What A Day - Game Off

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

Police arrested 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse yesterday for killing two protestors and injuring a third at demonstrations in Kenosha, Washington against police brutality. Professional athletes joined in calling for justice for Jacob Blake, with teams from the NBA, WNBA, MLB, and more going on strike.Biden and Trump are averaging a near tie at the moment in North Carolina, which is sort of the site of the RNC this week. North Carolina is also a state where Republicans have repeatedly practiced voter suppression, through voter ID laws and gerrymandering. We discuss the state’s role in the 2020 election. And in headlines: Hurricane Laura makes landfall, the CDC gets USPS’d, and the MTA needs billions to keep running on time.Sign up for Vote Save America's weekend of action: votesaveamerica.com/adoptastate

It's Thursday, August 27th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is what? A day where we're hoping someone will cut our internet access so we don't have to watch the RNC tonight. I mean, literally, who do I have to pay to just help me not see this? I am currently in the process of knocking down a telephone wire. Sorry. On today's show, we check in on North Carolina and what's at stake for the battleground state in this year's election. Then some headlines. But first, the latest. So many people have reached out to me telling me they're sorry that this happened to my family. Well don't be sorry because this has been happening to my family

for a long time. Longer than I can account for. It happened to Emmett Till. Emmett Till is my family. Philando, Mike Brown, Sandra. This has been happening to my family. And I've shared tears for every single one of these people that it's happened to. This is nothing new. I'm not sad. I'm not sorry. I'm angry. And I'm tired.

That was Latitra Widman, Jacob Blake's sister, acknowledging what frankly too many people in the U.S. cannot, that this violence is continued violence that we as black people face and mourn and adore and have since the beginning of the country. As we went to record yesterday's podcast episode on Tuesday night, news started breaking of a shooting at the racial injustice and police brutality protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And yesterday, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was arrested for killing two protesters and injuring a third with an automatic weapon. Videos on social media appeared to show armed civilians like Rittenhouse exchanging pleasantries with Kenosha police prior to his killing spree. He has since been charged with first-degree intentional homicide. So Akilah, what else do we know at this point about Rittenhouse?

Okay, so he was a really big fan of Donald Trump. Videos he posted to his own TikTok account showed him front row at a Trump rally in Des Moines, Iowa in January. He lives in Illinois and crossed state lines with a gun specifically to intimidate protesters. He was also training to become a police officer. And in addition to the typical misogynist, racist content that we expect from white supremacist shooters, he had what I'd describe as an obsession with Blue Lives Matter, given that all of his profiles featured flags and language that supported police lives above others. This against the backdrop of an RNC that lionized the police and held up the concept of so-called law and order last night. Right. And the protests in response to everything happening in Kenosha now

loom even larger than before. So let's talk through some of the major protest actions that we saw yesterday. So ironically, yesterday was the four-year anniversary of the first time Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest police violence against black people in America. And, you know, we all know he was completely blackballed for that. But clearly, the racial violence has continued. So yesterday we saw NBA teams go on strike amid playoff games, including the Milwaukee Bucks, who are the first to take this action in the NBA. Here's a clip. The past four months have shed a light on the ongoing racial injustices facing our African-American community. Citizens around the country have used their voices and platforms to speak out against these

wrongdoings. Over the last few days in our home state of Wisconsin, we've seen the horrendous video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back seven times by a police officer in Kenosha and the additional shooting of protesters. Despite the overwhelming plea for change, there has been no action. So our focus today cannot be on basketball. That was Sterling Brown of the Bucs in their press conference announcing the strike. The Bucs also called for Wisconsin's lawmakers to take up policing legislation in a special session the governor has called for. And across many professional sports, games were postponed or canceled due to player strikes. All of the NBA games scheduled yesterday were canceled. The WNBA players wore shirts with seven bullet holes in the back as they took a knee during the national anthem.

They also went on strike. Inter-Miami and Atlanta United Football Clubs also went on strike. Two-time Grand Slam winner Naomi Osaka was scheduled to play in the semifinals of the Cincinnati Masters tennis tournament today. She's striking and in a statement on Twitter said, quote, I don't expect anything drastic to happen

with me not playing, but if I can get a conversation started in a majority white sport, I consider that a step in the right direction. Watching the continued genocide of black people at the hands of police is honestly making me sick to my stomach. All of those games and matches will be rescheduled. Yeah, and there was even conversation in a meeting last night about, you know, the potential continuity of the NBA bubble. So it's definitely going to continue. And every major sport that is happening in the pandemic has seen strikes, and maybe the most surprising of them all is Major League

Baseball. That's right. So if you're not a sports person, you might think that all these leagues kind of have the same values. But generally speaking, America's pastime is apolitical, aside from fans fighting or booing politicians. But the Milwaukee Brewers and the Cincinnati Reds decided to also strike their game yesterday in solidarity with protests against racial inequality and systemic oppression. Right, so that's what's happening in the sports world in response. And there were some developments yesterday pertaining to the officer who shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back at point-blank range. What all do we know there?

All right, so the Wisconsin Department of Justice revealed that the officer's name is Rustin Sheskey and also claimed that there was a knife in Blake's car. I have a hammer in my car. Like, it's not illegal to have a hammer or a knife in your car. And I just want to say, considering he was shot seven times, I think it's fair to say that the knife wasn't a threat. Also yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice said

it would open a civil rights investigation into the police shooting. And Wisconsin's governor called in additional National Guard troops. We're going to keep tracking the story and keep shouting the Black Lives Matter. We hope that you do the same. But let's move on for now to the election and specifically North Carolina, which is sort of the site of the RNC this week. Yeah, a little bit, sort of. So we've been looking at swing states.

And last week we talked about Wisconsin, which was the original site of the DNC. This week, as you said, it is North Carolina time. In big picture, this has been a real swingy state at the presidential level recently. In 2016, Trump won by just under three percentage points. In 2012, Mitt Romney won by two points. And then in 2008, Obama won, though, by a mere 0.32%. And at that time, he became the first Democrat to win there at the presidential level in decades. But getting back to the most recent presidential election in 2016, we saw Democrats making gains in some suburban areas, sort of the spots like the Research Triangle around Duke and UNC. But Republicans offset that with their own gains in more rural areas throughout the state. And those are some

of the trends we saw repeated in other parts of the country as well. So that's just a little bit of context. And it looks like North Carolina is going to be close again in 2020. And right now, Biden and Trump are averaging a near tie. And in the race for Senate incumbent Republican Senator Tom Tillis is often trailing his Democratic opponent. Yeah, another big issue at play in North Carolina is gerrymandering, or unfair electoral maps that are drawn by legislators, in this case, Republicans to keep themselves in power. So let's talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so the last decade specifically there has seen Republicans draw maps that have egregiously done this. And Republicans in North Carolina for years have kept majorities in the legislature, sometimes big ones, even when Democrats would

win statewide, which is evidence of how the maps work. Though in 2018, Republicans lost their super majorities. And also kind of for what it's worth here, gerrymandering is a big issue in other states like Wisconsin as well, where activists are saying at this moment that a lot of the Republicans in the state legislature are less responsive to their constituents, say, for example, on police reform and special sessions to pass something like that, that people are calling for right now, than they otherwise might be if the maps weren't drawn to keep them in power. It's an accountability thing. More on the maps in a second, but back to North Carolina. The Republican state legislature has also worked to institute laws that restrict voting. So, for example, in 2013, the state legislature enacted a series of voter ID requirements following the Supreme

Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act. The ID law was challenged and an appeals court struck down the ID requirements, plus other parts of the law that would have reduced early voting. Broadly, the court found the effort was meant to, quote, target African-Americans with surgical precision. The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal in the case, which effectively, again, struck it down. All right. And back to the issue of gerrymandered maps. They were struck down by state judges last year. So what? What now? Yeah. So the judges said they were a

partisan gerrymander, which is illegal. The maps were then quickly redrawn to pass court muster. And so North Carolina is now one of many states in which Democrats have refocused on something Republicans have dominated in the past decade or so state legislatures. And that's a big focus in this year's election when groups are eager to flip at least one of the chambers, since the next set of state legislatures will be in charge of drawing new district maps for the next decade based on the census this year. Yeah, so if you have three minutes in the despairing news to fill out the census, please just do that. Please. It's only going to take a few minutes. Only a few. And groups like Common Cause North Carolina have zeroed in on gerrymandering,

among other voting issues. I spoke with one of their directors, Jane Pinsky, about the current state of the maps in North Carolina. Here is what she had to say. If your standard is below zero, yes, they are better than they were. Are they great maps? No. And the reason is that the maps were still drawn by elected officials, legislators, people in power who had a vested interest in keeping themselves in power and in keeping their party in power. There was really no input from citizens. It was done very, very quickly under court order. And we started from a starting place that was not a good one. Right. And as an example of the problem that still exists, she referenced a city near Chapel Hill that is about 50% Hispanic that is currently divided into two congressional

districts, making it so their representation is too small in each to get their needs spoken to. All right. Well, in addition to all of this, in a state that could be as close as North Carolina in a number of elections up and down the ballot this year, the issue of ballot access, vote by mail, and polling options is going to be pretty crucial too. Yeah. And in fact, North Carolina is going to be the first state

to send out ballots for the November election starting September 4th. That's to voters who requested them in advance. And already there are reports that the requests are 10 times higher than they were at this point in the last presidential election. There have also been a number of changes to voting due to the pandemic, including allowing absentee ballots to count if they are signed by one witness and not two, allowing for people to request their ballot by email and a requirement that voters are notified if their

ballot has an issue and then given the chance to fix it so that it counts. I spoke with Allison Riggs, who's the interim executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. Her group actually filed the lawsuit to make sure voters are given the chance to fix their ballots if there's an issue. It's understandable that people don't understand the process, but we will work to educate them so that they are more likely to cast a ballot that is acceptable and without mistake the first time. And if they do make an understandable mistake, we'll fight full heartedly to make sure that that federal injunction protects their right to fix their absentee ballot because, you know, someone shouldn't lose the fundamental right to vote and the fundamental right to due process simply because there's a global pandemic going on and they have to use a cumbersome process to vote that they've never had to use before. Right. And Riggs still thinks more needs to be done to ensure that voting goes smoothly and

is accessible to everyone, including more election funding. She also encouraged voting early in person, safely if possible, when there would be far fewer people than on election day, if that is a good option for folks. She said that that was her plan. All right. Well, there are only a few weekends left between now and the election. Can you believe it? This weekend, Crooked's Adopt a State program is hosting a special weekend of action. So if you haven't already, sign up to Adopt a State at votesaveamerica.com slash adopt, and they'll send you details about what you can do to help from home. It's Thursday WOD Squad, and for today's Temp Check, we're talking about a breaking celebrity business venture. Aveline, a line of clean wines launched by Cameron Diaz just two months ago, was met with some criticism from wine people who took issue with the term clean wine.

Basically, used the way Diaz is using it, the term describes most wines made by smaller producers. You'll have to decide for yourself whether Aveline tastes clean or filthy, but it did come in last when about 400 wine tasters ranked celebrity wines at an online event last week. So Giddy, speaking of Aveline, what is your favorite celebrity side project? I really like that Rick Ross has a bunch of wing stops. Oh yeah. I think that that is very on brand. He also talks about lemon pepper wings. All the time. All the time.

I also have really been wanting wing stop recently, and there have been some ads for it on television, and I blame my TV for seducing me. I love that. That's a great answer. I think that, yeah, Rick Ross, the boss, should be out here officiating over Wings. I think it's

excellent. So that's, yeah, that's a good one. That's solid. Thank you. I saw an interview with the CEO of Wingstop who said that he had to clarify to some people that Rick Ross is not actually the CEO of Wingstop. He's like a franchisee. Which I think is, just means he is officially

the CEO now. So that's my, he's always the boss. Okay. He's Rick Ross. That's just how it works. But same question for you, Akilah. Are you, what clean wine from a 2000 celebrity are you interested in? See pretty much none, but I will say that as far as like celeb side projects go, uh, anything Mary Kate and Ashley feel like doing every once in a while is great. Like their clothing is a lot of layers. It's really huge for no reason, but I'm into it. You know, they have a brick and mortar store.

I like that they have Elizabeth and James. They're like fragrance line. They have like, I mean, they have, they've done everything. Clothes, fragrances, home videos about detectives. Pretty much anything they're into, I'm into. They gotta come back. They need to come back for one of, home videos about detectives, pretty much anything they're into, I'm into.

They gotta come back. They need to come back for one of those home videos. You know, we need them like solving a crime together or trick-or-treating or something. That's, you know, that's the solution to ending the pandemic, frankly. Yeah, but just like that, we have checked our temps. I have to do something that no one on my show realizes I'm doing, but it's my best friend's birthday. Happy birthday, Sinead. Stay safe and we will check in

with you all again tomorrow. Happy birthday. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. Over half a million people in Texas and Louisiana evacuated their homes on Wednesday in preparation for Hurricane Laura. At the time of recording, the storm had reached Category 4 with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour and was about to make landfall. Experts say the hurricane had potential to be the most powerful hurricane to ever hit Louisiana and one of the strongest to hit the U.S. Forecasters warn of what they're calling an unsurvivable water surge that could reach as high as 15 to 20 feet, creating large, destructive waves. Texas Governor Greg Abbott warned residents to get far out of harm's way, saying it could take rescuers 24 hours or more to reach hard-hit areas. In an effort to keep evacuation shelters less crowded during the pandemic, the state's governors are encouraging people to book hotel rooms.

God, I just hope people can be as safe as possible. The government executed the only Native American on federal death row yesterday, despite objections from tribal leaders. 38-year-old Lesmond Mitchell died by lethal injection at a federal prison in Indiana as a punishment for murder and other crimes committed in 2001. Federal law gives tribes the authority to decide whether or not members will receive the death penalty, but critics say the government bypassed that law using a loophole. Leaders of the Navajo Nation and 13 other tribes criticized the government's decision, describing it as an insult to their sovereignty and a continuation of America's long history of failing to honor deals with Native people. Mitchell is the fourth federal inmate to be executed this year since the Trump administration resumed the death penalty in July,

and another man is scheduled to be executed on Friday. The Center for Disease Control might be the latest agency to get USPS, which is our cool new term for being made to advance Trump's political agenda. The CDC announced new COVID-19 guidelines on Monday that say testing is not necessary for people who are asymptomatic, but we're in close contact with others who are coronavirus positive. Experts say there's no scientific basis for that change. And two officials within the CDC say it was directed by the White House's Coronavirus Task Force. Members of the task force met last Thursday to debate the new guidelines with the notable

absence of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was having surgery at the time, and said yesterday the new recommendations downplayed the very real risk of asymptomatic spread. Of course, any instruction to pull back on testing seems suspect, since it fits with Trump's theory that knowing how many people have coronavirus makes coronavirus worse. Trump's coronavirus testing czar, Dr. Brett Giroir, denied White House involvement with the guidelines and said they originated within the CDC. As we said, you mess with Fauci, you get the ouchie. We meant it. The small metal rooms with less than good air circulation called trains haven't done well during the pandemic.

As a result, New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority says it needs $12 billion in federal aid or it'll have to raise fares, scrap key programs, and cut service by 40%. Ridership on the subway fell by 90% in April and has now risen to only a quarter of usual levels. That's contributed to a huge deficit for the MTA, which transit officials want the federal government to address in their next stimulus package. Democrats set aside billions for transit agencies in their relief bill, but Republicans did not. And New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says he's limited in how much he can help since his state is facing its own financial crisis, and he would probably like to blame it on Bill de Blasio somehow.

The MTA has launched a campaign called Save Transit to generate public support. If they promise to let me drive the train, I will come up with that $12 billion myself. Choo-choo. And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review,

be an angel investor for our clean wine, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just user manuals for trains like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And please save transit. Save it. I need to get sweaty crossing at Hoyt Sherman again, OK? Give me that back in my life.

What a Day is a Crooked Media production. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tun is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Thank you.