The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 2516 - How Gaza Exposed The West’s Moral Rot; NYC’s Left-Wing Uprising w/ Omar El Akkad, Chi Ossé

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

It's an Emmajority Wednesday (I know, we're as confused as you are) and we have two great guests for you today. First, we cover Donald Trump's ominous threats to protesters who are upset about ICE rai...ds in Los Angeles and around the country. After that, Emma talks to journalist and author Omar El Akkad about his new book "One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This" which reckons with the failure and refusal of the West to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Get Omar's book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/777485/one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this-by-omar-el-akkad/ And later we're joined by New York City Council member Chi Ossé about Zohran Mamdani's exciting political campaign, the left's momentum in America's biggest city and the how we can fight for affordable housing while protecting vulnerable communities. Follow him on social media, he's always putting out great stuff, and learn more about Zohran Mamdani's campaign and how you can get involved here: https://www.zohranfornyc.com/ In the Fun Half, we check in on the ruptured bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Musk is trying to play cute but Trump doesn't seem like he wants to get back together at this point. The White House Press Secretary said they acknowledge Elon's recent statement but that's about it. Lol. Greta Thunberg has been released from Israeli detention, though two of her fellow activists from the flotilla, Thiago Avila and Rema Hassan have apparently been transferred to Israeli prisons where they are in solitary confinement. Greta tells reporters that the very least countries like hers can do now is advocate for an end to the genocide and to recognize Palestine as a state. We're glad she's safe, but Dave Portnoy certainly isn't. He joked about wanting to blow up her ship with a missile, though he's also gotten very touchy about jokes that target Jewish people, while he himself continues to make antisemitic jokes. Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Follow us on TikTok here!: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here!: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here!: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here!: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase! Check out today's sponsors: • TRUST & WILL: Get 20% off at https://trustandwill.com/MAJORITY • NAKED WINES: To get 6 bottles of wine for $39.99, head to https://NakedWines.com/MAJORITY and use code MAJORITY for both the code and password Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech @RussFinkelstein Check out Russ' podcast the New Yorker Political Scene Scene: https://rss.com/podcasts/newyorkerpoliticalscenescene/ Check out Matt’s show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon’s show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza’s music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder – https://majorityreportradio.com/

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You are listening to a free version of The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. To support this show and get another 15 minutes of daily program, go to Majority.fm. Please. The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Wednesday, June 11th, 2025. My name is Emma Vigeland in for Sam Cedar, and this is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Omar Elakad will be with us to talk about his book.
Starting point is 00:00:46 One day, everyone will have always been against this. Later in the show, New York City Council member Chi Ose joins us to talk about Zoron, broker fee ban, and the insurgent left here in the city. Also on the program, last night L.A. imposed a downtown curfew as Trump pours in Marines and National Guardsmen for a taxpayer-funded display of force. Guantanamo Bay is back on the table for migrant detentions as Trump floats sending 9,000 people,
Starting point is 00:01:24 including people from ally countries like the U.K. and France, to the infamous torture prison off the shores of our country. MSNBC reports that ICE is creating tactical units to deploy the five blue cities being described as an authoritarian power grab over local governments. A grand jury indicts New Jersey Representative La Monica McIver for protesting at an immigration detention center. Trump's interim AG Alina Haba Unfortunately went to my high school
Starting point is 00:02:03 I'm not going to talk about that Saying jarul boys Habba Habba Haba Abba what are you doing Inditing a sitting congresswoman Well It's because the king said so The king said so
Starting point is 00:02:18 It's the watchword maybe Elon Musk apologizes for some of his attacks on Donald Trump I know to come Those come downs can be real tough. Call on him move. Okay. Jeffrey Epstein files.
Starting point is 00:02:32 He said some. I wonder what side of the ledger that one's on. Mikey Cheryl handily wins the New Jersey gubernatorial primary. And the well-funded APEC darling, Josh Gottheimer, barely cracks double digits. What a joy to see. The Abundance Democrat. Yeah. We're the popularists.
Starting point is 00:02:56 now, baby. A poll finds that 64% of Israelis think there's no need for the news to highlight the suffering of civilians in Gaza anymore. Okay. House Republicans get queasy as Trump and Russ vote
Starting point is 00:03:12 float illegally clawing back funding from the last spending bill already approved by Congress to fund their tax cuts. An appeals court keeps Trump's tariffs in place for now, as he says he and China have a deal. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard admits she fed classified JFK assassination files into an AI program.
Starting point is 00:03:40 Dozens of workers at the CDC walk out in Atlanta calling on RFK Jr. to resign. And lastly, that same HHS just cut nearly a thousand suicide hotline services for LGBT. Hugh Youth. All this and more on today's majority report. It's an emmajority report, actually, on a Wednesday, which you don't typically see, but Sam and I are switching days, because I'm going to be off Thursday and Friday for, you know, that whole wedding thing. Number 13 writes in, correcting me, it seems. Jesus Christ, y'all, the Congresswoman wasn't protesting. She was performing an oversight visit. Um, apologies. Some of the articles call it protesting, so it can be a little bit difficult to keep track. But thanks for the correction regardless. They're targeting lawmakers who are protesting, too. So it's just, it's sometimes, yeah.
Starting point is 00:04:39 I mean, it is a good point, though. The protest gets overapplied. Melissa Jira Grant had a good piece in the, uh, the new republic about how this isn't just about protesting ICE. This is about how we need to stop ICE from doing what they are doing. in people's communities like taking nine year olds and sending them to honduras like it's disgusting and it's the resisting it is it's not just about like protesting it and here letting our voices be heard i'm glad when i hear that uh this is tom homen say this is making it harder for us to take
Starting point is 00:05:13 away people that just want to put in tiles at home depot yeah the community's pissed off at that that's that's why like they have to say i'm sorry to go off on this but like tom homeman's saying we're not actually going after criminals and who cares that they don't have records. Well, DHS has been on Twitter and ICE has been on Twitter the last couple of days saying, look at all these criminals. And it's not just that they're here illegally, but they're also doing drug traffic and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, it's insane.
Starting point is 00:05:39 Habo says the two counts that she's being charged with carry a maximum sentence of up to eight years in prison. I mean, it's just this would not be happening if Donald Trump wasn't inserting his loyalists into these positions of power in ways that are really breaking convention, honestly. Speaking of that guy, Donald Trump, who has infected every element of our lives and is constantly giving us anxiety, I mean, we try to alleviate it a little bit with mockery, but the images that they're coming out here of this Fort Bragg speech are a bit concerning. I feel like if you've been paying attention to politics long enough, you'll see why this is not this is very atypical right um it's not a shock that sometimes in most countries in the
Starting point is 00:06:31 world military personnel sometimes lean right wing um and that's why you can have elements like in ukraine like the azov battalion that have right wing views but that is often used as like a right justification here to cut off arms to Ukraine. It's not necessarily I think the strongest footing to put your argument on. But Trump is going a step further
Starting point is 00:07:01 and inflaming the politicization of our armed services. Like maybe I'm just old fashioned but it doesn't make me feel super comfortable to see uniform troops cheering on explicitly political speeches
Starting point is 00:07:17 especially when those speeches are fascistic in nature and it it there there should be some confidence in our society that our military is not going to be politicized in this manner and that it's going to put its oath to the constitution over the political movement of the commander-in-chief at one point but trump is actively trying to undercut that notion so on saturday it's his birthday. It's not even the exact alignment of the 250th anniversary, I think, of the U.S. Army, but they're doing that to celebrate the dear leader at the same time. And he's been ramping up to this. You've seen tanks rolling into Washington, D.C. for this ostentatious display,
Starting point is 00:08:06 as Trump is justifying cutting grandma's social security access under the auspices of trying to make the government more efficient and less wasteful, the numbers on this military display are as wasteful as it gets. And it's just to flatter his ego. Here he is talking about what's happening in L.A. during this speech at Fort Bragg. And before going further, I want to say a few words about the situation in Los Angeles, California. Have you heard of the place where I've deployed thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines to protect federal law enforcement from the attacks of a vicious and violent mob. And some of the radical left, they say, oh, that's not nice.
Starting point is 00:08:52 Well, if we didn't do it, there wouldn't be a Los Angeles. It would be burning today, just like the houses were burning a number of months ago. Generations of army heroes did not shed their blood on distant shores only to watch our country be destroyed by invasion and third world lawlessness here at home, like is happening in California. As commander-in-chief, I will not let that happen. It's never going to happen. What you're witnessing in California is a full-blown assault on peace, on public order, and a national sovereignty carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion of our country. We're not going to let that happen. Remember, millions of people
Starting point is 00:09:43 We're allowed to come into our country, totally unchecked and unvetted by stupid people or radical left people or sick people. Either or. But regardless, open border policy, the dumbest policy, yet, I would say even dumber than men playing in women's sports. Transgender for everyone. Great. All right. There. He's got the through line with that.
Starting point is 00:10:10 Can I just say there's a joke? Sure. But there is a joke he makes a little later in that clip where he says, you know, something about, like, I forget what point he makes and he asks if they agree with it. Flag burning. Oh, that's what it is. Making it illegal to up to one year in prison, which he said on the campaign trail to burn the American flag. This has already been ruled on by the Supreme Court that's a protected free speech expression. Speaking of the American flag, Emma said all the nice stuff about, you know, how it would be nice to think better of our troops and stuff like that.
Starting point is 00:10:42 Google Fort Bragg and ask yourself if you're surprised by this and ask yourself if maybe the people who say we should be slashing the military and maybe maybe the founding fathers were right about a standing army. It's not compatible with democracy, which you just saw behind that guy. And there, let's do three here just to give people a sense of like, this is not a, this is not an invasion. the National Guardsmen, they don't even have anything to do. And now police in L.A. are being reassigned to protect the National Guardsmen who are protecting federal buildings that are not under attack. This is a video taken by Aaron Burnett, or at the very least published by Aaron Burnett of CNN, showing what it actually looks like here. We'll talk over this a little, but you see the National Guardsmen in riot gear all lined up in a row outside this federal building. Just kind of standing around.
Starting point is 00:11:57 Burnett's caption says there's no protests here. They'll pan out a bit, but go ahead not. Mexico, the guns in Mexico for any so-called invasion, they would come from Amlarica. right this is actually a point of contention our supreme court unanimously including the liberals said that our gun manufacturers aren't responsible for say arming the cartels despite marketing to them the same way they said you know um they're liable for marketing towards sandy hook right even though the marketing is exact same sort of thing um all you see there is some explicit language criticizing donald trump spray painted on the buildings i didn't realize
Starting point is 00:12:40 that vandalism was such a national concern that the national guards have to be sent in. But the right wing got its marching orders. This was so, it's so obvious. Like I wonder who they're actually speaking to directly if it's a group or if it's someone in the Trump administration directly. Stephen Miller.
Starting point is 00:12:59 Directly, it could be. Matt Walsh, Charlie Kirk, all tweeting out the same thing at the same time, basically, yesterday, June 9th, within, I mean, at Walsh and Kirk within an hour of one another. Just copy paste. Ban all third world immigration, Matt Walsh says, legal or illegal. There should be a moratorium on all immigration from the third world. We've reached our capacity.
Starting point is 00:13:27 We cannot be the world's soup kitchen anymore. Charlie Kirk. It's time to ban the world's soup kitchen as if the people here that we're at Home Depot aren't like building these people's houses. Yep, for sub-minimum wage. You know, can that, can we just, we have a little bit of time to play this new segment? We do, but I just want to highlight, like, how, well, let's do that in a sec. It's time to ban third world immigration, legal or legal.
Starting point is 00:13:50 It's almost exactly word for word. He just put it's in front of it. We've reached our limit and we have huge cultural, blah, blah, blah. Jack Posobiac, it's time to ban third world immigration, legal or illegal. Copy paste, copy paste. This is a coordinated propaganda outfit, and I want to emphasize. this stuff. With the tech right, which is putting images, the most inflammatory images, including the burning cars, including the guy standing on the hood that are not at all representative of the rest
Starting point is 00:14:21 of the protests. And that's the worst they can get, by the way. They're putting them to the top of everybody's feed and they're coordinating with right-wing influencers to manufacture consent that allows for this authoritarian crackdown. Go ahead, Matt. People are right to be mad. And anything that you see that seems excessive in the streets is provoked by this absolute lunatic white supremacist policy that we're seeing and this is a news story just one of many like this tom homin saying actually they're they're writing because we're taking rapists and drug traffickers is such a heinous smear against the entire people of los angeles or any of these immigrant communities they're upset because they're taking their brothers and fathers and sisters and wives and it's let's just play this
Starting point is 00:15:03 An update tonight on a nine-year-old Torrance boy and his father who were deported to Honduras, away from family and friends. Tonight, they are speaking out. KTLA's Lindsay Peña has more. Martir Garcia-Lara and his father, Martir Garcia-Banegas, are now back in Honduras after being deported from the U.S. just days ago. Now, in a small town, the nine-year-old is trying to get used to his new reality. He says, I was scared to come here. I wanted to stay with my brother. We first told you about Martyr and his father
Starting point is 00:15:42 after members of the Torrance Elementary PTA reached out to KTLA. Martir has attended classes there since the first grade and members of the school community were concerned about what had happened to him and his family. The pair were detained and separated after attending an immigration status hearing in downtown L.A. back in late May. Federal officials say the father and son had been ordered to return to Honduras back in
Starting point is 00:16:07 2003, but remained. Martyr's brother Kevin is still in the U.S., though. He's grown now, but Kevin was with me my whole life. I want to see my friends again. I miss all my friends. The elder, Martyr, saying he had a feeling things would end up this way and believes They're being cruel to people. Now, maybe there's people that are listening to this, I hope not,
Starting point is 00:16:40 that think that they would take this standing down. If people in their lives had them completely severed from the people they grew up with and loved and sent to a foreign country, maybe you would accept that standing down. I basically have a different view of humanity that you view that as an unjust encroachment, that you'd send this kid and his dad away from their brother and friends to start a whole new life
Starting point is 00:17:04 somewhere, what? Because Stephen Miller isn't happy with the fucking demographics. Because all in these images here about the Posobia, Kirk, whatever, notice the first thing they say, we have a huge cultural thing. That's all it is. The educational stuff, now we can deal with that.
Starting point is 00:17:19 George H.W. Bush knew we can deal with that. We could educate, even undocumented kids can be in schools. Housing? Who's building the housing? Are you kidding me? Financial? Who do you think? I mean, these are ridiculous, but it's ultimately because all these guys are white supremacists and they're in power right now.
Starting point is 00:17:35 I actually just got this book and we've had I believe that we've had this guest on before the author of hate monger Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the white nationalist agenda, Gene Guerrero.
Starting point is 00:17:52 I'm going to read it soon actually because there's some backstory to Stephen Miller I feel like hasn't been discussed enough, including the fact that he grew up in the L.A. area. And there were reports in Guerrero's book about how when he was in high school in Santa Monica, he would clash with the students there who were speaking Spanish and he would tell them to speak only English at the time. His level of resentment towards immigrants, legal immigrants, goes back to his childhood. This is a very small man motivated by deep racism, anxiety, self and outward hatred.
Starting point is 00:18:31 wherever it begins chicken or the egg situation. He's been disowned by his family. And yeah, the vice did a video on that where he's saying, you know, make the, make the, make the, and everyone knew who the janitors were. Make the janitors pick up your trash. Throw it on the ground. Who cares? He was disowned by his family in part because he grew up in a Jewish household and the Trump
Starting point is 00:18:53 administration is so anti-Semitic, if I recall. So this is somebody who has a lot of it. of cruelty in his heart. But this is why it's so important to back off even the concept of legal immigration as a framework for analyzing this moment. Because think about the word legal. Just think about it a little bit more deeply when you're trying to apply it to an action or a process of legal or illegal immigration. And then when you apply that to a human being And you put people's humanity within the context of outside of state acceptability, which is illegal, and inside it. Then the state gets to define who is more human than the other person.
Starting point is 00:19:42 And with a white supremacist fascistic administration in place, we see how this is manifesting in practice. AOC had a great point on blue sky. We can end with this. But I just want to show that, like, there's a way to respond to this that is. capitulating to the right, like we're seeing from way too many Democrats. She writes, it is 100% carrying water for the opposition to participate in this collective delusion that Democrats, for some reason, need to answer for every teen who throws a rock,
Starting point is 00:20:15 rather than hold the Trump administration accountable for intentionally creating chaos and breaking the law to stoke violence. They are in charge. They are both stoking this violence and exaggerating any violence. And I'd also say Democrats need to get their cops under control so they don't help provoke these and instigate these things into bigger problems like they've been doing. It's not just the National Guard being sent in. It's police departments that, frankly, we haven't brought under control as they need to be. It's a failure of liberal governance in cities, which is being exploited by the right right now.
Starting point is 00:20:52 But that's in part because liberal governance, obviously preferable to right-wing governance. but it's had these failures where police departments have completely gone off the rails and are wagging the tail of Karen Bass as opposed to the other way around. And it's what makes this race here in New York City so important because it's time that true left-wing leadership comes back to our cities, not this. In a moment, we'll be talking to Omar El-Aqad, author of One Day, everyone will have always been against this. but first a word from our sponsors.
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Starting point is 00:26:40 award-winning journalist and novelist author of his latest. One day everyone will have. always been against this. The title is pretty self-explanatory, but Omar, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Of course. First of all, I can promise you that this would be the first, maybe the first one of your only media interviews on this book that you won't be asked to condemn Hamas. So I think, you know, you're that you're in good hands here. I had the statement ready. All right, fine. I guess. we'll make do we'll make do um so you were born in cairo uh your your book kind of interweaves
Starting point is 00:27:24 your personal story coming to the west as a teenager coming to canada where you've you've been in both worlds right and you can you had like this shift in your world but you have the mental clarity being an older kid at that point to kind of see some of those differences in coming to the United States, like, or sorry, to Canada. Just tell us a little bit about that transition, how your, what your conception of Western values were versus how you experience them when coming to the United States. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's, it's, I mean, Canada, I keep saying United States. I mean, I ended up in the U.S. eventually, about 11, 12 years ago. So it's, it's a bit of a circuitous route, right, because I'm born in Egypt. My dad has to get the
Starting point is 00:28:14 hell out of Egypt when I'm five years old. And so we moved to Qatar, which, you know, pound for pound is the richest place on earth. And if you've never been, it's a very relatively surreal lifestyle. You know, if you're not among the migrant laborer class who are treated like absolute dirt, if you're sort of middle class and up, it's the easiest life in the world, in large part, because you're stepping on the necks of the folks who actually sort of built the place. but if you're not sort of born into a cutary family you can't stay in Qatar permanently
Starting point is 00:28:48 you're always in a kind of precarious situation where your visa could be revoked or you know so on and so forth and so we had planned on that happening and my dad had decided to start the immigration process to Canada at the time he couldn't point out Canada on the map it was just sort of the next destination because once you leave your home that's kind of the life you live
Starting point is 00:29:11 you're looking for the next harbor and the way I thought of Canada specifically the U.S., the West generally was as a kind of harbor to me it wasn't so much a place as a kind of negation. When you grow up in a place like Qatar, everything is censored, for example.
Starting point is 00:29:33 You know, I have these formative memories of holding up copies of Newsweek to the light to try and see past the black ink that the censor had used to block off whatever was, you know, deemed too dangerous for me to read. And so my first impression of the West was essentially just a negation of that. I don't care what this place is, but at least I can go there, and I don't have to deal with this. And for the most part, that is what it was for me when I first show up to Canada.
Starting point is 00:30:03 You know, I go to the library, and I can ask for any book I want, and I don't have to worry about the possibility of getting deported if it's the wrong thing. know, that sort of thing. And for the majority of my life in this part of the world, that was enough. I could deal with everything else. I could deal with the racism. I could deal with the sort of petty indignities because I had that. And I think the book, in large part, is about the moment where that tradeoff wasn't
Starting point is 00:30:31 something I could do anymore, where the price I was paying for that became too high for me to bear. and and that threshold was that crossed in the environment after october seventh i mean what was that feeling like for you to kind of see we experienced it covering it on the show the immediate aftermath of the hamas attack was this whole display of this ramp up of what the genocide was going to look like. And I think we all foresaw that it was going to be a genocidal slaughter. I don't know if we could have foreseen it being a year and eight months long and us having basically no idea of being completely in the dark at this point about how many are dead. I mean, it's in the hundreds of thousands. And yet there's still this Western narrative that
Starting point is 00:31:33 it's oh it's 58 or 60,000 people like the slaughter that we've seen it was quite obvious and that's what the title of your book is a version of a tweet that you put out that went viral it was quite obvious in the weeks following yeah I mean I think for me the way I've been describing it is
Starting point is 00:31:56 in terms of this break at least personally for me I've been describing it the same way that sort of Hemingway's characters went bankrupt, you know, little by little and then all at once. I was a journalist for 10 years, and there were things that I saw that if I was a less cowardly person, would have probably brought me to this break much sooner. You know, you go to Afghanistan and you see the local soldiers being put on the front lines of every forward operating base such that if the attack comes, they're the ones who die.
Starting point is 00:32:31 not the NATO soldiers. You see the hierarchy of human life. You go to Guantanamo. You see this ad hoc legal system in violation of all normal sort of legal modes designed purely to get these convictions. And in every case, I was able to compartmentalize and to say, yes, there's something kind of rotten here,
Starting point is 00:32:52 but it's just this moment, and it's just this situation, it's unique to this. And I think what has happened over the last 20 months is that my ability to compartmentalize has imploded. You know, I keep coming back to the same three factors that make this different for me. And those are sort of intimacy, immediacy, and complicity. I wake up every morning,
Starting point is 00:33:23 and within moments of the horrible thing happening, I see it. little kids starving to death, toddlers torn apart by the force of these bombs. There's an intimacy and there's an immediacy to it that if I was a perfect human being, probably shouldn't matter, right? What's wrong is wrong regardless of how immediate or intimate it might be. But it does matter, that I see it so closely. And then thirdly, there's the complicity, right? my tax dollars are doing this, right? I'm killing those kids. That's me. And so it becomes
Starting point is 00:34:01 impossible to ignore in the way that I so successfully ignored these things previously. That's what's changed for me. And it's not like these currents weren't present before. You don't even have to look to Afghanistan or to Guantanamo Bay. You can look to Gaza itself. This place has been an open-air prison for years and years and years, and nobody cared. On October 6th, of 2020, a report came out detailing how deadly a year it was for Palestinian children. That's never the
Starting point is 00:34:33 starting point of any narrative around this, but it existed. And I was able to ignore it, and that's a function of the kind of human being I am. That's a function of the obliviousness that largely carried me through my existence in the West and has largely
Starting point is 00:34:49 fallen apart now. Well, I think, you know, it's it's not moral failing it's more just what's engendered in us as a part of being
Starting point is 00:35:02 in the West we have an ivory tower kind of view of the other parts of the global south and the Middle East that we exploit but it's
Starting point is 00:35:14 the other part that's so striking in your book is like it's even in the title when we're talking about this moral rod of Western liberalism which I want to get into even more specifically,
Starting point is 00:35:27 but just the idea that people can't see historical parallels or feel this immense guilt about being on the wrong side of history, your analysis of this moment, can you speak a little bit more about the inconsistency of things like, you know, how we speak about the Holocaust and never again? And then the silence of some of those same people as this genocide is not being done
Starting point is 00:35:55 we don't read about it the next day in the newspaper we see it every day on our phone I think for me to the best I've been able to answer that kind of question has to do with the sort of reward and punishment equilibrium with respect to something like the suffering of the Palestinian people certainly where I live
Starting point is 00:36:21 I live out on the West Coast, I think this is true of most of the United States, if not the Western world at large. There is essentially no consequence to pretending none of this is happening. I wake up every day and I open my computer and I see evidence of the worst things human beings can do to one another. And then I go about my day and it's as though none of this is happening. You know, and there's emails that need to be replied to and there's bills that need to be paid, and there are Zoom meetings that need to drag on endlessly, and you need to do the stuff. And in fact, not only is there no consequence for the vast majority of the people that I'm around
Starting point is 00:37:02 at any given moment to thinking about any of this, there's an immense punishment waiting if you do think about this too much, and if you do talk about this too much. I mean, I was on tour for this book for two and a half months, and at virtually every event, somebody would come up to me afterwards and say this is the first space where I've been able to sit with this where I've been able to think about this because if I talk about this at work I might get fired
Starting point is 00:37:29 if I talk about this with my friends they might stop being my friends and it's not you know they're not there at this event because they love me or they love the book they don't care about any of that it's just a place where you can feel like you're not losing your mind and so I think a lot of this makes perfect sense if you have conditioned yourself to believe that Palestinians are not sufficiently human? And what else do you're good?
Starting point is 00:37:57 How has that conditioning made itself manifest in the West? I mean, there's a lot of discussion about anti-Semitism in this country. Anti-Jewish hate is a real thing, but a great majority of the instances that are cited are protests against Zionism and the genocide. And I can name dozens of think pieces that I've seen just in the last month on that very topic. And yet Islamophobia, which, you know, even in the word, right, it sounds like you're afraid of spiders. But Islamophobia is the most pernicious and widespread bigotry in our country right now. And it crosses traditional political lines.
Starting point is 00:38:48 where when we're talking about Western liberalism, there's this kind of hollowness of performing virtue and doing so in basically an explicitly domestic context about groups that have been marginalized historically in this country. But when that looks outward and expands to the consequences of capitalism and imperialism of which the Gaza genocide is both, why can't. Why is that analysis failing and why is it in the end so racist in outcome with so many of these people who would bulk at that idea if it was applied to black people, here domestically, Latino people, et cetera? I mean, there's a couple of things that come to mind. First and foremost, I mean, we live in an incredibly anti-Semitic part of the world. The current administration is rife with raging anti-Semites. I mean, I know that it's sort of been buried under God knows how many scandals and outrages now, but it wasn't that long ago that we were sitting around trying to discern whether one of the central figures in this administration was actually making a Nazi salute or not.
Starting point is 00:40:02 I mean, this isn't subtle stuff. I think that is separate from a patently disingenuous effort to conflate criticism of a state that is currently engaged in an act of genocide with anti-Jewish. hatred. I think that is a patently bad faith effort. But it doesn't change the fact that we do live in an incredibly anti-Semitic part of the world. I think with respect to Islamophobia, one of the reasons that it has essentially no effect is because it can have no effect. The consequences of this country or this part of the world genuinely caring about anti-Muslim or anti-Arab hatred are too immense to ponder because the second we decide
Starting point is 00:40:50 that these human beings of which I am one are sufficiently human such as to warrant actual response to this hatred. We're not just contending with the random stuff that's like yelled at me every now and then on the street. We're not just contending with angry comments on Twitter from Freedom Eagle 1776 at Hotmail or whatever, right? We are contending with wholesale sports.
Starting point is 00:41:15 water, right? Which is happening right now. And how do you go about sort of admitting to yourself that this is the consequence of the thing you've allowed to fester? I think just at a societal level, at a governmental level, once you start thinking of these human beings as being sufficiently human to warrant condemnation, the thing you have to condemn is so overwhelming and so all-encompassing and so all-inditing as to essentially require something much, much bigger than a statement of apology or, you know, some declaration of regret or something. And so I think that's part of it. And honestly, part of it is proximity to whiteness.
Starting point is 00:42:00 Yes. Like, you know, I know full well that I get very different reactions depending on whether the first thing someone hears about me is this accent or whether they read my name first. those are two entirely different human beings primarily because this accent has a proximity to whiteness and this name doesn't and I know I have to live with that that's the calculus of my existence in this part of the world
Starting point is 00:42:23 and that's not going to change overnight let's this is a good way I think to transition to this poll I saw curious about your take on this Omar yesterday Harat's the Israeli paper posted a rober about this study that was conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. So this is done by the university.
Starting point is 00:42:52 This, the Zionists will say, ah, are so liberals, right? Nope, they're just reposting what the study found, reporting on it, and you can't count on other Israeli media to do that. So 64% of Israelis see no need for more reporting on Gaza's suffering is what the poll found. Now, we should say that this includes Arab Israelis in this total. So in terms of Jewish Israelis, it's higher than 64% who see no need to cover Gaza's suffering anymore. If we could go to the paragraph, according to the survey conducted by Dr. Boaz Sharkey and Lee Aldar, 64% of Israelis believe that the local media is reporting on Gaza has been balanced,
Starting point is 00:43:38 and there is no need to present a broader picture. regarding the situation of Gaza's civilians. 89% of the people that support the Nanyahu government have that view. But the other question is, if we could scroll down a little bit more here, this is good. 41% of all respondents said that the news on Israel's two mainstream commercial stations, channels 12 and 13, are biased in favor of the population of Gaza. So that is the plurality opinion. But scroll down even more, because that's insane, but there's even more. okay here we go um actually no down a little bit more thank you here it is another question asked in the
Starting point is 00:44:21 a chord poll was to what extent respondents agreed with the statement that there are no innocent people in gaza 64 percent agreed with it to a large extent describing their agreement as between four and six on a scale in which one is total this agreement and six is complete agreement so this is the top 50th percentile in terms of strength of response. 64% agree with the statement. There are no innocent people in Gaza. And then the last piece of the poll that I think is important is on the, here, this paragraph.
Starting point is 00:44:53 When it comes to Israelis' views of foreign media outlets, which for the purposes of the polling referred to CNN and the BBC, 69% of respondents said they were biased in favor of Palestinians in Gaza. even when asked about Fox News, which is identified with the American right wing, half of those polled and 67% of voters for coalition parties said it was biased in favor of Gazans. I just want people to sit with that for just a second. 69% of overall Israelis think CNN and BBC's coverage and here in the United States were intimately aware with CNN's coverage and Dana Bash and Jake Tapper pushing the pro-Israel narrative over and over
Starting point is 00:45:36 and over again. 69% of Israelis think they're biased in favor of Palestinians and half of Israelis think Fox News is biased in favor of Palestinians. What do you make of those numbers? What does it say about the West and Israeli society's role in it? I mean,
Starting point is 00:45:57 honestly, there's something refreshing about it because there isn't this sort of attempt to hide behind a narrative that clearly has no connection with reality. One of the ironic things about that study is that if you were to try to essentially write a news story about that and run it in most of these Western publications that are considered too biased in favor of Palestinians, you either wouldn't get it on the air or you'd get fired for it.
Starting point is 00:46:31 It would be considered too inflammatory. And this is true of a lot of stuff that runs in Israel. media and runs plainly without any real controversy that would be considered far too controversial to run to run in the Western world. I mean, one way to think about this is imagine living in Israeli society right now and not holding those views. How incredibly frustrating an experience that must be. this is
Starting point is 00:47:05 this is essentially a viewpoint that is in line with the reality of what is happening obviously in the most overt way over the last 20 months but also over the last 70 plus years the non-existence of the Palestinian people is central to a particular narrative of Israeli life and again if that sounds controversial fine but it's in line with the reality of the situation. It's an ethno state maintained by violence and domination,
Starting point is 00:47:38 and a majority of Israeli society wants the violence and domination to continue to maintain the ethnic purity of the state. And I mean, look, if all this stuff makes your viewers or your listeners uncomfortable, fine. Ignore Israel entirely. Name me one colonial outposts in history that was able to maintain, its colonial narrative, while simultaneously maintaining a narrative in which the indigenous population that had to be displaced or eradicated was of equal value. Their lives were of equal value.
Starting point is 00:48:12 It doesn't exist. It certainly does not exist in the United States. It only exists in hindsight. It only exists one or two hundred years later when, you know, the Obama administration can issue this declaration saying, sorry about all the genocide. And, you know, my book is titled what is titled for a reason. reason, right? Because we're going to get around to that place. We're not there yet. And so, to me, you know, first of all, this isn't the first poll of its kind. This is obviously sort of incredibly heightened because of the moment we're in. But there's a very long history of these kinds of opinions being in place. And they sort of have to be, right? There's no way somebody can imply that a situation in which quite literally millions of Palestinians live in open-air prisons, where every movement is subjected to control by the Israeli
Starting point is 00:49:06 military, where they have to carry different ID cards and travel down different roads and take different buses, there's no way somebody can imply that that is an equal landscape from which to build peace. That just doesn't exist. And I think, honestly, it's sort of refreshing to just see that statement outright, instead of hearing some State Department spokesperson person. Talk to me about the desire for equal peace and equal justice as all the while my tax money is funding, this incredible glaring asymmetry. And this is why it has to come from the outside, like it had to do in South Africa and in Rhodesia. And the differences, I think, in those instances are, one, the level of militarization and bombing is not anywhere close. But
Starting point is 00:49:56 two, white people were definitely demographic minorities. The anxiety, too, within Israel is the idea that it's more like 50-50 if you were to incorporate Palestinians into official statehood, not just under occupation and control and as third-class citizens that they're now slaughtering. So I guess that's a good way, I think, for us to wrap. rap here what what we're in this place right now
Starting point is 00:50:36 the Mamdani campaign in here in New York is very exciting and he went on TV and he talked about when being asked about his views about Israel he they said do you believe as a Jewish state that you you support it he said he supports it as a state of equal rights and this is I think a really important divergence from liberalism, which has been maintaining this two-state solution myth for longer than my lifetime. And it's so untenable at this point, but our politicians on the
Starting point is 00:51:11 national level have completely not caught up to it. Can you speak about the contradiction of liberalism's support for Israel as an ethno state, especially when you compare it to like the multicultural values these same people espoused domestically? Yeah, I think there's something patently exhausting
Starting point is 00:51:36 about trying to maintain a sort of liberal approach to this because you essentially have to take every other value that you claim to espouse in every other case and carve out a little exception for it. You know, segregation is wrong,
Starting point is 00:51:52 except in this case where it's good and necessary. Apartheid is wrong, except in this case where it's good and necessary. The sort of visceral, emotional and psychological reaction you feel when you hear about people being forced to take only certain roads, for example, has to be set aside. And over time, that is damaging, right? And I think what you're seeing,
Starting point is 00:52:22 right now is, at least for the first time in my lifetime, an actual political consequence to this kind of incredibly disjointed mode of liberalism in which you hold on very vocally to a certain set of views and principles, except in one case. If you had told me, you know, two years ago, that the suffering of the Palestinian people would factor in any way in the results of a U.S. presidential election, I would have thought you were out of your mind. And now it can be argued that at least to a certain extent this factored in the last presidential election.
Starting point is 00:53:05 That means something. There is someone who, you know, maybe he doesn't win, but has a serious shot at becoming mayor of maybe the most important city in the country who is finally calling out this glaring hypocrisy. Again, if you told me that two years ago, I would have thought you're out of your mind. And so what you're watching, I think, is a level of change.
Starting point is 00:53:26 But politics, particularly sort of federal politics in this country, is a trailing metric. It takes a very long time to catch up with what the population is thinking, what people are demanding. And so as sort of heartened as I am by just seeing the most basic acknowledgement and the most rudimentary changes, It is depressing in the sense that I think of, you know, how many bodies between this moment and when we reach political calculus that acknowledges it, something is changing. It's just changing very, very slowly. And the Israelis are counting on that. It's why they're killing every journalist that they can find. It's the deadliest conflict.
Starting point is 00:54:11 I hate calling it that, but that's the metrics used for journalists in history. And they've killed all the record keepers. They've killed them. And so we don't, we won't, they want to use this period of darkness, both journalistically and in terms of Gaza's capacity to count the dead and their hospital capacity to kill as many as they can in this period of time where they're doing it in somewhat secret. I mean, look, the moment a U.S. presidential administration makes the phone call and lets it be known that there's actual consequences to any of this
Starting point is 00:54:50 and that it needs to stop, it will stop. I mean, fundamentally, this has happened in the past. This happened under Reagan very famously. None of this happens without my tax money, none of it. And the second a solution is imposed by the United States, and I use the word imposed very deliberately here, it will come to fruition. But we have had administration after administration year after year, decade after decade of some White House or State Department spokesperson coming up to the podium and saying, we're so flustered and frustrated.
Starting point is 00:55:30 We don't know what to do. They won't listen to us. And it's patently nonsense. And everybody knows it's nonsense. Everybody knows that the second that there are actual consequences and there's actual pressure to not engage. in what is effectively wholesale slaughter, that will all come to an end. It's just a matter of waiting on whether there's enough domestic political pressure such that enough politicians make the calculation that it is in their favor
Starting point is 00:55:59 or in their personal interest to consider Palestinians human. We're effectively waiting on that date. Every other argument is an attempt to employ a level of pragmatism and political calculus onto something that, at least to my mind, is this clear or moral issue as has existed in my lifetime. Absolutely. Well, everybody should read one day, everyone will have always been against this. It's a beautiful book.
Starting point is 00:56:30 Omar, thanks so much for your time. Today, we'll put a link to your book below wherever people are listening to or watching this. Thanks so much. And at majority.com. Thank you. Thanks. All right, folks, quick. Oh, quick break. And when we come back, we will be joined by Chiosay, city councilman here in New York.
Starting point is 00:57:11 Thank you. We are back, and we are joined now by Chiosay, New York City Council member representing Bedstuy and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. He's also been campaigning with memorial candidate Zoran Mamdani. of June 24th, a Democratic primary. Early voting starts June 14th. I will be early voting next week. I cannot wait. Chee, thanks so much for coming on the show. Oh, my God. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm so glad to see you because I've been sending around your videos to family and friends. For people that don't follow you on social media, you've been doing this series of why shit doesn't work or what's it called? Exactly. Yeah, why it's, can you
Starting point is 00:58:41 explain that? And this is just, you're a kind of this younger generation of Democrat that actually knows how they use social media. And they seem to all be coming out in New York. So pride for us, I guess. Yeah. I mean, I've been, I'm a child of the internet, right? And the second language that I speak after English is the language of the internet. And I utilize this tool of social media within my job as being a city council member. This arose a couple of years ago. We're the New York City RENK Guidelines Board, which is a board that's appointed by whoever the mayor is, was voting to, you know, increase New Yorkers' rents from 8 to 16%, which was completely outrageous, you know. And I arrived at a hearing, at a Rink Guidelines Board hearing to protest against what the board was proposing.
Starting point is 00:59:32 And there were about 16 people, you know, in the audience that were, you know, advocating for the rents to be lower. So I took to my phone, you know, spoke to TikTok, spoke to Instagram Reels, like edited a really short video, telling people to pay attention to the RGB, tell them to show up to the next hearing, and the video went viral. People were saying that they were going to bring their friends, and, you know, at this next hearing, you know, instead of 16 people at first hearing, over a thousand people showed up. And we were interviewing people on the line, and they were like, we came here because of your videos. We came here because of your videos. And at the end of that RGB vote, instead of it being from 8 to 16%, it was 1.2 to I think about 2.5. So ever since then, I've been utilizing short form media, not only as a tool for entertainment, but as a tool for political organizing, which helped me pass a bill recently that would ban force broker fees in New York City. And then also just it helps me get my values out there that incorporates a lot of people into the political process who have been disengaged.
Starting point is 01:00:36 prior to that? That is, it's encouraging because we just had a Taylor Lorenzo on like two weeks ago just about her thesis is that since the pandemic, the bridge between the internet world and the real world in terms of political communication, I mean, they've come together. And I think there are a lot of Democrats who are behind on the technical aspects, but also the messaging, which is the more important thing, right? This is when we're talking about policy and housing is so important here in New York City. We'll get to like the the Mamdani campaign, his proposals, some of the abundant stuff in just a sec.
Starting point is 01:01:17 But you mentioned the broker's fee ban, which takes into, takes effect today. Can you explain what broker's fees are here in New York City and why this is such a big deal that as of today, a judge denied the request from this real estate board to stop. the stoppage of broker's fees being offset onto the prospective tenant. How does that work and why is it so important that New York City got rid of it? Of course. So prior to today, if you were a prospective tenant in New York City and you're looking for an apartment, whether through word of mouth, on street easy, maybe from a friend, you are consistently finding that you are being forced to pay this broker fee that ranges from 10 to 15% of your annual rent to a broker that your landlord hired. And whenever you showed up to a listing, either sometimes the broker wasn't
Starting point is 01:02:14 there, either the broker was rude, you know, very unprofessional. And this is, I just say my personal experience is that I've had proposed broker's fees of like $7,000 to $8,000. And they, the broker calls you to give you the code to let you in so you can. can see the apartment yourself and then they want $7,000, $8,000. Yeah, it's fucking ridiculous and that's not an isolated story, right? We've heard this from thousands of New Yorkers. And we as New Yorkers prior to this bill just took that as, you know, a fact, you know, when we were spending thousands of dollars to someone that we've never met, right?
Starting point is 01:02:54 Or just gave us a code to a lockbox. So a couple of years ago, I introduced this bill called the Fair Act, which would require that whoever hires a broker within the city of New York would pay the broker fee. And the real estate lobby was pissed about this because they wanted to force tenants to pay a broker fee. They spent a lot of money and lobbying against the bill. They defeated it once, you know, when there was another council member who was blocking it from moving forward in the legislative process. But again, we were utilizing social media, TikTok, Instagram Reels, and telling people online to, call their council members, to call the speaker's office, to show up to city council hearings
Starting point is 01:03:35 and advocate on behalf of this bill. And this was attempted in the past to prevent, you know, broker fees from being forced onto tenants. But we were able to be so successful because we dominated the communication strategy about what this bill was trying to do. We were telling people simply that in what other transactions do you hire something and order something and then force the other person to pay for it. And we got the bill passed last November. The bill goes into effect today. The real estate industry of New York is pissed off,
Starting point is 01:04:10 but we successfully beat them in that pursuit. And we're going to save New Yorkers thousands of dollars. We're putting more bargaining power into the hands of tenants. You know, we're showing, you know, this lobby that's been able to squash tenants' rights over the past couple of years that we're here to fight and we're here to fight in a different way. Can you explain that to people how this elimination of forced brokers fees on the tenant will put downward pressure on rental prices? Because I think if the default is going to be, okay, well, the brokers have to make money some way. That means that's just going to get baked into
Starting point is 01:04:48 people's rent. Yeah. So, you know, I think that's bullshit when the real estate lobby says that it's going to be baked into, you know, people's rents. And also the fact that the Real Estate Board of New York is now concerned about increasing rents is completely outrageous. 44% of the housing stock in New York City, that's nearly 50% is rent stabilized. So it would be illegal for landlords or brokers to bake the fee into the rent in those cases. In addition to that, you know, rents are set by market forces, not by what landlords could charge. You know, if your landlord could raise your rent, they would have done so yesterday. And in addition to that, you know, this will put a downward pressure on rents because it gives tenants more bargaining power when it comes to their renegotiating of their lease.
Starting point is 01:05:33 You know, instead of having to pay a broker fee and moving into a new apartment, they won't have to pay a fee. The landlord would have to pay a fee to replace them as a tenant. And that would put a downward pressure on the rents in the city. It's exciting and also showing, I think, a little bit some more. results. And I'm wondering what your take is on this of really since 2018. It feels like there has been an effort and a successful effort to replace so many of these Democrats that were do nothing or corrupt or complicit with Andrew Cuomo up in Albany with the IDC. Basically for people that don't know, they were Democrats that had D next their name so people would vote for
Starting point is 01:06:20 them and they caucus independently with the Republicans and Cuomo kind of gave them a bunch of gifts and favors because it helped kill progressive legislation. We're now at this point right now where like the city is primed for a progressive mayor because the city council, there's a bunch of you guys there that are doing great work like this. Like with your endorsement of Zoron and this left wing almost insurgent movement in the city, do you see this as a really exciting opportunity for the city council to finally not have an acrimonious relationship with a mayor and one that could finally change the tides of high prices and everything here in New York. Absolutely. And just to hammer and uplift one of the points that you made, I don't even think
Starting point is 01:07:05 it's about progressivism. I think it's about economic populism, right? We are really, many of us within the council are putting forward, you know, legislation that is tangibly helping the lives of New Yorkers. And we've seen that in the past session in terms of the passing of this bill, and it will definitely yield way for Zoron to be elected as the next mayor of New York City. It would be so amazing to have a mayor that is not embarrassing and destructive to the city of New York like Eric Adams is. It's been really rough over the past four years, trying to navigate the corruption that
Starting point is 01:07:46 exists on the other side of City Hall. And I think New Yorkers deserve a mayor that will work with the city council who are doing some really amazing things around making the city more affordable, like the bill that I recently passed. When we're, housing is is so central to national conversations around the Democratic Party right now. It's never been more unaffordable to buy a home or rent one. Rent is now, I think, crossed the average threshold, if I remember reading it nationally, around one-third of people's income, which is supposed to be the high watermark for what you're paying on housing when you're budgeting for yourself. And that's just like it's baked into the cake at this point in terms of people's cost of living. We're seeing a record of credit card debt. There's a lot of people that are just putting it on the card.
Starting point is 01:08:42 And we're in a really precarious economic situation right now. There's a very well-funded centrist movement nationally within the Democratic Party called abundance that says a lot of this is the problem of zoning and zoning deregulation, which Zoron's campaign includes. But it kind of leaves out some of the other things that are commodifying our housing and gouging it to such a degree. What's been your take on this national conversation about rent and housing and how it looks like in practice on the city council here in New York? Yeah. You know, I think that's a really good question.
Starting point is 01:09:24 And I try to stay out of, you know, those quarrels that exist online. You know, I've always said that my response to our housing crisis and an affordability crisis within the city is yes and when it comes to housing, right? And I think sometimes people get stuck with one type of solution over the other. But I think there are a myriad of ways that we as legislators, as people who work for the government, can address our housing crisis. Yes, we need a rent freeze. Yes, we need social housing. Yes, we need good cause eviction.
Starting point is 01:09:56 And yes, we need to build more homes, right? New York City has a vacancy rate at 1.4%. We're seeing still thousands and thousands of people come from around the country and around the world. you know, seeking new jobs in the city, which puts a pressure on our housing market, right? It's very competitive to find a home. Listen, I represent beds dying Crown Heights, which are, you know, it's a predominantly black community still, but it's seeing a lot of displacement and gentrification over the past 10 years. I saw the largest displacement of black people in my community compared to any other community
Starting point is 01:10:30 in the city. And it's because folks who are moving here, you know, working, you know, on Wall Street or in tech jobs are competing for the same homes as people who are working for the MTA and other city jobs. So the only way, in one of the many ways that we can address, you know, that specific issue is to build more homes. And, you know, that is some market rate homes. That's affordable homes. That's low income homes. I do believe the answer to our housing crisis is yes. And I think sometimes people can get stuck in, you know, one camp or another camp and, you know, be very passionate about their beliefs there. But we have to be creative in many different ways in order to
Starting point is 01:11:10 solve what's what's happening with the affordability crisis. You mentioned gentrification, and it's really important, I think, to talk about this more because I feel like five, ten years ago, when that word was thrown around, it was usually like, yeah, it's kind of sometimes using our social cultural context to talk about, oh, like white people moving in, taking away people's home. Sometimes it was a bit of it like a joke or but for people on the ground, it's something that
Starting point is 01:11:41 people are experiencing in real time. But it's not like a fight between tenants. It shouldn't be, right? And I think that was how it was framed maybe 10 years ago. But now there's this understanding that like what's driving it
Starting point is 01:11:56 is those same people can't afford homes where they used to be. And so they've got to go to areas and push other people out and real estate developers and landlords capitalize on that because they can make more money with people that they're willing to pay
Starting point is 01:12:12 maybe $500 more a month than the person that was already living there. So like how do you as a politician make the gentrification conversation politically productive? Yeah, I think my response for the past couple of years now is I think it's easy to get taught up with the color of gentrification being white or black,
Starting point is 01:12:38 but I do believe the true color is green, right? Green in terms of the unaffordability crisis that's happening across the country that's pushing people, you know, out of some states, maybe coming to another, you know, developers and sometimes landlords who get greedy and hurt people with rising rents and displacement. I believe that New York City has been a city for all people. I believe that those who grown up in the city should be able to stay, but I also do believe that we should make room for more people by building homes. And I do believe that in order for us to address, you know, this issue of this placement,
Starting point is 01:13:19 you know, it's not, I don't want to create quarrels with one type of group and another type of group. I again want to create space for everyone. I think that's very hard for people to grasp sometimes. I think displacement and gentrification is a very emotional, you know, as someone who's grown up in Brooklyn, I've seen, you know, my community change immensely. But as someone who's now in a position of power and is learning more about how we can address this problem, you know, instead of, we can't create a ban in New York City to prevent
Starting point is 01:13:56 people from coming here. That will never happen. We just need to make more space for those who do want to come here. Vacancy tax. Is that the kind of thing that the city council is looking into? The city council isn't currently looking into it, but I'm such an advocate for vacancy tax. I do believe we need a vacancy tax,
Starting point is 01:14:17 especially on some of the warehouse departments that exist within the city. I hope that under the next Momdani mayorship, that is something that we could work together on, a pier-to-taire tax, you know, for some of the oligarchs that own, you know, large, large homes and apartment buildings within our district are also taxed as well. But that's something that I'm an advocate for. I don't think the council's working on that right now, though. All right, well, we'll put a pin in that one. Lastly, just because you've mentioned the Mamadani campaign, you endorsed, you've been campaigning with him,
Starting point is 01:14:55 your assessment of the race now that we're just days away from early voting and less than two weeks away from election day. Yeah, Zoron can win. I do believe that we still need a robust ranked choice voting strategy in terms of ranking five candidates and not ranking Cuomo in order for us to get there. I'm really excited about some of these polls that we've been seeing in this race, you know, looking neck and neck. Also, something that's not accounted for within these polls is that, in my personal experience, there are so many friends of mine who are changing their registration to New York City to vote in their first elections, so many young people who are not accounted for within
Starting point is 01:15:40 this polling, who are actually deeply excited about this movement that Zoran and his team have created during this campaign. I think there's going to be a lot of people that have currently, been unaccounted for that are going to show up in droves in these days of boating. So I'm feeling cautiously optimistic. You know, I think Cuomo, you know, he's he's a political juggernaut in many ways. But, you know, Zoron and even some of these other candidates have really put up, mainly Zoron, I've really put up a really great fight, you know, in terms of how this race is getting turn out. So I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm feeling hopeful. They're reaching a lot of people
Starting point is 01:16:24 who've never been reached before. And I think that that's what's going to get them past the finish line. True last question here is because of the success, regardless of the outcome and ranks over on one, rank all five, don't rank Cuomo, getting that out there. But the city campaign matching system, to me, I feel like this has been such an unmitting. success. And when we're talking about campaign finance reform, I feel like there should be efforts to expand, honestly, our matching system here in New York City. Do you see that as possible if Zoran wins this campaign? And honestly, this should be taken more nationally matching systems for campaigns because it removes the incentive for Cuomo to say like, hey, Dordash, give me a million
Starting point is 01:17:16 dollars or whatever. I mean, I love our matching funds system. We'd love to see it expanded, not only within New York City, but across the country, especially in some of these congressional races, love to see for there to be a matching funds program so that folks can compete in races where APAC is funneling or any, you know, any PAC is funneling a lot of money into the race. So I really hope to see this program expanded. I'm not sure. how the CFB or where their head is at in terms of expanding the program, that is sometimes a bit out of, you know, our control or my control as as as fair enough, but I would love to see it expanded.
Starting point is 01:18:00 It's definitely helped me get elected in 2021. It's still helping me in my reelection race right now. And we'll hopefully be one of the big reasons that we beat Cuomo on June 24th. All right. Well, from your mouth to God's ears, How can people support your re-election effort, Chi, and also just, you know, some of the work that you're doing over at the city council? Absolutely.
Starting point is 01:18:26 So if you live in bedside and crown heights, please vote for me. Early voting starts on June 14th election days on June 24th. Right now, the best way that you could help me is going to Zoron's campaign and volunteering while also, you know, spreading what great people of the working families party have been saying. and that's ranking all five candidates and not ranking Andrew Cuomo. I love the city, what hate for Cuomo to destroy it. Again, and I really do believe a better future is within reach if we keep them away from City Hall. Well, I really appreciate your time today.
Starting point is 01:19:03 Thanks so much. Chiosay, New York City Council member representing bedside Crown Heights. We'll put a link to the canvassing and all that you're talking about down below wherever people are listening to are watching this. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Of course. All right, with that, we're going to wrap up the free part of the show.
Starting point is 01:19:23 Head into the fun part of the show where we will take your calls, read your I.M's. Getting a good amount of I.M.s in. I don't know why I'm doing the Trump voice. Matt was happening on Left Reckoning. Yeah, Left Reckon, we had a big show last night. Steven Semler on talking about the big, beautiful bill and the amount of money that, oh, just so happens that when troops started coming home from Iraq, our police department started getting militarized in a way that's easily
Starting point is 01:19:56 viewable in graphs, kind of like all the left was saying the entire time I've been sort of conscious of politics. It's weird how all this stuff has just come true, including the Nazi stuff about demographic anxiety. So yeah, good show last night. And two nation writers on talking about the new edition of The Nation Magazine, which is 160 years old. And, I mean, that's a long publication history for anything, like, even outside the United States. I don't know how many things have been publishing that long, but interesting discussion there. So they did, they have writers from all 50 states talking about this, this United States of America. So check that out, patreon.com, so it's left reckoning.
Starting point is 01:20:39 All right, folks. also wanted to congratulate since I won't be here tomorrow but I don't think he will be here either because he's got better things to do our friend Matt Binder is now a father of three
Starting point is 01:20:55 that's what it means to be a mighty man of that oh yeah baby really really exciting news for our friend we will give him a show far in celebration Congrats Matt Binder. Also check out our merch Shop.com.com.
Starting point is 01:21:16 You can get those trucker hats including the baby blue which is available for pre-order. We've also brought back the Vergonia and if you want to be a part of the max left you can get your max left t-shirt shop. Dot Majority Report Radio.com.
Starting point is 01:21:35 All right guys. in the fun half. Okay, Emma, please. Well, I just, I feel that my voice is sorely lacking in the majority report. Wait, what? Look, Sam is unpopular. I do deserve a vacation at Disney World. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome Emma to the show.
Starting point is 01:21:53 It is Thursday. I think you need to take over for Sam. That's good. Sir, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pause you right there. Wait, what? You can't encourage Emma to live like this. And I'll tell you why. So it's offered a tour?
Starting point is 01:22:06 sushi and poker with the boys twerk sushi and poker with the boys was offered a twer yeah sushi and poker with the boys what? Twirling sushi and poker Tim's upset
Starting point is 01:22:19 Twirling sushi and poker with the boys was offered a twirl sushi and that's what we call the bids Twirl sushi and poker with the boys Right We're gonna get demonetized
Starting point is 01:22:33 I just think that what you did to Tim Poole thought was mean. Free speech. That's not what we're about here. Look at how sad he's become now. You shouldn't even talk about it because I think you're responsible. I probably am in a certain way, but let's get to the meltdown here. Twerk.
Starting point is 01:22:49 Ugh. Sushi and poker with the boys. Oh my God. Wow. Sushi. I'm sorry. I'm losing my fucking mind. Someone's offered a twirp.
Starting point is 01:22:56 Yeah. Sushi and poker with the boys. Logic. Twerp. Sushi and poker with the boys. Boy, boy, boy. I think I'm like a little kid. I think I'm like a little kid.
Starting point is 01:23:04 A little kid. I think I'm like a kid twerk. I think I'm like a little kid. Add this debate seven thousand times. A little kid. I think I'm like a little kid. A little kid. I think I'm like a fucking liar.
Starting point is 01:23:15 Some people just don't understand. So I'm not trying to be a dick right now, but like, I absolutely think the U.S. should be providing me with a wife and kids. That's not what we're talking about here. It's not a fun job. That's a real thing. That's a real thing. Willie Walker.
Starting point is 01:23:33 That's a real thing. That's a real thing. Thank you, real thing. Joe Logan has that offered it to a word. That's a real thing. Or that's the twer. A real thing. That's a real thing.
Starting point is 01:23:42 That's a real thing. Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Rogan has done it again. Offered it. That's a real thing. That's a poker with the boy. I think he might be blown out of proportion. Real thing. That's a poker with the boys.
Starting point is 01:23:53 Offered it. That's a real thing. That's got poker. Let's go Joe. Twirl. Sushi and poker with the boy. Take an easy thing. Shushi and poker.
Starting point is 01:24:03 Things have really gotten out of hands. Sushi and poker with the boys delusional You don't have a clue as to what's going on Live YouTube Sam has like the weight of the world on the shoulders Hoggers! Sam doesn't want to do this show anymore
Starting point is 01:24:17 It was so much easier when the majority report was just you We're happy Let's change the subject Rangers and Nick's going right Now shut up Don't want people saying reckless things on your program
Starting point is 01:24:29 That's one of the most difficult parts about this show This is a pro-killing podcast I'm thinking maybe it's time We bury the hatchet. Left is best. Trump. Violet twir?
Starting point is 01:24:39 Don't be foolish. And don't fucking tweet at me and don't get shit. The way that is cucked to all these people. Love it. That's where my heart is. So I wrote my honor's thesis.
Starting point is 01:24:48 About it. Oh. She wrote an honest thesis. I guess I should hand the main mic to you now. You want to go right on the unformed policy. We already fund Israel, dude. Are you against us? That's a tougher question.
Starting point is 01:25:01 I have an answer. incredible theme song i bumbler emma viglin absolutely one of my favorite people actually not just in the game like period

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