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Political Renaissance

Published Oct 24, 2024, 7:01 AM

We are living through an extremely fractious political moment. Dr. Jonathan Metzl joins to discuss what's at stake in this election and how voters are responding to this urgency.

Good morning, Peeves, and welcome to ok F Daily with me your girl, Danielle Moody recording from the Home Bunker, Folks. In today's conversation with our dear friend, doctor Jonathan Metzel, we talk about where we think the energy is right now with less than two weeks to go until the election, and Jonathan gives his own anecdotes on his experience thus far trying to vote in Tennessee, and we talk about a bit of good news that early voting in battleground states. Tennessee is not a battleground, but early voting in battleground states are breaking records, and usually that bodes as a really good sign for Democrats. After Jonathan and I record, I went back and was looking at headlines that would surface later in the day, and it said Republicans are voting in historic numbers and Republicans are early voting, and it's you know, breaking records and all of these things. And so I realize we don't know who to believe and what to believe anymore. And that's kind of the point of MAGA and the point of Donald Trump over the last nine years of terrorism in this country is that we can no longer rely on polls, we can no longer rely on the news, we can no longer rely on institution. We don't know which way is up and which way is down, and nothing that used to make sense makes sense anymore. And a part of me feels like we are living inside of black mirror, living inside of Orwell's nineteen eighty four, that it's already here, and I don't know, oh, to be honest, how we backpedal out of this. Obviously, I think that the election of Kamala Harris would be a really major step in the right direction, But I'm on the fence of if that happens or not. Folks like, no one knows. None of us know, and we won't know, probably for a couple of days following the election. And that's what's so disheartening, I think, is that how could you have all of this information about Donald Trump and still think to yourself that he should lead this country is obscene and absurd. But on the other hand, like I just said, so many of us, millions of us, feel absolutely disoriented and detached from what we've known to be normal and true, and that has been done on purpose, so that you can believe that a figure like Donald Trump, maybe he isn't as bad as people think he is. Fucking Ezra Cline who wrote that bullshit and the New York Times, And so I understand where people are in this moment, and all I can encourage you to do is find whatever grounds you, whether that be you know, meditation, walking your pet, gardening, you know, doing whatever grounds you and just allows you to feel and see and taste and smell like reality. Double down on that, because I feel that over the next couple of months we are going to be kind of just embedded deeply inside of this tornado of misinformation of disinformation, and you're not alone in your disorientation of where things are. So ground yourself. Really engage in community, in your own community, and stay sane, my friends, because we are in this for the long haul. Coming up next, my conversation with our friend, our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel. Folks, you know that whenever we have the opportunity to speak with our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel, we are always always thrilled and grateful. Jonathan, you are back in Tennessee, and Tennessee, I sent you a video. I will tell folks that I sent Jonathan a video because I am vacillating, Jonathan as time gets closer to the final day to vote, between feeling good and feeling really anxious, feeling excited and feeling really depressed. And then I watched this video of this white woman in Davidson, I think Davidson County in Tennessee, where you are, and she had just finished early voting. She'd gotten into her car and she'd burst into tears because in her twenty years of living in Tennessee and voting, is never experienced the type of lines and packed parking lot and she was just beside herself. I wanted to get your reactions to the video and then your own reactions to having voted already in Tennessee and just give us like a bit of the experience that you have.

Well, it's funny, I actually haven't voted yet, because.

Oh you haven't voted yet. Okay.

I went and the line was like around the block nine times, So actually had to get back to my day job. Like that woman in the video. Early voting is usually like ten minutes, and I got there and I'm just like, oh my god, So I'm going to go back again today. So it's interesting, right, we're in a really we're in such an information vacuum right now, Like it's so unprecedented. All the modeling we have doesn't account for anything that's happening now, Like are people being honest with the polls or are they hiding from the polls? What will be the effect of Kamala Harris engaging Liz Cheney And how are people going to respond to that? Well this push Elon Musk is saying he will reproduce with your wife if you vote, or something like that, and so it's just like all these weird things and all of it is so it's all so unprecedented, and so I understand that everybody's then focusing on their own their own world. Right in Tennessee, I've never seen more people vote than or talk about it or engaged. I've been having a lot of the candidates come to my class and they're saying the same thing. So I guess the question is what I liked about that video? As the woman said, we've been jerrymandered out of existence. That's what I feel like. People really felt like their vote didn't matter, and now people feel like their vote matters, and so it's kind of like trying to fight back against jerrymandering.

Well, wait, hold on, because I don't want you. I actually, I'm actually I'm going to shrink you for a moment because I actually don't want you to dive into posing a question. I want to ask you, like, in all seriousness, how does it feel? How has it felt? And how have the candidates that have visited your classes and they're all remarking in the same way that they've never seen lines in this manner that they've never seen people or heard people in conversation about voting. How does that actually feel? Regardless of where we think that these people are voting or who they're voting for, what does the actual experience feel like?

I'd sell you what it has felt like for the past decade here. Is that member in the cartoons when somebody would get run over by the steamroller and then they're just like a flattened pancake on the road. That's what it's felt like to be a Democrat here for the past ten years. It's just there's something about germandering, the kind of gearmandering that we see in Tennessee. It does two things. First, it makes it you feel like your vote doesn't matter, because everything is so incredibly predetermined that you know you're voting out of a civic duty, but your vote doesn't count in a way. And that's just not not just for presidential elections, I mean, that's for everything. But the other thing about jerymandering is that it pushes the party in power. There's no checks and balances on the party in power, so it pushes them into what we see now, which is just pornographically obscene right wing extremist and this is probably be true whoever is in power, but it's like when there's no natural competitor, the rush is to go more extreme. And so in Tennessee we've had these terrible mess shootings, and then the party in power lets eighteen year olds walk down main Street with AR fifteen's without any training or regulation or anything like that. So I guess in a way, what we're seeing is this a moment of the natural limits of germandering, which is that the extreme nature then pushes back toward the center, which is what's nice about it's happening here in Tennessee. But I also want to just be clear, we've had the renaissance of a whole new kind of political engagement here in Tennessee, which I never thought i'd see was Covenant Moms after the Covenant School shooting here, who were Centrists or Republicans who were just sick of the stance on guns. But that's kind of broadened out to voting rights. Obviously, abortion is a huge, huge, huge issue here, and so I'm curious to see. I mean, you hear me being a little hesitant, and it's just because I've gotten my hopes up before, but this, somehow, this feels different. There is something, there's something happening here that I would pay attention to. Trump's going to win the presidential race. But everything else is just you know, we have got Gloria Johnson here, We've got the just Times. We're doing a huge event here about guns in next week. There's real activity here that is part about people being sick of the extreme nature of some of this. Part of it is that we've had a lot of people move here from other parts of the country who are not as extreme. So I would keep your eye on Tennessee right now.

I mean, this is one of the reasons why I'm asking one. I think that your kind of description of gerrymandering is exactly the point. It is to squeeze out any hopefulness and any belief that you have any power, right, And that's like what has happened in Tennessee, what's happened in Texas is a microcosm of what Republicans want to do nationally. Your vote doesn't count. You squeeze out the hopefulness, and then people feel just depressed. The voting becomes depressed, and they're able to literally get away with murder. And so I think that what is happening, what we're seeing in Tennessee, what we saw with the early voting as the day started in North Carolina, in Georgia last week, you're seeing these historic numbers that are superseding twenty twenty by doubling the numbers from twenty twenty. And look, people's hopes get up and they get down. That's just the nature of being human. But I think that denying ourselves in this moment an opportunity to feel hopeful and allow that hopeful energy to spurn us forward. Like I feel like that also is really necessary and important, right, Like I don't want people to be like, well, I've had my hopes let down before. Yeah, you're human, it's going to happen. But I think that it's really encouraging to look at and for you, you know, from your first hand experience, to be like, yeah, early voting here usually in and out because nobody's doing it, and now you're having to go back a second day to vote. I think that that means something. What do you think I mean, Jonathan, you mentioned that abortion is very big there, but we know because of the Covenant shooting and because of what the legislature did by trying to quiet these mothers, trying to quiet any type of action, trying to censure and kick out the two Justins from the state House who were duly elected and then forced to do a special election and then censured again. I think that the egregious action that has been taken against the Tennessee three, and particularly the two young black men, the Justins, how do you think that that is playing out in this early voting that you're seeing, Like, how do you think that the civic engagement? Do you think it is at all connected with what folks have experienced by watching what Republicans have tried to do with this group.

It's not just the bad treatment they got, it's actually what they tapped into and mobilized. I mean, there was a grounds well, there's a strong progressive streak here. There are many many young people who have felt left out, and I think what they were tapping into before they were censured, before all that stuff, was they mobilized in a way that we thought was not possible. There was just such a feeling of helplessness here, honestly, that these shootings were going to keep happening, that this stuff was going to keep happening, and so they kind of modeled a kind of fighting back in a way that I think was very timely and very empowering. And part of the story with Tennessee in a lot of other places is there's also a profound old guard. I mean, I just drove to work here and I just rushed in to speak for our conversation because I was in traffic for an hour. But I could have ridden my bike. It would have taken me twenty minutes. We have a transit bill on the docket here, but there's tremendous resistance from kind of people who are like, I don't want my tax dollars doing that. There are a zillion Trump signs here and a zillion Harris signs here, and so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. But it does feel like something has been tapped into here that is hopefully something that's going to spread and go national.

I mean, I hope that it does as well. And you know, I get the tempered like emotions that folks are having right now with two weeks to go, I know that I am vacillating with a lot of emotion. Like I said at the top, I think that it's all like hitting me that like either this is the beginning of something of a new era of democracy or it's the end of democracy, like there is no in between. And I think that the stakes and now that the time has arrived where people are already voting, that it's starting to like hit me that in a couple of weeks this country could be profoundly changed.

No, And in a way that's why, I mean, we're all so I've been doing four different stops on my lecture tour a week in addition to my day job and working with campaigns and stuff like that, and so it does feel like these are, on one hand, the two most important weeks. You know, these are the two most important weeks. So you can't. You can't let down now, but it does feel like everything's at stake, and you know, just watching I'll be in Pennsylvania tomorrow. I'm going tonight to Pennsylvania, and so I'm really curious to see what the mood of all of this is. It's just I don't know. There's again so many variables and if you could ever design in a system to keep people engaged, like def gone one, this is kind of where we're at.

Yeah, I think that this is right, and I think that it's fair to say that these two weeks are the most important because it is when I mean, I'll be voting in New York on Friday, when early voting starts. It will be actually the first time that I'm early voting. I usually have been very old school about the process and have stayed, you know, to election day. But I am not going to be able to do that because I will be working and I don't want to let me.

Ask you because in a way, what's also interesting about this election, there is some kind of like it's like the revenge of the forgotten Gerrymander voter or something like that. So you do kind of see a flip side in New York of what's happening in Tennessee. Obviously not exactly, but in New York, a lot of Republicans felt like their vote was didn't matter because it was such a blue state. But it feels like in New York, and this is a question, they've found their hook, which is immigration and crime to get people who felt like their vote didn't matter. We're kind of right wing people from Staten Island or Long Island or something like that, and so control of the Congress could go through New York, and so New York in a way, you're seeing the almost a mirror image of what's happening here in Tennessee, but the opposite where people there's an issue that has gotten people to kind of fight or take it back or something like that. In a way, we're seeing like the reverberations maybe of germandering or I don't even know how to put it, but it does seem interesting that there are these two processes playing out.

I mean, the fact is, and it doesn't matter because facts don't matter in this time and age, is that New York has had the lowest crime rate that it has had in decades. So for people it is the fear mongering, which is how we ended up with a crooked ass mayor in Mayor Adams, former cop who is a grifter and a cheat and a liar to come into power by saying that crime crime, crime in New York is skyrocketed, and none of that has been true, None of it is true. And by giving police more power here, which is what he's done, and increased their budgets which were already ballooned to disgusting places, there have been more shootings by police in New York City. So I feel like, while sure, where I am from out eastdal Long Island is definitely very red, but I remind people constantly that that was not the experience for more than half of my life. Is that where I grew up had always been a democratic stronghold for like middle class, lower middle class, working class people, the teachers, the firefighters, the police officers, the you know, the small business owners. Like that is the area that I grew up in, and it has become republican. So to me, it's like anything that was democratic that's become republican can make a return again with the right kind of candidate, the right voice, and the right infrastructure.

But also like you know, we're seeing a moment now where the whole game of politics is finding people who will tribalize on your behalf and who will vote unflinchingly for filling the blank as a wedge issue, the issue itself almost as secondary because nobody's really I mean, actually, what I like about THEIRS campaign is like they're actually going to fix the problems if they win, or address them. But for the most part of the game of politics is getting people to vote for your thing as a wedge issue. I mean, I see it with guns, like nobody's taken anybody's gun, but this fear that people will vote because Libs are going to come take their guns. It just mobilizes base and it puts you in a tribe. And we've seen that I think in New York. I mean, I just I'll be really interesting to see what happens in New York with these myths and all these kind of things. But there's a lot of stake in your state.

Also, there's going to be a lot at I think that if there's anything that we can learn from the last nine years of politics is that there isn't good We're never going to go back to a time when elections we can say that elections don't matter, that like we can just kind of rest on our laurels and the machine is going to run itself. I think that people are finally really conscious and waking up to the fact that, like, I need to have a voice and participate in my elections state, local, and federal, because if I don't, if I look away, then I have book bannings that are happening at the school level. I have cities that are allowing, like you said, eighteen year olds to walk around with ar fifteens. I have all of these things that I have judges that are being put in place that are magified, right, Like, I think that people are recognizing, oh, we can't just kind of vote every four years and hope for the best.

And also, let me add, I mean, how many people do you know in New York that get their healthcare from the Affordable Care Act?

It's a lot myself.

Yeah, And so if Trump wins, they're going to destroy the Affordable Care Act. They have messaging people, but I mean, if I was in New York, I'd be out there in Staten Island telling people they are going to lose their healthcare. I mean, there are things that will happen that it's not like red state blue state separation, Like you know, most Blue states depend on the Affordable Care Act. If Trump sinks that, it will be a massive guided missile directed at the heart of blue states. And so this is what drives me crazy about even with respect all this, like people in Michigan are going to lose their healthcare. People are going to lose their healthcare. So I don't know, it's I don't know, Let's get through the next two weeks and then we'll go on a beach somewhere sip a cocktail or something.

Probably not because I feel and I'll you know, i'll give you the last word. But my it's like, let's get through the next two weeks. But then depending on what happens in the next two and a half weeks, the time between then and inauguration, I'm very concerned about.

You know, I think I told you before, like I think of the guy in the third year of the One Hundred Years War who said, I can't believe this thing is lasted three years already. You know, we're in the beginning of something. We don't know how long. It's.

Yeah, it's true.

All right, here's my last question for you. Okay, what are you going to be for Halloween?

Unfortunately I was going to be dressing up with my god daughter, but now I am summoned to DC for.

Work, so oh okay.

I will not be there. So yeah, what are you going to be?

Anybody can steal this out in our listening audience. I'm going to be slutty Moodang now I'm just kidding. I don't know. I haven't thought about it yet.

Oh God. All right, Well, when we come back next week, you can tell us what the decision is. Okay, thank you, my friends, and good luck on your continued lecture tour and series. Talk to those people in those red states. Let them know what they're gonna lose.

Yeah, we appreciate you hanging everybody.

That is it for me today, dear friends on Woke A app as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.

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