Social Justice - A Conversation

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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 0:41
Well, good evening everybody. Welcome back to social justice a conversation. I'm here with my partner, Kiera Kramer, and this is going to be our super election special show, because this is going to be our last broadcast before the November 5 election. So we wanted to take the time to talk to everybody about what's going to happen tomorrow, hopefully, and, you know, just lay out some of the things that have been happening up to this time. One of the things that I think struck the both of us in the last in the last week to 10 days, was the occasion at Madison Square Garden for the Republican nominee of his party, which really, I think, really dumbfounded a lot of people. It was, it was a extremely repellent, gross, inappropriate use of of time and energy to basically use that occasion instead of talking about positive things that have, could have, could have been done for the country, to really engage in a lot of crude, vulgar, inappropriate conversation that really made me watching it cringe. But one of the things that this campaign has brought out is the fact that there doesn't seem to be any bottom there. That basic all this, all these, you know, comments and racial insults and all the rest of it, have become so normalized. And I think that that goes back to 2015 and the man coming down on the on the escalator, and America now, particularly his followers, accept this as just a normal course of events.

Unknown Speaker 2:36
Furthermore, I think something that I've been reading about, which has been pretty concerning, has been the incidence of both burning of ballot boxes. Most recently, I see that the Supreme Court has allowed Virginia to purge voter rolls ahead of the election. And so I think seeing how in these various states, there is a continual threat to democracy, and our democratic process of voting has been extremely disturbing in the days leading up to the election, and I'm very curious as to how state officials are going to be managing that situation, and how To remedy it once a catastrophe like that occurs.

Unknown Speaker 3:22
Well, I think that we're going to have two elections. I think we're going to have the election, the ostensible election, on the fifth of November, as to, you know, people voting on that day, and then we're going to have a second election. The second election is going to be the challenge, the enormous challenge about the verification of the votes. And then the challenge after that is when this situation falls into the Congress, where in the House of Representatives, has to validate the votes that is going to be, that is going to be one of the tests of our of our country. And I am worried, as probably a lot of other people are worried about, whether or not a Republican Congress will, even despite evidence to the contrary, either validate or invalidate what what the voters have done, because it seems that the House of Representatives basically has no independent sense of thought process, and basically they seem to be Taking the tack that well any election that does not restore the former president to the presidency is, on its face, invalid, which will be an enormous crisis with the country, and the ramifications of it, obviously are very dire.

Unknown Speaker 4:59
Yeah, I agree. And furthermore, I know something we wanted to discuss today was the recent rhetoric that Trump has been using at his rallies. Most specifically notable is his, and he didn't directly quote this, but at his rally, his spokespeople have said recently that they called Puerto Rico a floating garbage dump, among many other just inappropriate and horrific comments about African Americans, Jews and many other populations that represent the big melting pot of the United States. And I think we should talk about what that really means for a president to endorse and accept that words like these have been uttered by himself and those who represent Him when these are the demographics that make up the United States. And I think it's important to acknowledge that when Puerto Rico was hit by several natural disasters during his presidency, his response was to hand them some paper towels and for them to clean up the mess, and for a president to not only not take responsibility and leadership in a moment when people needed him most, but to honestly make fun of them and to belittle them and patronize them in that moment is extremely inappropriate. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 6:25
yeah. Well, it is a mystery to me. It is a mystery to me, and I can't get in in somebody's head, but it is a mystery to me how many people who are Latino are going to vote for this man, if you just look at the basic facts and all the insults that he's thrown upon, you know Mexican people, Puerto Rican people, you know Dominican people, how would you be voting for this guy? I don't. I don't. I've said this before in this broadcast. I really don't get it, although I think, I think the Escapade in Madison Square Garden that was, that was a new low, which is saying something, because this stuff has been going on for years, insulting, not just the Puerto Rican people, but, but really, all Latinos, really, all Latinos when he uses, when he uses the language of that he uses so frequently, of saying that, you know, our country is being polluted, the blood, our blood, and all the rest of this stuff, who is he talking about when he talks about the immigrants who were coming in, and there were cancer on American all the rest of stuff. Who was he talking about? Well, he talking about Hispanic people. Now I know, of course, that you know, there are obviously, you know, differences in many things that have to do with a Mexican being a Mexican or a Dominican being as American or Puerto Rican being a Puerto Rican. But nevertheless, it is. It is an attack on the Latin of the Latino group of people, and

Unknown Speaker 8:08
ultimately, it's an attack on everyone who isn't white and probably isn't a man, arguably, yeah, yeah. And so to me, the choice is clear as to which candidate will genuinely, at least not to your face, insult you for being exactly who you are, and arguably argue that you have a place at the table because she herself is a person from an immigrant family who understands the like The diverse and vast cultural makeup of this country, and hopefully, what I think is really important as we inch closer to the day of the election, is for people to realize that there is more to voting than protecting one's own self interest. I think where a lot of people end up voting for him just because, and I know many people of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds who have voted for him, and it's I think ultimately, many of these people think with their pocketbook. But the irony, the deep irony, is that he doesn't care about their pocketbooks, if you're not in the top 1% he quite literally does not care, and his tax and economic plan will skyrocket prices. It will raise the national debt. None of those things are good for the average hard working American, even the average hard working upper class American or upper middle class, or even upper relative upper class. And so to me, it's dumbfounding how various people of different economic backgrounds find ways to make excuses for him, like saying he'll remove the tax on social. Security. He wants to get rid of Social Security altogether. What are you going to tax if it doesn't even exist anymore? And I find that to be the very deep irony with many of his political ads.

Unknown Speaker 10:10
Yeah. Well, of course, you know, whereas, whereas you would think that a woman of her stature would be celebrated, you know, representing the best of America, representing diversity, representing, you know, a whole group of people who are disenfranchised. For so many years, we now have a woman of Indian, black extraction, who has done all these things that have been very commendable. And as to use the words of you know Michelle Obama, she she constantly has to prove herself. So, in other words, she was the District Attorney in Oakland, California. She was the District Attorney in San Francisco, California. She was the two term Attorney General, she was the United States Senator, she was the vice president. But we got to find out. I've been harping on this theme for a number of broadcasts. We got to find out more about it. We don't know who she is, okay, but you know who the other guy is, okay? You know his his track record, so to speak, and it's almost and I've said it before, and I'm not original in saying it, there's a false equivalence here between these two people, because it's like a seesaw. But the seesaw is not even the seesaw in reality, is completely disjointed, because you have a one person, basically, whose whole life was dedicated to law enforcement, basically, versus the other person. And then the other thing, of course, too, is that being a woman, she's supposed to endure all these insults and all the rest of his garbage that that a man would would not be, would not be burdened with. And you know, they were talking about what happened at the rally on Madison and Madison Square Garden. What about that? What about the commentary by one of the speakers regarding to one of the people, I guess, that worked with her, that he was her pimp. I mean, what does that say? What does that say that this stuff has become so common and so accepted? But I think, I think what I would say as as a white person and as a man, I would just say this, that if you, if you are a woman, and you are looking, are looking carefully and clearly, and what's going on in this race and and what party is going to protect your rights, your bodily autonomy rights, or you're a person of Hispanic ancestry and you have heard all these insults and slurs from from the ex president and his minions. It's a very simple choice. This is not this is not complicated. You have on one side, someone who's going to try to empower you, enable you, create programs for you, versus the other person and his party, which basically don't even have a true platform of how they can make the country better. Except this book, this 900 page book, The 2020, 25 plan, which is basically the absolute reverse of what she would do, or the opposite of what she would do. Basically, how many rights can we take away from people?

Unknown Speaker 13:31
And I hear the argument so often that he's not directly endorsing it. His name is in it over 300 times. How many times does it need to be in there for you to realize that maybe it's not a coincidence that he just happens to be mentioned over 300 times. And I also find it hilarious that he renames his own policy program project 47 I think is what he called it. Why would you even insinuate or create a program that has a name so similar to project 2025 it's, I don't even know. It's beyond me.

Unknown Speaker 14:12
Well, you have to, you have to. You have two things going on here. One thing you have going on, of course, is his plan or non plan? His plan, his basic plan, is very simple. He wants to take over the country. He wants to rule the country basically unquestioned. He wants to basically as much as he possibly can, take away people's rights, of course, enabled by the Supreme Court, who has been helping him every step of the way, but it's, I think, inaccurate and really distorted though, to throw it all on him. There are a number of there are a number of players in this play that also deserve blame, certainly the Republican Party. Party deserves blame. The Republican Party has completely abandoned whatever precepts they were supposed to adhere to. They very recently came out with a book about Mitch McConnell, and it's very interesting, because throughout the book, he castigates Trump. He says he's despicable. He goes through a whole bunch of stuff and and when they had the January 6, well, those people who are now supporting him, it's Ted Cruz, you know, and Mitch McConnell, the whole demo, the whole Republican roster, Lindsey Graham, all of a sudden now they're, they're, they're, they're backing up Trump and and the excuse is, the excuse is, well, he's terrible and everything, but we can vote for Kamala Harris. Is it that we can vote for Kamala Harris because of the programs of Kamala Harris, or we can't, or because we can't vote for a black, Asian, Indian woman. That's that's really what America has to face. America has to face a decision, not not with subterfuge and excuses, but whether or not our country has the courage and the moral conviction to vote for somebody that they know certainly deserves to be in that office, against the person she's running against, or because of just of the color of their skin or their gender, we can't vote for.

Unknown Speaker 16:34
And I think those who have already been who've experienced prejudice as a result of their ethnicity and their gender, fully understand what's at stake. Not only that, I argue that even if you disagree with a couple or more of her policies, what you have to remember is that we still exist in a democracy and any of her policies, especially those that will be very profound and possibly life altering for many Americans, will have to go through the Senate and through Congress, through both houses, and they will be met with rigorous opposition. And if anything can get done, it is going to be a miracle, unless, by some chance during this election, we're able to to pursue and to advance a Democratic majority. However, if that does not happen, there will still be discourse in this country and in DC about the policies that she wants to advance during her presidency. But I would argue the opposite. If Trump comes into power, he has made it so that the fundamental principles of our democracy have been slowly eroded, and his appointment of new justices on the horizon to the Supreme Court and any majority that he may hold in the Senate will absolutely topple our democracy, and I think that is what is really at stake. You may not agree with every policy she has, or maybe you agree with some and disagree with others, but remember that democracy can still prevail under her, and that different ideas will be expressed. And we know that Trump has a history of putting yes men behind him, and he only wants yes men behind him. We see this when his own faculty in the White House have overheard him saying such things as, I need this same administration that Hitler had an administration that would refuse to go against my will, and we know that Kamala wants to hear diverse opinions, and she will appoint people that will challenge and question her and make sure that she is putting forth the best possible solutions to America's pressing problems, but we know that Trump will only put in People that say yes to Him, yeah.

Unknown Speaker 19:01
Well, what's interesting too, though, what's interesting too, though, is the whole situation, you know, with the newspapers, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times refusing to endorse a candidate. Okay, which, which, which, they always did. Now, let me ask you this, and not ask you personally, but ask our audience. I can't imagine somebody being worried about not endorsing Kamala Harris. I can't imagine that because the people who run the Los Angeles Times and the people who run the Washington Post, particularly the Washington Post, has all kind of business dealings and contracts with the federal government. Now, if Kamala Harris becomes president, no one's going to have to worry that Kamala Harris is going to, you know, end their contract because they didn't support me in a newspaper editorial. But. All these people who are in big business, the oligarch, we call them American oligarchs. They're afraid of this guy. It's the same reason why. It's the same reason why Jamie Dimon, the guy who's the CEO of Chase Bank, he's a secret. He's a secret supporter of Commonwealth house. Why should it be a secret? What does he have to be afraid of, see, this is what I'm talking about now. And it's by these actions that it's a proof that they know that if this guy gets in the democratic processes that we've always taken for granted, are going to, are going to, are going to evaporate. I mentioned a few weeks ago about a movie called advise and consent. And I talked about that movie, and I thought, I think it's an enormously relevant movie, because in that movie, it has to do with a man who's trying to become Secretary of State, and then he has, in many ways, a dubious past, and one of the people who comes to testify against him testifies that, you know that he believes that, you know, there should be an overhaul of the government, our democracy and everything. And he's asked, he said, well, the man has asked, basically, well, it would be a violence overthrown. He said, No. He said, No. He said, it wouldn't be done that way. He said, what would it be done is by an erosion of our values, erosion of our principles, erosion of all the things that we as Americans hold dear. And it would happen in a gradual way. This has been going on for 10 years now, since he came down the escalator in 2005 we need to make a statement as a country that we need to go forward. We cannot go back, we cannot return to the chaos and the division that has ruled this country for almost a decade. Because if we don't do that, we're going to find our democracy has gone by the board,

Unknown Speaker 21:52
and would Dave, it would be in shambles, and it's already sleepwalking towards that state. And what I find to be I ultimately, I think it's just this epitome of cap of putting capitalism against democracy. Ultimately, these Bezos, the CEO of Chase. How did we get to a point where we have put someone in power who is so inflammatory and so dangerous, quote, unquote, to the interests of capitalism that by his one word, you will be silenced. To me, that is sleep walking towards dictatorship, that you feel that because of your pocketbook, you have to be silenced, and that you cannot speak on what you really believe and that you can't have discourse with this man because he has a quote, unquote enemies list. What productive nature does that have on our country? In what way is this further advancing any of the things that this country really needs to make it truly a country worthwhile for the people that live in it.

Unknown Speaker 23:04
Yeah. Well, I think, I think that what, that's what made the Washington Post non endorsement so bad. First of all, because the paper built its reputation during the Watergate days when Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward wrote these articles that led to the House Committee and eventually led to the removal of President Nixon. But we're in a different era now, so we don't have, I don't mean we as the whole country, but in many circles, we don't have the same kind of moral voice. When Nixon was involved in Watergate and he had to release the tapes and everything, a congregation of Republicans went to the White House and told him he needed to resign for the good of the country, and Nixon resigned. Where are those people today? Where are those people? Those people seem to have disappeared, and this is what we've been both talking about, there's an erosion. There have been an erosion of these values. There have been erosion of these beliefs. In the book about Mitch McConnell and looking at looking at the saga going from January 6 to today, particularly about the Republican Party. What we lack in America, in many ways today, from my observation, is a lack of belief. And by lack of belief, I mean specifically this, people who are in our government, in our Congress, in positions of responsibility, who basically don't believe in anything except their own aggrandizement, their own power. It has become the Congress, our Congress, and also the Supreme Court, to basically be uninterested in the will of the vast majority of people that. Basically, these are jobs that they hold at the sufferance, basically of one man, and their whole mission is to please that one man and to serve Him, almost like a slave would serve a master. And this is what you have. We don't have a functional government. We don't have a functional government. And if he is elected, we will have a totally non functional government, because what we'll have is an unfunctional president, a indifferent, corrupted Supreme Court and a Congress basically. That's there to do, is bidding. So what happened in the last Congress, which was basically very, very few, very, very few, bills were actually passed that will just accelerate. That will just accelerate. So I don't, I don't know what to say any more than you know, we've talked together for weeks about this, but it's our responsibility, though. You know, we can talk about Donald Trump, we can talk about the Republican Party, we can talk about all those things, but ultimately, it is about us. It is about each of us as individuals, what our responsibility is, what our duty is as citizens, to know that the history of how our country was founded and how our country was based on the belief that we were not going to be ruled by a king or a tyrant. We were going to be ruled by ourselves. We were going to be ruled as a democracy. We were going to be ruled as the melting pot of all these peoples from all over the world, working together as a diverse community to solve problems, not to silence people or intimidate people or threaten people. That is exactly what are the challenges before us that there is no there is no other way to put it, and when and if we do not vote, if we do not exercise our franchise wisely, we have no right to complain when all these things are going to eventuate down the road, and believe me, they Will eventuate, and

Unknown Speaker 26:59
not only that, they may dissipate our rights and freedoms, and for women, they already have, and I think that is a humongous wake up call for at least half of our nation that they will not stop with us. They will not stop with women. And to that, I want to end our broadcast with saying, before this election, please go out and vote. You can fix any voter registration issues at the actual voting locations, and please do not let any of those things be a barrier. Make a plan to go out and vote. And I encourage you during this time to not let the doom and gloom of politics get to you too much, but to realize your power and your voice in during this time,

Unknown Speaker 27:47
I'll just close and say that we must all work together, because even though we may have different beliefs, we are not the enemy. We should be the ally. Thank you so much, and good night. You

Unknown Speaker 28:08
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, k2@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 28:38
look forward to it. You

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