From Gaza to Los Angeles, our leaders have set the world on fire
As fires continue to rage in Los Angeles, news of an imminent ceasefire in Gaza are raising hopes across the world. All this comes as Trump is about to enter office, ensuring that the system responsible for these catastrophes will continue. Mehdi Hasan, founder of Zeteo News, and Francesca Fiorentini of “The Bitchuation Room” podcast join The Real News as the world burns, and seems on the edge of an even greater conflagration.
Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome to the Real News Network and welcome back to our weekly live stream. You can catch our team here live every Thursday, and you can find us reporting on this channel every week, lifting up the voices and stories of real people on the front lines of struggle around the world and bringing together a diverse, wide array of truth tellers, analysts and fighters for global working class justice. So be sure to subscribe to our channel like this video and share your thoughts with us in the live chat right now. Alright, well, happy New Year and all that 2025 has wasted no time throwing us back into the burning trash heap of history, and we’ve got no time to waste here. So let’s get rolling. We’ve got two powerhouse guests joining us today. Returning to the channel, we’ve got the one and only Francesca Fiorentini, correspondent, comedian, and host of the Situation Room podcast.
Francesca is also the former host and head writer of the Web series News broke on AJ Plus and she hosted the Special Red White and who on M-S-N-B-C. And joining us for the first time, we’ve got the one and only Medi Hassan world renowned broadcaster, former host of the Me Hassan Show on M-S-N-B-C, an author of numerous books including Win Every Argument, which was published in 2023. Medi is also a Guardian US columnist and he is the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of the Vital News Outlet eo. We’re going to start today’s stream in my home of Southern California where cataclysmic wildfires, which continue to explode in frequency and severity due to the manmade climate crisis, have killed at least 25 people displaced, tens of thousands obliterated entire neighborhoods and scorched wide swaths of the landscape. The entire region was on high alert this week with the National Weather Service warning that a new wave of intense winds could cause explosive fire growth.
But there’s some relief here in the latest reports. According to the New York Times this morning, dangerous winds were subsiding in the Los Angeles area on Thursday, delivering a boost for firefighting efforts, even as frustration grew among displaced residents desperate to return to their neighborhoods. After more than a week of devastating wildfires, nine days after the Blaze is ignited, no timeline has been announced for lifting many evacuation orders that have affected tens of thousands of Southern California residents. The Palisades Fire, the largest in the area, had burned nearly 24,000 acres and was 22% contained as of Thursday morning. According to Cal Fire, the Eaton fire covered more than 14,000 acres and was 55% contained. Now as the fires burn here at home across the world, Palestinians who have somehow managed to evade the civilization erasing fires of Israel’s genocidal assault for the past year and a half are rejoicing at the bombshell news that the bombing may finally end in a stunning development.
As Jeremy Scahill writes at Drop Site News, an agreement on a deal that will halt at least temporarily Israel’s 15 month long genocidal assault on Gaza was announced on Wednesday to scenes of celebration by Palestinians and Gaza. The agreement is divided into three phases, each spanning 42 days, and outline specifics on the first phase, including prisoner swaps, Israeli troop withdrawals, allowances for displaced Palestinians to return to their homes while leaving the details of the ensuing two phases to be determined through future negotiations. The deal will take effect on January 19th. The terms of the agreement being negotiated are nearly identical to what was on the table last May when outgoing President Joe Biden first announced it in his farewell address from the Oval Office last night, president Biden very noticeably tried to take credit for the deal being reached, but reports from inside Israel itself tell a very different story.
The Israeli newspaper Harts reported this week that Israeli sources say that the involvement of the incoming US administration led by Trump’s aggressive Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, revived hostage talks with Hamas. While Netanyahu’s propaganda machine claims that Trump has left him no choice. What happens inside his coalition will determine whether the Prime Minister approves the deal. So what does this all mean for Palestinians and Israelis, for the world and for us working people here in the heart of US Empire? What does that tell us about the legacy of the outgoing Biden administration and about the new international order in the Trump 2.0 era and with Trump’s inauguration just days away, what will next week reveal about what we’re actually facing in the coming four years with a second Trump administration and a fully magnified GOP effectively controlling all branches of government? So to dig into all of this, I want to go to our amazing guest, Medi Hassan and Francesca Fiorentini.
And a quick note to all of you watching live. We’re going to be talking with Medi and Francesca for the next hour, but we’ll be responding to your questions from the live chat in the last half hour of the stream. So if you’ve got thoughts or questions, please share them in the chat. Alright, Francesca, I want to come to you first sis, because you are back home in LA right in the middle of the madness and we’ve been following your social media updates on the wildfires for the past week. And first of all, I really just want to say that I and the whole Real news team have been thinking of you, your friends, your family, and we are sending you all our love and solidarity in these apocalyptic ass times. I want to ask if we can start with having you just lay out what the past week and a half have been like for you, what you want most people who don’t live in SoCal, to know about what you and others there have been seeing, feeling, experiencing, and where do things stand now,
Francesca Fiorentini:
That’s a huge question, but thank you so much for having me back and thank you for yes, all the kind words. And my heart also is going out to all the people who have lost everything. My sister-in-law lost everything and her family, but so many people are in this position and I just want everyone to know that we’re relying on mutual aid and solidarity from communities. That is what is happening. That is who is around right now. People are coming back to their homes, but the air quality is not okay. The A QI doesn’t measure things like toxic chemicals burning from electronics or toys or old homes that might have asbestos in it. There’s no way to measure that. Nobody’s out here telling us how to stay safe, what to do, helping us with air filtration systems, which can often be incredibly expensive. It is all person to person.
It is Facebook mom groups to community organizations that were already on the ground. I actually recently just did a piece for EO specifically about the people who are coming together in this moment to literally save lives. And one of those people are day laborers, migrant day laborers, shout out to the day Laborers Organizing Network and the Pasadena Worker Center. They are organizing day laborers who often have experience in things like landscaping. They know how to handle a chainsaw to get rid of some of this debris that is blocking people’s homes, has fallen on their cars, on and on and on. It is the people, and I hate that. I hate that we only have one another, but also it is a reminder that we are all we have. That push comes to shove. We are woefully unprepared in this country for this kind of climate chaos.
We are woefully unprepared as we were under covid for the kinds of pandemics that will be, again, all too commonplace with our public health infrastructure completely decimated and it’s only going to get worse. So it is really gutting, it is apocalyptic, it is scary, but it is also heartening. And the silver lining is to see some of this solidarity. And I think honestly, people just getting offline stop participating in the conspiracy theories and which again, are really, really running rampant right now. There is a lot more to say about what happens next. I’ll just say that LA has a massive fight on our hands and to me it also plays into the questions that have arisen ever since the 2020 George Floyd uprising about where our money in this city goes. Now, I want to caveat that by saying that no amount of money could have stopped a hundred mile winds spreading embers here and there and just lighting fire after fire after fire.
That is climate change. But on an LA specific level, we have a budget that is out of control, skewed towards the cops. We need to change that. And so many grassroots organizations here have been blowing the whistle. And as our elected officials become more representative, you’ve got a shout out to YIs Hernandez on city council who Soto Martinez also to Naia Ramen and finally recently elected Isabelle Rado. All of them are progressives and three of them who were in office at the time voted against that budget that gave more money to the police than any other place. So there is a national conversation we can also talk about that I’d love to talk about, but that is what’s happening here locally. There’s a fight ahead of us and it is on every front.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, Francesca, and just to everyone watching not from Southern California, I am sure the images of the Santa Ana winds blowing those embers was quite shocking. They are nothing new to us, but this speed and this late, or I guess this early in the year that is, I remember my own parents being evacuated from their house in 2008 because the Santa S had blown embers over to our side of Brea and the fires were getting close to our home. This happens all the time, but the speed, the intensity, the ferocity, the fact that these winds are blowing this much in January when normally there’s something we expect in the fall like these to say nothing of the mega drought that we’ve been in the southwest for the past 25 years. I mean, there is so much to talk about here.
Francesca Fiorentini:
I’ve only lived here for a few years and I literally don’t know when the Santa Ana winds are supposed to happen every year. It’s like, no, it’s supposed to be in October. No, they’re in August. It’s very funny that no one actually knows when they’re happening. But yes, what hasn’t happened is rain in nine months
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I guess the Santa Ana’s are just year round at this point. So not great folks. And I also want to highlight what you said, Francesca, about just the impact of the diss and misinformation and medi. I want to come to you on this question in a second because it really strikes me as someone who was interviewing folks on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina in the wake of the hurricane a few months ago. They were saying the exact same thing about how Trump’s tweets, about fema far right conspiracy theories about anything immigrants, that it was actively hurting relief efforts and that those relief efforts were largely being driven by mutual aid, by people on the ground. So I want folks to really take that to heart and think about what that means for us as a society that is going to be facing compounding cataclysms more frequently.
Now, medi, I want to bring you in here first to give you a chance to respond to anything that Francesca said there. But also as someone who has worked in the upper echelons of broadcast news, I really want to get your perspective on how the media has responded to these fires from the manufacturer of bullshit. Pseudo stories driven by whatever Trump or Musk said about the fires to the media’s proven unwillingness to report on these environmental disasters in a continuing context of climate change. And actually in a searing piece that we published at The Real News earlier this week by columnist Adam Johnson, Adam points out that a survey of nightly news coverage from the first full day of the LA Fire showed that in 16 minutes of coverage, A-B-C-N-B-C and CBS Nightly News broadcast did not mention climate change once in their Wednesday morning coverage of the LA fires.
Neither the New York Times Daily Podcast nor the New York Times Morning newsletter address climate change at all. Severe weather events when they’re reported on at all, typically because they’re within the US are indexed in the oh deism genre of reporting where politics and human decision-making are stripped away entirely. And all one can do is look on helplessly and say, oh dear, there’s no villain victims, but no victimizer, no political actors or politics at all. And above all, no explicit or implicit call to action just agency free human suffering that may sort of kind of be linked to erratic weather patterns with no sense there’s anything the viewer or reader can actually do about it. It’s just vaguely sad and everyone is expected to chip in a few dollars to GoFundMe gaw at the suffering and move on to the next extreme weather event right around the corner in a matter of weeks. Meam, please, your thoughts on the media response to the California wildfires and your advice for viewers about how we need to navigate this chaotic information ecosystem to get the answers we need in times of emergency.
Mehdi Hasan:
It’s a very troubling time when it comes to media misinformation. I am somebody who believes that most of our issues that we have in society right now do go back to the media, right? I’m one of these people who thinks that we need to have long, hard conversations about the information era that we’re in. I think people on the left have not done that. I think people on the right are enjoying the fact that people on the left haven’t done that. It’s became fashionable for a while to say, oh, you can’t blame the media for everything. Now look, a lot of this comes back to how you get your info. You mentioned earlier about the pseudo manufacturing of bullshit news. Adam’s spot on in his piece about the O ideaism and the idea from liberal media that if you talk about climate change, you’re talking about something political, right?
The right have so successfully turned science into a partisan issue that you no longer can talk about vaccines or climate science or any other obvious undeniable scientific issue without sounding like a liberal or a progressive or a leftist. It’s actually genius on their part that they’ve managed to turn science, objective science into a right left issue. And so of course, the liberal media cowed by the right doesn’t want to touch issues that they think at a time of storms, at a time of tornadoes, at a time of fires. You can’t talk about politics and therefore you can’t talk about climate change because climate change is coded political. And that is the success story that they’ve done on the liberal media side, of course, on the right wing media side, what they have done. And Adam mentions no villain, no victimizer, that’s the liberal view of the world. The right are the masters of understanding the importance of having a villain, right? What they have done so successfully is they’ve tapped into human beings basic psyches, basic fears, and understood that for any political crisis you have to have a bad guy. Democrats have failed to do that. Liberals have consistently failed to do that. The right have rightly understood the need for a villain. Now, the villains they’ve picked are horrible Mexicans, Muslims, trans kids, foreigners,
Maximillian Alvarez:
Immigrants, DI caused the fire
Mehdi Hasan:
DRT, and they apply that model to any crisis. It doesn’t matter what it is. So fires come along. I tweeted this earlier this week. It’s actually kind of admirable from a kind of, if you put your evil genius hat on, you have to admire the ability for the right to turn in a matter of days, some might say hours, an issue of objective, climate change, natural disaster. What do we do about this policy-wise into, no, it’s about the water hydrants and the pressure and the water hydrants and it’s about the number of helicopters. And why don’t we have drones in the skies? And why was Karen Bass in Ghana? And we can go down the list of what they’ve managed to do in terms of empty reservoirs and DEI, firefighters and all of the rest.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Why didn’t they use their weather machines?
Mehdi Hasan:
Why didn’t they use their measurements to control it for good, not evil? And that is actually admirable. I’m sorry. It’s amazing because a lot of people, I think 10 years ago, five years ago would’ve said, wait till climate change starts hitting the us. Wait till people start dying from it, then everyone will be forced to take it seriously. Actually turns out, no, even if you’re losing Americans in front of your eyes, they can make you look elsewhere. That is the power of propaganda. And in the old days, it would’ve been Rupert Murdoch and Fox. Today it is Elon Musk and social media and Mark Zuckerberg and Co and Musk has of course been driving a lot of this. There was that hilarious moment where he asked firefighters about water pressure. They were like, no, we were good on water. But that is the power of propaganda and misinformation.
And I was talking to a colleague earlier about this. We’ve had the right so successfully hijack the debate about media information, say it’s censorship, censorship. And Mark Zuckerberg last week came out and said, censorship, we’re going to get rid of our fact checking. And actually, no, I’m sorry. The debate has to be about content moderation. It has to be about responsible journalism. When people are dying, we can have inane abstract debates about free speech, but people are dying in a pandemic. Yeah, I do want Facebook to take down posts saying, put ivermectin in your body or inject yourself with disinfectant. Yeah, I do want people to be able to say, you know what? In the middle of a hurricane in North Carolina, don’t stay in your home because if you leave the government are going to seize your property, you might die even the local Republican congressman at that time. So I do think when people’s lives are on the lines, it’s very easy to have abstract First Amendment discussions. But in public emergencies, we can’t just have unlimited misinformation and people say, oh, that’s authoritarian. No, it’s how it’s always been
Until very recently when these libertarian freaks pretend that there should be no restrictions on their lies and gaslighting. So look, we need to have hard conversations about all this stuff. The moment Elon bus bought Twitter in 2022, that in itself told us the Democrats and the liberal side of the spectrum were not ready for this fight. The fact that they just rolled over and can you imagine if George Soros next month tried to buy Fox? You think the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress will be like, yeah, free market. Do what you want to do though they would do everything they could to stop it because they understand the power of those platforms. Liberals and leftists have not understood the power of those platforms,
Francesca Fiorentini:
Right? Or the efforts to reign them in move so glacially slowly, although they begin, and that inevitably if you don’t actually break up big tech, it will just get eaten by a bigger and bigger and bigger fish. And I want to just say that just on social media, misinformation and disinformation, it’s truly leading to online vigilantism that is terrifying so that everyone thinks that they are a particular sleuth to find out who started the fires, likely a downed power line. You dumb idiots, everything else that started wildfires here in this state of California. It’s a down power line. Okay? So just to say that it is really getting into a terrifying level of vigilantism and people are using apps to do exactly this. So it’s taking misinformation and applying it in real world and making citizens arrests and things like this.
Mehdi Hasan:
But also just to go back to your original question about what can people do who are not crazy freaks. I think people watching this need to understand that A, don’t play the game, participate in the kind of crap that Francesca highlighted and you’ve highlighted, but also, I mean the death of expertise and respect for expertise. I mean, look, I’m on the fence on this one. Elites have lied to us for a long time. A lot of foreign policy experts got us into Iraq and defended Gaza. But I do worry since the pandemic, when you saw Dr. Fauci became the villain of the right, not Donald Trump, the man who said, put disinfectant in your body, not Republican politicians who refuse to mask or do basic mitigation measures, but Fauci became the villain of the right wing movement. Scientists started going around with bodyguards. People like my friend Peter Hotez in Texas had people turning up at his home to try and film him. I think that is a reminder of there’s a great meme doing the rounds. Last week I was a covid expert This week I’m an expert on water pressure in California.
Speaker 4:
People
Mehdi Hasan:
Log in and overnight everyone on Twitter becomes an expert on whatever the de jore story is. That’s a real problem. Social media is really empowered, and Bill Bird did a great line on Jimmy Kimmel the other night saying some fuckhead in his underwear in his mother’s basement is now suddenly the world’s expert on California water pressure systems like get a grip on everyone, especially in the US where academia is seen as some kind of shadowy force. People are ivory towers are not to be trusted. It is really weird that we don’t go, oh, there’s a crisis about wildfires. Let’s ask the wildfire experts what we should do. There’s a crisis about covid. Let’s ask vaccination experts and disease experts and infectious disease experts watch No in this country. Let’s ask a pundit on cable news. What we should do.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yeah, I mean there’s a lot to say. I do just want to talk about really quickly, just add to me’s point about a villain and creating villains. And obviously we know that the villain in the LA fire story is the fossil fuel industry, and that is so clear. But there’s a lot of sub villains within that. And right now you’ve got Republicans who are talking about tying aid relief for California to a budget that would enshrine the Donald Trump tax cuts four billionaires into law. So double whammy, quite literally the 1% that gave us these wildfires that giving us these once in a century flood, they’re going to enshrine that 1% even more. So the enemy is the billionaire class, and it is no clearer than when you look at climate chaos and what the billionaire class continues to, but people bring on all of us. Go ahead.
Mehdi Hasan:
Frankly, people just don’t see it, right? This is the problem right now, it’s obvious it’s the billionaire class. It’s obvious it’s the fossil fuel industry, but I’m talking about even apolitical people, not like fox junkies, but such as the power of the social media discussion and the background noise and such as discipline of the right wing media machine and rightwing pundits and rightwing politicians to say the message in unison in a way that Democrats or liberals or leftists don’t, is that today, for example, if you ask people, oh, California, was it really bad? Should there be condition? I think the average person would say, yeah, yeah, but what about Texas? It’s mismanaged. What about Texas? I don’t hear the same. We don’t talk about Texas in the same way. Max mentioned at the start, 25 people are dead. That’s 25. Too many. I’m sure that death hole’s going to go up in Texas. 250 people is the government’s death to 700 is the unofficial death toll from the slow storms. A couple of years back when Ted Cruz fled to Cancun, right when the Texas power grid shut down, there were no consequences from that. No one talks about tying aid or conditions for Texas. There were no political people like Karen Bass’s career is over. Greg Abbott got reelected after that. Ted Cruz got reelected after that. Why? Because again, liberals in the left are not very good at creating villains in the same way that the right does
Francesca Fiorentini:
Because they often receive money from the exact same class that the right does. I mean, we have villains set out before us. Look, the fact is the matter is that 10 years ago we didn’t have names like Elon Musk or Mark Andreessen or Sam Altman or whomever else, other billionaires who were in the rooms with Donald Trump. We didn’t have those names. The income disparity was already concentrating, but we didn’t have the names.
Mehdi Hasan:
Now
Francesca Fiorentini:
We’ve got literal names. These emblems of late stage
Mehdi Hasan:
Capitalism, they’re literally going to be sitting on stage next week in the inauguration.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yes. And we still can’t name them. And I just want to say Democrats are not off the cuff here. I just want to shout out that the Lever had an incredible report about how the California Insurance Commissioner, who oversees fire insurance in this state has received contributions from the insurance industry and is currently in 2023, passed a reform that would allow the buck to be passed to consumers versus the insurance agency because insurers are leaving California, we all know this. They’re leaving Florida, they’re leaving everywhere, and instead they’re
Mehdi Hasan:
Not leaving Florida. Florida is a perfect place in America. What are you talking about?
Francesca Fiorentini:
Well, actually, ironically, Florida has more checks and balances looking at the insurance industry there than in California. So all to say Ricardo Lara is his name. He’s going to be throughout LA if you see him and if he’s giving you a good information, great, alright, but also he has taken money from the insurance industry to specifically pass reforms that would make consumers premiums go up and let them off easy. They would have to do very, very little. They have to try to cover people for two years, 5% more coverage. But if it gets too expensive, they’re going to leave. Meanwhile, they’re literally hiring private firefighting forces that are protecting the buildings that they insure to say nothing of the Republicans like Rick Caruso, who also hired private firefighters to protect his property and wants to be mayor. So again, it always gets worse and we are going to see that come Monday how all of this is going to get worse.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And just to add one more thing there on just how absurd this entire situation is and how villainous it is, and then I want us to kind of pivot and talk about Gaza here in the next half hour. But my colleague Dave Zin was talking to us about this earlier this week. It’s like the Monday night football game that the Rams were playing was supposed to take place in Los Angeles. It got moved to Arizona. Everyone on the media, in the sports media was talking about, oh, what a great effort it was to move this game to the State Farm Stadium in Arizona when State Farm are the pieces of shit who just revoked a bunch of people’s home insurance a month ago before these fires. It is absolute madness. And one more point I wanted to make because me, you mentioned the need for expertise and verifiable information and authoritative information.
I want to also compliment that with information and firsthand accounts and stories and human faces of the working people who are being affected by this. And that is what we do here at The Real News. I remember when the Baltimore Bridge collapsed last year and all these same pieces of shit were on right wing media saying, oh, it was DEI that caused the mismanagement here. That collapsed the bridge. I was there talking to the immigrant workers who were coworkers of the men who died on that bridge. I was talking to longshore workers about how the shipping industry has made these container ships bigger, filled with more dangerous materials. Two to 3% of them are only abiding by US port regulations. The others are flags of convenience ships. Like we’re not talking about that. Instead, people are running around talking about bullshit like DEI. The same way that I was talking to folks in Asheville who were dealing with the effects of that hurricane the same way I talked to folks who were living near Eagle Pass in Texas who had a bunch of right wing idiots show up in their town and cause more disruption than the undocumented immigrants who were supposedly crossing the border.
But then all these right-wing nut jobs got there and there was no one there. I mean, I want folks East Palestinian, Ohio where the train derailed. I’ve been there multiple times. I’ve interviewed countless people from that community Immediately once that train derailed and those people’s lives were turned upside down and they are still sick, they are still suffering. I talk to them every week. It was a media circus over who’s more to blame for this Trump or Biden, who’s going to get there first? Trump or Biden. Everyone just cares about that. And then they stopped caring about the people who were right at the center of it. And that includes you and me and any one of us who are in line to suffer this kind of catastrophe in the future. And sadly, there are going to be more of them whether they’re caused by industrial accidents, climate change, what have you.
Mehdi Hasan:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, please.
Mehdi Hasan:
What you’re saying is we didn’t do enough coverage of James Woods’s house. Almost burning down what you’re saying, the real
Maximillian Alvarez:
Story. Yes. I’m saying my heart bleeds certainly for James Woods, but I will say on that note that I am deeply disappointed in so many people on the so-called progressive left who were talking about my home southern California as if these fires only burned James Woods’s house and that they were something to be celebrated when I’m seeing people who are being displaced who live in homes that they couldn’t afford to buy now, but maybe they’ve been there for a generation and the property values have gone up. So they’re not all these rich people that you’re pretending like are sympathetic characters
Mehdi Hasan:
Conversation perhaps for another day. But having worked at M-S-N-B-C and seen CNN how it goes, I say this as someone who moved to the US from another country, there’s also an east coast bias with our media, right? The West Coast is another country for people in New York and DC LA is not the same value, important status. I think I saw something a week ago in the midst of all the LA Fires houses destroyed 27,000 acres. I think apartment block was on fire in New York and it was live footage suddenly from this one building in New York on fire. And that’s always going to be the case. One building in New York will always get more coverage in the entire city outside of the east coast. And there is that longstanding problem, bipartisan problem. Forget right or left, there is east coast bias amongst our media. That’s the
Francesca Fiorentini:
Fact. Yeah, for sure. And also just really quickly, I mean, I was tuning into local news for the first time in a real ever because you’re watching local news and you’re like, oh, okay, obviously I’m using my husband’s family’s login to get to the log. That’s
Mehdi Hasan:
What good news was made for fire trucks, things on fire,
Francesca Fiorentini:
But right, but exactly. But again, a lot of people have, don’t have cable or don’t just don’t have their TV set up or whatever, only doing streaming. And so then for breaking news, and this is why the ownership of Twitter is incredibly important. They are going to Twitter. And if you’re not doing any fact checking on social media, then we are so
Mehdi Hasan:
Far, Twitter used to be a great place in a crisis. Now it’s the worst place in a
Francesca Fiorentini:
Crisis. Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Speaking of terrible places, I want to turn our eyes to the other side of the world where we have been watching one of the greatest crimes of humanity unfold over the past year and a half on platforms like Twitter. I want to turn to Gaza and Israel, where as of right now, there is both hope and trepidation about whether or not this truce deal reached this week will actually be accepted and implemented by Israel. The Associated Press reported just this morning, a last minute crisis with Hamas holding up Israeli approval of a long awaited agreement to pause the fighting in the Gaza strip and release dozens of hostages. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday. Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of people across the war ravage territory. The Israeli cabinet was expected to vote on the deal Thursday, but Netanyahu’s office said they won’t meet until Hamas backs down accusing it of reneging on parts of the agreement in an attempt to gain further concessions.
Without elaborating on that, a senior Hamas official said, the group is committed to the agreement announced by the mediators medi. I want to come back to you here and then Francesca, please hop in after we still don’t know if this ceasefire deal will take effect as planned this Sunday. The next 72 hours are going to be very critical and very intense. But if the deal does take effect, what will this mean and what will it not mean for Gaza, for Palestinians and for Israel and Israeli society? And that is the single most important question right now. So only once we’ve all addressed that, then let’s talk about what these developments tell us about the legacy of Biden’s administration and what the hell we can expect in geopolitics and the Trump 2.0 era.
Mehdi Hasan:
I mean, they’re interlinked in the sense that I’m thoroughly cynical about everything that happens in the Middle East, and I’m very cynical about the Israeli government because they’re a group of very cynical people and all American negotiators, whether the Democrats or Republicans don’t have the best interests of the people at Gaza at hand. Let’s be honest about that. Look, if this is real in any shape or form, even in a temporary form, that’s a good thing. Because even if you get an hour where a bomb stop falling, that is some kind of relief for one of the most depressed peoples on earth. The Palestinians of Gaza who spent the last 16th months being Genocided, right? Having their capacity to continue living existing, destroyed in front of our eyes, live streamed to us as the Irish lawyer for the South African government said exactly a year ago at the ICJ, this is the first genocide where people are live streaming their own genocide, begging for help from the rest of the world.
And a year later, here we are with no change. So if we’ve even got an hour of a pause, I’ll take it and Palestinian and Gaza will take it. Now, that doesn’t mean though we have to start celebrating and cheering and suggesting that there’s peace in the Middle East, peace in our time. That’s bullshit. And I’m very skeptical about this deal, not just because Netanyahu today said they’re not going to vote on it, not just because Ben Vere his far right terrorist, convicted terrorist. National Security Minister has threatened to resign if the deal goes through, and that means the Netanyahu government would fall and Netanyahu is all about self-preservation. But separate to that, just look at the deal itself. A, it’s the exact same deal that was on the table in May of last year that the Israelis rejected, but the Americans lied and said, Hamas rejected be.
It involves three phases, right? 42 days for the first phase, 42 days for the second phase. It’s really the second and third phases where the actual long-term impact of this kicks in, in terms of withdrawal of Israeli forces, in terms of any kind of humanitarian reconstruction. Those two phases, a lot of people are saying, we will never get to, right? Netanya is only interested in phase one if we even get to phase one where you do a limited release of prisoners and then he goes back to bombing net. Neil has made it very clear that he’s not going to stop the war. He doesn’t want to stop the war, and that’s why he’s never been interested in a ceasefire. He’s only interested in pauses. So some people spent the last 24 hours attacking me on social media because I was one of the people who said, Trump will be worse on Gaza than Biden.
So there’s a lot of gotcha moments going on right now said, well, look, Trump was better. He did it in 24 hours. What Biden couldn’t do in a year, I would say, let’s wait and see. Right? I’m old enough to know that Donald Trump is not what you think is not what you see. And people who have celebrated Donald Trump early tend to find egg on their faces. So I hope I’m wrong. I hope that in a year’s time or six months time, people will say, Mary, you were wrong. Donald Trump was much better for the people of Gaza than Joe Biden, but the man is not even president yet. Please stop the premature celebrations. Let’s see if this ceasefire happens on the Sunday. Let’s see if it holds. Let’s see if it actually delivers peace. Let’s see if we get any kind of reconstruction, because stopping the bombs is only one part of it.
Garzas cannot continue to exist in a place that is uninhabitable, which groups experts say will take, what, 80 years to rebuild 42 million tons of rubble. So I want to see what happens first. Already today, we’ve seen Donald Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor, waltz, Michael Waltz, I think his name is saying that we support Israel’s right to go back into Gaza whenever they like. We’ve seen Marco Rubio, who’s going to be the Secretary of State saying he’s going to lift all sanctions on the settlers that Joe Biden brought in the limited sanctions on the limited far right settlers. So this is far from done, the people who think it’s all done now of being very naive and have learned nothing from the first four years of Trump. But look, having said all that, I know you want to get into it a bit. Clearly Trump’s done more than Biden in the last week in terms of applying pressure. That’s undeniable. And it’s embarrassing for Joe Biden and the Democrats that that’s the case.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I mean, think, oh, Francesca, please hop in.
Francesca Fiorentini:
No, no, no, go ahead.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No, I was just going to say, I think everyone is rushing to do the thing we were just talking about in la, right? It is like rushing to have a take on what’s happening while it’s still unfolding, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. And so I think everyone, especially on the MAGA Trump side, is trying to kind of sell this as a Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan hostage kind of moment before we even know if the deal’s going to be accepted.
Mehdi Hasan:
Well, it simply, you mentioned the hostage Treasury because of course in 1968 you had Nixon, Vietnam, and Kissinger. We discover later that Kissinger was treacherous and was passing messages to the Vietnamese saying, we’ll do a better deal. Don’t stop the war now. And many more Americans and Vietnamese, of course, and Cambodians and lotions died because of that. We know that in 1980 now, and there’s a great new book from Craig Unger on this that Jimmy Carter was very close to getting the hostages out of Iran, but Ronald Reagan said to Iranians, don’t do it. I’ll give you a better deal and I’ll get you weapons. And this may be the third time that happened. We know that Netanyahu and Trump met at Mar-a-Lago last year. We don’t know what was discussed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump said, make sure you hold off till I’m office.
So I get the credit. We know Trump doesn’t give a shit about Palestinian life. It’s all about his ego and showing that he is a deal maker. He’s a successful president. He wanted this done by January the 20th. By the way, it’s not going to be done by January the 20th. Can I just point that out? Everyone? I love the way we grade Donald Trump on a curve, even the left grades Donald Trump on a curve. He literally said he wanted all the hostages released by January. There won’t be hostages won’t be released by January the 20th. The deal only begins on the 19th. So this is the man who also said he would end the Ukraine War in 24 hours. Right? Good luck with that. Apparently it’s going to be over on Monday night. So this is the kind of bullshit that unfortunately left us to have allowed Trump to be graded on a curve about. And like I said, I hope to be proved wrong, but to say that I’m wrong right now, or that those of us who warned against Trump on the issue of Gaza are wrong because there’s this ceasefire deal that hasn’t been even implemented or voted on by the Israelis yet. Calm the F down.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yeah, no, I 100% agree, but I will say I was surprised when I heard it came through. I was like, oh, completely shocked. And it’s amazing that Netanyahu hasn’t even agreed to it, that it hasn’t even gone forward. But the narrative of Trump got a ceasefire is already out there. Right. And again, messaging, right, what we talked about earlier, they masters. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it’s the kind of the Bill bar. There was no collusion headline. Everyone was like, oh, okay. There was no collusion and that made it. That’s the headline. And so Trump got this, but again, I was reacting to it sort of in real time on my show, and I was like, damn, it really does. And here’s the thing we need to be very careful about, not as Nora Kott lawyer, a Palestinian lawyer, awesome academic said, don’t give Trump any flowers on this. It is really a revelation of Joe Biden and the inability to actually get a ceasefire after the professing of working round the clock. I mean, I think maybe the differences between the Nixon and the Carter examples medi is that I don’t know if Joe Biden really was working on a ceasefire around the clock. I mean, I don’t think he was actually invested.
Mehdi Hasan:
He certainly didn’t apply pressure. I mean, this is the deal, to be fair to Biden, this is the deal that they put on the table that the American,
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yes,
Mehdi Hasan:
He never applied the pressure. I wrote my first column for The Guardian last February, and it was a column about how Ronald Reagan called man be in 1982 when the Israelis were Besieging Beirut. He saw a child on TV with no arms. He rang be and said, this is a Holocaust. And be said, how dare you use the word Holocaust, but no one called Reagan and Antisi in those days. You could say that. He said, this is a Holocaust. You need to stop this now in 20 minutes. The Israelis stopped bombing Beirut. I said, at the time, in February of 2024, Biden can make a phone call and end this genocide. The very serious people, the very savvy, smart people. Oh, no, it’s not that simple. You can’t do that. Actually, you can, right? Steve Witkoff went to Israel and said to Netanyahu, it’s got to be done in time.
I don’t care if you’re on a holiday, but look, how much of it was pressure, how much of it was mutually beneficial behavior by Netanya and Trump? We don’t know yet. The thing about Trump is half the things come out in memoirs and books. We have reporters sitting on stories that they write about in bestselling books like a year later. You’re like, why didn’t you tell us that at the time? How many New York Times and Washington Boast and Politico reporters have done that? So I would like to hear what happened at Mar-a-Lago last year. I would like to hear what was actually said between Witkoff and Netanya. How much of it was pressure and Netanyahu’s arm being twisted? How much of it was Netanyahu and Woff and Trump saying, this is good. We’ll make it look like you pressured me into this because it’s mutually beneficial for it to happen this way.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Sure. And obviously, who knows the back deals that were promised around the West Bank and annexation and the Miria Adelson money and all that,
Mehdi Hasan:
The Israeli press called a gift bank. Francesca, they’ve said that Trump gave
Maximillian Alvarez:
Lifting sanctions on Pegasus, which could come in very handy for an authoritarian regime. Yeah, I mean, I think, again, a lot of these details are going to come out in the wash, but I think one distinction that came up in the great interview that Jeremy Scahill did on Drop Site news yesterday with Palestinians reacting to the news was a sort of distinction that when it comes to Biden, he’s very merits ideological in this regard. Like he’s expressed himself as a full fledged Zionist who wants his legacy or wanted his legacy to kind of be pegged to standing with Israel. Whereas Trump’s is more transactional, and this guy’s got a whole lot of things he wants to do right here. He’s seen how much Gaza has tanked. Biden’s administration hampered that administration. He doesn’t want have to deal with that. I do think that’s a useful distinction while, but I wanted to ask what you guys said.
Mehdi Hasan:
Can I just jump in very briefly, just push back a little bit. I hear that that Trump is transactional. The implication of that is that there is some consistent strategy to what Trump says or does. I refuse to accept that Trump is only consistently inconsistent. So okay, he’s transactional in the sense that he’s a businessman. He likes to make money for him and his kids. He likes to do deals and wrote books about it and sees himself as a dealmaker. I get that. But in actual reality, the man is a narcissist. He’s a dumbass, he’s an ignoramus. He’s a vain, thin-skinned little man. And the idea that people can’t manipulate him, he is absurd. He’s the most easily manipulated politician of our lifetime. So when people say, oh, well, he’s transactional, he’s not an ideological Zion. Even if I accept all that, which I’m not sure I do, he’s surrounded by people who are, you’re telling me that Marco Rubio, and as I say, Michael Waltz, and what about Mike, Mike Huckabee Huckabee now who says there’s no such thing as Palestinians.
There’s no such thing as a West Bank. I just want to know what’s Mike Huckabee thinking for the last 48 hours? He’s okay with this. Clearly stuff has been going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about. There is long-term ramifications that we don’t know about, and I think we have to really be skeptical of this idea that somehow Donald Trump’s going to just do deals with the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris, and that’s why he’s different to Biden. Who’s this lifelong Zionist? No, I mean, first of all, he’s not even fricking president yet. We’ve got four years of shit coming down the line. Talk to me at the end of four years, if at the end of four years, Palestinians are free, if at the end of four years Iran hasn’t been bombed, if at the end of four years there isn’t another genocide in Yemen, then fine. I’ll be the first to come on here and say, I was a hundred percent wrong about Trump. But come on, if we learn nothing from the first Trump term,
Francesca Fiorentini:
I mean, I think transactional can be taken in two different ways. Transactional, it sounds like diplomacy, but I think when people say it right, when people say it, it’s more like anything for flattery. And to me, I think he is able to read the room, I think, and there’s a line from one of his rallies over the last year that really stuck with me where he said, he goes, well, and Biden, he’s terrible on Israel. He hates Israel, hates the Jews. He was basically trying to, he does the brow beating of Jewish voters. So he was saying he hates Jews, but I guess he hates Palestinians a little bit more. And there was a smile, and I was like that because even he knew what he was saying was bullshit, and that actually Biden is helping genocide the Palestinian people. And there was that smirk as he understood that all of the Democratic voters that now you got Paul proves that so many people voted on Gaza.
Mehdi Hasan:
I mean, in that sense, he’s an evil genius. The man is both an Ior Aus and an evil genius. I mean, he went to Dearborn, Michigan, which Biden didn’t dare to go to Kamala Harris didn’t dare to go to, he went to Dearborn, Michigan and said, I am a peacemaker. I will bring peace to the Middle East. Liz Cheney will get Muslims killed. Don’t listen to Liz and Kamala. I’m the peacemaker, right? And people lapped it up, which is nonsense. Go back and look at Trump’s first term again. I know Americans have the memory of a goldfish. The guy increased bombing in Iraq, bombed Syria, increased drone strikes in Pakistan, and Somalia helped MBS genocide. Yemen, except I can go through the whole record. The idea that Donald Trump was some kind of anti-war anti interventionist candidate is a complete myth. But again, as you pointed out with the Bill Barr report, he’s transactional. He didn’t collude with Russia. He’s a master of getting these one line narratives about himself out there, which somehow people stick to. He’s Teflon Don,
Francesca Fiorentini:
And it’s more than him. I mean, I think medi that it is this desire for a demagogue to just take the reins. And I think everyone has that. I mean, I’d load to think that I would have that in, but there is even liberals or liberal media, there’s like, Hey, maybe he’s such an idiot. He’s smart there,
Mehdi Hasan:
Strong man. I mean, I spoke to No Gaana Paul yesterday in our live town hall as aeo, the Israeli journalists, and she said, look, even Israeli leftist politicians are buying into this idea that he was a strong man who came in and just beat up Netanyahu and made him do it. And she didn’t buy that narrative either. But even leftists, see that. And by the way, one thing I would say about the American left is what I’ve seen over the last few days and during the election campaign, is in the desperate desire to kick Joe Biden, which I totally get and understand, I’ve got a piece coming out in about 10 minutes on Joe Biden’s awful legacy on Gaza. The problem is where I split with some of my fellow leftists in America is this idea that in order to do Biden down, you have to promote Trump.
This idea that Trump is, I can be very critical of everything Biden did without drinking Kool-Aid about Donald Trump. And that is what Im seeing now in the last few days. The reason why we’re seeing the narrative of Trump, the peacemaker, Trump did this cease. It’s not just the right pushing. There’s a lot of people on the left trying to attack Biden by saying, look, Trump did what you couldn’t do. And I get all that, but that only helps the Trump narrative. Like I said, we don’t know the backstory to the ceasefire deal yet. I don’t know if it’s real. I don’t know if Trump went and twisted Benjamin net Neo’s arm and made him do something he didn’t want to do. We don’t know what was offered in return. We don’t know what the long-term consequences are for Gaza and the West Bank, but they’re again, graded on a curve. It’s not just the right and liberal media that grade Trump on a curve. I think progressives do it too, because we are understandably so frustrated with the Democrats
Francesca Fiorentini:
That
Mehdi Hasan:
We give Republicans a pass on things we wouldn’t give Democrats a pass on.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yeah, I agree with that. I think we’re trying
Mehdi Hasan:
To cajole anti the entire establishment.
Francesca Fiorentini:
I think there’s a desperation to cajole the liberal, whatever the Democratic leadership to be like, see what a little bit of backbone
Speaker 4:
Might
Francesca Fiorentini:
Get, which is fair that I think. But you’re right. There’s a slippery slope there, and absolutely it can play into the same. Trump did a thing narrative that we know is bullshit.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right? And I want to make one point and then throw one more question before we got to let Medi go. I know you only got a couple more minutes, man, but I would point people to a very instructive interview that I did with Sarah Nelson, the president of the Flight Attendants Union, who famously became a household named six years ago in the midst of the longest government shutdown, led by Trump in the GOP ostensibly to secure billions of dollars for his stupid southern border wall. And the government was shut down for 35 days, 400,000 federal workers went to work during that entire time without pay. And it was this high stakes game of political brinkmanship as every government shut down inevitably is. But Sarah, I had Sarah on and asked her what we could learn from that moment, from that struggle going into the next four years.
And I think she really rightly pointed out something that I want to introduce to the conversation that we’re having right now, which is we are going to get trapped in this kind of same bipartisan bullshit cycle if those are the only two terms that we have to define our political values, our struggle are the things that we’re actually fighting for. Whereas Sarah rightly pointed out that even though Trump is coming and we are going to have to be on the defensive, we’re going to have to come to the aid of our immigrant neighbors, our trans and GBTQ folks, neighbors. Everybody who is under attack needs to be protected. But if we are just responding to the Trumpian news cycle, we are not fighting for the working class with principal consistency and with strategy. And Sarah, I would again point people to that interview. I’m not going to go into it all now, but really listen to what she’s saying and take to heart what that’s going to mean going into these next four years, and how we have to define our terms as a class, a global working class, and what we need and who’s getting in the way of it, Democrat, republican, whatever, and keep fighting consistently for what we need.
And in that vein, looking ahead at the next four years, with the last few minutes we’ve got Medi, I wanted to ask you both if we could look ahead to next week’s inauguration, sticking with this theme of geopolitics and international relations in the Trump 2.0 era. And as I said before, friend, you’ve been talking about this quite a lot, and I really appreciate it and medi you as well. So let’s talk about first the Trump effect has impacted countries around the world from Argentina to El Salvador, Italy, India, Brazil, over the past eight years since Trump was first elected. And let’s help our viewers understand this global right word shift that is really happening here. What does it mean for instance, that Trump has invited far right leaders to attend his inauguration, like President Na Bke from El Salvador,
Speaker 4:
Argentinian,
Maximillian Alvarez:
President Javier Malay, Victor Orban, prime Minister of Hungary and Italian Prime Minister Georgia Maloney, and that some like Malay are actually going to be there on Monday. Medi, please hop in.
Mehdi Hasan:
So I’m glad you mentioned this. I mean, I’ve been tearing my hair out for almost a decade now, trying to point out that this isn’t just about Donald Trump in the United States. This is a global phenomenon. You can’t understand it in isolation, but you do need to understand that Donald Trump, because by virtue of the US being the US, is the symbol of it, is the leader of it, is the inspiration for it is the guiding star for it sets the benchmark for it. So whether you’re Narendra Modi in India, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, or Erdogan in Turkey, or Orban in Hungary, or Putin in Russia, or Lapan in France, or Farage in the uk, go down the list, Malay in Argentina, Bolsonaro in Brazil, they look to the United States for inspiration. They see what Trump gets away with. They try and do the same, and it’s remarkable. I used to do a show for Al Jazeera English called Upfront, a weekly show where I interviewed politicians around the world. One thing I noticed in 20 17, 20 18 20 19 was the politicians I was interviewing from Africa and Asia all started sounding like Trump. They were all saying the same. They were literally echoing. Why not? Why wouldn’t they look at America? They go worked in the us, why can’t we do here?
Francesca Fiorentini:
Didn’t do Ter say fake news. Wasn’t that his,
Mehdi Hasan:
All of those lines, fake news and all of that stuff about enemy of the people and all just downright lying about what’s in front of your eyes. All of that. I started noticing in interviews I was doing with politicians around the world. That is the Trump effect globally. And that’s why it was so important to try and stop Trump from coming back to office, not just for the United States, but because of the symbol and the message it sends around the world because of the power of this networking. When people talk about domestic extremism, it’s not domestic, it’s transnational, right? White supremacy, supremacy of all forms, racism, fascism is transnational. It is very global. We are seeing liberal democracy on the decline in the retreat and migrants and Muslims especially demonized across the Western world. So it is really important to pay attention to all these connections and see who Donald Trump is sponsoring and propping up and understanding that this is a common struggle wherever you are in the world.
And to go back to your point about Sarah Nelson, I would tie that into here to make a final point, which is we have to stick with our principles, right? That is what’s key. What worries me now is in an age of social media, we’re very cultish. We are very partisan. And that’s not just the right, the right, they’re way out there, but the left liberals, progressive centris, are not immune to the online disease of cultism and partisanship, right? This idea of politics as a football game, I support my team, not your team, and I’ll turn a blind eye to my team’s successes as long as I’m attacking your team. That’s a problem, right? Politics is not about personalities, it’s about issues, it’s about principles. I think that is the only way we get through this era. I went on Blue sky yesterday and I saw a long list of prominent liberals saying, thank you, Mr.
President, for getting this ceasefire deal. What? That’s as bad as the MAGA people saying, Donald Trump is peace of our times, right? We got to get away from this idea of holding up politicians or political parties and saying, I support them. No, no, no, no. You support principles and if they’re in line with your principles than you get behind them. And I think that is what we’ve forgotten. And social media is making much, much worse by kind of treating everything as a kind of putting you in your echo chamber, putting you in your tribal bubble. And if we’re going to survive the Trump era, if we’re going to survive fascism, we have to stick to principles, not people and politicians.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And Fran, real
Francesca Fiorentini:
Quick, before you hop in
Maximillian Alvarez:
Credit for wanted,
Francesca Fiorentini:
Is that what I’m hearing? I think that’s what I’m hearing. Many.
Mehdi Hasan:
Exactly. He is the Mandela of our,
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I just wanted to hop in because Medi, I know you’ve got to go, but I wanted to really, really encourage everyone watching. If you are not already, please go support eo. Thank you Medi. Can you please let folks know what you guys are doing, what you got coming up, and where folks can find you.
Mehdi Hasan:
So we have got a lot going on right now. xeo.com, ZETE o.com is our place come do support or subscribers. We’ve got some amazing documentaries coming out on Gaza and Palestine very soon. We’re rolling out some amazing new contributors next week, many of whom viewers of your shows will know. We’ve already got some great contributors like Naomi Klein and Baam EF and Owen Jones already in our stable, but we’re adding to that for the Trump era. And we have a wonderful podcast that just won an award. We are not kidding. So we are doing a lot. We appreciate your support and we appreciate the plug.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Appreciate the work that you do, brother. It’s an honor to be in the struggle with you and I’ll see you on the other side, man. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me on.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Bye man. Bye-bye.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, Francesca Fiorentini, I’m dying to hear your thoughts on the Trump effect over the last eight years and how this is all coming to a head in his inauguration next week with potentially a lot of foreign diplomats and even heads of state showing up from the global populist, right?
Francesca Fiorentini:
Yeah, I mean it’s chilling and it also, I think to Sarah Nelson’s point, and I’m really glad you brought that up. I think we need to have fighters on every single flank, I don’t know, war terminology, but on every single battlefield. So there have to be people who are pushing against the barrage of misinformation that’s going to be coming from Donald Trump. There have to be people fact checking. There have to be people pushing back on these narratives. There have to be people who are watching what he does and what his administration is doing. That’s going to be critical. But for so much of our sanity, we need to be building. We have got to build. And that can even be with your neighbors. It can be with your community members and your schools and your churches and your synagogues and whatever it is. We have to create spaces of real, again, mutual aid and solidarity.
It’s the only way we are going to sort of mentally survive, but also physically, quite literally as we’re talking about LA fires and people surviving thanks to the goodwill of their neighbors and their communities, we need to make sure that locally, that locally we’re electing the right kinds of folks, that we are holding people to account that we’re pressuring Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom, but from the left that we have again, these amazing new progressive leftist city council members that can be the next generation that so many Democrats have fought so hard, whether it’s the squad nationally or on a local level to make sure that progressive stay out of politics. So I super agree with Sarah that I hate the reactive doom loop that we can get into. One thing, and I don’t want to knock it, but one thing that people on the left do often is look at right wing news outlets and right wing influencers and sort of make fun of them.
And I do think it’s important, but sometimes I think about the world upside down. Imagine if right now there were right wingers who watched everything we said, and then they made clips and videos based on the outlandish things. We said, we need a green new deal. And I’m like, that’s power. I’m tired of giving right wing mouthpieces more power by highlighting their bullshit. I’m like, what are we building? What are the scary things we’re singing? What are the real socialist plans that we are creating and enacting? You know what I’m absolutely for defund the police. Fuck yeah, let’s talk about it. Let’s enact it. The right says we did. No, we didn’t. So these are the kinds of things that I’m interested in building and on my show habitation room, having activist organizers, thinkers who can build that now to Trump’s global fascism. I got to say it’s not just, I don’t want to give Trump too much credit because you look at someone like naive B and you’re like, this dude is his own little creation like El Salvador who has basically consolidated power, political power in his country.
He was able to break through the two party system of, I mean it was mostly a two party system by just demagoguing them, saying, turning on them and using his own independence. I think as a weapon and as sort of a badge of honor, which a lot of people are responding to and has now enacted sort of this scorched earth incarcerate first policy on the communities of El Salvador. And depending on who you ask, many El Salvador are very on board for it and very okay with it because they think it’s cleaned up the streets. Nevermind what happens 10 years later, nevermind when people have been incarcerated for decades. There’s no job opportunities when they come back. Nothing’s improved in the economy in El Salvador, right? But it is fascinating because this little crypto king demagogue is, I mean the Trump Jr came to his inauguration. So did Matt Gaetz came to the naive inauguration. What the hell? So the US is actually looking at countries like El Salvador, like Israel, the countries where we’ve propped up their militaries, we’ve assisted with their genocides and saying, what can we learn? We want to build walls here. We want to lock people up indiscriminately here in the us. I think there is a scary authoritarian symbiosis happening between these figures.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to talk about this a little bit more in the last half hour that we’ve got, and I’m going to circle back to it in a sec. But I wanted to let you all know watching live that we’ve got Francesca sister Fran on for the next half hour. Brother Meti had to hop off, but we are here to answer your questions or respond to your comments. So I’m going to be throwing some of those up on the screen in a second. So please, if you’ve got questions for Fran or for me, please throw them up there and we’ll tackle them as many of them as we can get to in the next half hour. But a note on the naive B thing, Francesca, because we’ve got a real problem on our hands here. And again, I appreciate the hell out of you for actually being like one of those prominent voices who is talking about this regularly and getting people, your audience to think about the world beyond our own individual scope. Think about the world outside of the US borders, and in fact, it would tell you a lot about what’s happening here as well.
But we’ve also reported on what’s happening in El Salvador. We had a really powerful video report published by the great Latin American based journalist, Mike Fox from El Salvador s
Francesca Fiorentini:
Such a good podcast. Everyone should listen to it. Tell me the name of it again, remind people.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So the one that we put out last year was called Under the Shadow, which was an incredible podcast series that I would highly encourage everyone who’s listening or watching this go binge that whole series. And also listen to Mike’s previous series, which we produced with him in partnership with Nala, the North American Congress on Latin America called Brazil on fire, specifically go find the episode near the end of Brazil on fire where Mike investigates the rise of the evangelical right in Brazil and talks about how this right wing evangelical pro Bolsonaro group is pretty much saying what the evangelical nut jobs here are saying about Trump. So if you want to look at that Trump effect, if you want to hear it in audio form, it’s there in Mike’s podcast, Brazil on fire and a lot more is there in his podcast that we ran last year under the shadow.
But also to circle back to naive Bke and El Salvador, we published a standalone documentary report that Mike did there about b’s dragnet arrest, first sweeps. We talked to family members of those who have been disappeared in these sweeps who are completely innocent, but maybe they got tattoos, maybe they’ve been accused of being affiliated by a gang or maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But this is the real problem that I wanted to get your thoughts on. Fran, and you already touched on this, right? There is a parallel here to Trump and the US that we can learn from because Trump, as we know, didn’t come from nowhere. I mean, you have to have a long brewing crisis of legitimacy in the existing system, economy culture to create enough of a desire in people for something as extreme as Trump or bouquet or what have you. And in El Salvador, we can’t pretend that that wasn’t the case. We can’t pretend that working people, poor people were not just devastated for years by drug cartels, by gang violence. This impacted them every single day. And now the functional difference for your average working person in El Salvador, as we’ve heard from them, is I can walk on the streets. My kids can go to school. I don’t feel as afraid anymore. And naive, B, the proto fascist neofascist guy who has accomplished this is the most popular politician in the world right now, but like you said, he’s still serving the needs of capital while addressing some of the needs of the people through draconian measures. And then people, he’s incredibly popular because of that.
What do we do with that? I guess another way of asking that question is what do we do if someone like Trump remains incredibly popular over the next four years? How do we intervene in that? What is the left’s place here?
Francesca Fiorentini:
I mean, I obviously am no expert on El Salvador, but I do just mean to what I hinted at before, there’s only so long you can lock people up and we all know what happens. And it has happened in the United States, that is where gangs are formed. So the odious MS 13 formed, wasn’t it in Los Angeles formed in a prison. So when you lock people up, you are contributing and you treat them like criminals even if they are not criminals to say nothing of how we should be treating criminals. Let’s put that aside. You will create people who are violent, who are gang members who don’t when they come out of prison and you have not helped them reintegrate into society or have offered any kind of job opportunities to say nothing of prohibited them from being employed simply by the fact that they were incarcerated.
What do you think is going to happen? So for me, the bhel model’s really interesting because the US is not El Salvador. Okay? We are not being terrorized by cartels no matter what your Facebook aunt says that is not happening. But what’s interesting about the right in the US is that they’re able to convince us that yes, we are being terrorized by migrants and cartels and it’s happening in Springfield where they’re eating cats and dogs and they’re killing innocent young white victims. And we’re going to pass the Lake and Riley act. And we are convinced that somehow we are El Salvador. And I think any Salvadorian would come here. In fact, they do want to come here precisely because it is safe. So what are you talking about? It is just very funny that the US suffers from this imagined doom and this imagined crime when crime is down.
And so again, back to la, these moments when you’re like, oh, all I got to do is go out, talk to my neighbors, meet people, see the solidarity, see the comradery, and I am suddenly not afraid anymore. I’m not sitting at home just watching local news and getting freaked out. So I think it is our job, while the US is still a relatively safe place because we could get to the levels of El Salvador. That’s what happens when your elites do not invest in their people for decades and decades and decades. But our job is to break through, to humanize specifically, I think the people who’ve been left out of the system, which are unhoused people, the people who are victims of late stage capitalists, greed, and systems not working for them. It’s to hold accountable. Our democratic officials specifically who are still neoliberal actors and who still take corporate donations, it’s to primary them.
It’s to unseat them. It’s to say their way is leading us down the primrose path. Back to fascism. Don’t pull a Biden Newsom, don’t pull a fucking Biden bass. Don’t pull a Biden, don’t deliver us into the hands of Rick Caruso. Don’t deliver us in the hands of a Republican governor so you can seek higher office. So these are all the sites that we need to fight on because it’s not just the global demagoguery. It’s happening in every single place where you have very feckless politicians who might be smart. Newsom’s a smart guy, he knows what he’s talking about, but he also knows that he’s never going to pass Medicare for all for California, that he’s going to skirt environmental regulations so that rich people can rebuild their homes in places they probably shouldn’t build. So we’ve got time on some of these areas.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and the crazy thing that we’ve got here to make your point that yes, the United States is not El Salvador working, people are not being terrorized by drug cartels ravaging the streets. But the thing is working, people are being killed and terrorized by cartels. They’re just the ones in boardrooms. They’re the ones in dc. They’re the ones who are stocking up the Trump administration right now. They’re the people that everyone was righteously pissed off at after the United Healthcare CEO was assassinated, right? I mean, the cartels are here, they’re running the show, and we are all feeling it in one way or another. They are poisoning our water and buying off politicians to do nothing about it. They are corporate capturing the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us, which is why we now all have PFAS and other forever chemicals like microplastics all in our bodies, which is, but to your point, at the same time, the right wing fear machine is constantly trying to convince working people that the dangers are here at eye level. The dangers are around the corner. They’re living in your neighborhood, they’re in your children’s schools, they are your fellow workers who are responsible for your misery, not the people. They’re DI.
They’re
Francesca Fiorentini:
DI. Yeah. And I think that is, and that is so, and this is what I, God, if there’s, you know how we each have the one thing we’ve said a million times over, if there’s one thing that I want people to know of, if my political pecking order, the first thing I want to say is that identity politics are radical. They were developed, identity politics was spearheaded by black feminists who wanted intersectionality, who said, we can tackle capitalism, we can tackle racism, and we can tackle sexism. We can do it all together. That’s identity politics. The problem is Democrats have used hollow empty identity politics only in the form of representation as a stand-in for the real radical identity politics of having not just again, the Cornell Westly black faces in high places, but actually passing legislation that positively affects black communities and poor communities and women.
I mean, the one place that we are like El Salvador in the United States in the year 2025, I visited there and I did a whole piece about how they’re locking women up for having miscarriages because abortion is criminalized because the rights of the fetus are enshrined in the constitution, max. I’m telling you, we are headed there in this country. They will enshrine the rights of the fetus, the rights of the unborn into the US Constitution. And guess what? Then all people with uterus become second class citizens, period. And it is fucking terrifying. And we could be sentenced to 30 years to life. I spoke to women who were in prison longer than their rapists who got them pregnant in the first place. That’s what they were accused of is miscarrying slash abortion. But all to say, I forgot where I was saying before that. You know what I mean?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. You’re spiting fire. And I kind of wanted to build on the emotion here because I’m feeling what you’re feeling. I know our audience is feeling it, and we’re all feeling a lot of shit right now. And I kind of want to dig into that real quick. And again, I’m looking at questions in live chat and comments. We’re going to be throwing them up. But on that last point, I want to ask if we could maybe just break the fourth wall here. And I have a question for you, Fran, which is right now, what do you think your most unproductive fear is and what your most productive anger or where your most productive anger is coming from? I mean, I guess for us to be a little sort of internally mindful of where our emotions are coming from and where they’re driving us. I am not telling people out there don’t feel anything, but don’t be overwhelmed by those feelings, but also know how you can harness those feelings and when those feelings are harnessing you for other ends. So yeah, I guess just sort of an open question right now, what’s the most immobilizing, unproductive fear that you’re feeling now? And what’s something that’s galvanizing you?
Francesca Fiorentini:
Most unproductive fear is America’s cooked. We need to go by, how do I get out of here? How should I take my child and leave somewhere where the air is cleaner and there aren’t guns in people’s hands? And somewhere that respects her bodily autonomy and her rights. That’s where my maybe unproductive fear is at. And my productive fear is when I squarely plant myself in my place, and I say, you live in a neighborhood, a community, a city. You have an elected official. You can talk to them, you can go, you get involved. There are groups that have been working in the cities that we all live in and the towns we all live in for generations. Plant yourself in this moment in history and get to work.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think that’s beautifully put. I don’t want to add anything onto that I think was amazing. Well, let’s bring in some comments here from the live chat. A lot of these aren’t even questions, just folks really expressing a lot of things in the live chat that I want to make sure we name here. But we’ve got one comment here from Kevin Tuey. I do know the severity. 8% of Americans, 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Again, if you need a bigger example of why the kind of red state, blue state MAGA Democrat thing is just horse shit, neither of them have a 78% hold on the population that’s working people, blue, red, independent, who are getting screwed over by this economic system. I think that’s very rightly pointed out. And let’s see,
Francesca Fiorentini:
We’ve got, and I think that’s the resurgence in labor organizing too, is like we have enemies. We’ve got a villains list. Your boss is part of it, your landlord is part of it. That is how you’ve got Elon Musk in your life. They are your boss, they are your landlord,
Maximillian Alvarez:
And they run things like bosses. In fact, if you want to learn about and you want a good sense of what we’re in store for in the next four years, and in fact what we’ve been moving towards over the last 40 years, like look at labor struggles, look at how bosses respond to workers when they get uppity and try to exercise their rights. Like they get squashed, they get fired, they have their rights violated, they get intimidated. They’re subjected to unsafe working conditions regularly, yada, yada yada. This is the kind of boss governance that Trump and his cabinet Musk. I mean, that is how they think. They don’t think about us as human beings. We are at best human shaped widgets that can do things for them, but our lives do not matter to them.
Francesca Fiorentini:
No.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And on that, let’s throw a few more comments here. So yeah, I mean I think this is timeless, but well put by Black Rain, you can tell the greatness of a nation by how they treat the less fortunate.
Speaker 4:
And
Maximillian Alvarez:
On that note, it’s important to underline as Fran and Medi and I have been in this live stream, that we need to not just think about the United States as the center of the universe here. And in fact, there’s going to be a real interesting dynamic going on between the NAFTA countries, Canada, the US and Mexico. And right now you’ve got Mexico’s new president, Gloria Scheinbaum saying explicitly on the so Klo in Mexico City that we have to prioritize the poor for the good of all. That’s kind of to the point of the comment that we just read. And Fran, I’m curious how you’re looking at the soul of that statement and also how Mexico and shine bomb’s government are going to be a player in the next four years. I
Francesca Fiorentini:
Mean, again, I wish I could only do Latin American politics. I like it way better than American politics. So I am no expert, but I have been really heartened by shine bounds rise to power her posturing, her being able to sort of stand up to Trump, but also say we’re willing to work with you. And then of course, in the LA fires, most recently sending 75 firefighters and other national forestry and disaster relief workers and officials to Los Angeles and saying, we believe in solidarity. We are a nation of generosity and solidarity. Max Trump, the Mexicans are rapists and criminals is about to assume office on Monday. And the president of Mexico wants to be in solidarity with us. I mean, it is crushingly.
I don’t even know. I don’t have words for that kind of treatment when we have treated them so opposite. And so I think that there’s a model there. I don’t think it’s an accident. She’s a woman. But again, hey, look at me playing the identity politics card. But I think it shows you that her administration and AMLO enjoyed a certain amount of support already from the people what they had done and delivered for the Mexican people clearly bore out. And so that she can get away with saying, when we help the poor, we help everyone imagine if what would happen in this country, all the Jesus lovers would be like, Ew, gross poor. I don’t believe in poverty. No, no, no, no, no. I’m in the prosperity gospel. God delivers to those who are rich more riches. And I think we had the beginnings and the fits and starts of that in Bernie Sanders. But I dunno about you Max, but I’m still in the post-election haze where I haven’t fully decided to support the Democratic party. I’m still like Uhuh. They have to do a lot to earn my vote and trust and we have to do a lot to change them. So if you don’t let us change you and transform you then and get out of the way, then we’re going to have a problem.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I mean, I’ll be honest, that’s where I am. I mean you and so many others that we’ve spoken to on this channel. I mean, I think I’m not naive and I grew up a deep red Republican in Southern California in Orange County. I spent the first half of my life a Latino orange county, very outspoken Republican,
Speaker 4:
And
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now I’m a lefty socialist nut job years later. That was a long ideological journey that really began or really turned in the financial crash and great recession in the 2008, 9, 10, 11, that range. Those were the years that really changed my life, changed my family’s life. Those were the years where the system that I thought I could work hard in and be rewarded for showed how nakedly the deck was stacked in favor of the fuckers who got bailed out for causing a crisis that led to millions of families like mine losing everything, including the home that I grew up in.
Speaker 4:
I
Maximillian Alvarez:
Was working in warehouses in factories 12 years ago, not knowing what the hell I was going to be doing with my life. But that period I think was really important in sort of breaking a lot of that ideological crust that I had. Maybe it was the sort of optimism of youth. Maybe it was also still the last drags of the post Cold War era where it felt for many of us, the US was going to have a big enough pie for all of us to get a piece
Francesca Fiorentini:
And make a good life for us. Sure, you just work hard enough you can get that piece. And now, I mean it’s amazing people now I think there isn’t even that if you work hard, I think everyone left right? Doesn’t matter where you stand. You understand that working hard is not going to deliver. Now it’s about how do I get the cheat code for this life so I can at least not even be rich, but just be comfortable. You need a cheat code to even own a house, right? I need a cheat code. And often that cheat code is a shortcut by bashing minorities and immigrants and women and whomever else who I think has a little bit of something that I want. And so just when I really empathize with people who believe in crypto, and again, I’m not here to knock it. I know a lot of people have it, but it’s like I understand the impetus to like, well, look, if I just play this lottery a little bit, maybe I can get out of the dregs of where the majority of people in this country are at. And in that sense, the right wing narrative of you too can be a billionaire tomorrow. I mean, they’re really just pedaling one massive Ponzi scheme, except there are bodies that have to be, that are being claimed in the process
Maximillian Alvarez:
That hit like an ice pick to the chest. And I know we only have a couple more minutes
Here, but I want to circle back to something you said when we were talking about the productive and unproductive fears we’re dealing with now. And I think this also hooks into some of the comments and questions I’m seeing here in the live chat. So I want to put up two here in succession. One, I think a really pointed question from the brindle boxer, it’s beyond depressing. How do we get out of the doom loop considering what we’re facing in four days? And the brindle boxer just want to let you know we are with you. We’re all feeling that. And I want us to end on that question while also kind of highlighting this other comment from Black Reign, again about the need to intervene on the local level and do what we can to hold politicians accountable, not just react to Trump, but all those people throughout the political hierarchy with names and faces and positions and emails and phone numbers. There’s actually a lot that you can do when you see the spread of power instead of just believing that it all resides in one person over here in Washington dc.
Speaker 4:
And
Maximillian Alvarez:
So I kind of wanted to end on that note, Francesca, and give you the final word here. We don’t have to give everyone a playbook of everything they can do. As we say here at The Real News all the time, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something more often than not that something is going to be in your area in the circles, you have influence in your community, in your apartment building, in your workplace, in your district. So I wanted to just ask for your final thoughts on that, Fran. Not just how people can get more involved locally, but what doing something in your real physical world, offline, why that is so crucial to fighting the larger forces that we are going up against right now.
Francesca Fiorentini:
I mean, every time there’s a demonstration, every time there’s a protest, every time you go out and you make your sign and you listen to a speech and your legs are hurting and you can’t hear the speech and whatever, I really feel that every time I do that, every time I’m with community, I feel much better. I feel mentally prepared and physically and mentally not alone. So I do think protest has a place in the world. We know it has power. Concedes nothing without a demand, never has, never will. But it’s also for our own nourishment. I feel nourished when I am in community, whether it’s chanting, whatever, a slogan or a song, but I also feel nourished. I feel like I have a couple moments of maybe happiest moments in Francesca’s last 10 years and some of the other than my child being born, obviously two moments stick out.
One fundraiser for the I Napa 43 disappeared students, teacher students in Mexico who disappeared in 2015, I believe. And I was at a fundraiser back then in San Francisco, and it was obviously, this is a terrible thing that happened. It should be incredibly depressing. But there was the food, the music, the number of people that came out, the activists and organizers and community leaders that hadn’t seen each other in so long. But this awful event brought us together and we were dancing and we were raising money and we were just in it. And it was truly one of the nicest nights I’ve experienced. Another day in this last year comes to mind when a pro-Palestinian market took place, sprung up in la. I don’t know the organizer’s name and I apologize, but there was everyone selling kafis and pins and cute hats to doing henna tattoos to selling their delicious food from all over the world, amazing, affordable plates. And then you had the poetry and the music and you’re just like, this is it. I feel so fucking seen. I feel so fucking support. We’re not here all chanting, Rob, we’re not getting mad. We’re not having a meeting. We’re eating good food. We’re listening to beautiful music. We are making art. And I know this sounds corny, but I’m telling you, it was like it was intergenerational. I brought my daughter like, don’t, don’t. Don’t sleep on building community and having fun. Allow yourself to be joyous even as we resist.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think it was beautiful, powerful words by the great Francesca Fiorentini. If y’all are watching and you are not subscribed to Francesca’s show the Situation room, you really need to go correct that asap.
Speaker 4:
Francesca,
Maximillian Alvarez:
I cannot thank you enough for the spending this hour and a half with us. I can’t thank the great Hassan enough for joining us for that first hour. Again, if you’re not subscribing to EO and following the great work Me’s doing and all the folks at eo, including now contributors like Francesca herself, who has a great piece out on the LA fires and the people helping in the midst of tragedy, go watch that video, subscribe to eo, follow Francesca Fran, what are you going to be up to? Where can folks find you? Just final plug here before we
Francesca Fiorentini:
Close out. Yeah, yeah. Look, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays live, 1:00 PM Pacific, 4:00 PM Eastern youtube.com/franny. Theo fran, I fio o. My name is too long to write it all out. And you can listen as a podcast habitation room. We try to have comedians and then activists and experts and thinkers and all that, and we try to be fun and be a little reverent. Go see live comedy guys. I’ll be at the Ice House in Pasadena next Wednesday, 7:30 PM Tickets are still available. It’s going to be a great show. I’m calling it New World Disorder, a Night of political comedy. So come out to that if you’re in the Pasadena or LA area,
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. So everyone out back home, go check that out. Follow Francesca’s work. Fran, I can’t wait to have you back on the channel. Sis, really appreciate you taking the time now.
Francesca Fiorentini:
Thank you, max, as always, for the pointed questions and just your passion, we love it. We see it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you, sis right back at you means the world to me and to all of you watching, I don’t know what’s going to happen next week, next year, or in the next four to eight to 50 years. In fact, none of us do because that story has yet to be written. I want to kind of close on this thought here because we cannot give over the power of writing history before it’s even been written, right? You can’t ask what the next four years will bring with the assumption that we are just going to be waiting and responding to whatever is passed down from on. High. History is always written in that dialectical space between top and bottom, from the grassroots, from the upper echelons, the struggle over power. We are part of that struggle. What happens next depends on what we all do now, how we respond to it, the demands that we put on power, not just the ways that we respond to the whims of power, right?
I mean, so think about that. Think about the power that you have that your community has, the power you can build with your community, with your coworkers in your workplaces and beyond. You are not powerless here. We are not powerless here, but we will be way less powerful if we already concede the point that what happens in the next few years is just out of our hands. It’s not. And that is what we here at The Real News are committed to people, power and people in general. We are about you and your communities. We are about people around this country and around the world. And we believe all human life is sacred and worth fighting for, and that we all deserve a world better than this. And that we are the ones who are going to make that world happen. And we at The Real News are going to be there covering your struggle as you make it happen. We’re going to be there on the ground. We want to talk to you about what you’re going through and how others can help. So please support our work, subscribe to this channel, reach out to us and let us know about your stories so that we can help lift them up and help them reach more people. And above all else, please take care of yourselves and take care of each other, solidarity forever.
Related
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Source link
