S4E35: Silencing the Left: The Fight for Truth and Justice in Uncertain Times

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from the desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555.

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are Barren Wastelands. Think again.

0:00:34 - (Joe Geoffrey): It'S time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:45 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe and welcome to this episode of 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I am your host Chris Clarke, and it has been one hell of a week. I am necessarily having my attention drawn to things that are happening outside the desert. I imagine you are too. Some of you know that I have been a left-wing activist for a long time. Nixon was president when I started. I was a young teenager.

0:01:18 - (Chris Clarke): I was involved in sitting in administration buildings in protest, working on the defense campaigns for inmates who were charged with various crimes as a result of the Attica Prison Rebellion. It was all very new and exciting and I had no perspective back then. I thought that things are going to get either much, much better or much, much worse in a hurry. This was back in 1973 and 1974 and as I got more experience and just more life under my belt in the course of growing up, that sense of incredible urgency kind of dwindled.

0:01:56 - (Chris Clarke): Even through the Reagan administration when we saw hard won gains getting eroded all over the place still seems like paradise compared to now, but that sense of urgency dwindled. But now it is back. I'm also going to say I am not going to make a pro forma statement about deploring the assassination that happened recently because of course I oppose political violence in almost all forms. And I only say almost because I live a privileged life and I don't know what people are facing in other parts of the world or even other parts of this country.

0:02:32 - (Chris Clarke): There are probably circumstances in which I would decide people are justified in using some violence to defend themselves to defend their own lives. But we are not there in a mass political sense in the US we are not there. And if we needed proof that we are not there, the assassination of Charlie Kirk offers that proof that we are not there. Because regardless of what the shooter's motivations were, whether they were left wing as first charged with little evidence, or far right as later charged with only a little bit more evidence, or somewhere in the confused middle as now seems to be the case, it doesn't matter to the outcome.

0:03:18 - (Chris Clarke): If the shooter was coming from a political viewpoint somewhere on the left, he did not do the left or the rest of us any favors. He made things much worse for people with a left point of view. And that is the inevitable result when you have an entire communications media empire that has decided to become subservient to an authoritarian regime. In Washington D.C. the administration is quite clearly using this assassination as an excuse to carry out some of the more extreme components of their agenda.

0:03:53 - (Chris Clarke): Now, the firing of Stephen Colbert happened before the assassination. Right now, pretty much everybody I pay attention to on social media or on the left in other places is bemoaning the firing of Jimmy Kimmel after Kimmel said things that are demonstrably true. The most damaging thing that he said was that the right-wing movement is looking for ways to make political capital out of the assassination.

0:04:18 - (Chris Clarke): And that is absolutely correct. It's a really cynical move. Now it's people on the right that need to start professing their opposition to political violence. Because on the left, our record is pretty clear. We're not perfect. We have a track record on the left of the people occasionally taking matters into their own hands, committing acts of violence. And if you want an example, you need look no further than Luigi Mangione, who has become sort of a folk hero.

0:04:49 - (Chris Clarke): And I understand why, despite the fact that I would have tried really hard to talk Mangione out of doing what he did. The vast majority of political violence, however, especially if you don't define vandalism or property destruction as violence, is caused by far-right extremists. And the Justice Department has said as much. You probably heard about a report that got scrubbed from the Justice Department's website.

0:05:17 - (Chris Clarke): I just happen to have a copy here. You can go to 90 miles from needles.com extremism to download a copy. I think if more people download it, the better off we are. We can maybe get hundreds of people to email it to the Justice Department and say, hey, you lost this. At any rate, January 4, 2024, report done by the National Institute of Justice, or NIJ, which is part of the DOJ, says pretty much what I've been saying here. The report is entitled what NIJ Research Tells Us about Domestic Terrorism.

0:05:53 - (Chris Clarke): And in the very first paragraph of the report it says, since 1990, far right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than either far left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives in the same period the last 35 years, since 1990, far left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives. The report continues a recent threat assessment by the U.S. department of Homeland Security concluded that domestic violent extremists are an acute threat and highlighted a probability that COVID 19 pandemic related stressors, long standing ideological grievances related to immigration and narratives surrounding electoral fraud will continue to serve as a justification for violent actions.

0:06:44 - (Chris Clarke): End of quote. And in the days since the assassination, the vindictiveness and cruelty of people who support far right initiatives and organizations has been on proud display. These people want the current administration to double down on their dictatorial tendencies. They've engaged in over-the-top public statements about the proper way to mourn. Mr. Kirk, if you don't have a sort of lugubrious tear-filled Vaseline on the lens soft focus reaction to this assassination, you are considered evil and supporting of terrorism.

0:07:22 - (Chris Clarke): If you just mentioned some of the things that Charlie Kirk said over the course of his career in right wing politics, that is apparently beyond the pale. Many of the things he said, many of the positions that he held, many of the ideas that he advocated for were atrocious. Any one of us who either is or loves someone who is a person of color, a trans person or someone else in the LGBT community, a non-citizen or a woman will know that this person was spouting poison.

0:07:56 - (Chris Clarke): He was spouting verbal poison. But all of that is off limits for discussion. And here's what's got me worried. The recent firing of Jimmy Kimmel, which, or at least it appears to be a firing in response to Kimmel saying entirely correctly that the MAGA movement is trying to find every possible way to make political capital out of this assassination. Not only does Kimmel seem to have lost his job, but there are people in the media world like at Sinclair saying him losing his job isn't enough.

0:08:26 - (Chris Clarke): He needs to apologize to the Kirk family and make a substantial donation to Turning Point, which is Kirk's organization. The chatter has gotten really ugly. And while this is going on, we have parallel threads in which administration officials are talking about decertifying nonprofit organizations that are left of center, which of course concerns me a great deal here at the Desert Advocacy Media Network.

0:08:53 - (Chris Clarke): There is a bill in Congress right the second that if passed, would give the State Department the power to revoke American citizens passports based on their political viewpoints. We have been shown abundantly that the large corporations that own most broadcast stations, radio or tv, and the tech companies that provide streaming video and social media opportunities are not going to help us. They are going to do whatever they have to do to make sure this administration allows them to profit.

0:09:20 - (Chris Clarke): Public service is not part of the equation. And so not only do we have a situation in which getting a word out about what's happening in this country, whether you're talking environmental issues in the desert or environmental justice issues in northeastern cities, or social justice or trans and LGBTQ rights, the ability of women to control their own bodies, or any number of other issues that people left of center are invested in or that are important, we're going to have to rely on small initiatives, not all of them as small as 90 miles from Needles.

0:10:02 - (Chris Clarke): There are groups like Zeteo, started by the journalist Mehdi Hassan, which is doing top notch reporting efforts like the Border Chronicle, which I've repeatedly sung the praises of and will continue to people on Substack who are left of center or green of center, you might say, even those people on substack that have 20 subscribers the task of revealing what's going on in this country is necessarily falling to us because Paramount and Comcast and Disney and Apple and Netflix and Google and Meta don't have the slightest interest in informing us at this point.

0:10:42 - (Chris Clarke): Quite the contrary. They profit from sowing untruths and division and doubt. And at the same time, it's precisely the smaller groups that are doing this work that don't have to worry about shareholder value. We also don't have to be afraid of somebody's sarcastic jokes about the administration torpedoing a multi-billion-dollar merger. But at the same time, hardly any of us have money for attorneys to keep us out of CICOT in San Salvador.

0:11:13 - (Chris Clarke): I'm going to be honest, I'm frightened I'm not going to stop doing the work. But I am frightened about this. And part of why that is is because I just don't feel like this project has gotten as much traction as it really needs to get. I talk to listeners a lot about making donations, and those are absolutely crucial and we could use a lot more of them. And 90 miles from needles.com donate will get you to a place where you can provide us with a little bit of wherewithal to do this work.

0:11:51 - (Chris Clarke): But there are a lot of ways to spread the news about this podcast that don't involve you dipping into your rent money. For instance, we have hundreds and hundreds of listeners. It's not huge for a podcast, but it's also not small for a podcast. I think we're probably in the top 20% of all podcasts, and in the last six weeks we've had fewer than six people share our work on social media. Now, far be it for me to even seem like I'm discouraging people from making financial donations, because I'm not.

0:12:28 - (Chris Clarke): But if a person said, I can either give you five bucks a month or I can spend ten minutes a week posting every single episode that you put out to my three or four social media networks, I'd probably pick that second thing. One of the things that's informed my approach to doing this podcast is my experience working with nonprofit organizations in the environmental realm, some of which do a great job working with grassroots communities and others do not.

0:12:56 - (Chris Clarke): The strength of this organization, such as it is, is due to the breadth and diversity of our supporters. We don't just rely on a couple of granting organizations. There are hundreds of you that are ponying up somewhere between 5 and 20 bucks a month more. For some of you. In August, for the first time, we passed the threshold of having more than 2,500 downloads of episodes of the podcast, partly because we put out more episodes in August.

0:13:28 - (Chris Clarke): But we have been climbing up towards 2,000 downloads each month. In the last 30 days, we've had a little bit more than 900 unique listeners, which is awesome. It is gratifying. And if each of those unique listeners, each of you listening to this right now, posted episodes on social media or talk up podcasts to like-minded people, we could be expanding our reach significantly. And we need to expand our reach if we're going to face this moment in American history.

0:14:04 - (Chris Clarke): People have been getting their news from late night comedians, which is odd in itself, but that source of news is being taken away as we watch. We need to fill that void and we need your help to do it. We are up against really powerful and intimidating forces. These forces want to silence us or bury us in noise and lies. Now, I'm just one person, and even with financial help, I cannot meet that challenge alone. But together, if you share not just episodes of this podcast, but anything else that fights back, if you speak up, if you push our work into new circles that haven't heard of us yet, that puts us in a stronger position to face the next couple of years, as chaotic and brutal as they may be.

0:14:57 - (Joe Geoffrey): Don't go away. We'll be right back.

0:15:01 - (Chris Clarke): Thank goodness for Fred Bell. His recording of natural sounds in the desert has been a huge boost to this podcast. And I think especially in this episode where we have a bunch of concentrated bad news, we definitely need a little bit of a palate cleanser. For those of you who are unable to get out into the desert in the next couple of days and just listen, here's a taste of some finches splashing in a guzzler at the Desert National Wildlife Refuge outside of Las Vegas.

0:15:31 - (Chris Clarke): Let's listen.

0:16:48 - (Joe Geoffrey): You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. Leave the Snakes Alone.

0:16:56 - (Chris Clarke): And that's it for this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover artist, and Martine Mancia, who put together our podcast artwork, as well as Fred Bell, who graced us with those wonderful finches making a big noise at the Desert National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada. Our theme song, Modi Western, is by Brightside Studio. Now, we have no new donors to thank in this episode, but I'm hoping that'll change. And if you want to help me change it, you can go to 90miles from needles.com

0:17:27 - (Chris Clarke): donate and pick an amount of money and a frequency either one time or monthly or annually and we will be most appreciative I am sorry to report that we are not going to have an event this coming week in Tucson. We just couldn't get one together. We had a couple of false starts and they didn't pan out. So we're just going to have to try harder and earlier next time. There's a lot of good places to have events in Tucson and we were just behind the curve.

0:17:56 - (Chris Clarke): If you are in Tucson on Wednesday and Thursday of this coming week and we've talked before, reach out. Maybe we can have lunch because I suddenly have a full day of free time in Tucson. If you're closer to El Paso, I look forward to shaking your hand at the El Paso zoo on Saturday, September 27 for the Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta, the 21st annual such it's a long running tradition in El Paso. There's going to be a whole lot of other wonderful groups in addition to us.

0:18:23 - (Chris Clarke): Check out our show notes for details. And next Friday, in case you are not hanging out with me in Tucson or getting ready to go to the El Paso Zoo for Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta. Our next episode that will drop on Friday includes an interview with a returning guest, one of my oldest friends, Mike Ketterer, a chemist and physicist professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University. They still let him haunt the campus and he'll be talking about some solid evidence he's collected that fallout from nuclear testing didn't just go east, but actually settled in relatively significant amounts in Inyo and Mono counties in the state of California east of the Sierra Nevada.

0:19:04 - (Chris Clarke): That's an upsetting prospect and definitely more needs to be done to look into this. But Mike's an engaging interview and I think you will be fascinated with what he has to say. I'll be editing that episode up until I leave for Tucson in El Paso, and it'll drop a week from today on the 26th. In the meantime, back to the topic at hand for this episode. We in the desert are a diverse kind of group. We have liberals and conservatives.

0:19:35 - (Chris Clarke): We have veterans. We have trans people, people of color, disabled people. We have women in the desert. We have migrants in the desert. We have people that have roots going generations and generations back. We are all desert people, and we need to stand up for each other. And if you're living in the desert and your way of life is under threat, we can work together, regardless of our politics, although we may have some interesting conversations along the way.

0:20:05 - (Chris Clarke): So until next week, please take care of yourselves and take care of those around you. And together we can all take care of the desert. Bye now.

0:20:17 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.