90 day tariff pause was announced. Not a good look at all, says this guy. Definitely not. I mean this is clearly some sort of insider trading situation. We don't know who that buyer is.

[Sam Cedar]

When you know the dip is going to undip, it makes it easier to buy the dip than sell.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yep. Seth Thelit, Ph.D. said state issued bonds have been the primary engine of capitalism since the formation of the bank of London. Arguably the single greatest, most important aspect of the success of the capitalist economy is the bond market. Just want to back you up here, Emma. I work in finance despite my PhD in literature. Thank you Seth Phillip, PhD because some math is not my strongest suit and you feel like you have a good handle on some of this stuff. But it's also just crazy how fast the news is moving. Trump really has perfected the strategy of giving people the inability to sink their teeth into anything before he creates the next next chaotic moment. But I do think that like we're looking at long term damage to the health of the United States economy because this bond market is not recoverable. I mean we're not going to probably see it for the next 30 days, but then when there's like, there's going to be a bit of a lag. But in the next 45 days, 60 days, a lot of the indicators are that we could fall into a recession. And the inverted yield curve, that doesn't always amount to a recession, that's a bit of a misnomer, but it can be one of the indicators. And also everything else seems to be an indicator.

[Sam Cedar]

I mean it's just, it's just, it's pretty basic. Like if we're expecting factories to get made, that requires a large amount of investment. If that's not coming from the state, which is not because Congress is just sitting there twiddling thumbs, it should come from the private capital markets. And those are as like go to CNN and look up markets and see they are being driven by extreme fear right now when that is happening, they are not going to be building factories in Bloomington.

[Emma Vigeland]

This. That's exactly right. I'm sorry to. Yes. And again, but that's part of why the US companies are hurt the most by this is because they are the most reliant on outsourcing and contracting out their production. So like yeah, I wish that we hadn't reorganized our economy to benefit corporations and given them tax cuts and deregulation and these trade deals allowed them to create their businesses in this way. But that's the reality of what happened. And they don't have the capacity to onshore or the willingness honestly to onshore this kind of stuff with the tariffs coming first.

[Sam Cedar]

Not without government help.

[Emma Vigeland]

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[Prem Thakar]

Thanks for having me. Hi, guys.

[Emma Vigeland]

Hey. Yeah, it's great to see you. And you've been really busy doing great work at Sateo. Whether you're in prep press briefings grilling these State Department freaks, or you're covering some of these just immensely terrifying ICE disappearances of student activists all across the country. It's been a month since Mahmoud Khalil has been detained by ice. What can you tell us about that case?

[Prem Thakar]

So the latest Mahmoud case is that an immigration judge has given Trump administration 24 hours to cough up whatever evidence they have. And by Friday, the judge will rule on whether on Mahmoud's case. I think what's been difficult, I think just as journalists but also just for all you guys just watching is there's now seven, if not more, high profile cases of students who've been targeted specifically for this sort of weird foreign policy authority that the government is using to try to target these students. And all those students have, have potentially, you know, more than one case going on with regards to the immigration court side of things, with regards to sort of challenging the broader nature of these cases. And that's just the case. As you know, there's, you know, dozens of other students who might be being targeted with the foreign policy aspect of this that the government is going after, which is saying that, you know, these students are threatening or compromising US Foreign policy in some way by virtue of protesting or writing an op ed. And then, as I'm sure we'll get into it, there's also hundreds of more students now who are being targeted for other jurisdictions and authorities that are also very loose, very weak, just kind of throwing things at the wall. And it's difficult for me. I don't know about you, Emma, but just thinking about how when Mahmoud was first attained, I thought that perhaps this would have been a moment in which so many different contradictions and tensions that were leading up to that moment would have been a boiling point. That would have been a point where there just would have been such a strong sense of people putting their foot in the ground and saying, this cannot go on. And instead we now are seeing the aperture widen even more, whether it's college students, whether it's El Salvador and this gulag prison. And it's, it's, it's, it's frightening. It's terrifying.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah, it is. And the, the announcement that came yesterday, I guess that the administration is going to use AI or something to look through people's social media to determine if they're anti Semitic, AKA anti Israel, criticizing the genocide. Like, obviously, it's funny, we were talking, I was talking to Russ this morning about that movie the Apprentice and Roy Cohn and his influence on Trump. But like, this is very much reminiscent of the Red Scare, the targeting of left wing movements in this country under the guise of national security. But instead of communism, we're just saying anti Semitism, AKA anti Zionism. And like the, there are hundreds of kids that are now being affected by this, according to reporting, or young people, I should say.

[Prem Thakar]

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And it's tough because I'm of, and I think a lot of people are of two minds and I think reasonably so. On one hand, you know, everything about this Trump administration has felt like it's just flooding the zone. You know, the famous Steve Bannonism of just, you know, just overwhelming the people with too many things to keep track with and, and kind of just throwing stuff at the wall, seeing what sticks, whatever, just. It doesn't matter. We're just doing everything. It feels chaotic. It feels hard to keep track of. On the other hand, it feels like so much of this in, in a broad sense has some level of a common denominator in terms of what's trying to be accomplished. You know, you think of things that maybe seem a little desperate, but actually have a sort of through line. There's the Lake and Riley act, which, which at its core is, is not just anti migrant, anti immigrant, but it's anti due process. It's, it's anti. Any sense of normal fee or, or norms about, about justice, about people's right to, to be presumed innocent before being just rounded up. And of course, there was the, the total of, I think like 56 Democrats between the House and the Senate that ended up voting for that right. There's Trump's attacks on, on law firms. There's Trump's attacks on universities, both in different ways, meant to be institutions that, if you believe in norms in any sense or sort of intellectual values or protection of law, those institutions are at least meant to be doing that. The law firms, obviously, especially these big law firms in some respects are meant to be at least some form of maintaining standards of law in this country, especially as, as the Trump administration also goes after, the American Bar association, which also maintains legal standards, universities, Platonic ideals, at least when, when they're meant to be, that the ideal version of them are supposed to be havens of speech, havens of discussion, havens of laboratories of democracy in a stronger way than states are supposed to be. You know, where, where people can hash things out and learn from each other. There's, there's, there's of obviously like just these different ways of, of attacking students and, and attacking their citizenship, their right to be here, any rights that are supposed to be afforded to them. All that seems sort of disparate but like, somewhat related, but there is this broader denominator of giving the government the authority in as many ways as possible to determine one's personhood, determine one's fate in this country, that the idea of you having guaranteed rights or of us having a guaranteed way of going about systems of justice, systems of legality, that's all those categories don't matter. All that matters is what this small set of people determines, does, or does not grant you citizenship rights, equal protections, personhood generally. And I think if we as people in the media can ground all of this stuff into that denominator, I think that would make things a little easier for people to understand that these aren't just random things being thrown around, but do seem like some sort of concerted effort that's been thought about to as much as they can really just concentrate the authority to just decide who gets to matter.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah, can we pull up 10 guys? I think that this, our conversation just took us here. But I would love your reaction prem to this clip because you see how neatly the suppression of anti genocide voices fits into the erosion of the rights of just people who are here as immigrants. Right. And there was this. These stories keep getting lost. And this was one that just stuck with me. Right. The Baltimore Banner wrote a great article about this case. In particular, it's a woman named Elsie Barrios. Oh, maybe this is not 10. I'm sorry, guys, but I could have gotten the number wrong here. 11 the El. This is a woman named Elsie Barrios. She was arrested on March 31. There were some ICE agents who broke through her car window to get inside. And her daughter filmed this interaction. The Trump administration is claiming that this mother has ms.13ties. There is no evidence of this. Her daughter obviously is strenuously objecting to this, but this is how this interaction went. There's some subtitles here and I'll try to read over this for the podcast audience. I haven't committed a crime. I'm going to talk with my lawyer. You need a warrant, they said. And then he broke the car window and unlocked it. You guys cannot take her just because you guys want. Don't worry, darling. Don't worry. Calm down. Don't worry, my love. So she's talking to her daughter here. Put it in park. I think we got the gist. So you saw that she kept her car window rolled up. She said, I want to talk to my. She said, do you have a warrant? They didn't answer her. She said, I want to talk to my lawyer. And then they reacted by breaking her car window and unlocking her. And now she's been scooped up. And that was 11 days ago. Yeah.

[Prem Thakar]

I think what the Trump administration gives us, if nothing else, is the most exaggerated, accelerated display of the worst impulses that this society can create. And I think people at home need to ask themselves, is this the kind of place that you want to be not only living in, but part of. Because we all, even in the most minuscule ways comprise this society. When you see whether it's, you know, ice officers breaking down a window to take a mom away from her children because she's apparently in a gang, or whether you see plain clothes masked people approaching college students for writing an op ed saying that their school should follow student votes to maybe consider recognizing that a country that this country is giving billions of dollars to is committing a genocide. If you want to be a part of that, I, I that you need to ask yourself that if that's something that you want to be a part of, whether that's something that themes even in the realm of decent or okay to you. And it's not about moralizing, it's just about what you think you want to be a part of. And it, I think what's, what's frustrating for me is that, you know, understandably so, we often base our, our concerns with this as first they came for X group, they might come after you next. Sure, it's possible. And as we've seen, yeah, like those, again, these legal categories mean nothing to this administration of this movement. That if they deem you to be inconvenient to them, they'll go after you.

[Emma Vigeland]

Oh yeah, she was, she was seeking asylum here and she had gone, she had a work permit. She was going through the official channels. I think that's probably how they found her.

[Prem Thakar]

Definitely, definitely. But it seems like that's not necessarily sufficient in terms of what this argument needs to be about, which is that even if you never get pursued after you're part of this, you are not only paying your taxes to a government that's carrying this out, you're not only sort of a voter or a non voter, but you're a neighbor to these people.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yep.

[Prem Thakar]

And I think if you can see these videos of people being rounded up, see these people being taken from their families and honestly, even if someone did commit a crime, there is a thing called due process that means you can't just be rounded up and sent to a prison camp in a different country. Even if someone commits a crime, there has to be sort of baseline amount of tolerance that we have in terms of what are we going to allow to be done in this country, what are we going to be allowed to be done in our name? What are we going to allow to be done to people just like us, which is to say people who at the end of the day just want to lead a dignified life.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah.

[Prem Thakar]

You're not the only one that wants that.

[Emma Vigeland]

And, and to me prem this, it's not to Say everything is the result of capitalism. But a lot of what we're talking around is capitalism, right? Whether it be the United States's relationship with Israel, as it functions kind of as our colony in the area of the world that we're constantly waging war in, because it's a war for influence over the area that produces oil. That's a huge part of it. And then whether it's this, the terrorizing of people who are here as immigrants, this is also so that they. They're fearful to speak up if they're being mistreated. They're fearful to go out in public life and to be a part of America. Like, there's all this, of course, racism, deep, deep racism that Donald Trump is tapping into here and engendering in the public. In many ways, he's exacerbated this. But it's also because the suppressing of people's rights continues to benefit the people at the very top, which is what this administration and this political movement represents and what the Republicans do. But we're at this point of, like, one of the darkest chapters in our history, the end point of this long project.

[Prem Thakar]

1,000%. 1,000%. And I think those dynamics are actually so evident to tons of people, even people for whom might have even voted for Trump. Like, just the basic idea that there is a structural inequity in terms of who's calling the shock in this country, who's not, that there's this broad sense that, you know, there's a large amount of people who are powerless in this country or feel powerless, and there's people who get to dictate those decisions. But it seems like there's a refusal by the supposed opposition movement in this country to lay that baseline argument out, but then also to fill in the gaps such that people don't nevertheless feel sort of enticed by people who say that it's still immigrants fault or that's still trans people's fault, that they feel that they're being screwed over, because that's not who's at fault of that. And, you know, I think you and I and plenty of people sort of in our sphere, we get sort of gone after, especially when it's the Trump administration power, when we sort of criticize the opposition or Democrats or progressives or what have you. And just aside, I think, like, people ought to understand, like, we don't get passionate of being critical all the time. The reason we're critical of whoever left or right is because things can be better. And things are very evidently can be better. And I think one thing that will always stick to me as we see the devastation around us is that this was. The permission for this was created and manufactured. We've seen, yeah, Americans have sort of idiosyncratic opinions and a lot of things and also opinions that change. I think too often in this country we see people as very static, as immoving, as if they're anti immigrant ones. They're always going to be that way that they're just racist rubes. No, people can change in the same way that you and I have changed.

[Emma Vigeland]

That's the popularism argument that like the Democrats should just chase poll. What is polls? Well, versus making their own case. It's insane. It's insane.

[Prem Thakar]

Right. And it's like the illusion that like polls are just created as if like people's opinions aren't shaped by what we say and what we do. And I think if you have, you know, 50 something Democrats saying, yeah, a bill that gets rid of due process is not just you know, okay, but we'll vote for it, that's what helps create this. If you have half the Democratic caucus smearing anti war protesters, pro Palestine protesters, as anti Semitic, as terrorist sympathizers, no wonder we get here. There's permission for this, there's tolerance for this. And I think, of course in this moment, the biggest thing is to respond to what's being done right now. But if we want to stand up against it, let alone prevent it in the future, there needs to be an honesty about how we got here in the first place. Because someone who manufactured this is not going to be someone who can all of a sudden stand up against it. And I mean, as we've seen, it's not like every single Democrat is united in saying Mahmoud Khalil's name over and over again. We're lucky to get, you know, maybe a fifth of them doing it on a regular basis. And so I really encourage people who are liberal Democrat partisans to, to understand that when we're making these points, we're not just being critical for the sake of being critical. I'd much rather just be.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah.

[Prem Thakar]

You know, satisfied with the way this country is going. But we get here from a direction. This doesn't just happen. There's a permission, there's a tolerance that's created by the people who are supposed to be standing against this. They're supposed to be having a sort of baseline amount of principle such that it's much easier now if this were to happen, to resist it because there's a Sort of coherent precedent of people who have always been against this kind of thing. But if you weren't always against it, well then good luck resisting it.

[Emma Vigeland]

And to, to bolster this. I mean this is why it's also not just about what's doing. They pick and choose, you know, what is currently popular that they're going to support. So as you say, the Biden administration completely ceding the ground on immigration, the party moving to the right on immigration, whether it's the Harris campaign or it's the down ballot, Democrats who ran this way, they're okay with doing that, right? They're okay with following what was now popular opinion. But this just came out in Pew two days ago that there has been an 11 point increase in unfavorable views towards Israel in the United States. Now a majority of United States adults have a negative view of Israel. And for Democrats for this base Dem, lean Dem, it's moved from 53% in 2020. Oh, I guess they started that a little bit later for those that cohort, but it's now up to 69% of people who lean Democrat are Democrats that have a negative view of Israel. 71% of Democrats age 18 to 49, they don't choose to really change their policies based on this popular opinion.

[Sam Cedar]

I just want to underline the age 18 to 49. Republicans moving from 35 to 50. So 50, 50 on Israel.

[Emma Vigeland]

Unbelievable. But even that, even Republicans, you see a shift. That's a 10 point shift for Republicans, lean Republicans. And we had a caller the other day whose brother is getting into some really anti Semitic stuff. That's hopeful. I could see that also being where Candace Owens route. Yeah, where the Republicans go. And that's extremely dangerous. That's also what, what Zionism wants, frankly. So like to illustrate your point here, Prem, it's not just the popularism. They pick and choose what popular policies they want to see and it's always going to the right. It's never doing this.

[Prem Thakar]

Right. Yeah, yeah. And I think like, you know, for me it's been interesting because I've sort of oscillated between trying to argue things on the basis of popularism versus arguing things on the basis of morals. And I think our baseline point, at least my baseline point is that people are dynamic. People can change. If you bring a case to them, if you treat them as dignified as you would want to be treated, if you see yourself as someone who can learn and change and grow, that means other people can too. And so I tend to try to base you know, discussions on that basis, that regardless of what a poll says, we can, you know, person to person talk about something and see what's the better option. But for those who are popularists, this among many other issues, it's only, you only follow the polls on certain things. You know, if, if after two years of you saying we have an immigration crisis, finally the polls say, oh yeah, we have an immigration crisis, you then say, oh well, we got to follow the polls. People say there's an immigration crisis. Well, what about over and over and over again people in this country thinking, yeah, like, you know, we should legalize or decriminalize weed or you know, we should have universal health care or we should, you know, take care of gun control, Gun control, control guns, take care of our environment a little more. Condition eight to Israel, not support a genocidal government whenever that's popular. Are we following that? Are the Democratic consultants saying we should follow the people on that cause? Are they? Are all the highbrow, smart, smug thinkers and pundits saying, oh well, a majority of the people think this we should follow? No, no, no, no, no. They choose which issue is smart to follow and they make sure as much as they can, their friends in the media affirm that premise. There's an immigration crisis, there's immigration crisis. There's an immigration crisis. Crime is skyrocketing, crime is through the roof. Do we really need to cut taxes? I mean, isn't there a good amount of people in this country? Those, those hard working, job creating billionaires? I don't know if people really want to do that. I mean, look, two years later, here's a poll that says the same thing. So we should follow the polls. It's ridiculous, it's absurd. And that's why for our sake, we shouldn't even need to make arguments based off polls because clearly it's a bunch of BS and people again, are dynamic and can change and can grow and we got to make the argument to people. But if we're going to talk to popularists, we should at least show that their arguments are bs. You can manufacture proof of something and then argue that it should be so. But then there's 20, 30, 50 issues for which the people say one thing and we're just not going to do it. Why? I don't know. Because it's too radical. I mean, who gets to decide what's radical? These same smart, smug people who say what is or is not radical?

[Emma Vigeland]

Exactly. Right. Well, really appreciate your time today, prem talker. Just phenomenal reporting. Everyone's got to go to Zateo and support them. This is the kind of like progressive news organization that we really need in this time period. So thanks so much, Prem, for your time. Really appreciate it.

[Prem Thakar]

Appreciate you guys. Take care.

[Emma Vigeland]

Thanks. With that, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we are going to be talking to Alec Katsanes about his new book Copaganda.

[Sam Cedar]

It's it.

[Emma Vigeland]

We are back. And we are joined now by Alec Karakatsanes, founder of Civil Rights Corps, author of How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. Alec, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

[John Ehrlichman]

Thanks for having me.

[Emma Vigeland]

Your book comes out next week. Congratulations. Everybody can pre order it and check it out and we'll put a link down below because you've been a phenomenal writer and have other great books that people can check out. But this is just it's so prescient because and important for people to engage in this topic right now because we just played with our previous guests this footage of ICE picking up a woman in Maryland, I believe, and she says, you don't have a warrant. I want to talk to my lawyer. And the ICE agents break her window and open up the car and take her out. And apparently she's been in detention for like 11 days. And so I'm interested in how you observe this current political moment and how Copaganda, as you've studied it, has paved the way for the criminalization of immigrants and it's been used to erode their rights.

[John Ehrlichman]

Absolutely. My book is really about the role that liberal institutions so the news media and I don't focus on the far right media in the book. I focus on sort of mainstream news media that's commonly considered to be liberal or progressive. But my book is really about how do liberal institutions like the news media, academic institutions. I have a lot of stuff in the book about the role that professors and universities play and nonprofit organizations in kind of accepting and adopting and perpetuating a lot of the underlying assumptions, attitudes and mythologies of the far right. And they put this sort of liberal veneer on them, but what they're actually doing. And there's so many subtle ways this happens every single day in the way the news is reported to us in terms of what stories are told, what stories are not told, what sources are used, what sources aren't used, what language is used, how they're framed. And the combination of all of those things changes our brain chemistry, makes us more susceptible to the authoritarian zeitgeist. And it's Very important at this moment for all people of goodwill at this moment of rising fascism, to really understand the role that these liberal institutions are playing, because they're frankly, they're walking us off a cliff.

[Emma Vigeland]

And what are the hallmarks of propaganda that these liberal institutions engage in? I think like, people are probably familiar with the local news adage, if it bleeds, it leads. But it feels like that is almost just the tip of the iceberg of how propaganda is in our daily lives and in our news media.

[John Ehrlichman]

Yes, I mean, this book really came out of our work. I'm a civil rights lawyer. That's really my main job. This is this stuff analyzing the news media and police comes out of that work. It's sort of something I do on the side. But one of the most important things you have to understand, and civil rights lawyers and people who work inside the punishment bureau understand it very well, is the police call themselves law enforcement, but that's really a term of propaganda. They want you to think that a law is broken, a law is enforced, but in reality, the police only enforce some laws against some people some of the time in some places. And the choice over, first of all what to criminalize and how to criminalize it, but then the choice of where do you look for crimes. You know, for example, over the last two, three decades in the United States, there's been more arrests for possession of marijuana than all violent crime combined. The Police spend only 4% of all their time on what they call violent crime. And so what you have to understand is that the news media and I explain this in the book, and I think in a really fascinating chapter about the secret world of police public relations departments, there's a multibillion dollar industry influencing, you know, how we think and they.

[Emma Vigeland]

Here in New York, that's part of Zoran's campaign pledges. He wants to cut that budget and people were laughing at him. No, it's significant, absolutely.

[John Ehrlichman]

There's over 80 people at NYPD. The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has 42 full time employees as of a few years ago, working on manipulating the way you see them in the News and in TV. The LAPD has another 27 people. So just the two largest police departments in Los Angeles and there's dozens more police departments in the LA area. Those two departments alone have 67 people working to manipulate how you experience the reality. And I think that the most important thing to understand is that the distortions in the understanding that police have about safety filter their way into the news. And so what happens with the News is that the news ends up because of the role of police and a lot of multi billion dollar companies that kind of profit off of every step of the way in the criminal system. They focus on certain kinds of threats but totally ignore other kinds of threats. So they focus a lot on shoplifting. They created this kind of shoplifting epidemic in the news right at a time when actual shoplifting was down. We now know that. And property crime was at near 40 year lows in the United States at that time. For the last couple of years they fomented a panic about retail theft. There were 309 articles about a single theft from a Walgreens in San Francisco a couple of years ago. Okay, 309 articles. And at the same time not a single article about about much more serious wage theft by Walgreens of its employees. Wage theft is a $50 billion a year problem. That's about five to six to seven times depending on how you count all other reported property crime combined in the United States. It's completely ignored in the news, even though it's much more consequential.

[Emma Vigeland]

That is a great way to talk about COVID and its impact on propaganda. Right. Because there spike in violent crime in the pandemic after there was. There's been precipitous decline for decades, starting to before I was even alive. That crime has been on the decline in the United States. And yes the once in a lifetime pandemic and the insecurity that it created did result in a kind of two year speak spike rather in violent crime. Just anecdotally I got to say it felt like. And then of course it precipitously declined after that in 2023 and in 2024 across the board violent crime. And there were some. There was an increase I think in carjacking last year, but that was an exploitation of a bug in some of the cheaper models of cars that people were exploiting. Like all fell off a cliff these statistics. But. But you had Donald Trump and the Republicans running on crime and you had even liberals kind of conceding this, this point without addressing the over underlying statistics and what, what the factors were in causing this increase. And then paired with that you had what you described this like bunch of media outlets just taking Target and Walgreens as press releases at face value about why they were losing money and they blamed it all on shoplifting without evidence. And then quietly like six months later some trade publication will be like yeah, like it actually wasn't that we put a target in the wrong area of of Manhattan or. And it didn't. Wasn't that profitable for us, so we blamed it on shoplifting or whatever. Like that was a whole multi year propaganda effort really. In my view from 2020 to 2024.

[John Ehrlichman]

Probably the most important piece of propaganda, if I had to pick one in contemporary news discourse is that fluctuations in police reported crime, which again is only a tiny sliver of all the actual harm to people in the world. Right. But fluctuations in police reported crime, we are told by the news media, have to do with things like policing and bail reform and like length of sentences and like, you know, there was a whole propaganda spree around progressive prosecutors. Like the recall of a prosecutor in San Francisco. The idea that somehow his policies are affecting crime. That is like climate change denial. Okay. There's a global warming like scientific consensus that the actual drivers of interpersonal harm in our world are not like how police are like walking the beat or how many people police are arresting this year versus last year or what a prosecutor's policies are, or whether the sentence you can get for a crime is eight years or six years or four years. The actual drivers of harm are big things about our society like poverty, inequality, access to health care is huge. You know, the single biggest driver in a lot of the research in terms of like the number of actual arrests for interpersonal violence is like access to health care for poor people. So you can actually look in these states that have expanded Medicaid, they've done these studies, dramatically reduces police reported crime. If you expand Medicaid, things like early childhood education have a huge effect on crime for years. Things like isolation and loneliness and toxic masculinity. All of these things are shown in the research to actually be the drivers of crime. Another big one is exposure of children to lead.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yep. So that, that, that aligned with the taking out of lead in, in paint and other, and, and some, some replacing of pipes, sorry, in the back half of the, of the 20th century. Just wanted to put that out there.

[John Ehrlichman]

And unleaded gasoline, unleaded gasoline was one of the big reduction, it looks like from the research that taking lead out of gasoline was a huge driver of lower crime. So these are the things that actually drive crime. But the conceit of the news media and virtually every single daily news story, whether it's TV or radio or podcast or the front page of the New York Times, it all suggests some connection between, you know, big crime trends and what the police are doing. And that is fundamentally the probably the most key piece of propaganda. Because what does that enable them to do. It enables them to boost police, prosecutors in prisons, which people who own things in our society, very wealthy, elite people, they want that level of control and surveillance and because it actually enables them to do something else, which is to control poor people. So while those policies don't actually prevent crime, they do permit extraordinary control over protests, over union and labor organizing, keeping very poor people at bay in their community, enforcing things like gentrification and the property values of developers and things like that. They actually are quite important for those reasons, but they have nothing to do on a macro level in any significant way with the actual levels of safety that we all experience. That's a really important thing to understand. And it's hard to believe that because we're so conditioned every single day to be linking police and crime. And police are one of the least important factors, and so are prisons and prosecutors and courts and jails. And like, these things are just not that linked to how much crime there is in a society.

[Emma Vigeland]

Can you expand on that point? Because people may not believe you. Like, people may hear what you're saying and say, that can't be possible. Because I hear on the news, if crime goes up, well, it must be because we fund the police. Or, sorry, if crime goes down, must be because we fund the police. If crime goes up, well, we need to fund the police more. Like, it's heads, I win, tails you lose kind of situation for police.

[John Ehrlichman]

Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, whenever there's a cold day, someone comes on the TV and says there's no global warming. Like, like anybody can. Can, you know, make any point they want with anecdotes. But when you actually look at the research, you know, for example, the United States spends more money on police prosecution and prisons than any society in the history of the world. We are nowhere near the safest society. If more money on police prosecution and imprisoning people actually made us safer, we'd be the safest country in the history of the world. And there are. We are now throwing people in jail cells at a rate six times our own steady historical average up until 1980. And we're throwing people in jail at like, five to ten times the rate of other countries. And all those other countries have lower rates of violence. So you have to understand that it has nothing to do with all the money we're throwing into these systems. Those systems have a different purpose. And what my book tries to do is walk you through every step of the way with the examples. And I try to also make it funny because this is a serious topic, but it's also fun to make fun of some of the journalists and others who engage in this kind of simplistic propaganda. But I walk you through with the evidence and the research and then try to give people the tools they need in their own communities to start having these conversations. And the other thing that we're doing with the book is we have, as with my last book, usual cruelty free copies for any student, teachers, anybody in prison. They can all get free copies of the book and all the royalties from the book are donated to charity. It's really about like getting these ideas out there. Because in every other setting in our world, we are being relentlessly propagandized. We're being propagandized to be afraid of immigrants, to be afraid of strangers, to be afraid of poor people, to be afraid of people of color and black people. You know, in Washington, D.C. where I live, the black people are arrested and jailed and imprisoned at 19 times the rate of white people. There is no public safety benefit associated with that, according to the research. So we have an emergency in this country. And the way that the liberal media and liberal Democrat, you know, Democratic Party politicians talk about these issues actually embraces all of the misinformation and mythologies of the far right. And that is such a dangerous thing to do in a moment when the far right is in the ascendance and is using all of the architecture of these systems to destroy any semblance of an opportunity of dissent and opposition. And we're in a period where if we don't get this right really soon, there may not be any going back.

[Emma Vigeland]

Well, the architecture is clearly being used to both target, as we've discussed, anti genocide demonstrators and particularly folks who are here as immigrants. Right? Like the erosion of due process and the conflation of immigrants. Having a civil violation of crossing the border without the proper documentation with violent criminals feels very much like. Or associating them with gangs, right, feels very much like propaganda that has been used on the local level for the past few decades, including gang databases, which is another way to criminalize poor people by trumping up charges against them. So you can incarcerate them without having like a, a crime to charge them with. It just basically puts them in some sort of system where there's no accountability as how, as to how they can get on it or get off of it. But if you're poor or black or Latino and you're in some city, you're. There's a chance that you're on this.

[John Ehrlichman]

Database and the architecture for this, you know, much of it was built by Democrats, whether it was Clinton and Biden in the 90s or at the. And you have to also understand that the state and local punishment bureaucracies across the country are controlled by Democrats in most big cities. Obviously the Republicans, you know, the, the far right is, is weaponizing all of this stuff and is also a huge supporter. I mean, the police unions are all, you know, supporting far right candidates. I'm not, I'm not saying the Republicans are better or anything, but what I am saying that this architecture was built and controlled by Democrats. And I have a lot of examples in the book of moments in history when Democrats and liberal journalists either knowingly or. Or ignorantly spread arguments that directly led to the. To the construction and profiteering and building of these exact systems which are now being weaponized in ways that liberals seem to be afraid of. And it was very clear what was going on. And also, there's nothing really new about this. You know, what I walk through in the book also, exactly how this is taken from stuff that happened in England. It's taken from stuff that happened in French and British colonies. It's taken from stuff that happened in prior periods in the US History. Right? The otherization and the fear mongering around certain groups and the use of the fear around those groups to support repression of everybody is a very common historical tactic. It's been used in this country around native people, black people, LGBTQ people. It's been used around immigrants. At every key moment in history, the forces of repression kind of find key people to hate and to get everybody to hate. And they use that hatred and that fear to build up their own power, which they then use to control the entire population and to increase the unequal distribution of wealth and power in our society. So there's nothing new about what's happening now, except that now there are incredible technological tools at the disposal of these people. Power and wealth and technology have been centralized in fewer and fewer hands than ever before. And that makes some of the consequences, having built this, this architecture, all the more dangerous because it's very, very hard at this point for anybody to escape the level of power that like the government has over our lives.

[Emma Vigeland]

Can you give some more historical context about some of this? Because I remember as a teenager watching that documentary, the House I Live in, and it changed my perspective, like, forever. Right? It's just one of those moments where it clicks and I still remember some of the details from that, which is like that cannabis started to be called Marijuana to associate it more with Latinos. There were articles in the south about black people using cocaine to be able to stay up all night and steal your woman and also do all your work for you and steal your job. And opium for Chinese immigrants in California, that was also used as a way to disparage immigrants. And then that created the prohibition of these drugs that furthered the mass incarceration of the very people that they demonize via these stereotypes and usage of these drugs. And we're not out of the woods on the war on drugs. Right. Like as you just said, marijuana arrests are still dwarfing, I forget what the other point of comparison was, but a violent crime arrest in this country. So like, if you could just talk more about that history of prohibition as well, of these kinds of drugs and how it's been used to target those specific groups.

[Matt Binder]

Yeah.

[John Ehrlichman]

You have to understand that when something is made illegal like a drug, what the government is doing is it's giving itself enormous power to selectively enforce those laws. So the drug laws have been, have. There's been 40 or 50 million human beings with metal chains put on their bodies, separated from their families and thrown into cages where they are at extraordinary risk of sexual and physical assault and death for the last 40, 50 years because of the so called war on drugs. But, but those same drug laws are not enforced at Yale University dorm rooms or private boarding schools or Goldman Sachs weekend parties. Right. So they are enforced in absolutely brutal fashion in the poorest communities in our country. So just because something is criminalized doesn't mean that it'll be equally enforced. And in fact, what you're doing is giving the government more power to selectively target people. So that is nothing new. And the examples that you gave of the history of marijuana prohibition and cocaine prohibition and opioids, there's a key part that to add to what you said, which is it wasn't just the government doing that. It was the New York Times.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yes.

[John Ehrlichman]

It was media oligarch, the Hearst newspaper publications that actually spread the fear of Mexican immigrants and the cannabis panic and epidemic. And it's this symbiotic relationship between people in power in the government and people in power in the news media who combine to kind of like turn what would be otherwise a brutal sort of elitist policy into kind of like conventional cultural consensus. And it's that process. And then at the same time, there were academics at Harvard and Princeton and Yale, all these fancy schools who were doing kind of fake nonsense research and opinion pieces, and they were, they were validating at the same time, all of this stuff, which, you know, a lot of the stop and frisk stuff came out of elite academia totally debunked. It's complete nonsense. Right. And so I have a couple of chapters in the book where I actually take you through what I think are some horrific but also extremely funny examples of in particular, professors at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. But those are the stories I tell. But like, the role of these elite institutions and the media in fomenting these panics is something that we absolutely have to study. Because what you describe, the criminalization of certain substances that didn't used to be criminalized or the enforcement of those laws doesn't just happen because the government wants it to. It needs a whole sort of apparatus of propaganda associated with, in order to validate and create kind of conventional wisdom around, around those policies. And the same is true, of course, of the demonization of immigrants. The same is true of, you know, in each generation there are sort of different types of panics around different types of behavior. And I think that the piece that I talk about in the book that makes it all just so clear is what some of the highest ranking aides to Richard Nixon said afterward. There's this famous admission that they made, which is that it's right there in the tapes. It's right there. You can see it. They said we didn't care about. Essentially what they were saying is we didn't care about drugs. It wasn't a problem. We actually also, we understood. And Nixon had actually commissioned a blue ribbon panel of experts and they actually recommended legalizing some of the drugs. Right. He had thought he had stacked that commission with like police and other people. But when the experts actually studied it and they didn't do any of this to reduce drug use or to make our society safer, they did it so they could have extra tools to target the anti war movement and black people.

[Emma Vigeland]

They admitted that they said it. People can look up the quote. It was, I think it wasn't the Nixon tapes, as you say, is Ehrlichman, I believe.

[Sam Cedar]

John Ehrlichman.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah, yeah. And like you even see. And when you put an industry like this underground too, right? When there was, then these drugs start to get introduced to the United States, they are pigeonholed as like that. They're made into kind of racist propaganda, but they're also addictive. And the demand continues to grow and grow and grow. Then you create an underground criminal network or, you know, network of, of illegal sales. Right? Here's the quote.

[Sam Cedar]

This is Actually, a different quote, this is from Joe Kennedy iii. He said, literally said, we, when we decriminalized it, we actually had a pretty big consequence for the way that Massachusetts prosecutors went about trying cases in terms of. Because an odor of marijuana was at last, initially, at least initially, I think is what that meant. Because marijuana was an illegal substance. If you smelled it in a car, you could search the car, right?

[Emma Vigeland]

So a precursor to criminalizing those, those people. But, but yeah, you basically create the, this whole different kind of pot of criminality that cops can, can tap into to further incarcerate the poor and discipline them, right? When you create this whole network of, of, of the economy that's underground, basically.

[John Ehrlichman]

But I want to add one really key point, which is about propaganda, because this current book that I've written is all about how they get us to buy into this system and even support it and cheer it, right? And there's a really important propaganda point. So let's take this war on drugs that you're talking about. It's such a good example, right? If you look back since like let's say 1975, the United States has spent trillions of dollars. It has literally put in cages tens of millions of people. It's kicked millions of mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers and others out of public housing because some relative of theirs was arrested for marijuana. It has firebombed and chemically sprayed millions of acres of land throughout Latin America, right? It has stopped, searched and frisked hundreds of millions of people. It has surveilled the communications of billions of people. It has killed hundreds of thousands of human beings and separated millions and millions of children from their families and on and on and on and on and on. All of those things. And yet the availability of dangerous drugs today is more than it was at any prior time in that war. Dangerous. And the usage of dangerous drugs by young people is skyrocketed as well. And in terms of like overdose deaths and stuff like that, like overdose deaths are at all time highs, okay? These are facts. The people who did the war on Drugs and are still doing it, they know these facts. They're not like ignorant, right? Everyone in the system understands that the point of the War on Drugs was never to reduce. The drugs are purer than they ever were. They're more widely available. More people are dying, right? Everyone understands that. And yet, if you go to any news article, Associated Press, New York Times, NBC News, etc. Whenever they're talking about some kind of opioid law or new drug Law or whatever. They almost always contain phrases like, and they're considering increasing the mandatory sentence in order to respond to the opioid crisis. There's this assumption of good faith and that the stated reasons that politicians are saying they're doing, you know, they're going to a new undercover unit in order to combat the increase of opioid overdoses or, you know, new penalties for prosecutors. All this stuff is treated by the news media at face value as if the reason that the government is doing this thing that everyone understands has nothing to do with the availability of drugs and is actually making the problem worse. But they're playing along with that propaganda game. And that gets to one of the themes of the book, which is the news media does an enormous disturbance to us when they parrot these stated motives of people in power as their actual motives.

[Emma Vigeland]

Right, right, exactly. I mean, and just to wrap up here, Alex, I know you gotta go. But just like the stated motives in public. But we have this quote. It's just so incredible. John Ehrlichman telling a Harper's writer back in 1968. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

[John Ehrlichman]

And when you hear that quote, you're outraged, you understand? But essentially every single day, and I walk through these examples in the book, the New York Times, the Atlantic, all these publications that liberals like are doing the exact same thing. They are pretending that the drug war policies or these other punishment related policies are some attempt at public safety or reducing drugs or something like that, when everyone involved in them understands that they are about something else, which is controlling poor and marginalized people and profiting. And that myth, that lie, what I call in the book, that big deception, is sort of the core of what we have to understand if we're going to actually change how these issues are discussed in our society.

[Emma Vigeland]

Well, I really, really appreciate you coming on today. People can pre order the book or get it next week when it's out, I think. April 15th, right, Alec?

[John Ehrlichman]

Yeah. Although I've heard that some people have already gotten their copies in the mail when they ordered it. So go for it.

[Emma Vigeland]

All right, go for it. Check it out. Link down below. Alec Karakatsanes, founder of Civil Rights Core, author of How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. Thanks so much for coming on today.

[John Ehrlichman]

Thanks for having me.

[Emma Vigeland]

For sure. All right, folks, with that we're gonna wrap up the free part of the show and head into the not free half. That's our new branding in this not fun time period. But we'll have some fun. I think making fun of Trump, that's how we get through it. It's your support that makes this show possible. You can become a member and support these kinds of interviews, this kind of work. @jointhemajorityreport.com you can im the show. We'll read. We can read some of your IMs on air. Like DJ Dad Corps. I pre ordered Alex book so hard. Can't wait to read it. That's very nice to hear. Juice for Jesus. I look forward to searching for the Poly Market studio section of the Copaganda book. So if you join the Majority Report, you can have some of your clever IMs read on air and even ones that we deem to be not so clever room. We'll have a back and forth. But Brandon, hello. How are you? Good to see you. What's happening on the Discourse?

[Brandon]

Hello, good afternoon. It's lovely to see you as well. Actually, I was just streaming before I came on here and what we did this morning was watch the, I don't want to say the latest episode. I think there have been more since this one. But the most recent good episode of the Patrick Bet David podcast where he has a sort of micro debate between Terrence Howard, Academy Award nominated Terrence Howard and NASA scientist about Terrence Howard's ideas.

[Emma Vigeland]

What? Sorry I had to cut you off. Finish your sentence. I just got excited to talk.

[Brandon]

That was. That was. I mean, that's really it. Like the Patrick Bet David podcast had on Terrence Howard and a NASA scientist to debate Terrence Howard's ideas.

[Emma Vigeland]

What's going on with Terrence Howard is he just lost it now.

[Brandon]

I don't know is the word to put in.

[Emma Vigeland]

I didn't really know anything about him before except that, you know, he was in some movies I liked like back in the day.

[Brandon]

But I think I lack the diagnostic tools due to a lack of formal education in psychiatry or psychology or whichever one. I don't know. Again, I don't even have the tools to know which one. Right. That would be necessary to diagnose what's wrong with him. But certainly it's something.

[Emma Vigeland]

Certainly. Hello, Matt Bender.

[John Ehrlichman]

Hello, Emma. How are you doing?

[Emma Vigeland]

I am Doing well, what's happening on your shows? Yeah, I did a.

[John Ehrlichman]

Did a call in show yesterday at YouTube.com mattbinder and of course, leftist mafia tonight at YouTube.com mattbinder so check it all out.

[Emma Vigeland]

Check it out. And Matt, what's happening on Left Reckoning?

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah, Left Reckoning. On Tuesday night we had John Binnam Nakamon, he' candidate at Columbia University, talking about both actually kind of similar. It's a good companion piece to the Ella Cara Katsanis interview. Talking about abolition and mass incarceration and that sort of stuff. And also the protests student movement for Palestine and the insane reaction to these. By these weird things called university boards that run universities. It's not like the students or alumni or teachers. It's this secret third thing that seems pretty detached from reality, if I do say so myself. And you know, as somebody who came here to attend one of these schools, namely nyu, it is interesting to just think about what is that thing that I pay hundreds of dollars of to pay back student loan money for every. Every year. The thing that. Where I have multiple classes taught by an IDF veteran. It's just interesting, the questions that we all have about, you know, should you go to these universities that literally sell themselves as places where you learn how to change the world through activism?

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah. All right, well, check that out, folks. We will see you in the fun half. We'll take your calls, read your IMs, have some fun. That will promise that. See you there. Okay. Emma, please. Well, I just. I feel that my voice is sorely lacking on the majority report. Wait, look, Sam is unpopular.

[John Ehrlichman]

I do deserve a vacation at Disney World, so.

[Matt Binder]

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome Emma to the show.

[Emma Vigeland]

It is Thursday.

[Matt Binder]

Yes, please.

[Prem Thakar]

I'm. I'm.

[Matt Binder]

I'm going to pause you right there.

[Emma Vigeland]

Wait, what?

[Matt Binder]

You can't encourage Emma to live like this. And I'll tell you why. So was offered a tour. Sushi and poker with boys. Tour, sushi and poker with boys. Who was offered a tour?

[Prem Thakar]

Yeah.

[Matt Binder]

Sushi and poker with boys.

[John Ehrlichman]

What?

[Matt Binder]

Twerk, sushi and poker.

[Emma Vigeland]

Tim's upset.

[Matt Binder]

Twerp Sushi and poker with boys was offered with twerp sushi and. That's what we call biz. Twerp sushi and poker with T. Boys.

[Prem Thakar]

Right.

[Matt Binder]

Twerk, sushi and poker.

[Emma Vigeland]

We're going to get demonetized.

[Matt Binder]

I just think that what you did to Tinpool was me mean free speech. That's not what we're about here. Look at how sad he's become now. You shouldn't even talk about it.

[Emma Vigeland]

I think you're responsible. I probably am in a certain way. But let's get to the meltdown here.

[Matt Binder]

Sushi and poker with the boys. Oh, my God.

[John Ehrlichman]

Wow.

[Matt Binder]

Sushi. I'm sorry. I'm losing my mind. Someone's offered a tour. Sushi and poker with the boys. Logic. Sushi and poker with the boys. Boys. I think I'm like a little kid. I think I'm like a little kid. I think I'm like a kid. I think I'm like a little kid. I think I'm like a little kid. Had this debate 7,000 times. A little kid. A little kid.

[Prem Thakar]

I'm losing my mind.

[Matt Binder]

So I'm not trying to be a dick right now, but, like, I absolutely think the US should be providing me with a wife and kids.

[Emma Vigeland]

That's not what we're talking about here.

[Matt Binder]

It's not a fun job.

[Emma Vigeland]

That's a real thing.

[Matt Binder]

That's that real thing.

[Emma Vigeland]

Real thing.

[Matt Binder]

Willy Walker. That's a real thing. That's real thing. That's a real thing. That's got a real thing. That's a real thing. Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Rogan has done it again. That's a real thing. Oh, I think he might be blowing.

[Emma Vigeland]

It out of proportion.

[John Ehrlichman]

Real thing.

[Matt Binder]

That's that poker. That's a real thing.

[Sam Cedar]

That's poker.

[Alec Karakatsanis]

Let's go, Joe.

[Matt Binder]

Twerk, sushi and poker.

[Emma Vigeland]

Boy, take it easy.

[Matt Binder]

Twerk, sushi and poker. Things have really gotten out of hand. Sushi and poker with the boys. Sushi. You don't have a clue as to what's going on live.

[Sam Cedar]

YouTube.

[Emma Vigeland]

Sam has the weight of the world on his shoulders. Sam doesn't want to do this show anymore.

[Sam Cedar]

Anymore.

[Emma Vigeland]

It was so much easier when the majority were. Before it was just you.

[Matt Binder]

Let's change the subject.

[John Ehrlichman]

Rangers and Knicks are doing great now. Shut up.

[Emma Vigeland]

Don't want people saying reckless things on your program. That's one of the most difficult parts about this show. This is the Pro Killing podcast.

[Matt Binder]

I'm thinking maybe it's time to bury the hatchet.

[Emma Vigeland]

Left his best trump. Pilot work.

[Matt Binder]

Don't be foolish and don't tweet at me. And don't.

[Emma Vigeland]

The way Emma has all of these people love it. That's where my heart is. So I wrote my honors thesis about it. Oh, sorry. You wrote an honors thesis. I guess I should hand the main.

[Brandon]

Mic to you now.

[Matt Binder]

You are to the right of me on foreign policy.

[Emma Vigeland]

We already fund Israel. Dude, are you against us?

[Matt Binder]

That's a tougher question I haven't answered.

[Emma Vigeland]

Incredible theme song. Hi, Bumbler.

[Prem Thakar]

Emma.

[Emma Vigeland]

Vin. Absolutely one of my favorite people, actually. Not just in the game, like, period.