The Philip DeFranco Show - Trump is Bringing Back Jim Crow

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Starting point is 00:00:36 and Republican lawmakers in numerous states are already working to eliminate black congressional districts. The VRA is a landmark 1965 bill that banned racial discrimination in voting and protected minorities from practices aimed at diluting their votes. And one of the single most important provisions in the law was Section 2, which prohibits gerrymandering that undermines the power of minority voters. So for decades, Section 2 has been used to four states, mostly in the South, to redraw congressional maps that diluted minority voting power in 1. one of two ways. Either splitting them up so they don't have a majority in a single district or

Starting point is 00:01:03 packing them together so they only have the majority in one district when it should be two or more. So for example, Louisiana was forced to redraw its maps a few years back to include a second majority black congressional district because they'd initially just drawn one despite the fact that black people make up a third of the population. But in the ruling last month on the case, Louisiana v. Calais, the Supreme Court argued that by considering race to ensure black voters were equally represented, Louisiana's maps itself amounted to a racial gerrymandering. And they issued a sweeping ruling that dramatically limited protections that ensure minority voters can actually have their votes count.

Starting point is 00:01:31 So as a result, Republican-controlled legislatures across the South now have the power to eliminate majority black districts that they were previously forced to draw under Section 2, and oh my God, have they seized that opportunity. Right over in Louisiana, which was the center of this whole dispute, the state senate's already passed a map that would get rid of the second majority black district and the bills advancing through the House ahead of a June 1st deadline. Also just days after the Supreme Court decision, Florida Governor Ronda Santas enacted a new map that's already facing a lawsuit from challengers who alleged that it erased both black and Latino

Starting point is 00:01:57 majority minority districts. And just a few days after that, Republicans and Tennessee, dismantled the only black majority district in the state. Republicans in the South Carolina House have also passed a plan that would eliminate the only majority black seat in a state where roughly a quarter of the population is black. Mississippi is also especially egregious, right? They have more black residents than any other state in America.

Starting point is 00:02:14 We're talking nearly 40% of the population. And their governor has vowed to dismantle the one single black majority district by next year. Also, earlier this month, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use a map. They would get rid of one of its two majority black seats. And then, here in my home state of Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp also recently announced that he would be convening a special session of the state legislature to redo electoral maps for 2028 that have the potential to wipe out multiple majority black districts. But you've got to understand two things.

Starting point is 00:02:38 One, this is just the beginning and two, the impacts here will be absolutely catastrophic. The Congressional Black Caucus estimates that its ranks are going to be reduced by as much as one-third due to the ongoing redistricting efforts. And you've got experts saying that we could see the largest ever decline in black representation since the post-Civil War reconstruction error. For a century after the Civil War, black majority districts were in these single digits or at zero. But after the VRA was passed in 1965, the numbers grown to 63 districts are around 14% of the House. And of course, beyond that, these efforts are also going to reduce gains made

Starting point is 00:03:07 by non-white Congress members more broadly, while also giving Republicans a major upper hand in future elections. I mean, one analysis found that gutting Section 2 could effectively give the Republicans as many as 19 more seats in the House. And in addition to expanding Republican majorities, these efforts will have dramatic impacts on black voters, not just in the South, but nationwide. And while, of course, the direct result of all this is diluting the power of black voters in southern states, dismantling black majority seats. It also means fewer black representatives in office to push for broader policies that impact black Americans. Black lawmakers, they've historically led the charge in a number of policies, things like voting rights expansion and criminal

Starting point is 00:03:38 justice reform. They've also fought to secure resources to fund infrastructure, health care, and other forms of economic development in underserved non-white neighborhoods. So we're talking about deeply rooted structural issues of inequality. They go far beyond the ballot box. So it becomes obvious what's happening here. Republicans are trying to take black people's right to vote away. Right, I mean, our memory of Jim Crow has faded into segregated water fountains and people say in the N-word, and I think it's very important and it's worth reviewing what Jim Crow actually was and the Southern autocracy it built. A lot of it is basically indistinguishable from what Republicans are trying to do right at this moment. Jim Crow was a character that was invented in 1828 by a white minstrel who blackened his face with burnt cork,

Starting point is 00:04:13 exaggerated a limp that he saw in a black stablehand in Louisville and shuffled around stages across the country singing a song called Jump Jim Crow. So the point of name in the laws after Jim Crow, a racist caricature was to make clear to black people where they stood. clear that they were bound by the law but not protected by it, and to make clear that the white people who wished to do them harm were protected by the law but not bound by it. And the entire legal architecture of the South, for the next century, it's built off of that message. And then the second thing to understand is that for about a decade after the Civil War, the American South was actually the most racially democratic place on earth. Black men, they were voted in numbers that in some states wouldn't be reached again for a hundred

Starting point is 00:04:44 years. Hiram Revels filled the Senate seat once held by Mississippi's last antebellum senator. South Carolina State House of Representatives had a black majority. 16 black men sat in the United States Congress between 1870 and 1877 and 600 or so served in Southern state legislatures. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments had been ratified in rapid succession, and the federal government, fresh of a war that it had won, was for a brief window willing to enforce them. From 1866 to 1872, the federal government waged what was until the FBI's anti-clan work in the 1960s, the most successful counterterrorism campaign in American history, and the target was the original Ku Klux Klan. The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, the third of which is

Starting point is 00:05:21 literally called the Ku Klux Klan Act, gave the army and federal marshals the authority to arrest Klansmen, and they used it aggressively. There were thousands of indictments across the South. The president, Grant, was personally committed to this, and he pushed it through over significant political resistance. And by 1872, the first clan was effectively destroyed as an organization for the first time in the United States's existence. It seemed like we were trying to take steps to live up to our founding creed. But of course, it's that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, in the pursuit of happiness. But then, Northern

Starting point is 00:05:53 Progressive Republicans sold out black people in the South in 1876. And so the same institution that it destroyed the first clan, it was now being used to break strikes and police labor, while the second wave of white supremacist terror and the slow legal architecture of disenfranchisement, it operated without federal interference. Within 10 years, there were no black congressmen. There would not be another black senator from the South until 2013. In Mississippi, specifically, black voter registration fell from roughly 90% during reconstruction to under 6% by 18, And this project, it ran on two tracks, which is kind of how all American projects of distributed destruction tend to run. And so the first track was the integration of state power with private violence.

Starting point is 00:06:28 The Ku Klux Klan, the White League, the Red Shirts, and the Knights of the White Camellia were the social infrastructure of the post-war South, drawing membership from sheriffs and judges and state legislators. And they killed black voters and the white men who organized with them. They burned churches and schools. They murdered reconstruction-era politicians in their homes and on the courthouse steps in. In Colfax, Louisiana, on Easter Sunday of 1873, they killed somewhere between six. 60 and 150 black militia men who had already surrendered. The Wilmington Massacre of 1898, an actual coup against an elected biracial city, government

Starting point is 00:06:56 and the Tulsa massacre of 1921 were carried out by armed mobs that overlapped almost entirely with the local political establishment. The state never needed to commit the violence itself. The state only needed to make sure that the violence was never prosecuted. And it may come as a shock to you, but local prosecutors elected by white people only would not prosecute white on black violence as a matter of policy. Now, the federal government, they prosecuted some of this for the few years that the Enforcement Act actually gave US attorneys real teeth before the Supreme Court took those teeth out and

Starting point is 00:07:21 United States v. Krukshank. The ruling there that the 14th Amendment didn't reach private acts of racial violence, only state ones. And then the second track was the law. And the law had to look like it wasn't doing what it was doing because the 15th Amendment said that you couldn't disenfranchise a man on the basis of his race. So the trick was to disenfranchise him on the basis of something else that just so happened to track his race pretty much exactly. So they got creative. There was the grandfather clause which exempted you from literacy and property requirements if your grandfather had been eligible to vote before 1867, that is to say, before the 15th Amendment. So with most black men's grandfathers at the time, having been enslaved of the more than

Starting point is 00:07:52 55,000 black Oklahomans living in the state in 1900, 57 had a grandfather who would have qualified. And then when the Supreme Court finally struck that clause down in 1915, Oklahoma, they just held a special session of the legislature and rewrote the law. So anyone already registered as a 1914, they were registered for life. And black voters, they were given a single 12-day window in the spring of 1916 to register or just be disenfranchised forever. And that law stood until 1939. There was also the poll tax, which had to be paid in cash usually months before an election, and in some states, cumulatively, meaning that if you hadn't paid in 1898, 1899, 1900, you owed all three years worth to vote in 1901. There was also the good character requirement in which

Starting point is 00:08:29 the white registrar looked at you and decided whether your character was good. Louisiana also specifically disqualified anyone living in a common law marriage or anyone with an illegitimate child, both determined at the registrar's discretion. There was also the understanding clause, which required you to interpret a passage of the state constitution to the registrar's satisfaction with no published standard for what satisfaction was. There was also the requirement in some Louisiana parishes that you produced two already registered voters who would personally vouch for you at a parish where already registered voters were white. So with all this, you saw black voter registration in Louisiana falling from 130,000

Starting point is 00:09:00 to 1,300 in a matter of a few years. Right, and then there were the literacy tests. In Louisiana, in 1964, applicants were given 30 questions to answer in 10 minutes, and a single wrong answer was failure. Just to give you an example, one of the questions read in full, and I'll even put it it on screen for you, spell backwards, comma, forwards, and a registrar could fail you for spelling backwards with a comma or for spelling it without a comma. You know, while white men, when taking the same test when they were given it at all, had their

Starting point is 00:09:22 answers accepted on the loose end of any plausible interpretation. So these tests weren't tests that you could study for and pass. These are what I would call kangaroo court tests, where the results kind of already decided based on the color of your skin. And it's all just crazy. When the South Carolina's Attorney General appeared before the Supreme Court in 1966 to defend these mechanisms, he read aloud one of the questions that his state had asked of would-be voters.

Starting point is 00:09:41 There was who was the president of the Constitutional Convention? What kind of suit was he wearing? In Mississippi and Georgia, black voters would be asked how many bubbles were in a bar or soap, how many kernels of corn were in a jar, how many seeds were in a watermelon. And then after all of this, after the grandfather clauses, and the poll taxes, and the literacy tests, and the registrars, there was the white primary, which made the entire question of registration almost beside the point. The Post-Reconstruction South was a one-party region. Whoever won the Democratic primary, won November automatically, and the Democratic Party, as a private organization, was free to set its own membership rule.

Starting point is 00:10:11 And it had one rule, and it was that you had to be white. So a black man in Alabama or Texas or Georgia who had somehow paid the poll tax at the time and passed the literacy test and convinced the registrar of their good character, they'd arrive at the November polls to vote in an election whose outcome had already been decided months earlier in a primary that he wasn't allowed to enter. The Supreme Court did not strike this down until 1944, and Texas spent the rest of the decade trying various workarounds before finally giving up. And all of this, it's why the decision last month in Louisiana v. Calais, it is so ridiculous.

Starting point is 00:10:38 If you knew nothing about history and you looked at Jim Crow laws, in a vacuum, right, just on the surface level, on their face, you could say maybe they're not racially discriminatory. But for Justice Alito to say that state legislatures have to explicitly admit that they are discriminating against black voters in order for a gerrymandered to be racially discriminatory is ridiculous. It completely ignores the history of the South and actual material reality because whether you're drowning out black voters as a partisan or a racist, the effect is still the same. Jim Crow and the Southern Autocracy operated inside of the formal architecture of the American Constitutional Democracy the entire time. There were elections,

Starting point is 00:11:08 there were two parties on the ballot, technically. From the outside, and often from the inside, it looked like democracy, but it really wasn't. It was a sustained authoritarian regime that had figured out how to operate inside of the legal shell of a republic. In 2013, the same Supreme Court that had spent half a century enforcing the Voting Rights Act decided to just rip it up under the intentionally ignorant belief that it had done its job. Shelby County v. Holder was a five to four decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, and the argument was that the South had changed enough since 1965 that the preclearance regime, with its coverage formula targeting the former Confederacy, was no longer a defensible use of federal power.

Starting point is 00:11:38 Right, and preclearance meant that if a state wanted to change who could vote, How they voted or where they voted, they had to run it past the federal government first. This was instituted because the VRA had to kill the Jim Crow Hydra. The federal courts had spent the previous half century chopping at one head of a hydra at a time, and every time one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, another sprang up in its place. And the effect was immediate. Black voter registration in Mississippi went from about 6% in 1964 to about 60% by 1968. Black candidates, they began winning local offices across the South for the first time since the 1870s,

Starting point is 00:12:06 but then John Roberts decided that things were different now. And actually, within 24 hours of the decision, you had Texas announced. it would implement a new voter ID law that had been blocked under preclearance. Within months, North Carolina passed an omnibus voting bill that a federal court later ruled had been written in the court's exact words with, quote, almost surgical precision to disenfranchise black voters. In the past 10 years, southern states have closed over a thousand polling places, purged millions of voters from the rolls, Titan's signature matching and witness requirements for

Starting point is 00:12:30 absentee ballots and redrawn their districts in ways that, on any reasonable read of historical record, did exactly what preclearance had been designed to prevent. They are bringing back Jim Crow. You can call it Trump Crow. And now they're trying to reconstruct the southern autocracy in the one-party state that existed for most of this country's existence. And I know all of this. It's not exactly inspiring, but I think that everyone should also understand how politics works in a one-party authoritarian state, like the American Southern Autocracy, while you still have time to stop it. The thing about autocracies operating inside of a constitutional system is that it still holds elections, it still passes budgets, and it still produces idealistic young people who want to do good in the world and find out very quickly what doing good is actually going to cost them, and then life still goes on. Right now, we get to be kind of picky about who we align ourselves with and who we denounce and exile from our coalition. But if we do not win, and when I say we, I do not mean the Democratic Party, though many are using the Democratic Party as a vehicle.

Starting point is 00:13:18 It's just really anyone who would not consider themselves a Trumplican. If we do not win in November and in 2028, exercising such a luxury is basically committing suicide because the political math is going to be so radically different. What is a red line today, that becomes a bargaining chip tomorrow if we do not win. National opposition parties and one party states they have to reshape themselves in order to survive and ultimately they become complicit in the oppression that they want to stop. The Southern Democratic Party was the only party that Northern Liberals could operate inside of if they wanted any federal power at all and it produced hideous compromises. The Northern Liberals knew that they were hideous, but they made them anyway because there was no other game in town and the alternative was doing nothing FDR, arguably the most progressive president we've ever had was a Democrat, and so was Mr. Segregation Strom Thurman. And FDR was only able to pass the New Deal reforms because of the Southern segregationist block that produced Strom Thurman.

Starting point is 00:14:04 So all the New Deal reforms, the GI Bill, Social Security, the right to a union, federal housing, fair labor standards, you name it. All was passed thanks to Northern liberals teaming up with Southern segregationists to pass it. And guess what? It wasn't because the Southern white suddenly saw the light. It was because the Northerners agreed to exempt Black people from all of the programs. Every program that we now considered to be a monument to American liberalism was built on a foundation that excluded black people because the people in coalition with the liberals would have rather lived in third world poverty than let a black man get the same benefits as them. When the NAACP went to FDR and begged him to break the Southern filibuster on the anti-lynching bill, he told them that if he pushed through the anti-lynching bill, the Southerners would block every measure that he asked Congress to pass in order to beat the Nazis and keep the country from balling apart. So he said he could not take the risk. And that's why you have historians saying that he wasn't wrong on the math, it wasn't that he lacked courage, it was just that the math was the math was the

Starting point is 00:14:51 Because what you get in opposition is the ability to shape policy on things that the ruling party has decided not to police For FDR and the Northern Liberals, there was labor and social reforms. What you don't get is the ability to contest the ruling order on the things that the ruling party has placed off of the table, and that was Jim Crow. And the price of these bargains is always paid for by the people who the ruling order has excluded from the bargain entirely. And if we slide into the version of America that I think that we are sliding into, in America that is unfortunately very familiar, then Democrats are going to face the very same math as FDR and the Northern Liberals. It will exist in a world where they have to make the same compromises in order to survive. They'll have to become an opposition that cannot afford its conscience and they'll have to

Starting point is 00:15:25 learn to ration it. So that is why we have to win. Everything depends on us winning. And with all this, you know, I think perhaps I should end this, hopefully, and tell you that things will sort themselves out because the right thing always seems to eventually win in America. And that may be largely true, again, asterisk, but millions lived and died over the course of 200 years and never saw a lick of freedom outside of like 10 years after the Civil War. As MLKSA, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Also, do you think someone would have been comforted sitting in Mississippi in 1910 by the knowledge that their grandchildren would one day vote? This sucks to hear.

Starting point is 00:15:56 Like, I know living in a developing autocracy is not exactly a bucket list activity, but the only way out is to fight through it. Progress is never linear, and the only way that things get better is if you do something to make things better. And then there's more we're going to dive into in just a minute, but first let me thank a sponsor and say, you know, you ever start playing just one quick game and suddenly it's two hours later and you're fully invested in fictional politics? Because, yeah, this game can do that. And honestly, it's just nice to have something that takes me away from the chaos of the real world. And it's today's sponsor, Raid Shadow Legends. And also, I get why people get hooked. The graphics are wild, like console level detail, but you can also play it on your phone or PC.

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Starting point is 00:16:52 Narma the Return. And you hit level 15 and get another amazing epic, Drake from the Lizardman faction. Plus, you can choose one of five promo codes for a free legendary champion of your choice. I'd recommend Rath, Grand Oak Podridge, because I like support champions who can swing a fight. These champions are available after downloading through my link or QR only within 48 hours after downloading with my link. But then as you're hitting that like button to support your favorite daily dive into the news, we got to jump back into it and talk about how Donald Trump may now have everything that he needs to justify military action against Cuba. at least by his standards. Right, he strangled the economy but failed to bring down the government.

Starting point is 00:17:20 He's received new intelligence that could help him argue that the Cuban military poses a threat to American lives. And the former leader of the country, he is now wanted in the US on charges that could land him a death sentence or life in prison. So actually, let's start there, right? Because the Justice Department announced charges against Raul Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, accusing him of murder and a conspiracy to kill American citizens.

Starting point is 00:17:38 And those charges stem from the fatal downing of two planes off the coast of his country more than 30 years ago. And those charges have also been brought against five fighter pilots involved in the attack on the the planes, which were operated by a group called brothers to the rescue that offered assistance to fleeing Cuban refugees. In this case, though, then-President Fidel Castro, claimed that they had been dropping anti-regime leaflets over the Capitol, and he also took responsibility for the downing. But this indictment said that his brother Raul, who was minister at defense at the time, could also be held responsible because, along with Fidel, he served as one of the final

Starting point is 00:18:03 decision makers in the Cuban military chain of command. Right, and with that, you know, I'll say, exiled Cuban American lawmakers and activists, as well as survivors of the attack and family members of the victims, they've long called for Arul to be criminally charged. But according to two former federal prosecutors familiar with the case, past administrations lack the political will to file charges against such a high-ranking member of an adversarial government. But momentum, it's been building. Right, last year, one of the pilots named in the indictment, he was found to be living in Florida. He was actually first arrested on charges of immigration fraud after he filed for permanent residency but failed to disclose his 30-year-long service in the Cuban Air Force.

Starting point is 00:18:33 Also in February, four Republican lawmakers asked the Justice Department to indict Castro writing in a letter. We believe, unequivocally, that Raul Castro is responsible for this heinous crime and saying it is time for him to be brought to justice. But with all that, acting attorney general Todd Blanchew, who announced the indictment alongside the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, he had little to say when asked why an indictment in this case had been brought right now. And the question you've got most people asking is whether the administration's real motivation is paving the way for a military operation to capture Castro, bring him back to the country to face trial, and pressure the Cuban government into giving into Trump's demands.

Starting point is 00:19:01 For the same way that an indictment against former Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro served his justification for an attack that notably killed dozens of Venezuelans as well as Cuban soldiers with Maduro and his wife now awaiting trial in New York. And actually, with this, an American aircraft carrier, the same one that served as a staging ground for the operation to capture Maduro, it has now arrived back in the Caribbean, along with multiple warships. Now you had one official telling the New York Times

Starting point is 00:19:22 that the vessel is really only there as a show of force, but who knows? And Blanche, of course, wouldn't say whether the indictment was meant to lay the groundwork for military action, but he did say that a warrant had been issued for his arrest and that he expected Castro to eventually face trial in the United States. We expect that he will show up here

Starting point is 00:19:38 by his own will or by another way. When Trump was asked yesterday, whether he would take military action against Cuba, he replied, I don't want to say that. Though we also said, there won't be escalation. I don't think there needs to be, look, the place is falling apart.

Starting point is 00:19:51 And actually on that last note, he somewhat accurately, though in his Trump exaggerated manner way, laid out how dire the situation is on the aisle. It's a failing nation, you see that, it's falling apart. They have no oil, they have no, it's a failing nation, so I just can't tell you that. But we're there to help, we're there to help the families, the people. They have no way of living.

Starting point is 00:20:12 They have no food. They have no electricity, they have no energy at all, but they do have great people. What Trump also didn't mention there is the role that he has had in creating those conditions. Right, he's effectively imposed a blockade to stop fuel shipments from reaching the country, pushing the country into an energy and humanitarian crisis. Also earlier this week, he signed an executive order sanctioning officials in Cuba's energy, defense, financial and security sectors along with three government agencies. And all of this here, I mean, it also comes along with a decades-long American embargo and other

Starting point is 00:20:39 policies that have at the very least contributed to poverty, a scarcity of goods, and a lack of economic growth on the island. But with this, yesterday, which was also the anniversary of the day that the U.S. ended its military occupation of the island at 1902, you had Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a child of Cuban immigrants, delivering a message directly to the Cuban people in Spanish. And he notably denied that the U.S. played any role in the hardships that they have endured. has been utilized to help the people. And he specifically blamed a military-run conglomerate known as Gaiesa that's estimated to control between 40% and 70% of the Cuban economy.

Starting point is 00:21:18 And to be sure here, many experts agree that this repressive regime's handling of the economy, it's left something to be desired, but many would also reject the idea that the U.S. bears no blame. And so in response, you've seen people like former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes writing on Twitter, Rubio now full Orwellian, the total blockade that we have put on your country after decades of an embargo has nothing to do with the scarcity in your lives or the fact that we are intentionally starving your children.

Starting point is 00:21:39 It's adding in a follow-up post, also, Rubio works for a guy who has looted far more billions of dollars for himself and his cronies than even the most corrupt Cuban officials. And that says you also have people saying that Trump administration is being very hypocritical here. Noting that you have the Trump administration, inditing Raul Cash or for what they argue

Starting point is 00:21:53 is defending Cuban airspace, while Trump and Heggzath celebrate the killings of people that have turned out to be innocent fishermen. Right, the Trump administration has killed nearly 200 people and dozens of strikes on boats and international waters, some of whom may have been fishermen, some of whom may have actually been drug dealers, but none of whom had a trial,

Starting point is 00:22:08 or which is why you have many experts saying that these strikes are in fact straight up murder. And so you actually had the Cuban government making the same argument in a statement. Right, and also the country's UN ambassadors among those claiming the charges against Castro were part of an effort to create a pretext for military action. And actually also suggesting the New York Times

Starting point is 00:22:22 that shooting down the planes had been justified. But he claimed brothers to the rescue had violated Cuban airspace 25 times before the Cuban military took action. And with that saying that Cuban officials had repeatedly pleaded with American authorities to stop the group's flights over Cuba, including with a letter from Vidal Castro to President Bill Clinton, a claim that's apparently supported

Starting point is 00:22:36 supported by declassified U.S. documents from the time, and so you had the ambassador asking, how many deliberate and serious violations of U.S. airspace would any U.S. government allow before taking action? And while he also claimed that Cuba's ready to negotiate with the United States, he said that the government isn't convinced that the Trump administration is acting in good faith, telling the New York Times. Obviously, it does not help a climate of dialogue and trust that every other day there are statements like, we are ready to take over Cuba. At least for right now, it doesn't look like Trump's changing his approach of making maximalist demands. Right, CIA director John Ratcliffe recently visited Cuba and met with senior officials,

Starting point is 00:23:06 within Castro's grandson. And while he reportedly told them that the Trump administration was offering a genuine opportunity for collaboration, he also said that the opportunity was contingent on Cuba severing its ties with Russia, China, and Iran. And that's partly because Russia and China are believed to have high-tech spying facilities on the island.

Starting point is 00:23:20 All while, you also have Axios recently reporting on US intelligence that Cuba had obtained more than 300 military drones from Russia and Iran since 2023, has stashed them in strategic locations across the island and is now discussing plans to attack the American military base at Guantanamo Bay if there is a conflict with the US. And so in the meantime, you have both Russia

Starting point is 00:23:36 and China pledging their support for Cuba. A spokesperson for the Kremlin saying today that Russia will provide Cuba with active support in the face of increasing US pressure. You had a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson saying that the US should stop threatening force at every turn and that his country firmly supports Cuba and adding, the United States should cease

Starting point is 00:23:51 using sanctions and judicial apparatus as tools of coercion against Cuba and refrain from making threats of force at every turn. But yeah, ultimately, you know, all this, in addition to the indictment, it is seen as something that could serve as a pretext for military action. And in fact, that's exactly the argument

Starting point is 00:24:04 you had Rubio making new reporters today. Cuba not only has weapons that they've acquired from Russia and China over the years, but they also host Russia and Chinese intelligence presence in their country, not far from what we're standing right now. So Cuba's always posed a national security threat to the United States. They, by the way, have been one of the leading sponsors of terrorism in the entire region. Cuba's consistently posed the threat to the national security of the United States. And the other thing that poses a threat to the national security of the United States

Starting point is 00:24:31 is to have a failed state, 90 miles from our shores, run by friends of our allies. And ultimately, it does seem like the White House is laying the groundwork for a potential attack. And now, whether or not it follows through, that's an open question. But another key thing is that earlier this week, you already had a political reporter writing that she's been told by U.S. officials that the administration is growing more open to military action by the day, saying they're frustrated that the pressure campaign hasn't led Cuba's leaders to back down. And saying that military planners are weighing options beyond just a snatch and grab cash throw, including everything from a single airstrikement to scare the regime to a full-on ground invasion.

Starting point is 00:25:01 So kind of just add this to the pile of things that we're going to have to watch play out. though, I will say there is a playbook that we've seen before, and so far Trump is following it. Right, but then from that, and more news need to know today, we got a few more things. Like, I gotta, I gotta squeeze in here. Yesterday, ultra-Israeli nationalist and national security minister Ben-Gavir posted a video taunting pro-Palestine activists that were captured by Israeli forces on an aid boat that was headed to Gaza. He captioned the video, welcome to Israel and to translate. At one point in it, he said, we are the landlords.

Starting point is 00:25:27 He also said that he wanted to take the activist prison, saying that they went there full of pride, like big heroes. And this all came after more than 58. with 430 people for more than 40 countries set sail from Turkey last Thursday as part of the global Samud flotilla. With Israel at the time saying that it was a PR stunt at the service of Hamas. Right, and by Monday morning, Israeli naval officials started intercepting them and by Tuesday night, every aid boat had been detained. With a group representing the activists saying that they were physically abused and had severe, widespread injuries. There were talks of Israeli forces using tasers and rubber bullets when they intercepted the flotillas. They said dozens of people were

Starting point is 00:25:58 suspected of having broken ribs, making it hard for them to breathe and mention degradation, sexual harassment, and humiliation. Right, they said that at least three people had to go to the hospital with Israeli authorities, at least so far, not commenting on these allegations. But now, thanks to this video, Ben-Gavir has got an international blowback from the US, the UK, France, Italy, Canada, and even his own prime minister who said that his actions were, quote,

Starting point is 00:26:19 not in line with Israel's values. And while those are not the harshest of words from Netanyahu, and there are many who believe that he's not actually bothered by this, the fact that he did not co-sign this does stand out. And while, since all this, you know, Israeli officials have started the deportation, process to send the activists back out of the country. International government officials, they're still pushing this further, demanding apologies, summoning ambassadors and envoys.

Starting point is 00:26:40 And reports are saying that's what really has Netanyahu coming down on his own minister, public opinion, not the behavior itself. They're saying that videos like this tear down the illusion of the Hasbara campaign that Israel is used to justify its policies and military actions against Palestinians. You've got many saying the Israeli leadership, they're treating this as a public relations crisis. Others wondering what's happening when the cameras aren't on if they feel comfortable filming this. Even more, adding it the real issue for Israel here is, that it provided the globe with live, irrefutable evidence that a structural violence and a disregard for human rights are foundational to the current Israeli establishment. Also, in other news you should know, back here in the U.S., airport officials and security contractors just met at TSA headquarters to discuss privatizing airport screening screening screening

Starting point is 00:27:17 services. With the reportedly being called TSA Gold Plus, and with it, in addition to federal TSA workers, the government would hire other security agents through contracted security programs as part of a screening partnership program. And that's actually already happening in places like San Francisco, Kansas City, and Atlantic City. But especially after the wait times that we saw with the TSA shortage from the last government shutdown, you now have cities like Atlanta voting to explore this new option as well. With some saying that it allows them to consider what it would look like if we could better serve grandmothers standing in line all day long, because our federal government can't get its act together to keep our TSA workers employed. And while you have some say, you know, this looks good to the Trump administration because it saves them about $52 million,

Starting point is 00:27:50 according to last month's White House budget. You have others saying, you know, some of those savings are because privatization would cut over 4,000 TSA jobs. And with that, you had Everett Kelly, president of the American Federation, a government employees union, saying that many TSA agents hold security clearances. But this plan would give, quote, direct operational control of the most sensitive technology in the aviation security enterprise to private vendors. But then there, you have others shooting that concern down,

Starting point is 00:28:11 saying that we've been using private companies since 9-11 and that the system has been safe for 25 years, stressing that, quote, it's important that airports have options. However, you have Kelly maintaining, the consequences of reverting to a contractor-driven modeler, not theoretical, saying we lived them before September 2001 and the historical record is unambiguous. And then, finally, today,

Starting point is 00:28:28 we have to talk about the officers who protected the capital from the J6 riots filing a lawsuit to block the $1.8 billion Trump slush fund, worrying that it's gonna be used to help people who are already sending them death threats. With a lawsuit naming President Trump, Todd Blanche, and Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, his defendants in claiming at the fund was created to finance the insurrectionist and paramilitary groups that commit violence in Trump's name. They also claimed that the Trump administration exceeded its statutory authority by creating the fund without authorization from Congress.

Starting point is 00:28:52 Daniel Hodges and Harry Dunn being the officers leading this, and Hodges saying, why would you pay people who attacked the police at the capital of the United States, who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Why would you pay people who wanted to assassinate the vice president? With the madding that he and other officers at the Capitol that day have been receiving threats ever since, and adding, I guarantee you, somebody is watching this right now in typing death threats against us, saying this will only continue to emboldened and potentially arm a militia that Donald Trump will have on retainer. Right, a huge thing is that no one in Trump's camp's been willing to rule out payments for J6 riders convicted of violent crimes from that day,

Starting point is 00:29:23 even though there were more than 150 officers injured. And of course, I have to mention that Trump pardoned most of the people who were in jail for those crimes, and dozens of them were eventually re-arrested for some things like child sex crimes in a legal possession of weapons. And without anything that bars those people from the slush fund money, the lawyer representing the officers in the suit says the defendants must be prohibited from transferring money to this corrupt and illegal monstrosity.

Starting point is 00:29:42 That, my friends, you beautiful bastards, is the end of your Thursday, Philip DeFranco's show. Before you leave, let me just say, I love yo faces. Also, it would mean the world's me if you give us a like. Also, if you're interested, whether it be the first story, the last story, anything in between, I'd love to hear your thoughts, opinions, and reactions in those comments down below. But no matter what you do, including why, the brand new episode of crashing out, which we just released recently.

Starting point is 00:30:02 I'm gonna just say, thank you for being a part of this. Again, I love yo faces, and I'll see you right back here next time.

The Philip DeFranco Show - Trump is Bringing Back Jim Crow

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