Social Justice - A Conversation

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Speaker 1 0:05
The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 jazz and more the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 3 0:23
name is Kira Kramer. I'm a fourth year honors college student, a public health major and a pre law student. And this

Speaker 2 0:30
is social justice, a conversation, a conversation you

Speaker 2 0:43
Well, good evening, everybody. Professor Stanton here with my co host Kara Kramer, welcome everybody back to social justice conversation. Much has happened since our last broadcast, as you would imagine, and we're gonna, we're going to get into a few of those things today. Wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, some of the cabinet choices that have been made by the President Elect, which are kind of interesting. You know, it's, it's, it's really a mark of how much the society and politics has has changed, even in the days of strict Republicanism and strict democratism, to use that phrase to be nominated to a cabinet position was Not only high honor, but it was a very highly credentialed resume and and list of achievements that would allow you to even be considered for a cabinet post. And there are some very bizarre some very bizarre picks that the President Elect has made. I was thinking of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. That was one. And I was, I was envision, I was envisioning a conference or a get together between Marco Rubio and, say, the prime minister of Turkey, or even better, Vladimir Putin, I would, I would love to be in that room, because that was not, it would not be a meeting of equals. So that was one thing. Christy Nome as the head of Homeland Security. You know what qualifications she has escaped me, the gentleman that was on Fox and Friends to be made the defense secretary,

Speaker 3 2:50
yeah, Pete hegsa, yeah. And he has no government experience.

Speaker 2 2:54
That's that would be about, right? You know, we don't want anybody to have too much experience or knowledge about these matters. One of I think Lawrence O'Donnell said it, and I think Lawrence O'Donnell was correct in this. He doesn't want to appoint anybody who really has expertise, because he wants all those positions and the policy stuff that comes out of them, coming from him.

Unknown Speaker 3:22
He wants yes men, yeah. He

Speaker 2 3:24
want yes yes men and yes women, people who will do his bidding, people who, because of their inexperience, really, can't, really contradict them. The mistake that he made, according to his backers in the first term, was getting people who really knew a lot about what was going on, either General Kelly or General Mattis, General McMaster, people in the Defense Department who were very well schooled. John Bolton, of course, is the United Nations ambassador. He picked the least, Stefanik to be the United Nations ambassador, which is, you know, off the wall also because she has no she has no experience in foreign policy. It's amazing, though, when you look back, I was looking the other night at some of the some of the achievements of some of the people who had been the United Nations ambassador, traveled all over Europe, had had ambassadorships in different countries, have written foreign policy papers, you know, would go members of think tanks and everything, and that's, that's all I got. Like, you can just, you know, pick anybody. It's like, you know, like, if you went to McDonald's, like, Okay, you're the next defense secretary. Come on in, you know. And and, and the public, I the public seems to be okay with it, you know, that's, that's the very bizarre thing. You know, there's no demand from people, at least outside of the Democratic Party, who are, who are knowledgeable about these things, to say, you know, wait a minute. Now, we want to pick. Are the best, most experienced people, because obviously those are the people, especially in matters of foreign policy, who are going to protect the country. And you don't hear any of that, no.

Speaker 3 5:12
And I think that's just right on theme with President, former president and future President Trump's presidency is he himself, is a businessman, and he's going to put business people behind him, just as we're seeing Elon Musk becoming this. Oh, how are they phrasing it? They state that he is going to be the running the office of the Department of government efficiency, trying to gut and restructure and dismantle different parts of the federal government, probably, and particularly those that would be responsible for investigating anything that the government under the Trump administration has done or will do, and ultimately, I think it's really an effective strategy for getting away with murder and with getting away with whatever it is that they want to do, and making sure that people who are incapable, inexperienced, unqualified is The best way to do it. And ultimately, this toll will be paid for by the American people,

Speaker 2 6:25
yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think in the last administration, when he was the president, they had a long list of people who had to leave their jobs, people who worked in the Department of the Interior, the labor secretary there was, there was a whole passel of them. And basically now they want to remove any kind of ethical limits or restraints on these people. And all the while that they're doing that basically eliminate those, those departments that have that are essential to the country, such as the Department of Education, to just name one, and they, they want to, they have a position of being very much anti union advance and very much anti protective of workers. It is very bizarre to me, and I don't understand it, how the teamsters union, which at one time was the most powerful union probably in the country, could not make an endorsement when they knew that this guy was was never a union person. He's on tape actually saying it when he was talking about how many people he could fire and everything like that. And the United Auto Workers, of course, you know, supported Kamala Harris, but a lot of the Union, a lot of the big unions, didn't do very much endorsement of her at all. I was surprised at how many of the culinary workers in this city went with, went with the ex president. I was really surprised at that.

Speaker 3 8:07
I think it was that ploy to economics, the no taxes on tips, no taxes on Social Security. Well, if Social Security doesn't exist anymore, how are you going to tax it? Yeah, I don't know, yeah,

Speaker 2 8:18
yeah, yeah. Well, I think, I mean, I mean, there was a very interesting article today about the demographics, how in the vote, she failed to meet all the the medians that that Biden had set what he was running. You know, as far as to black men, as far as the women's vote, as far as the Hispanic vote. And she was, she was really laughed by by Biden. Biden did much. Biden did much better. But of course, of course, as we need not forget it. We must not forget Biden was an older man who was white. The advantage that Biden had vis a vis Trump was Biden was not threatening. Biden really didn't present a threat to almost anybody. He was this man who had been in the Congress for years. He had been in the Senate, he had been on all these committees, and he didn't really stake out much of a policy position when he was running for office. He didn't campaign much because of COVID. So people put, I guess, their best intentions in Biden that. Well, he's going to be okay. Things are going to quiet down. We won't have the chaos we had with the ex president, and that's why they elected him. Of course, the problem became when, as his term persisted, he couldn't, he couldn't do the job, physically or mentally. He he was not, he was not able to do it. So then the Democratic Party had to decide what. They were going to do, and they had to. They had two unenviable positions they could have. They couldn't. They couldn't really get rid of him, because you can't force the president to resign. They certainly couldn't impeach him, because he hadn't done anything wrong in that sense. But he had to willingly leave office now. Then the thing was, well, if he willingly left office, what should the position of the Democratic Party be? How would they get a nominee to run against the ex President? Well, there were two ways. One, one way, of course, was what he did, which was to say, I'm going to not run for re election, but I'm going to throw my support and my delegates to Kamala Harris. Problem there was, of course, that there was a limited amount of time for Kamala Harris to establish herself. The other alternative, which was not a great alternative either, although some people have, like James Carville, have advocated, was to have an open convention on the idea that, you know, people would see that the Republic, the Democratic Party, was very dynamic. They would open up the floor to all the different states and all the different proposals and all the different alternatives, and out of that would come, hopefully the nominee. But that wasn't really a great solution either, because maybe in all that infighting to get that nominee, they would have alienated a lot of the people who would have voted for Biden if he was up to the job. So that's where they were stuck. And then, of course, she gets the nomination, and she has to do in three, three and a half months, what some candidates take years to develop. And I think considering her obstacles, she did a credible job in way she presented herself and the way she campaigned. A lot of the knock on her was that she didn't make her proposals as public as she should have, she didn't promote her proposals. I don't know if I totally agree with that. She certainly had a proposal. She had, she certainly, you know, was very much involved in the bill that would have changed the immigration law. So that was one thing she did. She definitely was for helping people who had to take care of the elderly, and providing financial subsidies for them and and, you know, in a way, she couldn't, she couldn't win, because she had always been very progressive. So the people who did any kind of study of who she was and what she stood for. Knew, knew what those positions were, unless you were just you were ignorant. You didn't care. You weren't you didn't want to bother finding out about it. So pretty much everybody knew she was a very progressive candidate. What was, I thought powerful in her favor, though, was which, which which, in many ways, never got mentioned. Was she was a very powerful progressive candidate, but she was also a law and order candidate. She had also, she had held in the state of California the three most important legal jobs that you could have, District Attorney of Ogun, District Attorney of San Francisco, and, of course, two terms as the California Attorney General. So the idea that that she was weak or soft on crime was not in any way backed up by her record. It was completely the opposite. So in a way, you you would have had the best of both worlds. You would have had a person who, because of their knowledge of not just the legal system, but how about about police response and all those things, probably had a lot of ideas about how to make the law, our enforcement of the law, the prison system, more equitable. So that should have gone over as something positive. But as I as as was always in the back of my mind. And I've said it before, and I'll and I'll say it again, she had two she had two major handicaps, handicaps that couldn't really be erased by saying that she should have spoken up about more about policy, or, you know, other things like that. She was black and she was a woman, and the two combined together is, is, I believe, at this stage in our history of our country, not electable. Not electable. Because if you had a woman of her stature. Who campaigned in a very, I think, dignified, respectful of the system, inclusive to people who you know didn't agree with her, but welcoming, not threatening anybody who was opposed to her, per se. And that didn't work. That didn't work. I think the biggest issue that the country has to face, which I think goes way, way beyond this election, is is the tsunami, the earthquake, whatever you want to call it, as to how we judge that candidate or candidates for the ultimate office, that the the divining rod, the ultimate test was character, and that seems to have gone by the board. I think there's an acceptance now that character, per se, is not necessary or required for that person to be in that highest office, not just

Speaker 3 16:05
character, but qualification, experience, any of the things that any normal employer, even those that would have voted for Trump, would have looked for in the own and their own employees, are not things that they would want from the President of the United States. Yeah,

Speaker 2 16:20
well, I think that's, I think that's absolutely true. I think that's absolutely true. I think that. I think that when I look back at some of the people who became president, and we had, we had our failures there. We had Warren Harding, we had Ulysses Grant, we had a few people who didn't didn't fit the bill, so to speak. But as you say, you know the minimum qualifications, the expertise, what have you. But also, I think that people accepted a lot of the stuff that went on that was wrong. They accepted the racism at the rallies. They accepted the the hate. They accepted all these things because they had become so used to it over nine or 10 years since 2015 when this man first came on the scene, that he was a reality star, that he was an entertainer, that all the rest of the stuff. So those rules didn't apply to him, because he was a different he was a different kind of animal. The rules had to apply to her. Those rules were to restrain her, not that she would have ever done anything like like he did, but those rules restrained her. They said, Well, you know, she has to present herself in such in such a way. Now you could imagine, you could imagine, if someone came out with charges against her of sexual impropriety, she would her goose would have been cooked. They would have disowned her, because there is a double standard, as there always has been in regard to those things, versus men versus women, but in a case where you had someone who was convicted of felonies, when you had someone who was involved in numerous complaints about sexual misdeeds and all the rest of this stuff and business malfeasance, that it's hard to it's hard to think of a time, maybe even going back to the founders. Of course, we weren't there at the time, so we really didn't know what they really thought about a lot of things. But I can't imagine that most America's preceding this one would have given the person a pass. And as you say, Kira, quite correctly, they wouldn't have given the person a pass in their own lives regarding, you know, people that they had to appoint to positions, or people who were in the workplace or whatever it is. I mean, you can just imagine one of these companies, Disney or MGM, what have you, and somebody comes in and they have a record of felonies, that person would be excused. They would never hire somebody like that. But in this case, in this case, it was okay. And I think, I think that's that has to do with how people see him. I think the people who support him, I'm not saying everybody. I mean, there were black people that voted for him, there were Hispanic people who have voted for him. There were women that voted him. But his core constituency, his core constituency, desires, in America of yesteryear, they desire an America that's not inclusive, that's not equitable, that's not racially conscious, that that is against immigration, not so much because they they know or believe that all these people are bad. It's because they. Of a different nationality. It's because they're of a different ethnicity, and that's why they don't want them here. And that's part of the whole the mosaic, the mosaic of, you know, who she was as a person, and you know, instead of celebrating what she did, which was to come from, you know, a middle class background. Her mom basically would raise the kids to achieve that should be the exemplar of what the country stands for, that this remarkable person who was ascended to this, this, this height, you know, to law school and all the rest of these things. But it was downplayed, though it was downplayed. And the other person who, basically, you know, came from a from a place of entitlement, not, not, not that, that per se makes him a bad person, but she had gone over, she had gone through all these obstacles and the the jarring contrast between the two of them is what stands out to me, when I, when I, when I, when I watched the debate even, when I watched the debate even. And you know what was? What was so interesting to me was that when he debated Biden, of course, right away there were calls that Biden has to leave. He has to go. The vast majority made by the were made by the Democratic party, the Republican Party. Of course, wanted Biden to stay as long as he could. But when you saw her debate him, you knew, unless you were completely biased or not not aware of of what a debate is or what the positing of ideas is. She she made him look ridiculous. She made him look out of place, uninformed, ignorant. But unlike when Biden was removed, there were no calls to remove him, and that's because he was he, regardless of what he said or what he did, that wasn't important. It was only the it was only the agenda that they believe he followed to protect them from the hordes of people coming in there, from women's rights, from all these different things. He's, he's there, he's there, you know, a champion. Now, of course, in reality, he doesn't believe in anything. He's not a he's he just does not, but he will do for them whatever he can, not out of any moral principle or anything like that, to sustain his to sustain his leadership. Now everybody's saying, Well, you know, how bad could it be for the next four years? Well, that's the question we'll have to see as time progresses. But who's to say that it will just be four years?

Speaker 3 22:57
That is the real question. That is, say that we will have another free and fair election in four years, right? And

Speaker 2 23:04
I thought it was also interesting about the election. And I'm, you know, I'm not, I'm not mark Elias or any of those people who can, you know, who know election law inside out. There was no questioning of the vote, there were no lawsuits, there was none of that. But if the system that he was complaining about was truly fraudulent, then how did he get elected? You see, that's the other part of it too, you know. And of course, he he is what he is. He is what he is. And people who, you know, who voted from he apparently had 25% of the black male vote. He had a rather large increase in the Latino vote. He had a I was shocked. He had a plurality of the women's vote, but, but let's be real, he is not going to help any of those constituencies, any of them. So you could vote for him. You can say it's the economy. You could say, you know, whatever it is that's just a dream. That's just a dream. It's a dream that's That's an illusion, you know, and of course, and of course, you know, with the women's issue he wants to pass, and not that he does. I don't think he believes. I truly don't think he believes in anything. I think they want to pass a federal law to have a nationwide ban on abortion. And then if that happens, then I think all bets are off in the country as to what's going to be I really believe that. I think this is, this is very scary territory. I agree, and I don't, I don't, you know, I'm, you know, we're in a democracy. Everything I don't see. I don't see. The majority of the people who have been offended or harmed are. Uh, accepting this, and we're going to be in unknown territory. That's why he wants to get control of the military. That's why he wants to have some kind of a board to rate the generals, probably on the question of fealty to him as against those who basically are doing their duty. So that's going to be another crazy, chaotic thing too. They had a guy on last night, general McCaffrey, and he was saying, this is like insane. There's no border generals now reviewing the generals. That's you're reviewed by the people that are, that are your contemporaries of equals. He has no idea what, what, what makes a general. He beat the service. He got six deferments or something. He was never in the he was never in the military. He he said, according to General Kelly, that people serve in the military are suckers and losers, you know. So it's, you know, follow

Unknown Speaker 25:54
what he says and what he does.

Speaker 2 25:56
Well, that's it. That's it, you know, it was, what was Aesop's fable, a subs fable, was that there was a an ASP. The ASP apparently was the insect that bit Cleopatra. And there's a frog by the bank, and the frogs stretched out. He's getting the sun, and everything's nice. And the ASP comes over to the frog and he says, you know, he says, I want to go across the river. So the frog, you know, Frog, looks at him very suspiciously, and he says, I don't know about this. He says, you know, you have a bad reputation for biting people, and the the ass looks him. Says, no, no. He says, That's fake news. He said, that's that's not really what I do? So the frog says, Okay, I'll give you a break. Climbs on the back of the frog in the middle of the Nile River. The Ass bites the frog. So the frog turns around, looks at the ASP. He says, boy. He says, You want grateful thing. He said, after all, done for you. I'm taking you across the river. And you know, you're buying me. And the ass says to him, he says, I'm sorry, I bet he said, but, but that's my nature. Sort of, sort of frog looks at him, and he says, Well, I'm gonna sink now, because that's my nature. But that's what it is, though, absolutely that's what that's what it is, you know, and we need a wake up call.

Speaker 3 27:24
I don't think that we will get a wake up call until the majority of Americans actually feel the weight of their consequences, because for too long, it is too easy to be ignorant, but until their ignorance impacts them, we won't see a change. Yeah, yeah. Nevertheless, I urge all of our listeners to become as much as much a part of your community and a political activist as you can be in your state legislatures and voice your opinions as often as possible, we want to thank you for listening and for joining us today, and we look forward to sitting with you again next week.

Speaker 2 28:08
Yes, thank you for your thank you for your listenership, and we look forward to that and a very good night to all of you. You I

Speaker 3 28:24
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 we

Unknown Speaker 28:54
look forward to it. You.

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