Kirk’s Corpse on Parade and Nestor’s Progressive Truth

[0:04] In this episode, we waste more time than I like talking about Charlie Kirk and his death because the right seems to want to make him a saint to the lost cause, and he was a terrible human being.

[0:18] Then we have a conversation with Sean Nestor, a progressive activist from the Toledo area who shares some ideas about the current political system we have in this country. This is Secular Left with Doug Berger, an independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day.

[0:47] Music.

[1:00] Is it me, or is the death of Charlie Kirk feeling like a modern-day Horst Wessel propaganda campaign? For those who don’t know, Horst Wessel was a thug in the Nazi party in the 1930s who was murdered, and Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda chief, used it to court sympathy and popularity for the Nazi party in the next election.

[1:30] Charlie Kirk wasn’t employed in the Trump administration. He wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t a college graduate. And his rhetoric was creating fake debates on college campuses to support his white Christian nationalist agenda and to generate clicks. That’s how he made his money. He didn’t have a real job. His job, his occupation was to sow division and create chaos in our political system. He was a racist, a bigot, and added nothing to the national conversation except division and calls for violence. When Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked in his home, Charlie Kirk, during his podcast, said that people should get together and bail out the person who was arrested for it, for the act. And also don’t forget that his group, Turning Point USA, spent money to ship many of the January 6th protesters and insurrectionists to D.C. To steal the election in 2021.

[2:40] He has also constantly attacked trans people and sponsored a speaking tour for a woman who tied for fifth place in a swim meet with a trans woman. She was so insecure by the result that she made a career, supported by Kirk and his group, of trashing trans women any time she could. Yet Kirk’s body, after he was murdered, was escorted by the Vice President of the United States on Air Force Two. Talk about stolen valor. And there are calls for his body to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol, which I don’t think is going to happen, but there was calls for it. They also had a prayer service at the Kennedy Center. Yes, that Kennedy Center. Named for John F. Kennedy, who was a complete opposite of the racist Charlie Kirk.

[3:33] Trump wants to give Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But for what? What did he do? He took a bullet, that’s for sure, but generally he was a waste of space.

[3:46] Literally three months ago, a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota was gunned down by a Trump supporter, and the only response from Trump at the time was basically, shit happens. In fact, when he was asked about why they lowered the flags for Kirk, But not for that Democratic lawmaker. Trump actually had the gall to say that he wasn’t aware of the previous violence. Trump’s GOP erased the Black Lives Matter mural in D.C., while Trump’s buddy Ron DeSanctimonious in Florida had the rainbow crosswalks erased by the Pulse nightclub memorial. But sure, let’s give a white, moronic, racist, patriotic honors for upholding the Trump agenda. It’s ironic that a white supremacist would be shot by someone who didn’t think he was racist enough in one of the whitest parts of the country, Utah. Charlie Kirk was a vile human being who built a career on hurting others. He did deserve to be hit in the mouth or pied or milkshaked. Instead, he has become a martyr to the same people who have stoked the specter of violence and politics for decades. He will be missed by his family, but not by me.

[5:06] And what I wanted to do right now is, this is not hyperbole. I’m not saying that he’s a racist or anything just based on a feeling or a vibe. We actually have receipts. There’s this person on Facebook that I follow called The Dad Briefs. and he had a video clip. J.D. Vance… Took over Charlie Kirk’s radio show or podcast shortly after Kirk was murdered and tried to debunk the idea that Kirk was a racist.

[5:50] And decided to say that Kirk had never said any of these exact words. See, that’s what these conservatives usually do. When you accuse them of being a bigot or a racist and say that they say something, you’re paraphrasing what they’re saying. Everybody knows that. People that are educated in English know that when you’re paraphrasing, you know that that’s not their exact words, but the gist of what they’re saying. And so that’s the straw man that Vance built and then tore down in his little blurb. But this dad briefs guy had the clip, the full clip of what Charlie said made it sound even worse. When he talked about black women not having the brainpower to get hired without affirmative action.

[6:52] And in the clip that the dad briefs shows, Kirk also said that these black women that he names, took white jobs. And that’s classic white supremacists. And so I wanted to play that clip. And then the next clip that I’m going to play after that is he was having a Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Conference, festooned in pink, obviously, where he tells the young ladies that are in attendance that, yeah, they could be anything they want, but it’s more important for them to be mothers and have babies because that fulfills his Christian nationalist agenda that he believes in. He goes to a megachurch or went to a megachurch in Phoenix that basically said men are at the head of the family. Women’s job is to have babies.

[7:53] So this is the guy that’s being venerated, that’s getting an escort on a plane, on a government plane, with calls to have his body lay in state. So let’s take a listen to that. The writer accuses Charlie of saying, and I quote, Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. But if you go and watch the clip, the very clip she links to, you realize he never said anything like that. He never uttered those words. You really have to wonder. In fact, you know, if we would have said.

[8:33] Three weeks ago, Blake, if we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Katanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called a racist. But now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us. They’re coming out and they’re saying, I’m only here because of affirmative action. Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously. You know, on the one hand, it could be encouraging to think that a vice president doesn’t believe Charlie Kirk said this because it’s deplorable. But it’s more likely that he’s speaking to an audience that is emotionally attached to Charlie Kirk. This very same audience that is saying that Kirk’s words are misconstrued because they’ve been taken out of context. And they’re right because the context makes it worse. Not only did Kirk say that these women lack the brain processing power to be taken seriously, he said that they took white jobs. And this belief that a job is inherently white is at the center of the great replacement theory, which is the strongest thread of white Christian supremacy that is woven into the fabric of Turning Point USA. Meanwhile, the aim of affirmative action and diversity, equity, inclusion is to ensure that the qualifications of all candidates are considered, not just the white ones, because they are not fighting for supremacy. They’re fighting for equality. And that makes supremacists very uncomfortable.

[10:01] Every single one of you in this room have what it takes to be a talented person in office or in corporate life. Most importantly, please become a wife and start a family. That is the most important thing. If you so feel called and want to be happy, I really encourage you to do that. But that shouldn’t be the only thing you do. If you so choose, you have the agency to do that. So one of the fallouts of the Kirk murder is that Trump and his cronies are using the opportunity to get revenge on anybody who does not show any deference to the Kirk assassination.

[10:40] They claim that if you don’t, if you talk bad about Kirk and point out his failings as a human being, that you are celebrating his death and you deserve to be fired. That’s one of the things that J.D. Vance talked about when he guest hosted Kirk’s podcast was that, you know, government authority, the power comes from the people. And if you see people celebrating Kirk’s death, call them out. They need civility. They call it civility. Civility needs to be reestablished, blah, blah, blah. Well, what that actually comes up to is that the government is pressuring employers to fire people who do not talk reverently about Charlie Kirk. A Washington Post op-ed writer was fired for basically saying, quoting Charlie Kirk.

[11:48] That’s the main thing that you see in some of this coverage about his death is they’ll say he was a Christian and he supported free speech, but they never quote what he talks about. One of the things that he was known to be taught that he talked about that’s been quoted in other situations was that he supported the Second Amendment so much, the right to bear arms, that when there were school shootings and such, he said, well, that’s the price of having the Second Amendment. Some people are going to die.

[12:24] You know, isn’t that isn’t that a lovely thought? Lovely thought.

[12:28] Music.

[12:38] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[12:44] Music.

[12:44] I’ll see you next time. So people are getting fired. There was a couple of professors, administrators at Clemson University who were fired for social media posts. I just saw an article the other day that an administrator at Texas A&M was was has resigned, was forced to resign because they wouldn’t do anything about somebody getting talking about Charlie Kirk. That was less than honorific.

[13:28] And then, of course, then the big news was that comedian Jimmy Kimmel was effectively fired from his show after his monologue on Monday night, the 15th, Monday the 15th, when he made some jokes about the coverage and the way that the MAGA people are acting. And they had a couple of large ABC affiliates complain and ABC put his show effectively on indefinite suspension. So basically, technically, he was fired. And then I saw a little bit a few days ago, there was an article in People Magazine where they demanded that he apologize to Kirk’s family and make a donation to his group, and Kimmel refused, and so then they suspended his show.

[14:25] So I have a clip, and this clip is pretty much the full monologue from that night, and if you listen to it, you will note that there isn’t anything inherently offensive about it. He didn’t say, hey, Kirk’s dead. Great. You know, oh, what a jerk. Oh, no. He was talking about, Kimmel was talking about the MAGA reaction to the death and how they were trying to use it to score cheap political points. And one of those cheap political points was getting Jimmy Kimmel suspended, technically fired from his show.

[15:09] And so I just wanted to play that. We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff, which got some criticism. But on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this. My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. But may I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir? I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks? They’ve just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it’s going to be a beauty. Yes, sir. He’s at the fourth stage of grief, construction.

[16:04] Demolition, construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, okay? And it didn’t just happen once. When I heard it, I was in the midst of, you know, building a great… For 150 years, they’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House, right? They don’t have a ballroom. They have to use tents on the lawn for President Xi when he comes over. If it rains, it’s a wipeout. And so I was with the architects that would desire. It’s going to be incredible. and they came in they said Charlie Kirk is dead I didn’t know what they meant they said he was dead Charlie Kirk was shot, and they thought he was dead because it was so horrific and they said dead.

[16:53] Yeah so that’s the thing and that’s basically what I wanted to point out that Charlie Kirk was.

[17:02] For all the things that people like Trump and his ilk say about him, he’s none of that. He was a racist. He was a bigot, a misogynist. He was a Christian nationalist who didn’t believe in equal rights for everybody. He trashed trans people at every opportunity. And he was just an awful human being. Did he deserve to be murdered? No, no. Political violence like that, where you’re shooting somebody to kill them, is never a good thing, never appropriate. But like I said, somebody should have punched him in the mouth or hit him with a pie or milkshaked him. Those are appropriate political responses to Charlie Kirk. The one thing I will say about the Jimmy Kimmel firing is that it is true that the First Amendment does not protect people from consequences in private entities like businesses. The First Amendment is only for protecting people from actions of the government on their speech. So the government can’t preempt you. They can’t dictate what you say and what you can’t say.

[18:31] There’s decades, hundreds of years of litigation about that in court cases. However, if Ma and Pa Kettle owns a business and you say something they don’t like, they can get rid of you. They can fire you for saying something they didn’t want you to say. Tell a customer, if you’re a customer-facing person, you tell a customer to screw off. Well, your boss could fire you for saying that because you’re not allowed to say that. And that’s not violating your First Amendment rights. People sometimes claim that. They get fired from work for saying something, and then they claim that their First Amendment’s violated. That’s not the case. Now, how the Jimmy Kimmel situation is different is that the government…

[19:31] Pressured the company to fire him. That is totally different. That is why I disagree with the actions that ABC took. And it is clear that it was the pressure from Trump and the SEC that forced them to do it. Not to mention the fact that Nexstar, one of the affiliate companies that complained is in the process of acquiring another affiliate company and they need the blessings of the FCC to finish it. So Trump being a transactional president where he takes his bribe and then does the bidding of the people that bribing, that was their bribe, was they were going to get Kimmel off the air to curry favor for Trump.

[20:28] That is violation of Kimmel’s First Amendment rights. And the fact that ABC bent the knee and acquiesced to it is typical. You know, that’s the thing. That’s the thing that most people don’t know is that major corporations are not benevolent people. It’s all about the bottom line and government regulation and they’re going to do everything they can to protect themselves. Whether it’s the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, like we saw in this case.

[21:05] They’re going to do whatever they need to do to protect them and their shareholders. And if you understand that, it makes your life a lot better because then you don’t get overly concerned about stuff when it comes to businesses. You don’t get concerned, well, if I’m boycotting, I’m hurting a worker. Or if I do this, I’m doing that. You don’t have to worry about that because the companies are not, they’re not, uh, even the ones that say that they do good things don’t always do good things. Um, a perfect example, just recently, uh, Ben and Jerry’s, they sold out to a multinational conglomerate, uh, Unilever, I think it’s called. And Unilever was clamping down on some of their, uh, social justice initiatives. And the founders, Ben and Jerry, bristled under that. And in fact, just this past week, Jerry resigned after 40 years with the company because he wants to do social justice stuff and he can’t because you’re a part of a multinational conglomerate. They’re only going to do it when it’s good for their bottom line or for their publicity.

[22:22] So so that’s what you got to know about that. And so that’s why I had a problem. And this just seems to be a pattern with ABC. Back during the Gulf War, the first Gulf War, ABC canceled Bill Maher’s show Politically Incorrect because he, during one of his shows, he talked about how the terrorists on 9-11 didn’t have a problem doing what they did, that they were skilled in doing it, and the government wasn’t able to stop them. Um, then you had, uh, and then you had ABC killing a story that reflected negatively on the Disney company because the Disney company owns ABC. So this is a pattern that we’ve seen with particularly ABC. And going back even further into history, during the McCarthy era, CBS pretty much fired Edward R. Murrow after he took down McCarthy. Even though what Murrow did was good, the advertisers complained, the government people complained, and so they eventually canceled his program and sidelined him, and he eventually quit because the company would not support what he did, even though it was the right thing to do.

[23:49] And that’s what major companies do. That’s what major stockholder-owned companies do, is they only do things to protect themselves. So, where are we at on this? Charlie Kirk was a terrible human being. He didn’t deserve to be murdered, but he doesn’t deserve to be given a sainthood. And the Jimmy Kimmel firing did violate the First Amendment, especially because the Trump administration applied the pressure, which is also the same thing that the Republicans complained about that the Biden administration was doing when all they asked social media companies to do was to stop allowing the misinformation to be posted. And the Republicans just had a conniption about that. So anyway, that’s how I feel about Charlie Kirk and this whole situation. And it’s going to be an issue for a while, I have a feeling.

[24:55] Hello, this is Doug, host of Secular Left, reminding you that I like to be validated. If you like this podcast and want to thank me, feel free to buy me a coffee. Go to buymeacoffee.com slash secularleft and donate some cash to help make this a better show and validate me as a person.

[25:18] You’ll feel better in the morning.

[25:23] All right. Joining us today is Sean Nestor. He’s a friend of mine. He is a local activist here in the Toledo area. And thank you for joining us today, Sean. Thanks for having me, Doug. And why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to the people who may not know you and what your political history is. Sure. I’m a lifelong Toledoan, mostly focused on local politics, but I’ve done a lot of things from organizing to electoral work to helping out in various social justice nonprofits. I currently work as treasurer for Toledo area jobs of justice, but in the past I’ve been a co-chair of the Lucas County Green Party. I’ve managed various political campaigns. I’m currently treasurer for a sitting member of Toledo City Council. So I’ve worked a lot on politics from a lot of different angles, and I volunteer a lot and do a lot of do-gooder work, I guess you could say. And also for the audience, I want to let everybody know that Sean is further left than I am. And so we’ll find out. But we both like punk rock. So I guess there’s something, some common ground there somewhere. Exactly.

[26:38] Yeah, the first kind of topic I wanted to talk about is a common mantra that I hear in our space, in our political space, is that voting makes really no difference. That Republicans and Democrats are exactly the same. Do you believe that or do you want to qualify that? That’s a really good question because I do think there’s a lot underpinning that and people come at that from a lot of different angles.

[27:08] I think I would have to say it really depends on what your political goals are. And for people that are really adamant leftists, you know, who feel that, You know, for example, capitalism is a big problem and we need to change our economic system. You know, capitalism isn’t something you can really, you’re given an option to vote for in the reality, in our electoral system. Things like our foreign policy aren’t things that you’re really allowed to vote for. You’re given the opportunity to vote for a representative, but once they’re in office, you know, there’s always, well, you should write and lobby and, you know, call them. But, you know, I think a lot of people look at that and go, even if a hundred thousand of us do that, and that does happen, is that really counterbalancing all of the money and the intrigue that’s influencing how these people are ultimately voting? So I do think depending on what your goals are, it may or may not make sense. I’m a fan of the perspective that the reality is voting is.

[28:12] Does have benefits. Um, it’s not that hard to do. They do try to make it harder all the time. And there are reasons for that, obviously, but I do think it’s worthwhile, uh, if only to express, uh, perspectives, including on things like what sort of things do you want to fund or not? I get people being very cynical on the, about federal politicians. I’m very much in that camp myself. But the reality is there’s probably issue campaigns on the state and local level that actually make a huge difference in the day-to-day lives of people. And I don’t think it makes sense to get so cynical about voting that you pass up all these opportunities to say, decriminalize marijuana, or maybe enact protections for abortion access, for example. These are things that have happened here in Ohio and in Toledo in recent years that have made a big difference on people’s quality of life. So I think when people get, you know, analytical about the utility of voting, I think there is a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater and to say, well, the whole thing’s corrupt. The whole thing’s ridiculous. I don’t want to grant it any legitimacy.

[29:27] And you could take that perspective, but there is also a truth that there are people who think very differently than you do who are taking advantage of the vacuum that you’re leaving to vote in policies that may actually harm you directly and it’s also often used as.

[29:45] Political rhetoric to justify why bad things are happening you know because they’ll say well look nobody showed up to vote for this nobody must have cared that much and that’s the proof now whether that’s reflective of reality or not, that is a meaningful political argument that carries weight in circles where it matters. So I think just showing up to vote, um, you know, again, I think it’s fair to put pressure on politicians to give you something to vote for and to put pressure on the main political parties, uh, maybe to work on building an alternative party, if that’s your thing. I think there’s many ways to engage the electoral system that people overlook and uh i completely understand why some people say i just won’t do it um i just don’t feel like it’s worthwhile but my message is that a lot of it may be garbage but there’s always something worth voting for and um i haven’t missed i do leave certain elections blank because you don’t just because you vote doesn’t mean you have to vote for every office that’s there i’ve had seats where both the Democrat and Republican were so hard on immigrants, I couldn’t cast a vote for them.

[31:00] And that was my choice. And I think that made sense, but there were other things on that ballot that I was happy to vote for. And I got some good results of it. I got funding for my local park system.

[31:10] I got funding for mental health services that support people I care about. I mean, there’s so much. And I just think people should really take a look at what’s involved with voting beyond the typical, you know, voting every four years for president kind of stuff.

[31:23] Yeah. And I do know some people, you know, they complain about no viable third parties and, and, and the system is game towards the two major parties. There’s no mistake about that. But there have been some viable third parties, such as Minnesota. They had the Democrat, was it the Democrat Farmer Party or something like that? Well, they had the Farmer Labor Party. That’s what it was. They eventually merged with the Democratic Party, which is why the official Democratic Party over there is the DFL, the Democratic Farmer Labor Party. Yeah. Right. And I know Wisconsin, they also had, they have some socialists, or they used to anyway. I don’t know if they still do, but. Well, a lot of countries did have socialist parties. Wisconsin, if you go to places like Madison, have a progressive party. And I think in Vermont too, there is an active third party called the progressive party that does have elected offices on the state and local level. And they engage and push politics to the left out there. So, I mean, there are pockets of it. I think even in Cincinnati, there’s a charter party and it’s been a while since I checked on it, but it’s strictly local and they’ve managed to get people elected over the years. I mean, there’s a lot you could do. I’m a little bit of a student of independent and third-party existences in the United States. And much of it may be historical because the power is so heavily concentrated right now.

[32:47] But things like the Populist Party in the late 19th century and into the early 20th did incredible work, including getting us off the gold standard and establishing fiat currency, which saved a lot of farmers. From complete, um, destitution. So, I mean, I just think there’s a lot in, I could go on on that subject, but I won’t because I don’t think I want to fill up the whole time with that. But yeah, the other one too, that I just remembered, there was a group in, uh, Columbus that, uh, tried to get a slate to elected to city council, uh, because they were mad about the tax money going to nationwide arena. Is this, well, and I know like, for example.

[33:35] I think that was largely affiliated with the working families party, which is interesting entity that generally takes advantage of ballot fusion laws that some States like New York have where a candidate can legally run with under multiple parties, which we don’t have here in Ohio, but some States do. And that’s where working families party has chosen their strategy to be. They did some branching out some years back. And I think they worked with some folks like Will Petrick down there to do some good stuff. For a while, they were working to endorse candidates in states that didn’t have ballot fusion, but I think that slowed a bit. Again, there’s so many different ways to do third-party politics. Again, I’m not quite a scholar, but I’m very well-read, and I’ve been really fascinated by efforts, for example, to build a labor party in the United States, which really got a lot of momentum in the 80s into the 90s. A lot of people here in Toledo were actually very involved with that, including Mike Ferner, Anita Rios, and Baltimore Velasquez. So a little bit of forgotten history, but a lot of important stuff here in Toledo and in Ohio. Yeah. One of the topics that I’ve been working on the last few couple of years, not as much as I used to, and you’re aware of it too, is ranked choice voting. Yes. Trying to get ranked choice voting in the state.

[34:56] And one of the things that was interesting about it was that places like Toledo and Cleveland and Cincinnati, and I think Columbus did too, they all had ranked choice voting in the 20s and 30s. And they saw, I think it was the 20s and 30s. More 30s and 40s. Yeah, more 30s and 40s. And so then they saw a rise in women and minorities being elected to city offices. And then, of course, the white supremacists said, wait a minute. And they went to court and got it overthrown or they voted it out because they didn’t want too many women or black people on city council. And so we see a lot of that. They don’t come right out and say that, but that’s what a lot of the opposition is coming at. And I’m going to name names. Ohio Senator Teresa Gaviron down in Wood County, she introduced a bill to ban ranked choice voting in municipal elections. And of course, that would stomp on home rule, which I find interesting that Ohio has a home rule, home rule law for individuals until the state legislature doesn’t like it. And then they ban it. But what is it that you like about ranked choice voting?

[36:23] Well, again, as an advocate for independence and third parties, rank choice voting has got a lot of benefits. It’s used in places like Ireland, which I’m a big fan of. And it’s been used in various places in the United States, both historically and in the present day. And what we find is it requires people to make appeals to their entire constituency, not just an extreme minority. So it helps to kind of mete out political extremism by requiring that anybody who wins gets to at least a plurality of the voters who voted in that election. And I think it helps, you know, if you say, well, how does that help third parties? The big thing is that it allows people to cast their vote for a third party or independent candidate while also saying well if they don’t win i would want my vote to go to this person, and um if and if they don’t win i want it to go to this person you know you can kind of go down the line and that allows for people to actually express interest in third parties and help to.

[37:35] Demonstrably prove that there is active interest in these parties while at the same time eliminating the spoiler effect which you know keeps a lot of people from wanting to cast their vote because again if you’ve i did a lot of third party politics when i was involved with the green party between 2010 and 2018 and again i would hear from so many people i really like what this third-party candidate says it’s way more to what i believe but i know their resources are limited and their reach is limited and this other candidate.

[38:09] Is not they’re more like what i believe in and i’m just worried so i’m going to cast my vote for the person i think can win but is not quite where i’m at and in this way that spoiler concern, kind of takes away our ability to express our values politically i think that’s very important if we want to be a democracy we need to allow people to express their political views and all the compromise that’s required when there’s only two parties and it’s a first past the post voting system it just ends up distorting what people actually want especially uh entire constituencies so rank choice voting cuts through all that rank choice voting gives us an opportunity to have much truer political expression to what we actually have and enables us to it gives a path for third parties to grow under our current climate into something more meaningful and maybe better resource so that in the future we can have competitive third parties and not feel like we’re stuck with the two major ones. Yeah. And I was doing some research on another topic and came across the historic vote totals for some recent governor elections here in Ohio. And Mike DeWine ran for the first time for governor in 2018, and he won the Republican primary with 48% of the vote.

[39:37] So that means that there was over 50% who did not want him. Right. But because he had the most of, I think there was like seven other people, he got to go forward. I don’t think that, I personally don’t think that that’s fair. Right. And you do see it primarily in crowded primaries where, you know, somebody can end up getting the nomination with 20, 30% of the vote at that, because that happens to be a larger share than anybody else got. And again, you’re, they end up getting the party nomination when a majority of people did not express that they were okay with that. So again, I think ranked choice voting helps to get truer political expression, both when used in primaries and in general elections.

[40:24] Yeah. And one of the public comment, I think it was a public comment from Senator Gaviron, was that she believed that whoever got the most votes should win. And it’s like, well, then she doesn’t understand ranked choice voting because that’s what happens is when they do the counts, it gets to that point where whoever has over 50% is declared the winner. Yeah, well, I’m sure she didn’t actually read up on rank choice voting. I’m sure somebody came to her with model legislation, said, hey, pass this or we don’t cut you another check when it comes time for re-election. And she said, yes, sir, because that’s how politics tends to happen. There are, especially on the Republican side, a lot of groups that draft legislation and go and tell these people what they’re going to pass. And then they just click their heels together, salute, and say, you got it, boss. And that’s the reality that is making a lot of people upset and making a lot of people cynical about our electoral system. And I think they have a point. Yeah. And you’re exactly right because Gaviron went to a conference, a Republican legislator conference, I believe it was in Colorado, and came back with that bill.

[41:41] And a group also came up with a bill that banned gender affirming care in Ohio that Gary Click introduced. Yeah, and I mean that’s the disappointing thing is you’d like to think that, Our legislators are individuals that are capable of thinking on their own and acting on their own, but their behavior in office shows us that most of the time, they’re basically robots who take input from powerful entities and turn it into policy. And meanwhile, we’re all sold that the people have the power and our vote matters, but even when we vote for something, we have legislators that are taking it away. A great example of that being recreational marijuana in the state of Ohio, which overwhelmingly passed a, well, I won’t say overwhelmingly, but it was actually pretty good margins. You know, we got a majority support for recreational marijuana with very specific conditions on how it would be taxed and how that revenue would be distributed.

[42:44] And the state legislature immediately turned around and started chipping away at that and they keep taking that away saying no no no we don’t it doesn’t get to go back to schools or anything productive we’re going to put it in the general fund we’re going to put it to what we think it goes to i mean and they’re already trying to find all sorts of ways to limit it or mitigate it and they’re also trying to find ways our attorney general was trying to find ways to undermine the abortion amendment to the constitution that was enacted again these people still he’s still trying to undermine it yeah he’s not going to give up because these people don’t respect the popular will they don’t see the population as an entity to serve they see it as one to tame to control and to direct the way they think things should behave they believe everybody should have their moral set and if you don’t then anything goes they don’t care if they have to ignore constitutional provisions like home rule or the single subject rule that were enacted during a previous time of rampant corruption in Ohio history.

[43:47] They will trot all over that and they do it regularly with things like school funding. And, uh, they are not going to stop. And the biggest reason they’re not going to stop is we haven’t really mounted a meaningful opposition to them.

[44:00] They keep getting away with it. And in a way we keep letting them because yeah, we, we, we go on podcasts and we talk and we make Facebook posts, but at the end of the day, they’re still doing it. The judges are still ruling this way.

[44:15] Uh, they’re still rigging the maps, uh, so that their people get into power. They’re still uh setting things up so that they can go around the back end and tweak legislation that people pass through initiatives and as long as we let them keep doing it they’re going to keep doing it or they finagle the ballot language to confuse people oh yeah i did with the gerrymandering one you know and it was disappointing to me because a lot of people text me on election day or during early voting and they always say well what do you think of this and it puts me in a position because i don’t like telling people how to vote to me that’s very undemocratic but i had several people texting me that honestly should have known better that wait uh what is this language about gerrymandering i think i want to vote no the way it’s framed is this who’s behind this and these people had ignored months and months of ads and news coverage about this i mean it just goes to show that getting information out to people is much harder than it should be it takes too much money to reach the population we have and the people with money use that money and those resources that the money buys to spread deliberate misinformation and this is one of the ways that a minority of people really are directing and controlling the majority of us.

[45:41] Music.

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[45:58] I’ll see you next time. The rules are just so convoluted that it makes it nearly impossible for a grassroots group to get all the signatures in this in the amount of time that needs to be they need to be getting gotten gone.

[46:27] I made up a word and, and so, yeah, so that was probably in 2020 or whatever, when we were talking about that, it’s probably much higher now. Yeah. And I think that’s one of those, there’s so many things that until you get involved with a campaign like that, or until you get into the weeds and really volunteer or otherwise, you know, plug yourself into some deep electoral work you don’t realize how there are all these arcane rules that are just on their face unfair and set up to keep people from having a voice as a minor party person working with the green party we found there were so many ridiculous laws that were kind of subtle and in there to keep third parties from having ballot access you know so for example you know if you want to run for certain offices like a county office um as a major party candidate you need you know 50 signatures if you’re an independent 1500 you know so you know you’re going to go spend all your time and money get grabbing signatures while they’re coasting because it should be easier for them because they’re already you know with a major party and you, Citizens initiatives are one of those things. They have continually adjusted the rules for statewide citizens initiatives to reduce the amount of time you have to collect signatures.

[47:48] They’ve added things like, oh, if there’s any economic component, there have to be two elections, one for the general idea, then two to get people to approve the specific budgets. Uh they add all these requirements about how many what percentage of signatures you get and you need to get at least x percentage from so many counties um they add all these rules to make it basically impossible to do and the ten thousand dollar minimum is actually i wouldn’t agree with that my having worked out a few group with a few groups on this and my knowledge of this stuff it legitimately takes at least one or two million dollars to mount a successful constitutional amendment campaign in ohio now things like um it again i’ve had republican legislators come out and say hey if people really want to they can pass their own laws uh so and clearly they don’t do it because we’re doing such a good job what they are obscuring is the fact that they’ve made it next to impossible for people to come together and use their right to pass laws as citizens and there’s really some gall because they’ll say things like.

[49:02] And people may not know this, but here in Ohio, you can gather signatures to amend the constitution, or you can gather a lower number of signatures to pass a regular law, just regular ordinance or revised code. And the major difference is that a constitutional amendment cannot be amended by the state legislature or the governor. It’s law. It is not able to be changed. Whereas a regular law, the General Assembly can go back and monkey with it and change it. So for example, the recreational marijuana law that was enacted in Ohio used the lower signature count. And that’s why the legislature keeps monkeying with it and changing it against what people wanted, saying that they know what’s best. And again, they have a super majority that they gerrymandered. They have rigged it so that they come across as we represent all the people. That’s why we have so many Republicans in office. No, it’s because you gerrymandered these seats to take what is not, because Ohio is a much more even state than people want to give credit for. If you add up the number of people who identify as Democrats or at least lean liberal or left-leaning in the state, it is much more even than most people are giving credit for, even with the realignment that’s been going on.

[50:24] And yet the republicans constantly do this song and dance of saying well we are what the people want therefore we can do whatever we want and if people wanted to do things differently look we technically have citizens initiatives uh but again you look under the hood they have undermined that process and they’ve undermined a lot of constitutional laws like i said the single subject law is routinely violated the home rule law is routinely violated and it’s upheld by judges who themselves are political actors there’s always this oh judges are impartial referees that’s nonsense judges who are still largely elected in ohio uh which is important to note.

[51:04] Are political actors and i do think one of the failures we’ve had on the left side is not creating more of an effort to elect and support liberal and left-leaning judges into state and like appellate courts and the Ohio Supreme Court, because those absolutely are political bodies. And we should be helping people understand what it means to be a judge on that side of the aisle and how important it is to have those judges weighing in to help ensure that some of these gerrymandering laws and other ways that the system is undermined are not allowed to happen. Yeah, I think based on recent elections, I think a state breaks down to something like 55-45, 55 Republican, 45% Democrat. And unfortunately, the Republicans have like 60 seats.

[51:59] So they have far more seats than the, than the vote tally. Yeah. I mean, it’s a super majority that they’ve engineered and this is becoming part of the national conversation because of the kind of arms race going on in Texas and California over, you know, federal seats. And again, uh, you talked about ranked choice voting earlier. I think this is a good point of time to mention. There’s another thing you could do called proportional representation, where basically there’s so many seats in a house, in a legislative body, everybody shows up, there’s no districts, everybody casts their vote for the party that they feel the most in. And then the seats are doled out based on the percentages. So if 60% of people vote with one party, that party gets 60 seats out of 100. And if another party gets 30, they get 30. But it gives a much more meaningful proximity to where things are, at least through the lens of a party. And I do think I’m also a supporter of proportional representation. I just don’t think there’s as much of an infrastructure for enacting that the way there has been in recent years with Rank the Vote to establish Ranked Choice Voting.

[53:08] And the other thing to note, too, is that there are more people that are not registered for a party, registered voters in Ohio, than are registered with a party. Yeah. And that’s a weird thing. If you’re not from Ohio, the only way to register with a political party is to vote in that party’s primary. And since most local elections, which happened in odd numbered years, are nonpartisan, which is a reform I support, that means you get one opportunity every two years in the gubernatorial and in the federal primary elections and a lot of people don’t know what primaries are and don’t vote in them but if you vote in that you get registered with that party and you’re stuck with it until the next two years and i’ve actually been one of my pastimes because i’m a nut has been since i have a spreadsheet i’ve updated every two years with that cycle uh after red ballots are certified certified yeah i go through county by county and i have kept a spreadsheet that shows uh.

[54:21] County by county and then again statewide where party registrations are for everything and again, consistently in that entire time 60 to 70 percent of all registered voters are not registered with any party now that may and again this is difficult because many of them probably do say i i see myself as a democrat or a republican they just don’t know about the primaries or they don’t vote in them um but i think the reality is most people would probably say i kind of lean this way but i’m not beholden to them and a lot of people also go you know what i think all these people are nuts and i’m registered to vote but i don’t vote often it’s only when i get something showing up i mean it’s it’s really sad the state of our politics on so many levels both in terms of voter turnout participation in the system but again when you i think people kind of innately have a sense about how corrupt and rigged things are which affects you know engagement uh and there’s not enough confrontation with that that there’s a lot of untapped voters out there that could be motivated with the right communicator with the right platform a lot of those ideas that actually would be very popular are kept from popular political discourse by the major parties.

[55:43] And honestly, things like the Trump phenomenon, I think, are capitalized on that. Trump was able to say and do a lot of things that were outside the norm, but some of it resonated with people who probably weren’t normally regular voters, or they had gotten cynical and stopped voting. And suddenly, he said the things that got them motivated to vote again. So maybe he’s not a good example because a lot of people don’t like his specific politics. But I think it just speaks to the fact that this kind of artificial constraint on what we could talk about does end up reducing the amount of participation in our political system in general. And I think that’s a shame. Yeah. I am one of those people that I am not registered with a party.

[56:30] I do not vote for Republicans as a matter of principle.

[56:36] I may vote for a Republican in a local race, depending on what that local race is. Right. But national and state. No, I just do not. I don’t vote for judges. I don’t vote for for state reps or anything like that, that if they even reek of being a Republican, I don’t vote for them. Um, and the reason why I am not registered a registered Democrat is I don’t like the party officials. I don’t like the infrastructure. Um, there’s been too many examples I’ve seen in the past where they like, well, we’re seeing it currently with Mondami in, uh, New York. Where he’s the Democrat nominee and the national people are nowhere to be found. Well, yeah, or they’re doing things to undermine him. Right, to undermine him, yeah. I’m very similar to you in that I also pretty much, I think the only time I may have voted for a Republican has been maybe for a couple of the more principled local Republicans. There’s a judge here, Tim Kuhlman, who’s a Republican, who’s actually done some really brave work confronting our penal system and its overly punitive mindset. So, you know, I got to give him credit. Yeah, I think I voted for him too once.

[58:01] So, I mean, there’s a few people, but again, they tend to be restricted to local candidacies where you find them. But, you know, on a state or federal level, again, even if they come across this principle, the fact is they’re co-signing a lot of just frankly evil things that this party has been promoting that are ending people’s lives um deporting them elsewhere uh without any due process and um i’m kind of like you in that i’m not registered with any party uh the party i was registered with does is not allowed to exist in ohio anymore and um.

[58:36] People have said, well, why don’t you just vote in a Democrat primary for people you like? Well, I don’t want to get the text messages. That’s a big part. I get enough junk email. But no, the real reason is I don’t identify with the Democratic Party. They have not earned the right to have my name affiliated with them is how I see it. It’s not because I think I’m some big hotshot. I just think that nobody owns my vote and I’m going to die with that. And when people assume that they have some sort of innate ownership of how I vote or where I vote or who I vote for, I take issue with that. You need to earn your vote. You need to earn my vote. And we should all have that mentality. Nobody owns our vote. And if they don’t speak to our values, if they do things that just make us cringe with, I just can’t support that, then we shouldn’t support that. And we should demand better. Now, what I do think more people should do is let people know that instead of just, you know, pouting and going in the corner. And I think the people that I admire the most are the ones who don’t vote or don’t register with the parties or refuse to vote for certain candidates, but also make it known to those candidates, if possible, directly to their face. Um as like glenn ryan did uh recently in uh here in toledo with sherrod brown.

[59:57] Because you know sherrod brown has co-signed the genocide in gaza and he said look you can’t do that i love you and i think you’re a good working class representative but this is unconscionable to me and you won’t have my vote until that happens and i think when he hears that from enough people that may change sherrod brown’s vote it’s probably you know for a lot of us we might say it’s the wrong reason, but that’s also a difficult reality of politics is that most of the time when good things have happened, the motivations for it have rarely been just pure morality or, you know, this is what’s good. There’s often some self-interest or maybe, you know, other interests behind it. But I think that’s the strategy people should undertake is letting people know why they may not be registering and what it would take to become registered. Say, hey, look, I would register with the Democratic Party if there was a real serious push party-wide for Medicare for All or for, you know, ending these foreign wars that are just ruining us or, you know, getting rid of ICE in this Gestapo situation. I mean, I think you can put some terms out there and communicate them to your officials. And if they don’t listen, the next person who runs for that office in that party probably will. So, you know, keep that in mind. Yeah, about Sherrod Brown and Gaza.

[1:01:21] Yeah, I am… I’m torn by that issue, not the genocide part, because that’s very wrong. I’m not torn about that part. But, you know, I see their perspective, and we’ve already seen examples where federal legislators that went against Israel were primaried, and they lost their elections in the Progressive Caucus. Um, but what I would like to see, like from Sherrod, I think Marcy Kaptur also signed on to it. Yeah. Is they say, look, this is what we did then. We fucked up. Yeah. You know, and it’s, it’s changed. The situation has changed. Uh, Israel is no longer on that high road anymore.

[1:02:12] You know, but they don’t do that. They just stick to their guns, sorry, the pun, stick to their guns and they, you know, it’s like Joan of Arc burning at the stake, you know, without renouncing her beliefs. You know, it’s like, why? Why are you doing that? Well, I think there’s all that could change tomorrow with either of those candidates here. And i think the only thing that is likely to change it is if they do hear from enough people that that is a deal breaker for them so again for those who are upset voice that and make sure it is heard as much as possible and as often as possible and as loudly as possible there’s many people that have taken videos of themselves confronting marcy captor about her role in the genocide. I’m sure it makes her uncomfortable, but the more she experiences that, you know, there’s kind of, there are people that have this view of her that, you know, she’s kind of like St. Marcy, you know, you can’t question her. It’s too important to have her. But again, what’s.

[1:03:21] There’s this subtle thing where if you refuse to hold somebody accountable for anything, including up to now an actual genocide, they’re going to keep going, wait a minute, I can do whatever I want and these people will vote for me. So why should I do anything that they believe in? They’re always going to be guilted into voting for me because the alternative is supposedly so much worse. Yeah, and that’s what we have.

[1:03:44] We have this dearth of accountability for anybody. Anybody, whatever side of the aisle they’re on, there’s just no accountability. The Republicans in the state, they’re in their supermajority. They don’t give a shit. Right. You know, we have Marcy Kaptor. I do give her credit, though. She did show up at some ribbon cutting or something and got shouted down. So at least she came out in public.

[1:04:09] You know, some of those Republicans aren’t even coming out in public. Oh, yeah. I mean, and that’s the thing. Marcy will, you know, she ignores people when they yell at her, but you know she hears them. And again, she knows in the back of her mind, there’s an easy answer, which is to change her point of view. But the calculus she seems to be making is she knows that her district is going to be gerrymandered and be even redder next year. So she seems to have been making a play to the right as much as possible, trying to appeal to right wingers, which again, I would disagree with her, but what, you know, she’s an experienced politician and who am I? Right but at the same time what i see is you keep appealing to conservatives when there’s a far more conservative candidate they’re going to go for that person and there’s so much that your legacy can get you but i mean sherrod brown had a great legacy and he lost to bernie marino that was a shock to a lot of people um but in a way it wasn’t because i think there’s a limit to where that legacy and what your history has been this is politics and there is something to what have you done for me late. And you can’t coast on past victories. You can’t coast on, you know, Hey, I’m not as bad as the other guy. And when you do get gerrymandered, uh, you know, if you’re trying to just be a slightly different version of what.

[1:05:34] The other alternative is, that district’s going to be tailor-made for a Republican. And my honest assessment is it doesn’t matter what she says or does at this point. Once that district is redrawn, she will not win re-election. This last one was a squeaker, and the next one will probably be the end of her career. And my only question to her would be, do you feel like you spent the last so many years of your career doing something you could be proud of? Or did you spend them desperately clinging to an office that by embracing values that are a complete contradiction to what you’ve said that you stand for?

[1:06:13] I don’t think she’s leaving much of a legacy doing it this way, trying to jump on the conservative bandwagon because that’s what her gerrymandered district tells her to do. She’s not being a leader. She’s being a follower. she’s chasing votes rather than using her legacy and her influence to persuade people into a different way of looking at things she’s been far too willing to throw vulnerable people away if it means saving her career and that’s hurt any sense of you know virtue that you could project onto her so again uh i wish there wasn’t she’s kind of part of this sort of gerontocracy that people have said the democratic party is embracing where it’s far more important for them to keep these seventies and 80 year old people in office than it is to allow younger, more progressive people to have a chance to grow their own political careers, to take the democratic party in a more left-wing direction. And again, it’s sad. Marcy is unfortunately part of that system. She’s just holding onto her seat at all costs. Doesn’t matter if nobody else gets a chance at that seat. It doesn’t matter if leftists are thrown completely under the bus, immigrants, you know, Palestinians, doesn’t matter. And that’s just sad.

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