Pod Save America - “The Green Book New Deal.”

Episode Date: February 25, 2019

Trump hates the dictator in Venezuela but loves the one in North Korea, Mueller is nearing his end game with a lot of questions still unanswered, and Senator Dianne Feinstein debates the Green New Deal with some student activists. Then one of the architects of the Green New Deal, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, talks to Jon Favreau about why the ambitious proposal is such an urgent necessity. Also – Pod Save America is going on tour! Get your tickets now: crooked.com/events.

Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. Later in the pod, my interview with one of the architects of the Green New Deal, Rihanna Gunn-Wright. There's a lot of news to cover today as well, from the escalating situation in Venezuela and Trump's upcoming summit with Kim Jong-un in Vietnam, to Mueller's endgame and the kids who showed up on Dianne Feinstein's lawn. I'll tell you guys, I'd really like a Green Book New Deal.

I was thinking about that. Because. I was going to call you up. Because the movie isn't the best movie of the year. There wasn't a real joke to that. You just wanted to. Green Book New Deal. Green Book New Deal.

Now find a joke around it. Green Book New Deal. Okay. I love it. You had a show Thursday. I heard it was fantastic. Great love a joke around it. Green Book, New Deal. Okay. Love it. You had a show Thursday. I heard it was fantastic. Great love it or leave it. Emily Heller, Ira Madison, Hari Kondabolu.

Great panelists. Great conversation. We talked about all the things. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Check it out. Also, a reminder, you can watch Pod Save America every week on our live stream at youtube.com slash cricket media.

Pretty thirsty, Elijah. Make Elijah happy and smash that subscribe button. That was in the copy. That's in the copy. Michael put that in the copy. Alright. Let's get to the news. The crisis in Venezuela grew even more serious this weekend

when violence erupted along the country's border with Colombia, where Nicolas Maduro's regime blocked the delivery of humanitarian aid supplied by the United States and other neighboring countries. The Trump administration has recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela's president, and Mike Pence, to the rescue, is scheduled to meet with him in Colombia on Monday. Tommy, the White House has made pretty clear that they want Maduro gone,

and there was a report in Axios that Trump takes a markedly different view of Venezuela than Middle Eastern countries, which he views as hopeless. A senior White House official also said, quote, it's a real life example of the failure of socialism. And there's an appeal in that. What is Trump's strategy here? And how do you think Obama or another Democratic president would be handling it differently right now? Another interesting anecdote is apparently in McCabe's book, he talks about Trump at briefings saying that Venezuela is the kind of place you should go to war with because they have lots of oil and we'll take that. That was alarming. Yeah, although not remotely surprising since he says it all the time about Iraq.

So, you know, look, there is a very dire and legitimate humanitarian crisis happening in Venezuela. Nicolas Maduro came to power several years ago, but his reelection last year was fraudulent. He locked up his opponents. There was vote rigging and vote stealing. Like, he is not, he's a horrible person. He's starving his own people.

There's serious questions about the legitimacy of his election. So what Juan Guaido did was he looked at the Venezuelan constitution and essentially exercise a provision that says if the person in charge takes power illegitimately, the head of the assembly becomes the president. So now I'm the president. And then the international world recognized him as the new president, Guaido. So Trump is just pressing the case on this as much as he possibly can. He gave a major speech in Miami, I think it was last week, where he was trying to threaten military officials to try to get them to peel off and come to the opposition side. Over the weekend, there was this clash at a bridge between Colombia and Venezuela, where opposition forces are trying to force aid into the country.

So there's a very legitimate humanitarian reason to want to push aid in there. But it also seems like this is setting up a pretty serious clash, which if Guaido can get aid in, it basically says, I'm in charge. I'm the one who can deliver for you. I'm the president. So, like, I don't think you can divorce the politics here. And so, like, I don't think you can divorce the politics here. For Trump, there's also Florida politics, which is why you see General Marco Rubio tweeting once a fucking minute about Venezuela over the weekend. And there's also this broader anti-socialist pitch that I guess he's trying to make, which is to say Venezuela is socialist. That will be your future of Bernie Sanders and AOC are the next president and vice president of the United States. Yeah. Maduro has called the international shipments a potential Trojan horse that would lead to military intervention. So is there truth to that? How would that happen? And why are, I noticed that some international humanitarian organizations like Red Cross aren't trying to send aid in there. What's going on with the aid? So like Jose Andres' organization, the World Central Kitchen is down on the border trying to get aid in there. What's going on with the aid? So like Jose Andres' organization, the World Central Kitchen, is down on the border trying to get aid in there. I don't think that Jose's organization

is a Trojan horse for the CIA. Jose wants regime change. But I think it would be naive to suggest that the Trump administration was trying to send aid into the country just at the goodness of their heart. I think that Elliott Abrams has been traveling on these planes

with humanitarian shipments. He is someone who in the 80s worked with some of the worst right-wing organizations in the world to help lead coups. And so, of course, they're questioning our motives. It would be like sending Don Rumsfeld or Paul Wolfowitz to a humanitarian mission in Iraq. It doesn't matter how good the policy is. It's the wrong messenger at this moment. To say the least. To say the least.

So what should Democrats be saying and doing here? Like, Bernie Sanders, who got in some trouble last week for refusing to call Maduro a dictator, then tweeted over the weekend that Maduro should allow humanitarian aid into the country. And to put it mildly, many of his supporters and folks online were very unhappy with with bernie's tweet um why is that is that is that justified what you know what what's the right what's sort of the right stance for democrats who want maduro gone but also are very

you know cognizant that the kind of saber rattling that Trump's doing could lead, you know, the United States into another intervention that we don't want to be part of. So Ben Rhodes and Senator Murphy wrote a great op-ed on this. They talked about some steps Democrats should take. One, we should call for, offer temporary protected status for Venezuela in seeking asylum. There's literally millions of them flowing out of the country. I saw Kamala Harris did that. Kamala Harris came out for it over the weekend. It was very smart. We should be giving aid and support to countries like Colombia, who are dealing with millions of migrants coming over

the border, target sanctions on Maduro and his goons. But we should also be cognizant of the fact that through the 50s through the 80s, the US meddled in like a half a dozen countries, elections, coups, and some really dark chapters of their and our history. And I think Bernie is hesitant to jump into the fray because he knows the history in the region, because clearly Trump's motives are not humanitarian. And like, I understand and agree with the play to recognize Guaido as the president. It makes sense constitutionally in Venezuela. But I think the next step in that process has to be free and fair elections.

And he also doesn't want to play this gotcha game of like, is Maduro a dictator or not? Declare it, says CNN pundit or whoever the fuck it is, right? What do you think? You're a sticky wicket. Listen, all right. I do think the Ben and Chris Murphy op-ed was very smart.

And one of the things that's very hard in this situation is that this is one of those rare times where Trump isn't getting everything totally wrong. This is a situation where just because Donald Trump has an ideological interest in proving something in Venezuela and just because he has not he has shown such deference to dictators around the world and has such authoritarian tendencies at home doesn't mean that there aren't places where we align on trying to remove Maduro. It's just that we might have a slightly different approach. Yeah, I mean, look, Maduro, like, people are starving to death. Babies, children dying, like people can't get you go to the hospital, and you can't get literally anything like cotton balls. Like basic medicine, saline drip. So yeah, it is a crisis. It's an absolute crisis. I think it's just a question of tactics, and the best way to to get to a better place for the people of Venezuela and not necessarily overthrow a government because what we're very good at in this country is the invasion portion of regime change and then we literally don't plan for the part that comes next we saw that it happened in it happened in in

Afghanistan it happened in Iraq like we just have to remember the history destabilizing a place is a lot easier than stabilizing indeed and I guess and that's why you know what Marco Rubio was doing over the weekend seemed so egregious, because there didn't seem to be any purpose for Marco Rubio tweeting pictures of, you know, Muammar Gaddafi being captured, other than to do what?

To beat his chest? Like, what diplomatic or strategic purpose were those tweets over the weekend? None. I mean, like, along with what Lovett was saying, I see the situation down there

and I sincerely want as a human being to have aid go into this country and would love for there to be a clean policy whereby we could just make that happen. But as recently as 2002,

the United States backed a coup against Hugo Chavez. Right. And so that's obviously sitting in the back of everyone's mind. Organized by Elliott Abrams. Organized by, yeah, so in the back of everyone's mind, that's there. And then in addition, John Bolton, the National Security Advisor,

goes before a press briefing with a little notepad that says 5,000 troops to Colombia. So that is another not very subtle message. And then psychopath General Marco Rubio tweets a photo of a Gaddafi who, in that moment or shortly after the photo that's depicted, he was murdered in cold blood, sodomized with a bayonet, apparently. And he thinks that that is an appropriate thing to tweet. And I say this as someone who was working in the White House at that time and was part of the policy in Libya that led to his death and thinks of that moment as something we should all deeply regret.

And he's like, chest something on Twitter about it? And not the removal of Gaddafi, the fact that it is something that happens with chaos on the street and someone being dragged through the street and murdered. Well, it's a complicated, I mean, it's sort of a two-part thing. Like, the Libya intervention was part one, stopping tanks from rolling into Benghazi and murdering an entire city. And then there was part two where it got, the mantle got picked up by the broader international community. It really did turn into a regime change strategy, which led to its ouster, and now there is chaos. Right.

These regime change strategies and invasions do not seem to turn out so well. No. And I don't know how many examples we've now had throughout history of that. Well, I feel like this is why I think sometimes Democrats struggle is because I think under George W. Bush and for a long time before, that military intervention

is seen as a clear choice. It is seen as a clear direction you can go. And it is tough. And it is also, you know, in the case of Venezuela or Iraq, it is saying, look at how horrible things are for these people. Look at what this dictator is doing to their people. We should intervene. And I think Democrats have not always been very good about talking about why there's an alternative and that if the only something is military intervention, that everything else

sounds like nothing. And so I think one of the things we struggle with, even in these kinds of conversations is, okay, so the Trump saber rattling isn't right. The Trump aggression isn't right. The Trump kind of old fashioned intervention into Latin America isn't right. What's the alternative? And it always is seemed to be defined as something less as opposed to something different. All right, let's talk about one of the many dictators that Trump actually likes, North Korea's Kim Jong Un, who he's scheduled to meet with in Vietnam this week, as a follow-up to a first summit that was so successful, the White House memorialized it

with a series of commemorative coins. Tommy, over the weekend, Jake Tapper asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo why he believes that North Korea is a nuclear threat when the president says it's not. What, if any, progress has been made since the last summit? None.

None. None. That was a remarkable interview. Because Jake was like, President Trump tweeted the following words. And Pompeo's response was, no, I didn't. Jake's like, here's an image of the tweet. No, I can't see that. Here's him repeating them verbatim at an event last night. You're standing next to him.

I don't know what you're talking about. What the president believes. He thinks that's suspend disbelief. What the president believes is this. Well, that's not what the president believes because that's not what he tweeted. He was like on the plane flying home and he basically tweeted,

I don't have the exact words in front of me, but there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea was I believe the summarized version. So there's been no substantial progress at all since the last time? No, we never hammered out a shared agreement on what the term denuclearization means. And the follow-up talks, which should have happened before the head of state talks, where you sort out, like, we have a demand for complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization.

Pyongyang called that gangster-like demands. demands so uh what's happened though is you know as we've been engaged in these lower level talks and north koreans keep blowing off pompeo or steve began or all the people we send over he's our negotiator um trump is now saying well he's in no hurry because there's not additional weapons testing that doesn't mean their program has stopped like a stanford university study estimates that over the past year they have may have north North Koreans may have created enough fissile material for seven more weapons. CSIS has found additional testing sites. So they are increasing their stockpile, which is challenging in terms of giving them more negotiating leverage.

There's a nonproliferation threat where they could give them to other bad actors in the region. There's a whole bunch of problems here. And so, like, again, I don't want there to be a war, but he's accomplished nothing, and he's willing to let a great event with good optics and a nice headline sweep the rest of it under the rug. It seems like they're already lowering expectations for this summit. What would a good outcome be,

or a relatively good outcome be of this summit? Like, just another agreement that maybe perhaps has more teeth? I don't know i mean i think if they froze uh production of fissile material and any weapons testing uh while they carry out these additional talks that would probably be a good thing yeah but maybe unlikely i don't know man you know trump tweeted something he said what was it he said something like look at all these people who can never do anything good. You're going to tell me how to talk to North Korea? Yeah.

And, you know, it's funny because it's true. It is true, right? It is true that, you know, Donald Trump is confronting the same problem that Barack Obama confronted, that George W. Bush confronted, that Bill Clinton confronted, Bush confronted, that Bill Clinton confronted, which is the incentives for North Korea remain exactly as they always have been, which is to make as many nuclear weapons as possible while pretending you're going to stop at some point or being open to talks to keep the kind of aggressiveness of the international community off your back. And it won't change with conversation. It won't change for being nice. It won't change with Donald Trump's negotiating skills, that's for sure.

Of course, the criticism of Trump is not necessarily his negotiating skills. It's that he's lying about the progress. Well, of course he's lying about it. The lying about the progress aside, right, the idea that Donald Trump has found some new way in to solve this just isn't true because unless you come up with something that changes the fundamental incentives that North Korea has, why would anything change? Yeah.

And this brings us back to General Rubio, who is a moron. And Gaddafi, after the Iraq War, gave up his entire nuclear weapons program and he died in the streets. And I think a lot of dictators, since that happened, have looked at that as an example for why you cling to the strongest weapons you have for as long as humanly possible. So it's just another reason why the neocon position is not always the brightest. So probably that's not getting solved this week. Probably not. But I mean, he could do something big and splashy. Everyone should be ready that he might declare that there's now peace on the peninsula for the first time.

And that could be literally true. Everyone should be ready that he might declare that there's now peace on the peninsula for the first time. And that could be literally true. Because in 1953, when the Korean War ended, there was an armistice, but never a formal peace agreement. So we could say, now there is peace. And it will look and sound big and important, and he'll do any credit for it and a peace prize and all the things he wants, but it will be meaningless. Look out for that second coin. Can I ask you something about that? You know, one of the things that's been kind of like an undercurrent to these conversations about North Korea for a very long time is the U.S. position has been that it's

unacceptable for North Korea to have nuclear weapons. And yet the kind of whispers behind the scenes is it is acceptable. We're accepting it. Is there a chance that what we're marching towards is Donald Trump being the weak being the weak kind of soft appeaser where we land in a situation where there's some degree of normalization and acceptable level of nuclearization of North Korea and we just move on from there? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a chance that they become a de facto nuclear weapons state the same way Pakistan is and a whole bunch of other places. And it's a major failing of the entire non-proliferation regime that we've been

trying to uphold for a long time. Now, it's like not entirely Trump's fault, but certainly his big, bold play has not solved the problem. And if he gets to a place where he just concedes that, it's not good. I mean, the Japanese won't be happy. The South Koreans will be happy. A lot of people will be in a much riskier neighborhood if we go that route. All right. Let's talk about the Mueller investigation. Oh, thank God. On Friday, prosecutors submitted an 800-page sentencing memo.

800 pages. Describing former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort as a, quote, hardened criminal who, quote, repeatedly and brazenly broke the law. According to the New York Times, prosecutors cited sentencing guidelines of up to 22 years for a wide-ranging conspiracy involving obstruction of justice, money laundering, hidden

overseas bank accounts, and false statements to the Justice Department. Oof. Paul Manafort may be going to jail for the rest of his life. What did we learn from the memo, guys? And maybe, more importantly, what did we not learn? It doesn't seem like there was a lot of new revelations inside of these memos, right? So I think, you know, one of the things that we can...

And many people thought that, like he had done in previous sentencing memos, whether it was Cohen or other people, that Mueller would sort of spell out more details of the larger conspiracy, potential conspiracy with Russians as he has before. And even, by the way, in the recent trial or the recent court appearance where Manafort's lawyers and Mueller's lawyers sort of squared off with in front of Judge Amy Berman Jackson about, you know, why Manafort had broke his agreement by lying. And they went into great detail about some of the lies, including, you know, sharing polling information, private polling information with a constant Kalimnik, who is alleged to be a former russian intelligence asset um and a meeting between kalimnik and manafort where they discussed a peace plan and

lifting sanctions on russia so all of these juicy details were made public during the hearing over the lies and yet in the memo itself we learn nothing more well one thing one thing i took away from it was that you know I feel like there's a lot of expectations sitting on Robert Mueller's broad shoulders. Broad square shoulders. But he's not worrying about that.

He's doing his job, right? And what I took away from the sentencing memo is the news may be looking for new information. Observers and pundits like us may be looking for the new next part of the story. But this was a document designed to say, hey, everything you know already, it's a big fucking deal. And he's a despicable criminal and deserves a lot of punishment. And you don't need to learn anything new for that to be true.

Yeah. He's a crime connoisseur. He's a crime aficionado. He's a crime aficionado. He was first warned about potentially violating the FARA violations, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, back in 1986. And he has just been brazenly breaking the law since then. So we know that Paul Manafort is an incredibly greedy, hardened criminal. And we know that that's the guy that Donald Trump chose to run his campaign for a long time. Right.

Well, I mean, again, we're always looking for the tape recording between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, where Putin says, hey, you want to collude? And Trump's like, yeah, let's collude. And again, what we have here is that the president of the United States, his campaign manager, and then deputy campaign manager, are both hardened criminals. Hardened criminals who are going away for a long time. And his national security advisor also lied to the FBI. Yeah. And he's going away.

And his personal lawyer, he's going away. He hired a bunch of criminals to run his campaign and staff his White House with. That seems to be pretty bad. And it wasn't a crime hiatus. That seems to be pretty bad. And they didn't like, it wasn't a crime hiatus, you know. It wasn't like, okay. Yeah, Paul Manafort's most recent crime was in 2018 when he was tampering with witnesses.

After already being indicted. And I must say, you can really tell in this memo that that was frustrating to Robert Mueller. He found that off-putting. He did not take a crime gap year. Yeah, he did not pause in any way. Yeah, it's unbelievable. I still, you know, Marcy Wheeler talked about it with you guys, I believe, and she's also been writing a lot about this.

You know, we still don't fully understand Paul Manafort's motivation for lying so brazenly when his life was on the line, right? And it's some combination of protecting Trump, protecting himself from the Russians. We don't fully know, but it's a reminder in this how dangerous and risky and reckless it was for him to do that. Well, and again, so nothing, we still don't know more about Manafort sharing sensitive polling information from the Trump campaign with Kalimnick and nothing about the meeting with Kalimnick about sanctions relief, which we also know are two things that Mueller's

prosecutors told the judge was quote at the heart of the special counsel's investigation and the judge then agreed with that so the question is when do we get to learn about this um marcy writing over the weekend she says you know by choosing to leave the record where it stands by choosing not to describe what the evidence shows regarding the augustnd meeting in the sentencing memo. Mueller has deviated from the approach he's taken in every other instance where he had an opportunity to provide a speaking document. That leads me to believe he's certain he will be able to provide a report in some public form, presumably in the same kind of detail he has presented in all his other statements.

So that's Marcy's belief. You know, other people may not agree with that. But what we're dealing with now is this situation where Department of Justice guidelines say, you know, you don't put out and make public a lot of derogatory information about American citizens who are not actually indicted. Unless it's Hillary Clinton five days before. That's the rule. But the other big exception for this case is if the DOJ guidelines also say you can't indict a sitting president, and there's derogatory

information about a sitting president, does that mean no matter what kind of wrongdoing Trump may have committed, if it falls short of a crime that he can be indicted for and he can't be indicted, then what are we all supposed to do if the president has committed a crime? It's quite a catch-22 we're dealing with here. I mean, the Kalimnick, the sending of polling information from Manafort to Kalimnick, to me, is still the most interesting, massive piece of information we know about collusion.

The criticism of the Mueller investigation is that there has been no collusion with the U.S. and the Russians, with Trump's campaign and the Russians unveiled. Well, in fact, there has been. And I remember when that news first broke, the New York Times reported it as some private, some public polling. And I was trying to be really skeptical and say, as a campaign professional, is some half public, half private polling document that Manafort forwards over to some goon? Could that really help you actually intervene in our election at a precinct level the way we all thought this might have happened, like a really sophisticated level? And I was skeptical. And then the more we learned about that polling information, it was highly detailed stuff that was so complicated that most people couldn't understand it. And the Kalimnik was needed to sort of explain what it meant. And then within days or maybe weeks,

the Russians hacked Hillary's internal data. Her analytics. Again, like we can't gloss over the forwarding of the polling data from Manafort to Kalimnick, who was a former GRU-linked person. And again, the willingness on behalf of the Trump campaign,

on behalf of multiple high-ranking officials in the Trump campaign, from Paul Manafort to Don Jr. to Jared Kushner to all the rest of them, willing to collude, willing to take dirt on Hillary Clinton by going to that meeting in June. Asking Roger Stone, when's WikiLeaks going to dump the next tranche of emails? If you just hack Hillary Clinton, that's not all the information you need because they didn't have Wisconsin. They didn't even know it existed. So you need the internal Trump data

to find out what's going on in parts of the country that Hillary campaign didn't know about. You need a map. His Twitter handle is John Lovett. Don't have it. Listen, I know, I know, I know. It's first of all, it's trite. It's not me.

Don't fucking tweet at me. It's trite. It's boring at this point, and I couldn't help myself. I hate myself more than you ever could. Okay? So what's next? On Sunday, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said he'll subpoena Robert Mueller's report if it's not made public and get him to testify about what he found. The Washington Post also published a piece this weekend about how House Democrats are preparing to fight for access to the evidence Mueller has uncovered in any underlying investigative documents he's produced,

and that they're prepared to argue that the amount of material released in the Clinton email case has set a precedent for the access they can expect here with Mueller. So that seems good. That's great. Look, I love the idea that we're going to pretend that precedent is going to make any difference in these Republicans' moons' minds,

but I'm glad they're making a case. No, what could make a difference is just that finally, we have the House. We have power. Yeah, we have power. I mean, Ken Starr's report was hundreds of pages long and very detailed and countless footnotes. It was written in a narrative format

for maximum impact with the public. So, I mean, that's a recent precedent we could also look at. But we also know that whatever's in Manafort's report will not discuss the hush money payments that Michael Cohen made. That's being handled separately. It will not discuss any efforts to investigate the inauguration and all the dirty money flowing into that bad boy.

So there are other reports to come. Yeah, I mean, it's not just Mueller building a case here. The House Democrats really have to put together a case here. Well, we also have separate legal, the SDNY, the District of New York are building a case here about well those are we also have separate legal the sdny yes york are building a case but then yes the the democrats should investigate all the areas that they feel need to be well because i think the question is if there are no more indictments and if muller does not make an actual conspiracy charge against anyone um the house democrats have to figure out whether they still want to proceed to impeachment hearings. And so far, there's already plenty of evidence, including particularly the fact that federal prosecutors have implicated the president in a campaign felony for directing Michael Cohen to make those hush

money payments. Let's not forget about that. So like, House Democrats still have all this wrongdoing and potential criminality out there that they have to deal with. We should note, before we move on, that today, according to the New Yorker and the Washington post, uh, more legal trouble for Trump, a staffer from Trump's 2016 campaign is suing him because she says he kissed her without her consent before a Florida rally. More than a dozen women have publicly accused Trump of sexual harassment or assault, but Alva Johnson is the first woman to come forward since he's been president. Yeah. And I think, well, so I think the, the, this story I think is important in part because it may help undermine the, the NDAs that have locked up a lot of people around Trump, including

people that have worked at the White House, you know? So I think to, to Tommy's point, so the SDNY has said they could charge Manafort if Trump pardons him. So I think that's a really big deal and a very good thing because it means that Manafort's not going to squirrel out of this. That's going to land. But I think one thing we should be thinking about, and I'm glad that Schiff said what he said, we'll subpoena whatever we need to if we have to. But I feel like the sentencing memo is a small example of the worst case end to Mueller. There's a lot of speculation, the sentencing memo is a small example of the worst case N to Mueller, right?

There's a lot of speculation. The sentencing memo is coming. The sentencing memo is coming. There's going to be so much cool shit in there. Holy shit, I can't wait to unbox the sentencing memo. It's got like a new kind of camera. It's awesome. It's like portrait mode.

Battery still sucks. Battery still sucks. And then it comes out and it's like nope there's not that much new in there maybe some of the redacted stuff could be interesting detail but no it wasn't a big revelation and i think one thing we should be thinking about is what happens if this expectation isn't met that muller isn't building some towards some big grand report that reveals a lot more than we already know a A, what does that mean for Democrats? And B, what does it look like if it no longer looks as though Mueller and investigators in

Congress are on the same team, you know, where we're now subpoenaing Mueller, trying to get Mueller to do things he doesn't want to do? And I think it's just worth thinking through the implications of trying to force Mueller's hand as opposed to how it looks right now, which is kind of two things happening in concert. Yeah, I think that's pretty easy. I think it is. And you've seen some of the House Democrats, especially the ones in the Intel Committee, taking this line over the weekend, which is like, we just want the whole truth to come out.

Like, the American people deserve to know all the details of what happened when a foreign power tried to conspire uh possibly tried to conspire with uh the campaign and and the candidate that they eventually helped win win the presidency and also by the way there are a whole bunch of other federal investigations like tommy was just saying into the trump organization the inauguration everything like that and we need to let those investigations go and we need to learn the truth and by the way like like we just said even if muller comes out with nothing else even if there are no new details the president states was implicated by federal prosecutors in a campaign

felony it happened and like if there had been no Russia if there had been no Russia story that would be potentially one of the biggest news stories of the year for any other president the president was implicated in a crime not by you know witnesses or this evidence, by federal prosecutors. So they were so sure of it that they put it in their documents that they filed in SDNY.

And I think that Democrats have to wrestle with like, yeah, what do we do with that? And I don't think, I mean, the only people not on their team on that one are Republicans in Congress and the White House. No one else is questioning federal prosecutors and SDNY for implicating the president in a campaign felony. I also just am curious, too, about the various jurisdictions, right?

Because one thing, you have the House Judiciary Committee, which would be in charge of things related to impeachment. You have the Intelligence Committee that's looking into the kind of intelligence-related aspects of this. And I wonder what happens as this ends. What gets fed from Mueller to the Judiciary Committee, something that Marcy was speculating about and what, you know, are the, how, how much are they coordinating? You know, how much are they going to be able to do this as one, one effort? Yeah. I mean, the, the language about the report that should be created says just at the conclusion

of the special counsel's work, he or she shall provide the attorney general with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the special counsel so it's like brief and pretty vague and we don't know it could be really long it could be short it could be yeah nothing so this this will be a battle and i think prepare yourselves yeah for democrats it's just we want the truth we want the details and the American people wrote that. Okay, let's talk about the Green New Deal. A video went viral on Friday that showed a group of children who had gone to California Senator Dianne Feinstein's San Francisco office to ask her to support the Green New Deal. In the video, which was posted by the Sunrise Movement, a relatively new organization that's been pushing members of Congress on the Green New Deal, Feinstein tells the kids the following, quote, that resolution will not pass the Senate, and you can take that

back to whoever sent you here. I've been in the Senate for a quarter of a century, and I know what can pass, and I know what can't pass. I know what I'm doing. You come in here and you say it has to be my way or the highway. I don't respond to that. I've gotten elected. I just ran. I was elected by almost a million vote plurality. So you know, maybe people should listen a little bit. Now, guys, the Sunrise Movement later posted a longer video where Feinstein finally says she may vote for the Green New Deal resolution after all. And she even agrees to give one of the students an internship in her office. Did that change your view of the interaction or just what did you think in general of the interaction? did that change your view of the interaction?

Or just what did you think in general of the interaction? I tweeted, I quote tweeted the shortened version of the video that, quote, everyone knows it's good politics to tell little kids to fuck off. I was obviously making a joke. She didn't actually say that. But I do think. And you don't think it's good politics. More importantly.

Thank you. Stand by that. Thank you for walking me out of that trap. Stand by that. But, you know, I then had a lot of people tweeting at me, did you watch the full video? Watch the full video. And I watched the full video, and I don't think it's better. Within three minutes, as John read,

she accuses that kids have been sent there by someone. I don't think that's an appropriate way to treat a child. There's a little girl who is talking about her sincere concern that climate change could ruin the planet for her as we know it. And Feinstein basically says to her, we're not going to solve this in a decade, despite the fact that the UN report says that's the time frame we have left to get to work. So I don't think this is how you should talk to little kids. I don't think telling little kids, I've been around for 30 years, trust me, is an appropriate response.

Like, that's not how you treat kids. They're kids. Be nice. The reason, you know, and I tweeted the next day, like, I can't believe, like, 24 hours later, you know, everyone's still screaming at each other over Dianne Feinstein, partly because I think it's not a huge deal.

Like, what happened was she handled it very poorly. Like, that was clear. But also, like, I actually think the whole situation worked out as it should, right? In order to push these lawmakers, and that includes Democratic lawmakers, who have been there, who have been in Washington for a very long time. And look, a lot of them fully believe, all of the Democrats actually believe in science. They believe that climate change is happening. And a lot of them have a sense of urgency.

Dianne Feinstein, people have made the point, well, she's very old and she's not going to have to deal with the effects. But she's a grandmother, right? She has kids. She has a near-perfect environmental record. She's been fighting this a long time. But she's also been in D.C. for a long time. And so her vision is sort of limited by the politics that is in D.C. right now.

And I think what those kids are saying is we have to expand our horizons here because this is an urgent threat. And what you need to do in that situation is direct action is called for. You do need to go and sit in and and press your senators and your representatives and push them on these things and get and it may have worked because by the end she's saying like yeah maybe i'll actually vote for the green new deal resolution after all so what those kids did was great and it was courageous and i'm glad that they did it and she didn't respond well but that's what you do you keep pushing you know you don't you don't sit there like there's there's no version of this where dne Feinstein just won re-election for six years and like suddenly she's going to step down over this or we're going to push Dianne Feinstein out of the party.

Like we need her vote. So the question should be how do we get her vote? Should we sit more in our office? Should we fight more? Like how do we do it? Here's the thing. You know, I thought Heather McGee on Meet the Press was really strong on this. You know?

And she was clearly very emotional about it. Meet the press. Meet the press was really strong on this, you know, and she was clearly very emotional about it. You know, pointing to your environmental record when we haven't done enough on the environment for 30 years while you've been in office, not your fault. The consensus has been too far to the right. We haven't cared about this enough. And what's happening right now, and, you know, I feel like one of the lessons, too, right now is, you know, all these senators and all these people that have been in Washington a long time saying, you don't understand what's possible. You don't understand how we get things done, have narrowed their own sights. I mean, even the resolution she was talking about that she was in favor of was more limited, right? Well, so this is an interesting, this is an interesting

thing to talk about. So I read her resolution, you know, and it basically says zero emissions by the middle of century 2050, right? Which is what the international panel had said. The Green New Deal, the AOC resolution is more ambitious in that it says, let's do it by 2030, right? And then Feinstein says, let's do carbon, let's do a carbon tax to get there. Also, let's make sure that the transition is just and equitable. Let's use some of the money to help communities that deal with it. She has also, by the way, as senator, presided over, she represents a state that has gone further in meeting its commitments to Paris than any other state, right?

And so that's part of the truth. But like, now, all this said, it's possible and it seems likely that her plan does not meet the urgency of the moment. And that AOC's plan does meet the urgency of the moment. It's not that it doesn't just meet the urgency of the moment. It is not aggressive enough to move the debate, right? Like, that is a resolution where the debate is already over.

This is the consensus place where we need to land, right? What AOC has done, what some of the more progressive members in the House have done, is shown that Democrats have been failing to do something quite basic, which is move the fucking window. Move the debate. Talk about a wealth tax, talk about a 70% marginal tax rate. And all of a sudden the entire debate shifts. But that's what I'm saying. That's why this is so, this, this outcome is so good, right? Because if Dianne Feinstein's plan is probably a bit bolder than where we were just a few years ago, but if that's now seen as the plan that is the shitty compromise plan,

then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement has already achieved something. But this is the point, though. You know what I'm saying? So it's good. But Dianne Feinstein, she's very, look, she is already, she's very unlikely to be seeking another turn.

She has probably run her last race. Anything she advocates for should be what she believes, the place we need to land, right? Saying that the Green New Deal goes too far, I have my own version. The point that I think these activists are making, the point that Heather McGee is making, is this isn't any other issue. This isn't one issue on the list of things you're going to care about. This is an absolute emergency and crisis. Everything should be focused on it. And if what you're going to say to people is what they're advocating is too far, you're making a mistake, right? Or even worse in this

instance, if a little kid is saying, but you represent us, you have to listen to us. We voted for you. And you say, how old are you, kid? She says, I'm 16. You're not a voter. That is, it is so focused on the wrong thing. There's no reason to be chiding children for caring so much about an issue that they're going into legislative. God, we need more kids like that. No kidding. Yeah, no reason at all. My thing is just like, look, we need Diane's to find signs vote. So how are we going to get the vote, right?

Like, I think that. You don't think we have her vote on these things? You think she's going to be one of the people that stops us from getting somewhere? No, we clearly don't have her vote yet on the Green New Deal resolution that they brought to her office. We don't have it at all. And so here's my thing. You need an outside game and an inside game to get this done, right? We need those kids showing up in Democratic offices and Republican offices,

and they're doing a great job outside Mitch McConnell's office today, right? We also need an inside game of persuasive arguments and pressure and people who know how legislation works to make sure that we get, and we're not going to get fucking 60 votes in the Senate on climate change legislation. How do we get 51 votes, maybe if we eliminate the filibuster, among Democrats to get something like this passed? that's what we need to figure out and like you know it can be unfair that we have to deal with this and that we have people like diane feinstein who were not great to the kids but as the sunrise movement and aoc and others have pointed out we got 10 years

and so we all have to sit and figure out how do we get the votes but i think what do we need to do to get the votes but to me the criticism of diane feinstein that is this like she shouldn't be one of the people we have to fucking persuade of course not of course not but this is reality the most liberal states in the country of course not i just find the defenses of her very frustrating it's like you i've run your last race this is the most liberal state this is a state that leads on this issue you claim to lead on what i'm saying is why aren't you in front? Why are you behind? What I'm saying is, you know, for activists and organizers, it's not about defending her or

attacking her. It's like, we just fucking need her vote. That's what politicians are like. We hold them up as like, they have to have the best character. We need to fucking get the vote. So what do we do? I'm saying one of the ways you persuade Dianne Feinstein is persuading the people that are defending her that they're wrong. I'm sorry. I would ways you persuade Dianne Feinstein is persuading the people that are defending her that they're wrong. And I'm sorry that like this is, you know.

I would send another round of kids to the office. How about that? That's probably more effective than yelling about her online. And I also think this all got kind of wrapped up into a broader defense of institutions that was part of the civility debate. Like Andrea Mitchell, who I think is one of the hardest working, smartest reporters out there. Like I used to love talking to Andrea Mitchell. is one of the hardest working, smartest reporters out there. Like I used to love talking to Andrea Mitchell, but she tweeted,

ask yourself if you would use your kids to ambush a senator working on climate change resolution with demands that don't include actual legislation. Now that is, I think- That is so silly. I think it's a very silly defense of process and the status quo that doesn't reflect the way you actually get politicians to move on things,

which is generally through fear. Fear of losing an election, fear of losing support election, fear of losing support from donors or constituents or whatever. And I think that's the path. Or in the case of, you know, Dianne Feinstein, who doesn't fear losing another election, because as Levitt said, she's probably not going to run one. Emotion, right? Like, and, you know, maybe those kids got through to her, maybe the next round of kids will get through to her. No, I thought Andrea Mitchell's, who again, exactly, is a great reporter, but her responses to Heather

McGee on Meet the Press were also just like, she's like, well, they're not doing that outside Republican offices. It's like, well, they are doing it outside Republican offices. You should know that. We just didn't see the video. And again, it's also this sort of like, this is part of a central problem that it's not, that reporters covering these issues struggle to deal with, which is if what it can pass is what's defined as reasonable, nothing is reasonable. There's nothing reasonable because one of our two parties is co-opted and is a kind of a rear guard action against planet earth, right? The Republican party in the United States is an outlier. It is a fringe and it is the most

detrimental force on this issue. So like, and we shouldn't, and we shouldn't forget that. I mean, the Trump administration just this week is creating a group of their own scientists who dispute the overwhelming conclusion of every other scientist in the world, including a guy named William Happer, who has said, quote, the demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.

So that's what we're dealing with on the other side. That seems reasonable. That's a thoughtful measure to take. That's what we're up against. And exactly. And people are like, oh, why are people bugging poor Dianne Feinstein? She's on our team. It's like the reason they are is because there's no conversation to be had with the Republicans.

Yeah. They are climate deniers. You know what I'm saying? We need a 100% accuracy on our side because they are at zero on their side. I mean, the woman that they're now nominating to be the UN ambassador says, I think they're smart people. They're smart. I like the science on both sides. And of course, it's because her husband is a billionaire co-executive. Yeah. I understand there's frustration when you see lefty Twitter, liberal Twitter, including many people we're very good friends with attacking someone who you think is more your ally than your enemy on this issue i get that like fair yeah but um you know i don't

think we should be too precious about it i mean it's just but also like underpinning all of this as you said you know there are they're setting up new working groups on climate science to sell to sell a lie that dovetails with our previous conversation about north korea right because when the top intelligence officials went before Congress and they said that North Korea is unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons program, Trump hauled them into the oval the next day, uprated them in front of the cameras and then had them all say they were misquoted.

So like we are, facts are, are, are being shaped and skewed and manipulated in really dangerous ways. Like stuff we saw pre-Iraq war, science around climate, like on every set of issues. And that's why I think people are approaching this issue with some real emotion and fear

about what could happen if we don't act. Well, and one of the reasons it's so difficult is because while people are just making shit up and lying that run the government, we're also like every, you know, people all over the world are starting to see climate devastation. And yet for a lot of people who aren't yet seeing the climate devastation in their own lives, they're thinking like, who are all these people yelling about something's going to happen in the future and telling me that I have to pay more or change my behavior right now. And changing those minds is, you know, the most important obligation and responsibility of

anyone in politics and activism over the next four years, eight years, 10 years, because we know that we don't have much time. And I do think it's like, it is incredibly important. We need more people showing up in offices like this. We need more activism because this is gonna be fucking hard we couldn't we couldn't pass a cap and trade bill when we had democratic majorities in the house in the senate nancy pelosi got a whole bunch of house democrats to vote for a cap and trade bill which was you know a market-based solution to the problem a lot of them ended up losing their uh re-election and it didn't pass it didn't pass in the senate because a lot of the democrats in the Senate are from southern and midwestern states that depend on coal. And they're worried that, you know, people are going to lose jobs now in their state for something that they're trying to fight in the future.

And we're going to face that again. And we should be realistic about the challenges that we face in trying to get this stuff done. But that should also make us figure out, you know, sharper strategies, like I said, both on the outside and the inside. Okay, well, we're going to talk about this more after we come back with one of the architects of the Green New Deal, Rihanna Gunwright. I, for one, think we need a Green Book New Deal. On the pod today, the policy director for the progressive think tank New Consensus and one of the architects of the Green New Deal, Rihanna Gunn-Wright. Rihanna, welcome to the program.

Oh, thank you. I'm so happy to be here. We're happy to have you. So I want to start with the context for the Green New Deal. Because the media is the media, you know, they tend to frame the context as political and ideological, right? So, you know, the Republican Party moves far to the right under Trump and as a response, because politics is so polarized, Democrats are moving further to the left and proposing things like, you know, Medicare for all and a Green New Deal. But it seems to me there's a different context for why the Green New Deal is so ambitious. Can you talk about that context and talk about why this plan is so different than climate groups may have proposed, you know, just a few years ago under Obama?

Yeah, I think actually the context of that question sort of points out why it's different. We didn't move to the left because of Republicans. We are trying to address the issues that people are clamoring about and saying that they're facing and that they are facing in real life, which is wage stagnation, income inequality, environmental degradation, right, Medicare for all. And so I think the reason why the Green New Deal is so comprehensive is a couple things. One, it's based on sort of a mass mobilization, not sort of, it is based on a mass mobilization industrial policy approach to how to deal with climate. And we have to bring down emissions so dramatically, which means that we have to throw everything. We have to essentially throw the full might of the country behind this problem if we're going to solve it. And then I think and so that sort of transformation requires different policies in order for you to be able to pay for it, quote unquote, with real resources in terms of workers and physical capital. Often we talk about paying

for it when we only actually mean financing it. But actually for mobilization this big, you are trying to get to full employment largely because you will probably need all of that. And so we have to sort of have a labor market where people can move around, where there's a safety net, where there's like a simple entry point for people, a ton of people, right? The labor participation for working adults is lower now than it was a decade ago. And so you have all these people that have fallen out of the labor market that you have to plug back in. And so you need a streamlined workforce development like skills training, which we don't have. And so I think what people often think of is like a progressive wish list of policies in the Green New Deal is actually sort

of, it's not sort of, it's actually about planning for a mass mobilization. I think the second part that makes it so different is we take very seriously the fact that this will be an economic transformation, right? When you change your energy source, you change everything, right? And climate change isn't even just because of energy. It's also about the ways that we think about growth in terms of this, like consume, consume, consume, the ways that we use energy, all of that. And so the Green New Deal is just recognizes simply that it to decarbonize at the pace and sort of the speed that we have to and at the scale that we have to, we are going to change our entire economy. And so if we're going to do that, why not transform it so that it includes the most people and that we end up with a healthier economy than we did before? And so that's also why you see a lot of

the things related to justice that you see in the Green New Deal. And then I think there's just like really a very sort of simple third answer, which is that also this isn't a list of policy prescriptions. We approached it in terms of what kind of work needs to happen for us to decarbonize our economy. And so it's also very project focused in the sense that we're thinking about what work needs to be done, how do we create jobs, and sort of how do we use that job creation, this new moment in our economy to renegotiate power relationships between the public and the private, between everyday folks and the elite, in ways that people, that the majority of Americans are asking for.

And just so listeners know, what is the ultimate goal here with regard to reducing carbon emissions? What do we have to get done? Because, you know, I've seen some people say, okay, we need net zero carbon emissions by 2050. I've heard, and then obviously in the Green New Deal resolution that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey put forward, they said, well, we're going to try to do net zero by 2030. What do you think, what has to happen in terms of reducing carbon emissions and by when? So the science says that we have about 10 to 12 years. There's some scientists now who say like, we don't have any more time. We're on track to have sort of warming of two degrees. And so I think, so it's confusing because the 2050 number is about global emissions, right?

And the U.S. is still the largest economy in the world. And so we contribute a ton of those emissions. And so for us to reach net zero by 2050, the U.S. will probably have to decrease, well, not probably, we'll have to decrease much more quickly than 2050 overall, in part because we play such an important role in sort of creating technologies, making them available to developing countries and helping them decarbonize, which is going to be a huge part of this overall, you know, dealing with climate change. And so for us, I forget the exact targets. I think it was like in the IPCC report, I thought it was like 50% by 2030. I'd have to go back and look. I don't remember. But I think it's clear that we need to move before 2050. And I mean, right now,

to move before 2050. And I mean, right now it's as if we hit two degrees of warming, like 99% of the coral reefs will be gone by 2040, right? And the human costs of fossil fuel pollution and climate change are already here, right? 66% of asthma deaths in the country are women. 70, what, 3% of African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal fire power plant. And black children, probably not coincidentally, die from asthma three times more than white children, right? 80% of Latinos live in an area with at least one air pollution violation, right? So people, and then how many people have, you know, black lung because of coal mining. Right. So these there are already people whose bodies and lives are on the line because of our reliance on fossil fuels. And that's not even talking about extreme weather events. And so I don't think we can move too quickly. Right. Because we know that the devastation will increase. And so I think ASAP is really what the science seems to actually conclude. So there's a lot of different ways to reduce carbon emissions, which of course has to be done across every industry, all kinds of different things. You

can put a tax on carbon, you can put in place regulations, you can invest in clean energy. What made you select this specific set of policies, which, you know, as you've described, sort of revolves around large scale industrial mobilization? Well, I think there's a couple things. The first is that mass mobilization is necessary to have the reductions that we need in the timeframe frame if you're talking about 10 years, right? Just simply because there's too much work. You're talking about changing the grid. You're talking about decommissioning a bunch of old infrastructure.

You're talking about building new renewables. And you're talking about upgrading all buildings so that you have more energy efficiency. And so there's just a ton of work that needs to be done if we are going to decarbonize our entire economy in a timely manner. And the other reason I think that we chose this is because these two issues, climate change and inequality, dovetail and create a particular synergy, not just because they're interconnected, right, in terms of greater inequality tends to lead to greater emissions, but just in the solutions,

right? If you have all of this work that you need to be done, you're going to be creating a lot of jobs and a lot of need and a lot of demand. And then on sort of the income inequality side, there are studies that say we've done as much means testing, well, not as much, but we've had more means tested programs since the 1980s. And pre and post tax income are about the same, which means that transfers like dealing with it through the tax code isn't enough. So you have to intervene in the labor market. And so there's been so much talk about public employment programs and whatnot. But the issue is you don't want to just make work, you want it to be productive. And so

you have these two things dovetailing so that you can have a strategy where you both decarbonize and you reduce income inequality. So we figured why not take that opportunity? A lot of people talk about maybe that's too much, but to me, that just sounds like efficiency. Well, I was going to say, I mean, because people will say, all right, you've got these two crises. You've got climate change and income inequality, right? But climate crisis is existential. So let's solve that first. Our political system is a shit show anyway. It can only bear so much. But to me, it seems like it's not only the right thing to do to also tackle income inequality, and we start there. It's also seems like potentially a more politically

pragmatic thing to do, because as you're trying to build consensus on how to transform the entire economy, obviously, that's going to create winners and losers. And that could actually exacerbate income inequality as poor families who have to, you know, bear the burden of the transition to the new energy economy. Like, what are they supposed to do? But if you can tell them, look, as we transition, you're going to have a guaranteed job, you're going to have a good wage, then maybe you're going to get support from both those people and the people who represent them in Congress. Is that basically the strategy? A hundred percent. And I think, like, it works on a couple levels.

One, so I remember David Roberts was actually on this podcast, and he talks a lot about how power is necessary. We have to build power in the climate movement, largely because the GOP has just failed to move, and it's so intransient. And so you need a lot of public pressure to be pushing this issue and to be pushing it to the forefront, which I think the Green New Deal helps. And then the second thing is that it's also, besides just being right, it makes political sense. People of color are overwhelmingly in favor of climate change, but a lot of those same people cannot care about climate change or might not make it their first issue because they are so economically insecure and facing so many existential crises. I think I talked about this on Twitter before,

but I think the existential crises argument is really tough because what constitutes an existential crisis depends on who you are and where you are and what other problems you face. So climate change, if you are a black woman who's a single mother, right, whose kid has asthma, yeah, you want to fix the environment because your kid has asthma, but you also have a precarious job. You don't have any savings potentially, right? Your child's school isn't that great, so you're worried about that. So climate change is falling far below. Now, if we can talk to people and connect climate change to the things that they care about, that is a huge potential block of climate voters that you just activated that might not have voted on that issue before. Right.

And so you're leaving them on the table. And also, these are the same populations that, let's be honest, conservative groups, fossil fuel companies that don't want this to happen. Those are the people that they're going to target talking about job loss, about economic loss, about what this transition is going to take away from them. So why don't we head them off before we give them the space to do that? Yeah, it makes sense. So the other big issue from critics is, as you mentioned, financing. People say, okay, how are we going to finance this? Is it going to be higher taxes? And if it's not higher taxes, then, you know, maybe it's true. We've worried way too much about debt and deficits in the past.

But if this is really going to be the cost of a World War style mobilization, you know, aren't we going to risk inflation at some point if we keep just financing it through, you know, debt and deficit? So I'm not an economist, but all the economists that I've talked to definitely agree that that fear about inflation is overhyped, not only because we haven't met our inflation targets in years, not only because the rate of borrowing is, in years, not only because the rate of borrowing is interest rates are low, but also because we have tools to deal with inflation, right? This is a problem that we know how to solve. Climate change is a problem. You can't argue with physics, but if you have, I guess I just don't understand. You can't argue with physics, but if you have, and we do have the tools to deal with inflation, then I don't understand quite why it's

such a big worry. Yeah, I mean, I guess if we were, if this country were under attack, like we were in one of the world wars, we wouldn't sit there and be like, well, we need a mass mobilization effort to fight the war. But first, we have to figure out how to deficit finance it. Exactly. And we're talking about coral reefs disappearing right like not existing in 20 years we're talking about hundreds of thousands of deaths if not millions of deaths we're also talking about an economy that is already bleeding money because of climate change and it's only going to get worse was the nasa study that just came out that was like 91 billion the u.s economy lost just last year due to climate change. Like

there is no reality in which climate change doesn't create a cost. The issue is, are you going to deal with that cost on the front end proactively and try to plan and create a better economy? Or are you just going to deal with it when it's an emergency? Because you're going to deal with it, right? It's going to come with the price tag. You just need to decide when and where and how you want to spend your money. So what's your most effective argument to skeptics and to people you're trying to mobilize around this issue? my personal story, which is that I came into this climate fight really recently. And that was largely because climate has seemed like such a white issue to me. Not that it only affected white people. But like I said, I was trying like all of my work has dealt with equity and poverty and these intersectional solutions. And so and I'm trying to center marginalized people in the work that I do. Right. How do we create a system that actually works for them, that gives them power instead of distributing the pain to them? Right. That gives them resources instead of distributing violence to them.

I just never, I couldn't understand how I'm talking to a, you know, I'm trying to write policy for a woman who's standing two days in line for public childcare assistance, who like has a shift job. Her boss is calling her threatening to fire her, but she can't even go to her job if, you know, if her childcare assistance isn't renewed and she might not even make it to the front of that line after two days, right? And so how am I talking to her about solar panels? Like what? I don't, I didn't, I didn't understand the connections. But coming into this work, we did a lot of work on environmental justice at the Detroit Health Department. And then Abdul El-Sayed, who I was his policy director, is a huge advocate of environmental issues, especially from a public health perspective.

And then this understanding how the system worked. Right. And also understanding the fact that, like, we can change this. This is human made and we have a lot of the technologies that we need. And so I try to explain that to people because I'm like, I've amassed an immense amount of social and political capital for a 29 year old black woman, especially for a 29 year old in general. I have a Rhodes Scholarship. I'm educated. I should care about these things. And if I don't care until I understand how it fits in the system, you better believe that people who have a lot less time and a lot less money and, you know, just a lot more sort of pressing issues to them are not going to connect with it either. But we need these people to lead this movement because this idea that somehow we're just going to get there by trying to like persuade GOP power brokers is just maddening to me.

They haven't come along yet. I was actually just on a podcast where I heard that like conservative white men are the least likely to be alarmed by climate change, right? And we're just ignoring all of these people who are suffering from these systems and also who would move if they just understood. And so I find that that's really effective because once you explain to people like, hey, I didn't start out in climate because I think the other thing that we don't recognize is that there's like quite a high bar to entering into the environmental space. It's a very science heavy space. And often it feels like unless you are a particular activist, you can't speak unless you're a climate scientist. And so I think lowering those barriers, talking about how much systems made a difference to me and now to the communities that I, you know, talk to and work with really helps.

Yeah, I do think it's about connecting the dots for people, right? Because you can already see, you know, like there's a whole bunch of people when you tell them, well, you know, the coral reefs are going to disappear in 10 years. You know, they might say, oh, well, that seems sad, but oh, well, that's not like existential. And once you know what that means for coral reefs disappearing, then you're more alarmed and look, and you're also alarmed when you start seeing like when it's a drought on your farm, right? When it's a wildfire in your backyard, when your kids are suffering from asthma because there's a coal plant. And I do think we probably all have to work harder to connect the dots about why this is such an urgent crisis in people's lives right now, because otherwise you get people saying like, so wait, we have to do a bunch of stuff now for something that's way off in the

future, or people are saying is off in the future 10 years. Like, do I really want to believe it? Do I really want to have a mass mobilization right now? And it seems like the big challenge here is like helping people and making people understand especially people in power like how urgent this is for people's lives right now absolutely and i think that again power building is part of that i remember when i first came into this like the world war ii mobilization example made sense to me but i also i was always like well in order to get that sort of of amongst the people, you have to have everyone sort of agree, or at least most people agree that this is like an imminent threat that has to be moved on immediately. Right.

That's how you get the sort of very friendly Congress. That's how you get a friendly and willing public. And I feel like right now, because the Green New Deal is helping to connect all these dots, that urgency is coming, right? And also, obviously, there's all of these other things, wildfires going on, right? There's constantly the polar vortex, you know, 15 homeless people in Chicago froze to death, right? Like, this is not normal. And then the next week, it was like 60 degrees. Like, people understand that this isn't normal, but doing that connecting work is so crucial.

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're doing that work and all the work that you're doing on the Green New Deal and this movement to try to get people to pay attention. Really appreciate it. And thank you so much for joining us. I know you're very busy trying to save the planet. Oh, please.

You're so welcome. I don't want to go down in a ball of fire either. I want to eat myself into the grave like a good American. Thanks to Rihanna Gunwright for joining us today. We'll see you guys on Thursday. Bye. Bye. bye bye Bye.