Nicholas Kristof: Gratuitous Cruelty

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Speaker 3 Hello, and welcome to the Bowler Podcast. I'm I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We got a doubleheader today. Senator Alyssa Slotkin is in segment two.

Speaker 3 She had a big speech at the Center for American Progress yesterday about an economic plan forward for the Democratic Party. So stick around for that.

Speaker 3 But first, delighted welcome to New York Times columnist. His books include a memoir, Chasing Hope, published last year, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Speaker 3 He's also the, more importantly, the general manager at Christophe Farms, which produces hard cider, Pinot Noir. I'm not a Pinot Noir man myself.
Chardonnay and Rose in the Willamette Valley.

Speaker 3 It's Nick Christophe. What's up?

Speaker 7 Hey, well, I just can't believe you are starting off by admitting you're not a Pinot Noir fan. The best wine ever.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I know. That movie Sideways made it very popular.
And so I pretended to like it for a little while. And I just finally came around to admitting that I just don't.
It's not for me.

Speaker 7 You know, you've got to keep on with the fakery.

Speaker 7 One of our family tales that I kind of won my wife over at a party by bringing her a Pinot Noir when everybody else was inflicting Cabernet

Speaker 7 on her. Okay.

Speaker 3 Well, I have to check out your rosé, the Christophe Rosé. That's really

Speaker 3 it really is.

Speaker 7 And it's just so nice to have something to distract myself from all the mess in the world under Washington.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I bet. I bet.

Speaker 3 Well, I want to talk a little bit about your Oregon life at the end, but what prompted us to reach out, I so appreciate that you came on the pod was, I don't know, maybe about a month ago now, Marco Rubio was testifying that your reporting about the impact of USAID cuts was a lie.

Speaker 3 You wrote a response column where you say, I see Secretary Rubio as a good man doing bad things. I thought that was a little generous, but we'll get into that.

Speaker 3 And then you replied by telling him to meet Evan Anzu, who you met in Africa. So why don't you start by sharing Evan's story and then we'll talk more broadly about your reporting.

Speaker 7 Yeah, so I made a trip to South Sudan at the beginning of March to try to gauge the impact of USAID cuts. And at that point, Elon Musk had said that no one had died from those cuts.

Speaker 7 And, you know, within an hour of beginning my reporting in South Sudan, I had the names of a bunch of people who had died, including kids. And so Evan Anso was a little boy who was an AIDS orphan.

Speaker 7 His parents had died. And the only way he could access ARVs, antiretrovirals, was through a social worker who was paid by this program, PEPFAR, that George W.
Bush had started.

Speaker 7 And those intermediaries, those social workers, were cut out. And how is a little boy going to access ARVs? He doesn't.
And then he gets an opportunistic infection and dies.

Speaker 7 And, you know, that happened to him. It happened to

Speaker 7 a boy called Peter Dundee. It happened to a little girl called Ekol Ding.

Speaker 7 And it is happening to people all over the world.

Speaker 3 Talk to us about your reporting because I'm just extremely interested since you're on, you know, I'm sitting in my hole here in

Speaker 3 New Orleans shouting at the screen, but you're actually, you were there. You've done several trips.
So kind of talk about where you've gone and just at the broadest level.

Speaker 7 So my first trip in March was to South Sudan and to some degree to Kenya. Kenya was a little less affected.
South Sudan was

Speaker 7 brutally affected. And then just recently, I'm just back from a trip to West Africa, a follow-up trip where I was mostly in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Speaker 7 And again, you know, what you see everywhere is kids dying unnecessarily of really simple things, of malaria, of diarrhea, and indeed of HIV-related infections, of malnutrition.

Speaker 7 And you see women dying in childbirth. And, you know, that is because USAID truly was flawed in some ways, but it was also saving six lives a minute, as our best guess.

Speaker 7 And when you take that away, you get people dying. And

Speaker 7 I just wish that Marco Rubio, instead of denouncing my reporting, would come with me on a trip. And I'd be delighted to show him some of these kids who are starving.

Speaker 7 And I think I would like to think that would at least melt his heart.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 We'll get back to Rubio. I'm skeptical about that.

Speaker 3 It's a good instinct. I appreciate your instincts on that.
So I just helped me paint a picture. So you're going, I wouldn't even know where to start, right? You go to Sierra Leone and what, like the

Speaker 3 embassy? Are you

Speaker 3 working with NGOs? And what part of it, what are you looking at?

Speaker 7 You know, normally I might drop in on an an embassy to talk to officials there, but these days I kind of think I would get any ambassador in trouble, get him fired if I showed up in the embassy.

Speaker 7 So, you know, so basically what I was doing was dropping in on villages. And so I dropped in on

Speaker 7 one village and I asked if there had been any children who had died.

Speaker 3 Did you have a translator?

Speaker 7 Yeah, so I had a translator

Speaker 7 and we found a local health worker who had been kind of laid off in all this chaos, but he showed me around and I asked if anybody had died in that village recently.

Speaker 7 And they said, oh, you know, this little boy died. So we went and talked to the mom and it turned out that he had had malaria.

Speaker 7 Normally, the local health worker would have had the malaria treatment, the medicine, and also the hospital would have, as a backup, because of the collapse of USAID.

Speaker 7 Neither of them had this really cheap malaria medicine, and the baby died.

Speaker 7 And now, as it turned out, that mom had her second child was also sick with malaria, and the hospital and the health workers still didn't have anti-malarials.

Speaker 7 And you just, you know, you just see this mom with a sick child. And all these arguments that I hear about, oh, this isn't our responsibility, and we should look after our own kids.

Speaker 7 This is a mom with a sick child. She's already lost one child because of the sudden way in which USAID was created.
And

Speaker 7 she's at risk of losing another because of politics in Washington, because of decisions made in Washington by people who've never been to places like this village.

Speaker 3 Do folks there understand what's happening?

Speaker 3 That it's related to Washington?

Speaker 7 I regularly ask people, do you know who the President of the United States is? And in the villages, most people did not know. Some of them had heard of Trump if you mentioned it.

Speaker 7 They were sometimes aware of USAID and sometimes aware that USAID had, that there had been big problems with it. They were aware that medicine was less available.

Speaker 7 I visited one village, again, just kind of,

Speaker 7 I just went with some health workers off into the mountains.

Speaker 7 I heard of a woman who had died in childbirth. And so we went to the village.
We found her dad and her sister.

Speaker 7 And she had hemorrhaged in April, and there had been a hospital donated by USAID two years ago for that kind of eventuality.

Speaker 7 And so they called the ambulance, and the ambulance crew said, well, the funding has been cut for fuel for our ambulance.

Speaker 7 And so if you bring us fuel, we can, you know, we can go rescue this woman, Yama Freeman. But, you know,

Speaker 7 that's not going to happen. And so a bunch of, she's badly hemorrhaging.

Speaker 7 And a bunch of the strongest young men in the village, they put her in a hammock and put her on their shoulders.

Speaker 7 And they ran down this red mud path 10 miles toward the hospital, shouting encouragement to her as they go, you know, keep on going, Yama.

Speaker 7 And she dies en route for want of fuel for an ambulance that we had already donated.

Speaker 3 Just like a fucking comedy of heirs.

Speaker 3 And that's so sad like there's some i guess conversation that things are that like they have uncanceled some of this stuff so you were there most recently like you know help me sort through that like what is still you know what is still part of the doge cuts you know what what have they put back into place so that is true that some things have been uncanceled the the problem is it's very hard to figure out what is being uncanceled and it you know it was this quite complicated system where you had

Speaker 7 different groups doing different things. So one group would supply the ARVs, another would provide the health workers who'd administer them, another would look after the, you know, the supplies

Speaker 7 in a warehouse. You know, somebody else would coordinate among the different NGOs.
Somebody else would do viral load checking. And

Speaker 7 this all kind of collapses. So some elements have been preserved, but they often don't work together with the other elements.

Speaker 7 And so some malaria programs are coming back, for example, but the malaria medicine in one county in Liberia, it was being stored in this medical warehouse that the county had, and USAID had contracted to upgrade the warehouse, and they started the work, and the roof was torn off.

Speaker 7 And then that's when the stop work order went out. So now the medical warehouse has no roof.

Speaker 7 So, okay, in theory, they're providing malaria medicine again, but all of a sudden there is no roof on the medical warehouse.

Speaker 7 And, you know, it's just things like this that you hear over and over and over. And

Speaker 7 it's just maddening. I mean, especially for something that said it was about government efficiency to see

Speaker 7 the toll of the inefficiency. The State Department has one estimate that the cost of shutting down USAID was $6 billion.
dollars.

Speaker 7 So instead of saving money, they've spent six billion dollars killing a lot of kids.

Speaker 3 Getting to see how that process works. I wonder how you respond to, you know, I've seen Elon has done a little bit of the round and JD, I guess actually this was JD, not Elon, but Elon has said this.

Speaker 3 JD was repeating something Elon had said. He was on Theo Vaughan's podcast.
Theo was asking him about. you know, the USAID and

Speaker 7 these horror stories.

Speaker 3 And JD kind of confidently says, well, you know, know, did you know that only one in $10 or whatever, I forget the exact number, three in $100 that went to USID was actually going to help people and the rest of it was all grift and it was people skimming off the top and these NGOs, these folks are getting rich.

Speaker 3 How would you respond to that criticism, having seen it all on the ground?

Speaker 7 I think there's something to the critique that too much money was going to the

Speaker 7 contractors and the Beltway, the Beltway bandits, as they're called. I think there's something to that to critique.
There have been efforts to have more money go.

Speaker 7 But I mean, the real reason so much of the money isn't being handed directly to people on the ground is that it's going, say, to buy vaccines.

Speaker 7 So, I mean, one of the most life-saving efforts is called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. It has saved 18 million lives so far.

Speaker 7 And, you know, it is this very efficient international body that is buying vaccines for malaria, for HPV to prevent cervical cancer, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 7 And, you know, it's not going to help to give somebody in Liberia $5 and tell them to go buy their vaccines. You have to coordinate.

Speaker 7 The same with the Global Fund Against AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis. You know, there are some things that are more efficient when the money is spent in a global way.

Speaker 7 You know, but I mean, was there room to reform USAID? Absolutely. Was it too bureaucratic? You know, totally.

Speaker 7 PEPFAR, I think, think, sometimes spent more than it needed to on some kinds of salaries in a way that disrupted the ecosystem. Could that have been spent more efficiently? Yeah.

Speaker 7 But, you know, what we got wasn't a reform. It was demolition.

Speaker 3 And when you're talking about waste, also, in some of your columns, you wrote there are two things that struck me just about the current waste that's now happening in the reform system, which is there was something called Plumpy Nut.

Speaker 3 I guess we've already, the manufacturers we manufacture here in America, which is now not getting to people. And then there are the Merck medicines.
Talk about those examples.

Speaker 7 So the Plumpy Nut, Plumpy Nut is this miracle peanut paste that over the last 20 years or so has been developed. And it just brings severely, acutely malnourished children back to life.

Speaker 7 It's incredible to see how effective it is. And it is one reason why malnutrition mortality has come down a great deal.
So right now, a child is dying of malnutrition about every 15 seconds.

Speaker 7 And meanwhile, the U.S.

Speaker 7 taxpayers have already purchased 185,000 boxes of Plumpy Nut that taxpayers own, that is sitting in a warehouse in Rhode Island gathering dust because the State Department, given the collapse of U.S.

Speaker 7 AID, doesn't really know what to do with it.

Speaker 3 So it's manufactured here.

Speaker 7 It's manufactured in the U.S.

Speaker 3 It's creating jobs here. Yep.
We've already paid for it.

Speaker 7 Exactly.

Speaker 3 And it's already been produced. It's sitting in a warehouse in Rhode Island doing nothing.

Speaker 7 That's correct. And there's another 500,000 boxes in Georgia in a kind of similar situation.
There are two manufacturers in the U.S., one in Rhode Island, one in Georgia.

Speaker 7 And this is just, I mean, talk about waste.

Speaker 3 Do you think the richest man in the world could figure out how to get that to Africa, you know, if it wasn't for you?

Speaker 3 If he didn't want USAID to do it because the communists were in USAID or whatever, you think he could figure out how to get the boxes to Sierra Leone?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, and it's inefficiency, but it's inefficiency that is killing kids. You know, it just,

Speaker 7 I can't tell you how heartbreaking heartbreaking it is to see a child with severe malnutrition. And I think that's because they don't, they don't cry, they don't,

Speaker 7 they don't show pain, they don't show any expression. They're,

Speaker 7 they barely turn their heads. They're basically, the body is saving every

Speaker 7 calorie it can to just keep the major organs functioning. And they look a little like zombies and their eyes follow you, but

Speaker 7 they're so expressionless and it just breaks your heart. And meanwhile, we paid for the Plumpy Net to save their lives.

Speaker 7 And then, you know, as you suggest, there's something similar that I went to a warehouse in Sierra Leone in a gated compound.

Speaker 7 The security guard let me into the warehouse and there is enough medicine to prevent river blindness, this terrible. scourge of blindness, enough medicine to help 7 million people in Sierra Leone.

Speaker 7 It's donated by Merck. Merck then shipped it to Sierra Leone.

Speaker 3 So we didn't even pay for this.

Speaker 7 We didn't even pay for this. Every dollar in basically the U.S.
just has to pay for distribution.

Speaker 7 And every dollar in this, this is called Mass Drug Administration, every dollar in mass drug administration leverages $26

Speaker 7 in donated drugs. It's there.

Speaker 7 But the U.S. canceled the drug administration.
And so it's sitting there gathering dust. And some of it

Speaker 7 approaching expiration dates. When it expires, the

Speaker 7 destruction of these drugs will be expensive. It's just this nightmare.

Speaker 3 And what is river blindness that the drug prevents?

Speaker 7 Aaron Powell, river blindness, it's a disease that it's a parasitic disease where the parasites go behind the eye and they destroy the optic nerve and it is painful.

Speaker 7 It means that very large areas can no longer be farmed. People have to flee.
And it's been one of the great successes, partly because of Jimmy Carter.

Speaker 7 They discovered that this deworming medicine, ivermectin, can control river blindness, can prevent it. And Merck has been donating, I forget how many doses of this for years now.
And so

Speaker 7 ivermectin. As the drugs?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's the same. The miracle drug that the MAGA people saw.

Speaker 7 Every V COVID. Yeah.

Speaker 7 And i mean but ivermectin doesn't work on covid boy it works with the river of blindness i mean it's it's an incredibly effective drug can't we use that propaganda you know how great ivermectin is we want to bring it to the people of sierra leone

Speaker 7 it's setting it it's it's just wasting away i mean the paradox is that merck makes money on ivermectin largely to deworm american pets when you deworm a dog or horse in the u.s it's with ivermectin And then they

Speaker 7 use those supply lines to produce an ivermectin to provide free

Speaker 7 ivermectin. It's the brand name Mectazan to Africa to wipe out riverblindness.

Speaker 7 Riverblindness has come down more than 90%.

Speaker 7 Jimmy Carter gets a special shout-out. He was heroic in focusing attention on this.
It's been one of the great public health successes of the last 25 years.

Speaker 3 That public health success and the great public health success of the Bush administration with Pepfar just being totally just axed for nothing, essentially.

Speaker 7 I mean, you know, it's a measure of whether it's PEPFAR under President Bush or the river blindness or the strides against polio, against leprosy. You know, one doesn't hear about leprosy anymore.

Speaker 7 That's because it's gone down about, I don't know, 97% or something. You know, there really have been huge strides.
And now, again, they're in doubt.

Speaker 11 Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

Speaker 9 This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Speaker 13 Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone.

Speaker 11 We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

Speaker 9 After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

Speaker 20 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 22 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 3 Alright, well, you and I could not be more aligned on this.

Speaker 3 I mean, I I guess you're doing the Lord's work while I'm just sitting here, but it's hard for me to come up with challenging questions to you.

Speaker 3 But luckily, you posted an article recently where some of your readers were upset with you. And so I want to go through a couple of those questions.

Speaker 3 But before we get to the readers, here was Rubio's response. When you asked Rubio to do an interview about these accusations that you are lying, he cowardly declined to do that.

Speaker 3 He then provided a written statement and said, America is already the most generous nation in the world. We urge other nations to dramatically increase their humanitarian efforts.

Speaker 3 If you had the chance to talk to him, what would you have said to him about that?

Speaker 7 Well, I'd point out that it is true that the U.S. donates more than any other single country.
I mean, the U.S. donates more than Luxembourg or Liechtenstein.

Speaker 7 We're a big country. Per capita, we donate rather less than the average member of the OECD, for example.
And we donate 0.24%

Speaker 7 of GDP. Norway donates more than 1%.

Speaker 7 And I'd also note that when the U.S. slashed aid,

Speaker 7 that also created a permission structure in which other countries promptly followed suit. So instead of spurring other countries to do better, it actually led them to cut aid themselves.

Speaker 7 So Britain cut aid, France cut aid, Netherlands cut aid. I think Belgium cut aid.

Speaker 7 And the result is this perfect storm in places like South Sudan or Liberia or Sierra Leone or Eastern Congo where kids are dying and women are dying in childbirth.

Speaker 3 It's not actually crazy for the New York Times columnist to say to the Secretary of State, let's talk about this. Let's travel to Africa.
And it is his job. I know he has like four jobs.

Speaker 3 He's also the archivist and

Speaker 3 he's kidnapping students based on their op-eds and stuff. But

Speaker 3 if he truly believed in this policy, that this was inefficient,

Speaker 3 that we could do better.

Speaker 3 Many Secretary of States have gone to Africa, visited Africa, talked about, met with locals. It's notable that that is not part of this program at all.

Speaker 7 No, I mean, Rubio is interesting because,

Speaker 7 you know, he's a smart guy. He's well-informed.
And historically, we know that he has been a champion of U.S.

Speaker 7 aid, I think, both for humanitarian reasons, but especially for the projection of soft power, for the way that it is a way of dealing with China.

Speaker 7 And, you know, since being appointed Secretary of State, that has just completely collapsed. And now he's just an echo chamber for Donald Trump.
And, you know, that's what ambition does to you.

Speaker 7 It's really sad to watch.

Speaker 3 Have any of the high-ranking Trump officials gone to the countries that were receiving U.S. aid that you are familiar with?

Speaker 7 I can't think of any.

Speaker 3 Yeah, me neither. Some of the other arguments you got from readers, and this is kind of related to what Marco just said, but what do you say to the more

Speaker 3 good faith arguments about America first? That like we we have a lot of problems here. There are hungry kids here.

Speaker 3 We just don't have the resources for this. It's not about

Speaker 3 the fact that we're black-hearted or whatever. It's just we got to do the best we can.
We got to take care of people here. What do you say to that?

Speaker 7 I mean, it's a fair point.

Speaker 7 I think we do have real needs at home. And

Speaker 7 when I write my tiny little checks at the end of the year, I have to weigh things I care about abroad against needs at home. I'd make the point, though,

Speaker 7 in trying to weigh those in my own mind, both for my giving and for government policy, I'd note that the needs abroad are simply vastly greater than those at home, and that it is far cheaper to save a life abroad than at home.

Speaker 7 Like I mentioned that woman whose child, whose baby had died of malaria. So when the hospital didn't have the drug, she could have gone out to a pharmacy and purchased it.

Speaker 7 It would have been about $20.

Speaker 7 And she scrambled and she could not find $20 in time. $20 can save a life abroad.
The ARVs to save a little child like Anzo, Evan Anzo, who we talked about earlier, that costs about 12 cents a day.

Speaker 7 You know, you cannot save lives with that kind of money at home.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 also,

Speaker 7 I think that there's a danger with the American First Argument that it becomes

Speaker 7 a complete lack of compassion for people

Speaker 7 of

Speaker 7 different skin color or different passport color. And, you know, it was also true in the 1930s, 1940s that we had real problems at home, real inequities at home.

Speaker 7 Yet clearly we should have done more to bring in Jewish immigrants from Europe, for example, instead of turning them away. And so,

Speaker 7 yes, there are trade-offs. Yes, I don't have any perfect algorithm for how much we spend abroad versus how much at home.

Speaker 7 But fundamentally, I don't think that not spending 12 cents a day to keep a child alive in South Sudan is going to mean that fewer kids in the U.S. are going to be living and thriving here.

Speaker 3 I think I'd add to that is it's not just, and you mentioned the

Speaker 3 0.02 of GDP or whatever, but the tangible example I always bring up is in Trump's first term, 2019, the tariffs caused all this disruption in the agriculture industry.

Speaker 3 And so we did a bailout of farmers. And that farmer bailout cost basically the cost of USAID.
Like it's essential equivalent of the entire program, right?

Speaker 3 And that's just one thing that we did that people barely even remember internally. I think you mentioned the example of the Yemen bombings recently, which cost.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, we spent $7 billion

Speaker 7 bombing Yemen since the fall of 2023. $7 billion.

Speaker 7 And, you know, you think about what that could have done, how many kids' lives that would have saved around the world.

Speaker 7 And we didn't even notice the Yemen bombing and it didn't really achieve anything. And, you know, we

Speaker 7 could have done so much good with that money. You know, you think about the, you know, we can afford a parade and a military parade in Washington, but we can't afford to keep Evan Anso alive.
Really?

Speaker 3 You're turning me into a bleeding heart live here, Christophe. We're going to get to some democratic stuff at the end.
Just a couple of these other pushback arguments real quick.

Speaker 3 This one is vaguely compelling to, I think, if you don't really know what's happened around the world, but I understand why this would be a compelling argument to people.

Speaker 3 But it's we've been pouring tens of billions of dollars into other countries for many decades and nothing changes.

Speaker 3 We don't have any results. So obviously, this is not a valuable program.

Speaker 7 So let me push back.

Speaker 7 I'd say that the most extraordinary thing happening in the world over the last 50 years has been incredible progress against global poverty.

Speaker 7 For example, in 1950, 27% of children died before the age of five. Now we're down to

Speaker 7 just under 4% of children. It's incredible progress.
When I was a kid, a majority of human beings had always been illiterate throughout human history. Now we're pushing 90% adult literacy.

Speaker 3 That's about to go back down thanks to AI and TikTok.

Speaker 7 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 Absolutely.

Speaker 7 But I made my first trip through Africa in 1982, and

Speaker 7 the comparison today in terms of less leprosy, less river blindness,

Speaker 7 less extreme poverty, fewer people dying of malaria, it's just staggering.

Speaker 3 The last pushback you got, which it was like,

Speaker 3 reminded me of my new, the new liberal cultural milieu I'm swimming in now, because I didn't hear this argument before from very many people, but it's the degrowther, the lefty degrowther argument, which was essentially, as you put it, providing food aid may seem merciful, but it's just going to lead to population increases and more people starving down the road.

Speaker 3 We need family planning and fewer children in Africa. I'm like, I could not, like, I'm physically repulsed by that argument, but I understand that people at NAVA.

Speaker 3 So I would like to hear what you think of that.

Speaker 7 So, I mean, that's very much a Thomas Malthus argument that,

Speaker 7 and it's wrong.

Speaker 7 So, the reason people have a lot of children is because they think that there are many children will die. And so if you help keep those kids alive, they have fewer children.

Speaker 7 And you see that around the world. I mean, India used to be the kind of the

Speaker 7 center of the Malthusian nightmares. And

Speaker 7 now the average, the total fertility rate, the number of women an Indian woman will have over her lifetime is 2.0.

Speaker 7 And that's less than replacement level, which is 2.1. So, you know, absolutely, we need to support family planning and give women control over the number of children they will have.

Speaker 7 There are 300 million women worldwide who need support with modern family planning, and we can help them with that. But

Speaker 7 that should not come at the expense of keeping their babies alive. I mean, that's just grotesque.

Speaker 10 Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

Speaker 9 This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Speaker 8 Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone.

Speaker 11 We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

Speaker 9 After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

Speaker 20 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 22 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 3 I want to go to El Salvador. It's just, you know, the worst horror that we're inflicting on people, I think, in this administration, this competitive category.

Speaker 3 But you wrote about El Salvador, but you started the column with a story about your father, who had been disappeared, and how he was eventually released thanks to the advocacy of a French diplomat, Robert Morisset.

Speaker 7 Morrissey. Yeah, Morissette.

Speaker 3 And you talked about the lesson of that. So maybe just share that story a little bit.

Speaker 7 So my dad's family, they were Armenians in Eastern Europe, and they spied on the Nazis during World War II.

Speaker 7 They got caught. Some of of the family members were killed by the Nazis.
Others were executed by the Soviets. My dad fled and was in a concentration camp in Yugoslavia.
And

Speaker 7 then

Speaker 7 this French diplomat, Robert Morissette, who had nothing to gain. It wasn't really his job to worry about.

Speaker 7 My dad was a Romanian citizen, Romanians and Yugoslavian prison camps, but he did. And

Speaker 7 my dad was spared.

Speaker 7 Then my dad got to France. And then Presbyterian church in Portland, Oregon sponsored his way to come to the U.S.
It wasn't clear my dad was going to get a visa.

Speaker 7 And two French journalists spoke up for my dad and he was able to get the visa. And again, you know, should journalists really be suggesting to an American ambassador to give somebody a visa?

Speaker 7 Not clear, but I exist because all these people did things that were kind of at the edge. So I contrast

Speaker 7 that compassion and empathy that was directed at my dad that was completely transformative

Speaker 7 with

Speaker 7 the,

Speaker 7 you know, I don't know what the opposite of empathy is, but just the gratuitous cruelty that has been directed at so many people today, whether it's, you know, AIDS orphans in South Sudan, whether it's immigrants here.

Speaker 7 And, you know, Absolutely, we need to control our borders. Absolutely, there are difficult trade-offs that need to be made.

Speaker 7 But just grabbing people off the street and shipping them to a brutal prison in El Salvador, I mean, that's just going out of your way to be cruel and heartless.

Speaker 3 Yeah, merciless. It's horrific what they're doing.
And I appreciated the story because

Speaker 3 it spoke to the element of,

Speaker 3 I think that sometimes there's a hopelessness. that people feel about this sort of thing.
Like, okay, well,

Speaker 3 you know, this is just not something that is resolvable at this point, right? Like, they can have legal remedies and all that. And, but the story shows that it's not like quite right, right?

Speaker 3 Like, that by drawing attention to this sort of stuff, by pressuring them, like, despite the fact that many of the people executing this policy are cruel and depraved and kind of heartless and don't really care that much about the lives of the Venezuelans that have been sent to El Salvador, they still don't like negative PR.

Speaker 3 And Bukele still is going to have to deal with the world after Trump. That'll happen at some point, right? Like there are contingencies, like there are ways to do this.

Speaker 3 And the story of your dad, I think, highlights,

Speaker 3 to me, I read it as like bucking people up to Trump and

Speaker 3 not to have a learned helplessness.

Speaker 7 You know, one thing I often hear from people is that

Speaker 7 the problems are so vast that anything I do is only going to be a drop in the bucket. And, you know, in a sense, that is true.

Speaker 7 There are close to 5 million kids a year who die somewhere around the world under the age of five. And, you know, that's heartbreaking.
We're not going to solve that.

Speaker 7 But it is pretty easy to save some of those lives really cheaply. And yes, that's a drop in the bucket in a sense.
But, you know, my dad was a drop in the bucket. And Robert Borset, you know, he

Speaker 7 changed a drop in the bucket in the form of my dad. And the First Presbyterian Church in Portland, Oregon did the same.
And I exist because of those drops in the bucket. You know, drops in the bucket.

Speaker 7 That is how you fill buckets. And it

Speaker 7 doesn't change the overall trend, but boy, it's meaningful and it's powerful to save individual lives and transform those trajectories. Aaron Ross Barrett,

Speaker 3 do you have any thoughts on edge case examples of what people could do about the El Salvador situation in particular?

Speaker 3 And when I talk to Democratic politicians, part of me is like, shouldn't Democrats and European countries and stuff start to threaten El Salvador and say that you're going to be treated like Venezuela and North North Korea if you continue this.

Speaker 3 I don't know. Are there other ⁇ do you have any other thoughts on dealing with the disappearings?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, I think that Bukele

Speaker 7 cares about his image. He puts a great deal of emphasis on his image.
He's very popular within El Salvador because

Speaker 7 while he's been brutal, he has also

Speaker 7 vastly improved the security situation.

Speaker 3 Yeah, quality of life has improved.

Speaker 7 Yeah. But he cares about his international image.

Speaker 3 If you're not wrongly jailed into the RoboCop prison.

Speaker 7 For everybody else, the quality of life's improved.

Speaker 7 And so the power of embarrassing leaders like that, I think that

Speaker 7 really counts.

Speaker 7 And I've seen how when you write letters about a political prisoner, then, you know, sometimes they don't do any good. Miraculously, sometimes they do lead somebody to be released.

Speaker 7 Kim Daejong was the South Korean dissident. He was almost executed, and he was a thorn

Speaker 7 in the side of the South Korean officials.

Speaker 7 But they did spare his life under pressure. They eventually released him under pressure.
And then I watched as he became South Korea's president. There are vulnerabilities.

Speaker 7 One can imperfectly have real effect on improving human rights.

Speaker 3 All right. Let's talk about the Democrats for a second.

Speaker 3 You thought about leaving your perch as a scribe and farmer

Speaker 3 to run for office there in Oregon.

Speaker 3 That didn't take off for a variety of reasons. But just through that experience,

Speaker 3 and since that happened, obviously Trump is one again.

Speaker 3 What did you think you had to offer? What's your assessment of what the Democratic Party is not offering right now? What are the gaps in your estimation?

Speaker 7 So I guess I'd mention a couple of gaps. And certainly there are many Democrats who are very aware of this.
I'm not bringing something dramatically new to the picture.

Speaker 7 But I'm very aware of the challenges in working class America, partly because my hometown here, Yam Hill, Oregon, is very much a working class community.

Speaker 7 And the traditional employers were agriculture, timber, and light manufacturing. Those jobs went away.
And meth arrived.

Speaker 7 And at this point, more than a third of the kids on my old school bus are gone from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. And it has been devastating to watch.
And

Speaker 7 people

Speaker 7 feel betrayed by what they perceive as elites, and they have a point.

Speaker 7 We've lost more than a million people since 2000 through overdoses, and we have not had a policy that is remotely as serious as that problem.

Speaker 7 I think there is a problem with condescension toward working working-class Americans. Some Democrats are good at not talking down.

Speaker 7 Robert Kennedy,

Speaker 7 not RFK Jr., but the original. I mean, he was brilliant at,

Speaker 7 despite his privileged background, at really listening to and communicating with working-class Americans.

Speaker 3 You have Marie-Gluz and Camperenz out there in Washington, not Oregon, but the Pacific Northwest. Are there others that

Speaker 3 you can jump to your mind on that front?

Speaker 7 Totally, totally. And, you know,

Speaker 7 it's talking about,

Speaker 7 you know, not so much about these 30,000-foot levels about democracy as talking about just the daily issues that people are struggling with. So I think the Democrats have to do a better job of that.

Speaker 7 And also, we just have to do a better job fixing our blue parts of the country. And that's particularly true in the West Coast.

Speaker 7 And, you know, these days in Chicago, we are great at saying that, you know, housing is a human right, but we do a really bad job of addressing homelessness on the West Coast, California and Oregon in particular.

Speaker 7 You know, we deeply believe in education, and yet

Speaker 7 education outcomes

Speaker 7 in Oregon, for example, are near the bottom of the country. And,

Speaker 7 you know, we've got to

Speaker 7 do a better job addressing governance in our own places, partly because, you know, we care about governance and partly because we unfortunately become a talking point for Republicans in Wisconsin, Ohio, Georgia, et cetera, when we screw up.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, you mentioned the housing thing. I think about Oregon.
There's this map. A Yanni put out this map.
It was like a county map of where there's housing shortages throughout the country.

Speaker 3 And, you know, it's, and it's like most of Oregon is on the map, like towards the higher end, a 10% housing shortage significant.

Speaker 3 I wonder how much of that is running into environmentalism, do you think? We did the Malthusian stuff earlier. Is that the issue? Or is it red tape stuff?

Speaker 3 Or is it lack of, like, what do you attribute that to?

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 my

Speaker 7 read, I've been persuaded by the evidence that it's basically that we're not producing enough housing and that as a result, housing is expensive.

Speaker 7 When people have looked at does homelessness correlate to addiction? Does it correlate to poverty? No.

Speaker 7 What really correlates to is high rents and difficulty in producing new housing, housing shortages.

Speaker 3 But why do you think Oregon's not producing new housing? And San Francisco, I get it, you have limited land and all that. Like Oregon's got plenty of space.
It's not like Oregon's overcrowded.

Speaker 3 Why isn't Oregon building enough housing, do you think?

Speaker 7 So it has been in many ways an issue of regulation. We are very proud of our land use laws, which we pioneered in the 1970s, and they have preserved wild spaces.

Speaker 7 We don't have a big sprawl problem in Oregon, but it

Speaker 7 is a lot more costly to put up new housing in Oregon.

Speaker 7 So Vancouver, Washington is right across the border from Portland, and an average home in Vancouver on the Vancouver side is about $100,000 less than a similar home on the Portland side.

Speaker 7 I think people associate addiction with homelessness because obviously you look out in the street and those who

Speaker 7 are struggling tend to be those with mental health problems with addiction. And that's all real.

Speaker 7 But partly it's simply a, you know, if you don't have enough housing, the people who aren't competent enough to get it and don't have the money to get it are those with various

Speaker 7 other problems. So

Speaker 7 we focus very much on preventing evictions, but if you're short 170,000 housing units, then

Speaker 7 that's the basic structural problem. And

Speaker 7 just things like making it easier to have basement apartments, to have rooming houses.

Speaker 7 We used to have solutions to homelessness like trailer parks and rooming houses, boarding houses, and then we zoned them out of the way and got rid of them.

Speaker 3 What does being the general manager of a farm mean? Are you out there picking grapes? Or, you know, what were this morning before you came on,

Speaker 3 was your hands in the dirt?

Speaker 7 This morning before I came on, I ran through the vineyard. I'm not sure if that counts.

Speaker 7 My morning run is around there. So this is the family farm where I grew up.
I mean, actually, right now I'm in the house where I grew up.

Speaker 7 I know part of it was we were just trying to, my wife and I were.

Speaker 7 Trying to figure out how we could address some of the problems that I was writing about. There's lack of good jobs in the area.

Speaker 7 And so we think our role is principally advocacy. But we thought, well, you know, if we can,

Speaker 7 we used to have a cherry orchard. If we can maybe do something that adds a little more agricultural value, then that'll be good for the community, maybe help with some tourism.

Speaker 7 And so we got the kids to, you know, pledge their commitment. So we started this family wine and cider business.

Speaker 7 And everything that could go wrong did, you know, we put an impregnable deer fence around our vineyard and an apple orchard and then after we'd finished it

Speaker 7 enormous expense and trouble it turned out that we had imprisoned some deer inside our impregnable deer fence with nothing to eat but grapevines and and and apple trees and um you know so

Speaker 7 plenty has gone wrong but we have managed to produce some award-winning ciders some wines that have uh very much impressed the wine critics and sounds like the answer is and some jobs because

Speaker 3 you're not out there picking the grapes.

Speaker 7 And some jobs. Yeah.

Speaker 7 And some jobs. And, you know, and it's been good for me, I think, also, because as a liberal columnist, I rarely meet a regulation I don't like.

Speaker 7 And all of a sudden, as a small business owner, I'm regularly outraged at this with that effort to regulate me.

Speaker 7 And so it's, you know, it's just good to see the world through a different prism sometimes. And if people want to...

Speaker 7 If they want some great Chardonnay, rose, or a Pinot Noir, they should check out ChristopheFarms.com.

Speaker 3 All right. Well, of God, we're radicalizing you to the

Speaker 3 cutting red tape neoliberal abundance agenda. All right, last thing.
You know, since you're there, people are like, what groups are still doing good work in Africa that I could donate to or support?

Speaker 3 Do you have any suggestions on that front?

Speaker 7 Absolutely. So on this trip, the groups I've been suggesting are Hill and Keller International, which does a lot of work on blindness and nutrition.

Speaker 7 And they were the ones who were supposed to be, who would have distributed this river blindness drug. And if they can raise enough money, it still will be distributed.

Speaker 7 So that's one option I mentioned: deworming. There's a group called Deworm the World, which very efficiently deworms kids.
And, you know, this is so cheap to do.

Speaker 7 You can deworm a kid for about a dollar a year. They stay in school more.
They do better.

Speaker 7 And this malnutrition, this miracle-paced Plumpy Nut.

Speaker 7 So the two organizations in the U.S. that make it and that can send it abroad, they're both nonprofits, I recommend.
One is Edysia Nutrition, that's E-D-E-S-I-A Nutrition in Rhode Island.

Speaker 7 And the other is MANA Nutrition, M-A-N-A, MANA Nutrition in Georgia.

Speaker 7 You know, those are some sort of three great options, Helen Count International, Dear Worm the World, and either Odyssey or or Mana Nutrition

Speaker 7 for this peanut paste.

Speaker 3 Great. Well, I will contribute and we'll put the links in the show notes.
And I really appreciate the work you've been doing.

Speaker 3 Let's stay in touch.

Speaker 7 Thank you. I appreciate that.
Thanks for the conversation. It was fun.
Thanks so much, Nick. We've got to get you on Pinot Noir, though.

Speaker 3 Not going to happen, baby. I'm going to try out that Christophe Rosé.
Up next, Alyssa Slotkin.

Speaker 11 Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

Speaker 9 This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Speaker 13 Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone.

Speaker 11 We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

Speaker 9 After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

Speaker 20 So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Speaker 22 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 3 And we're back and delighted to welcome for the first time Democratic Senator from Michigan, a former three-term Congresswoman. She was a CIA analyst and served three tours in Iraq.

Speaker 3 She just today laid out an economic war plan for the Democratic Party during a speech at the Center for American Progress. Earlier today, we were taping this on Thursday at Senator Alyssa Slotkin.

Speaker 3 How are you doing, Senator?

Speaker 23 I'm very well. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 Talk to us about the war plan.

Speaker 23 You know, I've been a senator for six months now, and I just kind of got tired of waiting for someone else to come up with like a vision, you know, playing a little offense.

Speaker 23 And I think, you know, we hear a lot about how Democrats need to be playing defense because of what's coming out of the White House. But I just, I don't know how you win.

Speaker 23 in 2026 and 2028 and generally without playing some offense.

Speaker 23 So this was my best dab at an economic war plan and how to focus on the things that I hear from Michiganders they're focused on, which is their pocketbooks and get back to basics.

Speaker 23 So I took some of the war planning skills that I had from a former life and applied them to trying to preserve and expand the middle class.

Speaker 3 I mean, the economic war plan kind of implies that there wasn't one before and you kind of basically just said it. You wanted to get up and sort of start talking about it, start offering something.

Speaker 3 Do you think that's a fair criticism of the Democrats that there was not enough of a clear, substantive economic message for voters last year?

Speaker 23 I don't know that that's a matter of opinion. I mean,

Speaker 23 in my state, I guess I'll speak to that. In November, it was a pocketbook election.

Speaker 23 And a lot of people would say to me when we knocked on the doors, like, I don't like Donald Trump, but I just need someone to put more money in my pocket. And I think he's...

Speaker 23 more ready and talking about doing that. And I don't really know what the Democrats stand for.
I mean, that was something we heard repeatedly. And so

Speaker 23 it was a pocketbook election. I think I'm still trying to understand and learn more about the New York City mayoral election, but I think that was also a pocketbook election.

Speaker 23 Very different candidates, very different proposals, but speak into the same core issues. And I don't think that's by mistake.

Speaker 23 So I don't think there's a debate that people feel like the Democrats don't have. We do great things.
I've seen really amazing policies pass. I've seen important legislation pass.

Speaker 23 But if people don't know what you're about, then it sort of sometimes is a tree falling in the woods.

Speaker 3 I was coming to Zoran in a little bit, but you brought it up.

Speaker 3 So we'll go to that first, just because there's one element of it that, you know, regardless of what you think about the actual policies, which I do want to get into in a second, but just from a marketing and branding standpoint first, he was able to bring pocketbook issues to the forefront.

Speaker 3 in part because of whatever campaign tactics, but in part because he offered some policies that are easy for people to understand, right? Rent freeze, free bus fare.

Speaker 3 What are some equivalents of that for, you know, maybe whatever you want, a center left or just a mainstream Democrat?

Speaker 3 Like what are, what are some ways to get people to connect with the policies so it's not kind of just platitudes about pocketbook issues?

Speaker 23 Yeah. I mean, first of all, I think it's important that you don't lure people with things that are not doable, right?

Speaker 23 I mean, there's, I can't speak to whether all of those policies are doable, but I think you got to be declarative, right? Declare a housing emergency and build 4 million units of housing.

Speaker 23 People understand what declaring a national emergency is. They understand when we have a natural disaster.
Speak in terms that connect with people's emotions, right? They can't buy a house.

Speaker 23 They can't afford to move into a bigger house. And so I think sometimes we forget the emotion of it.

Speaker 23 And I think, first of all, just be really clear with kind of the emotion and the goals of what you're trying to achieve. And then we have to be bolder.

Speaker 23 I mean, I think that's one of the key lessons is, you know, Trump, no one would ever say he's not bold. I don't agree with a lot of stuff that he does, but he's got the boldness, Gene.

Speaker 23 And I think Democrats, frankly, should learn from that. You know, I think one of the things I said today that I, for some reason really took off on the Twitters was,

Speaker 23 I believe in banning cell phones in K through 12 schools across the country, right?

Speaker 23 And it's declarative, it's bigger, and it connects with parents who are looking at their kids and seeing how distracted they are. And they're worried about it.
They're stressed about it.

Speaker 23 So I don't know. I think it's also, it's, it's policies, but I think people also want to hear that we have some like backbone and gumption and some boldness.

Speaker 3 I'm with you on the cell phone banning. I think that another thing that Democrats have struggled with is having

Speaker 3 you know, clear things to fight against besides Donald Trump, the person, right? And at some level, it's, I think this is something that resonates with folks, right?

Speaker 3 Which is that these kind of devices have taken over people's lives, particularly young folks, in ways that are damaging.

Speaker 3 And obviously, there's, you don't have to be a Luddite, you know, there are ways to encourage technology, but you also just have to recognize that there are real social harms and that you should address them.

Speaker 3 And another thing you said in the speech is that

Speaker 3 social media companies should be held accountable for algorithms that are getting kids addicted to the phones.

Speaker 3 Talk about how you balance making these tech companies in some ways the villain or at least

Speaker 3 something that needs to be gone after

Speaker 3 versus not wanting to seem like you're anti-technology, anti-growth, anti-whatever, innovation.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I mean, I think this for me is everything's a balance, right? We're a country that believes in freedom of speech. So I can't like come out for an anti-speech

Speaker 23 kind of policy. But what I can say is that these social media companies have tweaked their algorithms to monetize extreme content and hate.

Speaker 23 Clickbait that gets our young people interested and engaged is being monetized, and that tends to lean towards extreme content.

Speaker 23 And so I signed the amicus brief that's on its way on to the Supreme Court to hold them accountable for the algorithms and for the monetizing of hate.

Speaker 23 You can't go at them and say social media shouldn't exist. These companies, you know, shouldn't, they have to prevent every terrible word that is used on their on their platforms.
That's not feasible.

Speaker 23 But go right at the thing that runs counter to American interests and isolate that. That to me is the sort of lead foot when you're dealing with these things.

Speaker 23 And by the way, we're going to have a huge job to figure out how to handle artificial intelligence. Like you think social media is bad?

Speaker 23 I mean, figuring out the left and right limits of artificial intelligence is going to be a project of my lifetime, right?

Speaker 23 And that's tricky, right? Same thing when you think about bringing artificial intelligence into our schools. We want our kids to have facility with this technology.

Speaker 23 They're going to need it if they're going to get, you know, the jobs of the future. But you don't want to give it to them so early that they lose the training and critical thinking skills.

Speaker 23 I need like, you know, doctors and scientists to help me think through these issues and figure out the left and the right limits.

Speaker 23 And actually, if our political system were healthier and we weren't fighting all the time and we weren't snarking at each other all the time, we'd be focused on these big issues of our time, social media, artificial intelligence.

Speaker 23 You know,

Speaker 23 the big movers are the ones that need most attention. And then they're ones that get the least attention because we're fighting about the big, beautiful bill.

Speaker 3 What about the TikTok ban is one example of this? And you guys passed it. That was a bipartisan thing.
It was signed. And the president right now is just breaking the law by allowing it to continue.

Speaker 3 Like, what do you make of that?

Speaker 23 I mean, it falls into the category for my Republican colleagues of things they believed in until Donald Trump told them not to. I mean, it was a very bipartisan bill, that bill.

Speaker 23 The ban against TikTok was something we discussed actually a lot in Congress and in my time. And Republicans spoke on the floor of the House and they did all kinds of media about it.

Speaker 23 And then Trump came in, flipped his position on TikTok, realized it was important for him to get his message out. And he basically shamed and scared the other Republicans into just keeping quiet.

Speaker 23 And so there's so many issues on a given week where my Republican colleagues who have believed in something all of their lives give up on it because they're scared of Donald Trump or scared of their own, you know, losing their own election.

Speaker 23 I see it all day, every day.

Speaker 3 There was one tension in your speech for me a little bit, and it's something that I feel as well as somebody that likes the capitalist system, wants people to be able to feel like they can go and be wealth creators.

Speaker 3 You said in the speech, you know, essentially something to the effect of that we should stop demonizing rich people, we should stop demonizing success.

Speaker 3 The part of it's like, don't some of these rich people need to be demonized?

Speaker 3 You know, don't the people in charge of these algorithms that have, you know, amount of wealth that is like unimaginable not that long ago, who are influencing the government, who are inviting Trump to their weddings?

Speaker 3 I mean, like, don't these guys need to be demonized?

Speaker 23 So I didn't say, you know, stop hating rich people. I said that we got to stop vilifying success.
We want people to succeed.

Speaker 23 We also want them to play by the rules and the same set of rules that you and I and everyone listening have to abide by. And that is where things fall off, right?

Speaker 23 You can have very, very successful people who give lots of money. They hire lots of people.
They're good humans. But then you get a lot of people who make all that money and they abuse their power.

Speaker 23 They

Speaker 23 skip out on playing by the rules. They abuse the system and manipulate it.
And those people should be held accountable. But I think the thing that keeps coming up, I hear it from people in Michigan.

Speaker 23 They think that Democrats hate like small business owners, right? The guy who owns my grocery store, Holly Foods in Holly, Michigan, right? He's an immigrant. He's done very well.

Speaker 23 He bought one grocery store, then three, then seven, right? He kept expanding. And he's like, I I don't feel like I have a home in the Democratic Party.
I'm a small business owner.

Speaker 23 I play by the rules. I pay my taxes.
I'm struggling here. And I feel like you guys don't appreciate hard work and success.
And that's not what I want for the party.

Speaker 23 There's a big difference between a small business owner who's doing well and like a major global corporation that's exploiting their workers.

Speaker 23 They are very different humans and very different problem sets. So that to me is the point is that let's not just like be against anyone who's successful.

Speaker 23 And I think there are certainly voices in our party where that comes off that way.

Speaker 3 Which takes us a little bit back to the Zoron question and the mayor's race. And, you know, I mean, it's just one race.
It's just a municipal election, but it's in the biggest city in the country.

Speaker 3 The Democrats, like the establishment Democrats kind of circled the wagons behind somebody who had a lot of issues. So maybe that is the problem that you could identify.

Speaker 3 But nonetheless, you have this DSA, an avowed socialist that is likely to be the next mayor. Do you feel like comfortable in the same coalition as him? Are you worried about that?

Speaker 3 Are there specific things that worry you or excite you about the prospect of Zoran as mayor of New York?

Speaker 23 I will be honest that I've not been a great student of the New York politics. So I don't know a ton about it and a lot about his policies.
But I think the message was clearly: A, voters want to.

Speaker 23 someone who speaks to their pocketbook and B,

Speaker 23 they want a new generation of leadership. I mean, that is a theme that I am seeing all over the country.
I think it might be a hangover a little bit from what happened with President Biden, right?

Speaker 23 It's just like, we want new,

Speaker 23 not the folks who have been there forever or the establishment or whatever you want to call it. I think those two themes I see everywhere in the country right now.

Speaker 23 So I think it's part and parcel of that. I'm not 100% sure.
I certainly know that Manhattan politics or New York politics are not Michigan politics. There's differences.

Speaker 23 I think people have to represent the area that they're from, and he's clearly winning in the area where he's from.

Speaker 23 But I do know that coalitions, I mean, math is important if you care to win elections.

Speaker 23 If you actually give a crap about winning, which to me, coming from a swing state is the preeminent thing that I care about because of what happens with the policies if we lose. You got to have math.

Speaker 23 And math means a big, broad coalition of people.

Speaker 23 That means we need to figure out how to work together and work on the issues that unite us, which is why I worked on an economic war plan, because economic issues tend to be a place that has a broad spectrum of supporters.

Speaker 23 Moderates, progressives, everything in between, I think, can get with the program of needing to deal with our economy so that we can preserve some semblance of a middle class.

Speaker 3 There was an article recently about how I think you're on a text chain with the moderate women that are totally the lead in the party, a couple other friends of the bulwark, Abigail Spanberger, Mikey Sherrill, who have now both moved out of D.C.

Speaker 3 wisely, running for governor of their respective states of the Democratic nomination.

Speaker 3 When you think about that, like you're talking about that coalition politics and that math, and it's interesting, right?

Speaker 3 That like basically in the Republican Party, everybody's running in the image of Trump, like at this point. And that was not the case 20 years ago.

Speaker 3 But you're going to have this off-year election where you have your fellow, however you want to brand it, moderate, you know, women running in New Jersey and Virginia, and you've got this a Democratic socialist running in New York.

Speaker 3 Like, is that a workable coalition for you? When you guys are on the chain, are you like, we can learn stuff for Zoron, or we might have to distance ourselves from this part of the coalition?

Speaker 3 Like, how do you, how do you balance that?

Speaker 23 Well, again, I mean, I'm just, I don't, I've never met him.

Speaker 3 Maybe not him personally, just in just in the picture, you know, AOC, you know, you know, other people in the DSA that are in, like, just, I do feel like you got to distance yourself from them, or that, like, okay, this is a big, broad coalition.

Speaker 3 We got to learn from how they've successfully leveraged social media or whatever.

Speaker 23 I mean, I think that in a diverse coalition, I think about it, I guess, in military terms, right? Like when you go

Speaker 23 to war or when you launch an operation, you have different teammates who are doing different things, right? You've got the infantry right up front, hand-to-hand combat if they have to.

Speaker 23 They're in the mud. And then you've got the air cover in the back.
You've got logistics. You've got the tanks.

Speaker 23 I mean, you've got a lot of different things happening, but you need all those different players to be successful. And they need to work together.
They need to communicate.

Speaker 23 They need to be on the same page on what the goal of the mission is. That's how I, in an ideal world, would see what Democrats are, is that we're working together and we each bring our strengths.

Speaker 23 There is no doubt that the social media game that we just saw in New York was strong and there's lessons to learn from it.

Speaker 23 I just want to also be clear that there's lessons to learn from people who win in red and purple places. And that you please don't litmus test me out of your damn party if you like to win.

Speaker 23 And I think that's the two-way street we need to be on. And I mean, my job here in the Senate is to work with anyone who's interested in things that are going to make Michiganders' lives better.

Speaker 23 I don't, honestly, it's my job to work across the aisle, even when I don't like it. It's my job to work with the most progressive members of the Senate, even when we don't agree.

Speaker 23 My job is results for Michiganders, and I do not care who you are and what you're, I got to get things done for my people. And that's how I approach kind of teamwork.
And sometimes I get in trouble.

Speaker 23 Sometimes people are saying, how can you work with this person? I'm like, well, we just passed a veterans bill that's going to make it easier for people in my district and my state to get care.

Speaker 23 I'm fine with that. I don't like that guy.
We're not going to hang out and have a drink, but we got a bill done. And it's going to help people.

Speaker 23 And that's the measure to me of success, not like whether

Speaker 23 the the people I'm working with pass someone's imaginary test.

Speaker 3 You said something that just sparked a thought about learning lessons and winning in challenging places. And you just won last fall on the same ballot where the vice president lost, both narrowly.

Speaker 3 I mean, the gap was pretty small, but margins matter. Was there any lesson you took from that?

Speaker 3 Do you look back at that and think, man, it was chance, it was two coin flips, and mine landed heads, hers landed tails?

Speaker 3 Or do you think that there was something in particular about the type of your campaign you ran or the difference between national environment? I don't know.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I think it was two things. And she had a very short time, you know, to put together her campaign.
And, you know, that's all, obviously, we can rehash all that. But it's two things.

Speaker 23 Number one, my campaign, we talked exclusively about economic issues. Every single TV ad, every digital ad, every piece of mail, every speech.

Speaker 23 And then on the national level, people couldn't get a sense of what the big issues were for National Democrats, for Kamala Harris. She liked everything, or she believed in everything.

Speaker 23 And so they didn't know what were her priorities. And then, number two, it's much more ephemeral, but just some alpha energy.
I keep saying this. I think Democrats have lost their alpha energy.

Speaker 23 I think we need to be tougher. I think we need to have a plan.
We need to get like our coach energy up,

Speaker 23 which means you light a path through the dark tunnels so that people know where you're going.

Speaker 23 You hold people accountable when they screw up, and then you hug them and cry tears of joy when we succeed.

Speaker 23 And that in my union halls, in my small businesses, at rallies, whatever, I could feel people wanting that. And, you know, they see that in Trump.

Speaker 23 And I think I had just a couple extra ounces of it than the average Democrat.

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Speaker 3 Speaking of Alpha Energy, you went at the Secretary of Defense in a hearing a couple days ago over whether or not he'd have the courage to say no to Trump like Mark Esper did when it comes to military and going after American civilians.

Speaker 3 I'm wondering what you made of that exchange, as well as his performance earlier this morning, you know, talking about how Trump had the best bombing in the history of bombings.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's, I get particularly agitated about this because I was at the Pentagon for seven years. I was a CIA officer before then, but I know.

Speaker 23 how much is riding on a Secretary of Defense, things that happen in the dark of night that no average citizen even sees and how consequential that role is.

Speaker 23 And I sat through that entire hearing last week and was getting more and more frustrated because he was treating it as like

Speaker 23 a TV show.

Speaker 3 Weekend Fox and Friends.

Speaker 23 Yeah. And by the time I'm like the last person to go, right? I mean, I'm really next to last.
And so by the time it got to me, he was poo-pooing like basic questions around our Constitution.

Speaker 23 He was smirking.

Speaker 23 He was sort of not taking

Speaker 23 the level of seriousness I thought the issue deserved.

Speaker 23 And then seemed like completely baffled that I would ask about the orders that had been given to the uniformed military about what to do if the protests of unarmed civilians got more agitated.

Speaker 23 And it was like that was a crazy thing for me to be asking. And the exact same thing had been asked by Trump to his former, his predecessor, Secretary Esper.
It kind of broke me.

Speaker 23 and that's when we had our our heated exchange why is the military still in the streets in california do you have an answer to that um it seems insane to me every it's like everybody's moved on but they're still there with the national guard what what is up with that it is clear that the uniformed military and even the guard i think were not required in that situation it's and you know what if you're a violent protester and you you know hurt property damage property or you hurt someone else like you should be arrested and taken to jail that's an easy answer.

Speaker 23 But I think the president wanted to make this a political statement by showing that he could, by starting with California, by starting with LA, by playing on the use of social media to make it look like it's absolute chaos there, you know.

Speaker 23 So I think it was all for politics. And then he announced, of course, that he could go to other cities.
He has been eroding

Speaker 23 our democratic norms since he took office. And I think he wanted to demonstrate that he was willing to go ahead and do this if he saw fit.
So, shouldn't everybody just be like, what in the fuck?

Speaker 3 Why is the military still on the streets of Los Angeles? It's insane.

Speaker 23 Of course. And this is why when I had my hearing, it was the same day that we were ramping up, you know, to eventually we learn bomb Iran, right? So, like.

Speaker 23 The issue saturation, the time saturation, I think is the only reason why people aren't up in arms about it, certainly in California continually, because since they were deployed, we've gotten into military action in a third country.

Speaker 23 The president's giant bill is moving forward. He is effectively using a flood the zone approach.
And that is why we're not still talking about it.

Speaker 3 To Iran, what you mentioned before, Alija, what did you make of the sort of military engagement? at the top level? And then I'm curious about the sort of back and forth on the Intel.

Speaker 23 To be honest, as someone who's a Middle East specialist by training and did three tours in Iraq and watched Iranian terrorism and ballistic missile program and nuclear ambitions up close, it's difficult.

Speaker 23 I had two thoughts, all based on my tours in Iraq. One,

Speaker 23 the Iranian government are not good actors.

Speaker 23 And we have been working on this kind of action for 20 years, right?

Speaker 23 And so I didn't have a whole lot of love lost. for their nuclear facilities.
I'll tell you that.

Speaker 23 At the same time, my other thought was, I've seen what happens when a president thinks that a military action is going to be really quick, really easy, you know, slam dunk, and then 20 years later, we still have troops in Iraq, right?

Speaker 23 So, and I saw that up close and personal. So, and I just had a real trust issue with these guys in the White House and in the Defense Department being able to manage escalation, right?

Speaker 23 I mean, the Iranians shoot ballistic missiles at our base in Qatar, and they don't hit anyone, no one dies, thank God. But, like, what if their telemetry had been off?

Speaker 23 What if we hadn't been able to defend and it had hit a chow hall and killed 40 Americans? What would we be doing right now?

Speaker 23 Do you think Donald Trump would have just sat down and let 40 Americans be killed in cold blood and not felt the need to react? War has a way of escalating outside your planning.

Speaker 23 And I do not trust these guys to manage that escalation.

Speaker 23 But I got to be honest, I didn't cry like big, big tears for the Iranian government who, you know, have killed friends of mine when that action first took place.

Speaker 3 And that did happen. In the south of Israel, one of their missiles did get through.
So there was a chance of escalation there. A couple of people died in the south of Israel, sadly, after all this.

Speaker 3 All right. So lastly, then on the Intel question, there's a briefing today.

Speaker 3 There's a press conference. What is your sense of how effective it was?

Speaker 3 And are you worried at all that now the administration is going to have to like kind of keep up errors on how they were successful and that that lack of clarity on what the truth is and what the facts are might

Speaker 3 in some way hinder you know judgment in the future?

Speaker 23 Well, um, I just got out of the briefing and obviously classified, so I can't talk a lot about it. It was, you know, Tulsi Gabbard was not there.
That was very obvious.

Speaker 23 And when you don't have your director of national intelligence at a briefing, that sends a signal, I would say a couple of things.

Speaker 23 What is missing, I think, for most people is trust that any of the assessments that are going on by the career people are actually being read, absorbed by the president, right?

Speaker 23 The president's kind of spouting off about how awesome it was and it did this and it did that and he's contradicting his own DNI. And so you lose trust and then

Speaker 23 you get people who come in and walk you through the details. I actually think that this operation was significant.

Speaker 23 And I think while it will still take quite some time to figure out exactly what the battle damage was, exactly how far back it put their nuclear program, there is currently no air defenses over Iran.

Speaker 23 Like facilities were destroyed and not just the facilities that we went after.

Speaker 23 There was a pretty systematic approach to their facilities that I can say I feel strongly at least set them back significantly.

Speaker 23 Whether that's like permanent, whether it's this, that, and the other, we can quibble, but I think I will also say it's not just about like measuring, you know, amounts of uranium.

Speaker 23 It's also the message it sent to the Iranian regime. They sued for peace within 20 minutes of the United States striking.

Speaker 23 And I don't say this because I love Donald Trump, God knows, but just factually, they wanted a ceasefire and were ready to go in for a ceasefire. very quickly.

Speaker 23 And this country is a very proud country. You don't do that unless you know they've got you.
They have zero air defenses and zero like just protection for their facilities.

Speaker 23 And so whether or not the uranium is exactly where we think it is, we will figure that out. The intelligence community will figure that out.
It always takes time.

Speaker 23 But psychologically, I think we're in a different place. I'm not going to pretend that that's not real just because I don't like the president.

Speaker 3 I said that was the last question, but that answer gave me one follow-up, which is that just listening to that, I agree. Like if the Iranians are as weak as it seems based on all this,

Speaker 3 it's probably not in our acute national interest. But for Israel, isn't Israel going to want to go for? Isn't this the moment for Israel to try to encourage regime change in Iran?

Speaker 3 If they're this weak, like, mightn't this isn't that like a logical next step? And won't that create issues potentially with us?

Speaker 23 They've obviously also told Trump that they were going to stand by the ceasefire.

Speaker 23 I will just say this: while Iran clearly is militarily weak, when a country is attacked, including us, we tend to pull together. We tend to say, well, whatever our difference is,

Speaker 23 we're mad at the people who are attacking us. So I don't want to equate this attack as if like the regime is about to collapse and therefore Israel is going to go in and just tip it over.

Speaker 23 I think countries tend to

Speaker 23 pull together. when they've been attacked.
And to be honest, I just don't know what the view is on the ground right now. Managing B.B.
Netanyahu has clearly become part of Trump's full-time job.

Speaker 23 And he's going to have to keep up that full-time job, is my guess.

Speaker 3 All right. Senator Alyssa Slotkin, we'll put a link to the full speech in the notes here so folks can go check that out: the economic war plan for the Democratic Party and for the country.

Speaker 3 Appreciate it very much. Let's do it again soon.

Speaker 23 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 23 You

Speaker 23 people of the world

Speaker 1 I will tell him how you treated me

Speaker 1 If you treat me with love and kindness

Speaker 1 I will beg him to send you to heaven

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Speaker 1 when you see a good thing in this world

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Speaker 1 if you treat me the way you treated Jesus,

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Speaker 3 The Bullark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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