Spitting Images: Shahid Buttar

chunk of cheese. And with Bernie Sanders one in the scene every man woman and see if you tan Germanic, if you're transterfering, and seat you're a friend of serving to see Sherman kering. The week workers earn a fifteen gon Zoomers earn the degrees with human friending the week attacking the corporations with certain decurb greeted with the green new deal. The earth burning will see. So who are you on on this battle for humanity? Are you with the Ola Garta with the working families? Are you with

the future of our planet or his enemy? Are you with the one person? Where were you on the sands and the revolutions over and exploding like a nova? I just took a right of Kroger and nobody pulled me over. I got lost on site and ain't nobody sober. You know my name, Dope Knife. My mama called me Toga go. We smoke up. It's all leegal, We all equal, We all ball. No such thing as small people, gunsticks, pots and pans before evil. Now we got plots of land fall.

Zero sedo. I won't be shocking and jobbing. Blaze at your face. Why the fuck are you smiling? Politicians ain't original, nothing surprising. They clones of each other like they stuck on the island. Well, what's up, y'all? What's happening? My name is Dope Knife, Lingo franca and we are waiting on reparations. Hurry, Hey, So how you doing. I'm busybody, fresh off of quote unquote vacation in North Carolina. Else, Dope, watch a lot of Netflix, uh ate a lot of

cookie doughs straight out of the tube. So it sounds like a little bit of what you're doing here. But over there, yeah, I pretty much the same thing. I'm still going to commission meetings and whatnot. Um, but just in the company of my mother. How is she all right? She's good, mean, she she's got lupus and so she's been very careful with COVID and everything and just generally has a lot of like long issues and so, uh, I'm glad that she's staying safe and inside. I was

reading at home. So yeah, So I have a meeting with the police chief of Athens tomorrow about some of the movement's demands. Um that we've been uh having his protests over continually. I've been seeing you know, all of the country. They're still ongoing. Even the media has not covered it. It's closely, but you know, there's been a call for like a ban on neck restraints here, a ban on tear gas like they've done in Seattle, Denver, Dallas,

Philadelphia and in Portland. Um, and a lot of other things that aren't even radical, like the finding the police freak people out, but like things like requiring officers to give a warning before they shoot is actually required in seventy out of one hundred of the largest police departments in the country. You know, as a fan of action movies, cops in action movies used to like yo freeze all

the time. I don't know what happened to that. Yeah, Um, there's the requirement that officers have a duty to intervene to stop another officer from using excessive force, which is standard in fifty out of one d of the largest police departments in the country. Um, out of the hundred largest police departments in the country have de escalation continuum and like a use of force continuum. And so like, we're just asking for things that him. Yeah, I want

to presently see him tomorrow. Um does he not know this? He knows the ship. You know, this is what we want. Uh. They called this meeting because they were like, Mariah, you have to stop having these caravans without apertmit. And I was like, the movement does not ask for permission to mass disrupt, Like you know what I'm saying, Well, how are you doing. I'm good. Um, I was chilling here taking care of your cat. And uh, you know, sweet boy, he was coming in and out as he pleased, but

he was good. Um. Made some more progress on my comic book, and I produced a bunch of beats that I'm going to be using on this show soon. Sick not gonna be on this episode. This episode is going to be some of my older beats and Factor chandelier. But I'm gonna have some new fire for the people in a little bit, and the Black Lives Matter Punisher shirt that I did with Jerry Conway, the creator of Punisher, that finally got printed and people are starting to get those.

So and then on top of that, I'm getting ready for this show that I have on July eight. It's gonna be on Twitch tv Slash the Grand Collab. But it's gonna be like an indie hip hop stream show is going to be a bunch of dough backs, but I'm gonna be one of them. So yes, tuned into the rap a little bit. But yeah, Now other than that, just been watching the news and and you know, writing and stuff like that. You you heard about this Kanye show.

Is there something new? Well, I mean development, you know, we haven't we haven't talked about him since he announced that he was I feel like last time that we mentioned him, he announced that he was going to run for president and it's obviously bullshit, But just your general thoughts. I mean, I loved watching like the libs lose their

ship about it. A lot of people doing the you know, doing the research about what countries, what sorry, doing the research about what states he can't get on the ballot for how would it affect the electoral math and whose votes would he take? Oh, the young black voters aren't gonna vote for Biden anymore. I'm kind of mad that it's Kanye, to be honest with you, like I'm mad that it's not that if it was any other rapper that I would think it's as acceptable or that they're qualified.

But at least I would understand people's logic, you know what I mean? Can I ask you a question? Yeah, what if it was tell them quality? Yeah? Well, okay,

So that's exactly what I'm saying. So I'm not saying that, oh, I think that Taller Quality is qualified to be president, but if somebody says, oh, Tler Quality should be president, I'm thinking, okay, while people are looking at famous people to be president these days, So alright, Tyler Quality is a conscious rapper who people know is politically where I understand someone's logic in picking. What if it was Chance the rapper, You know, he was going hard for Kanye

the other day when about operations in abolishing prisons. But exactly at the same time, I will say, you know, Chance the rapper is a lot more politically aware of of a rapper and a person just historically than Kanye has been in my in my opinion, from my point of view. So again, I would understand people's train of thought to be like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna I think the chance of the rapper. But but what but like, would you feel tempted, would I want? Would you feel

tempted what to vote for? Chance the rapper? Hell, I might be a little bit tempted. No, I'm kind of over. I'm over like celebrities. I think I think I've seen what that's like. Good, all right, Fine, well let's talk to our real candidate, all right. So yeah, bottom line, I mean, I don't I think that it's I think it's kind of racist to frame it in this in the way of, oh, a black person's running, they're going to siphon the black vote, doesn't matter who they don't

understand how hip hop works. But in the sense that like white listeners make up like Kanye was able to like catapult to such a ban because his appeal is mostly to white people. But the thing that you know, we're going to cover it a bit on our our episode that we're doing on Donald Trump at some point. But I don't know, like I feel like when I

think of Donald Trump as president. To me, and I've always felt this, there's like a list of qualities that I think disqualify him from being from being able to lead a country point blank period. You know what I'm saying.

They're like a list of like character traits and human qualities that I feel like, Okay, that's checked off, Okay, check off, and they'd like go into order of like importance of just like functionality of what somebody needs, the tools of someone needs to like be the head of stay. And like he's racist is like number four in there, you know what I'm saying. But there's like a couple other traits that I'm like, yeah, I see that in Kanye.

I wouldn't want that to be president at all. Like ever, like no, like you know what I'm saying, I feel the same exact way that I feel about that of Trump about it. So I don't know. To me, it's it's just it's disappointing that I mean, we're here at

all because we could have had Bernie Sands. Speaking of Bernie, so like I feel like, you know, I opened up the show with some bars I wrote about Bernie back in February because our guests this week has somewhat failed a void in a lot of like young progressive organizing UM, like capacity, UM, media, attention and leadership UM. His name should hit Batar. He's running for UM Dancy Pelosi seat

in the twelfth congressional district of California. And so I think that like a lot of folks are turning for hope else that they're looking to people like shot Head, looking to people like Kanye. Maybe not like Bernie Bros said as much. I don't know. I saw mixed things

on Twitter. Frankly, what about Bernie Bros Being like, yeah, Kanye. Well, this is going to be part of a series that we're gonna be doing of interviews with people who have or who have had a foot in the culture of hip hop as active participants, whether that be an m C breakdancer, graffiti artists, but then also have another foot either in politics or activism just general cool ship that's making an impact, making a difference in the world. This

series is called Spitting Images. I thought that myself, And so there's obvious races that like progressives are now sort of turning their attention to UM across the country because you know the very policy driven um we're seeing now with pandemic unfolding and five point four million people having lost their health insurance UM since it started, like you know, fucking Medicare for all man, it could have been a

thing um and stuff like that. So we're like trying to figure out how to keep that those policy goals alive. And it's through electing people like shot Ahead, I think. So to start for folks that don't know about you, if you can tell us a little bit about yourself and why you're running down set Nancy Pelosi in Congress.

I'm an immigrant, UM, an artist. I'm a lawyer and an advocate, and I basically watched my city in Washington for the better part of twenty years be represented by a voice that's proven all too willing to Sup or Wall Street before San Francisco. And I've been in San

Francisco since two thousand. I spent about half that time in Washington, d C. Fighting for San Francisco's values and interests there without a seat in Congress, and from the time when I was challenging bushes, wors for profit and Obama's drone strikes and wars on the press and deportations and mass surveillance, and then Trump's corruption and mendacity and assaults on human rights and reason across every one of those eras of abuses, I've seen Nancy Pelosi standing with

corporate and conservative interests instead of the progressive interests of the city that I love. And so you I've heard you refer to yourself in in other interviews as a political artist, and I wonder how UM arts have factored into your advocacy or been leveraged for your advocacy in

previous campaigns that you've fought for US issues. It's been really for me, very integral, even before politics, like in a meta sense, like I got a culturated basically through spoken word and hip hop, Like it was hearing I was in Chicago in the nineties and um, you know, like the Green Mill is a place that comes to

mind on the north side of the city. And you know, even like just back in Hyde Parks on the south side, just hearing in Cipher's hearing on stages and open mics on the trains, and like the trains and the train stations, like moming with people. You just to hear people's stories, you know, and that's it was through the mechanism, if you will. It's like a gross ware to apply here, like the word is the beginning of art, and I think it was the art is always reflecting on the

circumstances that we come from and and are in. I think any art that pretends not to be political is simply blind to its political insinuation. It was like, if you're not challenging the power in your art, you're implicitly deferring to it. And much of the art I had a chance to hear in that era was very, if not challenging power, at least speaking from beneath the boot.

And so that's plus my own experience, you know, that's kind of a perspective through which I see policies, you know, from the lens of an immigrant whose family migrated around the world, you know, halfway around the world twice to get here, seeking the freedoms and opportunities that we continued to deny our own people here in the United States and always have you know, um, when did you first start, like wrapping, and what impact do you think it had them?

Like your ability to communicate in general or in public speaking U in late high school around how old, were you h sixteen fifteen sixteen, I was doing musical theater. I'm sorry, Oh, I said, word, that's that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're we're We're like a hippoie hob show, so we say stuff like word fresh though, no, no, it's cool. I think I had to turn up the volume on my mike because obviously I think I had it turned down.

So that's fil and fall. Sorry for that, but yeah, I know, for me, musical theater was like how I cracked out of my shell. You know, I was an awkward immigrant and I didn't really know how to fit in. And I grew up in rural Missouri and we moved to the suburbs, and that was a pretty profound cultural change. It's like we immigrated by moving half an hour, no second time, and for my family a third time. That

was the second time. For me. You know, my family moved from Pakistan to England, and from England to rural Missouri, and then from rural Missouri to the suburbs. Every one of those was a, you know, pretty profound migration. And then I moved to the South side of Chicago before I went to Stanford for law school and like every

one of those was a pretty profound migration. And yeah, the art I mean for me, I would say poetry and lyrics, both in the sense of giving me the opportunity to just speak to things that I don't necessarily even address in my politics, you know, like just where your soul comes from, Like that's a venue for a whole range of expression beyond that, and you know, like the metaphysical unity of all things and how we all share an interest ultimately, like a self interest in preserving

a future for all of us. Like that's like the thing I don't necessarily like riff on a lot in a left brain this course, you know, but like the heart gives me a chance to hit on um, so that the more visionary side. And then also just in the sense I would say, you know, I get um.

I get occasionally shouted out for knowing how to use a microphone, and I think that that particularly came from performance and just time on micure the path that you're on, Like was this all was this always part of your plan or was there ever like a point where you considered actually focusing on music or poetry. I mean my dream if I were instruct my like yeah, like if you had a genie that you could just like, Yeah, I'd rather be an artist, frankly, not to keep my

time than to dabble in politics. I feel that. Yeah, for sure, Definitely I feel pressed into politics. I mean this is I feel scripted by by cur Yeah for sure, definitely. I feel the same in like, you know, my political work. I wish I didn't have to be doing this, but someone has to be pushing for these changes. I'd rather just be rapping all day. But well, but that idea of doing it off on and off the mic, you know, being about it, Yeah, is is you know something I

take that from. Like, you know, there's so many m c s over do you remember, like back in the day, I think it was Al Gore and Bill Clinton were demagoguing sisters soldier. That's like become a political colloquialism for speaking out against your base pretty much. And she was like she was a spoken word community organizer. Like you know, the number of people I've met over the years who are compelled by the things they witnessed to speak the

truth whatever it means for power. I mean, that's that's like the grist from which all useful anything in our society has calm, you know, those those are the grios. That's the oral history that preceded the institutional history that is, you know, brainwashed gation. I've been for the last few days. I've been, um bumping, get out of your chair your two thousand and eight album, right, So I'm just just

curious just how did that album come together? Because it seems to be the only one in your discography, so like, you know who produced it? Was it all all the beats somebody you knew or was it you or I couldn't really find too much of the credits for it. Yeah, I'll break it down, um, and yeah, I've had other songs since, but not really enough to put an album together out of Oh my God, the world needs it. Nancy, will you give us the second album? I appreciate that

I have. I have tracked in the can, right, but I've never released just because it's like I don't have any time like make cover art or I mean, I've got this one song Justice that have had mccan for like a year, and it's just like bumping house track. It's a little poppy and it riffs on mass incarceration, homelessness in particular as well as militarism. Like I try to do like the Doctor King's intersecting evils. Yeah, yeah, and you know it's like probably my best like vocal

rendition of anything song. So like you know, I like to sing and wrap over house tracks. That's kind of a don't tease this with stuff that we'll never get to hear. Well, if it's like that, if I hear there's an audience, I'll just put a random like that's definitely an audience for my man. That's definitely what's wearing

right now. Well, we're actually this is gonna this is gonna be This interview is part of a series that we're thinking about doing where we're just gonna be talking to people who are you know, one foot in hip hop and the other foot in politics or activism, you know, right on, because there's a lot of people who are doing it. Apparently, talk to equipso make sure you talk

to him. And Okay, definitely Fristco five, you know, helped organize the one of the really driving forces behind the longer strike at the Mission District Police Station responding to the murder of Alex Nieto and Mario Woods. Before that, UM and if you get a chance to talk to Keith Ellison. One of my favorite moments of TC my first time there. I think this would have been like

two thousand nine eight. I'm riding up an escalator and I'm right next to representative at the time, Keith Ellison, and somehow we fall into a cipher to each other the escalator. It was it was really like I remember that moment just feeling because it was very like not to kind of ship that happens. Yeah, well, I mean that's the thing with like MCN is this like fight club and ship like we're everywhere, we're the politician teachers.

I'm pretty sure. My favorite cipher I was ever and was at net Roots in two thousand seventeen in Atlanta with a bunch of folks from like Democracy for America, my Working Families Party. We're just like, you know, we just ciphered up in the lobby of the highest, you know, and it was like about defeating mass incarceration and uplifting working family escention. Hell yeah, but sorry, we were talking about back to the album. Yeah, so yeah, So the production.

The production was really unique. It had a lot of like hand percussion. It sounded really had a homemade sound to home, made like acoustic quality to it. That that's it's most of the hand drumming you heard on that album. There were two people of Kristin Rant in Washington, d C. And Ken Qualm in Washington, d C. And they both

illustrate exactly what we're talking about. Kristen. Kristen has a lifetime band from the National Press Club because she interrupted Donald Romstall to drop the banner saying you have blood on your hands, are speaking of the press conference in two three. I met her right when I moved to Washington the first time, and we co organized the DC Gorilla Poetry Insurgency. It's one of the grassroots performance collectives and I put together over the years. And then she

she's we've performed together like any number of places. She taught me to draw. And then Ken Qualm and on a Boss, the China Town Boss. I think from China, I think from Boston to New York and like two thou So then maybe and he was at the time, he was like a young man, he'd been organizing against the war as a student on his college campus, got

super into it, got super burnt out. I think he ended up paying some like personal prices for his organizing in terms of like you know, needing to take some time away from school and like definitely burned out of his inspiration and then like I've seen him since get reinspired in reuation the movement, and he'd come to he was Remember he was a trained musician at the Berkeley School of Music, so that he was like a legit musician.

And Kristen is too. She she trained an oboe in particular, and they were basically the instrumentation you heard on the album was like my holies, you know, and like who I could drag into a studio. So and and it's interesting too because that album, you know, it reflects much more of like a funk and you know, live music performance sensibility than most of what I performed is like

wrapping with a DJ. I started DJing to throw myself beasts that I could run over, and so I'm much more a househead than I am what comes across in that album. But that album, frankly is also much more kind of like what I bring to the mic, and you know, in a space where I don't have a DJ in a sound system like that, so you're like a you know your your double threat. You know, are you you wrap in you DJ? But are there any other like elements that you get down on, Like I

can bring a little I play cupo. I know a lot of people who do that. It was like a transition and a break in for though. Yeah, I started training because it's like I mean, I used to kickbox and study a keo before this. And so the martial element of couple particularly appeals to me in additions and the like stylistic embellishments that you know, the b boys and be they're also like developed to innovated on. So I just like to move on my kindness the final

love motion. So dance and martial arts both kind of like snowboarding, all those things kind of hit that button from me. Where on the Katie Helper Show you made a joke about rap battling Nancy Pelosi, Are you you don't strike me as like the battling type when I battle wrap, I just called people out for being egotistical. Yeah, I wonder if you have any battle with your blood, like like get grandmother on it, Like you know, what would your mom thinking, you know, saying like that's a

good that's a good strategy. I used to. I used to battle myself, so though I know I ran across some cats like you nice were you were? You still djaying every Thursday in the Castro up until the pandemic hit, every month a month until until the pandemic. And I saw the last time I was rolling through. Actually there was a former member of our Board of Supervisors who passed away recently, so there was a memorial for him.

And as I was walking to the memorial, I just happened to pass the spot where I played piece every month and they start it, uh, serving people out on the sidewalks. So they kind of moved the service out on the sidewalk. So I'm open maybe to get back in there and bumps some beats off the dolphin, you know. Well not even campaign events, just like different playing the ball. Well I had a chance to do some of that.

We just played actually a renegade in Alamo Square at sunset on my ex girlfriend's friends put it together Thursday. I think that lies and uh, and then this is even crazier. An art truck just got to town. It used to be the Bernie Man and our homie David just got to town on Friday, and we spent all weekend bumping beats all over the city and different like block party protests, all youth lad My favorite moment of

the whole week was Saturday morning, Independence Day. I'm on the roof of a van in a Code Pink and Extinction rebellion caravan going to Nancy Pelosi's house for an empty chair debate, chanting defund, police and the Penting defund we had. All the horns are going, Yeah, that's what's up? So what is the pandemic? In the campaign? Trail been like free musically, well musically it's just kind of like shut down music. But I missed it all. I mean,

I still write lyrics. Um, I've gotten to plug in on a couple of like Zoom conferences, like basically different DJ crews that are doing live streams. You know, it's like dance with everybody in there their living rooms, in their bedrooms, and that's kind of cool, but like I feel, I feel pretty shorn. That's one thing I missed. Frankly.

There are a lot of things too. More and then I'm like this and I have more than once more, particularly like just the experience of people being together, and especially because like I don't even know when we experienced that together that that's one reason for me that Renegade Alamo Square was like so it was my heart because like, I haven't I haven't been on a dance floor with a group of people and you know, months, and then we're out there and there's all these little dogs and

little kids and like people having their picnics and like help me throwing down. Sam's throwing down some beautiful house music, and it's a sunset on this I think after them and the system was it was perfect. Um, I guess it was evening because I usually worked all around eight or nine, so I think I got there right around sunset.

But it was just like the feeling of just being in community and motion, you know, like we talked in the house music community sometimes about like you know, the clubs, church and you know, yeah, I hadn't gone to a a church in a while, so yeah, speaking of faith. On the same Katie Helper interview I listened to, when speaking of faith, you said, like any good DJ, you remix

things and religious in refference to your religious practice. And I wondered if the mindset of remixing makes its way into your political work at all or if other musical mindset sets inform your political efficacy. That's a fascinating question. And I suppose yeah. I mean, I was just talking.

I remember on a podcast with the Student Texas over the weekend, and at one point in the conversation I described progressivism and libertarianism as flip sides at the same point, and he has a libertarian seemed to be very compelled by that. And you're talking that through and you know,

that's there's a remix there. I'm a democratic socialist, and I often said, but the D back in democratic socialism, people focus on the S because that's what's you you know, like socialism in the face of corporate capitalism is like people are like, wow, that's novel. You know, maybe it is, but a lot of us have long been committed to making sure that people get housing and food and health care first before people get yachts, and so like, that's

that's socialism. The D and the democratic social movement is just like maintained the best digital commitments to democratic governments that are slipping to our fews. And that's much more typically if you trace it back, that tends to go, you know, to libertarians tend to be the people more concerned with that kind of stuff. But I remember co intel pro though you know, I was born in the tail end of it and socialized certainly after it. The

conventional wisdom would suggest it ended. But the threat to dissent and the weaponization of intelligence apparatuses and police departments to suppress dissent and and subvert our democracy by using security and public safety as a ruse to offend First Amendment principles. That is as timeless as the United States, and that goes back to the wards into the FOM.

That would just say, in terms of the remix, I think a lot of democratic socialists they lead into the socialism and they forget the democratic and so like, if I have a remix, it's that I'm bringing in this like and you know, I would say it's like particularly inflected by a memory of the Panthers and the civil rights movement and the movement for peace and Vietnam and what happened to those movements and how they were neutralized.

And I think a lot of contemporary socialists forget that not distant history and reed in the first place because of the way our schools work. Yeah, I think that's but it's so relevant. But it's so relevant absolutely, I absolutely agree. Yeah, in digging like through you know, your music. Something that was of note was in twinty four Team you put out like a video slash song called us A versus the N S A and then and say

versus USA. And then I also noticed that you you were spitting you know, there's some videos on YouTube of you spitting a Ferguson too Jerusalem like verse while djaying sometimes. And it's just I know that at that particular moment in time and in there were a lot of things going on that for whatever reason, I personally was just

compelled to talk about within my art. So did that did that moment in time like have any sort of special significance that you felt the need to like write those two things, because that's around the time of like Edward Snowden obviously for the Ferguson shooting all within Yeah, within about a year of each other. Lots of things to say that. I mean, my dream has always been this gets back to your question only about you know, how would I construct my life if I wanted it?

My dream has always been do like rapid response political education through like hip hop and house music and if I could drop a music video within a week of a new cycle to be like, here's what it is, like, here's the background, here the context, here's when you're not being told in the media, and like people don't have the stomach to read that I've discovered, but it seems like they'll watch a music video for it, So like, Okay, let's just let's package it like that. I think that's

like that could be a thing. That's kind of what we do on this show. That's my vision, y, yeah, right, if that's the vision that you're promoting, I mean I props to you. I mean, if you have a page on my website, not for the campaign, but like my personal science just my name dot com where the lyrics for n S a versus USA are annotated and hyperlink to background news stories and articles like every word in

that in that song means something. And you know, I basically write whether it's for an academic audience or a public literary audience, or for like a musical audience as like public education slash propaganda recognizing that so right, and and those songs for me in particular, I guess we're like my they were My opus is in the sense of actually responding in as close to real time as I could get. Like I dropped n S a Versus USA.

It took me about a year after the Snowden revelations to get the music video done, but like you know, I had to like you to Kickstarter and the whole nine and like that took me a while, but by the time it dropped, it was like still it remains

unfortunately entirely too relevant. You know, it goes back to the plot to kill Dr King and connects that to Fred Hampson's assassination and the bombing of Judy Barry and Edward Snowden's revelation or Obama's continuation of Bush's legacy, and you know the way that DHS biometric data collection inflex all this and like you know, the corruption that evades

this entire enterprise. Yeah, we actually we did. Um we did an episode on Conceal pro recently in the history of FBIIL and some black musicians, and I was really hoping to hear you talk a little bit about the CIA's involvement in the War on drugs. That's kind of an extension of the way the federal government has worked to break up breakup black communities and what you, as a congressman would do to heal the aftermath of the War on drugs. Thank you so much for bringing the

lens there. People forget this entirely, and I find and in contemporary mobilizations around the Movement for Lick Lives, this tends to be the thing I talked about is Gary Webb's legacy and how it relates to the issues and we are confronting today in terms of militarized police and the assaults on our communities. It is documented fact that the Central Intelligence Agency ran crack cocaine into US cities in the nineties to fund its rogue foreign policy abroad

and its human rights abuses across Latin America. And the agency never paid any price for that, no budgetary price, no programmatic price. Nobody went to jail. You know. The worst that happened there was the Iran contra scandal, which was a piece of it. You know, the fuller dimensions of this never emerged until later. U s cops were dying on the streets of US cities, gunned down by narco traffickers that the CIA had trained and equipped. And as a response to that and a generation of people

participating in an underground economy. But the CIA created we sent two and a half million black and brown people to prison. And that's that's changed the hip hop generation and the post hip hop generation, like indelibly that Like it's such a formative like part of our history and our story, the stories that we're still telling through our music. And I fear that as we tell those stories, we tell them almost as if we are depicting an elephant.

But talking about the tusk, like we talk about the militarization of police, we talked about how it impacts our communities. But behind the tusk is this whole other thing. And that's not just police. That is an extractive international industrial complex. That's what Eisenhower warned us about, the N one. And it's much bigger than police. It is an industrial system of capital extracting wealth from people and communities around the planet.

Like and that's the story of imperialism. And so policing is like one face of a hydra. And I'm very adamant in my policy recommendations and you know, the policy I aimed to effectuate as a legislature, as a legislator to deal not merely with the task, but to dismantle the elephant, the elephants of the GOP, the elements of imperialism, the elephants of social control, whether from corporate sources or government sources. Policing is absolutely the tip of the sphere.

I mean, the tusk is a good metaphor there, but there's a lot more behind it, and I'm adamant to get at all of it. Yeah, I found really interesting that UM among calls to defund the police nationwide. Um. You know, Bernie Sanders hasn't like necessarily gotten behind that, but has put forward legislation to to fund the Pentagon

by ten percent and redistribute that fundamed communities. I think that is making that link between the broader industrial complexes that we're dealing with with that that tie into militarization and social control. And I know that you yourself have also UM joined this call to to fund the Pentagon, and I wanted to see if you could talk to us a little bit about why. Yeah, the two absolutely connect. It's micro and mac. You know, the policing is the

part of the military industrial complex that we see. The Pentagon is the part of the military industrial complex that we project and especially now in a time of pandemic and economic collapse. Knowing how crucial is the need to establish universal healthcare doesn't just put your neighbors at risk when they can't get their medicine. It puts us alid.

Looks like, we need medicine, we need doctors. We need cost not to be an impeditt We need to keep people in their owns, We need rent mortgages not to be an impediment. Right. I mean that we're going to have a wave of evictions and homelessness if we don't do something to keep people in their homes. If we play out the tape, and you know, presume for the moment that we managed to hold the pandemic at bay long enough to develop a vaccine or herder immunity, then

of course climate to the hystrophe remains looming. If we are to see brighter days on any of these fronts, if we are to survive them, we have to put something other than profit at the center of our calculus.

And um, you know, I see in the rented mortgage crisis and the failure of corporate democrats to support for MS in Silhana Mars proposal to cancel rents and mortgages, and and provide government support for small landlords so that they also don't have to bear the burden of this crisis, but to make sure that housing costs fall where they can be most easily shouldered, particularly on banks and corporate landlords, which we have bailed out before. So you know it

makes perfect sense. But you can't find a corporate democrats see yeah, um, as well as you've fought for I guess you could say civil digital rights, digital civil rights for twenty years both US constitutional lawyer and it is

part of the Electronic front Frontier Foundation. And in our co Intel pro episode we talked a bit about digital safety while protesting, highlighting that people you know might come prepared for tear gas or bring water, but they might forget what risk there are with like facial recognition software other in forms so veilance to control. So what do you like, how would you define our digital civil liberties and how have you fought to protect them as well

as what work remains to be done? Right, So, digital civil liberties there are sort of the idea of keeping ourselves safe in spaces even as we move into digital spaces, right So, and and frankly, the whole in the bucket when I talk about digital civil liberties as we're losing civil liberties in other than the non digital arena. So I think of them expansively as like kind of like again like progressivism and libertarianism or flip sides of the people.

It's like liberties in my mind. But there's a whole bunch of people who are particularly concerned about one part of that, which is the liberties online. And you know the threat vectors, there are plenty. Unfortunately, corporate platforms do everything from spy on their users to constrain what they see, often very arbitrarily, without any motive in the due process. I actually had an interdu taming down my YouTube and

Google subsidiary about two maybe three months ago. I did an interview with an independent journalist Anymore and I to hear with and it's it's it's even crazier when you consider the subject matter, because what we were talking about was how the mainstream press was not covering the congressional attempts to railroad and other extension of the Patriot Act government surveillance powers through Congress, and how it wasn't drawing

press attention. So we do this interview YouTube takes it down within ten minutes of it hitting the web, right, he didn't record a local copy of it, so it was gone effectively. So that's a corporate platform. So they

never told you what the reason was. We suspect because this was early in the pandemic and there were you know, there was a lot of concern about fake news relating to it, and we did talk about the coronavirus stimulus packages and my critique of corporate democrats and their privileging corporate interests and you know, some of the same issues

we're talking about now. So the theory is that saying the words COVID or coronavirus basically triggered some other, right, So it's we don't think it's and this is the danger when we talk about digital civil liberties. Maybe here's the thing that makes it digital. It's less the concern about censorship by a sensor within afarious intent, which is

still a real thing, just to be clear. But what we're really concerned about a censorship by algorithm there where there's no one making the decision at all, you know, And and that's a good metaphor for capitalism. Capitalism is like computers, here, it's a thing and mechanism to be built to try to facilitate something that has gotten off its leash, that's run a month, that is now calling the shots. You know, capital is supposed to be a thing that facilitates exchange, maybe a way to better more

efficiently out of a resources. But when capital attains a gravity of its own such that our democratic processes sort of it instead of our communities, we have a problem, a pretty severe problem because it inevitably, whether through a pandemic or the grinding gears of a military industrial complex or paramilitary police, it leaves people dead. And to wait, yeah, yeah, um, I want to talk a little bit about the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act. Um do you think there's

any wins for the movement here? And um, where, if anywhere does it fall short? And I guess for listeners who might not be um familiar with the George Floyd and Just Justice and Policing Act, like, what is it? Right? This is the bill that the House passed recently. I've been quite critical of it and the theater surrounding it, but I do want to acknowledge the parts of it that are worth praising and you're right to just invite sort of parsing it because it is a very multi

component measure. So for the better part of twenty years have been advocating measures, including the Undracial Programming Act, which corporate Democrats have never supported. Parts of it are included in the Justice and Policing Act. Other things that we've proposed for years, including any qualified immunity and creating a violent registry of violent police, they're also included in the

Justice and Policing Act. And I'm grateful to corporate Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, for fighting off parts of our platform. I wish they did it sooner. I'm glad they finally showed up. The bill has yet to become laws, still has to pass the Senate and be signed by a president into law, so just to locate where it's out in the process, A critical cynical view of the passage of the law through the House might suggest that because the Senate will pass it, it was politically cheap for

the House to do it. There was no cost they have to pay because it can't become policy as long as the Senate is constituted as it is, right, So that's that's a cynical view of the passage of it. Another cynical view of the passage of it is the theater surrounding it, which was Nancy Pelosi and the entire Democratic leadership kneeling in traditional West African barb reserved for

royals on the House floor. After having legislated for a generation the measures that created this crisis, from the Crime Bill to the measures that allowed the transfer of military equipment to local police, to the serial funding requests by the Department of Justice that then fund local police whether

or not they comply with civil rights. Each of these active measures by Congress have built the problem that they're now showing up to claim to care about, and just to get into the last party of question around what were the parts of the bill that fell short? And and frankly, there's one particular part of it that is actively harmful and I want to dig in on that in terms of falling short. What the bill does not do, and you mentioned Senator Sanders also has yet to support

casts a defund police. That is the community demand. And the reason we're demanding that is because we have been through this too many damn times. We are tired of saying their names the time for commissions is over. There have been commissions, there have been proposals. We are done. We know that that community safety is undermined by police.

What we need public safety. The way to get public safety, and too many communities is to remove the publicly subsidized threat in our communities and then the military agents of the state who murder arbitrarily with immunity. And just to get into that next part about what in the bill is actively unharmful. Beyond failing to defund police, the Justice and Policing Act also inflates police budgets by trying to create a national mandate for police body which do not

help civil rights. Police body cameras are a corporate bait and switch. You cannot get accountability through a body camera, both because the most it even offers, even if they're always on, and even if we always got the footage, the most it offers is the officer's perspective of a particular set of incidents. It doesn't give you transparency into an incident, just an officers perspective. It doesn't give you transparency into patterns or practices or what the officers doing

out of the field of view. And it doesn't give you. This is the key accountability. Even if a body camera gave you transparency into the entire setting, which a dash cam. Yeah, it was just about to say. It strikes me that usually it's the dash cam they captured stuff like that when you see videos. Dash cams are helpful because they capture the officer in contact. Bodycams are not because they don't.

And in any case, even with all the tools, whichever you know, whether it's dash cams or body camps, and too many cases, the problem is the law not transparency. When we say George Floyd's name or Eric Garner's name, we are remembering people who were killed on video that we have all seen hundreds of millions of people happening exactly and it didn't put anybody in prison, right The only person from Eric Garner's scene who went to prison was the man holding the camera, Ramsey Taga, I think,

isn't uh. And the idea that that transparency is going to equal accountability presumes that the law actually works, and the only way the law works is to insulate power from accountability, and ending qualified immunity is a big part of this. So that's part of the justice and policing Act, which is frankly, uh, you know, I'm among the things

I'm grateful for. This last most recent and continuing wave of popular mobilization for doing is expanding the popular consciousness around when we say defund police, when we say end qualified immunity. These are proposals, you know, I proposed defunding policing, ending qualified immunity in twenty een. These are proposals the Movement for Black Lives study We've all been saying, but only recently have they become embraced by institutional actors, by

casual observers of the movement. And I think the public education that the movement has done, particularly around issues like ending qualify and im like defunding police, is driving the legislative agenda. And I say, you know, the future is this simple. You're either on the train with our communities or you're not. You're in the way, and we're going to take your seats. It's that simple, show up for

our communities. We're going to show you the door. And I aim to be a vehicle and agent of that transition in a particularly pivotal seat because of who is occupying and it has occupied for the last three years. Has the campaign that you're on seen any sort of boosting attention since Bernie dropped out hugely, So I've been amazing a lot more often our Bernie grief having to

put those dollars. Thank you for this report. It makes a huge difference in you know, as soon as we won the primary, I knew that there would be a because we now have a foot in the door until November, and I knew that there would be a point and the cycle where more and more eyes would be turning to us, if only because the field would be narrowing and we'd be one of the last of the Mohicans

for our movement on the field in this cycle. I had hoped certainly to be running on the ticket behind Bernie, because our nation needs his vision now more than ever, and because frankly, I would rather my time in Washington be about building a brighter future rather than trying to stave off the worst parts of our predatory paths. But

you know, be that as it may. When Bernie suspended his campaign, I think a lot of people around the country we're looking for opportunities to vindicate our movement and still advance the principles that we all share in the not REOs movie, and I am incredibly humble, grateful for

frankly just astounded by be what's happened. I mean, I'm auditioning for a chance to represent a city in Congress, and at the same time, without frankly any design or even idea that this was a possibility, I stumbled into an opportunity to be one of the voices representing a movement. And again, I'm just grateful for the chance to play that role, and really great full to all the people around the country we've been blocking to our campaign. We

now have. I think we're right around twenty five thousand donors across the country, which for a congressional campaign challenge. Now, I mean we're raising as much money sometimes there have been days recently where we've raised as much as in a day as it took me a month to raise. And I got as many votes as are Consing and Cortes did after three months in the race, and I've

got four times since then. And we've been building this campaign pretty dramatically and it's you know, reflecting in ways and I didn't even again when I started out, I didn't even understand where possible. And yeah, I'm looking very much forward to the next three months into the my first term in Congress after removing Nancy. So what does winning look like to you, like in terms of the coalition you need to build and the outreach that's left

to do. So, the folks at the core of the coalition include the progressive social movements of San Francisco, so the immigrant rights community, the movement that's been very active and resisting police islands, the movement for a Global peace and justice, the civil liberties, digital civil liberties. These are

all very much core parts of our coalition. Other parts of our coalition include artists, countercultural community that recognizes the co optation of our hopes and dreams by an establishment. They include um beyond immigrant rights like immigrants communities of various pieces, and so this is one among the parts of the coalition we really need to more solidify. Include

Chinese speaking immigrant communities. We have a very robust and active Spanish language outreach program, so that's also building UM. The gay community in San Francisco is something of a political kingmaker, and I've done a lot of work defending gay rights and the primary uh the parts of the city where the lgbt Q community are most concentrated did support Pelosi far in a way. I think that's driven by a false impression that she is resisting Trump when

it actually does so much to advance Republican policies. And so a big part of our work is cracking that impression and educating many of our neighbors about how we are actually representing in Congress and what Polo season record actually looks like. It's one reason why I'm so eager to have a debate with her. But she hasn't debated anyone. I appreciate that, but you know, she hasn't debated anyone in thirty years. So is she going to show up

for work now? I would certainly hope so, But you know, ultimately it's up to what news organization to CNN going to like do its job or not. Is the chronicle going to make it happen. She can decline our invitations, she can decline. She's already declined KPF as well. She's refused to respond to it. So that's that's her emo. She just doesn't show up. If I debated her house, A bunch of groups brought me to her house this weekend, set up a chair outside her house, asked her a

bunch of questions, particularly about the military budget. She wasn't there to answer them, and then they enemy the microphone and indicated that she wants to participate in debate at all um her I think her only indication. I think she would regard this race as basically a threat to her to ever acknowledge the only acknowledgement I've ever heard,

You're gonna like this. I woke up one morning to read in the New York Times that Christine Pelosi, Nancy's daughter, who they want to give the c to after Nancy retires, to then wield it for another generation. Christine's on the d n C, she apparently has recorded in the New York Times, had called Bernie Sanders to complain that Susan

Sarandon had endorsed me. And the Times article didn't name me, It just depicted this saga about what right, And I tweeted, I'm like, you know, if you all are so concerned about actresses in Los Angeles endorsing my campaign in San Francisco to represent our city in Washington, D C, why can't you just instead of calling Bernie Sanders in Washington and it being reported in New York. Just show up for the damn debate. It's not defend your position, it's

just entitlement, you know. And the whole situation weeks of entitlement to me. So when you ask me, like, you know, will she show up for debate? What's her attitude of the race? I mean, as far as they're concerned, I think like they own the seat and it's that simple, you know. And I'm just a usance. If the conditions of stuff have them in a position where they don't have to even engage in a debate for thirty years, that's that's not democracy at all. And I think, you know,

the conditions now are very different. I think the conditions now are very are such that they probably can't survive ducking a debate, like how can And this is the ultimate question, not just for the people of San Francisco, for our news media, but I think our democracy were large is can the leader of the opposition party actually get away with keeping a criminal president in office and doing everything she can to advance his criminal agenda while

mouthing resistance on television? Like is anyone going to call her on that? And like I'm calling her on that, But it's a journalists in particular, I would just say for the sake of news media as an institution. And I'm saying this part particularly in the context of a

criminal president waging an outright assault on their profession. And like, you know, given that you have a right wing ideologue deriving the press as telling fake news, you have a corporate defender in the supposed opposition party who refuses to actually demonstrate in meaning any of the words that she's saying.

So you have to two very powerful oligarchs, real estate tycoons born with silver spoons in their mouths, to powerful East Coast families basically governing by theater, trading illustrations with smoke and mirrors. And that's what the press has been reduced to reporting on to the American people. And I would like to just offer a little bit of truth

in that equation if anybody can tolerate. I'm assured that whoever wins the White House in the next term, I'm going to be fighting them from the left, because it's just a matter of you know, which racist misogynists with a history of promoting belligerent international conflict is the one I'm going to be charged to fund and I'm eager to see. Yeah. Well, I got two final questions for you. The first um, you are on a podcast called Waiting on Reparations, and so I feel like we have to ask,

what are your thoughts of reparations fully legit? I mean, there have been four centuries of theft from an entire set of people. I would like to see reparations effectuated through a set of measures that particularly address dynastic wealth. So my first law of your article. In two thousand, I wrote a paper about ways to advance economic equality through a market framework, and inheritance in particular violates and

market framework. If you think about a market distribution norm, that's about theoretically distribution according to productivity, but it's decidedly not distribution according to birth. That's a feudal norm, not a market norm. So if we disaggregate feudal him from capitalism, there's a huge opportunity to shake loose a massive accumulated pool of resources that have basically been siphoned off the table.

There's a French economists many years later, about five years ago, Thomas Picketty who wrote a book Capital, establishing empirically that the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of increase in productivity growth, meaning that fortunes accumulate over time, and the accumulations of fortunes basically deprived the economies that

they're siphoning resources out of. So and a trusts and estates policy that claused back from dynastic fortunes the funds that could get redistributed through a reparations process could be one interesting way to get there. I think there are, you know, interesting ways to get there in terms of like tax amnesties that we could consider, you know, like what would four centuries of tax amnesties of of a

federal tax amnesty for black entrepreneurs and wage earners look like. No, but like there's lots of creative ways to to to synthesize what reparations might look like. At the very least, we need to move forward. There is a proposal for a formal commission to propose potential structures, and I want to see that. I really like the idea of a tax amnesty because you know, the predictable responses always you know,

how do we pay for it? And in this context and size steps that problem and says, well, you know, there's just a lot of neat waste and elegant ways to address to establish criticisms that I think, yeah, critics haven't even needed to grapple with because we haven't synthesized. Yeah, they think that how you're gonna pay for it is the end of the conversation, and really it's the beginning

of a conversation that fos have already been having. Well, I mean we've seen in the last three months that if they want to come up with ship ton of money, they can pretty quickly. I think it's been really eye opening for a lot of the public. Yeah, definitely, right, another just creative way here that we can do some remixing, you don't try to Reflecting on your earlier question, think

about equity licensing schemes in the cannabis industry. If we legalize cannabis at the federal level and say that enterprises can only be of a certain size unless they're black owned, like, that's a way to effectuate reparations that that doesn't involve any public expenditure, you know, it's it's using a license or to effectually and effectively put in place like a you know, a what in another another era we might have written off as a fermative action and you know

all the things that it became subject to politically, like reparations are an opportunity to revisit that conversation in the way they could be more sustainable polity. And my final question, any music recommendations for the people always public enemy and uh, they've got this new tour with Rage Profits of Rage, which digging on that, highly recommend it. I actually had a friend Obey, who performed with them, so that it was cool. Yeah, that must be a fierst brother to

have the like with those folks. That's yeah, I should I should share while I'm on your show that one of my dreams is to be endorsed by Chuck d tom Morello. Actually I'm the first politician he's ever endorsed. The endorsed eighteen. That's pretty proud of that m But you know, Chuck, somebody along been inspired by any number of mcs. But just in terms of other recommendations, there's a house producer by the name of Ross Couch who puts out some just beautiful music that would often some

very visionary lyrical samples and vocalists. He seems to know curate that there's one track I've been spinning. I played the other day and almost square the one I'm the kind of chance to play recently that just took me back. It's The Shaman is a British group from like the late eighties or only nineties. They have this track move any Mountain that to me is very um. I don't know. If I had an anthem for our campaign, that would be it. And you know, I remember hearing this track.

It was like on the desk or when I was like seventeen eighteen, and you know, maybe it's been ringing in my head for twenty years, but I do feel very firmly that we used people can in fact move any mountain, and that is exactly what we're going to do. Well, how do people help you? Movies, mountains, show head, tell them how to stay in touch with your campaign? Good looking out Folks can visit us online. Our website is

shaw Hit for Change dot us. We're also on all of the major social media platforms Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube at shaw Hit for Change awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's been wonderful campaign. We're rooting for you. Thanks y'all, I appreciate it. You have super fun conversation. I wish I had I had more chances to have exchanges like this, and I appreciate you

bringing me on. Alright, we'll have a good night. Hey, when you're whenever you're thinking about picking up the you know the mike again, you know, holler at us. Well, we'll throw down some verses right on, right down with that. Let's make that happen. We got this sound truck out so we can bump right exactly. Well, ship, it ain't nothing too but to do it, I mean, we're all here. We got to beat yo. Let's get a beep going. Let's do this hey hey yeah, heah a wait in

the reparations, we did it in Minnesota. We did it up in the front and in November, we're sending another member of the squad to go representatives in Congress. Remember the name of shot but Todd. When you go to the dropping option in the ballot box. We finished the funder panagon and put it in the medica. We're all I'm making sure what Todd. Let's get to go to college. Quarter pop every heap of godless within New wa Less, excuse up and really live, honest people who promised you

for people over profit. But now we got it for the lawyer artists advocate. You can't it. Get your head up, Congress, yoga bullshit, open us to know what can breathe this mask on. Don't approach me when I go in the street. I'm a beast. Where the host or I'm roasting a beat. You want some hold to believe the vote Shaheed never seems the way we go wins holding like no escape. And that's why the big homie is going against the grain. But wait, because if we all get Pelosi to go

to fake, he'll expose make resistance. Mostly it's just a fake. I don't give a funk with nobody saying you better go out and play. I read books. I ain't voting for you over the day. I don't even know what they're trying to beat. Got a nigger feeling like the last of a dying breathe. Whish I was a little bit taller, Wish I was a baller, then I could get tested for corona. But I'm not so that you're gonna accept I be a Ghana. That's why I'm smoking so much. Merrijauna on your Hey, my name is dope

knife Franca we are waiting reparations. See you next week. Next week. Waiting on Reparations as a production of i Heeart Radio. Listen to Waiting on Reparations on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.