Social Justice - A Conversation

Unknown Speaker 0:00
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Unknown Speaker 0:16
Good evening. My name is Charles Stanton. I'm on the faculty of the Boyd School of Law and the UNLV Honors College. My

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name is Kira Kramer. I'm a fourth year honors college student, a public health major and a pre law student. And this

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is social justice a conversation, a conversation.

Unknown Speaker 0:42
Well, good evening, everybody. Welcome back.

Unknown Speaker 0:44
Hi. We're happy to have you here with us.

Unknown Speaker 0:47
We're gonna, I guess, start our program today with a little bit of a review of the vice presidential debate. And you know what? What? What we thought of it? And you know what you out there thought about it. So I'm gonna let Carol lead off here and see what her opinion about it is.

Unknown Speaker 1:07
So I was somewhat surprised by the appearance of civility during the debate. I think that was quite refreshing from the normal debates that we've been having. I know online, I've heard people say that it was boring because it wasn't so confrontational. However, it was harrowing at times to see both vice presidential candidates agree that some things are an issue, such as gun violence, women dying from abortion or from abortion laws and among other topics, to see that both candidates said, not sure what they actually believe, necessarily, but they said in front of live television that they agree that this is a problem, and at times they diverged in their two different approaches to Addressing the said problem overall, there were some moments where I was definitely appalled by a few things that JD Vance said specifically on the abortion issue. I had a moment where I was listening to him say that we just need these women to trust us. And he said that I just felt that his articulation of the abortion issue under this guise of, yes, we feel bad that these women are dying, but they'll stop dying if they just trust us. And given the history of the United States, not just the current history, but take any healthcare history in which the United States has perpetuated great abuses against many different populations within the United States, I think it's safe to say that we can't just Trust the United States, even now, where we have individuals and legislation passed that limits the ability of the FDA to regulate industries. We have many different chemicals and products that are harmful to human beings and harmful in the United States that are banned in every other country except this one, where is the track record of us being able to actually trust that the United States puts our health and our interest first. And I'm not just talking about women. I'm talking about the foster children that will inevitably end up in foster care if the parents that they are born to cannot afford to care for them, who is looking out for their interests. And being from my my parents work in the foster care system like industry and system, and it's not necessarily an industry, and pardon me, but they work for the state. And growing up, there was a profound understanding that access to abortion is one factor that contributes to lessening the incidence of child neglect and abuse. Granted, it's not a sure fire, but it is one factor that contributes. And so to hear that JD Vance was urging for women to trust the government, I found deeply, deeply unsettling.

Unknown Speaker 4:19
Well, I saw, I saw a few things in watching it. The first thing that struck me, they had a large article in the Times about, you know, evaluating what each one of them said. And there were a lot of falsehoods that he propagated throughout the debate, the things that struck me, of course, was, was, was the abortion issue number one, particularly because he was always a very vehement opponent of abortion, and a lot of his, a lot of his, you. Approach has been viewed not just by women, but by men, as well as very derogatory of women. So we have a man basically who, on the one hand, talks about women trusting him and people like him when the track record is completely the opposite. It was interesting also how he he seeked to disassociate himself from actually stringent abortion restrictions. This was, this was, I guess he was probably told by whoever advised him on this debate that the abortion issue was that was a, was a very bad issue for the Republican Party. So he had to, he had to see more amenable. So that was, that was one thing that struck me. Second thing that struck me was, of course, his views on health care, and the absolutely astounding claim that it was Donald Trump who saved Obamacare. Well, we know that is a total fantasy. The entire

Unknown Speaker 6:06
time his 2020 ticket was running on the premise that he would abolish Obamacare, yeah, and so don't know where that idea came from. They've been trying to do it for ages, and so just appalling. And

Unknown Speaker 6:23
of course, what was interesting is the the night and early morning when they had the vote in the Senate, Mike Pence had been sent there specifically to try to convince John McCain to go along with ending Obamacare. And John McCain would not do that, even though John McCain, at the time, was dying. So it was, it was, it was something that it struck me as being very venal, to say the least. So, so that was another thing. The third thing that struck me during the debate was the approach of how each one of them spoke to spoke to us, the voter, and the way Walt seemed to speak to people, to me, seemed much more immediate and much more direct and much more humane. There was something about his presentation that was relatable, and the other guy. Basically, it was almost like it was scripted,

Unknown Speaker 7:23
not just that. I felt it was, there was a great deal of placating happening. It was this, it sounds too good to be true. You sound so slick and so presentable that it's mildly, if not more than mildly suspicious. But I definitely feel like it was this moment of placating fears, of placating the bigotry that we know you hold deep inside you because it's on the internet like you, we can see who you are fraternizing with, yeah, yeah, Nazi sympathizers, yeah. And the rest of

Unknown Speaker 7:57
the like, yeah. Well, I think, I think too was, is the fact that at the end of the debate, when they were Summing up, he asked him directly, the governor, do you acknowledge that your running mate, the ex president, lost the election in 2020 and he couldn't come up with an answer. And then he and then he said, and then he said, which was even further out. He said that basically that Donald Trump didn't do anything to try to obstruct justice and uphold the election, because nothing happened on January 20, when Biden was sworn in, but what happened two weeks earlier was that they tried to overthrow the government, and he was behind this. And that, of course, segues into the into the report that Judge chutkin, which I was glad to see, released, of Jack Smith, summation of what the case that they have is about. And the most chilling thing about it is when an aide had gone into the ex president's office to tell him of what was going on in the Capitol and how they were they these people were intent on killing the Vice President, and the Vice President and his family were in jeopardy, and the President's answer was, so what? So that just tells you all you need to know. I don't understand to me, and this is just from my own personal perspective. I don't understand why Mike Pence has not come out and said he's going to vote for Kamala Harris.

Unknown Speaker 9:37
Who knows it could be an NDA? It could be an NDA, I don't

Unknown Speaker 9:41
know, but it's something very there's some very bizarre there. Yes, I agree. Because I think if you, if you we, each one of us, if someone tried to kill, to kill you, that tried to kill your family,

Unknown Speaker 9:53
who knows, maybe the threat is still prominent. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 9:57
that's absolutely if he does speak up, there's,

Unknown Speaker 9:59
there's no way. Knowing, yeah. And I don't think politics has any limits, especially no ethical limits. Yeah. And we've already seen the current or the former president of the United States has been attempted, like there has been attempted murder, yeah, on his head. And so I don't know. I don't think that at this point American politics, that it would beyond, be beyond American politics, to threaten the Vice President's life if he, if he spoke up about what he really observed? Yeah, I agree, but that's just speculation. Yeah. I also felt that it was that moment in particular was very powerful during the debate, that non answer, and I think non answers really speak for themselves? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 10:42
yeah. Well, it's, it's interesting because that's his non answer. Is the reason why Mike Pence is in his running mate, yes, because he wouldn't be able to count on Mike Pence to circumvent the Constitution, basically. But so, so, so those were two interesting things that happened during the week. They had a very large article in USA Today, this was a few days ago, having to do with the crime of rape, and how so many 100,000 women in our country had filed complaints, et cetera. And very few of these cases had actually been adjudicated where the evidence examined and the low number was 100,000 but it went up to be up to four or 500,000 in many states. What's what's also very disturbing is the fact that the government had provided funding assistance to the states to help them clear up the backlog of all these cases. And in a number of states, the money had to be returned because they never were interested enough in doing it. And I think, I think one of the problems with you're never going to stop sexual assault. That will always be with us, because people are, people are evil in many cases, but it there's kind of a diminishment of the crime of sexual violence in our country that's become kind of an acceptance, in a bizarre way, that people do these things and, well, you know, it's not that bad, and, or, or they don't care, or whatever it is, or something else is more important, or something else is more important. So, you know, when they talk about, you know, these crimes, I think a lot of it is also connected to the way women are talked about in poverty and political in political circles too, where, you know, cat women and all and all this nonsensical stuff leads to, leads to a loss of respect, and in a bizarre way, I think, empowers people who are malevolence to feel that they have some kind of a right to be abusive. And I think that that philosophy has has really grown in the last 1015, years. A lot of that having to do with with social media,

Unknown Speaker 13:11
yeah. And I've seen the effects of it in young people, my own friends, who have dealt with that. And I've seen in my own community how there is this understanding that you'll never be able to win a sexual assault case anyway. So why should you tell anyone? And that has prevented many of my friends from stepping forward and actually going to anyone, but they also fear the repercussions of stirring up problems with the men that have committed crimes against them, and I find that to be deeply problematic. And not only that, I think that article really circles back to what we saw at the debate where, if you can't even trust your government to prosecute the people that commit harmful acts against you, if you can't even expect your government to keep you safe, or your children safe, because women are not the only people who are victims of this violence, but as our children, if you can't even expect them to see or hear your case when They're given money to do so from the federal government. Who can you really trust? How can you trust? And kind of adding on to that, not to circle back to the debate and to the abortion issue once again, but JD Vance mentioned multiple times that, you know, we need more resources for family, because he's so family centric. We need more resources. Nowhere in Trump's plan, is there a plan for paid maternal leave? Is there a plan to buttress and to continue to foster more funding and more infrastructure for foster care? There's nothing. There is nothing that actually set like, I know some. People will say that abortion is wrong no matter what, but I find it to be even more heinous when you take away people's rights and you don't provide anything to support those families.

Unknown Speaker 15:16
Yeah, yeah. I think that's true. I think that's very true. I think what's sad though, what's sad though is that there's a kind of acceptance of it, that there's not a strong statement that comes out, where people identify something as being very wrong, and we work on, we work on trying to stop it, rather than you know what you know. You hear a rich man say on a bus about his attitude toward women, or you see commentators who basically blow all these things off as not being important. And I think it's very true what you say that people have lost faith in in more injustice. There's been, I think, an appreciable decline in people's belief that there will be justice done in a case where a person is harmed. I don't think most people believe that anymore. No.

Unknown Speaker 16:19
But then again, the power lies with us. Women make up half of the population, if all women now this is hard to mobilize half of the population of the United States, but if all women, like developed and executed a strike on labor, on products, on consumption, if all women did so, you would probably see some change, yeah, yeah, change, and the capacity to inspire it is possible, but it's not easy, and women have to be fed up enough, and that is how we got the right to vote. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And so I don't think it's beyond us. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 17:00
yeah, I don't, I don't understand, though, the the numbers of women who vote for the Republican Party, I don't get it. There's something I'm missing there, because there's there. They're not, they're not, they're not for you. I mean, it's just, it's just what it is. And you can, you can try to, you know, mythologize certain ideas that you've come to believe, but then they're not, they're not factually based, you know. And I think, I think the fact that people have have seen the justice system as failing really leads, in a lot of cases, to a feeling of hopelessness that there's nobody that's going to be out there who's going to listen to what I say, or take it seriously or do something about it. And you know, cinematically speaking, you know, all these movies that we've seen over the past few years tie into that where there is not, like, an aggressive approach as to, you know, incarcerating people who should not be walking around,

Unknown Speaker 18:11
right? And I know with the case you mentioned, where up to from 100,000 to 500,000 rape cases have not been evaluated, I'm sure it's likely that in many of those cases, these are repeat offenders. And how many of these cases could have been eliminated if a repeat offender could have been prevented from committing heinous crimes against women? And that type of preventative action is something that we don't value in the United States. And I think it's not just seen in in the criminal justice system, but it's seen in health care. It's seen in education. We see this. We'll deal with the repercussions of our actions instead of actually preventing repercussions in the first place.

Unknown Speaker 18:54
Yeah. Well, the whole how this whole thing got started, with this government funding and everything was what was the case in Detroit, where this woman had been sexually abused. She waited for months and months and months she had to get a third party involved who was not a who was not a police official, but official, but somebody in the media, and they go to a warehouse, and they go to a warehouse in Detroit, and there's all this backlog of evidence. The tragic thing is, in that particular case, was around 220 or 230 men were responsible for like 90, 90% of those sexual assaults. So that obviously is a crime, as we know, that features recidivism, whether these people keep doing the same thing over and over. But as you said before, if they had been aggressively pursued, how many people would have not been home? Harmed by what these, these men were able to do. But everything was just, everything was just not taken it wasn't taken seriously. And it's, it's, um, it's a societal problem that goes, that goes beyond that, where there was a large article about the state of Georgia with the prison system, where they've had all these murders in the prison of all kinds of egregious things, and time marches on. And, you know, you read some of these stories about similar states five years ago, 10 years ago. I mean, there was, there were stories during the time we had covid Here in Nevada, all the inmates that died in the prison, and there was they weren't provided with even basic medical care, but, but it is a kind of willful indifference people, people don't care people, people just are, I don't know that people are into themselves, or they're doing their thing, or whatever it is, and society, ultimately, is very harmful, because we need to have some kind of a social fabric that that will stand up and say certain things are wrong. And I think, you know, over the last 910, years, that's been greatly eroded through social media and also through through what we'll accept politically, that we'll accept certain things that inherently we know are wrong, but we make excuses or rationalizations for the people that say them. And I think the young people in the country, in many ways, are trying to find their way among all this. Because I've talked to many students, and they've said to me, you know, I can't believe some of the stuff that's going on out there, how do they get away with doing this? But it's because people are indifferent, and the media basically, in a sense, is corrupt, also, because the media basically will put anything on air, right? It's like when you see The China Syndrome movie, and you know that the day they almost had a nuclear meltdown, and they go to a commercial for a toaster or something, and you say, Well, what is going on? And it always, it always really, what really struck me, though, was even in the debate that they had with waltz and JD Vance, where I was watching the debate, and then we got to have some commercials, and I'm saying to myself, Well, this is like a civic duty or obligation, that should be bereft of any commercials, no commercial. It's, it's, you know, it would be like if you had a, you know, like, I don't know, 911 and we're going to run some commercials for Alpo, something like that, you know. But it's, but it's accepted, though, that's the other crazy thing about it, you know, and what something that was amazing to me one night I was, I was on YouTube, and they had about the day that President Kennedy was assassinated. And I, of course, I was, I was a little kid then, but they actually had the tape of CBS, and they went to commercials a few times. It was like there was a soap opera on, and I think it was for Downey or dove or something. And then they went back to the they didn't immediately, they didn't immediately go they stopped everything. This happened a couple of times, and then finally, I guess, at a certain point when they found out how serious it was, then they went live to Walter Cronkite, but I'm saying they went back to the program, they went back to the guiding light. They went back to, you know, Alpo, or calibration, or whatever it was. And that's something ingrained though. You know, it's a monetary society. I mean, it really is. I mean, look at this. I'm not going to start on the Supreme Court. Supreme Court again, but I mean, if you look at it, I mean, it's like anything goes right. You know,

Unknown Speaker 24:10
I think what is the most heart wrenching for me personally is that when you see what these politicians are allowed to get away with in both their action and their rhetoric, it's not a deal breaker. Trump being convicted of sexual assault is not a deal breaker. How can you allow like how can you justify putting in a president who speaks about women the way that he does? And I just find that, and it's not just women, it's everyone, it's immigrants, it's any, a person of any religion that is not Christian. And that's not a deal breaker. It's not a deal breaker for the nation. And I, I. I urge people listening to really decide what your deal breakers are, yeah, yeah. And like, what inherently to you is acceptable for the treatment of another human being, yeah? And I felt that that Tim waltz really brought that home. Yeah, yeah. I agree that stop demonizing everyone else when not to quote, I think it's Michael Jackson, but the man in the mirror is the person we need to look to, yeah, yeah, to make a better change, yeah, yeah. And I know that's corny, because it's some song lyrics, but no deep down, yeah, why aren't we looking at our systems? Why do we keep blaming the American people when it is our responsibility and our duty as Americans to stand up for what's right? Well,

Unknown Speaker 25:58
I think, I think what you said is correct. I think that, unfortunately, they had an article in the Times about this woman who wrote who had been victimized by the ex president, and she said it wasn't, what did she say? It wasn't 19 women or 26 when it was like over 60 women that had been victimized. Okay, unfortunately, in our country, a lot of people buy into that. Unfortunately in our country, as far as sexual victimization is concerned, a lot of people buy into that as being normal. I'm sorry to say that, but it's the truth. And they buy into a lot of other things too. They buy into the demonization of immigrants, they buy into the demonization of people who are not the same color as they are, or the same religion or what have you. And there's, there's a large audience in this country for that kind of thinking. Unfortunately, we will see in a matter of weeks, if that, if that, if that's been eradicated, and the country can move forward in a positive way, but it is disturbing to me that this woman who's running for president is running against the man who's been convicted of felonies, but we got to know more about her when we know everything we have to know about the other person that she's running against, and there's something, there's something defective there, there's some mind view, or world view, or whatever you want to say that's not correct. It's not just not morally correct. It's not, it's not intellectually correct. It's just not correct. And you have a lot of people who almost are looking for excuses not to vote for her when basically, she's, she's, she's done nothing to merit that kind of approach, and the other person does whatever they want to do, and it's all good. But as you say, how could it be good, though, when all these people are being harmed? Well, because a lot of people identify with it. A lot of people, unfortunately, in our society, in our world, in our country, maybe they grew up that way. I can't answer all the reasons why, but that's their worldview, that we can do certain things to women, we can do certain things to minorities. We can do. I mean, I'll close with this, the FBI case of rather large settlement that the FBI made a few days ago with all these women who wanted to be FBI agents and the abuse that they dealt with and all the rest of his stuff. This is the FBI. This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is our armed investigating. And all these women went in there and they were mistreated. I mean, what could you say more than that? You can't say. But on that sort of somber note, it's been a great pleasure to be able to reach out to all, all of you, and we hope to do that again next week. Yes. And

Unknown Speaker 28:57
as I've echoed for the last the last few weeks, please, when you can take the time to register to vote and to get the vote out as well as vote. So thank you so much for listening to us, and we hope that you have a great rest of your week. Good night. You

Unknown Speaker 29:23
I thank you for listening to this broadcast, and if you have any questions or ideas for future discussion topics, please contact myself at K, R, A, M, E, k two@unlv.nevada.edu or Professor Charles Stanton, at, C, H, A R, L, E, S, dot, S, T, a n, t o n@unlv.edu. See you next time

Unknown Speaker 29:52
we look forward to it.

Unknown Speaker 29:53
You.

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