Dying Democracy

in Trump's inner circle. From a former Fox News executive who was in the room when they decided to make the call for Arizona based on all of their findings and saying that they knew that Donald Trump lost the election. They knew it then they said it, and they had no idea that it was going to cause such a fury. But the facts were the facts that they had posters that were working that were both Democrat and Republican and academics and all of these people, and they knew Arizona

was called. Then you have you know, other folks who spoke to the fact that they also the night of the election, what was the mood? What do you understand? They understood that the election had been called and that based on the states that everyone had been tracking that Donald Trump lost the election. You heard that from Bill Barr, You hear it from Ivanka Trump. You hear it from all of the inner circle. You hear it from x Fox News executives. You hear it from the state attorney

general from Georgia. You hear it from everywhere. The purpose of this right, the purpose of the way that this hearing is being laid out and day and day two

is this. It is to show that Donald Trump knew that he lost the election, but that instead he decided to perpetrate a lie which, according to many reports from the One six Committee and NPR and others, he was able to grift get this, folks, a quarter of a billion fucking dollars on his stop the Steel, help us Stop the Steel two hundred and fifty million dollars he was able to bring in between the election right in

November and like January sixth, that is extraordinary. You have Donald Trump Junior's girlfriend, Gilfoyle, who has paid sixty thousand dollars for her handful of minute introduction to Donald Trump at this quote unquote stop the Steel rally, folks. The way that this is being laid out. Is what we've always known. Donald Trump is a fucking grifter. He's a fucking criminal, right. Even his own people they were willing to,

you know, keep it going. But then once logic set in, they were like, yeah, so you lost, Like we got to move forward. And Donald Trump kept bringing up to the Department of Justice, who he was using as his personal law firm, here are all of the ways that

we should be tackling this quote unquote steal. And when Bill Barr, who we all know is a fucking liar, who we all know is a criminal and should be indicted for his offenses against the American people, and in collusion with this White House, when he's the one that says, yeah, so this is all bullshit, Like, then you know that you have literally jumped the shark. The other way to know that you've jumped the shark is when you've decided that the person who you're taking advice from is shit faced.

Everyone who was interviewed who was in the White House on the day of the election has testified to the fact that Rudy Giuliani was half in the fucking bag, but yet it wasn't. All the other paid advisors and polsters and folks that Donald Trump was listening to. He was listening to the one drunk right who is Loizidou saying, Oh,

we can make this up in a recount. You had several people testify to the fact that when we are talking about recounts, and the biggest recount being the two thousand election, when we allowed the Supreme Court of these United States to decide the fucking election, you were talking about a margin of five hundred and eighty seven votes Donald Trump. In the states that were being hotly contested, you were talking about at minimum ten thousand votes. You

do not make that up in a fucking recount. So what are we looking at in the big big picture when we're trying to see Donald Trump in an orange jumpsuit to match his orange face. We are looking at intent? Right? Did Donald Trump intent to defraud the people? Was Donald Trump aware right that he had lost the election? Because the only defense has been laid out by a number

of lawyers on cable news. The only defense that Donald Trump's lawyers really have is to say that he believed that he didn't lose the election, and so he was going to do everything in its power well, when everyone inside of your inner circle has testified to the contrary, not only did they tell you, they told you that what you were scheming to do was in fact that

crazy and a scheme. So what pisces me off, though, is that you have now these Trumpers right who wanted to create this distinction on the inside between the kooks of Rudy Giuliani and then everybody else. But the thing is is that they were all aboard the insurrection train. Donald Trump had been talking about this election being stolen well before the Stop the Steel rally, ahead of our capital going up in smoke. He started making those claims

before the election in fucking August. Oh, the only way that we lose is if is if the election is stolen. The only way that we lose is if the election is stolen. No, the only way that you lose is if the American people decided that they want off the Trump fucking crazy train and they want some type of return to a normalcy. So I personally think right now after watching day two, that this committee is doing exactly

what it needs to be doing. My only critique is that every single hearing, every single public hearing, should be happening in prime time. There should be no hearing that is happening at ten o'clock in the morning, when the American people are at work. Every single hearing should be happening at seven pm, from seven to ten, every you know, for every single one, because that is when you know that people are home, when they have finished dinner or

they're making dinner, and they're watching what's going on. Right, We need eyeballs, We need people to recognize that not only did this grifting ass criminal president No No, that he was lying, He whipped these people up into a frenzy to tell them that if they were really patriots, that they would go and take their country back by any means necessary. So he knowingly put his own base

in harm's way to square up against the police. Not only that, but from the previous day one of the hearings, what did we learn that Donald Trump was nowhere to be found, and that his own chief of staff was trying to change the outside perception that he wasn't in charge of the White House or of a country, and that it was really Mike Pence talking about to General Millie, we got to change the narrative, said Meadows. I'm pretty sure that it wasn't politics that was leading that moment.

It was more so, Oh my god, the capital is being overthrown and people are trying to overthrow our democracy. That's what I think a general would be paying attention to. But what do I know. What we also found out yesterday is that in a pressor that the absentee Attorney General was giving and by absentee Attorney General of course,

referring to sleep at the wheel Merrit Garland, that he is. Indeed, he was asked by a reporter, are you watching right our folks watching these hearings, and he said, I am absolutely watching the hearings, as are the prosecutors at the Department of Justice. Well that was a good sign, because you've had this committee do all the fucking hardlifting for you,

all of the heavy lifting. So maybe maybe that is a glimpse into the fact that we will, at some point in time, god willing, be moving forward with a slew of indictments that Glenn Kirshner and I have been talking about on woke F for the last year and a half. Folks, I gotta tell you, you know, somebody asked me yesterday if I was encouraged, right because they wanted to have cautious optimism, and they're like, are you encouraged by what you are seeing and hearing? And it's like, well,

do I have hope? Not really, because this country continues to show its ass on a regular fucking basis. So do I have hope that this doesn't just turn into primetime entertainment and that by the time that we get to election midterm elections, that it's just one big nothing burger. I have no idea. I am ye of little faith. I want to be proven wrong. I do not want to be proven right in this instance. I want to be proven wrong. I want the Department of Justice to

come out with guns blazing. I want the Democrats to get their shit together and realize that if they are not messaging about who this opposition party really is and what they have been attempting to do and what they continue to do at the state and local level, if they are not making this clear distinction, we're gonna fucking lose. It isn't it doesn't have to be inevitable, but if Democrats don't at least pretend to try, then that is where this is going to end up, You know it is.

I gotta tell you the other thing, and let me make this transition real quick between our slow moving coup and our dying democracy and other things that I'm noticed. Sing I tweeted this yesterday, folks. I went on Amazon because, as we are all seeing, following the baby formula shortage, there's another production shortage tampons right which, by the way, according to CNN and other news reports, are up ten percent in price, as is fucking everything because inflation. There's

a tampons shortage. So my mother says to me yesterday, Danielle, I think that you need to start just like just start buying, like when you're out and about, which I'm not really out and about because them in a boot. But when you're out or you know, looking on Amazon and doing your orders, make sure to put in an order for tampons. So I decided, they said, okay, let me go ahead and do that. I bought two boxes

of tampons. Each box has supposedly ninety six tampons in them, right, for seventy eight dollars, essentially eighty dollars when it all comes around, it up eighty dollars. Now, I have wonderful people on two who were sending me links at Walmart and other places for tampons that are not that expensive. But other folks are saying, yeah, I've seen the price

gouging happening already, and this is not great. What kind of fucking country are we living in right now where we can't get baby formula or tampons and everybody wants to talk about, Oh, it's a supply chain issue, and I'm like, is it really? Did we not fucking learn anything during COVID that this interdependence that we have on other countries, that maybe we should start figuring out how

to have production in this country. Right, Since Republicans wanted to sign away you know, corporation's ability, right so that they get all the tax breaks and have all the fucking, you know, safe harvards for their money overseas, we don't have fucking production in the way that we used to in this country, right, And that has nothing to do with as the Republicans would love to tell you, Oh,

people coming in and not wanting to work or stealing jobs. No, they gave corporations tax breaks to take their businesses elsewhere. That's what fucking happened. That's why we're in the predicament that we're in, and that's why we are basically doing a fucking nose dive into being a developing fucking nation. I'm paying eighty dollars or tampons and hoping what that I don't run out for some of something that I

need every goddamn up. That on top of the fact that the Dow Jones fucking closed down more than nine hundred points. Right, we have gas, the new norm level of gas, new median gas price is over five dollars, and in some places like California, which has always had high gas prices, you're talking about seven dollars a fucking gallon. Dude, What are we doing here? This place is beyond a fucking shit hole. And it doesn't look like there are any signs of any of these things changing for the

better at any time. And on top of that, you have a Democratic party that says they want to concentrate solely on kitchen table issues, and I'm saying to you, the kitchen table don't matter. Right. If we don't have a democracy, you can't vote, you can't access an abortion,

you can't live life free of abject violence. Like I just you know, I hate to say this because people always want to come from me, and they always want to say I'm doing a disservice to the Democratic Party, which is like the new fucking talking point for people to post underneath my videos, And I'm just like, I'm doing a disservice or Democrats have done a disservice to themselves by believing that this radicalized party is somehow working

together to preserve democracy, somehow that they believe in the rule of law. When these people continue to show them who they are, It's just mind boggling to me. I'm like, how do you win elections? You win elections by proving that you are better than the other guy, the other person.

So if you are still referring to these people who are literally trying to ruin our country as your friend, how are you making the distinction between what the American people need to do and whose behalf they need to do it on. It's so mind boggling. But I gotta tell you that this week is going to just be another week in hell here. And we got Supreme Court

decisions that are supposed to be coming down. Some came down yesterday, another batch is coming down on Wednesday, and we are getting closer and closer to the official overturning of Roe v. Wade. And I got to tell you. You know, you have Homeland Security coming out talking about, oh,

we have a rise in domestic violence threats. You have thirty one members of a white supremacist group that was arrested over the weekend, right because they got tipped off that this group was getting ready to riot at a Pride parade. My head, it feels like it is on a swivel, feels like it is on a swovel, just

from one bad headline to the next. And again I'm saying, how is this Democratic Party not connecting the dots between the criminality of the Republican Party, white supremacy, rise in domestic violence, and like all of the economic issues that we are having. How are we not connecting this back to Trump and the Republicans? How is this not part of your narrative? Oh not all Republicans. Wait, stop saying

so many words when you don't need to. If you would identify with the Republican Party, you stand with Donald Trump, which means that you stand with white supremacy, misogyny, patriarchy, islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and the rest of it. There is no room between these groups now, So stop tripping over yourselves Democrats and

trying to prove otherwise. Just tell the fucking truth. Speaking of truth, friends, coming up next, my conversation with the host of The Young Turks is Overruled, Adrian Lawrence, fantastic lawyer, and we get into a conversation about where we are headed in this country as it pertains to the rights that are being rolled back. My conversation with Adrian Lawrence, host of the Young Turks Is Overruled, is coming up next. Hey there, I want to tell you about another podcast

I think you'll love. The Brown Girl's Guide to Politics, hosted by a Shanty Gohler, the president of Emerge BGG, is the one stop shop for women of color who want to hear and talk about the world of politics. Join a Shanty this season as she talks to incredible women of color who are changing the face of politics and tackling some of the most important issues facing the United States, from reproductive justice to voting rights, to climate change and more. Tune in every Tuesday wherever you get

your podcasts. It's no secret that the news is horsepill hard to swallow. Thankfully, there's Habituation Room podcast hosted by comedian and commentator Francesca free Erntini for a lighter take on the heavy stuff. Each week, the Bituation Room brings you progressive comedians, experts, and activists to break down the issues in a way that won't just leave you crying under a weighted blanket. Get the Bituation Room on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher,

and streaming on YouTube and Twitch. Folks, I am very excited to welcome to Okay affidaily for the very first time. Adrian Lawrence, who is the host of the Young Turk show Overruled, is author of the book Staying in the Game, the Playbook of Beating workplace sexual Harassment, which is just awful that we need a playbook, among many things. Adrian, thank you so much for making the time to join us.

I don't even know where to what catastrophe, what tragedy to begin with to discuss with you, but let us start with the one that has been in the news since the leaked decision came down, which is the inevitable overturn of Roe v. Wade. As we see and as we have read in the ninety eight page leaked draft decision. This is setting in place a reality for many people who never thought that this could happen, even though Republicans have been working to overturn Roe v. Wade out in

the open for fifty years. Why do you think that so many people are caught off guard by this moment and this decision and how heinous it is. First off, thank you so much for having me. It's so unfortunate

the reasons that I'm here. But yes, I think that a lot of people were caught off guard because it had to some extent become somewhat of an institution when we're talking about rowing weight that access to abortion, even though the GOP has been working for deck aids to whittle it down to bear bones and to continue to strip the rights of primarily women and other childbearing people as well, but to strip those rights down because it's impacting bodily autonomy, and bodily autonomy is one of the

essences of humanity. And so what we do definitely know is that this is really just an effort to remove women from the workplace, to continue to control our bodies and to subjugate us, and to take it back to that nineteen fifties flip where we didn't necessarily have all the rights that we have today. This is removing competition in the workforce, but ultimately this is going to end up hurting the nation in Toto if Roe v. Wade is reversed, as that leaked opinion indicate, will definitely be

the hostility. You know, one of the things that I wrote about this a week or so ago for The Daily Beast about the connection between the Republicans belief in the replacement theory, low birth rates, the manifesto that was put out by the Buffalo terrorists that took ten black lives, that all of this is actually a convergence of everything that the Republican Party has stood for for quite some time. Do you think that Democrats are missing an opportunity to

make this connection. Do you think that there is a better way that the media needs to be making the connection between all of these insidiary policies that are passing and the overarching goal. You know, well, Danielle, what you just raised is a lot of complicated issues, almost very much intertwine though, because reality is the media is still

considerably white and male. We're talking about around seventy percent, which is similar to law enforcement in our country, and regardless of whether somebody has a D or an RNX to their name, when it comes to politics, there is still this almost bipartisan thought when it comes to oftentimes white men in our society about white male supremacy, and so they're not going to get from the media the

wholehearted truth about what is going on. And we see that every day when we see the fact that they are willing to say things like racially tinged or these comments as opposed to simply calling it what it is, which is racist. So when you consider that factor, you have to realize that the media is definitely going to be giving very I guess you'd say saturated versions of this or in some way it is watered down to the point where you're not necessarily going to get that connection.

You're not necessarily going to get the truth of the fact that this is about controlling the bodies of women. And it does definitely have ties to this replacement theory. And we know that also from the history of abortion laws in the United States of when they have been

enforced and how they've been enforced. Also with immigration laws and how they've been enforced, and this fear that they're going to have black and brown people or people from other countries primarily black and brown, who are going to

have babies at certain rates and numbers. And so this is all tied together in this fear that there aren't going to be a population of white people in the United States at the numbers that there have been in previous years, and thus being a minority and apparently, you know, maybe these white to individuals realize that minorities aren't treated that great here in the US and their fear being born. You know, It's always so funny to me because I say to myself, I don't understand why they have all

this fear around the demographic shift. If they believe that white privilege doesn't exist, right, if we all as people of color, have been making it up right and we're just so sensitive, I don't understand why there would be any fear on there on their side whatsoever. I also

don't know why nobody ever asked them that question. You know, you brought up something earlier with regard to the economic ties between abortion rollbacks and removing women from the workforce, And I want to talk about that because Janet Yellen, when she just recently sat before Congress was not a hearing about abortion. It was a hearing with regard to inflation. But she made the connection between our economic stability and

the ability to have abortions. And so I just want you to talk a bit about the connection that she made. And again, how we have only ever talked about abortion access as a right to bodily autonomy and not an equity issue and not an economic issue. Can you speak

to that? Absolutely? So. In addition to being an attorney and being the host at the Young Turks, I'm also a vice president at Jennifer Brown Consulting, where we do workplace inclusion training and I just did a training conversation on reproductive health as a diversity, equity and inclusion issue. That's d EI, and it is very much the case because when you look at business and how business operates, this is about the advancement of a company and the

ability to have human capital your workforce. And if you force individuals to have babies that they do not want to have, what you're ultimately going to do, because our society essentially puts the weight of childcare on women, is you're going to put women in an even greater position to not be in the workforce. That lost participation also

career trajectory starts to spin out of control. In the adverse way, people stop being able to participate in the workforce when their obligations have to go elsewhere, when they have to take care of children. So we know that it has significant financial impacts on women, emotional psychological impacts on women as well as just the ability again to

contribute to the workforce. And Yellen is absolutely correct because we know that even just the abortion restrictions that are in place right now, that we are losing one hundred and five billion dollars toward just our GDP as a nation, and that's per the Institute of Women's Policy Research. We know that there is so much incredible economic loss just by virtue of the fact that women are restricted from

being able to dictate their bodily autonomy. And it really is mesmerizing how a lot of these companies out here who talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, they talk about fairness and ensuring that women are uplifted on an equal platform

and workplaces, yet they are dead silent. Now, this is about equity, This is about an opportunity to contribute to the workforce, to be able to fulfill your obligations as an employee, as a worker to contribute at optimal performance, which you cannot do if you are forced to bear a life and to take care of it, and you also do not have the social supports to uplift that life to nurturing or even as we're seeing right now with a formula shortage to thee it you know, it's

incredible to me the President just put together a plan to open up our Defensive Production Act in order to alleviate the loss right now of people unable to get formula for their children. One hundred and ninety two Republicans voted against it in the House. That's all of them voted against providing baby formula at the very same time that they are voting for and applauding the rollback of abortion access. How make that make sense about how we

are again? As people that work in media, I do not see the questions being asked to these leaders about addressing their blatant hypocrisy. How do you refer to yourself as the party of family values but tell people to allow their babies to starve. I think what they're telling us is they are okay with babies starving as long as they are black babies, brown babies, and people who do not have the means to be able to travel

or to ship formula. In this is not only an issue of class, it's definitely one of race as well. And we damn sure no, it's about gender. It is all the top tier systems of oppression at play here. And it is so incredibly hypocritical for individuals to say they care so much about children, especially since we're seeing so much of this quote unquote groomer narrative, which is

just completely out of control and ridiculous. And yet when you actually have an opportunity to protect children in a way that is one of the most basic fundamentals of getting them new Christian and food, you say no, no, That shows me who you really are. That truly shows me who you really are, which, as far as I'm concerned at damn pool, I mean and just vial right like,

because it is. It is really when we think about the ways in which the Republican Party has decided to not support a child tax credit, not support the production of baby formula, not to support universal pre k, not to support any of the mechanisms that would allow people in this country, all people in this country, including the only people that they care about, which are white families, to be able to have safe, healthy families, right, and

they vote against this all the time. What do you say, though, again to Democrats who are not pushing back with the kind of urgency and force that they need to in order to pay the picture right now of our dystopian present, because it's not even a dystopian future, because the future is actually here, right And if you've been living in these red states and our person of color who is also low income or from another marginalized community, you've already

been experiencing this. What are they missing? You know? I think so much of the frustration with the Democratic Party is the fact that they're fighting with kid gloves. It's you know, the GOP has had gloves off for a long time. They're out here in the octagon doing all sorts of nonsense and mess. They have dropped any kind of gentleman's agreement or sense of decency, and yet the Democrats are still here acting like it's a tea party

and nobody have time for that. The fact is we need people who are heavy hitters, who are out here willing to take the gloves off, who are willing to fight at the level that's necessary to not only save our democracy because as far as I'm concerned, that stuff is gone, but at least to avoid that dystopian reality

that is standing right in front of us. And the fact is, if we don't get heavy hit in positions to disrupt the status quo, then what we're going to end up is with the status quo that's more a reflection of a Handmaid's Tale dystopia, or we're just going to end up quote, We're going to position ourselves so that we completely totally implode as a nation. Do you think that there is an opportunity to turn this Titanic around?

Or Adrian is this is the decision with Rowe, the pending decision with Row, just the tipping point to where you think and how far you think that this Republican Party is willing to go. I want to say, I

don't have an answer. I think with this Titanic, I just think it's going to sink because unfortunately, I don't think that the Democrats have enough in them to actually push back of the force that's necessary, and I think that the GOP is just preserving its pockets in terms of campaign contributions and the organizations and the companies that

continue to fund that. I think that the thing that will make things change is Boycott's is public pressure, because the companies are the ones really running the game, and so if the ones that are paying these lawmakers in terms of the decisions that they make, if those payments stop, or if there are threats that come with those payments, then that's the only way that the laws are going to change. But as of right now, I can't see

us going anywhere but down. I worry for and I want to pivot for a moment to the massacre that happened in Buffalo, to ten black people going about their black lives on a Saturday, the murder, the deaths ranging from thirty two years old to eighty six years old, right to a father that was picking up cupcakes for his son's third birthday, to a grandmother that was going

to be preparing Sunday dinner gone. The only reason why the media, I believe, is even talking about this as an act of racism is because the shooter, the terrorist, said so himself in a hundred and eighty page manifesto. If he had not offered though all of those pages

that pretty much read like segments on Fox News. Do you think that the media would have come to that conclusion or we again are allowing the perpetua, the perpetrators of violence, to be able to tell us why they have done this violence as opposed to listening to the victims of said violence. I don't think that the media would call him a racist if he didn't call himself that. But I also don't think that all of the media

is calling him racist. Some of them are out here trying to label him as mentally unstable, trying to suggest that racism is a mental health issue as opposed to a choice. People are completely and totally sane when they decide that because of your Melano account, you are lesser than I am. That is not a mental health issue, and it also does a disservice to individuals who have

mental health issues. Let's talk about racism as it really is, because it sits in so many people's hearts in this nation, and so many people are trying to avoid that label because they just don't want to be branded that way. But it does not mean that they aren't that way, and that their behavior isn't a reflection of racist rhetoric that we often see, unfortunately also spewed by the media. So, as far as I'm concerned, it's not getting the level of just attention that it deserves and also to be

cast in the correct light. Last question for you is this, this is a connection. And again, I'm not a lawyer. I tell people all the time, I'm not a lawyer, but I know enough to ask the right questions. Rittenhouse drove hundreds of miles across two different states within AAR fifteen over his shoulder, went to Wisconsin, shot and killed two people, wounded a third. Federal judge let him off right because apparently Kyle Rittenhouse was in fact standing some

type of ground. I have no idea. What when you insert yourself into a peaceful protest and open up fire. What's the difference legally, in all honesty, between the Buffalo terrorists driving two hundred miles with an AAR fifteen and other weapons and opening up fire in a grocery store, right Like, it's the same behavior. And so I just want to I want you to explain to to to

my audience it is there a difference? Am I? Am? I? Am? I? Crazy, So you know, I would say it's the same kind of sentiment definitely there in terms of I believe it's definitely racially backed, racially motivated, without question. The thing is, the facts are just so incredibly different in terms of Written House, because Written House was in a situation where he did have that completely unnecessary firearm with him. But

there was a gentleman, one of the gentlemen. I believe it is the one who lost his life, that he had become to some extent, the aggressor in the situation. But I still very much of the mindset that if you show up to a party with a gun in some way, and you show up to a rout, you have that mindset that what happens is a product of

your doing. But also too, when we look at what happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin, especially with the judge and that interaction with the judiciary, that was not a reflection of justice as far as I am concerned. For example, that judge making the decision in terms of the applicability of the law, leading until the last minute to make that

decision so that the prosecutors couldn't appeal it. Those kind of things were strategic actions that I believe they robbed the state of justice and we have the results as

we have them. And the thing is is that something again democrats being able to truly value that third branch of government, the judiciary, and ensured that there are judges on the bench who truly are a reflection of society and aren't not looking to protect individuals who have this racist mindset and show up to protests talking about shooting

people and bringing guns. Our society is so incredibly broken and through and there are too many people who are not here for democracy, are not here for justice, and do not in any way intend on applying that whole life liberty in pursuit of happiness in an equitable way across society, but are very much in terms of selective enforcement. And so again I don't think there's necessarily a way to write the ship. I just think that the ship

going down. Oh, Adrian Lawrence, thank you so much for making the time to join us on woke F The show is overruled and the book is staying in the game of folks, So be sure to check those two things out. Adrian. I hope that you'll come back and join us again soon. Hey, I'm David Plots of slates Political gap Fest. As another election season accelerates, it can be tricky to sort through all the noise and the news.

Each week, on the gap Fest, John Dickerson, Emily Bathlon and I decipher the headlines, break down the races, and tell you what issues really matter. We do not always agree, We definitely do not always agree, but we always deliver thoughtful debate and we always have a good time. So subscribe to Slate's Political Gapfest new episodes every Thursday. That is it for me today. Dear friends on Woke f As always power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke as fuck.