Political State of Emergency

think that the American people really care about this. Are you fucking dumb? Do you think that Americans, particularly women, don't care about the fact that the Republican Party is a coven for misogynists, is a coven for sexual abusers. From the state, local, and federal level, there have been accusations for a number of people. A person in Tennessee and the Tennessee Legislature just resigned because he was fucking

an intern. So you think that the party that wants to couch themselves as somehow about family values, We know that there are there's no family and there are no values. All these people want is fucking power so that they can impose their will, their religion, their bullshit, their lives on the rest of us. Donald Trump is a man

that they bowed down to. They they would give blood for this man so long as he says that he will make the people around them who they don't like lives harder, so long as he will release cruel policy. Because if you ask these very same people, you know there'll be a whole heap of them that will be at that bullshit CNN town hall which I did not watch, am not watching. But by the time you listen to this,

we will know what has happened. Four hundred people call themselves Republicans in the widest fucking state of New Hampshire to give softball questions to Donald Trump. The question that I would ask. Ask these people how their lives have been made better by the Republican Party. Tell me exactly how your specific life. Don't talk to me about all day banned abortion. Tell me exactly how your life and the lives of your family members are better because of

Republican policies. I'll wait, tell me how, over four years of Donald Trump's corrupt, fucking ass presidency that your life improved. Because unless you are a multi millionaire and a billionaire. The answer is the same way that couldn't answer the fucking question around what does it mean to be woke. What they care about and what they know for certain is that Donald Trump is a misogynist, white supremacist, and that is what they like in a candidate. That's what

they like in a party. They want to go back to a time when it was okay for men to grab women however, whenever and wherever that they wanted, and those women didn't have any recourse. They want to go back to a time when black people were forced off of sidewalks because white people were walking down the street. They want to go back to a time where gay people are forced into the closet or jailed. That's their

idea of making America great again. So miss me with the bullshit with these fucking fake ass journalists who can't take questions. You know, the other day, bravo to Joe Biden who flipped it on reporters at the White House when he asked them, you tell me what Republicans said was in their plan? Did you ask them? He's like, I'm not trying to be funny, I'm not trying to

even be a wise guy. But did you ask? And I realized that when questions are posed back to these reporters, they don't have fucking answers because they don't ask the very politicians that they are throwing in Democrats' faith. They don't ask Kevin McCarthy. So you say that it's fine for George Santos to remain in Congress because you need the votes, and that he's innocent until proven guilty. So what are your thoughts on Donald Trump being held liable

for sexual abuse and defamation? Should he, then, by your line of thinking, be able to still run for president? And will you back him? Because a jury of his peers found him liable and would have found him fucking guilty, and he would have been jailed if the statutory of limitations was unlimited, But by grace of new legislation in New York, Egen Carroll was able to file a civil suit.

You know, folks, I just keep thinking about the fact that this country, I really, honestly, you know, all credit is always given to the forefathers of this nation for concocting this project called democracy. And I got to say, there are a lot of fucking holes that they left unfilled, because why is it that you can be indicted, that you can be how liable for sexual violence, that you can be charged with crimes and still run for president and still be a member of Congress is fucking beyond me.

It's as if the forefathers either they thought that to be a politician was to be above reproach, you know, the same way that again, no real laws right except for ethics, no real laws put in place for grifting as Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas is able to be a kept fucking man by Harlan Crowe. No oope, no violations around that, no laws on the books ensuring that there's actual accountability and responsibility for the people who are

making decisions about the rest of us. You see, if they were only making decisions for them, go with God, I could give a fuck. But you see, their perspectives are being colored in order to side with people who are able to give them the most money. So then your decisions that you're making and how you are making them, oh, they matter. The Republican Party has shown their entire ass as has CNN, and the question is much in the same way that people took over this State House in Tennessee.

They're taken over the state house in Ohio. I believe that the people of this good country right because I still believe that there are more more. I want to believe this people. I want to I want to believe that there are more good people, right, sane people, logic driven people in this country than there are Trump supporters. The Trump supporters are just the whiniest and everyone gives

them a fucking microphone. But I believe that what we are seeing, which is not being covered by mainstream media, what we are seeing with these protests taking over state houses, is that the American people have had enough. They don't want to be dictated to. They want to be able to choose their representatives and remove their representatives when their vision for the future no longer aligne. We are once again in an outrageous place, and I, you know, I

keep having this conversation. I asked Glenn the very same question earlier this week. You know, does America come out of this right? Do we get to the other side? Do we restore our integrity, our global standing? I don't think so, and neither do a lot of people that I talk to. I think that this is it. So it has those of us who believe in democracy as imperfect as it is, who believe in justice as rare as it is, to continue pushing. But the question is

until what point? Which brings me to something I've talked about on this show and I continue to talk about every time I go on TV. We need a national strike. We need to shut this fucking country down. If we are to restore this nation's integrity and integrity in our institutions, then everything must be grinded to a halt until action is taken. One person, Joe Manchin, right now put out a statement. He is the head of the Natural Resources

and Energy Committee in the Senate. He's not passing any more EPA names because guess what they are, radical, says the man for Big Coal, because he doesn't care about how many of his constituents have died of black lung. He doesn't give a fuck. So long as he can continue making money off of polluting the environment, he will. So now he's gonna hold the rest of the country's safety hostage. Tell me the difference between Joe Manchin, Kirsten Cinema,

and the Republican Party. There isn't one, folks. We have got to recognize that our time, this democracy, this clock is running out, and the question is are there really enough good people to do what's right that, dear friends, I honestly do not know, but it's a question that I'm going to continue to dig into and ask of our guests every single week that we make it to the end of Coming up next, my conversation with Helen Gimm, who is the Democratic front runner in the primary for

mayor in Philadelphia. That primary takes place on Tuesday, so if you are in the Philadelphia area, this is an important conversation for you, and even if you are not, what does it mean to be a progressive urban mayor at a time when this country and quote unquote blue

centers are on the fritz? Folks. I am very excited to welcome to wok F Daily mayoral candidate for Philadelphia and the Democratic front runner, Helen Gimm, who is a urban twenty first century style mayoral candidate, and Helen one, congrats on your positioning on the conversations that are bubbles

up around you. I know that the primary is on Tuesday, but you should feel really good about about where you are, so talk to me, talk to us about what does it mean to be a progressive urban mayor given the climate you know that the entirety of the country is in right now.

disinvest in neighborhoods and communities. We've allowed some of our most essential institutions to completely fall apart, whether that's public transit or schools, or the issue of public safety. And now more than ever, I think what you are seeing from a new wave of candidates who are coming in are not people who just hold a set of ideologies, but people who are born out of movements, who have spent a lot of time in them, not just kind of you know, like hanging around on the edges, but

have actually driven large scale movements for change. When we get into office, we actually deliver. That's the biggest thing about what needs to happen with the big cities. And a progressive movement right now. We have to actually deliver the things that we're talking about. It's not enough to talk about it. It's not enough to disparage the status quo austerity politics of the past. We actually have to prove that we can deliver safe drinking water to every

child and every family you know, in every neighborhood. We actually have to deliver an economic justice mission that gives jobs to people in communities and neighborhoods and doesn't simply recycle them into like the low wage, high turn work of other places. And we have to deliver housing. I mean, this is the mission right now. This is why cities are on the move and they're tired of the status

quo politics that haven't that have failed to deliver. But we have to be able to deliver that, and that's born by people who've actually done the work.

off the street. So talk to us about your platform for gun safety.

think that's what needs to resonate right now. We see a lot of mass shootings and horrifying things happen in other communities, but when they're happening in black and brown and immigrant communities, they're seen as just a course of life,

and that is absolutely not the case. And that's why it is so important for us to restore the mission of safety back to the progressive movement, a mission that has taken on and fought, you know, ridiculous prohibitions on common sense gun control, but has also talked about the need for investments if we believe that violence is rooted in disinvestment. And you know, Philadelphia often called the poorest

large city in the country. Almost one out of four our residents live in poverty, thirty seven percent, thirty seven percent of our children's party. And I don't believe any of that is by accident. Whether intended or not. Those policies have been deliberate, they have been purposeful, and they have been devastating. And thus everything we do has to be equally purposeful, equally determined to reverse those trends and to ensure that people live healthier, safer, and more enriched lives.

And so our platform absolutely goes in on taking illegal guns off the street. It absolutely talks about, you know, different levels of law enforcement coming together. That's what people have been struggling with and doing. But I'm also very clear I'm here to deliver crisis response because that's one of the things that our communities talk about. We want to promote more detectives, not just hire police officers. We

do it twenty to forty at a time. We've got a thousand off, we have a thousand positions vacant in our police department. Absolutely, people feel like there's not enough police. But it would take me forever to promise that I could deliver police officers so what I'll do in the interim. We're going to promote more detectives to reduce caseloads and actually solve crimes, which is the most lawless thing about Philadelphia.

People are gaining away with it. Second, we're deploying more first responders, mental health first responders to take off the hands of our nine to one one calls in our police departments, the homelessness, addiction, domestic situations, certain domestic situations, and mental health episodes that are not well dealt with by the police department, and allow our police officers to focus more on the violent crimes that individuals want. And

then we're deploying more group violence interrupters. We had thirty six hundred kids drop out of school in September of this year. Since September, four thousand kids dropped out of school last year. They are not going to the police, they are not calling a nine to one one. I have got to reach them, and so we need individuals on the ground in communities doing the group violence interventions interruptions that we have seen make a difference, but it is not always in the form of a police officer.

We can get crisis response, we can get first responders out onto the streets. If we understand that we have to handle crime differently from just ramping, you know, making false claims that we're going to be able to restore a thousand police officers when we're in a state of emergency right now.

And how do you plan to address that level of anxiety, instability and what many have said is post traumatic stress disorder that young people are dealing with right now.

deliberately blocked. I fought for fair funding lawsuits that have won their constitutional grounding through state courts, but it's still up to us to fight for this. Thirty years ago, I was a teacher in the public schools, teaching thirty eight kids and a one hundred year old building without air conditioning on the fifth floor. And I knew then that our kids deserve so much better. But I also know this, you get the city you fight for. No

one's coming in to hand this to us. So we got to go out, and for the last twenty years, I've tried to build a movement to fight on behalf of kids. I've made it very clear from the moment you walk in to a public school in Philadelphia, where the average age of a building is seventy years old, you can build the disinvestment. You can feel it when we start suspending kids as young as five years old.

You can feel it when we deny kids. A nurse, a librarian, and a counselor, but we guarantee them a surveillance camera, a metal detector at the front door, and a school police officer. We've got more police officers than we have counselors in our schools. And that's why when

I came into office, I did a number of things. One, I helped end a seventeen year state takeover of our public school systems that had depressed and closed down more than thirty public schools that had disinvested around these things, and with the same people in charge, we put back nurses and counselors. We built out a social worker program, we made we made investments in pre K I started, you know, arts and music, and I am here to

run for mayor to finish that job. I don't think that a city can rise when it tells so many young people and their families that they are not worthwhile. And if you can tell that to a five year old child in a neighborhood, you will tell it to their parents, you will tell it to the communities around them, you will disinvest overall. And that's what I think we're

feeling in Philadelphia. And in the meantime, we've been chasing all manner of things to make up for our lack of investment in families, in neighborhoods, in communities, and in the stabilizing things that make people healthy and hop We've done massive corporate tax breaks. We've given away the stores to like, you know whatever, if a billionaire sports owner will hand them the keys to the city and an

open checkbook. We flirted with casinos. We are surrounded by more casinos than almost any other city in the state of Pennsylvania, and it has brought us nothing because those things are extractive. They do not invest, and most of all,

they don't build. They extract capital out of communities. I am here to put that capital back into people, and I want to show what it looks like by having strong schools that are invested, open year round, after school programs seven day a week, libraries, parks that are lit up and brightened, programmed library you know, recreation centers that are open in the evenings, and summer camps that are running.

The fact that this is called radical is outrageous. The most by the most radical thing about me is that I actually delivered these things. That is a radical thing, because when we reorient the budgets, when we actually prove that the things that hold us back were just us and not you know, all these external forces. We show how small the ideas always were. We unlocked opportunity in capital and we watch people rise. And I think there

are plenty of people who are scared about that. I've got a billionaire right wing zeal putting in, you know, a million plus dollars into negative advertising against me to hold that back. But I know that the thing that they're afraid of are the people that are working and laboring for years to change the city and put its resources back into communities.

by Republicans and the extreme right would actually thrive. And that's what they don't want. Are black and brown people thriving. One of the biggest issues and I'm in New York in Brooklyn, and one of the biggest issues that we're facing in this city, as in a lot of cities, including yours, is the rising housing costs. Housing costs have got out of control, rent has gotten out of control.

Just recently, you know, we had a horrific situation here with a homeless man, Jordan Neely, who was murdered, whose killer is still out free, and people are protesting and saying that we should have done something, you know, for a person that is experiencing a mental health crisis that

has been pleading and asking for help, but we don't. Right, So what do you say with regard and how would your administration be dealing with the rising housing costs and how that is also connected to the homelessness crisis that we're seeing across major cities. How would you deal with that?

But you know, like what we were able to show is that when a city actually leans in on really aggressive policies to create alternatives to an eviction that could otherwise keep somebody house, we can deliver. The program that I delivered not only showed that significant reduction, it drew down almost a quarter of a billion dollars in investments

from state and federal actors. It's the law that I built now is passed in one hundred and eighty cities across thirty six states, and was part of the Biden Bill of Rights. The reason why I bring that up is that nothing outside of us is actually going to stop. We know what markets do, right they market response. There is nothing at the federal government. You know. I think

that there's a lot that could be done. Let me be clear, but I cannot afford to wait for a federal government or a regressive state legislature to act when we know what the crisis looks like. That's why I think America's cities have to lead on an affordable housing vision. We can't actually fund it. I think that's the difference. And a lot of people don't want to do things

that they can't fund. But my belief is you can't fund something that doesn't and if you don't have a clear idea of what you want, you become victim to a pastiche of different federal programs, different little state things, and we start piece mealing stuff and it doesn't meet the need. Right now, what I have is an all out mission to keep our people house. I've got eighty five hundred vacant lots that are city owned. I have

to have a plan for that. I have, you know, municipal courts where we see evictions after all the work that we've done kind of ticking up. I've got to have a plan for that. And I believe that when we keep people housed, when we link housing to stronger education,

to healthier individuals. Our eviction work was reviewed by the by Pen Medicine, by the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and prove that housing saves lives during COVID And we've already made the link with the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia that mediating on housing actually helps people live healthier lives. So I'm here to deliver on a housing in the midst of a housing crisis. I'm here to deliver on a housing plan that not only addresses affordability, but can

also tackle climate and health. And what I mean by that is people black and brown folks living residents living in some of the poorest sections of the city have the highest utility bills, are the live in the most substandard housing. So if we are leaning in on home repairs or prioritizations on affordability, not everything has to be built new right now, because that's not the most efficient

way to do things. But if we are doing a real emphasis on home repairs, rent stabilizations, other types of things, then let us make sure that those communities are first in line for solar energy and the lowest utility bills. Let's make sure that they are first in line for lead remediation and the healthiest homes. Make sure that we do the you know, the vacant lot usage, so that we're building up tree canopies and making those places as restorative as a community as we are focused on the

individual house itself. These are the things that cities can do more importantly when we do it at scale. The most important thing we can do is send a message out to the market. We're not letting just the market decide all of these things. There is a big investment effort right now on maintaining affordability whole homes repair. I can provide seed money, including loans and revolving loans, types of things we can start, you know, with rent assistance

that is able to keep people house. I need to command our private markets to see this as a place of investment, like a kind of venture capital, but this time not a venture capital for the wealthiest. This time a venture capital that actually invests in communities and watches the economic wealth of a region go up. That is a task like I think we've seen it done in different areas. It tends to be done by like economics sectors and that kind of thing. But a strong signal

goes out to the investment community. You want to be here, and I want to send that signal because I know that this is not just going to be done simply by municipal funds alone. I need to excite a different kind of economy here that invests back. And I need to do yeah with big banks, you know, new lending institutions, but a real eye towards equity, affordability, and how people live.