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tv   The Rachel Maddow Show  MSNBC  March 14, 2023 1:00am-2:00am PDT

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there. and that is why their case i brought their. >> i think some people who are watching this might be wondering how an fda approve drug, that has been used for over 20 years, how is it possible to challenge th safety of a drug that has been widely used for so long now? >> yes, of course, let's g through the basic, basic arguments for the plaintiffs they are saying this drug neve should've been approved. there was not enough consideration given to how i would affect younger people. of course, with what the fda and other intervenors ar saying, this has been on the market for more than 20 years. if we thought there were significant safety issues, the would have risen now, we don't know the judge will decide. you know, there is a chanc that he ultimately agrees with the plaintiffs but it's hard to say this will stop medication abortions in right here on msnbc. the rachel maddow show starts right now. good evening, rachel >> good evening, eamon nice to see you and thank you for the big tease, the big mention i've got elizabeth
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warren live this hour. really appreciate that >> very excited to hear what she says about this very distressing situation. >> me, too thank you so much. and thanks to you at home for joining us this hour it's good to have you here when we get a new president in this country or when we get a president re-elect for a new term, that president is inaugurated. he or someday she is sworn in to start a new presidential term in january, right that's why it's always so cold january 20th is when the inauguration happens but that has only been true since the 1930s. up until the 1930s presidents did not get inaugurated in january. they waited another two months they didn't get inaugurated in march. the last time a president got inaugurated on the old day in march, the final march inauguration was march 4, 1933 that was when fdr got sworn in
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as president for the first time. that was also the last time we as a country would have to wait that whole four month period after the election before we let the new president take over. after we had that first inauguration of fdr, after that one we moved the inauguration date earlier, back to january. we actually had to amend the united states constitution in order to make that change, and that called that amendment to the constitution the 20th amendment, they called it the lame duck amendment because by moving the inauguration from march back to january we were shortening the lame duck period. we were trying to eliminate a long lame duck period after which the old president had been voted out but before the new one started on the job the idea was sort of obvious, to try to minimize the risk of crisis, minimize the risk of
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confusion in terms of who was running the country in case something hinky happened in that period between the election and the start of the new president's term so the last time we had one of those long four-month inter regnums was before the inauguration of the new president in 1943. before that it was really obvious that year in 1933 that it was pastime to make that change it was really, really obvious in 1933 that it was going to be a good idea to not wait until march anymore, to instead let a new president take over sooner and the reason that was so obvious in 1933 is because when fdr finally got inaugurated that year, in march 1933, we were literally in the middle of a
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nationwide run on the banks when he got inaugurated this was in the middle of of the great depression, of course, 1933 and during the term of the previous president, republican herbert hoover, who had a disastrous presidency. during hoover's time in office there'd been a series of banking panics, people making runs on banks. it happened in specific parts of the country in 1930 and 1931 but in 1932 there was a really big surge in bank failures in both the west and midwest and there started to be a national panic. in 1932 when that national panic was taking hold, individual states started declaring bank holidays nevada was the first one who did it, but then other states including michigan followed suit individual states started declaring holidays they started declaring all banks would be closed on specific days
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basically just to stop people from rushing in and pulling all their deposits and collapsing more banks but doing that a piecemeal -- doing that in a piecemeal way, doing that state by state, sort of happenstance, random state by random state wasn't enough and the problem was spreading. and the fall of 1932, november 1932 that's when roosevelt was elected in the presidential election he was elected to replace hoover in a landslide roosevelt won 42 states that year but even as roosevelt won and everybody knew there was going to be a new sheriff in charge, right, there was going to be somebody new in washington who say going to have radically different economic policies, still the banking system was
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havi conniptions. roosevelt won in november but wasn't able to get sworn in until march 4th. when he did get sworn in, though, he immediately took action fdr was inaugurated on march 4th. two days later on march 6th he declared for the first time a nationwide bank holiday to freeze the banking system in place, to finally put a national system -- a national response in place to shore up banking coast to coast to give americans everywhere assurance that they would not lose their money in the banks. and after that we would never again as a country wait that long for a new president to take over after he'd been elected in november when fdr sprang into action in march 1933, when he stopped the national banking crisis two days after he was sworn in, he also at the same time invented a whole new thing to communicate with the american people, to explain to them what he and his
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new administration were doing and how it was supposed to work to stop the national run on the banks. on march 12th he gave his first fireside chat, and it was about the bank crisis. >> my friends, i want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the united states about banking, to talk with the comparatively few who understand the mechanics of banking but more particularly with the overwhelming majority of you who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks i want to tell you what has been done in the last few days and why it was done and what the next steps are going to be first of all, let me state the simple fact that when you deposit money in a bank, the bank does not put the money into
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a safe deposit vault it invests your money in different forms of credit, in bonds, commercial paper, in mortgages and in many other kinds of loans in other words, the bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels of industry and agriculture turning around a comparatively small part of the money you put into the bank is kept in currency, an amount which in normal times is fully sufficient is to cover the cash needs of the average citizen >> he was a good explainer that was a good explanation to the american people what was going on and he went onto explain that although most banks were well-run, not all banks were well-run he said some were run by bankers who in his words were incompetent or dishonest and he said people losing confidence in the banks had caused people understandably to rush to get their money out of the banks. that had created the present crisis, which had led him and
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his brand spanking new government to step in and take over to try to stabilize the whole mess >> let me make it clear to you that the banks will take care of all needs. when the people find that they can get their money, that they can get it when they want it for all legitimate purposes, the fandm of fear will soon be laid. people will again be glad to have their money where it will be safely taken care of and where they can use it conveniently at any time i can assure you, my friends, that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than it is to keep it understand the mattress >> i can assure you it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress president franklin deroosevelt, that was his first ever fireside chat it was 09 years ago exactly, 90 years ago yesterday. and just in case you were under the mistaken impression that anything ever changes ever, here
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was president biden 9:00 a.m. this morning >> today, thanks to the quick action of my administration over the past few days, americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe your deposits will be there when you need them because of the actions that our regulators have already taken everyone should feel confident your deposits will be there. >> 90 years apart, same message from the president, 90 years apart another bank crisis. and the reason president biden today was able to say you don't have to put your money under the mattress, it's safe, we're making sure of it. everybody who deposited money in these banks will be able to get
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their money out of the banks, the reason he was able to promise that today was also because of fdr two days later he took control of the banking crisis and six days later he gave his first fireside chat in which he explained the banking crisis to the american people and told them what he was doing to get ahold of it. just a few weeks after that, fdr signed legislation that created the fdic, the federal deposit insurance corporation, which does exactly what it says. if you make deposits of your own money into an american bank, any federal bank insured by fdic can guarantee you the federal government will provide insurance for your deposit, so no matter what stupidity your bank gets up to, the money you deposited is insured you will be able to get it back. fdr created fdic in 1933, right after he was inaugurated today we are still benefitting from it. and today in america we are
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having another one of those thank you fdr kind of days because wednesday, last week, a bank called silvergate was first to go caput. they went caput on wednesday senator elizabeth warren who became a national public figure at all because of her harz nosed, plain talking explanations and criticism about bad actors in the financial world, elizabeth warren was all over it when silvergate bank collapsed wednesday last week. she said, quote, as the bank of choice for crypto silver bank gate's failure is disappointing but predictable. i warned of silvergate's risky if not illegal activity and identified severe due diligence failures now customers must be made whole and regulators should step up against crypto risk. that was wednesday when that bank failed.
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then late wednesday night another california bank, silicon valley bank announced they had lost nearly $2 billion, and that started a run on that bank by their depositors venture capital firms in particular appeared to have pulled their own funds of sill call valley bank and told the companies they were invested in they too should pull their money out of that bank so by close of business thursday people who had their money deposited had tried to pull over $40 billion out of that bank. that was close of business thursday by friday mysteriously that bank had decided it would pay out a bunch of bonuses to their staff and executives, just hours before the federal government, the fdic, came in to take them over interestingly the government apparently over the weekend tried to find someone -- some other company to buy silicon
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valley bank. in the end they decided they didn't have time to make that sale properly given the risk this thing was going to spread and more banks were going to fail, so they gave up on that over the weekend after initially trying to do that. by sunday, by yesterday sure enough another bank was down, signature bank, which was another bank tied up in the crypto currency shenanigans. so what does this mean first of all, people who put their money into those banks are going to get their money back. the fdic -- that you know fdr -- insures every bank account up to a quarter million dollars. and the biden administration says deposits bigger than $250,000 will be covered as well so people who deposited their money will be able to get back the money they deposited over and above the additional amount is being covered by the federal government, by a fund that the banks pay into, which
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is why president biden was able to say today that the taxpayers will not be on the hook for covering these failures. but still we're talking about the biggest bank failure since the financial catastrophe that hit at the end of the george w. bush administration in 2008. i mean the biggest bank failure financially just in terms of raw numbers, the biggest bank failure ever in the u.s. was washington mutual, which failed during the 2008 crisis the second biggest bank failure ever in the u.s. is this silicon valley bank, which just failed now. second biggest bank failure in u.s. history here's the question, though. is this it i mean is what we're seeing here, these three banks falling apart in quick succession, is this a sign something was wrong at these specific banks, these guys specifically did something wrong? or is there a bigger wider problem here that should make us
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worry about more banks and how is this different than what happened in the giant financial catastrophe of 2008 and 2009 some of that we know for one thing when we have the huge bank bailouts then which have caused, you know, not only economic ripples but political ripples for more than a decade since, part of the anger, part of the i think political realignment that happened in response to the anger about those bailouts was because not omdid bank executives like not get in trouble, those bank bailouts included more than just the people who had put deposits at these banks, more than just people who had money deposited at these banks and benefitted therefore when the banks got rescued. when there was the big bank bailout in 2008 and 2009 the people that got bailed out didn't just include people who held deposits but held stocks in those banks and shareholders who had invested in those banks and
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financial institutions they got bailed out, too, in 2008 and 2009, which never really made any sense. president biden said today that's not going to happen this time he said people who deposited their money in these banks, yes, they'll be protected but people who invested in these banks, people who held stock in these banks, no -- when you invest you take a risk and so those people took a risk by investing in these financial institutions investors will lose their investment money share holers will not be rescued. that seems sensible. that is different from 2008 and 2009 why did shareholders and investors get bailed out the first time around anyway i don't know and why didn't we learn this lesson from the last time this happened in 2008 and 2009? and there there's a real story and it's a story with some familiar political actors in it. when we had the financial
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catastrophe in 2008 and 2009 congress did pass a big package of new rules from the financial industry to stop this from happening again. you may remember president obama signing these new rules into law in 2010. right, you see these were rules signed into law in 2010 that made banks keep "x" amount of cash on hand, "x" amount of liquid assets so they could meet their customers demands if their customers all came in to withdraw their money, even if a whole bunch of them did it all at once just as fdr explained when you deposited money in a bank it's not like they lock it up in a vault. they do stuff with your money. dodd/frank established new rules in terms of the riskiness and required financial institutions to pass stress tests where they'd have to show they could
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survive and not collapse if something economically bad happened those new rules were very hard fought after the 2008, 2009 financial catastrophe, but they were passed by the democratic led congress signed by president obama in 2010. then what happened well, eight years later in 2018 after relentless lobbying by the banks and financial industry, once republicans were in control of congress and president donald trump was in the white house, guess what happened? they decided it was way pastime to roll back those new safe guards >> the legislation i'm signing today rolls back the crippling dodd/frank regulations -- >> oh, good. that roll back was passed -- was sign by then-president donald trump in 2018. in the senate it was passed by all the republicans and 17
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democrats -- 17 moderate and conservative democratic senators who joined with the republicans to pass it in the house there were 33 democrats who joined with the republicans to pass it including future democratic senator -- well, no longer democratic senator kyrsten sinema that repeal of the dodd/frank seat belts, that repeal of the dodd/frank safety regulations in 2018 made it so those rules put into effect to stop there being another crisis, they wouldn't apply to all that many banks anymore. senator elizabeth warren at the time called b.s. on this whole thing, and she did it right here on msnbc with our friend chris hayes. watch this it turns out elizabeth warren was exactly right when she sounded this alarm in 2018 >> senator elizabeth warren took to the floor today to express outrage over a bill republicans are soon expected to pass with the help of some senate democrats. the bill would rollout many of
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the wall street reforms passed a decade ago following the financial crisis, and senator elizabeth warren joins me now. why is -- how does this get 67 votes? you haven't actually voted on it so far, but -- >> i'm sorry, let me just stop you right there. how does this get any votes, any votes? we are now -- next week will be the tenth year anniversary of when layman brothers crashed and signaled to the entire world that the collapse of 2008 had started. and how it could be that after we got some dodd/frank protections in place, after we got ten years nearly of trying to rebuild, after the banks are more profitable than they have ever been in history, how could it be that this congress is saying i know what let's do, let's make it easier for big
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banks to cheat american families let's make it easier for them to load up on risks let's take 25 of the40 largest banks in america, banks that sucked down $50 billion in bailout money and nobody went to jail let's take them off the watch list and treat them any tiny little community banks out somewhere nowhere where they can't hurt the economy nobody can explain why they're saying that banks that are up to a quarter of a trillion dollars should be regulated as if they're community banks. >> that was elizabeth warren in 2018, and that is, in fact, exactly what passed in 2018. that's what donald trump signed in 2018. elizabeth warren when she predicted what kind of risk that would create, she was 100% right. this silicon valley bank, this is one of the banks whose ceo lobbied that a bank like his
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shouldn't be subjected to the new regulations that his bank was no risk to anyone. and because of that change signed by president trump in 2018, in fact, silicon valley bank did not have to be subjected to the extra stress test it didn't have to be subjected to the, you know, dodd/frank regulations on what it could do with customers money it didn't have the extra dodd/frank liquidity requirements to make sure they'd have enough cash on hand if their customers came knocking on the door at the same time, which tay did. they did in palo alto. they did in santa clara. they did across the country in wellesley, maz they did all over the country in every town where they had a bridge the type of stress this bank was subjected to was the type of stress they were supposed to be tested against had they not hobied harder for themselves to be exempted from the new regulations otherwise put in place after the last crash to stop this from happening
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elizabeth warren was right when she said what rolling back those regulations would do in 2018 well, now that it has come to pass, she says this in "the new york times." she says, quote, no one should be mistaken over what happened unfolded in the past few days. these bank failures are the direct result of leaders in washington weakening the financial rules. wall street, chief executives, and their armies and lawyers and lobbyists hated this law they spent millions trying to defeat it. and when they lost they spent millions more trying to weaken it greg becker was one of the many high powered executives who lobbied congress to weaken the law. with support from both parties president trump signed the law to roll back
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silicon valley bank they got relief from stringent requirements facing their claim on the laughable assertion banks like them weren't big therefore they didn't need strong oversight. she said, quote, i fought against these changes. i wish i had been wrong, but on friday silicon valley bank executives were busy paying out congratulateatory bonuses hours before the fdic rushed in to take over their failing institution leaving nonprofits and accounts at that bank alarmed they wouldn't be able to pay their employees. had congress not roll back the stricter oversight, svb would have been subjected to stricter requirements, they would have been required to stress tests to expose their vulnerabilities because those requirements were repeal, when an old-fashioned bank run hit them, they couldn't
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withstand the pressure these threats never should have been allowed to materialize. joining us now is senator elizabeth warren, democrat of massachusetts, and a member of the senate banking committee i really appreciate you making time to be here tonight. thank you. >> thank you >> so you understand these things well. i really don't i don't have a head for this suf. i'm not a person financially minded at all. let me first by asking you if i've miss out anything important or understand this in a way that comports with your understanding? >> nope, you got it basically right, that the way to understand this cries is it's really got kind of three players in it. the first is congress and president trump who said let's weaken the regulation, which you've hit really hard the second part is the regulators themselves, in particular the fed, in particular jerome powell, the chairman of the federal reserve bank who took that change in the laws, and, boy, did he run with
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it in fact, he ran further than a lot of people even thought the law let him. in tailoring the oversight of those banks in order to make it as weak as possible. and by the way, just a little side note. i very much opposed his being renominated to the federal reserve bank, and the reason was exactly this, what he had done on using the opportunities he had by the change in the law in 2018 to weaken bank regulations. in my view he was just headed in the wrong direction, and that's what made him dangerous in the position of chair of the fed but then there's part three, and that is those executives those bank ceos who lobbied hard to get this change in the law, those are the ones who when the window opened, wow, were they ready to go. and they went out and they
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decided to load up on risk and why? they loaded up on risk because it made their banks more profitable, and that made it have them have higher salaries they got to rule over bigger banks. they got big bonuses they brought in their friends, and they did all that by taking on more risk, and it worked, svb increased its profitability of the last three years by 40%. they took on all that risk, made themselves more profitable right up to the day that the bank exploded and that's -- that's the whole story. part one, the congress, part two, and part three the executives who took advantage of this >> people around the country watching this right now and i think people around the country trust you on these issues because this is how we all got
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to know you as a public figure in the first place explaining these difficult moments. people around the country watching you right now who don't have deposits at silicon or signature, have not heard of these banks have their money in big banks and this is a problem specific to the tech industry, which is the silicon valley bank and the crypto industry, which seems to have been tied to signature and other banks. people are wondering if this is something confined to niche areas of the economy, or this is something, these same kind of criticisms you're describing apply to other kinds of banks and potentially bigger banks as well >> so, when you talked about regulation, one little twist on it is that we really have had since dodd/frank a kind of two tier regulatory system one for the community banks that is pretty light touch
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regulation it says in effect they didn't cause the crash back in 2008 and they're not going to cause a crash later on they are pretty simple how they're run, pretty straightforward. they serve their communities, and frankly they don't need a whole lot of oversight that's great, and it works well. if you have your money in a bank like that, good forio, it'll be fine the very largest banks still have the tougher regulation that dodd/frank put in place, the great big name brand banks what happened is these banks, they're often called regional banks although they're really national, is this tier of banks that are big, that the old line had been anybody with more than $50 billion in assets is going to be subject to these stronger regulations. they got it changed to $250 billion, and what you have is
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this group of very aggressive banks, some more aggressive than others, some run in wilder ways than others. but that's where the problem is in the system. what the president of the united states has now said -- and i want to stop here and say, boy, am i glad that joe biden is president of the united states right now. he approached this in a way that's very calm, stayed right on top of it, and said we are going to have to do something different here we're going to have to tell all those small businesses who have got their money in those banks, all those non-profits who have got their money in those banks, all those folks who are worried about meeting payroll when monday rolls around, their money is fully protected and that's what everybody at home needs to know if you're a depositor in one of these banks, your money is fully protected. take a deep breath nothing you need to worry about on that end of it. but our job is to think about
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the system overall and that means we need congress to act congress needs to roll back the trump -- the trump bank regulation relief. we need to make the change in the laws because then that will affect the regulators and the regulators will make sure they're ingaming in closer supervision over those banks and that in turn will rein in any of the ceos thinking banking is a great place to get a multi-million dollar salary and a bunch of bonuses and your own jet plane. remember you and i have talked about this before. what should banking be banking should be boring and anybody who wants to take a lot of risk and make a lot of money should not be in banking banking should be boring, and that's how we need to make some changes in the law
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we, congress, need to go back, we need to get rid of the trump banking bill and go back to better regulation. we do that, we'll make banking boring again >> sign of a functioning democracy is when people -- not only is banking boring but when people are right and everybody else is wrong, and it becomes crystal clear on days like this the people who are right get to have the last word about it, at least get to be the ones who get the pride of place and senator elizabeth warren, that's why on days like this we turn to you. thank you for your clarity as always thank you for joining us tonight. >> thank you >> we'll be right back stay with us
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comcast business. powering possibilities. i screwed up. mhm. i got us t-mobile home internet. now cell phone users have priority over us. and your marriage survived that? you can almost feel the drag when people walk by with their phones. oh i can't hear you... you're froze-- ladies, please! you put it on airplane mode when you pass our house. i was trying to work. we're workin' it too. yeah! work it girl! woo! i want to hear you say it out loud. well, i could switch us to xfinity. those smiles. that's why i do what i do. that and the paycheck. chances are you've heard of an american author named jodi t tipicoult. she's huge and a few days ago
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she was shocked to learn one of her book has been banned the booked is called "the storyteller. it's a book about the holocaust and a county in florida has now banned it from its school libraries under republican governor ron desantis' broad vague new laws governing what kids can and cannot read she responded with this. she said, quote, "the storyteller" is a novel about the holocaust. it chronicles the growth of anti-semitism and faugsism in nazi germany it was a strange irony a parent wanted this particular book remove because it felt a bit like history repeating itself. that feeling, that stuff maybe we thought we had left behind is rearing its head again, that feeling happening a lot these days last week house republicans held a hearing supposedly on the origins of covid-19. they invited as their expert witness this guy, famous for writing a book that claims among other things that jewish people are genetically evolved, they
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are biologically programmed to love money that was their expert who they brought ipon the science of covid. meanwhile, here's a picture of former president trump's adult son, eric. he's the one on the left, the blonde one there here he is hanging out with a guy who he's now traveling the country with the guy on his left, our right, is an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist who said the jews did tlooin and hitler, quote, was fighting the same people we're trying to take down today. eric trump and this jews did 9/11 guy is traveling the country doing something called we're retaking america tour. in may that tour will be taking over one of trump's florida
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properties npr this weekend just reported on a group of self-described nazis who have been projecting giant five-story tall swat cus and other anti-semitic imagery on tall buildings in the city of jacksonville, florida. and then there was ohio this weekend. right-wing extremists, white supremacist groups have been targeting drag queen story hours. but what happened in ohio this weekend was a different order of magnitude. one drag queen story telling event in a park in the town of wadsworth, ohio, drew hundreds of protesters including lots and lots of full-on neo-nazis, many of them armed, lots of them carrying swastika flags and shouting sig heil. i do want to show you just a few seconds so you can get a sense how unnerving this must have
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been for that community. probably goes without saying you may find this footage upsetting. here it is >> and you hear them saying weimar conditions, weimar solutions. they're talking about hitler, right, he overthrew the weimar republic we all know what hitler's solution was these guys out in numbers and screaming at ohio kids this weekend. got some folks on the right trying to ban books about the rise of nazism and the rise of anti-semitism in 1930s germany while others are literally trying to make it happen all over again stay with us we've got more to come on this
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we have become laser focused in this country in the past couple of years and i think this year in particular on really, really violent extremism gushing out of the political far right in this country. and i know we've focused on it a lot in this show in particular i think it's super important we don't look away from that. but when we talk about not just the extremes and not just the ultra right, when we talk about
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conservatives gaming electoral power in this country even as the far right feels more and more empowered to be more and more extreme we have to look at how republicans are gaining and exerting power over the american people and more and more republicans are doing that with structural changes they're making to our country, changing the way, for example, we run our elections, weakening and bending the rule of law in some cases, making it easier the team to hold onto power and making it harder for anybody else to take it from them this is happening at a time when one of the big thinkers of my generation, one of the big thinkers of my time in terms of democratic party politics, one of the guys who's been for a couple of decades now been among the people in charge in countering conservative domance instance, he's leaving his job his name is guy cecil.
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he worked on hillary clinton's presidential campaign in 2008, ran the arm of the party that worked to get democrats elected to the senate in 2013, and took over as chairman of a democratic super-pack called priorities usa which allowed big money back into politics. priority usa was basically the democratic party's answer to that ruling. and under his leadership he turned what was basically a run of the mill super-pack into what is now a big tool. under his tenure priority usa pelted the air waves with more than 12,000 ads promoting democrats and democratic causes. they raised more than $650 million to try to help democrats flip seats up and down the ballot their ads, their campaigns were crucial in flipping the house in 2018 and holding onto the senate in 2022.
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guy cecil is one of the party's biggest. and now he's leaving that job. he announced he's leaving priority usa at the end of this month after eight years in that landmark very important job, which made me want to grab him are tonight which i hope i can sneak in as an exit interview before letting him know that's what i'm doing it's nice to see you >> thank you after all that maybe i should stay >> here's the thing, you're not a household name in every household. for political junkies and people who know how the democratic party works, you're a big deal first of all i have to ask you are you leaving for some intriguing reason? >> no, nothing wrong >> you're leaving because you want to do something different >> i never imagined in 2015 i would be here eight years later. we ran ads and we existed every
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four years to do that. and after '16 we realized this is not the way we win, that republicans invest in the long-term. they invest in the federalist societies. they invest in institutions that aren't just about one issue or about one candidate but about making long-term ideological change and so we thought, hey, we have this opportunity, we have this vehicle, let's identify a couple of the structural gaps we see now and let us help the democratic party and the progressive left fill some of those gaps and we're doing that and we had the same leadership now for six years. i get to come on shows and talk about our great work, but the reality is we have a team led by our executive director daniel butterfield, they're going to continue doing this work how do we close the digital divide between the left and the right? how do we counter algorithms that reward hatred and right-wing ideology?
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how do we make sure we're fighting not just voter suppression through relitigation but voter suppression? all those things are going to continue i also think organizations benefit from change. they benefit from new leadership and fresh thinking and i think it's important for those leaders of those organizations every once in a while to take a step back and remove themselves from the minute by minute work and ask themselves what am i now called to do and for me knowing the organization was going to be in good shape, having a lot of trust in our leadership, i thought now was the time to take a step back and take another look at what's happening in our country and how i can best serve. >> so at this inflection point you're making for all those reasons, which i trust you in terms of explaining those things at this inflection point where do you feel like the democratic party has ground it can reasonably make up not just places where the democratic party is behind but
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they can catch up to republicans on some of these sort of structural long-term projects that, for example, the federalist society and other groups on the right, have had an advantage? >> i think that's the very place to start they're now out in the open about what their intentions are. there are billions -- and they're a larger cohort of leaders. there's over $1.4 billion being invest in essentially creating federalist societies not just focused on the courts but focused on silicon valley, education, focused on technology we're not prepared to combat that or go on the offensive because so much of our infrastructure is based on an issue or a candidate criminal justice is my number one. i like barack obama but i wasn't sure about hillary clinton not enough of our focus is on how do we make sure that we are laying the ideological ground through all the various levers to win the second i think is more of an
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internal look how we communicate. look, our party is diverse, and we're unwieldy but part of that comes because we are much more diverse than the republican party there are more backgrounds there are a lot of issues that we care passionately about that. and one of my concerns is that we have fetishized the use of data and analytics we create caricatures out of vouters, and what that does is i think it makes it more difficult for us to diversify across our party. black voters care about criminal justice reform and also care about good pay and in same way gay families and white families do >> the other thing the
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structural -- the other thing they've done is the sort of personal policy approach which is to make sure in every influential institution and every feeder institution that leads to those institutions, you've got ideologically committed people who over the course of their entire career are going to be -- set a bead on achieving the ideological goals of the movement. the left does not do that. and that sort of work is something you have to plan literally a generation ahead of for. >> yes i think there are two things really important one, there's a mythology we're the party of big government, republicans are the party of small limited government that is actually not true. republicans are the party of limited government when it comes to helping the middle class preserving -- our ability is to take care of the poor, making sure social security is in place. in all those instances they want a limited government but they want a large activist government
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when it comes to litigating my marng to my husband, controlling the uterus of american women, protecting the right of domestic abusers to have access to guns i feel like we need to change the narrative a bit how we view the republican party the entire evangelical movement, i used to be a baptist minister before i got into politics, it sold their soul for one issue and apologized to donald trump for six years and continue to do so because they had their eye on the long-term ball, which was destroy roe v. wade, nationalizing a ban on abortion. we need to think more long-term about how we're going to engage at every level of the ballot and across all these different spheres of influence because the reality is most americans agree with us on most issues, so we have to ask ourselves whose fault is it that we're not effectively communicating those things i don't want to overstate the
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problem. our love language is anxiety in the democratic party, but i do think it's important for us just to take a step back and say, okay, what can we do better because we really are trying to make our country fairer and more prosperous and more just, and now our job is to do the hardwork to make that happen >> guy cecil the chairman of democratic usa thank you. we'll be right back. stay with us
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all right, that is going to do it for us tonight "way too early" with jonathan lemire is up next. and then you hear the fake news saying, ooh, he didn't do so well in the mid-terms i did well, th