3567 - Bovino Out; Getting to Reparations; New NDP Leadership w/ Dorothy Brown, Avi Lewis

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Majority Report with Sam Seder

Episode 3567 – Bovino Out; Getting to Reparations; New NDP Leadership
Date: January 27, 2026
Guests: Dorothy Brown (tax professor, Georgetown Law), Avi Lewis (journalist, NDP leadership candidate)

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Majority Report dives into a major shift in immigration enforcement with the ouster of ICE Chief Bovino, explores the historical and present-day arguments for reparations in the United States with Professor Dorothy Brown, and closes with journalist Avi Lewis’s campaign for leadership of Canada’s progressive NDP. The discussion is laced with the show’s trademark political irreverence and sharp critique of both right- and center-left policy failures.

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Key Topics and Segments

1. News Roundup—Bovino Out, ICE, and Fallout (00:12–18:54)

• Bovino’s Removal: The hosts express relief and cautious optimism at the ousting of ICE Chief Bovino, with listener stories of community organizing (whistling outside his hotel) bringing a dose of humor and hope.
• Sam’s Caution: Sam Seder reminds listeners that, while Bovino is gone, the underlying policy and apparatus remain:

  “They’re just going to be a little bit more low-key. That’s it.” – Sam Seder (04:30)

• Continued Violence: Emma and Sam discuss the pattern of federal violence, documenting how administration narratives about protesters’ supposed violence unravel rapidly under the weight of video evidence—and the crucial role of citizen journalism.
• PR Crisis for Trump Admin: The administration’s shifting, flailing narrative is diagnosed as PR crisis management, signifying grassroots victory but not a policy shift.

2. Administration Gaslighting & Media Coverage (05:35–18:54)

• Clips & Commentary: Blistering audio clips play from Trump’s Deputy AG Todd Blanche, cycling from blaming protesters (“not protesting peacefully”) to quick backpedaling on Fox as video evidence contradicts the official story:

  “Without that video ... they would have tried—maybe succeeded—in building a narrative before it comes out.” – Sam Seder (11:02)

• White House Response: The administration’s empathy is called performative and selective; their “worst of the worst” framing is lampooned.
• Politics Over Policy: Discussion about the unchanged, underlying policy—Trump’s base will not shift, but admin style and PR will get a makeover to try and weather the midterm storm.
• Democrats’ Role: Emma flags that Democrats have only recently moved away from “cooperate with ICE” talking points.

3. Shift to Policy Solutions: Abolishing ICE & Big Structural Changes (18:54–27:43)

• Beyond Leadership Changes: Sam and Emma pivot to a bigger vision, emphasizing systemic change over mere personnel swaps:

  “Not just heads rolling. Abolishing ICE.” – Emma Vigland (18:54)

• Set-up for Reparations Interview: Sam sets the stage for a conversation about historical reckoning and transformative policy with Dorothy Brown.

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4. Interview: Professor Dorothy Brown—“Getting to Reparations”

(27:43–63:42)

Overview & Key Arguments

• Background: Dorothy Brown, law professor at Georgetown, argues reparations are about government compensation for harms done to Black Americans—not just slavery but systemic discrimination thereafter.
• U.S. Precedents: Brown details historical instances where the U.S. paid reparations to various groups, exposing the hypocrisy and anti-Blackness in their exclusions:
  • Italians lynched in Louisiana: U.S. paid Italy, but not Black victims’ families (29:17)
  • D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act: White slaveowners got “pilot” payouts for freeing enslaved people
  • Indian Claims Commission: Decades-delayed, partial compensation to tribes for stolen land
  • Japanese internment survivors: $20,000 per survivor, following advocacy and commission findings
• Memorable Quote:

  “People figure out whatever they want to figure out—if the incentives are there.” – Dorothy Brown on reparations’ so-called complexity (36:24)

• Ongoing Theft after Slavery: Brown links post–Civil War policies—sharecropping, redlining, mass incarceration, tax code bias—as forms of systemic extraction from Black Americans, necessitating a holistic approach to repair.
• Eligibility Debate: Brown supports reparations for all Black people targeted by white supremacy (not just descendants of U.S. slavery), but advocates for a government commission to determine specifics:

  “It is blackness that white supremacy targets ... whether they immigrated from another country or not.” (55:13)

• Structural Solutions:
  • Tax code reform to value labor and not only capital (which disproportionately helps white Americans)
  • Education funding overhaul
  • Addressing environmental racism
  • Guaranteeing returns for Black homeowners equal to those in white neighborhoods
• On Political Will:

  “When white Americans understand the history of race, they actually think we need to do something to fix it.” – Dorothy Brown (61:29)

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5. Canadian Politics: Avi Lewis for NDP Leader (92:45–111:39)

Understanding the NDP

• History & Legacy: Founded as a labor party with deep left-populist, social democratic roots; responsible for single-payer healthcare in Canada.
• Current State: After 2023’s electoral “wipeout,” the NDP is searching for revival; Lewis runs on an explicitly progressive, anti-monopoly, populist platform.

Lewis' Platform and Vision

• Addressing Cost of Living: National public grocery option to break up food monopolies and slash prices; rent control; public options for cell service and internet.
• Democratic Reform: Aggressively advocating for proportional representation to unlock real left power and end the “natural governing” status of the Liberal Party.
• Movement Building: Calls for party/unions/movement cohesion, year-round organizing, and unapologetic “moral clarity” on issues like genocide in Gaza.
• Quote:

  “We can do left populism right... bringing back a bold, straight-talking left populist option with moral clarity.” — Avi Lewis (106:56)

• Sense of Urgency: Membership deadline looms for Canadians wanting to influence the party’s path.

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6. Back to Immigration: ICE and Congressional Maneuvering (61:29–124:19)

• Senate/Democratic Moves: Democrats’ shift away from DHS/ICE complicity, as public and internal party pressure grows.
• Republican Discord: Even Fox hosts and the far right are expressing frustration with a bloated, unaccountable DHS.
• Local Political Fallout: Mainers pressure Susan Collins over DHS appropriations; condemnation and organizing led by Platner, a local Democratic leader.

7. Exposé: Former ICE Chief Bovino’s Racist Record (122:43–126:38)

• Discrimination Lawsuit: New details emerge (see Daniel Boguslaw, The American Prospect) about Bovino’s derailing of Black/Latino agents’ promotions within CBP, referencing Confederate iconography in internal emails—a direct, disturbing link to white supremacist nostalgia in federal leadership.

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8. The Bigger Picture: Trends in Fascism, Surveillance, and Free Speech (126:38–139:40)

• White Supremacist Messaging: Connection between white nationalist infiltration of federal agencies and current anti-immigrant violence.
• TikTok & Speech: New CEO’s alarming ban on “Zionist” as a pejorative, and collusion with pro-Israel groups for surveillance/censorship, is roundly criticized as political policing.
• Anti-Semitism/Anti-Zionism Debate: Hosts push back on conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and comment on tech/plutocrat involvement (David Ellison, CBS, TikTok).

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9. Wrap-up: Tim Pool, the Right, and Political Cowardice

(141:40-end)

• Right-Wing Grievance Entrepreneurs: Sam and Emma mock Tim Pool’s flip-flops on civil war, ICE, and “paramilitaries” (i.e., community members filming ICE), highlighting his embrace of fascist positions (and lack of courage).
• Recurring Theme: The necessity of not just public pressure and “winning the narrative,” but fundamentally changing policies and structures—whether it’s abolition of ICE, real reparations, or revitalizing left-populist politics.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Continued Struggle Post-Bovino:

  “People should take inspiration from what we’ve seen in Minnesota ... but this fight continues.” – Sam Seder (114:38)

• On U.S. “Tradition” of White Victim Compensation:

  “White supremacy always takes white victims. It has no problem hurting white Americans on the road to subordinating Black and Brown people.” – Dorothy Brown (44:52)

• On Canada’s Crossroads:

  “We have left so much on the table for the right... We can do left populism, right.” – Avi Lewis (106:56)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:12 – Show intro; Bovino out
• 05:35 – Trump admin gaslighting, protest video
• 27:43 – Dorothy Brown interview begins
• 44:52 – Reparations, anti-Blackness, post–Civil War oppression
• 55:13 – Eligibility for reparations
• 92:45 – Avi Lewis interview begins
• 106:56 – Left populism and urgency for NDP reform
• 122:43 – Bovino’s racism and internal CBP emails exposed
• 126:38 – ICE, fascism, and surveillance
• 141:40 – Tim Pool mocked; right-wing politics deconstructed

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Final Summary

This episode of The Majority Report paints a vivid panorama of current political struggle: the past is not even past in America’s ongoing systemic racism and punitive immigration regime; the only victories worth celebrating are those that dismantle abusive systems, not just swap their figureheads. In parallel, Canada’s left confronts its own moment of reckoning and possibility. The message is clear, in both irreverence and analysis: The work is not done, and only bold, structural movement politics can shift the tide.

Transcript

[Emma Vigland]

You are listening to a free version of the Majority Report. Support this [e-mail] and get an extra hour of content daily.

[Sam Seder]

The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Tuesday, January 27, 2026. My name is Sam Seder. 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, Dorothy Brown, tax professor, Georgetown law, author of Getting to Reparations How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with our Past. Then Avi Lewis, journalist, educator, activist, running for the leadership of Canada's federal New Democratic Party. Also on the program today, one down and many, many more a holes to go. Bovino out. Meanwhile, a federal judge in Minnesota orders ICE chief Todd Lyons to appear in court to address contempt charges. Rand Paul calls on immigration agencies to testify in front of the Senate. House Democrats lay the groundwork to impeach Kristi Noem. First of many Trinidadian families file wrongful death lawsuit over US Military boat strikes. Very odd thing for drug cartels to do to think they could win a lawsuit like that. Former FIFA president supports a boycott of US hosted World cup games. Day number 16 of the New York City nurses strike. 15,000 New York City nurses on strike. Meanwhile, 30,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses in California and Hawaii strike as of yesterday as Democrats refused to vote for DHS funding. Senate Republicans begin to panic as a government shutdown looms just four days from now. India and EU announced the mother of all trade deals. This on the eve of Starmer's visit to Beijing.

[Emma Vigland]

Are we winning yet?

[Sam Seder]

So much winning. Speaking of winning, EU opens investigation into Grok's sexual deep fakes scandal ups ups to cut another 30,000 jobs. All this more on today's Majority Report. Welcome ladies and gentlemen.

[Emma Vigland]

It is sort of Newsday Tuesday. I mean we kind of shuffled some things around for yesterday because it was such a significant day, but at least we have some some good news today. My goodness.

[Sam Seder]

Bovino out. And this, this made my morning. We got a. I am from Rob in Minneapolis. I use my majority report safety whistle outside of Bovino's hotel in my town of Maple Grove, Minnesota last night.

[Emma Vigland]

Hero that I. Oh, beautiful.

[Sam Seder]

Makes my day. I don't care what happens after this. My day has been made. Well, all right. Bad things could happen in this environment. Yes.

[Emma Vigland]

Not, not. My superstitions are telling me that's not the right way to go.

[Sam Seder]

Okay, well, putting that aside, that made my day to the extent that the day has passed.

[Emma Vigland]

Made your moments. Made your minute.

[Sam Seder]

Very happy about it. Let me put it that way. Let's get into. You will win. I mean.

[Emma Vigland]

We have no choice.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah. What are you gonna do? All right, all right. Let's get into this. The, the, the fact that both, now, listen, I, I, people should not have any illusions here.

[Emma Vigland]

Yep.

[Sam Seder]

This is as much about aesthetics and style and approach as it is anything else. Bovino is going to be gone, but there's going to be some other douchebag who's going to be in charge of this. They're just going to be a little bit more low key. That's it. They may not. They may leave Minneapolis or they may just take out 500 of their militia troops and leave 3500 there. They may take out a thousand and leave 3000 there. They may take out 2000 still leave 2000 and just be quiet enough and hope the whole thing dies down. Rand Paul has called for Kristi Noem to testify, but not until March 3rd. There's a lot of like, crisis management going on here. So a lot of this is pr. With that said, the fact that they feel like they're in crisis management with their PR is a positive. And how did we get there? It just, it's a combination. I mean, it's essentially what the people in Minneapolis have been doing.

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah.

[Sam Seder]

I mean, period, end of story. But you can see how they, the Trump regime people have had to backtrack. Let's, let's go on January 25th. This was two days ago, on Sunday, the day after pretty killing. And here is Todd Blanche on deputy attorney general. He's the deputy attorney general and a reminder, Trump's defense lawyer as of January 1, 2025. Of course, after Trump became president, this guy came in as number two at the doj. He's the one who grilled Ghislaine Maxwell, found out that Trump did nothing. And so then she got a vacation stay and a puppy. Than a puppy. So here's Todd Blanche on Sunday, that city.

[Emma Vigland]

You're saying he wasn't protesting peacefully and.

[Sam Seder]

Yet the video before shows him holding.

[Dorothy Brown]

Up a cell phone directing traffic.

[Emma Vigland]

The video after, after shows him being.

[Sam Seder]

Pummeled by these law enforcement. Everyone has now seen this video across the country with this man holding up a cell phone.

[Emma Vigland]

And part of the outrage that people are expressing is that they feel as.

[Sam Seder]

Though the federal them to believe something.

[Emma Vigland]

That they don't see with their own two eyes.

[Sam Seder]

Is that what the administration is asking of the American people, to believe that he was violent?

[Emma Vigland]

When the video, based on what everyone.

[Sam Seder]

Has seen so far, does not show that. Well, first of all, I did not.

[Avi Lewis]

Say he was violent. I said he was not protesting peacefully. And you just described what every American has seen. Which is, which is video shortly ahead.

[Sam Seder]

Of the incident where he was screaming.

[Avi Lewis]

In the face of Ice.

[Sam Seder]

He had a phone up right to the right into ice's face. You tell me, is that protesting peacefully? I mean, we all see the same thing. I mean, you shouldn't try to gaslight the administration.

[Avi Lewis]

That was not a peaceful protest.

[Sam Seder]

And yes, what happened afterwards is tragic, it is horrible, it is heartbreaking. But make no mistake about it. That would have never happened. That would have never happened. And it doesn't happen in cities around this country every single day. But for the complete failure, the complete failure by the mayor and by the governor to do anything, to do anything to protect their citizens, they park their officers blocks and blocks away. Okay, I mean, fail. I mean, nice try, but fail. Total fail.

[Dorothy Brown]

A.

[Sam Seder]

Of course that's peaceful protest, baby. It's the second time it's happened in that city in two weeks. Don't talk about what's happening in other cities. The idea. And everyone watched the video. He was not. He wasn't. All he was doing was recording. But guess what? It is peaceful protest. When you yell at a police officer or you yell at a federal official, when you yell on the street, that's what peaceful protest is. It's not like there's a certain decibel level for your voice.

[Emma Vigland]

I mean, please stop gaslighting the administration, Sam, here, and don't love bomb us either. Listen, healthy relationship.

[Sam Seder]

This administration has boundaries and we've got to maintain those. So narcissistic.

[Emma Vigland]

Can you use I statements? Welcome.

[Sam Seder]

Such a narcissist. Here is Todd Blanche Just 24 hours later on Fox News. On Fox News. So that gives you a sense of just how far and how things change dramatically by Sunday night. And look, again, this is a function of the work that people in Minneapolis have done. Being on the ground, videotaping, logging this stuff, being smart about this stuff. I mean, this is the people, not the politicians. 100% a function of them doing it. And you know, whoever that, that that person was who had the footage from the other angle, they could have. They could have, like, I'm just going to hand this into the authorities. I'm going to. They were smart. They put it to the press. I mean, this is the way that it's going to have to work. But here he is within 24 hours backtracking on Fox News of all places. Todd I want to dial into the frustrations at DHS, my colleague Bill Malujian reporting about that, about the DHS's rhetoric. Here's a quote from his reporting saying there is extreme internal frustration with DHS officials going on television and putting out statements to describe Alex PR as a domestic terrorist who was there to inflict maximum damage on federal agents or conduct a massacre. Even after multiple videos emerged to show that these claims appear to be inaccurate. Some of these sources have described DHS's response to the shooting as a case study on how not to do crisis pr. One said they're so fed up they wish they could retire. Another says DHS is making the situation worse. And even another adding DHS is wrong and we are losing this war. We are losing the base and the narrative. This is coming to a head. Todd I, based on the DOJ's purview, do the actions of Alex Freddie amount to domestic terrorism? Look, we're it's an investigation, so I'm.

[Avi Lewis]

Not going to prejudge what his actions were or not.

[Sam Seder]

But there's two things that have to.

[Avi Lewis]

Be part of this narrative. There are two very important points that.

[Sam Seder]

Have to be part of the story that we're talking about.

[Avi Lewis]

Number one is the reason why that happened on Saturday is because we get zero cooperation from police.

[Sam Seder]

Oh yeah, it's going to blame somebody else. Now, he doesn't bring up gaslighting there. Let's see what happens when the administration itself, later that day, this is yesterday, now has to deal with these accusations because and again, you know, this is without that video, in the multiple angles of that video being released and being amplified like within an hour, they would not have been able they would have tried and I think to some extent been successful in trying to create and build a narrative before it comes out.

[Emma Vigland]

I mean, they took Preddy's phone, by the way. The federal government has access to it. So without that other angles of the footage, they would have tried to bury the evidence from his own phone. Officials referring to him in that way.

[Jake Tapper]

Rushing to that judgment.

[Emma Vigland]

Danny, go ahead.

[Sam Seder]

Thanks, Caroline. On Stephen Miller's comments, will Stephen Miller be apologizing to the family of Alex.

[Avi Lewis]

Pretty for calling him, quote, an assassin.

[Sam Seder]

Who tried to murder federal agents despite the fact that, as you say, this is still under investigation?

[Emma Vigland]

Ms. Look, again, this incident remains under investigation and nobody here at the White House, including the president of the United States, wants to see Americans hurt or killed and losing their lives in American streets. And we mourn for the parents. As a mother myself, of course, I cannot imagine the loss of life, especially losing one's child. And that same empathy from the President goes for the parents of angel families and parents of victims of illegal alien crime across our country as well. And that's exactly why the President continues to be holding wholeheartedly committed to deporting the worst of the worst criminals from our country.

[Sam Seder]

Okay. And see this is, I mean there's a couple of things going on here. Of course we showed images yesterday, we can show them, we'll show them again today of literally hundreds of kids in a detention facility down in Texas. I mean, no empathy for those, these families. No empathy for the father who has been in a detention center for two months and his 30 year old son.

[Matt]

Who.

[Sam Seder]

Relied on his father for 24 hour day care dies. I mean, none of that empathy there.

[Emma Vigland]

Or Renee, good that she was a lesbian. So they got to hate her too.

[Sam Seder]

They had no, yeah, don't gaslight them. But you can see here, this is the moment she is out there having been instructed by Trump and probably Susie Wiles, Chief of staff, we gotta get back on the worst of the worst thing. We gotta get back to message we lost it, We've lost the. And when we're not selling it. Well, and there's a reason why Steve Miller apparently was excluded from the two.

[Emma Vigland]

Hour meeting with Noem and with Corey Lewandowski, her partner that is not like sort of an informal, serves an informal role alongside her. But yeah, he was boxed out of that meeting, which is interesting.

[Sam Seder]

Now there's two, there's one or two ways to read this. I mean it's very difficult understand right now all this is, is palace intrigue bullshit. Their policy is not going to change how they implement it. Maybe they won't have someone out there, you know, Bovino was out there as if he was like literally, I mean they were literally shooting commercials for what they were doing every single day. And they may take a slightly different tact, but remember, at the end of the day, this is about, this is about two things. Feeding Donald Trump's base and there's still 30 to 40% of the country who are happy with what they're seeing. Those people are never going to change. They're never going to change. They can only be beat. That's it. There may be another 10, 15% that can be peeled off over time and you don't even need that. But there's 30% of this country who are never ever going to change from, from that perspective. But what we're seeing here is they're going to change their tact. But at the end of the day, they are very worried about the midterm elections going off in a, in a way that reflects how people want to vote and which is why we had Pam Bondi try and trade. We'll leave if you give us the sensitive voter data that you need. There's obviously like no connection there except for there's a connection there and that in and of itself may end up being legally jeopardizing to their entire, to their entire project. So we will see.

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah, but, yeah, and I just want to add something really quickly before we get to our guests because like the, the, the second clip that we played there was Blanche who was saying that they just need to cooperate locally with ice. This is just a reminder that that was something that early on in the wake of Renee Good. Or around that time when they were cracking down in Minneapolis that Chuck Schumer was saying needs to happen. That's when we had like basically a freak out anger fest on this show. And we saw that, or at least I did, of, of Chuck Schumer making that case. So the point is, is, is that the Democrats have moved on this like we're seeing. Chris Murphy did an interview this morning with the New Republic and was talking about the five different asks that they're going to demand on DHS funding. It doesn't go as far as we want. We need to abolish ICE in the long term, but we have to get the majority for that. There are some realistic asks that Democrats can be pushed on. You have the chair of the Oversight Committee or, sorry, the top, the ranking member saying abolish ICE and things like that. Call your senators and tell them to hold the line on this front because the inclination of a guy like Chuck Schumer is cooperate with local law enforcement. Local law enforcement. Cooperate with ice, please.

[Sam Seder]

And let's play the final clip of this four act play. This is the guy that I doubt we will hear much from going forward, although.

[Emma Vigland]

Until the trial.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah, until the trial. Or his, his vice presidency at the Heritage foundation. Calling law enforcement names like Gestapo or.

[Jake Tapper]

Using the term kidnapping.

[Sam Seder]

That is a choice that is made. There are actions and consequences that come from those choices. Right. And one of those by Felicia, I think, is what the kids would say back in the day.

[Dorothy Brown]

Right?

[Matt]

Yeah, the kids said that.

[Emma Vigland]

I was expecting that to come out of your mouth.

[Sam Seder]

All of my vocabulary is learned from when my daughter was in junior high.

[Emma Vigland]

That's exactly when that was big. Yep.

[Sam Seder]

It's still fresh in my mind. In a moment, we're going to be talking to Dorothy Brown, tax professor at Georgetown Law, author of Getting to Reparations how building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with our Past. At one point, at one point, hopefully we will be in a different era. It's been encouraging to watch what's happened in Minneapolis, but when we get to that era, we better have some ideas about how to move forward that are dramatically different from what we're doing.

[Emma Vigland]

Not just leadership changes, not just heads rolling. Abolishing ice.

[Sam Seder]

Abolishing ice. But I'm talking just largely in terms of a larger programmatic vision of the world. And we'll be talking to Dorothy Brown in a moment about her latest book. First couple words from our sponsors. This episode of the Majority Report brought to you by Wild Grain. Wild Grain Today when Ryan gave me the copy for this, we both were like, oh God, that bread was so good. Wild Grain is the first bake from frozen subscription box for artisanal breads, seasonal pastries and fresh pastas. Plus, all items conveniently bake in 25 minutes or less. This is not store bought stuff. Wild Grain uses simple ingredients you can pronounce and slow fermentation process that can be easier on your stomach and richer in nutrients and antioxidants. There's no preservatives, there's no shortcuts. Wild Grains boxes are fully customizable. In addition to their variety box, they have a gluten free box, a vegan box, and now a new protein box. I had like a peasant bread. I had, they give you free croissants in your box. I had apple cider donuts. The bread was, I mean, all of it insane. You put it in your oven for 20 minutes and it's like a fresh baked bread. Brian's almost like crying right now. I was trying so hard not to eat this stuff, but it's so good. It's so good. And it's, first of all, it makes for a great gift. But second of all, like, I made my kid fresh croissants in the morning. That, you know, makes up for a lot of failures that I've, that I've, you know, as a father, that I've done. It is convenience.

[Matt]

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[Sam Seder]

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[Dorothy Brown]

That's exactly right. Take homeownership, for example. The majority of white Americans are homeowners. So we would expect to see tax subsidies for homeownership. But the majority of black Americans are renters. And home ownership subsidies don't help the majority of black Americans. And as the home ownership subsidies work in our racially segregated home ownership, black black homeowners don't benefit as much as white homeowners do. So that's exactly right, Sam.

[Sam Seder]

And that's a doesn't grow on a tree.

[Dorothy Brown]

Right.

[Sam Seder]

Like, it's not like it's just. Well, that's just a coincidence. It is because there is no sort of, like, basic notion that we should reward, we should give a tax subsidy to homeowners versus renters. I mean, there's no, it's just correct. We've chosen to do that because the people with the political power have the political power. So and I recall, you know, vaguely that the, that it came about in the conversation of critical race theory and crt, which, you know, guys like Chris Ruffo have made, you know, sort of like kryptonite. But at one point, we will regain our, we will, we will regain our sanity and people will look at this again. But that it was, it was sort of like a challenge. When you were sitting down with your parents doing their taxes, this occurred to you. How did you get to. It sounds like you had a similar sort of, like, personal experience or sort of change in your perspective on reparations. What was that?

[Dorothy Brown]

That's exactly right. I went into tax law because I thought it had nothing to do with race. And as I wrote in the Whiteness of Wealth, I've never been more wrong about anything in my life. So similarly, I came to the Reparations Project as a skeptic and one of my former colleagues said, was describing her foreign relations course and how she teaches that the US Government paid reparations to Italy on behalf of Italians lynched in Louisiana. And I said, wait a minute. Are you telling me we, the United States government, has paid cash compensation to Italy for Italians lynched, but not for black Americans and their families who have been the victims of lynching? And she said, that's exactly right. And that's when I said, okay, there's a lot I don't know. Maybe I need to look into this. And that was the beginning of getting to reparations.

[Sam Seder]

I mean, I sort of almost want to return to that at one point because we've killed hundreds at this point in ICE detention facility who are supposedly foreign nationals. You know.

[Dorothy Brown]

Yes.

[Sam Seder]

It's not necessarily verified, but that I had no idea of that story as I was reading. And I also. Let's talk about the other examples when the US Government paid reparations because I was aware. And that Haiti had to pay France to free themselves. Yes, to free, not just to free themselves, but for something like 40, some ungodly number, 40% of their GDP up until like the mid-1940s, I think it was. The dates escape me. Exactly. And the exact Numbers, but an extraordinary amount because they had to essentially buy their freedom from the French slave holders. We sometimes hear that, you know, like libertarians say, you know, if Lincoln had offered this, we wouldn't have had a civil war. Well, it turns out that there was, there was a deal to explain to us.

[Dorothy Brown]

Yes. And I will say to those libertarians, the white enslavers of the story I'm about to tell you were opposed to it. So no, the offer of cash compensation was not something that was readily accepted. So I shouldn't say readily accepted. They took the cash when they could. They didn't want to. They wanted to continue enslaving people. So in 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the D.C. compensated Emancipation Act. And what that did was in the District of Columbia, freed all the enslaved workers. Now, the process for enslaved workers getting free was their enslaver had to file a petition. They had to file a petition. They had to describe one. They had to sign an oath that they were loyal to the Union because we were in the middle of a civil war. And the theory behind it, Abraham Lincoln thought, well, maybe if we can compensate people, if we free enslaved workers, they won't oppose freedom as much. He was wrong. But I digress. So they filed a petition. They requested cash payments for each of their enslaved workers. And this three person commission considered the petition. And within months, everybody got a check.

[Sam Seder]

Every.

[Dorothy Brown]

Not everybody got a check. The enslavers who can prove it, and that was the lion's share of those who filed petitions, got checks to compensate them for the enslaved workers who were freed.

[Sam Seder]

There's so much involved in that policy that I want to break out. One is, so it was almost like a pilot program.

[Dorothy Brown]

Correct.

[Sam Seder]

And so theoretically, like, you know, it would have if there was that type of interest in the South. We want that deal. Correct?

[Emma Vigland]

Correct.

[Dorothy Brown]

And there was none of that. And the reason why it worked in the District of Columbia was just like, now we have no elected representatives in Congress to oppose it. So I found newspaper editorials where people opposed it. So it's clear the people in the District of Columbia did not want their enslaved workers free. But since it was a foregone conclusion because Congress passed the statute, they saddled up, put their petitions in and collected their checks. Although some of them, some of them tried to circumvent the law by moving their enslaved workers to Maryland, moving them outside of the District so that they wouldn't technically be freed. So the DC Compensated Emancipation act was passed in April. By July, President Lincoln and others had heard that People were trying to circumvent the law. So they passed a supplemental act that empowered enslaved workers to get their freedom and file their own papers, file their own petition. And at that point, the enslaver would not get a check. So if the enslaved had to come themselves, it meant the enslaver was not going to get a check.

[Sam Seder]

So it basically disincentivized, like, you know, for lack of, you know. And this is going to sound. I mean, you know, I want to be careful because we're talking about people, but from their perspective, there was a punishment if you hide your assets.

[Dorothy Brown]

Correct? Correct. That's exactly right.

[Sam Seder]

And there's a couple of other things, too, that we should note about this, which I find fascinating. One is that it. It gives us a baseline. And maybe we can talk about this later, but it gives us a baseline of what the value of like. It. It gives a baseline of, like, you know, what the value was at that time of. And. And. And, you know, it's just one number that could be put into an algorithm. The other thing I will say is that it also represents one more example of a. Of how you could come about with, let's say, a wealth tax, because these. They did not sell these slaves.

[Dorothy Brown]

Correct.

[Sam Seder]

But there was a way in which we put the value on these slaves at that time because these people considered them commodities. They're human beings, of course, but it just shows that we have a long and storied history of. Of assessing the value of things.

[Dorothy Brown]

We can assess anything we want to.

[Sam Seder]

Right.

[Dorothy Brown]

And when people talk about reparations that, oh, it'd be too hard, it'd be too complicated. The four examples in my book show four different ways to do it. And with respect to the DC Compensated Emancipation act, they were valuing human beings. And I don't think there's anything more complicated than that. But not only did they do it, they got it done in, like, nine months. So it was done really quickly. So, you know, to me, one of the arguments I hear against reparations, it's, oh, it's so complicated. How would you do it? People figure out whatever they want to figure out, if the incentives are there.

[Sam Seder]

And we should note that I would imagine in 1862, they're using an abacus, not a calculator.

[Dorothy Brown]

Actually, yeah. They were using a Baltimore slave trader as helping them figure out the value of those enslaved workers.

[Sam Seder]

Let's talk about another example of reparations in US History. The Indian Claims Commission. Explain that to us.

[Dorothy Brown]

So the Indian Claims Commission was set up to Compensate tribal nations for the land we stole from them, either through violence or by giving them an unconscionable bargain. By saying, you know, if you want to live, you have to take this price. And the price was obviously too low. So the Indian Claims Commission was created to compensate tribal nations for what the United States government did in terms of stripping them of land. And now to contrast what happened when white Americans are being compensated, the Indian Claims Commission took a couple of decades for the payments to be made. So when it comes to paying compensation for people of color, the process is a little slower than when we're talking about the DC Emancipation Compensated act or when we're talking about writing a check to Italy for Italians lynched in Louisiana. I'm sorry, one more thing. I'm just going to say it wasn't just a one off with respect to lynching Italians in Louisiana. There were three separate incidents of lynching Italians in Louisiana.

[Sam Seder]

In terms of the Italians, were they paid in between the different examples or were the three. How did that go?

[Dorothy Brown]

Right, example number one, the payment was, for example, number one, there were 11 Italians that were lynched. They were falsely accused of killing a sheriff and they did not. And in fact, some of them were even acquitted by the jury, but they were still in prison and they were lynched. The second example, they were paid separately. The third example, Italy was paid a third time. So there were three different separate incidents of Italians being lynched. The Italian government saying, give me reparations and the US Government sending the check. Ultimately.

[Sam Seder]

So this sounds like an ongoing program essentially. Right. Like, you know, we do this each time you do this, we will send a compensation.

[Jake Tapper]

Yes.

[Dorothy Brown]

And the, and there was some discomfort at that. So at one point the President said, you know, we really need to fix this. And it was fixing lynching of Italians because they didn't have to pay when black Americans were lynched. But we needed to fix the Italian problem because we had to stop paying writing these checks.

[Sam Seder]

Let's talk about Japanese internment camps. You know, just going over this stuff in the context of where we are today just shows that like, you know, we have, we are just seeing, we have a tendency.

[Dorothy Brown]

Yes.

[Sam Seder]

And we're just seeing our DNA show up at different times through history, but that DNA remains. But Japanese internment camp and Japanese Americans.

[Dorothy Brown]

Yes. So During World War II, Japanese Americans or Americans of Japanese ancestry were arrested and imprisoned. And it was a mass incarceration effort. And decades later, there was a push to compensate them for their mass incarceration. And there was a commission that was formed, and the commission recommended that each Survivor receive a $20,000 cash payment. And ultimately it became law. And those who were imprisoned received the $20,000 payment. So here we have an example where mass incarceration was compensated with respect to Japanese Americans. But we know that mass incarceration of black Americans has occurred as well, and there's been no move for compensation for black Americans in that instance.

[Sam Seder]

And we should say, I mean, this is not to minimize, obviously, Japanese internment, but more Japanese came out of the camps than went in. In other words, children were born there. You know, the conditions were outside of the total deprivation of people's liberty. You know, nothing like what we see in US Prisons today, or for that matter, the detention centers and concentration camps we have for immigrants.

[Dorothy Brown]

I actually say that's not. That's not accurate for all of the camps. In fact, there were food shortages. There actually were revolts by Japanese Americans in the camps because of the inhumane conditions that they were subject to. So actually, they were pretty bad. They were pretty bad.

[Sam Seder]

I stand corrected on that point. What, before we move on, like, you know, we have these examples. Is there a way to sort of, like, broadly. I mean, I, you know, was there.

[Dorothy Brown]

A.

[Sam Seder]

I mean, I can understand sort of like the math issue here, but in these different instances, was there a moral component or was it simply like, you know, what, we need better relations with Italy, we're going to pay off, or. Or. I mean, I would imagine in the context of Japanese Americans, this is. It's a legal issue and a justice issue, because it wasn't like we had to answer to Japan at that point. I mean, how would you characterize the. The motivation behind all these different things?

[Dorothy Brown]

So I would say they're different. With respect to the DC Compensated Emancipation act, as you pointed out, this was designed as a test case to see if we could get more Southern states supporting cash compensation. And we learned, no, we did not get more Southern states in favor of cash compensation. They wanted to keep enslaved labor. With respect to Italy, there was a point where the Italian ambassador was removed and sent back to Italy, and there was talk of war. So this was a fairly serious. The first instance was a fairly serious example where you had a foreign country saying, this is unacceptable. You have to keep our citizens safe. With respect to the Indian Claims Commission, there was a thought that if we compensate tribal nations, that they will be more willing to assimilate with the rest of America, something that the tribal nations did not ask for. In fact, what they asked for was land. So the Indian Claims Commission was a little tone deaf in what they awarded. And with respect to Japanese American internment, there was a push from the Japanese American community to right this heinous wrong. And so I would say the four different cases have different motivations. But when you zoom out, you see that they're for heinous things the government did that also happen to black Americans.

[Emma Vigland]

And I guess maybe when I'm zooming out and thinking about it thematically, there's of course, like the anti blackness element, but it's also the humiliation and like when we're looking at Haiti that is plunging them into decades and decades, centuries of austerity because of this humiliation of our property being seized from us. I mean, and we still see the shadows of the Lost Cause today. In many ways, the Lost Cause and this fascist mythology has been given new life by this Trump administration in ways that we haven't seen in decades or.

[Dorothy Brown]

Absolutely right, Emma. And one of the things I talk about in the book is how white supremacy always takes white victims. And we see this in Minnesota. We've seen it in other instances. White supremacy always takes white victims. It has no problems hurting white Americans in the road to subordinating black and brown people.

[Sam Seder]

So let's move forward. I mean, you recount how in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction, we actually see the beginnings, and not just the beginnings. I mean, in many respects, depending on which communities you're talking about real building of real wealth amongst Friedman political power. And then at different times over the course of the past 10, 15 years on this show, we've delved deep into what actually happened during Reconstruction. Essentially programs and coups in place. South Carolina, you could argue just flawed coup, but pogroms, destruction of black wealth. And then of course, the Lost Cause ends up telling sort of a different story of it. But we're, we're looking at a. We have this sort of like secret history, as you call it, on some level of, of, of reparations that have existed. And then we have almost like a doubling or like a double down on the stealing of wealth. I mean, if you look at.

[Dorothy Brown]

Right.

[Sam Seder]

Slavery, I mean, it's a little bit at arm's length to say you're stealing all these people's labor. Obviously you're also stealing so much more than that. But there is a. There's actually like dollar figures one could easily associate with all of this.

[Dorothy Brown]

That's absolutely true. What the second part of my book talks about is what happened to black Americans after the 13th amendment, 14th amendment and 15th amendment. What we often Refer to as the Reconstruction Amendments were enacted. And my argument is chattel slavery may have ended, but it shape shifted. We got sharecropping and convict leasing, we got sundown towns, we got eminent domains stripping black Americans of property. We got FHA redlining. We got separate but equal. We got returning vets after World War II who were fighting white supremacists abroad, the victims of white supremacy at home when they were not able to take advantage of their GI Bill benefits. So what we have in this country.

[Sam Seder]

For example, tax code that devalued black.

[Dorothy Brown]

Work and by the time we get to World War II, a tax code that black Americans were paying into. Because before World War II, the only people that pay taxes were the richest Americans. By World War II, the base was incredibly expanded and we now had black Americans paying taxes to a government that treated them like second class citizens. I can't imagine anything worse than that. Right. So we have all of this legal discrimination against black Americans. In fact, we started talking about homeownership. It wasn't illegal to just to stop. I'm sorry, it wasn't legal discrimination against black Americans in home ownership and housing was not illegal until the 1968 Fair Housing act was passed. And that's not that long ago. And we only got the Fair Housing act passed in 1968 because Martin Luther King was assassinated. They had been pushing for that for years and couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. Martin Luther King is assassinated. Suddenly Congress can do it.

[Sam Seder]

There are plenty of people alive today still living in the same homes they were living in 1968. And certainly, you know, in many, many families, you're one or two generations away from homes at that time. And home ownership, particularly in the past 15, 20 years, but even prior to that, is the single biggest driver of intergenerational wealth that exists in this country.

[Dorothy Brown]

That's absolutely right. And the federal government helped white Americans buy homes. And they were a bar to black Americans buying homes who in, in spite of the government managed to buy homes. But racially restrictive covenants were legal. White Americans could say, I'm not gonna sell my home to you because you're black.

[Sam Seder]

Okay, so. And then in the third part of your book, you get down to sort of more like the brass tacks, I guess, of like actually how you would implement this policy. Let's just cover a couple of the things. When we say as a definition of reparations, what do we mean?

[Dorothy Brown]

When I talk about reparations definition, I'm talking about government compensation for harms done to the black community. So it's cash. Plus, it isn't all cash because our systems for building wealth are anti black and discriminatory. So if we were to provide everybody with cash, the system for building wealth would find a way to strip it from black hands and transfer it to white hands. So what I want is reparations that will also fix our systems for building wealth such that it's a fair, it's an even playing field.

[Sam Seder]

So give us an example. I mean, without obviously like some maybe changes to the tax code. I mean, just like the top line, if I remember, was had to do with dual dual earners. And if you have one earner who's making only 40% of the pay, I think, I mean, I may get the number numbers wrong, but I think it.

[Dorothy Brown]

Was, you're good, you're good, you're good. 60, 40, you get a 60, 40 or 50, 50 split.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah, yeah, you are, you pay, you're penalized essentially, as opposed to a 50, 50 type of situation or a single earner for. And, and it just so happens that black people tend to have, like, if there's a second earner, they're making about 40%. And, and you're. And you're penalized. And I would imagine nearly everybody who either wrote those bills or executes those laws were not aware of this. Because I think if I remember too, there is no data on race when it comes to the IRS and what people pay in taxes, that you had to go out and find that yourself. And so would that be one of the things that you fix?

[Dorothy Brown]

Yes. So I absolutely call for tax reform as one of the areas of systemic discrimination that needs to be fixed. How we tax capital versus how we tax labor is a huge part of the problem. So we have, you know, the reason why the richest Americans, the richest billionaires, pay very little in taxes is because most of their income comes from stock ownership. Well, why do we treat income from stock ownership differently and better than income from labor? That's just the wrong answer in my view. So one of the tax reforms I certainly would advocate for would be treating all income the same way. So it's that the rich, richest Americans would pay their fair share.

[Sam Seder]

And we should say, you know, there's no evidence that a, that stocks, you know, it's not like I'm investing in a factory that's going to hire a bunch of other people. I mean, that was theoretically the idea behind capital gains taxes and whatnot, but it has been completely bastardized. I will also say there's a very strong argument that when Reagan changed the capital gains versus income tax, we saw CEOs getting paid a different way. And between that and stock buybacks, a whole nother incentive structure on what to do with the corporation at that point. What are other sort of like add ons outside of like cash that would change our, the structure of our, of our economy in such a way that would no longer essentially punish black people.

[Dorothy Brown]

So how we Fund K through 12 education in this country, which is largely wealth based, would need to be revamped in its entirety. Most of how K12 is funded is property taxes. And that's a function of the housing wealth in that particular neighborhood. And we know that black and brown people tend to live in lower income, lower valued homes. So that we need to change how K through 12 is funded. We need to address environmental racism. We need to which is another function of where black and brown Americans live. Who's polluting in those neighborhoods, whose neighborhoods are not being polluted. So we need to address how homeownership wealth is created. So one idea I had in an earlier article that I wrote said black homeowners could be guaranteed the same rate of return that an analogous home in a white neighborhood receives. So there are ways to fix how we generate wealth in this country to make it a more even, even handed playing field.

[Sam Seder]

Let's talk about eligibility. There is over the years and you know, I think, I feel like I don't know how long ago it was that we had Sandy Darity on who is also a proponent of reparations. But there is a split or a controversy within, sort of like the movement for reparations between those who want all black people to receive reparations. And maybe there's very, you know, you need to be in the country for a certain amount of period of time or parents or second generation or whatever it is, and then others who describe themselves as ados. It's African descendants of slaves who are only eligible. Your position is the former. Give us a sense of eligibility and why, why you don't believe it should be exclusively to people who are descendants of freedmen, essentially.

[Dorothy Brown]

Right. So I am a descendant of freedmen, right. So my parents were from South Carolina and Georgia. So I know I'm a descendant of enslaved workers. I believe it's blackness that white supremacy targets. And the story I give is I grew up in New York and when a cab would pass me by, they wouldn't look at me and say, I'm not going to stop for you because you look like you Descended from enslaved people. They say, you look black. I'm not stopping for you. They don't look at someone from the Caribbean and say, oh, you look like you're from the Caribbean. I'll stop for you. It is blackness that targets whether they are. It is blackness that targets people whether they were born here or whether they immigrated from another country. Therefore, what happened after the 13th Amendment was passed was blackness put a target on everybody's back. But I also say, I believe that a commission should be created to study this. A commission created by the next Democrat elected president. The first day they're in office, they sign an executive order creating a commission, and the commission will study eligibility. I have my opinion. Other people have their opinion, and then the commission will work it out, just like all the differences with the Japanese American commission was worked out as well.

[Sam Seder]

And we should. I mean, I think, like, you know, the argument just is, if it's reparations, are you giving reparations for having been slaves, or are you enslaved, or are you giving reparations about discrimination? Which, of course, at different times has implicated different communities? And I think that's where the hang up is. But.

[Dorothy Brown]

But I think they're missing. They're missing the fact that discrimination occurred after chattel slavery ended. And why is that? Because the blackness of the enslaved worker carried over. It didn't stop. There was discrimination that occurred. Why were only black people enslaved and not white people? That was discrimination. So this notion that somehow because of discrimination, it's something other than slavery misses the reality and misses the history.

[Sam Seder]

Well, let me ask you this too, which is sort of like a slightly tangential question is do you see reparations in the form of reparations, not just cash, but structural changes in our society as. Or do you see the idea of reparations as an end or as a means in which to bring about that structural changes? Right. Like, I mean, the things that you're talking about in terms of structural changes are ones that people introduce outside the context of reparations, but they're not limited to black people.

[Dorothy Brown]

Right. So my argument of reparations is as limited to the people who were targeted by blackness, which is black people. So the structural reform will benefit black Americans and create a society where we don't look at black success as aberration, or we look at it as the norm. And if black people are successful and we look at that as the norm, that I think that's how we all get free.

[Sam Seder]

But for instance, like, I could be talking to. I mean, I've certainly had conversations with, with others to the effect of like, we need to treat labor income derived from labor to give it as at least, at the very least the same amount of value as income derived from capital. And we would do that through the tax code. Now I guess what I'm asking is like, do you see reparations as a mechanism in which to create a more economically just society that will benefit people outside of those that may fit into the specific eligibility you're talking about for reparations?

[Dorothy Brown]

So I see this as a class versus a race question. And for me reparations is about race. For example, poor white Americans are not targeted because of their whiteness. Right. As opposed to black Americans who are targeted because of their blackness. So the fact that I might come up with a proposal. Well, one other thing, when we talk about capital versus labor, we never talk about race, but we should because what you would find out is white Americans at all income levels are more likely to own stock than black Americans. So when we talk about capital versus labor, it's always a class based decision discussion devoid of race. When really if we brought race into it, you would see that capital versus labor is really a race based reparations conversation.

[Sam Seder]

Interesting. I mean, and maybe it's just a, well, what's the implications of looking at one versus the other? And you know, like at the end of the day, if we were to tax income from capital and labor, and I don't mean to just stay on this, but I think this is the perfect, this is the most like obvious example, What would the difference be? If we looked at it through a racial lens or a non racial lens.

[Dorothy Brown]

We would see that black Americans, even high income black Americans, are less likely to own stock. So any preferential treatment for income from stock is benefiting disproportionately white Americans across income lines.

[Emma Vigland]

It also I think is your argument, would you say bolstered by the fact too that reparations have been so delayed that the systemic racism that has been the outgrowth of those systems has largely made some of these questions more irrelevant. I mean, even like, you know, when we're looking at the 20th century and what that has done to black wealth, to black families via redlining and even the prison industrial complex. You could make an argument for reparations on that basis without even of course, the very important history of chattel slavery on top of of it.

[Dorothy Brown]

And I think when we're talking about reparations, it needs to be holistically done and not one offs or piecemeal, which it's something that we've never had. We've never had the conversation in this country right now. The Trump administration doesn't want us to talk about the history of race in America. Right. We've seen recently book bans. So there's a reason why the Trump administration doesn't want us talking about the history of race, because it's really bad. And when white Americans understand the history of race, they actually think we need to do something to fix it. So the more people understand history, the closer we get to reparations for black Americans.

[Sam Seder]

How much of what. Of where we. I mean, how much, like, what we're seeing today in terms of the, you know, in the context of immigrants. How much, like where do you see the sort of. The parallels? And if not even the parallels, maybe just like as part of a single sort of essence of the country or element of the country in what we're seeing today within the work that you have done.

[Dorothy Brown]

So what I see today is sometime in the future, the United States government paying reparations for what they're doing right now because they're targeting people based on the color of their skin. They're targeting. That's what they're doing. They don't. They're not going up to everybody. They're going up to black and brown Americans. And with the Kavanaugh stops, we've been told it's just fine for you to go up and target people based on race, which is exactly what happened with Japanese Americans, which is exactly. So, to me, what we're seeing now, it's going to be something that in the future we're going to be asked to pay compensation for, because it's just that bad.

[Sam Seder]

Dorothy Brown, the book is Getting to Reparations How Building a Different America Requires Reckoning with Our Past and I suspect also our current. Our current, our contemporary. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

[Dorothy Brown]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Emma Vigland]

Thank you.

[Sam Seder]

All right, folks, gonna do a little bit of different formatting. Formatting today with the program. We're not going to go into a fun half because in like 25 minutes, we're going to be talking to Avi.

[Emma Vigland]

Lewis.

[Sam Seder]

Who is running for the. I think they call it the chair of the NDP up in Canada. And you have one more day if you are Canadian. We will be talking to Avi Lewis about it, but it's a new, I guess just the NDP leader, maybe, I guess the leadership. You have one more day if you are Canadian, to join the ndp. I guess that's the deadline for registration. So we want to have them on today. You have one more day to do it. Obviously, if you're an American, you are. You're. You're screwed. And you should have. You should have emigrated to Canada when it was easier. I imagine now they're going to shut the borders and that's it. You could say that in any context any day of the week. That's true. It just was. It was just laying right out there for us. So let's go right into this. What's the latest? Is there a breaking story? Because we've been an hour since I've looked at the news.

[Emma Vigland]

I mean, I think we could go four and five just to tell a story here if you're.

[Sam Seder]

Yes. Okay. We were talking about, I mean, The course in the wake of this Predi shooting for whatever reasons, and I think, you know, I certainly have thought quite a bit. And, you know, we've talked in the office like, you know, why was it that Nicole Goods. Nicole. Renee. Great. That's okay. Shooting did not create this level of national backlash.

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah.

[Sam Seder]

Whereas Predis did. And there's been suggestion that, you know, the nature of what was going on, you know, at the moment or the fact that Good was a lesbian. And I think there's also sort of like this notion of, like, compounding interest. For lack of a better term.

[Matt]

The second killing is around automobiles too, in our country. And who deserves to like, run people over and who deserves to get shot if you're behind the wheel of one.

[Sam Seder]

Right. The idea that there was like some type of threat, even, although it was quite clear that there was ludicrous. Yeah. But I do think that we. What becomes clear and undeniable is that this is a pattern. It's not a coincidence that they shot two people dead on video within two weeks of each other.

[Emma Vigland]

And I think three weeks. The compounding piece too, is also where you can have some people who felt very queasy perhaps about the Renee Goode shooting, killing, murder, who thought, okay, well, then they have to de. Escalate at this point. I mean, maybe they'll calm down a little bit more. Maybe then the rest of ICE will get. Get the memo. I mean, you know, that was almost in some ways like many kind of centrist reactions to the killing of George Floyd. But we've actually seen that police killings have increased since 2020. So this is all has to be systemic. And I think people are starting to get that.

[Sam Seder]

We should also say that. In the interim between the good killing and the pretty killing we had whistleblowers reveal that ICE does not feel like they need to follow the Constitution when it comes to the Fourth Amendment and.

[Emma Vigland]

That they were issuing these directives to not follow the Fourth Amendment verbally and were preventing other members of ICE from keeping the memo with them, which is something that guilty people do.

[Sam Seder]

And lastly, it's also just sort of like we mentioned this in the past, after good is killed. It is one would have imagined that the word from leadership would be, guys, back off. We need to sort of like we, you know, we need to burnish our image and we need to be, you know, we need to cooperate with the community, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know what that looks like, but I do know what it doesn't look like. And it's what we saw in the wake of the good killing. And so now Democrats, and we were 24 hours away, 36 hours away. Senate was supposed to meet yesterday. They didn't because of the snow. I suspect they also weren't pushing it because they were putting out. They were. They've been delaying about this DHS stuff. They would have had the vote maybe today. And that vote would have contained DHS funding. And the Democrats were prepared by hook or crook to allow that to pass by not, not whipping against anybody, providing cloture. So in other words, you needed seven Democrats to vote to move to a 50, 50 vote, essentially. And that would have happened, make no mistake about it. We saw it in the House. We saw Jeffries orchestrated in the House so that it could go forward. And now all of that has changed. We watched the two senators from Nevada first come out on Saturday and say, we can't vote for this. Then we watched Angus King come out and say, I can't vote for this. Even Fetterman now who is saying, like, well, maybe this has got a little too far. Let's. Here is Representative Robert Garcia.

[Emma Vigland]

Yes. The top Democrat on House Oversight. I think he doesn't really, you know, Ro Khan is getting a lot of attention for the Epstein stuff. Garcia did a lot of the legwork here on Oversight and big upgrade, I would say, from Connolly. Like, we wanted AOC in this position, but Garcia has been doing a good job here. And, and the fact that he doesn't back off on this abolish ICE question, despite Katie Turr having some pretty negative framing around it, shows you what these internal numbers really look like about how people feel about this agency. So who's going to do what ICE has traditionally been in charge of? I mean, I've had a number of Democrats on this show, former ICE officials, former border officials, a lot of them under Obama, who have said that getting rid of ICE is a bad idea, that they do do important operations, they do remove dangerous people.

[Sam Seder]

Hold on for a second. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I've had a number of people who worked in these agencies whose current jobs rely on the relationships they have with these rate agencies for, let's say, private prison contracts, for, for providing blankets, you know, to the extent that blankets. Are you. I mean, I like. Do people not hear themselves?

[Emma Vigland]

I mean, her question cuts two ways.

[Sam Seder]

What's the other way?

[Emma Vigland]

Joking. Her husband is.

[Avi Lewis]

Her husband.

[Matt]

Damn media.

[Sam Seder]

Well, I mean, look, people meet on sets, people get promoted and people get promoted. But, I mean, but, but honestly, it's, you know, putting that aside, you know, I, I just, I don't know how, like, her producer doesn't say, like, you know, what this question doesn't, you know, you could at the very least have a little bit of, like a qualifier. Now, of course, these people are heavily invested in maintaining the structure as it exists now. And just the fact that people associated with these organizations want it to continue isn't really an argument that we need to have it continue. I mean, look what. This is what it's really about. They don't want to spend 20 minutes even reading in to support the argument they're making. She doesn't know. She doesn't know. Go ahead.

[Emma Vigland]

ICE officials, former border officials, a lot of them under Obama, who have said that getting rid of ICE is a bad idea, that they do do important operations, they do remove dangerous people. And the idea to abolish it is. It's not only bad politics, they say, but it's not.

[Dorothy Brown]

It's not smart.

[Avi Lewis]

Well, I think at this moment, they're incorrect.

[Sam Seder]

Let me explain why.

[Avi Lewis]

For as you probably know, and folks should know, ICE and dhs, the way it exists today did not exist just a few decades ago. Creation of the last few years of overreach. And certainly the ICE of right now is an agency created by Donald Trump that is larger and with more resources than at any time in American history. There are functions within DHS and which within ICE that could be done by other agencies. There are important functions, whether it's issues at American seaports or issues along the border that need actual good investigative work, that are issues and that agents are actually trying to work hard to ensure, for example, that drugs are brought into this country. But what's happening right now, what ISIS turned into is beyond the scope of what we need in this country and surely to take care of the American public.

[Sam Seder]

And so, so we can have functions.

[Avi Lewis]

Within DHS be handled by different agencies, but ICE in its current form cannot exist because what they're doing right now is they're killing people in the street, they're violating due process. And Kristi Noem has to be held accountable for that. And people need to understand that this is a moment we have to have courage and stand up for the country and do the right thing.

[Emma Vigland]

Congressman Garcia.

[Sam Seder]

You know, whatever things people are. I mean, listen, I, I get it. Sometimes you don't get any sleep. There's two ways you can respond to what she said there. And Garcia's was good, but there's better ways to do this and they need, if they're going to push whatever you call it, reform abolishment of, of ice. The bottom line is like in the reform that we're talking about now with this voting thing is this is largely window dressing because that's about as much as we can get. I do think that I do. And basically just like trying to inhibit the ability of this agency to come on full on like, you know, a palace guard stuff, like the mask stuff, I think like actually will have a lot of. Will be very helpful. If Democrats are aggressive following it and.

[Emma Vigland]

Forcing them to cooperate with state probes, that's one of Murphy's ass as well. I mean, there's like very warrants necessary, all of that. And they can't go into schools or churches. These are some of the things Senate Democrats are holding the line on and they need to.

[Sam Seder]

It's, it's tapping the brakes. Ultimately what we need to do is get the car off the road, but this is at least tapping the brakes and keeping it from careening at people walking on the sidewalk. But there are two basic answers for this. One is that this is an agency that was created as part of George Bush's war on terror. And now it is an agency that is actually waging terror on the American public. That's the, that's your elevator pitch. But the other is we need to take this agency and you can call it whatever you want. You want to call it ice, you can call it nice if you want whatever national you add like an N. It needs to be put under the auspices of the Department of Justice. It needs to have a structural form of accountability. In a system that has accountability. They have destroyed the Department of Justice. Donald Trump has. But structurally, and it may be very hard to Repopulate it with actual individuals who care about this stuff. But the structures are set up in such a way that, that it will be much easier and much more clearly defined. Who you put in there, people who have at least some awareness and fealty towards the law. Some people who will not just sit around and joke like, dude, we're not going to listen to what the court says. Now, granted, we had bovine or whatever that dude's name in the Justice Department who was saying that, but those are outliers. You need to put it under the auspices of the Department of Justice. Now, meanwhile, like, none of this outrage when the Trump administration has essentially destroyed, abolished the Department of Education, abolished usaid, abolished, like, huge functioning of swaths of our government. The idea that, like, it's, it's bad politics. Is it really?

[Emma Vigland]

It's really not. Donald Trump's approval rating has been precipitously dropping. And it's not just the economy here. He's well below Biden. Immigration is falling, too. He was in plus numbers, plus 9, plus 10 by some polls in on the issue of immigration when he was inaugurated. Now he's -17 in almost every poll. So they're crazy if they're not going to capitalize on it. I like that he did mention that this agency is so, so young because I think that gives people an image of like, okay, we can, we. It doesn't need to be always this way. I can remember a time when there wasn't DHS and ice. But to go further, you can talk about the resources that they're expending. I mean, like the fact that this ICE budget is more than a great majority of militaries throughout the world, where is that money going towards? It should be going towards improving your life, not terrorizing people on the street. That's the step they can take forward. And even if you want to, you can connect it to the deeply unpopular foreign policy of this administration and the one prior to it and talk about how it's the same infrastructure there. Do you want the infrastructure that is killing Palestinians in Gaza and like our foreign policy to have to come home and terrorize people on the streets? Well, this is a part of the same system. This is the war on terror.

[Sam Seder]

And as a political matter, you know, the idea that we have all of this money going into this black hole and what's coming out of it are people who are brutalizing Americans. That's not what people want their tax dollars going towards. I mean, it's pretty straightforward to say this is, this is A system that is so screwed up and it is such a mess that we need to start from maybe not the beginning because we can go back to the structure that existed before it, which was far more effective. I mean these are easy arguments to make, it seems to me.

[Emma Vigland]

I mean just five, really quickly here. If we could just play this as a, as a, I don't know, a deserve an addendum. I mean this, this shows you like Laura Ingraham and Representative Chip Roy here, Republican Representative, talking about DHS in ways that like, in some ways are as outflanking flanking the Senate leader Chuck Schumer on this issue. Now I'm not trying to oversell it and say that that has like any kind of political, like real political momentum behind it, but like this must be what the numbers look like behind the scenes. It must be really, really dire right now.

[Sam Seder]

And if on Fox they can get away with saying this, certainly Democratic, you know, yes, Conserva Dems who are, you know, who want to seem like they're. This is a question of being responsible could certainly use this talking point the country.

[Emma Vigland]

This is about ending immigration enforcement.

[Sam Seder]

I mean, I've never been a big.

[Emma Vigland]

Fan of DHS going back to 9 11. I thought creating another bureaucracy was not necessary and it's another set of agency.

[Avi Lewis]

Rules and all the complexities that go along with it.

[Emma Vigland]

But it's not about that. They don't care about red tape, they don't want enforcement.

[Avi Lewis]

Congressmen, that's what this is all about.

[Emma Vigland]

That's what the, you know, that's what all the signal app chats are all about. That's what all the, you know, screaming.

[Sam Seder]

Hitler is all about.

[Emma Vigland]

They want, want a destabilized America and zero deportations.

[Sam Seder]

Laura, this is completely correct and well, no, no, no, let it keep. Laura, this is completely correct and you.

[Matt]

And I are aligned. You know, I, you know, 20 something.

[Sam Seder]

Years ago I would have said, hey.

[Matt]

Let'S just leave INS and let's leave it at doj.

[Sam Seder]

But we have DHS there for a reason and we have the country.

[Emma Vigland]

Okay, but we have it for a reason.

[Sam Seder]

I mean, first off.

[Emma Vigland]

But that's what you just said about ins, right? I mean they're gesturing towards it at the very least. And can I solve it really quick? It's that there were some January6 like people in the base were outraged at the classification of January Sixers as domestic terrorists. And I think that's part of what they're kind of like touching on here. And also the Second Amendment people are really Pissed off at how the administration reacted to this.

[Sam Seder]

I will also guns today. He said, you can't, you can't be walking around with guns.

[Emma Vigland]

I mean to the ICE people, they're pissed.

[Matt]

The only question, what are they going.

[Sam Seder]

To spend all that money on? Oh, the protesters. But still the 2A. Yeah, the 2A people are bummed. But I will say this. I do not believe Laura Ingraham, which she says, I didn't want the extra bureaucracy. It was actually Democrats who were against it to the extent that any of them were. They were all terrified at that point. And B, like there is no reason why you can't go back to the Department of Justice. I mean like, you know, like the idea is that if these guys are saying this, yep, there is a, there is a, like a five lane highway in which to drive down your attacks on, on ice.

[Matt]

It's a bureaucracy.

[Sam Seder]

You could go in and like, you know, if you, you know, if, if Tom Swazi needs to impress his right wing people, you know, his doge loving ass, you could just say this is a bureaucracy that's gotten out of control.

[Matt]

Fraud here.

[Sam Seder]

There's a, it seems to be like where there's a lot. Who's accounting for this money? It's just absurd.

[Matt]

Will Chuck Schumer allow that?

[Emma Vigland]

Well, that's so, I mean you're the, the, you know, there are other Republicans that are basically upset that they'll say, well, it's local law enforcement that isn't cooperating with ice. I mean we played Blanche making that same argument on Fox News just yesterday. That was what Chuck Schumer's reaction was a few weeks ago to ICE abuses. Well, it just needs to be local law enforcement cooperating with this a little bit more. Liberals need to reckon with imperialism.

[Sam Seder]

He has to go.

[Matt]

Chuck Schumer has to go. And I don't understand what the.

[Emma Vigland]

I don't understand what. Wait, I don't understand.

[Sam Seder]

I think part of the problem is like, it's unclear to me who wants to take his job.

[Matt]

Warren? Somebody do it.

[Sam Seder]

I mean, someone comes in a goddamn plate.

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sam Seder]

Oh, do you want to see the day that Susan Collins basically said, I'm, I'm done being senator from Maine.

[Emma Vigland]

Oh my goodness.

[Matt]

Can't wait till.

[Sam Seder]

Do we have, do we have Platner's speech? Do we have a clip from that by any chance?

[Matt]

No, I can find one.

[Sam Seder]

Let's compare Susan Collins and we should say Janet Mills apparently was out fundraising in California while ICE was invading Maine. Now look, people fundraise and that's fine.

[Emma Vigland]

And Platner was out of town for a much more wholesome reason. Getting him and his wife are going through ICE IVF treatment in Norway because they can't afford it in the United States because it's horribly expensive here.

[Sam Seder]

But. So he's back now. Mills was out, Platner was in. But here, let's play Susan Collins first and then we'll. We'll go to Platinum. Now, I did see also a clip of two ICE agents trying to have a beer in Maine. I'm not sure exactly where it was, but the ICE agents supposedly from Arkansas. It was a Portland. It was in Portland. And a patriot spotted them in the bar and as they were walking out, explained to them that that person would rather they leave Maine than be there.

[Matt]

The bar, I think, told them that as well. I think. Oh, that they had to go out of there.

[Emma Vigland]

That's awesome.

[Sam Seder]

It was from checking IDs.

[Emma Vigland]

Senate Susan Collins chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee. So she's in like the eye of the storm here, and we should exploit that for all that we can.

[Sam Seder]

Here she is almost like a. I think someone put this on Twitter. This is not a parody of Susan Collins. It's actually Susan Collins.

[Emma Vigland]

Let me say, Madam President, that the tragic death of Alex Petrie has refocused.

[Sam Seder]

Attention on the Homeland Security bill.

[Emma Vigland]

And I recognize that and share the concerns.

[Sam Seder]

I do want to point out to my. Pause it for a second. She got his name wrong. Yeah, it's. It's pretty. But nevertheless, I mean, she's. She's concerned. I share your concerns about Alex. What's his name?

[Emma Vigland]

And I recognize that and share the concerns.

[Sam Seder]

I share the concerns. I do want to point out to.

[Dorothy Brown]

My colleagues that there are many safeguards that have been put in this bill.

[Sam Seder]

That I would encourage them to review and that the vast majority of the.

[Dorothy Brown]

Funding in this Bill, more than 80%, is for no non immigration and non border security functions.

[Matt]

Like shooting people in the face.

[Sam Seder]

I think. Shooting protesters. I think she's saying that like. Well, we rolled it all into one bill to make it harder for you to vote against the DHS part. So I just want to remind you that only 20% of this bill will go towards shooting Americans and breaking down people's doors and stripping children, five year olds, putting five year olds into internment.

[Matt]

Camps and hacking your chick signal chats.

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah.

[Sam Seder]

Another 20% will go to the Coast Guard to shoot people in the water.

[Jake Tapper]

Right.

[Matt]

Fly drones over your house.

[Emma Vigland]

I mean, this. Well, then the question is, Susan Collins, why not strip out DHS funding and have a robust debate about that.

[Sam Seder]

Only 20%. If this argument was about 22% then I think you'd have something.

[Matt]

I share your concerns, but I'd remind you, let's get this money to these alcoholic Nazis.

[Emma Vigland]

It is rare that Republicans have two bad choices in front of us. And right now they have two bad choices. They either shut down the government partially because hopefully Senate Democrats aren't moving, or they have to strip it out and have a prologue protracted debate about DHS and ice. And I'm not sure which one harms the Republicans more, but I'll take which one that is.

[Sam Seder]

Here is the next Senator of Maine speaking to what Mainers are following are dealing with and the prospect of more funding for the dhs.

[Matt]

Let's have a chat about ICE appropriations.

[Sam Seder]

The ICE annual budget is $9 billion.

[Matt]

Over the summer Republicans with the help.

[Sam Seder]

Of some Democrats voted to give ICE 18 billion in supplemental funding. That windfall has been used to terrorize communities and kill our friends. Right now, Senate appropriators are negotiating the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill in which despite all the abductions and the killings and the terrorizing of our communities, they're talking about giving ICE another $9 billion. You heard that right? After doubling ICE's budget, they're now talking about tripling it. Despite what's occurring right now. It passed the House last week. Now it's in the hands of the Senate. And as we all know, Susan Collins is the chair of the Appropriations Committee. We will be voting on whether to.

[Emma Vigland]

Proceed to the final six bill package.

[Sam Seder]

Of appropriations bills sent to us by.

[Dorothy Brown]

The House of Representatives. I hope we can come together in.

[Sam Seder]

A constructive way to get this done. She is the one leading these negotiations. We need to tell Susan Collins no more money for ice. Every single dollar that goes to ICE that is then used to go after our communities and kill people is blood on the hands of Susan Collins. So join me. Calling her in, calling her office and pressuring the Senator. No more concern, no more hiding, no more money for ice.

[Emma Vigland]

A Chuck Schumer style Democrat would say lay down in the grass and don't call attention to your opponent if they are making a mistake and supporting something like this. What makes Platner and this kind of bottom up politics so much more effective is that he doesn't care about that. Get activated, call her office. And that's the way that we make a change as opposed to just like sitting back and praying that this election cycle will be more favorable.

[Sam Seder]

With that said, speaking of bottom UP politics. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to be talking to Avi Lewis, journalist, educator and activist running for the leadership of Canada's federal New Democratic Party. Tomorrow is the deadline to join the ndp. For our Canadian friends and for those of you astute enough to renounce your U.S. citizenship and get a Canadian citizenship within the next 12 hours. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're speaking to Avi Lewis. Sam. It. We are back. Sam Cedar, Emma Vigland on the Majority Report. It's a pleasure to welcome back after a 22 year hiatus, Avi Lewis to the program. Journalist, of course, educator, activists running for the leadership of Canada's New Democratic Party. Avi, just for the, for the sake of, of our audience, many of whom are American, give us a sense of the the New Democratic Party in Canada.

[Avi Lewis]

All right. So not like the Democratic Party.

[Sam Seder]

Fair enough. No.

[Avi Lewis]

And also no Susan Collins impression for me today. Thanks for wow, you guys are really, you go there.

[Sam Seder]

Cool.

[Avi Lewis]

The the NDP was formed in 1961 coming out of the original populist left Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, which was Canada's Socialist Party, Democratic Socialist party from the 1930s. And the NDP was formed as a modern labor party in 1961. And my grandpa, David Lewis was one of the founders of the original party in the 30s. And my dad, Stephen Lewis was a leader in Ontario in the ndp in the 70s when I was growing up. We are the party that brought universal healthcare to Canada. We had this famous so Kiefer Sutherland's grandpa, Tommy Douglas was the socialist premier, NDP premier of Saskatchewan. And he brought in universal healthcare, single payer health care in Saskatchewan. And then the NDP brought it to the national level. And that's the third party. We have a third party in Canada that's not like Jill Stein. And we have been a force provincially in government. We've never held government federally. So provinces, most provinces in Canada at one time or another had an NDP government. And you know, like all of politics in the last 30, 40 years, things have shifted, you know, rightward. And the NDP is in this moment, we hope, federally refinding the Bernie Zoron Democratic socialist energy, which is part of the political culture and tradition in Canada, but which hasn't been the driving energy of our third party. And we need it now. We need left populism and we've been channeling it to great success in this leadership campaign. There are five candidates, one who is a sitting MP who's kind of more, the safer choice and a few of us others. But our campaign has had just unbelievable momentum. We've had to, unlike you guys, we're not in perpetual elections here. So we've had to create a national organization since September, like in four months. And we've raised a million dollars, which in Canada there's election finance rules where the maximum donation is $1,775. Unions, corporations cannot donate. We have strict campaign finance thanks to the NDP in the 1970s brought in Canada's first campaign finance laws. And so we've got this huge momentum. We're filling rooms across the country and dare I say, feeling a little bit hopeful that we could have a truly exciting left, a political alternative on the national scene here in Canada. I've been just thrilled and blown away by it.

[Sam Seder]

Aside from like feeling like I'm talking to like an alien who's referring to like limits on campaign contributions. Like what are these strange things from the future, but give us a sense of like, of, of what, what it is to be in the leadership of the ndp, because I don't know, one to one, how would, what would that be analogous to in the. In the States?

[Avi Lewis]

Yeah. This is unfamiliar territory for you folks in the States because. So we're the third party nationally. There is also a Quebec party, which there are like 343 seats in the parliament, something like 70 or so in Quebec. And there's a party that runs only in Quebec, so they get a lot of the seats there. And so we're actually the fourth party in the Parliament. And in the last election we got our asses handed to us. We lost party status. We were reduced to seven seats in the whole Parliament. And we have, because we have the Westminster system from the UK, we have a parliament where you need to have 50% plus one of the seats in the House of Commons you have a majority, you can do what you want. Basically, right there. Isn't that checks and balances kind of system to constipate the political process? Sometimes a bad thing when we have a terrible majority government. Right now we have a minority government, which means that Mark Carney, you know, from the famous Davos blah, blah blah, has to get the cooperation of another party in order to pass legislation. He's been doing that with the Conservatives and passing these fast track laws to do big new extraction projects, increasing military spending in Canada from less than 2% to 5% of our GDP, doing some extreme shock doctrine shit. And the NDP right now is at the bottom of the electoral cycle and we need to rebuild kind of from scratch.

[Emma Vigland]

Well, what do you. I guess just to back up for a second, when you look at the NDP's losses the last cycle, do you attribute that in many ways just to the fact that the Liberals are riding this, like, backlash, of course, to Trump's over the top threats to Canada? I mean, that's really where you would lay the blame.

[Avi Lewis]

There was a massive, it was a black swan election. People say, like a massive tidal wave of fear of Trump. You know, we're under attack, sanctions, economic attack. We've, you know, we fought the free trade deals in the 80s and 90s because we were on the left were like, bad idea to totally integrate our economy with one 10 times as big.

[Sam Seder]

Oh.

[Avi Lewis]

Which also happens to be an imperial power on planet Earth. And now like our auto sector and much of our economy, we have become the gas tank on the US Humvee in the last 30 years. And they take our oil, they want our water. You. Sorry, you. No, I won't say you guys, but you know what I mean. And so we fought for, we lost those, we lost those free trade battles, but now we've got the longest undefended border on Earth. And on the other side is Trump and he's declared war on Canada economically and talked about the 51st state. And like that really shaped the last election. People voted out of fear. And I was running in Vancouver, center where we live, and knocked on more than 50,000 doors in that riding of 130,000 voters. And people were just like, we'd knock on the door, start introducing ourselves. We get the look of just like, just shame, guilt. I love what you're saying about price caps on groceries, about national rent control, all these things. But like, I got a vote to stop Trump. And so we elected a guy who is a banker, a central banker whose first job was at Goldman Sachs. He can handle his way around a paragraph, no question for you. This might be very exciting for us. It is also kind of exciting, but you know, a deep neoliberal who has gone far to the right since he was elected to protect us from trauma. And now the lane is wide open. We have like so much open space on the left to speak to the everyday emergency of people just trying to get by in a rigged economy. And the cost of living crisis in Canada, I think might be even more extreme than in the United States because our housing bubble is still completely bonkers. The price of food. People come to visit from the States and they are shocked at how much a basket of groceries cost in Canada. Because we got five grocery chains, we got three cell phone companies, we got five big banks that made $70 billion last year. We have monopolies in every sector of our economy who are price gouging like crazy. Canadians are really suffering and they're scared. And now we're coming in saying we need a public option for groceries. Nationally, we're going to have, you know, we've got a pretty detailed plan for 50 kind of Costco, plus local nationally owned grocery stores, reducing the cost of groceries 30, 40% and costing $300 million a year, which is 1/2 of 1% of our defense budget right now.

[Sam Seder]

Wow.

[Avi Lewis]

So, so we got something going here, Sam. You get, you guys, you get your passport ready and maybe a little assistance.

[Sam Seder]

Well, I mean, that was actually going to be my last question, was see if you would adopt me. But, but so in the, in Carney speech, you know, we had talked about Carney's speech on this, on this program, it sounded like, you know, not so much an abandonment of his neoliberal ideology or project, but just more like we just need to find a different partner and leave the US Behind. And so from the NDP perspective, this guy's going to go, it seems to me, like down the road of some of the worst tendencies the United States had over the past really 40, 50 years now and see some type of open Runway. But right now you're pitching essentially NDP members or people who have sat on the sidelines or have looked, maybe they voted for a different party, but are trying to look for an answer where there's like a bold choice. So can people switch parties now? I mean, how does it work?

[Avi Lewis]

Well, so the way we don't register like you guys do for a party, you can buy a party membership. You have to buy a party membership if you want to vote in a leadership election. Tomorrow at midnight is the deadline for ours. So it is a time when people need to get off the sidelines. It's 10 bucks in most of Canada, 25 bucks at most for a party membership. There's a box to check if you're underemployed, which who isn't underemployed? Like the 99% boxes, I'm underemployed. And then it's five bucks for a membership. If you join the Liberal Party, in order to vote for Carney against Trump, you just have to send them an email to their info at, to their inbox and just say, I'm canceling my membership. And then you go to our website, you buy a membership at LewisForLeader CA and then you can vote in the election in March for NDP leader.

[Sam Seder]

What's the, like the voting rate in Canada relative to the states?

[Avi Lewis]

You know, it's been going down and down. You know, at the lowest level, at the local level, we have elections with 20, 30% turnout. The highest election turnouts are, you know, half, 50% or I'm not up to date on the latest, on the latest figures. But it's, it's sad because the thing is we have a system, this first past the post system where a party can win government, majority government in Canada analogous to all three branches in the states, with 36% of the national vote, 37%. And if your vote is distributed efficiently where the most seats are, you can have complete power with a 36, 37%. So people often feel they have to vote strategically. They have to vote against the worst thing happening. Some of the things that you guys have. But, and frequently. And this is how the Liberal Party continue is the natural governing party of Canada is their preferred epithet, which is they come in the last two weeks of every election. They are like, the Conservatives are coming. The Conservatives are coming. They say snatch 10% of our vote in the last two weeks of every election and they get over the line and have another mandate. So we are the victims of this strategic voting gambit that the Liberals are really expert at pulling in Canada. And that's why we've been fighting for proportional representation. So the way it works in the parliamentary system is if The Liberals need 20 votes from the NDP, if we get a bigger caucus and they need us in order to pass legislation, then we have the balance of power. We have them over the barrel. And I've said that we need to go in there with one demand proportional representation, have a citizens assembly to figure out what system we want and then implement it, because that's the reform that would unleash all the other. If we had a government that represented roughly the proportion of seats is equal to the proportion of the popular vote, there would be more smaller parties. People could vote their conscience and find a party that really represents their politics. And then after the election, smaller parties would have to work together like they do in Europe and Scandinavia. And Canadians love it when parties work together.

[Dorothy Brown]

It's so Canadian.

[Avi Lewis]

It's so lovely. So we got to, we got to fix our democracy too.

[Sam Seder]

I got to say, I didn't realize, like, you sort of have a parliamentary system without some of the best parts of a parliamentary system.

[Dorothy Brown]

Exactly.

[Sam Seder]

Okay, so lastly, like, I mean, in terms of your pitch to end NDP folks. I know we have a lot of NDP folks who listen to the show.

[Avi Lewis]

Oh yeah.

[Sam Seder]

And I would imagine many of them are already excited about your candidacy. But is it, is it the structural change that you're looking at, like sort of the attempt to accumulate some power to have influence over what's happening in the country? I mean, obviously I understand the sort of like, you know, we had it here. I think Biden in many respects was a product of like this fear of Trump and a flight to safety, as it were, in a sense that, like.

[Avi Lewis]

Oh, not to be so safe.

[Sam Seder]

Well, not. Certainly not. You know, after, you know, 18 months and sort of the, all the problems started to creep in.

[Emma Vigland]

It was also Covid too. Yes, people were fearful in so many ways.

[Sam Seder]

Had, had, had staying in your basement not been a, an acceptable way to campaign. It may have been a big problem, problem in 2020. But. So how do you, what's your pitch to NDP people as to why, like, I don't have a sense of who, you know, you're running against for this, but are you out there ahead of the others in terms of this understanding of like, we need to create power for the NDP so the NDP can show its value to Canadian voters?

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Avi Lewis]

I mean, what the pitch is really is that we are at the bottom of the cycle. We have to rebuild as a party that involves the union movement, because the union movement in Canada is inside the tent in the NDP and they have seats on our federal council and they have a presence at our conventions. But more than that, we have left so much on the table for the right. And like in your country, the whole cost of living emergency and people's legitimate rage at the unfairness of our economy has been harvested by the populist right. And we are saying we can be, we can do left populism, right. We're talking about the cost of living emergency. We're talking about the government stepping up and goddamn governing in a time of market failure, when the market is failing to deliver the basics of goods and services that people need to live a dignified life at a price that people can afford. We're talking about public ownership, we're talking about public alternatives to cell phones and Internet, a massive build out of public housing to solve our housing crisis. And we're talking about building power from the base with distributed organizing, trusting our local riding associations, our local districts to organize year round and integrate with other movements, community organizations in their spheres and actually bringing back a bold, unapologetic, straight talking left Populist option. With moral clarity. We talk about the genocide, which is the outrage and agony of Canadians that our government continues not as badly as yours, but in material ways to send arms to Israel in an ongoing genocide, which is still five Palestinians a day murdered since the so called ceasefire. It's ongoing. We can talk about these things at the Left party in Canada without apology. And we need to, because we actually need to reach people with solutions that are as big as the crises we face with a moral clarity underpinning it. And we are seeing this surge at the base, which is thirsty for an honest to God progressive politics that just doesn't try to fucking like thread every needle and triangulate every, you know, political calculation and just like, no, guys, this is what we need to do. And people are, people are responding. And we're organizing in ways that Zoron and coming out of the Bernieverse, like the actual distributed organizing techniques have made our campaign a giant organization in Canadian terms. For a party that is supposed to be in the wilderness and on life support. We've developed ridiculous momentum. In Calgary and Edmonton. We had like 3, 400 people packing out rooms. We booked a nightclub in Toronto the other night on Bloor Street, a place where I took David bowie in the mid-90s when I had a fantastic job interviewing rock stars.

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah.

[Avi Lewis]

And we became friends and like we're having bands at our gigs, we have, you know, lovely design and artists showing up and doing like all those organic things where people just start to own the politics, take it into their own hands. And there's a feeling that we could get our voice and our power back.

[Sam Seder]

So it's a little bit.

[Emma Vigland]

I mean, you're harnessing the Zoron energy by flexing your cool muscle there, by bringing out the David Bowie reference. That's pretty awesome.

[Avi Lewis]

He was a very gracious, very gracious and lovely person.

[Emma Vigland]

There we go.

[Sam Seder]

What's the website again?

[Avi Lewis]

LewisForLeader CA Lewis4Leader CA and there's a big ass join button. The main thing right now in the next 24 hours, 30, 30 hours, is memberships, memberships, memberships. And we ride into Winnipeg at the end of March and with any luck, we take this thing.

[Sam Seder]

We're gonna, we're gonna put a link@ Majority FM and in the podcast and YouTube description. Avi, good luck. We will follow up hopefully in March. You will win this thing. And then, and then on to. Well, at least take a bite out of Carney.

[Avi Lewis]

Yeah, I think that work really begins after March 29th. We're not we're not. We have no illusions about that.

[Sam Seder]

Avi Lewis, thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. And I will be in touch in terms of the adoption papers. Excellent, Excellent. I'll do the dishes. I do the dishes, too.

[Avi Lewis]

So you do dishes.

[Sam Seder]

I do the dishes around the house.

[Avi Lewis]

So.

[Sam Seder]

All right. Good.

[Avi Lewis]

Sam, we're gonna get a nice little. We'll get a nice little. Little cut for you.

[Sam Seder]

I appreciate it. Thank you so much. All right. Thanks so much.

[Avi Lewis]

Cheers.

[Sam Seder]

All right, let's take a, just a quick break and then we'll come back, we'll just play a little bit of music and we're gonna reset and then not fun half music. We're not going to go to the fun half.

[Emma Vigland]

It's Freebie Tuesday.

[Sam Seder]

Freebie Tuesday Rolls right off the tongue. Oh, yeah. We are back.

[Emma Vigland]

Oh, Jesus.

[Sam Seder]

What?

[Emma Vigland]

I'm sorry. I forgot.

[Sam Seder]

What were you saying?

[Emma Vigland]

I said we're back at the same time.

[Sam Seder]

By all means. Like harmony.

[Matt]

We're.

[Emma Vigland]

We.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah, we, we're doing like that AM talk radio. We're back. Sam Cedar, Emma Vegland. Yeah, do it.

[Emma Vigland]

Yes.

[Sam Seder]

We're not gonna do that.

[Emma Vigland]

All right. Well, we're back.

[Sam Seder]

One thing I wanted to go over and then we should talk about this Bovino story as well as he is on the way out, but the way like the sort of like the coda to at least this chapter in, in the ice invasion of Minnesota. And again, I don't think that people should take for granted that there aren't going to be thousands of ice shock troops in Minnesota, that they're not. They're going to stop in any way. This is a crisis management moment for the Trump administration. It's helpful. It's better that they're having a crisis than not. But it does not necessarily mean in any way that there is going to be material relief from Minnesota or that they're not going to be sending it to other places and whatnot. This fight continues and folks should take inspiration from what we've seen in Minnesota. The folks there were have been and continue to be just amazing. And hopefully in the next day or two, we're going to talk to some people who've looked in and reported on, you know, many of the things that they did to protect their community. But one story that is not getting, you know, sort of like that puts this into context is we're trying to figure out why Minnesota, why are they going to Charlotte, why are they going to this place, why are they going to la? I mean, and part of. I would Imagine there's a bunch of different reasons, right? Like it became easy for the Trump administration because there was a, because of the Somali supposedly fraud because Ilhan Omar.

[Emma Vigland]

Also was upsetting Trump as she tends to do because she's a black woman that is intelligent and stands up to him 100% can't handle.

[Sam Seder]

There was like Chris Rufo is pushing a notion that like somehow this Somali fraud was tied into a terrorist group. And so all these pieces came together and of course, you know, we're talking about like, oh, ICE is going around. They are looking for somebody who looks a different shade of dark of color relative to white people. And you know, you could walk around Minneapolis and pick out Somalis and walk up to them and challenge them. They didn't know that there was this many, that 90% of the Somalis there are citizens in the 10% aren't undocumented immigrants.

[Emma Vigland]

Well, they might have known that. I mean, I also don't know if that's true. Like they may have tried to make an example out of them too. There's also the Islamophobia, you know, I mean with Stephen Miller driving this immigration policy, he is a rabid Zionist as well as an anti Latino racist. And so attacking them for the, you know, being a largely Muslim population in.

[Matt]

This time, I think is key the Somali populations. And actually Graham Platner told David and I this on left reckoning that the same thing happened in Maine, but is a huge fixation for Nazis in Minnesota. Like white supremacists storm front type folks.

[Emma Vigland]

Are obsessing over it all since Ilhan Omar got elected. The brother, the conspiracy theories about her marrying her brother there were totally false. I mean this has been story came out today.

[Sam Seder]

The Biden administration started investigation of her. The investigation has not been closed, but they have not gotten any evidence in which to move forward. So it's just Trump administration. Well, the Biden administration started.

[Emma Vigland]

Are you serious?

[Sam Seder]

My understanding, yes. And the Trump administration has just kept it open because, because why would they close it? But, but, but of all the different reasons why they went after Minnesota, another one, and this may be the most sort of like material one came out when Pam Bondi issued a letter saying we will pull ICE agents out of Minnesota if you give us your voter roll data. They are soothing. They're suing 20 states across the country. They want Social Security numbers, they want data roll stuff. And it is because they're going to hand this material over to right wing activist groups that are going to attempt to call people and to prevent people from voting and the way they would do that. We've seen this time and time again. This has been the story for the past 25 years with the Republican Party, how aggressive they are at purging voter rolls because they know that even if they make a mistake, they're putting the burden onto the voter and it makes it much harder. And so that is at the very least a significant part of this story. And here is because there is no connection between give us your voter rolls.

[Matt]

No.

[Sam Seder]

And we'll take out all the ICE agents supposedly protecting your communities. Here is Jake Tapper interviewing Steven. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, the voter rolls, what kind of information do they contain? What do you think Bondi is after? Are they going after undocumented immigrants who, who would vote? Although I would guess there aren't that many of them, if any. Well, here's what they want. They don't just want the public stuff, which anyone can get, name, address, voting.

[Jake Tapper]

History, stuff like that. What they want is very personal, private, sensitive data on millions of people, namely Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, military.

[Sam Seder]

Service history, where applicable.

[Dorothy Brown]

And this is already in litigation, like.

[Jake Tapper]

We'Re in court on this right now. They've asked for this information from dozens of states.

[Sam Seder]

The vast majority, like Minnesota, have said no.

[Jake Tapper]

There are multiple lawsuits going on, including.

[Dorothy Brown]

In Minnesota right now.

[Jake Tapper]

So that's what makes this particularly puzzling.

[Sam Seder]

Why they want it?

[Jake Tapper]

That's a good question.

[Sam Seder]

That's sort of key to the legal arguments here.

[Jake Tapper]

Our legal position all along before this.

[Sam Seder]

Weekend, ransom note from the attorney general.

[Avi Lewis]

Was that state and federal law don't.

[Jake Tapper]

Permit them to get this data. And so what she's basically asking us for in this letter is to hand.

[Dorothy Brown]

Something over which we think the law.

[Jake Tapper]

Precludes her from getting under these circumstances.

[Sam Seder]

Well, explain it. So it is unclear, you know, how they're going to use this stuff to disenfranchise voters. I mean, it's, it's, it's conceivable that like Donald Trump is just going to sell it to, to Elon Musk because Musk is going to use it for God knows what. I mean, but the point is it is very, very strict range that this offer would be out there. Give us this voter information and we will, we will pull our 4,000 troops from your state. Doesn't make any sense.

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah.

[Sam Seder]

But here's though, the last, I guess the coda to the coda of the Bovino thing.

[Emma Vigland]

Yes. Well, just one thing on that. I hadn't realized how many, how deep the connections were from right wings and groups that were trying to access voter rolls for a decade. Mother Jones had an article about this. Brooke Rawlins, the Secretary of Agriculture, the think tank that she co founded, America First Policy Institute, has been trying to sue for these voter rolls for years and years. Harmeet Dhillon, also a part of the administration, now, has been as a part of these efforts as well. So, like, as you know, when you see these administration's actions, there's always some sort of well funded right wing group behind it that's been pushing it for this long. So it's very scary. But this Bovino story, I was not aware of this. Daniel Boguslaw, who's a really good writer, also writes in Rolling Stone, I believe, but wrote in the American Prospect, an article that came out today, this morning about Bovino's A lawsuit that was leveled against him in 2022. Can you scroll down to the sentence that says before his ascension? So this article compares him to Colonel Lockjaw from. From one battle after another, which is pretty funny.

[Sam Seder]

But it's hard to imagine that they didn't base it upon it.

[Emma Vigland]

I mean, seriously.

[Sam Seder]

I mean, the character looks identical.

[Emma Vigland]

Although it did come out, you know, or he was filming this in 2023. So. Oh yeah, PTA was very precious.

[Sam Seder]

But Bovino's been around.

[Emma Vigland]

He's been around.

[Sam Seder]

I would imagine he's did research and I would imagine he would have come across.

[Emma Vigland]

You're probably right.

[Dorothy Brown]

For years.

[Emma Vigland]

Oh, that would make sense then. So you're probably right about that. But I wasn't aware of this. That before his ascension as the face of American immigration enforcement, Bovino was himself embroiled in a discrimination suit that was ultimately settled by the Department of homeland security in 2022 for an undisclosed sum. Just a reminder, this is Biden. Biden is president at this point. 2022. The origin of this, you know, as they're investigating Ilhan Omar for some reason because.

[Sam Seder]

Get to the bottom of this, Jack.

[Emma Vigland]

The origin of the discrimination suit was Bovino's alleged efforts to manipulate the CBP hiring process to bar the hiring of qualified black and Latino agents into senior supervisory roles. According to allegations in the lawsuit brought by John Joyner and eventually followed by other CBP employees seeking remedy for discrimination, Bovino canceled a job posting and then surreptitiously hired a white supervisor into the role of a number of other. Into the role over a number of other qualified applicants. Court records show that during the hiring process, the man Bovina selected for a senior role, Christopher Bullock, Wrote that Bovina was like a Confederate general sent to liberate a fort from black Union soldiers. They have this email exchange in this PDF here.

[Sam Seder]

That's just somebody who's against dei, right?

[Emma Vigland]

Scroll down to the bottom of the PDF because this, it goes. It goes up. So they're talking here all the way to the bottom. The bottom, yeah, yeah. So they're talking here about this, you know, potential promotion for one of these non white CBP employees was the last announcement. Say they're talking about it over and over again. Geez, we'll fix it. Gregory Bevino says, basically essentially saying that they're gonna fix it so this guy doesn't get this internal promotion. And Christopher Bullock, who was the guy that he gave the job to, the white guy responds with images of the Confederacy and of. According to Boguslav's article here, specifically of this general and these incidents that were about putting down efforts to liberate a fort from black Union soldiers. And all Bovino says there is. Oh, geez, delete five exclamation points.

[Sam Seder]

He literally puts Chief Bovino over the picture of this. This Confederate going after a fort. Going after.

[Matt]

Bullock testified that he sent the email to be Vivino because Bevino was a, quote, history buff. Who would think the email was funny?

[Emma Vigland]

Why would you think it's funny?

[Matt]

He's a Confederate. He's a fucking Klansman.

[Emma Vigland]

This is why I wanted to touch on this, because Matt's been making this point over and over again. We just were talking, you know, with Dorothy Brown about this, about how the lost cause has continued, how we are still in the wake of the Civil War and you have all of these forces that are trying to restore white supremacy. And it's not even subtle all the time. Like, the reason you can compare him to Lockjaw is because he's literally. He was sued and then they settled, I guess. But those internal communications make it clear how they view themselves as confederates beating back the forces of Brown and black people in this country from being in leadership or being a part of their ranks.

[Sam Seder]

I mean, that is the most fascistic. That is the element of this regime that is the most fascistic, which is they are on a ultra nationalist purification tour, ethnicizing. They are attempting to racially purify this country. You see it in the context of. It has nothing to do with immigration status. You wouldn't be sending. There's a story in the Times where they are sending people who are in the process of refugee status or who are here legally. You don't have to be a citizen to be here legally. They're sending them down to Texas, they're questioning them and then they're just releasing them in Texas. They have no way to get home. They are attempting. They are torturing people in these detention centers by providing no heat, no blankets, no clothing, no food, no medical care. And they're basically saying to people who are here legally, either they're within a legal process or they're waiting for a judge, or they're waiting for their green car, whatever it is, is. And they're basically saying, we have the right, we have the ability, more so than the right to keep you here until you decide I'm going to leave. I will leave the country. I will sign whatever documents you put in front of me.

[Emma Vigland]

They're challenging birthright citizenship in front of the Supreme Court right now because of this ethnic cleansing campaign. They want people who were born here, if you were of the wrong shade, to be able to be deported, supported based on their whims.

[Sam Seder]

That is what I mean. There are, you know, you can hear multiple definitions of fascism, but the big. But the big element is this notion of an uber nationalism that is centered around a racial purification. And that is what we are getting. That is why their project is to walk around Minneapolis and the tip off for them to go and talk to someone is what color are they? That is the prime. That is the foundational, sort of like suspicion for their suspicions of people and.

[Matt]

The Democrats asleep at the wheel. You had four years Joe Biden. And this is a thread I started in 2013, but this was after the pattern had been developed. I wrote this in 2019 in light of Stephen Miller's white nationalism being documented. This was on the email showing he was a big fan of the. I forget that the European white nationalist book we should revisit stories like these dismisses many of the time as eerie coincidences. And this is just one example. This is an actual story on the official government website with a 14 word headline starting with we must secure. And Laurie says it's not an accident there are actual Nazis call themselves Nazis now. Maybe people must think that that was just a coincidence. It's happened multiple times since and pretty much everyone's on board with it now. But there's other examples Here they're mentioning 1488 numbers. 1488 children after the. This is like Health and Human Services, like they are Nazis infiltrated our government and they need to be purged out of it.

[Emma Vigland]

And on cue this morning the New York Times doing reporting that other people have been doing for like a year or more or Matt posting threads. They had an article administration. Social media posts echo white supremacist messaging. It's almost like this has been a pattern.

[Matt]

Can we notice this now?

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah, we're noticing.

[Sam Seder]

It's not echoing white supremacist messaging.

[Emma Vigland]

It is.

[Sam Seder]

It is white supremacist messaging.

[Matt]

Camp of the Saints. Yeah, that's the one that Stephen Miller is a big fan of, which is basically about. Which is. I mean he just said it to Jake Tapper the other week, which is that basically European colonial power should never have given over the power that they had in the third world and should be continued, should it continue to dominate it. Now the problem with Stephen Miller is that European powers didn't give that power up because they thought better of it and felt bad. It was because they were thrown the fuck out.

[Emma Vigland]

Well, he's. You could probably trace the Monroe Doctrine stuff to Stephen Miller as well. I mean, I don't know if there could be one cabinet removal that would have more of an impact in a positive way than Stephen Miller. Cuz Trump trusts him. He's his longest serving adviser. Everything Trump learned from Roy Cohn is embodied in Stephen Miller. He has his. He likes that. He's tough.

[Matt]

Not the criminal.

[Emma Vigland]

Turns out the American public doesn't love it that much.

[Sam Seder]

We should get into this later in the week or maybe next week. TikTok's been sold. Larry Ellison seems to be in charge of it. The. He's the guy who bought CBS and is ostensibly, I mean, it quite appears that he has bought Tick Tock to make sure. Oh, we have that clip. Right. He has bought Tick Tock and I don't know, I mean, I'm not going to jump to any conclusions. Let's go to. What number is it? 17. This is Adam Presser. He's the new CEO of TikTok. And like you should also know that there is updated terms of service that apparently allow them to track data as to whether you're trans, whatever your political leanings are, your religion, your race and possibly undocumented. Matt said that he went in to go and close out his account, but he had to sign the terms of service for his. Here's what I would suggest. If you don't want to deal with it, just delete the app. Your account will stay live, but you will. You have not signed off on the terms of services and so they will either like shut your account down at one point or, you know, they, if they do shit based upon your account after that, you haven't signed that terms of service. Maybe they'll be in, in some heavenly future, a large class action lawsuit. But let's just listen to CEO Adam Presser. This is like one of those things where I was like, are you sure this is real? Like, is this not like this feels like AI. Because how could somebody say this out loud?

[Matt]

We made a change to designate the.

[Sam Seder]

Use of the term Zionist as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech. So if somebody were to use Zionist, of course you can, you can use it in the. In the sense of you're a proud Zionist, but if you're using it in the context of degrading somebody, calling somebody a Zionist as a. As a dirty name, then that gets designated as hate speech to be moderated against.

[Matt]

Over the course of 2024, we tripled the amount of accounts that we were.

[Sam Seder]

Banning for hateful activity. We also have, I think, over two dozen Jewish organizations that are constantly feeding us intelligence and information when they spot violative trends. There is no finish line. There's no finish line to moderating hate speech, identifying hateful trends, trying to keep the platform safe. There's no such thing as an end game. We made a change. I mean, honestly, like, as a Jew, I would love him not to say the word Jew ever in public.

[Emma Vigland]

But if he's saying Jew in a positive way, then the algorithm is gonna.

[Matt]

A positive way. Like the Jewish groups are all giving us intelligence about who to censor on.

[Sam Seder]

I mean, this is just insane. People should start making ironic videos like, I a proud Zionist. That's why I think every Palestinian should be wiped off the Earth. I'm a proud. Honestly, like that. That is, that. That's how you'll. The way that you'll get. But of course there'll be. There's obviously going to be, you know, people spying on you. One of the two dozen organizations. But this is just insane. Yeah, this is just insane. I mean, the. The idea that he's. They're literally policing people's perspective on Zionism.

[Emma Vigland]

On a political ideology. I mean, it's like they never answer.

[Sam Seder]

The question, how can you use apartheid? You use it as if it has negative connotations. Therefore, you were going to ban your post. But when Elon uses Apart. Exactly.

[Emma Vigland]

They never answer the question about how there can be a major Christian Zionist organization in this country that pushes the Republican Party towards this vision of Zionism. Kufi. And where you can have Joe Biden calling himself a proud Zionist as a Catholic man in this country, when they talk about this political ideology. As a protective class. And like we're back to blaming the Democrats here because God, we have to frickin change this party over this TikTok ban and the forced sale to restrict the speech of young people who are posting about genocide and the wall of dead babies that that crazy liberal Zionist Michelle Obama woman was talking about. Like that was a. That effort could have. Would have had zero oxygen if it weren't for Joe Biden and our friend.

[Sam Seder]

It was pushed. All right, wait a second, wait a second. I've got a job to do. I'm doing, doing my job. All right, so the ticketalky was very dangerous. Is this why you're always so happy about when you say social media? We did it. We did it. We fixed the social media. Part of my job and part of my job. My job. Yeah. Is to make sure that people on the left are supporting Israel in the Tiki Talkies. We Tiki talky. We, we ticky talking it away.

[Matt]

There is a finish line. It's called the IHRA definition of anti Semitism, which includes criticizing Israel as anti Semitism and it must entirely.

[Sam Seder]

Bingo. You know what? I didn't like the tone of your voice. Said Israel, they got a ban that we need to cut that from the show.

[Matt]

In 15 minutes, left reckoning is going to start. I have a challenge and actually a competition with a prize.

[Sam Seder]

Okay.

[Matt]

And there's a story here TikTok bang. How each member voted in the house. And you go and there's a huge list of all the people who voted. And you can see the ones next to with a D next to their name here. If you can find a single one of Those and there's 155 of them, you know what? A single one that hasn't taken Pro Israel money.

[Sam Seder]

Hey, I will give you a free.

[Matt]

Left Reckoning subscription for a year.

[Dorothy Brown]

You know what?

[Matt]

And I've already done the A's. So Adams, Adams, Aguilar, Alred Ammo and Asha Kloss, they've all taken Israel money. So start with the B's. And if you can find one Free Left Reckoning membership.

[Sam Seder]

You know, Matt, there's a tone to your voice that I think sounds a little anti Semitic. That's a hard Z.

[Emma Vigland]

You can do a kissy noise after Zionism, you have to go Zionism. And then you can say onto you.

[Sam Seder]

The way you talked about that, I feel like it's inappropriate and we're going to have to cut out that segment.

[Avi Lewis]

The heat is on them when they do this.

[Emma Vigland]

Does it help the Efforts. Your efforts to combat anti Semitism. Or I know it's more about pronouncing.

[Sam Seder]

Why do you got to be so drippy when you say that word?

[Emma Vigland]

Does it help your efforts to keep the left. Zionist?

[Sam Seder]

Okay. So much better when you smile.

[Emma Vigland]

Yes, we love you. When there is a conflation of Zionism with Judaism and then when there are. One of the most. The richest people on the planet is the biggest Zionist donor who is restricting people's free speech both in the media property that his son purchased in CBS News and in the social media that the kids use. And we're talking about combating anti Semitism and. And how Jews controlling the media is like kind of an anti Semitic trope. Is that a concern for you?

[Sam Seder]

I don't know if you are aware of this, but as you said the word Zionist, you frowned like you were smiling and then. See, this is. I think I didn't understand.

[Emma Vigland]

You know what I. Facial recognition.

[Sam Seder]

It's the Instagram.

[Emma Vigland]

I didn't account for it because you look.

[Sam Seder]

You doing the selfies and you don't know. You should. Okay. That's why I'm not going to even entertain it. Because of the frown.

[Dorothy Brown]

The tone.

[Sam Seder]

The tone. It's bad. It's not. No. We're not going to allow that. Not anymore.

[Matt]

That conflation is their whole ball game.

[Sam Seder]

David Ellison. The Ellison family now owns the program.

[Matt]

And I'm seeing a lot of folks.

[Sam Seder]

Majority Report, a lot of folks. Mr. App.

[Matt]

Like Hannah Einbinder, calling her as a Jew, anti Zionists and that. Keep talking like that. I would say the all Zionists because you pointed out that there are lots of Jews who don't respect this stupid.

[Sam Seder]

Listen, listen. With all the things that are going on with the Miss. Miss Whatever her name is. What's a miss? The. The. The. The. The. The violent rhetoric around trying to. To like draw pictures for. For kids.

[Emma Vigland]

Oh, oh. Is this terrorist sympathizer.

[Matt]

Ms. Rachel, we don't want to.

[Sam Seder]

Oh my God. Don't even begin. Don't even begin.

[Dorothy Brown]

Is this.

[Sam Seder]

I. I just can't believe that guy actually said that in public. I just. I can't get over it. Like, dude, don't you. Is there anybody who's a professional who's working for you? Go like, hey, boss, second pass. Do you watch that and feel like he's trying to get you killed? I mean, honestly, it's like, what the.

[Matt]

There's a certain level where some of that stuff is symbiotic. And if anti Semitism entirely was removed from the equation. What would supporters of Israel have to talk about? Like, they need antisemitism to exist, without a doubt.

[Sam Seder]

Well, I mean, it's. It's also, frankly, it's the same dynamic in which, you know, like, you sort of. You fund Hamas because you wanted to sort of, you know, you want to have there to be two different forces that are fighting in terms of like a, you know, undermining Palestinian cohesiveness and national unity. All right, let's. We got nine minutes.

[Emma Vigland]

What do you want to do?

[Sam Seder]

I want to do Tim Pool.

[Avi Lewis]

I just need.

[Sam Seder]

We need a little bit of fun.

[Emma Vigland]

Okay. Yeah, that's true.

[Sam Seder]

Do we start with 14?

[Emma Vigland]

There's also 11 and 12, which is kind of funny, but. But Tim Pool's fine.

[Dorothy Brown]

Tim Pool.

[Sam Seder]

Which one is this? Is this 13? Okay. Okay. Tim Pool, of course, who. You know, he's been lost in the wilderness. I think he's actually, like, actually out of his home right now because he's. I think it was in the wake of the shooting. Was it that.

[Matt]

Yeah, he fled to Florida.

[Sam Seder]

He fled to Florida scared of hunting season. And I somehow. I don't know what's going on with the weather in Florida. Still exactly the same temperature as it was in West Virginia, apparently, based upon.

[Matt]

His dress, that in Florida is hilarious.

[Emma Vigland]

Do you think he has a beanie tan?

[Sam Seder]

Oh, my God. But here he is trying to. Now, here's the interesting thing is that I think Tim Pool must have realized, like, he. His days of, like, fence sitting, it's just not. It's not productive at this time. He may go back to it, but he is all out. And remember, this is a guy who for years was. Was just frothing at the mouth for a civil war in the country, and he thinks he might get it and he's excited about it.

[Jake Tapper]

Been going on with these leftists. Alex Preddy, while it appears to have been. I would, you know, I don't want to call it an accident, but unfortunate circumstances. I don't think the guy was trying to murder or massacre anybody, but he certainly was prepared to.

[Sam Seder]

I think that's fair to say.

[Emma Vigland]

What?

[Jake Tapper]

I don't think he was there.

[Matt]

Yeah, I mean, he was prepared to massacre people and he's gonna.

[Sam Seder]

Who was he preparing to massacre? Who is it that he was preparing to massacre? Because if this guy was preparing to massacre, I mean, it's absurd. Anybody who's watched the video knows that this is just absolute bullshit. He's just talking to an audience that must not have seen anything. But if you are prepared to massacre whatever. Presumably the ICE agents. Why would you be sitting there with your phone when you could have easily massacred them from the distance?

[Matt]

I would actually point people toward a different sort of preparation. Prem talker of Zatao is pointing out that it looked like Preddy had a altercation with a border enforcement a few days prior to this. The question I have was, was that a targeted assassination? But let's get back to Tim Pool talking about him being prepared to massacre people as he stepped in, as a woman was being pushed by these thugs.

[Jake Tapper]

I would. You know, I don't want to call it an accident, but unfortunate circumstances. I don't think the guy was trying to murder or massacre anybody, but he certainly was prepared to. I think that's fair to say. I don't think he was there with the intent to.

[Sam Seder]

Look, Pause it for a second. He was not there with the intent to, but he was prepared to do it. What does that mean? What does that mean? Is he. Is he. I mean, listen, I am totally in favor of outlawing people carrying guns, but if carrying a gun to Tim Pool means you are prepared to massacre people, then we should really revisit this, and he should revisit his positions on it.

[Matt]

Because I want you to mention to Kyle Rittenhouse.

[Emma Vigland]

And that's what I was about to say. That's actually the definition of what Rittenhouse was there to do.

[Sam Seder]

Rittenhouse was. Rittenhouse, maybe 100% had his gun out. Like, state lines. Yeah, he. Cross state lines, whatever. I mean, like, it wasn't that far, but he went down to where the action was. This is a guy who's going around with his phone to record ice. Go ahead.

[Jake Tapper]

Any cops? He's resisting arrest. It's not a protest. He showed up tracking on duty with an insurgent group. Okay, I got to make sure I.

[Sam Seder]

Pause it for one second. We got to go back, because I must have missed something. An insurgent group. Tim doesn't know what it means to have friends or community. So it's all going to be a paramilitary organization, even though it's like a zoom. It was a group. Let's just assume it was a group. It's an insurgent group. It is. Now, you are actively involved in an insurgency if you are recording. These guys are not law. You know, police officers, they have less jurisdiction than police officers. That is simply the fact. But is he suggesting that if you record police officers, you're an insurgent?

[Matt]

This is about the signal chats. This is about if Americans track what feds are doing in their communities. That is actually insurgency.

[Emma Vigland]

Well, I mean, to the point, but when you're saying about the signal chats, that's because the FBI was announced this morning. Cash Patel there looking into the signal chats for Minneapolis organizers who were resisting.

[Matt]

Cash Patel admitted that was prompted by some CHUD online.

[Sam Seder]

So let me just get this straight. This guy who took millions of dollars, supposedly unknowingly, whoopsie from a foreign government, is now claiming that other people, because they use signal or they videotape ICE militia, their insurgents.

[Matt]

The rumble studios.

[Sam Seder]

Okay, I'm just curious. Okay.

[Jake Tapper]

Fracking on duty with an insurgent group. Okay, I got to make sure I clarify this, because this is important to understand. Freddie was reportedly part of an. Of a paramilitary group organized by activists as well as Democrats in the state governments or. And potentially law enforcement. They had shift duty. They had shift. It's not an exaggeration. We've learned all this from the signal releases. They would go on duty, patrolling districts. So what we've learned is of their city.

[Sam Seder]

Of their city with their phones, and.

[Emma Vigland]

They'Re like, yeah, they were on community patrol.

[Sam Seder]

Did this guy want Curtis Sliwa to win? Because you will not believe what Curtis lee was doing. 60 years with the Guardian Angels.

[Matt]

Maybe if everybody didn't hate you in West Virginia, you could have some patrols.

[Emma Vigland]

I know. He wouldn't know anything about going outside. He's so pale. Dude, he's in Florida.

[Sam Seder]

Do you think. And we would have to go back when that guy Zimmerman killed. Was it Trayvon George? Trayvon Martin? Yes. That's what Zimmerman was doing.

[Emma Vigland]

Yep.

[Sam Seder]

Actually doing. Preddy was not going around. If he was part of a. An organized resistance to ICE to protect the community, he wasn't going around with the weapon to do it. If you were going around with a weapon to do it, you would have the weapon out.

[Emma Vigland]

Right. And in the Zimmerman case, he killed a young boy as a community patroller, and they defend him. But in this instance, of course, when the ICE agent does it, they're all.

[Sam Seder]

And they had shifts. They had shifts.

[Emma Vigland]

I know.

[Sam Seder]

You know what? I remember when I was part of a paramilitary called the Park Slope Co Op, and I would have a shift where I would be working the register.

[Matt]

It was organized, the tactical organization.

[Emma Vigland]

Did you have a calendar to determine?

[Sam Seder]

Oh, you mean a. We had. We had something from our CO. Who's send us what shift we were on, who's funding this from. From Commander X would send us what time the shift begins.

[Matt]

Also, I remember Tim Pool's take on George Zimmerman. He was just anxious to point out that George Zimmerman was not a white guy, so that it couldn't have been racist.

[Dorothy Brown]

Yeah.

[Jake Tapper]

Presumably on the ground. On duty with a paramilitary group to obstruct ICE enforcement. Now, I'm not saying he's going there to kill anybody, but he was armed and he brought an additional magazine. Meaning this guy is part of a paramilitary group. Leftists have engaged.

[Sam Seder]

Pause it for a second. So wait a second. Let me be clear. The if you carry an extra magazine in your holster, which apparently, as far as I can tell, seems to be pretty regular practice, you're part of a.

[Matt]

Paramilitary, and the feds can shoot you.

[Sam Seder]

Okay?

[Matt]

So, yeah, long story short, I don't.

[Jake Tapper]

Think he's trying to kill anybody. I think he gets into a fight with ice, which is hidden is his intention.

[Matt]

He didn't. He got in the middle of a ICE fight with a fucking woman, and.

[Sam Seder]

He was sprayed in the face before he even turned towards them to do.

[Jake Tapper]

In the scuffle, they see he's armed. Agent disarms him. Something happens. Accidental discharge. You hear gun, gun, gun. And then what happens? Well, dude was holding in his. In his hand his phone like this.

[Sam Seder]

Oh, my God. Are you kidding me?

[Jake Tapper]

Agent. I mean, this happens all the time. Not all the time, all the time, but it happens frequently enough. Those shootings are rare. CBP agencies, a guy.

[Matt]

So we're skip a little bit ahead. We see what he's doing here. We got to get to this next part where he gets on Trump for backing down. So let's see here.

[Emma Vigland]

I wonder if he jumped the gun on this.

[Sam Seder]

Here we go.

[Jake Tapper]

That way. We don't know for sure. It may not be an unconditional surrender, but, I mean, Minnesota Star Tribune's framing it that way. Gavin Newsom, the left, they're cheering. They're saying, take a bow wow, we've won. Trump is Buchanan. He's not Lincoln. You know, in the past, people have said, is. Is Trump maybe an Abraham Lincoln. I've said something.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah.

[Matt]

Morons.

[Emma Vigland]

Trump said it.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah. I'm like Abraham Lincoln. Now Tim Pool can go forward with validation. Let's only hope.

[Jake Tapper]

Trump is Buchanan. He's not Lincoln. You know, in the past, people have said, is, is Trump. Maybe on Abraham Lincoln. I've said something like, you know this. Trump's compared himself. Yeah, spare me. You are Buchanan, bro. Donald Trump.

[Sam Seder]

Brutal roast.

[Jake Tapper]

He's capitulating. He's backing down, he's negotiating, he's equivocating, and that's more Buchanan than anything. You know why? Because when Lincoln got in, Lincoln put the boot down, sent in the troops, kicked off a civil war. I kicked off a civil war as to who stuck.

[Matt]

Yeah. So this is the thing that caught my attention.

[Sam Seder]

What, Tim?

[Matt]

Lincoln got in and put the boot down. The fuck are you talking about?

[Emma Vigland]

Lincoln got boot down.

[Dorothy Brown]

Lincoln.

[Matt]

Lincoln entered. And there's some, like, mythology to this, but Lincoln entered Washington D.C. under the Undercover of night, under Pinkerton's, because the south freaked out to him winning the election so much that they basically seceded immediately.

[Emma Vigland]

He thought he was gonna get assassinated in the middle of his inauguration speech.

[Matt]

Lincoln's putting the boot down was saying, we're going to continue stocking the forts that are American governments. And then a shot rang out because the south wasn't going to tolerate that.

[Emma Vigland]

Like, I mean, but this isn't. This kind of just lost cause stuff. Right. It's a Klansman, really. Klansman stuff. Because all history shows that Lincoln did everything he could basically to keep the Union together. That was kind of what he was forced. He's like, yes, revolution. He was a. He was right. He was less. More moderate abolitionists. Right.

[Matt]

And it is true that Trump is Buchanan in the sense that Buchanan was pro states rights and slavery.

[Jake Tapper]

Anything. You know why? Because what we are seeing with his presidency, he's capitulating, he's backing down, he's negotiating, he's equivocating. And that's more Buchanan. Anything. You know why? Because when Lincoln got in, Lincoln put the boot down, sent in the troops, kicked off a civil war. Now, you know, I know it's gonna be disputed as to who started or.

[Matt]

Whatever happened, only by idiots.

[Sam Seder]

Oh, yeah, okay, okay. I know there's no documentation on that. Listen, I just said he kicked off. In other words, started the war. But I know there's gonna be some controversy about who started the world. You have arguments about history and stuff like that, but I'm not talking about that because someone said the word Buchanan to me the other day. And so that's what I'm going with.

[Matt]

And then he does this whole habeas corpus thing, because that's the one thing he respects about Lincoln.

[Emma Vigland]

Do you think that, like all of the armed security guards he has because he's so afraid, take shifts.

[Sam Seder]

Oh, it's a question. Let's go. Let's go into, like, where he becomes sort of like self conscious and realizes, like, oh, I really do sound like a fascist bootlicker. How am I going to get out of this? And he is sort of like taking A, he's decided to sort of like, instead of like, do the havesies thing, I'm going to double down on it. Here he is. Incident. I mean, here he is trying to explain, like, if you suck your own fascist boots, are you really sucking fascist boots?

[Emma Vigland]

Huh?

[Jake Tapper]

First of all, when these people come out and go, tim's a bootlicker for defending us, I'm like, no, no, you misunderstand. It's my boots. It's mine. I voted for them. I'm wearing the boot. I'm stomping on the ground. I ain't licking anybody. I'm clapping for these people that I said, please go out and enforce the law. And anybody else who's cheering for who voted for it too, we're all wearing the boots. You're the one crying. You're the one saying you're coming, first.

[Sam Seder]

Of all, okay, now, even in, even, like, I understand what he's trying to say here, but you. He is admitting he's licking the boots. The only debate as to whether those are fascist boots or not. That's all. That's it. He is admitting he is full in on the idea of ICE being able to bust down your door without a warrant, feds coming in, busting down your door without a warrant, shooting people essentially without any recourse or accountability, sticking out schools and courthouses, basically, the door is open, according to him. And if it's President AOC and we have federal people coming in busting into his studio, it's. There's still going to be boots. It's just that he won't be licking those boots.

[Matt]

I mean, taking money from the government, like Russia boots.

[Sam Seder]

Whose boots do you think bootlickers are licking?

[Emma Vigland]

No, it's not the act of licking boots.

[Sam Seder]

It is calling somebody a fascist. Bootlicker is calling them a fascist, bragging that you're a fascist.

[Emma Vigland]

Right.

[Sam Seder]

And therefore I'm not bootlicking.

[Emma Vigland]

You're just not in power.

[Sam Seder]

This guy's mind is so feeble that he thinks the insult is that you are in some way subservient to the fascists as opposed to you're a fascist. You are without a doubt serving the fascist cause. He thinks the issue is, like, it's embarrassing to be seen as licking the boots. So I'm going to say it's my boots, dude. That's what we're saying. You're a fascist. You're supporting fascists.

[Matt]

Yeah. And also, you're not exactly signing up to join ice. In fact, you fled to Florida.

[Sam Seder]

I would also say deer Season. Nobody's under your boot. You're just sitting in a studio like everybody else on the, on the web. You're just sitting in a studio. I mean, granted, you're, you're, you're running from your home. I mean, you know, but that's all you're doing. You're not stomping anybody. If you want to, they will sign you up. They'll give you a $50,000 bonus. You can put on one of those big vests and be a real tough guy.

[Avi Lewis]

I just have to register.

[Matt]

We immediately started joking about Tim Pool swallowing his own boot and then fellating himself and saying, I'm sucking my own dick. And Brandy Jensen came to that exact.

[Sam Seder]

Same no, it's too bad. We did have this discussion before the.

[Matt]

This Brain Jensen tweet. Put this up. The text. I'm not sucking Trump's dick. It's my dick. I'm sucking my own dick. I'm wearing the boot. I am. I'm wearing the beanie.

[Sam Seder]

His bobblehead Buchanan doll next to him. Exactly. All right, folks, couple IMs and we'll get out of here. Intended to take phone calls today. Of course, that did not work out.

[Matt]

I'm on the island. I'm on the flight logs.

[Sam Seder]

Carl Bark. Sam went all in in the button up and cardigan and now has a matching pair for each day of the week.

[Emma Vigland]

I mean, I think it's the same one, right?

[Sam Seder]

Well, all right.

[Matt]

Two of them.

[Sam Seder]

I have a cardigan, but I have different. Different shirts. Yeah, I just, I, you know, how often do I wear a cardigan on air? Very rarely.

[Emma Vigland]

People don't realize this is like the coldest week in a while.

[Sam Seder]

It's so cold out and it's cold in here. And I don't know, maybe I'll have to wear a pullover, like fully commit tomorrow. But I feel too constrained. So if I have a cardigan, I feel like I can take that off. But I don't have multiple cardigans.

[Emma Vigland]

You don't do it.

[Sam Seder]

Although I may have one more cardigan. Cardigan's good for if you want to make a pitch like Mr. Rogers. Hey, folks, won't you be a member? Yeah, that look nice. That would actually. I get to record something like that. Won't you be a member? Join the Majority report. Oh, I gotta put it. I actually. I've been wearing, like, big rubber boots coming in for work because it's so slushy.

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah.

[Sam Seder]

And I put on my sneakers just like every morning I watch them come in with his Shoes. Put my shoes on. Hi Brian. How are you today? Why you're looking so so happy and and, and awake this morning. I've been having some self esteem issues. Well yeah.

[Emma Vigland]

That sounds like a lovely, lovely work environment.

[Sam Seder]

Makes me want to puke. Well, hello Brian.

[Matt]

Light some incense.

[Sam Seder]

Tomoff link. Happy news day Tuesday folks here in Britain. Manchester Andy Burnham has was considering a run for special election of parliament for the Labour Party but several Labour Party figures including Starmer blocked him. Also my niece was born yesterday. Can my niece, brother and partner Partner and his partner get a shofar? Indeed. Congratulations Uncle Tom. Lo fic V. We'd be hearing a lot more from Tom. We'll be hearing a lot more from Tom Homan. Now that's true. It's. It's gonna give me. Marbles. I hope Schumer gets thrown out. So maybe this impression can also go says scent with lasers. Yes, sorry about that, Dave from Tallinn. So let me get this straight. Get it? Five more Dimpria. Sam, I want to hear about putting it in your oven. Okay? I don't know what that means. Pizza Express Woking. What do they mean? Rolls traditionally done by ICE hasn't only been around 23 years. I'm 33. Does that mean I'm in antiquity?

[Matt]

Here's a fun recommendation. Hobbs bombs. Inventing tradition.

[Sam Seder]

Rural lefty Is Alex Petrie related to Laura Petrie from the Dick Van Dyke show? Okay, Jordy Ph.D. i lick my boots. No, wait, I mean I don't lick their boots. Their butts are licked by me. Also wear pointing out that ICE agents don't get the bonus over 5 years. 10k per year with a paycheck payback requirement.

[Matt]

If they quit, you won't see it. Buddies.

[Sam Seder]

I'm the one who licks. Bull Prague. Why didn't they have a second magazine in the picture? There wasn't one loaded in the Pitzel pistol. It was above the gun according to Brian. Space Cat Jones. And it's not just Zionism. TikTok has also been silencing people who talk about ice over the last few days. Numerous creators have had zero views on their ICE videos.

[Emma Vigland]

Yep.

[Sam Seder]

All right, two more Jenks bracelets. He's not at Jefferson. He's a Jasper Buckleman. Looks like Tim Pool recently saw some Shane Gillis history stand up bits. That's what that sounds like. And the final IM of the day, Travis from Pittsburgh. If I hold my fingers in a gun shape and go pew pew, then it's the same as mass murder. Tim Pool.

[Matt]

Well, you're prepared for it.

[Sam Seder]

Matt, Brian, Emma, Great job today, folks. See you tomorrow. It might take a strength like I To get to where I want? But I know somehow I'm gonna get there? I wasn't looking when I just got caught between the truth and the light fall? The finding out won't make me feel any better? Yeah, I know the clock is ticking? But the meds are gonna kick in? And my piling light shining bright? I get some weather choice was made for the option where you don't get paid? For the road that bends before it finally breaks you? I guess you might have lost my drive between the 101 and the 5? Do you know how far the detail takes you? Yeah, no, the clock is ticking? But the mess I kick in? And my pilot.