Social Justice - A Conversation

Wesley Knight 0:00
This is a Kun V studios original program. 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.

Charles Stanton 0:15
Good evening. My name is Charles Stanton. I'm on the faculty of the Boyd School of Law and the UNLV Honors College.

Kira Kramer 0:22
My name is Kira Kramer. I'm a fourth year honors college student, a public health major and a pre law student.

Charles Stanton 0:28
And this is social justice a conversation, a conversation. Well,

good evening, everybody, and welcome back. Charles Stanton here with my cohort, Kira Kramer, we want to welcome you back to the last few shows of this of this semester. And we hope that the shows have been enlightening and informative, and we hope this these this show and the show to follow will will keep in that vein. Just wanted to open up with a couple of things which are, which are kind of interesting, you know, having to do basically with the situation with the immigrant removal and the deportation of a lot of these folks. It's very, very interesting. I was thinking as I was, you know, watching all of this transpire, and how Senator Holland, Ben Holland, had gone down to El Salvador to talk with this man who had been, who had been removed out of the country, not not so much with a lack of due process, but with a lack of any process at all. He was just basically thrown in a plane and they and they took him down there. And I'm amazed. I'm amazed, and I don't know how he feels about this, but I'm amazed at how really little attention this has gotten vis a vis the Congress. I mean, there's a few people have spoken out about, you know, the usual people that would speak out about, of course, Alexandria, Ocasio Cortez, Senator Van Hollen, you know, Senator Bernie Sanders and stuff like that, but the vast majority of people are just like indifferent about it. And it's really interesting to me that people don't seem to realize that the rights that have been taken away from this person today can be the rights that can be taken away from you tomorrow. And people don't seem to people don't seem to get that. And I don't, I don't really understand, I don't really understand why they think that it's going to stop with this one person, and why they why they don't think basically that it could go beyond just people who are here illegally, but people who basically have views that are unpopular, right?

Kira Kramer 3:05
I think what people don't understand. They don't understand why we protect immigrants or non citizens, and that's because when the government decides that non citizens don't have rights. The government also decides who are citizens. And if they decide who are citizens, then they also decide who gets to have rights. And so that is why, in our Constitution, it is so enshrined that people have rights, and some in other news, 500 political scientists that were surveyed recently are advocating that we are currently shifting towards a form of authoritarianism, more specifically competitive authoritarianism, which is this idea where essentially a leader can come into power through democracy, through elections, and they're able to then appoint and fill civil service and key appointments with loyalists, which then attack the media, universities, non governmental organizations to blunt public criticism and tilt the electoral playing field in the ruling party's favor. And this is not the authoritarianism that is like generally associated with countries like China, but more so associated with countries like Hungary and Turkey. And ultimately, this is pretty alarming, considering how most but not all, but most political scientists agree on this point. Yeah.

Charles Stanton 4:50
Well, sure, Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Because if you think about it, so many of the countries that he takes up as much. Models are all countries that used to be democracies, but now have turned over into authoritarian regimes. Turkey, certainly, Hungary, certainly, you know, in Venezuela also, and what's interesting in some of these countries, where, in countries like Turkey, where the people who are running for office are arrested in Hungary, where basically, you know, the vote is constricted. In Venezuela, basically, where you had an enormous popular plurality for the opposition candidate. He got millions and millions of more votes than Maduro got. And yet, still, you know, the United States is treating this guy as the legitimate leader of the country. Is really, is really mind boggling, because factually, it's totally untrue. But all of his models are authoritarian. All of his models are people who basically believe in one person rule. And you would think in our country that would there be much more of an opposition to this? I mean, I've been saying this for a long time that it just strikes me as really bizarre. How, how few people you know are really raising their voice, not not just, not just the easy target of the Republican Party, but, but the Democratic Party as well. Chuck Schumer, Hakeem, Jeffries, I mean, that is not leadership. That is not leadership. I mean, their their activity has been very, very small, and it's almost like they're afraid of antagonizing this guy instead of, instead of meeting him head on, which is what they what they should have been doing a long time ago. And we're seeing really now, finally, that academia is waking up after being in a slumber for a long time, and not just at Harvard, but other places, as well as to basically his attempt to to constrict the ability to teach and inform the students. And I think that's that's part of a plan that that's gone on for a long time. The attack on dei is really, at its core, an attack on history, the history of our country, the denial of rights, the racism that went on, the misogyny that went on, all these things and they don't want they don't want people. They don't want people to be aware of, actually, what our history is and why and why there was a need for these programs. And they're essentially connected. Because if you if you lie about the history, if you distort the history, if you create a new history and make it like that, everything that happened was okay and everybody was treated fairly and equally, then it would be reasonable to say, well, you don't need dei programs, because the history of the country was not what it really was, which was completely the opposite. These programs that came that were created and came about did not come about because things were, everything was hunky dory and people were being treated, right? They came about because people were being mistreated and people were people were basically forced into, like, very subservient positions, particularly, you know, having to do with getting into universities, applying for jobs. I mean, even even even even today, in a sport like, say, the sport of football, where they had something called the Rooney Rule, which was a rule, basically, with that people of color have to be afforded an interview as part of the interview process for coaching or general manager jobs, the amount of black coaches vis a vis the amount of black athletes, is a mind boggling disparity. I mean, there are very few relatively speaking black coaches, and yet, I would say between 60 to 70% of the players are African American or Latin or whatever you would say. And they have these, they have this interview process. But the interview process, in many ways, is a sham, because they'll find one or two people, and they know they're not going to get the job, but they go through this charade of interviewing them. I was very interesting one night. I was listening to this guy who he does a lot of the Raiders. He's the beat. Person for the raiders and also Sports Illustrated magazine. And I was surprised in really what he said. He pretty much said it was a sham. He pretty much said that like, if he were doing the interview process as he knows it now, he would basically tell the the applicants that they had no chance of getting the job. So if the person has no chance of getting the job, why would they call them on to be interviewed, except to satisfy some rule that they put in, knowing, of course, that it was totally bogus and it wasn't going to lead to anybody really getting the job. And then the other part of it is, which I've also noticed, is that a black coach, particularly in football, has a very short shelf life, where if a black coach gets a job, and let's say, let's say they're fired from the job, very rarely do they get another job. But a lot of the a lot of the coaches who are white or recycled, I mean, you have the guy who, you have the guy who he coached for the Patriots for a while. He got a job with the Denver Broncos, and it was, it was, it was disastrous. And then somehow the Raiders hired him. Don't ask me how, and he was disastrous with the Raiders. But I think if he was a black coach, man, he wouldn't even gotten that second shot with the Raiders. Man, he would just have been out of, out of the loop completely, and that's how it works. And you know, as I say, it's all, it's all, it's all tied together. But the other thing that's part of it too we talk about dei is the inclusion part. And the inclusion part is basically that people work together, you create a community, and all the rest of that stuff. They don't want inclusion. They want people to be at each other's throats. Their power, economic and otherwise, is based on a divided country that they can always throw out. Well, these people are taking your jobs and all the rest of this stuff, when it's actually that the economy is basically been run by them for decades and decades, and Dave used that to amass all this wealth, instead of the people being unified who are being ripped off. Basically,

Kira Kramer 12:13
no, I completely see that it's the whole point of I wrote an article for the undergraduate Law Review at UNLV that discussed the affirmative action case, the Supreme Court case, and the reason that a school like UNLV, which touts to be the most diverse and then one of the most diverse universities in the nation, doesn't have affirmative action is because already the population that we are pulling from here in Nevada and in Las Vegas is extremely diverse, and our diversity doesn't come about from affirmative action, but rather from the diversity of our population. However, at a school like Harvard, where the in state is not the in state population is not diverse, and while the school is extremely competitive, affirmative action exists to essentially allow for diversity, because in Las Vegas, we are able to naturally have a diverse population based on our own state population. But that can't be said for all universities and locations across the country, and so that means for there to be equal opportunity, affirmative action is simply a tool that is used to facilitate that equal opportunity. Where here that facilitation, it just wouldn't be necessary. It's just not something that would improve our diversity numbers. And so, just because, inherently, we are more diverse, and so in terms of in the job market, it just to me, it signals a very scary reality that we've fought very long and very hard for people of color, for women to get into the workforce and to see or to hear that that simply that they're pulling candidates on for interview to meet diversity quotas, but that that absolutely means nothing in terms of who will secure the job in the end, is just very de legitimizing Many of our like many people, pay millions of dollars in student loans to become educated. Many women are graduating college at rates much higher than men. And so if people are, if some people are taking the time to become subject matter experts in their fields and actually contribute positively, whereas others are not, is, how is that going to be affecting our economy and our job market in years to come, when people who are clearly qualified for their work, as we can see, like a microcosm of this playing out on the federal level currently, based on who was appointed to significant positions of power with a lack of um. The required education and skills to properly manage that position. We're seeing it now, and we're also seeing the consequences of doing that on a federal scale. But when that's done on a national scale, across all the workforce in the country, it's pretty alarming. Yeah, yeah. Well, sure, but furthermore, I don't think that you can genuinely keep up the economy and the GDP and the growth that America and that our politicians specifically want to see, if you're not allowing people who are educated to promote that prosperity. Yeah,

Charles Stanton 15:38
yeah. Well, again, you know, what's so so sad about it is that we have been blessed in this country by diversity in many ways. And one of the ways that we have been blessed, as you just said, was the brain power source that we have in our country that no other country has, and that brain power source the diversity that we have because we have stood for certain principles that has that has become a magnet for people to come in here, who Are people of many varied talents. And it cannot be an accident that in so many different fields of endeavor, whether it be a scientific or business like or having to do with various, you know, industries like the automotive industry and all the rest of that that we've made, all these innovations, we've been able to find cures for diseases. I mean, when you look back, when you look back at the catastrophe of COVID and the fact that we were able to create vaccines in a relatively in a relatively short time, remarkably short, remarkably short, was was absolutely connected to the fact that we were able to call on all these different people who had been scientists in their own country, who had become academics in our medical schools and universities and graduate schools, and we were able to pull all those people together to create, to create the vaccines that we did. And what's so sad about it is that all those great things are the expression of a country that is trying to live up to certain ideals. And the response of just basically saying, Well, the answer to diversity is to lie about our history, or the answer to diversity is to remove people in the middle of the night and not give them their rights. Is more? Is more than just is more than just removing a person out of here, its significance is a repudiation of what the country is supposed to stand for, that we are a country of immigrants, of immigrants. We're a country of the rule of law. It reminds me. It reminds me of the movie that I consider one of the all time, great social justice movies, all time, great movies, period. It's bad day of black rock where the man comes into this town and he's he's trying to find the father of this man who he served in the military with, and he wants to give the Father the Medal of Honor that his son, this man's son, won posthumously during the war. And he goes in there, and the place is a hotbed of racism, basically, and he's met with at every turn with abuse and all the rest of these things. And he said, you know, he wants, at one point of the movie, he wants to rent the jeep. And this woman, of course, doesn't want to help him out, because he's trying to find out what actually happened to the father of this man. And he says to the woman, woman says, Why are you doing all that you're doing? And he says to the woman. He says, Well, he says, Because. He says, because I think there's something wrong, really wrong went on in this town, he says. He says, There's not too many towns like this. He says, but 1211, town like this is too many and and I feel here that the rule of law has broken down and that the gorillas have taken over, and that was made in 1954 but it really resonates today when you see the people in our government not merely, not merely deporting people and removing people, but their, their true, genuine enthusiasts. Enthusiastic contempt of law, contempt of our Constitution, contempt of the judicial decisions that have been made, even by the highest court. They feel totally unbounded to basically do whatever they want to do, and they have no respect for the law. So if they have no respect for the law, then how do we convey to the populace that the law should be respected at all?

Kira Kramer 20:24
That's the real question. I don't, I genuinely don't have an answer. I think it's the million dollar question. I think the law can only be respected when it's taken away. And when people realize the privileges they were afforded because of the Law no longer exist, and they lose their rights, yeah, yeah. And it, they won't respect it until it touches them, it's gone.

Charles Stanton 20:54
Yeah? Well, sure. I mean, when you look at, when you look at, and we've discussed this together, you know, on and off the air. It was always my thought that the cliche in the whole thing was that you had the Congress and you had this, you had the Supreme Court, and that the Supreme Court, even though it gave, you know, the immunity thing on the basic principles of the law, they would uphold those principles, and pretty much by and large, with the the removal of immigrants and stuff like that, they pretty much have. But the problem is not that they haven't done that. The problem is, what is the enforcement mechanism? How do you, how do you ensure that when the Supreme Court makes a decision like that, and in the case of the in the recent case, it was seven to two. So you got, you got Justice Roberts, you got justice Gorsuch. And then you got, you got all these judges who were appointed by the president himself, and they all refer you know that the law has to be upheld and everything. How? How is the law upheld? I

Kira Kramer 22:11
guess we look to the executive for enforcement. I feel like as long as he doesn't have the military on his side, then that's a saving grace, because the enforcement is millet is probably military.

Charles Stanton 22:22
Well, see the thing, the thing that I that I've said before, and this is the thing that I fear people are observant of what's going on. It is not an accident. That over the last months, the protests have grown considerably each succeeding week. And my concern is, my concern is that you have a bunch of people. I don't know what the percentage is like. Let's say 47 48% voted against him. Let's just say that. And then you have what it was, 50% or 51% voted for him. What's going to happen when a lot of those people have voted for him get the idea that he betrayed them? They get that idea, and they start to coalesce with the people who voted against him. Now, ordinarily, ordinarily, they would be able to depend on the law and the courts to protect them. In the case of Medicaid, you know, payments in the case of veterans rights and all the rest of these things. But if they make all these decisions, and the people see that basically, the courts have no power and the Congress is indifferent. What happens then you

Kira Kramer 23:42
have to rely on the Congress's indifference. You have to like, and with the midterms coming up, who knows if we will still happen in different Congress. And so it really just depends on like. I think Wisconsin is a positive foreshadowing that money will not always win or buy an election, and so if, like you said, the people who voted for him but now have had their great awakening, and the people that didn't vote to him didn't vote for him, band together to blow the midterms away, then I think we might see some improved enforcement of the Supreme Court decisions and of Congress stepping in more effectively and more efficiently. But if we don't see that, then I think your question doesn't have a good answer.

Charles Stanton 24:34
Well, my can, my concern with it basically, is that it's taken out of it's taken away from the law. In other words, the people get the idea, basically, we're in, you know, April of 2025 they see their benefits going down the drain. They see their 401, k is going down the drain. They see that the people who were in the Republican Party. Already won't have town halls. They see that the courts are being ignored. What's, what's going to be the response there? Well, it could be civil war, yeah? Well, yeah,

Kira Kramer 25:09
it could be, you know, we follow in in the footsteps of the French,

Charles Stanton 25:14
yeah? Well, yeah. I mean, I think that's, I think that's really, I think that's really plausible. We do

Kira Kramer 25:19
see gun ownership currently skyrocketing across the nation. So that's, that's something, well,

Charles Stanton 25:24
that's, I don't know if I mentioned this on the broadcast. I know somebody who has one of these businesses. They sold out their entire stock. They sold out 1700 everything was sold. And I'm saying to myself, Wow, that's kind of, that's kind of,

Kira Kramer 25:39
what a good time to be in that business.

Charles Stanton 25:43
But and, and a very, very diverse group of buyers, to a very diverse group of buyers, not just very interesting, not just one segment, but a whole, you know, panoply of people. And I think it's really a cause for concern. I've said this before, and I'll say it again. I think there needs to be a movement in the Congress between moderates of both parties, which would be a consensus if you could get the moderates of both parties as to what's going to be going down the road, because I don't see this as sustainable, not with the tariffs, not with all these different things. And the other thing is the economy, the economy has basically been tanking for weeks now, and then he wants to, he wants to remove the head of the Federal Reserve Board, but he doesn't have the power to do that. So basically he's trying to assume all these powers that he doesn't have, but the Congress. It's not just, it's not merely the courts that have to be active. It's the Congress itself. It's the it's the it's the people who run the Republican Party, particularly, particularly in the Senate, where they have to vote on these people. And I think it's been shown. I think it's been shown and proven already the disastrous effect of the Senate basically approving some of the nominees, particularly the Secretary of Defense, but not him alone, who is wholly unqualified, and they just would go with it. Yeah, put him in. Put him in. You know, no,

Kira Kramer 27:16
it's outrageous. We see as time goes on, we see that every single nomination nominee was is currently an affront to our democracy and to the good people of the United States. I agree at the same time. So as we wrap up this broadcast, I simply just want to encourage you all to remain engaged and active to participate in protests or economic blackouts. I know it's especially economically. It might be even easier now to not participate, because things are going to be getting really expensive, but as this time goes on, I think it's really important that we look to the midterms for mobilization. I think that's really going to be the most important next step. Yeah,

Charles Stanton 28:03
yeah. I agree. I agree on all counts. And so with those wise words, we will say good night for now. And on behalf of myself and Kira, we look forward to visiting with you very

Kira Kramer 28:19
soon. Thank you.

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

Charles Stanton 28:59
we look forward to it.

SFX 29:00
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